Junkscience.com -- Archives, December 2009

For those who yearn for seasons past, here are a few paintings from Little Ice Age Europe:

No one but the utterly naïve greenies believe that the Mann-made global warming hype is anything to do with climate – much less saving the planet. It is, as always, about power, influence - and money.

Out of literally thin air, the money-men have been able to conjure up a brand new product on which to increase their riches, the fabulous "carbon" which in less than a decade will – they hope – underpin an "industry" worth more than $2 trillion a year.

That alone justified the enormous effort which is being made to cement global warming as an issue in the public consciousness and, more importantly, in the legislative systems of the world. And it is the latter which is most important. Once the elimination of "carbon" is locked into enough legislative systems, it does not matter what people think – the revenue stream will be secure.

Bearing in mind that the issue is based on the central deception that the life-giving gas carbon dioxide is a "pollutant", behind the push to create this multi-trillion dollar industry is a vast nexus of influence, at or near the heart of which – it is emerging – is the chairman of the UN's IPCC, Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri.

Carefully cultivating the image of the concerned "scientist", he has on the back of the global warming hype not only been able to amass a considerable personal fortune (about which he is extraordinarily shy) but has also built a powerful global organisation under the brand-name "TERI", as the front for his lobbying and power-broking activities. (EUReferendum)

Climategate – Outside hacker, internal mole or whistle-blower ?

New information reveals that the now-famous break-in of the computers at the University of East Anglia— which revealed that in a few instances leading climatologists seemingly massaged data to show more global warming and discussed excluding contradictory research— in fact, may not have been the act of an intruder. A detailed analysis of the East Anglia’s files by Canadian network engineer discloses that the emails and documents were likely leaked by an internal source, spotlighting a perennial but often neglected threat — old-fashioned espionage or whistle-blowing. (HSNW)

If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists

Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear. (James Delingpole, TDT)

Our “con of the week” goes, however, to the British climate “scientists” who have been keeping the world’s “official” temperature records. Moscow’s Institute of Economic Analysis charged last week that the “British Team,” led by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the now-infamous Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, cherry-picked Russian climate stations. They chose stations that supported the theory of recent man-made global warming, and ignored valid stations that did not. This “trick,” Russians say, over-estimated Russia’s warming by more than half a degree Celsius. That’s no small thing; global warming since 1900 has totaled only about 0.6 degree C—and Russia has 12.5 percent of the earth’s land area. (Dennis T. Avery, CGFI)

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus—Mexico City next year—and the job will be done.

Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions. (Nigel Lawson, WSJ)

DHAKA – Bangladesh, one of the nations most vulnerable to global warming, will seek 15 percent of a 30-billion-dollar climate change fund committed at the Copenhagen summit, the environment minister said Tuesday.

Bangladesh, with a population of 150 million, makes up around 15 percent of the approximately one billion people estimated to be affected by global warming, Environment Minister Hasan Mahmud said.

"We demand per capita compensation: 15 percent of the 30 billion dollar fund," he said, referring to the "fast track" finance pledged by rich nations for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change for the 2010-2012 period. (AFP)

The climate change talks show, at least, that the world takes the issue seriously. Now we need a truly global carbon-trading scheme (The Independent)

WASHINGTON - U.S. lawmakers face an uphill battle enacting a climate bill in 2010 that includes a cap-and-trade market in greenhouse gases, after this month's U.N. meeting in Copenhagen failed to hammer out a global pact on emissions cuts. (Reuters)

Senate Republicans warned Monday that the bruising fight over health care reform could deliver a knockout blow to another Democratic priority: passage of a climate change bill in 2010.

With a united Democratic Caucus, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was able to get to cloture on health care without a single GOP vote. But Democrats aren’t united on climate change, and the bitter battle over health care has left even sympathetic Republicans with little desire to help — a dynamic that would likely doom the bill to legislative failure.

“It makes it hard to do anything because of the way this was handled,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Graham didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to — the fierce partisan fights during the past few weeks have torn away at the Senate’s clubby decorum, raising temperatures, fraying nerves and creating what one Democratic senator has called a “very high” level of distrust among members. (Politico)

AN emissions trading scheme is the cheapest and most efficient way to achieve the greenhouse gas cuts the Federal Government is aiming for from the Copenhagen Accord, economists believe. (Ben Cubby, SMH)

Senior Conservatives are to lobby Republicans in the US Senate to persuade them to back a climate emissions Bill. As the Tory leadership struggled to prevent party sceptics from dominating the environmental argument after the Copenhagen summit, David Cameron pledged to continue the work started in Denmark in trying to find a legally binding climate change agreement. (The Times)

BEIJING — Chinese officials, stung by criticism in the West that China had sabotaged a legally binding agreement for reducing greenhouse gases during talks in Copenhagen, fired back on Tuesday, saying that wealthy nations were seeking to sow discord among developing countries in a cynical attempt to avoid reducing their own emissions.

In comments made to the state-run media, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman took umbrage at the assertions made by Ed Miliband, the British secretary of state for energy and climate change, who said that Beijing had thwarted the passage of an ironclad agreement last week. (NYT)

Have to admit, having read an AGW blog about COP-15 I could not avoid committing the sin of wasting time reading the Copenhagen Accord. And yes, there is an interesting and quite telling concept after all. It shows that no scientist, AGW believer or otherwise, has likely participated to the writing of the Accord, or has even been involved in reviewing any of it.

In there, “the increase in global temperature” is referred in absolute terms. A much more scientific, logical and legal thing to write would have been

To understand the absurdity of the Accord as it stands, imagine the world of 2050, with giant emission reductions already achieved, and powerful models showing that “anthropogenic interference” amounts to +1.7C. Still, if by pure misfortune natural variability sums up to +0.4C, the Copenhagen Accord says we have failed (despite having achieved the wildest dreams of the average 2009 greenie).

Imagine now another world of 2050, with no emission reduction at all and “anthropogenic interference” running at +3C. Still, if by pure stroke of luck natural variability sums up to -0.9C (eg a series of giant volcanic eruptions from 2045 onwards), the Copenhagen Accord says we have succeeded (despite having done nothing at all).

Sadly, all of that shows how silly is the idea that there is something good in the Accord because it has followed the lead of scientists. In truth, the Accord has made the IPCC irrelevant apart than as a confirming body for whatever the USA and China would like to see agreed upon regarding “climate change”. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

Cracks emerged on Tuesday in the alliance on climate change formed at the Copenhagen conference last week, with leading developing countries criticising the resulting accord.

The so-called BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – backed the accord in a meeting with the US on Friday night, and it was also supported by nearly all other nations at the talks, including all of the biggest emitters.

But on Tuesday the Brazilian government labelled the accord “disappointing” and complained that the financial assistance it contained from rich to poor countries was insufficient.

South Africa also raised objections: Buyelwa Sonjica, the environment minister, called the failure to produce a legally binding agreement “unacceptable”. She said her government had considered leaving the meeting.

“We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable,” she said. (Financial Times)

If climate activists had spent the past 10 years acting instead of wasting time at talkfests such as the one at Copenhagen, we would already have a price signal on greenhouse gas emissions.

It is an indication of the sorry state of community groups that when faced with a problem, they spend millions of dollars whinging and asking other people to do something. This is especially true when it comes to climate campaigners. While this group of young ideologues revel in their self-appointed moral superiority, they have so far achieved very little. (John Humphys, SMH)

The once unstoppable green machine lost its mojo at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. After all its laboring and cajoling, the movement at the end resembled not a powerful juggernaut but a forlorn lover wondering why his date never showed up.

One problem is that the people of earth and their representatives don't much fancy the notion of a centrally dictated, slow-growth world. They proved unwilling to abandon either national interest or material aspirations for promises of a greener world.

The other problem is that divisions are now developing within the green camp. There are members, like Michael Shellenger and Ted Nordhaus, who recognize the serious fall out from the "Climategate" scandal, while others, including large parts of the media claque, dismiss any such possibility. There are the corporatists aligned with big business--who will live with any agreement that allows them to exact monopoly profits--and the zealots--like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Bill McKibben--who see Copenhagen as an affront to themselves and to our endangered planet. (Joel Kotkin, Forbes)

Global warming deniers are tools of special interests politics, or radio/TV personalities. Liberals deserve no praise, either, for they joined the fray late. Someone should be blamed for the inexcusable GW crimes against humanity. Science. Science should have stated clearly long ago that the problem is overpopulation. Population equals industry = CO2 emissions = global warming. (James Cunningham, News-Leader)

22 December 2009 – While most countries are not happy with the outcome of this month’s summit on climate change in Copenhagen, “really good progress” was made towards a binding agreement “to save the world,” with the United Nations leading the way to possible adoption at next year’s meeting in Mexico, General Assembly President Ali Treki said today. (UN News)

In addition to divisions at Copenhagen between rich and poor countries, climate activists had to contend with some depressing poll results. Four new polls showed declining support for the belief that global warming is real.

The first was a survey taken in late September and early October by the highly respected Pew Research Center. Pew found a significant decline, from 71% in 2008 to 57% in 2009, in the proportion who believe there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. Another question in the poll showed that fewer people in 2009 saw global warming as a very serious problem than did in 2008--35% vs. 44%. (Karlyn Bowman, Forbes)

The amount of methane in the Southern Hemisphere's atmosphere has increased 0.7 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to figures released by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research's (Niwa) Baring Head station.

The amount of the gas in the atmosphere had more than doubled since 1700 AD, compared to any time over the previous 800,000 years.

Measuring stations in the Northern Hemisphere also recorded slightly higher amounts of methane than the Southern Hemisphere, as that was where most of the gas was produced.

According to Niwa's principal scientist Keith Lassey, methane is the second most important contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide as it traps 21 times more heat than CO2 over the same time period. (IBTimes)

WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) - Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.

"Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000," Lu said. "Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C. (InSciences)

“Lost amid the news coverage of Copenhagen and Climategate was the assertion that one of the more attention-grabbing statements of the IPCC AR4 was flat-out wrong: [the IPCC text is]

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).”(IPCC AR4 WG2 Ch10, p. 493).”

“To recap, the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source. As a result, the IPCC has predicted the likely loss of most or all of Himalaya’s glaciers by 2035 with apparently no peer-reviewed scientific studies to justify such a prediction and at least one scientific study (Kotlyakov) saying that such a disappearance is too fast by a factor of ten!”

The IPCC has long expressed a strong preference for relying on peer-reviewed scientific literature in its reports (PDF) :

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Interglacial Warmth: Does more of the former lead to more of the latter?

EXTRA!!
Copenhagen Climate Concerns: As representatives of the nations of the world meet in Copenhagen on Monday to attempt to restrict the use of energy produced from coal, gas and oil in the guise of fighting global warming, many scientists and scholars are expressing grave concerns about what they are trying to do. Recognizing these concerns, we have posted a series of YouTube video vignettes in which such scientists and scholars present the reasons behind them. Post them on your own website or blog using YouTube!

Contribute to the Center:
Click Here to Donate: We need your financial support! As a 501(c)(3) public charity, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change accepts corporate, foundation and individual donations to fund its educational activities. All donations are kept confidential. If you have browsed our website or utilized our material in the past year, please consider making a financial contribution. We need your help to keep us going.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 776 individual scientists from 460 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Lake Tutira, North Island, New Zealand. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Extinction (Real-World Observations - Animals: Other Animals): In addition to birds and butterflies, other animals also appear to be well equipped to handle significant increases in temperature throughout their natural ranges.

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Black Cutch (Raizada et al., 2009), Indian Rosewood (Raizada et al., 2009), Mountain Ebony (Raizada et al., 2009), and Sugarcane (Vu and Allen, Jr., 2009).

Earlier this year, Congress approved a scheme to pour $80 billion — on top of the tens of billions already spent — into renewables. A government report released last week indicates the money will be wasted.

Renewable energy is the shiny gem that everyone wants but no one can have. Not even a president. Campaigning last year in Lansing, Mich., President Barack Obama said that it was his goal for the U.S. to generate 10% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025. But he cannot, by the force of will or executive order, change the laws of physics and economics.

America has long relied on fossil fuels to power its economy. Oil, natural gas and coal provide about 84% of the nation's energy.

And for good reason. They are plentiful and typically easy to retrieve, and, consequently, cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. They supply only about 4% of our energy, the remainder coming from hydro and nuclear power.

An axis of environmentalists and Democrats want to change this ratio, because, according to the usual complaint, we depend too heavily on the fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

Trouble is, the market for renewables is poor. Few want to use the inefficient, unreliable and expensive sources. But that hasn't slowed the renewable energy campaign, which has succeeded in persuading the public that renewables are a sensible energy source and convincing Congress to fund supporters' daydreams.

The government can continue to "invest" in renewables, and the dreamers will keep using public money to find the magic formula. But little will change over the next 25 years. (IBD)

An oil company wants to invest its profits in clean-burning American natural gas. A Hungarian billionaire and a "green" politician want to stop it. This is the real Climate-gate scandal.

While the greenies of the world united in Copenhagen to talk about the weather, emitting a Third World-country-size chunk of greenhouse gases to gather there, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, was doing something about it.

On Dec. 14, Exxon agreed to buy XTO Energy, a natural gas firm, in a deal valued at $41 billion. XTO is one of the leaders in something called "fracking" technology, in which water, sand and additives are pumped into the ground to unlock trillions of feet of natural gas previously thought to be unobtainable.

This is what energy companies really do with their profits. They find more energy, then sell it to you.

While the technique is not new, the technology exploiting it is. (IBD)

Di-methyl-ether (DME) is a fuel that I have been talking about since at least 2006. I have blogged about it, and I have classified it in several of my presentations as a "Sustainable Contender" (including in a slide at last year''s ASPO conference). I want to use this post to explore DME in a little more detail, and explain why I think you should keep an eye on it as an attractive renewable replacement for diesel. [Read More] (Robert Rapier, Energy Tribune)

Among the thousands of rowdy protesters and activists at last week's Copenhagen climate change conference was the group Don’t Nuke the Climate. Their big moment came when they unfurled a banner inside the Bella Center to mark their displeasure with the idea that nuclear power is a carbon free source of energy. Currently there is a fierce debate within ideological environmentalism over whether nuclear power is an acceptable energy technology for addressing concerns over man-made global warming.

Seeing the anti-nuke protestors in Copenhagen reminded me that I had recently read James Gustave Speth's environmentalist manifesto Red Sky at Morning: America and the Global Environmental Crisis (2004) as preparation for an academic symposium on global warming. As I explained in my book, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (1993), environmentalism owes a great ideological debt to the anti-nuke movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and in many respects the two have now melded. (Ronald Bailey, Reason)

We need to transform to a new, clean energy economy but we can’t build solar panels in the Mojave Desert if California Senator Diane Feinstein has anything to say about it:

KEVIN RUDD'S environmental agenda is under attack on two fronts, with the country's biggest private renewable energy business declaring his green power target at risk of failure.

As criticism of the emissions trading scheme grows bolder after the fractured Copenhagen summit, AGL has labelled the administration of the the renewable energy target a fraud. (SMH)

I recently blogged about an interesting op-ed in which Ken Klukowski and Ken Blackwell of the American Civil Rights Union argue that the Supreme Court need not overturn The Slaughter-House Cases while “incorporating” the right to bear arms against the states. (Josh Blackman fisked the article in more depth here.) This piece was essentially a distillation of the ACRU’s amicus brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago, which ultimately argues, like Cato’s brief, that Chicago’s gun ban is unconstitutional. (Ilya Shapiro, Cato at liberty)

GENEVA - The H1N1 flu pandemic is moderate but infects and sometimes kills much younger people than traditional seasonal influenza, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Comparing the number of deaths from the pandemic virus known as swine flu with those from seasonal influenza can be misleading, the U.N. agency said.

"WHO continues to assess the impact of the influenza pandemic as moderate," it said in a statement. "Accurate assessments of mortality and mortality rates will likely be possible only one to two years after the pandemic has peaked." (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Americans who were worried about the safety of the swine flu vaccine are still worried and it may not be easy to convince them to get themselves or their children vaccinated, researchers said on Tuesday.

About 60 percent of parents polled say they plan to get their children vaccinated and 79 percent of adults will try to get the vaccines for themselves, but there is a hard core of resistance that has not been moved by entreaties by the U.S. government, pollsters said.

"Thirty-five percent of parents say they are not going to get it and 60 percent say the major reason is safety," Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health said in a telephone interview. "Our view is there just has to be more work on understanding how people think about the vaccine."

Several studies have shown the H1N1 swine flu vaccine does not cause unusual side effects and Blendon said it is not clear why so many parents are fearful. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - For pregnant women involved in a traffic accident, the impact of an airbag does not seem to raise the risks of most pregnancy complications, a new study finds.

Airbags, used along with seatbelts, are known to cut car-crash victims' risk of death and severe injury. However, concerns have been raised about the impact of an airbag on a pregnant woman's abdomen; there have been, for instance, case reports of uterine or placental rupture leading to pregnancy loss.

But until now, large-scale studies had been lacking.

In the new study, researchers analyzed data on 3,348 collisions involving pregnant women in Washington State between 2002 and 2005.

They found that for most pregnancy complications -- including placental detachment from the uterine wall, fetal distress and Cesarean delivery -- there was no evidence of a higher risk for women whose crash had involved an airbag deployment. (Reuters Health)

CHICAGO - High levels of a compound called C-reactive protein may be a sign of a future risk for heart attacks, stroke and cancer, though it does not seem to be a cause, researchers said on Tuesday.

An analysis published in the journal Lancet attempts to resolve a long-standing debate over C-reactive protein, or CRP -- whether it is a warning sign of heart trouble, or a direct cause.

Some studies have suggested the protein, which is associated with inflammation, may be as important as high cholesterol in causing heart disease. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is requesting public comment on options for disclosing inert ingredients in pesticides. In this anticipated rulemaking, EPA is seeking ideas for greater disclosure of inert ingredient identities. Inert ingredients are part of the end use product formulation and are not active ingredients. Revealing inert ingredients will help consumers make informed decisions and will better protect public health and the environment.

“Consumers deserve to know the identities of ingredients in pesticide formulations, including inert ingredients,” said Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. “Disclosing inert ingredients in pesticide products, especially those considered to be hazardous, will empower consumers and pesticide users to make more informed choices.” (EPA)

Poverty trumps smoking, obesity and education as a health burden, potentially causing a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at health and life expectancy data from the National Health Interview Surveys and the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys and came up with various behavioral and social risk factors that affect quality of life, then used a formula to estimate the quality-adjusted years of life that would be lost.

The average person whose income level is below 200% of the federal poverty line (the bottom third of the country's population) would lose an estimated 8.2 years of perfect health, smokers 6.6 years, high school dropouts 5.1 years and the obese 4.2 years. Binge drinking and being uninsured were at the bottom. (LA Times)

The causes of obesity are complex and individual, but it is clear that chronic overeating plays a fundamental role. But when this behaviour becomes compulsive and out of control, it is often classified as "food addiction" - a label that has generated considerable controversy, according to a McMaster University psychiatrist and obesity researcher (McMaster University)

LONDON - Interfering in mosquitoes' sex lives could help halt the spread of malaria, British scientists said on Tuesday.

A study on the species of mosquito mainly responsible for malaria transmission in Africa, Anopheles gambiae, showed that because these mosquitoes mate only once in their lives, meddling with that process could dramatically cut their numbers. (Reuters)

A massive tree that is a relative of the pea yet rises more than 135ft above the ground is among a treasure trove of plants and fungi discovered by botanists.

It is one of a "bumper crop" of almost 300 new species discovered in the past 12 months by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. (The Independent)

CHIA farmer Fritz Bolten believes he's part of the next big thing in Australian agriculture, an expanding Top End food bowl overflowing with a seemingly endless supply of water.

As seasonal rains arrive to top up Lake Argyle and irrigate 14,000ha of deep, fertile soil at Kununurra, 45km west of the Northern Territory border, stage two of the iconic Ord River irrigation scheme is about to become a reality. With $415 million from the Barnett and Rudd governments in the bank, the long-awaited expansion plan - riddled with various catastrophes and scandals for 30 years - will see a further 8000ha ready for sale by 2011.

If that goes to plan, those pushing to create an agricultural nirvana in Western Australia's East Kimberley believe there is enough water from the 2000sq km Lake Argyle to irrigate up to 100,000ha. (The Australian)

PARIS - More research is needed into Monsanto's genetically modified maize MON 810, the only biotech crop commercially grown in Europe, to assess its environmental impact, a French advisory body said.

The opinion given by biotech committee HCB, published on Tuesday, was requested by the French government, which last year banned cultivation of MON 810 citing environmental concerns.

In a debate about whether to renew the license for the maize type, France and other European Union states have criticized as insufficient a favorable opinion in June from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (Reuters)

NEW DELHI: A report in a British newspaper has accused IPCC chief Rajendra K Pachauri of making a fortune from his links with ‘‘carbon trading’’ companies.

Apart from listing the number of companies, banks and institutes with which the IPCC chairman is associated, the report in The Telegraph of London alleges that Pachauri’s The Energy Research Institute (TERI) continues to have ‘‘close links’’ with the Tata Group (which set up the institute) and that this relationship has helped the latter in its green and carbon trading businesses.

Reacting to the report, Pachauri told TOI: ‘‘These are a pack of lies from people who are getting desperate. They want to go after the guy whose voice is being heard. I haven’t pocketed a single penny from my association with companies and institutes. All honoraria that I get goes to TERI and to its Light a Billion Lives campaign for reaching solar power to people without electricity. All my dealings are totally above board.’’

Pachauri pointed out that the previous IPCC chairman was in the World Bank and the one before that was a professor. ‘‘Can you then say the university benefited from his association with IPCC? The people who have flung these charges are part of the same vested interest group which hacked the server of UK’s East Anglia University. They are getting desperate because the world is now serious about moving away from fossil fuels. I want to ask them how much money they spent in the operation? Hacking a server is a costly exercise,’’ he said. (Times of India)

Surely not even an organisation as a corrupt and dishonest as the IPCC can afford to keep Dr Rajendra Pachauri on as its chairman after the weekend’s damning revelations by Christopher Booker and Richard North?

But Pachauri – with all the chutzpah we have come to expect of our favourite jetsetting, millionaire, troll-impersonating railway engineer - is not going down without a fight. Just as he did after Climategate, Pachauri has produced his classic ‘nothing to see here’ ‘Big Brother knows best’ defence. ( James Delingpole, TDT)

There's trouble over tree rings as the Climategate emails reveal a rift between scientists. For Part 1, go here.

In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded.

In a post-Copenhagen world, climate history is not merely a matter of getting the record straight, or a trivial part of the global warming science. In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change).

Elsewhere on this site are two Climategate posts based on my reading of the Climategate emails (Part 1 and Part 2). This is an open appeal for an answer to a question I was not able to answer at the time of writing. It is clear that Keith Briffa, a dendrochronologist at the University of East Anglia, changed his views on the last 1,000 years of climate history and ended up adopting Michael Mann's Hockey Stock. Sometime after 1999, his criticisms of Mann stopped.

I read hundreds of the emails, including the first five years word for word, along with most of 2009, and scores of pages from many other years. I searched for clues. But I work for a daily newspaper, and once I realized there was a great epic story in what I had read so far, I wrote what I wrote. But despite successive dips into the emails, the 2,000+ page document failed to reveal the answer to the question: When did Briffa change is views, and why? The answers must be there somewhere. Or are they?

No blog posting or published report that I've seen has produced an explanation so far. If anybody has found the smoking Briffa emails in which he acknowledges and explains why he abandoned his earlier perspectives on the temperature history of the last 1,000 years, please drop a comment, link to key emails or whatever -- either as a comment below or send me an email: tcorcoran@nationalpost.com

Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable.

Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas.

This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as "scientific socialism." By the 20th century, all sorts of notions wrapped themselves in the mantle of "science."

"Global warming" hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is "science." (Thomas Sowell, IBD)

Supreme Climate Folly noted that every institution that touches the climate change issue “gets de-legitimized, including the EPA, the presidency, the scientific community, the mainstream media, and the Supreme Court itself.”

This list lengthens. (James DeLong, The American)

Global warming... or a lot of hot air?

If you have spare 45 minutes, you may check whether this FoxNews report on global warming issues was "balanced".

Click the tape (next to "play") for the six pieces of the playlist.

The first part shows some AGW champions behind Copenhagen. The second part focuses on the hockey sticks, Michael Mann, Ross McKitrick, and Steve McIntyre. Pat Michaels speaks a lot, too. The third part is about the ClimateGate.

The fourth part is dedicated to Bjorn Lomborg's opinions - comparisons of the importance and economic efficiency of carbon mitigation and malnutrition or diseases; George Monbiot adds some hysteria at the end. The fifth part looks into the U.S. Congress and the impact on the Americans. The final, sixth part looks how the EPA may circumvent democracy and directly regulate the households.

By the way, today, the price of European carbon indulgences dropped by 8.7% to a six-month low of EUR 12.40 because of these people's failure in Copenhagen. (The Reference Frame)

Researchers are contributing to a new model of climate change that may give more accurate predictions of the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth's future.

As Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard -- especially about the future. The computer models scientists use to predict climate change are always works in progress.

In a sort of cosmic reality competition, 20 groups around the world are developing new models they plan to submit for review under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international body whose recommendations are being considered at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which ends Dec. 17. Three modeling groups are based in the United States, and Cornell researchers are involved in one of them. (PhysOrg.com)

If a model has not been proven to fully reflect reality, then it has very limited use and should be treated like a horoscope.

Everyone readily admits that things aren’t always what they seem. But are we really applying this knowledge in our daily dealings? Are we consciously ferreting out the illusory from the reality? I think not.

For instance, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion.

There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets.

The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want you to look at this real controller.

I’ll probably have to turn in my membership card, but as a computer programmer (and physicist and environmental activist) I’m here to spill the beans about the Wiz.

The first hint of trouble is spelled out in Wikipedia’s explanation about computer programmers:

My layperson explanation is that computer programming is all about making assumptions, and then converting these into mathematical equations.

The big picture question is this: Is it really possible to accurately convert complex real-world situations into ones and zeros? Hal may think so, but higher processing brains say no. Yet this is continuously attempted, with very limited success. Let’s pull the screen back a bit more.

We’ll start with an example about how such a model makes assumptions. (John Droz, Jr., PJM)

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21, 2009 — Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the world's largest scientific society, today published a major analysis of the divisive issues at the heart of the debate over global warming and climate change. The article appears at the conclusion of the much-publicized United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which sought to seal a comprehensive international agreement on dealing with global warming. An embargoed text is available to journalists upon request. (American Chemical Society)

While many people take for granted the fact that it is dangerous to use articles of faith as the basis for public policy, we often fail to realize that science too represents an extremely dodgy justification for law. With a population that is often willing to unquestioningly defer to the “experts” on matters they feel are above their pay grade, the governed run the risk of empowering legislators to pass law that is just as much a product of faith as anything that can be found in your local church or synagogue.

Policies based on “scientific fact” have a history of being more than just problematic, as with the veneer of absolute truth behind them they have oftentimes been downright irrational. This historic record should act as a guide to our current political occupation with anthropogenic global warming. (Nick Rizzuto, Townhall)

LONDON - A handful of countries blocked a legally binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen and the talks process needs urgent reform to prevent something similar happening again, Britain's prime minister said on Monday. (Reuters)

BEIJING: China condemned claims ascribed to Britain's climate change minister that it had "hijacked" negotiations

Tuesday the accusations were a scheme to sow discord among developing countries.

The sharp words from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu were the latest baring of diplomatic bad blood after the talks in Copenhagen ended on Saturday with a broad, non-binding accord that fell short of hopes for a robust global agreement on how to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Jiang was responding to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper that said the Environment Minister Ed Miliband had accused China, Sudan, Bolivia and other left-wing Latin American nations of thwarting efforts to reach deeper agreement on how to fight global warming. (Times of India)

In the Bella Center on the south side of Copenhagen and in the Senate chamber on the north side of the Capitol, we're seeing what happens when liberal dreams collide with American public opinion. It's like what happens when a butterfly collides with the windshield of a speeding SUV. Splat. (Michael Barone, Townhall)

It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former's accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter's was unsightly.

It would have been unprecedented had the president not described the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit as "unprecedented," that being the most overworked word in his hardworking vocabulary of self-celebration.

Actually, the mountain beneath the summit — a mountain of manufactured hysteria, predictable cupidity, antic demagoguery and dubious science — labored mightily and gave birth to a mouselet, a 12-paragraph document committing the signatories to ... make a list. A list of the goals they have no serious intention of trying to meet.

The document even dropped the words "as soon as possible" from its call for a binding agreement on emissions.

The 1992 Rio climate summit begat Kyoto. It, like Copenhagen, which Kyoto begat, was "saved," as Copenhagen was, by a last-minute American intervention (Vice President Al Gore's) that midwifed an agreement that most signatories evaded for 12 years.

The Clinton-Gore administration never submitted Kyoto's accomplishment for ratification, the Senate having denounced its terms 95-0.

Copenhagen will beget Mexico City next November. Before then, Congress will give "the international community" other reasons to pout. Congress will refuse to burden the economy with cap-and-trade carbon-reduction requirements, and will spurn calls for sending billions in "climate reparations" to China and other countries.

Representatives of those nations, when they did not have their hands out in Copenhagen grasping for America's wealth, clapped their hands in ovations for Hugo Chavez and other kleptocrats who denounced capitalism while clamoring for its fruits. (George F. Will, IBD)

Obama's attempt to put China in the frame for failure had its origins in the absence of American campaign finance reform (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

The American president has been uniquely placed to lead the world on climate change and squandered every opportunity ( Naomi Klein, The Guardian)

After the Copenhagen climate conference failed to stop global warming, the next big question for climate change is who is going to save the planet now? ( Louise Gray, TDT)

100% of the people all over the world agree that 45,000 humans travelled to Denmark and made a lot of fuss for about two weeks, and all we’ve got is a declaration that is not worth a single paragraph of commentary. Give me another UN conference like this and we’ll be back to the League of Nations.

There’s more one should think about and I am sure it will slowly surface in the next few days. One question is who are the losers out of that all, and by that I mean the “jokers” that were presumed to be able to achieve something, proceeded to huff and puff a lot but were then demonstrated able to achieve nothing at all. Among them:

When push came to shove, the Powers That Be did not care at all about the opinions of those listed above.

I wouldn’t be too harsh with the Maldives, most of the African nations, etc. They do not have much power to do anything at UN level, anyway. Russia has lost a bit, by not being included in the final five signatories, and for the same reason Brazil, India, and (mysteriously) South Africa have gained a little.

But let me say very clearly, as UK taxpayer I find the performance of the Ed Milliband particularly awful, and the absolute unimportance of anything Gordon Brown had to say especially embarrassing. Go, go, Gordon go!!

ps looks like it’s high time to get US or Chinese citizenship… (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen produced neither a grand success nor the complete meltdown that seemed almost certain as late as Friday afternoon. Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It produced instead a softer interim accord that, at least in principle, would curb greenhouses gases, provide ways to verify countries’ emissions, save rain forests, shield vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate change, and share the costs. (NYT)

After two weeks of increasingly ill-tempered negotiations, one of the European delegates at the Copenhagen summit “to save the planet” had clearly reached breaking point; or perhaps it was the ingratitude of the people he was trying to save that caused this negotiator to tell the BBC’s science correspondent, Susan Watts, that millions of Africans now “deserve” to be incinerated.

Watts was reporting a conversation she had had with an unnamed “European negotiator” after South Africa decided to join the quartet of America, India, China and Brazil in putting its name to a statement rejecting any binding emissions targets, and thus comprehensively sabotaging the entire conference. “South Africa has signed up to this!” the delegate told Watts. “They’re going to fry — and they’ll deserve it.”

One’s heart does not warm to anyone expressing such sentiments, but it’s easy to understand the fury that must have overcome this delegate. Here was Europe offering to impose vast costs on its own industries and peoples to save Africa from the alleged perils of runaway CO2 emissions — and that continent’s most powerful international voice says, thanks very much for the offer, but we think we can best provide health and prosperity to our people by being free to expand our economy exactly as you did in the industrial revolution, by using the wonderfully cheap forms of energy that nature affords: fossil fuels. After all, why is it that in the US many fewer people die as a result of very high temperatures than used to be the case a hundred years ago? Air-conditioning.

I know that for those thousands of “climate activists” who descended on Copenhagen, the idea of air-conditioning in African homes is something almost too revolting to contemplate; but then they have never understood that, for the real inhabitants of the developing world, the American example of achieving health and comfort through technology and subverting harsh nature for human ends is something to be emulated, not shunned. (Dominic Lawson, The Times)

Everyone, it seems, is disappointed with the Copenhagen Deal drawn up by world leaders, with its promise of more money to tackle climate change and its commitment to stop the planet from warming by more than two degrees. But never mind all that. As spiked kicks off a major online debate about the future of the planet and humanity post-Copenhagen, here is our Alternative Copenhagen Deal. (sp!ked)

Earlier this year, Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the leader of an effort to write a U.S. climate change bill, argued that domestic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would help President Obama pry similar cuts from China and other major developing nations.

The failure by Mr. Obama to win binding reductions at the U.N. climate conference that ended Friday in Copenhagen means he and Mr. Kerry must persuade a skeptical Senate to pass that same bill without a global treaty. The prospects appear as daunting as ever. (Washington Times)

President Barack Obama's weak Copenhagen accord may make it harder for Congress to pass punitive cap-and-trade legislation that requires greenhouse- gas emission cuts.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer 75% to 10% not to enter into an emission-reduction scheme that doesn't include nations like China and Brazil.

That should be important news for the president, whose preferred domestic policy solution of a 17% reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 would be implemented without the guarantee of similar action by other nations. (Margo Thorning, IBD)

Participants in the UN climate change conference wave as they exit the Bella Center in Copenhagen on Friday, the 13th day of meeting. The conference rammed through a battle plan against climate change forged by U.S. President Barack Obama and other top leaders, sidelining smaller states.
Photograph by: Attila Kisbenedek, Agence France-Presse; Getty Images, Canwest News Service

Environmentalists digesting their disappointment with the Copenhagen climate conference are already turning their attention to the next eco-battleground, urging Canada to use next year's G8 and G20 summits to set the agenda for the next big climate conference in Mexico in 2010.

Hosting next year's summits will increase expectations on the Canadian government to correct its image as a "laggard" on climate change, Keith Stewart, climate change program director at WWF-Canada, said Sunday.

"Canadians expect their government to do much more to try to be an honest broker, particularly in the coming year when we're going to be the president of the G8 and co-hosting the G20," he said. (Phil Couvrette, Canwest News Service)

There is a new climate-change crisis that Canada needs to address in the wake of the Copenhagen conference: the suddenly frosty relations between energy producing and consuming provinces.

Ontario and Quebec had promised federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice in advance they would refrain from bad-mouthing others, but they were barely off their jets before they started spouting “embarrassment” at the oil patch in general and Alberta’s oil sands in particular.

The way Mr. Prentice sees it — and this is from a minister not prone to shooting off his mouth — the antagonistic anti-oil position taken by Canada’s two largest provinces “was not responsible.”

“We felt it was important to stick to the high road during the negotiations,” he said in an interview. “It was unhelpful and not good for our country to have those comments made on the international stage. No one has ever said the oil sands should get a free pass.”

He is not alone in being disgusted by the podium-seizing antics of Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen, backed by retiring Toronto Mayor David Miller, whose people insist he is not taking a job with an environment group as I suggested recently (but my sources insist will be proven true). (Don Martin, National Post)

Coming from Hollywood may explain Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disconnect with reality. In the real world, saying so doesn’t make it so. In Copenhagen last week, he made the astonishing claim that the Golden State is evidence we need not choose between a clean environment and economic growth because: “We’ve proved that over and over again in California.”

Environmental well-being and economic vitality need not conflict. But California is far from proof. The state under Mr. Schwarzenegger is an economic mess, largely thanks to taxes and government regulations. The governor’s pet environmental projects are chief culprits. (The Orange County Register)

Senator Saxby Chambliss and Rep. Frank Lucas, ranking members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees respectively, sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson on December 18 requesting the agency correct the Forest and Agriculture Sector Optimization Model (FASOM) used as the basis for USDA’s analysis of climate change legislation. Chambliss and Lucas noted that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had stated that the FASOM, which is often cited in the climate change debate, is not “current” and “complete.” They sent a similar letter to Sec. Vilsack on December 17 requesting the flawed analysis be corrected and that the Secretary report to Congress upon its completion. (Hoosier Ag Today)

EXACTLY which part of the word "failure" can't Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong understand?

Or Professor Tim "Flim" Flannery for that matter?

By any measure, the just-concluded Copenhagen climate conference was a flopperoo of grand proportions.

It was an abject disaster, a dud, a dog, a bust, yet this heroic trio are intent on snowing the public as completely as the weekend's blizzards chilled cities across the northern hemisphere.

Senator Wong boldly told us that we "have to remember that this Copenhagen Accord was negotiated by and supported by the majority of the world's nations, the majority of the world's economy".

But the reality - a concept alien to Mr Rudd, Senator Wong and Professor Flannery - tells us that the so-called Copenhagen Accord is not only legally non-binding but is effectively meaningless.

This is because the joke United Nations summit, complete with panda-suited fools, didn't "adopt" any motion, it merely "took note" of a range of views.

That's because there was no consensus. Rafts of lawyers can now debate whether there is a UN agreement, or whether the UN climate convention has been killed. ( Piers Akerman, The Daily Telegraph)

CLIMATE Change Minister Penny Wong has ruled out doing a deal with the Greens to pass the emissions trading scheme in the Senate.

The refusal to negotiate with the minor parties could deliver the Rudd government a second double dissolution election trigger if the Senate twice rejects the amended legislation that will be reintroduced on February 1.

Senator Wong said today she was willing to talk to the Greens and other crossbench senators to get the legislation through.

“The reality is, though, the Greens have taken a position in relation to targets that the Government was not able to negotiate on,” she said.

“They indicated they do not wish to have a negotiation unless the Government was prepared to put targets of 25 to 40 per cent on the table. That is not the Government's policy and that is not the Government's position. We don't believe that is a responsible way forward.” (The Australian)

Developed nations have the best anti-pollution standards

IN taking stock after the Copenhagen climate change conference, Australia's policymakers need to protect the national interest by guarding against carbon leakage and the export of jobs to developing nations. Such an approach will also be in the best interests of the global environment, as few developing nations have enforced the strict anti-pollution standards that apply in Australia and other advanced economies.

Essentially, the conference's failure to update the Kyoto Protocol leaves developing nations to do as they like. But as the long list of business interests of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and head of India's Energy and Resources Institute, suggests, the politics of carbon are replete with vested interests. (The Australian)

TO secure a Copenhagen Accord Kevin Rudd sold out Australia's long-term negotiating interests and accepted the full cost of any future climate change agreement.

During the Copenhagen conference the Prime Minister claimed "if every country pulls its weight we can secure the agreement which we need in Australia's national interest".

But that isn't what the accord delivers. Instead, countries such as Australia offered all their bargaining chips to get China and India to commit to an agreement that obliges them to offer nothing in return.

And now that the accord has failed to attract the consensus required for it to be formally adopted as a decision of the conference, the Prime Minister has committed us to a worthless agreement while declaring that Australia is prepared to put all its bargaining chips on the table. (The Australian)

KEVIN Rudd is under pressure to come clean on the likely cost-of-living impact of an emissions trading scheme if Australia goes it alone before other nations act.

The failure of the Copenhagen talks to deliver a binding treaty has prompted warnings from the opposition that the impact of an emissions trading scheme could now be greater on families.

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said the government should commission modelling on the true impact of the scheme and whether it would go beyond original estimates of $1100 for families on average.

“The real thing now is to release the impact on the cost of living of the ETS. Will the cost rise from $1100 to $1500 to $2000. Because his system was designed to fit in with an international scheme,” Mr Hunt said.

He said the existing Copenhagen Accord was a very weak document. (The Australian)

The federal government has rejected a call for the creation of a greenhouse trigger, a move that would give it the power to block emissions-intensive projects.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett today released the Hawke Report, a lengthy investigation of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

Report author Alan Hawke has recommended Labor create a so-called greenhouse trigger.

The trigger would give Mr Garrett oversight of projects with at least 500,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

"The trigger would capture a wide range of actions including projects that would have a large amount of emissions released during construction, and those that would result in a large amount of emissions released during any period of operation," the report says.

Dr Hawke said the trigger was needed so urgently the government should create it by regulation. That means draft laws approving the trigger would not need to be passed by a hostile Senate, although the upper house could later move to disallow it.

"The introduction of an interim trigger may have an additional benefit of removing the incentive for organisations to seek to benefit from delaying the introduction of Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)," he said.

Mr Garrett said he would consider the 71 recommendations of the report but rejected outright introducing a trigger. (AAP)

LONDON - The benchmark contract for European Union carbon emissions futures closed at a six-month low on Monday, having fallen as much as 9 percent in intra-day trade after a weak U.N. climate deal disappointed investors.

EU Allowances for December 2010 delivery closed 8.62 percent lower at 12.41 euros ($17.78) a tonne, after falling as low as 12.28 euros in the last hour of trade. EUAs have not traded at those levels since June 16.

Prices responded to news over the weekend that U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen ended with a bare-minimum agreement. Delegates said an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers fell far short of the conference's original goals.

Prices fell 8 percent in opening trade and lost more ground toward the end of the day. (Reuters

Carbon prices plunged on Monday in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, dealing a blow to the credibility of the European Union’s carbon-trading scheme. (Financial Times)

Electricity bills could go up as a result of the weekend's feeble agreement on climate change at Copenhagen, energy suppliers have warned.

The price of carbon – paid by heavy polluters such as power plant operators – plummeted yesterday by almost 10% on Europe's emissions trading market. This was in response to the EU scrapping a planned commitment to cut emissions by 30% by 2020 because other countries failed to show similar ambition.

E.ON and Centrica warned that they would not invest the tens of billions of pounds to build expensive new nuclear reactors and clean coal plants at today's carbon price, which is supposed to penalise dirty coal and gas plants. (The Guardian)

Copenhagen turned out to be a damp squib – derided by the Prime Minister yesterday as "at best flawed, at worst chaotic". But the failure to reach a global deal also left UK electricity generators calling for the Government to guarantee the carbon price, or face missing its ambitious green targets.

Few dispute that the key to cutting Britain's emissions by 34 per cent by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050, is to clean up electricity generation. But the economics are tricky at best. And with little substance from Copenhagen, generators are warning the Government must intervene soon or the nuclear power and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology the UK needs will not get built. (The Independent)

For years, radical thinkers have proposed risky technologies that they say could rapidly cool the earth and offset global warming. Now a growing number of mainstream climate scientists say we may have to consider extreme action despite the dangers. ( Kevin Bullis, Technology Review)

We continue, however, to see the use of climate change and global warming used interchangeably (e.g. see). This is presumably based on the narrow, and scientifically flawed, perspective advocated in policy statements as this (see)

“Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. “

Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union

“……. the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, [but also] the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first- order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human infl uences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.”

I have posted on the need to broaden the science assessment for years, with examples of my posts on this topic

The bottom line message is that climate change involves much more than global warming or cooling. When the two terms are used interchangeably it shows either a lack of knowledge or a deliberate attempt to mislead policymakers and the public. (Climate Science)

The wonderful Christmas season is upon us, and no Christmas story would be complete without snow. If you really like snow, Greenland is the place for you! The snow there lasts all year long and is 1,000s of feet deep in the interior – a white Christmas is guaranteed every year in this winter paradise.

Anyone following the global warming debate is aware that Greenland is a favorite topic of the apocalypse crowd – melt Greenland, sea level will rise, the ocean currents will be disrupted, and the climate of the world will be changed for thousands of years — all thanks to our inability to slow-down our greenhouse gas emissions. The rhetoric from Copenhagen recently was full of disasters involving rapid melting of Greenland. Within the past week alone, we found the headlines “Warming Hits Greenland’s Hunters” and “The Maldives and Greenland’s Ilulissat: Two Countries Experiencing Global Warming at an Alarming Rate”.

Two recent articles form the basis of our 2009 Christmas story. Under the tree is our first box of goodies, ironically from Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. Box and his colleagues at Ohio State and China, with financial support from NASA, set out to reconstruct the near-surface temperature record from Greenland from 1840 to the near-present. They combined meteorological station records with a regional climate model to create a spatial reconstruction of monthly, seasonal, and annual near-surface air temperatures over Greenland. (WCR)

As this graphic continues to show – year after year, Perth dam catchments rainfall has proved remarkably reliable over 35 years in the face of recent WA Govt propaganda spruiking, “our drying climate”, etc etc. See my late 2007 article, “There never was a rain shortage to justify seawater desalination for Perth’s water supply” and downloadable word doc with several rational proposals vastly cheaper and lower impact than seawater desalination to augment Perth water supply.

But the silly WA Govt are going ahead with the plus $Billion new desal plant at Binningup just north of Bunbury.

Disgraceful waste of taxpayer monies, exactly at a time we are entering economic rough times. Crazy. See the full page press advert your taxes paid for;

Read my July 2007; W.A. Govt propaganda takes water supply “post rain” and in May 2007; West Australian Premier talks utter nonsense about rainfall

What was it he said – from Hansard;

Clearly, politicians fed climate change rubbish from the ruling public service elite are believing their own incestuous propaganda.

All rain data from the Australian BoM – who else. (Warwick Hughes)

Around the world, China is investing in oil and gas resources to fuel its booming manufacturing industries and transportation sector to continue its sky-rocketing economic growth. China is not endowed with very much oil and gas resources of its own. Thus, it needs to partner with countries around the world to ensure availability of future supplies of oil and natural gas that it will need to keep up its current pace of economic growth.

The U.S., which does have oil and gas resources, is not following China’s lead in investing in these resources. Instead, the U.S. is looking toward wind and solar technologies to fuel its economy. However, wind and solar power are generating technologies and will not help where oil is needed in the transportation and industrial sectors.

Further, wind and solar power have capacity factors that cannot compete with those of fossil fuel generating technologies, and they can create instability issues with the electrical grid. They are also more expensive technologies and must have government support through tax credits to compete at all with fossil-fuel generating technologies. (Mary Hutzler, MasterResource)

The risks of electricity blackouts and gas shortages in the middle of the next decade are a lot more tangible than whatever will happen to the climate, writes Dan Lewis. (TDT)

WHEN Keith De Lacy was treasurer of Queensland, a certain K. Rudd was the other can-do man in the then state government.

Now that the Prime Minister has come up in the world, Mr De Lacy has a message for him: the Australian coal industry was sold out in Copenhagen, and Kevin Rudd needs to drastically revise his climate change response.

These days, Mr De Lacy's main job is with miner Macarthur Coal, which he chairs. His concern after the failure of the summit in Denmark to secure binding international action on global warming is that the Rudd government's decision to persist with emissions trading will do more harm than good to export-exposed industries such as coal. "It (an ETS) will erode our competitive position, while it does absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse emissions," he told The Australian.

"If you replace Australian coal with Canadian coal or South African coal or Indonesian coal, that doesn't do anything for anyone."

The non-binding Copenhagen deal, which has been on the end of criticism from both Europe and the developing world, was done between the US and the so-called "BASIC" alliance of Brazil, South Africa, India and China.

It has not been lost on a largely dismayed resource sector that South Africa is one of our principal coal export competitors. (The Australian)

An AP piece by Sean Murphy, Many Take Dim View of New-Fangled Christmas Lights (December 21), is another example of some of the problems that occur when an (inferior) product forced on consumers in the name of ”energy sustainability” (aka, the futile climate crusade).

And so this holiday season–the time of year when many turn the winter blues into a winter wonderland–consumers are finding themselves increasingly stuck with LED lighting. Some wonder how ‘green’ the ecolights are compared to what is in your attic. Others have tried and given up on solar LED as the ‘green’ way. (Robert Bradley Jr., MasterResource)

Potatoes and algae may replace oil in plastics - Frederic Scheer is biding his time, convinced that by 2013 the price of oil will be so high that his bio-plastics, made from vegetables and plants, will be highly marketable.

Scheer, 55, is the owner of Cereplast, a company that designs and makes sustainable plastics from starches found in tapioca, corn, wheat and potatoes.

He has believed for the past 20 years that the price of oil will eventually make petroleum-based plastics obsolete and clear the way for his alternative.

"The tipping point for us is 95 dollars (£59) a barrel," he said. At that price "our product becomes cheaper" than traditional plastic.

"The day where we hit 95 dollars a barrel I think all of a sudden you're going to see bio-plastics basically explode," he said. (TDT)

An unlikely source of energy has emerged to meet international demands that the United States do more to fight global warming: It's cleaner than coal, cheaper than oil and a 90-year supply is under our feet.

It's natural gas, the same fossil fuel that was in such short supply a decade ago that it was deemed unreliable. It's now being uncovered at such a rapid pace that its price is near a seven-year low. Long used to heat half the nation's homes, it's becoming the fuel of choice when building new power plants. Someday, it may win wider acceptance as a replacement for gasoline in our cars and trucks. (AP)

The gun-control group that sprang from the Joyce Foundation is using false information and bad research to demonize concealed carry permit holders.

Would you trust the statistical and factual reporting acumen of an organization that can’t even tell the difference between someone being dead or alive?

No, this isn’t about the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia or the other bad actors of Climategate (though it could be). This is about a little organization that Barack built. Not ACORN (though it could be). This is about the Violence Policy Center (VPC), one of the gun-control organizations our B+ president helped fund as a board member of the left-wing Joyce Foundation. (Bob Owens, PJM)

Shooting groups are reporting a growing number of cases where officers in armed response vehicles and helicopters are swooping on people who are legally shooting.

In many cases, the shooters are arrested and have had their guns seized. They are sometimes locked up and have their DNA taken, before police accept their error.

The Countryside Alliance has described as "hysterical", the "massive overreaction" by officers, while the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) has warned that an incident could lead to a lawful shooter being killed by police marksmen.

The problem has become so great, that the field sports' bible, Shooting Times, has launched an initiative – called the Campaign for Common Sense – to urge police to improve their dealings with field sports enthusiasts. The publication has also submitted a dossier detailing its complaints and proposals to a recent consultation by the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) on police firearm use. (TDT)

Who deserves the most blame for the wrecking ball that Congress and the president will soon take to the greatest health system in the world? The Republican who gave them her vote.

'When history calls, history calls," Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe said in October when she joined Senate Finance Committee Democrats as the lone Republican supporting their health care revolution.

Sometime between then and now "history" hung up on her.

With the vote 14-to-9 on that key panel, Snowe wasn't the deciding factor. But she gave Democrats something to use to optimal effect in the next two months — bipartisan legitimacy for the false notion that doing "something" was better than the "status quo."

"As I pledged to the president in an Oval Office meeting Saturday afternoon, I couldn't agree more that reform is an imperative," Snowe said Sunday. But support for the Democrats' reform is in the low-to-mid 30s today in no small part because most Americans think the private health insurance they enjoy today, while not perfect, is pretty darned good.

Snowe made a calculated blunder, crossing her fingers and hoping for the best from the most left-wing Congress and president in history. She thought her vote would let her in the door of Senate Democrats' deliberations in crafting a final bill, and that she could tell the folks back home how she improved it.

It turns out that the sophisticated, compassionate moderate, supposedly so much smarter than the uncompromising Joe Wilsons and Jim DeMints of her party, was played for a fool.

Sen. Snowe issued a 900-word statement last weekend opposing "the pending Senate legislation as it currently stands" — apparently still under the illusion that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants her input.

It goes on and on complaining about Reid's "nearly 400-page manager's amendment that cannot be changed or altered, with more than 500 cross references," how "we are now expected to vote on the overall, final package before Christmas with no opportunity to amend it" and that it all "was done in the shadows, without transparency, just to garner the necessary 60 votes and nothing more."

Well, welcome to the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, Sen. Snowe, of which you have reputedly been a wide-awake member for 15 years.

Up in chilly Maine, all those ads for "Rolling Snow Plows" may take on new meaning. Washington is where Snowe gets rolled. (IBD)

In the rush to fund a U.S. healthcare overhaul, Botox injections to smooth wrinkles will not be taxed, but visiting a tanning salon will be.

Plastic surgeons and Botox maker Allergan Inc successfully fought a proposed 5 percent tax on breast implants, face-lifts and other elective cosmetic procedures in Senate Democrats' healthcare legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dropped that plan, nicknamed the "Botax" after the popular wrinkle fighter, in changes released on Saturday. It was replaced it with a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services.

California-based Allergan launched a major offensive against the Botax plan after it was included as a late addition to the Senate's healthcare reform bill in November.

Allergan Chief Executive David Pyott personally raised objections with lawmakers and the company launched a website and Facebook page to rally tax opponents. The website called the plan "a tax on self-improvement."

Plastic surgeons also lobbied heavily against the Botax. They argued the tax would unfairly hit middle-class, working women who make up a large portion of their patients, not just the wealthy.

"The lobbying was fierce and intense," particularly from physician groups, said Capitol Street analyst Ipsita Smolinksi. (Reuters)

When reading newspapers or surfing the web, I am still drawn to the issue of man-made chemicals in commerce. I was trained as a toxicologist, and was employed in that capacity with a major international petroleum company for over 30 years. How incredibly lucky — to be able to put into daily practice a science that held me in thrall... and still does.

The details of how living organisms work at the cellular and molecular levels are hugely complex and still incompletely understood, and one of the best methods of finding out how things work is by “perturbing” them … such as by introducing various concentrations of chemical substances that interfere with normal processes. You learn how things normally work by studying the abnormal. When I started my career, almost no one knew what toxicology was. Times have certainly changed.

Health Canada is proposing an unorthodox way of combatting a food ingredient suspected in some cancers: It wants to let manufacturers put small amounts of a cancer-fighting drug into potato chips and similar foods to curb production of the harmful chemical.

Ever since acrylamide was discovered seven years ago in such foods as french fries and chips cooked at high temperatures, scientists have struggled for a way to get it out. The chemical is not added deliberately; it is an unintentional byproduct of cooking.

Though the evidence is far from definitive, acrylamide has been connected to cancer in animals and possibly people.

As a partial answer, Health Canada is suggesting removing the requirement for a prescription to administer the enzyme asparaginase, except when it is injected into leukemia patients as a treatment.

That way, food companies could include small amounts of the drug in their products, the department says in a "notice of intent" document published on Saturday. Evidence suggests that asparaginase lessens the production of acrylamide by as much as 90%. (Tom Blackwell, National Post)

NEW YORK - Dietary "phytoestrogens" -- plant substances that have weak estrogen-like activity -- have little impact on the risks of developing hormone-sensitive cancers like breast and prostate cancer or colorectal cancers, new research suggests.

In a large study of some 25,000 British adults, researchers failed to find any "significant" differences in cancer risk related to dietary intake of these compounds.

Phytoestrogens are found in a wide range of foods including dairy products, soy foods, cereals, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, coffee and tea. Previous studies have suggested dietary phytoestrogen intake is associated with increased breast cancer risk and reduced colorectal cancer risk in women. The results from earlier studies were hampered, however, by limited data about phytoestrogen content in food.

No previous research has examined the association between phytoestrogen intake and prostate cancer risk.

In the current study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers assigned phytoestrogen values to nearly 11,000 foods following chemical analyses. For the first time, phytoestrogen values were assigned to animal products.

Unlike plants, which themselves contain phytoestrogens, phytoestrogens are generated by the digestion of animal products like meat and dairy products by microbes in the gut, the researchers explain. (Reuters Health)

HONG KONG - The consumption of popular Chinese herbal products containing aristolochic acid is associated with an increased risk of urinary tract cancer, a study in Taiwan has found.

Aristolochic acid, known as Mu Tong in Chinese, is found naturally in some herbs that are used in Chinese herbal products to treat hepatitis, urinary tract infection, rhinitis, dysmenorrhea and eczema.

While studies in the past have linked urothelial cancer to the use of aristolochic acid, this is the first study to see if the same association can be made between cancer and herbal products containing aristolochic acid. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - New study findings offer reassurance to pregnant women that acetaminophen does not appear to raise the risk of birth defects.

Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol and certain other painkillers, and is often found in over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. Taken as directed, acetaminophen is considered safe during pregnancy, making it the medication of choice for pregnant women's body aches and fevers.

However, there are still some questions about whether the drug can contribute to birth defects. Studies looking at birth defects as a broad group have either found no link to acetaminophen use or have yielded inconclusive findings. (Reuters Health)

Sedentary lifestyles are making children less fit - even among those who are not obese, a study suggests.

Essex University staged fitness tests on 600 10-year-olds a decade apart in an area with low levels of obesity.

They found significant falls in fitness levels, concluding the average 10-year-old in 1998 could beat 95% of youngsters in 2008 in running tests.

The researchers said the focus on obesity was obscuring the health risks of wider declines in fitness levels. ( BBC New)

WEIGHT-LOSS clubs for FOUR-YEAR-OLDS are being launched on the NHS in a bid to tackle Britain's obesity crisis.

The fat-fighting classes are already running in northern England, and will now be rolled out nationwide.

The move comes after official figures last week showed a quarter of five-year-olds are overweight - and experts warned that tubby kids are likely to grow up into obese adults.

Doctors fear many parents dismiss early obesity as "puppy fat". But Paul Gately, professor of Exercise and Obesity at Leeds Metropolitan University, said: "Puppy fat is no longer relevant to our children. They just don't grow out of it any more."

The flab-busting classes - which aim to teach whole families about healthy eating and exercise - are held on weekends. (The Sun)

NEW YORK - If you've ever thought that you literally feel other people's pain, you may be right. A brain-imaging study suggests that some people have true physical reactions to others' injuries.

Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt.

The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained "functional" pain.

"Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.

"Consequently," he told Reuters Health in an email, "there is considerable effort to uncover other ways in which the pain might be generated."

Derbyshire said he now wants to study whether the brains of patients with functional pain respond to images of injury in the same way that the current study participants' did. (Reuters Health)

CAPE DENISON - Expeditioners to Antarctic train for freezing temperatures and social isolation, but a study has found there is something else to be wary of -- sunburn.

The recent joint study by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency found that more than 80 percent of researchers to the South Pole were potentially exposed to ultraviolet (UV) rays in excess of the recommended limits.

Almost a third received more than five times these limits.

The study showed that in some cases the UV exposure levels in Australian Antarctic stations can reach an index level of 8 or more, making exposure levels there similar to what lifeguards in Australia's sunny Queensland state potentially receive.

"It's the first study that we have done to look at the personal doses of solar UV radiation of Australians working in Antarctica," AAD Chief Medical Officer Jeff Ayton, co-author of the report, told Reuters.

Measurements were carried out during unloading of two vessels while they were at Australian Antarctic stations Casey, Davis and Mawson. Participants wore UV-sensitive badges on their chests for the duration of the working day, which ranged from five to 10 hours but could be as long as 14 hours.

Their face, hands and in some cases more of their limbs were uncovered and subjected to UV exposure.

"Despite sun protection being provided to the workers, a large portion of them reported feeling sunburnt," Ayton said.

There is a large variation of UV radiation in Antarctica. In winter, when there's very low levels, vitamin D deficiency is a real threat.

But in summer, the study found that the extended duration of sunlight, the hole in the ozone layer and the light's reflection off the ice and water contributed to the high levels of UV radiation exposure. (Reuters)

Last Friday I joined a protest of over 80 people at farmer Peter Spencer’s property in the mountains near Cooma. Peter (61), is now past the twenty-eighth day of a hunger strike, perched high above the ground on a communications tower on his property. Looking down from his eyrie he seemed at first somewhat curious and dishevelled, but when he spoke he was lucid, his arguments were cogent, and passions ran high.

Peter Spencer is demanding the Australian government pay fair compensation to him and all Australian property-holders whose property rights were taken without compensation pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol. He also demands a Royal Commission into the way governments acquired those property rights, because it seems to have been deliberately intended to, and did, subvert the constitutional protection against the unjust acquisition of property.

Why is Spencer directing his fire at the Federal government, since it was the State government, through the Native Vegetation Act (NVA) that passed the laws restricting farmers use-rights? The answer is because the Federal government moved the States for, benefited from, and paid them to make these unjust acquisitions.

The Commonwealth decided to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions by restricting farmers land use across Australia. Farmers made an easy target compared to power stations or other emitters.

Under the Australian Constitution, if the Commonwealth wants to acquire a person’s property, it must do so on just terms, i.e. pay fair compensation. Since land-use rights form part of the equity of a property, the taking of those rights, and vesting the control and benefit of them in government bodies, is in effect a compulsory acquisition of property rights.

To give you some idea of the scale, Peter Spencer’s property is 12,000 acres, the use-rights of which were in effect confiscated along with his livelihood. One farmer at the protest said these laws cost him $30,000 a year. Another landowner lost $1.2 million worth of equity from a 40 acre block of land.

Think of the whole of Australia, and you can see that the value of the property rights thus forcibly acquired without payment, from the entire landscape of property-holders, must run into billions of dollars.

Coveting private property, but not wanting to pay for it, what did the Feds do? They got the States to take it instead. Unlike the Federal Constitution, State Constitutions (except one) contain no provision for the payment of fair compensation for the taking of property. NSW legislation requires it, but the NSW State simply overrode that with ordinary legislation, smacking of rule by decree.

Using the Commonwealth Natural Heritage Trust of Australia Act the Commonwealth gave NSW $1.2 billion, that it got from the sale of Telstra, for their part in stealing billions of dollars worth of other people’s property.

So Mr Spencer’s case is this. He can’t sue the Commonwealth because, though they sponsored the acquisitions of property, acquired the benefit for their purposes, and are constitutionally liable to pay compensation, they didn’t actually do the deed themselves.

And then he can’t sue the State because, although they acquired his property rights, they aren’t legally liable to pay for it.

In the High Court, the Commonwealth is arguing that the Constitution was not intended to protect against forced acquisitions of property by the executive arm of government! The absurdity, or dishonesty, of this argument should be obvious. If it were accepted, it would make the very idea of private property, and constitutional and limited government, meaningless.

And now to compound the offence, faced with Peter Spencer’s hunger strike, the Commonwealth says it’s all a State matter.

Either it is entirely appropriate to call for the Commonwealth to fix the problem, since they can obviously use the same measures with the States to fix the problem as they did to cause it.

If you want someone to grow beef, or wheat, or tomatoes on their property, you don’t pass a law making it a criminal offence to grow something else. If there is a social need for a person’s property which is to be forcibly acquired, then society needs to pay for it. But if society can’t afford to pay, then it can’t afford to have it and is not entitled to it.

To breach this principle, as the Federal and State governments have done, violates basic ethics, blatantly subverts our Constitution, and is already spelling the end of limited government and a free society.

All Australians should understand that the Commonwealth is implicated up to its neck in what it blames on its accomplices the States, and should join in demanding a Royal Commission into this devious and appalling abuse, and fair compensation for all persons affected by this unprecedented case of massive governmental theft. (Quadrant)

Monday, 14 December 2009 02:31
By Forrest Laws
December 10, 2009

You have to wonder when the public will finally grow weary of claims by environmental groups more interested in fund-raising than truth-telling. Example: Go on the Environmental Working Group Web site, ewg.org, and look at its latest fund-raising ploy warning consumers about the dangers of, gasp, hand sanitizers.

If environmental groups don’t drive U.S. agriculture back into subsistence farming, it won’t be for lack of trying. A few days ago, the nation’s media outlets received a press release with this headline:

“New Report Reveals Dramatic Rise in Pesticide Use on Genetically Engineered Crops Due to the Spread of Resistant Weeds. GE Crops Increase Herbicide use by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008.”

The article went on to say its author, The Organic Center’s Charles Benbrook, presents “compelling evidence linking the increase in pesticide use on GE, ‘herbicide-tolerant’ crops to the emergence and spread of herbicide-resistant weeds.

Well, duh. Anyone knows that if you increase the sprays of a herbicide, chances are some of the weeds will become resistant. That’s what happened with atrazine in the 1970s and with ALS inhibitors in the 1980s and 1990s. The fact herbicides — mostly glyphosate — have been sprayed on genetically engineered crops has little to do with weed resistance.

And it’s only logical that the number of pounds of herbicides would increase when you’re applying a pound of glyphosate per acre compared to fractions of an ounce of the herbicides it replaced.

“An ounce of one can be more dangerous than a pound of another, so measuring them as if they were exactly the same is nonsense,” said John Reifsteck, an Illinois farmer, writing in the Nov. 20 issue of the Truth About Technology and Trade newsletter.

Others responding to Benbrook’s analysis, funded by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Food Safety and Greenpeace, noted that other studies have shown the opposite — pesticide use on global biotech crops dropped almost 800 million pounds between 1996 and 2008.

They’ve also shown production costs have gone down and crop yields have risen since 1996. “Glyphosate has been low cost, effective and easy to use,” said economist Ross Korves. “It is not a surprise that producers would use it until a more cost effective product becomes available.”

It’s also not surprising that the sponsors of Benbrook’s study are not above melding the facts to try to fit their own agenda. “We’ve dealt with many critics of modern crop technologies for years, including some associated with today’s report,” said CropLife America President Jay Vroom.

“Much of the rhetoric of the news release is familiar — dozens of claims all of which are refuted by government and university of data sources.”

You have to wonder when the public will finally grow weary of claims by environmental groups more interested in fund-raising than truth-telling. Example: Go on the Environmental Working Group Web site, ewg.org, and look at its latest fund-raising ploy warning consumers about the dangers of, gasp, hand sanitizers.

I’m sure you will want to donate $5 to EWG and get your free “Dirty Dozen” refrigerator magnet telling you about produce and pesticides.

e-mail: flaws@farmpress.com (Delta Farm Press)

VINKEL, The Netherlands - Dutch farms started culling thousands of goats on Monday as part of efforts to fight an outbreak of the highly infectious disease Q fever, which has been a factor in six human deaths this year.

Q fever is caused by a bacterium that is mostly transmitted to humans from goats and sheep, especially during delivery of young, and the number of human cases of the disease has risen to more than 2,300 currently from about 170 in 2007.

About 60 farms of a total of 410 in the country are now known to be affected and authorities decided about 40,000 goats at these farms should be killed to stop the disease spreading. (Reuters)

Indonesia's next big quake due under Mentawais - A massive undersea earthquake is long overdue beneath the Mentawai islands in Indonesia and could cause another deadly tsunami, say scientists mapping one of the world's most quake-prone zones.

Unlike the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed around 226,000 people, this tsunami is expected to be smaller but may be just as deadly as it would hit Sumatra's densely populated coast.

"The size of the tsunami may not be as big, but the problem is the size of the population is about three times as great as Aceh," said Kerry Sieh, the director of the Singapore-based Earth Observatory. (TDT)

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies. Photo: EPA

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year. (Sunday Telegraph)

Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia?

Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change.

Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public."

Chutzpah has been redefined.

As Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. The fact is that imminent man-made climate disaster has been shown to be a massive fraud driven by manipulated data and deliberate suppression of facts to the contrary. (IBD)

Yesterday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA), of which I am President, issued a study (in Russian), “How Warming Is Being Made: The Case of Russia.” The report, prepared by IEA director Natalya Pivovarova, suggests that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU) in Norwich (England) apparently cherry-picked Russian climate data. ( Andrei Illarionov, Cato at liberty)

There are more than 2,000 pages and millions of words in the Climategate emails (get a searchable archive here), and I am two of those words on one of the pages. This cameo walk-on role doesn't amount to anything in the great 13-year epic chronology of science warfare found in the email cache, but it is still satisfying to be there -- even more satisfying because my bit part appears in a small chain of emails that leads right up to one of the top dogs in Climategate, Phil Jones.

I got the Climategate part by virtue of a column last Oct. 1 about the looming meltdown in the official global warming science and policy machine.

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review underway, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, all the attention has been dedicated to a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.

As President Obama returns from Copenhagen, polls show that Americans are becoming more more wary of his global warming agenda – and of global warming itself.

Fresh from a global warming deal in Copenhagen, Denmark, President Obama returned to a cold, snowy Washington where the politics of global warming are slowly shifting underfoot.

Mr. Obama’s Copenhagen promise to cut US emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 will rely heavily on the cap-and-trade bill currently winding its way through the Senate. But a bill that was never going to be an easy sell has become even more fraught with potential complications during recent months.

Polls suggest that Americans have soured on Obama's climate strategy, and the "climategate" e-mail scandal has highlighted the public's increasing skepticism of the basic science driving some of the White House’s most aggressive policy prescriptions. (Christian Science Monitor)

As President Obama arrives in Copenhagen hoping to seal an elusive deal on climate change, his approval rating on dealing with global warming has crumbled at home and there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer money to encourage developing nations to curtail their energy use, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

There's also rising public doubt and growing political polarization about what scientists have to say on the environment, and a widespread perception that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is happening. (Washington Post)

On December 8, ABC’s The Drum – Unleashed posted an opinion piece of mine entitled “Kill the IPCC”. As submitted the piece was entitled, a little more gracefully, I think, “The bell tolls for the IPCC” [full text published in Quadrant Online here]. But the essential message can be represented by either heading.

And that the IPCC should be closed down was indeed the essential message that I wished to convey. For during its 20 year-long existence it has done incalculable economic and political damage (which continues in Copenhagen as I write), but above all else it is the damage that the IPCC has inflicted upon Science that concerns me.

Our citizenry used to able to rely upon practitioners of the scientific method to provide dispassionate analysis of the pros and cons of a problem of public concern. But no longer, I fear, as Climategate has recently displayed.

After my article was posted, there ensued a day or so of busy emailing at The Drum, which included the writing of over 500 blog postings. The authors of most of these contributions seemed particularly upset that the ABC had permitted the expression of a climate rationalist viewpoint - and allegedly an ignorant one at that – on the website of what they had hoped was a balanced public broadcaster.

The rush of emails was shortly followed by an article on The Drum by former Labor Science Minister, Mr. Barry Jones, entitled (doubtless by the editor) “Bob Carter’s attack on reason”, which seems to have been intended as a commentary on, and perhaps a reply to, my own original posting. By December 20, Mr Jones’ piece had attracted a further 792 blog comments, most of which supported his views.

In turn, therefore, I now provide this reply to eight of the points that Mr. Jones raises. (Quadrant)

These are hard times for climate scientists who want government action on global warming. Not only has the Copenhagen summit largely produced discord, but an embarrassing public release of private e-mails exposed attempts by a group of climate scientists to hide scientific evidence that didn't conform to their beliefs or pronouncements.

As CBS News put it, the scandal, called "Climategate," is "casting doubts on the very science on which this summit is based." In a widely noted Washington Post column, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin argued, "the documents show that there was no real consensus" among climate scientists. And a new ABC News poll finds that only 29% of the public now place "a lot" of trust in what scientists say about the environment.

The question of whether there is a scientific consensus on human-induced global warming has long inspired heated debate among both scientists and politicians. The most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes global warming as "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by human activity. But skeptics have argued that the IPCC, which is tasked by the United Nations with evaluating the risks of climate change, is itself influenced by political considerations and "pre-conceived agendas."

In a broader effort to measure scientific opinion, one scholar analyzed peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change and concluded that over 75% supported the notion of anthropogenic (human-induced) warming. But critics argued that the analysis was itself skewed toward finding such a consensus.

So how do you know what scientists really think about global warming? Well, you could always ask them. That's precisely what the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), which I direct, did in 2007 when it hired Harris Interactive to survey American climate scientists.The results won't entirely please either the Climategate correspondents or their critics. (S. Robert Lichter, Forbes)

Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science. (Patrick J. Michaels, WSJ)

The following article appears today in American Thinker, by David Douglass and John Christy, which tells their story of how scientists involved in Climategate did their best to protect the IPCC global warming party line through manipulation of the peer review process:

“The CRU emails have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer review process appear to have been compromised by a team* of global warming scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. The team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in IJC by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer (DCPS). The DCPS paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant “global warming” in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.

“We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.

” *The team is a group of a number of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often supports the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For this essay, the leading team members include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others.”

John Christy and David Douglass provide a detailed accounting of how a comment on one of their papers was handled in the peer review process (even more detail here). Their experience, with the gory details revealed by the CRU emails, show in all of its unpleasantness how activist scientists sought to stage-manage climate science from the inside.

Their story hits very close to home with me, as I went through a very, very similar process with respect to a comment (PDF) and reply (PDF) on the "shameful article" on hurricanes and global warming that I co-authored in 2005 (PDF). (If my emails ever get hacked you'll see that ugly episode from the inside.;-) That situation had a positive outcome only because at the time I protested efforts to deny us a right to respond in accordance with journal policies and threatened to go public with the improper efforts at stage-management. I am sure that these sort of shenanigans go on in academia more than we'd like to admit, however that does not justify them.

What these episodes reveal is an effort by activist climate scientists to stage-manage the peer review process much like how one might manage a partisan blog for public consumption. The blog management philosophy of Real Climate was described as follows in the CRU emails:

In today's Washington Post, Michael Mann of Penn State University and CRU email fame, gives us some good news about climate science and some bad news about his colleagues.

The good news is that climate science in his view is not at all impeached by the release of the CRU emails.

What we have just witnessed in Copenhagen was a rare spectacle in global affairs: a massive exercise in political groupthink reaching its pinnacle precisely as the rational foundation for it began to unravel in a very public way.

Even as records confirmed the authenticity of the controversial “Climategate” e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain, true believers at the UN conference were still in denial (the first stage of grief), acting as if CRU were some minor outpost in the climate research landscape. In fact, it is a world leader in global-warming research.

Stretching back over ten years, e-mail records show a culture of corruption at CRU in which researchers fabricated trends in climate data, concealed modifications to their computer models from public scrutiny, attempted to evade Freedom of Information requests and tried to isolate sceptical colleagues in the scientific community.

Among those at the UN who bothered to address the Climategate bombshell, the response generally took the following form: the scandal doesn’t matter much because thousands of scientists have signed letters supporting the theory of man-made global warming. That’s like portraying presidential elections in Iran as models of democratic behaviour; when the outcome is predetermined by those in power, counting ballots is merely an artful conceit.

I would like to trust the signed declarations of scientists supporting the global warming “consensus”. But in my experience, when it comes to political causes, professors are not the Socratic gadflies of academic lore. Scepticism isn’t a habit of academics today any more than candour is a habit of politicians. (Mark Aveyard, The National, UAE)

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

WUWT reader Dennis Kuzara wrote to Wikipedia in response to our earlier article on Wikibullies prompted by Lawrence Solomon of the National Post. He has received an eye-opening reply. Emphasis mine – Anthony

> > 4. Has William Connolley been removed as a Wikipedia administrator? If so who has taken his place?

In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article.

Nobody has replaced him specifically, but there are more than a thousand other administrators with very varied backgrounds.

Source: Satirical Press
Earth Global Climate Control System

In breakthrough news today, The United Nations announced they had found The Global Thermostat to control the Earth’s temperature.

With 45,000 people searching for the controls in Copenhagen at the Bella Convention Center, commentators were shocked when it turned up instead in a closet in the basement of the World Meterological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva.

“It’s a landmark day for human-kind” said Rajendra Pachuri, Chairman of the IPCC.

Barack Obama stood for a standing ovation that lasted 23 minutes and said: “It gives us all hope”.

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia: “We wouldn’t have found this without Obama’s magic touch. Obama rolled up his sleeves in Copenhagen, and the ancient Sumerian map fell out of his shirt.”

Tim Flannery, an Australian environmental spokesman, said: We must make sure this thermostat does not fall into the wrong hands. It must be managed by an unelected, unaudited government with infinite powers. Nothing else is safe.

Pachuri went on to explain the degree of control the IPCC expected to be able to have:

Nations wishing to apply for adjustments to the thermostat need to file a comprehensive application in 14 languages, in a form expected to be 4,000 pages long.

Within 30 minutes of the announcement, new social networks were springing into action on Twitter and Facebook. One, Ice-Age Now (IAN), was lobbying for The Thermostat to be switched down to glacial levels. He said skiers, skaters, and polar bears have been deprived of their full potential since the upper paleolithic era 15,000 years ago. “For most of homo sapiens’ history, temperatures have been a lot lower. It’s time we faced that”. Critics pointed out that he owned property in Texas, which would dramatically improve in value as the ice forced all Canadians to move south, and also that “about 4.56 billion people would starve to death”.

No one could explain how the Sumerians would have known about the Global Thermostat, especially since they lived 3,500 km away (2,200 miles) from Geneva. But paleoclimate experts noted that the Sumerians had flourished during the Holocene Optimum, which was warmer than today, and that possibly the discovery of the ancient thermostat had been key to the development of human civilization.

Over the last 30 years janitors had stored progressively larger vacuum cleaners leaning against the switch, resulting in the climbing world averages.

A janitor had accidentally bumped it last week and was possibly responsible for the blizzards that struck Copenhagen and London this week. Training in Global Temperature Control has been added to his Duty Statement. (Jo Nova)

The Copenhagen summit achieved its main aim, to maintain the carbon-trading system established by the Kyoto Protocol, says Christopher Booker

Heads of state: protesters at the Copenhagen world summit mask themselves as world leaders, including Australia's Kevin Rudd, Germany's Angela Merkel and President Obama Photo: Casper Christoffersen/EPA

As fairy-tale snow gently descended on Copenhagen, the great global warming conference degenerated through pantomime, boredom, chaos and anger to its entirely predictable conclusion – a colossal pile of fudge with a very hard and nasty rock hidden at its centre. The "world summit" on climate change was never really going to be about saving the world from global warming at all. Even if the delegates had got all they wanted, it would no more have had any influence on emissions of CO2 – let alone on the world's climate – than the 1997 Kyoto Protocol before it. (Christopher Booker, TDT)

In 2004, it was less than $300 million. But in 2005, the trade really started to soar, ending the year with $10.8 billion-worth of transactions. A year later, in 2006, the "carbon" market had grown to $31 billion. In 2007, again it more than doubled its turnover, to $64 billion. Last year, it did it again, reaching a colossal $126 billion. By 2020, some estimates suggest the annual value will reach $2 trillion.

Not only does this represent a very significant business volume, its stunning growth rate makes carbon trading the hottest item in town, with banks, financial houses and independent brokers piling in to make a killing.

The larger part of the market actually comprises the EU's mandatory Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – and other very much smaller allowance schemes - accounting for 73 percent of trading volume in 2008. But the whole system is underpinned by what is known as "project-based transactions". These comprise, in the main, so-called "carbon credits" generated by the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

This mechanism was formally created in 1997 by the Kyoto climate treaty and started operating in a very small way in 1998 building to 78 million "credits" (or Certified Emission Reductions, CERs, as they are formally known) to 333 million this year with a projection of 1.7 billion by the end of 2012. (EU Referendum)

The city of Copenhagen 'is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport'. So said John Sauven of Greenpeace UK after the climate summit broke up. And he is right.

This is the biggest heist in history. As they poured carbon over snow-covered Denmark from their gas-guzzling jets, world leaders were congratulating themselves on securing a deal which will make their backers and financiers a trillion pounds a year. These riches will come from buying and selling permits, the so-called 'carbon credits' which allow industry and electricity generators in developed countries to emit carbon dioxide.

Forget 'Big Oil' - this is 'Big Carbon' making the most of a 'business opportunity' that was created by the first climate treaty at Kyoto in 1997.

The frenzied negotiations we have just seen were never about 'saving the planet'. They were always about money. At stake was this new 'climate change industry' which last year ripped off £129billion from the global economy and is heading for that trillion-pound bonanza by 2020 - but only if the key parts of the Kyoto treaty could be renewed.

With the treaty due to expire by 2012, unless it was replaced, the money tree would fail. Hence, all the power and vested interests of big business were brought into play, stoking up the panic over climate change to create an atmosphere where the parties could keep the money flowing.

Carbon Trading is barely 13 years old yet the scale of the industry is astonishing. Overall control lies with an obscure committee created by Kyoto, The Clean Development Mechanism Executive. It issues firms with the 'golden tickets' known as Certified Emission Reductions (CERs).

At Kyoto, Western governments set targets to cut emissions. In order to achieve this, they set 'caps' on the amount of CO2 a company can produce.

However, if they go over these limits, they may buy permits from firms who have not used up their quotas.

The developing world is not subject to the same caps as the West so they can generate CERs which are then traded by banks.

The actual emissions don't change, it's merely a matter of how much you have to pay for them. For example, in 2006, the NHS spent £6million on carbon permits to keep patients warm. (Daily Mail)

I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.

I know. I saw it with my own eyes. And it wasn’t for the first time. This was my second international UN conference in less than one year – the first being the so-called Durban Review Conference in Geneva that purported to review the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa” of 2001. The latter was as much about real racism as the former was about real climate change. It was also – as will be recalled – something of a farce, with the appearance Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dominating the event as he spewed vitriolic anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Nevertheless, the UN declared the conference a success.

It will say the same of Copenhagen, no doubt. At least the presence of the various despots (Chavez, Mugabe, the re-upped A-jad, etc.) was not as damaging this time. It was more of sideshow, compared to the true objective of COP15 – the cementing of UN bureaucratic power under the guise of CO2 regulation. That was why the Climategate revelations were particularly poorly timed for the United Nations. Yes, they were largely ignored or dismissed at press conferences, but they were an overwhelming presence about which many were aware. ( Flemming Rose – the illustrious cultural editor of Denmark’s Jyllands Posten – told me in an interview that these revelations were covered much more extensively in the European press than in the US.) Furthermore, rejecting Climategate as an assault on “settled science” is, of course, risible because the concept of settled science itself is tenuous at best, verging on an oxymoron. As a commenter noted on this site, Einstein upended the settled science of Newton and now Einstein is in question. Yet we are supposed to believe without question some unknown mediocrity at the IPCC because of “majority rule” [sic].

Yes, it’s comical, but it’s quite worrisome, if you examine the true game afoot. Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Well, now jet lag is setting in, so I’m going to shut down for the moment. But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home (9 1/2 hours from Copenhagen to Atlanta, another 4 from Atlanta to LA) finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first. (Roger L. Simon, PJM)

A funny thing happened this week. Humanity did a low-orbit bypass of a totalitarian world government, and pulled away, but only a few noticed the near miss.

Christopher Monckton has already spoken about the draft treaty with it’s message of setting up a new form of global governance, but without any mention of voting. He spoke again yesterday to Alex Jones and pointed out that in a sense Copenhagen succeeded, despite what everyone is saying. After all, it was never really about saving the environment was it? It was about setting up a world government, and they got the odd $30 billion dollars. Not bad for a failure.

“That is the one thing that they are definitely going to succeed in doing here and they will announce that as a victory in itself, and they will be right because that is the one and only single aim of this entire global warming conference, to establish the mechanism, the structure, and above all the funding for a world government.” the British politician, business consultant, policy adviser exclusively told the Alex Jones show yesterday”

“They are going to take from the western countries the very large financial resources required to do that.” Monckton said, adding “They will disguise it by saying they are setting up a $100 billion fund for adaptation to climate change in third world countries, but actually, this money will almost all be gobbled up by the international bureaucracy.”

“The first thing they will do, and the one thing I think they were always going to succeed in doing at this conference is to agree to establish what will be delicately called ‘the institutional framework’. Now that is a code word for world government.”

When I talk to people about the insidious reach of big government one example I’ve been using lately is that of The Netherlands. In the name of “carbon-pollution” the government of the Netherlands wants to have a GPS in every car in order to charge people for their CO2 emissions. Each GPS will track where and when every car moves, radio the data in and an audit office will calculate CO2 emissions based on kilometers driven and the car model. They will also know exactly where people go and how long they stay there for, 24 hours a day. [Source]

But there is a better more efficient system for taxing carbon emissions, and with the exquisite sensitivity of being directly connected to the exact amount emitted, Governments could just tax… fuel (and it’s not like they haven’t thought of that already).

There is no need for major audits, amassed records, or an invasion of privacy. Plus it’s virtually impossible to cheat. In many ways the GPS solution would be worse for the environment. It would let a poorly maintained car get away with increased emissions without an extra penalty because they would be charged for the average emissions for that car model. Likewise there wouldn’t be as much incentive to pump up your tyres and tune that motor, because if your car was better than average, you don’t save much money, even though you save emissions. It’s too bizarre for words. Yet apparently other state departments (like Oregon) have considered the same thing.

The amount of data that would “need” to be maintained and managed is boggling. And the security would be a headache and a half. (Just think how handy it would be to track all your competitors car movements, or your ex-wife’s, or your employees. Just think how many people would like to track you too? Hackers would come, and then they’d know where you went too…)

Is there any limit to how large and powerful the reach of any government aims to be? (Jo Nova)

A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.

The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.

The Prime Minister will say: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries. One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship.

“I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as a global community.” The summit failed to produce a political agreement among all the countries. Delegates instead passed a motion on Saturday “taking note” of an accord drawn up the night before by five countries: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. (The Times)

The Telegraph seems to have mounted a temporary recovery from its bout of Copenhagen fever, if the Sunday edition is anything to go by. Most significant of all is a full page article by Booker and North raising questions about the man at the centre of a malodorous web of finance and power, Rajendra Pachauri. This is one of those topics that the establishment media have been desperately trying to bury, though it is, of course, bubbling away among those irresponsible bloggers.

The Indian connection is just part of the story, but a very significant one for the British. It is serious enough, for example, that 1,700 steel workers in Redcar have had their jobs stolen and removed to Orissa, but do they know that it is facilitated by the system of carbon credits that their own Government has supported and funded with their taxes through the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) scam inflicted on them by the corrupt bureaucrats of the EU? The hapless and hopeless British Government has stood aside while the country it is supposed to represent is being stripped bare. The once prosperous fishing ports are empty, agriculture is tied up in bureaucratic knots and now the remaining heavy industry is being filched from under the eyes of the uncomprehending populace. Government-created poverty and dependence spread inexorably across the benighted land. Meanwhile, as Booker notes separately, Copenhagen accord keeps Big Carbon in business.

Even Matthew d'Ancona, Stuntman Dave’s representative on Earth, weighs in with a piece entitled Copenhagen was the MPs' expenses scandal writ large. The political class, faced with resistance from hoi polloi to their projected impoverishment, have abandoned argument and now resort to puerile name-calling unworthy of the infants’ school playground.

On another tack, the Telegraph has also, at last, noticed the devastation left behind by that philistine political thug, John Prescott, on the streets of Britain’s towns. The main front page headline in the printed version is Thousands of gardens ‘stolen’ by developers. Your bending author now seldom goes further than the short walk (or, to be more accurate, electric vehicle ride) to the village pub. Over the last forty yards or so, three gardens have disappeared in the last two years, to be replaced by houses wedged in the gaps, so that each house in the row has no surrounding space at all. Many beautiful mature trees have been felled and the result is the worst kind of urban blight in what was once an attractive semi-rural area. Greenery and song birds are a thing of the past. New Labour has certainly left its mark here.

Oh, and by the way, the bottom corner of the front page has an article by Chief Hysterian, Louise Gray, and friends, headed Climate summit ends in chaos and ‘toothless’ deal.

Even that home of extreme Green propaganda, The Sunday Times, seems to be moderating. The Copenhagen farce is glad tidings for all is the headline for a piece by Dominic Lawson that exposes the inadequacy of our political leaders.

Rogue columnist Rod Liddle has a piece noting the threatened retirement of Britain’s Health Tsar Zealot, SIR Liam Donaldson: Watch out, world – Dr Doomsayer may be visiting you soon. This master of the fake statistic has also caused great cultural devastation throughout Britain and much unnecessary panic among the credulous.

COPENHAGEN — The historic U.N. climate talks ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise that gives billions in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Two weeks of wrangling at Copenhagen exposed sharp divisions between rich and poor nations — and even among major greenhouse-gas emitters like China and the United States — on how to fight global warming.

Yet in the end, nearly all 193 nations at the U.N. climate conference agreed to President Barack Obama's solution, which points toward deeper emissions cuts for rich nations but without mandatory targets that would draw sanctions. (AP)

COPENHAGEN — After two weeks of delays, theatrics and last-minute deal-making, the United Nations climate change talks concluded here early Saturday morning with a grudging agreement by the participants to “take note” of a pact shaped by five major nations.

The final accord, a 12-paragraph document, was a statement of intention, not a binding pledge to begin taking action on global warming — a compromise seen to represent a flawed but essential step forward. (NYT)

Delegates at the Copenhagen conference have agreed not to block a deal brokered by the US president - despite criticism by campaigners and smaller nations. ( Sky News Online)

The "first steps towards a low-carbon future" or a "toothless declaration"? Politicians and campaigners give their response to the deal (The Guardian)

Amid the chaos and confusion of frantic negotiations on the final night of the summit, what kind of deal actually emerged? (Press Association)

How will Copenhagen work, how much will it cost, and why is there so much unhappiness with the outcome? (Louise Gray, TDT)

Deal thrashed out at talks condemned as climate change scepticism in action (John Vidal, Allegra Stratton and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian)

China stands accused of wrecking global deal - Nations stunned by tactics of world's largest polluter. Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor in Copenhagen, and Jonathan Owen in London report

China "systematically wrecked" the Copenhagen climate summit because it feared being presented with a legally binding target to cut the country's soaring carbon emissions, a senior official from an EU country, present during the negotiations, told The Independent on Sunday yesterday.

The accusation, backed up by a separate eye-witness account from the heart of the talks of obstructive Chinese behaviour, reflected widespread anger among many delegations about the nation's actions at the conference. (The Independent)

The Chinese government expressed quiet satisfaction at the outcome of the Copenhagen talks despite European accusations that it had systematically wrecked the negotiating process.

China's foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, described the outcome as "significant and positive".

Among the achievements, he said, was the setting of binding emissions cuts for rich nations and voluntary mitigation actions by developing nations, such as China.

"It is not a destination, but a new beginning," he said in a statement that asserted China's right to continue its economic growth without the limits of legally binding emissions cuts.

Xinhua, the state-controlled news agency, also emphasised what was maintained rather than what was achieved.

"The Copenhagen accord protected the principal of 'common but differentiated responsibility' under the climate convention and the Kyoto protocol. (The Guardian)

What a disaster. The climate summit in Copenhagen has failed because of the hardball politicking of the United States, China and several other countries -- and because people just can't seem to fathom how catastrophic climate change will be. They probably won't have long to wait before things become a bit clearer. (Der Spiegel)

December 19th, 2009

Dear Bill,

Yesterday, in response to the end of the Copenhagen negotiations, you issued a press release with 350.org titled “The President has wrecked the UN (and the planet),” in which you wrote: “The president has wrecked the U.N. and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it’s at the expense of everything progressives have held dear.”

Afterward, you published an article on the Grist homepage titled “With climate agreement, Obama guts progressive values,” in which you wrote: “He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is… when you sink beneath the waves we don’t want to hear much about it.” This followed a recent post by your organization accusing Obama of “corruption” and “conspiracy” for his climate negotiations with Ethiopia.

I’m writing you today because, as a young clean energy and climate advocate, I believe these words are wrong and irresponsible, and I would like to respectfully request that you issue a public apology to President Obama and young climate leaders across the country.

...

Sincerely,
Teryn Norris

Director, Americans for Energy Leadership
Founder, Breakthrough Generation

The politicians have chosen low taxes and oil money today over survival tomorrow (The Independent)

It might have seemed safe to assume that the drama of the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen had finally ended when President Barack Obama emerged from a last-minute bargaining session with leaders of major developing nations to announce a deal. Obama quickly left town, aides saying Air Force One had to rush to beat the major snowstorm bearing down on Washington. Having agreed terms with the leaders of the U.S., China, India, Brazil and South Africa — the major carbon emitters of today and, even more importantly, of tomorrow — the President would have seemed to have brought two weeks of often fruitless negotiations, including at least one all-nighter, to a successful conclusion. Instead, Obama's announcement marked the beginning of the all-nighter that never ended.

Because the U.N. body that oversees the climate negotiations works by consensus, every country present had an opportunity to voice their disproval of the proposed deal. And many took full advantage of that opportunity. The summit's final negotiating session dragged on for more than 30 straight hours, concluding on Saturday afternoon with the parties agreeing simply to "take note" of what had become known as the Copenhagen Accord. Although the refusal of several nations to endorse the deal meant it fell short of formal approval, according to the U.N. the outcome was enough for aspects of the agreement to become operational. "It may not be everything we hoped for, but this decision of the Conference of the Parties is an essential beginning," said an exhausted U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. "Finally, we sealed the deal." (Bryan Walsh, Time)

COPENHAGEN -- The global effort to combat climate change is stuck in essentially the same place after a massive United Nations summit that it was before the confab: with major emitters deadlocked over how much each of them should have to do to curb the rising output of greenhouse gases.

The two-week summit, billed as an event that would usher in an era of global cooperation against global warming, crashed into the same reality that has slowed the shift to cleaner forms of energy in the U.S. and around the world. Fossil fuel is cheap and convenient. In places where its use is growing most rapidly, its production of heat-trapping gases is widely viewed as less important than its boost to economic growth.

That explains why officials from some of the world's fastest-growing producers of greenhouse gas -- China and India -- resisted calls in Copenhagen to cap their emissions, though they said they would continue a range of domestic environmental initiatives that they see as in their economic interest. Their reluctance, in turn, minimized the environmental steps that industrialized countries were willing to take.

Far from resolving the issue, the Copenhagen conference set up months more of international haggling over what to do about climate change. (Jeffrey Ball, WSJ)

COPENHAGEN - Several developing nations lined up on Saturday to reject a deal worked out by U.S. President Barack Obama and major emerging economies to help fight global warming at the end of a U.N. summit.

"I regret to inform you that Tuvalu cannot accept this document," said Ian Fry, delegate for the low-lying Pacific island state that fears it could be wiped off the map by rising sea levels.

Delegates of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba also angrily denounced the "Copenhagen Accord," saying it would not help address global warming. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN, Dec 19 - The climate change summit proved to be a "spectacular failure even according to its own terms," but civil society had "some successes," such as the inclusion of certain issues on the climate agenda, and making the voice of the South heard loud and clear.

That was how activists assessed their efforts at 15th Conference of Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as the climate change talks came to an agonising end Saturday in Copenhagen. (IPS)

Leading Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery says he is happy with the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

COPENHAGEN Climate Council chairman Tim Flannery says a draft climate accord reached by world leaders is ''good but not perfect'', and described Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's role at the summit as ''outstanding''. (SMH)

Kevin Rudd, talking of Copenhagen, has never said truer words by sheer accident:

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says Australia had hoped to achieve more from the Copenhagen conference, but must now move forward and implement the accord.

She said the "extreme views" of some nations cannot be allowed to derail the process, but that Australia would do "no more, but no less" than the rest of the world on climate change. (SMH)

THERE were 45,000 people at the Copenhagen summit and more than 100 world leaders, but in the end it came down to an extraordinary personal showdown between the leaders of the world's two superpowers and biggest greenhouse gas emitting countries, China and the US.

The deal itself was anything but historic. But the implications of how the Chinese handled this negotiation well might be.

In a disastrous result for the world's environment and for 19 years of difficult and painstaking environmental diplomacy, China undoubtedly won.

Chinese chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua said China was leaving Copenhagen "happy", before walking out of the Bella conference centre late on Friday night with his clearly cheerful team .

In a statement, Xie, who is also vice-chairman with China's National Development and Reform Commission, said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was also happy with the agreement.

They are about the only people in the world who are happy about Copenhagen's failure, except perhaps those who are sceptical about the science of global warming and who therefore think global emission reduction efforts are not necessary in the first place. (Lenore Taylor, The Australian)

THE Copenhagen conference was rightly killed by greed, science fiction and a surfeit of hot air emitted by the 45,000 delegates, rent-seekers and assorted hangers-on, all of whom attempted to defy common sense and cripple the global economy.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who sought to attain some semblance of world statesmanship as a "friend of the chair" appointed by host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, again demonstrated his lack of diplomatic negotiating skills as conferees failed to agree to a meaningful conclusion. (Piers Akerman, The Sunday Telegraph)

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.

The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center. (SPPI Blog)

Britain may leave Copenhagen committed to making the deepest cuts in its carbon emissions of any industrialised nation .

Gordon Brown is backing a deal that could lead to the UK trying to almost halve its production of greenhouse gases by 2020, something British officials say would have “real costs” for households. (TDT)

The Copenhagen climate conference ended on Saturday without unanimous agreement as the world’s biggest economies backed a limited accord that leaders said would form the basis for a future deal to tackle global warming.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, acknowledged that the outcome was “not everything we hoped for” but described it as an “essential beginning” as he brought a close to two weeks of fractious negotiations in the Danish capital.

Talks had continued through Friday night into Saturday morning in a bid to reach consensus on a tentative agreement struck between the US, China and other big emerging economies on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and financing to help developing countries cope with climate change.

But several developing countries, led by Venezuela and Bolivia, refused to endorse the deal, ensuring that the conference would end without an official agreement. Instead, all 193 countries agreed to “take note of the Copenhagen Accord” without committing to accept it. (Financial Times)

I hate to say I told you so, but I have predicted the failure of the Copenhagen summit to agree to binding commitments for over a year.

The Copenhagen fiasco was not just foreseeable, it was inevitable. The inability of the international community to break the climate deadlock reflects the incompatible national interests and demands that divide the west and the rest. This is now a permanent feature in what is likely to become an indefinite moratorium on international climate law-making.

In light of the Copenhagen non-agreement, there will be increased pressure by EU members states to water down unilateral emissions targets that are conditional on an international treaty. Just like Japan, it will be impossible for Europe or, indeed, the UK to continue with policies that are burdening national economies with huge costs and damaging their international competitiveness.

Climate politics face a profound crisis. Revolts among eastern European countries, in Australia and even among Obama's Blue Dog Democrats are forcing law-makers to renounce support for unilateral climate policies. In the UK, the party-political consensus on climate change is unlikely to survive the general elections as both Labour and the Tories are confronted by a growing public backlash against green taxes and rising fuel bills.

However, the biggest losers of the Copenhagen fiasco appear to be climate science and the scientific establishment who, with a very few distinguished exceptions, have promoted unmitigated climate alarm and hysteria. It confirms beyond doubt that most governments have lost trust in the advice given by climate alarmists and the IPCC. The Copenhagen accord symbolises the loss of political power by Europe whose climate policies have been rendered obsolete. (Benny Peiser, The Observer)

HE collapse in Copenhagen shows the power of the polluters over the politicians.

The oil, coal and big-resource companies put off the day of action and edged the world further into super-heating.

That means worse drought, bushfires, snow-melt, tropical storm damage and accelerating sea level rises. (Bob Brown, Herald Sun)

As it drifts from the present into the past, the Copenhagen climate change conference looks both better and worse. Worse, because a considered reading of the accord, which was its only tangible output, reveals that it is not just inadequate but in fact utterly empty. Better, because of the novel manner in which this ultimate failure was reached. As the sight of the daily chaos drops out of view, it becomes easier to appreciate that the rich world was forced to haggle with the bigger emerging economies on more equal terms than ever before.

As the dust has settled on the "meaningful agreement" proclaimed late on Friday, it has become plain that it was scarcely an agreement at all. For one thing it was "noted" rather than adopted by the assembly, and for another it contains no commitments with real bite. The gaping hole where emissions targets should have been was immediately apparent, but it took a little longer to spot that seemingly firm pledges on aid were hedged with lawyerly language, and that passages dealing with supposed "easy wins" – such as on forestry – were devoid of all detail. But amid all the multiple omissions in the three pages of waffle that constitute the accord, the most damning of all was a lack of anything firm about what happens next. (The Guardian)

Not many people showed up to the small side room where a delegation of House Republicans had a news conference Friday afternoon. In general, the GOP team was there to spread the word that the science of climate change is a hoax.

But toward the end, House Energy and Commerce Committee member Fred Upton of Michigan made a remark that, if true, could bring all the work of the Copenhagen conference to a grinding halt.

“I can tell you that if the House had to vote on Waxman-Markey today, it would lose by 50 votes. I can tell you a lot of Democrats, if they had to vote today, would vote the other way,” he said.

Waxman-Markey, of course, is the sweeping climate change bill that passed the House in a dramatic vote in June. It was the first time either chamber of Congress ever passed serious global warming legislation — and it only came after months of negotiations with wary Democrats, leading up to a flurry of arm-twisting in the hours before the vote by President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even then it only squeaked through with a vote of 219-212, with 44 Democrats voting against it.

Since then, the action on climate change has shifted to the Senate, which has had a starring role at the Copenhagen summit as the rest of the world calls on the chamber to complete legislation and create a U.S. domestic climate change policy. While House Democrats have been welcomed here, the world has paid less attention to the lower chamber as a player, since its work on climate change is already done.

But, of course, it’s not completely done. If the Senate does pass a climate bill, it will have to go to conference with the House bill, and the final product sent to both chambers for yet another vote. And it’s true that with such a close vote the first time around, House passage of a conference report isn’t necessarily guaranteed. If Upton is right, and 50 Democrats voted “no” — which would require vote-switching from just six moderate Democrats who were wary of supporting a climate bill to begin with — that could potentially doom U.S. efforts to pass a climate bill. And that, the world has made clear, will doom efforts to reach a global treaty. (CQ Politics)

OTTAWA — The missing details from this week’s international climate change agreement could wind up hitting Canadian industries hard, said the chairman of a government advisory panel on business and environmental issues.

“I see this as a further delay and further uncertainty for business in terms of making investments,” said Robert Page, who chairs the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. ( Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service)

The stage is set for a new war over climate change in Australia after the Copenhagen summit yielded a controversial result and ended in chaos. (AAP)

THE failure of world leaders to strike a legally binding deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions ''entirely vindicates'' the Opposition's decision to reject the Government's emissions trading scheme, Tony Abbott claimed yesterday.

As Australian environmental and business groups last night urged governments to commit to fresh talks early next year, the Opposition Leader said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been wrong to ''rush Australia into an ill-considered and premature emissions tax''.

''Pretty obviously the best way to go is direct action to tackle climate change rather than a great big tax that will hurt our exporters without actually doing anything to help the environment,'' Mr Abbott said. (The Age)

IT IS difficult to know which is in more trouble after the extraordinary last 24 hours of the Copenhagen climate conference - the environment or multilateralism. Probably the former, but the latter is in bad - some would say irreparable - shape.

Virtually nothing at the summit went right. Put aside the shocking organisation and the terrible food; the failure to agree on a substantial climate change accord in Copenhagen wastes two years of work since the Bali summit and, if not addressed with an increasingly unlikely international treaty in 2010, could mean a return to the pre-Kyoto Protocol days when no countries had binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In climatic terms, this would be potentially opening ourselves up to some of the worst scientific predictions: in Australia, more drought, worsening bushfires, increased deaths due to extreme heat in the summer. (The Age)

THE Copenhagen summit has ended in disappointment and division. World leaders have reached an agreement including a "target" of limiting future global warming to two degrees Celsius.

But the deal is not legally binding and contains no decision on the crucial point: exactly how much should we reduce carbon-emissions over the next decade?

That question will be addressed when leaders meet again late next year in Mexico City and The Sunday Telegraph predicts a similar result: plenty of heat and light, and plenty of disappointment. (The Sunday Telegraph)

The plan emerged from the chaotic Copenhagen conference on climate change, which ended in acrimony any mistrust between world leaders.

The summit was unable to reach a substantive deal on cutting greenhouse gases because of a row over how countries would prove that they are honouring promises to cut their carbon emissions. China in particular objected to any external monitoring of its actions.

Mr Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy now are working proposals for a "European monitoring organisation" that will oversee every country's actions on emissions. (TDT)

“Life in a box is better than no life at all,” playwright Tom Stoppard famously opined, through the personage of Rosencrantz. (Or was it Guildenstern?) That’s lucky for us, because our energy, environmental and economic policies have certainly put us in a box – and there is no easy way out.

Congress passed a $787-billion “stimulus” bill, and a $3-billion cash-for-clunkers program that trashed perfectly good cars, and the energy and raw materials that created them. It’s halfway toward imposing nationalized healthcare that could cost taxpayers another $2.5 trillion over the next decade. Unemployment now stands at 10.2% officially, or 22% if you include people who have given up on finding a job. At this point, 25 states have borrowed $23 billion from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund, to meet their obligations to employment-deprived workers.

Meanwhile, over in Copenhagen, the G-77 poor nations snubbed Europe’s offer of $10 billion over three years, for climate change reparation, mitigation and adaptation. “The world’s scientists and policy makers say this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced,” G-77 chairman Lumumba Di-Aiping noted. Something closer to $1 trillion every few years would be more appropriate, he suggested.

That’s in addition to regular foreign aid – and on top of the $50 trillion in life support for corrupt dictators that the developed world has already provided to still-impoverished nations since 1950.

In response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dutifully pledged that the United States will importune taxpayers, private donors and other countries to raise $100 billion annually through 2020, to help poor nations cope with the “ravages” of global warming – or our current “CO2-driven” global cooling. She claims the money will be provided only if China and other major developing countries agree to binding emission targets that can be verified internationally (a condition that they have steadfastly rejected).

But of course, neither Di-Aiping nor Clinton wants to remind anyone of a few elephantine realities. This “greatest risk humanity has ever faced” is based on fraudulent claims, data, models, analyses and peer reviews. The proposed 83% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 would send the United States back to levels last seen in 1908 – or 1868 when population, energy use and technology changes are considered. (Paul Driessen, Townhall)

It seems that the Copenhagen summit is finally over. It ended with a vague, non-binding declaration which almost coincides with the document I posted yesterday morning. Because the document is so unimportant, I don't really think that you have to investigate which words have changed a bit.

Nevertheless, most third-world countries have disagreed even with this modest outcome. So the U.N. will only say it has "taken note of" the declaration but it won't dare to put it to vote because everyone knows it couldn't be adopted by the required consensus (given the fact that e.g. Sudan considers the agreement to be equivalent to the Holocaust).

I think and hope that this Copenhagen failure is the beginning of the end of the AGW hysteria in the realm of politics. The Danish capital was effectively able to cope'n'hang (with) the political ambitions of the AGW champions. The key facts behind the dynamics of the "action against climate change" are not hard to understand.

Outsourcing vs suppressing economy

The third-world countries have only endorsed the Kyoto Protocol because it only brought them advantages but no obligations or expenses. Obviously, they will only endorse a new framework that effectively reproduces the advantages of Kyoto.

Most of the sensible people in the richer countries have understood that the only possible effect of the Kyoto arrangement was that some factories and other economic activity has been moved from them to the third-world countries.

COPENHAGEN - A weak U.N. climate deal, agreed on Saturday after two weeks of talks pulled back from near collapse, underscored the vulnerability of a process depending on consensus and may mark a diminishing U.N. role.

The principal negotiations took place among about 30 countries and the biggest breakthrough involved just five -- the United States, China, Brazil, South Africa and India.

The final deal was not legally binding and left it for countries to choose to participate -- all but four or five were expected to do so -- marking a departure from its umbrella U.N. climate convention.

"I don't think it's the end of the U.N.'s climate role but it's a new model inside of it," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Resource Institute's climate and energy program. (Reuters)

LONDON, 20 December 2009 - It is now widely recognised that the misguided Copenhagen Conference was a complete failure. Those political leaders and policy makers who refuse to accept this reality are merely burying their heads in the sand and are forfeiting the trust of the public.

"The Copenhagen fiasco was inevitable because the basic approach of current climate policy is fundamentally wrong. The deadlock provides policy makers with an opportunity to recognise that the failure was not accidental but systemic. There must therefore be no more futile conferences with this failed agenda," said Lord Lawson, the Chairman of the GWPF.

Following the failure to agree any binding targets and deadlines at Copenhagen, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) welcomes this opportunity to abandon the UN's inherently flawed approach to climate change. Instead, governments would be well advised to adopt a new policy approach that shifts the focus of future negotiations to adaptation to global temperature change, whatever its direction, and to an agenda aimed at helping to increase the resilience of both advanced and poorer countries to such change. (GWPF)

That sound you'll hear in 2010 is a can being kicked down the road. Again. In the wake of the failure of the international negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, you'll hear a lot of talk about how the world has two good chances in the new year to achieve what it failed to do at Copenhagen. Don't believe it.

Yes, we will have Copenhagen Redux during international negotiating sessions in June (probably in Bonn) and November (Mexico City). But these meetings are unlikely to achieve anything more than Copenhagen did. In the meeting that ended Dec. 18, despite all-night talks and an 11th-hour plea by President Obama, all we got was a "political" agreement, which is basically just a promise to keep talking and try really, really hard to agree to a treaty in 2010. Negotiators dropped the pretense that a binding accord would be reached next year, and a White House official conceded that the paltry accord "is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change." The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of. (Newsweek)

There are few national leaders in the world who had more at stake in Copenhagen last week than Kevin Rudd. He and his government managed to manoeuvre themselves into having the most to lose if things didn’t pan out – apart from the government of Denmark.

And pan out is what Copenhagen did not do. The Chinese delegation went home elated, popping champagne in the Peoples’ 747, while a bedraggled Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong would have sat miserably with their seat belts firmly buckled, glum-faced and barely speaking, thinking about having to face a euphoric Tony Abbott.

It seems only yesterday that Climate Change Minister Penny Wong emerged from negotiating with Opposition Energy spokesman Ian Macfarlane declaring “peace in our time”, with predictions of a rapid passage of the CPRS legislation and, at last, certainty for businesses.

Since then, Macfarlane and his boss Malcolm Turnbull have been turfed out in a coup by the anti-appeasers, and the carnival in Copenhagen that was supposed to support the emergence of emissions trading schemes everywhere turned into a circus instead. (Alan Kohler, Business Spectator)

THE Rudd Government will press ahead with its plan to put a price tag on carbon pollution even though the leaders of other nations refused to reach a legally binding agreement on reducing global warming in Copenhagen. (Sue Dunlevy, The Daily Telegraph)

The Federal Opposition has renewed its call for a national debate on the Government's emissions trading scheme in light of the Copenhagen summit outcome. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

The Copenhagen conference on climate change has been a "comprehensive failure" for the prime minister, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says. (AAP)

THE Rudd government faces a dramatically more difficult task in selling its emissions trading scheme as a result of the weak result from the Copenhagen conference, which has delayed critical decisions on national targets and international timelines.

The government has now conceded it will not be able to set its own emissions-reduction target until February at the earliest.

That complicates its attack on Tony Abbott's "direct action" climate plan, which is based on trying to prove that it would be a more expensive, less efficient way to meet the national target.

The failure of Copenhagen to set clear timetables or targets will strengthen the Opposition Leader's claim that Copenhagen was always a false deadline for the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Mr Abbott yesterday described the final outcome of the talks as an "unmitigated disaster" for Kevin Rudd and a vindication of the opposition's anti-ETS position. (The Australian)

THE weaker-than-expected climate deal in Copenhagen means Kevin Rudd should go back to the drawing board with Australia's scheme to cut carbon emissions, Tony Abbott argued yesterday. (Courier-Mail)

Copenhagen's wishy-washy outcome is a boost for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and a setback for the Prime Minister, as they look to an election year in which climate policy will be a core issue.

A strong agreement would have given Kevin Rudd backing for his decision to bring back rewritten emissions trading legislation in February. At a personal level, a successful conference would have been a diplomatic plus for Rudd, who was a ''friend of the chair''.

Instead, the minimal progress, with eyes shifting to yet another conference some time next year, has made it easier for Abbott to maintain that other ways to cut emissions are better than a ''great big new tax''.

Rudd so hyped the need to get his scheme through before Copenhagen that, now the conference has ended with only a weak ''accord'', people will be inclined to say, ''So what was the hurry? And why rush now?''. (Michelle Grattan, SMH)

Labor's argument for emissions trading has been discredited after world leaders failed to reach a binding climate deal at Copenhagen, the federal opposition says. (AAP)

BUSINESS groups have called for a rethink of the Rudd government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, after the Copenhagen climate change talks failed to set targets or timetables to cut greenhouse gases.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson yesterday called for a cost-benefit analysis of the CPRS, compared with Tony Abbott's direct action approach to cutting emissions.

"Copenhagen tells us that finding workable responses that are fair to our economic as well as environmental goals is what is necessary," Mr Anderson said, amplifying calls he made for a rethink of the CPRS after it was defeated in the Senate last month.

"We now have the green light from the global community to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of what Australian industry is already doing, of the government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme versus the direct action ideas the Abbott-led Coalition might come up with, and versus other options or policy mixes comparable nations might develop." (The Australian)

As the Copenhagen climate summit comes to close, it seems fair to say that rarely has a gathering of so many doing so little gotten so much attention. But Copenhagen does have its uses. For starters, it reminds us that environmentalism continues to be a cover for uglier agendas.

Bolivian president Evo Morales was interviewed by Al Jazeera television while in Copenhagen. "The principal obstacle to combating climate change is capitalism," he explained. "Until we put an end to capitalism, it will continue to be a big obstacle for life and humanity."

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe proclaimed in a speech: "When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it's we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die."

Right. That is, unless Mugabe kills them first. (Jonah Goldberg, Townhall)

Now that big climate confab in Copenhagen is ending, it’s time to refocus our attention on the issues that matter most when it comes to energy and carbon dioxide: physics, math, and money. [Read More] (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

Last week, I appeared on the premier of John Stossel’s new show on Fox Business – a show titled (appropriately enough) Stossel. The topic was global warming and, happily, I had an hour (well, actually only about 43 minutes once you subtract out the commercials) to discuss the issue with John and members of the studio audience. If you missed the show, you can catch it here.

My arguments on Stossel tracked those offered here at MasterResource last month. In short, I had no interest in engaging in a debate about the physical science of natural versus anthropogenic climate change.

I was entirely interested in the implications for public policy if we accept the most recent IPCC report at face value. I think it’s quite interesting that even if one accepts the common definition of what constitutes “mainstream science” on this issue that one is still hard pressed to put forward a defensible mitigation scheme.

Alas, my inbox suggests that a number of people who watched the show thought I was too willing to accept the contention that there has been warming and that man likely has a lot to do with it. Instead, a number of Fox viewers wanted me to launch World War III over the climate record.

I didn’t for two reasons. First, I am not a scientist and am more comfortable leaving that debate to those engaged fully in that field. I know that this doesn’t stop a lot of people from holding forth regardless, but it stops me. Second, one can be correct about the climate history being short of what Al Gore or Michael Mann make it out to be without being correct about the contention that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has little to do with the warming at present. For some reason, that’s an impossible point for many people to grasp. [Read more →] (Jerry Taylor, Master Resource)

MEETING the carbon emission targets under discussion at Copenhagen could require Britain to shrink its economy by almost one-third, a lobby group claimed last night.
The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA), a group that campaigns against taxes and government policies, said Gordon Brown's offer of a 42 per cent cut in UK greenhouse gases by 2020 clashes with his policy of seeking rapid economic growth to escape the recessi on and restore the public finances.

In order to achieve the ambitious target, Britain would have to undergo "a recession of unprecedented ferocity", said Matthew Sinclair, research director at the group. In a report, he claimed technological advances needed to achieve deep reductions in Britain's "carbon intensity" – the tonnes of emitted for each £1 million of GDP – will not be available by the end of the next decade.

And he said this means the only way of meeting the target would be to cut the expected size of the economy by 30 per cent – or just over £500 billion. (The Scotsman)

Coming from Hollywood may explain Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's disconnect with reality. In the real world, saying so doesn't make it so. In Copenhagen this week, he made the astonishing claim that the Golden State is evidence we need not choose between a clean environment and economic growth because: "We've proved that over and over again in California."

Environmental well-being and economic vitality need not conflict. But California is far from proof. The state under Mr. Schwarzenegger is an economic mess, largely thanks to taxes and government regulations. The governor's pet environmental projects are chief culprits. (The Orange County Register)

As the Copenhagen Climate conference comes to a conclusion amidst riots by demonstrators and scrambling by policymakers, Czech President Vaclav Klaus has a message for the world: Global warming is a "new religion," not a science. (Gene Koprowski, FOXNews.com)

The conclusion that our planet is warming thanks to human activity must not be forgotten amid discussion of research ethics, say climatologists Hans von Storch and Myles Allen. (Nature)

Looking at UAH daily temperatures, one can estimate the temperature anomaly for December 2009.

In average, the first 17 days of December 2009 were 0.10 °C warmer than the same days in 2008. The "2009 minus 2008" differences for the month are

In 1998 the world experienced the warmest year since records began. In the decade since, however, this high point has not been surpassed. Some have seized on this as evidence that global warming has stopped, or even that we have entered a period of ‘global cooling’. This is far from the truth and climate scientists have, in fact, recognised that a temporary slowdown in warming is possible even under increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions. (UK Met Office)

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) posted a question to the National Journal's Copenhagen Insider blog that repeated discredited information about emails stolen from the Clamtic Research Unit at East Anglia University. (sic) Rep. Sensenbrenner also repeated an attack on the scientists who had their emails stolen, accusing them of engaging in "scientific fascism." Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists' Strategy and Policy Director, attempted to set Rep. Sensenbrenner straight on the blog and urged him to stop his attacks on scientists, which he calls "wrong and dangerous." (Press release)

There is an interview of Tom Karl, Director of the National Climate Data Center titled Global warming: What the science tells us. His responses repeat his advocacy position that he has presented in other venues.

However, I want to highlight what one of his answers which is quite a dishonest response.

“Many people imply that the CRU temperature data are the exclusive or principal basis for climate change predictions. Please identify some key studies that do not rely heavily on CRU data, and their conclusions. Thanks.”

Thomas R. Karl: Hi there – thanks for the question. In fact, there are other global temperature datasets that are calculated by other institutions. For example, NASA calculates an independent global temperature dataset, as does NOAA (here at National Climatic Data Center). The analysis techniques for each of these datasets are all independent of each other and yet they all come to the same conclusion: that global warming is unequivocal….”

This is a dishonest answer and Tom Karl knows it. The NASA data set and the CRU data sets are not independent of the NCDC data set.

I have discussed the interdependence of the data sets in recent posts (e.g. see and see ).

Tom Karl has even conveniently ignored the text from the CCSP 1.1. report [of which Tom Karl was the Chief Editor!]; i.e.

“The global surface air temperature data sets used in this report are to a large extent based on data readily exchanged internationally, e.g., through CLIMAT reports and the WMO publication Monthly Climatic Data for the World. Commercial and other considerations prevent a fuller exchange, though the United States may be better represented than many other areas. In this report, we present three global surface climate records, created from available data by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies [GISS], NOAA National Climatic Data Center [NCDC], and the cooperative project of the U.K. Hadley Centre and the Climate Research Unit [CRU]of the University of East Anglia (HadCRUT2v).”

These three analyses are led by Tom Karl (NCDC), Jim Hansen (GISS) and Phil Jones (CRU).

The differences between the three global surface temperatures that occur are a result of the analysis methodology as used by each of the three groups…… This is further explained on page 48 of the CCSP report where it is written with respect to the surface temperature data (as well as the other temperature data sets) that

“The data sets are distinguished from one another by differences in the details of their construction.”

“Currently, there are three main groups creating global analyses of surface temperature (see Table 3.1), differing in the choice of available data that are utilized as well as the manner in which these data are synthesized.”

“Since the three chosen data sets utilize many of the same raw observations, there is a degree of interdependence.”

“While there are fundamental differences in the methodology used to create the surface data sets, the differing techniques with the same data produce almost the same results (Vose et al., 2005a). The small differences in deductions about climate change derived from the surface data sets are likely to be due mostly to differences in construction methodology and global averaging procedures.”

“Examination of the three global surface temperature anomaly time series (TS) from 1958 to the present shown in Figure 3.1 reveals that the three time series have a very high level of agreement.”

There are also other major unresolved issues with the surface data sets of NCDC, NASA and CRU which Tom Karl continues to ignore; e.g. see

Tom Karl has a serious conflict of interest, as I have documented in these posts

Tom Karl has clearly demonstrated that he is an advocate and is presenting erroneous information on the robustness of the surface temperature data record as a metric to assess multi-decadal surface temperature trends. We need a new Director of the National Climate Data Center who will provide policymakers with an accurate balanced monitoring of the climate system. (Climate Science)

There is another paper on the role of soot in the climate system in the Himalayas (thanks to Jos de Laat for alerting us to it!). The paper is

“Recent thinning of glaciers over the Himalayas (sometimes referred to as the third polar region) have raised concern on future water supplies since these glaciers supply water to large river systems that support millions of people inhabiting the surrounding areas. Black carbon (BC) aerosols, released from incomplete combustion, have been increasingly implicated as causing large changes in the hydrology and radiative forcing over Asia and its deposition on snow is thought to increase snow melt. In India BC from biofuel combustion is highly prevalent and compared to other regions, BC aerosol amounts are high. Here, we quantify the impact of BC aerosols on snow cover and precipitation from 1990 to 2010 over the Indian subcontinental region using two different BC emission inventories. New estimates indicate that Indian BC from coal and biofuel are large and transport is expected to expand rapidly in coming years. We show that over the Himalayas, from 1990 to 2000, simulated snow/ice cover decreases by ~0.9% due to aerosols. The contribution of the enhanced Indian BC to this decline is ~30%, similar to that simulated for 2000 to 2010. Spatial patterns of modeled changes in snow cover and precipitation are similar to observations (from 1990 to 2000), and are mainly obtained with the newer BC estimates.” (Climate Science)

There is an editorial in a new issue of Boundary Layer Meteorology by three internationally well respected climate scientists that supports the need to include landscape change in the assessment of climate. The article concludes with the text

“Based on the results from these articles we call for a more deliberate inclusion of LULCC and its impacts in future weather, climate, and climate change related studies.”

Two degrees may be all that distinguish a thriving coastal city from a deluged ghost town, according to a study led by University researchers that was the basis for an article in Wednesday’s issue of Nature.

Conducted by a team of Princeton and Harvard scientists, the study, called “Probabilistic Assessment of Sea Level During the Last Interglacial Stage,” concludes that even moderate global warming could lead to a rapid rise in the global sea level, submerging New Orleans and areas along the East Coast of the United States.

Princeton contributors to the article included geosciences professors Frederik Simons and Adam Maloof, geosciences and Wilson School professor Michael Oppenheimer and Robert Kopp, a postdoctoral researcher in the Wilson School.

According to the paper, a two degree rise could raise the sea level between 20 and 30 feet, which would flood parts of Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Though that process would likely take several centuries to finish, the researchers claim that if greenhouse gas emissions remain constant, then the planet could be irrecoverably put down that path. (Daily Princetonian)

A physicist whose work is often highlighted by climate-change sceptics is refusing to provide the software he used to other climate researchers attempting to replicate his results.

Nicola Scafetta, a physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has published a series of papers over the past few years that suggest the sun played a much bigger role in warming over the 20th century than is generally accepted. In particular, one 2006 paper he co-authored concluded that: "The sun might have contributed approximately 50 per cent of the observed global warming since 1900" (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2006GL027142).

This paper has been widely cited by those seeking to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the cause of climate change, including US senator James Inhofe. Scafetta has also contributed to a book that claimed that "carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change".

Many researchers in the field (PDF), however, regard Scafetta's scientific papers on the sun's role in global warming as incorrect, despite their publication in peer-reviewed journals. (New Scientist)

The Copenhagen agreement to work towards keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees centigrade means that the Rudd government’s ETS target for 2020 is too weak.

Legislating the ETS before the Copenhagen conference, as demanded by the government, would have imposed a policy designed to fail.

Instead of aiming to cut national emissions by just under 140 million tonnes by 2020, the Rudd government now needs to target cuts of around 250 million tonnes.

This will require closure of about half the existing coal-fired electricity generation in Australia, an activity that currently burns 57 million tonnes of black coal and 70 million tonnes of brown coal every year.

Doing so will require replacing about 10,000 MW of black coal plant and a large part of the 7,300 MW of brown coal plant. Achieving this will require building a bigger combined cycle gas power station than the Origin Energy Darling Downs plant in Queensland every year in addition to capacity needed to meet electricity demand growth and the 8,000 MW of wind farms required by the RET.

Darling Downs, the biggest of its kind in the country, will be commissioned in 2010, with 630 MW capacity, at a cost of $780 million. It has taken three years to build.

Pursuing a national task of these dimensions will also require a substantial investment in new gas production. Only natural gas is available to fuel commercially viable replacement for coal power in the short to medium term.

As the gas industry has pointed out many times, a carbon charge of about $20 per tonne will be needed to make the investment viable. (Keith Orchison, Business Spectator)

According to Climate Camp organiser Emma McIntyre, this tactic was unsuccessful:

"Everybody knows that this is a game changer," says Aubrey McClendon, chief executive of the $16bn (£10bn) Chesapeake Energy Corporation, the largest independent producer of shale gas in the US. (TDT)

THE Copenhagen climate-change summit meeting is behind us, and did not achieve what was hoped for. There was no lack of good intentions, but they generated conflicts rather than solutions, and the product was a weak agreement to disagree in the future. Forests were part of the discussion, and several things were understood: carbon dioxide is a potentially world-altering lethal pollutant, fossil fuels are the problem, biofuels are part of the solution. But exactly how to pare down the use of fossil fuels and switch to energy sources derived from plant material? That is the problem. (Bernd Heinrich, NYT)

More evidence is emerging that the Nuclear Power Corp. of India (NPCIL) is planning to finance future nuclear construction through debt financing. Both local and international sources will be tapped. NPCIL plans to raise at least $6.5 billion from local sources, and another 3 billion euros from international lenders. Local funding will also include equity from NPCIL and at least three Indian partners. Three Billion is being raised locally to finance 4 locally designed 700 MW PHWRs. Another $3.5 billion is being sought to pay for 2 larger Russian PWRs to be built at Kudankulam. In addition equity financing for Indian Nuclear development is expected to come from Large Indian businesses, including the Oil Corporation of India, The National Aluminium Company, and NTCPL. (Energy Collective)

The good news is that today, December 19, 2009, is the day we got clarity on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid effort to steal medical care and call it “reform.”

OK, that’s not quite right. Since it was Ben Nelson of Nebraska that finally got Harry Reid his desperately needed 60th vote for socialized medicine, I hope 1) that the next two year are unpleasant for Sen. Nelson and 2) that he loses in 2012 by a landslide.

I’m still not being entirely candid. Nelson is a pathetic pawn in this game. He’s history and I hope he has plans for a new day job. He’ll need ‘em.

The really bad news is that the American people are just about to find that their medical care got a whole lot worse and a whole lot more expensive and cumbersome.

Why? Because, as Senator Mitch McConnell put it, “This bill is a monstrosity. This is not renaming the post office. Make no mistake — this bill will reshape our nation and our lives.”

Whenever politicians start bandying about the word "historic" to describe something they've just done, grab your wallet and lock up the silver.

Whenever politicians start bandying about the word “historic” to describe something they’ve just done, grab your wallet and lock up the silver. Chances are, the only thing “historic” they’ve accomplished is in coming up with a more unique and inefficient way to separate the taxpayer’s hard-earned coin from his person. (Rick Moran, PJM)

In 2002 a relatively unknown study about consumer perceptions of food safety was published (1). In it, three researchers discovered a startling point: Given the choice between information delivered by experts and views offered by activists, consumers overwhelmingly sided with negative information, despite the credibility, or lack thereof, of the source.

The study went like this: A sampled audience was given descriptions about the process of food irradiation to examine the effects of how the information was presented. Participants were grouped into ten groups of six to twelve. Each participant received a neutral description of food irradiation based on current scientific literature. Some groups received additional positive information from a consumer education association, other groups received negative information from a consumer advocacy group and finally, the rest of the groups received both the positive and negative information about food irradiation.

The results showed that “even though the scientific evidence is favorable, claims by opponents, even if they are inaccurate and only suggest potential risks, will tend to reduce consumer demand” (p. 192). Negative information, in other words, dominated the test subjects’ perceptions leading to changed perceptions of food irradiation that disfavored the scientific information.

The researchers concluded:

The public, therefore, is more easily swayed by emotional appeals and potentially misleading or incorrect information from non-scientific sources even when expressed simultaneously with scientific information. (TheGoodTheBadTheSpin)

WASHINGTON - The swine flu pandemic may have changed the U.S. approach to handling influenza forever, and for the better, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

While they said years of work were needed before vaccine production was up to the desired standard, some experiments such as vaccinating children in schools might work to help control seasonal influenza.

But there are still holes in the public health system that will take years to patch, and communication with the public could use a bit more polishing, they acknowledged.

"We still don't have the domestic capacity to make as much (flu vaccine) as we need as fast as we need it," Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Health and Human Services Department, told a news conference.

She said HHS had been forced by the H1N1 pandemic to work closely with state and local health officials to monitor the virus and deploy drugs and vaccines.

"I actually think our nation's preparedness, our seasonal flu efforts and so on, will never be the same," Lurie said. (Reuters Life!)

WASHINGTON - Results from flu tests show the pandemic of swine flu is definitely on the downswing in the United States, researchers at Quest Diagnostics said on Friday.

The report supports what U.S. health officials have said - the H1N1 is ebbing across much of the United States, having reached a second peak in October.

"Children ages 5 to 14 continue to experience the highest percentage of H1N1 positive test results compared to negative results, with a positivity rate close to 40 percent. By comparison, nearly 80 percent of children in this age group tested positive for the virus in late October," Quest said in a statement.

The company analyzed 170,000 flu tests taken between May and December to map out two peaks in the U.S. epidemic -- one in April and one at the end of October.

"Between this peak week and December 9, testing rates fell by 75 percent. In the most recent week reported, December 9, testing rates were equivalent to volumes experienced in late August, when the second wave began," the company said. (Reuters)

In 2005, the National Rifle Association of America enacted a law that probably saved the American gun-making industry from bankruptcy. And just this last week, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to this landmark legislation, ensuring this law stays on the books to preserve America’s culture of lawful firearm ownership.

For years, opponents of the Second Amendment sought to eliminate gun rights by eliminating guns. Anti-gun groups, working with big-city mayors like Michael Bloomberg of New York City, devised a scheme to rid America of firearms.

They filed product liability suits, alleging that firearm manufacturers should be held liable for any injury caused by a firearm. And not just a gun made by that particular gun-maker; the suits go after every gun-maker for every gun injury. ( Ken Klukowski, Townhall)

FRIDAY, Dec. 18 -- Blacks tend to carry around less of a particularly unhealthy type of abdominal fat than whites, even though they suffer more from obesity-linked illness, researchers report.

The new finding suggests that body-mass index (BMI) guidelines may need to be tailored to specific racial groups to better reflect risk, experts say. (HealthDay News)

(Dec. 18, 2009) — Many young children in child care centers are not getting as much active playtime as they should, according to new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (ScienceDaily)

Courtesy of Brendan Halyday

Around the world, news outlets have been reporting on a new study in BMJ, the U.K.'s leading medical journal. In the article, titled "Santa Claus: A Public Health Pariah?," Australian epidemiologist Nathan Grills meticulously lays out the reasons why Santa Claus is a terrible role model—a danger to children everywhere.

For instance, Grills writes, "Epidemiologically there is a correlation between countries that venerate Santa Claus and those that have high levels of childhood obesity." The researcher warns that the British tradition of leaving brandy along with the cookies means that Santa would be drunk-driving his sleigh. Santa's behind-the-reindeer malfeasance also includes "speeding, disregard for road rules, and extreme sports such as roof surfing and chimney jumping. Despite the risks of high speed air travel Santa is never depicted wearing a seatbelt or a helmet." (Grills somehow forgot to include that Santa is constantly breaking into people's houses—an obvious invitation for children to become burglars.)

Alerted to the article through a journal press release, news outlets everywhere immediately started reporting on Grills's article. Headlines proclaimed: "Santa Should Get Off His Sleigh, Jog to Trim Image, Doctor Says"; "Santa Promotes Obesity and Drink-Driving, Claims Health Expert"; and, of course, "Bad Santa."

Every wire service carried a version of the report. The international wire services AFP and AP wrote that Grills had established a relationship between Santa belief and obesity, and that he also warned against sitting on Santa's lap: it would lead to the spread of infectious disease. The wire stories were in turn picked up by major news networks and other venues.

Since then, people haven't been just reporting on Grills's work: he's being eviscerated for it. (Newsweek)

NEW YORK - Combining artificial sweeteners with the real thing boosts the stomach's secretion of a hormone that makes people feel full and helps control blood sugar, new research shows.

It's unknown whether this means anything for people's health, but "in light of the large number of individuals using artificial sweeteners on a daily basis, it appears essential to carefully investigate the associated effects on metabolism and weight," conclude Dr. Rebecca J. Brown and colleagues from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Because artificial sweeteners are virtually carbohydrate-free, they have been thought not to have any effect on how the body handles glucose (sugar), the researchers explain.

But there's some evidence that artificial sweeteners may trigger secretion of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). GLP-1 is released from the digestive tract when a person eats as a "fullness" signal to the brain, curbing appetite and calorie intake. (Reuters Health)

With the advent of new technology, newspapers are being threatened. Many are expected to go out of business, and the rest will have to change substantially. Many observers fear that journalism will become too driven by speed, and that judgment and deliberation will be lost. Others said that news reporting would be devalued and only those providing analysis and opinion would survive. Worst of all, worries that the new technology will lead to a monopoly over information.

A description of the dire situation faced by newspapers today as they face the Internet? No. These are the concerns expressed in the 1840s as the telegraph transformed the news business. This week’s Economist tells the story of how Samuel Morse’s invention was thought to signal the death knell for newspapers, and to thoughtful journalism. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

The WHO held a "side event" on Thursday at the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen to highlight climate change's effect on public health, CNN reports. "We're reminding people that climate change is not just an environmental issue or an economic issue - it's a health issue that's actually about people's survival," Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a scientist in the WHO's Public Health and Environment department, said of the event.

According to Maria Neira, the WHO's director of Public Health and Environment, "The major killers at the moment are all climate-sensitive." She added, "Malnutrition kills 3.5 million people a year, diarrheal diseases kill two million people a year, and malaria kills almost one million people each year. Global warming will probably exacerbate these problems."

Policy makers are beginning to understand the health benefits of "climate change mitigation strategies," Neira said, adding that she welcomed the recent EPA announcement that declared greenhouse-gas emissions as a "public health threat." The article also includes quotes from Andy Haines, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who recently published a study in the Lancet highlighting the health benefits of some strategies used to cut greenhouse-gas emissions (Tutton, 12/17).

ENVIRONMENTAL groups from rich countries have for years waged a campaign against those in poor countries who want to harness their natural resources for economic growth. Their efforts threaten to do lasting harm to the aspirations of millions of poor people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and must be resisted at all times and in all places.

One of those places is the Copenhagen climate change summit taking place in Denmark. Thousands of delegates from around the world are gathered there trying to work on ways to limit global warming. But it is increasingly clear to those of us in the south that the north is using the summit as a way to maintain their living standards, while keeping the developing world in a state of destitution.

For example, just this week a document emerged that outlined a plan to stop poor countries from clearing some of their forest lands to make room for more productive uses, such as palm farming, rubber farming and urban development. The suggestion — encapsulated in the so-called “Danish text” — is risible and morally obtuse and its emergence threatens to torpedo the entire conference.

Every nation in history has harnessed its resources in the early stage of its development. Indeed, Europe itself was arguably the most forested region on the planet for most of its history until it started its economic growth path several centuries ago. Over the course of many decades, Europeans sensibly altered and re-altered their land use to permit more productive agricultural use and enterprise, with the resultant job creation.

Today, nations across the developing world aim to do the same thing — to harness some of their natural endowments to create products for sale in world markets. And so countries in Africa and Asia develop palm plantations to sell palm oil across the globe. Farmers in Latin America alter land uses to grow fruits, vegetables and flowers to satisfy customers in their region and beyond.

These efforts come with some ecological costs, just as they did in Europe , North America , Japan and other places in the north in decades past. Only once the northern nations became rich — and not a moment before — could they afford the environmental protections they now demand of their poorer neighbours to the south. (Business Day)

Biologists determined that short-term, seasonal exposure to pesticides in rivers and basins may limit the growth and size of wild salmon populations. In addition to the widespread deterioration of salmon habitats, these findings suggest that exposure to commonly used pesticides may further inhibit the recovery of threatened or endangered populations.

"Major efforts are currently underway to restore Pacific salmon habitats in an effort to recover depressed populations," says David Baldwin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who co-authored the study with NOAA colleagues in the December issue of the ESA journal Ecological Applications. "However, not much research has been done to determine the importance of pollution as a limiting factor of ESA-listed species."

The researchers studied the impact of pesticides, such as diazinon and malathion, on individual salmon using pre-existing data, and then devised a model to calculate the productivity and growth rate of the population. They used several exposure scenarios to reflect realistic pesticide use across various landscapes and over time. (Innovations Report)

Can nuclear solve the global water crisis? - If a person doesn't drink clean water they will be dead in less than three days. That's why water is the most valuable commodity there is.

As the global population expands, demand for water for agriculture and personal use will increase dramatically, but there could be a solution that will produce clean drinking water and help reduce carbon emissions as well. That process is nuclear desalination.

Many areas of the world are suffering from a water crisis – and it's not just arid, developing countries that are suffering. The Western US is particularly vulnerable and its water crisis is getting more severe by the day. (TDT)

Finally more scientists dare challenge the shameless apocalypse mongering over the Reef, comparing predictions to performance:

And here’s the scientist with the greatest credibility problem of all on that score:

COPENHAGEN has had a language all its own this past fortnight as delegates battled the minutiae of draft agreements. The obscure acronyms of the summit went over the heads of most of us, but it set us thinking about the way some words related to the environment and green issues are now commonplace.

Think about the big one, climate change. A decade ago, it was scarcely used in news reports: this year, it has been hard to escape. In 2000, The Weekend Australian and The Australian published just 128 stories that mentioned climate change. In the year until December 14 this year, the figure was just shy of 3300. That's an average of more than 10 references each day.

It was not always so. Climate change was level pegging with "global warming" until 2005 but the following year it took off as the phrase of choice when talking about what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd likes to call the "moral challenge of our times", overtaking global warming, which this past year was mentioned 899 times.

We ran the computer over a number of other words, looking at their usage each year in the noughties, curious to see which words had become embedded in the language and which had fallen out of use.

Our analysis is admittedly crude, checking the number of times a word shows up in the

library archives of the newspaper. But it is revealing in its own way, the citations signalling the ups and downs of the climate change debate (there we go again).

In 2000, for example, nobody was much interested in carbon emissions (17 mentions) but this year we are (765). And while the idea of an emissions trading scheme was around in the middle of the decade it only took off in 2008, when it jumped from eight citations in 2007 to 314. It has tripled this year, not bad for a scheme that nobody seems to understand.

Eco-warriors are fickle folk, regularly changing the environmental disasters du jour.

Issues we were once assured were central to human survival no longer rate a mention. The hole in the ozone layer was once a big deal, with 64 references in 2000. In the past 10 years, activists drifted away, in part because the hole began to shrink, so that this year, the references are just 36.

And pity the scientists who bet their careers on addressing erosion. This was a huge issue in the 1990s, with activists assuring us that Australia's topsoil was blowing out to sea.

But this year it rated just 16 stories. Some issues are simply not sexy enough to be stayers. Ethanol was the fuel for the future (233 stories in 2007) but ran out of gas this year, with just one-quarter of the coverage it received in 2007.

Clean coal seems to already be fading, more than halving from its peak of 424 stories in 2007. Wind power too, seems not to have flown in media coverage, with about 120 stories each year since 2006.

Activists with a better nose for a winner will have climbed on board the rising sea level raft.

In 2000 The Australian wrote about it just 42 times but by 2009 the figure was up by more than 400 per cent.

Sometimes, the vaguer the concept the better. "Sustainability" is a star example, increasing close to sevenfold across the decade.

After the avalanche of coverage from Copenhagen, it's hard to believe the green "industry" has

peaked. Yet our tables show that the three most recognisable phrases of the environmental movement -- climate change, global warming; and greenhouse gas, were all cited more frequently in 2007 -- the federal election year when Labor ran hard on the issue -- than in 2009.

As for the green capital itself, Copenhagen's role in saving the planet went from a couple of references in 2000 to about 1000 this year.

In contrast the most famous Australian ever to stay in the city, Mary Donaldson, only made it into the paper 16 times. Kevin Rudd will improve on that. (Stephen Matchett and Helen Trinca, The Australian)

SALMON, Idaho - Overzealous antler gatherers face a new flurry of regulation by U.S. Western states trying to stop harassment of deer and elk during critical, food-scarce months.

Hard times have boosted the number of people hoping to cash in on antlers -- technically bones, not horns -- that can fetch as much as $18 per pound ($39.60 per kg) and are used to produce everything from furniture to health tonics in Asia.

But wildlife officials say the practice, extremely popular in Wyoming, Montana and other Western states, threatens wildlife, especially in the winter months.

"It has the effect of harassment on animals when they need all their energy just to survive," said Anis Aoude, big game program coordinator at Utah's division of wildlife resources.

Utah's bids to curb antler enthusiasts failed due to public opposition, but Montana this year passed a law that threatens to strip hunting and fishing rights from trespassers, including antler gatherers, on state wildlife management areas.

Mike Korn, assistant chief of law enforcement for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said the law was needed to deter harassment by antler gatherers, whom he said gathered in droves in early spring. (Reuters)

The Dirt on Climate Change - Could soil engineered specifically to maximize carbon storage dampen some effects of climate change? Very possibly.

Conflicts tend to scatter people, and ideas, in unexpected ways. After the American Civil War, a flood of so-called Confederados fled the devastated South and set up farms in the Brazilian Amazon. They planted rice and sugar cane and tobacco, and they prospered. But the lands they settled — primarily high bluffs along rivers — weren't any more pristine than Alabama or the Carolinas had been. As they plowed, the settlers unearthed vast quantities of potsherds that showed the land had been inhabited before. And the ceramics weren't the only sign of previous human cultivation: The deep black earth itself, very different from the pale, nutrient-poor soils of much of the Amazon, quickly revealed that people had been indispensable in creating its fertility.

"The rich terra preta, 'black land,'" of one settlement was "the best on the Amazon. ... a fine, dark loam, a foot, and often two feet thick," wrote an American naturalist named Herbert Smith in 1879. "Strewn over it everywhere we find fragments of Indian pottery. ... The bluff-land owes its richness to the refuse of a thousand kitchens for maybe a thousand years."

Though they have always been prized by farmers, the dark soils of the Amazon were largely forgotten by science for a century after their discovery. They are now re-emerging as an important topic of study, not because they're an ethnographic or historical curiosity, but because they show an exceptional ability to store carbon, which in the form of carbon dioxide has rapidly turned into one of humanity's most pernicious waste products. As a result, they're joining the rapidly growing roster of tactics that might be used to combat climate change. Researchers around the world are considering whether people may, by engineering soils specifically to maximize carbon storage, be able to absorb substantial amounts of our emissions, increase the fertility of agricultural areas and dampen some of the effects of climate change.

Sound utopian? Maybe. But as the long aftermath of the Civil War shows, solutions to deeply ingrained social problems often do emerge — though not always quickly and certainly not without enormous and sustained effort. (Peter Friederici, Miller-McCune)

IGNORE the unwarranted claims that hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK expose human-made climate change as a conspiracy. Away from those headlines, an equally intense battle is taking place over access to the data showing global warming is real.

It reached a peak earlier this year, when the UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) turned down freedom of information (FOI) requests for its temperature records. Last week, the UK's Met Office attempted to quell the growing anger at its lack of openness by "releasing" data from 1700 weather stations around the world. The move was a token gesture. The Met Office has admitted to New Scientist that those figures were already publicly available through the World Meteorological Organization.

Much data remains under lock and key. It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it. What they have not yet publicly revealed is that under a confidentiality agreement between the Met Office and the UK's Natural Environment Research Council, a portion of the UK's own temperature measurements is only made available to "bona fide academic researchers working on agreed NERC-endorsed scientific programmes". Why? So that the data can be sold privately. "We have to offset our costs for the benefit of the taxpayer, so we balance that against freedom of access," says David Britton, a spokesman for the Met Office. (Fred Pearce, New Scientist)

Al Gore’s claim last week that the Climategate emails were insignificant relied on two main defences. Both are so flagrantly wrong that it’s not enough to say Gore is simply mistaken.

Last week we showed that the first of his Climategate defences was so preposterously wrong that it was doubtful he had even read the leaked emails he tried to dismiss. You see, five times in two interviews he dismissed the emails as dated documents that were at least 10 years old:

In fact, most of the controversial emails, as I showed, were from just the past two years - and the most recent from just last month - November 12, to be precise.

So Gore was so wrong on the first count that it was difficult to think of any way an honest man could have made such a mistake. Five times.

But now Steve McIntyre has exploded the second argument Gore made. And now all doubt in my mind is gone. Gore must have simply lied.

Gore’s second argument was that these emails which seemingly showed Climategate scientists trying to silence or sack sceptical scientists were taken out of context, since the two sceptical papers they referred to were in fact published, after all.

But before I go to McIntyre’s evidence on this, first note Gore’s rhetorical trick - or deceit.

His trick is to ignore the mountain of emails that clearly suggest a collusion against sceptics, and the hiding of data, and to suggest instead that the allegations boil down to just a single email about a single instance of two Climategate scientists allegedly blocking two papers.

Here are just some of the Climategate emails that Gore ignored, which all seem evidence of the very collusion to hide data or censor sceptics that he denies. They include ones like this (from 2005):

THE Met Office was last night facing accusations it cherry-picked climate change figures in a bid to increase evidence of global warming.

UK climatologists “probably tampered with Russian-climate data” to produce a report submitted to world leaders at this week’s Copenhagen summit, it is claimed.

The Met Office’s study, which says the first decade of this century has been the warmest on record for 160 years, is being used to trumpet claims that man is causing global warming.

But experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis say the British dossier used statistics from weather stations that fit its theory of global warming, while ignoring those that do not.

They accuse the Met Office’s Hadley Centre of relying on just 25 per cent of Russia’s weather stations and over-estimating warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.

This digest of Russian media carries a story that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

Climategate is indeed changing our world.

For longer text of Russian article.

Read the rest of this entry » (Warwick Hughes)

A prominent Russian climate sceptic and free-market economist says that the British HadCRUT global temperature database - much of which has now been released to the public following the "climategate" email scandal - has been manipulated to show greater warming in Russia than is actually the case.

Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to then-Russian President Putin, is head of his own thinktank in Moscow, the Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA). He is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian American thinktank. He has always been a climate sceptic, having vigorously opposed Russia's signing up to the Kyoto protocols.

On Tuesday, Illarionov released the following report (pdf in Russian), comparing the newly-released HadCRUT data to records from the Russian meteorological service, which supplied the parts of HadCRUT covering Russia. (Lewis Page, The Register)

The Russian paint-by-numbers data. The CRU data matching NOAA and NASA. What's left?

With the revelation about the cherrypicked Russian stations (plus six other freshly, independently discovered problems), the real story of how we got here just took a shape.

The Climategate files were made public just a month ago, and the email messages that were revealed have already had real impact. The emails show us scientists being petty and political, even corrupt. Suppressing dissenting science and perhaps even violating the law to prevent data from being shared with the rest of the world. They show us people with failings, egos against egos. But the emails themselves aren’t enough to call the overall science of CO2-driven, human-caused climate change into question.

The Climategate emails, however, make up only five percent of the Climategate files. The other 95 percent, the programs and data and documents, are where the real story is hiding. That story has begun to come out, in several independent analyses of the data we have, using hints from the emails and from other files and raw data that is available from other sources. (Charlie Martin, PJM)

Family First Senator Steve Fielding and Lord Monckton demand answers from Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and not just over his use of dodgy data:

In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government.

Or, at least, he should. (David Harsanyi, Townhall)

Copenhagen summit battles to save climate deal - Delegates at the climate summit are battling to prevent the talks ending without reaching a final deal. Earlier, a US-led group of five nations - including China - tabled a last-minute proposal that President Barack Obama called a "meaningful agreement". However, it was rejected by a few developing nations who felt it failed to deliver the actions needed to halt dangerous climate change. But the majority of nations are urging the Danish hosts to adopt the deal. To be accepted as an official UN agreement, the deal needs to be endorsed by all 193 nations at the talks. (BBC)

Obama brokers a climate deal, doesn't satisfy all - COPENHAGEN — Two years of laborious negotiations on a climate agreement ended with a political deal brokered by President Barack Obama with China and other emerging powers but denounced by poor countries because it was nonbinding and set no overall target for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But a final session of climate conference delegates that lasted through the night cast doubt early Saturday on whether the president of the conference, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, could declare the Copenhagen Accord approved. (AP)

Climate deal meets furious reception - COPENHAGEN — Fury erupted Saturday at a gruelling climate summit as poor nations ripped into a deal agreed by a core group of world leaders which even its supporters admitted would not stem global warming. (AFP)

Accord? Ambitious title, anyway: FACTBOX: Main points of the Copenhagen Accord - COPENHAGEN - U.S. President Barack Obama reached a climate agreement on Friday with India, South Africa, China and Brazil. The deal outlined fell far short of the ambitions for the Copenhagen summit. Here are key points from the agreement, which is titled "Copenhagen Accord." (Reuters)

The cranks are cranky: Copenhagen: Obama Announces Climate Deal, UNFCCC Crumbles? - In a late night press conference at the close of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, President Obama declared that a "meaningful deal" had been reached with major emitting nations moments before boarding Air Force One and returning to the United States. While the final structure of "the Copenhagen Accord" is still in question, the content and reverberations of President Obama's speech today leave little doubt that the UNFCCC process, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Whether it continues to shamble on like a zombie through sheer force of inertia is yet to be determined...

Breaking free from the auspices of the UN's 190+ nation negotiating framework, major emitters, including the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, appear poised to move forward with or without the rest of the UNFCCC nations.

According to a flurry of tweets and reports from observers on the ground in Copenhagen, the leader of the "G77," a large group of developing nations, are crying bloody murder, declaring that the deal "locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever" and saying "Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush." The EU is grudgingly signing on to the accord "as better than no accord." And protestors, led by radical activist Bill McKibben, are gathering outside the Bella Center crying "shame on our leaders."

"The President has wrecked the UN (and the planet)," declared a press release from McKibben's 350.org. (Jesse Jenkins, Devon Swezey and Yael Borofsky, originally at the Breakthrough Institute)

At ’Hagen , greens’ love lost for their poster boy - COPENHAGEN: US President Barack Obama’s hesitant appearance in Copenhagen drew dismay on Friday from environmentalists , conceding that the leader who once embodied their dreams is hamstrung politically. (Economic Times)

U.S.-led climate deal under threat in Copenhagen - COPENHAGEN - U.N. climate talks fell into crisis on Saturday after some developing nations angrily rejected a plan worked out by U.S. President Barack Obama and leaders of other major economies for fighting global warming. (Reuters)

India, US accept 'Copenhagen Accord'; EU, others still unsure - After two-weeks of almost never-ending disagreements, the climate change conference in Copenhagen has produced a political accord that was weak and vague, devoid of the most basic targets, and, most importantly, unsure of being accepted by everyone. (Indian Express)

Deal and No Deal: the Copenhagen Uncertainty Principle - What in Hell on Earth Just Happened - By the time the world learned of President Obama's announcement about a "meaningful" agreement to close these climate talks, called the "Copenhagen Accord," Santa-in-chief was already on his Air Force One sleigh. And not a moment too soon.

By the wee hours of Saturday morning, as African negotiators were leading an uproar over the accord and civil society groups were protesting outside, it was still unclear which other countries were willing to support and sign it. At 3 AM, a plenary session was beginning to meet, with plans for talks to continue through Saturday. "If this makes it through the meeting in a couple of hours' time then I see it as a modest success," said Yvo de Boer, who added the understatement of the year: "We could have achieved more."

What remains is for two bodies, the COP and the MOP, to debate the Copenhagen Accord. Each body will also review the documents governing continued debate on climate change on two separate tracks: the Kyoto Protocol -- opposed by most industrialized nations but demanded by China and the G-77 -- and the Long-term Cooperative Action track (LCA). (Feast your eyes on those documents at the COP15 website; see the two bottom documents.)

The basic deal -- or whatever you want to call this un-official document -- agreed to in closed-door sessions between the US, China, South Africa and India, outlines a next step towards another agreement.

Then again, it doesn't do very much. And it may not even really exist as a deal in the eyes of other countries. (Tree Hugger)

Poor countries reject US-BASIC deal on climate change - Copenhagen, Dec 19 A US-brokered deal with four emerging economies, including India, on climate change that places no legally-binding emission cuts on developed nations ran into rough weather today with a majority of poor countries rejecting it, saying that it was one-sided. (PTI)

Americans asked little of Obama, and got little in return - Instead of the transformational leader whose intellect and charm could change the course of history, Barack Obama's anti-climactic visit to Denmark has shown him to be a bit of a wet firecracker. (Globe and Mail)

Copenhagen's Lesson in Limits - And we don't mean carbon limits. - Whatever led President Obama to believe that his personal intercession at the climate-change summit would achieve something major, his very presence in Copenhagen made "a significant breakthrough" a political imperative, no matter how flimsy. And that's exactly what a senior Administration official called a last-ditch deal—details to come—in a media leak as we went to press last evening and the conference headed into overtime.

Mr. Obama's inexplicable injunction yesterday that "the time for talk is over" appears to have produced an agreement to continue talking. The previous 12 days of frantic sound and pointless fury showed that there isn't anything approaching an international consensus on carbon control. What Copenhagen offered instead was a lesson in limits for a White House partial to symbolic gestures and routinely disappointed by reality.

Apparently, the agreement provides "the foundation for an eventual legally binding treaty," but that same "foundation" has been laid many times before. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver "legally binding" limits. However, the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became a pre-emptive dead letter because countries like China, Brazil and India said they were unwilling to accept anything that depressed their economic growth. (Wall Street Journal)

Marathon turns into merely ‘a first step’ - After two years of excruciatingly detailed negotiations and two weeks of increasingly frenetic haggling, the ”Copenhagen accord” agreed by major economies on Friday night is just 2½-pages long.

No-one is overjoyed by it. Even US president Barack Obama, the first to proclaim a ”success”, admitted that it was ”not the end but the beginning” of action to fight the threat of climate change.

Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, described it as a “first step”, and stressed the difficulty of persuading 192 countries to sign an unprecedented global agreement to fight the threat of global warming.

European and African countries refused to endorse the text immediately, continuing to discuss it into the small hours of Saturday morning, although the EU fell into line a few hours later. Environmental groups were generally horrified, and businesses that will benefit from restrictions on emissions expressed disappointment. (Financial Times)

Analysis: Obama the pragmatist gets what he can - COPENHAGEN — The world is coming to know President Barack Obama, the pragmatist whose stand at a messy global warming summit underscored the way he leads: Let's get done what we can, imperfect as it is. (Associated Press)

Obama says 'unprecedented' deal reached on climate - COPENHAGEN — President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty. (Associated Press)

CLIMATE-COPENHAGEN (INSTANT VIEW): INSTANT VIEW-Reaction to Copenhagen climate deal - COPENHAGEN, Dec 18 - U.S. President Barack Obama reached a climate agreement on Friday with India, South Africa, China and Brazil, a U.S. official said. The deal outlined fell far short of the ambitions for the Copenhagen summit. Here are reactions: (Reuters)

Copenhagen Climate Conference Collapses - Ronald Bailey's fifth and final dispatch from the Copenhagen climate conference - World leaders are abandoning the Bella Center like rats off a sinking ship after declaring that a deal has been reached at the Copenhagen climate change conference. Two years ago at the Bali climate conference, it was agreed that the signatories to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol would finalize a binding global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen meeting. That goal was put aside even before the meeting here got started. In turn, the Copenhagen conference was supposed to resolve major issues like the mid-term reduction commitments by developed countries, how to monitor those commitments, and how to fund adaptation and mitigation in poor countries. Now those goals have been put off to the indefinite future. (Ronald Bailey, Reason)

Nations split over Copenhagen ‘deal’ - Some world leaders at the Copenhagen talks on climate change declared on Friday night that they had reached a “meaningful agreement” but admitted it fell well short of their ambitions for the first truly global treaty on cutting greenhouse gases. (Financial Times)

Climate Talks in Copenhagen Heading Into Overtime - President Obama remains huddled with other world leaders in the second floor of the Bella Center where talks are being held. On the main floor, it is a scene of high drama and low expectations, with palpable confusion and frustration among negotiators. (Greenwire)

New climate draft drops 2010 deadline for treaty - COPENHAGEN — A new draft climate agreement being considered by world leaders at the U.N. summit in Copenhagen drops a previous 2010 deadline for achieving a legally binding treaty to fight global warming. The latest draft obtained by The Associated Press doesn't have a deadline. Like previous drafts it refers to "deep cuts" in global emissions of greenhouse gases but does not give exact figures. (Associated Press)

Obama urges climate action, offers no new proposals - COPENHAGEN - U.S. President Barack Obama urged world leaders on Friday to "act together" on an accord to fight climate change, but he did not offer new U.S. commitments to cut emissions that some see as crucial to a deal. (Reuters)

House Republicans warn Obama on climate steps - COPENHAGEN - As President Barack Obama labored behind closed doors to break a deadlock over efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Republicans from the U.S. Congress were outside those meetings urging him not to bother. (Reuters)

In Copenhagen, greens' love lost for Obama - COPENHAGEN — US President Barack Obama's hesitant appearance in Copenhagen drew dismay Friday from environmentalists, conceding that the leader who once embodied their dreams is hamstrung politically. (AFP)

From dinner to desperation: The 24-hour race for a deal in Copenhagen - The Copenhagen climate change summit had been meticulously planned to produce a streamlined agreement. Instead, it turned into an epic struggle over the shape of a future world economic order (The Guardian)

Diplomatic frenzy at final day of UN climate talks - COPENHAGEN — A diplomatic frenzy enveloped the final scheduled day of the U.N. climate conference Friday, with President Barack Obama meeting with China's premier as world leaders pressed to salvage a global warming accord amid deep divisions between rich and poor nations. (Associated Press)

Obama snubbed by Chinese premier at meeting - COPENHAGEN: President Barack Obama’s first closed-door meeting with world leaders in Copenhagen to forge an agreement to slow climate change had a notable absentee: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. On the last scheduled day of negotiations for a global accord, tensions between the US and China are on the rise. The world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters came to an impasse over finance for developing countries, pollution-reduction goals and verification of emissions cuts. (Bloomberg)

Copenhagen's Legacy for Investors? Wait And See - Conferences on environmental policy are usually pretty dry with more talk of pacts and policy than cinematic global calamity. The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen did not buck the trend – it was hardly the stuff of blockbusters, but for investors ready to move early, it did open the door to some potentially lucrative opportunities. Even without a landmark agreement on climate change, investment sectors with a stake in the environment could see renewed interest in the wake of the conference. (Smart Money)

NEW YORK -- The Copenhagen talks on climate change were convened with a sense of urgency that many ordinary folks don't share. Why is that? One big reason: It's hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say.

''It's not in people's faces,'' said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. ''It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That's quite a different thing.'' (Associated Press)

In the FT today Tom de Castella has a worthwhile piece on the lessons that the climate science community should draw from the aftermath of the CRU email hack/leak. Unfortunately, from my vantage point the community is far from learning these lessons. Here is how de Castella ends his piece:

Clive Spash, whose adventures with CSIRO in Australia have been discussed here a few times (here, here and here) has posted on his website a link to "the paper" that caused all the "fuss." The paper focuses on "emissions trading schemes" (ETS) that are the focus of international and many domestic efforts to reign in growing carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. Spash includes the following footnote at the outset:

The global-warming economics coming out of Washington doesn’t match the global-warming economics of Copenhagen. For instance, according to Senator John Kerry (D-MA) cutting CO2 creates jobs and stimulates the economy. At least that’s what the press release describing his cap-and-tax legislation claims.

But in Copenhagen this view of economics gets turned on its head. In Copenhagen Senator Kerry talks about the need to pay other countries to adopt the CO2-limiting regulations that supposedly create jobs and stimulate an economy.

If the mandates, regulations, and energy taxes needed for carbon caps are so great for the economy, why do we need to promise hundreds of billions of dollars to other countries to get them to adopt the same?

China holds the world to ransom - Beijing accused of standing in the way of climate change treaty at Copenhagen as US throws down the gauntlet by backing $100bn fund to help poorest countries

China was under intense diplomatic pressure last night to abandon key demands which risk scuppering an international treaty on climate change in Copenhagen.

Today President Barack Obama is due to arrive in the Danish capital after Hillary Clinton electrified the faltering conference by announcing that America would back the setting-up of a climate fund for poor countries which would have $100bn to give away annually by 2020.

But at the same time she issued a blunt challenge to China, which has now overtaken the US as the world's biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, to allow its promised emissions cuts to be internationally verified – something the Chinese have been stubbornly resisting. ( Michael McCarthy, The Independent)

The leaders in Copenhagen will reach some agreement. Politically, they have to

As world leaders arrive in Copenhagen, luggage filled with deficit-financed public funds to facilitate the do-or-the-planet-dies climate deal that is the object of this weekend’s last-minute, round-the-clock deliberations, the question arises: Is this any way to run a planet? “Deliberation” is not the right word, by the way. Nothing done by 200 negotiators at three o’clock in the morning on an artificial deadline will be deliberate. Yet deliberate is exactly what’s needed when contemplating large-scale changes in how the world — the world, the whole world — does business.

A global deal to address climate change is likely to be agreed today but the commitments it contains on cutting greenhouse gases will fall short of the minimum target set by the UN’s science body.

The European Union is preparing to increase its commitment on cutting emissions as part of an endgame at the Copenhagen summit which will see other countries making similar concessions.

A pledge yesterday by the United States to contribute to a $100 billion (£60 billion) annual climate protection fund appeared to have won sufficient support from developing countries, which are desperate not to walk away empty-handed from the summit.

President Obama, who will join 120 other heads of state in Copenhagen today, may announce a specific financial contribution to make up for not improving on the emissions target he announced last month.

Another big obstacle to a deal was swept away when the US and China appeared to agree a compromise on the issue of independent scrutiny of emission reductions reported by each country. China accepted the need for transparency but stopped short of saying that it would abide the findings of any external audit of its emissions. (The Times)

For nations of a nervous disposition, there is an ocean of difference between “transparency” and “scrutiny”: a commitment to the first is a sop, a commitment to the second is a surrender.

The climate change debate has blazingly illuminated China’s stance on the issue.

There are many reasons why emotions in Beijing run high over allowing outsiders to verify China’s adherence to its emissions promises. (The Times)

That’s right. Hot air, no fixed targets, promises of a vast transfer of wealth from the West and everyone flies back home thinking they’ve been warriors for mankind.

If the report is true, it’s almost as much as a sceptic could hope for. (Andrew Bolt)

The headline from Gallup is that developed nations should cut their emissions and that is indeed borne out by their numbers, but there are some other figures that need to be highlighted and a point or two to be made.

The big take-away for U.S. politicians is that — quite clearly and resoundingly — Americans overwhelmingly favor a plan that includes all nations. In fact, 75-10 is a good ol’ fashioned route for the “everyone” side over the “just us” side. That means any plan that plan that starts with U.S. pain as a means of demonstrating “leadership” on the issue is not going to be well-received.

But, as is often the case, how is as important as whether to cut emissions. The question here doesn’t mention how we do that, though our suspicion is that a question posing several alternatives would show a strong preference for innovation, rather than command-and-control policies such as cap and trade or a hefty carbon tax. (The Chilling Effect)

While a majority of Americans believe global warming is happening, far fewer see it as a crisis. (Dana Blanton, FOXNews.com)

The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site.

It is hard to do any more wrong by the American people than cap and trade. Whether done by domestic legislation or international treaty, significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions (like the 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 in the House Waxman Markey bill which the Obama administration had hoped to match at Copenhagen or get done at a subsequent UN global warming treaty conference) would raise gasoline prices by 58 percent by 2035, electric rates by 90 percent, impose nearly $3,000 in total annual costs on a household of 4, and destroy over one million jobs. Little wonder such measures are stalled in the Senate and are highly unlikely to be done by the Friday end of the climate conference (where in any event they would fail to get the required two thirds vote for Senate ratification). But Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is certainly trying to make a bad deal worse by pledging America’s support for a massive foreign aid package in the name of helping developing nations address global warming.

The world's carboncrats are beavering away this week on a vast new global cap-and-trade scheme that President Obama wants the U.S. to join. But before we do, maybe Americans should understand how this already works in practice. Union workers, take note.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 required signatories to reduce their carbon emissions, and the European Union in 2005 launched its own cap-and-trade system. The program sets a limit on carbon emissions, and companies are issued free carbon allowances that they can buy or sell based on their emissions needs.

Fast forward to this month's news that Corus, Europe's second-largest steel producer, is shuttering a giant U.K. steelmaking plant at Redcar, cutting 1,700 jobs. Corus blames the recession that has cut steel demand and says the British government hasn't done enough to help it.

Whatever the truth of that, there's little doubt that cap and trade made the closure much easier. The decline in steel production means European steelmakers have surplus carbon allowances. According to Carbon Market Data, a European research firm, in 2008 Corus had the second largest surplus of EU carbon allowances—7.5 million.

The EU is looking for ways to drive today's depressed allowance price of about $21 apiece back up to former highs of about $50, so Corus has the potential for a $375 million windfall. By closing Redcar's annual capacity of three million tons of steel, Corus will produce six million fewer tons of CO2. That means more carbon allowances, which could translate into about $300 million a year if credits hit $50. Corus is essentially being paid to lay off British workers.

Corus will also profit if it moves the production to India. As part of Kyoto, the United Nations created the Clean Development Mechanism to encourage Western companies to invest in developing-world factories. Participants are financially rewarded based on the amount of carbon they "save" with more efficient plants. (WSJ)

If you gained 50 pounds in 2009, would it make sense to pledge to gain only 30 pounds more in 2010? That's essentially what China and India have promised at the current climate talks in Copenhagen.

No climate treaty will succeed in reducing emissions unless it includes meaningful cuts from all the world's largest emitters. On our current trajectory -- what modelers call a "business-as-usual" scenario -- by the end of the century developing countries will account for more than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.

Faced with this reality, China and India have proposed voluntary cuts in their greenhouse gas "emissions intensity." Emissions intensity is a ratio between emissions and gross domestic product. China recently offered a 40-45 percent drop in emissions intensity while India offered a 20-25 percent cut.

The numbers sound impressive, and many proponents of a new treaty in Copenhagen have hailed them as significant progress, but a closer look shows that this proposal is about as serious as a banana-split diet. ( Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner)

The $US100 billion a year funding offer that the Obama administration tossed on the table at Copenhagen may be a big number, but what does it actually mean?

Perhaps the best explanation is Hillary Clinton’s: “The US is prepared to work with other countries towards a goal of jointly mobilising $100 billion a year…..we expect this funding to come from a wide variety of sources.”

Is it, in fact, a ploy like the US Environmental Protection agency decision whipped out at the start of the Copenhagen meeting?

A friend in Washington DC reacted to the first move by labelling it a 21st century version of a Potemkin village when I emailed him to get the lowdown on the EPA ruling that carbon dioxide is a health hazard and able to be regulated under the American Clean Air Act.

Potemkin villages were fake settlements erected in the Crimea in the 18th century by a courtier to impress Catherine the Great and to hide the reality of disease, poverty and misery among her subjects there.

In modern terms it denotes a politically-generated appearance to cover a less impressive underside.

The EPA decision, my friend pointed out, is a ploy on two counts: internationally, it gives Barack Obama a facade for his appearance at the Copenhagen talks, the US Congress having declined to date to deliver an ETS, and, domestically, it is designed to suggest to US senators, including Democrats with big concerns about the impact of carbon costs on their home turf, that he can go round them if they won’t deliver. (Keith Orchison, Business Spectator)

An attempt by developing and emerging countries to create "a new world order" in which Western industrialised nations are no longer dominant is threatening to scupper an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen, warned EU delegates. EurActiv reports from the Danish capital. (EurActiv)

Climate change is one of those issues I know enough about to know how little I really know. And I certainly haven't learned much more during the 193-nation climate talks that concluded in Copenhagen this week. I'm one of those agnostics willing to accept evidence that the earth is warming but not yet convinced that scientists fully understand why. And my skepticism has grown greater in light of the recent climategate scandal involving leaked e-mails that suggested prominent climate-change scientists have manipulated data and tried to stifle dissent in the scientific community.

But while the Copenhagen talks didn't shed much light on the climate issue per se, they certainly revealed much about the motivations of those involved in the debate. It was clear, both in the meetings and among protestors outside, that the most vociferous advocates for imposing limits on greenhouse emissions are motivated only tangentially by concern for the planet. The real target of radical environmentalism is capitalism. (Linda Chavez, Townhall)

President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Hugo Chavez received resounding cheers from the audience after saying, “Seven percent of the world population - some 500 million people - are responsible for half of contaminating emissions. Capitalism is to blame for this.” He also asserted, “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”

If President Chavez means carbon dioxide emissions when he says “contaminating emissions” his point is moot. The scientific evidence simply isn’t there to support that. But even if he’s talking about real pollution, the evidence still isn’t there. Not only has capitalism increased our prosperity and standard of living, it has made us cleaner and healthier in the process. George Mason economist Don Boudreaux explains:

But no sooner have those billions been promised, than the anti-capitalists up the ask:

How much is this carpet-baggers’ convention costing us, for heaven’s sake? Recall our prime minister now before our cash is all gone.

Yes, it’s weather, not climate, but what would the warmists have said if Copenhagen today was unusually warm, rather than unusually cold:

One of the reasons some Americans become wary of the United Nations is that it gives a platform to obnoxious bores, several of whom have taken the podium this week at the UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen .

Among them was Hugo Chavez , who paraphrased Marx in assigning blame for climate change: "A ghost is stalking the streets of Copenhagen...it's capitalism, capitalism is that ghost." That's from the leader of a country whose economy is based largely on the export of particularly dirty oil. Awkward.

"The destructive model of capitalism is the eradication of life," Chavez also said. Tell that to the millions of Chinese that Mao killed in the fight against capitalism, or the millions more recently pulled out of poverty because of market-liberalizing reforms.

Even worse was the performance of Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe. "When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it's we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die." Zimbabwe, of course, used to be one of the most developed countries in Africa -- until Mugabe's thugs pillaged the economy and tortured the population. (WashPost)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez couldn’t resist another opportunity to bash capitalism — and the COP15 Copenhagen Conference on global warming gave him a perfect setup. Protesters against globalization, capitalism, energy use, and other aspects of modern life thronged in the streets, while in the conference center, leaders from rich nations that want to “level the playing field” for CO2 emissions and poor countries looking for massive handouts gave Chavez a warm response.

In his harangue posted on YouTube, Chavez hit the “group of countries who think they’re better than us” and that provide a “world imperial dictatorship.” He, of course, made reference and deference to his hero Karl Marx:

Chavez got a lot of applause here too. He tied capitalism to the degradation of the earth: “the destructive model of capitalism is eradicating life.”

President Robert Mugabe, credited with destroying the economy of his own country, Zimbabwe, also railed against Western countries and capitalism:

And this is the conference where “world leaders” are supposedly coming together to plan the world’s energy future? It’s a scary thought.

Global Warming as Groupthink - The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's process institutionalizes groupthink on a global scale.

It is easy to mock the thousands of activists, officials and ministers flying to Copenhagen in their jets, driving around in an immense fleet of limousines, and collectively emitting more carbon dioxide than a small African country—all to force the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprints. But it is one thing to accuse them of hypocrisy in not living out their beliefs. Casting doubt on their belief that global warming poses an imminent threat to life on this planet is another.

To question so much scientific expertise and governmental authority seems arrogant or foolhardy—even in the city where Hans Christian Anderson wrote about the little boy who blurted out that the Emperor had no clothes. (Peter Lilley, WSJ)

A new UN report reveals the fundamentally misanthropic worldview underlying climate alarmism.

“Too Many Births Said to Threaten the Climate” read the headline in the November 19 edition of the French daily Le Monde. The headline refers to the new “State of World Population 2009” report published by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The document is called a “report,” but in light of the unabashed and unrelenting advocacy of which it consists, it might be better described as a “pamphlet.” Subtitled “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate,” what it advocates is combating “global warming” (“There is no time for delay; we are already on the precipice”) and its novelty is precisely to suggest that limiting population growth could represent a crucial contribution to this end. (John Rosenthal, PJM)

In the Grand Ceremonial Hall of the University of Copenhagen, a splendid Nordic classical space overlooking the Church of our Lady in the heart of the old city, rows of repellent, blue plastic chairs surrounded the podium from which no less a personage than Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was to speak.

I had arrived in good time to take my seat among the dignitaries in the front row. Rapidly, the room filled with enthusiastic Greenies and enviro-zombs waiting to hear the latest from ye Holy Bookes of Ipecac, yea verily.

The official party shambled in and perched on the blue plastic chairs next to me. Pachauri was just a couple of seats away, so I gave him a letter from me and Senator Fielding of Australia, pointing out that the headline graph in the IPCC’s 2007 report, purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 150 years had itself accelerated, was fraudulent.

Would he use the bogus graph in his lecture? I had seen him do so when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales. I watched and waited. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The climate action group ‘GO’ seeks to influence the politics of climate change through mob intimidation

The CBC seemed yesterday to be very much on the side of the protesters who attempted to break into the deadlocked Copenhagen climate talks. Reports expressed sympathy with the mob’s “frustration” at the “lack of progress.” Inside the Bella conference centre, meanwhile, a bunch of NGOs reportedly tried to help those storming the barricades to infiltrate the building.

Far from being unwelcome to promoters of draconian action, these arrogant noisemakers are a welcome force for intimidation. Take James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who appeared yesterday morning on CBC’s The Current. Mr. Hansen’s Al Gore-orchestrated testimony before Congress in 1988 and 1989 was of seminal importance to the UN climate agenda. He has become perhaps the most oft-quoted voice of official climate alarmism.

“It’s the protesters who offer the best hope for our planet,” according to Johann Hari. We’d best take a look at them, then.

UPDATE. In other protest news, Starvin’ Marvin is on his 40th day without food. Maybe he wants to be the new skinny Santa.

UPDATE II. No protests against Copenhagen anti-capitalist Hugo Chavez: “The applause was deafening.”

UPDATE III. Compare Copenhagen’s screeching greens with the sensible and modest Stephen McIntyre. (Via Treacher)

Though Barack Obama garnered much attention for his Nobel Peace Prize win, the United States has won three lesser-known, tongue-in-cheek awards at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference from a liberal environmentalist organization that has been critical of America’s refusal to wholeheartedly embrace their radical agenda.

And what “ignoble actions” earned the United States these noble prizes? According to the people at Avaaz.org, the U.S. government took home the “Fossil of the Day” award for “stalling negotiation to save life on planet earth.” Along with the Climate Action Network, Avaaz.org runs a daily award show at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. It’s worth noting that Avaaz.org is dedicated to “to clos[ing] the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want.”

Here’s video of the red carpet ceremony, shot by Heritage expert Steven Groves, who is on the scene at the Copenhagen Conference:

We at Heritage applaud this award in part because, climate change and research aside, signing a colossal UN resolution in Copenhagen this week would mean signing over our sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats in the United Nations and Europe (not to mention the tremendous economic harm Copenhagen regulations would wreak on the U.S. economy). Here’s to fourth “Fossil of the Day Award.” (The Foundry)

The arrival of President Barack Obama and over one hundred other heads of state in Copenhagen for a photo op at the UN global warming conference has buried the really big story here. No, it’s not the fact that no agreement will be reached on a new international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That outcome was foreseen months ago.

The big news is that the grand alliance pushing global warming alarmism and energy-rationing policies has started to break apart here in a spectacular way. The official United Nations global warming bureaucracy have thrown out the twenty to thirty thousand environmentalists who traveled to Copenhagen to attend the meeting as officially-accredited delegates of non-governmental organizations (or NGOs). The environmentalists are extremely angry and have every justification for being angry.

This is potentially momentous because the two wings of alarmism are totally dependent on one another. The UN’s Kyoto bandwagon has been pushed along by the environmental movement and no new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol, when it expires at the end of 2012, will have a chance of being adopted without the continuing and unremitting backing of the environmentalists whom the UN has unceremoniously booted out this week. For the environmental groups, Kyoto and its successor treaty are the only viable vehicles for achieving their goals of reducing emissions and putting the world on an energy starvation diet.

What has happened this week in Copenhagen is not based on any ideological disagreements. It’s all the result of four things: the size of the room, the number of attendees, total incompetence, and poor manners. The UN chose to hold what was billed as “the most important meeting in the history of the world” in a conference center that only holds fifteen thousand people. The environmental NGOs sent lists of delegates that added up to over thirty thousand. The UN looked at these two numbers and decided everything would work out fine. (Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads)

You simply cannot have so many celebrities and political will in one place, and expect them to concede defeat. It is just not in their nature.

A lefty organization sent me an indignant press release stating that the Danish police have “aggressed on protesters outside the Bella Center.” By this, they mean that the agitants, who moments before were shouting “Push the police away!,” were physically held back from entering an already crowded room.

It is true that it is depressing to see the heretofore useful word aggression turned into another mouth-numbing verb. But it’s heartening to hear that a group of professional whiners were told “No.” True to form, when turned away the perpetually petulant started screaming “Rights!,” by which they mean, as they always do, “My desires, not yours.”

And can it be a coincidence that we now hear from Russia — the land where the Climategate emails were first posted — accusations that the Hadley Climate Research Unit fiddled Siberian temperature data? The charge is that scientists only considered stations which showed warming, and tossed those which did not fit their preconceptions.

What makes this delicious is that the stations Hadley chose had large chunks of missing data, and the stations ignored had uninterrupted records. This makes sense: it’s easier to homogenize data that isn’t there. The explanations to come will no doubt provide for some light comedy.

The best news of all are the rumors that “progress has been halting” in Copenhagen. The word stalemate is showing up with increasing frequency in news reports.

Government ministers can’t agree on the best way to take money from their own citizens, give it to an opaque, above-the-law organization, and yet still control it; because, of course, with all that money comes power. Negotiators are skittish about how they can ensure that the money pledged will actually be paid into the pot, and if it does, who gets to dole out the funds. Everybody wants a piece of it, but nobody trusts anybody.

However, I believe this is only a spate of temporary sanity. (William M. Briggs, PJM)

Kevin Rudd would rather take the word of a six-year-old girl than of a 69-year-old climate scientist as distinguished as Richard Lindzen:

A populist caught out. Kevin Rudd tells Copenhagen negotiatiors that their idea of new taxes is “constructive” , but he tells Australian taxpayers that these taxes are bad:

Rudd is reminded that a great green tax on flying would savage the tourism industry of the most remote of the settled continents:

Seven times she gets no direct answer. And Gillard’s refusal tells you how vulnerable Labor suddenly feels. (Andrew Bolt)

Remember how Kevin Rudd insisted the Liberals had to pass his emissions trading scheme in time for the Copenhagen meeting? Looking at the all-in brawl it’s become, and how it’s essentially a showdown between the US and China, can anyone detect any sign at all that Australia’s example would have made the slightest difference?

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s plane to the same destination was delayed when a trolley ran into it. Which is more or less what Copenhagen represents for Australian tourism:

That’s nice of him. No flights for you, little Gracie. Oh, and the next time you write to the PM, please ask him how much all of this will cost you. Because Aunty Julia doesn’t want to say.

UPDATE II. Behold the Essex Six, who ask that you honk to stop global warming. Which means you’re driving a car at the time. They haven’t really thought this through. (Tim Blair)

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference enters its second week in Copenhagen, California will send a delegation to showcase the state’s own climate change policies. Since his election to office in 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made global warming and climate change a cornerstone of his gubernatorial legacy. When he addresses conference delegates this week, Schwarzenegger will boast that under his watch the state has implemented some of the strictest and most comprehensive environmental regulations in the world. But delegates won’t be presented with the true cost of Schwarzenegger’s war on global warming.

Californians know better than anyone else the devastating effects of severe environmental laws. The state is reeling from a mass exodus of businesses and employees who can no longer operate under such onerous restrictions. In 2008 alone, over a quarter million jobs were lost in the Golden State. Although California’s official unemployment rate is 12.3%, there are estimates it could really be as high as 20%. (David Spady, Townhall)

BARELY a month ago Malcolm Turnbull was leader of the opposition, Kevin Rudd was insisting Australia pass emissions trading legislation before he went to the climate conference in Copenhagen, action on climate change was the global moral imperative, there was the likelihood of an early double-dissolution election on a carbon emissions trading system and Tony Abbott was supporting the Liberal leader's position of passing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the Senate.

Today, Abbott is Leader of the Opposition opposing an ETS as a "massive tax", Rudd is fighting on all sides in Copenhagen after being attacked for doing secret deals, hypocrisy and walking away from the Kyoto Protocol. The Prime Minister is talking about Australia's national interest not moral imperatives, and there is little likelihood of the early election on climate change that Turnbull feared.

Indeed, the politics of climate change have so dramatically turned around that Abbott is daring the Government to "bring on an election" and Labor is drastically altering its election schedule and strategy.

Of course, Rudd's presence at the UN's organisational and political catastrophe in Denmark and the prospect, still, of some salvageable outcome will be an unknown quantity until just before Christmas, and a political variable.

But there are some conditions and outcomes that are now virtually unalterable and that are entirely different to Labor's original battle plan.

Before the groundswell over ETS in the Liberal party removed Turnbull as leader, the government was working on the basis that its threat of an early election, if the Liberals blocked the CPRS in the Senate, would enable Turnbull to carry the day and pass the ETS. This would allow Turnbull to say he could now "move on" from climate change and get back to economic matters.

Labor was convinced it had Turnbull's number and had a few contentious issues to throw his way, as he was excluded completely from criticising the effects of the ETS on the economy. (The Australian)

It is amusing to watch advocates of rapid, aggressive carbon dioxide emissions reduction, when confronted with the plain facts of the consensus scientific projections for climate change and its associated damages, move from “science says we must do this or die” to “well, actually, the science is pretty uncertain, so it’s possible that we might die,” and then proceed to some restatement of Pascal’s Wager.

Tom Friedman’s recent New York Times column is a perfect illustration of this logic. I’ll quote him at length, before demonstrating that his emission-cuts-as-insurance analogy breaks down once you plug in actual numbers:

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading bookie for this game. The current IPCC consensus forecast is that, under fairly reasonable assumptions for world population and economic growth, global temperatures will rise by about 3°C by the year 2100 (Table SPM.3). Also according to the IPCC, a 4°C increase in temperatures would cause total estimated economic losses of 1–5 percent of global GDP (page 17). By implication, if we were at 3°C of warming at the end of this century, we would be well into the 22^nd century before we reached a 4°C rise, with this associated level of cost. [Read more →] (Jim Manzi, MasterResource)

It’s all gone Pete Tong for alarmists in Denmark as the curse of Brown descends and the inconvenience of climategate refuses to go away. Greenpeace was punk’d, Phelim was unplugged and Al Gore turned into the Gaffeinator. It’s all good clean fun in this, your last round-up of 2009. (The Daily Bayonet)

YOU’LL have freaked at all the reports warning that if we don’t cut our gases, our cities will drown, our farms will turn to dust and giant hurricanes will suck up every last polar bear.

But don’t despair. I’ve scoured the papers to find this year’s 20 top tips to cut your gases and help save this planet from global warming catastrophe.

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen.

Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know: (Lawrence Journal-World)

A Skeptic that is skeptical about making Global Warming THE defining issue of our times? Obviously, that’s not something that could be left unpunished. And in fact…there are some slightly ominous remarks by Phil “Jekill” Plait (not the usual reasonable Plait one can find talking about every topic but global warming):

Jorge P. has brought my attention to an essay about climate change written by James Randi:

The Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) here in San Francisco this week is amazing for it’s sheer size: many thousands of Earth scientists presenting talks and posters on just about every Earth science subject imaginable.

Today was my chance to try to convince other scientists who work on the critical issue of feedbacks in the climate system that some fundamental mistakes have been made that have misled climate researchers into believing that the climate system is quite sensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions. A tough sell in only 14 minutes.

It was standing room only…close to 300 scientists by my estimate. There were only a couple of objections to my presentation…rather weak ones. Afterward I had a number of people comment favorably about the ‘different’ way I was looking at the problem.

And while that should be comforting, it is also disturbing. Since when in science did the issue of ‘causation’ become a foreign concept? When did the direction of causation between two correlated variables (in my case, clouds and temperature) become no longer important?

If temperature and clouds vary together in ‘sort of’ the same way in satellite observations as they do in climate models, then the models are considered to be ‘validated’. But my message, which might not have come across as clearly as it should have due to time constraints, was that such agreement does NOT validate the models when it comes to feedback, and feedbacks are what will determine how much of an impact humans have on the climate system.

Andrew Lacis, who works climate modeling with Jim Hansen, came up and said he agreed with me that, in general, the feedback problem is more difficult than people have been assuming. In a talk after mine, Graeme Stephens gave me a backhanded compliment when he agreed with at least my basic message that the way in which we assume the climate system functions (in my terms, what-causes-what to happen) IS important to how we then deduce how sensitive the climate is to such things as our carbon dioxide emissions.

The three organizers of the session were very gracious to invite me, since they knew my views are controversial. One of the three was Andrew Dessler, who works in water vapor feedback. I had never met Andy before, and he’s a super nice guy. They all agreed that there needs to be more debate on the subject.

But most of the talks presented followed the recipe that has become all too common in recent years: analyze the output of climate models that predict substantial global warming, and simply assume the models are somewhere near correct.

There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.

Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media. (Roy W. Spencer)

Several commenters (3187.4, 7031, 9877) argue that the recent plateau in ocean heat content (from 2003 to 2008) suggests anthropogenic warming is not occurring because it indicates that the climate system is not accumulating heat. The lack of heat accumulation, they state, demonstrates a failure of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis to account for natural climate variability, especially as it relates to ocean cycles. They claim that the recent trends in ocean heat content suggest the Earth’s energy budget is not out of balance owing to GHGs, in contrast to the findings of Hansen et al. (2005).

We have reviewed the assessment literature in light of these comments and disagree with the assertions made by commenters. Just as temperature will not necessarily increase monotonically with increases in GHGs (per response 3-6) neither will ocean heat content on short time scales. Many of the same factors that influence global surface temperature in addition to GHG forcing will also result in short-term variability in ocean heat content such as aerosol emissions (anthropogenic and/or volcanic), solar forcing, and internal variability in the climate system. EPA does not suggest that GHGs are the only factors that would influence the global energy budget, and hence ocean heat content. EPA agrees that internal variability likely plays an important role in the interannual and interdecadal variability of ocean heat content, as indicated by IPCC (Bindoff et al., 2007). But as noted in Volume 2 of the Response to Comments document, the long-term trend in ocean heat content is indisputably upward, which is what we would expect given the anthropogenic heating from GHGs. The IPCC notes that ocean heat content is a critical variable for detecting the effects of the observed increase in GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere and for resolving the Earth’s overall energy balance (Bindoff et al., 2007)

Though the commenters refer to a recent plateau in ocean heat content, there are published papers which find the opposite, as mentioned in Volume 2 of the Response to Comments document. In fact, this work (von Schuckmann et al., 2009) indicates the global ocean accumulated (between the surface and 2,000 meter depth) 0.77 (plus or minus 0.11) watts per square meter of heat between 2003 and 2008, which is roughly consistent with the 0.86 (plus or minus 0.12) watts per square meter of heat (between the surface and 750 meter depth) accumulated between 1993 and 2003 as documented in Willis et al. (2004); and Hansen et al. (2005). These studies suggest the ocean has and continues to accumulate heat, contributing to an overall imbalance in the Earth’s energy budget, as further documented in two other recent studies by Trenberth et al. (2009) analyzing the period March 2000 to May 2004 and Murphy et al. (2009) (analyzing the period 1950–2004).

We have added the following text on this topic to Section 4(f) of the final TSD on this topic:

The thermal expansion of sea water is an indicator of increasing ocean heat content. Ocean heat content is also a critical variable for detecting the effects of the observed increase in GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere and for resolving the Earth’s overall energy balance (Bindoff et al., 2007). For the period 1955 to 2005, Bindoff et al. (2007) analyze multiple time series of ocean heat content and find an overall increase, while noting interannual and inter-decadal variations. NOAA’s report State of the Climate in 2008 (Peterson and Baringer, 2009), which incorporates data through 2008, finds “large” increases in global ocean heat content since the 1950s and notes that over the last several years, ocean heat content has reached consistently higher values than for all prior times in the record.

Thus, the TSD’s summary of the current state of the science on ocean heat content as reflected in the underlying assessment literature is reasonable and sound.

An essential test of model performance is a direct comparison with observations. I have discussed in several posts (see and see) the inability of Jim Hansen’s GISS model to accurately predict the accumulation of heat in the upper ocean over the last several years.

Hansen, J., L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, Ju. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G.A. Schmidt, and N. Tausnev, 2005: Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science, 308, 1431-1435, doi:10.1126/science.1110252,

“Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse gases and aerosols among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85±0.15 W/m² more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years.”

“Our simulated 1993-2003 heat storage rate was 0.6 W/m2 in the upper 750 m of the ocean.”

“The decadal mean planetary energy imbalance, 0.75 W/m2, includes heat storage in the deeper ocean and energy used to melt ice and warm the air and land. 0.85 W/m2 is the imbalance at the end of the decade.”

Thus, the best estimate value of 0.60 Watts per meter squared given in Hansen et al can be used to calculate the accumulation of heat in Joules that Jim Hansen predicted in the upper ocean data from 2003 to the present.

The observed best estimates of the observed heating and the Hansen et al prediction in Joules in the upper 700m of the ocean are given below:

OBSERVED BEST ESTIMATE OF ACCUMULATION Of JOULES [assuming a baseline of zero at the end of 2002].

2003 ~0 Joules
2004 ~0 Joules
2005 ~0 Joules
2006 ~0 Joules
2007 ~0 Joules
2008 ~0 Joules
2009 ~0 Joules (estimated)
2010 ——
2011 ——
2012 ——

HANSEN PREDICTION OF The ACCUMULATION OF JOULES [ at a rate of 0.60 Watts per meter squared] assuming a baseline of zero at the end of 2002].

2003 ~0.98 * 10** 22 Joules
2004 ~1.96 * 10** 22 Joules
2005 ~2.94 * 10** 22 Joules
2006 ~3.92 * 10** 22 Joules
2007 ~4.90 * 10** 22 Joules
2008 ~5.88 * 10** 22 Joules
2009 ~6.86 * 10** 22 Joules
2010 ~7.84 * 10** 22 Joules
2011 ~8.82 * 10** 22 Joules
2012 ~9.80 * 10** 22 Joules

Thus, according to the GISS model predictions, there should be approximately 6.86 * 10**22 Joules more heat in the upper 700 meters of the global ocean at the end of 2009 than were present at the beginning of 2003.

For the observations to come into agreement with the GISS model prediction by the end of 2012, for example, there would have to be an accumulation 9.8 * 10** 22 Joules of heat over just the next three years. This requires a heating rate over the next 3 years into the upper 700 meters of the ocean of 3.27* 10**22 Joules per year, which corresponds to a radiative imbalance of ~+2.0 Watts per square meter.

This rate of heating would have to be about 3 1/3 times higher than the 0.60 Watts per meter squared that Jim Hansen reported for the period 1993 to 2003.

While the time period for this discrepancy with the GISS model is still relatively short, the question should be asked by the EPA as to the number of years required to reject this model as having global warming predictive skill, if this large difference between the observations and the GISS model persists.

The EPA failed to discuss this discrepancy between observations and the model predictions. Despite what they wrote, the climate system, as represented by the upper ocean heat content, has not been accumulating heat over the last 6 years or so. Based on the GISS model predictions, there should be approximately 6.86 * 10** 22 Joules more heat in the upper 700 meters of the global ocean at the end of 2009 than were present at the beginning of 2003.

Finally, the EPA is selective (i.e. biased) in terms of what they presented in the justification for their findings. They did not discuss or refute, for example, the conclusions with respect to ocean heat content changes reported in

The EPA Findings perpetuate the culture of ignoring peer-reviewed scientific results which is exemplified in the released CRU e-mails. (Climate Science)

Earlier this week, at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, NASA unveiled new data on atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs), notably carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor, from its Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) unit on the agency’s Aqua spacecraft. NASA touted two main findings as “breakthroughs” in GHG research.

One supposed breakthrough is the discovery that CO2 is not “well-mixed” through the global troposphere (mid-level atmosphere), but is actually “lumpy” — distributed in higher concentrations in two “belts” circling the globe, especially in Northern hemisphere, which is more heavily industrialized. Now, I suppose this is a breakthrough in the sense that it will allow researchers to improve CO2 “transport models,” which hitherto have assumed that CO2 concentrations are uniform throughout the troposphere. But it would be surprising indeed if scientists did not know until now that industrialized regions have higher CO2 levels than non-industrialized areas.

The second supposed breakthrough is the claim that the AIRS data remove “most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor [feedback]” in climate change. “AIRS temperature data have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said climate scientist Andrew Dressler of Texas A&M University. According to Dressler, “We are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in the Earth’s climate system.” Dressler is talking about the assumption, common to all IPCC climate models, that the initial warming from rising CO2 levels increases concentrations of the atmosphere’s main greenhouse gas, water vapor, trapping more outgoing longwave (heat or infrared) radiation (OLR) and increasing global average rainfall.

William Gray of Colorado State University, perhaps the world’s leading hurricane forecaster, offers a different perspective on the NASA water vapor data. Gray’s comment follows:

Dr. Gray presents a more detailed examination of these issues in his March 2009 Heartland Institute climate conference paper, available here. (Marlo Lewis, Cooler Heads)

New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earth’s thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.

Scientists from NASA’s Langley Research Center and Hampton University in Hampton, Va., and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., will present these results at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco from Dec. 14 to 18.

While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade's lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

The Amazon's flying rivers"—humid air currents that deliver water to the vast rain forest—may be ebbing, and in turn drying out the Amazon's diverse ecological and economic resources and the region's ability to absorb carbon dioxide and curb global warming, an expert said this week at the Copenhagen climate conference.

Rising t emperatures in the Amazon region, in large part due to climate change, are creating more arid savannas that disable the water cycle vital to Brazil's farming and energy industries.

Deforestation also plays a role. As more of Brazil's rain forests fall to logging and agriculture, there are fewer trees to release the water vapor that creates these flying rivers.

In addition to releasing water vapor, the Amazon forest have played a critical role in trapping greenhouse gas emissions that are a root cause of global warming. (National Geographic News)

There’s a new paper in Nature suggesting higher sea levels and temperature during the previous interglacial, which, of course, didn’t have man-made CO2 in the atmosphere:

With polar temperatures ~3–5 °C warmer than today, the last interglacial stage (~125 kyr ago) serves as a partial analogue for 1–2 °C global warming scenarios. Geological records from several sites indicate that local sea levels during the last interglacial were higher than today, but because local sea levels differ from global sea level, accurately reconstructing past global sea level requires an integrated analysis of globally distributed data sets. Here we present an extensive compilation of local sea level indicators and a statistical approach for estimating global sea level, local sea levels, ice sheet volumes and their associated uncertainties. We find a 95% probability that global sea level peaked at least 6.6 m higher than today during the last interglacial; it is likely (67% probability) to have exceeded 8.0 m but is unlikely (33% probability) to have exceeded 9.4 m. When global sea level was close to its current level (≥-10 m), the millennial average rate of global sea level rise is very likely to have exceeded 5.6 m kyr-1 but is unlikely to have exceeded 9.2 m kyr-1. Our analysis extends previous last interglacial sea level studies by integrating literature observations within a probabilistic framework that accounts for the physics of sea level change. The results highlight the long-term vulnerability of ice sheets to even relatively low levels of sustained global warming. (CRN)

A unique discovery of submerged man-made structures on the seabed off Orkney could help find solutions to rising sea levels, experts have said.

They said the well preserved stone pieces near the island of Damsay are the only such examples around the UK.

Geomorphologist Sue Dawson said that people have survived and adapted in the past and it is that adaption to climate change that needs to be learned from.

Caroline Wickham-Jones said: “The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we’d like to see how they coped with it.”

COPENHAGEN - Climate negotiators warned on Wednesday they may miss the opportunity to cap emissions from shipping and aviation and so miss out on billions of dollars in taxation to help poor countries cope with climate change. (Reuters)

LONDON - Dwindling prospects a strong climate deal at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen were likely to knock carbon permits under the European Union emissions trading scheme, traders said, and prices fell to a two-week low on Thursday.

Prices for the carbon permits called EU Allowances (EUAs) fell five percent to around 13.60 euros ($19.59) a tonne.

Some traders and analysts saw varying scope for further falls, ranging from the limited and temporary to the drastic, as the likelihood of a deal being clinched for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol looked increasingly remote. (Reuters)

We are nowhere close to the end of the oil age. A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. [Read More] (Michael C. Lynch, Energy Tribune)

They predicted that the cuts will leave the UK incapable of training the technicians required for a planned new generation of nuclear plants.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council announced which projects would by slashed from its portfolio in order to fill a £40 million hole in its budget. Two of the country’s three largest nuclear research projects will be scrapped completely.

Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, said: “At a time when the UK are planning on building eight new plants, to be killing off the entire discipline is mind-bogglingly stupid.” (The Times)

(Dec. 18, 2009) — If you've seen an Internet ad for capacitor-type power factor correction devices, you might be led to believe that using one can save you money on your residential electricity bill. However, a team including specialists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently explained* why the devices actually provide no savings by discussing the underlying physics. (ScienceDaily)

It may be a bit too late to order copies of the just published 198-page The Wind Farm Scam (Stacy International, 2009) by British ecologist John Etherington as a holiday gift, but it’s well worth getting (and giving) copies of the book as soon as you can secure them.

The book should be required reading for every high school, college, and university student — especially in those institutions offering energy and environmental programs.

Although the book written about the UK experience, most of its facts about “wind farms” are applicable worldwide. It explains wind energy—and its limitations and environmental insults—in easily understood terms It explains why wind will never provide a significant, reliable source of electricity.

As in the US, “wind farms” in the UK are being built primarily because of government fiat and huge government-forced subsidies, not because of their true environmental, economic, or energy benefits. Apparently, the tax breaks and subsidies in the US are even more attractive than those in the UK since two major oil companies, BP and Shell, have pulled out of UK “renewable” energy programs with the intent of focusing their attention (and renewable rent seeking) on the US and Canada.

Personally, I found Dr. Etherington’s well-researched and clear-headed discussion of wind energy a very welcome relief from the wind energy madness now underway in the US.

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000. (NYT)

UPDATED December 17, 2009

CARSON CITY, Nev. – State officials said today that information sent recently to national news media by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) is inaccurate, misleading and does not tell the true story of drinking water quality in Nevada.

“The fact is that Reno and Las Vegas drinking water meets and is significantly better than federal Environmental Protection Agency’s water standards,” said Allen Biaggi, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which oversees the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, the agency responsible for Nevada’s safe drinking water program.

“EWG’s criticism amounts to saying federal water quality requirements are not adequate. It’s like saying driving 25 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone is too fast.” (Nevada Dept. of Conservation & Natural Resources)

THURSDAY, Dec. 17 -- While physicians and surgeons are getting better at treating heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, too many Americans are ignoring the basic rules for preventing them, according to new statistics from the American Heart Association.

Topping the list: too little exercise, too much weight. (HealthDay News)

London, Dec 17 In a bid to fight the global epidemic of obesity, Dutch scientists are developing a new generation of foods that would prevent people from overeating by releasing "anti-hunger" aromas. (PTI)

(Dec. 18, 2009) — Childhood obesity is directly related to how close kids live to convenience stores, according to the preliminary findings of a major Canadian study presented at the Entretiens Jacques-Cartier in Lyon, France. The ongoing study is named QUALITY for Quebec Adipose and Lifestyle InvesTigation in Youth. (ScienceDaily)

After striking out three times, the U.S. Forest Service is embarking on another rewrite of the basic planning rule that balances logging against fish and wildlife and clean water in national forests.

Laying out a greener future for the national forests, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Thursday that work is starting on an environmental-impact statement to replace one produced by the Bush administration that was struck down by a federal judge. ( Associated Press)

Following SA’s example, the Northern Territory government takes action against plastic bags:

Wait a second. Wasn’t Woolworths the target of Kevin Rudd’s price justice plan? And now green policies have delivered the grocery giant a minor windfall? Just another example of unintended consequences. (Tim Blair)

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

An explosive new claim that the Meteorological Office in Britain 'manipulated' climate change figures has come from a leading Russian think-tank founded by a former adviser to Vladimir Putin.

As the Copenhagen summit comes to a climax on Friday, it was alleged that Siberian weather statistics were selected in a way that masks evidence not showing global warming.

The think tank strongly disputes the use of data from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change which were released in a bid to diffuse the recent row over hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.

The emails were seized upon by global warming sceptics as evidence that academics were massaging the figures.

The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed the Hadley Centre used statistics from weather stations in Russian and Siberia that fitted its theory of global warming, while often ignoring those that did not.

The report was seized on by media with close ties to the Kremlin, which is opposed to rigid new curbs on carbon emissions demanded by many Western countries at the Danish summit. Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the global-warming theory,' stated semi-official RIA Novosti news agency. ( Will Stewart, Daily Mail)

I wonder if they used this station, which is famous in Russia? See details here

Stevenson Screen at Verhojansk Meteo Station looking ENE

Steve McIntyre reports on Climate Audit that there’s an email from Michael Mann that is relevant:

It’s true, and it’s huge. Today another example of CRU having their foot on the scale, Russian papers are reporting that the Russian surface station data was sorted by CRU to use the highest warming stations only.

Gary Richmond wrote a very nice essay about the Climategate and the poor standards in climate science:

Washington, D.C. – PolluterWatch was launched today to expose and push back the polluting industry's propaganda. The project aims to legally obtain, organize and post large numbers of emails by top global warming “deniers” and top polluting industry lobbyists that “served” in the Bush Administration.

“Hard-working Americans don’t have the money or lack of scruples to hire hackers to sort and post stolen emails,” said PolluterWatch Director Kert Davies.

“It’s the guys making money lying about climate science who have been cooking the science books. Once their emails are brought to the light of day, we’ll know the truth. If they haven’t been lying, they’ll have nothing to hide, and we’ll be happy to organize and post all of their emails for them so the public can judge for themselves.”

PolluterWatch is currently investigating Patrick Michaels, a former University of Virginia professor financed by polluters who has been widely attacking credible climate scientists. (Deborah Dupre', Examiner)

It is surprising how much baggage can be carried by one little word. Have you ever noticed the difference in modern communication between “Science” and “The Science”? The first is a term we have used for centuries and is part of the common language, but just add that little definite article and you enter a whole new world of belief, prejudice and hostility.

Likewise, there is a world of difference between “Earth” and “The Planet”. Again one is just a word in our common tongue, but the other phrase immediately sets a whole agenda as soon as you hear it. Mass political and religious movements seem to develop a need for a jargon of their own, just as thieves develop their own cant. It gives them identification and a sense of belonging. Fortunately for the rest of us it also enables us to spot them and, if wise, avoid them. (Number Watch)

The East Anglia controversy serves as a reminder that when the politics are divisive and the science is sufficiently complex, the boundary between the two may become indiscernible. (Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom, LA Times)

Johnny Ball, a TV legend from BBC of the 1970s and 1980s who popularized mathematics and science - see e.g. The Red Planet - was booed by a far-left audience during a Christmas party of the fans of science and atheism. The reason? His AGW skepticism. See The Telegraph:

Reiter also gives yet more evidence at the corruption of the scientific process that is at the heart of the IPCC.

Yet another Gore whoopsie, this time on extra “tree mortality” thanks to global warming. At what stage can we call this fraud a bare-faced liar? It’s odd that not one of his many, many mistakes errs on the side of calm. (Andrew Bolt)

Perhaps it's the rule of threes--that similar significant events are grouped as triplets. Celebrity deaths and/or scandals, sporting achievements, all have been the cause of speculation. Let's add the politics of climate change to the list.

I was hoping to look at how Climategate has influenced the debate one month after the release of emails and documents that appear to show climate scientists and paleoclimatologists (The Team) trying to massage presentations, prevent publication of contrary points of view and evade the requirements of the UK's Freedom of Information Act. But I find that the effects can't be teased out from consequences of two other events--the COP15 summit in Copenhagen and the Obama administration's decision to allow the EPA to proceed with its endangerment finding for CO2. (Thomas Fuller, Examiner)

As the developed and developing worlds continue to spar here in Copenhagen over the terms of a comprehensive climate change treaty, a key United Nations official let the actual truth slip out as to what this conference is really about.

Janos Pasztor—the Director of U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Change Support Team—was characterizing the nature of the talks between the rich and poor nations of the world when he said the following: “This is not a climate-change negotiation … It’s about something much more fundamental. It’s about economic strength.” The nations at the negotiation, he added, “just have to slug it out.”

That is a remarkable statement, and may turn out to be the most truthful comment made during this entire two-week conference. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

And at the end of this first clip, Chavez rouses the rabble with more anti-Americanism, too:

Although apparently brief, the suspension of the Copenhagen climate conference after a walkout by the Group of 77 developing countries confirms that the talks are as much about money as about healing the world’s climate. [Read More] (Geoffrey Styles, Energy Tribune)

Kevin Rudd is considering a deal that will see us hand over hundreds of millions of dollars each year to countries such as China and Zimbabwe as a bribe to sign a global warming treaty:

With Rudd and West handing over cash like that, I’d be a warming believer, too, if I were an African or Chinese despot.

This is the greatest gathering of carpetbaggers in our history, and our sorry role under Rudd is to fill those bags until they say “when”.

For Heaven’s sake, just how much of our money is Rudd shipping overseas in his warming crusade?

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott says the climate change summit in Copenhagen is turning into a gravy train for some countries.

Wealthy nations in Copenhagen have so far pledged some $US22 billion ($24.43 billion) to bankroll the war on global warming.

Australia was one of six developed countries that promised to set up a fund to fight the loss of forests in neighbouring countries - a leading source for rising temperatures.

Mr Abbott told a gathering of Liberal Party members in the seat of Deakin in Melbourne's east that the coalition would be bringing out its own climate change policy in a few weeks.

He fears that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is in Copenhagen, will do a deal that will hurt the Australian economy while not doing much to advance world environment.

"My problem is, why does Mr Rudd think the best way to save the environment is to increase your cost of living?" Mr Abbott said. "Why does he give us a tax policy and tell us it's an environment policy?" (AAP)

After waiting hours in the cold with intermittent periods of snow on Monday and Tuesday in unsuccessful bids to get into the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, many of those who have long-supported a strong global response to the threat of global warming began questioning the wisdom of leaving these decisions to the United Nations.

The venue for the conference, the Bella Center in Copenhagen, has a maximum occupancy of 15,000, yet the U.N. organizers permitted some 45,000-50,000 people to register.

If they can't get something as simple as math correct, why should we expect them to get anything as complicated as climate science correct?

To resolve the problem, the organizers decided to scale back the size of delegations by cutting their size by - according to some reports - up to 80% after they'd already travelled vast distances at great expense to be here by requiring them to obtain highly-rationed "secondary passes." To say Non-Governmental Organizations were angry about the cuts would be an understatement.

On Monday, those who'd waited for up to 10 hours before being turned away began chanting "Shame on You U.N.," while others yelled "the U.N. Sucks."

Hmm... People angered about rationing... an 80% cut... something sounds very familiar about that figure. (National Center)

Climate talks at least 18 hours behind schedule as world leaders set to arrive in Copenhagen (John Vidal and Allegra Stratton, The Guardian)

With a little over 48-hours left of the two-week Copenhagen climate change conference, there has been no significant progress on any of the major issues.

There are no numbers from individual countries on how much each would be willing to contribute to a global climate protection fund. Nor has any country improved on its opening offer for cutting emissions.

Most developing countries, led by China, are still refusing to commit to legally binding actions to reduce the rate of growth of their emissions. They are clinging to the ten-year-old Kyoto Protocol, which allows them to carry on increasing their emissions indefinitely.

There is no certainty that any of the pledges made to date will be fulfilled because the 193 countries cannot agree on a consistent, independent monitoring system. (The Times)

Formal negotiations have reopened at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen after a delay of nine hours.
The hold-up was caused by wrangles over the texts to be used as the basis for the talks.

Beneath the dispute lies a long-running accusation from developing countries that the Danish hosts are trying to sideline their concerns.

New funds have been pledged, notably by Japan which will provide $5bn a year to poor nations if a deal is reached. (Richard Black, BBC News)

COPENHAGEN - China has told participants in the U.N. climate change talks that it sees no possibility of achieving an operational accord this week, an official involved in the Copenhagen talks said on Thursday. (Reuters)

Gordon Brown was last night engaged in a major round of shuttle diplomacy to try to save the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, which yesterday became bogged down in intense procedural wrangles.

The Prime Minister held more than a dozen meetings with other world leaders In the centre of the Danish capital. The talks lasted through the day and into the evening as they sought common ground on which a new international treaty to combat global warming can be agreed.

The talks themselves, being held in the city's Bella Centre four miles away, looked dangerously stuck last night – and this morning there are only 24 hours left to secure an agreement before the 120 heads of state, who have come to Copenhagen to shake hands on it, have to fly home. (The Independent)

Environmentalists claiming that the Copenhagen summit is ‘the last chance’ to save the planet sound like a broken record. (Patrick Hayes, sp!ked)

Dec. 16 -- World leaders will arrive in the Danish capital of Copenhagen in the next three days to agree on an accord to fight global warming. There may be nothing to sign.

Envoys from China, the U.S., the European Union and India, the world’s top polluters, have bickered, quarreled and walked out during talks among 193 nations. They’ve left presidents and prime ministers a choice between a fudge or a flop for the accord that the United Nations framed as the most comprehensive deal to curb global warming. (Bloomberg)

COPENHAGEN, Dec. 16 -- A battle is brewing over the future of the Kyoto Protocol, with the European Union saying Wednesday it was not enough to curb climate change and an agreement that was legally binding for all was needed.

Developing countries' are calling for the protocol to remain central to climate change negotiations.

Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren, speaking on behalf of the European Union at the high-level segment of the Copenhagen climate change talks, said the EU wanted a comprehensive agreement building on all essentials of the Kyoto Protocol.

"The Kyoto Protocol alone covers less than a third of global emissions and will not be enough to win the battle against climate change," he said. (Xinhua)

COPENHAGEN -- Trust between nations is in short supply at the U.N. climate talks. Dealing with it has emerged as the linchpin in the negotiations of a new global warming treaty.

"Transparency" is the buzzword du jour for U.S. negotiators, representing what they insist they want to see in a new deal: one that holds China, India and other major emerging countries to account for the emission reductions they make. (Greenwire)

Miliband warns heads not to stall on technicalities as some progress is made between the biggest polluters US and China (Suzanne Goldenberg, Jonathan Watts and John Vidal, The Guardian)

AFRICAN nations, led by Ethiopia and backed by France and Britain, have presented a plan to break the deadlock at the Copenhagen talks by raising billions of dollars to help poor countries cope with climate change through levies on international aviation and shipping and possibly even a controversial global financial tax.

Kevin Rudd discussed the plan with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown soon after his arrival in Copenhagen. Mr Brown, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is backing the Ethiopian scheme, although the financial tax proposal was last night meeting resistance from other developed countries. (The Australian)

A main aim of the Copenhagen climate conference is to expand the EU’s fraud- and corruption-plagued carbon trading scheme into a global system for trading carbon.

The European Union’s flagship cap-and-trade carbon credit trading system is plagued by massive fraud and is effectively under the control of organized crime, according to a December 9 statement issued by European police. Europol, an EU-wide criminal intelligence agency similar to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, says bogus trading at the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has exceeded €5 billion (U.S.$7 billion) over the past 18 months alone. Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent.

News of the scale of the fraud, which comes just weeks after hundreds of hacked emails suggest that scientists have manipulated and exaggerated global warming data, will cast further doubt over the effectiveness of carbon trading as a way to curb emissions. It may also provide fresh ammunition to critics of the Obama administration’s plans to implement a cap-and-trade system in the United States that is largely based on the European model. (Soeren Kern, PJM)

Copenhagen – On the heels of the 90s "tech bubble" and recent "mortgage bubble," participants at the U.N. COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen are being warned by the Washington D.C.-based National Center for Public Policy Research not to create a new "carbon bubble" based on an artificial market in carbon credits.

To highlight this threat to financial stability, the National Center for Public Policy Research is distributing bubble gum balls bearing the warning: "Carbon Credit Gum: World's Biggest Bubble" in Copenhagen.

"This colorful candy is meant to elicit laughter, but the joke warns of grave implications," said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "If our government creates an allegedly-tradable product in carbon allowances it will be creating an artificial market. What will happen when the carbon bubble bursts?" (National Center)

Copenhagen, Denmark – Hundreds of candy suckers are being distributed at the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark today to mock nations that are imposing harsh limits on their carbon emissions at great economic cost for little or no environmental benefit. The group distributing them is the Washington, D.C.-based free market National Center for Public Policy Research.

The suckers bear the caption "Sucker for CO2 Limits." (National Center)

A Greenpeace demonstrator dresses as death on horseback to represent the impact of climate change outside Parliament in Copehagen. AP View Enlarged Image

Copenhagen: When an overblown environmental conference culminates with Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lecturing the West on virtue, color it another shakedown.

The United Nations' Copenhagen Climate Conference is going fast into meltdown. It may be because it's not about climate anymore, but fitting a noose on the world's productive economies and extracting wealth transfers.

Poor countries have gone from defending their right to economic development as a reason for exemptions to emissions cuts to claiming a "legitimate" right to vast wealth transfers from the West to prevent emissions. They call it "climate justice." (IBD)

Senator tries to settle doubts about US commitment to emissions cuts but says China must meet accountability demands (The Guardian)

Bolivian president warns of climate 'holocaust' in Africa as Hugo Chávez blames capitalism for climate change ( John Vidal, The Guardian)

“Collapsing in chaos” is a phrase the media is using to describe the Copenhagen climate conference, and that certainly is the feeling among many here at the Bella Center. Little has gone right, and indeed many registered participants were never even let in. The Danish minister in charge has resigned. Now, those of us who managed to make it in may get turned away for the crucial last two days Thursday and Friday.

Substantively, it looks as though little has been accomplished towards binding emissions targets to replace the expiring provisions in the existing Kyoto Protocol. The reason is simple - reducing carbon dioxide emissions is prohibitively expensive. The citizens of none of the 192 nations represented here really want this done to them. Certainly not Americans, whose concern for global warming is plummeting while concern for the economy and jobs remains high. Not the Europeans whose words are rarely backed up by actions- many have not reduced their emissions under Kyoto yet are asking for tougher targets here. And not developing nations who insist on being exempted from any binding targets while demanding aid packages in the hundreds of billions annually, well above anything the developed world is willing to offer.

Prospects for U.S. climate legislation hinge on a successful outcome at Copenhagen, says Senator John Kerry (D-MA):

Unless President Obama can spring a substantive surprise this week in Copenhagen, guess who is going to once again be the bad guy in the negotiations? (Roger Pielke Jr)

"Hier stehe ich."
[Attributed to Martin Luther, painted in 1533 by Lucas Cranach the Elder]

Unlike Martin Luther [main picture], whom we believe posted his famous Ninety-Five Theses [below right] at All Saints' Church, the Schlosskirche (‘Castle Church’), Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, I have only only Four Theses on Copenhagen to post.

I thus herewith Nail to this Great Web Portal my Four Theses...

KEVIN Rudd today brushed off accusations of bullying by tiny Pacific nations at Copenhagen climate change talks as the "slings and arrows" of the negotiations.

Tuvalu's Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia said the pressure was continuing from the Australian delegation to drop a demand that global warming temperature rises be limited to 1.5 degrees. (The Australian)

The current climate talks in Copenhagen have exacerbated the controversy between climate skeptics and environmentalists. The arguments used by both denialists and supporters of the anthropogenic climate change idea have hardly changed since the late 1980s when the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere first hit the headlines.

The truth is that no matter how much we know about climate change, there never will be an agreement among scientists on all the aspects. When there is a full agreement and absolute truth about something, this cannot be science; it can only be religion. Therefore, economists and politicians have to handle the issue under circumstances of uncertainty — a typical but not unique feature of climate change policies.

An excellent example of addressing probabilities of unfavorable outcomes is buying airbags for your car. Airbags reduce the risk of an injury or death in a car accident, even though there are chances that the people who have airbags do not get into accidents and that the airbags do not always help if there is a car crash.

In decision theory, this approach is known as a “minimax solution,” or assessing the maximum possible losses and trying to minimize them usually at a cost much lower that the value at risk. In the language of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “minimax” is explained as the “precautionary principle”: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures, taking into account that policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost” (Article 3). But while the threat of a car accident is immediate, most of the severe climate change risks are projected to mature in several decades. (Ivetta Gerasimchuk and Theodore Panayotou, Moscow Times)

How much risk from climate change should there be before we spend trillions of dollars to address the problem?

Those advocating that we upend the global (and particularly the U.S.) economy to stave off climate change resort to a concept called the “precautionary principle“. Simply stated, it is that if there is some risk of an irreversible disaster in taking an action, then that action should be foregone.

In this formulation, the risk is climate change that will be disastrous for humanity, and the action to be foregone is continuing to add the carbon dioxide that is ostensibly causing it to the planetary atmosphere. The beautiful thing about the principle (at least for them) is that, because it doesn’t assign any particular probability to the risk (i.e., it is uncertain), then it doesn’t matter whether the science backing it up is known to be valid, because even if the science has only a small probability of being correct, the principle applies.

The original advocate of the precautionary principle was the mathematician Blaise Pascal, who came up with a famous “wager.” To wit: we can’t calculate the probability of the existence of God, but if he exists, the cost of believing in him is small, and the wages for not doing so is eternal damnation. Therefore, it makes sense to believe.

Many in the centuries since have pointed out the flaws in the argument. For instance, there is a non-zero probability that God will consign you to perdition if and only if you believe in him. Thus, to avoid this fate, the only safe course is to be an atheist.

Which points out the flaw in the principle in general. While it doesn’t require a precise accounting of the odds, it also doesn’t necessarily provide guidance as to what to do if there’s any chance that the proposed cure (or “insurance policy”) is worse than the feared disease. And a good case can be made (as has been by people such as Bjorn Lomborg) that in fact there is not just an excellent chance, but almost a certainty that this is the case with most of the proposed solutions to anthropogenic global warming. (Rand Simberg, PJM)

Before I head out to the demonstration this morning, I thought I’d throw up the first of my notes on the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

First the good news: it’s snowing out (big flakes, beautiful) and I didn’t drink too much last night.

Now the bad news: The rest. This whole event so far, what I can see of it anyway, is just silly. Basically, it’s a combination of a trade fair for eco products that are being flogged everywhere (I’m staying in a CO2 neutral hotel – you can see it on PJTV), third world operators looking for hand-outs (a couple of African scientists admitted to one of the skeptic scientists they knew AGW was a schuck, but it was a great oppo to get some cash) and leftover, re-upped hippies doing what they do — demonstrate and carry-on. I’m supposed to join them as they storm the Bella Center (conference central) today, for what I’m not sure. Well, I’m being disingenuous. It’s partly for a soupcon of more money for developing nations mixed with a dollop of the death of capitalism — the latter of which would be disastrous for them since they are the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie on the dole from their parents. But what do they care? It’s action — and I’ll try to be there.

But that’s the big problem here. It’s CROWDED. The whole place is crawling with journalists like rodents in a pirate ship. One estimate I heard was thirty thousand. They line up for hours for to get into events only to find their accreditation is lost. This may be Scandinavia, but it is wildly disorganized. I don’t think anyone anticipated the numbers. Certainly not the UN that is used to organizing events like Oil-for-Food. You have to root around for what’s important. Last night I headed out with some folks to an event that was supposed to be for ClimateSpark.org, supposedly a party/meet-and-greet with “industry” movers and shakers, some of whom reputedly knew AL GORE. (Gore’s name is thrown around here like Tom Cruise’s in Hollywood.) Unfortunately, very few showed, and yours truly high-tailed it in a matter of minutes.

Speaking of Gore, I haven’t bumped into him yet, but he has now heard of me (sort of), according to Variety. If I run into him, I’ll certainly let you know. Meanwhile, his face blares out from the front page of the daily “Cope 15 Post.” He blathers on about acid in the issue, a point that was apparently discredited but Al didn’t realize or care.

Further down that front page is a far more telling little boxes ad. It reads: “Want to reach everyone involved with the Climate Conference? Call our sales team now on 33 32 33 00.”

Just who out there is so dull of mind as to think they have something to learn about climate science from people dressed like this:

For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.

[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Open letter to IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri: A DEFECTIVE IPCC GRAPH AND ITS IMPLICATIONS (SPPI)

COPENHAGEN — Negotiators have all but completed a sweeping deal that would compensate countries for preserving forests, and in some cases, other natural landscapes like peat soils, swamps and fields that play a crucial role in curbing climate change.

Environmental groups have long advocated such a compensation program because forests are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. Rain forest destruction, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees, is estimated to account for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The agreement for the program, if signed as expected, may turn out to be the most significant achievement to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks, providing a system through which countries can be paid for conserving disappearing natural assets based on their contribution to reducing emissions. (NYT)

Al Gore’s office issued a formal correction yesterday to a speech the former US Vice-President had given earlier in the week that started the latest in a series of “climate spin” rows.

Mr Gore told the Copenhagen summit meeting that the latest research suggested that the North Pole would be ice-free within five to seven years. The Times revealed that this was not the information provided to Mr Gore’s office by the climatologist Wieslaw Maslowski, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California.

Dr Maslowski said that his projections suggested that the North Pole would be near ice-free, but that some ice would remain beyond 2020. He also denied providing the 75 per cent figure used by Mr Gore. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office,” he said.

The clarification said that Mr Gore “misspoke” on the polar ice prediction and that he meant that the cap would be nearly ice-free. (The Times)

Today, I am going to start a series of Q&A posts with respect to the climate issue. The first question is

This is the focus of the Copenhagen meeting. The clear answer, based on a wide range of peer-reviewed papers is NO.

The human addition of carbon dioxide is an important climate forcing, as I have posted on previously (e.g. see) but it is not the only important forcing and does not appear to even be the most important (e.g. see our paper Matsui and Pielke, 2006 with respect to aerosols where the forcing of wind circulations from the heterogenous spatial distribution of human caused aerosols was around 6oX greater than that of the radiative effect of CO2).

Thus, while I agree that the human addition of CO2 is a first order climate forcing, the claims that it is the primary human climate forcing is not supported by the science. This means that attempts to “control” the climate system, and to prevent a “dangerous intervention” into the climate system by humans that focuses just on CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases will necessarily be significantly incomplete, unless all of the other first order climate forcings are considered.

Moreover, as I have written on extensively, climate change is much more than global warming and cooling (e.g. see and see). Human caused climate change can occur even in the absence of global warming (such as from land use change). This makes attempts to mitigate climate change a much more daunting problem than assuming that all we need to do is control the human emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion into the atmosphere.

Thus the Copenhagen COP15 meeting is only addressing a relatively small portion of the issue of how human climate forcings influences society and the environment.

Moreover, natural climate variability and change in the past, even without significant human intervention., has played a major role in society; e.g see

Meko, D., C. A. Woodhouse, C. A. Baisan, T. Knight, J. J. Lukas, M. K. Hughes, and M. W. Salzer (2007), Medieval drought in the upper Colorado River Basin, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L10705, doi:10.1029/2007GL029988

We need a robust and effective set of comprehensive policies to address adaptation and mitigation to the entire spectrum of human- and natural- caused climate change and variability, such my son has proposed (e.g. see the end portion of the text in his post of October 30, 2009). The Copenhagen COP15 completely fails in this requirement. (Climate Science)

UPDATED 12/16/09 1415 PST with final pdf version of talk…and press release, 1425 PST.

I decided to make my invited presentation on estimating cloud feedbacks from satellite measurements available here (final version-pdf): Spencer-Forcing-Feedback-AGU-09-San-Francisco-final. There will be a UAH press release on Wednesday, December 16, which is embargoed until 11 a.m. PST (1 p.m. CST).

UAHuntsville Press Release
EMBARGOED: For release after 11 a.m., PST, Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Dec. 16, 2009) — Which came first, the warmer temperatures or the clearer skies?

Answers to that and similar “chicken and egg” type questions could have a significant impact on our understanding of both the climate system and manmade global warming.

In an invited talk scheduled for today at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in the Moscone Convention Center, Dr. Roy Spencer from The University of Alabama in Huntsville will discuss the challenge of answering questions about cause and effect (also known as forcing and feedback) in the climate.

“Feedbacks will determine whether the manmade portion of global warming ends up being catastrophic or barely measurable,” Spencer said recently.

Spencer’s interest is in using satellite data and a simple climate model to test the simulated feedback processes contained in climate models that are used to forecast global warming.

“I am arguing that we can’t measure feedbacks the way people have been trying to do it,” he said. “The climate modelers see from satellite data that warm years have fewer clouds, then assume that the warmth caused the clouds to dissipate. If this is true, it would be positive feedback and could lead to strong global warming. This is the way their models are programmed to behave.

“My question to them was, ‘How do you know it wasn’t fewer clouds that caused the warm years, rather than the other way around?’ It turns out they didn’t know. They couldn’t answer that question.”

One problem is the simplicity of the climate models. Because cloud systems are so complex and so poorly understood, all of the climate models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use greatly simplified cloud parameters to represent clouds. But the calculations that set those parameters are based on assumed cause-and-effect relationships.

Those assumptions might be working in the wrong direction, Spencer said. “What we have found is that cloud cover variations causing temperature changes dominate the satellite record, and give the illusion of positive feedback.”

Using satellite observations interpreted with a simple model, Spencer’s data support negative feedback (or cooling) better than they support positive feedback.

“This critical component in global warming theory – cloud feedback – is impossible to measure directly in the real climate system,” Spencer said. “We haven’t figured out a good way to separate cause and effect, so we can’t measure cloud feedback directly. And if we don’t know what the feedbacks are, we are just guessing at how much impact humans will have on climate change.

“I’m trying to spread the word: Let’s go back to basics and look at what we can and cannot do with measurements of the real climate system to validate both climate models and their predictions.”

A former NASA scientist, Spencer is a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville’s Earth System Science Center. (Roy W. Spencer)

“A 94-year time series of annual glacier melt at four high elevation sites in the European Alps is used to investigate the effect of global dimming and brightening of solar radiation on glacier mass balance. Snow and ice melt was stronger in the 1940s than in recent years, in spite of significantly higher air temperatures in the present decade. An inner Alpine radiation record shows that in the 1940s global shortwave radiation over the summer months was 8% above the long-term average and significantly higher than today, favoring rapid glacier mass loss. Dimming of solar radiation from the 1950s until the 1980s is in line with reduced melt rates and advancing glaciers.”

“The drivers for these long-term variations cannot be detected based on the available data sets as they do not resolve all components of the energy balance. ……We therefore caution against using classical temperature-index models calibrated in the past for projecting snow and ice melt in glaciological and hydrological studies and to calculate future sea level rise.

“Our data sets provide evidence that the extraordinary melt rates in the 1940s can be attributed to enhanced solar radiation in summertime. Models for past and future glacier changes should take into account the effect of decadal radiation variations as they significantly alter the relationship between glacier melt and air temperature.”

This is yet another study that documents the inability to properly describe the climate system when it is oversimplified by focusing on just the metric of surface air temperature anomalies. The higher Alpine glacier melt in the 1940s, also provides evidence that this climate event is not primarily caused by a long-term trend in the global warming (or cooling). (Climate Science)

Hundreds of millions of people around the world would be affected as low low-lying coastal areas became inundated, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns ( Alok Jha, The Guardian)

From this NASA press release I’ll have more on this later. The timing of this release is interesting.

Animation of the distribution of mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide. The transport of carbon dioxide around the world is carried out in the "free atmosphere" above the surface layer. We can observe the transport of carbon dioxide across the Pacific to North America, then across the Atlantic to Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia and back around the globe. The enhanced belt of carbon dioxide in the southern hemisphere is also clearly visible. Image credit: NASA

› Play animation (Quicktime) | › Play animation (Windows Media Player)
› Related images and animations
WASHINGTON – Researchers studying carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas and a key driver of global climate change, now have a new tool at their disposal: daily global measurements of carbon dioxide in a key part of our atmosphere. The data are courtesy of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft.

Moustafa Chahine, the instrument’s science team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., unveiled the new product at a briefing on recent breakthroughs in greenhouse gas, weather and climate research from AIRS at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The new data, which span the seven-plus years of the AIRS mission, measure the concentration and distribution of carbon dioxide in the mid-troposphere–the region of Earth’s atmosphere that is located between 5 to 12 kilometers, or 3 to 7 miles, above Earth’s surface. They also track its global transport. The product represents the first-ever release of global carbon dioxide data that are based solely on observations. The data have been extensively validated against both aircraft and ground-based observations.
Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Perlwitz, J., M. Hoerling, J. Eischeid, T. Xu, and A. Kumar (2009), A strong bout of natural cooling in 2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L23706, doi:10.1029/2009GL041188

with a remarkably convoluted way to rationalize recent cooling in North America so that it conforms with the IPCC perspective of global warming.

“A precipitous drop in North American temperature in 2008, commingled with a decade-long fall in global mean temperatures, are generating opinions contrary to the inferences drawn from the science of climate change. We use an extensive suite of model simulations and appraise factors contributing to 2008 temperature conditions over North America. We demonstrate that the anthropogenic impact in 2008 was to warm the region’s temperatures, but that it was overwhelmed by a particularly strong bout of naturally-induced cooling resulting from the continent’s sensitivity to widespread coolness of the tropical and northeastern Pacific sea surface temperatures. The implication is that the pace of North American warming is likely to resume in coming years, and that climate is unlikely embarking upon a prolonged cooling.”

Our appraisal of the natural SST conditions in the Nino 4 region, with anomalies of about 1.1 K suggests a condition colder than any in the instrumental record since 1871…..We illustrated that North America would have experienced considerably colder temperatures just due to the impact of such natural ocean variability alone, and that the simultaneous presence of anthropogenic warming reduced the severity of cooling.

“This, and similar recent attribution studies of observed climate events [Stott et al., 2004; Hoerling et al., 2007; Easterling and Wehner, 2009] are important in ensuring that natural variability, when occurring, is not misunderstood to indicate that climate change is either not happening or that it is happening more intensely than the true human influence. In our diagnosis of 2008, the absence of North American warming was shown not to be evidence for an absence of anthropogenic forcing, but only that the impact of the latter was balanced by strong natural cooling. Considering the nature of both the 2008 NA temperature anomalies and the natural ocean variability that reflected a transitory interannual condition, we can expect that the 2008 coolness is unlikely to be part of a prolonged cooling trend in NA temperature in future years.”

This paper is an amazing example of ignoring the obvious. None of the models anticipated this record cooling in the Nino 4 region. These sea surface temperatures are very much a part of the real climate system, which the IPCC claims can be skillfully predicted decades into the future.

Yet, the model simulations (which themselves are just hypotheses; e.g. see) are being used to claim that this cooling is just a short-term blip on a long-term upward trend.

The authors, of course, may be correct that the warming will recommence and continue into the future. However, while they did not intend this message, what they have shown convincingly is that natural climate variations exceed what the IPCC models can skillfully simulate. This should give pause to anyone who claims that these models are skillful predictions of the climate in the coming decades. (Climate Science)

Oil company has been splashing out on ads about its shallow commitment to low-carbon technologies during Copenhagen (Fred Pearce, The Guardian)

Three previous posts have examined the emissions problem related to intermittent industrial windpower that is firmed up with fossil-fuel generation.

This post deals with issues raised in comments and other feedback received to date. Further comments and debate on new issues will continue this series. (Kent Hawkins, MasterResource)

Probably not, unless there are some big changes in the culture of how health care organizations operate.

My latest HND piece examines this issue, and details some of the latest horrific data breaches. Yes, it is way worse than you probably thought. How about a "missing" hard drive with seven years' worth of personal financial and medical info on 1.5 million Health Net customers, for example?

The Feds have mandated that medical records go digital by 2014, and naturally, all the IT companies are offering their (very) expensive solutions. Unfortunately, though, technology is only a small part of the answer, and unless the health care industry figures out a way to bring DOD type data security to your local hospital—and get the little people on board—things could get ugly.

A raft of reasons are advanced to explain why newspaper circulation and the ratings of major networks are falling faster than a rock down a well. Global warming encapsulates many of the media failings that have contributed to their own problems.

Can you think of one element of the global climate controversy that has been introduced by the major media? Can you think of one example where the major media has actually contributed to the public's better understanding of any of the issues involved?

Major media have bought the party line. They have accepted without questioning the pronouncements of principal establishment figures and have bought into the symbology used by environmental groups and advocates. Had this generation of reporters and editors been working 30 years ago, we would still be fighting in Vietnam. (Thomas Fuller, Examiner)

SANTA Claus has been accused of acting in ways that could "damage millions of lives".

As the mythical man in red zooms around the planet delivering gifts, he is an unwitting promoter of obesity, unhealthy products, disease and even drink driving, according to an Australian academic.

"Other dangerous activities that Santa could be accused of promoting include speeding, disregard for road rules and extreme sports such as roof surfing and chimney jumping," said Dr Nathan Grills, public health fellow at Monash University's Department of Epidemiology and Preventative Medicine.

"Despite the risks of high speed air travel, Santa is never depicted wearing a seatbelt or helmet." ( AAP)

NEW YORK - Small particles from traffic and heating oil combustion may cause children younger than two to wheeze and cough, according to a new study.

High air pollution levels have previously been linked to asthma symptoms in children living in urban areas with heavy traffic, but this study is one of the first to investigate the types of particles that may be the most harmful, the researchers point out in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

"This study shows that there are multiple components of air pollution that we should be looking at in terms of health effects," Dr. Rachel L. Miller, lead investigator of the study, said in a telephone interview with Reuters Health. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - People who had greater intellectual ability as children may have fewer heart disease risk factors in middle-age, a new study suggests.

A number of studies have linked higher childhood IQ to better adulthood health and a longer life, but the reasons have not been entirely clear.

For example, early environment -- starting in the womb -- may affect both a child's intellectual ability and long-term disease risks. On the other hand, childhood ability also affects a person's chances of getting a good job or adopting a healthy lifestyle in adulthood.

These latest findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health, suggest that childhood intelligence indirectly affects long-term heart health -- mostly by influencing a person's education, job and health habits in adulthood. (Reuters Health)

Maybe it was just supposed to justify a boondoggle trip to Finland or her actual tree-hugger tendencies coming to the fore, but in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine, Associate Editor Sandra Upson turned a report on the world's only working nuclear waste repository project into an eco-rant that any Greenpeace member would be proud of. Visiting Finland's Olkiluoto Island, where the industrious Finns are quietly taking care of their nuclear future, Ms Upson transformed what should have been an uplifting example of what serious minded engineers can accomplish when government makes a decision and then gets out of the way, into a distopian hit piece.

The article starts out as one would expect for an piece in Spectrum, the official magazine of the IEEE—a respected society of professional engineers—lots of technical details about how precisely engineered the process of welding the massive copper casks of waste will be and all of the intricate precautions that are designed into the storage facility. In America, nuclear waste disposal has been a political football for decades which finally ended with the selection of the Yucca Mountain site, in Nevada. The Obama administration has since canceled the Yucca Mountain project after wasting some $9 billion of taxpayer money over the course of 20 years. America now has no plan at all.

Unlike the United States, the Finns are a serious, methodical and practical people. After realizing that the best source of energy for the 21^st century would be nuclear, they decided that they would keep their nuclear power plants running at least until 2080. Knowing that this would mean something had to be done to handle the radioactive waste created by the plants, back in 1983 the Finnish parliament mandated that the country’s two nuclear power plant companies set aside funds and begin planning immediately for disposal to begin in 40 years.

Their solution is a repository, named Onkalo, which is set to open in 2010. That is about the same time Finland's fifth nuclear power plant will come on line (there is talk of building a sixth plant as well). The repository plan is impressive: waste is to be placed inside of iron containers, sealed inside of welded copper casks and then buried, surrounded by bentonite clay, under more than 1,000 ft of solid rock (Project research and development director Johanna Hansen stands between a 1-meter-wide copper canister and its iron interior in the picture on the right, taken from the article).

After doing a thorough review of the site and plans for the repository, Upson's article took a turn for the strange when the author started speculating on what effect the onset of the next ice age could have on the deeply buried repository. Despite the fact that Onkalo is carved into rock that has been geologically stable for more than 1.8 billion years the author proclaimed: “In as little as 20 000 years, Finland may enter an ice age, and advancing ice sheets kilometers thick could carve out the rock and force more water into its fractured depths. The liquid may then diffuse through the bentonite barrier, eat through the copper, and carry off still-hot radionuclides. No one can be sure.”

Did she think to consult with a geologist or two, or was the opportunity to cast aspersions on Finland's plans too enticing? At least the article quoted Michael Apted, chairman of an advisory group to Finland’s nuclear safety authority, as saying “We’re talking millions of years for water to get through clay.” Because in the next paragraph Upson totally abandons any pretense of rationality for a flight into the imagined depths of a future ecological nightmare:

Hermaphroditic fish? Finned flamingos? Cockroaches reigning supreme? Maybe Ms. Upson always suspected that this would happen but I doubt most people do. The question is, why end a perfectly serviceable article in an engineering magazine with such utter tripe? Here are the Finns, perhaps the only nation on the planet taking a rational scientific and engineering approach to meeting their future energy needs in an ecologically responsible way, and this twit uses an article on how they are doing it as an opportunity to slide off the deep end into the seventh level of tree-hugger hell.

IEEE should be highly embarrassed that their flagship journal printed such balderdash. At least the article should have ended on an upbeat note, right? Not a chance. Upson caps off her crackpot musings this way: “Then perhaps, as one epoch slides into the next, whoever remains will come to Onkalo to study, with great curiosity, their distant ancestors’ struggle with the dark side of Earth’s bounty.”

While the real scientists and engineers of the world are busy “struggling with the dark side,” perhaps Ms Upson should seek therapy for those frightening visions—or alternative employment. Any number of green advocacy groups would be happy to have her if this article's last few paragraphs are an indication of her mindset. Perhaps she can use this Crank of the Week as a reference. (The Resilient Earth)

Having lost the war on drugs, the UK police now want to wean young people off cocaine by flagging up its eco-impact. (Nathalie Rothschild, sp!ked)

Humans have never lived lives so long, healthy, comfortable and secure. Yet such plain facts cannot disrupt the theoretical certainties of a Guardian columnist such as Madeleine Bunting:

Another eco alarmist demonstrates the pleasures of preaching austerity from first class:

Malthusianism is so widespread that greens can now openly sing the praises of China’s population authoritarianism. (Brendan O’Neill, sp!ked)

Regulations: The Clean Water Act is being rewritten to give a government bureaucracy the power to regulate every body of water from the Mississippi River to a rain-flooded field. The first casualty may be American coal.

With all the concern for the harm that cap-and-trade and regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant might do to the American economy and free markets, the Environmental Protection Agency is doing quite enough damage with an existing law on the books — the Clean Water Act. Congress plans to revise it to make it an even more powerful bludgeon against industry, energy producers and just plain folks.

The 1972 Clean Water Act was originally intended to protect the "navigable waters of the United States" — you know, the kind boats travel down. It was broadly and quickly interpreted to any pool of water in America capable of supporting a bathtub variety boat. The word "navigable" was forgotten and ignored, and even those trying to improve the environment were not immune.

In the name of clean water and wetlands-protection, people were literally being arrested for putting dirt on dirt. In August 1987, Bill Ellen was hired to construct a 103-acre wildlife sanctuary, including 10 duck ponds, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, on land so dusty it had to be watered down to protect construction workers' safety according to federal regulations.

But in September 1989, after three days of torrential downpour, angry government officials descended on his sanctuary looking for wetlands. Having found incriminating puddles, they arrested him for having the previous March dumped two loads of dirt where one federal agency said it was okay. It was also charged that the droppings of the migratory birds drawn to his ponds constituted waterway pollution.

For his crime against humanity, Bill Ellen was sentenced to six months in prison and four months of home detention. Guess he didn't notice the boats.

Such abuses of the law in which every puddle was considered protected eventually led to two Supreme Court decisions, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States in 2001, and Rapanos v. United States in 2006, which partially reined in these excesses.

The Clean Water Restoration Act of 2009 (S. 787), legislation that would challenge these Supreme Court rulings, is now moving through the Senate. Introduced by Sen. Russell Feingold, this legislation seeks to re-establish the nearly unlimited powers of the Clean Water Act.

"Well, this bill removes the word 'navigable,' so for ranchers and farmers who have mud puddles, prairie potholes — anything from snow melting on their land — all that water will now come under the regulation of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency," warns Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

Aside from striking "navigable," the bill defines U.S. waters as "all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters, and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams)," as well as "mudflats, sand flats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows" etc. Virtually everywhere water is or collects, even on a temporary basis, is covered.

Some 500 more jobs will have to be saved or created to make up for the 500 workers who will be laid off next year in West Virginia by Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy. The coal company blames lawsuits under the current Clean Water Act and other laws for the action.

The EPA is currently suspending 79 such surface mining permits in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. The agency says these permits could violate the Clean Water Act and warrant "enhanced" review.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says she's not against coal mining, but wants to see it "done in a way that minimizes impact to water quality."

This is not about clean water any more than cap-and-trade is about climate change. It is about increasing government power over every aspect of our lives. Every breath we take, and every drop we drink, they will be regulating us. (IBD)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Lakes Huron and Michigan are not losing extra billions of gallons of water daily because of navigational dredging as a Canadian group contends, a scientific panel said Tuesday.

After a two-year, $3.5 million study, the U.S.-Canadian panel concluded there was no reason to stem the flow from Lake Huron by placing structures in a river that connects Huron with Lake Erie to the south.

The report disagreed with Georgian Bay Forever, a Canadian environmental charity that has commissioned engineering studies of the St. Clair River. Those studies found that human activities, primarily dredging during the early 1960s, enlarged the river bottom and increased the volume of water moving down the river from Lake Huron to Lake Erie.

Because of that, the group says, Lake Huron is losing up to 12 billion gallons per day in addition to its normal outflow — enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The excessive loss is causing artificially low levels in Lakes Huron and Michigan, Georgian Bay Forever says. Geologists consider those lakes a single water body because they converge and have the same surface levels.

Low water has been a contentious issue for a decade on both lakes, causing millions in losses for shippers, marina owners and other businesses, although levels have edged upward the past couple of years and are near their historical averages.

The government report said several factors — especially precipitation and evaporation — have influenced differences in levels since the early 1960s.

It contradicted the Canadian group's belief that losses through the St. Clair River are a leading cause of the slump on Michigan and Huron. The river's average flow jumped by 3 to 5 percent during the mid-1980s, possibly because of ice jams or maintenance dredging. But the flow dropped within a few years and today is less than 1 percent above the normal rate, it said. (Associated Press)

Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists. (Frank Furedi, sp!ked)

“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.” (Paul Greenberg, NYT)

The focus belongs not just on CRU, but on all of the organizations which gather temperature data. All now show evidence of fraud.

The familiar phrase was spoken by Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — first performed around 1600, at the start of the Little Ice Age. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is the exact quote. It recognizes that fish rots from the head down, and it means that all is not well at the top of the political hierarchy. Shakespeare proved to be Nostradamus. Four centuries later — at the start of what could be a new Little Ice Age — the rotting fish is Copenhagen.

The smell in the air may be from the leftover caviar at the banquet tables, or perhaps from the exhaust of 140 private jets and 1200 limousines commissioned by the attendees when they discovered there was to be no global warming evident in Copenhagen. (In fact, the cold will deepen and give way to snow before they leave, an extension of the Gore Effect.)

But the metaphorical stench comes from the well-financed bad science and bad policy, promulgated by the UN, and the complicity of the so-called world leaders, thinking of themselves as modern-day King Canutes (the Viking king of Denmark, England, and Norway — who ironically ruled during the Medieval Warm Period this very group has tried to deny). His flatterers thought his powers “so great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back.”

Unlike the warmists and the compliant media, Canute knew otherwise, and indeed the tide kept rising. Nature will do what nature always did — change. (Joe D'Aleo, PJM)

I work at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. I’ve been following the Climategate scandal since its inception. The first time many of my coworkers had heard of the situation was when I asked them about it.

Well, well, well.
Look what was waiting in every single email Inbox on Monday morning:
______________________________________________

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.” Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

While Dr. Mann has made statements in the press during the last week to the effect of “I welcome this investigation” I wonder if he’s seen some of the correspondence being sent to PSU regarding him. Here’ s one from Pennsylvania State Senator Jeff Piccola that has some very pointed language.

Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer (Mine Your Own Business, Not Evil Just Wrong) attempts to ask Al Gore a question about 'Climategate' emails at the UN Climate Change Conference. Al Gore's Press Secretary grabs his McAleer's microphone and UN security guard pulls the cable from the microphone. For more Inconvenient Questions and answers about The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria visit www.noteviljustwrong.com

Have you ever seen one of those wild-eyed people with a sandwich board around his neck standing on the corner, screeching incoherently about how the end of the world is coming? Now, what if those people were insisting that you were really the crazy one? What if the newspapers agreed with them and the politicians wanted to pass taxes and spend hundreds of billions to implement their ideas? Sound too unbelievable to be true? Well, guess what? It's happening.

Global warming alarmists are regularly prophesying about doomsday scenarios -- except they're doing it in newspapers and from the stages of swanky resorts where they've flown in their private jets. Unlike the old school soothsayers, the Al Gore's of the world have figured out how to turn doom-mongering into a multi-billion dollar industry.

As you read these global warming predictions, visions, prophecies, fantasies, whatever you want to call them, ask yourself a question: if this is based on science, why do we have these huge differences in scenarios and dates? It's almost as if these people are all just pulling numbers out of their hats and putting them out there instead of basing their projections on any sort of real scientific evidence. (John Hawkins, Townhall)

You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason.

In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely, as they do the unthinkable and try to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s OK because other people did other things a little bit wrong, that were not related, and a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…

The big problem for this formerly good publication is that they have decided already what the answer is to any question on climate-change (and the answer could be warm or cold but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves them clutching for sand-bags to prop up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had. (Jo Nova)

Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels. Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.

That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who, like me, is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week. Dr. McKitrick expects this climate conference to yield the same results as previous ones: grand promises to cut carbon emissions that will be ignored once politicians return home to face voters who are skeptical that global warming is even a problem.

To end this political stalemate, Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear. But if the climate modelers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct about the atmosphere heating up, then the penalties would quickly, and automatically, rise.

“Either way we get a sensible outcome,” Dr. McKitrick argues. “The only people who lose will be those whose positions were disingenuous, such as opponents of greenhouse policy who claim to be skeptical while privately believing greenhouse warming is a crisis, or proponents of greenhouse gas emission cuts who neither understand nor believe the I.P.C.C. projections, but invoke them as a convenient argument on behalf of policies they want on other grounds even if global warming turns out to be untrue.” (John Tierney, NYT)

Nothing can surprise about the climate debate any more. First, UK homeopath-slayer Dr Ben Goldacre lays his climate cards on the table. Now his comrade in arms across the pond, James Randi, has done the same – only completely differently. (Climate Resistance)

U.S. EPA published its finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health in the Federal Register today, setting a stage for a series of rules to begin regulating the heat-trapping emissions.

The endangerment finding takes effect on Jan. 14, the notice (pdf) says. And EPA is expected to roll out its first round of greenhouse gas rules by March, the first-ever federal tailpipe standards for greenhouse gases.

The tailpipe standards would automatically trigger requirements that stationary sources install "best available control technology," or BACT, according to EPA. The agency has proposed a separate rule to shield smaller facilities from those requirements, the "tailoring rule," which is also expected to be in place by March.

Today's formal publication of the endangerment finding also opens the door to litigation. Some opponents of EPA regulations are vowing lawsuits. Challengers to the endangerment finding have until Feb. 16 to file petitions in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to press Congress for a legislative solution. (Greenwire)

Even as the Copenhagen conference generates headlines, polls show Americans' concern is tepid

Even as this month's Copenhagen conference generates front-page headlines, polls show Americans' concern about global warming is tepid. If marketers wish to tap into consumers' green sentiment -- of which there is plenty -- survey data and some expert opinion give reason to think a focus on global warming will be a tough way to do it.

Many a tree has been felled lately to print findings of opinion surveys in which people increasingly shrug off global warming as a major concern, or express doubt that it's happening at all. In an Ipsos/McClatchy poll released last week (and fielded earlier this month), 70 percent of respondents agreed that the world's temperatures "have been going up slowly over the past 100 years." But just 43 percent said they think the earth has been warming "mostly because of human activity."

And the Ipsos/McClatchy poll is scarcely an outlier in its findings. In a Harris Poll last month, a bare majority of respondents (51 percent) said they "believe the theory that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere will, if unchecked, lead to global warming," down from 75 percent in 2001. That's in sync with the findings of Pew Research Center polling over the years. In surveys in 2006 and 2007, 77 percent of respondents agreed that there is "solid evidence the earth is warming." By this October, the number holding that view had fallen to 57 percent. So, where does global warming now stand on the hierarchy of Americans' worries? In a Bloomberg poll this month, a grand total of 3 percent of respondents picked "climate change" as "the most important issue facing the country right now." (AdWeek)

Maurice Strong: The climate change challenge requires us to make changes in the fundamental nature and functioning of our economic system and resist the temptation merely to patch up the existing system to enable to continue, however, temporally, on the pathway that led to its crisis.

Moving to the carbon-free economy requires, as I already have said, that Copenhagen produces a commitment to a Climate Security Program and at least the main elements of it as well as establishment of a “Climate Security-Fund” to finance its implementation.

This would require firm and continuing commitments by the more developed countries based on their emissions and their Gross National Products (GDP).

The initial scale of this Fund will need to be on the order of USD 1 trillion over the initial ten year period. This will inevitably be viewed as unrealistic in the current financial crisis which will be used to justify such resistance.

But it must go well beyond foreign aid as conventionally defined and be integrated into the process of fundamental changes in our economy. It will ultimately exceed the initial target figure of USD1 trillion which is the estimated cost to the United States alone of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will take a strong will and binding commitments by the more developed countries to undertake the changes of their economies that this will require and for the developing countries to be in the position to absorb the resources they receive to build sustainable and competitive economies.

Some of the measure which could contribute to this process would be the fees on the use of the global commons – the ocean, the atmosphere and outer space that are not under national jurisdiction, a Tobin-type tax on financial transactions, taxes on fossil fuels and other sources of emissions and by shifting subsidies from those substances and practices which contribute to climate change to those which contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions. (MaximsNews Network)

The saddest fact of climate change—and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response—is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering. (Bjørn Lomborg, WSJ)

With talks at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ailing significantly—but by no means hopeless—the UN Secretary-General, Ban-Kai Moon, arrived today announcing: "We do not have another year to negotiate. Nature does not negotiate." (Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com)

The world has only seven years before climate change causes a “point of crisis” that will drive food shortages, terrorism and poverty, the Prince of Wales has warned. (TDT)

Just think - fomenting all this fear and adversarial "negotiation" is the path to a Nobel "Peace" Prize :-)

EUOBSERVER / COPENHAGEN - It was billed as the most important meeting in history. Naturally, as the whole purpose is to save the planet, or at least keep it inhabitable for human beings. But the UN climate conference in Copenhagen itself has so far been pretty uninhabitable for many of the human beings trying to attend.

Waiting for Godot in the queue for the climate summit venue (Photo: adopt a negotiator)

Thousands of participants from civil society and the media, but also high-level officials from international institutions and members of national delegations to the conference, have had to wait outside in the blustery, sub-zero Nordic winter for up to nine hours only to be told in the end that the Bella Centre venue in the southeast of the Danish capital has reached capacity and they will have to try again tomorrow.

A total of 192 nations are represented at the meeting, with their attending teams of lawyers, advisors, officials and trailing NGO observers, lobbyists, reporters and activists.

Organisers estimate the number of participants at over 45,000, including 14,000 national delegates, as well as another 4,000 just from the United Nations and 5,000 journalists.

The conference centre only has room for 15,000 people. (EUobserver)

European ministers worked to salvage a deal at the Copenhagen climate summit today as fears grew that some world leaders, scenting failure in the negotiations, could decide to stay away.

The past several days have been marked by increasingly bitter exchanges between the world's two biggest polluters, China and the United States, and a five-hour walkout by African delegates. The conference chairwoman, Connie Hedegaard of Denmark, today asked a group of European ministers to lead "informal" negotiations on the key blockages. (The Times)

COPENHAGEN - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Danish conference hosts warned ministers on Tuesday to compromise at deadlocked global talks to salvage agreement on a new U.N. climate pact. (Reuters)

KEVIN Rudd's climate change agenda is under fire from three fronts this morning with India, the G77-China bloc and former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton attacking Australia's approach.

Lumumba Di-Aping, the chief negotiator for China and G77 group of developing nations at Copenhagen, said today that what Australia had done so far was “simply not good enough”.

“The message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it's fiction,” he told ABC radio.

“It does not relate to the facts because his actions are climate change scepticism in action. All that Australia has done so far is simply not good enough.”

Mr Bolton, a prominent neo-conservative during the Bush administration, accused the Prime Minister of using the climate change debate to re-regulate the economy and give governments too much power

“It's typical not just of the Prime Minister but of a number of other advocates of the kinds of solutions being discussed at Copenhagen, that these solutions, greater government control of the economy, greater government regulation, government interference in all of our daily lives, is something many of these people have believed in for decades even before global warming was an issue,” he told ABC2.

“There is another agenda in play, one that is philosophically attuned to increased government regulation whether there is global warming, global cooling or no change at all. (Samantha Maiden, The Australian)

The chief negotiator for China and the small African nations at Copenhagen has accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of lying to the Australian people about his position on climate change.

Lumumba Di-Aping, who represents China and the G77 group of small countries, was speaking as the talks remained deadlocked and world leaders, including Mr Rudd, began arriving in the Danish capital.

Mr Di-Aping said he had high expectations of Mr Rudd, but claimed that throughout the negotiations the Australian Government has not matched its actions with its rhetoric.

"The message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it's fiction," he said.

"It does not relate to the facts because his actions are climate change scepticism in action.

"All that Australia has done so far is simply not good enough.

"It's puzzling in the sense that here is a Prime Minister who actually won the elections because of his commitment to climate change," he added.

"He was the only Prime Minister who came and clearly said we have to do something, we have to join Kyoto protocol and all the rest.

"And within a very short period of time he changes his mind, changes his position, he starts acting as if he has been converted into climate change scepticism. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

Copenhagen – Members of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have convened in Copenhagen to negotiate for a climate treaty likely to devastate the economies of compliant nations.

To poke fun while warning of this folly, the National Center for Public Policy Research is handing out T-shirts that display a photo of a Great Depression soup line and read, "My government went to COP 15 and all I got was this lousy economy."

"The shirts aim to remind COP 15 participants of the economic damage inherent to carbon reduction mandates. Adhering to restrictive carbon emissions standards will result in skyrocketing energy prices and devastate the economy," said David Ridenour, vice-president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. "While the fat cats in government can easily sign onto a feel-good environmental agreement, average people will be left to cope with the economic consequences." (National Center)

The United Nations has conceded that a deal in Copenhagen on climate change might not include promised financial aid for developing countries, an admission that will infuriate poorer nations and potentially scupper a broad-based agreement. (Financial Times)

COPENHAGEN -- The top U.S. climate negotiator brushed back European calls for faster short-term reductions in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, saying that by many measures the U.S. already matches or surpasses the European Union in fighting climate change.

The comments by Todd Stern, at a briefing by reporters, highlight an issue that continues to divide European and U.S. officials nine days into this month's United Nations summit: what baseline to use in measuring progress in cutting emissions.

While U.S. officials prefer to measure emissions cuts against the year 2005, the European Union prefers measuring cuts against the year 1990. A 1990 timeline greatly favors the EU because of economic and political developments since then that have reduced emissions, including the collapse of the Eastern Europe's economy following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Conversely, a 2005 baseline favors the Obama administration in international talks, partly because it leaves out the entire first term of George W. Bush. Mr. Bush, as president, resisted imposing economy-wide emissions caps on the grounds that it would damage the U.S. economy. (WSJ)

Dec. 16 -- China is demanding that a global agreement to cut greenhouse gases prohibit nations from imposing trade sanctions, further pitting the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases against U.S. lawmakers.

The draft accord from a meeting in Copenhagen to forge a climate treaty bars rich nations from adopting trade actions tied to global warming. China said such language will avert “trade wars.” (Bloomberg)

COPENHAGEN — China and the United States were at an impasse on Monday at the United Nations climate change conference here over how compliance with any treaty could be monitored and verified.

China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal. (NYT)

COPENHAGEN — The world's two biggest carbon emitters, China and the United States, Tuesday warned they would not shift on the offers for tackling their pollution, a question lying at the heart of the UN climate talks here. (AFP)

COPENHAGEN - U.S. greenhouse gas emissions targets pledged ahead of United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen have "protectionist aspects," Germany's environment minister said on Tuesday.

"The American position has certain protectionist aspects, so they want to avoid a level playing field because they are afraid that we are front runners in this competition," said Norbert Rttgen, referring to the race to shift away from carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

"The Chinese are not very interested in a level playing field either," he added. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN: With no signs of breakthrough in the tough negotiations in climate change conference here, India

As negotiators raced against time to hammer out a deal, four developing countries -- India, Brazil, South Africa and China – on Tuesday issued a joint statement accusing the rich nations of trying to derail the talks. (Times of India)

The Copenhagen agreement will increase bureaucracy and Swiss bank accounts without helping the planet

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon announced this week on his way to Copenhagen that “There is no time for posturing or blaming.” Good heavens, if there is no time for the UN’s two main activities, the climate talks must really be in peril.

Yesterday the U.S. and the EU were at loggerheads, China accused rich nations of making “empty promises,” and a leaked Cabinet document suggested that Canada, outrageously, wanted to pursue sensible policies by not penalizing particular industries more than the U.S. does. Environment ministers were burning the midnight biomass ahead of the arrival of 115 world leaders.

Will this supertanker of fools succeed by Friday in cobbling together an agreement that will ensure both more intrusive government and more global poverty without doing anything for the environment? Will they manage to sweep Climategate under the carpet?

The African Union on Tuesday estimated that the Copenhagen summit on climate change could lead to the "death warrant for the Kyoto Protocol," the only instrument currently regulating emission of greenhouse gases.

"Representatives of the continent have unanimously made known their absolute and determined refusal to pursue consultations that would sign the death warrant for the Kyoto Protocol," said a statement sent to AFP.

COPENHAGEN - Trade in controversial carbon rights under the Kyoto Protocol after 2012 could undermine emissions targets agreed under a new global climate pact, the European Union environment commissioner said on Tuesday.

Under the Kyoto treaty, which expires in 2012, nations that are comfortably below their greenhouse gas emissions targets can sell the difference in the form of rights called Assigned Amount Units (AAUs) to countries struggling to meet their own targets.

"If we have this amount of AAUs (post-2012), no matter how ambitious we are in Copenhagen, it will be not be enough because of this hot air," European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas told reporters at a U.N. climate talks in the Danish capital.

Critics call AAUs "hot air" because most of them are the result of the collapse of eastern European industry rather than investment in clean energy. U.N. climate talks this week to find a replacement for Kyoto have shed little light on the future of AAUs.

Seven eastern European countries proposed that AAUs be bankable under a new agreement, while green groups pushed to abolish AAU banking and large-scale trade in the rights.

"The political deal that will be forged in Copenhagen ... should keep the door open for allowing the full transfer of the surplus represented by the AAUs to the post-2012 framework," the group which includes Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria said.

Greenpeace warned against the idea, saying post-2012 trade in AAUs threatens the environmental integrity of a new pact. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN - The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of over half a million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show. (Reuters)

WND research reveals the European Union's cap-and-trade exchange is vulnerable to a sophisticated form of corporate extortion in which EU bureaucrats in Brussels are manipulated into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon permit bribes to keep companies from moving jobs to Third World nations.

In fact, it appears the scam is already under way. (Jerome R. Corsi, WorldNetDaily)

As climate change negotiations get into full swing ahead of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, debate over the basis upon which developed countries should compensate developing countries for their historic emissions intensifies. ( Fraser Durham, Director, CarbonSense)

Gordon Brown is offering hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to try to bribe Third World countries into signing a climate change deal.

With many developing nations refusing to back an agreement they claim favours the West, officials yesterday indicated that Mr Brown is prepared to offer ‘long-term’ cash to help finalise a deal.

Britain has already committed an extra £1.5billion to help developing countries tackle global warming – nearly a quarter of the £6.5billion offered by the rest of the EU.

But Mr Brown’s aides signalled yesterday that he is prepared to drive the UK economy even deeper into the red to burnish his reputation as a world statesman. (Daily Mail)

We have long noted the fall of our once great media institutions, such as The Times and the BBC into the maw of the climate/ world-governance movement, but the descent of the Daily Telegraph into this gaping abyss of nonsense propaganda is harder to take. It was always far, far from perfect, but there was clearly an attempt to maintain a balanced view, plus the fragile hold of Christopher Booker in his small, irregular columns of reason. In recent weeks, however, there has been a sea change. Presumably some sort of coup has taken place. For the centre of the paper is now occupied by Greenies of the wildest disposition. They are Geoffrey Lean and Louise Gray, plus attendant courtiers. No wonder that EU Referendum has taken to dubbing it The Scarygraph. Oddly enough, the web version of the journal still seems to demonstrate some effort to keep on an even keel, with quite a different emphasis. This makes it harder to illustrate a commentary as it is hard to find links to the pieces that actually align with the printed page.

Page 12 of the edition of December 15^th is typical. It is dominated by pictures of fluffy Emperor penguin chicks, cuddly koalas and a clown fish. Believe it or not, this last is at the top of the list of these endangered species. Apparently, the acidification of the sea by carbon dioxide has caused his fish to lose its sense of smell so that it cannot find its protective host.

Come off it! The only reason that the clown fish is there is that it was the sympathetic hero of a Disney cartoon. Until then the great majority of the population had never heard of it.

The bottom right hand corner of the page is reserved for the ersatz sceptic, Bjorn Lomborg, damaging to science as usual, but the rest of it is taken up by the dynamic duo, who have been drumming up the Copenhagen hysteria for weeks.

By the way, the intrusion of ocean acidification is no accident. You might not have noticed, but this has been opened up as a second front after setbacks on the warm front. The vital strategy is to keep up the war on carbon, both as a proxy for energy and the mainstay of western economies, to say nothing of the little matter of all life on Earth.

One of the stories that the establishment media have been energetically burying is the emerging detail of the financial web of intrigue surrounding Dr Pachauri, the prime driver of the climate scam at the UN. You can read all about it at EU Referendum, but to find it at The Telegraph you have to delve into the web version and the still independent blog of James Delingpole. By the way, you can also find within those confines a pointed comment on the suicide of the establishment media, which the editors of the Telegraph would do well to contemplate. As for our erstwhile hero, Boris Johnson, just another fall of the mighty. (Number Watch)

TONY Abbott will today accuse Kevin Rudd of attempting to use his proposed emissions trading system to disguise an old-fashioned Labor-style attempt to redistribute wealth to the poor.

The new Opposition Leader will virtually dare the Prime Minister to call an early election on climate change, vowing: "Bring it on. We will be ready for you."

In a speech to be delivered in Sydney this morning, Mr Abbott will declare himself "John Howard's heir, not his clone" as he gives voters their first detailed glimpse at his electoral posture since he ousted Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader on December 1.

He will use the speech -- obtained by The Australian last night -- to hammer Mr Rudd for producing little in two years beyond extra trade union power and his rejected Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

The new leader will sharpen his attack on the CPRS, moving beyond attacking it as "a great big tax" to accusing Labor of using it as a wealth-transfer mechanism. (The Australian)

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has attacked Kevin Rudd's stance on carbon emissions, saying the Prime Minister was going to Copenhagen ''with an open cheque written on the Australian people''.

Mr Abbott said Mr Rudd had refused to tell the country by how much more he wanted emissions cut. ''He won't tell us exactly how it is going to be achieved. And he won't tell us how much it is going to cost.''

He seized on projected NSW electricity price rises to buttress his argument about the consequences of an emissions trading scheme. The NSW pricing regulator has estimated electricity prices in the state would increase by 62 per cent in the next three years ''and those massive increases are due in significant measure to Mr Rudd's emissions tax'', Mr Abbott said.

''Mr Rudd is trying to tell us that there is a painless way to tackle climate change. There isn't.'' (The Age)

COPENHAGEN - The world this year suffered the fewest number of natural disasters in a decade, but floods, droughts and other extreme weather continued to account for most of the deaths and economic losses, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.

There were 245 natural disasters recorded this year, down from the decade high of 434 in 2005, said the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

The figures were released mid-way through an international climate conference in which 192 nations hope to nail down new firm targets for reducing carbon pollution, which is blamed for a long-term trend in more extreme weather. (Reuters)

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 774 individual scientists from 459 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Northeastern Slope of the Cariaco Basin, Venezuela Coast. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Lakes: How have earth's lakes been impacted by natural and anthropogenic-induced changes in the environment over the course of the Little Ice Age-to-Current Warm Period transition?

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Black Cutch (Raizada et al., 2009), Mountain Ebony (Raizada et al., 2009), Spinach (Jin et al., 2009), and Sugarcane (Vu and Allen, Jr., 2009).

Journal Reviews:
A Warming Bias in the U.S. Temperature Record???: In light of the disturbing revelations of the recently-leaked University of East Anglia emails, we felt it appropriate to revisit a paper one of us coauthored back in 2002.

The "Little" Medieval Warm Period in the Bahamas: The "junior partner" of the Medieval Warm Period surfaces once again, manifesting itself in a study of coral growth rates in the vicinity of the Bahamas.

Evolution to the Rescue: Can earth's many life forms evolve rapidly enough to survive rapid climate change?

There is a news release that indicates the major effect of soot on the climate, including glaciers, in the Himalayas (thanks to Charles Martin for alerting us to this!). The news release dated December 14 2009 is

“……the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people.”

“The Indo-Gangetic plain, one of the most fertile and densely populated areas on Earth, has become a hotspot for emissions of black carbon……. Winds push thick clouds of black carbon and dust, which absorb heat from sunlight, toward the base of the Himalayas where they accumulate, rise, and drive a “heat pump” that affects the region’s climate.”

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,” said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

“He has produced new evidence suggesting that an “elevated heat pump” process is fueling the loss of ice, driven by airborne dust and soot particles absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the local atmosphere and land surface. A related modeling study by Lau and colleagues has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters for publication.”

“……said Lau. “We need to add another topic to the climate dialogue.”

This news study reinforces the conclusion that a broader perspective of the role of humans in the climate system is needed, and that the radiative effect of CO2 may not the dominate human role as concluded by the IPCC report and as being discussed in Copenhagen. (Climate Science)

Drip by drip, like a glacier melting in the sun, the claim that man is changing the climate is dissolving into irrelevance. The recent findings of Swiss researchers expose another hole.

Former Vice President Al Gore has for years warned that man-made global warming is melting the world's glaciers — a tactic commonly used by alarmists who want to whip up hysteria. Swiss researchers, however, have presented evidence that weakens the argument.

Scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology have found that solar activity caused Alpine glaciers to melt in the 1940s at rates faster than today's pace, even though it's warmer now.

The study found that the sun in the 1940s was 8% stronger than average and far more powerful than it is today. It also concluded that solar activity was weaker from the 1950s to the 1980s, an era in which the glaciers advanced.

The Swiss researchers are spinning their own work, saying that the evidence doesn't mean the public can stop worrying about man-made warming. But their finding validates other researchers who have said solar activity has a far greater impact on temperatures than human CO2 emissions. (IBD)

Canadian-U.S. study attributes discernible drop in water levels in Huron and Michigan to drier weather (Globe and Mail)

The high alpine grasslands in the heart of Asia have been home to yak and sheep herders for centuries. But they are starting to disappear from much of this vast area. One major reason is overgrazing and depletion of the soil. Some parts of the grasslands are now called the "Black Beach" - a parched moonscape that has had its nutrients sucked out of the earth.

Largely gone, too, is the land's ability to hold large amounts of carbon. It's no small loss. The depleted grasslands here and around the world, along with degraded farmlands, are an open wound not only because of the loss of productive land but also because they are a lost opportunity to slow and reverse climate change. (China Daily)

COPENHAGEN -- The United States is counting on cows to help save the planet.

U.S. Secretary Tom Vilsack announced an agreement with the American dairy industry Tuesday to reduce the industry's greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020, mostly by convincing farmers to capture the methane from cow manure that otherwise would be released into the atmosphere. (Associated Press)

This story seems to be beyond parody. You couldn't make it up except that Michael Crichton was able to predict the story in his State of Fear which included a class action lawsuit on behalf of the people of the island nation Vanutu:

ExxonMobil’s announcement that it was buying XTO Energy for $41bn ($31bn stock and $10bn in debt) is a good answer to the critics who have been looking for the world’s biggest publicly listed oil company to do something besides pay dividends and buy back shares with its huge stockpile of cash.

While the Rockefeller family’s push of last year for Exxon to stake out a future beyond oil sounded good, Exxon insisted those sectors were not right for the company. Exxon has been built on fossil fuels. And it knows the business well.

In moving decisively into unconventional natural gas with the XTO purchase, Exxon is investing further in the fossil fuel business it already has perfected. Yet natural gas is not only less carbon intensive than oil, but new technology has made it abundant.

Accessing unconventional gas from sources such as shale rock, tightly packed sands and coal bed methane may be different from just capturing the gas that comes up during drilling a typical oil well, but it is a business Exxon understands.

And Exxon is smart enough to bring the XTO team on board to help it learn what it does not know. The boom in shale gas in the US has been dominated by the small oil and gas producers who figured out how to economically extract the gas, but the business is now big enough that the majors should be getting into it, if they are not already. (Financial Times)

While political leaders and environmental activists are gathered in Copenhagen to talk about carbon footprints, cap-and-trade schemes, and a “carbon-constrained world” China continues burning coal at record rates. And that coal consumption means that all of the rhetoric in Copenhagen will largely amount to nothing. [Read More] (Xina Xie and Michael J. Economides, Energy Tribune)

NSW households will need to brace themselves for the first impact of the Federal Government's proposal to cut emissions, with electricity prices expected to rise steeply over the next few years.

The state's pricing regulator, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) has today recommended that electricity prices rise by up to 62 per cent, including inflation, over three years.

Electricity prices are already rising at a double-digit pace, following agreed price rises to allow big capital spending programs by electricity retailers such as EnergyAustralia and Integral Energy.

IPART says the biggest impact on the proposed price rises is the Federal Government's recommended emissions trading scheme and increased network prices. (SMH)

SOME customers could be paying almost $900 more for a year's electricity by 2013, as the impact of the Federal Government's proposal to cut carbon emissions is felt in the household budget for the first time, with one group warning the increases ''will send many households into poverty''.

A large part of the increase stems from the Federal Government's proposed emissions trading scheme, which is aimed at reducing carbon pollution, with the intent that higher electricity prices will reduce electricity use.

Household electricity prices are already rising at a double-digit pace, following increases agreed to earlier by the Australian Energy Regulator, to finance large capital spending programs by electricity retailers such as EnergyAustralia.

Yesterday the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal included the impact of the Federal Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme in the household electricity bill, which is scheduled to take effect from mid-2011 once legislation passes Federal Parliament. (SMH)

And then there are the fines the United Nations will impose on us - fines some countries already face under the Kyoto Protocol:

AN election fought over the emissions trading scheme will be an election on tax.

It won't be an election on the environment. Kevin Rudd's policy will be to save the environment by raising the cost of living. My policy will be to save the environment by taking direct action to improve it.

When it comes to environmental credentials, I am more than happy to match mine against the Prime Minister's. I'd welcome any election that the Prime Minister called as a referendum on his emissions trading scheme because Australians have always been suspicious of governments that try to panic people into change on the argument that it's our one and only chance to get things right. (Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, From: The Australian)

The International Methane to Markets Partnership is publishing its first comprehensive report detailing the achievements of its 31 partner governments. Methane gas capture and use projects supported by the partnership since its creation in 2004 are currently reducing emissions by more than 27.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually -- equivalent to the annual emissions from 5 million passenger vehicles.

"The Methane to Markets Partnership is a true success story in the fight against climate change and the transition to a clean energy economy," said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office for Air and Radiation and current chair of the Methane to Markets steering committee. "Methane to Markets," said Ms. McCarthy, "is helping countries mitigate climate change, develop new sources of clean energy, and protect their local environments."

The Methane to Markets Partnership reduces greenhouse gas emissions by promoting the cost-effective, near-term recovery and use of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, while providing clean energy to markets around the world. (VOA News)

Climate change has become the global catch phrase of the 21st Century and decisions made at the current United Nations talks in Copenhagen will have a lasting influence on the global economy and the mining industry.

Here in Australia, we are not immune from the climate change movement and the government is positioning the country to be a global leader in this area. Already, we have implemented legislation requiring Australian corporations to record their Greenhouse Gas Emissions through the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 (the Act).
More recently, debate has raged about the introduction of an emissions trading scheme (ETS), which, whilst still highly controversial, is likely to occur sooner rather than later. (Jeames McKibben & Michelle Clarke, Australian Journal of Mining)

Solar lanterns and more efficient appliances are part of a new U.S.-led effort to deploy clean energy across the globe to combat climate change and other ills ( David Biello, SciAm)

“While the details of a binding agreement may not be completely worked out in Copenhagen, it is more important than ever that participants send a strong, indicative and ambitious signal that can guide energy investment and policy decisions globally,” said Nobuo Tanaka, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), today at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP-15) in Copenhagen. “This conference is the most important climate meeting to date, as we urgently need a framework that goes beyond 2012, the end of the Kyoto Protocol first commitment period. The economic crisis, with the resulting fall in global energy-related CO2 emissions of around 3% in 2009, gives us a unique window of opportunity to change our current, highly unsustainable energy path,” said Mr. Tanaka. “Current pledges point in the right direction, but fall short of what is needed to keep the global temperature rise to around 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The IEA proposes an energy policy and technology blueprint that can deliver ambitious climate goals to be agreed in Copenhagen, with energy efficiency at the core of CO2 reduction strategy in both the near and long term.” (Source: International Energy Agency)

As some countries have reservations on carbon capture and storage (CCS) the emerging technology will not be added to the UN-backed carbon reducing mechanisms here in Copenhagen. (CoP15)

WASHINGTON - Americans may live significantly longer in the future than current U.S. government projections, and that could mean sharply higher costs than anticipated for Medicare and other programs, researchers reported on Monday.

The researchers say that by 2050 Americans may live as much as eight years longer than government forecasts and that spending by Medicare and Social Security could rise by $3.2 trillion to $8.3 trillion above current projections.

Advances in medical care will accelerate, stretching out lifespans, the MacArthur Research Network on an Aging Society wrote in the report, published in The Milbank Quarterly.

"If we're right we've got a problem," Dr. Jack Rowe of Columbia University's School of Public Health and chairman of the MacArthur Research Network said in a telephone interview. "Can we really afford to have everybody quit work at 65?"

The research did not address any effects of longer lifespan on the current effort to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system. (Reuters)

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) may have announced that he expects to vote for Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) health bill this afternoon, but that leaves Reid with just 59 votes. He needs to get all three of the following holdouts to sign on the dotted line by Christmas:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
As we have thoroughly documented before, there are nearly two dozen abortion funding prohibitions in current federal law that reflect two basic principles: 1) that, except in situations involving the life of the mother, rape and incest, the federal government will not pay for or reimburse for abortions under federal programs like Medicaid; and 2) that, with the same exceptions listed above, the federal government will not subsidize insurance plans that offer coverage for abortion. This is why the Federal Employee Health Benefits (FEHB), military insurance through TRICARE, and the Indian Health Service do not cover abortion unless the mother’s life is at risk.

NEW YORK - A report out today points to yet another possible harmful effect of exposure to phthalates -- a controversial plastics chemical used widely in the manufacture of consumer products.

Researchers from Turkey found higher blood levels of the most commonly used plasticizer, DEHP, in a group of boys with abnormal enlargement of the breasts -- a common condition seen in up to 65 percent of adolescent boys called pubertal gynecomastia. The condition usually resolves on its own after boys get through puberty.

"Unfortunately," Dr. Elif N. Ozmert from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey noted in an email to Reuters Health, "we are exposed to this (chemical) in many ways via direct contact," breathing, and eating. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON -- A working group made up of officials from several federal regulatory agencies Tuesday proposed restricting marketing of foods and beverages that contain significant amounts of sugar, sodium and saturated fat, in response to concerns about childhood obesity.

Food marketing to children should be limited to foods that provide a "meaningful contribution to a healthful diet," the proposals say.

The recommendations of the group, which was created by Congress, reflect concerns that current marketing practices are influencing children's eating habits. (WSJ)

(Dec. 15, 2009) — A team of scientists at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the National Institutes of Health has piloted psychotherapy treatment to prevent excessive weight gain in teenager girls deemed 'at risk' for obesity. (ScienceDaily)

Recent reports from the Urban Land Institute and other planning advocates insist that so-called smart growth—a term meaning more compact urban development, combined with heavy investments in mass transit as an alternative to driving—is an essential tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In heeding this call, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress want to impose a national land-use planning policy that threatens the property rights of every landowner in the country. (Randal O'Toole, MasterResource)

WASHINGTON - Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Tuesday downplayed his department's analysis that U.S. climate legislation will result in carbon-capturing trees taking over millions of acres of farmland, saying "more current" studies do not foresee that result.

Up to 59 million acres, 6 percent of U.S. pasture and cropland, could be converted to woodland by 2050 under a cap-and-trade system, according to the Agriculture Department analysis. Trees, to control greenhouse gases, would be more lucrative than crops.

It was the first time Vilsack commented on the analysis, whose conclusions were released on Dec 3. The complete study will be released soon, said Vilsack. Foes of the House-passed climate bill say it will drive up farmers' production costs and allow only a minority of them to reap money from offsets. (Reuters)

LONDON - Increased funding is starting to pay off in the battle against malaria but prevention and treatment must be increased to try to halt the killer disease, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

The WHO's World Malaria Report 2009 found "significant progress" in the delivery of mosquito nets and malaria drugs, thanks largely to an increase in funds to $1.7 billion in 2009 from $0.3 billion in 2003. But it said $5 billion more was needed every year to get maximum global impact worldwide.

"The tremendous increase in funding for malaria control is resulting in the rapid scale up of today's control tools," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said in a statement.

"This, in turn, is having a profound effect on health -- especially the health of children in sub-Saharan Africa. In a nutshell, development aid for health is working." (Reuters)

As wild fish stocks continue to dwindle, aquaculture is becoming an increasingly important source of protein worldwide. Now, a growing number of entrepreneurs are raising fish in large pens in the open ocean, hoping to avoid the many environmental problems of coastal fish farms. (John McQuaid, e360)

Moderator: Henry D. Jacoby
Kerry Emanuel '76, PhD '78
Judith Layzer PhD '99
Stephen Ansolabehere
Ronald G. Prinn SCD '71
Richard Lindzen
December 10, 2009
Running Time: 1:58:31

About the Lecture

In mid-November, thousands of emails were hacked from servers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. A small fraction of them address controversial issues; how to present climate data in the most favorable light and how to combat climate skeptics, among others. The responses reported in the press have ranged from these emails being a confirmation of climate change deniers' assertions that global warming is a conspiracy and a hoax, to the whole affair being a tempest in a teapot with no relevance to the reality of global warming and the need to combat it.

This panel of experts gives its views on what 'Climategate' really means for climate science, the integrity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, public perception of climate, and the ongoing policy negotiations in the Congress and at Copenhagen. (MIT)

Some scientists just keep looking in the wrong places for answers. Here’s Stephan Lewandonsky, professorial fellow of psychology, in The Age trying to answer the most important question in modern science and economics. He refers to ClimateGate and asks if the stunning accusations of serious misconduct are true? Watch the flat out assertion backed by a non-sequiteur:

This does not even make sense within the confines of it’s punctuation. Is there a new Natural Law of Thermodynamics that says it’s impossible to withhold data? The data is gone, even Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit admits he has withheld it and won’t ever provide it:

We know the emails are real. Phil Jones has said as much. He admits he has withheld data for years, and that he’ll delete it as well if he has too. So it’s not “fantastical” to think that data is being withheld, it’s documented. (Jo Nova)

I hope I'm not betraying my age by referring to Steven Spielberg's classic move 'Jaws' in my headline. It comes from the moment when Roy Scheider first sees the shark that has been terrorising the beach population. Here I use it to refer to the task that faces those who believe strong action is needed to combat global warming.

It's as if Climategate (the leak of over 1,000 emails detailing chicanery and shenanigans among The Team of climate scientists and paleoclimatologists that produced The Hockey Stick and other scary fictions) triggered a flood of pent-up queries and complaints about the data that The Team says is proof that our planet is in peril, but that scientists and engineers are saying may not even be data--it may be fiction.

Let's start with AJSrata, a blogger whose work I ran across only today. This very plain language description of both the flaws of IPCC data and what it would take to correct them is instructional, to say the least. He will immediately be branded a denialist in the pay of Big Oil, of course (and hey--sooner or later alarmists will stumble upon a critic who actually is), but his explanation is compelling and should be evaluated.

London's Daily Mail online has a plain language description of what it took to 'hide the decline' and why The Team needed to do it. The story will not increase your respect for Michael Mann, Phil Jones or the rest of The Team.

Obviously, if you haven't read Steve McIntyre's explanation of the 'trick' that puts 'hide the decline' into context, you should do so.

Is it possible that GHCN temperature measurements for Antarctica (which show a warming trend unlike other measurements) are dependent on one station? And that the one station is perched on the Antarctic peninsula that juts into the warmest part of the ocean nearby? And that the station measurement device is actually contaminated by the urban heat island effect? Jeff Id at The Air Vent makes the case.

Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view.

Google shows the link was once valid

The leaked emails from East Anglia University have revealed apparent misconduct by climate scientists and paleoclimatologists that in some cases rises to the level of criminal activity. But are there more important consequences of their behaviour? I think so.

In U.S. domestic politics alone, Climategate looks as though it is restricting policy options for the current administration. Barack Obama campaigned on a portfolio of energy policies--weatherising homes and offices, investing in green energy research, raising mileage standards, and creating a smart electricity distribution grid, with a sideline issue of Cap and Trade. When President Obama took office, the people who 'brung him to the dance' sidelined the more focused (and more intelligent, IMO) parts of his plan and created omnibus Cap and Trade legislation that is a disgrace to the Democratic Party to which I have belonged for all of my adult life. It is most deservedly stalled in Congress, where I hope it lingers indefinitely, but the other parts of Obama's plan seem to have disappeared.

Meanwhile, again at the insistence of the alarmist converts in Congress, the EPA has declared CO2 a danger to the public health, I assume to be shortly followed by water--after all, if global warming continues, we all will drown, right? The consequences of this folly are far-reaching. The EPA has to regulate emitters of dangerous substances--if your small business has a fleet of vehicles, welcome to the world of regulation. If your small school or small church has more than 1 bus... well, you get the picture. The EPA is hoping that Congress will rescue it by exempting small emitters. So is President Obama. But Republicans, who are gleefully seizing the new club that Climategate has placed in their hands, will not be loath to just say no, and saying the President chose the EPA route, and now he can deal with the consequences.

Worse, the EPA, which is supposed to conduct independent scientific inquiry into the substances it chooses to regulate, did not do so for CO2. They chose instead to rely on IPCC reports on global warming. Those IPCC reports were in large part prepared by the scientists under investigation now, and rely heavily on the data that up and disappeared. Expect a decade of lawsuits. (Thomas Fuller, Examiner)

The opening film at the Copenhagen “climate meeting” was an apt reminder of the long-term damage done by global warming propagandists. A little girl has nightmares about being alone in a desert where her life is threatened by floods and hurricanes.

Al Gore’s sci-fi horror fantasy in documentary style – An Inconvenient Truth – has been shown to school children, as young as 4 years old, around the world for years. Lesson plans aimed to convince children that the threat was real and that anyone doubting the message was wrong. They intentionally frightened children into emotional and psychological trauma.

Closing the Copenhagen film, many children repeated the phrase; “Please help save the world.” Now parents and teachers are faced with the sticky question of how that should be done. How can we deprogram millions of children the world over without allowing the experience to leave permanent psychological scars?

Teachers were put in the position of effectively turning children against their wiser parents. Now that we have to tell them that their teachers were wrong, will they ever trust teachers again?

Efforts to politically indoctrinate and manipulate school children are not new but they have intensified in the west in recent years. Parents in the old Soviet Bloc at least had enough experience before its fall to have some wisdom on dealing with it. Westerners however, are newbies.

There may be some good news mixed with the bad. Interviews with people who grew up in Communist controlled countries yielded claims that many recognized much of the propaganda and tended to ignore it. There was a certain comradeship in playing ignorant, ignoring selected homework, and making sure that the grading curve for indoctrination lessons was very low. (Roger F. Gay, MND)

WASHINGTON—The Environmental Protection Agency's finding last week that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare could bolster global warming-related litigation against emitters of such gases, legal experts say.
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At the same time, the government's endangerment finding also could bolster the argument that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants and that pollution exclusions contained in various commercial insurance policies should apply in coverage disputes, some say.

The EPA finding, which was widely expected after it issued preliminary findings in April, stems from the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts et al. vs. Environmental Protection Agency et al. In that ruling, the high court ruled that greenhouse gases fall within the definition of pollutants under the Clean Air Act. It then ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases emitted by new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution and endanger public health. Such a determination is a prerequisite for regulating those emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA endangerment finding came on the eve of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, where delegates from 192 countries, including the United States, are gathered to try to reach a consensus on how to prepare for an international treaty to limit global warming. The conference continues this week.

Many said they believe the Obama administration will use the EPA move to spur Congress to enact climate change legislation, which could create federal pre-emption complications for common law global warming suits. (Sally Roberts, Business Insurance)

Suddenly the doomsayers aren't having it all their own way, as people stubbornly refuse to be terrified, says Eilis O'Hanlon (Irish Independent)

Al Gore's office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal. (Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster and Philippe Naughton, The Times)

I guess we can relax about Climategate, now that IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has said everything's okay. Pachauri said he doubted that trust in the IPCC would be damaged by the affair. “People who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind,” he said.

Just today, I was discussing with some commenters here the subject of tainted associations with Big Oil and large energy firms. There are those who say that because Steve McIntyre's boss once gave a lecture at a thinktank that once received funding from an oil firm, that his comments on global warming are tainted. (Thanks to Bishop Hill for that).

What then are we to make of the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri? I think after reading this article in EUReferendum, you will at least join me in acknowledging him as very familiar with energy issues. Some quotes from the article: (Thomas Fuller, Examiner)

The head of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, sure makes a good living from the great global warming scare. But with so many business ties with the alarmism industry, isn’t he too hopelessly compromised to be at the head of the United Nation’s climate change organisation?

Oh, and don’t think Kevin Rudd has missed the opportunity to steer some business Pachauri’s way, which might prove coincidentally to be a useful investment in Rudd’s ambitions to become UN secretary general:

KEVIN Rudd has refused to directly address Tony Abbott's claim that Labor's proposed carbon emissions trading system will cost average Australian families $1100 a year.

Instead, the Prime Minister has forecast a Coalition government's response to climate change would wrap Australians in red tape by allowing Canberra bureaucrats to dictate individual behaviour.

In a television interview yesterday, Mr Rudd was asked three times to respond to Mr Abbott's $1100 claim, which has been at the centre of the Opposition Leader's political attack since he won the Liberal leadership a fortnight ago.

Each time, he refused to address the figure. (The Australian)

There are way too many events related to the climate to describe all of them, especially when I am a bit busy. So just a few of them.

Henrik Svensmark - who gave an excellent talk on December 4th in Berlin during a conference I attended - had a heart attack on live Danish TV - or a malfunction of his pacemaker. Lomborg was standing nearby. A very worrisome video. Think twice whether you want to watch it. An excellent scientist like Svensmark is the last one who deserves such things. He's doing OK now, they say, and I wish him a full recovery.

The poor countries got so upset in Copenhagen that the talks were suspended.

Canada's Alberta - Edmonton etc. - is experiencing record cold temperatures up to around -46 °C which often feels like -59 °C in the wind (Edmonton Airport). I am sure that the residents of Edmonton are eager to reduce their usage of fossil fuels in order to cool the planet by additional 0.00001 °C.

Czechia feels like a tropical paradise in comparison. For this week, the meteorologists predicts something like balmy minus 20 °C.

If you want to see what kind of discussions we had with Greenpeace on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, December 4th, see this Monckton-Greenpeacechick debate in front of the Melia Hotel.

From next Monday, Andy Revkin is leaving the New York Times for Pace University. (The Reference Frame)

The Daily Mail has always been a bit of a curate’s egg – good in parts. Much of it involves irritating insubstantial scares, the dull doings of so-called celebrities etc. It has the great merits however of featuring several sound columnists and not subscribing to the environmental self-censorship adopted by the rest of the establishment media. Now it has created a breakthrough by actually showing to ordinary people just one example of the sort of scam that is being perpetrated in order to filch the hard earned pennies from their deflating pockets. It is almost a small miracle that a popular newspaper has shown its readers what “hiding the decline” actually means by a simple graphical illustration. This does not, of course, convey the sheer scale of obfuscation that has been going on over the years, but it is a dramatic beginning.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, who will shortly be called to give evidence about the alleged threat of WMD, attacks sceptics on Global Warming and pronounces the evidence for it overwhelming.

If you believe that Sir, you will believe anything. Many of us think it represents the greatest fraud in human history (by a long, long way), but what are a few billions here and there when you are a world figure? (Number Watch)

Minchin and Joyce are proud of holding doubts about the science, writes Rick Feneley.

Few non-scientists are better read or briefed on climate change than Nick Minchin, which raises the question: why does he remain such a determined sceptic in the face of so much science? (SMH)

For all the good will and great intentions that fill the Bella Center, it’s becoming clear that COP15 is not going to produce a comprehensive agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases

This has led to much gnashing of teeth among millions of well-meaning people who worry about global warming. But they (and we) should take heart. This “failure” may actually be a blessing in disguise. It might even bring us closer to a real solution to climate change.

Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that global warming is real, that it is caused by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions, and that we need to do something about it. But what we need is action that actually does good — as opposed to empty agreements that merely make us feel good. (Bjørn Lomborg, CoP15 Post))

MORE people attend UN conferences than make a meaningful contribution, but even by UN standards delegates are describing the Copenhagen climate conference as a circus.

Twenty-odd thousand green activists predominantly from developed countries are overwhelming the 8000 government officials and demanding meetings with delegations so they can push their proposals into any final agreement.

A handful of green, anti-capitalist activists has even infiltrated official negotiations and are representing countries in some negotiating streams.

While public attention is focused on debates about emissions reduction targets and peak emissions years, it is in second-tier negotiations that green groups are having the greatest influence.

A motley crew of negotiators representing Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana and India have put into technology transfer negotiating texts the scrapping of intellectual property rights necessary to attract private investment in the development of climate-friendly technologies that are needed to cut emissions.

In deforestation discussions, greens are attempting to limit developing country conversion of forest lands to agriculture use that could achieve the dual purpose of carbon sequestration and poverty alleviation. And when they're not thrusting themselves into negotiations they're providing spectacles for the media such as last week's Greenpeace resuscitation of a giant inflatable globe dying from a high temperature. (Tim Wilson, The Australian)

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

Copenhagen: China supported the G77 and other developing countries for removing obstacles and speeding up work on amending the Kyoto Protocol, Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief climate change official, told the press later on Dec 14.

China favors that the first installment of climate change fund goes to the African, the small islands and least developed countries that most need them, even though it doesn’t mean that China does not qualify, Xie said.

China is also willing share its experiences and developing cooperative projects with developing countries in mitigation and adaptation of climate change.

An air of disappointment clearly took hold earlier yesterday as African countries and the Group of 77, an alliance of developing countries warned that they would leave the negotiation table of the UN climate change conference mainly because the rich countries want to supplant the Kyoto Protocol and show no willingness to discuss binding emission by 2020.

At a press conference yesterday, African countries said that they refuse to continue negotiations unless talks on a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol are prioritized ahead of broader discussions under a second long-term cooperation action track. Australia, Japan and others have succeeded in stopping Kyoto Protocol discussions as a result. (China Daily)

After a half-day suspension, emission reduction talks have resumed in Copenhagen, but those promoting significant action on climate change are concerned the talks are missing the point.

African countries suspended the climate talks yesterday in the face of wealthier countries’ reluctance to discuss legally binding emissions reductions.

They refused to continue negotiations unless talks on a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol were prioritised ahead of broader discussions under a second negotiating track.

Australia, Japan and others succeeded in stopping Kyoto Protocol discussions as a result.

Of the two tracks of negotiations underway in Copenhagen, the Kyoto Protocol is the only one that includes a mechanism for legally binding emissions reductions by rich countries.

But crucially, the US had not ratified the Kyoto agreement. (NBR)

Our world is on an unsustainable path that threatens not only our environment, but our economies and our security. It is time to launch a broad operational accord on climate change that will set us on a new course.

A successful agreement depends upon a number of core elements, but two are shaping up to be essential: first, that all major economies set forth strong national actions and resolve to implement them; and second, that they agree to a system that enables full transparency and creates confidence that national actions are in fact being implemented.

Transparency, in particular, is what will ensure that this agreement becomes operational, not just aspirational. We all need to take our share of responsibility, stand behind our commitments, and mean what we say in order for an international agreement to be credible.

Representatives from more than 190 countries have gathered in Copenhagen in the hopes of meeting this urgent challenge to our planet. If we are serious about that goal, we will all embrace these principles.

It is no secret that the United States turned a blind eye to climate change for too long. But now, under President Obama’s leadership, we are taking responsibility and taking action. ( HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, NYT)

It is only logical that President Obama will sign the Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty if one results from this week's negotiations. His worldview demands it. His past statements and ongoing actions presage it.

Obama believes in the AGW (anthropogenic or man-made global warming) theory. He believes in "economic and social justice" and that logically leads to "climate justice." He may believe that the US owes a "climate debt" to the rest of the world. What better way to lead the charge than to carry the ultimate banner of the radical left -- wealth redistribution -- under the auspices of the "crises of climate change." AGW even has victims: "climate refugees."

Many doubt his ability to legally commit to a binding treaty and obligate the United States. The possibility however, prompted Senator Webb to issue a letter to President Obama reminding him not to sign any treaty in Copenhagen. The letter cautioned him to not make commitments that will not pass the Article II treaty ratification framework under the Constitution requiring a super-majority vote (67 votes) in the Senate. I submit that this thinking is flawed and he has no intent of taking that path.

The President has obligations under US law to "enforce" regulations and "follow the law." It is this foundation he would use to sign the Treaty in Copenhagen. In 1996 the
Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants. (Massachusetts et al. v. EPA et al.). ( David Boehmer, American Thinker)

COPENHAGEN -- Tempers flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit as poor nations staged a walkout to protest what they called inadequate aid offers from rich countries, and the U.S. and China jockeyed for position.

World leaders, including President Barack Obama, are expected to arrive in Copenhagen later this week, ostensibly to try to seal an international agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and subsidize efforts by developing countries to adopt low-carbon energy technology and adapt to shifts in weather patterns or rising sea levels.

But the talk in Copenhagen is increasingly about scaled-back expectations. One possibility is a very general agreement in which developed countries promise to try to reduce their collective emissions by some amount and to provide a pot of money to help pay for a cleanup in the developing world. But such an agreement would leave the toughest questions -- how much each country would cut, and how much each would pay -- up in the air. (WSJ)

Developing nations have staged a two-hour walkout at the Copenhagen climate talks, accusing the developed world, led by the European Union, Australia and Japan, of pushing to "kill the Kyoto Protocol".

The walkout was organised by the G77 group, which represents 130 small, mostly African nations. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

The president of the UN climate summit has urged delegates to "get to work" after protests from developing nations forced a suspension of several hours.

Talks resumed late on Monday after the president, Danish minister Connie Hedegaard, addressed some of the developing countries' concerns.

Their key demand - separate talks on the Kyoto Protocol - was met.

Some delegates talked forlornly of the vast amount of negotiating left to be done before the summit concludes. (BBC News)

No one really has any idea what climate change deal might come out of Copenhagen. While most Albertans probably sympathize with the general objective-- burning less carbon-based fuel--there are two ways to get there: A sensible way which will probably work, and the political Copenhagen way which will prove to be another costly United Nations failure. (Danielle Smith, Calgary Herald)

Gordon Brown will arrive in Copenhagen tonight as world leaders face the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching a historic deal on climate change.

The Prime Minister, who will be the first senior leader at the summit, has more to lose than most because he has effectively staked his reputation on securing a robust agreement.

Last night, key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling, with British officials saying they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change.

The draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened, with the deletion of a key target for cutting the rate of forest loss by 50 per cent by 2020. Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory.

Negotiators are unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions. Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has said that the most important outcome from the talks would be an agreement that emissions would decline after 2020. The draft text refers only to emissions peaking as soon as possible.

Another sticking point is whether there will be any independent system of checking whether countries are meeting their pledges on cutting emissions. China is refusing to allow any form of independent audit but Britain is insisting on this in any new treaty. (The Times)

SYDNEY — Fresh from failing — twice — to pass his widely contested plan to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd headed to Copenhagen on Monday hoping to succeed internationally where his domestic agenda has thus far fallen short.

Mr. Rudd is expected to play a key, behind-the-scenes role in the negotiations. He accepted an invitation from Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen of Denmark to join the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and President Felipe Calderón of Mexico as “friends of the chair” to help press other leaders to commit to action.

In the two years since Mr. Rudd received a standing ovation from delegates at a U.N. conference for reversing Australia’s longstanding refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol — his first official act as prime minister — he and his ministers have been fighting an increasingly fractious battle over the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at home.

Earlier this month, the Australian Senate rejected, for the second time this year, the government’s plan to implement a carbon pollution reduction system. The agreement would have placed Australia in the company of the European Union and other countries that already have, or are now debating, a “cap-and-trade” style approach to cutting greenhouse gases.

The Senate, where ~~the balance of power is controlled by pro-business conservatives and a vocal minority of climate change skeptics~~, voted, 41-33, on Dec. 2 to reject the government’s plan to set a nationwide cap on greenhouse gas emissions and issue pollution permits to be bought and sold on a newly created carbon market. (NYT)

KEVIN RUDD has rejected as inadequate the offers by all major developed and developing nations to cut carbon emissions.

As the Prime Minister prepared to travel to the Copenhagen negotiations to help craft an agreement to contain global warming, he said all the major countries had to do better if the conference were to succeed. (SMH)

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will arrive at the Copenhagen climate summit on Tuesday, where negotiations are hanging by a thread. (AAP)

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has acknowledged time is running out for a global deal on climate change as he prepares to enter the fray in Copenhagen.

And he's unlikely to be welcomed with open arms after taking an early battering over Australia's handling of land use emissions, which have prompted cries of cheating from countries such as France.

Talks have hit a critical stage with just four days left to negotiate a global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

With the clock ticking and ructions continuing to flare between developed and developing nations, Mr Rudd has acknowledged the risk of failure remains. (AAP)

IT WAS a candid remark in a private briefing. But unfortunately for the Government, comments by an Australian climate negotiator late last week in Copenhagen have pretty much let the cat out of the bag on where Labor intends to find any ambitious cuts to Australia's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, it will be in exactly the same places that the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, goes looking for his ''practical measures'' to solve climate change.

And they will not be anywhere near the smokestacks of dirty coal-fired power stations or the big polluting industries. They will be in the rolling back paddocks, grazing lands and grasslands of rural Australia - a green pot of carbon gold.

The premise is that simple changes in how we manage agricultural land - reducing tillage and fertiliser use or improving fire management - help return carbon to the soil. It is hard to put a dollar value on the bonanza but the numbers are enough, some say, to make Australia carbon neutral for the next three or four decades - all without having to impose a nasty tax, set up a complicated emissions trading scheme or clean up a single polluting pipe.

The climate change negotiator reportedly told an NGO group at a Copenhagen briefing that Australia would be able to commit to 25 per cent greenhouse gas cuts by 2020 - if land use rule changes driven by Australia and other developed countries are accepted as part of a new global climate deal. (SMH)

A proposal aimed at saving the world's tropical forests suffered a setback Sunday, when negotiators at the U.N. climate talks ditched plans for faster action on the problem because of concerns that rich countries aren't willing to finance it.

Most of the headlines at climate talks have revolved around greenhouse gases that come from coal, oil and other fossil fuels. But the destruction of forests _ burning or cutting trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches _ is thought to account for about 20 percent of global emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

So a deal on deforestation is considered a key component of a larger pact on climate change being negotiated in Copenhagen. (Associated Press)

The first phase of a groundbreaking national assessment estimates that U.S. forests and soils could remove additional quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere as a means to mitigate climate change.

The lower 48 states in the U.S. hypothetically have the potential to store an additional 3-7 billion metric tons of carbon in forests, if agricultural lands were to be used for planting forests. This potential is equivalent to 2 to 4 years of America's current CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. (United States Geological Survey)

BEIJING -- Xu Shisen put down the phone and smiled. That was Canada calling, explained the chief engineer at a coal-fired power plant set among knockoff antique and art shops in a Beijing suburb. A Canadian company is interested in Mr. Xu's advances in bringing down the cost of stripping out greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal.

Engineers led by Mr. Xu are working to unlock one of climate change's thorniest problems: how to burn coal without releasing carbon into the atmosphere. (WSJ)

Poll of leading energy firms finds that EU emissions trading scheme is driving investment in low-carbon technologies (James Murray, BusinessGreen)

Dec. 15 -- Climate-treaty negotiators proposed delaying until at least 2010 a decision on letting companies in industrialized nations offset their emissions by investing in carbon-capture projects in the developing world.

Envoys at the United Nations-led talks in Copenhagen debated adding the experimental technology to a list of UN- approved methods to limit the release of greenhouse gases.

The UN’s technical board must examine issues including who would be liable for any leakages of carbon dioxide pumped for permanent storage underground and report back to envoys either next year or in 2011, according to a UN draft paper.

Some countries “have registered concerns regarding the implications of this possible inclusion and highlighted a number of unresolved issues,” the UN said in the document, posted on its Framework Convention on Climate Change Web site. (Bloomberg)

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial. ( Brandon Keim, Wired)

Washington DC: The United Nations announced today it is permanently banning thousands of accredited non-governmental organizations* from the COP-15 climate conference in Copenhagen.

The restriction was announced today outside the Copenhagen conference center after several thousand accredited NGO conference delegates, including three from the National Center for Public Policy Research, waited outside for eight hours or longer in 32-degree F temperatures for admission.

NGOs apparently are being banned because the United Nations accredited 45,000 people for a building with a capacity of 15,000, although the stated reason was "security concerns." The "security concerns" may be related to the fact that, after waiting several hours in the cold, delegations began to chant, "Let us in! Let us in!"

"To be an "accredited" or "admitted" NGO to a COP conference, NGOs must apply months in advance, and typically only make travel plans to attend after receiving complete credentials from the United Nations," said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, an accredited COP-15 NGO organization that is as of now banned from the conference. "To give credentials to 45,000 people while choosing a building that holds 15,000 people is insane, though the United Nations, to be fair, has never been known for competence."

"What makes this an even greater travesty," said Ridenour, " is the COP-15 conference ostensibly is trying to find ways to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. If 30,000 people fly to Copenhagen for no reason, doesn't that put unnecessary greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?"

Ridenour has formally asked the U.N., which is permitting some NGOs to have many delegates inside while others are permitted none, to limit each NGO to one representative as long as space limitations remain a concern.

"Some of these NGO delegations are from rich countries like our own," said Ridenour, "but for some NGOs, raising the funds to attend a conference in Copenhagen is a real financial hardship. The least the U.N. can do is let in at least one member of these delegations so all of their money won't be wasted." (National Center)

A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen "Earth summit" has even been attempted before in human history.

I've been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind -- a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.

But it is different from the "anthropogenic global warming" myth. It was published with murderous intentions, which takes us beyond fraud. Whereas, the numbers cooked up to support the global warming hysteria in such places as the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were for the purpose of extorting money, which is fraud in the more conventional sense. (David Warren, RealClearPolitics)

It’s been less than a month since the Climategate files were first disclosed, but they’ve already had a dramatic impact on the debate over climate change.

On the one hand is the dominant so-called consensus — that human emission of greenhouse gases has been the primary cause of an unprecedented warming of Earth’s climate. On the other hand, there has been an underground opposition trying to make itself heard. What the disclosure of the files did was demonstrate that these opposition voices had been suppressed unfairly and unscientifically.

As a result, the raw data that had been withheld is becoming available to outside researchers. This new openness is already having results. (Charlie Martin, PJM)

The planet's ''canary in the coal mine'' is showing disturbing symptoms and we have only years, not decades, to save it.

The figure of our planet - a shining blue-and-white orb silhouetted against the stars, the swirl of clouds with the blinding white of polar icecaps set against ocean blue - is an image almost every human carries as the symbol of our common home.

But for how long will future generations see that blinding polar white anchoring the only place of human existence? While climate negotiators in Copenhagen speak in terms of 2020, 2030 or 2050, the future of the global climate system may be determined not in decades, but by our actions - or inaction - of the next few years, determined instead by the speed of melting ice. (The Age)

There’s plenty of stories about how Arctic sea ice is now “rotten”. There’s darn few that talk about yearly comparisons or what other scientific outlets are saying about the claim.

As many WUWT readers know, 2007 was the minimum year of summer extent in sea ice, a year that is routinely held up as a cause for alarm. Another cause for alarm has been the “decline of multi-year sea ice”. Most recently we’ve gotten claims of “rotten ice” in the news media. That “rotten” ice is “duping the satellites” they say. This all from one fellow, Dr. David Barber on a ship that took a short expedition in the Arctic and observed what he called “rotten ice”. Here’s Dr. Barber using the poster child for sea ice loss in a presentation.

http://www.umanitoba.ca/research/media/barber_dave_web.jpg

David Barber hypes polar bears - Image from University of Manitoba files

Seems that his “rotten” message resonated, even the media in Alaska (who can observe sea ice on their own) are saying it: New study: Arctic ice is rotten (Anchorage Daily News)

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Like many countries around the world, Taiwan's sea levels have risen steadily as a result of global warming and measures need to be taken urgently to combat an increased threat of flooding, local environmental scientists said Sunday.

Taiwan's sea level has risen by an average of 3 centimeters over the past 10 years, or about 0.3 cm each year, said Fan Kuang-lung, a professor in National Taiwan University's Institute of Oceanography. (China Post)

You might hear climate change "deniers" saying recent temperatures show global cooling. But then you hear climate "scientists" say that the last ten years are the warmest on record. Who's right?

They both are.

...That is, if you accept, say, the NASA/GISS Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change (land-ocean mix) as the "true" global temperature.

(By the way, I do not accept that the NASA/GISS data represent truth. The data NASA provides are not raw temperature readings, or even simple averages of temperature readings. They are adjusted, quality-controlled, homogenized, and fudge-factored in ways we don't know and they're not telling. But for the purposes of the question at hand, let's accept NASA's adjusted and homogenized data.) ( Randall Hoven, American Thinker)

CHURCHVILLE, VA - Why do global warming researchers ignore the sun, the ultimate source of earth’s heat? Especially as we know virtually all of our warming occurred before 1940 while 85 percent of the human-emitted CO2 came after 1940? Dennis Bray of Germany’s Institute for Coastal Research just polled an international group of climate researchers on what they believe and why. In light of the recent leaked documents from East Angelia University’s Climate Research Unit, the poll seems to provide important answers. (Dennis T. Avery, American Daily)

Sceptics about man-made climate change frequently cite research apparently linking natural variations in solar activity with fluctuations in temperatures on Earth.

The alternative explanation was the centrepiece of The Great Global Warming Swindle, a 2007 Channel 4 documentary which provoked fierce argument.

It is based on the work of Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen and Henrik Svensmark of the of the Danish National Space Centre, who both published studies in the 1990s appearing to show a remarkable link between solar activity and variations in the climate.

But a group of scientists now says that the research was flawed and that when "flaws" in the analysis are removed the apparent correlation disappears.

It follows work by Peter Laut, a former adviser to the Danish Energy Agency, who pinpointed what he said were flaws in the research.

André Berger, honorary president of the European Geosciences Union, told The Independent: "Their controversial papers must be retracted or at least that there will be an official statement by them acknowledging their mistake."

Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, of Potsdam University, added: "I've looked into this quite closely and I'm on Laut's side in terms of his analysis of the data."

But Prof Friis-Christensen told the newspaper that Mr Laut's critique represented "character assassination" and denied that the original work contained flaws. (John Bingham, TDT)

An eminent Australian scientist says the real problem will come when low-lying, densely populated Asian nations are flooded (The First Post)

Koalas are highly vulnerable to climate change and face starvation, a leading conservation group has warned.

The koala - an Australian icon known the world over - has made it on to a global list of 10 well-known species threatened by climate change, along with the fish that inspired the cartoon character, Nemo.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air mean there is less nutritional value in gum leaves, the koala's food of choice.

"Australia's iconic koala faces malnutrition and ultimate starvation as the nutritional quality of Eucalytpus leaves declines as CO2 levels increase," the IUCN warned as it released its list at the Copenhagen climate summit on Monday.

Conservationists don't like more CO2 in the air but plants do - they need CO2 to grow, so tend to grow faster when there's more of it around. The problem is that fast-growing gum leaves contain less protein and more tannin, so koalas have to eat more to survive.

The IUCN says koalas already eat up to 500g of leaves a day and their guts may not be able to hold much more. (SMH)

The clownfish that inspired Disney film Finding Nemo and Australia’s iconic koala bear are just some of the species that could be wiped out by climate change, according to a new study. (TDT)

Oh... More pores could ease global warming - By boosting the number of pores in leaves, scientists hope to one day absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.

TOKYO: Japanese researchers last week said they had found a way to make plant leaves absorb more carbon dioxide - an innovation that may help ease global warming and boost food production.

The Kyoto University team found that soaking germinated seeds in a protein solution raised the number of pores, or stomas, on the leaves that inhale CO2 and release oxygen, said chief researcher Ikuko Hara-Nishimura.

"A larger number means there are more intake windows for carbon dioxide, contributing to lowering the density of the gas," she said. (Agence France-Presse)

SYDNEY — How can a company give away millions of products, help poor people, address climate change and turn a profit? A boutique energy company run by the unlikely partnership of an Anglican priest and a handful of business executives thinks it has the key.

The Melbourne company, Cool nrg International, is handing 30 million energy-efficient light bulbs out to poor and middle-income families in Mexico in a bid to capture a previously untapped corner of the carbon offset trading market and to nudge the developing world toward cleaner energy.

Cool nrg is one of a growing number of businesses trying to cash in on the multibillion-dollar market for carbon offsets approved by the United Nations under its Clean Development Mechanism, a program created by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to fight emissions of greenhouse gases. The program allows wealthy countries that have binding greenhouse gas targets to offset their emissions by investing in clean technology in developing countries, which have no targets.

The Mexican venture, called Cuidemos Mexico, or Let’s Take Care of Mexico, is the first C.D.M. project to focus on reducing energy demand by improving efficiency at the household, rather than the industrial, level. It is also the first project to receive “programmatic” status, meaning that it can be introduced at multiple sites without needing U.N. approval each time. (NYT)

Tropical deforestation is a climate change crisis, but scientists fear for boreal wilderness, too (Boston Globe)

GENEVA: A surge in sunshine more than 60 years ago helped Swiss mountain glaciers melt faster than today, even though warmer average temperatures are being recorded now, Swiss researchers said Monday.

Their study into the impact of solar radiation on Alpine glaciers made the "surprising discovery" that in the 1940s, and especially summer 1947, the ice floes lost the most ice since measurements begin 95 years ago, according to Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ). (Geo World)

A seminal study into global warming by those at the centre of the ClimateGate controversy is now under scrutiny, with claims that the selection of weather data from Australia may have created an exaggerated warming trend.

Australian scientist Warwick Hughes says that up to 40 per cent of the data used in the Australian study from long-term records came from urban areas where data may have been affected by the Urban Heat Island effect – the phenomenon where heat-retaining surfaces in metropolitan areas cause significant increases in temperature compared to surrounding rural areas.

Hughes claims that the important 1986 study by Professor Phil Jones and colleagues has significant flaws. Professor Jones recently stood aside from his position as Director of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University pending an inquiry into information released in leaked emails - the so-called ClimateGate affair.

“For over 200 years Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age and the associated solar minimums so, of course, warming has taken place. Our position is to draw attention to what we believe are deficiencies in the Jones et al. methodologies which were important studies in the development of the global warming hypothesis,” Mr Hughes said. (Gavin Atkins, Shadowlands)

ANCHORAGE - While some federal agencies are expressing caution on Arctic development, the federal Minerals Management Service continues to forge ahead with petroleum exploration drilling off the shores of the remote northern Alaska coast.

Environmental groups say the location is environmentally fragile, hammered by global warming and woefully unprepared to handle a major spill.

It's likely a court ultimately will decide whether drilling will take place in the remote marine waters.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Monday that the MMS had conditionally approved an exploratory drilling plan for 2010 in the Chukchi Sea by a subsidiary of Shell Oil. He said reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil must include responsible exploration of conventional resources. ( Associated Press)

Environment Minister Jim Prentice and former prime minister Paul Martin both say the United States should pay for some of the environmental costs of Alberta's oilsands, to help fight climate change.

"At the end of the day, if American consumers buy Canadian oil and consume it in the United States ... the environmental compliance cost should really be absorbed on the United States' side of the border," he said in a phone interview with CTV News Channel from Copenhagen.

"So that's why we're working so closely with the United States, so that we have a harmonized system here -- that we do this on a continental basis so that we don't get those kinds of difficulties where environmental costs are now downloaded onto us as Canadians because that's not fair."

Martin has also been quoted as saying the U.S. should shoulder some of Canada's carbon emissions burden because it is the primary buyer and user of energy from the oilsands. (CTV.ca News)

A MAJOR clean coal power plant and carbon storage project is being considered for planning approval in Queensland, even though a feasibility assessment has not been completed and a site is yet to be found, along with the necessary $4.2 billion in funding.

The Bligh government confirmed on Friday that Co-ordinator-General Colin Jensen had given significant project status to ZeroGen, which is wholly owned by the state with initial backing from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Shell and the coal industry.

The declaration signals the start of comprehensive environmental assessments, even though the project is still at the pre-feasibility stage. (Sean Parnell, The Australian)

As world leaders congregate in Copenhagen for climate-change discussions, one solution to the increasing CO2 concentrations lies right beneath our feet.

Porous rocks thousands of feet underground can securely contain all the CO2 we will produce for hundreds of years. The EPA's move to control CO2 emissions escalates the urgency to use a technique called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). This process removes CO2 from flue gases at power plants, refineries and other emitting sites, then pumps it into deep wells or geological formations for long-term storage.

The process has been working successfully for decades. Without fanfare, CCS has been quietly doing its job at Shady Point power plant in Oklahoma for 19 years. CO2 gets extracted from flue gases and stored in depleting oil wells or sold to soft-drink makers. In West Texas, CO2 has been driving more oil to the surface for over 30 years near towns of 100,000 — with no leaks. In the North Sea, near Copenhagen, CO2 has been injected into a saltwater-filled formation so successfully that scientists say it can store all of Europe's CO2 for over 100 years. ( Gerry Calhoun, The Tennessean)

BRITAIN is at great risk of electricity and gas shortages from the middle of the next decade. Thanks to a toxic combination of technical innocence, political naivety and economic illiteracy, few disagree that this might happen.
And be in no doubt, in today's always-on, connected economy, should those cuts ensue, the impact will be far worse than in the 1970s. The damage to the UK's economy and international reputation would be inestimable.

Yet, from the depths of the wor st recession on record, the next government still has time to re-think, cut wasteful programmes and get back to basics – prioritising investment which puts a public good – energy security – first and affordability second and the environment third. (Yorkshire Post)

The choking soot that coats Linfen is testament to an inconvenient truth behind Beijing's promises to curb its greenhouse gas emissions: cheap and carbon-belching coal remains king in China.

Although they say things are improving, residents of this city in northern Shanxi province live in one of the most polluted places on Earth thanks to China's reliance on coal, a dependence expected to continue for decades. (AFP)

Over the last decade, a handful of the nation’s small energy companies pulled off a coup. Right under the noses of the industry’s biggest players, they discovered huge amounts of natural gas in fields stretching from Texas to Pennsylvania.

One of these companies, XTO Energy, grew almost unnoticed into the nation’s second-largest gas producer, amassing a substantial portfolio of gas fields, and developing expertise in the complex technology needed to extract the gas from beds of a dark rock called shale.

Now, the biggest energy companies are paying attention.

Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas producer, said Monday that it had agreed to buy XTO in an all-stock deal valued at $31 billion, the biggest oil and gas deal in four years.

The purchase allows Exxon to expand in shale gas, an area that has seen tremendous growth, and increase its gas resources by 45 trillion cubic feet, roughly equivalent to two years of domestic demand. The transaction is the company’s biggest since the $81 billion merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999.

The acquisition extends Exxon’s bet that fossil fuels will remain a critical part of the nation’s energy supply for decades. At the same time, Exxon expects the demand for natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned, will rise as the United States looks to pare its global warming emissions and the world seeks greener sources of energy. (NYT)

When Kevin Garnett led the Boston Celtics to the 2008 NBA Championship, his memorable post game interview included him screaming, “Anything is possible!” – A slight rendition of his shoe sponsor Adidas’ motto, “Impossible is nothing.” At Copenhagen where world leaders are gathering to discuss policies to ratchet down the emission of carbon dioxide, the goals of some proponents of a climate treaty are as close to impossible as you can get.

Many global warming activists believe 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the upper limit before we reach climate disaster. For reference, we are currently at 390ppm and we were at 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Bill McKibben, founder of the group 350.org says, “It’s the most important number in the world. It’s the line between habitability on this planet and a really, really desolate future.”

What does it take to reach 350 ppm? In short, a miracle. Energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology ran the numbers and found that for the earth not to surpass 450ppm by the year 2050, 26.5 of the 45 terawatts the world uses would have to come from carbon-free sources (assuming low population and economic growth). What would this< /a>entail? (The Foundry)

Alex Salmond’s opposition to nuclear power could sabotage targets to cut Scotland’s greenhouse gases by half, a report prepared for SNP ministers has suggested. (TDT)

Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg argued in SPIEGEL last week that efforts to halt global warming should be postponed. Fritz Vahrenholt, head of the renewable energy operations at German energy company RWE, disagrees. Never before has there been a better chance for a global climate deal, he says. (Der Spiegel)

FARGO, N.D. — “Energy beets.” That’s what a small group of agribusiness leaders want you to call them.

“Not sugar beets,” emphasizes Maynard Helgaas of West Fargo, N.D.

Helgaas and a small band of like-thinkers want the region to envision that by 2012, a series of five ethanol-producing factories, dotting North Dakota, and making ethanol from a new source — beets — not corn, and not sugar beets that would otherwise be used as food.

Unlike the 100 million-gallon corn ethanol plants that are recent standard size, these ethanol plants would produce 10 million to 20 million gallons of ethanol per year, each associated with 28,000 acres of beets.

The plants would be built in “modules,” so they could be replicated, but would take in beets from a 30-mile radius. Each of the plants would cost about $43 million, including about $10 million in operating funds.

While the economics are preliminary, promoters think its possible to produce from $500 to an $800 an acre in profits from these kinds of plants — at least $335 from the production side, and $114 from the processing, assuming they own part of it.

“All that depends on the price of ethanol,” Helgaas says. “You can see that this would be big — and exciting,” Helgaas says. (Mikkel Pates, Agweek)

Columnist promotes “fear-based science” as a solution to breast cancer and other diseases.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has won well-deserved praise for his heroic efforts to draw attention to genocide and child prostitution in the developing world. Recently, however, he has taken to warning about some “terrifying dangers” closer to home -- the tiny amounts of chemicals in everyday consumer items and their alleged links to a host of diseases.

His most recent column created panic on parent blogs with claims that the rise in cancers and asthma are linked to chemicals in the environment – specifically, kitchen and plastic containers. (Trevor Butterworth, STATS)

MORE women are being diagnosed with lung cancer than breast cancer for the first time as many refuse to give up smoking.

While less women overall are being diagnosed with cancer, experts expect lung cancer will make up 22 per cent of all cancer deaths by 2021.

The figures were released yesterday in the NSW Cancer Institute's Mortality and Incidence Report.

Experts believe more regular breast screenings and less women using hormone replacement therapies has led to a drop in breast cancer deaths.

However, women were finding it harder to give up smoking compared with men, leading experts to predict lung cancer would make up a larger proportion of deaths among women in the next decade.

For the first time there has been a downward trend in women being diagnosed with cancer in Australia - a trend which is mirrored in the US. ( Daily Telegraph)

A new report suggesting that loneliness trebles the odds of developing breast cancer is the latest addition to a long list of recognised risk factors — such as being tall or having one breast bigger than the other — that cause widespread anxiety but do precious little to help in the fight against the disease.

My advice to the millions of British women who are single, separated, divorced or widowed is to take this news with a pinch of salt, not least because the link between loneliness and breast cancer is an overenthusiastic extrapolation of a study on laboratory rats. (Dr Mark Porter, The Times)

In early-December, something terrible happened in the world of the Zhu Zhu pets: Mr. Squiggles, one of four electronic hamsters, was declared unsafe. There was too much antimony in his fur, said Good Guides, a San Francisco-based environmental group that bills itself as "the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home."

Was this a catastrophe for the hottest toy of the holiday season? Was Mr. Squiggles heading back to the great toy recall store in the sky, leaving Num Nums, Chunk and Pipsqueak to gibber plaintively for their missing pal as they zoomed along poop-free trails in homes across the world?

Or was this all just a cheap stunt that would generate massive publicity for another Grinch-like environmental watchdog group dedicated to saving the holidays, one "toxic" toy at a time? After hundreds of news stories warned parents about getting cancer from Mr. Squiggles, it all turned out to be a cheap stunt.

Good Guides has had to issue an embarrassing retraction. The Consumer Product Safety Commission confirmed that Mr. Squiggles was, indeed, safe. (Trevor Butterworth, Forbes)

The widely used herbicide atrazine may be responsible for a host of health problems seen in fresh water fish and amphibians, according to researchers who evaluated a group of published studies that examined the chemical's effects. (EHN)

The signs posted along Michigan's Tittabawassee River warning of dangerous dioxin levels don't really worry fisherman David Mitchell.

If he catches a fish that swims here year round he tosses it back. But if he hooks a walleye -- only an occasional visitor to the river and has lower dioxin levels than the year-rounders -- then it's time for dinner.

"I don't think it's as big a concern as what people are saying it is," said Mitchell, 51, as he sat on a pail on the muddy bank and cast his line out into the water.

"I can remember when the rivers never froze in the winters and now they're freezing over, so the pollution in the rivers has got to be a lot less than it was."

The Tittabawassee may be clean enough to freeze now, but it remains one of the most contaminated waterways in the United States and a key example of the nation's struggle to deal with its industrial past.

President Barack Obama's administration has vowed to take tougher action against polluters and has invested nearly a billion dollars of stimulus funds to spur cleanup efforts.

But the decades-long conflict over this one watershed underscores the complexities of trying to force companies into environmental action.

It also foreshadows the bitter battle the White House will face when it comes to implementing the emissions cuts needed to address climate change -- the focus of talks in Copenhagen to thrash out a deal for the global warming summit there on Dec 17 and 18. (Space Daily)

Sydney - If only worries about climate change were as overblown as the alarm over swine flu. The pandemic H1N1 virus has proved to be not as serious as predicted, Jim Bishop, Australia's chief medical officer, admits. "The fact is that everyone ... with mild illness will get over this very quickly and with a short illness and that will happen whether anti-virals are used or not," he said.

In fact, researchers in Australia argue that swine flu is no more potent than other strains of flu.

"Our findings show that, for hospital patients, the clinical manifestations and severity of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 and seasonal influenza were similar," they said in a study published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

The study, the work of doctors at Liverpool Hospital, the Sydney South West Pathology Service and the University of Western Sydney, tracked 64 admissions at Liverpool Hospital over a six-week period in June and July when the pandemic was peaking in Australia.

Even among children and pregnant women, where the risks had been assessed to be most severe, the researchers were "unable to demonstrate a difference in clinical severity."

Unsurprisingly, two months into a mass inoculation programme the health authorities are fretting over the low take-up rate. The shots are free, but only 5 million doses out of the 21 million stockpiled have gone out to surgeries, clinics and hospitals - and many of these have not been used. (DPA)

WASHINGTON -- With a new theory surfacing that toxic algae rather than asteroids killed the dinosaurs, scientists are still trying to unravel the mystery of what caused a massive algae bloom off the Northwest Coast that left thousands of seabirds dead and may have sickened some surfers and kayakers.

The bloom, which stretches roughly 300 miles from Newport, Ore., north to the Canadian border, still persists, though it's a shadow of its September and October peak.

Whipped by waves and storms, the microscopic phytoplankton, which had turned the ocean a rust color, broke apart, releasing toxins and creating meringue-like foam that coated the feathers of birds like spilled oil. Up to 10,000 birds died of hypothermia in September, and researchers are still trying to come up with a count for October.

Researchers are also checking reports that surfers and kayakers who came in contact with the foam may have suffered cold-like symptoms, including temporary loss of smell and taste. The toxins also may have become aerosolized and affected beachcombers. In another strange twist, pathologists performing necropsies found that some of the birds lacked normal bacteria in their stomachs and other internal organs.

"It's definitely a warning sign of something," said Julia Parrish, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington. "We don't know what." (McClatchy Newspapers)

A provision to allow payment for the healing power of third party prayers has been dropped for now - but it's worth going where journalists feared to tread and ask, what's the scientific evidence for prayer?

The merged health care reform bill (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), now being considered by the Senate, has dispensed with a controversial provision to pay for “religious or spiritual health care,” a move hailed by many concerned about the separation of church and state. Many news organizations noted the possible constitutional issues with a law that mandates that health insurance cover faith-healing expenses as if they were valid medical costs. Some mentioned the possible child abuse that comes from those who chose prayer over standard medical care for their kids. But few, if any, journalists tackled the fundamental scientific problem with the provision: Is there any evidence that intercessory prayer works?

This is perplexing to say the least: Evidence-based medicine has routinely dismissed the benefit of paid third-party prayer; and yet, the media treated the issue as if it were simply a matter of what would pass muster with the Supreme Court.

The spiritual healing provision was, as the Los Angeles Times reported, originally “inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.” (Rebecca Goldin, STATS)

Todd Stepp remembers an unusual call for help his family-owned towing company received more than a decade ago.

An 1,150-pound Tampa woman needed to get to a hospital, but there was no ambulance that could accommodate her.

"She was having cardiac arrest," recalled Stepp, 40, of Stepp's Towing Service.

The Tampa firefighters who responded called Stepp, and a crew removed the exterior wall of the woman's bedroom in her first-floor apartment.

Several men, including paramedics, emergency medical technicians and tow-truck staff, rolled the woman onto four stretchers they had fashioned together using heavy-duty straps.

A tow truck with a boom attached maneuvered and parked sideways as close as it could get to the woman, who was either in her late 30s or early 40s, as far as Stepp can recall.

Then the boom was moved above her and, with the help of cabled winches, she was lifted up and carried outside. Her mattress was moved to the waiting flat-bed truck and she was gently placed on it and strapped down. Paramedics joined her and police escorts surrounded the truck for the 10 mph ride to St. Joseph's Hospital, where she died later that day. (Tampa Bay Online)

(Dec. 14, 2009) — A new study criticizes the nation's food and beverage industry for failing to shift their marketing efforts aimed at children. The report said television advertising continues to contribute to epidemic levels of obesity, despite industry promises of reform. (ScienceDaily)

Adults may stave off weight gain by simply spending less time watching television, according to a new study. Overweight adults who cut television time in half burned more calories as a result. (PhysOrg.com)

YORK — The New York City health department has released a nauseating video in an effort to prevent people from drinking sugary beverages.

The video was posted Monday on YouTube.

A man opens a soda can and pours the liquid into a glass. It's actually a mess of goopy fat.

When he tries to drink it, he ends up with fat globs on his face.

The message: Drinking just one can of soda a day can add up to 10 pounds of weight in a year.

Health Commissioner Thomas Farley says sugary drinks are a large part of the obesity epidemic.

A 2007 health department survey found that more than 2 million New Yorkers drink at least one sugar-sweetened beverage each day. (Associated Press)

With the federal deficit reaching $1.4 trillion and most state budgets deep in the red, policy makers are desperately searching for new sources of revenue that the tapped-out American public might support. They think they’ve found one at the corner store: a tax on carbonated beverages. Charging a few more cents for a soft drink, legislators claim, will not only refresh exhausted state and federal revenues; it will make us thinner.

Several versions of this year’s health care bills included a soda tax to help offset new costs. In a September interview with Men’s Health, President Barack Obama called it ‘‘an idea that we should be exploring” because “our kids drink way too much soda.” The idea had been dropped from the health care legislation at press time but is expected to resurface next year. (Veronique de Rugy, Reason)

The childhood obesity epidemic could be levelling off in affluent homes but rising among those from disadvantaged backgrounds, research suggests.

People who are less well off tend to be wary of health messages telling them what to do - regarding it as "nanny-statism", experts said.

They calculated that obesity levels among children are set to "increase considerably" overall by 2015, echoing trends seen in other research. (Jane Kirby, Press Association)

A widening class gap is likely to be seen in the coming years in childhood obesity, a study suggests.

Previous research has suggested rates in England may be levelling off.

But the University College London team found this was happening most in children aged two to 10 from wealthier backgrounds.

Researchers said obesity rates among the lower classes were likely to be significantly higher by 2015 - for girls the levels may even be double. (BBC News)

Westchester, Ill. – A study in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that being overweight or obese increases the risk for developing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in adolescents but not in younger children.

Results indicate that the risk of OSA among Caucasian adolescents 12 years of age and older increased 3.5 fold with each standard-deviation increase in body mass index (BMI) z-score, while the risk of OSA did not significantly increase with increasing BMI among younger children. According to the authors, the results suggest that the increase in risk among overweight and obese adolescents may result from developmental changes such as reductions in upper airway tone and changes to anatomic structures.

"These results were a little surprising to us initially, as obesity is generally considered to increase the risk of sleep apnea amongst all children," said principal investigator Mark Kohler, PhD, research fellow at the Children's Research Centre at the University of Adelaide in Australia. "Previous results have been inconsistent, however, and appear to be confounded by using mixed ethnic populations and different ages of children." (American Academy of Sleep Medicine)

Every year, Americans are getting heavier; not surprisingly, so are our pets. The latest research indicates that half of all pets are overweight or obese. This closely mirrors the obesity epidemic in the human population.

This may explain why pet owners who were surveyed about pet body types (ideal, overweight, obese) thought their pets were at an ideal weight, even when they were obese. ( Chris Rainey, Sun Herald)

Nitrogen atoms are needed to make many important chemicals from drugs to fertilizers. But getting those atoms into chemicals is challenging, because nitrogen molecules are tough nuts to crack. They consist of two atoms sharing a stubborn triple bond, which chemists can break up only by scorching them with temperatures of up to 500°C. And that results in the simple chemical ammonia, which needs further processing to produce more complicated compounds. Now chemists have bypassed the energy-intensive reaction and devised a new one that splits molecular nitrogen at room temperature and synthesizes a common fertilizer. (ScienceNOW Daily News)

So The Mail is the sole remaining paper actually engaged in journalism? What happened to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian? FOIA2009.zip has been in the wild for almost a month, where are the media?

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts. (Mail on Sunday)

The emails, far from being meaningless or out of context, show alteration of data and attempts to rig the peer review process

True believers in catastrophic man-made climate change have been waiting for Al Gore to lead them through the Valley of Climategate. This week, The Goracle spoke. Appearing on CNN, he claimed that the emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia were more than 10 years old and amounted to a mere discussion of “arcane points.” What this was really about, he said, was an example of “people who don’t want to do anything about the climate crisis taking things out of context and misrepresenting them.” But then what would you expect Mr. Gore to say about his co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize? If they go down, he goes down.

In trying to minimize the importance of “ClimateGate,” Al Gore sounds like the Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

During a CNN interview, Gore downplayed the meaning of the emails at the center of the controversy by saying, “Well, they took a few phrases out of context. These are private e-mails, more than 10 years old, and they've tried to blow it up into something that it's really not."

Like Dorothy’s dog Toto, the posting of emails and documents on the internet from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has pulled back the green curtain on the secret world of leading climate scientists, exposing a disturbing pattern of apparent scientific misconduct.

Most concerning, the scientists involved played a key role in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the body responsible for producing the reports on global warming politicians use to justify mammoth interferences in the free market such as the Kyoto Treaty and cap-and-trade legislation.

These disclosures are a serious blow to Gore and to global warming alarmists at the United Nations and elsewhere.

While it’s easy for Gore to dismiss the significance of “ClimateGate” and continue to skip down the yellow brick road, concerns of scientific fraud in global warming research is an inconvenient truth for the CEOs who have banked on cap-and-trade legislation as a business strategy. (Tom Borelli, Townhall)

It is not enough for climate scientists and environment ministers to go to Copenhagen and tell each other how right they are. They also need to convince the public. National politics – the democratic process – is awfully inconvenient sometimes, but cannot be waved away.

The climate-science establishment – scientists subscribing to the global warming consensus and most governments, judging by words not deeds – understands this. This is why the Copenhagen meeting has a theatrical aspect; it is as much about public relations as about serious efforts to confront global warming.

The experts are intent on stirring up – they would say “educating” – public opinion. From their own point of view, however, they are making a hash of it.

The evidence for the climate consensus, they say, is stronger year by year. But in the US, public confidence in their statements is falling: less than half the electorate now regards man-made global warming as a proven fact. Admittedly, the US is an outlier in this, but few electorates anywhere seem sufficiently convinced to support, when push comes to shove, the policies that many climate scientists are calling for.

I recognise the consensus and believe it justifies, on prudential grounds, a big effort to curb emissions. But the climate-science establishment is making itself an obstacle. ( Clive Crook, Financial Times)

Compare the obfuscation and arrogance of the implicated scientists to the openness and humility of Albert Einstein.

It has become a common defense of global warming alarmists against the Climategate scandal to argue that the emails, leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), show science working — perhaps at its best. Yet a judicious reading of the emails shows that nothing could be farther from the truth. The emails display a disturbing disdain for the scientific method itself.

Specifically, the emails indicate that some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists have abandoned the basic scientific principle of subjecting empirical evidence, and the treatment of that evidence, to external scrutiny, so that findings can be verified and — when necessary — abandoned or revised. (Ian Murray and Roger Abbott, PJM)

Steve McIntyre is at it again. He has a new post up [UPDATE: And this further clarification] that puts the much-discussed little-understood CRU email "trick" into definitive context. The "trick" does not show scientific fraud. It does not show that climate science is a sham. What it does show is a group of scientists at the highest levels of the IPCC stage managing their presentation of climate science for the greatest possible effect via their creation of a graphic showing paleoclimate reconstructions -- the so-called "hockey stick." It also shows the conflict of interest faced by an IPCC lead author with responsibility for placing his own work into broader context.

McIntyre writes:

A team of AP reporters reviews the leaked/stolen CRU emails and come up with a damning indictment of their authors. The AP finds no evidence of fraud or misconduct, and no evidence that the science of climate change is a hoax. But they what they do find is, in their words, "not pretty." Here is an excerpt (emphasis added):

It is these efforts to stage manage climate science that I have argued is the most troubling aspect of the emails. These activist scientists stated that they were interested in the truth, but their actions as revealed by the emails showed a greater interest in truthiness in order to shape a public message and defeat their nefarious opponents. (Roger Pielke Jr)

The Associated Press has published an independent investigation into the scientific implications of the recent emails hacked from East Anglia University in England. In, “AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty”, AP writers Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter, and Malcolm Ritter concluded that “the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.”

But the article misses two very important points and stumbles in its logic. First, regarding the scientific consensus, the reporters conclude: “However, the [email] exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

The emails, as the article admits, reveal that “skeptical” scientists were stonewalled, blacklisted, and repeatedly denied access to data under the FOI. If the views of these scientists had been welcomed as a check and balance on the work of others, if they had been made partners at the table, if they had been given full access to the same data, if their research was published, and if those who opposed their findings had been forced to respond to their conclusions in peer reviewed literature, then the consensus would probably look much different than it does now.

At the very least, the pretense of utter certainty which proponents of the IPCC hypothesis maintain, would have been substantially diminished and they would have been forced to acknowledge that their position was not fully supported by the peer reviewed literature.

It is circular reasoning to appeal to a consensus that was shaped by scientists conspiring to eliminate all opposition. These scientists, though relatively few in number, wielded a disproportionate influence on the scientific community. Moreover, from the private emails it is evident that they were less confident about their own conclusions than they appeared to be in public discourse.

Second, the writers of the AP study are totally oblivious to the implications of the attempt by Phil Jones and others to “hide the decline” in a graph that was later published in the 2001 IPCC report. The decline refers to an unmistakable deviation in proxy temperatures derived from tree ring studies. The cause of the deviation has never been resolved. Tree ring proxies are used to reconstruct temperature data for the last 1000 years (instrumental data did not start until around 1850).

Though actual temperatures were rising after 1960, the tree ring data in one major study, by Keith Briffa, indicated that temperatures were falling precipitously. It is clear from the emails that this deviation in proxy temperatures (the “divergence problem") was not disclosed to the public or policy makers because it would raise questions and uncertainties about the overall reliability of past climate reconstructions.

Historical temperature reconstructions are a crucial plank in the IPCC’s hypothesis which claims that our current warming trend is the result of CO2 emissions. If it can be shown that today’s warming is unprecedented, then it is more likely (though not certain) that CO2 emissions are interfering with nature and skewing temperatures upward.

But over the last 1000 years, average temperature has varied by only one degree according to the reconstructions. The case for today’s extraordinary temperatures rides on only four or five tenths of a degree. The large shaded area in the attached graph (from IPCC TAR), which delineates the margin of error, clearly shows the imprecise nature these reconstructions. Briffa’s reconstruction (green line) was truncated at 1960 to “hide the decline.”

2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (Figure 2.21) comparing different Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions from 1000 A.D. to 2000 A.D. The recent instrumental Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison. Two standard error limits (shaded region) for the smoothed Mann et al. (1999) series are shown. The horizontal zero line denotes the 1961 to 1990 reference period mean temperature. Enlarged here.

Questions raised about the reliability of temperature reconstructions using tree ring data can effectively undermine the claim that our current warming is unprecedented. For example if temperatures in the medieval period were actually closer to the upper portion of the shaded area, as most paleoclimate histories have shown, then there would be no cause for alarm.

The AP investigation was misleading on this particular. The authors tell us that the so-called “hockey stick” reconstruction (shown on the graph) which asserted the 1990s were the hottest years in a millennium, was “upheld as valid” by a National Academy of Sciences study.

But, in fact, there were two studies. The second, conducted by a team of statisticians led by Edward Wegman, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, was highly critical of the hockey-stick reconstruction.

A pre-publication draft version of the same graph showing the deviation in Briffa’s reconstruction after 1960 (yellow line). Overall, Briffa’s reconstruction shows a significant departure from the other series. This was apparently adjusted in the final version. Image courtesty of Steve McIntyre, climateaudit.org. Enlarged here.

The AP article never mentioned this investigation. Nor did it mention that in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment, the hockey stick temperature profile was barely discernable. Temperatures in the middle ages were noticeably elevated over those in the 2001 assessment, though still not as high as the current instrumental record.

Contrary to the conclusions drawn by the AP investigation, there are serious scientific implications surrounding the Climategate emails. Though defenders continue to beat the drums in favor of the scientific consensus, it is becoming clear not only that this consensus was partially manufactured through manipulation, but also that the science it represents does not rise to the level of certainty it has auspiciously claimed.

Over the last couple of years, numerous studies have challenged various aspects of the IPCC’s science, including the dominance of CO2. Natural variability - ocean oscillations, solar cycles, etc. - plays a larger role in climate change than once thought. A spate of recent research has shown that aerosol pollution (e.g., soot, sulfur, nitrogen, dust) and changes in land use changes (e.g., deforestation, agriculture, urbanization) have a greater impact on climate than CO2.

Before we pull the trigger and spend billions of dollars on controlling carbon emissions, we need to consider the entire range of scientific research and reassess our policies in light of these findings. (Icecap)

Bill DiPuccio was a weather forecaster for the U.S. Navy, and a Meteorological/Radiosonde Technician for the National Weather Service. More recently, he served as head of the science department for Orthodox Christian Schools of Northeast Ohio. He continues to write science curriculum, publish articles, and conduct science camps.

The way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis. But it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data. (Fred Pearce, environment360)

AL Gore and the rest of the die-hard climate campaigners are huffing and puffing that nothing in the e-mails and documents that were hacked or leaked from the Climate Research Unit in England have any bearing on what we know about climate change or the political response we should make to deal with it. The entire matter is settled science, don’t you know — nothing to see here, move along. That’s rich, coming from the same people who told us for more than a decade that findings derived from the CRU’s work constituted the “smoking gun” of human-caused climate change. Gore relied heavily on this work in his climatehorror film “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Steven F. Hayward, NYP)

Ever since the UN-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted the view, following the 1992 Rio Summit -- also known as the Earth Summit -- that global warming is caused by the human activity of burning fossil fuel, scientists skeptical of this view have sought to caution governments and the public about the unsettled nature of the science of climate change.

But the voices of skeptics went unheeded as the environmental or "green" agenda-driven science of the IPCC, backed by a host of governments and bought by the media, brought us the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and now the Copenhagen conference with a much more ambitious agenda as a follow-up to the Kyoto treaty.

It is worth recalling that then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore failed to win the approval of the U.S. Senate for the 1997 treaty. Kyoto was rejected by a bipartisan vote of 95-0.

The recent revelations -- now known as Climategate -- of how proponents of man-made global warming fudged and manipulated temperature data at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the U.K. to back the IPCC claim confirms the skepticism of many scientists for more than a decade.

Among scientists voicing concerns over the IPCC claim was Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Dyson's voice was a reminder of Galileo's observation, "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

In a lecture given at the American Physical Society meeting in March 1999, Dyson spoke about the science and politics of climate. He noted, "that the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable."

Dyson explained the models "use fudge-factors rather than physics" and, besides "the general prevalence of fudge-factors," there were other specific defects adding to their unreliability. (Salim Mansur, Toronto Sun)

During the 12-day climate summit underway in Copenhagen, countries are trying to forge consensus on how best to protect the planet from global warming. An international all-star roster of academics is providing critical scientific data as the evidentiary backbone for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which hopes to prod perceived green slackers like Canada into more aggressive environmental reforms.

So why is a retired mining analyst living near Broadview and Danforth Aves. – a squash-playing grandfather who prompted a U.S. congressional hearing by crunching global warming research on his home computer – not invited to the party?

Because Stephen McIntyre is an enemy of climate change believers, a man who, essentially, double-checks the math behind research accepted as green gospel. Though his painstaking "hobby" has exposed flawed data supporting studies like the "hockey stick" graph – it claimed the 1990s was the millennium's hottest decade – he's considered a denier by those who fear the planet is burning up.

But the Toronto native won't stop asking the tough questions. (Toronto Star)

No one identifies any scientific flaws in Phil Jones's work, yet the 'fallen idol' narrative is too alluring for the media to resist ( Myles Allen, The Guardian)

The comprehensive collection of excerpts from the appalling CRU text file. A must read.

One of the most damning pieces of evidence in Climategate (so far) is a text file called HARRY_READ_ME.txt. This file is supposedly written by Ian “Harry” Harris, a researcher at the University of East Anglia’s CRU (Climatic Research Unit). In it he details the trials and tribulations of being tasked with creating a new climate information database from previous publications and databases. According to Harry’s documented struggle, he is confronted with missing, manipulated, and undocumented data that he has to use to try to piece together the newer TS 3.0 database. (Andie Brownlow, PJM)

Inhofe, ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, outlined several reasons for an independent investigation in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is among those who signed the letter.

Speaking at The Heritage Foundation this week, Inhofe said he had no confidence in the United Nations’ conducting an investigation of its own panel. “The U.N. isn’t accountable to anyone,” he argued, highlighting the problem of rooting out possible corruption in the IPCC. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

A band of 28 Republican senators is calling on the United Nations to appoint an independent investigator to probe leaked e-mails they claim raise serious questions about the science behind global warming. (FOXNews.com)

Global concern over climate change is unprecedented. For those working on research in to this topic, even just ten years ago, we would have been amazed to see the level of discussion currently taking place on this issue. How is it that a problem with its roots in scientific understanding can generate responses that are often emotional and at times clearly contradictory?

At the very centre of the climate change debate are a basic set of rules governing the transfer of energy through the atmosphere. For our planet to have a stable temperature, then the energy coming from the Sun must roughly balance that being emitted back out to space. The concern is that the particular form of the outgoing energy interacts with what are called atmospheric “greenhouse gases”. This happens in such a way that if their concentrations increase, higher temperatures are required to achieve the same loss of energy from Earth. The atmosphere naturally has high levels of such gases, and this supports life by preventing extremely low temperatures. But as the activities of humans increase these greenhouse gases, one of which is carbon dioxide, we can expect global temperatures to rise.

Our planet is remarkably complex, and weather patterns are controlled by interactions between the oceans, polar ice sheets, the response of the land surface and atmospheric transfer of water in clouds and rain. In addition, there are what are termed “geo-chemical cycles” at play, for instance where carbon dioxide is cycled through the Earth system. It is known from ice-core records that there are natural cycles in climate. There have been times in the past where, overall, the planet has been both warmer and cooler than at present. Similarly geological records indicate periods that have been both wetter and drier. (Chris Huntingford, The Times)

The following is a guest weblog by Will Alexander [and thanks to Madhav L Khandekar for introducing us to Professor Alexander!]. As I have posted before, I encourage climate scientists with peer-reviewed papers on this subject to present their viewpoints as guest posts on my weblog. Following is his brief biographical sketch: (Climate Science)

The longtime meteorologist and public speaker came out as a climate skeptic and is now getting blackballed. From public schools.

As an independent meteorologist, I do a lot of public speaking about weather and climate. I bring my weather program, called “How the Weather Works,” to elementary and middle schools. Most of the program is about the basics of our atmosphere, and a little bit covers how a forecast is made.

Last year, I started to include a section about global warming — and about how I am a skeptic — towards the end of my program.

At several of the elementary schools, this was actually met with approval. Some teachers approached me at the end of my talk and thanked me for giving the kids a different point of view — since all they hear otherwise is that the future will be a climate calamity.

A school told me I would not be able to return this year because of my global warming comments. When I visited the school last year, I told the students that the polar bears were not drowning and that their numbers have been increasing. I also showed them reasons to believe that nature has changed climate in the past and would likely continue to do so in the future.

One of the students then went home and told the parents. Apparently this did not fit the parents’ understanding of what is going on in the Arctic. I was told the student was upset; I tend to believe it was the parents that were upset. (Art Horn, PJM)

The release of e-mails that suggest climate change data were manipulated is causing a "tree ring circus" that is trying to inflate a scandal to prevent international efforts to reduce global warming, a leading House proponent of climate change legislation said Sunday. (FOXNews.com)

Don't be fooled about climate science. In April, 1994 -- long after scientists had clearly demonstrated the addictive quality and devastating health impacts of cigarette smoking -- seven chief executives of major tobacco companies denied the evidence, swearing under oath that nicotine was not addictive. (Alan I. Leshner, Washington Post)

For a brief moment I had a scintilla of respect for George Monbiot. His abject apology immediately after the Climategate scandal was noble, proper, honest – and fittingly grovelling.

First he implicitly acknowledged that newspaper environment correspondents these days do little more than write PR handouts for the climate fear promotion industry:

Second, he admitted Climategate was a scandal which could “scarcely be more damaging” to the cause of AGW.

Here he is in his latest column, back to his old tricks, accusing anyone who disagrees with him of being a shill in the pay of Big Oil.

In a separate article, he presents us with four case studies of how fossil fuel companies have used their evil petrodollars to corrupt and suborn the debate on “Climate Change”. (And see the difference it has made! That’s why Copenhagen isn’t happening this year; why the world’s governments aren’t still hell bent on spending $45 trillion of our money to combat ManBearPig….)

But who is it that sponsors the Guardian’s Environment pages and eco conferences? Why, only that famous non-fossil-fuel company Shell. (Though I notice their logo no longer appears on top of the Guardian’s eco pages: has the Guardian decided the relationship was just too embarrassing to be, er, sustainable?)

And which company has one of the largest carbon trading desks in London, cashing in on industry currently worth around $120 billion – an industry which could not possibly exist without pan-global governmental CO2 emissions laws ? BP (which stands for British Petroleum)

And how much has Indian steel king Lakshmi Mittal made from carbon credits thanks to Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme? £1 billion.

And which companies were the CRU scientists revealed cosying up to as early as 2000 in the Climategate emails? There’s a clue in this line here: “Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday.”

And how much was Phil Jones, director of the discredited CRU, found to have collected in grants since 1990? £13.7 million ($22.7 million)

And why does this Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild’s bank sound so enthusiastic in this (frankly terrifying) letter about the prospects of the “new world order” (his phrase not mine) which result from globally regulated carbon trading?

Or how about this tiny $7o million donation to the climate change industry from the Rockefeller Foundation?

What about the billions of dollars Al Gore stands to make from his ManBearPig scam?

I could go on. Many of Monbiot’s readers already have below his blog, most of them ridiculing the absurdity and hypocrisy of his position. Here’s one:

I couldn’t agree more. The other day, following our debate, Monbiot gloated that debating me was like “shooting rats in a bucket.” Is that so? Well I’d say that trying to argue with someone who plays as fast and loose with the truth as George Monbiot is like trying to wrestle an electric eel smeared with KY jelly. (James Delingpole, TDT)

The Met Office, Britain's national weather service, "has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science" in the wake of a whistle-blower's revelation of widespread misconduct by climate scientists, London's Times reports:

The concept of scientists--or journalists, or artists--signing a petition is ludicrous. The idea is that they are lending their authority to whatever cause the petition represents--but in fact they are undermining that authority, which is based on the presumption that they think for themselves.

The problem with the petition as a form is also a problem with the Met Office petition's substance. The purpose of the petition is to shore up scientists' authority by vouching for their integrity. But signing a loyalty oath under pressure from the government is itself a corrupt act. Anyone who signs this petition thereby raises doubts about his own integrity. And once again, the question arises: Why should any layman regard global warmism as credible when the "consensus" rests on political machinations, statistical tricks and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses?

To be sure, Joseph McCarthy was right about communism even though the ways he combated it were wrong and counterproductive. But that's all the more reason that honest scientists who view global warmism as credible--if such creatures exist--should rise up against these McCarthyite tactics. (James Taranto, WSJ)

We recently had a story about the UK Met Office putting out a petition amongst scientists (even non-climatologists) to prop up the image of the CRU. Some scientists said they felt “pressured” to sign.

In an extraordinary development a maverick commentator, Clive James, tells it how it is on the media coverage of Global Warming - HERE. The man is so rational! (Number Watch)

There is no evidence of carbon dioxide being a poison, or that it is capable of causing a warming Armageddon. What follows is a summary of the proof — straight from real science, peer-reviewed over the past 232 years by legions of physicists, thanks to Newton’s Principia.

Remember the famous picture of Miss Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blown high? Even at the age of 76, when I see this picture my temperature goes up — followed by the amount of carbon dioxide I exhale. Never the other way ’round. Now, thanks to the study of a series of ice cores, this appears to be an inconvenient truth for the global warming industry.

Al Gore used this ice core data to claim that carbon dioxide made the temperature of the world rise, threatening life on earth, because there was a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the world’s average temperature. Yet the data from the much-celebrated Vostok ice cores paints a very different picture: Up goes the temperature, followed by a rise in carbon dioxide.

More troubles lie ahead for the warmists. Independent researchers have pointed out that crucially important pieces of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) evidence were based on false statistical analysis. For starters, take a look at historical evidence from the last 1,000 years. There was a worldwide Medieval Warm Period — no, not just in Europe — and a few centuries prior to that period it was warm enough for the Romans to produce red wine on the borders of Scotland. (David J. Bellamy, PJM)

“Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.”
“The surface temperature record is being called into question.”
The Hubert Lamb Building, University of East Anglia, UK, where the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is located [photo by ChrisO, reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License]

“Climate change emails row deepens as Mail on Sunday investigation reveals...

“So science was not speaking with one voice on the matter. It only seemed to be, because the media, on the whole, was giving no other story. Then this Climatic Research Unit thing happened, and it was the end of the monologue. The dialogue has begun again.

The scientists are arguing on the matter, which is the proper thing for science to do, because in science the science is never settled.” [Clive...

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

In the high-stakes game of chicken the Obama White House has been playing with Congress over who will regulate the earth's climate, the president's team just motored into a ditch. So much for threats.

The threat the White House has been leveling at Congress is the Environmental Protection Agency's "endangerment finding," which EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson finally issued this week. The finding lays the groundwork for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the entire economy, on the grounds that global warming is hazardous to human health.

From the start, the Obama team has wielded the EPA action as a club, warning Congress that if it did not come up with cap-and-trade legislation the EPA would act on its own—and in a far more blunt fashion than Congress preferred. As one anonymous administration official menaced again this week: "If [Congress doesn't] pass this legislation," the EPA is going to have to "regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."

The thing about threats, though, is that at some point you have to act on them. The EPA has been sitting on its finding for months, much to the agitation of environmental groups that have been upping the pressure for action.

President Obama, having failed to get climate legislation, didn't want to show up to the Copenhagen climate talks with a big, fat nothing. So the EPA pulled the pin. In doing so, it exploded its own threat.

Far from alarm, the feeling sweeping through many quarters of the Democratic Congress is relief. Voters know cap-and-trade is Washington code for painful new energy taxes. With a recession on, the subject has become poisonous in congressional districts. Blue Dogs and swing-state senators watched in alarm as local Democrats in the recent Virginia and New Jersey elections were pounded on the issue, and lost their seats.

But now? Hurrah! It's the administration's problem! No one can say Washington isn't doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency's move gives Congress a further excuse not to act.

"The Obama administration now owns this political hot potato," says one industry source. "If I'm [Nebraska Senator] Ben Nelson or [North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad, why would I ever want to take it back?"

All the more so, in Congress's view, because the EPA "command and control" threat may yet prove hollow. Now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. Green groups pioneered the art of environmental lawsuits. It turns out the business community took careful notes.

Industry groups are gearing up for a legal onslaught; and don't underestimate their prospects. The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in England alone are a gold mine for those who want to challenge the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming.

But the EPA's legal vulnerabilities go beyond that. The agency derives its authority to regulate pollutants from the Clean Air Act. To use that law to regulate greenhouse gases, the EPA has to prove those gases are harmful to human health (thus, the endangerment finding). Put another way, it must provide "science" showing that a slightly warmer earth will cause Americans injury or death. Given that most climate scientists admit that a warmer earth could provide "net benefits" to the West, this is a tall order.

Then there are the rules stemming from the finding. Not wanting to take on the political nightmare of regulating every American lawn mower, the EPA has produced a "tailoring rule" that it says allows it to focus solely on large greenhouse gas emitters. Yet the Clean Air Act—authored by Congress—clearly directs the EPA to also regulate small emitters.

This is where green groups come in. The tailoring rule "invites suits," says Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), who has emerged as a top Senate watchdog of EPA actions. Talk of business litigation aside, Mr. Barrasso sees "most of the lawsuits coming from the environmental groups" who want to force the EPA to regulate everything. The agency is going to get hit from all directions. Even if these outsiders don't win their suits, they have the ability to twist up the regulations for a while.

Bottom line: At least some congressional Democrats view this as breathing room, a further reason to not tackle a killer issue in the run-up to next year's election. Mr. Obama may emerge from Copehagen with some sort of "deal." But his real problem is getting Congress to act, and his EPA move may have just made that job harder.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A19

US President Barack Obama is heading to the Copenhagen climate talks with empty promises on curbing US greenhouse gas emissions that he cannot fulfill, a top lawmaker said Sunday.

"He doesn't have that power to do that. And people in other countries don't realize that," Republican Senator James Inhofe, a leading critic of global warming legislation, told Fox News Sunday.

Inhofe said he wanted to press the message home in the final week of the Copenhagen conference that Obama will not be able to follow through on a pledge to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020 off 2005 levels as he will not get the necessary legislation through Congress.

"That's (the) reason I'm going, to make sure people in these other 191 countries know the president can't do that," Inhofe said. (AFP)

Yesterday, Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) unveiled an outline of their cap-and-trade proposal. Interestingly, their version of a national tax on American energy is hard to distinguish from earlier proposals such as the House-passed Waxman-Markey or the Senate committee-passed Boxer-Kerry.

All of these proposals have one thing in common: they hurt the economy. However, the Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham take great care in their 5-page document to detail the benefits of their proposal, and implicitly suggest why it is superior to each. Let’s debunk the major claims.

Senators Lieberman, Graham, and Kerry have come forward with a bold, new proposal on global warming… or not.

Who will be punished under this re-badged clunker? The Center for Data Analysis estimated that cap-and-trade legislation will cost the economy $7-9 trillion in lost national income and lead to millions of lost jobs (even after credit for any green jobs).

WASHINGTON Two more U.S. Senators jumped into the climate bill debate on Friday, offering a proposal that would cap planet-warming emissions but reduce the role of Wall Street in carbon markets.

Unlike the climate bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year, financial speculators would be shut out of carbon markets created under this legislation, introduced by moderate Senators Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Republican.

Instead of placing carbon limits on most major polluters, the bill would focus only on producers and importers of fossil fuels such as coal mining companies and not power plants and manufacturers.

The companies covered by their legislation would be required to buy permits for their carbon emissions in monthly auctions.

The majority of the revenue from the auctions would be refunded back to consumers to offset higher energy costs, with the remaining 25 percent going to clean energy development.

This market, known as "cap and dividend", would be more streamlined than the House's cap and trade scheme. (Reuters)

On November 10, 2009, Kenneth P. Green was invited to testify before the Senate Committee on Finance about global warming. A summary of his testimony appears below. During the course of his testimony, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) asked Green a number of questions about the science of global warming. His responses are printed here. (Kenneth P. Green, AEI Online)

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe tells Newsmax that the climategate scandal is the “clincher” that kills once and for all the cap-and-trade proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also said Democrats are “flat-out lying” and doing a “great disservice” to the rest of world by claiming Congress will take major steps to curb emissions.

And he predicted that Republicans will take over the Senate in the 2010 elections. ( Jim Meyers, Newsmax)

Forget the dire economic consequences of a Copenhagen climate change treaty for a second and think about the fraud involved.

Take the European Union, for instance, which implemented a carbon trading scheme analogous to a cap and trade system. And it has been fraught with fraud. French officials are investigating a $230 million carbon trading fraud scheme and this is only the tip of the iceberg in what is a startling revelation and huge blow to the climate talks in Copenhagen:

Steel firm Corus could qualify for millions of pounds' worth of Government environmental credits for a plant it is closing with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change yesterday confirmed that Corus's foreign owner, Indian steel giant Tata, was 'likely' to get its £90million allocation of carbon credits, including an allocation for the 150-year-old steel works in Redcar, Teeside, the mothballing of which was announced last week.

The decision prompted fears last night that Tata could profit from the closure by selling on the permits or using them at its other plants.

The credits allow firms to emit a certain level of pollution each year. Though issued for free, they can be sold to other firms. Over time the aim is to cut carbon emissions by issuing fewer credits. (Daily Mail)

What is the connection between Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railway engineer who has been much in evidence at the Copenhagen climate conference, as chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Indian-owned steel company's decision to mothball its giant Teesside steel works next month, ripping the heart out of the town of Redcar by putting 1,700 people out of work?

Nothing of this complex story is likely to be heard in the dreary concrete shed outside Copenhagen where, as temperatures drop towards freezing, 17,000 prime ministers, officials and climate activists are earnestly discussing how the planet is warming up towards extinction. But it certainly sheds a little light on a colossal worldwide racket these delegates are helping to promote, because the end of the story is that we shall all be paying to export thousands of British jobs to new steel plants in India, for no gain in the reduction of worldwide CO2 emissions. (Christopher Booker, TDT)

Faster? Please. Yet another proclamation that global warming is "accelerating, much faster than we anticipated," as activists have been telling us since the late '90s.

Using his best Chuck Schumer imitation, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon jumped in front of some cameras at Copenhagen and assured us that his cause was noble.

He searched his vocabulary for the precise phrase to convey his deepest conviction … and you could see his eyes sparkle when he hit upon the shim-sham-inducing word, accelerating, to describe what was happening to global warming.

Good Lord! I thought to myself. This is bad! If global warming is accelerating, if it is worse than we have predicted — happening three times faster than any scientist ever feared in his worst nightmare — then, by golly, we sure ought to do something!

But as I was jumping up to write a check to the Sierra Club, I remembered. Hadn’t I heard Ban Ki-moon’s phrase somewhere else before?

COPENHAGEN -- As police cracked down on climate protesters, church bells tolled 350 times Sunday to impress on the U.N. global warming conference a number that is gaining a following, but is also awash in contradictions.

Conference negotiators went behind closed doors in talks to pin down an elusive new pact on climate, talks in which the figure 350 looms as a goal for true believers, but one that appears impossible based on progress so far.

It refers to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the highest concentration that some leading scientists say the world can handle without sparking dangerous climate effects.

"It's the most important number in the world," said Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental activist group 350.org. "It's the line between habitability on this planet and a really, really desolate future."

Not everyone buys into that. But an entire environmental group has sprung up around the number, pushing 350 as a goal, sporting it on T-shirts and flags waved by throngs of protesters that marched to the conference center over the weekend. About 100 nations at the U.N. climate summit have signed on to the idea of heading for 350. (AP)

Why doesn’t AP just cut out the middleman and publish the Climategate scientists’ press releases? (Andrew Bolt)

The recently released Copenhagen Diagnosis assessment has been accomplished by 26 scientist, down from 4000 or so that contributed to the Fourth IPCC Report. These 26 have been described to be 'leading scientists', raising the question ‘what are they leading us to’?. (Klimazwiebel)

After the fiasco of this year's 'barbecue summer' prediction, you might have thought the Met Office would have hesitated before making such grand statements again.

Forecasters say it is likely to be the hottest year globally since records began nearly 160 years ago. (David Derbyshire, Daily Mail)

LONDON, 11 December 2009 - The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) today criticised the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UK Met Office for their political intervention in the international negotiations currently taking place in Copenhagen.

The Met Office claims that preliminary temperature data for 2009 show that global temperatures continue to rise and that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed.

According to the Met Office, the final temperature data for 2009 will not be made available until early next year. A spokesperson, however, stated that the preliminary estimates were released by the Met Office in order to influence the negotiations at the Copenhagen Summit.

"We are very concerned that both agencies have overstepped their scientific remits, which are supposed to provide governments with balanced advice and empirical data, and not to lobby politically," Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF said.

The GWPF is also concerned that global temperature data is being misrepresented to give the impression of continuous global warming. In reality, there has been no statistically significant warming trend for the last decade. The GWPF says this is a vital fact that must not be ignored. (GWPF)

Tony Blair turned up in Copenhagen yesterday to preach to world leaders about the dangers of climate change.

In a speech - which the former Prime Minister insists he did for free - he said it would be 'grossly irresponsible' not to sign a deal curbing global emissions of greenhouse gases.

But his appearance will raise suspicions that he is planning to cash in on global warming.

It comes just weeks after he registered the internet name 'Low Carbon Capital Fund' - thought to be a way of making money out of the demand for green technology. ( David Derbyshire, Daily Mail)

WITH its thousands and thousands of delegates, officials, journalists and protesters, the hundreds and hundreds of planes (commercial and private), and the trains and cars and limos required to transport people, food, drink and equipment, the Copenhagen climate summit is on course to create more C02 than would a medium-sized African country. It looks set to deliver little other than pious rhetoric and ambiguous promises, and I'm glad, as I deplore bad decisions and ruinous expenditure based on dodgy science and scaremongering.

To those of you howling 'denier', may I point out that what I am is a sceptic. As I was a sceptic about papal infallibility, imminent epidemics of mad cow or flesh-eating diseases, avian flu and the millennium bug. Or boom and bust being a passe concept.

There are many like me. To the horror of most scientists, politicians, the educational establishment, the media, the liberal elite, green zealots and brainwashed children, a substantial chunk of the population of Ireland, the UK and the US have so far resisted being bullied into becoming blind adherents of this new religion.

Sceptics mostly believe in treating the planet decently, respecting nature, conserving flora and fauna, keeping the population at sustainable levels and developing clean and cheap sources of energy, but we need convincing: a) that the planet is warming up dangerously; b) that if it is, that is mainly the fault of man; and, c) that even if man is guilty, that the currently fashionable ill-thought out and hysterically presented solutions will make matters better. (Irish Independent)

COP15, the global warming summit currently underway and underwater in Copenhagen, was meant to be some combination of a coronation, papal blessing and environmental Woodstock. It isn't turning out that way. Could the scandal involving leaked emails from a UK university be the reason why?

The emails have certainly changed the nature of the discussions around the world. Although we are still seeing pictures of polar bears and ice caps, the dialogue surrounding the pictures is about containing the damage, limiting the repercussions, and (forgive me) hiding the decline in support of actions to fight global warming.

For Al Gore, who canceled his trip to Copenhagen, this must bring a nightmarish sense of deja vu. He was expecting a coronation in his run for the presidency, after being vice president for 8 years of peace and prosperity. A Texas governor who had confessed to a drinking problem must have seemed like a patsy. But then in an instant, it seemed like the media had turned on him, twisting his words to make it seem like he claimed to have invented the Internet, critcising his debate performances, and on and on until he lost. I think he's seeing it again for the battle against global warming.

Support for environmental issues traditionally is wide but not deep. We're all green until governments want some of our green, and then we start thinking differently, and we seize on almost any excuse to do so. In the past few months, the world has started to be informed about the costs of mitigating climate change, and you don't need to say $1 trillion a year too many times for it to be remembered. (Tom Fuller, Examiner)

BRUSSELS, Dec 12 - Some of the world's most polluting companies are receiving financial support from the European taxpayer to promote the continued use of the fuels that cause global warming, according to a new report.

In 2005, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, set up a group known as the Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP) to advise it on the possibility of capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and burying it underground. Dominated by large energy firms, ZEP has secured 1.5 billion euros (2.2 billion dollars) in public subsidies and is busily lobbying for support from policy makers at the international climate change talks now under way in Copenhagen.

Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an organisation which monitors the influence of big business on the EU's institutions, deems it inappropriate that such vast sums are being allocated to carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects when the technology they employ has not yet proven to be environmentally benign.

In a report titled 'Public funds used to lobby for fossil fuels in Copenhagen', CEO notes that the proponents of carbon storage admit that it will not be ready for use before 2020. As a result, it will not help realise the EU's objective of reducing by 20 percent its greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the next decade.

Yet while the technology it is extolling is still in its infancy, ZEP is holding an event in the Danish capital this weekend to urge that carbon storage should be eligible for funding under the United Nations' clean development mechanism. This mechanism allows industrialised countries to invest in low- polluting projects in poorer nations as an alternative to cutting their own emissions of greenhouse gases. (IPS)

CLIMATE talks in Copenhagen still have several days to run, but I'm calling it early. Australia wins. No other nation can possibly match the level of comedy that we've brought to this international save-the-planet chucklefest. ( Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph)

WASHINGTON — President Obama jets off to Copenhagen later this week to try to place an American stamp on a global climate change agreement. He will be trailed by a cloud of diplomats and bureaucrats all proclaiming the progress his administration has made on global warming in its 11 months in office.

What he will not be carrying is the assent of Congress to whatever he commits the United States to do. That’s a problem for a leader who represents the world’s second biggest greenhouse gas polluter, behind China. (John Broder, NYT)

The key decision on preventing catastrophic climate change will be delayed for up to six years if the Copenhagen summit delivers a compromise deal which ignores advice from the UN’s science body.

World leaders will not agree on the emissions cuts recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are likely instead to commit to reviewing them in 2015 or 2016.

The delay will anger developing countries who, scientists say, will face the worst effects of climate change despite having contributed relatively little of the man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A draft text published by the UN says that there should be a review in 2016, which could result in an “update of the long-term global goal for emissions reductions as well as of the adequacy of commitments and actions”.

The Times has learnt that negotiators from developed countries are planning to use the idea of a review to justify failing to agree the 25-40 per cent cut in the 1990 level of emissions by 2020, recommended by the IPCC.

Even the most ambitious provisional offers made by all the countries amount to a reduction of only 18 per cent. (The Times)

TOKYO - Japan threatened on Friday to drop a pledge to cut greenhouse emissions by 25 percent by 2020 if the Kyoto Protocol is extended without setting emission reduction goals for the United States and China. (Reuters)

BEIJING – Despite China's pledges to improve energy efficiency, its carbon emissions could double by 2020 as compared with 2005 levels, surpassing limits seen as key to fighting global warming, experts say.

As officials in Copenhagen discuss how nations can share the global burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are crunching the numbers to determine the future level of emissions by China, the world's top polluter.

Even if China keeps its promise to reduce carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, and if its economy grows by just eight percent, its gas output could still double, they say.

"With eight percent growth, emissions will increase by 74 percent," said Emmanuel Guerin, a climate analyst at France's Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI). (AFP)

COPENHAGEN — They sang each other's praises in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit, but China and the United States traded sharp barbs in a superpower standoff that has helped set the UN talks on edge.

On key issues ranging from how to share out the burden of slashing greenhouse gases, whether such efforts should be independently verified, or if the United States owes developing countries -- including China -- a "climate debt," the world's two largest carbon polluters were at loggerheads.

"The atmosphere seems extremely negative. Every one is taking tough positions, talking to their domestic audiences," said Isabel Hilton, editor of online environmental newsletter China Dialogue.

"Its a big change of tone. Before coming, China made positive noises, even suggesting they were ready to announce a date at which their carbon emissions would peak," she told AFP.

"But here they have been hanging very tough." (AFP)

COPENHAGEN -- Crunch time draws near at the global warming summit.

Hundreds of ministers descend on the Danish capital this weekend, the midway point of the two-week negotiations. Just a few days later, more than 110 world leaders, including President Obama will join them.

Amid the photo-ops and handshakes -- not to mention a dinner with the Danish queen -- the leaders will expect progress in the world's quest for a new global warming agreement. Negotiators scrambled today to deliver.

The cavernous Bella Center, home of the U.N. climate talks, is awash in paper. The chairmen of two key U.N. panels released drafts that could form the basis of a new agreement, condensing 180 pages of dueling proposals into eight. Almost immediately, small island nations countered with their own outline. The Danes are expected to put forward their text tomorrow. China, India, Brazil and South Africa are busy drawing up a new list of must-haves that they call "nonnegotiable."

Some of the old hands at U.N. climate talks say this kind of document flurry is not normally seen until the final hours. (ClimateWire)

The dignified representatives of the world's countries who gathered in Copenhagen enjoy many childish games. But one of the favorite ones was a pissing contest: who can restrict the rise of the global mean temperatures more toughly?

Does Earth on August, 17th, 1773 plus 1.5 °C equal Eta Carinae? Al Gore probably "thinks" it does. Click to zoom in a little bit.

Some primitive tribes from some small Pacific islands - such as Tuvalu and Kiribati - want to improve the previous 2 °C limit proposed by officials from richer countries. They demand that the globe's temperature will never jump more than 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level: Google News.

We didn’t expect much from the first week of the global warming conference in Copenhagen. Countries need to do a little posturing before getting down to the hard work, which is supposed to start on Monday. But the belligerent talk from China seemed to go well beyond the usual positioning.

The best hope is that the talks will produce an interim understanding under which industrialized countries would commit to fairly precise targets for reduced emissions, and others, like China, to broader but measurable goals. The industrial countries would be expected to help poorer countries shift to less-polluting forms of energy.

That would set the stage for a legally binding deal in 2010. But there is no chance of even an interim agreement without the enthusiastic participation of China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. China’s absence would give other developing countries — and the United States Senate — an excuse to do less than needed. (NYT)

The first week of the annual U.N. climate change summit is usually a relatively sedate affair. Sub-ministerial level diplomats (or "sherpas," so called because they do most of the work) quietly exchange drafts of negotiating texts and trial balloons, while a small number of environmental journalists and activists follow the proceedings. It's not until the second week of talks, when ministers, heads of state and protesters show up, that the summit really takes off.

Not so in Copenhagen this year. The 15th Conference of the Parties has been an undeniably major event from the start, from the lavish opening ceremony on Dec. 8, which included a video of children literally begging the assembled delegates to save the world, to the largest organized demonstration of the summit on Saturday, attended by an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 environmentalists, climate activists and other protesters. While largely peaceful, the march was accompanied by smaller, more violent protests that led to several hundred arrests. (Bryan Walsh, Time)

MOSCOW - Russia does not plan to sell its unused Kyoto Protocol emissions rights and instead wants to carry them into a new climate change agreement, a senior Kremlin official said on Friday.

Analysts said Moscow could swamp the market with its own unused quotas, called Assigned Amount Units (AAUs) and theoretically worth billions of dollars, if it decided to attempt to sell them before Kyoto expires in 2012.

"Russia is going to carry the saved quotas in the Kyoto Protocol over to a new agreement," the Russian presidential advisor on climate, Alexander Bedritsky, told a Moscow press briefing.

"As far as I know, there are no plans to sell emission quotas," he said.

Under Kyoto, countries comfortably under their emissions targets can sell the difference in the form of AAUs to other nations.

Russia has an inventory of billions of AAUs due to the collapse of its industry in the 1990's. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN - Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said on Saturday farmers worldwide must be rewarded for fighting global warming, for example using carbon markets which would add to public climate cash.

Vilsack was speaking on the fringes of U.N. climate talks which have traditionally focused only on cutting carbon from power plants and factories rather than from farms or forests. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN -- Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei lashed out today at U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern, calling "extremely irresponsible" his recent pronouncement that no American climate change funding would go to China.

Speaking to reporters at a U.N. climate change conference where nearly 200 countries are trying to negotiate an international emissions agreement, He said he was "shocked" by Stern's comments.

Industrialized countries are expected to deliver billions of dollars through midcentury to help poorer nations avert climate disasters and develop low fossil-fuel economies. The United States and other nations have proposed $10 billion through 2012 but have not made it clear how much they would make available beyond that. Yet even that short-term funding should not go to China -- at least not the U.S. share, Stern said earlier this week.

"I don't envision public funds, certainly not from the United States, going to China," Stern said (Greenwire, Dec. 9). (Greenwire)

COPENHAGEN -- The political script for a big climate-change conference in this Danish city has U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders flying in later this week to christen a new era of global environmental cooperation. In reality, the summit is shaping up as a pivotal economic showdown between the U.S. and China.

The International Energy Agency projects that nearly all the growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions over the next two decades will come from developing countries -- and that fully half of that total will come from China alone. A central point of contention here is whether China, amid all its newfound economic might, still deserves billions of dollars in annual aid from the U.S. and Europe to help it shift to a cleaner pattern of growth. (Jeffrey Ball, WSJ)

Ethiopian PM Meles warns Africa will be watching to see whether funds being pledged by European countries are real, or recycled (VOA News)

The Copenhagen climate change summit is likely to end with two rival texts because the main countries cannot agree on the key question of how to share the burden of cutting emissions to a safe level.

The extent of the disagreement was exposed by the publication yesterday of two draft agreements, neither of which contained clear numbers or language on any of the most contentious issues, despite two years of negotiations before the summit.

The US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has forced negotiators to work on two separate texts and there is now little chance of the twin-track process producing a single document. The negotiators from 193 countries are hoping that the early arrival at the summit of several leaders next Wednesday, including Gordon Brown, will help to break the deadlock. (The Times)

The Financial Times and others report that the EU has promised to pay EUR 2.4 billion per year to the third world. This amount should be repeated thrice, between 2010 and 2012, to give them a total of EUR 7.2 or 7.3 billion.

That is pretty much equal to the amount promised by Obama, USD 10 billion, on behalf of the U.S.

Many people in Africa are using cars efficiently. ;-)

For some of the poor countries, this modest amount could be a welcome contribution to their funds. Except that they will have to waste these funds instantly - for a "fight against climate change". Consequently, the help may actually end up being a negative one because the money is going to be used to suppress their industry.

Gordon Brown has said Britain will pay £1.5 billion to a European Union climate change project despite the British recession and his Government’s huge deficit. (TDT)

Developing countries and aid agencies have derided the latest pledges by richer states to tackle global warming.

EU leaders ended a Brussels summit with a three-year deal to pay 7.2bn euros (£6.5bn; $10.6bn) to help poorer nations cope with climate change.

The EU contribution is part of a global "fast start" package being debated at the UN Copenhagen summit.

But leaders of poorer nations and some aid agencies described the sum offered by the EU as inadequate.

The 7.2bn euros is Europe's contribution to a proposed package of $10bn (7bn euros) a year designed to help Africa, island nations and other vulnerable states cope with climate change from next January until 2012. (BBC News)

Tension between developing and developed countries builds as climate summit enters its fifth day

The chief negotiator for 134 developing nations left the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) yesterday in anger.

Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping from Sudan, the G77 group’s top negotiator, is also accusing Denmark of driving the climate summit into the ground.

‘Things are not going well,’ he said after walking out from an hour-long negotiation. ‘It’s very problematic that there’s a different agenda running alongside the official UN process,’ Di-Aping told Politiken newspaper.

When asked to elaborate on those comments, he said:

’Your prime minister has chosen to protect the rich countries, and that’s not ok,’ referring to Denmark’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

‘If the Copenhagen summit ends in failure, the whole Scandinavian multilateral tradition will be jeopardised. What your prime minister is doing is completely against the spirit of the foreign aid Denmark and the Danish people have given to Africa for so many years,’ said Di-Aping.

The G77 group represents 134 mainly developing countries, including China, Indonesia and Argentina.

COP15 President Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s former climate minister, has refused to comment on the case. (Copenhagen Post)

Saudi Arabia is a major dissident at the global climate conference in Copenhagen, where representatives of more than 190 countries are trying to agree on a new international initiative to combat climate change.

Many environmental groups say the oil-producing giant has long played an obstructionist role in climate change negotiations. Saudi officials fear that reducing emissions will reduce oil exports and be catastrophic for their economy.

For years, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries claimed that scientific evidence that people cause climate change was inconclusive. Then, a few years ago, the Saudis shifted their focus to stall tactics and demanding payments of $100 billion to $200 billion to offset future losses in oil revenue.

After a file of e-mail messages by environmental researchers emerged in late November that appeared to question whether humans influence climate change, Saudi negotiators are back to their original tactic: Deny the science. (NPR)

Dec. 13 -- Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter, will be “pushing hard” for an agreement on climate change at Copenhagen this week, Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said in a statement.

Australia will be hardest and fastest hit by climate change because it is one of the hottest and driest continents, Swan said. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is this week due to attend the conference, which will conclude on Friday. (Bloomberg)

This is a measure of progress. We’re winning. And if any local warmers want to cry about it, they should ask themselves a few questions first, including: Have I had any children since 1990? Have I flown anywhere? Do I own nice televisions and computers that I didn’t own in 1990? How much better is the car I drive? And so on, until the link between emissions and quality of life becomes evident.

UPDATE. Our politicians are also contributing. Fairfax political correspondent Stephanie Peatling reports:

Another eco-success from Canberra! But even worse, according to Peatling, is that our politicians are driving poisonous cars:

Isn’t carbon dioxide meant to be the current gas of fear? Peatling, formerly her paper’s environmental corres pondent, should know. (Tim Blair)

COPENHAGEN - A U.N. climate pact must expand the circle of countries in the fight against warming, Australia said on Saturday, but officials at talks in Denmark have a long way to go to seal the outlines of a global deal.

Australia fears rising temperatures will trigger more intense bushfires and greater extremes of droughts and floods, threatening crops and livelihoods. It says all major greenhouse gas emitters should sign up to legally binding steps to reduce emissions. (Reuters)

Australia has led the charge on proposed land-use rule changes to the new global climate deal.

The changes would open the door to the bonanza of green carbon that could be stored away in the world's rural lands.

UN figures show Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 82 per cent since 1990, largely as a result of bushfires and drought.

An Australian climate change negotiator has reportedly said the country could cut its emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 if it could count land use changes.

But the move is deeply dividing the Copenhagen conference, as Australia - and other big players - have been accused of trying to pull off an accounting rort. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

AUSTRALIA has formally warned the Copenhagen climate summit that negotiations to save the planet are not on track.

There are six days left before world leaders are supposed to seal a deal to tackle climate change.

At the summit's halfway mark, Australia's climate change ambassador Louise Hand has announced that things are not going well.

"Australia is seriously concerned by existing gulfs on those issues essential for a deal," Ms Hand told the summit overnight.

"We are currently not on a path to deliver the environmental outcome we need."

Australia is worried about an official UN draft treaty, which would force rich countries to cut emissions quickly while being more lenient on developing countries like China.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who is in Copenhagen, reiterated that the draft "isn't good enough". ( AAP)

December 7, 1941. “A day which will live in infamy”, according to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How ironic then, that the Copenhagen Convention opened on December 7, 2009, exactly 68 years after that fateful day which led to direct US involvement in World War 2. Let us hope that what results from Copenhagen is nowhere near as catastrophic.

Many reading this article have no doubt heard of the infamous draft treaty that some hoped would be ratified at Copenhagen. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apparently was heavily involved in the drafting of the treaty, yet when asked about it in Parliament he dissembled and in general refused to answer questions relating to it. Rudd was quite happy to sell off portions of Australia’s sovereignty in the hopes of ingratiating himself with the international community, and more particularly the United Nations (tragically, thousands of Australians have sacrificed their lives defending that same sovereignty that Rudd is so comfortable just surrendering). It is well known in Canberra circles that Rudd’s long term goal is Secretary General of the UN; prime minister of Australia is a mere stepping stone. (Dennis Jensen, Quadrant)

Australian company leaders overwhelmingly think a failure of world leaders to reach agreement at the Copenhagen climate summit will not harm business, a new survey shows.

Brushing aside fears that a failure in Copenhagen could ultimately hit companies' bottom lines, the survey shows 60 per cent of 354 business leaders said it would have no impact.

A further 14 per cent of respondents believed it would have a positive impact, with only 25 per cent concerned it would have a negative impact. (AAP)

COPENHAGEN -- The United Nations proposed that rich countries pay to help poor ones curb pollution, while cutting their own emissions by at least 75% and possibly more than 95% by 2050 -- a suggestion that heightened tensions between the U.S. and China over climate change.
Journal Community

It isn't clear that the Copenhagen summit will yield a binding agreement on nations' efforts to combat climate changes. The U.N. document is the first official attempt to outline a substantive agreement from the summit. (WSJ)

AUSTRALIA faces having to make a hefty payout to help developing countries such as China and India cope with climate change in order to clinch a deal in Copenhagen.

Despite Australia facing a domestic Budget deficit of about $50 billion for the coming year, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Sunday Mail from Copenhagen that Australia would have to contribute to so-called climate "abatement" funds if India and China were to come into the climate-change tent.

"There are a range of figures flying around," Senator Wong said. "(British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown has proposed a $100 billion mix of public and private money. We have not indicated a figure but we have indicated we're prepared to do our fair share." (Glen Milne, Sunday Mail)

AUSTRALIAN government officials are living it up in a 127-year-old luxury hotel amid criticism that the Copenhagen climate change conference has become an overpriced talkfest that will do nothing to halt global warming.

A large contingent of Australia's 100-plus delegation, including Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and her offsiders, has set up camp at the $850-a-night Kong Arthur Hotel in the heart of Copenhagen.

A bowl of soup in one of the hotel's restaurants costs $51.

A Sunday Mail investigation has also found more than 100 Australian businesspeople and political lobbyists were treated to a lavish drinking session at the Australian ambassador's residence in Copenhagen on Thursday night.

The revelation comes as climate change campaigners at the conference question the green credentials of those involved. (Sunday Mail)

Police in the Danish capital Copenhagen say 900 protesters have been detained following a huge climate change rally.

The move came after youths threw bricks and smashed windows as more than 30,000 demonstrators marched to demand action at the UN climate change summit.

Similar marches have been held in cities around the world, calling for decisive action on global warming. (BBC News)

COPENHAGEN -- Danish police outnumbered protesters on Sunday, detaining more than 200 people on a second day of demonstrations as environment ministers met for informal talks to advance negotiations on a new pact.

Meanwhile, church bells in Denmark and other countries rang 350 times, a number that refers to what many scientists consider a safe level of carbon dioxide in the air.

Police stopped an unauthorized demonstration headed toward the city's harbor and carried out a security check of some of the participants, Copenhagen police spokesman Flemming Steen Munch said.

The hundreds of demonstrators were outnumbered by police officers in riot gear who surrounded them. Steen Munch said police found bolt-cutters and gas masks when they searched a truck that led the demonstration. At least 200 activists were detained, he said.

A day earlier, police had detained nearly 1,000 activists at the tail end of a 40,000-strong march toward the suburban conference center where the 192-nation U.N. climate conference is being held. (Associated Press)

Christopher Monckton holds a Socratic dialogue on climate data with a Greenpeace supporter. It’s the wanting to believe that is the key in this debate, and also the reason why facts barely count. The disgraceful role of the media in creating this scare is very clear:

This line from the Greenpeace fan, in dismssing Monckton’s data on a lack of recent warming, is a classic:

Against Monckton’s courtesy and data, warmists at Copenhagen from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition offer abuse, heckling, smears and the old sticker-on-the-back trick:

You may wish to inform some of these business where you are taking your business in future. (Andrew Bolt)

COPENHAGEN — Ray Weiss looks at the chanting protesters, harried delegates and the 20,000 other people gathered here for a global warming summit and wonders: What's the fuss all about?

Weiss, a geochemist who studies atmospheric pollution at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, says the numbers at the core of the debate in Copenhagen are flawed.

Specifically, he says the cuts that countries including the USA are proposing in greenhouse gas emissions are difficult to measure and highly susceptible to manipulation by government officials and companies.

"I don't see the point in doing all this if the numbers are so far off," Weiss said, shaking his head as he watched conference attendees hurry by Thursday. "When you hear politicians tell you that they can measure these things, just because they passed a deal in Copenhagen, I think you should take that with a few grains of salt." ( Brian Winter, USA TODAY)

Two Copenhagen climate conferences took place last week. The UN Copenhagen conference was attended by politicians, 16,500 bureaucrats, thousands of journalists, activists and NGOs. Hundreds of limos, over 100 private jets and huge amounts of energy were expended by more than 30,000 attendees. Many of the attendees were ascientific agitators with a political agenda.

Australia’s prime minister had a Copenhagen photo opportunity whistle stop in his dedicated jet and expended more fuel on this trip than the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort does in a year. Your taxes payed for 114 Australian bureaucrats to attend this junket yet some 71 UK delegates attended.

The UK Taxpayers’ Alliance calculated the conference cost as much as the GDP of Malawi. If such funds were used to provide electricity and drinking water to Malawian families, then land clearing, wood and dung burning and disease would decrease. Now, that would have been true environmentalism!

The carbon footprint of these moralising folk, most of whom are self-appointed, is astronomical. Never fear, their great sacrifices are saving the planet. Saving us from wanton energy expenditure, hypocrisy, blackmail and irrationality at Copenhagen would be a good start. (Ian Plimer, Quadrant)

Imagine a "dream" agreement emerging from Copenhagen next week: The U.S. agrees to cut greenhouse emissions 80% by 2050, as President Barack Obama has been promising. The other developed countries promise to cut emissions by 60%. China promises to reduce its CO2 intensity by 70% in 2040. Emerging economies promise that in 2040, when their wealth per capita has grown to half that of the U.S., they will cut emissions by 80% over the following 40 years. And all parties make good on their pledges.

Environmental success, right? Wrong. Even if the goals are all met, emissions will continue rising to nearly four times the current level. Total atmospheric CO2 will rise to near 700 parts per milion by 2080 (the current level is 385), and—if the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models are right—global temperature will rise about six degrees Fahrenheit at mid latitudes.

The reason is that most future carbon emissions will not come from the currently industrialized world, but from the emerging economies, especially China. And China, which currently emits 30% more CO2 per year than the U.S., has not promised to cut actual emissions. It and other developing nations have promised only to cut their carbon "intensity," a technical term meaning emissions per unit of GDP.

China claims it is already cutting CO2 intensity by 4% a year as part of its five-year plan. President Hu Jintao has hinted that at Copenhagen China will offer to continue such reductions. By 2040, that will add up to a 70% reduction in intensity.

Sounds good, but here's the catch: With 10% annual growth in China's economy, a 4% cut in intensity is actually a 6% annual increase in emissions. India and other developing countries have similar CO2 growth. That 6% yearly increase is what is shown in the nearby chart.

True, China's CO2 per capita is only a quarter of the U.S. emissions rate. But warming doesn't come from emissions per capita, it comes from total emissions. (Richard Muller, WSJ)

Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures change

In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But in 1999 it became clear carbon rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003 we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.

AGW replies: There is roughly an 800-year lag. But even if CO2 doesn’t start the warming trend, it amplifies it.

Skeptics say: If CO2 was a major driver, temperatures would rise indefinitely in a “runaway greenhouse effect.” That hasn’t happened in 500 million years, so either a mystery factor stops the runaway greenhouse effect, or CO2 is a minor force. Either way, CO2 is trivial, or the models are missing the dominant driver.

Amplification is speculation; it’s a theory with no evidence that it matters in the real world.

Conclusion:
1. Ice cores don’t prove what caused past warming or cooling. The simplest explanation is that when temperatures rise, more carbon enters the atmosphere (because as oceans warm they release more CO2).
2. Something else is causing the warming.

Al Gore’s movie was made in 2005. His words about the ice cores were, “it’s complicated.” The lag calls everything about cause and effect into question. There is no way any honest investigation could ignore something so central.

The lag in the ice cores is old news to skeptics, but most people in the public still have no idea. This is page 5 of the HTML version of The Skeptics Handbook (the first booklet). I should have posted it long ago. This graph series and data is so compelling. It’s one of the most basic features of climate science evidence, and yet it is so misused. Even tonight, I did a radio interview for NewstalkZB, New Zealand, and the pro-climate scare spokesman still referred to both the fraudulent Hockey Stick Graph and the Vostok Ice Cores as if they helped his case.

Between 1999 and 2003 a series of peer reviewed papers in the highest journals came out showing that carbon rises hundreds of years after temperature, and not before. What amazes me is that fully 6 years after Caillon et al in 2003 published their definitive paper, people still think the ice cores are evidence supporting the scare campaign. “The climate is the most important problem we face”, yet somehow not a single government department, popular science magazine or education department thought it was worth doing a close up of the graph and explaining that there was a definitive, uncontested long lag to the general public and that carbon always followed temperature?

The Al Gore style version (of which there are hundreds online, see below) hides the lag by compressing 420,000 years into one picture. If the public had known that temperatures lead carbon, Al Gore would not have been able to get away with using it they way he did.
Graph: Vostok - all 420,000 years of temperature and carbon in one graph.

Graph: Vostok - all 420,000 years of temperature and carbon in one graph.

In 2008 I marvelled that with billions of dollars available to agencies and education campaigns, no one had graphed the lag as a close up. Why did it take an unfunded science communicator to get the data and graph it “as a hobby project”? I wanted to see that long lag, I wanted to be able to point at a graph and explain the lag to all the people who have no idea.

If you want to explore the thousands of years of those famous ice cores, the Vostok page has the full set of graphs, and this page right here is the place to comment and ask questions.

Petit et al 1999 — as the world cools into an ice age, the delay is several thousand years.

Fischer et al 1999 — described a lag of 600 ±400 years as the world warms.

Monnin et al 2001 — Dome Concordia – found a delay on warming from the recent ice age 800 ± 600 years

Mudelsee 2001 — over the full 420,000 year Vostok history, Co2 lags by 1,300 ± 1000 years.

Caillon et al 2003 — analysed the Vostok data and found a lag of 800 ± 200 years (Jo Nova)

TWO Copenhagen climate conferences took place this week.

The UN Copenhagen conference is attended by politicians, 16,500 bureaucrats, thousands of journalists, activists and non-government organisations. Hundreds of limos, more than 100 private jets and huge amounts of energy were expended by more than 30,000 attendees.

The UK Taxpayers Alliance calculated the conference cost as much as the GDP of Malawi. If such funds were used to provide electricity and drinking water to Malawian families, then land clearing, wood and dung burning and disease would decrease.

The carbon footprint of these moralising folk, most of whom are self-appointed, is astronomical. Never fear, their great sacrifices are saving the planet. Saving us from wanton energy expenditure, hypocrisy, blackmail and irrationality at Copenhagen would be a good start. (Ian Plimer, SMH)

The Copenhagen climate talks are neglecting a food crisis, which requires measures that can both curb climate change and boost food production, the head of the UN's food agency has said.

"We would like to see greater conscience of the importance [of agriculture]," Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told Reuters this week at the Copenhagen climate talks.

"Historically the discussion centred on the industrial aspects of climate change, be it in terms of factories or transport, but less on the primary sector of agriculture." (EurActiv)

Coca-Cola and Unilever have warned that their profits could halve over the next decade unless they reduce their emissions, as business leaders in Copenhagen called for a global fixed price on carbon dioxide. (TDT)

Western carbon dioxide emissions increase plant yields in the Third World. So why are they asking for reparations?

At Copenhagen, Third World countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations from the West for the consequences of the West’s fossil fuel burning, among them droughts and crop failures.

Third World countries have it backwards. The West’s CO2 emissions have been increasing crop yields while helping to ease the Third World’s water shortages. Rather than plead for reparations, Third World governments should offer a paean to Providence.

The bureaucrats at Copenhagen dread high CO2 levels. The biosphere craves them. Plants evolved when CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at a healthy 1000 parts per million, two-to-three times today’s paltry level of about 380 parts per million.

(Dec. 10, 2009) — How do plant ecosystems react to rising concentrations of the greenhouse gas CO₂ in the atmosphere over the long term? This fundamental question is becoming increasingly pressing in light of global climate change. Researchers from the Chair of Grassland Science at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have now -- for the first time worldwide -- taken up this issue for grasslands. The scientists found their answers in two unlikely places: in horns of Alpine ibex from Switzerland and in 150-year-old hay from England.

...

The result: In both locations the intrinsic water-use efficiency of the grassland vegetation rose over the years. This implies that the plants improved their water storage potential as temperatures rose and the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere increased. Based on these results the TUM scientists have now, for the first time ever, managed to demonstrate the long-term effects of anthropogenic climate change on the water-use efficiency of grasslands. (ScienceDaily)

(Dec. 10, 2009) — Disagreement over what constitutes a forest could undermine an agreement to protect forests, which is expected to be one of the bright spots at the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen, according to an analysis by the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins. (ScienceDaily)

Leading scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winner, have rounded on studies used by climate sceptics to show that global warming is a natural phenomenon connected with sunspots, rather than the result of the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.

The researchers – all experts in climate or solar science – have told The Independent that the scientific evidence continually cited by sceptics to promote the idea of sunspots being the cause of global warming is deeply flawed.

Studies published in 1991 and 1998 claimed to establish a link between global temperatures and solar activity – sunspots – and continue to be cited by climate sceptics, including those who attended an "alternative" climate conference in Copenhagen last week.

However, problems with the data used to establish the correlation have been identified by other experts and the flaws are now widely accepted by the scientific community, even though the studies continue to be used to support the idea that global warming is "natural". (The Independent)

There is a remarkable admission in the leaked e-mails from Phil Jones of the dependence of the long term surface temperatures trends in the ERA-40 reanalysis on the surface temperature data from CRU.

This is a very important issue as ERA-40 is used as one metric to assess multi-decadal global surface temperature trends, and has been claimed as an independent assessment tool from the surface temperature data. The report ECMWF Newsletter No. 115 – Spring 2008 overviews the role of ERA-40 in climate change studies. (Climate Science)

This article is much longer than the Spectator’s and contains all the evidence one should need to establish that there was a scientific consensus on global cooling in the period 1972-1975. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

London, Dec 10: Researchers believe that a newly detected 19th-century volcanic eruption may solve the mystery of the ‘cool decade in the early 1800s’.

Scientists have long blamed the 1815 eruption of an Indonesian volcano, Tambora, for a worldwide cold snap the following year, the so-called year without a summer, but the entire decade from 1810 to 1819 was about 0.5 degree Celsius cooler than normal, making the dip in temperatures prior to Tambora a mystery.

A recent analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica reveal that in 1809, a volcano somewhere in the tropics erupted, which was responsible for it.

Scientists found high concentrations of sulfuric acid ice cores dating to 1809 and 1810, which forms when eruptions spew sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.

“That reduces the amount of energy that actually comes into the Earth’s and that helps to cool the planet,” National Geographic News quoted Jihong Cole-Dai, an environmental chemist at the South Dakota State University in Brookings, as saying.

Scientists have always been suggesting that injecting sulfur into the lower atmosphere would be a potent measure to combat global warming.

“That geo-engineering idea is based on how we understand volcanic eruptions cool the Earth,” Cole-Dai said. (ANI)

Natural scientist Peter Taylor is afraid we are not preparing for a global cool-down that could be part of a long-term cycle

In his provocative book Chill, he warns that the world is cooling not warming and that solutions proposed at Copenhagen ignore the risks of a possible return of the Ice Age...

Like a magician who fools themselves but not audience, the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) lobby have identified the wrong problem and the wrong solution.

Global cooling threatens disaster for humanity in the developed and developing world alike, yet the media and the scientific consensus ignores this peril.

The Climategate controversy revolves around whether warming has been real and why it has not persisted – but it misses the point.

Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming.

The AGW brigade have mistaken the current warm period for a trend caused by carbon emissions. But the detailed science says it could be natural and part of a cycle.

Behind the scenes at the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is no consensus – the dissenting views have been covered over in the summary documents for policy makers – and among UK and EU politicians it’s even worse, and criminally expensive for the British taxpayer. (Daily Mail)

In the December 9th New York Times, columnist Tom Friedman tells his readers that the precautionary principle demands that the world take aggressive action to curb the risks of damaging climate change, even if the likelihood of it is only one percent. To support his claim, he writes: “The evidence that our planet, since the Industrial Revolution, has been on a broad warming trend outside the normal variation patterns - with periodic micro-cooling phases - has been documented by a variety of independent research centers.”

Question: Does Tom Friedman know that the ocean-atmosphere system has been cooling since the Holocene Optimum?

Very few, if any, scientists contend that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution sparked a nearly instantaneous rise in temperatures. The rise in temperatures that most of the CRU scientists and most mainstream scientists consider to be non-normal is the one that began in 1975 and ended in 1998.

This is an important point, because although we did in fact start warming in approximately the year 1800, meaningful rises in CO2 would not occur for nearly a century and a half. Why did we begin warming in 1800? One answer is that it was time for the pendulum to swing back toward warm after the 550-year period known as the Little Ice Age. Internal dynamics and possibly solar variability likely brought our ocean-atmosphere system both into and out of the LIA. (Via Icecap)

In today's Denver Post Vincent Carroll discusses how my work has been received among the activist scientists associated with the clique of the CRU emails. Carroll does a very nice job in accurately presenting my views. Here is how it starts:

Read the whole thing here, and feel free to come back to discuss or ask questions. (Roger Pielke Jr)

Dear global warming fanatics,

Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever.

I know this is difficult for you to accept. Things seemed to be going well. You’ve got the cap-and-trade bill lurking over the United States, ready to shatter an already weakened economy plagued with unemployment problems, and effectively end America’s role as a dominant industrial power. Your beliefs have been instituted in public schools as the official state religion, whose rituals and incantations are forced upon millions of school children. The wealthy royalty of popular culture is pleased to produce an endless string of movies, music, and television programming to market your beliefs. Your critics were marginalized to the point where the presidential candidate from the 2000 Democrat ticket felt comfortable referring to them as Nazis.

I can see how losing all of this cultural and political power in a few short weeks would be stunning. I hope the shock has dissipated enough for you to understand where we are now, and where we are going from here. (Doctor Zero, Hot Air)

14 Dec 2009: Monetary policy committee needs a green advocate, says former chief scientific adviser (The Guardian)

Clive Hamilton, (failed Greens candidate and “intellectual” Australian) couldn’t persuade skeptical adults he’s right about carbon pollution, so instead of improving his arguments, he’s trying the same lines out on our kids.

Clive Hamilton has written to your kids. If you’re like me, almost everything he said about you was a lie. How do you answer your children if they say “you are paid a lot of money to try to stop laws about pollution and what you do will kill poor kids?”

After you explain the truth, and point out that this man, a/ wouldn’t know, and b/ has an interest in promoting the fake scare, it might be time to give them a skill for life. The most dangerous people in the world are the ones who pretend to have good intentions, and there’s a way to tell the fake heroes from the real ones.

Fakes don’t like debates, open discussions or other opinions, they don’t want their ideas exposed to the light of polite conversation, or the plasma arc glare of real evidence. To keep everyone in darkness, fake heroes throw names instead of talking politely. They try to intimidate people who disagree to keep them from speaking. Sometimes they even tell lies. (And they tell themselves it’s OK, because the ends justifies the means…)

Hamilton does all he can to pull the plug on the shining lights. He wants eminent physicists like Will Happer, censored. Happer is a Princeton University professor of physics and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy. But Hamilton calls Happer a “Denier” and says his words “are dangerous“. Just because Happer has excellent credentials doesn’t mean he’s right, but Hamilton does not even think he deserves to be heard.

Ponder what Happers grown up children, (or Bob Carter’s, Ian Plimer’s, or Bill Kininmonths) might think of Hamilton’s advice about how their dad is “spoiling things for them and the other kids at school.”

If Hamilton really wanted to save the environment he’d want to see all the studies on how the suns magnetic field might affect clouds and rainfall, and find out what astrophysicists are saying, or how there have been hundreds of examples where carbon rose, but temperatures fell or visa versa over decades and centuries and even millenia. Only by getting better information could he help the worlds poor, or the worlds polar bears. There’s no danger of that happening. (Jo Nova)

More than 250 million people risk losing their livelihoods because of dying tropical coral reefs in what a senior U.N. environmental economist said on Saturday was part of a double climate crisis facing the world.

"We forget that there are two emissions problems. The one that everyone is aware of and is doing something about is climate change," said Pavan Sukhdev of the U.N. Environment Programme on the sidelines of the world's largest climate talks.

"The second emissions problem is the emergency around coral reefs," he said.

"More than 250 million people are at risk seriously of their lifeblood going away because of the lack of fish on tropical coral reefs," he told reporters in Copenhagen. (Reuters)

Goldacre’s sulphites example is very poorly chosen, and for a professional sceptic, he appears remarkably willing to defer uncritically to zombie lists of zombie arguments. Moreover, if zombie arguments are what bothers him, what about those deployed by the living dead of the climate orthodoxy? Here are some of the claims repeated ad nauseam by and in support of the climate change orthodoxy, along with our responses: (Climate Resistance)

One of the favorite buzzwords of alarmists is “unprecedented” when talking about present day warming. Yah, the Earth’s never, ever, been hotter, the “hockey stick” proves it, it’s unprecedented, and its all your fault!

Well, we’ve known it’s unsubstantiated spin for quite a long time. NOAA apparently has too, because the data presented in this video is in fact from NOAA and is from the year 2000 on their website. But you don’t see it publicized much. Why? Well, because it totally destroys claims of “unprecedented warming” in our present day.

WUWT reader “docattheautopsy” produced a YouTube video for us for distribution for which I’m grateful and you can see below. I’ve also produced an animated GIF which is done somewhat like a video, since not all blogs and websites can support video. Here is the low-res version at 480 pixels wide. As you go back in time, our “unprecendented” temperatures of the present day don’t seem quite so large, when put in perspective of geologic time.

Low res version - click for hi-definition version (0.9MB)

GORAKHPUR, India – As world leaders and top scientists in Copenhagen debate how to deal with climate change, farmers a world away in flood-prone areas of northern India are taking it into their own hands to adapt to shifts in the weather.

For decades, inhabitants of Uttar Pradesh state have been witnessing erratic weather, including increasingly intense rainfall over short periods of time.

The rain, combined with heavy mountain runoff from nearby Nepal, which is also seeing heavier-than-usual rains, has inundated villages, towns and cities in the region.

The flooding often results in thousands of people being displaced, homes damaged and possessions destroyed. It has also brought major livestock and crop losses for many of India's poorest farmers.

But farmers in Manoharchak village, on the banks of the Rohini river, are outsmarting nature and using simple but effective techniques to deal with negative impacts of climate change.

"For the last three years, we have been trying to change our ways to cope with the changing weather," said Hooblal Chauhan, a farmer whose efforts to adapt have included diversifying his farm production from traditional wheat and rice to incorporate a wide variety of vegetables. (Reuters AlertNet)

As climate negotiators meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, many scientists say that farmers around the world will have to adjust to more extreme temperatures, droughts and floods as a result of global warming. But in the United States, the nation's largest farmers' organization, the American Farm Bureau Federation, opposes any strong actions to counter climate change, either in Copenhagen or in the U.S. Congress. (VOA News)

I decided to make my invited presentation on estimating cloud feedbacks from satellite measurements available here in Pdf form: Spencer-Forcing-Feedback-AGU-09-San-Francisco. While it is a draft version, I doubt that the final version will be significantly different. There will be a UAH press release on the day of presentation, December 16. (Roy W. Spencer)

I’ve been following this issue a few days and looking at a number of stations and had planned to make a detailed post about my findings, but WUWT commenter Steven Douglas posted in comments about this curious change in GISS data recently, and it got picked up by Kate at SDA, which necessitated me commenting on it now. This goes back to the beginning days of surfacestations.org in June 2007 and the second station I surveyed.

Now look at the graph in a blink comparator showing Orland GISS data plotted in June 2007 and today: (WUWT)

The hits just keep on coming. About the same time that Willis Eschenbach revealed “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero,” The UK’s Met Office released a “subset” of the HadCRUT3 data set used to monitor global temperatures. I grabbed a copy of “the subset” and then began looking for a location near me (I live in central Arkansas) that had a long and generally complete station record that I could compare to a “homogenized” set of data for the same station from the GISTemp data set. I quickly, and more or less randomly, decided to take a closer look at the data for Nashville, TN. In the HadCRUT3 subset, this is “72730” in the folder “72.” A direct link to the homogenized GISTemp data used is here. After transforming the row data to column data (see the end of the post for a “bleg” about this), the first thing I did was plot the differences between the two series:

The GISTemp homogeneity adjustment looks a little hockey-stickish, and induces an upward trend by reducing older historical temperatures more than recent historical temperatures. This has the effect of turning what is a negative trend in the HadCRUT3 data into a positive trend in the GISTemp version:

How reliable is any of the weather data used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to claim we warmed until 2001?

We’ve seen bizarre adjustments made to raw data to create warming trends in Darwin and Orland, for instance. Now Anthony Watts discovers that the one station used by a supplier of IPCC data to measure warming in the Antarctic is sited not just in the small part of the continent that’s warming, but in a settlement that’s boomed with new sources of “urban"-type heat, from an air strip and a hanger to a cluster of toasty new buildings. Here is that place, the Rothera research centre:

The world's poorest continent is the least responsible for global warming. It is also the most vulnerable to its effects (Globe and Mail)

In the first part of this series it was established that between 1995 and 2009 no statistically significant climate change--neither warming nor cooling--occurred in any of the ten most populated cities in the United States. The following represents the second part of this
continuing series—an analysis of the continent of Africa.

As established in the correlation study below, between 1995 and 2009, no statistically significant climate change occurred in any region of the continent of Africa: (1) Algiers, Algeria (North); Capetown, South Africa (South); Dakar, Senegal (East); or Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (West). (Associated Content)

In the first and second parts of this series it was established that between 1995 and 2009 no statistically significant climate change--neither warming nor cooling--occurred in the United States or in any region of Africa. The following represents
the third part of this continuing series—an analysis of Australia.

As established in the correlation study below, between 1995 and 2009, no statistically significant climate change occurred in Australia. Average daily temperatures in Perth and Sydney served as the supporting data for this study. (Associated Content)

In the first three parts of this series it was established that no statistically significant climate change--neither warming nor cooling--occurred between 1995 and 2009 in the United States, any region of Africa, or Australia.

The following represents the fourth part of this continuing series—an analysis of Asia.

As established in the correlation study below, no statistically significant climate change occurred in Asia between 1995 and 2009. Average daily temperatures in Almaty, Beijing, Mumbai and Tokyo served as the supporting data for this study. (Associated Content)

Ocean acidification is an "underwater time-bomb" that threatens fish stocks, marine life and coastal communities around the world, a Natural England report has warned. (TDT)

COPENHAGEN, Dec 10 - So what do we do if COP15 does not bring adequate emission reduction targets or if the targets are not implemented by countries? What if we are faced with an ecological crisis in the next 15-20 years?

In that case, we need to be prepared for climate geoengineering, say scientists meeting on the sides of the fourth day of negotiations at the Dec. 7-18 15th Conference of Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

”Do we need geoengineering?” asked oceanographer John Shepard from Southampton University, one of the authors of the report ”Geoengineering the Climate. Science, Governance and Uncertainty” published by the UK Royal Society in November this year.

”It depends on COP15,” was his answer. ”If we cannot reduce emissions as fast and as much as needed, what else can we do?” (IPS)

The other day I attended a preview screening of "The Road," the new film of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic 2006 novel of the same name.

It made for harrowing viewing, imagining a wasteland Earth from which, following an unspecified cataclysm, almost all life had disappeared. In that devastated environment, humans faced a terrible choice: Starve, or eat each other. It was a fun evening out.

There is clearly a morbid public appetite for destruction on the silver screen at the moment.

"The Road" has none of the computer-graphic, end-of-the-world porn of movies such as "2012" or "The Day After Tomorrow" — but it is far more affecting. The director, John Hillcoat, is on record saying that the themes in "The Road" resonate deeply in this "fearful age." He was referring, of course, not only to fears of global terrorism, but of climate change and mass extinction.

Whether we fear global warming enough to change our ways, however, is another matter — just as it is whether or not the current crop of disaster movies will have an effect on our behavior.

But "The Road" set me thinking about how humans might evolve in a climate-changed future. And a clue can be found from an ecological disaster in the distant past. (Rowan Hooper, Japan Times)

An army of chief executives attending the international climate talks in Copenhagen urge government officials to curb emissions and unleash a new wave of so-called clean energy investment. (LA Times)

Attacking the energy industry is bad news for all of Canada, but especially Alberta and Saskatchewn

As climate change delegates amass in Copenhagen to forge a new treaty, governments are going out of their way to ignore the elephant herd in the room – tainted scientific results, growth-killing targets to curb greenhouse gases and massive transfers to developing economies. Eventually, people will realize that climate change policy is complex, difficult to analyze and based on suspect model forecasts.

Is effective human action to bring down temperatures doable at relatively low-cost? Last month, TD Economics sponsored a study by the Pembina Institute and David Suzuki Foundation, sparking a debate on the economic costs of climate change policies.

Brisbane is a long way from Copenhagen, and not only in distance. As a cast of thousands generate hot air at the UN conference in the Danish capital, electricity suppliers in the Queensland capital are contemplating plans for coping with another five years of sweltering summers.

Queensland is not bad as a microcosm of the real world for many countries with substantial fossil-fuelled power systems.

Coal provides well north of 80 per cent of Queensland electricity production, most of it flowing in to the south-east corner – where the outlook is for a 70 per cent increase in peak demand in the next decade and for a substantial increase in end-user prices well before any carbon charges are taken in to account.

More than a thousand pages of determinations and reports about just Queensland’s electricity distribution challenges are now up on the website of the Australian Energy Regulator ahead of a mid-January final decision on the capex and opex outlays to be permitted the state government-owned Energex (which supplies the south-east) and Ergon Energy (the rest of the sprawling State).

State Energy Minister Stephen Robertson, on the front line at the end of November when the AER draft determination, and the hefty rise in network charges for consumers that flows from it, became public, sought to fend off journalists and consumer groups by reminding them that the south-east’s population increased by a third in 12 years to 2009 and while the peak power demand went up 99 per cent. “Nobody likes to see prices rise,” he bleated, while trying to send a subliminal message that the sweaty Queenslanders had brought this on themselves so they should just suck it up.

In the past decade use of household cooling in the south-east has risen from under 25 per cent to 70 per cent, and almost a third of these homes have two or more air-conditioners. To this can be added the demand of flat-screen TVs and personal computers – as well as all the commercial business power consumption that follows the swelling population. (Keith Orchison, Business Spectator)

Consultants recommended lowering night-time noise limits because the sounds made by spinning blades were enough to disrupt sleep patterns.

However, the advice, contained in a draft version of their 2006 report, was removed from the final submission which was eventually used in official guidance for local authorities ruling on planning applications from wind farm developers.

It means that hundreds of turbines at wind farms in Britain built since 2006 have been allowed to continue generating high levels of noise.

Evidence of the changed advice was uncovered after a two-year battle using the Freedom of Information Act by campaigners opposed to a wind turbine development close to their home at in mid-Devon.

One of those campaigners, Mike Hulme, said: “This proves what we have been saying all along, that the noise guidelines should be reviewed. They haven’t changed substantially since 1997, in which time the design of turbines has changed and the number of wind farms has increased. (TDT)

The mainland earns billions in carbon-offset sales. But by taking credit for projects that would have been built anyway, it may not be playing by the rules (Business Week)

As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to talk about cutting carbon dioxide emissions, much of the focus is on placating China, because without significant action by the Chinese, the entire effort is a farce. Thus, many leaders have agreed to subsidize China’s alternative energy industry and the Chinese are all too willing to play along. And nothing reveals how China has been gaming the system than the wind sector. [Read More] (Michael Economides and Xina Xie, Energy Tribune)

The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.

The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration’s first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers.

But on Friday, the Energy Department said that AltaRock had given notice this week that “it will not be continuing work at the Geysers” as part of the agency’s geothermal development program.

The project’s apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration’s geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth’s bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source. (NYT)

CHICAGO - The United States needs to establish a permanent group that advises the government on vaccine safety and spend more money to address safety concerns about vaccines, the Institute of Medicine said on Friday.

The institute, one of the National Academies of Sciences that advises U.S. policymakers, called for a stronger, more focused national vaccine strategy that sets the nation's vaccine research agenda.

"While the immunization system has functioned well through the years, we may have missed opportunities," Claire Broome of Emory University, Atlanta, who chaired the committee that wrote the report, said in a statement.

The committee reviewed a draft of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' National Vaccine Plan, which sets the national agenda for protecting Americans from vaccine-preventable illness.

"Because vaccines and immunization constitute a major public health matter that involves multiple government agencies and has great importance to the public's health, an effective coordinating entity is needed," the committee said in the report.

They said the National Vaccine Program Office at HHS, which has taken a lead in ensuring the safety of the H1N1 swine flu vaccine, could serve this purpose, but it currently lacks adequate authority and influence. (Reuters)

BEIJING - China's vaccination campaign against the H1N1 flu strain is not proceeding as fast as it should be partly because people are needlessly worried about the safety of the vaccine, officials said on Friday.

Some 125 people in China have died of swine flu, but the country began a mass vaccination programme in September and has inoculated more than 32 million people to date.

That campaign, however, seems to be floundering just as the country heads into winter and ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in February, when millions of people travel back to their home towns - potentially taking flu with them. (Reuters)

A schoolboy has been suspended for 'crisp dealing' at a school which has banned fatty drinks and snacks.

In sign of pupil disgruntlement over school meal reforms spearheaded by TV chef Jamie Oliver, 12-year-old Joel Bradley was caught allegedly selling a packet of Discos at a marked-up price of 50p.

He was suspended from Liverpool's Cardinal Heenan High School because it was the second time he had been caught.

His father, Joe, said the boy had been 'victimised' for an enterprise which could earn him as much as £15 a day.

'I think the school has made a beeline for him because of what I've done,' he told the Liverpool Echo.

Mr Bradley, from Liverpool's Norris Green district, admitted he too had once been caught selling canned drinks, chocolate bars and crisps from a van outside the school - saying he was filling a void left by the closure of a local shop.

But headmaster Dave Forshaw said parents and pupils must abide by the school rules or go elsewhere.

'We are a healthy school and proud of it,' he said.

'If parents are not happy then they are perfectly free to take their children to a school that allows pupils to sell these things and allows a father to sell them outside on the pavement.'

Mr Forshaw said pupils were caught around 'three or four times a week' selling snacks at the school.

'We have six to seven regular sellers we pinpoint', he said. (Daily Mail)

NEW YORK - People who want to maintain a healthy weight over time shouldn't obsess about their fat intake, new research shows.

The percentage of calories that a person got from fat, as opposed to protein or carbohydrates, had nothing to do with how much weight they gained in the coming years, the research team found.

The kinds of fat they ate didn't matter either, Dr. Nita Forouhi of the Institute of Metabolic Science, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, UK and her colleagues found.

The findings, Forouhi noted in an email to Reuters Health, show that "it is more important to aim for a healthy lifestyle including a balanced healthy diet and regular physical activity, than to focus on fat intake alone as a factor for weight gain." (Reuters Health)

CELEBRITY-endorsed fad diets do more harm than good, with doctors saying they may actually be fuelling the current global obesity crisis.

A recent survey commissioned by the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSA) shows most dieters will try just about anything to lose weight except follow a sensible eating and exercise plan.

Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the BSA, says that the promotion of unhealthy foods and diets has fostered unhealthy attitudes to food and dieting and may even lead to eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and orthorexia where sufferers become obsessed with eating only "good" foods.

We need to do away with quirky diets and get people to realise what will keep them healthy, Professor Hawkey explains.

In the majority of cases, simply increasing physical activity levels and eating sensibly will prevent long-term conditions. ( Sunday Telegraph)

SOME people are more violent and exhibit ``werewolf'' tendencies during a full moon, a study published in the respected Australia Medical Journal reveals.
The findings of the 11-month research at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital could force police and other emergency services to shake-up how and when they deploy staff.

Many in the industry have already claimed for years there is a direct link between a full moon and more violent episodes, however, many police have disregarded anecdotal evidence as only a coincidence. (Courier-Mail)

Diane Francis authored a very disturbing and 40-years-outdated column on Tuesday (“The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China’s one-child policy,” Dec. 8). Such rhetoric about overpopulation flies in the face of the depopulation dynamics that are striking fear into many politicians and economists around the world.

But just as disturbing is Ms. Francis’ sanitized view of China’s one-child policy, which she recommends. This policy has been thoroughly documented as being a forced abortion policy, with all the outrageous abuses against women that one might expect from such a policy. China is facing a serious gender imbalance because of its massive slaughter of unborn girls, due to parents’ preference for boys.

As the Copenhagen conference unfolds it is possible to detect the outlines of the grim future dystopia that will emerge if the stealthy and remorseless proponents of global eco-fascism are allowed to remake our world in their image. Consequently, the opportunity exists for an artistic and literary critique of the Brave New Green World these fanatics wish to impose on us all.

Once again we face the totalitarian temptation that has bedevilled modern history, that all-encompassing will-to-power that possesses ideological fanatics and drives them to transform themselves (and all of us) into mere components of a great Totality, an immense unified and holistic system where every person becomes an obedient and unquestioning functionary mobilized in the pursuit of a single goal, an ultimate solution: in the twentieth century entire generations were sacrificed to ensure the triumph of the race, the Volk, the people, or the proletariat; in the twenty-first century similar demands are being made for sacrifices on a mass scale to appease the earth goddess Gaia, conceived as the wrathful, relentless, unyielding, and omnipresent source of all life, value and meaning. Gaia – She who must be appeased. (Merv Bendle, Quadrant)

With unemployment at its highest levels in more than 25 years, the Obama Administration is trying to show that it is focused on jobs. Last week's White House "Jobs Summit" brought together business, labor, academic and environmental leaders to talk about how the government can foster job creation. Unfortunately, the summit agenda repeated much of the same nonsense we've been seeing from the Administration for the last year.

Exhibit A: the Administration's ongoing push to create "Green Jobs." The Administration touts environmental initiatives not only as a way to improve quality of life and discourage climate change, but also as a way to employ more Americans. Accordingly, last week's summit included a breakout session called "The Innovation Agenda and Green Jobs of the Future."

The Green Jobs conceit goes like this: the government should offer tax credits and impose regulations that lead businesses to implement environmentally-friendly practices. This will create jobs doing what's needed to qualify for the credits or comply with the regulations. Most importantly, carbon regulation (most likely in the form of Cap and Trade) will lead to investments in technology that reduces carbon emissions.

This is a modern version of Frederic Bastiat's parable of the broken window. The accidental breakage of a shopkeeper's window may look like an economic boon - it creates work for a glazier, who spends his extra income on goods from other merchants, producing a virtuous cycle of economic activity. But what's not seen is how the shopkeeper would have otherwise spent his money: on goods from other businesses, creating a similar virtuous cycle. Breaking the window is a net loss for society, as no bonus economic activity is generated and a valuable capital item is lost. (Josh Barro, TCS Daily)

PORTO VELHO, Brazil - Straddling one the Amazon's main tributaries and flanked by dense jungle, a construction pit the size of a small town bustles with bulldozers and nearly 10,000 workers blasting huge slabs of rock off the river bank.

While blue-and-yellow macaws fly overhead, a network of pipes fed by a constant flow of trucks pours enough concrete to build 37 football stadiums.

The $7.7 billion Santo Antonio dam on the Madeira river is part of Brazil's largest concerted development plan for the Amazon since the country's military government cut highways through the rain forest to settle the vast region during its two-decade reign starting in 1964.

In the coming years, dams, roads, gas pipelines, and power grids worth more than $30 billion will be built to tap the region's vast raw materials, and transport its agricultural products in coming years.

The Santo Antonio dam in the western Amazon's Rondonia state, which goes online in December 2011, will pave the way for a trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by making more of the Madeira river navigable.

But the behemoth project may also make it tougher for the nation to steer a new course as a leader of the global green movement.

Brazil's government says such development is needed to improve the lives of the region's 25 million inhabitants, who remain among the poorest in Latin America's biggest economy. (Reuters)

Twenty thousand years ago, North America had a more impressive array of big animals than Africa does today. The continent was populated by mastodon, several species of mammoth, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats and bison twice the size of their modern counterparts. By 10,000 years ago most of these animals were gone, including the 10 species that weighed more than a ton. Many drastic changes occurred during this interval, including the arrival of Homo sapiens to the new world. Many have cited humans as the cause of this great megafaunal die-off: were H. sapiens causing mass extinctions even during the stone age?

Many changes took place at the end of the last glacial period. The transition to the Holocene interglacial was a wild affair: the climate flipped from cold to warm, then back to cold during the 1000-year chill of the Younger Dryas, before rapidly rewarming to our more familiar, more comfortable climate. There was also an increase in large fires, and the types of vegetation changed drastically. After people arrived the stone aged Clovis culture flourished for less than 1000 years. One popular theory is that the first Americans rapidly hunted the continent's megafauna (big animals) to extinction and then, with the disappearance of their major food source, suffered a population collapsed themselves.

Alternatively, some scientists have argued that an extraterrestrial object struck Earth ~13,000 years ago, triggering the Younger Dryas, starting fires, killing the megafauna, and putting an end to the Clovis culture. A new study entitled “Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America,” just published in Science, seeks to answer the question of what killed the Mastodons. Interestingly, the researchers investigated the decline of North America's largest animals by studying a tiny organism—the [spores] of the Sporormiella fungus. As Jacquelyn L. Gill et al. explain:

As explained in a perspective article in the same issue of Science by Christopher Johnson of the School of Marine and Tropical Biology, at James Cook University in Australia: “Sporormiella is a fungus that produces spores in the dung of large herbivorous vertebrates. Lots of dung means lots of spores, so Sporormiella gives an index of the biomass of large herbivores. The spores accumulate in sediments along with pollen and charcoal, allowing changes in biomass of large herbivores to be matched exactly to sediment records of vegetation and fire, which can in turn be dated and aligned with other archaeological and environmental records.” Simply put, the more spores the more dung, the more dung the more big critters.

Gill et al. analyzed sediments from a lake in Indiana looking for spores and found that megafaunal decline began ~14,800 years ago and took more than a thousand years (see the figure). Furthermore, large vegetation changes and an increase in fire came after this decline ruling out changes in plant life or fire as primary causes of the megafaunal extinction. Climate change also looks implausible because vegetation changes followed megafaunal decline—climate change would most likely have affected megafauna by changing vegetation, not the other way around. Finally, all this happened long before the proposed extraterrestrial impact so there is no smoking cosmic gun either.

Was it we evil humans that destroyed native America's megafauna menagerie? According to Gill et al., “human impacts remain plausible, but the decline predates Younger Dryas cooling and the extraterrestrial impact event proposed to have occurred 12,900 years ago.” They further state “This evidence excludes rapid-extinction hypotheses such as an extraterrestrial impact or a Paleo-Indian blitzkrieg.” If humans hunted these animals to extinction they must have been people present before the Clovis culture arose, but the existence of such people has been controversial itself. So the earliest Americans are not off the hook yet—so much for the noble savage living in harmony with nature.

There is another interesting conclusion that can be drawn from this study. Before 14,800 years ago, the environment around the site studied by Gill et al. was open savanna. Parkland dominated by grassy pastures, scattered with spruce and rare broad-leaved trees—an environment where wildfire was rare. As the big animals began to disappear, trees increased, no longer suppressed by the large herbivores. The result was a transitory spruce/broad-leaf woodland, the like of which does not exist today. The changing environment of 14,000 years ago caused an increase in major fires which helped speed the transition and kill off the remaining megafauna. Eventually, much of North America would be covered in forest.

The point here is that the megafauna didn't just live in their environment, they actively helped to maintain the conditions most conducive to their survival. As they declined in number it was as though nature turned against them, altering the environment and hastening the animals' demise. Megafaunal extinctions elsewhere would have had similar consequences during the glacial-interglacial transition, triggering significant restructuring of the world's ecosystems. Though this was a catastrophe for some species it was a blessing for others, who would take their places and prosper within the changed ecosystems.

There is one inescapable conclusion: man is not the only species that alters the environment to suit its own needs. All animals have some impact on their environment, the interactions of large herbivores with vegetation and fire can be seen at work in Africa today. So, the next time some save-the-environment-from-the-evil-humans activist type tries to tell you people are destroying the natural world ask them which world they mean, because there is no unaltered “natural” environment. The only unaltered pristine environment, indeed, the only world where climate doesn't change, would be one with no life at all.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

The House of Lords meets in a lavishly decorated chamber, in the Gothic style, in the Palace of Westminster (see below). Image from Wikipedia

House of Lords, 8 December 2009: Lord Turnbull: My Lords, on first reading the Committee on Climate Change’s latest progress report, I found it an impressive document. It was broad in scope and very detailed. But the more I dug into it the more troubled I became. Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed. There are questions in four areas-the framework created by the Climate Change Act 2008, the policy responses at EU and UK level, the estimate of costs and finally the scientific basis on which the whole scheme of things rests. I will consider each in turn.

Unlike many of those involved in the climate change field, I have no pecuniary interest to declare, but I am a founder trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which seeks to bring rationality, objectivity and, above all, tolerance to the debate. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Climategate emails were released by a whistle blower, not a hacker according to analysis by CFACT Advisor Lord Christopher Monckton. Sign the petition at www.allpainnogain.org and follow CFACT's Mission Copenhagen at www.cfact.tv

Who can forget the classic confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Alfonso Bedoya in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Now it’s being reprised in living color, featuring banditos from East Anglia, Penn State, Washington and the UN.

“We’re Federales,” they tell us. “You know, climate police. Evidence? We ain’t got no evidence. We don’t need no evidence. We don’t have to show you any stinkin’ evidence."

“Hold your tongue, hombre. We ain’t trying to do you any harm. Why don’t you try to be a little more polite? Why don’t you just throw us a little more money, and stop questioning our integrity and science?”

The United States alone has spent over $30 billion on alarmist “climate science” over the past 20 years – plus another $35 billion on renewable energy – based on the banditos’ tales of global warming catastrophe, if we don’t slash fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions.

However, instead of solid, reproducible scientific evidence, the bandito scientists offered hypotheses, speculation, assumptions, assertions, “hockey stick” graphs, computer models and worst-case scenarios – purporting to demonstrate that CO2 causes planetary warming … and the warming will be cataclysmic. (Paul Driessen, Townhall)

Imagine if, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, some young monk's conscience got the better of him and he leaked to the world the fact that the Catholic church had been hiding the actual Earthly skeleton of Jesus of Nazareth.

The council -- the 1960s gathering of theologians to update Catholic theology and liturgy -- would have been thrown into disarray.

The Resurrection is the central mystery of the Christian faith and if, suddenly, Christ's bones were found, well, that would prove that he was a mere mortal.

It would prove that Christians had been worshiping a fake.

It wouldn't matter that most people had never heard of the Office of the Ossuary or whatever Vatican agency was in charge of keeping things quiet. The fact the teachings of the Church had been debunked would be all delegates could talk about.

That's because the council was about theology.

The proof that the current climate summit in Copenhagen is not about environment and science, but rather about politics and ideology, can be seen in that fact that two weeks ago, some young computer programmer's conscience got the better of him and he released computer code and emails exposing the skeleton of climate change. Yet almost no one in Copenhagen is talking about it. (Lorne Gunter, National Post)

The Copenhagen summit is in full force, and so too is the idea that man-made global warming is incontrovertible. But Martin Cohen argues that the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear-mongering

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers". (THE)

As the science scandal known as ClimateGate grows, the largest U.S. physicists' association is finding itself roiled by internal dissent and allegations of conflict of interest over a forthcoming review of its position statement on man-made global warming.

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society's review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton's Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible "catastrophic consequences" of climate change.

Socolow's research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government. In an interview published by Princeton's public relations office, Socolow called CO2 a "climate problem" that governments need to address.

"It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming," says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory. (CBS News)

This doesn’t just bring down the scientists who wrote the emails, it brings down all the institutions and organizations that were supposed to have exacting standards and ought to have exposed this years ago. These men, whose work was so bogus, were lauded by the IPCC, published in Nature and Science, and defended by the National Academy of Science.

This evidence of collusion, falsification, hiding data, and consistent deceit blows away the infrastructures of the practice of science. It doesn’t hurt the scientific method, but it destroys the premise that the IPCC expert review means anything, that peer review is capable of even picking up outright fraud, and that the National Academy of Science is functional.

In other words, all the human processes of science, the journals, the famous peer review, the committees with international reviewers: they have also been exposed as corrupted to some degree.

Of the 26 names on the Copenhagen Diagnosis, 12 are connected to the email scandal. It implicates almost half the lead team. The IPCC only had 60 reviewers of the one chapter that matters (Chapter Nine), and some of them reviewed their own work, many had vested interests, and now a significant number have been caught by the scandal.

Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) had their attorneys file three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA. Chris Horner, representing CEI, said the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies failed to comply with the Freedom of Information Act for the past three years.

The hacked e-mail scandal called the very science behind global warming into question.
Source: CNN

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic believes that some of the data analysis and modeling problems now being found in the AGW thesis are due to confirmation bias in which researchers’ observations are anchored on what had previously been reported. She looks at the devastating exposition on Watts Up With That? and asks “Climategate: Was the Data Faked?” But she’s not willing to concede the existence of a conspiracy, which she believes would have required too many conspirators. Instead, she posits the existence of an unconscious bias and quotes Richard Feynman on how error crept in Millikan’s electron experiment to illustrate her point:

Confirmation bias “is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.” A similar, but subtly different kind of problem affected the Space Shuttle program. Let’s call it ‘incentive bias’. NASA grossly underestimated the probability of a launch failure and set it at 1:100,000 because that’s what it was bureaucratically believed to be. What it bureaucratically had to be. Richard Feynman, who was asked to look into the causes of the disaster knew this number could not possibly be right. But he also knew how powerful an influence a bureaucratic bias could be. There was a consensus on how safe the vehicle was on launch among rocket scientists. But there was only one problem: it had to be wrong. (PJM)

It’s the adjustments to the raw data - and almost always upwards - that produces so much of the 20th century warming. So how sound is the science behind those adjustments?

We’ve earlier marvelled at the amazing adjustments by which the IPCC created this warming in Northern Australia:

Professor Sinclair Davidson says the Rudd Government is right - Tony Abbott is hundreds of billions out when he says the Government could cost us $400 billion if it caves into the pressure at Copenhagen. Trouble is, the true cost is even more. (Andrew Bolt)

Yesterday, I posted on the two questions below and gave the answers for each question

“More than half the world’s countries say they are determined not to sign up to any deal that allows temperatures to rise by more than 1.5C – as opposed to 2C, which the major economies would prefer.

But any agreement to reach that target would require massive and rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions combined with removal of CO2 in the atmosphere. An extra 0.5C drop in temperatures would require vastly deeper cuts in carbon dioxide and up to $10.5 trillion (£6.5tr) extra in energy-related investment by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.”

This is why the second question and its answer is so important. It is clear in the peer reviewed literature (e.g. see and see) that the IPCC (and COP15) is using a data set (which the CRU, NASA and NCDC analyses use) that has a significant warm bias when used as the metric for global warming (e.g. see), as well as an erroneous attribution of the majority of the warming to human added carbon dioxide (e.g. see and see);

This focus on a global average temperature threshold (of +1.5C or 2C), as reported in the news article, and the assumption that reaching this threshold is primarily a function of the emissions of CO2 is inaccurate. The participants at COP15 have been mislead (and the leaked CRU e-mails illustrate why, as alternative viewpoints such as I have expressed in this e-mail have been squelched) . (Climate Science)

Welcome to the inaugural ‘Most Alarming Alarmism by an Alarmist’ Award.

Finalists were nominated by the loyal readers of The Daily Bayonet, and voting is now open.

Quotes are randomized and given without attribution (we’re looking for the daftest quote, not the biggest moonbat.)

The winner will receive full attribution and acclaim when the results are in.

Polls close December 17th at midnight PST and the winner will be announced December 18th.

Cast your vote below and remember to vote early, vote often. The poll is not scientific, in much the same way that global warming science isn’t. (Daily Bayonet)

Tax fraudsters have targeted the EU's carbon emissions trading system, pocketing about five billion euros (7.4 billion dollars), the Europol police agency said Wednesday.

"The European Union Emission Trading System has been the victim of fraudulent traders in the past 18 months," said the agency in a statement.

"This resulted in losses of approximately five billion euros for several national tax revenues."

The agency, based in The Hague, added that it estimated "in some countries, up to 90 percent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities." (AFP)

Delegates to the climate change conference in Copenhagen should remember the dread words “Oil-for-Food”.

World leaders plan to design global “Cap-and-Trade” system — which could grow to $2 trillion (£1.22 trillion) — to limit greenhouse gas emissions in a last-gasp bid to reverse global warming. Environmental critics such as James Hansen, the Nasa scientist considered the “grandfather of global warming”, have made conceptual objections to Cap-and-Trade, which they dismiss as ineffectual.

But even if the system is created, there are enormous pitfalls.

Key parts of Cap-and-Trade have a “corruption” warning written all over them in red flashing lights, because they are to be run by the United Nations. (The Times)

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in way that could hurt business. (FOXNews.com)

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The "finding" comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA's jurisdiction.

A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox's Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: "If you don't pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. ... And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."

And such "uncertainty" is a huge "deterrent to investment," which will hurt the economy even more.

Translation: We don't want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn't act, well, a-groin-kickin' we shall go.

This is grotesquely dishonest. (Jonah Goldberg, Townhall)

LA PORTE, Texas — Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its finding that greenhouse gases threaten the public health and welfare of Americans, alleging the conclusion is based on "manipulated data." ( Associated Press)

WASHINGTON -- Senators working on a compromise climate bill unveiled the basics of their plan for the first time on Thursday, including encouragement for new nuclear power plants, a continued use of coal and a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target that's lower than what the Senate had been considering. (McClatchy Newspapers)

The leaked draft accord has outraged activists and developing nations but contains no real surprises.

“Asked about arguments by diplomats and some protesters that the United States should provide hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to developing nations as reparations, Mr. Stern, the special envoy for climate change, bluntly fired back at a news conference. ‘I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like,’ he said. ‘For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.’”

In truth, Arrhenius famously posited the greenhouse effect in 1896. The Industrial Revolution is generally accepted as having begun in or about 1850. The greenhouse effect is not the same as the modern left’s claim that economic activity must be held in check because Man’s contribution is creating dangerous climate change. But the ignorance is fairly revealing: it’s not about the climate or the science to these people.

Do I need to tell you that the New York Times’ highly political science reporter Andrew Revkin did not blink at this? The paper has not always been so forgiving of misunderstandings of the matter by political officials. (Christopher Horner, PJM)

National aid budgets dedicated to reducing global poverty would be raided to establish a “climate fund” to help developing countries to adapt to climate change, under a British plan tabled yesterday in Copenhagen.

Money earmarked for education or health would be diverted into projects such as solar panels and wind farms.

The proposal has angered developing countries, which are demanding that all the money in the climate fund be additional to the 0.7 per cent of income that industrialised countries have pledged to give as overseas aid.

Poor nations had hoped that the British plan, devised with Norway, Australia and Mexico, would establish the principle that the climate fund be entirely new money. (The Times)

“We need to purge the debate of the unpleasant religiosity that surrounds it, of scientists acting like NGO activists, of propaganda based on fear, for example, the quite disgraceful government advertisement which tried to frighten young children - the final image being the family dog being drowned - and of claims about having ‘10 days to save the world’. Crude insults from the Prime Minister do...

“A plague o' both your houses!” [The dying Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Act 3, Scene 1]

As a scientist, I am dismayed by the teenage sparring of so many of my colleagues in the ‘global warming’ debate. One day we get more than 140 scientists writing to Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, to challenge the current status of climate-change science; then we have more than 700 international...

The ‘’Danish text’ has raised “trust issues” between rich and poor countries [Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, December 9].

“The Empire has always relentlessly and ruthlessly grabbed natural resources” [Lumumba Stanislaus Dia Ping, the Sudanese Ambassador for the Group of 77 Developing Countries, December 9].

The publication by The Guardian newspaper of the leaked draft Copenhagen Conference...

The 21st century Goliath is Global Warming. It is a powerful six-legged monster. In no order of strength, those legs are:

(1) The big money climate change scientists and their powerful institutions from governmental centers to Universities,

(2) The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is a Geneva-based, highly funded bureaucracy controlled by one-world government political activists,

(3) Environmentalists who seek to use threats of climate chaos to stop the use of fossil fuels and return to a simpler, more “natural”, primitive lifestyle,

(4) Government at all levels whose political leaders find dealing with global warming is their opportunity to save us all from disaster cementing their status and success,

(5) The media populated by people who love to warn us of impending disaster and give us the advice we need to cope, who believe in Al Gore and his political party and who know that “the sky is falling” is the best headline of them all,

(6) Al Gore, who uses his status as a successful former Senator and Vice President to provide a platform to promote his message of doom and gloom, a message he learned in his only college science class and must have truly believed for many years but should see now is only an empty threat.

The total financial resources and power structure behind Goliath are staggering.

Goliath now occupies Copenhagen. For the 15th time, Goliath is meeting to publicize his long list of threatened consequences if do not head his demands. The ice will melt, the coasts and islands will flood displacing millions and killing tens of thousands; the polar bears and eventually thousands of other species will die as habitats are destroyed; hurricanes will become superstorms wrecking havoc on the coastal cities killing tens of thousands; heat waves will kill more hundreds of thousands as they grip the planet; drought and heat will destroy our agriculture starving untold millions more. He tells us this is because of our carbon footprints left by our burning of fossil fuels emitting exhaust of carbon dioxide. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

MOSCOW, Dec 9 - Russia's polar bears are adapting their behaviour to overcome the "catastrophic effects" of global warming, but new migration routes are pushing them dangerously close to humans, a leading researcher said.

The polar bear population that stretches from eastern Russia to the U.S. state of Alaska has fallen from an estimated 4,000 to around 1,500 as ice fields melted in the past 20 years, said Nikita Ovsyanikov, the top polar bear expert at the Academy of Sciences.

But growing temperatures have also opened up some new feeding grounds by allowing the bears to break through the ice, he said, forcing the great white carnivores closer to human settlements where they are often killed by nervous residents and poachers. (Reuters)

The gory photos of male polar bears devouring cubs, dragging shredded carcasses around and creating a bloody mess on the white snow of Canada's North have caused a stir on the Internet and in reports that link the activity to climate change.

But cannibalism among the species is a natural occurrence, says one expert, disputing what is just the latest story to put the polar bear in the debate over man-made global warming.

"Both Inuit and scientific knowledge show that cannibalism in polar bears happens, and it probably always has," said Steve Pinksen, director of policy and legislation for Nunavut's Department of Environment.

The concern over cannibalism comes after a tourist group witnessed adult male bears attacking cubs for food. There have been at least eight reports of similar sights from Churchill, Man. The photos accompanying stories on the issue show bright-red remains strewn across blankets of snow.

Mr. Pinksen, however, called the incidents an "act of nature," and said the public reaction has been taken out of proportion.

"Maybe if you're sitting in an armchair in the city somewhere, these pictures would be a shock, but people up here see these things all the time," he said, adding residents who are hunting animals for food, clothing and income have seen evidence of these attacks in the past.

"A bear eating a bear is not a pretty picture, but nature is not really a pretty thing all the time," Mr. Pinksen said. (Alison Brownlee, National Post)

Climate change stands to drive as many as one billion people from their homes over the next four decades, the International Organisation for Migration said in a study on Tuesday.

The IOM report, launched on the second day of international climate talks in Copenhagen, estimated 20 million people were made homeless last year by sudden-onset environmental disasters that are set to amplify as global warming increases. ( Reuters)

Deadly heat waves, home-wrecking hurricanes, neighborhood-scorching wildfires: When you stop to think about it, global warming can be downright depressing. Now, scientists are starting to validate that feeling.

According to accumulating evidence, climate change won't just trigger new cases of stress, anxiety and depression. People who already have schizophrenia and other serious psychological problems will probably suffer most in the aftermath of natural disasters and extreme weather events.

"When these events happen, people with pre-established mental illnesses often have more extreme difficulty coping than the rest of the population," said Lisa Page, a psychiatrist at King's College London. "This is an area we maybe need to think about a little more seriously." ( Discovery.com)

John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and President Barack Obama’s top science adviser, told Congress last week that the Earth could be approaching a series of “tipping points” that could drastically alter the climate and Earth’s natural systems and cause the sea level to rise dramatically.

“Climate scientists worry about ‘tipping points’ in the climate system, including ecosystems, meaning thresholds beyond which a small additional increase in average temperature or some associated climate variable results in major changes to the affected system,” Holdren told members of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. ( Christopher Neefus, CNS News)

Joint Statement from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, the United Nations Environment Programme, Ecofys, Climate Analytics, the Sustainability Institute, the European Climate Foundation and ClimateWorks. (UNEP)

Alliance of Small Island States say any deal that allows temperatures to rise by more than 1.5C is 'not negotiable' ( John Vidal, The Guardian)

MOSCOW - The rest of the world’s passions may be boiling over in Copenhagen this week, but Russia is paying no attention.

There is an impression that the government and public opinion – quite in the classical liberal laissez faire spirit - share the conclusion that global warming has a moderate and non-unprecedented nature, its impact on human health and wildlife is largely positive and that carbon emissions are hardly the primary factor in climate shaping. Thus, it is not a crisis and there is no need to resort to massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

How has such an absurd situation arisen in modern Russia with strong statist traditions? Isn’t objectively existing global climate change impacting it? Continue reading… (The Foundry)

In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order."

The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality — wealth redistribution via global socialism — with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism. (Charles Krauthammer, IBD)

Global warming does not respect borders. A mindset shift is required if world leaders are to save us from ourselves ( Kofi Annan

COPENHAGEN — Poor countries on Thursday challenged Barack Obama as he received his Nobel prize to steer the US back into the Kyoto Protocol and help free up 200 billion dollars in funds to fight climate change.

"That's the challenge that President Obama needs to rise to. This is what we expect from him as a Nobel prize winner," said Lumumba Stanislas Dia-Ping of Sudan, representing 130 countries in a bloc called the Group of 77 and China.

"This is what we expect from him as one of the advocates of new multilateralism," Dia-Ping told reporters at the UN climate talks.

"That is what we expect of him as someone who is a member of both the developed and developing world -- his extended family, his brothers, his cousins, his uncles are still in that continent (Africa) of which he is proud to be a member." (AFP)

In the midst of resolving conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama briefly mentioned another war in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: the war on climate change. He said,

Interestingly, the more attention the Climategate scandal receives, the firmer the Obama administration is that the scientific consensus is, in fact, a consensus. First Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson and now President Obama. But the truth is there is a lot of scientific dissent refuting the claim that doing nothing will result in more natural disasters. It’s easy to blame hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, floods, tornadoes and every other natural disaster on manmade global warming since they’re all climate-related but the correlation simply isn’t there. There is no consistent long-term pattern. Climatologist Roy Spencer pointed out after Hurricane Katrina that we had similar hurricanes in a less industrialized world: “Certainly, the previous huge hurricanes that we had in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, didn’t have anything to do with mankind’s production of CO2 because we hadn’t produced very much by then, and I find it just irresponsible that anyone would claim that this hurricane was caused by global warming.” Continue reading… (The Foundry)

COPENHAGEN - President Barack Obama's top aides promised on Wednesday "robust" negotiations toward a global climate change deal this month, but firmly stated the United States does not owe the world "reparations" for centuries of carbon pollution. (Reuters)

THE Australian delegation to the Copenhagen climate change conference could number 114, official documents reveal.

That number dwarfs the 71-strong British delegation. Such is the size of the delegation, it includes a dedicated "baggage liaison officer".

The carbon footprint for 114 people travelling to Copenhagen and back business class amounts to 1817 tonnes of emissions -- the equivalent to the annual output of 2500 people in Malawi. The list appears to contradict assurances from Kevin Rudd's office last weekend that fewer than 50 federal officials would attend.

It includes 10 attendees listed as members of the Prime Minister's personal staff, on top of six representatives from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The names of 29 officials from the Department of Climate Change are listed, along with bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Agency for International Development, the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Treasury and the Bureau of Meteorology. (Christian Kerr, The Australian)

Kevin Rudd has defended the size of the delegation Australia is taking to the Copenhagen climate summit.

But the prime minister rejected media reports the delegation included nine media advisers.

The Australian contingent numbers 114, more than the 71 being sent by the British government, The Australian said on Friday.

Mr Rudd did not dispute the reported number, saying officials from the state and territory governments were part of Australia's delegation.

"In terms of our core Australian government delegation it is probably in the order of about 50 or 60," he told Fairfax Radio. (AAP)

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict. (Diane Francis, Financial Post)

Calls for forced population control as a means to conquer global warming are in the news this week. We knew the Copenhagen climate conference would keep drawing out the cranks.

'Humans are overpopulating the world," Diane Francis, a staff writer for Canada's National Post, said in Tuesday's edition.

"A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days."

Zhao Baige, a member of the China delegation at Copenhagen, holds a similar view, according to a report from China Daily. (IBD)

Has the Universe forsaken Al Gore? Why did the Nepalese cabinet climb the mountain and what’s the Sun been up to these days? (Daily Bayonet)

Most Britons are not prepared to change their lifestyle to help combat climate change, according to a YouGov/Channel 4 News survey of more than 2,000 adults, as the Copenhagen summit on climate change gets underway.

Nor do they want to open Britain’s doors to migrants who have to find a new home because climate change devastates their own country.

Past surveys have found that most people accept that climate change is underway, and needs to be tackled. YouGov’s latest figures suggest, however, that clear majorities think other people should bear the brunt of change.

Not one single respondent says they have stopped, or will stop, eating meat in order to help combat climate change, even when they are reminded that the United Nations says that meat production generates significant amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. (Channel 4 News)

Roger Pielke Jr is one of the nicer misanthropic twits around but that doesn't stop him making stupid arguments: Up, Down or Sideways

an earlier post I made the case that one needs to know only two things about the climate change to begin asking whether accelerating decarbonization of the economy might be worth doing:

Report launched from leading marine scientists at Copenhagen summit shows seas absorbing dangerous levels of CO2 (The Guardian)

Recent claims by climate change alarmists have raised the possibility that terrestrial ecosystems and particularly the oceans have started loosing part of their ability to absorb a large proportion of man-made CO₂ emissions. This is an important claim, because currently only about 40% of anthropogenic emissions stay in the atmosphere, the rest is sequestered by a number of processes on land and sea. The warning that the oceans have reached their fill and their capacity to remove atmospheric CO₂ is accompanied by the prediction that this will cause greenhouse warming to accelerate in the future. A new study re-examines the available atmospheric CO₂ and emissions data and concludes that the portion of CO₂ absorbed by the oceans has remained constant since 1850.

Wolfgang Knorr from the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, has published a study in Geophysical Research Letters entitled “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions increasing?” Knorr combines data from ice cores, direct atmospheric measurements, and emission inventories to show that the fraction of human emitted CO₂ that remains in the atmosphere has stayed constant over the past 160 years, at least within the limits of measurement uncertainty. Here is the paper's abstract:

This work directly contradicts studies that claim to have shown that the uptake of atmospheric CO₂ by the ocean has already slowed. Knorr's work is backed up by a study in Nature by S. Khatiwala et al.: “Reconstruction of the history of anthropogenic CO₂ concentrations in the ocean .” Noting that buring fossil fuels has increased the level of to CO₂ in the atmosphere, the authors state “the ocean plays a crucial role in mitigating the effects of this perturbation to the climate system, sequestering 20 to 35 per cent of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.” They found that sequestration by the oceans had not diminished significantly and that land plants have greatly increased their absorption of the gas. Quoting from the paper:

Some have suggested that reducing human CO₂ emissions by 50% would bring atmospheric levels into equilibrium. This new report raises the possibility that, if human emissions were lowered, absorption levels by the oceans and land plants might decline as well, maintaining the growth in overall atmospheric CO₂ levels. It also seems possible that, if man's release of carbon dioxide is greatly reduced, the terrestrial biosphere could shift from a net absorber to a producer of greenhouse gas. The change in sources and sinks over time is presented graphically in figure S3 from the paper's supplementary information, shown below:

These observations imply that all the hoopla about reining in CO₂ levels may be working at odds with nature, that Earth's environment already has mechanisms in place to regulate changing levels of greenhouse gases. The observation that the terrestrial biosphere was a source of CO₂ until the 1940s, and has subsequently become a sink, indicate that the problem is not as simple as shutting down factories and banning SUVs. With nature regulating GHG levels on its own, perhaps we have time to look more closely into the matter before we leap off an economic cliff at the urging of the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore.

Many climate scientists and ecologists seem to seek the dark cloud instead of the silver lining for any new discovery. A case in point is concern over increased ocean acidification due to the absorption of greater amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. While the previous panic over bleached coral reefs seems to have abated (see “Bleached Coral Reefs Bounce Back”), researchers continue to warn that many species of invertebrates will disappear as the oceans acidify. But new observations indicate that the effects of increased CO₂ on marine environments will be more complex than previously predicted. In fact, a new study shows that some of these species may benefit from ocean acidification, growing bigger shells or skeletons that provide more protection.

Because different ocean creatures use different forms of calcium carbonate for their shells, marine scientist Justin Ries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hypothesized that not all ocean organisms would respond the same way to increased acidity. Ries and two colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Anne L. Cohen and Daniel C. McCorkle, exposed marine organisms from 18 marine species to four levels of seawater acidity. As described in an article from ScienceNOW, the first environment matched today's atmospheric CO₂ levels. The second and third were set at double and triple the pre-Industrial CO₂ levels, conditions the IPCC has predicted to occur over the next century. The fourth CO₂ level was 10 times pre-Industrial levels, a level not seen since before the onset of the Pleistocene Ice Age more than 3 million years ago.

Blue crabs, lobsters, and shrimp thrived in the highest CO₂ level, growing heavier shells, the researchers reporte in Geology. Ries speculates that these bottom dwellers are somehow better able to manipulate CO₂ ions to build their shells, even though fewer ions are available to them in an acidic environment. Exactly how they accomplish this remains unknown. Meanwhile, American oysters, scallops, temperate corals, and tube worms all fared poorly, growing thinner, weaker shells. Clams and pencil urchins, who's exoskeletons dissolved at the highest CO₂ levels, were the biggest potential losers. In all a thought provoking study, but we don't need to borrow trouble.

Barring any massive natural outgassing of greenhouse gas, CO₂ levels will not rise as high as those in the fourth test environment, at least not in the foreseeable future. The atmosphere did experience similar CO₂ levels during the middle of the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago. “This is an interval in which many of these organisms lived and apparently did okay, despite the extremely elevated levels of atmospheric CO₂ that existed at that time,” Ries said. “The take-home message is that the responses to ocean acidification are going to be a lot more nuanced and complex than we thought.” As usual when Earth's climate changes, there are winners and losers but life carries on.

For Earth to experience such conditions the Pleistocene Ice Age must come to an end, which implies the melting of all significant glaciers, a tremendous rise in sea levels and other climatic changes scientists can only guess at. On the bright side, if Earth is transitioning back to pre-ice age conditions mankind really doesn't have any say in the matter—at least our conscience will be clear.

As a final note, it has become fashionable to declare current global temperatures as the highest in more than a million years, implying that anthropogenic global warming has resulted in a climate that is out of the norm for interglacials during the Pleistocene Ice Age. An article in the November 19, 2009, edition of Nature by David Noone has revealed that, using temperature estimates derived from isotopes in polar ice cores, interglacial periods were rather warmer than previously thought. How much higher is hard to say exactly given the limits of measurement accuracy for the proxy data but “the last warm period, the Eemian, occurred around 128,000 years ago, and from various proxy measurements it is widely accepted that temperatures then were higher than those during modern pre-industrial times.”

According to the USGS, during the peak of the last interglacial period, around 125 thousand years ago, sea level was about 6 m (20 ft) higher than present. This estimate is based on dating of emergent coral reefs on tectonically stable coastlines distant from plate boundaries. These data indicate that global ice volumes were significantly lower than present, by an amount equivalent to the present volume of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets. This in turn suggests that temperatures were higher for longer than today in order to melt that volume of ice—all without human help. Despite these findings, global warming alarmists continue to issue bombastic statements that are known to be false—what kind of scientists are these people, who purposely mislead the public?

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

USA Today’s house editorial today bemoans the fact that Climategate “gives ammunitiion to the skeptics,” but concludes that “the overwhelming scientific consensus remains that the Earth is warming, largely because of human activity, with potentially calamitous consequences involving melting ice caps, rising sea levels and shifting agricultural patterns.”

So do they get a skeptic to fill the daily “Another View” slot they offer to rebut their editorial? No — they get another alarmist! Under the panicky-but-now-tired headline “We need to act quickly!”, Melanie Fitzpatrick of the Union of Scientists Concerned About Their Grant Funding writes:

Next year is “more likely than not” to be the world’s warmest year on record and man-made climate change will be a factor, according to the Met Office.

It said that natural weather patterns would contribute less to next year’s temperature than they did in 1998, the current warmest year in the 160-year record.

El Niño effect, the cyclical heating of the Pacific Ocean, is much weaker than it was in 1998 but the Met Office expects the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions to more than make up the difference. (The Times)

As established in the correlation study below, between 1995 and 2009, no statistically significant climate change--neither warming nor cooling--occurred in any of the ten most populated cities in the United States: (1) New York City; (2) Los Angeles; (3) Chicago; (4) Houston; (5) Phoenix; (6) Philadelphia; (7) San Antonio; (8) Dallas; (9) San Diego; or (10) San Jose (San Francisco Bay Area).

Furthermore, no statistically significant climate change occurred in the cities of Anchorage, Nashville, Miami nor Salt Lake City, all of which were included in the study to add further regional diversity. (Associated Content)

I’ll admit to being a skeptic when it comes to other skeptics’ opinions on the potential effects of sunspot activity on climate. Oh, it’s all very possible I suppose, but I’ve always said I’ll start believing it when someone shows a quantitative connection between variations in global cloud cover (not temperature) and geomagnetic activity.

Maybe my skepticism is because ~~I never took astronomy in college~~ (oops…my wife reminds me I took it 1st year). Or, maybe it’s because I can’t see or feel cosmic rays. They sound kind of New Age to me. After all, I can see sunlight, and I can feel infrared radiation…but cosmic rays? Some might say, “Well, Roy, you work with satellite microwave data, and you can‘t see or feel those either!” True, but I DO have a microwave oven in my kitchen…where’s your cosmic ray oven?

Now…where was I? Oh, yeah. So, since I’ve been working with 9 years of global reflected sunlight data from the CERES instrument flying on NASA’s Terra satellite, last night I decided to take a look at some data for myself.

at a meeting in Copenhagen organized by the Danish People’s Party to the European Parliment [which was convened by Morten Messerschmidt who is a Member of the European Parliment; his goal was to provide a forum to present alternate viewpoints to that of the IPCC; I appreciate his leadership in this much needed venue!]. The speakers at this meeting were mostly supporters of the first hypothesis in our EOS article

“Human influence on climate variability and change is of minimal importance, and natural causes dominate climate variations and changes on all time scales. In coming decades, the human influence will continue to be minimal.”

“Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first- order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.”

There were no speakers who presented the IPCC view (since the organizers wanted alternative viewpoints), although I had recommended that speakers be invited to present and debate this viewpoint.

I have a few comments on the talks and a recommendation to the climate skeptics.

First, there were several informative talks including one by Henrik Svendsmark on the role of the Sun in the climate system. The talk and data presented by Leighton Seward on the effect on vegetation by added CO2 was quite informative. From a science perspective, I benefited by the new information I learned.

However, this was basically a skeptics meeting, and I was the exception since, while I find major fault with the IPCC’s narrow focus on CO2, I do accept that human activity is significantly affecting the climate system, and that added CO2 (among a diverse set of other climate forcings) is significant.

What I find puzzling in the conclusions of the skeptics is that, even though the evidence for a human signature on the climate at local and regional scale is irrefutable, they do not reject the first hypothesis listed above.

If there is any debate, it is the extent these human climate forcings alter hemispheric scale circulation patterns. The importance of the long-range transport of the aerosols input into the atmosphere through human activity (e.g. industrial emssions, biomas burning) is certainly very clear.

Thus, I do not see how anyone cannot accept that the first hypothesis listed above is rejected [for the same reason, of course, I cannot understand, why it is not clear to everyone that the IPCC and Copenhagen focus primarily on CO2 is based on a refuted hypothesis].

I suggest, that if the skeptics would recognize that the first hypothesis has been rejected and accept the second hypothesis, they would have greater visibility and effectiveness in the discussion of the science.

All of the presentations and discussions were video taped, and I will announce on my weblog when they are available. (Climate Science)

As we all know blogs have become a fashionable means of communication made possible by modern technology. The question is, ‘What does this mean for science?’. Is it a reasonable means of communicating science to an open global audience? Is it a reasonable means for intra scientific discussions? How do we keep values from tarnishing scientific objectivity? Can they operate as an alternative to the peer review process associated with journals? And, of course, many more questions.

Here we can address a few of these question. First, what is the perception, from climate scientists, concerning the traditional means of peer reviewed journals as a means of communicating findings in the climate sciences?* (Dennis Bray, Klimazwiebel)

Back when Al Gore was running for President, Mark Steyn described him as our first alien candidate. Mark wasn’t expressing doubt about Gore’s native country. He wasn’t a birther avant la lettre. Rather, he was expressing doubt about Al Gore’s manner — weirdness incarnate — and, ultimately, his sanity.

The presidential election of 2000 seems awfully long ago, more, somehow, than the 9 years it’s actually been. A lot has happened in the world. Yet time cannot wither nor custom stale Al Gore’s infinite monotony. Back in 2000 he was hectoring us about the environment. In the interim, he has just kept hectoring on.

Most people, having absorbed the climate data, have quietly stopped talking about global warming. Instead, they now warn about climate change. Why? Because it seemed every time someone would organize a conference to bemoan the dangers of global warming, the event would get snowed out. So most politicians have given up on “warming” and have embraced “change.” More nebulous but somehow less embarrassing. (PJM)

São Paulo/ Leipzig. Deforestation in tropical rain forests could have an even greater impact on climate change than has previously been thought. The combined biomass of a large number of small forest fragments left over after habitat fragmentation can be up to 40 per cent less than in a continuous natural forest of the same overall size. This is the conclusion reached by German and Brazilian researchers who used a simulation model on data from the Atlantic Forest, a coastal rain forest in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, around 88 per cent of which has already been cleared. The remaining forest fragments are smaller, so the ratio between area and edge is less favourable. The reason for the reduction in biomass is the higher mortality rate of trees at the edges of forest fragments, according to the results published by researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the University of São Paulo in Ecological Modelling. This reduces the number of big old trees, which contain a disproportionately high amount of biomass. (Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres)

Funny: A lingering pool of disbelief - Despite a decade of record drought, Australian farmers refuse to buy into climate change

SWAN REACH, AUSTRALIA -- Before climate change strangled his lemon trees, Hermann Markovsky would drift off to sleep to the murmur of black swans in a lagoon beside his citrus farm.

The lagoon has dried up and the swans are gone. Gone, too, after a decade of the worst drought on record, is Markovsky's right to pump irrigation water from the Murray, Australia's largest river. Once called the Mighty Murray, it is now too sickly to flow to the sea, nor can it fill the irrigation pipes that sustain the country's agricultural heartland. (Washington Post)

Just five years ago, anyone who talked of easing Earth's climate crisis by fertilising the seas with iron, scattering particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or building a sunshade in space courted ridicule.

Today, such advocates -- "geo-engineers" -- are getting a respectable hearing.

Their ideas are still beyond the scientific pale, for they remain contested as risky for the environment and laden with unknowns about cost, practicality and legality.

But mainstream scientists who once dismissed these projects are now looking at them closely.

And some grudgingly accept that at least some concepts are worth exploring as a possible "Plan B" -- a last-resort option if political efforts to tackle global warming fail and catastrophe looms. (AFP)

The announcement of new powers to regulate carbon dioxide will allow the EPA to hammer the energy sector, particularly coal production and coal-burning electrical plants. However, environmental activists have hardly sat silent on the sidelines before the EPA “finding” that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a danger to human health. As KDKA in Pennsylvania reports from deep within coal country, nuisance lawsuits over mining cost Bickmore, West Virginia 500 jobs this week: (Ed Morrissey, Hot Air)

The head of American Electric Power Co., the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the U.S., said advances in technology would allow the company to eliminate the emissions from its coal-fired power plants by 2025.

Mike Morris, chief executive of Ohio-based AEP, said his company's early experience with a carbon capture and storage project at its Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia had exceeded expectations. As a result, he believes AEP will be able to retire 25% of its coal-burning power plants and install advanced carbon-capture equipment on the remaining 75%.

That optimism represents a significant change for an influential executive who in the past has been skeptical about the industry's ability to capture and store carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, in a cost-effective manner.

"This still is an extremely expensive undertaking, but the answer is near at hand," said Mr. Morris in an interview Tuesday. (WSJ)

Vast coal deposits lying deep beneath the North Sea will be burnt in situ to generate up to 5 per cent of Britain’s energy needs, under new plans approved by the Government last week.

The UK Coal Authority has awarded licences to Clean Coal, an Anglo-American company, to develop five offshore sites for a technology called Underground Coal Gasification (UGC).

The method, which has not been used on a commercial scale in the UK, although it is widely used in Australia, taps the high energy content of coal while doing away with the costly and labour-intensive need to mine it first. (The Times)

With thousands of politicians and environmentalists meeting in Copenhagen to discuss ways to achieve major cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions, one might assume that the need for drastic increases in nuclear power capacity would be an obvious solution – a path forward upon which factions on both the Left and the Right could agree.

Alas, that is not happening. Instead, the Green/Left in the US continues its decades-long opposition to nuclear, all the while insisting that the only way forward is through greater use of alternative energy sources like solar and wind. (Robert Bryce, MasterResource)

The Scottish government is just about on course to reach its target of generating half the country’s electricity from renewable energy sources within the next ten years — but, if the lights are to stay on, it has to find a replacement for its major power stations.

These conclusions seem inescapable, given current trends in the development of new power supplies and the looming power station closures. (The Times)

The two countries have long had an uneasy relationship. Recently they have squabbled over re-drawing borders, territory, Tibet and the Dalai Lama. And of course, the two countries fought a brief war in 1962. In the latest bit of diplomatic tit-for-tat, New Delhi has curbed visas for Chinese technicians eligible to work in India, a move that seems to have boomeranged on the Indian power industry. Over the past few months, at least 3,000 Chinese workers who had been working in India were either deported or had their visas revoked. Most of them were engaged in turnkey power projects that are at an advanced stage. That in turn, has caused repercussions throughout the India electricity sector, which badly needs new power generating capacity.

The controversy began after Indian media outlets reported on the “separate” visas issued by Chinese authorities to Indian passport holders from the states Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh. While India’s sovereignty over Kashmir is disputed by Pakistan, China lays claim to areas in Arunachal. Other problems include repeated Chinese incursions along the Indo-China border, a tussle between the two countries to exercise influence over the Indian Ocean, and China’s negative comments about Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Arunachal Pradesh.

Estimates suggest that the visa revocations will lead to the delay of the startup of nearly 4000 megawatts of power-generation capacity. Central Electricity Authority (CEA) Chairman Rakesh Nath has said that pleas have come from most Indian electrical power producers to end the visa crisis due to shortage of skilled labor force that can be readily filled by Chinese. (Priyanka Bhardwaj, Energy Tribune)

CHICAGO - Swine flu has killed nearly 10,000 Americans, including 1,100 children and 7,500 younger adults, and infected one in six people in the United States since arriving last April, health officials said on Thursday.

"What we've seen for months is this is a flu that is much harder on younger people," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a media briefing.

He estimated that between April and November 14 there had been nearly 50 million cases of H1N1 influenza in the United States, mostly in younger adults and children. That was more than double the CDC's estimate in November of 22 million Americans. (Reuters)

LONDON - H1N1 pandemic swine flu is far less lethal than feared, British scientists said on Wednesday, but public health officials should not be complacent in fighting it and vaccination campaigns should continue.

The first comprehensive analysis of deaths from swine flu in England since the H1N1 virus was declared a pandemic in June shows there are 26 deaths in every 100,000 cases of swine flu - a death rate of 0.026 percent. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON — Parents who let their kids romp in the mud and eat food that has fallen on the floor could be helping to protect them against maladies like heart disease later in life, a US study showed Wednesday.

"Our research suggests that ultra-clean, ultra-hygienic environments early in life may contribute to higher levels of inflammation as an adult, which in turn increases risks for a wide range of diseases," including cardiovascular disease, Thomas McDade, lead author of the study, said. (AFP)

NEW YORK - A relatively low birth weight and early-age weight gain may increase the likelihood of early puberty, hint findings from a German study. Earlier onset of puberty has been linked to certain cancers, high blood sugar and obesity.

The study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests the onset of puberty may occur from 4 to 7 months earlier among boys and girls who weighed less than normal at birth and among those who rapidly gained weight from birth through the age of 2.

Low birth weight and early rapid weight gain were both independently associated with younger age at the onset of the pre-pubertal growth spurt, younger onset of the peak spurt in height, and younger menstruation in girls, Dr. Anja Kroke, at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, and her colleagues note. (Reuters Health)

The New Science Of Obesity - What research tells us about why we gain weight and how we can best lose it.

Americans are fatter than ever and it's seriously harming our health. More than 72 million adults are obese, and that figure is expected to soar to 103 million by 2018. The problem is so bad that it could even cause life expectancy to start to decline, according to some demographers.

The good news is that basic research is helping scientists understand why we eat too much and how we can best lose weight. One major finding from earlier this year is that human adults have stores of calorie-burning brown fat, long thought to exist only in newborns and certain animals. But it turns out to also be present in small quantities in adults. (Rebecca Ruiz, Forbes)

1. There are certainly some others out there, but most of them work for trade associations that are quite narrowly focused, whereas the opposition (EWG, NRDC, USPIRG, GoodGuide, etc.) simply focus on "evil industry." Thus, we see the effects of divide and conquer.

Also, the trade associations hardly ever get aggressive in attacking the fear entrepreneurs. If they did, maybe they wouldn't get invited to all the right cocktail parties.

2. Most scientists don't care because the bar has been set too low, and they have to play the game to survive. The holy grail is simply getting the paper published. Whether or not it is a crock does not matter. Editorial standards are non-existent, since there are too many journals that need material. Consequently, almost anything can now be published somewhere.

3. Yes, virtually everyone IS "on the take" to bend science in the direction of where the money is flowing.

I would add that most of the granting agencies are very PC, and know surprisingly little about practical science. Indeed, some agencies such as the EPA make their impractical approach a badge of honor. Making matters worse is that Congress, like most Americans, know little of science, and can be easily buffaloed. After all, who wants to be against "children's health" or the "environment"? (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

Ottawa’s Centre for the Study of Living Standards issued a new report this week on the progress of its index of economic well-being, which it has been developing and tracking for a number of years.

When people mention economic well-being, it’s best to duck. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the subject but discussions of it invariably are ideologically loaded. “GDP is an awful measure of happiness. Capitalism, which produces oodles of GDP, therefore doesn’t really contribute to human good in any meaningful way. Rather than stress and strain to buy ourselves more and bigger flatscreens, we’d all be better off to go out into the desert and suck on cactus roots.”

You have to wonder when the public will finally grow weary of claims by environmental groups more interested in fund-raising than truth-telling. Example: Go on the Environmental Working Group Web site, ewg.org, and look at its latest fund-raising ploy warning consumers about the dangers of, gasp, hand sanitizers.

If environmental groups don’t drive U.S. agriculture back into subsistence farming, it won’t be for lack of trying. A few days ago, the nation’s media outlets received a press release with this headline:

“New Report Reveals Dramatic Rise in Pesticide Use on Genetically Engineered Crops Due to the Spread of Resistant Weeds. GE Crops Increase Herbicide use by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008.”

The article went on to say its author, The Organic Center’s Charles Benbrook, presents “compelling evidence linking the increase in pesticide use on GE, ‘herbicide-tolerant’ crops to the emergence and spread of herbicide-resistant weeds.

Well, duh. Anyone knows that if you increase the sprays of a herbicide, chances are some of the weeds will become resistant. That’s what happened with atrazine in the 1970s and with ALS inhibitors in the 1980s and 1990s. The fact herbicides — mostly glyphosate — have been sprayed on genetically engineered crops has little to do with weed resistance.

And it’s only logical that the number of pounds of herbicides would increase when you’re applying a pound of glyphosate per acre compared to fractions of an ounce of the herbicides it replaced. ( Farm Press)

POPULAR thinking about how to improve food systems often misses the point, according to results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems from Dalhousie University, Ecotrust and the Swedish Institute for Food & Biotechnology.

Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study found that the world could achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh product matters more than organic versus conventional or wild versus farmed when considering environmental effects on a global scale such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat and ocean acidification, the study found.

The study is one of the first to take a comprehensive, global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full lifecycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything: how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits. (Farm Weekly)

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the ‘integrity and honesty’ of global warming research (The Times)

The professional association for physicists is facing internal pressure from some of its most distinguished members, who say the burgeoning ClimateGate scandal means the group should rescind its 2007 statement declaring that global warming represents a dire international emergency.

When CBSNews.com asked on Monday whether it will rethink the statement calling for immediate reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, the American Physical Society said it would not. APS spokeswoman Tawanda Johnson replied with a pre-ClimateGate announcement from November 10 reiterating support for the 2007 statement; neither APS president-elect Curtis Callan nor Johnson would answer other questions on the topic.

Pressure on this venerable society of physicists, which was founded in 1899 at Columbia University, is coming from members who are squarely in the scientific mainstream and are alarmed at the state of climate science revealed in the leaked e-mail messages and program files from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. (See CBS News' prior coverage.)

Those files show that prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data, plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing, and discussed how to conceal apparently buggy computer code from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law. Internal investigations are now underway at East Anglia, Penn State, and the British government's weather forecasting unit. (CBS News)

The Goracle believes the Climategate emails "do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus."

I’ve said a few times that the Climategate emails remind me of the Spycatcher affair, with all the efforts of the alarmist establishment to suggest that there’s nothing to see in the emails simply meaning that ordinary people really want to see them (hence the “Tiger Woods Index” issue). Today, Al Gore proves to be economical with the truth in his interview with Slate:

Unless Gore is just speaking clumsily, and simply means the most recent email he read was ten-years-old, he’s lying, misinformed, or both. The last email actually dates to Nov. 12 2009. The emails as a whole outline a campaign of disinformation and distraction that has lasted for 13 years. Who is really in denial here? (Iain Murray, PJM)

Is it unreasonable to suggest his charge of theft against the fossil fuel industry is totally without merit?

The spinning from the climate industry in the wake of Climategate has been as fascinating as the incriminating emails themselves.

One demand being peddled by the powers-that-warm in Copenhagen and elsewhere is that we should all concentrate not on the damning emails, but on who was responsible for their “theft,” which had to be carried out for money, which in turn obviously came from the fossil fuel industry.

These guilty-until-proven-innocent villains have also been fingered by Canada’s warmist spinner-in-chief, Dr. Andrew Weaver. Dr. Weaver, who is Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, claims that his office has been broken into twice, that colleagues have suffered hack attacks, and that mysterious men masquerading as technicians have attempted to penetrate the university’s data defences.

Following up on Weaver's Web, Peter Foster's column this morning on Andrew Weaver, Canada's leading climate modeler and climate crime victim, we have news: The break-in at Doc Weaver's office, which he linked to the evil fossil fuel industry's attempt to discredit global warming policy, turns out to have been one of numerous break-ins at the University of Victoria.

On Dec. 2, an official university-wide email warned that "there have been a number of office and lab break-ins across campus in recent days–initially Science & Engineering buildings, but now Cornett & BEC. Psychology has had several offices and labs broken into, and last night there were break-ins in second-floor offices in BEC. Entry seems to be happening by jimmying/forcing locks."

This news comes from none other than Steve McIntyre (the man who broke Mr. Weaver's hockey stick) on his world-famous Climate Audit blog. A UVic informant sent Steve a copy of the internal email after reading that Doc Weaver was publicly blaming the oil industry for the break-in at his office, where a computer was stolen--implying a connection to the Climategate CRU email scandal. Aren't those oil industry guys smart and sophisticated--there they are wandering around the University of Victoria, jimmying locks in the psych labs. Are those lab tests on cognitive impairment part of the climate modelers tool kit?

Steve McIntyre has an even better explanation of what's going on:: "GCM (General Crime Modelers) believe that the break-ins at the Psychology Department at the University of Victoria are the proverbial “smoking gun” that proves the teleconnection between American fossil fuel interests and the Russian secret service, that resulted in Climategate."

On the funding front, though, the latest CRU Climategate email revelation has members of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit actively soliciting funds from...the fossil fuel industry, including Shell, BP and --what horror!--Exxon. Whether they got any dirty oil money isn't known, but you can read the details at climategate.tv

This line is good: "Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday...I expect they will accept an invitation to act as a strategic partner." And: "I'm talking to Shell International's climate change team, but this approach will do neatly for the new foundation."

By the way, climategate.tv is a subject of great suspicion at desmogblog, where they speculate that climategate.tv is itself actually funded by the fossil fuel industry. Gosh, those oil guys are really really smart. They fund everybody! I have reason to believe, in fact--based on the same high-quality line of reasoning and evidence that led Doc Weaver to link his office break-in to big oil-- that desmogblog may also be getting funding from unnamed sources that could be related to fossil fuel giants. Why not?

To anyone who is skeptical about the science of global warming, "ClimateGate" is the biggest scandal ever.

ClimateGate is the term being used for a handful of e-mails stolen last month from the influential CRU, the Climatic Research Unit in England. By far the most embarrassing email is from 1999, in which CRU's director Phil Jones brags he's used a trick to "hide the decline." That means hiding the studies from tree rings that show the earth has been cooling since 1960, when actual recorded temperatures show a trend toward warming.

The phrase "hide the decline" is now so infamous it is being spoofed on you tube.

And the fact that global temperatures have gone down in some years was in other e-mails, with one scientist lamenting "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

To long term skeptics and many Republicans, ClimateGate is proof that global warming is based on deception, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews.

"At worst its junk science and it's part of a massive international scientific fraud," said Rep. James Sensebrenner, R-Wis. (CBS)

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers critical of efforts to battle climate change said they would fly next week to the Copenhagen summit to undercut President Barack Obama's promises of strong US action.

Members of Congress' minority party vowed to highlight a scandal over leaked emails from leading climate scientists which they said backed their suspicions that the global warming threat was overblown and too costly to act on.

"I will not be one of the sycophants that says climate change is the biggest problem facing the world and we need to do all these draconian things that cost jobs," Representative Joe Barton, the top Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, told a news conference Tuesday. (AFP)

The response of the climate-science establishment to Climategate has been disappointing if predictable. The guild mentality has come to the fore. Campaigns are under way to defend the integrity of science from a scurrilous smear campaign. The message is simple: you are either with us or you are a barbarian.

The first line of response to the leaked or hacked emails, you recall, was to say that they showed science going on as usual--even science at its best, some argued. "Trick" did not mean trick; "hiding the decline" did not mean hiding the decline. These were innocent phrases torn out of context. As for the expostulations of harry_read_me, and discussing ways to punish or silence dissidents, and musing over the deletion of data that might be demanded under FOI requests, er, this is all just part of the healthy cut and thrust of normal scientific enquiry. We all have to let off steam now and then. No conspiracy. Nothing improper.

That did not work--too many of the emails speak for themselves--and the scandal refused to die down. The next line of response was to say that the emails involved just a few individuals, and implicate no more than a sliver of information about global warming. Even if you threw out everything the Climatic Research Unit had done, such is the weight of other research that nothing would change. (The newly empowered EPA administrator added a nice wrinkle last night on the PBS Newshour. The work in question was done abroad. Other research was done by Americans. So no cause for alarm. Well, no cause for lack of alarm, if you see what I mean.) (Clive Crook, The Atlantic)

Like rodents trapped in a cage with a snake, climate scientists and journalists scurry and dig, hoping to avoid the inevitable.

First the hamsters freeze as if in a state of petrifaction induced by utter disbelief. When it dawns on them that they have what looks like an insoluble problem on their tiny paws, they begin to shake and fidget, and soon they are darting feverishly from one side of the cage to the other, endlessly back and forth, seeking an escape hatch which simply isn’t there. It occurs to them that they are cornered, there is no way out, and they start digging furiously into the sand floor, emitting plaintive squeals of fear and despair as the snake slowly uncoils from its torpor and begins its relentless approach.

One feels for the caged hamsters. They are, after all, in an unenviable position, and being swallowed whole by a snake is certainly nothing to make light of. One may analogously sympathize with many of our climate warmists who, confronted with megabytes of recently released data indicating that the climate models have been rigged, the source materials contaminated, suppressed, or lost, and the empirical results fudged to consort with a pre-existent theory, are now reproducing the ritual actions of our unfortunate hamsters. Poor benighted creatures, but for all our empathetic concern we can at least take comfort in the fact that we are not in their place. (David Solway, PJM)

Last year, my column "Global Warming Rope-A-Dope" (12/24/08) started out: "Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy the planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil." New evidence proves that climatologists and environmental policy advocates have not only fed us lies, engaged in scientific and academic fraud but committed criminal acts as well.

Last month, Russian computer hackers obtained thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. (Walter E. Williams, Townhall)

Regardless of what the politicians decide at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the game has changed.

Thanks to the e-mail exchanges and other documents hacked from computers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, we now know there has been a conspiracy among some in the science community to spread alarmist views of global warming and intimidate, if not silence, those who disagree.

Let's hope these revelations result in a sober reassessment both of academia, generally, and the scientific enterprise specifically.

For far too long, science has been shrouded in a cloak of unquestionable authority as the final arbiter of all knowledge (except, of course, when the research has been funded by business, which for some makes it necessarily suspect).

Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science alone receiving $7 billion annually from the U.S. government — more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research.

Unlike business- or even independently funded research, the findings and recommendations of government-funded researchers has been viewed by many as sacrosanct. (David J. Theroux, IBD)

Alan Carlin — the EPA scientist whose skeptical report was hushed — thinks Obama and the EPA just placed a terrible bet with the politically motivated CO2 endangerment finding. (More at PJTV: Whistleblower an Inconvenient Voice in Obama's EPA)

On Monday, the EPA announced its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. One can infer from the timing of the announcement that the administration may have taken this action at this time in order to bring something to the table at the Copenhagen COP15 meeting.

From a scientific viewpoint, it was an odd time to do so — given that the very recent Climategate disclosures would presumably have taken some time to digest and analyze for their possible effects on vital conclusions. So the timing may have been based more on the political, rather than the scientific, factors involved.

But from a larger viewpoint, the U.S. president who was going to find a way to resolve partisan bickering in Washington has now embarked on a major escalation of the conflict — by using the power he holds over executive branch agencies to fight his enemies in Congress over the issue of global warming.

Although the EPA has always been, organizationally, an arm of the administration in power, until this administration the EPA has generally been able to maintain the appearance (if not the reality) of being science-based.

Originally, the rumor was that the purpose of the endangerment finding would be to pressure Congress into approving a cap and trade bill. Now, it appears fairly clear that the administration will not be able to gather the needed votes in the Senate to pass the bill — at least this year, and probably even next year, either with or without an endangerment finding. So there would seem to be little reason to push the endangerment finding now — unless they intended to use it as the basis for negotiating at COP15. (PJM)

We don't need a cap-and-trade deal. What we need is a RICO trial.

Every now and then, apparently, history challenges us with a crisis far too important to be left to the democratic process or the vagaries of public opinion. In these instances, the enlightened, the powerful, the moral must act swiftly.

So sayeth the Obama administration this week, empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to police greenhouse gases as a danger to public health and welfare, thus giving the agency discretion to regulate ... well, anything it pleases -- or, I should say, whatever is left. (David Harsanyi, Townhall)

This week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided that the air we exhale, carbon dioxide, is toxic and poses a danger to our well-being. The EPA plans to use this “endangerment” finding to issue costly new emissions regulations on Americans – once again putting Washington in charge. This deeply undemocratic process is an arrogant attempt by the Obama Administration to enact by regulation what they could not pass through the people’s Congress. Such a disturbing and cynical effort to take away your voice should cause all Americans to stop and wonder “what is next?” (John Culberson, Townhall)

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared greenhouse gases a danger to public health this week, in a move that could pave the way for future regulation. This is seen by many as a fallback move by the Obama administration in case the moribund Cap and Trade bill fails in congress. With perverse logic that could only be understood by a politician, carbon dioxide, a substance that is essential to life on Earth and to maintaining our planet's habitable ecosystem, has been lumped in with the likes of DDT and asbestos. The announcement comes on the first day of the Copenhagen climate summit and is seen by many as a sop to ecologists and global warming activists prior to President Obama's appearance at the end of the conference.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a written statement that the finding, which declares carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases a threat to public health, marks the start of a US campaign to control greenhouse gas emissions. “These long-overdue findings cement 2009's place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” she said. This marks new heights in political arrogance, for an organ of government to think that they should regulate the natural components of Earth's atmosphere in accordance with their own muddleheaded designs. (The Resilient Earth)

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it.

The EPA's finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant explains why the administration wasn't too concerned over possible failure at Copenhagen. This was their Plan B.

The finding is an environmental Sword of Damocles held over the head of the U.S. with a warning that if cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer is not signed into law, the full regulatory fury of an unelected bureaucracy will be unleashed on the American people and the U.S. economy.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has announced it will sue to overturn the endangerment finding on the grounds that the EPA has ignored major scientific issues, including those raised in the Climate-gate fraud scandal.

"EPA is clinging for dear life to the notion that the global climate models are holding up," said Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel. "In reality, those models are about to sink under the growing weight of evidence that they are fabrications." (IBD)

Congressional Republicans and business groups are denouncing the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health.

The finding, announced Monday, would allow the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, under the 1970 Clean Air Act. (A 2007 Supreme Court ruling declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants as defined by the Clean Air Act and that the EPA had the authority to regulate them if they are found to endanger public health and welfare.)

“If the Democrat Congress can’t kill jobs by passing a national energy tax, then the Obama Environmental Protection Agency will,” warned Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference. (CNSNews.com)

Of the many alarming comments Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson made to attendees at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a select few stood out as particularly daunting. On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the EPA dropped its own economic bomb, asserting that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are dangerous pollutants and a threat to human health and the environment. Consequently, the EPA is preparing to implement costly regulations on the economy to cut carbon dioxide emissions. But Jackson said we can take common sense without sacrificing our economy. Specifically she said,

Conducted by:
Dr. Dennis Bray
email: Dennis.Bray@gkss.de
tel.: (+) 49 4152 87 1849
Prof. Dr. Hans von Storch
email: hvonstorch@web.de
tel.: (+) 49 4152 87 1831
Institute for Coastal Research
GKSS Forschungszentrum
D21502 Geesthacht
Germany

According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the "Climategate" e-mails leaked from a British university have done nothing to undermine the United Nations' view that climate change is accelerating due to humans.

"Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear — that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause," he said on December 8, the second day of the UN's conference on global warming taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark.

His message is one that has been echoed repeatedly by UN officials, climate activists, government officials, and journalists since the e-mail scandal broke in November.

Of this much we can be sure, the same message will be re-echoed many more times before the Copenhagen summit ends. However, despite these repeated assertions, evidence from polls and public statements indicates that large sections of the public and the scientific community strongly disagree with the UN on this issue. Public support for a Copenhagen agreement on climate change had been dropping rapidly even before the "Climategate" e-mail scandal, as had public belief in UN claims that climatic change is accelerating due to human activities, and that stopping climate change must be a top-priority issue. (William F. Jasper, New American)

His Excellency Ban Ki Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth's orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that: (Copenhagen Climate Challenge)

In his column today, my colleague Thomas Friedman argues eloquently for a Dick Cheney-esque, “one percent doctrine” approach to climate change, which would treat caps on greenhouse emissions as a rational way to “buy insurance” against a potentially catastrophic outcome. Along the way, he cites Cass Sunstein on the “precautionary principle,” which (per Sunstein) holds that “it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events.”

It’s worth noting, though, that Sunstein himself is somewhat skeptical of using the precautionary principle as a guide to policymaking. Further on in the blog post cited in Friedman’s column, he points out that “a firm response” to a low-probability risk “might impose costs and create risks of its own.” And in a Boston Globe essay last year, he made a similar point:

This doesn’t mean that Sunstein is opposed to action on global warming. But he argues that any action needs to be subjected to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis:

This is where I think there’s room for serious skepticism, of the Jim Manzi or Bjorn Lomborg variety, about the proposals being bruited about in Copenhagen this week — not on the underlying science of climate change, but on the question of whether policymakers are likely to produce an agreement whose benefits actually exceed its costs. (Ross Douthat, NYT)

There will be a Morano-Hansen debate on foxnews.com (just the website) tomorrow, i.e. on Thursday! Let's admit, Hansen is pretty courageous - or suicidal - to try to debate a brighter, more informed, faster, more articulate, more balanced, trained, younger, professional skeptic.

Update: Hansen has returned to his senses and chickened out. They will have to find an alternative guest.

So far, I will offer you this Christmas video. Ann has noticed that the Copenhagen summit takes twelve days - an incredibly long time for such a nonsense. ;-)

That's a great opportunity for Twelve Days of Global Warming by the Minnesotans for Global Warming.

By the way, the hapless carbon billionaire is able to cause the Gore effect on TV, too. Seconds after Gore warned of another global warming Armageddon, CNN reported a monster winter storm. ;-) (The Reference Frame)

Talk about an inconvenient truth. In ever-increasing numbers, Americans are becoming skeptical about the scientific argument that there's a man-made global-warming crisis that requires immediate and drastic government action. The media's enablers of the radical environmental left have a response: Maybe America just isn't smart or curious enough to save the planet. In fact, they say our growing denial is making us nationally irrational.

On Monday, National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" ran a story by science correspondent Richard Harris. He worried aloud about a new Harris Poll showing that 51 percent of the American public believes that the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere could warm up our planet. That's down from 71 percent just two years ago. That's a free-fall. (Brent Bozell, Townhall)

The worst nightmare of the left is about to come true: The United States is about to achieve the carbon emissions goals set by the 1997 Kyoto Accords. Once seemingly beyond reach, the United States is already halfway toward meeting the stringent Kyoto goals for reduction in carbon emissions without a cap-and-trade law or a carbon tax or carbon dioxide being declared a pollutant.

Environmental nightmare? Yes. The goals of the climate-change crowd are not reduction in global warming but the enactment of a worldwide system of regulation that puts business under government control and transfers wealth from rich nations to poor ones under the guise of fighting climate change. Should the emissions come down on their own, as they are doing, the excuse for draconian legislation goes, well, up in smoke. (Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, Townhall)

In response to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference December 7th through 18th, The Heritage Foundation is launching a video series to cover all the details and aspects of the climate summit. We’ll address all the angles (climate, energy, national security, sovereignty, trade, and more) and provide you with everything you need to know about Copenhagen.

Steven Groves, Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow in Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, discusses what YouTube sensation Lord Monckton made a wildly popular topic: a climate change treaty’s threat to American sovereignty.

Rompuy: "2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet."

Still think it's a myth? (EUReferendum)

The Obama administration has a habit of waiting until late on Friday to release news it believes to be unpopular. Such was the case last Friday when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put out a statement announcing that President Barack Obama was changing the date of his visit to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen from Dec. 9 to Dec. 18 -- when a deal on a climate-change treaty is more likely to be announced -- and that the president is now promising to hand out billions in new foreign aid. (Terry Jeffrey, Townhall)

WASHINGTON — If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits.

So what is all this going to cost?

The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output. In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions that delegates to the United Nations climate change conference are expected to set in the coming days will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment from 2010 to 2030, according to a new estimate from the International Energy Agency. (NYT)

Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg has made famous the phrase “Copenhagen Consensus” which posits that money aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be better spent addressing other health and welfare challenges, like preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS. [Read More] (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

When you fly overnight from Johannesburg to Europe the lights become thin just north of Lusaka, Zambia, a few more in Zambia’s Copper Belt and then nothing (and I mean nothing) until the North African coastline. For most of this 11-12 hour flight there are no artificial lights below. From the Sahara on south, but excluding South Africa, a region that is home to more than 400 million people consumes less electricity than New York City.

Many of those who would save the earth from the scourge of modern energy want us to believe that it is no big deal that as many as 1.5 billion people, more than three fourths of the population of the world’s poorest countries, lack any access to modern energy. They still use wood and charcoal for cooking, and sometimes a bit of kerosine for lighting. For most of these people the only realistic way to gain access to modern energy is to leave the village or town and move to the city.

Oh, the financial tests that rural electrification projects have to pass . . . . And then there’s the carbon footprint. No, people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t want air conditioning, running water or computers. Just ask the IPCC.

Or, you could ask the people who flock to the small number of enclosed shopping malls in Africa – even with no cash for purchases the air conditioning (and Wi-Fi) are nice.

The International Energy Agency has looked at the issue of energy poverty. They conclude that for less than a 1% increase in CO2 output everyone in the world could be connected to the modern energy economy. [Read more →] (Donald Hertzmark, MasterResource)

Sarah Palin all but declared global warming a hoax yesterday when she urged President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen climate change conference and to stand up to the “radical environment movement”.

The former Alaska Governor and possible 2012 presidential contender seized upon leaked e-mails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia. The scientists have been accused by global warming sceptics of falsifying data to make the case that the phenomenon is real and man-made, something they deny.

The scandal has become a cause célèbre among climate change deniers and sceptics in the US. A group of Republican politicians has vowed to fly to Copenhagen next week to argue that the threat from global warming is overblown and too costly to act on. (The Times)

Poor countries have accused the rich world of “climate colonialism” as a rift between the two sides widened at the Copenhagen climate summit. (TDT)

Britain and its partners at the Copenhagen climate summit were accused of 21st century "carbon colonialism" today over a draft agreement that developing nations say would discriminate against them. (The Times)

Despite anger from developing countries over the leaked document, the negotiations are still on track for success (The Guardian)

Danish text raised 'trust issues' between rich and poor countries but won't derail deal, says UN secretary-general (The Guardian)

THE first cracks appeared among developing countries at the UN climate talks today, revealing divisions between emerging giants and nations most exposed to the ravages of global warming.

Tensions surfaced despite efforts to restore calm to the 12-day negotiations after a row over an early draft text proposed by Denmark, the conference's chairman.

The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu drove a wedge in the bloc of developing nations by calling for discussions on an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol.

For the first time, it would require China, India and other fast-growing high-population nations to take on legally-binding commitments to slash CO2 pollution after 2013.

The move was swiftly opposed by the big developing countries, ripping open a faultline within the so-called G-77 plus China bloc of 130 nations.

Until now, the group has stood by a diplomatic axiom that has prevailed since the UN climate convention came into being in 1992: rich countries caused global warming, and it was their responsibility to fix it. ( AFP)

THE powerful developing nation bloc has been split at the Copenhagen talks by a proposal from a Queanbeyan-based Australian representing the tiny pacific Island of Tuvalu.

The split came just as it was beginning to flex its muscle and amid increasing accusations between rich and poor countries, leading Climate Change Minister Senator Penny Wong to declare that the talks had “got off to a difficult start” after she arrived in Copenhagen.

“I do have to say some of the language is disappointing and unhelpful. We are going to have to move away from blame shifting and finger pointing if we are to get the agreement we need,” she said.

Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry demanded the meeting consider creating a legally binding Copenhagen Protocol that would enforce developing nation emission reductions and run alongside the Kyoto Protocol's demands on rich countries.

China, India and Saudi Arabia opposed the move because they don't want to be legally bound to meet their emission reduction promises.

But they are left in a no-win position because they don't like the idea backed by the US and other developed countries that a whole new agreement be formed, because they do want developed countries to continue to be bound by the Kyoto Protocol. (The Australian)

COPENHAGEN — Nearly 200 makeshift shields, scores of paint bombs and other equipment, including nine platforms with crude staircases, were seized early Wednesday in a police raid on a building that city officials had provided as free housing for activists visiting Copenhagen during international climate talks here. (NYT)

I get so many questions from readers about a variety of global warming issues that I thought I would whip up some Q&A for those who want to understand the views of skeptics a little better. I will try to update these with links and additional answers as time permits.

Climate science is complex and the study of it is highly specialized. Nevertheless, there is a common theme that runs through the claims of the global warming establishment, from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Weather and climate events that happen naturally are being increasingly blamed on the activities of humans. So, causation is at the root of most beliefs about global warming and climate change.

As one digs further into the science, the direction of causation also emerges as a key theme, and it is one that can totally change the degree to which it appears humans affect the climate system. In my own area of research I have found that mixing up cause and effect when examining how cloud cover varies with temperature has greatly misled the scientific establishment regarding how sensitive the climate system is to our addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Not all skeptics believe the same things, though, so some skeptics will object to some of what I have listed below. These represent my opinions, not all of which are necessarily ascribed to by other skeptics. Additional details on many of these issues can be found throughout this website, including a Q&A list I published on April 19, 2009.

The following list, in no particular order, are my responses to common claims and accusations about global warming skeptics. If other scientists or laypersons want me to add to the list, or want to argue for changes, email me and I will update it as appropriate. Please be sure to check back for the latest update (posted above). (Roy W. Spencer)

Today marked the 17th straight day without a sunspot. It will according to spaceweather will mark the 260th sunspotless day this year and the 771st spotless day this minimum. This moves 2009 into 5th place in the top 20 spotless years since 1849, when that kind of assessment became reasonable. See the enlarged image here.

See how the sunspot number has not recovered from the expect minimum (declared by NASA first in December 2008!!!). See the enlarged image here.

This long cycle and the last 3 suggest that the phasing of the 213 year and 106 low solar cycle may be at work as it was in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, the so-called Dalton Minimum (below, enlarged here), the age of Dickens. Those days, snow was common in London. Ironically last winter was one of the snowiest in London in many a decade. Snow will fall next week in England (and Copenhagen). More later.

-------------------------------
See Dr. John Christy debate Gavin Schmidt on CNN below:

Minnesotans For Global Warming announces our new Christmas Album “It’s A Climate Gate Christmas”. Actually there is no album all we have is the commercial.

This follows their parody for “Draggin the Line” by Tommy James and the Shondells about Climategate.

Many of us have seen the article by Willis Eschenbach over at the Anthony Watts site, “Smoking gun at Darwin Zero” (SGDZ) . I disagree with Willis that the strongly warming GHCN Darwin 0 data has been used by CRU.

Fig 1 in SGDZ shows a small IPCC diagram with a sketch temperature trend for Northern Australia for the period 1900’s to 2000. Willis found that the GHCN adjusted Zero version for Darwin warmed very strongly post 1940, see his Fig 8.

That trend in Fig 1 looks to me to agree with the land only CRUT3 trend that anyone can generate for that Northern Australia region using the useful KNMI Climate Explorer page which lets you interrogate many monthly global databases – enter link on right to Monthly observations. Downloading CRUT3 and NCDC GHCN for the period 1907-2000 I get trends over the 94 years of 0.48 for CRUT3 and 0.87 for NCDC GHCN. Following four graphics all from KNMI Climate Explorer

IPCC Northern Australia region – trend for CRUT3

IPCC Northern Australia region – trend for NCDC GHCN

Darwin grid cell – trend for CRUT3 (I think they are wrong to join Darwin Post Office to Airport like that) No sign of Darwin Zero here.
Darwin CRUT3

Darwin grid cell – trend for NCDC GHCN
Darwin GHCN

To wrap up this section re Darwin Zero, I am saying the GHCN Darwin Zero data is not used in CRUT3. What a shambles the global T datasets are.

Read the rest of this entry » (Warwick Hughes)

Unseasonal weather in Lesotho

After about six minutes of ABC television news on 7 December we were off to the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho in Africa where the locals claimed to be suffering from climate change. It is summer in Lesotho and it is supposed to be warm and dry. Instead it is very cold (‘plunging towards freezing’) and wet. This, apparently, according to the ABC, is more evidence of global warming; now, of course, popularly called ‘climate change’.

Whereas cold and rain out of season in Lesotho some years ago might have passed without comment, and certainly without being reported by the ABC in prime news time, it is now all down to climate change and ‘ABC newsworthy’. In times gone by, the inhabitants of Lesotho may have cursed the perfidy of the weather and prayed to their god for relief. They would as well; I suspect, have resignedly accepted the difficulties that their weather brought them. Not anymore; not now that they have a man-made earthly culprit to blame.

One young village chap of 17 years explained that he was afraid his animals and crops might suffer because of the cold. A member of the Lesotho royal family explained that the winters were now much colder than they used to be and summers dryer.

This was all a bit confusing. How is colder weather evidence of global warming I thought; obviously unreasonably. And, if it was raining wasn’t this a welcome change from the dry summers the royal person was speaking about?

Presumably, even to African correspondent Andrew Geoghegan, who filed this story, the facts were not fitting too well. I can only imagine that a large cue card was prepared and positioned behind the camera to prompt the royal person to add, at the end of his remarks, that the temperature in Lesotho these days was 3 to 5 degrees higher than it used to be. He did not explain how he had arrived at this startling conclusion.

The credibility of this segment of so-called news was zero to any intelligent person; even, I would hope, to those wedded to the conventional wisdom of man-made global warming. Such is the chutzpah at the ABC that the segment was presented without a hint of embarrassment. (Peter Smith, Quadrant)

AUSTRALIA'S eastern states have a greenhouse gas storage capacity of up to 450 years for clean-coal technology, a geological survey by the Federal Government has found.

The report, by the Government's Carbon Storage Taskforce, says most of the storage potential is in aquifers - bodies of rock saturated in water - while depleted gas and oil wells have little to no capacity.

All up, the report estimates that storage capacity can capture 20 per cent of Australia's overall carbon emissions, including 90 per cent of coal-fired electricity emissions and 100 per cent of greenhouse gases from natural gas.

But the taskforce's report, which was released by Energy Minister Martin Ferguson yesterday, warns about big hurdles for carbon capture and storage in NSW, which ''on current data the majority of the basins have low storage capacity''.

The results mean NSW industry may be forced to pipe carbon dioxide up to 1700 kilometres to Queensland and Victoria to store carbon with the technology - greatly increasing costs. (SMH)

LONDON - Britain's climate efforts were questioned on Wednesday after it said it would auction off rather than cancel millions of carbon permits to come from a closed steel plant, equal to one percent of UK greenhouse gas emissions.

The government said cancelling the European Union permits, allocated to a plant owned by Europe's second largest steelmaker Corus in northeast England, would be a "lengthy process" so it would instead sell the annual rights to emit nearly 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide back to industry.

"There's a lot of paperwork around it, so the current intention is to auction them," a UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) spokeswoman told Reuters.

When I was going through Germany a week ago (the train is mostly moving along the Moldau and Elbe rivers, both in Czechia and Germany), it was impossible not to notice the huge number of wind turbines over there (something that I noticed in France half a year earlier, too).

The number is said to be even higher in Northern Germany.

Germany has brought the percentage of the wind-generated electricity to 7 percent (still below Spain which is above 10%) and this fraction is so large that problems inevitably follow. As the Czech radio reported,

Electricity bills could be capped to stop consumers being exploited and to make sure energy companies invest the £200bn needed for Britain's transition to a low carbon economy, the Guardian has learnt.

Industry sources say that the energy regulator, Ofgem, is in principle in favour of the move, which would wipe out one of the central planks in the privatisation of the energy markets: allowing companies to independently set electricity prices.

If the boiler in your home is old and inefficient, you will be able to claim £400 from the Government off the cost of buying a new one – which could then shave as much as £230 a year off your heating bills, as well as pumping less carbon into the atmosphere.

The scrappage scheme, which applies to about 150,000 households using G-rated boilers, is part of Alistair Darling's strategy for using the tax system to get people to alter their behaviour in ways that help combat global warming. (The Independent)

NEW YORK - Residents of poor neighborhoods may die sooner than residents of wealthier neighborhoods - regardless of what they eat, how active they are, or other individual risk factors, new research suggests.

This finding - that where you live might affect how long you live - comes from a study of more than 565,000 middle aged and older Americans enrolled in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which collected detailed data on diet, lifestyle, and medical history. Neighborhood characteristics were drawn from U.S. Census data for the year 2000.

"There was an increased risk of death from any cause or cancer in socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods," Dr. Chyke Doubeni told Reuters Health. What's noteworthy, he said, is that this difference "remained even after taking into account differences in dietary patterns and other person-level health risks." (Reuters Health)

AUSTRALIAN scientists can soon resume their research into the controversial field of animal to human transplants, because the nation's five-year moratorium will be allowed to lapse.

The National Health and Medical Research Council today announced it would not extend the xenotransplantation research ban, which was due to expire at the year's end.

"After careful consideration, the council is of the view that, although there is a wide range of community views on the topic, xenotransplantation research was acceptable in Australia when there are robust regulations in place," NHMRC chair Professor Michael Good said.

The moratorium was introduced in 2004 based on concerns that research in the area could prompt animal viruses - particularly pig endogenous retrovirus - to jump the species gap into humans.

Prof Good said the NHMRC had taken into account developments in science and technology since then, in particular evidence relating to the risks of transmission of animal viruses.

Research would be allowed to resume in Australia once new guidelines for researchers and ethics committees involved in animal-to-human studies were put in place, he said. ( AAP)

LONDON - If Barry Popkin had his way, sugary drinks would be taxed like cigarettes, and the levy would go up and up until societies were weaned off them and stopped piling on weight.

A nutrition expert who has advised the U.S. government and health policy makers around the world, Popkin says the epidemic of obesity and weight gain sweeping the globe could be slowed dramatically if people revised the mantra "you are what you eat" to include "you are what you drink".

Reviving a taste for water could cut between 300 and 600 calories a day from the diet of an average American or Mexican and almost as much from the intake of many Europeans, he says.

"Depending on the country you live in, we now have between 10 and 25 percent of all calories consumed in sugary or caloric beverages," Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, told Reuters during a visit to Europe.

"This change has been phenomenal, particularly in the past 25 years. It's not the sole cause of the global obesity problem, but it's the thing we can change with the least affect on people's food intake." (Reuters)

HAMBURG - Europe's food industry is proving slow to buy palm oil certified under a new scheme as produced without destroying tropical rain forests, the head of Germany's edible oil industry association OVID said on Wednesday.

Some 1.2 million tonnes of palm oil certified under the new programme Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) had been produced since the scheme got underway in autumn 2008 but only 320,000 tonnes had been sold, said OVID chief executive Petra Sprick.

The rest, largely produced in Malaysia and Indonesia, is in storage tanks awaiting buyers.

"The main problem is that this product has an extra price surcharge," she said. "This is needed as an incentive to producers who face extra costs for certification." (Reuters)

USA Today has been running a lengthy series on the condition of food sold through federal school lunch programs, and today’s installment is particularly interesting. It turns out that fast-food chains like Jack in the Box and Burger King – predatory capitalists who want nothing more than to make filthy lucre off of unsuspecting hungry people — have much higher meat quality standards than does the selfless government sworn to protect the public.

How can that be? Oh right: As I wrote in my paper “Corruption in the Public Schools: The Market Is the Answer,” companies that have to attract and keep customers to stay in business have a huge incentive to avoid such things as, you know, sending their customers to the hospital! Not so government bureaucrats or educationists, who are getting your tax dollars no matter what.

This is a basic, basic reality that is all but totally ignored by people who insist we need government to protect us from evil corporations. And it is doubly ignored (if that’s logically possible) in education, where the assumption is that government must provide the schools if they are to be any good, and that profit-seekers are handmaids of the devil.

And so I ask (only slightly tongue-in-cheek): How many more children have to get E. coli before we allow freedom in education? (Neal McCluskey, Cato at liberty)

Except he doesn’t. He comes up with an answer alright – 15 billion if we all live like the average Indian, 2.5 billion if we all live like we do in the UK, and 1.5 billion if we all live like fat, horrible Americans. It’s all derived entirely from standard ecological footprint stuff.

We were looking forward to hearing a good argument for why that might be. It’s Sir David Attenborough, after all. There wasn’t one. Just lots of footage of people without access to enough food, water etc. No historical or political context. Just lots of simplistic environmental determinism. Apparently even the Rwandan civil war/genocide/whatever you want to call it was the result of too many people. Nice. And of course…

Happily, for anyone wanting arguments for why Malthus, Attenborough and sustainability are wrong, here are some we prepared earlier:

KILIMANJARO, Tanzania, Dec 8 - At the foot of Africa's snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, images of the mountain adorn the sides of rusting zinc shacks and beer bottle labels, but the fate of the real version hangs in the balance.

As politicians and lobbyists try to thrash out a new climate deal in Copenhagen, experts in Tanzania say local land practices must increasingly take their share of the blame for the rapid shrinkage of the ice on Kilimanjaro's peak.

According to one recent U.S. scientific study, the cap on Africa's highest mountain may disappear by 2033.

"The forest itself is the key element in this. It completely affects the amount of rain running off the mountain," said Jo Anderson, director of Ecological Initiatives, an environmental consultancy based in northern Tanzania.

"Less vegetation; less rain. We're seeing local human impacts directly." With less rainfall on the lower slopes, there is also less snow on the summit.

Anderson said forests that have disappeared in the past 30 to 40 years on Kilimanjaro's lower slopes -- cut down by villagers for charcoal and open farmland -- were just as much to blame as rising temperatures worldwide.

Batilda Burian, Tanzania's environment minister, told Reuters that the east African country was losing 91,500 hectares (226,100 acres) a year, of its 33 million hectare total.

"It is a huge problem and most of it is happening because people don't have energy supplies so they are cutting down the trees to make charcoal," she said. (Reuters)

Ed Miliband, who is at the centre of Labour’s attempts to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, had a water cooler installed in his constituency base and has claimed more than £1,500 on his expenses to have it topped up since then.

He has continued to drink the spring water despite the head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, telling Whitehall departments to switch to tap water.

It is claimed that tap water uses 0.3 per cent of the energy required to produce the bottled variety, and does not result in plastic waste.

Phil Woolas, then a junior environment minister, said in February 2008 that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had already stopped using bottled water in meetings because of the cost and ecological considerations. He claimed it is “absurd” to use natural resources in manufacturing bottled water rather than simply turning on a tap to get a drink.

However Mr Miliband’s office expenses for 2008-09, which will be published by Parliament on Thursday, will show that he has continued to buy 19 litres (33 pints) of spring water for the office in his Doncaster North constituency almost every month. (TDT)

IN light of ongoing debates on global food security, agricultural sustainability and climate change, it is important to recognise the benefits biotechnology brings to world agricultural production.

According to several research summaries released by PG Economics, those impacts are significant.

Biotech crops have contributed to significantly reducing the release of greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices. (Farm Weekly)

The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell believes that a Coral Sea ‘No Take’ zone is a very real threat after the Rudd Government’s successful proclamation of the Coral Sea Conservation Zone.

Speaking at a public meeting organised by those opposed to the proclamation Senator Boswell said that “Pew has won this first battle, but the war to save fishing industry jobs still rages.”

“An Eastern Marine Bioregional Plan will be declared in 2010 and it is important that the Coral Sea area is not singled out within that plan as a no take zone in order to satisfy the ever increasing avaricious appetite of the green movement.”

“This proclamation is a disgraceful abuse of power by the Minister for Environment who has unilaterally declared an area of nearly a million square kilometres of ocean as a conservation zone without any consultation with industry representatives at all.” (Senator Ron Boswell)

All right, class, what’s the First Rule of Holes? That’s right: “If you are in one, stop digging.”

Events this weekend suggest that this isn’t covered in the usual climatology graduate program. (PJM)

A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s about ten years, folks.

Now to today. Error and intolerance rule in the global warming scare. Read the flaming emails from the principals of Climategate. Read about Joseph “Climate McCarthyism” Romm by his critics on the Left. Read the latest from (non-Climategater) Michael Schlesinger, who lost his cool against New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin.

And of course there is John Holdren, now science advisor to President Obama, who said this to me when I asked him to critically review my essay evaluating his 2003 criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, “The Heated Energy Debate.” Holdren responded:

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612). [Read more →] (Robert Bradley Jr., MasterResource)

The opening days of the Copenhagen climate-change conference have been rife with denials and—dare we say it?—deniers. American delegate Jonathan Pershing said the emails and files leaked from East Anglia have helped make clear "the robustness of the science." Talk about brazening it out. And Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and so ex-officio guardian of the integrity of the science, said the leak proved only that his opponents would stop at nothing to avoid facing the truth of climate change. Uh-huh.

Mr. Pachauri and his allies are fond of pointing out that climate change science is bigger than East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and that other institutions' research backs the theory. This is true. But it's also the best argument for opening up to public scrutiny both the raw data and the computer code that lies behind pronouncements of looming climate catastrophe. Citizen-researchers—some of whom are, indeed, skeptics—have been after some of this information for years. CRU's apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, is only the tip of the iceberg.

In 2004, retired businessman Stephen McIntyre asked the National Science Foundation for information on various climate research that it funds. Affirming "the importance of public access to scientific research supported by U.S. federal funds," the Foundation nonetheless declined, saying "in general, we allow researchers the freedom to convey their scientific results in a manner consistent with their professional judgment."

Which leaves researchers free to withhold information selectively from critics, as when CRU director Phil Jones told Australian scientist Warwick Hughes in a 2005 email: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

An interesting question. Often, when independents obtain raw temperature data or computer codes, they do uncover flaws, thus advancing climate science—the "sunlight" now shining on CRU's data and codes is doing just that. That's what motivated Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Christopher Horner to request a slew of information from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which has already corrected its temperature records thanks to Mr. McIntyre's probing. Mr. Horner told us he wants "an entire accounting of rolling, relevant data, adjustments, codes, annotations and of course internal discussion about the frequent revisions." (WSJ)

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), ranking Member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), spoke to bloggers at The Heritage Foundation’s weekly Bloggers Briefing today and focused his remarks on the controversial “Climategate” scandal — the series of leaked e-mails that have blown holes through the theory of man-made global warming.

As Sen. Inhofe sat down to speak, he opined that he was just in the Senate trying to convince Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to investigate the subject of the e-mails, instead of the people who uncovered the e-mails. Sen. Inhofe was the leader of the global warming opposition ten years ago when he chaired the EPW Committee; when a blogger asked him what he thought about the emergent news that the science was flawed, the Senator quipped, “Redemption.”

BLITZER: A huge global warming conference about to begin in Copenhagen right now; lots of serious views under way, serious debate unfolding.

Let's get Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe joining us from Massachusetts, Democratic Congressman Ed Markey. They strongly disagree on what's going on.

Senator Inhofe, let me start with you because the EPA administrator Lisa Jackson today she said this in announcing the steps the Obama administration wants to advance. (The Situation Room, RealClearPolitics)

The Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as "the World's Most Famous Hurricane Expert" says the "ClimateGate" e-mails from the United Kingdom that revealed possible data manipulation are evidence of a conspiracy among "warmists," those who believe man's actions are triggering possibly catastrophic climate change.

"The recent 'ClimateGate' revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years," said Colorado State University's Dr. William Gray. (Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily)

The 'climategate' emails that appear to show British researchers manipulating data on global warming may have been leaked to undermine the Copenhagen talks, the Government's chief scientist claimed yesterday.

Professor John Beddington said it was 'an extraordinary coincidence' that the emails - stolen from an University of East Anglia computer server - were published on the eve of the UN summit.

The release of these emails and the way in which it was released on a variety of websites does lead one to wonder whether there's been a sort of conspiracy,' he said. (Daily Mail)

CRU scientists receive torrents of abusive and threatening e-mails since leaks that began in mid-November 2009. From environmentalresearchweb, part of the Guardian Environment Network

Two of the scientists involved in "Climategate" – the e-mail hacking incident at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK – have been emailed death threats since the contents of their private e-mails were leaked to the world. No further information can be revealed about these particular threats at present because they are currently under investigation with the FBI in the United States.

Many other CRU scientists and their colleagues have received torrents of abusive and threatening e-mails since the leaks first began in mid-November 2009. Tom Wigley, previous Director of CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, US, has been horrified by the e-mails he and other colleagues have received. "They are truly stomach-turning and show what sort of venomous monsters we are up against," he told environmentalresearchweb.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, the most recent Climategate email was from just two months ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.

How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong? (Andrew Bolt)

In fact, he refuses to accept the accolade of being the kind of principled man who could well have been the whistleblower, had be been inclined:

Wigley claims in the above ABC interview that he got perfectly good answers from his angry demands for answers from fellow Climategaters to what he was witnessing. Oddly enough, he did not pass on what those answers really were, other than to suggest that any destruction of material was of no consequence. (How would he know? Did he hold an inquiry?)

In this interview he dodged answering questions about the apparent fraud of Climategate scientist Wang Wei-Chyung that had got him so upset in private emails, or about the bizarre decision of Climategate scientist Keith Briffa to pick an unrepresentative group of tree rings to show a warming rather than the cooling that a bigger sample would have showed. He did not address what he meant when he wrote of “dishonest” IPCC presentations. He seemed to deny what the University of East Anglia has in fact confirmed - that raw data was destroyed. He denied what emails again confirm - that requests for data for checking by sceptics were blocked.

Let me now repeat what I wrote last week about Wigley and his emails, which to me showed he did indeed choke on the deceit he was witnessing. After each email, I’ll run the explanations and excuses Wigley gave the ABC today. Ask yourself: was he being totally frank? (Andrew Bolt)

At a time when leftist enviro-tyrants ought to be hanging their heads in shame, they are, instead, taking the offensive. They are not only dismissing the staggering ClimateGate scandal as insignificant but also redoubling and accelerating their push to enslave the world with their progress-swallowing treaties, laws and regulations.

It's the same old leftist playbook: Approach every desired major policy change as a crisis, and demand immediate action. If the public begins to wise up to the distortions and exaggerations, elevate the threat warning from dire to urgent. (David Limbaugh, Townhall)

The controversy surrounding the hacked e-mails of climate scientists has given new life to the skeptic camp that had been largely relegated to the sidelines during this year's legislative fight and, in the minds of opponents, handed them a potent new weapon against the climate bill.

During the House and Senate debates this year, lawmakers primarily sparred over the economic impact of the bill, rather than the science connecting man-made greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. And while advocates on both sides say that a climate and energy bill will live and die next year on its economic merits, the e-mails have reignited a debate that many on the left believed they had long since won. ( ClimateWire)

Think environmentalists are stooges? You're the unwitting recruit of a hugely powerful oil lobby – I've got the proof (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

"A mocker resents correction; he will not consult the wise." (Proverbs 15:12)

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken the route of many who would rather call names than have a serious debate about "climate change." He characterizes those who question "settled science" members of the "flat-earth" society. When people resort to name-calling it is a sign they have lost an argument.

The hacked emails from the global warming center of the universe -- the Climate Research Unit at Britain's East Anglia University -- could be the climatology equivalent of discovering the bones of Jesus. If the veracity of the emails is confirmed and if they contain evidence of data "trickery," as some global warming skeptics have suggested, their content could perhaps point to a vast cover-up of scientific evidence that some believe will disprove the "doctrine" of man-made climate change. So who are the real flat-earthers? Are they the ones who won't listen to any evidence except that which supports their cult-like faith, or are they the growing number who say the science is anything but settled and needs more study? (Cal Thomas, Townhall)

The United Nations “climate” summit is upon us, already qualifying as the world’s biggest emitter of hypocrisy –with the Telegraph reporting on the convergence in Copenhagen of “1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

And here’s the beauty of this grand scam. Not only is it based on unsound “findings” with the UN claiming a “consensus” that never was, based on “science” that was something other than scientific. Beyond that, if anyone cares to venture further, lie boundless vistas of bad economics. (Claudia Rosett, PJM)

This is the first of a three-part series of articles exploring Obama administration science czar John P. Holdren's self-acknowledged intellectual debt to geochemist Harrison Brown. The second part, to be published tomorrow, will feature Brown's endorsement of government-enforced eugenics as a necessary measure to prevent global over-population.

In the 1950s, before climate scientists had targeted carbon dioxide as a dangerous chemical, atomic scientist Harrison Brown, one of Obama science czar John Holdren's acknowledged gurus, called for a global increase in carbon dioxide, precisely because of its perceived greenhouse gas effects.

Harrison Brown – a geochemist who supervised the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project – wrote in his 1954 Malthusian book "The Challenge of Man's Future" that the production of the food needed to feed an increasing world population could be advanced by human-manipulated greenhouse effects, including forcing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In 1986, science czar Holdren co-edited a scientific reader, "Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown."

In one of his introductory essays written for the book, Holdren acknowledged he read Brown's "The Challenge of Man's Future" when he was in high school and that the book had a profound effect on his intellectual development.

Holdren acknowledged Brown's book transformed his thinking about the world and "about the sort of career I wanted to pursue."

Holdren further commented in glowing terms that Brown's book was a work "that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts about the interactions of the demographic, biological geophysical, technological, economic and sociopolitical dimensions of contemporary problems."

Pump more gas

Lamenting on page 140 that "the earth's atmosphere contains only a minute concentration – about 0.03 percent" – Brown observed, "It has been demonstrated that a tripling of carbon-dioxide concentration in the air will approximately double the growth rates of tomatoes, alfalfa, and sugar beets."

Brown then argued on page 141 that "controlled atmospheres enriched in carbon dioxide" would be an essential component of enormous greenhouses built to grow plants in nutrient-rich solutions.

His conclusion? Pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in all regions of the world. (Jerome R. Corsi, WorldNetDaily)

Carbon dioxide is dangerous and a threat not only to human health but our entire planet. How do we know? The Environmental Protection Agency told us so, officially announcing that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are “the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.” But there’s two important points to make regarding “carbon pollution.” One is that we don’t really know how much carbon dioxide is affecting earth’s temperatures. The second is that we may be underestimating the benefits are carbon dioxide on our planet.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that carbon dioxide represents a threat to human health starts a process that regulatory experts say will take years to resolve.

Whether it becomes the “glorious mess” that Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) predicted depends on factors like how much flexibility utilities and other emitters are given to meet the new standards and whether Congress eventually passes a cap-and-trade bill that would clear up some of the uncertainty surrounding the regulation. (Jim Snyder, The Hill)

Carbon dioxide is dangerous, says Lisa Jackson, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is dangerous, like the growling exhaust pipe of a 25-year-old Chevy Corvette or the sulphurous plume from a coal-fired power station. Overnight, America has decided: carbon-dioxide pollution is a public health hazard and emitters will be shunned like cigarette smokers.

The EPA’s decision on Monday to treat CO2 as if it were a noxious poison was craved and dreaded in equal measure by climate activists and industrialists. It is a bombshell, more than just a public relations ploy to make President Obama look cool at the Copenhagen summit. It unleashes one of the toughest US regulators and gives it a mandate to go after heavy industry with compliance orders and fines. Power generators, oil refiners, chemical manufacturers and cement makers have been warned: the bloodhounds of the EPA will hunt you down and curb your emissions.

This is politics, of course. A lot must happen before the EPA begins to slap fines on recalcitrant power companies. The agency needs to draw up regulations that work — a monumental task. It needs to decide which CO2 abatement technologies are effective and affordable — at present, there are no commercial carbon-capture technologies, only government-subsidised pilot projects.

But make no mistake: this is the beginning of America’s puritanical crackdown on carbon. If you are surprised that the atmospheric gas that feeds the roses in your garden is being labelled a dangerous poison, remember that America doesn’t regulate its citizens with the gentle persuading hand of the Queen; it does so with the passion of the religious convert. If the EPA is unchallenged, carbon will be hunted down, in the tailpipes of cars in Los Angeles and in the stacks of power plants in Virginia. (Carl Mortished, The Times)

Industry groups vowed to fight an Obama administration proposal to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, even as some companies prepared to comply with restrictions they regard as inevitable. (WSJ)

NEW YORK -- Political, costly, and likely to choke off growth. That's how the energy industry and companies that use a lot of energy describe the Environmental Protection Agency's announcement Monday that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger and must be regulated.

Almost all energy and energy intense industries hope that Congress will step in with new climate laws, namely through a cap-and-trade system that limits greenhouse gas emissions while allowing companies to buy or sell emissions credits.

If not, companies say, jobs will be lost, an economic recovery will be hamstrung and everyone will pay more for energy. (AP)

The Environmental Protection Agency has declared carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for life on Earth, to be a health hazard that has to be managed. What follows will be a useless bureaucratic exercise.

The announcement was made by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — the same official who admitted under oath in July that no matter what the U.S. does about carbon emissions, it will have little impact on global CO2 levels if China and India don't limit their output.

And those two countries have made it clear: While they may make politically correct pledges to cut emissions, they will not sign any binding agreement that will force them to do so.

Despite their constant screeching about the dangers of carbon emissions, don't expect the EU nations to scrupulously comply with binding agreements either. Until the recession slowed their economies, they were not on track to meet the emission targets set by the 1997 Kyoto accord. (IBD)

The subject of this post is the EPA endangerment finding. But the focus is not on whether or not the finding is appropriate. I am not a legal expert, but I am of the view that the Obama Administration is perfectly justified in advancing the finding, which as I understand it requires a very low scientific threshold -- do specific human activities lead to changes in the environment? And might those changes potentially lead to some degree of harm? I think that both of these thresholds are easily met, though the politics of implementation are likely very difficult. However, the finding itself is not the focus of this post. This post focuses on how some of my research is presented in the EPA endangerment finding and in the EPA response to public comments.

To be clear, nothing in this post should be interpreted as opposing the EPA finding or more generally as opposing action on addressing accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This post should be read in the context of a continuing series on the systematic misrepresentation of the science of climate change and disaster losses. Does such misrepresentation matter? Well, it matters to me because it is my research being misrepresented. Here is the latest installment. (Roger Pielke Jr)

The Midwich Cuckoos: Anti-social behaviour, 1950s style.

It has been observed that the outstanding characteristic of those leaked e-mails is that there is not one joke in them. Like Islam, the New Left do not do jokes. We noted recently that the big change in university life has been the absence of laughter. As the new generation gradually took control of the universities they pursued relentless campaigns over such things as the control of language and tobacco. It was all done in those plonking tones adopted by the po-faced when they are on mission. Jokes were for the frivolous oldies.

As with the Spanish civil war, tobacco was only a rehearsal. The methods developed for the campaign, such as using CDC and EPA to manufacture fake statistics, would be ready to be reeled out when the final push came.

While the Right thought they were in control in the Thatcher/Reagan years, the New Left were quietly infiltrating institutions, most crucially the schools. Education became a cultureless brain-washing exercise.

The crucial move is the by-passing of democracy, as the EU bureaucrats did so successfully in establishing control over a continent. Now the EPA is being used as a means to by-pass democracy in the USA. By declaring the very stuff of life, carbon, to be a hazard to life, again on faked data, they have given the President power to ignore the elected representatives of the people. Make no mistake about it; Socialist International now has control of America as well as Europe.

The small but welcome flurry of democracy in Australia has become a side issue. The impact of the Climategate whistleblower is in the process of being shrugged off by the privileged throng who have converged on Copenhagen in their limousines and private jets. Their naïve supporters (Lenin’s “useful idiots") take to the streets with painted faces demonstrating against the stuff they are made from. The silent majority do not do demonstrations, but if they do not soon bestir themselves they will be silenced forever in the Orwellian future that looms so ominously. (Number Watch)

In the last week alone, it has been at the heart of a major funding dispute with China and political chaos in Australia. But despite its growing importance, the world of carbon trading remains opaque, almost unknown by the average investor even as it becomes an enormous global industry.

At its heart, carbon trading is a simple business: Companies have caps on the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions they are allowed to make, for which they receive “credits.” If they exceed their emission caps, they can buy credits from other companies that are emitting below their caps, providing motivation for everyone to invest in greener technologies and reduce emissions. (Peter Koven, Financial Post)

Whatever the results of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, one thing is for sure: Draconian reductions on carbon emissions will be tacitly accepted by the most developed economies and sloughed off by many developing ones. In essence, emerging economies get to cut their "carbon" intensity--a natural product of their economic evolution--while we get to cut our throats.

The logic behind this prediction goes something like this. Since the West created the industrial revolution and the greenhouse gases that supposedly caused this "crisis," it's our obligation to take much of the burden for cleaning them up.

Plagued by self-doubt and even self-loathing, many in the West will no doubt consider this an appropriate mea culpa. Our leaders will dutifully accept cuts in our carbon emissions--up to 80% by 2050--while developing countries increase theirs, albeit at a lower rate. Oh, we also pledge to send billions in aid to help them achieve this goal.

The media shills, scientists, bureaucrats and corporate rent-seekers gathered at Copenhagen won't give much thought to what this means to the industrialized world's middle and working class. For many of them the new carbon regime means a gradual decline in living standards. Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.

You can get a glimpse of this future in high-unemployment California. Here a burgeoning regulatory regime tied to global warming threatens to turn the state into a total "no go" economic development zone. Not only do companies have to deal with high taxes, cascading energy prices and regulations, they now face audits of their impact on global warming. Far easier to move your project to Texas--or if necessary, China.

The notion that the hoi polloi must be sacrificed to save the earth is not a new one. Paul Ehrlich, who was the mentor of President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, laid out the defining logic in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb. In this influential work, Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and "an age of scarcity" in key metals by the mid-1980s. Similar views were echoed by a 1972 "Limits to Growth" report issued by the Club of Rome, a global confab that enjoyed a cache similar to that of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

To deal with this looming crisis, Holdren in the 1977 book Ecoscience (co-authored with Anne and Paul Ehrlich) developed the notion of "de-development." According to Holdren, poorer countries like India and China could not be expected to work their way out of poverty since they were "foredoomed by enormous if not insurmountable economic and environmental obstacles." The only way to close "the prosperity gap" was to lower the living standards of what he labeled "over-developed" nations.

These predictions were less than accurate. World-wide systemic mass starvation did not take place as population escalated. Rather those many millions wallowing in poverty in the developing world, particularly in Asia, lifted themselves into the global middle class. Far more efficient ways to use energy have been developed, and unexpected caches new resources continue to be discovered all over the planet.

Yet however wrong-headed, Holdren's world view now has jumped from the dustbin of history into the craniums of presidents and prime ministers. President Obama's pledge to "restore science to its rightful place" has morphed into state-sponsored scientific ideology. (Joel Kotkin, Forbes)

In the charming backstreets of downtown Copenhagen, where Hans Christian Andersen, once wrote his famous stories, the climate sceptics gathered. They came from far and wide, from business and science, to dispel the biggest fairy tale of them all: global warming. (TDT)

Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), has called on America to increase funding for poor countries to deal with climate change. (TDT)

A Republican lawmaker said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference on climate change to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the "scientific fascism" ends. (FOXNews.com)

25,000 bureaucrats, factota, hangers on, and representatives of various environmental organizations have just converged on Copehagen for the UN’s latest “Conference of the Parties (COP) to its infamous 1992 climate treaty. Expect a lot of heat, not much light, and a punt right into our next election.

President Obama says that the US will agree to a “politically binding” reduction of our emissions of carbon dioxide to a mere 17% of 2005 levels by 2050. This will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emission of the average citizen in 1867. Obama’s pronouncement has stepped all over the toes of the US Senate, which really doesn’t want to vote on similar legislation this election year. Jim Webb, a democrat heretofore very loyal to the President recently wrote Obama a very tersely worded note reminding him that the power to commit the nation to such a regulation lies with the Senate, not with the Commander-in-Chief. (Patrick J. Michaels, Cato at liberty)

For anyone thinking the Copenhagen climate change summit would just be a celebration of measures to defeat global warming, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Arlington, has news:

He's coming, and he is going to disagree.

Barton, one of Congress' biggest critics of global warming, will travel to the United Nations conference next week with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's delegation. But the similarities and agreements between the two lawmakers will presumably end upon arrival in Denmark.

As Barton told reporters Tuesday, he will not be "one of the sycophants that says climate change is the biggest problem facing the world and we need to do all these draconian things that cost jobs."

Barton and four other Republican representatives are attending to stir up opposition to Democrats' climate change plan and to disagree with the scientific research about global warming. The group is tentatively scheduled to leave Dec. 15, according to Barton's spokesman, Sean Brown. (Dallas Morning News)

The Guardian and others report a political nuke that has exploded in Copenhagen and which has been added to the ClimateGate:

Part of the problem with the climate change issue is that it isn’t seen as an ongoing review of scientific models and theories about human impact on planetary warmth. It has taken on a political and religious tone which makes any attempt to peer review the consensus subject to ridicule. We know that dissidents of the consensus evidence were shunned and blacklisted according to the hacked [or leaked] Climatic Research Unit emails from the University of East Anglia. Those who have challenged the prevailing urgency of action have been mocked, ridiculed, and relegated to the status of apostates. (National Post)

Americans for Prosperity investigates the "carbon-conscious" way many U.N. delegates are getting to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15).

According to the climate change catastrophists, there is now only a fortnight left to "save the planet" – two weeks being the scheduled length of the Copenhagen conference held to find a solution to "man-made global warming".

If there really is just a fortnight left before we are all doomed, it is good to see that the 20,000 or so delegates are going out in style. More than 1,200 limousines have flooded into the Danish capital (forget about public transport). According to this newspaper's Copenhagen diarist, "most of these stretched vehicles have been driven hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden. Last week France ordered an extra 42 of them. Only five of the limos are hybrid; the rest are petrol and diesel."

This great emission-fest will be mightily augmented at the conference's conclusion, when the really big cheeses – presidents, prime ministers, and (naturally) the Prince of Wales – arrive in upwards of 140 private jets.

It's this sort of carry-on which makes some of us question whether the world leaders lecturing us on our own carbon emissions truly believe what they say about the imminence of planetary disaster. For example, Gordon Brown fulminated at the weekend that those who questioned some of the assertions about the extent of man's influence on the climate were "flat earthers".

Yet it is Mr Brown who insists that we should construct a third runway at Heathrow Airport in order to accommodate a vast number of extra flights. It is the central departments of this government, which, according to the latest Sustainable Development Commission report, have increased their CO2 emissions by 8 per cent over the past decade. It is this administration which regarded the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi as useful in persuading Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to approve a vast oilfield exploration contract for BP.

That's right, the bad news is that a man convicted of the biggest mass-murder on British soil has been released after only eight years in prison; the good news is that this might help to boost our biggest oil company's output of hydrocarbons – apparently the proximate cause of humanity's destruction. ( The Independent)

An international group of scientists say there is an immediate need for a global assessment of the nitrogen cycle and its impact on climate.

On a planetary scale, human activities, especially fertiliser application, have more than doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in circulation on land. This massive alteration of the nitrogen cycle affects climate, food security, energy security, human health and ecosystem health. The long-term consequences of these changes are yet to be fully realised, but the human impact on the nitrogen cycle has so far been largely missed in international environmental assessments.

Nitrogen's role in climate change will be highlighted at an event on 7 December at the COP-15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Event organisers will be calling for a new assessment of nitrogen and climate, which will identify innovative nitrogen management strategies for global climate change mitigation and associated co-benefits to society. (ScienceDaily)

The 16,000 delegates to the two-week-long orgy of self-flagellation known as the Copenhagen Climate Conference want to shrink global output of CO2 not because of hard science, but out of envy.

Even as Climate-gate suggests that sham science lies behind global warming, delegates are swarming into the Scandinavian city to push for steep cuts in carbon dioxide output by industrialized nations.

We'll let others comment on the hypocrisy of those who, while trying to force the rest of us into an ever-smaller carbon footprint, will employ more than 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets while producing 880 pounds of CO2 per attendee at their conference.

Or the even-worse hypocrisy of Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.'s global warming guru, who in one 19-month period flew 443,243 miles — including trips to have dinner at Washington's Brookings Institution and one memorable overnighter to attend a cricket match — but now wants the rest of us to be forced into a "carbon allowance."

What goes little commented on, however, is the reason for the vehemence of these calls for CO2 sacrifice on the part of the U.S.: a desire to take our economy down. (IBD)

A modern reproduction by Hamish Laird of Thjodhild's church, with Eriksfjord in the background, as it might have been at Brattahlíð [anglicised as Brattahlid], the Estate of Eric the Red, which flourished in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Brattahlíð hosted the first Greenlandic parliament.

Context and contingency are everything when interpreting temperature trends. The UK Met... Read more...

Listening in the UK to the news coverage of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, one gets the idea that all has started in a rosy pink glow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just what is it about this issue? Our media loses all its usual bite, and turns to sentimental goo. It is "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".

In reality, the Conference has begun exactly as one expected, with all... Read more...

In response to the December 7th through 18th Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, The Heritage Foundation is launching a video series to cover all the details and aspects of the climate summit. We’ll address all the angles (climate, energy, national security, sovereignty, trade, and more) and provide you with everything you need to know about Copenhagen.

COPENHAGEN - China led calls by developing nations for deeper emissions cuts from the United States, Japan and Europe at U.N. climate talks on Tuesday, as a study showed that this decade will be the warmest on record. (Reuters)

COPENHAGEN, Dec 8 - Developing nations demanded deeper emissions cuts from rich nations, particularly the United States, at U.N. climate talks in Denmark on Tuesday, as a study showed that 2009 is the fifth warmest year on record. (Reuters)

THE world's biggest climate change conference has opened in Copenhagen with Kevin Rudd under immediate pressure to triple Australia's unconditional emissions-reductions target.

Amid optimistic predictions of a successful political deal to reduce greenhouse emissions on the conference stage and entrenched divisions hampering negotiations behind the scenes, Australia was under intense pressure to commit to an emissions-reduction pledge of at least 15 per cent by 2020 -- three times its unconditional target of 5 per cent.

Opening the conference, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen declared a successful deal was "within reach" and the executive secretary of the UN climate change convention, Yvo de Boer, said negotiations were in "excellent shape".

And international negotiators argued that the conditions placed by the Rudd government on making the deeper cuts had already been met. "It is pretty clear Australia will have to move well beyond 5 per cent," one developed-nation negotiator said. (Lenore Taylor, The Australian)

AUSTRALIANS could be hit with a tax bill of up to $400 billion under a draft deal leaked from the Copenhagen summit, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said.

Under the draft, Australia would be asked to lower its emissions by 25 per cent within a decade.

Rich countries would need to reduce their emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

Mr Abbott said such a plan would have a significant impact on Australia under the Rudd Government.

"Just to get a five per cent reduction in emissions, Mr Rudd wants to whack a $120 billion tax on us," Mr Abbott said.

"To get a 15 per cent or 25 per cent reduction in emissions on Mr Rudd's logic, it's going to be an even bigger tax - perhaps a $300 or $400 billion tax.

"So I think that the Australian people ought to be very concerned about anything that Mr Rudd might sign us up to in Copenhagen." (AAP)

So Abbott is talking science. But Wong’s response is merely to claim but, but, but … we politicians are holding a meeting.

What do you think is the best evidence of the current climate? The data or Wong’s meeting? Who do you trust most to tell you the truth about the climate: Abbott or Wong? (Andrew Bolt)

The new IPCC report, a briefing for the Copenhagen attendees, fails to understand that a rise in temps does not constitute proof that man caused it.

Our leaders have gathered in Copenhagen. There, in their winter of discontent, they pledge to do something about climate change.

Stephen It’s-Getting-Cold-No-Wait!-Hot-Out Schneider and many other environmental persons took up pen to detail the best — or at least, most frightening — arguments for action. It is thus important to understand this document to discover whether the information offered is convincing … or even relevant. (William M. Briggs, PJM)

by Bill Gray

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO₂ are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO₂ ’s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO₂ are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century’s global warming of about 1^o F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe’s temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO₂ emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO₂ output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate. The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA’s just announced decision to treat CO₂ as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty. (Bill Gray)

This is rather unique, and it shows the conviction that some individuals have. I’ve often thought that a full page ad in the NYT might get some action, but I really think volume is the answer now on an individual scale, just like Gore’s “we” campaign. I’m sure that thousands of letters to the editors are being launched right about now from folks who think a lot like Mr. Bell. Climategate and Copenhagen have stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Unfortunately, ads don’t become web searchable, so we have this image and the PDF below.

Ad in the Calgary Herald today, page B5 - click to enlarge

People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”

Darwin Airport - by Dominic Perrin via Panoramio

Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasofu . Climategate doesn’t affect that.

The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

So I’m still on my multi-year quest to understand the climate data. You never know where this data chase will lead. This time, it has ended me up in Australia. I got to thinking about Professor Wibjorn Karlen’s statement about Australia that I quoted here:

The folks at CRU told Wibjorn that he was just plain wrong. Here’s what they said is right, the record that Wibjorn was talking about, Fig. 9.12 in the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing Northern Australia:

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

If there was enough money, fame and power on the table (think seismic proportions, money that moves the economic landscape), would it be possible to take a small unproven scientific theory as an excuse and, with the best PR teams in the world, promote it, support it, and make it appear unquestionable?

If it were cloaked in the most “innocent” of motives, and shrouded in terminology that veils the truth, would it not run unchecked for years, unless some big vested interest opposed it? And if there was no particular big vested interest to oppose it, isn’t it possible that if the only harm it causes is to the giant disorganized mass known as humankind, there would be no committee of humankind to check its momentum. (JoNova)

THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate

. We had the "grandfather of climate change", James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions.

It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue.

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."

This is a refreshingly honest comment when contrasted with some of the statements in the hacked emails of the Climatic Research Unit, UK, made by leading British and US climate scientists, who were caught with their fingers on the "delete button" when faced with climate data that failed to agree with their computer models. (Michael Asten, The Australian)

AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.

Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.

JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes. (Professor Bob Carter, Daily Telegraph)

NOT everyone believes in human-caused climate change. Here, some of Australia's most respected scientists have their say on this very divisive debate. (Daily Telegraph)

Global Warmageddon is such an insidious enemy that it is at its worst when it isn’t even occurring. Damn! How does one fight at enemy like that? If that statement seems impossible, then I must refer you to two recent press reports. [Read More] (Mac Johnson, Energy Tribune)

The Earth's temperature may be 30-50 percent more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week

In the long term, the Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.

The results show that components of the Earth's climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.

Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and colleagues compared results from a global climate model to temperature reconstructions of the Earth's environment three million years ago when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were relatively high. The temperature reconstructions were derived using data from three million-year-old sediments on the ocean floor. (University of Bristol )

The Met Office today has released temperature records from over 1,500 weather stations from across the globe. (Directgov)

On Day 2 of the Copenhagen climate conference, the United Nations announced that the current decade is the warmest on record. Please allow us to unravel this web of deception.

The U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization released Tuesday a preliminary report that claims the 10-year period from 2000 to 2009 is the warmest since records began in 1850. We find the claim to be, well, a bit silly.

How, for instance, can serious scientists compare data from record keeping in 1850 to modern record-keeping? The report says the data are culled "from networks of land-based weather and climate stations, ships and buoys, as well as satellites."

It might be rude to challenge the leaders of the faith, but we have to ask: How many satellites, ships and buoys were used in 1850? Whatever the answer is, the WMO needs to explain to the public how adding data sources in later years skews the overall picture.

Furthermore, how do the land-based weather stations match up? Are they the same set of stations used since 1850, or have stations been added and dropped through the decades? Have there always been enough stations to adequately represent the global temperature? (IBD)

As national leaders and others assemble in Copenhagen for the climate change negotiations, the whole subject must seem a mystifying cloud of acronyms, numbers and data. But as important as all these are in crafting an action plan, they completely obscure the fact that the planet works as a biological as well as a physical system.

That biophysical system (the biosphere and atmosphere together) is the key to understanding the urgency of climate change as well as crafting a truly meaningful response. (NYT)

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - Dec. 7, 2009) - The Fraser Institute, one of Canada's leading economic think tanks, has released a new video urging Canadians to question the unfounded claims and fear-mongering promoted by global warming activists.

The video parodies the schemes devised by environmental extremists and special interests to sway public opinion in support of new regulations to reduce CO2 emissions and give governments unfettered control over how people live and work.

The video is available on YouTube by searching for Question the Hype. It can also be found at www.fraserinstitute.org.

Repeating the words "scientific consensus" over and over and telling sad stories about polar bears does not qualify as "science." So, why is it that the people who insist that Man-made global warming is based on science, not politics, always get shaky and defensive when people want to actually talk about the reasoning behind it? (John Hawkins, Townhall)

Carbon Dioxide: The Breath of Life: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recently declared carbon dioxide to be a dangerous air pollutant. Nature, however, suggests just the opposite. Hear the testimony – and see the results – of the man who breathed life into plants.

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 772 individual scientists from 458 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Narsaq Sound, Southern Greenland. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Subject Index Summary:
Extinction (Butterflies): How will earth's butterflies respond to the twin evils of the climate-alarmist crowd, i.e., atmospheric CO2 enrichment and global warming?

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: Scots Pine (Overdieck and Fenselau, 2009), Spinach (Jin et al., 2009), Spring Wheat (de Graaff et al., 2009), and Sugarcane (Yu and Allen, Jr., 2009).

NEW YORK - Coal miner Consol Energy Inc launched an attack on environmentalists on Tuesday, blaming ecological "activism" for forcing it to idle two mines in West Virginia that employ nearly 500 workers.

"It is unfortunate, at a time when reliable and affordable energy is so desperately needed to reinvigorate our economy, that the nation's energy industries are coming under repeated assault from nuisance lawsuits and appeals of environmental regulations," said Chief Operating Officer Nicholas DeIuliis.

"It is challenging enough to operate our coal and gas assets in the current economic downturn without having to contend with a constant stream of activism in rehashing and reinterpreting permit applications that have already been approved," he said.

His comments came in a press release announcing that about 104 workers at the Little Eagle Coal Co mine and 378 at the Fola Coal Co mine, near Bickmore, W. Va., might have to be laid off starting next Feb 7.

Consol attributed the Fola idling to an appeal brought under clean water and other laws, by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), against mining permits which have already been approved.

As a result of the OVEC appeal, a federal judge issued an order suspending Fola Coal Co's Clean Water Act permit for the Ike Fork portions of Fola operations.

"Without this permit, neither Fola Coal Company nor Little Eagle Coal Company can satisfy the required specifications of its coal sales contracts," Consol said in its release.

"To put it into human terms, we are talking about the jobs of nearly 500 of our employees at the Fola Operations, and the impact such legal interpretations will have on their quality of life and that of their families," DeIuliis said. (Reuters)

DIMOCK, Pa. — Victoria Switzer dreamed of a peaceful retirement in these Appalachian hills. Instead, she is coping with a big problem after a nearby natural gas well contaminated her family’s drinking water with high levels of methane.

Through no design of hers, Ms. Switzer has joined a rising chorus of voices skeptical of the nation’s latest energy push. “It’s been ‘drill, baby, drill’ out here,” Ms. Switzer said bitterly. “There is no stopping this train.”

Across vast regions of the country, gas companies are using a technology called hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas from previously untapped beds of shale. The push has been so successful that the country’s potential gas reserves jumped by 35 percent in two years. The new supplies have driven down natural gas prices for consumers and might help the global environment by allowing more production of electricity from natural gas, which emits fewer global warming emissions than coal.

What the drilling push will do to local environments is another matter.

The drilling boom is raising concern in many parts of the country, and the reaction is creating political obstacles for the gas industry. Hazards like methane contamination of drinking water wells, long known in regions where gas production was common, are spreading to populous areas that have little history of coping with such risks, but happen to sit atop shale beds.

And a more worrisome possibility has come to light. A string of incidents in places like Wyoming and Pennsylvania in recent years has pointed to a possible link between hydraulic fracturing and pollution of groundwater supplies. In the worst case, such pollution could damage crucial supplies of water used for drinking and agriculture.

So far, the evidence of groundwater pollution is thin. Environmental groups contend that is because governments have been slow to react to the drilling boom and are not looking hard for contamination. Gas companies acknowledge the validity of some concerns, but they claim that their technology is fundamentally safe.

The debate is becoming more urgent as gas companies move closer to more populated areas, especially in the Northeast, where millions of people are likely to find themselves living near drilling operations in coming years. (NYT)

Climate change advisers have decided that an extensive building programme at Heathrow — including the construction of a third runway — can proceed without jeopardising the Government’s carbon emissions targets.

The Committee on Climate Change will report today that 138 million extra passenger could use British airports in 2050, an increase of 60 per cent, without breaching government targets to reduce aviation emissions to below 2005 levels. (The Times)

The changing global climate threatens life-sustaining resources. Fresh water reserves and arable land are shrinking. Weather-related catastrophes, such as heat waves, floods, storms, fires and droughts, are becoming more frequent and destructive. Climate change imperils livelihoods, presenting one of the most difficult global challenges confronting the international community. (e! Science News)

As the Climate Change talks get underway in Copenhagen this week, there is much attention focused on alternative energy sources that produce little or no greenhouse gas pollution. Some of these energy sources - like wind, solar, biomass and geothermal - are also attractive because they are renewable and offset the need for imported oil, gas or coal. But, it will be a long time before any of these energy sources will be a large-scale alternative to fossil fuels. (VOA News)

WASHINGTON - One of the most systematic looks yet at the swine flu pandemic confirms that it is at worst only a little more serious than an average flu season and could well be a good deal milder, researchers said on Monday.

They analyzed data from Milwaukee and New York, two U.S. cities that have kept detailed tabs on outbreaks of H1N1, to calculate a likely mortality rate of 0.048 percent.

"That is, about 1 in 2,000 people who had symptoms of pandemic H1N1 infection died," Dr. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University and colleagues wrote.

Probably 1.44 percent of patients with H1N1 who were sick enough to have symptoms were hospitalized, and 0.24 percent required intensive care, they added.

The findings, published in PLoS Medicine, a Public Library of Science journal, should be reassuring to public health officials and policymakers who worry that a flu pandemic could kill millions and worsen the global recession.

They do not, however, guarantee that H1N1 will not worsen, or that some other, stronger, strain of flu will not emerge.

"We have estimated ... that approximately 1.44 percent of symptomatic pandemic H1N1 patients during the spring in the United States were hospitalized; 0.239 percent required intensive care or mechanical ventilation; and 0.048 percent died," Lipsitch and colleagues wrote. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Zhu Zhu toy hamsters do not violate U.S. standards for levels of the chemical antimony, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said.

"The popular Zhu Zhu toy is not out of compliance with the antimony or other heavy metal limits of the new U.S. mandatory toy standard," the CPSC said in a statement issued Monday night.

The news allays fears that cropped up after a report by a consumer group raised concerns about levels of a chemical in one type of the China-made toy. Zhu Zhus are one of the hottest toys of the holiday season.

Earlier this week, the CPSC said it was examining the toy. Antimony is used in lead storage batteries and sheet and pipe metal, and as a fire retardant in textiles and plastics.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prolonged exposure to antimony can cause lung and heart problems, ulcers and diarrhea. (Reuters)

By now, everyone in the toy industry has heard of the absurd junk science work done by poseur Dara O'Rourke. O'Rourke used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) to measure antimony on the surface of the Zhu Zhu Pet Mr. Squiggles Toy Hamster, and determined that they exceeded federal standards.

However, this is nowhere near the correct way to do the test! In essence, what he did is the equivalent of touching a steak to determine if it is at the proper temperature, rather than using a thermometer.

After garnering all the publicity that could be mustered by attempting to take down the most popular toy of the season—and one that people can easily afford—the clueless O'Rourke had to issue a "correction."

Too bad he doesn't know anything about appropriate testing methods, but runs half-ass tests, as part of his scare tactics. Aren't you glad that someone who didn't even take the time to check how the feds test a toy, before running his media scare, has had appointments at two prestigious universities?

This is very reminiscent of what the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics also does. For what it's worth, his pitiful lack of practical scientific knowledge, and lack of attention to detail, are pretty much in keeping with many of the green radicals.

That such a phenomenal mistake could have been made should destroy whatever credibility he still has, and I hope the Zhu Zhu people are considering litigation. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

* Study finds testosterone does not induce aggression
* Hormone increases status awareness, prompts fair play
* But myth about testosterone may encourage bad behaviour

LONDON - Testosterone makes people behave badly, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect, not its true biological action, scientists said on Tuesday.

A Swiss and British study found evidence that debunks the myth that testosterone causes aggressive, egocentric behaviour, suggesting instead that the sex hormone can encourage fair play -- particularly if it improves a person's status.

"We wanted to verify how the hormone affects social behaviour," said Christoph Eisenegger, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich who worked on the study. "We were interested in the question: what is truth, and what is myth?" (Reuters Life!)

CIGARETTE pack warnings that remind smokers of the fatal consequences of their habit may actually make them smoke more as a way to cope with the inevitability of death.

A small study by psychologists from the United States, Switzerland and Germany showed that warnings unrelated to death, such as "smoking makes you unattractive" or "smoking brings you and the people around you severe damage", were more effective in changing smokers' attitudes towards their habit.

This was especially the case in people who smoked to boost their self-esteem, such as youth who took up the habit to impress or fit in with their peers and others who thought smoking increased their social value, the researchers said.

"In general, when smokers are faced with death-related anti-smoking messages on cigarette packs, they produce active coping attempts as reflected in their willingness to continue the risky smoking behaviour," the study said.

"To succeed with anti-smoking messages on cigarette packs one has to take into account that considering their death may make people smoke." (Reuters)

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards. (NYT)

Madison County Circuit Judge Barbara Crowder is set to hear motions in a series of cases filed over alleged water contamination involving a popular weed killer.

Among the motions to be heard beginning at 10 a.m. Dec. 14 is a move by the defendants to designate the case against Syngenta Crop Protection as the lead case.

Syngenta is one of a number of makers of atrazine that is being sued by the Holiday Shores Sanitation District and a number of Illinois municipalities in a series of proposed class actions.

The 2004 cases have yet to reach the class certification stage.

The plaintiffs were recently allowed to amend their complaint to include degradent chemicals stemming from atrazine's breakdown and add other plaintiffs.

Holiday Shores is suing for unspecified damages in the six cases, claiming that the weed killer runs off from fields and contaminates drinking water.

Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ruled that atrazine is safe in drinking water in three parts per billion, the plaintiffs contend that even in small concentrations the weed killer can cause problems in human beings such as fetal death.

The 2004 cases are still in the early discovery stages. (The Record)

Some time starting in mid November 2009, ten million teletypes all started their deet-ditta-dot chatter reeling off the following headline: "Hackers broke into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit...."

I hate that. It annoys me because just like everything else about climate-gate it's been 'value-added'; simplified and distilled. The contents of FOIA2009.zip demand more attention to this detail and as someone once heard Professor Jones mutter darkly, "The devil is in the details...so average it out monthly using TMax!"

The details of the files tell a story that FOIA2009.zip was compiled internally and most likely released by an internal source.

The contents of the zip file hold one top-level directory, ./FOIA. Inside that it is broken into two main directories, ./mail and ./documents. Inside ./mail are 1073 text files ordered by date. The files are named in order with increasing but not sequential numbers. Each file holds the body and only the body of an email.

In comparison, ./documents is highly disorganized. MS Word documents, FORTRAN, IDL and other computer code, Adobe Acrobat PDF's and data are sprinkled in the top directory and through several sub-directories. It's the kind of thing that makes the co-workers disorganized desk look like the spit and polish of a boot camp floor.

What people are missing entirely is that these emails and files tell a story themselves. (Small Dead Animals)

Starting today, world leaders are beginning a two-week meeting in Copenhagen in a bid to change the entire direction of the global economy. They will do so, not on the basis of empirical scientific facts about global warming, but on alarmist computer-modelled predictions based on a swath of raw temperature data. Oh yes, and the scientific integrity of those doing the feeding and interpreting the results. [Read More] (Energy Tribune)

The "Climategate" row took centre stage on the opening day of the Copenhagen climate summit today as the world's leading oil exporter intervened to question the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.

As 15,000 delegates from 192 nations began what was billed as the "last, best chance" to avert a catastrophic rise in sea and air temperatures, Saudi Arabia's chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, spoke from the floor to say that e-mails hacked from a UK research centre had shaken trust in the work of scientists.

He was not the first to mention the Climategate scandal. In his opening address to the conference, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the hackers had been trying to undermine the work of his organisation. (The Times)

Rajendra Pachauri, the top United Nations climate-change scientist, said the panel he heads is “transparent and objective,” dismissing allegations by global- warming skeptics that UN data were manipulated. (Bloomberg)

A powerful defence of the science of climate change is being launched at the Copenhagen conference as the UN and world leaders push back on claims by climate sceptics and call for deeper cuts in greenhouse gases from wealthy nations.

The chief UN climate official, Yvo de Boer, strenuously defended the scientific reports of the UN's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying four successive reports, peer-reviewed by 2500 scientists, had endorsed the finding global warming was almost certainly a result of human activities. (Marian Wilkinson, SMH)

OPINION: The climate change conference begins under a cloud of suspicion following leaked e-mails suggesting global warming evidence has been fabricated, writes RICHARD TOL

RECENTLY, E-MAILS and other documents were apparently stolen from a computer belonging to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.

The CRU is a major data centre for climate research. Senior staff at the CRU have been influential in the formulation of policy advice in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United Nations. The stolen data was posted on the internet and has been the subject of much debate and speculation since.

Some have argued that the e-mails conclusively demonstrate that climate change is a fabrication of a small clique of environmentalists masquerading as scientists. That is plain nonsense. But what was in the e-mails, and what are implications for the science and policy of climate change?

The e-mails contain a lot of chit-chat. There is complaining about colleagues, and discussions about ending other people’s careers. There are e-mails about tax evasion and bending budgets to fit the rules. This is not pretty, but none of our business.

Other things do matter. The e-mails reveal a systematic effort to deny legitimate freedom of information requests. They contain evidence that the rules of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were deliberately broken to include a paper that supports a particular point of view. The e-mails show an intolerance of views and facts that do not support the received wisdom of the people involved. One of the stolen documents reveals that a key result, the instrumental record of the global mean temperature since 1850, cannot be reproduced.

This is serious stuff. Reproducibility of results and open-minded discussion are cornerstones of scientific conduct. (Irish Times)

The controversy over e-mails stolen from global warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as "Climategate," with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it "Swifthack," a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change. ( Bryan Walsh, Time)

Just two years ago, a United Nations panel that synthesizes the work of hundreds of climatologists around the world called the evidence for global warming “unequivocal.”

But as representatives of about 200 nations converge in Copenhagen on Monday to begin talks on a new international climate accord, they do so against a background of renewed attacks on the basic science of climate change.

The debate, set off by the circulation of several thousand files and e-mail messages stolen from one of the world’s foremost climate research institutes, has led some who oppose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and at least one influential country, Saudi Arabia, to question the scientific basis for the Copenhagen talks.

The uproar has threatened to complicate a multiyear diplomatic effort already ensnared in difficult political, technical and financial disputes that have caused leaders to abandon hopes of hammering out a binding international climate treaty this year.

In recent days, an array of scientists and policy makers have said that nothing so far disclosed — the correspondence and documents include references by prominent climate scientists to deleting potentially embarrassing e-mail messages, keeping papers by competing scientists from publication and making adjustments in research data — undercuts decades of peer-reviewed science.

Yet the intensity of the response highlights that skepticism about global warming persists, even as many scientists thought the battle over the reality of human-driven climate change was finally behind them. (NYT)

Too Big To Believe
George Monbiot of the Guardian (UK) was among the first mainstream media to express concern. “I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” He was reacting to corruption on an unprecedented scale in exposed files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Typically, he was only concerned about being fooled. To his further shame he is now in denial of the extent of the deception. True, the scale and extent appears unbelievable because it uses the deception of the Big Lie – too big to believe. However, I know it’s believable because I watched it develop and grow. Particularly since 1985 when the conference in Villach Austria conjoined the CRU with the fledgling Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Tom Wigley and Phil Jones attended but were already developing the phony climate science Maurice Strong needed to pursue his goal of destroying western economies. For example, in a 1983 article Wigley was convincing climate science of a falsely low pre-industrial level of CO2. Early attempts to challenge what they were doing followed normal academic processes and little interference occurred. For example, a book review I wrote based on the bad science became a Review Editorial In Climatic Change (Volume 35, Number 4 / April, 1997.) (Tim Ball, CFP)

Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.

Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide. (WSJ)

Science overwhelmingly shows greenhouse gas concentrations at unprecedented levels due to human activity

WASHINGTON – After a thorough examination of the scientific evidence and careful consideration of public comments, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten the public health and welfare of the American people. EPA also finds that GHG emissions from on-road vehicles contribute to that threat.

GHGs are the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “Business leaders, security experts, government officials, concerned citizens and the United States Supreme Court have called for enduring, pragmatic solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that is causing climate change. This continues our work towards clean energy reform that will cut GHGs and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and our economy.”

EPA’s final findings respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that GHGs fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants. The findings do not in and of themselves impose any emission reduction requirements but rather allow EPA to finalize the GHG standards proposed earlier this year for new light-duty vehicles as part of the joint rulemaking with the Department of Transportation.

On-road vehicles contribute more than 23 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions. EPA’s proposed GHG standards for light-duty vehicles, a subset of on-road vehicles, would reduce GHG emissions by nearly 950 million metric tons and conserve 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of model year 2012-2016 vehicles.

EPA’s endangerment finding covers emissions of six key greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – that have been the subject of scrutiny and intense analysis for decades by scientists in the United States and around the world.

Scientific consensus shows that as a result of human activities, GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are at record high levels and data shows that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years, with the steepest increase in warming in recent decades. The evidence of human-induced climate change goes beyond observed increases in average surface temperatures; it includes melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans due to excess carbon dioxide, changing precipitation patterns, and changing patterns of ecosystems and wildlife.

President Obama and Administrator Jackson have publicly stated that they support a legislative solution to the problem of climate change and Congress’ efforts to pass comprehensive climate legislation. However, climate change is threatening public health and welfare, and it is critical that EPA fulfill its obligation to respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants.

EPA issued the proposed findings in April 2009 and held a 60-day public comment period. The agency received more than 380,000 comments, which were carefully reviewed and considered during the development of the final findings.

Information on EPA’s findings: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment.html

Step aside, elected Members of Congress. If you can’t pass cap and trade legislation, The Environmental Protection Agency will move in with massively complex and costly regulations that would micromanage just about every aspect of the economy. They announced today that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten public health and the environment.

Since 85 percent of the U.S. economy runs on fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, imposing a cost on CO2 is equivalent to placing an economy-wide tax on energy use. The kind of industrial-strength EPA red tape that the agency could enforce in the name of global warming would result in millions of dollars in compliance costs. These are unnecessary costs that businesses will inevitably pass on to the American consumer, slow economic growth and kill jobs. Although the crafted rules say only facilities that emit 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year or more will be affected, businesses fear the exemption may not hold up in court and could now be imposed on many smaller commercial buildings, farms, restaurants, churches and small businesses.

Even EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged top-down regulations would be more costly than a cap and trade system, saying, “Legislation is so important because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly, least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution,” she recently stated, adding that “we get further faster without top-down regulation.” Of course, this isn’t a legitimate argument to pass cap and trade legislation. Cap and trade, a climate treaty and EPA regulations are the three ugly step-sisters of climate policy. Yet they’re trudging forward anyway.

Even CSM knows this was a really dumb move: Copenhagen, EPA, and climate change: Obama's false move - The EPA ruling on global warming and carbon emissions is the wrong way to win over the Senate and to cut a deal in Copenhagen, Denmark.

By the Monitor's Editorial Board

The climate-change debate in Washington and this week in Copenhagen, Denmark, isn't really about whether to act on carbon emissions. It is more about how to share the burden.

That's why the go-ahead by President Obama for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases as a threat to public health is so troublesome.

The EPA action, taken Monday, distorts the purpose of the 1970 Clean Air Act by setting up the executive branch, rather than Congress, to decide which emitters of carbon dioxide should pay the price.

The EPA's move would be similar to Mr. Obama trying to mandate universal health insurance for all Americans without waiting for Congress to act. Such a huge decision that sweeps across the economy and demands a balancing of interests needs a legislative solution.

Even EPA administrator Lisa Jackson was reluctant to push her agency's powers too far, knowing the EPA is ill-equipped to equitably spread the burden of curbing global warming. The climate bill passed by the House in November would have barred the EPA from taking such a step; the Senate is weighing a similar measure.

The agency is also on weak legal ground in interpreting a four-decade-old law that was never intended to deal with global warming. And its efforts might be hung up in courts for years, providing yet another excuse for Congress not to act. (Both businesses and some eco-activists are expected to challenge the EPA move.)

Letting the agency take the initiative also makes the effort against global warming vulnerable to a new president reversing its action in future years.

Nonetheless, an impatient US president, frustrated at Senate inaction on a climate-change bill, thought he needed something to show when he goes to the Copenhagen conference next week in order to try to coax other big emitters like China and India into a deal.

Let's hope his unilateral action doesn't worsen a cause that is still in need of wider public support.

Obama has declared that he wants to commit the United States to reduce its emissions 17 percent by 2020 (from 2005 levels). But he now needs to tell the world how much EPA's action will meet that goal.

As it is, the EPA decided not to regulate millions of carbon emitters – those that emit less than 25,000 tons a year – choosing instead to go after the easy targets, big power plants. So it remains unclear how much carbon effluent will be curbed. Under the Clean Air Act, such discrimination may not be allowed – a likely source for lengthy lawsuits. As one Sierra Club lawyer told Congress last year, "CO2 is CO2."

In 1976, the EPA tried to avoid regulating diverse sources for lead emissions, focusing on major ones. But in a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, it lost in court. It should not try such a move again.

Climate change is too important to be left solely to a Washington bureaucracy. And as a political move to pressure Congress, Obama's move will likely just backfire.

As he has lately started to do with healthcare, Obama needs to spend more time up on Capitol Hill to get the bill he wants. Trying to distort the American system of governance for the sake of a deal in Copenhagen will only heat up, not cool down, the rancor over passing a climate-change law. (CSM)

Business groups reacted with alarm and environmentalists with applause to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's formal declaration Monday that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, clearing the way for federal regulation. (Reuters)

Today the Obama administration issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases “endanger” health and human welfare. Here’s an wonky explanation of why this is a big deal:

Under the Clean Air Act, an “endangerment” finding means that the EPA will have to grant a waiver to those states (such as California) that want to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. The EPA has already agreed to do so. When “pollutants” that “endanger” human health and welfare are regulated, the EPA must expand its regulatory program to include “stationary” sources. The EPA has already announced that it will do so.

This is where Obama wants to get off the “endangerment” train, with the ability to regulate stationary and mobile sources (i.e., industry and cars) with almost complete discretion. These “endangerment” powers give the President tremendous leverage in a number of complex negotiations.

For example, the Obama administration already has told Congress that it will regulate greenhouse gases unless lawmakers deliver a cap-and-trade bill to his desk. The “endangerment” prerogatives also are the President’s bargaining chip in Copenhagen, where he plans on scoring his first diplomatic victory since his election night.

The problem is that the President can’t stop what he has started. Under the statutory language of the Clean Air Act, the regulation of mobile sources tripwires regulations for all stationary sources that emit more than 250 tons of a designated pollutant. For greenhouse gases, that’s pretty much everything larger than a mansion. These stationary sources would have to get a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit for any proposed modification, as would any new source. They would also have to get operating permits. The upshot is that millions of buildings would be subject to regulations.

To get around this, Obama’s EPA proposed a “tailoring rule” that would change the language of the CAA so that the threshold would be 25,000 tons. The legality of this is very much in doubt, as it amounts to the executive branch legislating, and is therefore a violation of the separation of powers.

Also under the Clean Air Act, any “pollutant” that “endangers” human health and welfare, and which is regulated for stationary and mobile sources, becomes subject to National Ambient Air Quality Standards. As described above, the Obama administration is in the process of fulfilling all these NAAQS criteria.

Last week, two environmentalist groups petitioned the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under NAAQS. Soon the EPA will have no choice. Once the NAAQS kicks in-and it will-the American economy is screwed. The government won’t be able to permit anything larger than a mansion. Taken to the extent mandated under the Clean Air Act, the EPA would probably have to order the shut-down of most industrial suppliers and users of conventional energy.

There’s only one remedy for this otherwise inevitable regulatory nightmare. The Congress must pass H. R. 391, legislation offered by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) that prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. (William Yeatman, Cooler Heads)

Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, today made final her determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

This Endangerment Finding will begin a cascade of crippling new regulations of the American economy and of the way people are allowed to live. Already EPA has proposed new auto regulations based on the Endangerment Finding requiring that requires that the average car sold in 2016 get the same fuel mileage as today’s Smart Car.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute petitioned EPA earlier this month to delay the Endangerment Finding until the scientific case for global warming alarmism could be reviewed in light of the Climategate scandal. EPA ignored that petition, so now CEI will file suit in federal court to overturn the finding on the grounds that the science does not support it.

Myron Ebell is director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, director of Freedom Action, and chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition. (PJM)

FAMILIES will pay little or nothing for Labor's emissions trading scheme, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged yesterday.

Full or partial compensation for rising costs would be available for couples with children on an income up to $160,000, as well as for singles on $30,000 a year or less. (Daily Telegraph)

Recent events suggest Climategate has already shifted politics towards the reality of a world without man-made global warming.

As the Copenhagen climate conference tirelessly discusses the “evidence of climate change,” it also asserts the need for massive energy taxes and energy “rationing” to prevent still more climate disruption.

That’s a bait-and-switch tactic. The discussion has never been about the planet’s historically variable climate. It’s always been whether humans caused climate change.

To date, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has never offered any evidence of a “human fingerprint” on the modest (0.5 degrees Celsius) warming that occurred between the 1850s end of the Little Ice Age and 1940. They haven’t even given us a convincing story about the 0.2 degree Celsius warming that occurred from 1940 to 1998 (part of that tiny warming has disappeared). James Hansen’s predictions of massive overheating, given to the Senate in 1988, have been overtaken by a quiet sun and a telling drop in global ocean temperatures.

The public has noticed there’s been none of the long-predicted runaway warming — or any warming at all since 1998. They’re reading the Climategate emails of the “consensus scientists” confessing they don’t know why warming stopped. That’s a huge confession.

Are the world’s political parties now suddenly realigning on the basis of non-warming? Have global warming taxes become the Greens’ defining moment? (PJM)

The United Nations Climate change conference has opened in the Danish capital Copenhagen. RT's Laura Emmet has talked to one man who'll be there - who's also one of the most outspoken critics of global warming theory. (Russia Today)

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If you are one of those who have not yet heard the peroration of Christopher Monckton’s speech in Minnesota hear it now. Then hear it again. Then pass it on to your friends and neighbours.

Regular readers will know that Number Watch is not inclined to make obeisance to those in the public eye. Christopher Monckton is different. Despite his arts background, he has amply demonstrated that he understands both the physics and mathematics of the global warming scare. He is a giant among dwarfs on the international scene. He has an intellectual mastery of the facts coupled with the gift of oratory. He is the Winston Churchill of his time, standing virtually alone in defiance of the antidemocratic forces that threaten to take over the world.

If you are American you have the extra incentive that you are elected to pick up the bill for the international socialist takeover. Already, Carol Browner of Socialist International is being granted control over your industries and economy.

The incompetent and impotent prime minister of Great Britain signed away his nation’s sovereignty in private and in shame, having resiled from a solemn manifesto promise to give his people a referendum before doing so. The incompetent and impotent leader of the opposition is not prepared to do anything about it. The President of the United States is poised to surrender the sovereignty of his nation in equally squalid circumstances. (Number Watch)

Particularly risible the list of “global warming facts” (can’t wait to see Tamino, Greenfyre or RealClimate excoriate it):

Well, at least the “facts” don’t include hurricanes any longer. (Maurizio Morabito, OmniClimate)

An official says President Obama plans to talk with former Vice President Al Gore at the White House on Monday as the president prepares for his appearance at a major international climate summit in Copenhagen. (AP)

The importance of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, passed unanimously with a 95-0 vote before the Kyoto Protocol, is two-fold. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

THE head of the world's top climate research body has compared Tony Abbott to former US president and climate sceptic George W. Bush and conceded the failure of Australia's cap and trade carbon bill has given momentum to climate naysayers worldwide.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian just hours before he was to deliver the keynote address on the opening day of the Copenhagen global climate summit, Rajendra Pachauri denied the defeat of the legislation would provide enough impetus to derail negotiators at Copenhagen from delivering an agreement.

But Dr Pachauri, who chairs the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore, said more important was the decision of US President Barack Obama to defer his Copenhagen trip to coincide with the leaders meeting on the last day of the summit.

"Yes, of course, it will be a motivator (for climate sceptics), but several positives have taken place, like President Barack Obama coming on December 18th and not the 9th," he said. (The Australian)

This is bad news for the Cameron team: the PoliticsHome website has just released an opinion poll showing that nearly three quarters of Conservative voters believe that the issue of climate change is exaggerated by the media. And so do a majority (51 per cent) of all voters. What is more, fully 46 per cent of all voters feel that it is given too high a priority by government. (The figure for Conservative voters on that question is no less than 56 per cent.)

So perhaps making global warming the iconic symbol of Tory modernisation was not such a great idea? This may be very damaging indeed: it could be one of the factors that is convincing many Tory and potentially-Tory voters that the party is more concerned with being fashionable (in Leftwing terms) than it is with addressing their real concerns. (Janet Daley, TDT)

"Please Help the World", film from the opening ceremony of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in Copenhagen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. Shown on December 7, 2009 at COP15.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a year-long study to be unveiled at the Copenhagen climate change meetings that begin today, was designed to dramatize how little time we have left to save the planet from catastrophic climate.

But the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which is billed as an update to the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a credibility problem. The Climategate gang - the same crew now discredited by emails that emerged showing a conspiracy to cook the books - had a dozen of its members in charge of producing the Copenhagen Diagnosis. More credibility problems: The Copenhagen Diagnosis relies on data from the Hadley Centre of the UK meteorological office and the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University - two bodies that may now need to set aside the data altogether and start over.

The suspect data --- known as HADCRUT - is a merged dataset comprised of marine temperatures provided by the Hadley Centre and land-based temperatures from the Climate Research Unit. Because the CRU portion of the data is so suspect with so much of the public, the Met Office has announced a three-year year investigation in which it will re-examine 160 years of temperature data. The Met took this step, which makes official the view that the world has been relying on suspect data, over the objections of the UK government, which fears waiting until 2012 before having solid data. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is among the most vocal of global warming advocates, having said that Copenhagen is the last chance to save the world from environmental disaster and characterizing those who disagree as "behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics."

The IPCC, has also announced an investigation into the Climategate scandal, as has East Anglia University and Penn State University, home to another infamous member of Climategate: Michael Mann.

Mann is the author of the hockey stick, the icon of the global warming adherents which purported to show that the Earth warmed rapidly in the 20^th century. That graph was later found to be bogus, as hearings into it before the U.S. Congress determined. Yet now Mann is back - he is one of the authors of the Copenhagen Diagnosis -- and so is his hockey-stick graph!

All told, 12 of the 26 Copenhagen Diagnosis authors are implicated in the Climategate scandal, including Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, a much criticized Lead Author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

The United Nations climate change conference begins in Copenhagen today, but it may spell the beginning of the end to the global warming scare.

For nearly two years, this meeting was touted as the biggest global warming conference since the 1997 meeting in Kyoto, Japan. That conference resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, with emissions reduction targets for developed nations. These targets expire in 2012, thus Copenhagen was seen as the pivotal time and place to expand the Kyoto approach into the future. American wisely stayed out of Kyoto – which has been a failure, as developing nations like China were exempted from reductions, and many developed nations have failed to live up to its commitments - but many thought President Obama would sign the U.S. up to a post-Kyoto deal.

But economic, political, and scientific reality is intruding. Even with the President promising to attend the conference on the critical final day, it does not look like much will come of Copenhagen other than the usual consolation agreement to try again next year. Continue reading… (The Foundry)

America's green tech fad isn't just failing to reverse global warming. It's actually hurting the effort to fight climate change.

That's the take from this really interesting piece by Mike Tidwell in Sunday's Washington Post. He argues that we should drop our eco-fad -- the green peacock on NBC, Vanity Fair's green issue, those toothless "5 Easy Ways to Green Your Office" posters and so on-- and focus on directly appealing to our lawmakers by calling, mailing and Tweeting at them to pass something even stronger than the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Hmmm. (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic)

The European Union has rejected the new carbon emission targets tabled by the United States and China and said they were much too weak to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The dispute between the three main players at the Copenhagen climate change summit overshadowed the first day of negotiations and dashed hopes that a deal on emissions was imminent.

The EU called on President Obama to announce a more ambitious target next week, when he arrives in Copenhagen for the last day of the conference on December 18.

But the US insisted that the provisional offer made 10 days ago by Mr Obama was “remarkable” and in line with what scientists had recommended.

Mr Obama has proposed to cut its emissions by 4 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, although he has said this is subject to getting the approval of Congress. The EU has made a legally binding commitment to cut its emissions by 20 per cent over the same period. It has also said it would increase the cut to 30 per cent if other countries committed to “comparable action”. (The Times)

The Obama administration's opening bid in the climate talks beginning Monday in Copenhagen is not impressing some key constituencies.

Kevin Conrad, executive director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and a special envoy for Papua New Guinea, said in an interview that while Obama has improved the rhetoric, "when you look at what they're proposing, it's absolutely unimpressive."

The United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse emissions "in the range of 17 percent" compared with 2005 levels -- equivalent to a 3.4 percent cut from 1990 levels, the baseline most of the world uses.

"Their position in my view is a deal killer if you're focused, as small island developing states are, on a robust agreement that is consistent with the IPCC recommendations," Conrad said. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's called for developed nations to cut their emissions by between 25 and 40 percent by 2020. ( Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

COPENHAGEN: The opening day of the meeting of 193 countries on climate change at Copenhagen was meant to be an occasion for reinforcing political rhetoric and niceties. But even before the meeting began, dark news of cracks within the biggest bloc of developing countries -- G-77 plus China -- started showing up.

The G-77+China spokesperson told the gathered negotiators that the developing countries were not at all happy with the ``common but differentiated responsibilities principle'' being discarded. It is also learnt that some member countries of the developing country bloc, in internal parleys, have demanded that emerging economies also undertake some form of commitments and get their actions scrutinised.

The signs of friction within this large and diverse group appeared even as there was talk of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) -- the group of nation-states that are most vulnerable to any rise in sea levels caused by global warming -- preparing its own draft of a political declaration at the end of the Copenhagen talks. (Times of India)

During the UN Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15), the Danish government invites the entire world to send their greetings to the conference. Greetings are submitted through www.greetings.cop15.dk and are composed of 150 characters of text.

The Climate Greetings will be shown on large screens throughout COP15 as well as at various other venues in Denmark and around the world. Read more about how you can show Climate Greetings at your venue

The Copenhagen climate talks have opened with a declaration that the 12 days of negotiations represent an historic opportunity for the world, but deep divisions between delegates have already emerged.

The representative of the developing world says the amount of money set aside to help poor nations adapt to climate change is an insult, and Saudi Arabia's chief negotiator has raised issues about the validity of the scientific research used to justify claims that global warming is man-made.

United Nations climate change chief Yvo De Boer opened the conference warning that although Copenhagen had already written history, it must be the right history.

"The clock has ticked down to zero. After two years of negotiation, the time has come to deliver," he said.

Danish Climate Change Minister Connie Hedegaard, the host of the function, said she was disappointed that the 15th gathering of climate negotiators would not end in a legal agreement.

"This is a time to deliver, this is the place to commit," she said.

"And yes, I know, there [are] still many obstacles, but it is up to us, us in this room now, to try to overcome them, and it is doable."

A four-minute video produced especially for the opening, featuring a young girl traumatised by nightmares of a world ravaged by drought and floods, was designed to shock the 15,000-strong crowd into action. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

The UN Climate Change Conference has the unmistakable feel of a religious gathering. (Bruce Bawer is in Copenhagen covering the conference for PJM and PJTV. See also Roger L. Simon: Climategate — Why Obama Switched His Copenhagen Itinerary)

Well, here I am at the Vatican in Rome, where thousands of pilgrims from every corner of the earth crowd St. Peter’s Square, their eyes trained on the glorious basilica within which the College of Cardinals is gathering in secret conclave to settle the all-important question: Who will stand in the shoes of the fisherman?

Oops, sorry, I got a little confused there for a second. In fact I’ve just arrived in Copenhagen. But you’ll have to excuse my mistake, because it’s already clear that being here during the next few days is going to be very much like attending some kind of massive religious gathering. The faithful — over 16,000 strong — are here, of course, for the 15^th United Nations Climate Change Conference, a.k.a. COP15 (“COP” as in Conference of the Parties), at which they supposedly hope to achieve a provisional international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus rescue our beloved blue planet from the fate envisioned in any number of bad Roland Emmerich movies. (PJM)

There were 12 of us skeptics among 12,000 believers at the Bali UNFCCC in 2007. We were a rag-tag team of passionate people, some of whom had PhDs, and most of whom were not paid to be there. We came because we were angry about the way science was being exploited.

It was a convention on a scale I had not seen before. Not just 2,000 for a weekend, which would be big, but 12,000 for two entire weeks, which was an extravaganza.

The UNFCCC meetings define the term “junket”. These mass climate conventions happen every year in locations like Nairobi (Kenya), Poznan (Poland), Montreal (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Milan in Italy. Copenhagen is COP 15, meaning there have been 14 before it. (And at two weeks each, that’s over six months of non-stop PR and “staff incentives”.) Is there any larger yearly congregation in the world?

From the outset the UNFCCC did everything it could to maintain the appearance that it is a fair, transparent, and scientific based organization. Yet on the ground, it did everything it could to make sure that there would be no dissent, no debate, and no free speech unless it was their official line. (Jo Nova)

AUSTRALIA has told the Copenhagen summit it's time for "bold action'' on climate change.

Australia's climate change ambassador Louise Hand took to the microphone before hundreds of delegates at the summit's opening session to back a strong climate deal.

"We want a success at Copenhagen, in fact we want a resounding success," Ms Hand said last night, to applause from the floor.

"We're committed to bold action, we're committed to a strong outcome."

The call to arms comes despite uncertainty about action at home, after the Liberal Opposition killed off the emissions trading scheme and elected Tony Abbott who's expressed doubts about climate science.

And the Copenhagen speech was made on behalf of some of the world's biggest economies. (news.com.au)

The front page headline said it all: “Rudd’s Copenhagen Dash” (Weekend Australian, 5-6/12/2009). The RAAF has Kev’s Big Jet on the tarmac, with the engines running, and the crew sleeping in the aisle, awaiting their master’s command. Finally! Australia has its Messiah, its climate change champion, ready to rush around the world to galvanize the Copenhagen conference, stiffen the wilting resolve of the participants, and deliver the world in one climactic act from the carbonized catastrophe that awaits us all. What a Wagnerian vision! What a time to be alive!

Or perhaps not: perhaps Kevin Rudd has gotten just a little over-excited about his self-appointed role as the number-one ‘can-do man’ of international politics, elevating himself into the big league by making himself useful to the Climate Change Lobby. Certainly, the domestic scene is not promising: his bluff has been called in the Senate; Penny Wong has been revealed as an ineffective, too-clever-by-half and boring drone; he faces a tough new opposition leader, who actually understands political tactics and strategy; and the by-election results in Higgins and Bradfield have disproved the notion that there’s a deep-seated groundswell of climate change concern in the electorate capable of re-shaping the political landscape in Australia.

Internationally, the Saudis have denounced the entire notion of anthropogenic climate change; James Hansen, the fanatical guru of that notion, has himself denounced the Copenhagen talk-fest, as has Al Gore; and the IMF has denounced Rudd’s favoured emissions trading scheme. Meanwhile, China and India have invented entire new concepts, such as ‘carbon intensity’, so that they can continue to pretend they are really prepared to sacrifice their own economic growth to accommodate the messianic obsessions of the West about CO2 in the air. And even President Obama, with whom Rudd fantasizes he has a special relationship, finds himself plummeting towards the day of reckoning, when the limits of rhetoric are exposed and he is forced to face the obduracy of a 10%+ unemployment rate in the US, and a litany of failure in every policy area into which he has blundered. (Merv Bendle, Quadrant)

The forecasts of global warming are based on mathematical solutions for equations of weather models. But all of these solutions are inaccurate. Therefore, no valid scientific conclusions can be made concerning global warming. The false claim for the effectiveness of mathematics is an unreported scandal at least as important as the recent climate data fraud. Why is the math important? And why don't the climatologists use it correctly? (Peter Landesman, American Thinker)

“Roger A. Pielke Sr., for example, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado who has been highly critical of the United Nations climate panel and who once branded many of the scientists now embroiled in the e-mail controversy part of a climate “oligarchy,” said that so many independent measures existed to show unusual warming taking place that there was no real dispute about it. Moreover, he said, “The role of added carbon dioxide as a major contributor in climate change has been firmly established.”

I want to correct a significant misstatement in one part of the above text. (Climate Science)

There needs to be recognition that there are three distinctly different viewpoints with respect to the extent that humans alter the climate system. (Climate Science)

Just FYI, today I'll be on NPR's On Point with Michael Mann (PSU), Juliet Eilperin (Wash Post) and Carroll Doherty (Pew Research Center for People and the Press) for a discussion fro 10-11AM EDT. I'll post up a link to the archive when available.

UPDATE: NPR called back to let me know they won't be able to have me on.

UPDATE 2: Near the end, in response to a caller who complained about hearing only one side of the story you can hear Michael Mann explain that all voices on this subject do get heard, and how his work is celebrated by skeptics. These comments go completely unchallenged in the interview which is one softball question after another. Mann says that it is the role of science to take on those opposed to action, and cites Real Climate as an example. Mann concludes with a passionate call for action in Copenhagen. (Roger Pielke Jr)

Watchdog says air travel cannot continue to grow unchecked if UK's emissions targets are to be met (Dan Milmo, The Guardian)

AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear. (Jimmy Hansen, NYT)

Rio Tinto Ltd is moving its investments in carbon capture and storage technology away from natural gas as a feedstock towards coal and petcoke.

The mining giant has dumped its stake in a project in Abu Dhabi to create cleaner electricity by storing gas emissions, Rio told the stock exchange on Monday.

Instead, Rio said it was focussing its investments in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) on a Californian project with UK-based energy giant BP.

"The Abu Dhabi project is a ground-breaking and important project based on gas feedstock, but Rio Tinto prefers to focus on projects with solid fuel feedstocks, which are better aligned with our other businesses," Rio's group executive, Technology and Innovation, Preston Chiaro said in a statement. (AAP)

To sequester carbon dioxide as part of any climate-change mitigation strategy, the gas first has to be captured from the flue at a power plant or other source. The next step is just as important: the CO2 has to be released from whatever captured it so that it can be pumped underground or otherwise stored for the long term.

That second step can be costly from an energy standpoint. Materials currently used to capture CO2 have to be heated to release the gas.

But chemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, say that a new class of materials they developed called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, hold promise for carbon capture. In a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Omar M. Yaghi and colleagues describe the performance of one MOF, which they say can release most of the CO2 it captures at room temperature.

Dr. Yaghi described a metal-organic framework as a “crystalline sponge,” a hybrid lattice of organic compounds and metal atoms that has a huge internal surface area where gas molecules can be absorbed. The MOF used in the study contains magnesium atoms, “which make just the right environment for binding carbon dioxide,” he said.

In experiments, the material separated out CO2 while allowing methane to pass. What was really surprising, though, was that at room temperature 87 percent of the CO2 could be released. And if desired, the remaining 13 percent could be liberated by heating to about 175 degrees Fahrenheit, far lower than temperatures currently required. (NYT)

KORBA, India - A thin coat of coal dust covers everything from trees to houses in Korba, a coal mining town in central India which lies at the heart of the country's struggle to balance economic growth with climate change concerns.

The air is heavy with smoke and dust spewing out of numerous mines and power plants in a region that powers hundreds of factories in the country's industrial west and lights up millions of homes.

Although India has announced a new climate plan which identifies renewable energy such as solar power as key elements, coal remains the backbone of energy supply in a country where almost half the 1.1 billion population still has no electricity.

"Coal-fired power will stay for the next 20-25 years at least," said R.D. Sonkar, chief engineer at one of Korba's many thermal power stations.

"Look at the high cost of solar and wind energy. Can we afford? Power from renewable energy will have to wait, I think." (Reuters)

LONDON - Project developers are baffled by a U.N. climate panel's decision to block 10 Chinese wind farms from receiving carbon financing, saying the move could slash investment in Chinese wind and other forms of clean energy.

After noting a drop in financial support from Beijing in the form of tariffs, the panel on Friday rejected the projects, saying they were profitable and capable of cutting greenhouse gas emissions without receiving carbon offsets under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

"The decision could have a severe effect on Chinese wind investment ... Half of all projects could fail to be registered under the CDM, or possibly worse than that," said John Green, a director at Carbon Resource Management, one of the largest developers of Chinese wind projects. (Reuters)

Health Care vs. the Value of Human Life - Don't believe the left would cut medical costs by rationing care? Check out their formulas to calculate your life's value.

Under the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation, we know that the government will have to determine some sort of rationing system in order to control costs. We are aware that part of the rationing will be absorbed in the discrimination that the bill inflicts upon the elderly; we know that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare. What has remained puzzling is how exactly this rationing will be determined for the rest of us. Similarly elusive is how the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee will decide whether or not you get certain medical treatments, regardless of the opinion of your doctor. After all, how do you put a dollar value on a human life?

If you think there is no answer to that question, you are way behind the progressives. In fact, most countries with socialized medicine, including Britain, are already using a mathematical formula that expresses the numerical value of one year of a human life in a measurement called the QALY, or “quality-adjusted life year.” In terms of determining medical care, the mathematical formula of the QALY is based on both how much a treatment may lengthen your lifespan and the quality of the life you will be living.

Basically, if you are in optimal health, the QALY of one year of your life is 1.0. But if you have any underlying conditions, like asthma or muscular dystrophy, your QALY is much lower. Under the QALY system, the blind are worth less than those with sight, as those who can walk are worth more than those in wheelchairs. Sound like discrimination against persons with disabilities? It gets worse. ( Sarah Durand, PJM)

Australia has the opportunity to prevent a "second wave" of swine flu early next year and yet it is being largely ignored, says a medical expert.

Cases of the pandemic A(H1N1) virus have spiked again in the northern hemisphere, says Professor Robert Booy.

He says that sets the scene for a reinvigorated swine flu to soon begin circulating in Australia.

Yet the Australian government's offer of 21 million free vaccines had drawn only a lukewarm public response. (AAP)

Now that the research dollars for benzene/cancer have dried up, people like Dr. Luoping Zhang—of UC Berkeley's School of Public Health—have to find another cash cow. Lucky for her, formaldehyde is under great scrutiny, and lucky for her that formaldehyde is far more ubiquitous than benzene ever was.

My latest HND piece examines just how The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) made the leukemia/formaldehyde connection. If you want to cut to the chase, let's just say that the fix was in. If you want some of the gory details, please read the complete article.

You'll discover that normal results in an individual somehow become "statistically significant" when that same individual is part of Dr. Zhang's cohort. You'll also discover how the mean in a series of numbers can be higher than the largest value in a set.

You might have trouble finding Zhang's paper, entitled "Occupational exposure to formaldehyde, hematotoxicity and leukemia-specific chromosome changes in cultured myeloid progenitor cells," since it has not even been published yet. BUT--since it was "accepted for publication," just before the IARC meetings in October, that was sufficient for a bare majority of the chemophobes at IARC.

Finally, you will marvel at what I call the incandescently stupid risk assessment on formaldehyde done by EPA. I have already received e-mail asking me if I made this up.

Sorry, but I couldn't make up a risk assessment whereby the safe level of formaldehyde is about 6 percent of what you have in your breath at all times--because of normal metabolism. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

NEW YORK - If you thought that smoking tobacco through a waterpipe was safer than cigarettes, think again: Compared to cigarette smoking, a waterpipe -- also called a hookah or shisha -- delivers more deadly carbon monoxide and roughly the same amount of addictive nicotine, according to a new study.

"This study can be used to dispel the myth that waterpipe tobacco smoking is a less lethal way of smoking tobacco," co-author Dr. Thomas Eissenberg of the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

"The take home message is clear," Eissenberg added. "If people are smoking tobacco in a waterpipe to avoid poisonous gasses like carbon monoxide and addictive chemicals like nicotine, they are making a big mistake."

Smoking tobacco with a waterpipe has grown in popularity in the United States, especially among the 18- to 24-year-old crowd, who may think that it's less harmful than smoking cigarettes. Some estimate that as many as one in five U.S. college students use a waterpipe to smoke tobacco.

But according to Eissenberg, until now, no study has directly compared the toxic chemical exposure associated with waterpipe and cigarette smoking under controlled conditions. (Reuters Health)

Less smoking, earlier detection, and improved treatments are credited for gains against lung, colon, prostate, and breast cancer (Business Week)

LONDON - Measuring body mass index or waist size in overweight people can accurately predict the risk of heart disease, Dutch scientists said on Monday. (Reuters)

Almost 1 million preschool children from low-income families are enrolled in Head Start, a national program for young children that readies them for school. While the program provides them with educational and social skill enhancement, a study authored by Temple University researchers finds that it also goes above and beyond the current federal recommendations for promoting healthy eating and exercise habits among this group of children who are at high risk for obesity. (ScienceDaily)

CANCUN, Mexico - An advocacy group on lung health plans to work with health authorities in 12 countries from 2010 to reduce indoor fuel burning, which causes respiratory diseases and lung cancer and kills 2 million people a year.

More than 3 billion people, or half of the world's population, still use biomass fuels like wood, dung and coal for cooking and heating in poorly ventilated homes and this results in severe indoor air pollution.

Indoor air pollution caused more than 1.6 million deaths worldwide in 2000, according to the World Health Organization, 90 percent of them occurring poor communities in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.

The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, a non-profit institute founded in 1920, estimates the number of deaths has risen to 2 million per year.

While families in more advanced nations have long switched to using cleaner fuels, more than 70 percent of households in China, India and African countries continue to burn biomass in open stoves. (Reuters)

For more than a decade, 57-year-old roofer and writer Joseph Jenkins has been advocating that we flush our toilets down the drain and put a bucket in the bathroom instead. When a bucket in one of his five bathrooms is full, he empties it in the compost pile in his backyard in rural Pennsylvania. Eventually he takes the resulting soil and spreads it over his vegetable garden as fertilizer.

"It's an alternative sanitation system," says Jenkins, "where there is no waste." His 255-page Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure is in its third edition and has been translated into five languages, but it has only recently begun to catch on. His message? Human manure, when properly managed, is odorless. His audience? Ecologically committed city dwellers who are looking to do more for the earth than just sort their trash or ride a bike to work. (Adam Fisher, Time)

AS world leaders prepare to meet tomorrow in Copenhagen to address global warming, skeptics are pointing to e-mail hacked from a computer server at a British university as evidence that the conference may be much ado about nothing. They say the e-mail messages show a conspiracy among scientists to overstate human influence on the climate — and some accuse The Times of mishandling the story.

Although The Times was among the first to report on the e-mail, in a front-page article late last month, and has continued to write about the issue almost daily in the paper or on its Web site, readers have raised a variety of complaints:

Some say Andrew Revkin, the veteran environmental reporter who is covering what skeptics have dubbed “Climategate,” has a conflict of interest because he wrote or is mentioned in some of the e-mail messages that the University of East Anglia says were stolen. Others wondered why The Times did not make the e-mail available on its Web site, and scoffed at an explanation by Revkin in a blog post that they contain “private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye.” What about the Pentagon Papers? they asked.

Others contended that The Times was playing down a story with global implications, coming as world leaders consider a treaty to limit the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere from autos, power plants and other sources.

Luis Alvarez Jr. of Charlottesville, Va., was outraged that a front-page article on President Obama’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States had not a single mention of the e-mail, in which one scientist, for example, said he had used a “trick” to “hide” a recent decline in temperatures.

Richard Murphy of Fairfield, Conn., said, “Given that the hacked e-mails cast doubt on some of the critical research that underlies the entire global warming argument, I am astounded that The Times has treated the issue in such a cavalier fashion.”

Does Revkin have a conflict of interest, as Steven Milloy, the publisher of JunkScience.com, and others contended? Why didn’t The Times put the e-mail on its Web site? And, most important, is The Times being cavalier about a story that could change our understanding of global warming? Or, as The Times’s John Broder, who covers environmental issues in Washington, put it, “When does a story rise to three-alarm coverage?”

Erica Goode, the environment editor, said that as soon as she learned that Revkin was mentioned in the scientists’ e-mail, she consulted with Philip Corbett, the standards editor. She said she read the roughly one dozen messages containing Revkin’s name and decided they showed a reporter asking for information for news articles, with “no particular close relationship with the scientists other than the fact that he knew them.” Goode and Corbett said they agreed that Revkin did not have a significant conflict and was good to go, with an acknowledgment in the article that he and other journalists were named in the e-mail. (Clark Hoyt, NYT)

The theft [ read: "release" since there is no evidence of any theft -- Ed. ] of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.

They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration’s climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.

No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years’ worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don’t change the underlying scientific facts about climate change. (NYT)

Having learned nothing from Climategate part of the cartel still try to discipline their NYT enviro-puppy (by smacking him over the nose with a rolled up newspaper?): Climate Scientist Threatens Boycott of NYT Reporter

Michael Schlesinger, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois, sends an message to Andy Revkin of the New York Times (via his widely circulated email distribution list) threatening some sort of boycott -- whatever that means -- of Revkin among climate scientists, for having the gall to mention my views and those of my father. The reference to prostitutes in the email presumably comes from this post at Dot Earth where Revkin mentioned a funny news story in his Twitter feed, (emphasis added).

A group of the nation's top scientists defended research on global climate change Friday against what they called a politically motivated smear campaign designed to foster public doubt about irrefutable scientific facts.

The allegations came after skeptics seized upon a series of hacked e-mails at England's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit as evidence of a climate change hoax.

The scientists from two major research centers, a national think tank and NASA, claimed during a telephone news conference that the e-mail exchanges were taken out of context in an attempt to influence pending greenhouse gas emissions policies.

It is, they said, a cynical, blatantly dishonest effort to cloud the fact that the world is now confronting a huge, potentially disastrous climactic shift. (Peter Fimrite, SF Chronicle)

Someone who is paid to find evidence of environmental catastrophes would probably find them more often than someone whose pay doesn’t depend on finding them. That’s something to keep in mind when you read environmental reporting on Climategate.

Any large news organization, such as the Associated Press, has reporters assigned to cover environmental issues. The agenda in environmental reporting is that humans are damaging the planet, and the role of the reporter is to wake people up to the damage. Otherwise, the beat would not be justified. For example, here’s how the New York Times explains its Dot Earth blog:

“By 2050 or so, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where, scientists say, humans are already shaping climate and the web of life.””

It’s not hard to see what the point is — humans are a plague on the planet, and overpopulation is the problem. This is the discredited enviro-Malthusian view that prompted discredited doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to make his famous bet with Julian Simon that the price of five metals — selected by Ehrlich — would rise as demand increased. Ehrlich lost. (Bradley Fikes, NC Times)

Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an e-mail in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, seventeen days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems that very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.

As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s U.N. climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now-exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a U.N. investigation into the matter, which will doubtless be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.

So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.

First and foremost -- contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the e-mail was sent in November of 1999 should allay any such confusion.

In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists -- those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate-savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.

And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.

Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:

Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows, but less sharply, and then it begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th century.

Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:

Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.

But I defy anyone to compare the above chart -- the one to which Jones wrote he had applied MNT -- to the unadulterated version above it and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here, there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud. (Marc Sheppard, American Thinker)

A one-stop source for information about the biggest scientific scandal in a century.

On the night of November 19, a compressed file containing 1,073 emails and almost 3,600 other files mysteriously appeared on a download site in Siberia. These emails and files had somehow been taken from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. This became known as Climategate.

The CRU and its director, Dr. Phil Jones, are important because the CRU is a central point for data collection, storage, and analysis of climate data. And Dr. Jones is one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR4 report, which is the basis for much of the current political drive for CO2 limits.

The theory IPCC favors for climate change is that human-caused CO2 emissions are causing the climate to warm beyond what would naturally happen. (Charlie Martin, PJM)

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Daniel Henninger critical of scientists who allowed the culture of Climategate to develop in their professions.

Christopher Essex, a leading Canadian applied mathematician and award-winning author, has written to Henninger. (Quadrant)

I am sure that most of you are aware of the incident that took place recently at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The identity of the whistle-blower or hacker is still not known.

The selected release of emails contains correspondence between CRU scientists and scientists at other climate research institutions. My own purely technical exchange of emails with CRU director Professor Phil Jones is, as far as I know, not included.

I published my first climate-related paper in 1974 (Chylek and Coakley, Aerosol and Climate, Science 183, 75-77). I was privileged to supervise Ph. D. theses of some exceptional scientists - people like J. Kiehl, V.Ramaswamy and J. Li among others. I have published well over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and I am a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Optical Society of America, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within the last few years I was also honored to be included in Wikipedia’s blacklist of “climate skeptics”.

For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished.

It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow. They have almost succeeded in that effort.

Yes, there have been cases of misbehavior and direct fraud committed by scientists in other fields: physics, medicine, and biology to name afew. However, it was misbehavior of individuals, not of a considerable part of the scientific community.

Climate research made significant advancements during the last few decades, thanks to your diligent work. This includes the construction of the HadCRUT and NASA GISS datasets documenting the rise of globally averaged temperature during the last century. I do not believe that this work can be affected in any way by the recent email revelations. Thus, the first of the three pillars supporting the hypothesis of man-made global warming seems to be solid. However, the two other pillars are much more controversial.

To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to “prove” that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails.

Some people were so eager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity. The next step was to show that this “unprecedented high current temperature” has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds, and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of the observed post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation. The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility. Yes, there always will be a few deniers and obstructionists.

So what comes next? Let us stop making unjustified claims and exaggerated projections about the future even if the editors of some eminent journals are just waiting to publish them. Let us admit that our understanding of the climate is less perfect than we have tried to make the public believe. Let us drastically modify or temporarily discontinue the IPCC. Let us get back to work.

Let us encourage students to think their own thoughts instead of forcing them to parrot the IPCC conclusions. Let us open the doors of universities, of NCAR, NASA and other research institutions (and funding agencies) to faculty members and researchers who might disagree with the current paradigm of carbon dioxide.

Only open discussion and intense searching of all possibilities will let us regain the public’s trust and move forward.

Regards,
Petr Chylek
Laboratory Fellow, Remote Sensing Team Leader, ISR-2 MS-B244
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA (via GWPF)

The lack of coverage of Climategate by the mainstream news media over the last 2 weeks has been breathtaking. Richard North at the EUReferendum blog advanced a way to measure media bias of this kind with what he calls his “Tiger Woods Index”, where he compares the number of Google search web matches to Google search news matches. The idea is that if the media are avoiding an issue, then the number of news matches relative to web matches will decrease. If the media are overly obsessed with an issue compared to what the public is discussing on web pages, then the number of Google search news matches will increase relative to the number of web matches.

I decided to play around with this idea with searches on several names and phrases of my own. Since “media bias” is such an ugly phrase, I will characterize the resulting statistics as a Media Interest Index. I found that for issues where the news media seems to have about the same level of interest as the public, the ratio of web page matches to news page matches was somewhere in the range of 500 to 1,000.

By using a totally scientific process (since I’m a scientist) to compare the media’s interest to the public’s interest, I decided that a ratio of 1,000 would represent equal media and public interest. Please do not ask for the data I used, since I will either hide it or delete it before I give it up. (Roy W. Spencer)

FOR A SPECIAL GRAPHIC LAYOUT, CLICK HERE.

In 1912, a respected paleontologist at the British Museum confirmed that bones found in a Piltdown quarry came from the “missing link” between apes and humans. Forty years later, the so-called Piltdown Man was proved to be a hoax. Thanks to purloined e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), global warming is turning out to be the 21st-century equivalent of Piltdown Man.

E-mails between a small group of highly influential climate scientists at the center of the worldwide panic over global warming exposed multiple discussions among them concerning their manipulation of data and using various evasive tactics to avoid releasing the facts behind their ginned-up numbers to the public via Freedom of Information Act requests.

Here’s a rogue’s gallery of five major perpetrators of what’s turning out to be the biggest scientific hoax in modern history: (Examiner)

HUNTSVILLE, AL -- How do global warming proponents handle a problem like Huntsville climatologist and global warming skeptic Dr. John Christy?

Recently leaked e-mails show that question has bedeviled some of the world's leading climate scientists to a point they may have destroyed their own credibility.

The furor is now a full-blown media event dubbed Climategate, and very near its center are Christy, Alabama's state climatologist, a handful of other researchers and, to a lesser extent, Christy's fellow researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Roy Spencer, also known as "the official climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh Show."

Christy was named in 51 of about 1,000 e-mails either hacked or leaked late last month from the University of East Anglia in eastern England. Spencer was named in 15. (The Huntsville Times)

Steve McIntyre, 62, is a Toronto retiree. He plays squash, dabbles with numbers and insists he never set out to stir up any trouble.

So why does his name appear again and again - in the most unflattering ways - in hundreds of e-mails written by the world's most influential climate change scientists, that were mysteriously taken from a computer in Britain last month and published on the Internet? ( Richard Foot, Canwest News Service)

Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.

The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders. (Mail on Sunday)

I’ve wondered whether Climategate scientist Tom Wigley, an Australian, finally choked on all the fraud, fiddling and coverups he was witnessing from fellow members of his Climategate cabal.

Steven Hayward points out that many other Climategate scientists privately had trouble swallowing the practices of their colleagues: (Andrew Bolt)

Americans honor the courageous informant, the gutsy citizen who stands against the savagery of the profit-mongering conglomerate. Well, sometimes. It appears, believe it or not, that there are those who aren't religiously tethered to this sacred obligation.

For now -- because of revelations of the ClimateGate scandal, in which hacked e-mails revealed discussions among top climate scientists about the manipulation of evidence -- Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain, has stepped down from his position. Michael Mann, architect of the famous "hockey stick" graph, is now under investigation by Pennsylvania State University. Similar inquiries should follow.

Yet Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is off hunting bigger game.

"You call it 'ClimateGate'; I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate,'" Boxer clarified during a committee shindig. "We may well have a hearing on this; we may not. We may have a briefing for senators; we may not." Boxer, as steady as they come, went on to put the focus where it belongs: on hackers. She warned: "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated. ... This is a crime."

If this hacker(s) is unearthed on U.S. soil (or anywhere in the Middle East, actually), Boxer can jettison the guilty party to Gitmo for some well-deserved sleep deprivation. (David Harsanyi, Townhall)

Senator Barbara Boxer has said that the e-mails supposedly stolen from a computer at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK should lead to prosecution of the hacker who did it. This rather obvious attempt to divert attention from the content of the emails, to the manner in which the e-mails were obtained, led my wife to make an interesting observation.

What if the intercepted emails uncovered medical researchers discussing the fudging and hiding of cancer research data, and trying to interfere with the peer review process to prevent other medical researchers from getting published? There would be outrage from all across the political spectrum. Scientists behaving badly while the health of people was at stake would not be defended by anyone.

So why should it be any different with Climategate? Unnecessary restrictions on (or price increases for) energy use could needlessly kill millions of people who are already poverty stricken. Cancer research affects many of us, but energy costs affect ALL of us. (Roy W. Spencer)

The scandal involving leaked or purloined emails from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia finally reached Capitol Hill this week, but not in the way you'd expect. Democratic committee chairmen ignored the evidence of scientific skullduggery at the influential research unit, even as its head Phil Jones stepped aside this week to make way for an investigation.

Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment Committee, did rouse herself to comment on the emails, saying their release should be treated as a criminal matter. "You call it 'Climategate'; I call it 'Email-theft-gate,'" she said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated."

In the House, the Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on what Chairman Ed Markey said was "the urgent consensus view . . . that global warming is real, and the science indicates it is getting worse." But the only witnesses were officials from the Obama administration, who support dramatic action on climate change. Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic appear but were denied. (John Fund, WSJ)

The United Nations panel on climate change has promised to investigate claims that scientists at a British university deliberately manipulated data to support the theory of man-made global warming.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called "climategate" controversy were too serious to ignore. (The Times)

The United Nations panel on climate change has strongly defended scientists at the University of East Anglia in Britain who are at the centre of a row over the alleged manipulation of data.

As world leaders prepare for the climate change summit in Copenhagen, climate sceptics had claimed leaked emails showed that the scientists exaggerated how much human behaviour is altering the climate.

But the joint chairmen of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say that the science is unequivocal in its evidence of global warming and supported by researchers around the world. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

The Climategate debate hots up. Finally the BBC pays some attention to the growing scandal (only 2 weeks late) and has a mini-debate involving Warmist/Alarmist Professor Andrew Watson (speaking from somewhere in UK academia) and leading AGW-sceptic Marc Morano (speaking via satellite link from the US).

Watson continually avoids the substantive points of Climategate (of course) deciding to whinge about character assassinations of the "poor scientists" (yes they are "poor scientists" but not in the way he would have us believe). Such complaints are rather ironic given his final words.

The BBC interviewer continually talks over Morano, in her desire to allow Watson to get in the last words.

He does, as right at the end, with stunning candour (thinking that his microphone is now off) he says of Morano, "What an arsehole".

No - we know who the arseholes are, Professor.

A lot of us have more than one email account — one for personal use, and one for work. We do that for several reasons. We want to keep our private lives separate from our professional activities. We don’t want bosses and co-workers to know everything that goes on at home. Employers have the right to know what staff members are doing with their work-time and company resources — which includes official email accounts — so those things are subject to scrutiny. If we work for the government (and therefore taxpayers), then we are subject to even greater oversight. So we isolate our personal electronic correspondence and in most cases employers don’t bother to ask about it — and if they did, they’d have some pretty upset employees on their hands.

So here we have Penn State University Climategate-ologist Michael Money-Mann outraged over outsiders viewing his “private” correspondence:

Where’s the outrage, Mike? If these truly were personal correspondence, you’d have a right to be upset and insist that no one view your emails. Of course that’s not the case — you work for a public university, and sent messages to public university addresses of other scientists. It’s more likely that you are expecting Penn State to cover your rear end. You’re probably right.

1. “They’ve” — implies someone from the group of skeptics they disdain was the one to pilfer and expose their messages. But CRU, Mann, and the rest of their cabal have no idea who exposed the records.

2. “stolen” — CRU, Mann, etc. cannot prove the records were extracted by an outside entity. They may have been exposed by a whistleblower. Those types are often celebrated as heroes when they scandals are revealed.

4. “emails” — yes, and so much more. They don’t even want to talk about the corrupted source code, which a software engineer — who is not a climate skeptic — interviewed by BBC said was, let’s say, less than professional.

But expect the made-up story of “stolen personal emails” to continue — at least until they are discredited about that as well. (Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute)

Climategate emails prove that we must redo the science with data and a process that can be trusted
By Lawrence Solomon

The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data.

How much falls from Climategate, whose participants read like a Who’s Who at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not much, says CRU’s disgraced director, Phil Jones, pointing out that CRU’s data for global temperatures is but one of several datasets, all in general agreement. Besides, many argue, CRU was no linchpin to the science. The IPCC relied on numerous other sources. Throw CRU out, they say, and the IPCC’s conclusions remain unshakable.

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted, says Christopher Booker (TDT)

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics. (Ben Webster, The Times)

What a close analysis of Dr. John P. Holdren's statement from December 2 reveals.

When the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on the state of climate science on December 2, the Republicans were ready to focus it on the Climategate fraud scandal. And the first witness, President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John P. Holdren, was ready to respond.

Instead of summarizing his written testimony in his oral remarks, Holdren read a prepared statement on Climategate. He said that the controversy involved a “small group of scientists” and was primarily about one temperature dataset. He said that such controversies were not unusual in all branches of science and that they got sorted out through the peer review process and continuing scrutiny. Holdren also said that openness and sharing of data was important, which is why the Obama administration is strongly committed to openness. In the case of the disputed dataset (the “hockey stick” graph), the National Academies of Science (NAS) undertook a thorough review of it and all other similar datasets and concluded that the preponderance of evidence supported the principal conclusion of the research. Holdren concluded by predicting that when the dust settles on this controversy, a very strong scientific consensus on global warming will remain.

Well, that sounds pretty plausible, but anyone who has followed Dr. Holdren’s amazing career knows that he is a master of plausible buncombe that disguises his “outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices,” as my CEI colleague William Yeatman has put it. Everything that Holdren said in his opening statement is incomplete and misleading. But explaining that is a job for another day. The point is that the alarmist establishment and environmental pressure groups have settled on these talking points in order to try to contain and sanitize the scandal.

When Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and other Republicans on the committee challenged Holdren’s analysis of Climategate, the president’s science adviser responded by repeating that it was just a small group of scientists engaged in some narrow research. Any mistakes or misdeeds on their part couldn’t possibly compromise the scientific consensus, which is as strong as it is vast.

But when asked about some of his own extreme statements and predictions, Holdren replied that scientific research had moved on from the latest UN assessment report in 2007. The most up-to-date scientific research was contained in a report written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and released last summer. Holdren mentioned and referred to this report, Copenhagen Diagnosis, several times during the course of the hearing.

I remember when Copenhagen Diagnosis came out because nearly every major paper ran a story on it. Global warming is happening even faster than predicted, the impacts are even worse than feared, and that sort of thing. I also remembered that the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis included many of the usual conmen who are at the center of the alarmist scare. So I asked my CEI colleague Julie Walsh to compare the list of authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis with the scientists involved in Climategate.

I’m sure it will come as a shock that the two groups largely overlap. The “small group of scientists” up to their necks in Climategate include 12 of the 26 esteemed scientists who wrote the Copenhagen Diagnosis. Who would have ever guessed that forty-six percent of the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis belong to the Climategate gang? Small world, isn’t it? (Myron Ebell, PJM)

It has been two weeks since Climategate revealed that some of the IPCC’s leading researchers have conspired to manipulate temperature data, hide data from other researchers, and bully those scientists who do not agree with them by interfering with the peer review process.

(If you haven’t heard about Climategate, it might be because you are still watching ABC, CBS, or NBC. Google ‘Climategate’, though, and you will get 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 web page matches.)

Supporters have claimed that there is nothing to see there…that the Climategate e-mails released to the world by a whistleblower just show how scientists normally work. This is a particularly bad strategy, and the public knows it. Scientists do NOT behave this way…at least not in my world.

Others have claimed that a few bad apples do not spoil the whole IPCC barrel. Well, if it wasn’t for the fact that these are the core people who gave us the primary thermometer evidence of 20th Century warming (Phil Jones), and the Hockey Stick temperature reconstruction which conveniently did away with the previous 10 or more centuries of natural climate change (Michael Mann), I might be inclined to agree with them. (Roy W. Spencer)

A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak.
by Steven F. Hayward
12/14/2009, Volume 015, Issue 13

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment. (Weekly Standard)

It’s time for climate science to clean house. Whatever investigations come of Climategate, they should not stop with the United Kingdom.

Climate skeptics are having a field day in the blogosphere, celebrating the firestorm of controversy that has surrounded the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Until recently, the CRU was considered one of the world’s leading climate research centers, and it has exerted massive influence on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC, in turn, has positioned itself as the ultimate authority on all things climate, even claiming a Nobel Prize (shared with Al Gore) for its work on global climate change. ( Kenneth P. Green, The American)

On the eve of next week's Copenhagen climate summit, the evidence couldn't be more embarrassing for proponents of global warming. Leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU), one of the world's leading climate change research centres, indicate that prominent scientists cooked the books to make the case for man-made global warming.

Perhaps the scientists were just joking in some of the e-mails, as they now claim, and that they used "poorly chosen words." If the East Anglia scientists were serious about everything in those e-mails, it's a bombshell.

Misconduct at an institute as respected and influential as Hadley -- including the manipulation and deletion of data and deliberate attempts to suppress peer-reviewed papers skeptical of global warming, as the e-mails indicate-- would undermine the very basis of an issue that is driving much of the world agenda. Global warming, endorsed by the national science academies of every major industrialized nation, would not only be flawed science, it would be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the world.

It's an incredible assertion that is difficult to swallow, especially with the Alberta government spending billions on carbon sequestration. (Calgary Herald)

The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at sceptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor.

It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit

Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated. (BBC News)

The real denialism. The UN’s top global warming official both admits the Climategate scientists emails looks “very bad” and needs investigation, yet somehow retains complete confidence in the science this cabal produced:

Meanwhile mainstream newspapers betray their fundamental principles by preferring group think to scepticism:

Never have you had a clear example of the herd thinking that most imperils the mainstream media. (Andrew Bolt)

My apologies for an absence of posts. I have been heavily engaged in radio and television interviews for the past 48-hours, helping to feed, I fear, the current media frenzy over the hacked/leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia and the imminence of Copenhagen. I thought it might be of interest, however, if I made two of my media interventions available here. (Clamour of the Times)

And then comes this response (comment 13) to which I’ve added a few paragraph breaks and one piece of emphasis: Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news and public affairs operations may not quite have caught up with Climategate, but the CBC's Rex Murphy has. Most CBC listeners and viewers might be wondering what he's talking about. Since the story broke two weeks ago with the release of emails from the world's leading climate institute, there has only been one news report on the network and the only analysis item was on Anna Maria Tremonti's The Current -- a pooh-poohing academic from the United States who said there was nothing in the emails worth talking about.

The radio network's vaunted science show, Quirks and Quarks, has yet to even acknowledge the existence of scientific debate over temperature records, let alone the email scandal. As far as I can tell, not once in the history of the show has Quirks and Quarks' host, Bob McDonald, sought to explore the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick--the two Canadians whose hockey stick deconstruction is now at the centre of a global science meltdown.

While Quirks and Quarks did nothing, the world's leading climate scientists spent a decade in behind the scenes debate over temperature data, squelching dissent and keeping mainstream scientists and media marching to the global warming official tune. Don't you think that would be of interest? And how come Bob McDonald missed a decade of debate?

Instead of tackling the real science issues, this week's edition of Quirks and Quarks--according to on air promotions--is going to focus on a side issue, the even shakier science of rising sea levels.

You can watch Rex Murphy's piece above. (Financial Post)

59% of Americans say it's at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, according to a Rasmussen survey released yesterday. 35% say it's Very Likely and just 26% say it's not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.

"This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called Climategate scandal," notes Rasmussen. "Just 20% of Americans say they've followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely."

Rasmussen speculates that the UN's credibility problem undermines the credibility of the scientists associated with it. "One reason for this skepticism may be the role the United Nations has played in promoting the global warming issue. Only 22% of Americans consider the UN to be a reliable source of information on global warming. 49% disagree and say the international organization is not reliable on that topic. 29% aren't sure."

The Rasmussen survey also finds just 25% of Americans believe most scientists agree on global warming. (Financial Post)

For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths.

What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit. "These guys (NASA) are quite clearly determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this." (IBD)

“What is now needed is a reshaping of the debate, in which the global warming partisans acknowledge that their case is not universally accepted, that their remedies are not necessarily the right ones and that their critics have motives as honest as theirs.” [Leading article, The Mail on Sunday]

The Mail on Sunday carries an excellent leading article which should be read by every politician in the UK from Gordon Brown to David Cameron. It is a call for a rational debate over climate change:

“The public have always been more cautious about this issue than either governments or media. They have also been required to pay heavily for dubious projects such as windpower, and denied their own choice of domestic lightbulb. They have smelt a faint whiff of fanaticism, and now their fears have been confirmed.

What is now needed is a reshaping of the debate, in which the global warming partisans acknowledge that their case is not universally accepted, that their remedies are not necessarily the right ones and that their critics have motives as honest as theirs. (Clamour of the Times)

Alan Wilkie – well known TV weatherman on the Australian Channel 7 of a few decades ago. Enjoy the four scanned pages from his 1976 book describing global cooling and the associated bad effects breaking out here and there around the globe.

These days we are constantly badgered by utter twaddle about “global warming”. I am interested to hear readers views on what a “mainstream” informed person was saying three and a half decades ago. (Edited 6 Dec)

Alan Wilkie

Our Changing Weather Patterns
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Ice Ages
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The threat of a new ice age loomed so large in 1974 that American intelligence collated a report on the likely effects. Maurizio Morabito unearthed it

A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document — never made public before — dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists. (Spectator)

The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost.

We believe that idea—we’ll call it “global warming alarmism”—fails the tests of theology, science, and economics. It rests on poor theology, with a worldview of the Earth and its climate system contrary to that taught in the Bible. It rests on poor science that confuses theory with observation, computer models with reality, and model results with evidence, all while ignoring the lessons of climate history. It rests on poor economics, failing to do reasonable cost/benefit analysis, ignoring or underestimating the costs of reducing fossil fuel use while exaggerating the benefits. And it bears fruit in unethical policy that would

In return for all these sacrifices, what will the world get? At most a negligible, undetectable reduction in global average temperature a hundred years from now. (Cornwall Alliance)

I can’t find the words to describe the illogic behind the EPA with this ruling. Perhaps it is best to say that bureaucrats don’t understand anything but regulations and leave it at that.

But there’s an interesting twist, just two days ago, the University of Wisconsin says that CO2 is accelerating forest growth. Of course, bureaucrats wouldn’t understand this, because they can’t regulate tree growth. Oh, wait.

The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be fueling more than climate change. It could also be making some trees grow like crazy.

That is the finding of a new study of natural stands of quaking aspen, one of North America’s most important and widespread deciduous trees. The study, by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota at Morris (UMM) and published today (Dec. 4) in the journal Global Change Biology, shows that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past 50 years have boosted aspen growth rates by an astonishing 50 percent.

“Trees are already responding to a relatively nominal increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 50 years,” says Rick Lindroth, a UW-Madison professor of ecology and an expert on plant responses to climate change. Lindroth, UW-Madison colleague Don Waller, and professors Christopher Cole and Jon Anderson of UMM conducted the new study.

The study’s findings are important as the world’s forests, which cover about 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface, play an important role in regulating climate and sequestering greenhouses gases. The forests of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, act as sinks for carbon dioxide, helping to offset the increase in levels of the greenhouse gas, widely viewed as a threat to global climate stability. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

On the face of it, there are so many reasons to dislike carbon trading. Setting up a derivatives trading system to achieve something as morally and politically fraught as climate change just feels wrong, somehow, to many people. Still others (the Brookings Institution is the latest) argue that a carbon tax is superior.

Yet while the majority in most countries supports action on climate change, surveys suggest that attitudes to cap-and-trade are more ambivalent. Yet an HSBC survey last year showed that carbon trading simply doesn’t rate highly on people’s radars, when thinking about government action on climate change:
HSBC Climate Confidence Monitor

Source: HSBC Climate Confidence Monitor

So, given all the criticisms of cap-and-trade, why is it so popular with policymakers? To understand both the critics and the supporters, we’ll go through the key arguments against cap and trade: (Kate Mackenzie, Financial Times)

* U.N. offset scheme stalling, needs reviving -IETA
* Copenhagen climate talks need to back swathe of reforms
* IETA calls for steering committee to help overhaul CDM

SINGAPORE, Dec 4 - A multi-billion dollar scheme driving clean-energy investment in poorer nations is faltering and urgently needs reforms mandated by negotiators at this month's U.N. climate talks, a report released on Friday said.

The International Emissions Trading Association said the scheme, called the Clean Development Mechanism, has proved a great success but was now a victim of poor management, delays and conflicting rulings that was stifling investment.

"Given the current economic climate, the CDM's enduring lack of predictability and consistency is causing investors to pull back, quickly," IETA said in the report, "State of the CDM 2009".

"Uncertainty over the post-2012 framework has only hastened this retreat," it said, adding that "the CDM, as it is, is barely working for us anymore". (Reuters)

Despite the unfolding international "climate change" scandal involving the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, President Barack Obama's ideological presuppositions on global warming remain unshaken, and he will still happily attend the Copenhagen global warming conference. (David Limbaugh, Townhall)

Nearly 100 world leaders are expected to appear at the global warming talks that open Monday in Copenhagen. This is an unprecedented showing of leadership for the issue. Yet at the same time, public opinion of climate change is souring — particularly in the United States.

A recent Harris Poll, among the latest of several over the past year, shows that barely half of the American public believes that the carbon dioxide that's building up in the atmosphere could warm up our planet.

There are multiple reasons for this growing skepticism, including psychological reactions and politics. Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale University School of Forestry puts one reason above all the rest: "First of all, it's the economy, stupid."

People can only worry about so many issues at one time, he says. So it's no surprise they worry about issues that hit closest to home.

"And the economy is still by far the No. 1 concern of Americans, which just pushes all other issues off the table." ( Richard Harris, NPR)

COPENHAGEN — By executive action, the Obama administration can boost the U.S. target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions beyond levels envisioned in legislation working its way through Congress, the head of the U.N. climate science network said Sunday.

"There is scope for going above what is going to be legislated," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told The Associated Press on the eve of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen.

Senate and House bills capping carbon dioxide emissions would reduce them by 17 to 20 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. Compared with 1990 levels, the standard U.N. benchmark, that's only a 3-4 percent reduction, experts calculate, a contribution far short of what scientists say is needed among industrial countries to avoid dangerous climate change.

Environmentalists have long urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to act on its own, without Congress, to rein in carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. (AP)

Planet Earth is in imminent peril. We now have clear evidence of the crisis, provided by increasingly detailed information about how Earth responded to perturbing forces during its history and by observations of changes that are beginning to occur around the globe. The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.

I believe the biggest obstacle to solving global warming is the role of money in politics, the undue sway of special interests. "But the influence of special interests is impossible to stop," you say. It had better not be. But the public, and young people in particular, will need to get involved in a major way. ( James Hansen, NEWSWEEK)

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.

China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen. ( George F. Will, Washington Post)

The UN's top climate official has given an upbeat assessment on the prospects of a global deal at a climate summit which opens in Copenhagen on Monday.

Yvo de Boer told the BBC things were in "excellent shape" as officials from 192 nations began gathering in Denmark.

Any agreement is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN official panel on climate change says emissions must be limited to avoid dangerous global temperature rises. (BBC News)

COPENHAGEN — At an abandoned beer warehouse in this city’s Valby district, law enforcement officials have constructed an elaborate holding facility with three dozen steel cages to accommodate over 350 potential troublemakers during a United Nations climate conference that gets under way here on Monday.

Critics call the holding pens — and a variety of other security preparations made as thousands of government officials, heads of state, environmental groups and assorted anarchists descend on the Danish capital — over the top. The police say the reactions of the critics are overheated, if predictable.

“This is surely the biggest police action we have ever had in Danish history,” said Per Larsen, the chief coordinating officer for the Copenhagen police force. “But I think the complaints are the kind we are very used to hearing in this country.”

Officials have made it clear that they aim to keep the peace during the 12-day conference, organized under United Nations auspices. From new laws rushed through Parliament allowing stiffer fines and extended detentions for those deemed unruly, to public displays of newly acquired antiriot and emergency equipment, leaders here say they are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. Meanwhile, a variety of protest and advocacy groups — some with obscure political lineage — have signaled in online postings and other public statements that they will not be cooperating. (NYT)

Next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate. Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to use Climategate to scuttle the Democrats' cap-and-trade legislation. Even the Saudis -- who like fossil fuels even more than Tiger Woods likes the ladies -- are getting in on the act, saying the scandal casts the entire case for global warming in doubt.

"Climategate," aka warmerquiddick, aka the CRUtape letters, aka the Mother of All Publicity Disasters, refers to the leaking of vast numbers of e-mails and other documents from a leading British global-warming outfit, the Climatic Research Unit. The e-mails show, depending on your outlook, anything from sloppiness, pettiness and dishonesty to outright fraud among some of the world's leading climate scientists. (Jonah Goldberg, Townhall)

First Rudd wasn’t going to go to the Copenhagen summit unless it was at the end, to be with Barack Obama::

But within hours Obama said he’d changed his mind and go at the end of the summit:

Which - as I predicted - has now prompted yet another rethink by Rudd, the world’s greatest autograph hunter:

The stench of corruption hangs in a pall over the delightful city of Copenhagen. The studied stoking of hysteria in the establishment media is in a crescendo, aimed at a climax next week. Those online readers who wonder why The Times was so quiet on the subject on December 3rd should know that all of us subscribers received a glossy colour magazine entitled Eureka. It purports to be a scientific supplement, but this one is a climate change special. As you would expect, most of it is a travesty of science. What is not fraud is subreption. As an example of the latter, there is a side box entitled Why does carbon dioxide in the air change the temperature? It is based on a simple diagram of the earth with arrows going up and down representing radiation: no mention of water vapour, the dependence of energy distributions on source temperature or absorption/emission spectra – in fact nothing to do with the so-called greenhouse effect at all. There is a page of quotations from eleven green extremists in politics and propaganda, with pencil sketches of each of them. Climategate? What Climategate? The only mitigating feature is a single column by Richard S Lindzen; calm, reasoned and entirely lacking in frenzy. (Number Watch)

The world has already changed. Whatever is agreed or not agreed at the summit on climate change that begins in Copenhagen tomorrow, momentous change has already occurred.

Sometimes it is difficult to see the longer cycles of history amid the oscillations of the day-to-day. So it may be disappointing that there will be no treaty emerging from the talks scheduled to last for the next two weeks. And it may seem an awfully long time since this process began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, via the Kyoto protocol of 1997 to a possible treaty next year. Just as we are dealing with a global ecosystem in which change is measured in centuries, and a climatic warming caused by humans driven by economic and population changes measured in decades, so the political response to it is going to take a long, long time.

On that outlook, The Independent on Sunday, as ever, prefers to take the positive view. As a newspaper that was founded two years before the Rio treaty, we may exhibit the optimism of youth, but we also have been in at the start, and have been concerned about the environment from issue number one. Thus we are old enough, and hope to be informed enough, to take the long view of Copenhagen. In that view, the formal announcements by the US and Chinese governments last month that they are committed to reducing their outputs of greenhouse gases were historic. ( The Independent)

It was powerfully mapped in one of the finest films ever, Citizen Kane, the story of progress from youthful idealism, via a series of small unplanned steps, to a climax of total corruption by self-absorption. It has recurred often throughout history: those who achieve supreme power through inheritance, usurpation or other political chicanery, favourites of the king, Hollywood divas, pathologically acquisitive industrial moguls etc. Some of them maintain their status to the end of their lives but few survive the judgement of history. Others head during their lives for the mighty fall and end their time in justifiable ignominy.

It has not been something that happens in the cloistered world of science, but until now science has been free of the taint of politics and therefore relatively incorruptible. Suddenly, however, political patronage has become a prime motivator for science. In those stories of old, powerful patronage was one of the movers on the path to megalomania. The world governance movement, after the collapse of the new-ice-age scare, discovered in global warming just what it needed to herd the masses in the desired direction. Furthermore it provided a justification for the grinding taxes that would be necessary to implement international socialist rule. (Number Watch)

CONSPIRACY theorists on both sides of the climate change debate could do worse than have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down ahead of next week's Copenhagen summit. That should give them time to realise that the atmospherics around global warming have shifted dramatically. The planet may still need attention but its citizens are no longer quite so sure what that should involve. In just a couple of weeks here -- and abroad -- the language and temper of the debate has changed.

This ought to be seen as good news, even by those momentarily stunned by the dilution of their case for taking strong political action at the Denmark summit. For the first time in the 17 years since the "Earth summit" in Rio de Janeiro, there is a chance for more questioning of the science of global warming. Scepticism is no longer out of order -- and thanks to the political debates around the world, people have a more sophisticated understanding of the issues. (The Australian)

First they try to steal $45 trillion of our hard-earned cash in the name of “combatting climate change”. Now they steal our holidays too: the organisers of the Copenhagen Summit – COP 15 to use its snappy official name – have banned Christmas. (James Delingpole, TDT)

BRUSSELS - Anti-poverty campaign group Oxfam accused European politicians on Sunday of planning to "cannibalize" existing development aid budgets and repackage them as part of a deal to fight climate change.

Oxfam said it had found evidence that exposed "undercover accounting" in some rich nations' pledges to help poor nations to tackle the climate threat.

But Sweden, holder of the rotating European Union presidency, denied the charges made the day before a U.N. summit starts in Copenhagen on negotiating a new global deal to combat climate-warming emissions.

"What is new and additional money is not always clear cut, but many countries, my own included, have foreseen and planned for Copenhagen, and the money is already in state budgets," Sweden's chief climate negotiator Anders Turesson told Reuters.

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough. (TDT)

If the greens have failed, it’s not for lack of trying. For years now, in everything from pre-school programs to “educational” ads aimed at adults, they’ve been “greenwashing” our brains. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that the EPA was focusing on children: ”Partnering with the Parent Teacher Organization, the agency earlier this month launched a cross-country tour of 6,000 schools to teach students about climate change and energy efficiency.”

Yet for all that effort, the public isn’t buying. As Politico notes this morning: ”The Pew Research Center found that by last January, global warming ’ranked at the bottom of the public’s list of policy priorities for the president and Congress this year.’” And “Independent voters and Republicans ranked it last on a list of 20 priorities, while Democrats ranked it 16th.” Meanwhile, “other polling suggests Americans are growing more skeptical of the science behind climate change, with those who blame human activity for global warming – 36 percent – falling 11 percentage points this year, according to Pew.” And that was before “Climategate” came to light.

At bottom, the greens face three basic problems. First, by no means is the science of global warming “settled” — if anything, the fraud Climategate surfaced has settled that question. Second, even if global warming were a settled science, the contribution of human activity is anything but certain. And finally, most important, even if the answers to those two questions were clear, the costs — or benefits — of global warming are unknown, but the costs of the proposals promoted by the greens are astronomical. (Roger Pilon, Cato at liberty)

CURRENT pledges from rich and developing nations for cutting carbon pollution will stoke potentially catastrophic warming by century's end, according to a study released just before the Copenhagen climate summit begins.

National commitments proposed so far for the December 7-18 UN conference would mean the global temperature would rise by 3.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, way over a 2.0 C threshold widely considered safe, the study said.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) would hit about 650 parts per million (ppm), according to the tally published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and energy specialists Ecofys. (AFP)

A Statement by Mr Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on Australian politicians and CSIRO to produce proof to justify the recent spate of climate scare forecasts.

The Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, Mr Viv Forbes, said that it was clear that the climate alarmists had pre-planned a “scare-a-day” schedule for the period while the Senate was considering the Ration-N-Tax Scheme.

“Presumably we can expect this ploy to resume in January 2010 prior to Mr Rudd’s third attempt to coerce the Senate to pass his friendless bill.

“Australians have been subjected to doomsday forecasts covering the whole plethora of demons such as droughts, floods, heat waves, bush fires, rising sea level, loss of the Barrier Reef and extinction of the pygmy glider. Just yesterday, the government’s ABC gave generous airplay to dire forecasts of climate change migrations and wars.”

“Any Australian politician forecasting that CO2 will produce climate doom is surely relying on proof from government scientific advisers such as CSIRO. Let us see the proof.

“However, the recent revelations that CSIRO has been involved in suppressing dissent from within its ranks suggest that CSIRO is being driven by political agendas rather than science.

“CSIRO seems to be on track to join a long list of government climate bodies caught gagging internal dissent, adjusting data, destroying data, falsifying data, or claiming proof where none exists.

“Already under a cloud are the Climate Research Unit in UK, the EPA in Australia and USA, NIWA in New Zealand, the IPCC and now our once respected CSIRO. In addition, the Climategate scandal is engulfing the alarmist world, so we need to be especially sceptical of their “forecasts”.

Mr Forbes said that as a grazier he took particular interest in rainfall and would be keen to see CSIRO’s evidence that a miniscule addition to the trace amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause long term increases in drought in Australia.

“There already exists a substantial body of evidence that the 21 year solar cycle is the major determinant of rainfall variations in our hemisphere. Moreover, there is abundant experimental evidence that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes plants more tolerant to both heat and drought stress.

“There is no evidence that rising atmospheric CO2 causes drought. In fact, a carbon dioxide “drought” would be far more devastating to plant growth than a seasonal shortage of rainfall.

“CSIRO has a long record of good and useful science. It should not abandon objective science for political advocacy.

“Unless CSIRO can produce data, evidence and proof to support the government climate scare forecasts, we are forced to conclude that it has become just another political lapdog.”

For an entertaining summary of global warming scare forecasts see: “The Twelve Days of Global Warming”:

Viv Forbes
www.carbon-sense.com

When Julia Gillard faced the media outside Federal Parliament in Canberra on Wednesday she looked shell-shocked. She then proceeded to give the most jittery, hollow, nonsensical performance of her career. It was pantomime of the lowest order.

''Today the climate change extremists and deniers in the Liberal Party have stopped this nation from taking decisive action on climate change,'' the Deputy Prime Minister said, deadpan, into a thicket of cameras and recorders.

Extremists and deniers. In case anyone had missed the point, she repeated the phrase five times. ''Now [we] have been stopped by the Liberal Party extremists and the climate change deniers. This nation has been stopped from taking a major step in the nation's interests by Liberal Party extremists and climate change deniers.''

This is clearly going to be the mantra the Rudd Government uses to describe anyone who opposes its pointless legislation on an emissions trading scheme.

Gillard used the terms ''denier'' or ''denial'' 11 times, pointed words because they carry the connotation of Holocaust denial. The last time that tactic was used in the national debate, after the release of the Bringing Them Home report, it exploded on those who used it.

So this is going to get interesting because the political ground has shifted in the past six months. It is now the Rudd Government that appears to be in a state of denial. (Paul Sheehan, SMH)

The ICM survey for The Sunday Telegraph will dismay proponents of "man-made" climate change – including leading scientists and the majority of world governments – as they gather in Copenhagen for the landmark climate summit.

Asked if they backed the main conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that humans are largely responsible for modern day rises in temperatures, 52 per cent of voters agreed.

However, 39 per cent said climate change had not yet been proven to be man made, while seven per cent simply denied the phenomenon was happening at all. Furthermore, fewer than one in four voters (23 per cent) believed that climate change was "the most serious problem faced by man" – a view endorsed by governments across the world.

A clear majority (58 per cent) said it was merely "one of a number of serious problems" while 17 per cent believed it has been exaggerated and is "not a very serious problem."

The survey follows the recent raising of tensions between proponents of man-made climate change, which is the prevailing scientific view, and those who take a more sceptical stance. The IPCC has said it will launch an investigation after the online publication of emails and other material stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the so-called "climategate" affair. Climate change sceptics claim the material shows that the evidence used to support man-made global warming has been manipulated.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Professor Phil Jones, who headed the CRU and who has stood aside after the leak of the emails, has received more than £13 million in funding for his research.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, said it was possible Russian hackers had been paid as part of a global conspiracy to cast doubt on the science of global warming. "I do not think this is a coincidence," he added.

Gordon Brown, who will attend the two-week, 192-nation Copenhagen summit, denounced "the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics" who challenged the prevailing view. (Patrick Hennessy, Sunday Telegraph)

WASHINGTON -- With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate change meeting. Its organizers had hoped it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices. (George Will, Townhall)

The carbon price of Copenhagen

When politicians say there is no Plan B, it usually means that they have given up on Plan A and are unsure what to do next.

The UN climate summit in Copenhagen has been portrayed as the last chance to save the planet by those keen to bounce the world into agreeing a treaty on cutting greenhouse gases. Copenhagen is, of course, merely the last chance until the next chance. The key players are already preparing for another summit next November, when the real deal may be signed.

To give it its formal title, Copenhagen is the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — often abbreviated to COP15. Mexico will probably host COP16 and the UN has begun planning COP17, likely to be in South Africa in 2011, and COP18 in Asia in 2012. This is an unstoppable global bandwagon that will just keep rolling, regardless of what is agreed on emissions. (Ben Webster, The Times)

"... to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough-the prime requisite is rightly to apply it." -Rene Descartes

"Don't bother me with facts, Son. I've already made up my mind." -Foghorn Leghorn

As world leaders prepare to gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global strategy for combating climate change-a strategy likely to involve a substantial growth of government power at the expense of individual and economic liberty-a shock wave of controversy threatens to shatter what many have come to view as settled science. (Ken Connor, Townhall)

Whatever results, or lack thereof, flow from the Copenhagen conference on climate change, taxpayers have a right to know: What works best in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming?

After all, a lot of money can be thrown away chasing measures and policies that either won't work or be cost-effective.

One of the very best attempts at measuring effectiveness and cost comes from McKinsey & Co., an international consulting firm that has produced a cost-abatement curve comparing different technologies used today or likely to be ready in the next two decades.

Mixing cost and effectiveness, and choosing approaches that won't materially affect consumers' lifestyles, McKinsey offers a rough guide to how the world might hold the rise in global mean temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius. Obviously, different measures will be more appropriate for some countries than for others. (Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail)

Usually the Palace of Westminster at night is lit up brightly for the delight of tourists.

But last night it was plunged into darkness as part of a security operation to deter green campaigners from climbing the building and holding a rooftop protest.

Only the famous clockface stood out from the gloom.

Officials suggested that the switch-off was designed as a gesture of support for thousands of climate change campaigners who were expected to march through London yesterday. But a senior Parliamentary source said the real reason was to make it more difficult for campaigners to scale the walls.

It would also stop any rooftop protest from being illuminated.

He said extra police had been drafted in amid ‘real concerns’ that demonstrators might stage a sit-in.

‘They had warnings that these protesters would get in,’ he added.

However, it appeared the fears were unfounded as less protesters than expected turned out to march. (Daily Mail)

MONTREAL - As world leaders gather in Copenhagen next week for historic negotiations on climate change, a fierce battle continues in Ottawa between environmental groups and a powerful army of energy, manufacturing and power utility lobbyists to influence Canadian legislation governing greenhouse gas emissions and billions of tax dollars in clean energy and emission-reduction subsidies.

These climate change lobbyists form one of the largest special interest groups on Parliament Hill, the Canadian public lobby registry shows. Since 1996, a total of 1,570 climate change lobbyists have pounded the halls of Parliament. Their client list has steadily increased since that year from just 13 to 109.

Oil and gas producers comprised the largest industry lobbying group from January through August 2009 with 24 companies and associations represented in Ottawa, according to the registry. These include all the major oil companies.

Ten other major producers of fossil fuels - mining firms and coal companies - have also lobbied on climate change legislation. Combined, all these major producers have employed about 465 lobbyists since 1996 or about one third of the total climate change lobbyists.

Other companies and organizations that have climate change lobbyists include manufacturers, power utilities, agriculture, transportation and environmental and health groups. ( The Gazette)

US lawmakers on Thursday rolled out business leaders who back action on climate change, hoping to counter criticism that a deal at this month's Copenhagen summit would hit the wobbly US economy.

Four days before the high-stakes climate meeting opens in the Danish capital, President Barack Obama and his allies are trying to show US commitment to a global deal even though key legislation has yet to clear through Congress.

Senator John Kerry invited executives of major companies to the US Capitol to provide ammunition for his and Obama's argument that US restrictions on carbon emissions blamed for global warming would generate a new green economy. (AFP)

Climategate hits the media. An illustrious career on the BBC and ITV was cut short when Professor Bellamy came out as a global warming heretic.

In 1960, I became a professor at Durham University in England. I taught botany to undergraduates and led research teams at Masters, Ph.D., and postdoctoral levels. Between 1969 and 1996, I was a TV personality. The BBC, rapidly followed by ITV, gave me free rein to inform the world about botany, natural history, and the environment.

My media popularity brought me many accolades: I was only the second person to have his photo on the cover of Nature. (Beaten to this position by Charles Darwin, no less!) The caption? “Science is Fun.”

Back in those days, it was. I regularly got my research papers published in Nature, that august journal.

I also was invited to become trustee, president, vice president, or patron of over 30 organizations, including: WWF, Wildlife Trusts, YHA, Population Concern, Marine Conservation Society, Coral Cay Conservation, Galapagos Conservation Trust, Plantlife, and BTCV. I was also bestowed with media and conservation awards from around the world, including the Dutch Order of the Golden Ark, BAFTA’s Richard Dimbleby Award, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for Underwater Research.

Two media colleagues, Julian Pettifer and Robin Page, were publicly sacked by the BBC — in essence, because they could no longer be viewed as non-biased in their opinions.

I can only only assume that, to them, I also fell into that category — because from that point on my career on TV came to an abrupt end. Despite my resume of approximately 400 TV shows.

Since that time onwards, anyone who sticks their head out for the anti-wind power or anti-global warming arguments has been subject to vilification, never scientific debate.

Professor David J. Bellamy has authored 35 books and presented approximately 400 television programs. (PJM)

Photo: The Post's Terence Corcoran, left, squares off against Anthony Cary, British High Commissioner to Canada. (Tyler Anderson/National Post; Jana Chytilova/National Post)

The following is an exchange between Financial Post columnist Terence Corcoran and Anthony Cary, British High Commissioner to Canada since 2007.

Dear Terry,

You seem to see the whole fuss over climate change as a case of mass hysteria. Naïve, self-hating worshippers at the shrine of Gaia have been bamboozled by generously funded hack scientists into thinking that human activity is to blame for every hot summer, hurricane or drought. It is all a plot by socialists who hate the free market and long to control it. It has the hallmarks of a cult. And so on.

I am prepared to meet you halfway. I will grant that climate science is in its infancy. There are so many variables, positive and negative feedback loops and cycles within cycles that only fools or rogues pretend to be sure of what is going on. Our climate models are barely predictive. Let us pray that it is all bunk: that we have mistaken short-term cycles for long-term trends; or that we have overestimated the extent of human causation.

But surely even you must accept that you could be wrong. You see yourself, perhaps, as a Galileo, valiantly upholding the truth in the face of persecution. But might you not rather be a flat-Earther, closing your ears to the accumulating evidence for a hypothesis you simply refuse to countenance?

The problem for policy-makers — for all of us — is that if the great majority of scientists are right, we face a formidable challenge. And the lead times are long, with GHGs emitted today continuing to drive up temperatures for many years to come. Given the scale of the risk and the relatively low cost of responding to it, the case for urgent and radical action as a simple matter of risk-management seems to me incontrovertible.

Gore backs out of his planned hand-shaking appearance in Copenhagen. Perhaps because anyone allowed to get that close might be able to ask a question. (Should Al Gore's Oscar be rescinded? Take the PJTV

Gone is the dry, stiff Gore who bored us to death in presidential debates during the 2000 election cycle. His passion for global warming has so enlivened him that he speaks of isotopes and carbon emissions with a fervor befitting an old-timey revival preacher talking about brimstone and fire. London’s Times Online actually went so far as to claim Gore’s passion “invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill” when Gore spoke on global warming at Oxford University in July 2009.

But putting aside the fact that Gore has honed his public speaking skills, the fly in the ointment is that he’s a fraud. Like the very global warming movement to which he has attached himself, he’s a snake oil salesman whose sales pitch is laced with scare tactics designed to push the public into embracing a radical, carbon-free agenda that rests on a combination of half-truths and outright fabrications.

And Gore’s fraudulence is not only seen in the fact that he pawns a lie, but also in the fact that he refuses to abide by the very lie he pawns. (AWR Hawkins, PJM)

Doing science, creating new knowledge, in German: Wissen schaffen, is a social activity. As all social activities, it can be done sustainably. Or not.

Studying classical Chinese language or the dramatic living of Christian IV is most likely done sustainably. The present science will have a bearing on future science, in an enriching way, but not in a limiting manner. The present science will not inhibit the legitimacy of future science. The public will be excited about future knowledge as it is about present newly constructed insights.

Research about the forest die back in Germany may serve as an example at the other end of the spectrum. The science of forest damages was in the 1980s heavily politicized, and used as support for a specific preconceived "good" policy of environmental protection. The resulting overselling and dramatization broke down in the 1990s, and news about adverse developments in German forests is now a hard sell in Germany. An observer[i] wrote in 2004: "The damage for the scientists is enormous. Nobody believes them any longer."[ii] Of course, the damage was not only limited to the forest researchers, but also to other environmental scientists and politicians as well.

And climate research? Often it is done sustainably, but sometimes not. Some institutions and some publicly visible scientists are known for simplifying and dramatizing statements of what one would expect from NGOs, e.g., "Coal-fired power plants are factories of death."[iii] A communication of drama is intended to "move", to initiate "action". The science is supposed to support a preconceived political agenda of something "good".

Overselling takes place in the triangle between policy, media and science. It goes with a risk[iv]: The risk for policy-makers is in the possibility that the goals set in this manner cannot be achieved, the ‘‘loss of legitimacy due to taking on too much.’’ The media primarily fear the ‘‘loss of public attention,’’ due to concepts and conceptual fields becoming worn out. For science, the principal risk is the ‘‘loss of credibility due to the particular dynamic of the catastrophe metaphor’’, or any other characteristic misleading concept.

Exploiting short-term "advantages" in the public-political discourse by simplification and dramatization for furthering a pre-conceived agenda helps generating attention and short-lived support for this agenda, but can hardly maintained for a long time as required in case of climate change policies. Attributing hurricane Katrina to climate change made headlines, and depicting global warming as an uninterrupted continuous upward trend made the understanding of the concept of global warming easier. But, later, we have to pay a price. There were no more Hurricane-disasters like Katrina's since 2005, and warming is stagnating in the last years. Both facts are not surprising for the climate researcher. They are consistent with the scientific understanding of the phenomenon named "Global Warming". However they are at odds with the simplifying-dramatizing communication strategy and with the resulting medial construction.

The maximization of short-term utility goes with a prize: The public will understand that it has been manipulated, and that it had not honestly been advised by its publicly funded social institution "science". Admittedly, manipulated for something, which has been perceived by certain elites as "good" – but what is the principal difference in this respect between Greenpeace and Exxon?

The effect is twofold. First, the public will no longer believe in the "story", or consider it merely entertainment – and people will effectively become sceptics. Certainly the contrary of the originally intended effect! Second, the public will be unable to distinguish the social institution science[v] and value-based NGOs – with the latter being considerably cheaper in delivering the same politically useful knowledge claims! (Roger Pielke Jr)

There is an erroneous statement by Tom Karl, Director of the National Data Climate Center [NCDC] with respect to the role of land use/land cover change on climate. It is so easy to refute his claim, so I am puzzled why he wants to show this lack of knowledge.

The excellent news article where the erroneous information from Karl appeared is

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and "a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology".

The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps - an estimated 12,000 cubic kilometres of water.

They feed many of the world's great rivers - the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra - on which hundreds of millions of people depend. (BBC News)

In a little over a week I will be giving an invited paper at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, in a special session devoted to feedbacks in the climate system. If you don’t already know, feedbacks are what will determine whether anthropogenic global warming is strong or weak, with cloud feedbacks being the most uncertain of all.

In the 12 minutes I have for my presentation, I hope to convince as many scientists as possible the futility of previous attempts to estimate cloud feedbacks in the climate system. And unless we can measure cloud feedbacks in nature, we can not test the feedbacks operating in computerized climate models. (Roy W. Spencer)

Jean Borlee is standing in a prairie field dotted with pumpjacks, round bales of hay, cattle and cow pies because his company, Luxembourg's steel giant Arcelor Mittal SA, needs help.

He has made the long voyage from his home in Liege, Belgium, to this tiny southeastern Saskatchewan community as part of a trip requested by the French government, in the hope of learning more about a new, but unperfected, technology in the fight against global warning called carbon capture and storage (CCS). (Carrie Tait, Financial Post)

Farmers have more to gain than lose from a cap-and-trade regime for greenhouse gases, despite estimates that they could see significantly higher production costs, according to a new analysis from the Agriculture Department.

An expanded economic study, which USDA released yesterday, estimates that farmers with energy-intensive crops could see their cost of production per acre go up to nearly 10 percent over the next 50 years. But agriculture officials insist that higher prices for fuel or feed would be offset by the gains of participating in an offset market.

"The bottom line is, we think this is a net benefit for farmers and ranchers," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. (ClimateWire)

Multibillion-dollar clean coal projects in West Virginia, Texas and Alabama are getting $979 million in federal stimulus funding, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday.

The money will go toward retrofitting existing coal-fired power plants owned by American Electric Power, Southern Co. and Summit Texas Clean Energy to capture and store carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas linked to climate change. The Energy Department is aiming to have the technology available commercially _ and to share with other big coal-using countries - in eight to 10 years

"Coal is a very important mix of our power. It generates over 50 percent of our electricity. The United States has 25 percent of the entire coal reserves in the world," Chu said. "We don't plan to turn our back on coal. Neither will China. Neither will India." ( Associated Press)

In November, auto sales in China continued their torrid growth, with sales up by 93% compared with November 2008. Furthermore, those Chinese auto transactions accounted for a quarter of total global sales, the highest proportion ever recorded. [Read More] (Energy Tribune)

In 2007, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program was created in the Department of Energy to support the development of advanced (i.e., “green”) technology vehicles. Last year Congress appropriated $7.5 billion to support a maximum of $25 billion in loans. So far, the subsidies have been dished out to Ford ($5.9 billion), Nissan ($1.6 billion), Tesla Motors ($465 million), and Fisker Automotive ($528 million). (Tad DeHaven, Cato at liberty)

As director of public policy analysis in my last seven years at Enron, I participated in many legislative and regulatory debates involving electricity, although the public policy thrust of the company was the opposite of what I personally believed was good social policy.

While I favored free markets, the business model of Ken Lay (a PhD economist with years of Washington regulatory experience) centered on special government favor. Enron, for example, had seven profit centers geared to government pricing/rationing of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) emissions. And in the 1990s, the company was squarely behind a Btu tax. Today, Enron would be pushing cap and trade and a federal renewables mandate–and a lot of mandated energy efficiency with its profit centers in mind.

Ken Lay’s political niche began innocently enough with a unique, highly focused natural gas strategy, one that would culminate in Enron’s 1995 self-description as “the world’s first natural gas major.” In pursuit of that goal, Lay promoted gas-fired power generation relative to coal. He countered the coal lobby’s contention that the 1970s shortages were the inevitable result of a tiring North American gas resource base. “We had a surplus of regulation, not a shortage of gas,” Lay would say, and Enron backed up its claim by offering utilities long-term fixed-priced gas contracts.

Enron also challenged the tendency of electric utilities to opt for coal plants over gas plants because, under public-utility regulation, the former’s higher capital cost created more rate base and thus more profits. Citing new combined-cycle technology, Enron made the case that gas was economically and environmentally superior to coal for new capacity. For example, in March 1992, Enron unveiled “the natural gas standard” in letters, press releases, and speeches. The standard, set forth under Lay’s signature, declared: [Read more →] (MasterResource)

In the first of two pieces on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, Gert Jan Kramer and Martin Haigh analyse historic growth in energy systems to explain why deploying alternative technologies will be a long haul. (Gert Jan Kramer and Martin Haigh, Nature)

US OIL giant Chevron Corp has sealed a massive $90 billion contract - the biggest energy deal in Australian history - to supply natural gas to Tokyo Electric Power Company and sell the Japanese utility a stake in its Wheatstone project.

The nation's latest trade coup - struck on the eve of the international climate change conference in Copenhagen - comes as Asian countries scramble to lock in long-term supplies of LNG ahead of an anticipated surge in demand for the low-emissions fuel.

Chevron announced on the weekend it had signed an agreement with Tokyo Electric to deliver 4.1 million tonnes of LNG from Wheatstone each year for up to 20 years.

Under the two-part deal, Tokyo Electric will also acquire 15 per cent of Chevron's holding in the huge gas field off the coast of Western Australia.

Although Chevron and Tokyo Electric did not disclose the value of the sales agreement, it is estimated to be worth a record-breaking $90 billion.

That tops ExxonMobil's $50 billion deal with PetroChina - Australia's biggest trade deal to date - to supply LNG from its Gorgon project, also in WA, earlier this year. (Herald Sun)

After intense opposition from building owners, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has dropped the most far-reaching initiative of his plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan, which the owners said was too costly, called for all buildings of 50,000 square feet or more to undergo audits to determine which renovations would make them more energy efficient, and for owners to then pay for many of those changes.

The mayor wants to go forward with the proposal to require energy audits, but now is leaving it up to the building owners whether to undertake the changes called for by those audits.

It would have put New York far ahead of other cities in the green-buildings movement. Many cities require that newly constructed buildings be energy efficient, but do not impose those standards on existing properties. Some 22,000 buildings, together accounting for nearly half the square footage in the city, would have been affected. (NYT)

Utilities got a boost last year, when the new investment tax credits from the federal government were extended to allow public utilities to qualify for the full credit, to help utilities invest in renewable power. (SciAm)

Posts at Knowledge Problem acknowledge the range of results from Part I and Part II in my series; Katzenstein and Apt; and an article by Michael Milligan et al, Wind Power Myths Debunked, but attribute much of the differences to characteristics of the power system to which wind power is added.

However, although results will vary by jurisdiction, the differences I reported are not derived from this consideration but from general issues with respect to wind power integration. Milligan claims low reductions from the theoretical maximum (negligible to 7 per cent), apparently from Gross et al’s literature review, but this does not survive critical assessment.

The work of Katzenstein and Apt is cited in the bibliography to Part I, even though they show that as much as 75–80 per cent of the CO2 emissions reductions presently assumed by policy makers is realized. The reason for its inclusion is that the underlying approach is used in the calculator. The difference is that the calculator takes into account the limitations that they acknowledge in their article, for example:

Even so, according to the Knowledge Problem post, they have been criticized as overstating the need for backup power supplies by Mills et al, and that geographic diversity helps to smooth out variability. In an update to the post attention is drawn to the Milligan article. This article contains often used, and questionable, arguments to support the ability of wind to offset fuel consumption and the resulting emissions despite its high degree of variability. The following addresses some examples of these. [Read more →] (MasterResource)

Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight says the process of extracting synthetic gas from coal is a good fit with other forms of power generation in the province. John Lucas, The Journal, File Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight says the process of extracting synthetic gas from coal is a good fit with other forms of power generation in the province.

Swan Hills Synfuels received $285 million over 15 years from the province's carbon capture and storage (CCS) fund Tuesday for a project that could change the face of electrical power generation.

The goal is to turn very deep coal deposits into very clean synthetic gas that can be used for power, and perhaps later petrochemicals.

And with the success of a demonstration project this summer, the plan is to now spend about $1.5 billion to drill 20 pairs of injection and production wells in a one-section area (one square mile), build a gas-processing plant to collect 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, and install a pipeline to take the syngas to a new 300-megawatt power plant in Whitecourt.

The whole project is scheduled to be operating by 2015. A 300MW plant would supply about one-quarter of Edmonton's current electrical demand.

Energy Minister Mel Knight believes synthetic gas from coal has a big future in Alberta. (Dave Cooper, Edmonton Journal)

When Statoil ASA brought Lars Christian Bacher to Calgary, the company named him president of its Canadian operations and gave him a mandate to get bitumen out of the oil sands - and, when that's done, think about getting more of the land around Fort McMurray into the portfolio.

After a $2.2-billion buy-in to the oil sands in 2007, the Norwegian company is building its first, 10,000 barrel-a-day Leismer, Alta., demonstration project, which will begin operations next October.

Mr. Bacher led an effort to restructure Statoil's offshore continental shelf operations before starting his three-year mandate in Calgary in September. He spoke to The Globe and Mail yesterday in his first Canadian interview. (Nathan Vanderklippe, Globe and Mail)

JOHANNESBURG -- Sasol Ltd. (SSL), the world's largest producer of motor fuels from coal, Thursday said it has agreed to study the viability of an integrated coal-to-liquids project in Indonesia using its proprietary technology.

A memorandum of understanding was signed in London by Ernst Oberholster, managing director of Sasol Synfuels International, and Gita Wirjawan, chairman Indonesia's Investment Coordination Board.

The Johannesburg-based company said that based on the outcome of the study it could use its technology to produce about 80,000 barrels a day of high quality fuels from Indonesia's abundant domestic lignite coal reserves.

Sasol also said it is investigating a number of options to reduce carbon emissions, including focusing on the development of effective carbon capture and storage technologies.

Sasol has been producing fuels and chemicals from coal for more than 50 years in South Africa and operates the world's only commercial scale coal-based synthetic fuels manufacturing facility at Secunda. (Dow Jones)

A research centre and factory to support the UK's civil nuclear industry are to be based in South Yorkshire, the government has announced.

The Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC) will be based in Catcliffe, Lord Mandelson said.

Rolls-Royce's factory, which will assemble parts for the UK's 10 new nuclear power stations, will also be based somewhere in the county. (BBC News)

A very large, 30-year study of just about everyone in Scandinavia shows no link between mobile phone use and brain tumours, researchers reported on Thursday.

Even though mobile telephone use soared in the 1990s and afterward, brain tumours did not become any more common during this time, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some activist groups and a few researchers have raised concerns about a link between mobile phones and several kinds of cancer, including brain tumours, although years of research have failed to establish a connection.

"We did not detect any clear change in the long-term time trends in the incidence of brain tumours from 1998 to 2003 in any subgroup," Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society and colleagues wrote.

Deltour's team analysed annual incidence rates of two types of brain tumour -- glioma and meningioma -- among adults aged 20 to 79 from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 1974 to 2003. These countries all have good cancer registries that keep a tally of known cancer cases.

This represented virtually the entire adult population of 16 million people, they said.

Over the 30 years, nearly 60,000 patients were diagnosed with brain tumours.

"In Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the use of mobile phones increased sharply in the mid-1990s; thus, time trends in brain tumour incidence after 1998 may provide information about possible tumour risks associated with mobile phone use," the researchers wrote.

They did see a small, steady increase in brain tumours, but it started in 1974, long before mobile phones existed. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Police departments that use "stun" devices like the Taser and other "less lethal weapons" such as pepper spray can expect to see rates of injury among suspects and officers drop dramatically, according to the first federal government-backed analysis of multiple police department arrest records.

As less lethal weapons rose in popularity and availability during this decade, local police departments tended to develop their own internal policies governing them, the study's authors note in their report in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The Department of Justice funded the study, one of several it says it will use to determine which "use of force" policies allow police to work most safely.

One concern of Amnesty International and other Taser critics is that police are more likely to use Tasers in situations that would not have called for physical force. That could mean that even if the injuries sustained by suspects are less severe than those they would have sustained during the use of other physical force, there are more injuries overall.

At least 350 people have died after they were Tasered, according to Amnesty International. It's unclear why, but in many well-documented cases, the victims were highly agitated, drugged, or had chronic medical conditions. Taser International says that the device's barbs cause skin punctures, and if used improperly, Taser fire can cause subjects to fall from a height or injure the face or groin.

"If you just do a simple comparison between cases where they use a less lethal weapon and those where they don't, you get the impression that the weapon causes injury," said John MacDonald, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who led the study.

To make their comparison more meaningful, the authors took a number of factors into account. In particular, they compared the number of times police had conflicts with suspects when officers had Tasers to when they did not.

Police usually resort to Tasers and pepper spray in more dangerous situations where injuries are more likely to occur, MacDonald said. In comparing records of more than 24,000 police officer and suspect conflicts from 12 different police departments, MacDonald and his colleagues found the risk of injury to suspects apprehended with less lethal weapons typically fell more than 60 percent compared to the risk to suspects who were arrested without the devices, when all other conditions were similar. (Reuters Health)

WASHINGTON - More than 80 percent of U.S. children severely ill with H1N1 flu have been treated swiftly with antiviral drugs, a trend that could be saving lives, U.S. health officials said on Friday.

Public education campaigns about swine flu have translated into quicker and better treatment with Tamiflu, Roche AG and Gilead Sciences Inc's influenza pill, they said.

Usually, at most 20 percent of children severely ill with influenza ever get treatment with Tamiflu or GlaxoSmithKline's inhaled drug Relenza, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

"In this year it been over 80 percent. That means doctors are getting the message that severely ill children need to be treated," Frieden told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Given within the first day or so of a fever, Tamiflu and Relenza can greatly reduce symptoms. A third drug in the same class, BioCryst Inc's peramivir, has emergency authorization for intravenous use in the most severe cases.

The quick treatment is important, as H1N1 is more likely to infect younger adults and children, as opposed to seasonal flu, which takes it heaviest toll among the over-65s. (Reuters)

CHICAGO - Children who get vaccinated against chickenpox may have a lower risk of developing shingles, a painful rash caused by the chickenpox virus, U.S. researchers said on Friday.

A study of more than 170,000 children 12 and under who got Merck & Co Inc's chickenpox vaccine between 2002 to 2008 found only 122 cases of shingles or 1 case in 3,700 children who got the vaccine, an unexpectedly low rate, the team reported in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

Shingles, sometimes called herpes zoster, is a painful recurrence of the chickenpox virus, which can lurk in the body for a lifetime. The infection usually starts with a rash on the face or body, and causes pain, itching or tingling.

"The message to parents and pediatricians is: vaccinating your child against the chickenpox is also a good way to reduce their chances of getting herpes zoster," said HungFu Tseng, a research scientist and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, California. (Reuters)

OXFORD, Pa. — Obese students at a historically black college near Philadelphia won't have to take a fitness class to graduate after all.

Lincoln University faculty nixed the idea this week amid complaints the so-called "fat course" undermined a school principle of equal treatment.

The school had initiated the policy to address high rates of obesity and diabetes, especially in the African-American community.

About 80 students had gotten e-mails saying they had to take the fitness course to graduate. The plan was to target students with a body mass index of 30 or above. That's considered obese.

The "Fitness for Life" course will instead be suggested to certain students after a freshman wellness class that addresses a number of health issues. ( Associated Press)

SOCIAL WORKERS have been told to think again about putting overweight children on “at risk” registers after scientists found that obesity can be linked to a genetic defect.

In the past three years dozens of parents in Britain have been accused of abusing their children through “overfeeding”, with some youngsters being taken into care.

In one of the most extreme cases, in October, social workers went to a maternity ward in Dundee to remove a baby born 28 hours earlier.

The research, by Cambridge University, suggests many parents have been wrongly accused and that the problem lies in the children’s chromosomes. Sadaf Farooqi, who runs the metabolic research laboratories, said: “We have found that part of chromosome 16 can be deleted in some families, and people with this deletion have severe obesity from a young age.” (Sunday Times)

Did you know your soda is a public health menace?

That`s what public health activists have declared about sugar-sweetened beverages -- soft drinks, fruit juice, sports drinks, and even chocolate milk -- in an effort to get the government to tax them. And when you mix self-appointed food activists with revenue-starved politicians looking under couch cushions for every last nickel and dime, the result is predictably unsavory.

Food activist Kelly Brownell, inventor of the so-called "Twinkie tax," has thrown his considerable weight around from New York to San Francisco in an effort to convince cities and states to tax sugary drinks. Just last month, California State Senator Alex Padilla indulged Brownell`s crusade by holding what amounts to a kangaroo court -- a public hearing -- in Los Angeles on the supposed "link" between soda and childhood obesity. Colorado`s Gov. Bill Ritter has called for a 2.9 percent tax hike on soft drinks.

The exploratory hearing in California was just a mask for a foregone conclusion. The activists` playbook is fairly straight forward: Suggest a "link" between a product and a health problem, raise taxes on the product, and hope to curb its consumption--all the while raking in revenue, which is often diverted to other programs.

But when it comes to soda, activist logic has a fatal flaw: There`s not a drop of truth to the notion that one kind of beverage, such as soda, is largely responsible for weight gain. (J. Justin Wilson, Daily Camera)

Public health crusaders like Kelly Brownell have long demonized sugar-sweetened beverages in an effort to get governments to tax them. As support for this questionable proposal, they claim scientific research shows a “link” between consumption of sugared drinks and a rise in obesity rates. But a study released this week casts doubt on the whole premise of this demonization campaign.

As Food Navigator reports, new research in the International Journal of Obesity finds the supposed “link” between sugary drinks and obesity may suffer from significant biases—the same sort of bias that the food police endlessly complain about. Researchers from the University of Alabama examined how studies on sugar-sweetened beverages were cited in later research. They concluded that the results of two studies—which showed a statistically insignificant link between sugary drink consumption and obesity—were later overstated by future researchers, and then by the media.

Why? Because of what these researchers call “white hat bias,” or the tendency to distort results to fit a preconceived notion of who the “bad guys” in the obesity debate are. In this case, the “black hats” are worn by sports drinks, soda, and chocolate milk, even though there is plenty of under-the-media-radar evidence to the contrary.

As we’ve documented, there’s plenty of scientific research that fails to suggest sugary drinks are a unique contributor to obesity. By ignoring the lack of scientific consensus and donning “white hats,” Brownell and other public health activists have simply created a red herring.

A nutritionist says alcohol is a leading factor in New Zealand's obesity rates.

A new report from the World Health Organisation says 62.7% of New Zealanders are overweight or obese.

That puts us seventh on the list of fattest countries in the world.

Nutritionist Nikki Hart says while the high quality of our research may make our obesity problem look worse than it really is, there's no denying New Zealand has a big issue with alcohol.

She says if people understood how many calories there are in alcohol, let alone its other negative consequences, we would do an awful lot better.

Hart says hopefully New Year resolutions will see people choose to reduce their alcohol intake and food portion sizes. ( Newstalk ZB)

Ilya Shapiro warns us that the U.S. Supreme Court probably will not uphold property rights in a case involving Florida beachfront property. But property rights did receive an unexpected boost in New York yesterday, where an appeals court overturned a taking for the benefit of Columbia University.

New York state is not a particularly friendly venue to property rights, but the judges rightly saw through the claims made by state official to justify seizing property from a private person for the benefit of a private organization. The ruling could be reversed, but nevertheless is an important affirmation that property rights warrant constitutional and legal protection even in New York. (Doug Bandow, Cato at liberty)

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, what in the land is greenest of all?”

Now for something a little different - I really enjoyed doing this. Just right for a Sunday.

Here is my input to today’s Sunday Mirror (beautifully done in the actual paper, I might add, with lots of lovely graphics) on which ‘green’ projects will really make a contribution to our future.

I was asked to grade 11 different schemes from 1 to 10 [10 being vital and important], including nuclear power, electric car production, eco-towns, windfarms, and carbon capture. Only 7 of the 11 appear in the basic online version [the others are included on a map in the paper - these are slightly less mainstream schemes, including podcars, biofuel ships, algae, and wave power].

The full two-page spread is on pp. 22-23 of the paper, and the Sunday Mirror has done it so well, I think it really does merit a buy.

I have to say that it also made a fun change from hacked e-mails and the Little Mermaid, and it shows how, sometimes, the tabloids can do things a lot better, and more succinctly, than their more self-important and ponderous heavyweights.

Good job the Sunday Mirror. Thanks. (Clamour of the Times)

If forests are the planet's lungs, few breathe deeper than those in Oregon.

The rain-soaked tangle of trees on the west slope of the Cascades and eastern Ponderosa pine forests draw in carbon dioxide and store it in timber, plants and soil. These forests absorb and store up to half of the emissions from Oregon's cars and power plants, according to a calculation by Oregon State University.

Now some in Congress and the administration are trying to find a way for the government to be paid for the use federal forests play in pulling heat-trapping gasses like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That might involve logging, thinning or no cutting at all. It matters here, however, because federal forests make up the majority of Oregon timberlands.

"No doubt, this is one way to bring considerable investment to the nation's forests," Tom Tidwell, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service said this month. "There are also some concerns and some questions." (Matthew Preusch, The Oregonian)

HOLYOKE, Colo. — Jason Timmerman coaxed a balky calf into a chute on his feedlot one recent afternoon and jabbed a needle into its neck. He was injecting the animal with a new vaccine to make it immune to a dangerous form of the E. coli bacteria.

The calf and thousands of others are part of a large-scale test to see whether animal vaccines are an answer to one of the nation’s most persistent food-safety problems.

The test has been a long time coming. Bureaucratic delays in Washington stalled the arrival of the vaccines for years, even as people continued to become sick and die from eating tainted beef. And now, even if the vaccines prove successful in the ambitious tests that are just getting under way, they face an uncertain future as farmers and feedlot owners worry about who will pick up the extra cost.

“I hope it works,” Mr. Timmerman said. “It probably won’t be so good for my pocketbook directly, but it’ll probably be good for the industry.”

Scientists are fairly sure that vaccines like the one Mr. Timmerman gave his cattle will not, on their own, wipe out the dangerous strain of E. coli known as O157:H7. But if they prove effective, they could significantly reduce the amount of harmful bacteria that cattle carry into slaughterhouses, which means that safeguards already in place there would have a greater chance of eliminating the remaining germs from the beef supply. (NYT)

Groundwater tested from selected community water systems in 14 states contains low levels of man-made organic chemicals, according to studies conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Scientists tested untreated source water from 221 high-production public drinking-water wells for about 260 commonly used chemicals, including pesticides, solvents, gasoline hydrocarbons, personal care and household-use products, disinfection by-products and manufacturing additives. The associated treated water from 94 of these wells was also tested for the same chemicals. This study did not look at pharmaceuticals or hormones.

Low levels of 120 man-made chemicals were detected at least once in untreated source water. Most of the chemicals found were at concentrations less than 0.1 parts per billion. One part per billion is roughly equivalent to one thimble full of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. About 140 additional chemicals were not detected at all.

Relatively few (5) chemicals were detected in untreated source water at concentrations greater than human-health benchmarks, and the majority of detections (84 percent) were at concentrations two or more orders of magnitude less than the benchmarks. No chemicals were detected in treated water at concentrations greater than the benchmarks. Benchmarks used in this study include U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Maximum Contaminant Levels for chemicals regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act and USGS Health-Based Screening Levels for unregulated chemicals. Most of the chemicals evaluated in this study are unregulated; about half do not have human-health benchmarks or adequate toxicity information to evaluate results in a human-health context. This is an area of continued research and development. (U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey)

THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.

But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.

As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government. (Jared Diamond, NYT)

PORTO VELHO - At an experimental government farm in the western Amazon's Rondonia state, researchers analyze grass seeds under microscopes, shake soil samples in test tubes, and measure the milk production of a new breed of cows.

While high-profile police raids targeting illegal ranchers and loggers in the Amazon grab more headlines, these scientists may produce a more important solution in the long fight to save the greatest rainforest.

Their aim is to reduce the pressure for forest destruction by raising the productivity of pastures through fertilization, better choice of grass, and planting trees. (Reuters)

Climate and environmental scientists have become dependent on computer models in recent decades. The scientific literature and the popular press are filled with strident warnings of impending natural disasters, all predicated on the output of computer programs. The IPCC has solemnly predicted that climate change will drive thousands of species to extinction if anthropogenic global warming is not reined in. The coprophagous press has uncritically swallowed these computer generated droppings, reporting conjecture as fact and possibilities and certainties. Even though the climate change faithful continue to blindly believe the IPCC predictions, at least some researchers are aware of the glaring flaws in their computer models.

In a perspective article in the November 6, 2009, issue of the journal Science, Kathy J. Willis and Shonil A. Bhagwat, both from the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, provide a look at what were termed some “novel conclusions” drawn from several recent modeling studies. Novel here is obfuscated science speak for “not inline with the consensus view.” The studies in question were all attempting to address the impact of climate change on biodiversity—the number and variety of species the Earth's environment can sustain. Here is how the authors described their report:

M. Luoto and R. K. Heikkinen, in their study of the predictive accuracy of bioclimatic envelope models, concluded that the topographic scale incorporated into a model's calculations had a significant impact on the model's accuracy. The study, “Disregarding topographical heterogeneity biases species turnover assessments based on bioclimatic models,” assessed models based on the relation between current climate variables and present-day species distributions. Specifically, models intended to predict the future distribution of 100 European butterfly species. They found that a model that included climate, along with the range of elevations and other topographical variations, predicted only half of the species losses in mountainous areas for the period from 2051 to 2080 when compared with a climate-only model. The inclusion of elevation range as a factor increased the predictive accuracy for 86 of the 100 species.

In another study, “Climate change and plant distribution: local models predict high-elevation persistence,” C. F. Randin et al. assessed the influence of spatial scale on predictions of habitat loss by species distribution models (SDM). Their bioclimatic model attempted to predict the survival of alpine plant species in the Swiss Alps. When the model was run using a 16 km by 16 km (10 mile by 10 mile) grid cells the model predicted a loss of all suitable habitats during the 21^st century. When they changed the model's grid to a much finer 25 m by 25 m (80 ft by 80 ft) cell size the same model predicted persistence of suitable habitats for up to 100% of the plant species. The authors attributed these differences to the failure of the coarser spatial-scale model to capture local topographic diversity, as well as the complexity of spatial patterns in climate driven by topography.

These two studies suggest that habitat heterogeneity resulting from topographic diversity may be essential for species survival in a changing climate, but that is not the observation I find to be most important here. What I find revealing is that structural changes to a computational model can have such dramatic impact on the model's results. Note that general circulation models (GCM) operate on scales of tens or even hundreds of kilometers, leading most modelers to admit that they are not very good at predicting things like clouds, precipitation or land cover changes (for a more detailed discussion of GCM programs see “Why Climate Modeling Is Not Climate Science”). Why not run all models with much finer grid scales if that would improve their predictive performance? The main problem is a lack of computer power.

GCM already run on some of the world's largest super computers. Reducing a model's grid size from 100 km to 10 km results in a 100 fold increase in the number of calculations needed for a single time step, too large for even the most powerful super computers. Reducing the grid to 10 m increases the computational burden by a staggering 100,000,000 times. There will be no computer hardware capable of supporting models of this scale for decades. It seems we are stuck with wonky models for the foreseeable future.

Missing factors, often ignored in climate models to help reduce code complexity and the number of necessary calculations, can also significantly alter a model's results. Highly variable, often contradictory predictions have been obtained when modeling tropical ecosystems. Many studies have indicated that increased atmospheric CO₂ affects photosynthesis rates and enhances net primary productivity, yet previous climate-vegetation simulations have not take this into account. A study examining the “plant food effect” of carbon dioxide was reported in an article, “Exploring the range of climate biome projections for tropical South America: The role of CO₂ fertilization and seasonality,” in the July 3, 2009, issue of Global Biogeochemical Cycles. D. M. Lapola et al. developed a new model for tropical South America that included the effects of elevated CO₂ levels on vegetation. Contrary to the consensus view—that global warming will damage the world's rainforests—they found that fertilization effects overwhelm the negative impacts arising from rising temperature.

Lapola et al. drove their new model with many different climate scenarios predicting conditions at the end of the 21^st century, scenarios generated by 14 coupled ocean-atmosphere GCM from the IPCC Fourth Assessment report. One of the widely reported side effects of global warming is supposed to be decimation of the world's tropical rainforests. Rather than the large-scale die-off of tropical plant life predicted previously, tropical rainforests remain the same or became wetter and even more productive. Again, from predicted destruction to even more verdant growth—yet we are asked to believe that the old models are accurate.

Not all climate science researchers are blind to the problems and limitations of their computer software playthings. Admitting this in public is another matter, however. As reported in the Washington Times, Kevin E. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a prominent man-made-global-warming advocate, in a private email wrote: “The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.”

While we are on the subject of the failings of climate modeling and the unsupportable claims made by the IPCC and its associates, I can not help but mention the revelations brought forth by the leaked “climategate” emails. As reported by Marc Morano, on the Climate Depot website, these highly disturbing emails show how Dr Philip Jones and his colleagues at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have for years been discussing devious tactics to bias climate data and avoid releasing the raw data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a list of the IPCC's scientific elite, such as Dr Michael “hockey stick” Mann who's graph turned climate history on its head 10 years ago by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age; Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa; Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the now suspect CRU.

Not satisfied with hoarding their data and manipulating the results, the conspirators acted to suppress open scientific debate by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal that dared to publish their critics’ work. Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, told The Wall Street Journal: “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical.”

As I have said previously on this website, when the lengths to which global warming extremists have gone to “support” their case becomes known, many scientific reputations will be ruined and climate science itself will be cast into disrepute. I had not expected the truth to be revealed so quickly or so dramatically. It is tragic, even criminal, that the mendacity of a number of bad scientists has so poisoned the debate about climate change and its possible implications. Reaction to the scandal ranges from disgust to calls for criminal prosecution and sadly, even denial by climate change true believers.

As reported on this blog, there are a large number of serious, dedicated scientists doing good work studying Earth's climate and ecology. These scientists understand the limited scope of mankind's understanding, the lack of accurate historical data, and, above all else, the limitations of computer models. After posting “Global Warming Predictions Invalidated,” I received correspondence from a number of TRE readers asking why I was so dismissive of modeling results. Their argument was that surely—even though myriad corrections and new factors need to be added to existing models—the old models could still be considered valid. Including new factors would simply make the models more accurate, their argument went. WRONG!

Computer models are highly non-linear—a seemingly insignificant change to a model's grid scale, time step or a coefficient in an equation can have a dramatic impact on the model's output. As was demonstrated by Randin et al., changing only the grid size of a model can change the result from a loss of all plant habitats to the survival of all affected plant species. From every thing dies to everything lives without changing any of the basic assumptions present in the model.

Now consider the “travesty” of the IPCC's models not being able to predict the past decade's lack of climate warming and the truth about computer models should begin to sink in—they are not reliable predictors of real-world climate change. The only reason the old models gave answers that appeared “correct” is because those were the answers that the modelers expected. It is easy to deceive yourself when you have a billion dollar computer model to manufacture lies you already believe in. The data were “adjusted” and the models tweaked and tuned until they predicted the future their creators desired, not the future that nature would produce. I reiterate, whether trying to predict temperatures or extinctions, none of the IPCC's computer model projections are valid.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical. (Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth)

The story of manmade global warming is over. In reality it never existed except in the minds and hearts of grant-seeking scientists and academics, ratings-obsessed television networks and their misinformed viewers and opportunistic eco-activists. [Read More] (Art Horn, Energy Tribune)

Academy voters Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd call on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind Al Gore's award.

For Immediate Release
December 3, 2009
Contact: Tom Kise
(916) 425-1314 or tkise@blackrockgrp.com

Los Angeles, CA — Today, Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd, both members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Oscar nominees, called on the Academy to rescind Al Gore’s Oscar in light of the Climategate revelations.

Simon, also the CEO of Pajamas Media and PJTV, said the following during his and Chetwynd’s co-hosted Poliwood program on PJTV:

Climategate began on November 19th, when a whistleblower released a series of documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. These documents exposed a coordinated effort among climate scientists to distort the facts regarding man-made “Global Warming.”

Click here for the Poliwood Highlighted Version, and here for the Poliwood Full Length Version. (PJM)

Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs. The evidence for data tampering and all manner of hocus-pocus was available some time ago for anyone who cared to look.

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition. (Daniel Henninger, WSJ)

Steve McIntyre is a mild-mannered Toronto businessman who dabbles in statistics as a hobby. But to some climate scientists, he's Public Enemy No.1. They mention him often in their e-mails and try to make sure his criticisms of their work aren't published. “They're really showing a siege mentality,” he says.

Mr. McIntyre is a bit player in a scandal that has swept the world of climate science like a mighty hurricane. It features leading scientists who, to the conspiratorially minded, seem to be colluding to manipulate data, withhold information, delete records and stifle dissent. “The worst scientific scandal of our generation,” declared one opinion writer in the Telegraph. Not quite. But the so-called “Climategate” affair – thousands of hacked e-mails made public on the eve of the Copenhagen convention – gives a pile of ammunition to those who believe global warming is a giant boondoggle. (Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail)

When e-mails of climate scientists hacked from a British University were published online, the reverberations were heard around the world.

Skeptics of human-caused climate change were elated: Several of the e-mails could be read to indicate that data was inaccurate or fudged, and some seemed to imply collusion about who and what was posted about global warming in peer-reviewed journals.

A couple of weeks later, the controversy continues to swirl like a tornado. Even Jon Stewart has weighed in on it.

Among the latest news, the University of East Anglia announced an independent reviewer of the e-mails and outlined exactly what he would investigate.

What Sir Muir Russell, until recently vice-chancellor at the University of Glasgow, will look at includes many of the serious questions that have been raised. (CSM)

The British university at the heart of a scandal over climate-change research announced a wide-ranging probe into allegations that its scientists manipulated data about global warming.

The independent review is part of efforts by the University of East Anglia to damp the furor over thousands of hacked private emails involving its researchers, which suggested efforts to squelch the views of climate-change skeptics.

The scandal blew up just days before world leaders are set to meet in Copenhagen for a United Nations-sponsored summit aimed at boosting international efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and slow global warming. (Guy Chazan, WSJ)

Oh Snap! Mouse trap - available at many fine stores - click

One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.

That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

The United Nations panel on climate change is to investigate claims that scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit manipulated global warming data.

The controversy was sparked by the publication of hacked emails on websites run by climate change sceptics, possibly in a bid to derail next week's Copenhagen conference.

The websites suggested that scientists had manipulated data to support a theory of man-made climate change.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme the claims were serious and he wanted them investigated.

''We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,'' he said.

''We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.'' (TDT)

Prof Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has been accused of manipulating climate change data following thousands of leaked documents that suggested academics delete sensitive emails to evade Freedom of Information requests from climate change sceptics.

Prof Jones, who has denied altering figures, has since said he would stand down from his post while an independent review is carried out

One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made. (Chris Irvine, TDT)

Piccola’s take-home message for Spanier is if his investigation is a whitewash, then the PA Senate Education Committee will conduct its own look-see-find.

How the Climategate emails were extracted from the UEA CRUnit may or may not have been a “criminal act” — that has still not been determined. But Dr. Thug clearly doesn’t understand how this whole public/private nature of correspondence is categorized. Let me explain.

Private emails between two or more parties: These are sent and delivered between personal email accounts such as those set up for individuals and private businesses on services like Google and Yahoo! You know, like the personal accounts that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin utilized last year that were illegally hacked.

Public emails subject to open scrutiny and broad dissemination: These only need to be sent by, or delivered to, at least one email address that is a public, government institution funded by taxpayers. An example in Great Britain would be the University of East Anglia, where Phil Jones was once director of the CRU. Another example, in the U.S., would be the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where every employee has a “llnl.gov” email address. That “dot-gov” suffix is a dead giveaway.

I suppose there are exceptions in the law for LLNL and other government agencies to withhold documents and emails from the public for national security purposes. Much as Santer might like to think global warming is one of those exemptions, I doubt he could successfully make a legal case for that.

So Santer’s messages to Jones and others at UEA were not “private” or “personal” correspondence. If he wanted them to be, he should not have used his llnl.gov email account with his official LLNL affiliation in the signature line. He should know better, since LLNL makes clear those distinctions. But if he did want to communicate with Jones on that level, I doubt he could have conducted official government business — such as discussion of climate data — on a Google account. That would have been evading public scrutiny. A Santer-Jones Google exchange would have had to been about the merits of U.S. vs. European football or something like that.

One last thing about Santer: he might want to review LLNL’s “Mission, Vision and Values” statement “that guides the way we accomplish our work and the way we interact with each other, our colleagues, sponsors and stakeholders, and the public.” Included among the values:

How the desire to “beat the crap out of” someone who is a fellow scientist, and who is also a taxpayer who helps pay his salary, is in accord with these above values is something I’d love to hear Santer explain.

But from the looks of his whiny letter, he’s of a completely different mindset. He thinks that while he’s on the public payroll that he has the right to intimidate dissenters, and to keep everything he writes in his LLNL role a secret. Clearly he hates accountability to his bosses.

Looks like there’s no other choice for him, then, but to quit. (Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute)

Climate change has mutated from a debate into a catechism. With so much at stake, says Fraser Nelson, can we afford to dispense with rational argument?

Last month, 1,000 emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The institution is more important than it sounds: for decades, it has been at the centre of the global warming debate, keeping in touch with the close-knit group of scientists who guard the various projections about global warming. Or, as the emails showed, the lack thereof. ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,’ said one scientist. Another said: ‘We can have a proper result — but only by including a load of garbage.’

As the world leaders gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto treaty it is unlikely the subject of these emails will be raised. This is not a forum for debate, but for the preaching of gospel. Already the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is hinting that the ‘fossil fuel lobby’ is responsible for the leaks — as if this made them any less damaging. They have hardly disproven global warming, but have exposed the way some scientists and academics see themselves on a crusade against the wicked deniers. Hysteria has taken the place of rational debate. (Fraser Nelson, Spectator)

Climategate is about a lot more than climate. It’s about science and its relationship to politics and profit, the academy, the state and, perhaps most importantly, information control. The manner through which we learn (or thought we did) important knowledge about key aspects of our existence, the way things are hidden, has been exposed in this one instance like the Wizard of Oz.

It’s obvious similar methods of control apply to many other information sources in our society. That is why Barbara Boxer is in shrill blaming-the-messenger mode, insisting that any Congressional investigation of Climategate would target the nefarious “hacker.” She realizes a great unraveling could come from this. So do to the global bureaucrats at the UN and the EU as they prepare for the Copenhagen conference. It is also why the mainstream media was so slow to report the East Anglia CRU emails and documents. They know that if you begin to report these things, you have to report on a lot of other things they have so scrupulously chosen to avoid. (Roger L. Simon, PJM)

On November 24, The Times published a disgraceful piece by David Aaronovitch, which plainly traduced Lord Lawson of Blaby, Dr. Benny Peiser, and the new Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). ‘The Clamour of the Times’ commented on Aaronovitch’s temper tantrum here. I repeat one of his paragraphs, just as a reminder:

“I am not going to accuse Dr Peiser of insincerity [and we all known what that means when employed by a journalist]. But when I see the mission statement that ‘our main purpose is to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant’, yet contemplate Lord Lawson in the chair and a panel of advisers consisting of leading climate ‘sceptics’, my mind reflects on the manner of ducks. If it quacks...”

Now, it is standard etiquette in journalism that when a person, or organisation, is attacked specifically by name, then that person, or organisation, is allowed a right of reply, if only in the form of a ‘Letter to the Editor’. I have found The Guardian newspaper, for example, to be pretty exemplary in this respect.

Accordingly, on November 25, and writing on behalf of the GWPF and Lord Lawson, Dr. Peiser sent a very reasonable ‘Letter to the Editor’ to The Times to challenge Aaronovitch’s diatribe. By Saturday, November 28, this letter had not appeared, and so Dr. Peiser wrote again, both to the Editor of The Times and to his personal contact at the newspaper, Daniel Finkelstein, as follows [NB. This is published here with permission]: (Clamour of theTimes)

ClimateGate is serious. When prominent climate scientists fudge results, refuse FOIA requests, take steps to restrict publication of dissident views, etc., it’s serious business, especially when their global temperature records were used by policymakers to call for a transformation of modern economies.

However, there is some humor in ClimateGate. Here’s some odd stuff a commenter on the website Climate Audit picked up as a result of checking out the file HARRY_READ_ME.txt - one of the hacked files. The “Harry” file tells the tortured story of a programmer at CRU struggling to make sense of inconsistent, missing, and incompatible data files and seemingly to try to replicate them. Many of those files had earlier been compiled by someone named “Tim,” who seems to have really made a mess of things. According to the commenter, this “Tim” seems to be Tim Mitchell - who worked at the Climactic Research Unit at University of East Anglia when he was a Ph.D. student and then received his degree. At the time, he also was a member of — no joke — South Park Evangelical Church, as he notes in his religious writings on climate change and religion.

That does make me a little uncomfortable about this guy being in charge of global temperature records to show we’re destroying the earth. Can’t check out his academic/research papers at CRU. Surprisingly, they’ve been taken down. (Fran Smith, Cooler Heads)

Which country’s media is least willing to report on Climategate? John Roskam divides Google mentions per country of origin by population, and confirms your suspicions:

In the 10 days since we first blogged about “ClimateGate” — the unauthorized release of e-mails and other material from the Climate Research Unit (C.R.U.) at East Anglia University in Norwich, England — it’s become strikingly clear that one’s view of the issue is deeply colored by his or her incoming biases. No surprise there, but still, the demarcation is clear. One of the best indicators: when you stumble onto a blog post about the topic, you can tell which way the wind is blowing simply by looking at the banner ad at the top of the site: if it’s for an M.B.A. in Sustainable Business, you’re going to hear one thing about ClimateGate; if the ad shows Al Gore with a Pinocchio nose, meanwhile — well, you get the idea. (Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics)

Have you ever been had, taken for a ride, as in deceived, misled, bamboozled?

Evidence is coming to light which strongly suggests that the whole greenhouse gas and climate warming story is an unscientific con.

It began in the 1970s, when a group of anthropologists and social scientists asserted the burgeoning world population threatened survival.

Not longer afterwards, the self-styled Club of Rome published the pessimistic Limits to Growth which said, in effect, that we were running out of resources.

In the 1990s the Tyndal Centre for Climate Studies at the University of East Anglia and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research began to talk and write about climate change as a function of mankind’s activities.

One of them, M. Hulme, wrote his book Why We Disagree about Climate Change, and included this revealing paragraph:

“...the idea of climate change is so plastic it can be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what can climate change do for us.”

This is hardly the way a true scientist approaches a study. (Roy Strang, Peace Arch News)

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

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

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

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

An eye-opening “global cooling consensus” CIA document dated 1974 has just been re-discovered in the British Library by Yours Truly and is extensively mentioned today in the (printed) pages of The Spectator (UK) and Il Foglio (Italy).

(updated 20091203 – 1042am GMT – the (suitably degraded) scan of the Spectator article is at the bottom of this blog)

And there is more (much more), from ever-improving climate models promising to become good in a few years’ time to the unsettling apparent ease with which Government agencies then (as now) could get scientists to agree on whatever they needed them to agree on.

Nobody aware of the CIA document’s contents should be able to avoid a good chuckle after reading any of the current AGW reports on famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena; on climate-related major economic problems around the world; on Africans getting in climate troubles first; and so on and so forth.

Why? Because it is all too clear that those scares cannot be real, since they have already been mentioned verbatim in all their dramatic effect, but about Global Cooling.

The whole lot of them, they are just empty threats, instruments of doom-and-gloom policy manipulation with no relation to reality.

It is deeply ironic that it takes a 35-year-old document, available on the web so far only in title, to show the absolute vacuity of the vast majority of pre-COP15 reports and studies. It is time to ditch everything we hear about collapsing ice sheets, disappearing glaciers, species extinctions, and each and every “it’s worse than we thought” report by “scientists”.

(*) Anybody thinking about Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck’s largely mistitled “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Volume 89, Issue 9, September 2008, pp 1325-1337)? Well, think again after reading this little gem of theirs:

As I wrote a little more than a year ago: “Widely accepted”: check. “Global cooling”: check.. There was a global cooling consensus among scientists, at least up to 1974. And it went on to appear in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times and many more media outlets around the world, at least up to 1976.

The CIA's 'global cooling' files (title)

The CIA's 'global cooling' files (text)

It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.

Bishop Pachuri of the IPCC and his wind powered staff

What follows is a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990’s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.

But Steven McIntyre was suspicious. He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods — normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included. If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus, they would be jailed. (Jo Nova)

Yesterday, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and 350.org petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for carbon dioxide (CO2) pegged at 350 parts per million (ppm). CO2 concentrations are currently about 387 ppm. The CBD is the eco-litigation group that successfully sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

I’ll have more to say about the specifics of the CBD-350.org petition (available here) in a later post. For now, I just want to note that the petition is additional confirmation that Massachusetts v. EPA, the April 2007 Supreme Court global warming case, is a bottomless well of absurd results that imperil both our economy and the U.S. Constitution.

CEI has been saying from day one – in our comment on EPA’s July 2008 Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, our comment on EPA’s April 2009 Endangerment Proposal, our comment on EPA’s September 2009 Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards Proposal, and in columns about Mass. v. EPA when the case was still pending – that an endangerment finding under Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) would satisfy the endangerment test in CAA Sec. 108 and, thus, trigger a NAAQS rulemaking.

Not even a global economic depression sustained over many decades would be enough to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels at 350 ppm — the goal of the CBD-350.org petition. For example, even if the world’s governments could somehow dial back global CO2 emissions to 1957 levels, when the global economy was smaller than one-third its present size, and then hold CO2 emissions constant for the next nine decades, global concentrations would still increase to 455 ppm by 2100.

Obviously, when Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, it did not authorize EPA to squash the U.S. economy. Indeed, one of the Act’s main purposes is to protect the “productive capacity” of the American people (CAA Sec. 101).

Nonetheless, by misreading the Act to include authority to regulate CO2 as an “air pollutant,” the Supreme Court set the stage for a regulatory chain reaction, including establishment of NAAQS for CO2 set below current atmospheric levels, which would effectively turn the CAA into a national economic suicide pact.

This is not the only ”absurd result” that follows from the Court’s misreading of the Act in Mass. v. EPA. According to EPA’s proposed Tailoring Rule, “literal” (i.e. lawful) application of the CAA to greenhouse gases would annually require 41,000 small firms to apply for Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permits and 6.1 million firms to apply for Title V operating permits. In other words, EPA and its state counterparts would have to process 140 times as many PSD permits and 400 times as many Title V permits per year as they do now. The permitting programs would crash under their own weight, construction activity would grind to a screeching halt, and millions of firms would suddenly find themselves operating in legal limbo. A more potent Anti-Stimulus Package would be hard to imagine.

To avoid these problems, EPA’s Tailoring Rule proposes, over the next six years, to exempt firms emitting less than 25,000 tons per year (TPY) of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases, even though the statute specifies that PSD and Title V shall apply to sources with potential to emit 250 TPY and 100 TPY of any regulated pollutant, respectively. The Tailoring Rule is actually an Amending Rule. To prevent Mass. v. EPA from turning the CAA into an economic wrecking ball, EPA proposes to play lawmaker and suspend provisions it doesn’t like, violating the separation of powers.

Even if the Tailoring Rule survives judicial challenge, which is doubtful, because it flouts clear statutory language, it would in no way lessen the threat of economy-crushing NAAQS regulation of CO2.

There is only one sensible course for policymakers to take: Overturn Mass. v. EPA. Congress should enact legislation, such as H.R. 391 introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), clarifying that CO2 is not subject to regulation under the CAA for climate change purposes. (Marlo Lewis, Cooler Heads)

WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans yesterday used the red-hot scandal over hacked global-warming e-mails to attack climate researchers for "scientific McCarthyism" and cast doubt on the phenomenon.

During a House hearing, President Obama's top science adviser took heat from GOP lawmakers demanding a probe of the e-mails from researchers at Britain's University of East Anglia showing they manipulated information on climate data.

"These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit," fumed Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).

He likened the scientists' efforts to squelch dissent to the bullying tactics of infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another Wisconsin Republican, who infamously lead a witch hunt for communists in the 1950s.

John Holdren, Obama's science adviser, fired back, "The science is proper, and this is about a small fraction of research on the issue."

Holdren's 2003 online exchange with a global-warming skeptic is among the hacked e-mails. The controversy led to the resignation last week of Phil Jones, head of the university's climate-research unit. (Geoff Earle, NY Post)

Despite ongoing investigations in the US and UK, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson dismissed Climategate during yesterday's Senate EPW hearing, saying she sees no need to investigate the matter. She vowed to implement job-killing global warming regulations despite growing evidence that the scientific basis of those regulations is crumbling.

Senator Inhofe asked Jackson to halt the endangerment finding until investigations over leaked emails showing collusion by scientists to distort, conceal, and delete inconvenient data are completed. (EPW)

"Science and scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my administration on a wide range of issues, including … mitigation of climate change," President Barack Obama declared in a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor soon after assuming office. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process. Public officials should not suppress or alter scientific technological findings."

Last week's Climategate scandal is putting Obama's promise to the test. If he wants to pass, there are two things he should do, pronto: (1) Start singing hosannas to whoever broke the scandal instead of acting like nothing has happened; and (2) Ask eco-warriors at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit next week to declare an immediate cease-fire in their war against global warming pending a complete review of the science. (Shikha Dalmia, Forbes)

The Democratically-controlled Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing yesterday to examine the science behind global warming. Two climate experts from the Obama administration testified, but when Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic at the hearing, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) refused to allow it.

Hosting a hearing on global warming with no dissenting opinions made Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the Committee, think the Democrats and the Obama administration were just as complicit in the global warming scandal sparked by Climategate as the Climategate scientists themselves.

“What the hearings showed is that the President’s science advisors are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate,” said Sensenbrenner. (Jillian Bandes, Townhall)

Warming Scandal: Despite the incriminating e-mails, administration science adviser John Holdren still thinks man causes global warming. And Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks it's the whistle-blowers who should be arrested.

Time was when Barbara Boxer thought it was just fine for the New York Times and Washington Post to spill national military secrets and war plans on their front pages. The people had a right to know where and how they were being led.

But we are not dealing here with the Pentagon Papers, the location of terrorist prisons or the surveillance of al-Qaida and its operatives. Boxer, top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, thinks those who unearthed the e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit should be prosecuted as common hackers, not rewarded as whistle-blowers. (IBD)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's top science adviser urged lawmakers to act to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, despite the uproar over emails in which some prominent climate scientists appeared to advocate squelching the views of researchers skeptical that human activity is driving a dangerous rise in global temperatures.

The adviser, John Holdren, said scientists generally are capable of defensiveness, bias and "misbehavior." But he said the meaning of some of the statements in the emails isn't clear, and that the significance of others has been exaggerated.

Human activity is "beyond any reasonable doubt" the primary cause of warming temperatures, Mr. Holdren said.

Mr. Holdren's comments drew a unanimously supportive response from Democrats and unanimous skepticism from Republicans, some of whom called for a congressional inquiry into the dispute over the integrity of climate science.

Proposed legislation that would impose caps on U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to climate change is stalled in the Senate, where Democratic leaders have said they don't plan to act on the measure until next spring. The proposal would require businesses to buy pollution permits and set up a system to trade those emissions rights. (Stephen Power, WSJ)

When "Climategate" broke on Nov. 20, with hackers stealing and subsequently releasing more than a thousand apparently dubious e-mails by renowned climate scientists, the timing couldn't have been more inconvenient for advocates of action on climate change. The major U.N. global-warming summit in Copenhagen was just a few weeks away, and the U.S. Senate was starting work on a bill that would cap U.S. carbon emissions. It was the eve of a month in which crucial decisions could be made in the global effort to curb climate change before its effects become truly dangerous.

The publication of private e-mails from researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University, which raised questions about whether scientists had distorted or scrubbed data on global warming, "could scarcely be more damaging," in the words of English environmental writer George Monbiot. But it was only one in a series of troubling indicators that skepticism about global warming is on the rise. A survey released in October by the Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans who believed there is solid evidence that the world is warming had dropped from 71% in April 2008 to 57% in October 2009; over the same period, the percentage who believed climate change is a very serious problem had dropped from 44% to 35%. (Bryan Walsh, Time)

The road to the Copenhagen climate-change summit this week has been filled with potholes over political dithering, bitter debates and lingering doubt that an enforceable agreement can be reached. But one thing hasn't been questioned: the essential conviction that global warming is real and that it is caused by human activity. Which may explain why someone recently illegally obtained thousands of e-mails from the personal account of a climate-change scientist at Britain's University of East Anglia and posted them on a website dedicated to debunking the leading theories for the causes of global warming. Faced with nearly universal consensus on the issue, climate-change deniers are apparently adopting ever-more creative tactics to discredit the science behind global warming. (Lisa Abend, Time)

E-mails hacked from a climate research institute suggest climate change does not have a human cause, according to Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator.

Mohammad Al-Sabban told BBC News that the issue will have a "huge impact" on next week's UN climate summit, with countries unwilling to cut emissions. (Richard Black, BBC News)

Talk about your global warming . . . When an estimated 16,500 delegates, activists and reporters descend upon Copenhagen Monday for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, a lot of hot air will follow.

The U.N. estimates the 12-day conference will create 40,584 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, roughly the same amount as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006.

Those greenhouse gas emissions are comprised of two parts: international travel and local emissions from hotels and transportation venues. Organizers will also reportedly lay 900 kilometers of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet, along with more than 200,000 meals to be served and 200,000 cups of coffee.

The conference will leave an enormous carbon footprint, says Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

“It will be huge,” Michaels said of the environmental toll. “Where is video conferencing when we need it? An equally important question is what will be accomplished here?” ( Joshua Rhett Miller, FoxNews.com)

A group of Senate Democrats who are considered swing votes on pending climate change and energy legislation sent a letter to President Obama Thursday morning detailing their conditions for supporting any domestic bill or international treaty to address global warming.

The senators, most from industrial states or regions heavily dependent on coal for power generation, laid out 10 provisions any agreement must contain to win their support. They timed their letter to guide Mr. Obama’s thinking as he prepares to go to Copenhagen next week to address the United Nations conference on climate change that is working toward a binding international treaty. With few if any Republicans likely to support legislation imposing mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, sponsors of the bill will need to round up virtually all Democrats to pass it, including these nine.

The senators who signed the letter are Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Begich of Alaska. All are fence-sitters on the legislation and their votes will be needed when the Senate bill comes up for debate early next year.

The signers of the letter say they will support climate legislation and international efforts to combat global warming if all nations — industrialized as well as developing — are held to stringent limits on climate-altering emissions. They say that tough verification and enforcement mechanisms are necessary. They want to see trade penalties levied against nations that do not comply with any international agreement. They say that any program to transfer technology to emerging nations must contain copyright protections for intellectual property. And any treaty or bill must protect American jobs and promote low-cost solutions to environmental problems.

The conditions are shared by virtually all the so-called Brown Dogs who come from manufacturing states and those that produce or use large amounts of coal. They are familiar to those who have followed the debate and reflect concerns about possible sharp increases in energy costs and loss of jobs in the heartland. (John M. Broder, Green Inc.)

WASHINGTON - Negotiators in the U.S. Senate are nowhere close to writing details of a compromise climate change bill requiring reductions in greenhouse gas pollution, Senator Joseph Lieberman said on Thursday.

Lieberman, an independent, has joined forces in recent weeks with Senators John Kerry, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, to try to come up with legislation that could win enough support to secure passage in the deeply divided Senate.

Asked by Reuters whether efforts were making enough progress so that senators could begin drafting a compromise bill, Lieberman responded, "No."

Lieberman noted that at least two key Senate committees, Finance and Agriculture, have not yet worked on their portions of a climate change bill. Until then, a compromise bill will not be drafted, he said. The healthcare debate consuming Capitol Hill is contributing to the delays, he added. (Reuters)

When President Obama goes to the Copenhagen climate change summit next week, he is expected to once again declare that the U.S. will reduce its carbon emissions 83% by 2050. Even though no legally binding agreement is expected, what Mr. Obama says in Denmark will define the U.S. position in subsequent international negotiations. He will not say how the cuts will be accomplished. For Americans, the details are worth knowing.

Annual U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions currently average about 5.5 tons of carbon per person. Achieving Mr. Obama's goal would mean reducing this to 0.63 tons per person by midcentury, taking expected population growth of just under 1% per year into account. If the rest of the world were to do likewise, global carbon dioxide emissions would be 25% lower than today. (Richard K. Lester, WSJ)

The climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, launched a ferocious attack on Conservative politicians who have cast doubt on the science of climate change in the run-up to the global UN summit in Copenhagen.

He said the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and former shadow home secretary David Davis were irresponsible and were acting as "saboteurs".

Miliband's comments follow articles from both men in the wake of the publication of emails hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climate research unit (CRU), which sceptics claim reveal wrongdoing by prominent climate scientists.

"It is profoundly irresponsible for people like Nigel Lawson, who has held high office, and David Davis to be doing what they are doing. It is very dangerous. People sabotaging the [Copenhagen] process deserve the name saboteur," Miliband said. "There are interests who do not want an agreement at Copenhagen. Anyone who comes forward at this moment and starts saying 'we can stick our heads in the sand' is irresponsible." (John Vidal and Damian Carrington, The Guardian)

SCIENTIST Clive Spash has resigned from the CSIRO and called for a Senate inquiry into the science body following the censorship of his controversial report into emissions trading.

Dr Spash has lashed out at the organisation which he said promoted self-censorship among its scientists with its unfair publication guidelines.

He said he was stunned at the treatment he received at the hands of CSIRO management, including boss Megan Clark, and believed he was not alone.

"I've been treated extremely poorly," he said. "There needs to be a Senate inquiry.

"The way the publication policy and the charter are being interpreted will encourage self-censorship.

"It's obviously happened before at the CSIRO - and there's issues currently."

Last month, Dr Spash accused the organisation of gagging him and his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading - and restricting its publication.

The report is critical of cap and trade schemes, like the one the federal government is seeking to introduce, as well as big compensation to polluters. (AAP)

POTSDAM - Germany's top climate researcher says he hopes he and his fellow scientists around the world have got it all wrong about global warming.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters he gets no pleasure at all in being a prophet of doom and hopes he and his colleagues have overlooked effects that could still arrest climate change.

"It would be wonderful if some mechanism that we haven't yet been able to understand could still have an impact and manage to stabilize global warming at a high level for a while," he said in an interview in his institute's office outside Berlin.

"I would be delighted if it turns out that we haven't understood the system as well as we think we do and that we might get a 20- to 30-year 'breathing period' when global warming slows or is even halted," the physics professor said. (Reuters)

We should remind you of the costs of addressing this ‘problem’ with cap and trade legislation. Heritage analysis projects the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill passed in the House would: Continue reading… (The Foundry)

Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.

While many advocates of aggressive policy responses to global warming say a consensus exists, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 25% of adults think most scientists agree on the topic. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not sure.

But just in the last few days, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed to reject any such disagreement in a response to a question about global warming, “I don't think … [global warming] is quite, frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.”

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.

This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Just 20% of Americans say they’ve followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely.

That’s a lower level of interest than has been shown about the White House party crashers and suggests that Americans have had their doubts about the science of global warming for some time. (Rasmussen Reports)

On the eve of major international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, belief in global warming in the United States has slipped to the lowest point in 12 years of measuring, according to a poll from New York-based Harris Interactive Inc.

As U.S. negotiators fly to the Danish capital to forge a political agreement based on President Obama's proposal to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent, most of the American public doesn't know what the talks are about, according to the Harris survey.

Just 51 percent of adults questioned said they believed carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would cause the Earth's average temperature to increase. Two years ago, fully 71 percent of respondents linked greenhouse gases directly to global warming.

The Harris results follow polls in recent months from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the The Washington Post and ABC News, and The Wall Street Journal and NBC showing a similar decline in the percentage of people who believe climate change is real and is caused by emissions from fossil fuels.

"This is a big problem for the president," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. "One of the main tactics of opponents of environmental regulation since the 1940s has been to challenge the science."

The dramatic 30-percentage-point drop over two years in the Harris poll is the starkest indicator yet that belief in climate change has plummeted in a short amount of time. The shift in numbers since 2007 came from a 15-point percentage increase from those saying they "are not sure" about the cause of climate change. (ClimateWire)

Where is Al Gore’s secret climategate-proof bunker? Has Heinz saved the planet? Does Hopenchangen have a chance of achieving anything? Dive and discover the answers to these questions, and more. (Daily Bayonet)

Speaking of Climategate, Jim Prentice, Canada's environment minister and a participant in the Copenhagen talks next week, told the press today after Question Period that "there were some serious allegations of impropriety and some serious questions about the quality of the scientific work that was done" at the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University.

Mr. Prentice, who views the science overall as being "relatively clear," also sidestepped a question about climate change being a big lie.

Question: You don't see this - I mean there are people from your province, from all provinces who see this as the smoking gun that there is some sort of big lie out there about climate change. You just don't buy that?

Hon. Jim Prentice: As I said, something quite inappropriate seems to have happened at this institution, the East Anglia Institution. I think we all want to get to the bottom of that, what that actually was.

Mr. Prentice, who has been criticized by environmental activists for failing to make a firm commitment at Copenhagen, indicated today that Canada's position at Copenhagen would not change. (Financial Post)

by William M. Gray
Professor Emeritus

Recent arguments concerning global warming’s influence on causing tropical cyclones (hurricanes-typhoons) to become more frequent and more intense has been given much coverage in the media and by some published papers which claim a valid linkage. But observational data shows no such linkage. Despite the global warming of the sea surface that has taken place between the mid 1970s to the late 1990s and the general global warming of the last century, the global numbers of tropical cyclones and hurricanes and their intensity have not shown any significant trends except for the Atlantic where multi-decadal circulation variations in the ocean drive large multi-decadal variations in major hurricane (Cat 3-4-5) numbers. (William M. Gray)

Reports that local inhabitants and travellers to the Mount Everest base camp are in danger from a lake of glacier meltwater overflowing have been exaggerated, a series of surveys suggests. A team of Japanese and Nepalese researchers say that the damming moraine at the downstream end of Imja Glacial Lake in fact appears more stable than it has for some years.

They also find that the lake's surface area peaked in 2004, directly contradicting other papers saying that Imja has been expanding at an accelerating rate. "Some previous studies have less observational foundation," Koji Fujita, leader of the team, told environmentalresearchweb. "Baseless rumours have been published and reported by the media, so I tried to publish our observational fact." (environmentalresearchweb)

The Netherlands is afire today over a Dutch study concluding Mount Kilimanjaro's snow melt — used as a symbol of AGW by Al Gore — is entirely natural.

Newspapers and news sites in the Netherlands today extensively broke the news of the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University and winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize — about the melting icecap of the Kilimanjaro, the African mountain that became a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Professor Damste studied organic biomarker molecules in the sediment record of Lake Challa, near Mount Kilimanjaro, and reconstructed the changes and intensity of precipitation in this part of Africa over the last 25,000 years. They observed an 11,500 year cycle of intense monsoon precipitation.

In the dry period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, Kilimanjaro was ice-free.

At the end of this period, a dramatic climate change from very dry to very wet took place — driven by changes in solar radiation — resulting in the creation of an icecap. At the moment, this part of Africa seems to be at the end of a similar dry period, resulting in the disappearance of the famous icecap.

DOSR calls Al Gore’s iconic use of the melting cap of Kilimanjaro “unfortunate” — since it now seems to be mainly the result of “natural climate variations.”

Leon de Winter is columnist for Elsevier Magazine in Holland. He is also a bestselling novelist and adjunct-fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is presently living in Los Angeles. (Leon de Winter, PJM)

Al Gore apparently has canceled a high-priced speaking engagement during the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, the Nobel Laureate was slated to lecture about his new book "Our Choice" where attendees could pay over $1,200 a ticket for the right to meet the Global Warmingist-in-Chief and have their picture taken with him. (NewsBusters)

With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature's example: Adapt or die.

That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm's way. (AP)

The world could suffer catastrophic climate change even if there is a deal at Copenhagen, scientists have warned. (Louise Gray, TDT)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Google Inc. launched a new feature in its Google Earth Web site Wednesday designed to let Californians see the risks of climate change.

Google unveiled the new interactive tool in San Francisco as part of a climate change press conference by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The state partnered with Google on the program that shows Californians how warming temperatures, rising sea levels, precipitation shifts and more frequent, intense wildfires impact their environment.

The feature, called CalAdapt, was one of the recommendations of a 200-page state report detailing how California should prepare for climate change. (AP)

With Climategate sucking all the oxygen out of the blogosphere, we’ve neglected some of our regular reporting duties here at WUWT.

Thanks to Paul Stanko, who has been tracking sunspots for WUWT for awhile now who writes in with this update. It looks like we’ll soon surpass 2008 for the number of spotless days. – Anthony

With November now in the past, I’ve got a fresh set of statistics, and it looks like this cycle is falling ever further into an even deeper funk. The attached graphics are revamped according to Leif’s impromptu peer review and I believe are
much improved. They are a few days old, though.

The 2009 spotless days are now 262 and the cycle 24 spotless days are now 774. On the cycle graph, I now calculated three different sets of spotless days per cycle. Minimum just counted the actual observed and reported days of zero sunspots. Maximum assumed that all missing obs were zero sunspot days. Likely assigned spotless days to the missing obs in the same ratio as the reported obs for that year. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

Chief Scientist Penny Sackett dismisses the significance of nearly a decade of cooling of the atmosphere, despite predictions of the warmist models:

Hmm. Good question, Chief Scientist, and it’s true one of us is confused. Shall we talk about these measures of ocean temperature, which also show an unexpected fall lately…

Sorry? What was that? Er, you did know, didn’t you, that the oceans have been cooling lately, too? And against the predictions of the models? Hello? Chief Scientist? (Andrew Bolt)

Prof. Richard S. Lindzen
Global Research
30th November, 2009

Abstract:

For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former. Whereas the former had the potential for convergence, the latter is much less effective. The institutional factor has many components. One is the inordinate growth of administration in universities and the consequent increase in importance of grant overhead. This leads to an emphasis on large programs that never end. Another is the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of ‘carrots and sticks’ whereby reputations are made and broken. The above factors are all amplified by the need for government funding. When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research. This paper will deal with the origin of the cultural changes and with specific examples of the operation and interaction of these factors. In particular, we will show how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of. ( inthesenewtimes)

A review of climate change in Antarctica forecasts that by 2100 the world's seas will have risen to levels previously considered too extreme to be realistic.

The review, Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment (PDF), was compiled by 100 scientists associated with the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Using 20 of the most up-to-date models that take into account the complex behaviour of the ozone hole over Antarctica, as well as the most recent observations of ice loss, the review predicts that the area of sea ice around Antarctica could shrink by 33 per cent – 2.6 million square kilometres – by 2100, leading to a sea-level rise of 1.4 metres.

"This is the first comprehensive review of Antarctic climate change that covers how the climate of the icy continent has changed from deep time," says John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey, lead editor of the report. The report also makes predictions about how the Antarctic climate will change over the next century.

For the past 30 years, the hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer above Antarctica has protected the bulk of the continent from the effects of climate change by generating fierce winds. In that time, sea ice around the continent has increased by 10 per cent. (New Scientist)

The world stands on the verge of committing itself to limits on the emission of carbon dioxide that would drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels. If this fateful decision is made, the economies of developed nations will be strangled. Human prosperity will be reduced. Our ability to solve pressing problems, both human and environmental, will be severely limited. We have been told that these shackles must be imposed to forestall a hypothetical global warming projected to occur some time in the distant future. But to date the only unambiguous evidence for planetary warming is a modest rise in temperature (less than one degree Celsius) that falls well within the range of natural variation.

The validity of warming predictions depends upon the questionable reliability of computer models of the climate system. But Earth's climate system is complex and poorly understood. And the integrity of the computer models cannot be demonstrated or even tested. To anyone with an awareness of the nature and limitations of scientific knowledge, it must appear that the human race is repeating a foolish mistake from the past. We have been down this road before, most notably in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it appeared that mathematics and physics had conclusively answered the question of the Earth's age. At that time, a science that had been definitely "settled" fell apart in the space of a few years. The mathematical models that appeared to be so certain proved to be completely, even ridiculously wrong. (David Deming, LewRockwell)

The Great Green Hope for lifting America’s economy is not looking so robust.

President Obama, both during his campaign and in his first year in office, has promoted the promise of new jobs in cutting-edge, nonpolluting industries, and such green jobs will be a major issue at his jobs “summit” meeting Thursday.

But, increasingly, skeptics who point to the need for more jobs are wondering why he is not doing more to create green jobs faster.

Growth in clean energy industries and in green jobs has been considerably slower and bumpier than anticipated, industry experts say.

But rather than giving up on its green jobs mantra, the White House will rededicate itself to promoting green industries at the jobs meeting, which will bring together business and labor leaders, politicians and economists.

The initial promise of green jobs was based on governments around the world declaring the fight against global warming to be a priority. The theory was that jobs in environmentally minded companies would grow rapidly as a result. But instead, some green-industry companies have been shedding jobs in the United States, and in some cases moving them to China. (Steven Greenhouse, NYT)

For some peak oil advocates who are nervous about the idea of a post-apocalyptic vision of society, it has become popular to argue for a peak and plateau rather than a peak and decline of 3–5% per year, as some of the original work postulates. This seems more palatable than calling for a global upheaval, Hollywood notwithstanding.

The original peak and decline scenario was based on the bell curve popularized by M. King Hubbert. A number have disputed the shape of the curve, arguing for a Gaussian curve instead, for example. But they are avoiding the basic question of causality. The appearance of a bell curve appears to be more coincidence than anything else, since it is not often replicated in reality. The 1998 Scientific American article, “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, contained the laughable figure of several stylized oil fields’ production curves surmounted by a bell curve and the assertion that the one aggregated to the other.

More recently, some peak oil advocates have ‘modeled’ national production as following a rise, plateau, decline shape that, in the most general sense, is accurate, but again assumes that all nations follow a fairly similar path, which implicitly assumes that geology determines that path. In fact, in many cases the level of the peak and subsequent production patterns are due more to fiscal terms than geology, as can be seen by several countries where changing government policies led to a reversal of the decline, such as in Argentina or Venezuela.

The CERA work does not fall into this pattern, however, not just because the author(s) are not in the peak oil camp in any form. [Read more →] (Michael Lynch, MasterResource)

ALGARY - Statoil Canada Ltd.'s future oilsands projects will be designed with carbon capture and storage in mind, the new president of the Norwegian company's Canadian wing says.

But the greenhouse gas-snatching technology has a long way to go before it's economically viable without government support, said Lars Christian Bacher in an interview.

"When it comes to the building of the next phases of our oilsands leases, they will be built CCS ready," said Bacher, who took up his post in September. (Canadian Press)

LOS ANGELES — For the second year in a row, Green Car Journal has named a German diesel Green Car of the Year.

The 42-mpg Audi A3 TDI topped a field that included three hybrids and two diesels to take the award presented today at the Los Angeles Auto Show. The judges praised the cars “exceptional fuel economy and low emissions” and hailed it as “stylish” and “fun to drive.”

“The Audi A3 TDI offers it all,” said Ron Cogan, editor of Green Car Journal and GreenCar.com.

There’s no shortage of awards and honors doled out in the auto industry, but this one actually means something because all of the cars considered are vehicles you can buy right now. The jury includes greenies like Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, and Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of the Ocean Futures Society. But it also includes certified gearheads like Jay Leno and Carroll Shelby to ensure the candidates are cars you’d enjoy driving. (Wired)

Two years ago Alejandro Castaño received an offer he could not refuse. AgCert, an Ireland-based company that produces and sells greenhouse gas emission credits, said it would not only dispose of the organic waste from his pig farms in central Mexico but pay him to do it.
UN carbon trading scheme

The idea was to capture and burn off methane produced by the pigs – as part of arrangements under the Kyoto protocol to encourage developing countries to curb their emissions. The UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows developed countries to buy the resulting credits – each equivalent to a tonne of carbon not emitted – to offset their own obligations under Kyoto.

As Mr Castaño puts it: “When someone says to you ‘I’ll deal with one of your biggest headaches and give you cash, too’, you don’t have to think too long or hard about accepting. It seemed like a great thing.”

Many farmers joined Mr Castaño. A Financial Times analysis of UN data shows methane capture accounted for 93 of the 119 CDM projects registered in Mexico, the bulk of them in manure.

But as countries prepare to meet in Copenhagen to forge a global climate change pact, the scheme has not met expectations.

Mr Castaño says that while one of the two bio-digesters that AgCert installed to capture and burn the methane worked properly, the other has produced only frustration.

“It broke almost as soon as it was installed, and then it spent months in maintenance,” says Mr Castaño. “The bottom line is that it has never burned very much [methane].”

Mr Castaño’s experience is typical of Mexican pig farmers who, via several private companies, opted into the UN programme with great expectations, only to be disappointed by the results.

More broadly, the FT analysis shows that methane avoidance is accounting for only 31 per cent of the credits Mexico expects its projects to generate by 2012. It also generated far fewer carbon credits per project than any other type of technology – a pattern repeated in other countries. (Financial Times)

* New flu form not transmitted to hospital staff or beyond
* Immune suppressed patients prone to drug-resistance
* Zanamivir (Relenza) should be used in resistant cases
* Tamiflu-resistant flu spread only among weakened patients

GENEVA - Tamiflu-resistant H1N1 viruses have not spread to hospital staff or beyond despite spreading among two clusters of patients in Britain and the United States the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

Investigations to date showed that the resistant-form of swine flu was not transmitted outside of two hospital wards in Wales and North Carolina where they emerged in October and November, the WHO said in statement issued overnight.

A total of a dozen patients, all with severely suppressed immune systems due to underlying medical conditions, were infected with H1N1 viruses resistant to oseltamivir, the generic name for Roche's Tamiflu.

"Transmission of resistant virus from one patient to another is suspected in both outbreaks," the WHO said.

"No illness in staff caring for these patients has been detected, suggesting that the resistant virus does not spread easily to otherwise healthy people, especially when good measures for infection control are in place." (Reuters)

PRESCHOOLERS are getting fatter and less active despite millions of dollars spent on government health campaigns.

They are eating more healthy food but exercising less and watching much more TV.

This puts many at risk of serious health problems, such as high blood pressure and changed liver function, as adults and even in childhood.

Experts are concerned by the latest findings and say government programs aimed at reducing childhood obesity are not working.

A Melbourne study of national data found the percentage of overweight or obese pre-schoolers rose from 20.6 in 2004 to 23.8 per cent last year. (Cheryl Critchley, Herald Sun)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The U.S. government violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to curb use of pesticides that have been accumulating in the Arctic food chain and in the fat of polar bears, a species listed as threatened, environmentalists charged in a lawsuit on Thursday. (Reuters)

OTTAWA - The widely used weed killer atrazine affects the sexual development of frogs, raising questions about the effects of its use in the environment, the University of Ottawa said on Thursday. (Reuters)

There are a number of scientists who disbelive the theory that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs. They point to evidence that some species of sauropod may have survived the Chicxulub impact—widely hailed as the smoking gun in the dinosaur extinction—as proof that the event was simply not big enough to be a knockout blow. Now, according to Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, new information reinforces his claim that a much larger impact that he has named Shiva, actually did the dinosaurs in.

Dr Chatterjee has found a bigger crater—much bigger—in India. Estimated to be around 65 million years old, the massive sea floor structure was created at about the same time as a number of other impact craters and the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction event. Although the site has shifted since its formation because of sea floor spreading, the formation is approximately 600 kilometers long by 400 km wide. It is estimated that a crater of that size would have been made by an asteroid or comet approximately 40 km in diameter. The explosion that caused it may have been 100 times the size of the one that created Chicxulub.

The Shiva crater is located beneath the Indian Ocean, west of Mumbai, India. It was named by paleontologist Chatterjee after Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and renewal. At the time of the KT extinction, India was located over the Réunion hotspot of the Indian Ocean. Hot material rising from the mantle flooded portions of India with a vast amount of lava, creating a plateau known as the Deccan Traps. It has been hypothesized that either the crater or the Deccan Traps associated with the area are the reason for the high level of oil and natural gas reserves in the region.

Chatterjee presented his latest findings on Shiva to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, on October 18th. He has identified an underwater mountain called Bombay High, off the coast of Mumbai, which measures 3 miles (5 k) tall from the ocean floor (about the height of Mount McKinley) from sea bed to peak and is surrounded by Shiva’s crater rim. Dr Chatterjee’s analysis shows that it formed from a sudden upwelling of magma that destroyed the Earth’s crust in the area and pushed the mountain rapidly upward. He argues that no force other than the rebound from an impact could have produced this kind of vertical uplift. Here are further arguments from a previous paper:

During the late Cretaceous, India was an island continent much like Australia is today. The sub-continent did not take up its familiar position in the south of Asia until 50m years ago, when it collided with that continent. The late Cretaceous was also a period of great volcanic activity, a time when huge eruptions created fields of basalt as much as two kilometers thinck. Before the discovery of the Chicxulub crater, these eruptions had been put forward as an explanation for the death of the dinosaurs—altering the climate and hastening their extinction. Even after Walter Alvarez's discovery of iridium deposits around the world and the identification of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, some argued that the eruptions were a major contributing cause to the extinction.

Further examination of the crater revealed rich deposits of shocked quartz and iridium, minerals that are commonly found at impact sites. More importantly, the rocks above and below Shiva date it to 65m years ago, the time of the KT extinction . Dr Chatterjee therefore suggests that an object 40km in diameter hit the Earth off the coast of India and forced vast quantities of lava out of the Deccan Traps. As well as killing the dinosaurs the impact caused the Seychelle Islands to break away from India. These islands and their surrounding seabed have long looked anomalous to geologists, being made of continental rather than oceanic rock. The seem more like a small part of a continental land mass rather than genuine oceanic islands.

Some say that the Shiva complex adds weight to the theory that the K-T extinction was caused by a massive asteroid fragmenting and hitting the Earth in several locations, known as the “multiple impact theory.” Extensive dating research at Chicxulub has suggests that the impact occurred 300,000 years earlier than the dinosaur extinction, meaning there really should be two ejecta layers. That no one had noticed two distinct layers previously could be explained by the fact that the accumulation of sediment in most rocks is so slow that the two layers merged together. After all, 300,000 years is a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Alternatively, it could be that no one has been looking for two layers, so they have not noticed the double signature or have ignored its significance. Indeed, two iridium layers have been found in some places. One such site is at Anjar, an Indian town north of the impact site.

This is an excellent example of how science is continually updated and refined. This new information does not make Walter Alvarez wrong or a bad scientist, any more than Einstein's theories proved that Newton was wrong. It merely shows that there was even more to the cataclysmic events that transpired 65 million years ago than first suspected. As always, science did not rest but continued to seek more evidence which lead to new conclusions. It also underscores what a dangerous place the solar system we live in actually is (see “Forget Global Warming, The Sky Really Could Fall”). It now seems that the Chicxulub strike, as bad as it was, was only a warning shot. The dinosaurs, dominant lifeforms on the planet, didn't take the hint and evolve sufficiently to create a space program capable of deflecting subsequent asteroids: sic transit gloria mundi.

The picture that has emerged requires a set of coincidences, but as I have noted before in this blog, given a half a billion years or so and any set of coincidences can happen, perhaps more than once. The true nature of the universe is revealed in the chain of events that transpired. The scenario goes like this: First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other; second, the impacts coincided with one of the largest periods of volcanic activity in the past billion years; and third, one of them just happened to hit where the volcanoes were most active. As The Economist put it, “what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.”

As scientists get closer to creating tasty, nutritious in vitro meat, let’s not turn this into another food scare. (Rob Lyons, sp!ked)

From now forward nothing will be quite the same for climate skeptics. It’s true that there is still a major war against unreason, and massive vested money which will fight all the way from the bank, but the ClimateGate story has taken on a reality that cannot be stopped.

John Stewart is a liberal (meaning leftie) comedian in the US, and watch him mock Gore, and give people the real import of “hide the decline”. …it’s just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique for recalibrating data in order to… …TRICK YOU!. He delivers the blows beautifully.

Most people in polls might say they believe we should do something about the climate, but only 10% of them are truly committed followers. The other 90% are dutiful. And because the dutiful followers of the greenhouse crisis are well… dutiful, they aren’t going to object too hard when someone tells them it was all scam, and… they don’t have to pay more money, or apologize for taking long flights, or swap their dog for a goldfish (which has a smaller carbon footprint). That’s why, once this begins to fall, there won’t be any resistance in the polls.

And things are changing fast in the trenches of the campaign against the Big Scare.

The grassroots effort to inform our representatives has scored a major win. The Australian Senate has finally rejected the ETS. Only two Liberals crossed the floor. Only a week ago there were 33 speakers in the Liberal Party who supported the ETS. Party discipline means some of them still do, but none the less, it’s a transformation. The Australian media reported this awakening as if it were a blood bath of disarray, and it would have looked that way if you believe in the theory of man-made catastrophe. Instead the conservative opposition were picking up the courage to give a voice to suppressed views, and they were reborn in the process.

The lack of free speech was what had kept the Australian conservatives down for so long. I wrote in October that Turnbull’s bullying was the core problem. It’s even worse in the Australian Labor Party, where Rudd throws a nasty mix of names at anyone who disagrees. If there was corruption or irregularities in the science, who among Rudds closest allies would have the courage to face the intimidation and speak up? Bullying and suppression of views is never the path to strength. That’s why Turnbull’s leadership failed, and why Rudd’s will too.

Christopher Monckton provides a 43 page comprehensive Summary of ClimateGate with the full sordid details of the corruption of scientific process. While Phil Jones head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit is forced to step down, and Michael Mann is being investigated.

Today the Daily Express in the UK did a ground breaking front cover, and no holds barred story. This is significant and curious. The main dailies have had 10 days to phone Professor Plimer and interview him, yet the tabloids are faster to get the core of what this means.

Blinded or at least baffled by science, the uninitiated majority imagine it as the sort of impersonal process a robot might carry out. Days before the Copenhagen climate conference – where scientific reasoning will make strenuous demands on everyday life – we have all been reminded that the frontiers of technical knowledge are not in fact advanced by automatons, but by fallible human beings.

The emails hacked out of East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit did not undermine the evidence that mankind is remaking the weather, but some of those who uncover the facts have adopted tribal attitudes. The effect is already evident – "The Big Climate Change 'Fraud'" was splashed on yesterday's Daily Express. The aftermath may also have helped persuade Tory David Davis to break the cross-party climate consensus by railing against the imposition of "hairshirt policies". The research unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, was right to belatedly recognise on Tuesday that he had to stand down while an inquiry got underway. ( The Guardian)

The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning.

As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard.

The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd by the defenders of doctored and destroyed data.

This environmental house of cards has started to collapse and hopefully heads have begun to roll. Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, fast becoming the Bernie Madoff of climate change research, has agreed to step aside for a time while his and the perfidy of his peers are reviewed.

He should be gone permanently. (IBD)

The scientist at the heart of the climate change email scandal was today interviewed by police about the scandal.

Two plain clothes officers arrived in an unmarked car in the afternoon and took Professor Phil Jones to Norfolk Police's headquarters in nearby Wymondham to give a statement.

Sources said the interview concerned the theft of emails from the university and alleged death threats since the contents of the emails were released, adding he was being treated as a 'victim of crime' rather than a suspect in any criminal investigation.

Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory added: 'He is one of the people assisting police with their enquiries.'

A spokeswoman for the University of East Anglia refused to comment and said Professor Jones would not be adding to a statement he released on Tuesday.

The professor refused to comment at his detached home in Wicklewood, a few miles outside Norwich.

Meanwhile, researchers are calling for Professor Jones to be banned from contributing to agenda-setting United Nations reports. ( Fiona Macrae, Daily Mail)

The decorated scientist — oft-mentioned in the CRU emails — wants to see the current blatant conflicts of interest removed from climate science. (Also read Bill Whittle: "Ike's Response to Climategate")

Professor Roger Pielke Sr. is mentioned often in the Climategate data dump emails — generally unkindly. Professor Pielke is an atmospheric scientist at CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University, a former Colorado State climatologist, and an active critic of the IPCC process. (A more detailed biography is appended below.)

In a Pajamas Media exclusive, Dr. Pielke kindly agreed to an email interview regarding his reaction to the CRU emails and his opinion of their implications. (PJM)

Since open government is a major initiative of the administration, and so is climate change, one mighty collision is coming soon.

The day after his investiture, President Obama issued a memorandum to agency heads on transparency and open government, pledging “an unprecedented level of openness in government” to promote “transparency, public participation, and collaboration” and “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was given the lead for this effort, with the creation of new positions of Chief Technology Officer and a Deputy CTO for Openness. The latter job is filled by Beth Noveck, New York Law School professor, initiator of the interesting and creative Peer-to-Patent program, and author of a book Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (2009).

“Openness” is a big topic. The Obama-ites, in their usual solipsism, assume the world began anew last January. But the effort to open up government has been an obsession of U.S. politics forever, with repeated Freedom of Information Acts, Sunshine Acts, Disclosure Acts, and so on. Much of the current drive for openness continues these efforts and adds computer tools, or is simply the use of the computer and the Internet to improve governmental interactions with the public. A better Internal Revenue Service or Transportation Security Administration website is indeed a public benefit, but it does not represent any serious change in government.

A little-understood dimension of the climate change story is how small is the number of scientists who occupy its core—the supposed ‘thousands’ distill down to a few dozen, at most.

In one area, though, openness is a big deal indeed—the area called crowdsourcing, or, more prosaically, the decreased transaction costs of community interaction.

And, as chance would have it (or perhaps God does have a sense of humor), we are getting a spectacular demonstration of the power and importance of crowdsourcing from climate change data. ( James V. Delong, The American)

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

Brilliant young astrophysicist Professor Nir Shaviv says he’s not surprised at all by Climategate, whether it’s the revelation that data was destroyed to prevent checking, or evidence that sceptics were blocked from publication:

Shaviv is coming to Melbourne this week for Albert Dadon’s Australia Israel Leadership Forum, where I shall be only too pleased to meet him. And a little proud, too, since it was my suggestion he be invited. I hope you’ll hear from him, too, on this visit.

Unlike most top scientists, he not only has a blog, but a highly readable one (if too infrequently updated). For instance, there was this after Israel’s Earth Hour:

Innocent (naïve?) scientists shocked by Nature's naked advocacy: When Nature Attacks

Nature has an very strong editorial out about the CRU emails. I'd go so far as to say that it is the most strongly written Nature editorial that I have ever seen, it is just seething in anger:

Nature sees the climate scientists as having done nothing wrong, and expresses hope that the release of the emails will show to the world the endless harassment that climate scientists must put up with:

The strong editorial is of course expected as Nature is a very public face of the scientific community and its editors probably feel (and actually have) a responsibility to defend their community. But Nature needs to also be careful as its over-the-top tone and unrelenting defense of the scientists in the emails does not jibe with either much of public opinion or many of the views expressed by scholars (including this one) about the significance of the emails.

I have received several emails from scientists none too happy with the tone of Nature's editorial. Here is an excerpt from one:

As we now know (and by "we" I mean "everyone with access to the Internet"), the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has just been caught ferociously manipulating the data about the Earth's temperature.

Recently leaked e-mails from the "scientists" at CRU show that, when talking among themselves, they forthrightly admit to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in the Earth's temperature since 1960 -- as one e-mail says. Still another describes their manipulation of the data thus: "[W]e can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Am I just crazy from the heat or were they trying to deceive us? (Ann Coulter, Townhall)

Considering that a lot of Climategate has to do with the muzzling of scientists that hold views contrary to alarmism, you might think the honorific-conscious senator would be concerned about the exclusion of their research from professional journals. After all, nearly four years ago she demanded an investigation into the Bush administration’s alleged silencing of NASA’s James Hansen:

Got that? TWO committees!! For ONE guy! Who lied about it! (Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute)

Those words come from David Harsanyi’s excellent column in the Denver Post. He writes,

I couldn’t let the recent spot of bother at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit go without doing a Silicon Graffiti video on how climate change has changed over the years. In six and a half minutes, look back at:

And for 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and keep scrolling and watching.

Since watching the Climategate scandal explode a week before Thanksgiving, debris from the mushroom cloud has rained upon the earth, and there are hints that some folks (other than me and my fellow climate realists) are getting curious about how the alarmists are funded. It used to be the narrative of the formerly mainstream media, when they deemed it worthy to include perspective from the “skeptic” side, always came with a “financed by Big Oil” disclaimer — whether it was true or not. Meanwhile the warmists’ financial gain from the game was irrelevant in the media’s eyes.

It’s been widely reported in the blogosphere about the millions of dollars in grants that East Anglia CRUnit director Phil Jones collected for his climate modeling, but so far I haven’t seen much detail about his fellow email correspondents. What about ‘em?

Inarguably the next-largest culprit is Michael Mann, Mr. Nature Trick, who is not to be confused with the Nature Boy or the other “Heat“-making Mann. He has had his grants available for public viewing for a while, so I’m surprised I’ve not seen those spread around the ‘Net. They are right there listed in his curriculum vitae. (Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute)

I am a climate scientist who worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s. I have been reflecting on the bigger lessons to be learned from the stolen emails, some of which were mine. One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence. (Mike Hulme, WSJ)

The leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia could not have come at a better time for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a "cross-party political think-tank" set up last week to counter the supposed lies and distortions of the climate science community.

Chaired by Lord Lawson, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, the foundation's stated aim is to "help restore balance and trust in the climate debate that is frequently distorted by prejudice and exaggeration". (The Independent)

"The science is settled," we've been told for decades by zealous proponents of manmade global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world's leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won't be surprised by the Obama administration's response to Climategate.

With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled. (Michelle Malkin, Townhall)

Cap-and-trade in Australia — which just a week ago was declared a certainty — is officially dead.

This is the first major climate change turnaround anywhere in the Western world, with significant implications for our domestic debate.

Combined with the Climate-gate e-mails revealing the data suppression and deceit underpinning "scientific consensus," the whole climate change alarmism house of cards is coming crashing down.

Early last week, the leader of Australia's conservative opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, announced that he had reached agreement with the government to implement cap-and-trade, thus binding his party to support it in parliament en bloc.

The agreement was signed, sealed and delivered — cap-and-trade would become law with bipartisan support.

Its passage was a certainty. The elite rejoiced.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the Senate: The Australian public woke up.

The days that followed were simply stunning. An unprecedented, uncoordinated and spontaneous grass-roots campaign erupted to force the opposition to reverse course.

Political offices went into meltdown, unable to cope with the torrent of phone calls, faxes and e-mails opposing what was effectively a massive tax hike. (Tim Andrews, IBD)

Australia has dealt a major blow to any international deal on climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit by failing to introduce new laws to control pollution. ( Louise Gray, TDT)

PLAYING politics with policy has derailed the Rudd government's legislative, political and election agenda on the emissions trading scheme.

Because it was too cute by half in playing politics with the Liberal Party's leadership, the government is left with a double-dissolution election trigger it cannot pull and doesn't even want to acknowledge it has.

It has a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in a form it cannot take to an election, which will turn industry campaign funds towards the Liberal Party and that is wide open to Tony Abbott's threatened GST-style tax attack. The CPRS bill, which forms the basis of the double-dissolution trigger for an election of both houses, is not even in a form the government wanted. The Prime Minister will have great difficulty calling a double-dissolution election before next August, because he cannot guarantee the amendments negotiated with Malcolm Turnbull, which give concessions to the coal and electricity generation industries and permanently exempt agriculture.

If Labor pulls the trigger it now holds, it will still be dependent on the Coalition to pass the amendments even after an election victory and a joint sitting of parliament -- exactly the same position it has been in for the past six months.

Julia Gillard's announcement yesterday that the government would give the Liberals "one more chance" to pass the ETS, "in the national interest", is a political cover story. It also makes a mockery of the so-called deal with the Coalition, which was supposed to be only open for a week and further delays action on climate change. ( Dennis Shanahan, The Australian)

A senior Tory MP has issued a direct challenge to David Cameron's environmental policies after warning tough green targets could 'cripple' the economy.

David Davis accused the green movement of having a 'fixation' with imposing targets on reducing carbon emissions.

The former Tory leadership challenger warned that taxpayers are already facing a £55billion price tag for 'green' policies. ( Claire Bates, Daily Mail)

The backlash against ‘global warming’ dogma is continuing apace, and I must update you urgently with respect to two stories on which I commented yesterday.

First, as predicted here, following the demise of Malcolm Turnbull as the Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament, and as Bloomberg now reports, the Australian Senate has indeed voted against Kevin Rudd’s Emission Trading Scheme:

“Australia’s Senate rejected the government’s climate-change bill a second time, creating a possible election trigger and leaving Prime Minister Kevin Rudd empty-handed when he travels to Copenhagen this month.

Senators voted 41 to 33 against the law, which included plans for a carbon trading system similar to one used in Europe. The failure concluded days of debate in the upper house and follows a revolt in the opposition Liberal Party that saw a new leader take charge vowing to scuttle the Rudd plan.” (Clamour of the Times)

Green campaigners must end a "ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies" to fight global warming, senior Tory MP David Davis has warned.

The former shadow home secretary criticised higher taxes on flights and the building of wind farms which "look like props from War of the Worlds".

There must be a "middle way", including more use of nuclear power, Mr Davis wrote in the Independent. (BBC News)

Alan Carlin — the EPA scientist whose skeptical report was hushed — says the EPA broke tradition and used external work (from the CRU/IPCC) for its proposals.

The emails and computer files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Great Britain may prove to be of some importance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current attempts to control greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

This is because the EPA — perhaps at the urging of others in the Obama administration — has proposed to regulate GHG emissions on the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports … and reports primarily based on the IPCC reports.

This is highly unusual for the EPA. I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so heavily on non-EPA synthesis reports to justify proposed regulatory action in their almost 39 years of existence.

As a result of this EPA decision, the EPA’s fortunes in regard to regulating GHGs are directly tied to the fate of the IPCC reports. (Alan Carlin, PJM)

CEI is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to halt efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions in light of Climategate information.

In light of the Climategate fraud scandal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on Wednesday filed a petition asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend its plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act, pending a thorough investigation of and public comment on the newly released information.

The still unfolding Climategate scandal produced by the release of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University in the UK raises new questions and doubts about the scientific basis for the Kyoto climate treaty, the successor treaty to be negotiated later this month in Copenhagen, the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer climate bills, the EPA’s proposed finding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, and other EPA regulatory proposals related to the endangerment determination. (Marlo Lewis, PJM)

If the evidence is overwhelming that man-made climate change is already upon us and set to wreak planetary havoc, why do so many people refuse to believe it?

The UN's panel of climate scientists, in a landmark report, described the proof of global warming as "unequivocal".

That was two years ago, and since then hundreds of other studies have pointed to an ever-bleaker future, with a potential loss of life numbering in the tens of millions, if not more.

Yet survey after survey from around world reveals deep-seated doubt among the public. (AFP)

In the run-up to the Copenhagen conference, the Science Museum in London invited web users to respond to the following statement with a ‘Count Me In’ or ‘Count Me Out’ vote for their ‘PROVE IT!’ Project:

"I've seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they're serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen."

Now, this vote wasn’t exactly presented as an unbiased choice, because the web site clearly proclaimed: “The Science Museum has examined the evidence. We're convinced climate change is caused by humans and requires urgent action.”

Unfortunately for the Museum (and even more so for the Government), the vote closed yesterday, with a result that the Science Museum neither expected nor wanted: a mere 2,650 users ‘Counted In’, while a resounding 7,612 ‘Counted Out’. (Clamour of the Times)

On Tuesday night about 1,100 people participated in a sold-out global warming debate that, in the end, turned downtown Toronto’s new concert hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music into a microcosm of a larger transformation that is sweeping the world. The debate pitted two well known global warming activists of international repute against two well-known skeptics. The skeptics won, shifting the audience’s support away from the drastic global warming action demanded by activists and toward the moderate response of the skeptics, a move that is rapidly becoming a trend everywhere. If global warming is a problem — and many have growing doubts about that — it is not a crisis that warrants draconian policy intervention in Copenhagen or anywhere else.

On Tuesday, the Munk Debates took on climate change. The Green Party’s Elizabeth May and The Guardian’s George Monbiot argued that “Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response.” Author Bjorn Lomborg and the U.K.’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, disagreed. Here are the closing arguments of Mr. Monbiot and Mr. Lomborg.

The reason I’m concerned about climate change is because of my experiences in northwest Kenya. I mentioned the region before, but I haven’t told you exactly what happened.

When I was there in 1992, they were suffering the most severe drought they had ever suffered to date. Since then they’ve suffered two which have been even worse. And because of that drought, everyone was under the most extraordinary pressure. They had run out of basic resources and the only option they really had was to raid neighbouring tribes and take resources from them.

Nobody doubts that George and Elizabeth and everybody else here have their hearts in the right place. That’s not the question. The question is whether George, in his experience of the people who are suffering in northwest Kenya, is saying they are suffering because of global warming — I would be a little more worried about making that connection right away but let’s just say that it is so. So we should do something about global warming.

That sounds nice. What is he exactly saying? If it really is such that global warming will mean more drought then as global warming goes on, we’ll have more and more drought so the people in northwest Kenya will become more and more desperate.

As President Obama heads to Copenhagen next week to meet with world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Summit, there will undoubtedly be countless calls for tighter restrictions on all the demonized activities that supposedly cause global warming. Burning up carbon-based fuel as they fly in on their private jets, wining and dining like the elite, attendees of the Summit will spend days pontificating on the dire state of the planet—caused by the evil, greedy men who aren’t in attendance—and then push radical plans to curb any modern, productive ventures that they perceive as contributing to nebulous “climate change.”

Global warming disciples will denounce America as the chief cause of climate change because of its consumer-driven, greedy, capitalist-based economy. The country that brought about the highest standards of living the world has ever known will be denounced as the greatest danger to the world’s future. To assuage global elitists and offer penance for her sins against Mother Earth, America will be required to subscribe to a new (sub)standard of living. (Meredith Turney, Townhall)

NEW DELHI/LONDON - China and other big developing nations rejected core targets for a climate deal such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just five days before talks start in Copenhagen, diplomats said on Wednesday.

China, the world's top emitter, together with India, Brazil and South Africa demand that richer nations do more and have drawn "red lines" limiting what they themselves would accept, the diplomats told Reuters. (Reuters)

The natural world is at the heart of Australian identity. "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains," runs a famous poem, but that attachment to the environment does not count for much in national political life. Under John Howard, Australia's former prime minister, the country was notoriously sceptical of international efforts to fight climate change, even though, as a hot dry continent with a growing population, Australia stands to suffer at least as much as anywhere else. ( The Guardian)

In the pre-iTunes, pre-MTV age, there was usually a multiyear lag before hit songs in the West reached India. Now India is experiencing a similar time-lag on global warming. Just when fresh doubts about the issue are emerging in the West, India is flirting with the idea of hopping on the global-warming bandwagon at the Copenhagen climate-change summit next week.

This is in large part a misguided attempt to bolster India's political standing in the world. In an October letter to the prime minister conveniently leaked to the press, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh expressed concern that India's intransigence on the issue was making it a pariah among developed countries, jeopardizing its bid for permanent membership at the United Nations Security Council. He counseled that India delink itself from the Group of 77 developing nations resisting forced emission cuts without compensation, and instead make common cause with the Group of 20 rich countries pushing for climate action.

Mr. Ramesh's letter is a significant change of tune, given he made headlines this summer when he bluntly told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that India was simply in no position to accept binding emissions cuts. It is widely regarded as a trial balloon by the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and has triggered a maelstrom of protest in parliament, forcing Mr. Ramesh to pledge not to accept legally binding emissions cuts. But the government is nevertheless trying to change India's current domestic global-warming policy more dramatically than it is letting on to better align it with global demands. (WSJ)

YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 2 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 3 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 4 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 5 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 6 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 7 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 9 +0.422 +0.549 +0.294 +0.511
2009 10 +0.286 +0.274 +0.297 +0.326
2009 11 +0.496 +0.418 +0.575 +0.493

The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly rebounded from +0.29 deg. C in October to +0.50 deg. C in November. Both hemispheres, as well as the tropics, contributed to this warmth. The global anomaly for November of +0.50 deg. C is a period record for November (since 1979); the previous November high was +0.40 deg C. in 2004.

Following is the global-average sea surface temperature anomalies through November 2009 from the AMSR-E instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite:

As usual, the trend line in the previous figure should not be construed as having any predictive power whatsoever — it is for entertainment purposes only. (Roy W. Spencer)

This essay was sent to me just about the time “climategate” broke. I regret the delay in publishing it but it is still relevant to the upcoming Copenhagen conference. – Anthony

Mr. Ban Ki-moon, get your priorities straight, and quit wasting the world’s resources on third tier problems

“Climate change has been my top priority since I took office,” says UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in an open letter to the participants of the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change.

He doesn’t seem to have read the new United Nations World Health Organization report on Global Health Risks. This document allows us to rank climate change among 24 global health risk factors. According to this report, hunger, poverty and a host of diseases easily outrank global warming (AKA climate change) as a global priority. The following two figures rank these health risks based on two different criteria. Depending on which criterion one uses, global warming is either second last or dead last!

Figure 1: Ranking global public health priorities based on disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost prematurely in 2004. DALYs discount years that would have been spent in a disabled condition based on the severity of disability. Note: underweight = hunger. Many of the risk factors — hunger, unsafe water, vitamin A, iron and zinc deficiencies, indoor smoke — are diseases of poverty. Read the rest of this entry » (WUWT)

BEIJING - Droughts and floods stoked by global warming threaten to destabilize China's grain production, the nation's top meteorologist has warned, urging bigger grain reserves and strict protection of farmland and water supplies.

Extreme weather damage can now cause annual grain output in China, the world's biggest grain producer, to fluctuate by about 10 to 20 percent from longer-term averages.

But with global warming intensifying droughts, floods and pests, the band of fluctuation in annual production could widen to between 30 and 50 percent, Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, wrote in a new essay. He did not say how long it might be before that could happen. (Reuters)

There is an informative article in the October 24th 2009 issue of the Economist titled “Of farms, folks and fish”. [subscription required]. The information provided on water issues in California is quite useful.

However, there is one important exception to the otherwise excellent article. This exception involves the erroneous assumption that there is regional climate predictive skill decades from now.

The incorrect statement reads [referring to legislation on water policy in California]

“Whatever happens, the legislation will not deal with the long-term threats to California and its neighbours. Climate change is already showing up “in the data”, says Mr Quinn. The snowpack of the Sierra Nevada, California’s most reliable water-storage system, is shrinking and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the spring and start producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention disastrous, floods. The delta is already below sea level and, as the sea rises, it may be submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever irrigation does not reach. It will become even drier.”

Climate variability and change certainly are risks in the coming decades, as they have always been in California. However, Mr. Quinn [Timothy Quinn is director of the Association of California Water Agencies] is misinterpreting the always present variability for a monotonic long-term trend. It is prudent to plan to drier conditions in the future, however, there is no scientifically supported evidence that the model predictions of a long-term movement to more drought conditions is a robust result. Planners should continue to develop water infrastructure that is more resilient, which includes plans to store water in the wet years with lots of mountain snow, that is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. (Climate Science)

LOS ANGELES - Demand for super-efficient LED lighting and other energy-saving lights will grow next year as both consumer awareness and the U.S. stimulus package spark sales, the head of Siemens AG-owned Osram Sylvania said on Wednesday.

Lighting companies including Osram, General Electric Co, Cree Inc and privately held Nichia Corp see a bright future for LEDs (light-emitting diodes) that use less power and have longer life spans than traditional fluorescent or incandescent bulbs.

While Osram Chief Executive Rick Leaman expects it will take five to 10 years for LEDs to take off, he sees growth in 2010 for "bridge technologies," such as halogen and compact fluorescent products, to help with the transition from traditional lighting and its phase-out starting in 2012.

"The incandescent bulb has been around for over 100 years. Consumers have become very familiar with that light bulb, with the shape, with the feel, with the lighting," Leaman said in an interview. "We believe it's important to provide the consumer with choices." (Reuters)

A vast swath of northern and western Scotland could be set aside to give greater protection to one of the UK's most enigmatic birds of prey.

There are just over 40 breeding pairs of golden eagles left in Britain, all but one in Scotland, but plans for the establishment of a 350,000-hectare Special Protection Area designed to safeguard the future of the raptor has brought conservationists into conflict with the renewable energy industry.

A 14-turbine wind farm near Inverary in Argyll was turned down by the Scottish government in October. (The Independent)

What does this mean? If Michael Wara's assertion is taken as in fact the case then the EU has sent to China $1 billion in support of actions that would have occurred anyway. This means that the EU is able to claim credit for reducing emissions by about the equivalent of 2 years worth of Portugal's emissions (EEA data), but from a global perspective nothing has actually happened differently than it would have otherwise. Except of course for that transfer of $1 billion from the EU to China.

It may very well be that the CDM (and other offsetting schemes) tell us little about the costs of emissions abatement, but instead provide us with a window to the price of credit claiming. (Roger Pielke Jr)

A huge movement is under way to include more fresh fruits and vegetables in the national school lunch program. It's an important step toward the equitable distribution of nutritious food, but such a program is unlikely to fix the so-called childhood obesity epidemic, and it shouldn't be justified as such.

Why not? The popularity of junk food and the putative decline in physical activity fail to explain many aspects of the rise in size that has occurred since 1980. For example, infant obesity has soared 73 percent during this period, a phenomenon that cannot be easily attributed to newborn lifestyles, as Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF, has pointed out. Moreover, many large people carefully follow dietary advice and remain fat. Such anomalies suggest the need to look beyond the usual suspects of soda and fries.

Fortunately, scientists are doing just that. Emerging evidence suggests that environmental toxins, specifically endocrine-disrupting chemicals, may play a role in making people fat. Such chemicals contain agents that can mimic, enhance or inhibit the function of hormones produced by the body, including those that stimulate the creation and duplication of fat cells.

Two chemicals prevalent in commercial plastics, bisphenol A and nonylphenol, have been definitively linked to obesity owing to their estrogenic properties, as discussed in an exhaustive review of the literature that appeared in Molecular Endocrinology. (Julie Guthman, SF Chronicle)

CONTACT: EWG Public Affairs, (202) 667-6982
For Immediate Release, December 2, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - Laboratory tests commissioned by Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Rachel's Network have detected bisphenol A (BPA) for the first time in the umbilical cord blood of U.S. newborns. The tests identified the plastics chemical in 9 of 10 cord blood samples from babies of African American, Asian and Hispanic descent.

The findings provide hard evidence that U.S. infants are contaminated with BPA beginning in the womb.

Additional tests conducted by five laboratories in the U.S., Canada and Europe found up to 232 toxic chemicals in the 10 cord blood samples. Besides BPA, substances detected for the first time in U.S. newborns included a toxic flame retardant chemical called tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA) that permeates computer circuit boards, synthetic fragrances (Galaxolide and Tonalide) used in common cosmetics and detergents, and perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA, or C4), a member of the notorious Teflon chemical family used to make non-stick and grease-, stain- and water-resistant coatings for cookware, textiles, food packaging and other consumer products. (Press Release)

STATEMENT BY JOHN BAILEY, CHIEF SCIENTIST, PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS COUNCIL
FRAGRANCES USED IN COSMETICS AND PERSONAL CARE PRODUCTS IN THE U.S. ARE SAFE AND REGULATED BY THE FDA

On December 2, 2009, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released the results of a biomonitoring study it commissioned that examined the umbilical cord blood of 10 American infants. EWG alleges that the test found a number of chemicals in the cord blood of the newborns, including fragrances used in personal care products, and that this sample produces sufficient evidence that American children are being prenatally exposed to dangerous substances that may have lifelong consequences.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), however, has already determined that “the measurement of an environmental chemical in a person’s blood or urine does not by itself mean that the chemical causes disease.” Like all other ingredients used in cosmetic and personal care products, fragrances are evaluated for safety prior to use in marketed products, and regulated under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broad legal authority to protect the public if any personal care product is determined to be unsafe.

“Biomonitoring is a method for measuring human exposures to materials that might originate from both naturally occurring materials and those that are man-made. Biomonitoring relies on the testing of human tissues and fluids, such as blood or urine, to determine if people have been exposed to particular substances.

“While biomonitoring can identify certain materials in human fluids, the detection of a chemical does not mean that a person has been exposed to a toxic level of that substance. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. public health research organization that conducts the national biomonitoring program, has said, ‘The measurement of an environmental chemical in a person’s blood or urine does not by itself mean that the chemical causes disease.’

“Biomontioring shows that both naturally occurring and manmade substances can be found in human blood and urine at measurable quantities, but it does not provide information about the amount of exposure, how that exposure is linked to the quantity found in the blood or urine, or how these levels may change over time.

“A recent biomonitoring study commissioned by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) specifically examined blood in the umbilical cord of ten babies. While synthetic fragrances were among the 232 materials reported in the ten samples, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has previously stated that the detection of a chemical through the biomonitoring process is not sufficient to establish a health risk. Moreover, cord blood measurements provide no information about sources or duration of exposure. The mere presence of a substance does not mean that there is a health risk. It is necessary to conduct a risk assessment to make this determination and the EWG does not include such an assessment.

“Like other ingredients used in cosmetic and personal care products, Fragrances are evaluated for safety prior to use in marketed products. In the U.S., fragrances (as with other ingredients) in cosmetics and personal care products are regulated under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broad legal authority to protect the public if any personal care product or ingredient is determined to be unsafe. Several expert scientific groups have been established to study the safety of individual fragrance ingredients and to make recommendations for their use. For example, the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials assesses the safety of individual ingredients and the International Fragrance Association enforces a Code of Practice to ensure that products comply with established conditions of use. ( see http://www.rifm.org/ and http://www.ifraorg.org/ ).

“The technologies for detecting small amounts of substances in human fluids has advanced so far beyond previous methods that almost any substance, whether natural or manmade, can be detected in the environment and in human blood. Biomonitoring can detect levels of materials present below one part per billion, which is analogous to one second in 32 years. Failing to put the results of biomonitoring testing into perspective can cause parents confusion and unwarranted anxiety about the safety of their children.”

For more information on biomonitoring, visit: http://www.biomonitoringinfo.org/cordblood/index.html

And, for more information about cosmetic and personal care products, visit www.CosmeticsInfo.org.

Based in Washington, D.C., the Personal Care Products Council is the leading national trade association representing the global cosmetic and personal care products industry. Founded in 1894, the Council's more than 600 member companies manufacture, distribute, and supply the vast majority of finished personal care products marketed in the U.S. As the makers of a diverse range of products millions of consumers rely on everyday, from sunscreens, toothpaste and shampoo to moisturizer, lipstick and fragrance, personal care products companies are global leaders committed to product safety, quality and innovation. (The Personal Care Products Council (Formerly CTFA))

NEW YORK - For women with heart disease, eating too many artery-clogging trans fats may increase their risk of dying suddenly from cardiac arrest, a new study suggests.

Trans fats, found largely in commercially prepared baked and fried foods, have become notorious in recent years because they not only raise "bad" LDL cholesterol -- as the saturated fats in meat and butter do -- but also lower levels of heart-healthy HDL cholesterol.

High trans-fat intake has been linked to coronary heart disease, in which fatty plaques build up in the heart arteries, sometimes leading to a heart attack.

But whether trans fats raise a person's risk of dying suddenly from cardiac arrest has not been clear.

Sudden cardiac death is usually caused by rhythm disturbances in the heart's upper chambers that render the organ incapable of pumping blood to the rest of the body. Some research suggests that trans fats could promote heart-rhythm abnormalities, but there is only limited evidence that they raise the odds of sudden cardiac death.

In the new study, researchers found that among nearly 87,000 U.S. women followed for 26 years, trans fat intake was not linked to the risk of sudden cardiac death across the whole study group.

However, when they looked only at women who had underlying coronary heart disease, there was evidence of an increased risk. (Reuters Health)

When it comes to smoking and obesity, what goes up must come down. A new study predicts that in the future, as smoking rates continue to decline and life expectancy increases, obesity figures will continue to rise, ultimately slowing those rates and contributing to poorer quality of life.

The New England Journal of Medicine study released today looked at previous health trends culled from national health surveys to forecast life expectancy and quality of life for a typical 18-year-old from 2005 through 2020. Past declines in smoking over the last 15 years would give that 18-year-old an increased life expectancy of 0.31 year. However, growing body mass index rates would also mean that that teen would have a reduced life expectancy of 1.02 years, giving a net life expectancy reduction of 0.71 year. (LA Times)

The millions of people who are following the twists and turns of the unfolding climategate scandal online are increasingly asking themselves the same question: if a scientific theory falls in the forest and there’s no reporter willing to cover it, does it make a sound?

The scandal has been raging for well over a week now and so far it has become one of the hottest searches on the internet, spurred a congressional investigation into the matter, prompted the UK Information Commissioner to consider evidence that documents pertaining to FOI requests were illegally destroyed, forced Penn State to launch an investigation into its climate scientist superstar, Michael Mann, freed scientists to finally speak out against the IPCC, and reignited an intense scientific debate over the fallibility of the peer-review process and the practice of hiding data from other researchers. Not that you’d have learned any of that from following the mainstream media.

Indeed, as many have been pointing out, the mainstream media tried to ignore or downplay the issue for as long as they could, and when that failed they spun it into a left-right issue or hosted meaningless debates which studiously avoid any serious examination of the actual leaked documents. The growing frustration of the millions of concerned citizens who are watching the media continue to report the same stories of impending climate disaster without so much as acknowledging the scandal is perfectly exemplified by the man who recently shamed Canada’s national broadcaster on live television about their coverage blackout.

By controlling the debate, the media moguls hope they can make this scandal go away. Perhaps that would have been possible in the past, but this is the age of the internet. We no longer have to rely on the mainstream media to tell us what we should or should not be interested in. In the age of the internet, we are the media. (The Corbett Report)

The shameless denial with which major newspapers and networks have treated "Climategate" layers even more scandal on top of the original one: Mainstream media now co-conspirators with scientific hacks and big government.

The evolution of America's dominant media from guardians of our freedoms to enablers of government growth has been a decades-long story, their biases copiously chronicled.

But their response to the scientific scandal of the century, since it broke a week and a half ago, bids to become known as history's great unmasking of these supposedly independent journalists.

The scandal burst into the open when a hacker — we'll call that mysterious figure a whistle-blower if they won't — released thousands of e-mails exchanged by climate scientists who beaver away at Britain's University of East Anglia.

The e-mails clearly reveal that the university's Climatic Research Unit, a central source of data for global warming alarmists, corrupted the science by hiding evidence of the last decade's decline in global temperatures. (IBD)

Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really?

The archive - a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions.

Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics' work - an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn't absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.

After a week of scrutiny of the emails, attention is now turning to the programming source code. Three quarters of the material released is the work of the academics, much of which they had jealously guarded. This includes a version of the world's most cited and respected temperature record - HADCRUT - and a number of surveys which featured prominently in the reports of the UN's climate change panel, the IPCC. The actors here shaped the UN reports, and ultimately - because no politician dare contradict the 'science' - shaped global policy.

The allegations over the past week are fourfold: that climate scientists controlled the publishing process to discredit opposing views and further their own theory; they manipulated data to make recent temperature trends look anomalous; they withheld and destroyed data they should have released as good scientific practice, and they were generally beastly about people who criticised their work. (You’ll note that one of these is far less serious than the others.)

But why should this be a surprise? (Andrew Orlowski, The Register)

Remember the Clinton aide who testified that he lied to his own diary? The latest from Michael Mann and the NY Times may top that.

By now you’ve likely forgotten the name of that Bill Clinton aide who feebly testified that he had lied to his own diary when recording events of the time. But you haven’t forgotten the pitifulness of the spectacle.

But isn’t it “Mike’s trick” that is being described here? Grasped and described as such by CRU’s Phil Jones as having been performed on Mike’s graph?

So — Mike’s defense is that no one had told him what he, himself, was up to?

These guys need to call for a RealInvestigation to get to the bottom of their actions. The more they stumble around, the worse they make it for themselves.

Christopher Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (PJM)

When asked about ClimateGate, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed its importance, emphasizing that “climate change is happening.”

Of course climate change is happening. Soon we’ll be calling press conferences to declare, “The earth is moving” or “It’s going to get dark tonight.” The reality is the climate has been changing ever since there was a climate, and part of that change was a cooling period as recent as the 1940s to the 1970s giving rise to fears of a coming ice age. When Gibbs spouts this rhetoric, he’s clearly referring to human-induced warming, but since when has climate change become synonymous with manmade global warming? And what does it take for a scientific consensus to stop being one?

In fact, the phrase “climate change” is one of climatologist Roy Spencer’s major irritations about the whole climate change debate. He writes, “Thirty years ago, the term “climate change” would have meant natural climate change, which is what climate scientists mostly studied before that time. Today, it has come to mean human-caused climate change. The public, and especially the media, now think that “climate change” implies WE are responsible for it. Mother Nature, not Al Gore, invented real climate change.”

If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:

Aarrggghhh!

That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”

Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.

While Harry is puzzling over temperatures — “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” — the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!” (John Tierney, NYT)

Defenders of the IPCC position on climate science have adopted different strategies in dealing with the scandal of the CRU emails and computer code. Some authoritative voices, notably Judy Curry, have engaged in dialog with skeptics and have reassured PhD students that the “tribalism” revealed in the CRU emails has no place in science.

On the other hand, another very common reaction has been to mock the “deniers” for taking certain phrases out of context. This circle-the-wagons strategy tries to convince the public that the CRU episode has absolutely no bearing on the actual science, and that at worst it reveals petty personality flaws. This spin is epitomized in sarcastic pieces which take on the voice of the “deniers” and claim that the laws of physics are all a socialist hoax too.

These defenses are self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read the actual CRU emails in question. The public’s faith in the sacrosanct “peer-review process” will be understandably shaken when they read just how this “consensus” was enforced. Furthermore, the real debate was not between ultra-skeptics who say “global warming is a hoax” versus professional climate scientists who say “anthropogenic climate change is real.”

Even in their Nov 24, 2009 statement, the University of East Anglia failed to come clean about the amount of decline that was hidden. The graphic in their statement continued to “hide the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction by deleting adverse results in the last part of the 20th century. This is what Gavin Schmidt characterizes as a “good thing to do”.

First here is the Nov 2009 diagram offered up by UEA:

Figure 1. Resized UEA version of Nov 2009, supposedly “showing the decline”. Original here ,

“Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

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

Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said: "I have accepted Professor Jones's offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.

“We will announce details of the Independent Review, including its terms of reference, timescale and the chair, within days. I am delighted that Professor Peter Liss, FRS, CBE, will become acting director.”

Professor Liss’ interests lie in environmental chemistry; biogeochemical interactions between the oceans and atmosphere; and global change. He has worked in the School of Environmental Sciences at the UEA for some 40 years.

The key next step will be the choice of the person to chair the Independent Review. S/he must be respected by all sides in the debate, but especially by sceptical scientists.

"Temporary" removal of Phil Jones until an investigation into Climategate is completed. (Update: Washington Post in denial)

When I read the Washington Post’s disgraceful editorial the other day on the Climategate scandal, I thought of how far they have fallen since their big moment in the sun, Watergate. In those heady days, editor Ben Bradlee and a team of crack investigative reporters led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate cover-up and brought down President Nixon. Of course, they were then on the side of the permanent Washington establishment, who loathed Nixon (as he loathed them), just as they are now on the side of the permanent Washington establishment, for whom global warming alarmism is a deeply held commitment. (Myron Ebell, PJM)

Now that the University of East Anglia has stood aside Professor Jones, it is imperative that the IPCC cease referring to his work.

Professor Jones, the “father of global warming” is the single most influential pro-IPCC climate scientist. On that there can be little argument.

The entire IPCC position is in tatters. (Warwick Hughes)

Damian’s revelation that Futerra has gone so far as to train even CBeebies researchers in “green” communication may offer a lifeline to embarrassed academics at the beleaguered “University” of East Anglia. The ever-helpful BBC might be able to channel them towards a less challenging audience than those brutal sceptics who are holding the Phil Jones University up to so much painful ridicule. Might there not be very promising alternative careers for Phil Jones and Michael Mann if a happy collaboration between CBeebies and, say, Blue Peter could be devised?

“And now children, here are Phil and Michael to show you how to make your own global warming statistics at home.”

“Hello, children, I’m Phil. Can anyone tell me what Michael is holding? Yes. It’s a hockey stick. Does anybody know what that is for? No, Timothy, it is not to beat the crap out of nasty sceptic Pat Michaels, though that is a very good thing to do. It is to save the world. No, Prunella, Mr Brown did not do that last month, he was only speaking metaphorically. Michael…” (Gerald Warner, TDT)

Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won't discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.

Some of the emails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that, and on something more important.

In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.

After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.

But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque. (Douglas J. Keenan, PJM)

In science, as in most disciplines, the process is as important as the product. The recent email/data release (aka Climategate) has exposed the process of scientific peer-review as failing. If the process is failing, it is reasonable to wonder what this implies about the product.

Several scientists have come forward to express their view on what light Climategate has shed on these issues. Judith Curry has some insightful views here and here, along with associated comments and replies. Roger Pielke Jr. has an opinion, as no doubt do many others.

Certainly a perfect process does not guarantee perfect results, and a flawed process does not guarantee flawed results, but the chances of a good result are much greater with the former than the latter. That’s why the process was developed in the first place.

Briefly, the peer-review process is this; before results are published in the scientific literature and documented for posterity, they are reviewed by one or more scientists who have some working knowledge of the topic but who are not directly associated with the work under consideration. The reviewers are typically anonymous and basically read the paper to determine if it generally seems like a reasonable addition to the scientific knowledge base, and that the results seem reproducible given the described data and methodology.

Generally, reviewers do not “audit” the results—that is, spend a lot of effort untangling the details of the data and or methodologies to see if they are appropriate, or to try to reproduce the results for themselves. How much time and effort is put into a peer review varies greatly from case to case and reviewer to reviewer. On most occasions, the reviewers try to include constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work—that is, the reviewers serve as another set of eyes and minds to look over and consider the research, eyes that are more removed from the research than the co-authors and can perhaps offer different insights and suggestions.

Science most often moves forwards in small increments (with a few notable exceptions) and the peer-review process is designed to keep it moving efficiently, with as little back-sliding or veering off course as possible.

The guys over at RealClimate like to call peer-review a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”

Certainly is it not sufficient. But increasingly, there are indications that its necessity is slipping—and the contents of the released Climategate emails are hastening that slide. [Read more →] (Chip Knappenberger, MasterResource)

The data-manipulating emails of Climategate have made a splash, with damning implications for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But is this just the tip of the UN climate con iceberg?

Shepherding, rewarding and promoting global alarm about “climate change” is a whopping beneficiary of this movement (bigger even than Al Gore) — the United Nations global system. Failing to achieve forward motion for peace or nonproliferation, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been grandstanding for more than two years about the UN’s war on the weather — and has made it his chief mission to persuade developed nations to “seal the deal” on a “climate” pact that would constrict production, transfer vast amounts to wealth to some of the worst governments on the planet, and put the unaccountable, opaque and too often self-serving bureaucracy of the UN at the switch. The UN’s IPCC collected the other half of the Al Gore Nobel Weather Prize, but do UN insiders really believe the IPCC is a bastion of untainted science? (If you want to check out who’s providing “guidance” for the IPCC, check out their web site – some of my favorites on the current roster are Iran, Cuba and Sudan). (Claudia Rosett, PJM)

Strategy papers call for United Nations to boss economies and erect world government under pretext of environmentalism (Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com)

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The airwaves are full of the “secret” codes and emails from Britain’s Hadley climate research center. New Zealand is looking at the upward trend in the “official” graph of its recent temperatures—while the country’s raw temperature data show no warming. Now researchers are digging into the Hadley data to find if the rest of the world’s climate data have been similarly “adjusted.”

But Der Speigel, the German news magazine, tried to blow the whistle on this climate fraud more than two years ago. In May of 2007, it published a story titled, “Not the End of the World As We Know It.” The story pointed out that Svente Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist who first posited the Greenhouse, had seen global warming as a good thing, with “better climates” potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past.

Der Spiegel noted how previous cold periods—including the Little Ice Age that began in 1300—were too cold for grain to mature properly. In Germany, thousands of mountain villages and huge tracts of farmland were abandoned due to the cold.

“When global temperatures plunged unexpectedly again in the 1960s, many meteorologists were quick to warn people about the coming of a new ice age—supposedly triggered by man-made air pollution. Hardly anyone at the time believed that a warming period could pose a threat.”

“It was not until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s that everything suddenly changed,” said the Speigel article. “From then on it was almost a foregone conclusion that global warming could only be perceived as a disaster for the earth’s climate. . .” (Dennis T. Avery, CGFI)

Mention politicians in the same sentence with global warming, and the “hot air” jokes almost write themselves. Unfortunately, what world leaders have planned for us when it comes to climate change is no laughing matter.

Indeed, Americans have good reason to worry as international elites gather in Copenhagen this month to discuss their climate-change agenda. The greatest danger is that U.S. officials will sign on to a treaty that would put us at a huge economic disadvantage, yet do virtually nothing to affect the earth’s atmosphere. (Ed Feulner, Townhall)

First, there were those infamous hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Now, a mere seven days before the Copenhagen Conference on climate change, this breaking news story takes the breath away. The whole ‘global warming’ shambles is falling apart. Today, The Copenhagen Post declares: “Denmark Rife With CO2 Fraud”:

“Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.”

“Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.”

We all knew from the start that carbon trading could prove, by its very nature, a crooks’ charter. But such an allegation relating to Denmark, of all places, at the precise moment of the Copenhagen Conference, where such cap-and-trade measures will be at the forefront of debate, must have the Little Mermaid crying so much that sea-levels may indeed rise.

Simply staggering! How long can this ‘global warming’ nonsense be tolerated? As Marcellus declares, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Emboldened following the Climategate scandal, the Liberal opposition in Australia's parliament threw out its pro-Kyoto leader yesterday and then today, under the leadership of global warming skeptic Tony Abbott, voted down the government's plan to pass cap and trade legislation. The proposed legislation, intended to be a feather in the cap of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd prior to his departure for climate change meetings in Copenhagen, failed by a vote of 41 to 33 in the Senate, Australia's upper house.

Despite speculation that Rudd would call a snap election on the issue - a threat some expected him to take up because polls show him to be a favourite over his opposition - a cautious Rudd declined to risk an election against his new adversary, a conservative who pledges to oppose any tax on carbon.

The government's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which faced fierce opposition from industry and agriculture, aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25% from 2000 levels by 2020. (Financial Post)

The Rudd Government has failed to explain its far-reaching emissions trading scheme to the public, environmentalists say.

The comments came as former Prime Minister Bob Hawke called on the Government to launch a public education campaign in response to newly installed Liberal leader Tony Abbott slamming the proposed scheme as "a great big tax".

Opinion polls have suggested an overwhelming majority of Australians do not understand the emissions trading scheme, which will force businesses to buy permits to pollute in a bid to tackle climate change. (SMH)

“The defeat of Rudd’s CPRS in the Senate today shows just how wrong headed most business groups have been over the politics of an ETS,” says The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell.

“The result shows that groups like the Business Council of Australia and Heather Ridout’s Australian Industry group have made a massive miscalculation in how to best represent their members’ interests.”

“Nothing is inevitable in politics if you have the will and energy to fight it. This week is evidence of that.”

“Instead of taking a stance against the anti-business ETS, these groups tried to cosy up to the government.”

“Instead of exposing the flaws of the ETS, they recommended passing it to keep their access to government Ministers and the limited concessions they had won behind the scenes.”

“Some groups were even panting at the prospect of the billions of dollars of financial churn which their financial sector members would benefit from, to the substantial detriment of the real economy players in mining, agriculture and manufacturing.”

“Most peak groups have been totally compromised by their approach to Rudd’s ETS. Their members should replace the key policy makers with people who will actually stand up for them.”

Senator Boswell welcomed the NFF’s highly critical stance against the ETS in today’s media. “Finally, the NFF leadership has prosecuted the disastrous effects of the CPRS on farmers.”

“The ACCI has been a rare voice along with the Minerals Council and the Australian Coal Association in working to bring the anti-business impacts of the ETS to light.”

“This debate would have been far less long and painful if other business groups had taken a similar strong and truthful stance.”

“Peak groups and organisations sup with the devil when they try to cosy up to the Rudd government. As more and more businesses realise the costs they would be up for under Rudd’s ETS, they will realise what poor service their representative bodies have given them.”

“The argument that it was important to pass an amended bill because a double dissolution engendered joint sitting would pass the original bill has been proven totally baseless. The original bill is no longer Labor policy.” (Senator Ron Boswell)

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Juliet

Well, here it comes, the International Conference on Global Governance in Copenhagen. According to the ever-truthful BBC it is the most important meeting in the history of the world. They even might be right this time, following the ease with which the European nations slid into antidemocratic, bureaucratic centralised government and the rise to power of a new movement towards the authoritarian left in America. 16,500 carbon-based entities will produce over 40,000 tones of carbon dioxide to travel to the conference. At least there will be some benefit to plant growth. The potential for new, insane attempts at world economic suicide is limitless. According to The Times the wild-eyed economist in charge of the IPCC is a leading world authority on climate science. His project is to suck gaseous plant food out of the atmosphere.

There is one glow on the southern horizon, however, where that glimmer is promising to turn into a beacon of hope, lighting the path of return to rationality. Read all about it in JoNova, which includes this heartfelt acknowledgement to the CRU whistle-blower, with which many of us may concur:

Thanks to the ClimateGate instigator, who-ever you are. The Australian people owe you a fortune. Somehow the God of Reason has smiled upon us and our democratically elected leaders are hesitating to give away $7 billion dollars of voter’s money annually (and ad infinitum) to foreign forces in the hope of changing the weather.

They are SO predictable. As promised, the WORSE THAN WAS THOUGHTs are coming thick and fast. The latest got a front page spot in The Times plus two centre pages, a big splash in the Telegraph and, it goes without saying, the ever-truthful BBC. It is a classic too, ignoring the data that there is no warming occurring (fashionably, hiding the decline) and building more computer predictions on other discredited predictions. You may now choose your depth of inundation from the à la carte menu, anything up to 50m (though that one comes only from the exclusive Hansen range). This modest little number comes in at about 1.4 metres; not too elaborate but just enough to enliven forthcoming banquets in Copenhagen (Number Watch)

New climate report warns sea-level could rise by up to 2m, but scientists warn against hysteria

Leading Danish scientists and researchers have warned of avoiding doomsday prophesies following the publication of the ‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ – a document by leading scientists predicting sea level rise of up to 2m by 2100.

The report was authored by many of those involved in the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that form the basis for the climate negotiations.

The latest warning from the scientists said if emissions remain unmitigated, global sea levels could well rise by 1m, with an upper limit of 2m by the end of this century.

But others worry that the news could be used to fan the flames of climate hysteria.

Dorthe Dahl Jensen is one of the leading ice researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and said doomsday rhetoric should be avoided.

‘Stop talking about doomsday. The Earth is absolutely not sinking, nor are the polar bears, because the Earth has previously been much warmer. The only thing that is threatened is our lifestyle,’ she said.

Dahl-Jensen said it was deeply frustrating that climate was being blamed for all the evils of the world, whether it was animals dying out or people getting sick.

‘The debate has almost taken on a religious quality’.

Head of research at the Danish Meteorological Institute and contributing author of the last three IPCC reports, Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, also cautioned against the new warnings being used hysterically, pointing out that the UN’s environmental program UNEP already said in September that some scientists predicted sea level increases of up to 2m. (Copenhagen Post)

The IPCC has been claiming Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035. The research paper they used concluded 2350.

“Climategate” is now more than the massive misconduct of one research institution.

Following the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) data dump on November 19, many other issues with the political science of climate change are now being let out of the darkness. (See the complete Pajamas Media aggregator and document repository here, and find another PJM exclusive on research misconduct in the climate science community here.)

Most people following the climate change debate are aware that many sources claim that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing “rapidly” — in fact, that they may disappear by 2035, a mere 25 years from now.

Today, in a guest post at Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, Dr. Madhav Khandekar discusses this bit of folk science (Dr. Pielke is also the subject of an upcoming PJM interview).: (PJM)

From the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute press release, just in time for Copenhagen.

The conch shell at left was exposed to current CO2 levels; the shell at right was exposed to the highest levels in the study. (Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

In a striking finding that raises new questions about carbon dioxide’s (CO2) impact on marine life, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists report that some shell-building creatures—such as crabs, shrimp and lobsters—unexpectedly build more shell when exposed to ocean acidification caused by elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).

Because excess CO2 dissolves in the ocean—causing it to “acidify” —researchers have been concerned about the ability of certain organisms to maintain the strength of their shells. Carbon dioxide is known to trigger a process that reduces the abundance of carbonate ions in seawater—one of the primary materials that marine organisms use to build their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons.

The concern is that this process will trigger a weakening and decline in the shells of some species and, in the long term, upset the balance of the ocean ecosystem.

But in a study published in the Dec. 1 issue of Geology, a team led by former WHOI postdoctoral researcher Justin B. Ries found that seven of the 18 shelled species they observed actually built more shell when exposed to varying levels of increased acidification. This may be because the total amount of dissolved inorganic carbon available to them is actually increased when the ocean becomes more acidic, even though the concentration of carbonate ions is decreased.

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season is over. Activity was light. More wind will be stirred up next week in Copenhagen, where climate change alarmists will gather to refuel their fear campaign.

The warnings were ominous. Noting the destruction left behind in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, warm-mongers told us that our carbon dioxide emissions were going to bring more severe storms.

Journalist and author Ross Gelbspan wasted little time in issuing what he probably thought was the definitive statement on the Katrina disaster. "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service," he wrote in the Boston Globe. "Its real name was global warming."

A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore, godfather of the global warming scare, said that "the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm — thus magnifying its destructive power — makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger."

In case the public couldn't make out the link that Gore was laying out, a poster promoting his 2006 movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," showed industrial smokestacks spewing out — you guessed it — a hurricane.

Then there was Kerry Emanuel, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor known as a leading hurricane researcher. Global warming would generate more intense hurricane activity, he believed, and the alarmists naturally seized on his work.

But then some funny things happened. (IBD)

LONDON - Nov 30 - There is clear evidence that climate change is contributing towards rising natural catastrophe losses and ambitious climate protection targets are needed to tackle the increase, according to Munich Re. (Reuters)

The first comprehensive review of the state of Antarctica's climate and its relationship to the global climate system is published this week (Tuesday 1 December) by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The review - Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment – presents the latest research from the icy continent, identifies areas for future scientific research, and addresses the urgent questions that policy makers have about Antarctic melting, sea-level rise and biodiversity.

Based on the latest evidence* from 100 world-leading scientists from 13 countries, the review focuses on the impact and consequences of rapid warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and the Southern Ocean; rapid ice loss in parts of Antarctica and the increase in sea ice around the continent; the impact of climate change on Antarctica's plants and animals; the unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide levels; the connections between human-induced global change and natural variability; and the extraordinary finding that the ozone hole has shielded most of Antarctica from global warming. (British Antarctic Survey)

A HUGE hole in the ozone layer has protected Antarctica from the impacts of global warming, according to scientists.

The temperature across Antarctica has not risen over the past 30 years and there has been a 10 per cent increase in the amount of sea ice appearing during winter.

Climate change sceptics regularly cite the lack of warming in Antarctica as evidence global warming is not happening.

However, researchers have now explained the phenomenon – they believe that a hole in the ozone layer above the continent has altered weather patterns and temperatures.

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research carried out the first comprehensive review of the state of Antarctica's climate. Their report, Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment, is published today.

Professor John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey, lead editor of the report, said: "For me the most astonishing evidence is the way that one man-made environmental impact – the ozone hole – has shielded most of Antarctica from another – global warming."

He said the ozone layer absorbs heat from the sun, which warms the atmosphere. If the ozone is absent, it has a cooling effect. This has led to a wider variance between temperatures at Antarctica and elsewhere on Earth, resulting in increased winds. (The Scotsman)

Climate change could kill more than 400,000 children every year in the future because of floods and droughts, according to a leading charity. ( Louise Gray, TDT)

In his regular column, the BBC's environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, looks at how the affair of the stolen climate e-mails has sparked debate among some scientists about the body which peer reviews climate science. (BBC)

Lord Stern labelled the views of those who are sceptical about the existence of man-made global warming as ''muddled and unscientific''. (TDT)

For decades, debate over whether to limit global population growth was stifled or ignored, branded as immoral and a return to heartless Malthusian logic.

But the potential impact on climate change of a planet teaming with up to 10 billion souls has again forced the issue into the open ahead of the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.

In a sign of change, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has declared that braking the rise in Earth's population would be a major contribution to fighting greenhouse gases. (AFP)

Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009.

Former American Vice President Al Gore, who is known for his environmental film An Inconvenient Truth, will visit Copenhagen during The UN Climate Change Conference. Here you will have the opportunity to meet him. (VisitCopenhagen.com)

Climate-change skeptics are barking up the wrong smokestack. The shell game being played isn't with the science, it's with the solutions — specifically, the carbon emissions targets that enlightened world leaders are pledging to meet. That's where the numbers don't add up.

When the Copenhagen climate summit convenes next week, the European nations that have led the crusade against global warming will be able to report that the continent has met the targets for carbon emission reductions set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. There may be shoulder dislocations from all the self-congratulatory back-patting.

But the Kyoto targets were well on the way toward being met before they were even established. The targets are based on 1990 emissions levels — after the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc had been fouling the air for years with their antiquated, carbon-spewing heavy industries.

When the communist regimes — and their creaky economies — collapsed in a heap, emissions from the former Soviet-dominated zone fell by nearly 40%. Now they are rising again, but they remain about 35% below Kyoto's benchmark 1990 levels. (Eugene Robinson, IBD)

Europe should impose a unilateral cut in greenhouse gas emissions of 30% by 2020, according to climate economist Sir Nicholas Stern. ( Roger Harrabin, BBC News)

An ambitious deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions needs to be agreed at the Copenhagen climate summit to give a 50/50 chance of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2C, Lord Stern has said. (TDT)

LONDON - Defeat of Australia's emissions trading plans may temporarily dent political momentum ahead of next week's U.N. climate talks, but succeed or fail, the scheme is unlikely to affect global carbon prices until at least 2013. (Reuters)

BRUSSELS - Europeans could help cut climate warming emissions to much safer levels for just 2 euros ($3) each per day, but they would also have to cut back on driving and meat eating, a report said Tuesday. (Reuters)

The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen (George Monbiot, The Guardian)

Scientific, economic and political realities are reining in worldwide efforts to combat global warming. But not so in California. As others stop short of committing economic suicide, California's overaggressive government could inflict further economic harm on the state. (Orange County Register)

Spain won’t be able to meet its carbon-reduction targets by actually cutting its carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, the Spanish government has told the EU Commission it will have to buy its way out through so-called Kyoto mechanisms, like the Poland deal. [Read More] (Andres Cala, Energy Tribune)

Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week:
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 771 individual scientists from 458 separate research institutions in 42 different countries ... and counting! This issue's Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from Makassar Strait, Sulawesi Margin, Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project's database, click here.

Plant Growth Data:
This week we add new results of plant growth responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment obtained from experiments described in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for: European Beech (Kosvancova et al., 2009), Norway Spruce (Kosvancova et al., 2009), Rivet Wheat (de Graaff et al., 2009), and Scots Pine (Johansson et al., 2009).

If you had something you needed in your home, would you go to the store to buy it anyway? Of course not! Strangely, however, some members of Congress seem determined to push the country toward making this counterproductive choice. The Congressional Research Service released a report at the end of October, “U.S. Fossil Fuel Resources: Terminology, Reporting, and Summary,” which clearly showed that the U.S. has a considerable amount of oil, coal, and natural gas at its disposal—but most of it hasn't been accessed. (Nicole Kurokawa, Townhall)

The Alberta government and its federal counterpart must step up to defend the oil sands, both at home and abroad, pushing the economic and energy-security arguments, says the incoming chief executive of newly created Cenovus Energy Inc.

Brian Ferguson, the man tapped to lead EnCana Corp.' s oil sands and refining spinoff that begins operating as a separate company tomorrow, also said Edmonton and Ottawa must counter well-organized environmental lobbyists to outline how the carbon-intensive industry is developing the tar-like resource responsibly. (Financial Post)

Something is rotten: Despite wind power, fossil fuels still dominate electricity production (Eric Reguly, Globe and Mail)

NEW YORK - New York State is looking for developers to build wind farms on its Great Lakes that could generate 120 to 500 megawatts of power to boost the amount of electricity that comes renewable sources by 2015.

The New York Power Authority would buy all the power generated from the offshore projects, which could be located in either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario.

Offshore wind power costs about twice as much as land-based wind projects, according to industry estimates. Offshore wind farms cost about $4 million per megawatt if no interest accrued during construction.

However, typically offshore wind farms can generate more power. Five firms are studying the Great Lakes wind project, which was first proposed in April.

A combined cycle natural gas plant, which does produce carbon dioxide, meanwhile costs just about $1 million a megawatt. (Reuters)

GREENVILLE, South Carolina - The United States is falling behind in the race for clean, renewable energy and risks losing its prominence in high-tech manufacturing, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Monday.

"America has the opportunity to lead the world in a new industrial revolution," Chu told business leaders, political leaders and engineers at a Clemson University symposium.

But, he said, "The world is passing us by. We are falling behind in the clean energy race. ... China is spending $9 billion a month on clean energy ... China has now passed the United States and Europe in high-tech manufacturing. There is no reason the United States should cede high-tech manufacturing to anyone." (Reuters)

FRANKFURT - Millions of Germans will pay more for their electricity despite sharply lower fuel prices, footing the bill for utilities' losses, renewable energy and higher transmission grid charges.

Market competition is not, therefore, working as well as it should, its critics conclude.

A number of big firms have announced prices hikes, meaning many of the 40 million households in Europe's biggest economy will not benefit from discounted wholesale power -- despite cheaper oil and weak demand. (Reuters)

LONDON, Nov. 30 -- Executives at supermajor Royal Dutch Shell are pulling back on their optimism for certain biofuels while others look to batteries as a way to cut emissions.

Biofuels made from corn and other sources were lauded as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. A link to rising food prices, however, and a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, in part because of deforestation, are leading researchers to search for alternatives. (UPI)

WASHINGTON - Swine flu continues to wane across the United States, but it has killed more than 30 children since the last count, U.S. health officials said on Monday.

The latest update on the H1N1 virus, posted at http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/, shows the infection is still at epidemic levels but below its October peak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

Since March, 198 children have been reported killed by H1N1, although the true number is likely far higher because many people with the flu don't go to the doctor and only a few who do are tested for swine flu.

The CDC said just over 20 percent of specimens sent for testing from patients with flu-like illness were positive for H1N1 swine flu, meaning that 80 percent of patients had something else. At the worst, this proportion was over 30 percent.

Swine flu continues to dominate, with 99 percent of flu cases being due to the H1N1 strain. (Reuters)

NEW YORK - Pregnant women who are exposed to higher levels of an increasingly controversial chemical in certain plastics may deliver their babies slightly earlier than women with less exposure, results of a study hint.

"The magnitude of the effects seen," the study team wrote in today's issue of Pediatrics, "might be associated with adverse health effects in newborns."

The chemical, DEHP -- short for di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate -- is a "plasticizer" used widely in consumer products to help make vinyl plastic soft and flexible.

"Exposures (to DEHP) are ubiquitous," Dr. Robin M. Whyatt from Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health in New York City told Reuters Health. DEHP breakdown products "have been detected in 95% of the general U.S. population."

In recent preliminary studies, DEHP exposure has been linked to some health risks. In animal studies, for example, exposure to this and other so-called phthalates has been linked to lower-weight babies and shorter pregnancies.

In preliminary human studies, prenatal DEHP exposure has been shown to affect the timing of labor; however, the findings have been mixed. (Reuters Health)

Women who use insect repellents during the first three months of pregnancy are more likely to give birth to baby boys with a genital defect, according to researchers. Insecticides used in gardening and agriculture may also be linked to genital malformations in boys. (The Guardian)

BAGHDAD - The guns are gradually falling silent in Iraq as a fragile stability takes hold, turning the spotlight on a stealthier killer likely to stalk Iraqis for years to come.

Cases of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply, Iraqi officials say, and many suspect contamination from weapons used in years of war and accompanying unchecked pollution as a cause.

"We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before war in 2003, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause," said Jawad al-Ali, an oncologist in Iraq's second city of Basra.

In the city of Falluja in western Iraq, scene of two of the fiercest battles between U.S. troops and insurgents after the 2003 U.S. invasion, a spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralyzed babies has alarmed doctors.

The use of depleted uranium in U.S. and coalition weaponry in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait and the 2003 Iraq invasion is well documented, but establishing a link between the radioactive metal and health problems among Iraqis is hard, officials say.

Iraqi medical facilities are limited, and keeping accurate health statistics during years of sectarian slaughter unleashed by the invasion was impossible.

In Basra in particular, pummeled by years of war and swamped with industrial and agricultural pollution, it is difficult for doctors to isolate specific causes for cancer. (Reuters)

WASHINGTON - Two-thirds of 382 fresh broiler chickens purchased from grocers by a U.S. consumer group were contaminated with one or both of the bacteria that cause most cases of food-borne illness, the group said on Monday.

The Consumers Union said the figure was an improvement from the 80 percent found in tests in 2007 but "still far too high." It urged the government to issue stricter food-safety rules. The group began testing for bacteria in store-bought chicken in 1998.

Salmonella, the most common cause of food-borne illness, was found in 14 percent of the chickens and campylobacter, the No. 2 cause, was in 62 percent. Nine percent of chickens contained both bacteria. Consumers Union bought the chickens at 100 retailers in 22 states last spring.

The Agriculture Department, which is in charge of meat safety, reported a salmonella rate of 5 percent in its samples taken at packing plants from April 1-June 30. Its researchers say cold water baths and other antimicrobial can reduce the presence of campylobacter to 11 percent. (Reuters)

Any free-marketer, like Prime Minister Harper once was, knows that corporate self-interest protects consumers, not legislation

My mother once accidentally crushed my thumb in a door. She was a good mother, but accidents happen. A door is in fact still a tremendous instrument for crushing digits, but should that make doors (or parents?) subject to legislative “recall” as safety hazards?

We live in a hyper-sensitive age, a state which is significantly encouraged by government legislators. A classic example is Bill C-6, a piece of “consumer protection” legislation that was recently passed unanimously in the House of Commons and is this week making its way through Senate Committee.

NEW YORK - The percentage of children born with Down syndrome has increased by about one percent per year since 1979, according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The increase is probably because more and more women 35 and over are having babies, Dr. Adolfo Correa of the CDC's Center for Disease Control's National Center on Birth Defects, one of the study's authors, said. These older women are five times more likely than younger moms to have a baby with Down syndrome, Correa pointed out.

Today, about one in 1,000 children and adolescents in the US has the chromosomal disorder, and about 5,400 children are born with Down syndrome in the US every year, Correa and his colleagues note in the journal Pediatrics. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Children who are relatively tall may be more likely than their shorter peers to become overweight young adults, a study published Tuesday suggests.

The study, which followed 2,800 U.S. children, found that those who were both tall and overweight at age 8 were at greatest risk of being overweight or obese around the age of 18.

But even among children who were within the normal weight range, those who were relatively tall were more likely to be overweight by young adulthood.

It's well known that overweight children often become overweight adults. However, the new findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, suggest that extra height also puts some kids at risk for extra pounds in the long term.

This may be out of sync with what a lot of parents and doctors hope - namely, that taller children who are a bit heavy will keep getting taller while weight gain will slow -- basically allowing them to "outgrow" their extra pounds.

Based on the current findings, extra height can instead be a liability. But it is not clear why that is, said lead researcher Dr. Steven Stovitz, an associate professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

It's likely, though unproven, he told Reuters Health, that in some children, taller height is a sign of "advanced skeletal maturity," rather than a genetic predisposition toward being tall.

Advanced skeletal maturity essentially means that a child is moving toward his or her ultimate adult height more quickly compared with shorter kids. At a certain point, weight gain continues, but the rate of vertical growth slows down. (Reuters Health)

LONDON - People who smoke "skunk" - a potent form of cannabis - are almost seven times more likely to develop psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia than those who smoke "hash" or cannabis resin, according to research.

Scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry said their study was the first to look specifically at skunk, rather than normal cannabis, and suggested high levels of tretrahydrocannabinol, or THC, were to blame for the drug's effect on mental health.

"The risk of psychosis is much greater among people who are frequent cannabis users, especially among those using skunk, rather than among occasional users of traditional hash," said Marta di Forti, the psychiatrist who led the study. (Reuters)

VANCOUVER - Worried you haven't been green enough in life? Don't let death come in the way of a more eco-friendly you.

From coffins made of recycled cardboard to saying no to embalming chemicals that seep into the soil, people are increasingly searching for ways to make their final resting place a more environmentally-friendly one.

Now cremation, the choice today of a third of Americans and more than half of Canadians, is getting a green make-over.

A standard cremation spews into the air about 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming -- along with other pollutants like dioxins and mercury vapor if the deceased had silver tooth fillings.

On top of that each cremation guzzles as much energy, in the form of natural gas and electricity, as a 500-mile (800 kilometer) car trip. (Reuters)

The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.

In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment: in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming”. (Christopher Monckton of Brenchley)

With trillions of dollars at stake for the climate decisions that are going to be made next week in Copenhagen, Americans deserve some discussion of the "climate-gate" e-mails. (John Lott, FOXNews.com)

The emails and documents leaked last week from some of the world's leading climatologists offer a rich trove of evidence that scientists were massaging the data and corrupting the scientific process to support their own preconceptions. But they also offer the beginnings of an explanation for why. In the words of another famous leaker, follow the money.

On its Web site, the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit describes how it could barely make ends meet for most of the years since it was founded in 1972, and how most researchers weren't even guaranteed salaries in the early years. "Since 1994, the situation has improved," CRU writes. Why 1994? That was the year the U.N.'s climate change convention came into force. Since then, it has been boom times for those lucky enough to have gotten in on the ground floor of a growth industry powered by grants from governments eager to understand just how quickly we were overheating the planet.

In the 1990s, CRU director Phil Jones helped bring in £1.9 million ($3.1 million) for climate research. But in this decade, according to one of the leaked documents, the total shot up to £11.8 million, including grants from the U.K. National Environmental Research Council, the U.S. Department of Energy and NATO. Another leaked spreadsheet for CRU researcher Tim Osborn shows a similar pattern. Between 1994 and 2000, Mr. Osborn secured research contracts totaling £173,881. Between 2001 and 2007, the last year covered by the file, his haul jumped to £764,055.

Or consider the cash that Michael Mann—another climate establishment figure whose name comes up frequently in the leaked emails—has helped pulled for Penn State University. In 2000, before Mr. Mann joined the faculty, the university banked $20.4 million in research funding for environmental sciences. By 2007, two years after he came on board, Penn State counted more than $55 million a year for environmental research, much of it government funded.

To keep this money flowing, climate scientists needed to keep the fear going. Anything that called into question their most dire predictions of climate catastrophe would put all that funding at risk. On the other hand, the bigger the climate calamity, the more willing governments became to fund global-warming research. Keeping the dissenters on the outside was not simply a matter of academic jealousy. It was in many cases a question of professional survival. (WSJ)

The recent expose of the e-mails from the scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, revealing the nefarious nature of their global warming crusade, does far more than damage the credibility of global warming activists. It damages the foundation of one of the last bastions of truth.

Science above all is about the search for truth, for fact, for data that either support or undermine a theory. When a group hijacks the scientific process for political and/or financial gain, not only does the science (and truth) suffer, but all of mankind suffers insofar as we lose faith in the supposed unbiased endeavors of those seeking answers to important questions. Scientists become the very politicians that so many people so vehemently distrust.

Over the years, science and the rigors of scientific inquiry have been held up as shining examples of the pursuit of truth unsullied by the vagaries of political discourse or influence. People learned to trust scientists for this very reason. What was deemed to be supported by science was held aloft as truth — after all, the science "proved" it!

However, once the scientists are revealed to be nothing more than the "wizards" behind the curtain, mere charlatans passing off parlor tricks as "science," the veil of impartiality is torn asunder, along with the trust that we had learned to place in them. (Paul Tortland, IBD)

PJTV and PJM now present a complete database of the Climategate documents with a comment section for readers to respond to the individual entries and a way to rank those entries according to interest level. Also available: a roundup of commentary and videos on the subject and Roger L. Simon on "Climategate: Terrified Liars of the UN" (PJM)

Some of the world's leading climate scientists have been embarrassed by the publication of hundreds of private emails & research documents, stolen by computer hackers from a British university. Climate change skeptics have hailed the material as proof that research data has been skewed and suppressed.

This is important information because the Copenhagen Treaty is about organising to bring in global governance and global carbon taxes using "climate change" as the vehicle. If this turns out to be a "climategate", the hoax of global warming is brought to public light.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.

One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson's study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre's campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work. (Clive Crook, The Atlantic)

Climategate: Follow the Money - Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries? (Brett Stephens, WSJ)

Thanks to Eric Raymond, famous computer guru and leader of the open-source movement, at ESR, we can see what those sophisticated climate modelers were doing. They’ve found the code from the leaked files, and Eric’s comment is:

This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

Here’s the code. The programmer has written in helpful notes that us non-programmers can understand, like this one: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline”. You get the feeling this climate programmer didn’t like pushing the data around so blatantly. Note the technical comment: “fudge factor”.

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’

The numbers in a row, in the [ ] brackets, are the numbers the data are to be altered by. If there were no adjustments, they’d all be zero. It’s obvious there is no attempt to treat all the data equally, or use a rigorous method to make adjustments. What could their reasons be?

In 1930: “Stock market crash and global depression causes artificial inflation in temperatures. Corrected, using inverted Dow Jones index until 1940″.

1950 – 2000: “Quality control at thermometer factories must be going to pieces. Thermometers are just reading too low, and it kept getting worse until 1970. Instead of demanding the factories get it right, simply adjust the data. Still not enough. Quality control puts air-conditioning exhaust vents close to thermometers in the field, to further counteract apparent factory problem.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m seriously concerned. All along I’ve said the world was warming. Now I’m not so sure. How would we know? How does anyone know in the light of all that data fudging?

Serious postscript: How can anyone defend this? These people work for a team that wants more of your money. Is this not evidence of criminal intent to deceive? (JoNova)

It would appear that the Climategate scandal, the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. revealing that scientists distorted climate change data, is not going to cool off anytime soon.

Climate change skeptics are fired up about the "accidental" deletion of temperature data by head of the CRU Phil Jones and the bogus data aggregation procedure used by scientists that "renders the [temperature readings] totally meaningless," but what gets some people's goats the most is the fact that the University of East Anglia is still denying that there was any wrong doing. (Graham Winfrey, Business Insider)

Surprise: Hacked e-mails have revealed that sober, empirical, fact-loving scientists at the heart of global-warming research behave like a crazed group of Delta girls engaged in a flame war to paint the Kappas as a bunch of nasty skanks.

It may not be the biggest scandal since Watergate. But what appeared to be a clear path to massive cap-and-trade legislation just a few months ago now resembles a Jenga tower, and the scandal looks like the tile that will bring the whole thing down. (Kyle Smith, NY Post)

I was working on another project related to the CRU emails and came across this email from Dr.Phil Jones. I was stunned, not only because he was dissing another dataset, but mostly because that dissing hit many of the points about problems with the NASA GISS products we’ve covered here on WUWT and at Climate Audit.

Here’s the email with my highlights added. Email addresses have been partially redacted.

click for larger image

Like many of Anthony’s readers here on WUWT, I’ve been riveted by all the revelations and ongoing discussion and analysis of the CRUtape Letters™ (with appropriate props to WUWT’s “ctm”). It might be hard to imagine that anyone could add to what has already been said, but I am going to try. It might also come as a surprise, to those who reckon me for a skeptic, that I do not think that anything was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data set maintained by CRU was irreparably damaged by these revelations. We’ve known all along that the data may be biased by poor siting issues, handling of station dropout, or inadequate treatment of UHI effects. But nothing was revealed that suggests that the global temperature data sets are completely bogus, or unreliable.

On the weblog Dot Earth today, there is text from Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, that presents analyses of long term surface temperature trends from NASA, NCDC and Japan as if these are from independent sets of data from the analysis of CRU. Andy Revkin is perpetuating this myth in this write-up by not presenting the real fact that these analyses draw from the same original raw data. While they may use only a subset of this raw data, the overlap has been estimated as about 90-95%.

The unresolved problems with this surface data (which, of course, applies to all four locations) is reported in the peer reviewed paper

where I document that even the CCSP 1.1. report acknowledged this lack of independence.

Andy Revkin’s post on the surface temperature record data sets is not journalistically accurate. (Climate Science)

There is a response by Gavin Schmidt on Real Climate with respect to the role of land use change on the attribution of surface air temperature trends [thanks to Charlie Allen for alerting us to it!]. While Gavin has expertise in global climate modeling, his reply illustrates his lack of expertise on the role of landscape processes within the climate system, and, in this example, with respect to the role of land use/land cover change on long temperature trends. (Climate Science)

In the spring of 2006 (and annually since), a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five year forecast of hurricane activity (for 2006-2010). RMS predicted that U.S. insured hurricane losses would be 40% higher than average the historical average. RMS is the global leader in so-called "catastrophe modeling." Their loss models are used by insurance companies to set rates charged to homeowners, by reinsurance companies to set rates they charge to insurers, by ratings agencies for evaluating risks, and others.

In 2007 I produced an initial verification of the RMS forecast based on comparing actual losses over two hurricane seasons with the prediction, and suggested that the forecast was already off track. With the end of the 2009 North Atlantic hurricane season today, we now have 2 more years of data (for a total of 4 years) to use in evaluating the 5-year 2006 RMS forecast. The figure below shows the RMS forecast in the context of the historical average (insured) losses and the actual losses, all expressed on an annual basis. All data comes from the ICAT Damage Estimator and insured losses are calculated as 50% of total losses. (Note that 2009 had essentially no losses.) The figure at the top of this post shows the same data on a cumulative basis. ... (Roger Pielke Jr.)

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes. ( RICHARD S. LINDZEN, WSJ)

Perhaps it is comforting to believe that science is an absolute discipline: immune from fads, fanatics and frauds, untroubled by extremists, evangelists, glory-seekers and bigots. But it is not. It is as vulnerable to the vested interests and biases of its practitioners as any corporate entity or political party.

Uncomfortable truths are suppressed and dubious evidence given undue prominence.

Nowhere is this more worryingly obvious than in the science of climate change. As a field of research it has become so heavily politicised that opposing views are spoken of in terms of religion: believers and non-believers, with the accent being on the righteousness of the former and the benighted state of the latter. (Ian Plimer, Mail on Sunday)

Drastic cuts in carbon emissions may not be sufficient to avoid the worst ravages of global warming and the world will need to suck carbon from the atmosphere to avert permanent damage to the climate, according to a leading world authority on climate science. (The Times)

Of course, this new asecetic lifestyle cannot possibly be imposed on a man as grand as Pachauri, with such crucial work to do to save us from the gases he belches out the back of his jet:

Jonathan Foreman also wonders whether Pachauri has urged the guests at his global warming party next week to avoid catching those sinful planes:

Whatever the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Nature may have some extremely nasty surprises up its sleeve, say scientists.

They say Earth's biosphere has numerous "tipping points" -- triggers that cause global warming and its impacts to lurch up a gear or two, rather than occur in a smooth, incremental way.

In other words, the planet itself would become the main driver of warming, making the crisis far more difficult to manage.

Many of the tipping points have only been discovered within the last decade or so, and experts admit to many unknowns as to how and when they could occur. (AFP)

Sea levels could rise more than twice as fast as previously predicted due to melting ice caps around the south pole, according to the most comprehensive study into how climate change is affecting the Antarctic. (TDT)

OSLO - The world has emitted extra greenhouse gases this century equivalent to the annual totals of China and the United States above a maximum for avoiding the worst of climate change, a study estimated on Tuesday. (Reuters)

Former Beatle Paul McCartney has said that he will interrupt his European concert tour to tell world leaders how eating less meat can lead to less heat.

Throwing his weight behind a growing campaign to address global warming by reducing the amount of meat we eat, McCartney will fly to Brussels on Thursday, where he will make his case at a special hearing of the European Parliament. (ANI)

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell has directed the agency's regions and research stations to jointly produce draft "landscape conservation action plans" by March 1 to guide its day-to-day response to climate change.

In a memo (pdf) earlier this month requesting the plans, Tidwell said climate change is "dramatically reshaping" how the agency will deliver on its mission of sustaining the health and diversity of the nation's forests. He focused particularly on water management.

"Responding to the challenges of climate change in providing water and water-related ecosystem services is one of the most urgent tasks facing us as an agency," Tidwell wrote. "History will judge us by how well we respond to these challenges." (Greenwire)

By midnight most nights, the Skywalker bar of the Caribbean Princess was a sea of heaving bodies as young men and women engage in what the Americans call "grinding" and the Trinidadians call "whining".

The deck around the pool resembled a rave party with conga lines snaking through the deckchairs to thumping Caribbean and African music. Welcome to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, being hosted by Trinidad, in the Port of Spain. The island nation has brought in two giant cruise ships to accommodate the influx of officials, their staff, a huge youth delegation, staff and media. The accommodation is wonderful, the setting spectacular, and the welcome warm. The Commonwealth youth delegation, staying aboard the Caribbean Princess, are getting an education that perhaps the founders of the Commonwealth did not quite have in mind when they established this association of the remnants of the British empire.

But as the Commonwealth celebrates its 60th year, well might we wonder about CHOGM's purpose apart from boosting the economies of small nations and providing an almighty junket.

CHOGM spent the entire first day and half of the second on the issue of climate change, the defining issue of this century.

They produced a memorandum which advanced none of the substantive issues that will be on the table in Copenhagen in just seven days time. It was a show of good will by the 52 Commonwealth countries that amounted to little more than a pledge to support the process guided by the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

The only hard announcement out of the CHOGM was to support a $US10 billion Copenhagen Launch fund already proposed by the European nations, which was an absolute no-brainer for virtually all commonwealth members because island and African nations will be the beneficiaries. (Anne Davies, The Age)

BEIJING - A clutch of major emerging economies including China and India have forged a united front to put pressure on developed countries at next month's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Over two days of quietly arranged talks in Beijing, the countries said they had reached agreement on major issues, including the need for the West to provide finance and technology to help developing nations combat global warming.

The meeting was attended by senior officials from China, India, Brazil and South Africa as well as Sudan, the current chairman of the Group of 77 developing countries.

China is the world's top greenhouse gas emitter and India is the fourth largest, while Brazil is also a leading emitter, mainly through deforestation.

All three, along with South Africa, have come under pressure to curb the pace of their carbon pollution and have announced plans to achieve this.

They say steps by rich nations to fight climate change are, collectively, not good enough. (Reuters)

By offering concrete emission targets last week, the United States and China have resuscitated global climate talks that were headed toward an impasse. But the details that have yet to be resolved -- including the money that industrialized countries would offer poorer ones as part of an agreement -- suggest a political deal remains a heavy lift for the 192 countries set to convene in Copenhagen in little more than a week.

Negotiators aim to produce a blueprint for a legally binding international treaty that would replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012 and govern individual countries' greenhouse gas emissions. ( Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post)

Those who propose draconian measures to curb CO2 production need a math refresher course. Look at the projections. Assuming existing CO2 reduction policies are not changed, by 2030, human activity will account for about 3.3% of global CO2 production (NASA). By itself, the United States is projected to contribute 15.8% of world human emissions in 2030 (IEA/EIA). Therefore:

America's projected share of total world CO2 emissions in 2030 is 3.3% x 15.8% = 0.52%.

Barack Obama has pledged that by 2030, America will have decreased its CO2 emissions by 42%. How effective will that cut be versus America's projected emissions? Do the math.

3.3% x 15.8% x 42% = .22% of total world carbon emissions in 2030, and

15.8% x 42% = 6.64% of all human emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels.

There is, unfortunately, a critical problem with Barack's pledge. A reduction of that magnitude will definitely trash America's economy. ( Ronald R. Cooke, ESR)

President Obama is set to go to Copenhagen but more and more emerging details on ClimateGate is likely to make for a bumpy trip. Here’s this week’s toon:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — It seems like proponents for tough measures on climate change have fallen on hard times.

President Barack Obama, who campaigned for strong American leadership to fight global warming, has backpedaled. The Senate, preoccupied with health-care reform and a troubled economy, hasn't made climate change a priority. Majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada says the Senate may not vote on a climate change bill until well into 2010 — long after countries meet in Copenhagen for climate talks. (Matthew R. Auer, McClatchy-Tribune News Service)

WASHINGTON — A new global warming treaty would be all economic pain and little environmental gain for America even if China and other fast-developing nations sign on as well. But if developing nations remain exempted, it would be all economic pain and no environmental gain. Either way, America should stay out! At the United Nations' Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in early December proponents of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — which expires in 2012 — will try to hash out a new international agreement for lowering carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, a new global energy tax may be in the works.

The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol and for good reason. Its provisions would have cost American consumers trillions while having virtually no impact on world temperatures.

Nonetheless, many in the international community want to finalize stringent new post-2012 provisions at Copenhagen, or at least initiate the process that would lead to such measures. They have also expressed optimism that the Obama administration would join in such an agreement.

However, the United States should follow the policy set out in the Senate's 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution and not enter into any global warming treaty that harms the American economy or leaves out major developing nations. The resolution passed 95-0.

Despite that unanimous — and eminently reasonable — resolution, then-Vice President Al Gore led the American delegation to Kyoto and agreed to a treaty that violated both provisions. ( Ben Lieberman, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)

Next week, the United Nations climate change conference opens in Copenhagen. Its purpose is (or was) clear: to draft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

As UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared recently, Copenhagen must “forge a new international agreement ... [which] must contain the full range of commitments required: on emissions reductions by both developed and developing countries, on finance and on verification.”

Needless to say, nothing of the sort will be agreed upon. The reason we use carbon-based energy is simply that it is far and away the cheapest source of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

MOSCOW -- Russia is on track to far exceed its targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions under the Kyoto climate-change treaty, but its success could derail efforts to reach a new accord against global warming, according to officials and analysts following the negotiations.

At issue in the thorny dispute is the huge surplus of carbon credits that Russia -- the world's third-largest producer of energy-related greenhouse gases -- is amassing by keeping emissions under generous 1997 Kyoto Protocol limits. The Kremlin has insisted that the credits be carried over into a new agreement, but environmentalists say that would cripple any treaty by making it much cheaper for countries to buy credits than cut emissions.

"You've got an elephant in the room that nobody is paying attention to," said Samuel Charap, a Russia scholar at the Center for American Progress in Washington, arguing that the Obama administration needs to take up the issue with Russia's leaders. (Washington Post)

COPENHAGEN - Denmark's Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said on Monday that his government had not tabled a proposal for an agreement on fighting global warming for next month's U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen.

"The Danish government has not put forward a proposal," he told reporters. (Reuters)

History will record December 1, 2009 as the day of the first major political damage to the momentum of the Global Warming Scam.

For the first time anywhere in a major western democracy, a mainstream party is ready to face an election on “climate change” and face the bullies. The Australian Liberal Party have elected a new leader, held a secret ballot and voted 55 : 29 to defer the Emissions Trading Legislation.

Abbot said: “he was not afraid to fight an election on climate change policy. And I am not frightened of an election on this issue.”

The finale of one of the hottest weeks in Australian politics came down to a nail-biting 42:41 finish, but the earlier three-way split had Abbott a clear winner, and the secret ballot leaves no doubt the party doesn’t want to rush into this massive emissions trading legislation. The recent galaxy poll showed 80% of coalition voters don’t want it either.

The fog of the scare campaign has reached a peak and is now clearly lifting, but there is much to do. Abbott after all, supported the emissions trading scheme only a few months ago (though for political reasons rather than scientific or emotional ones).

This is a victory for grassroots action and democracy. For those who say the Liberal Party should have been allowed a vote of conscience in the Senate: One, the Labor Party weren’t (and there are skeptics in there who are relieved today); and two, who are we kidding, climate change is not a religion, is it? Hard science should never be decided by the heart. Why would anyone bother launching a weather satellite if a passionate belief could affect the atmosphere?

Senator Fielding is pushing for a Royal Commission. Let’s do the sums. Over the next decade with an emissions trading scheme Australians would pay $70,000 million dollars to foreign interests, with no benchmarks to estimate whether we have achieved anything except a symbolic victory. Cost of a Royal Commission: $100 million, or 0.001% of that outlay just to make sure. To twist some cliche’s:

If Rudd passionately believes the science is settled and the world is warming due to human activity, he will leap at the chance to prove it, right?

The press of course, almost to a person, don’t get it. Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald: “Tony Abbott will offer himself as a political opportunist, a man who has switched his position to profit from a surging wave of opposition to Turnbull’s position on climate change.” [SMH]

It never occurs to those driven by ideology and not facts that there is any chance that an international committee could have been corrupted, or that human socio-political processes could be distorted, or that scientists could have been human. The press just can’t see the wave of common sense coming (at long last) as politicians wake up to the global fraud.

All credit to the dedicated hard work of men like Denis Jensen (our only science related PhD in Parliament) who’s been pointing out the illogical, unbacked nature of this for about two years to his own party. Senator Minchin’s role has been crucial (the Minchinites won!). Cory Bernardi has been outspoken.

Breaking news: At a meeting of the Liberal Party’s Members of Parliament today, Malcolm Turnbull was turned out as Leader and replaced by Tony Abbott on a 42 to 41 vote. Abbott then immediately called for a vote of his colleagues on the Labour Government’s cap-and-trade bill to ration energy and raise energy prices. The vote was 54 to 29 against.

A number of Liberal Members have risked their careers to stop cap-and-trade, including Cory Bernardi and Nick Minchin as well as Tony Abbott. They should all be honored for their courageous stand.

Toppling Turnbull was a necessary step, but it isn’t the end of the story. It is likely that the Senate will now defeat the cap-and-trade bill for the second time. However, a few disgruntled Turnbullite Liberal Senators could provide the votes needed to pass it. If it is defeated, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could then call a general election of both the House and Senate. So the fight is still to be won or lost. (Myron Ebell, Cooler Heads)

CANBERRA - Australia's plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions are set for almost certain defeat in a hostile Senate after the opposition on Tuesday elected a new leader opposed to the government's carbon trading scheme.

Australia's new opposition leader, Tony Abbott, said opposition Senators would reject the government's carbon-trade laws if they are not deferred until early 2010. Abbott said he was not afraid of fighting an election on climate change.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has struggled to have his carbon-trade laws passed in the Senate, which is expected to vote on the legislation this week before parliament adjourns until February.

If the upper house rejects the carbon scheme for a second time, Rudd will have a trigger to call an early 2010 election on climate change, with polls suggesting his government would be returned with an increased majority. (Reuters)

CANBERRA - Australia's major rivers are shrinking and farms are gripped by drought as scientists warn of climate change, but that has not convinced some skeptical politicians to back carbon-trade laws.

In a pointer to the difficulty of striking a pact to curb global greenhouse gas emissions at climate talks in Copenhagen, Australia's parliament is at an impasse over a scheme to slash carbon emissions blamed for global warming. (Reuters)

December 1st, 2009

“Rudd’s ETS will be further examined or opposed outright by both the National and Liberal Parties following the election of Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader today, said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell.

Senator Boswell paid tributes to the thousands of Australians who had contacted Parliamentarians expressing concern over Rudd’s ETS. “Today is a victory for grass roots democracy.”

“I want to thank all those people who knew that the full story on the ETS was not being told by the government and its spokespeople. Depending on how the votes go in the Senate, they will have played a huge role in mobilising political opinion against the ETS.”

“If we are to fight a double dissolution election, we will campaign against a massive new tax that will not have any impact on climate change.”

“We look forward to that contest.”

“We will turn the debate into one that exposes the ‘economic change deniers’ of Rudd’s ETS.” (Senator Ron Boswell)

The climate has always changed, it always will. At some level man must be contributing to it. I strongly believe that reducing pollution can only be a good thing not only for the environment, but also for the Nation’s productive capacity and our kids’ future.

However the ‘debate’ over man-made global warming has now been hijacked by those who claim that if you are arguing against the Rudd Government’s Emission Trading Scheme then somehow you are arguing against the environment.

This is a ridiculous argument and for me this debate has always been about introducing practical policies which are effective, sensible, and do not destroy our economy or lead to worse environmental outcomes.

Nor is it surprising that so many Australian’s are saying they have no idea how Rudd’s carbon tax will work. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how it will work is having a serious lend of you. The best way to describe the CPRS Legislation is to think of it as an MOU [memorandum of understanding]. The rules for how it will work in practice are contained in the regulations and no-one has seen the regulations because apparently they haven’t been written yet! (John Cobb, The Punch)

LONDON - Trade in permits to pollute is "largely pointless" when compared with the scale of growth in greenhouse gases in China and must be scaled up, one of the carbon market's most senior traders said on Monday.

Countries and companies in the developed world can buy emissions rights by investing in carbon cuts in developing nations, under a Kyoto scheme called the clean development mechanism (CDM) meant to cut the cost of fighting climate change.

But those cuts were tiny compared with rises in the world's top emitter, said Garth Edward, head of emissions trading at Citigroup, and formerly head of trading at Shell.

"The CDM in China is largely pointless as far as reducing its emissions trajectory," he said.

China is by far the largest market in carbon offsets, having delivered cumulatively 99 million tonnes of emissions cuts under the CDM in 2007 and 2008, about 46 percent of the global total.

The country's carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and making cement rose by 15 percent or 947 million tonnes over the same time period, U.S. data show.

Critics say that trade in carbon offsets is opaque and benefits traders at investment banks and industry lobbyists who negotiate opt-outs for polluters. (Reuters)

There is a civil war on the Left against cap-and-trade as the centerpiece of a U.S. climate bill. Among the leading critics is NASA scientist and Al Gore mentor James Hansen, who reiterated his opposition in Sunday’s The Observer with Copenhagen’s climate summit in mind:

COPENHAGEN - Makers of washing machines and detergents should agree to cut carbon emissions from clothes washing by 80 percent in five to 10 years, the head of the world's biggest maker of industrial enzymes said on Monday.

Steen Riisgaard, chief executive of the Danish company Novozymes, said that besides benefiting the environment, an ambitious industrywide target could boost the firm's detergent enzymes business, its biggest division by sales. (Reuters)

TELUK MERANTI, Indonesia — From the air, the Kampar Peninsula in Indonesia stretches for mile after mile in dense scrub and trees. One of the world’s largest peat swamp forests, it is also one of its biggest vaults of carbon dioxide, a source of potentially lucrative currency as world governments struggle to hammer out a global climate treaty. The vault, though, is leaking.

Canals — used legally and illegally — extend from surrounding rivers nearly into the peninsula’s impenetrable core. By slowly draining and drying the peat land, they are releasing carbon dioxide, contributing to making Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. (NYT)

The leftist spin about the global-warming bills in Congress is that they're about, in Nancy Pelosi's words, "Jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs." Here's the reality, courtesy of Max Schultz:

Tens of thousands of Spanish solar workers have been laid off as a result of that country's flirtation with green jobs. Let's not get fooled again. (Iain Murray, NRO)

On Saturday, the paper published an unsigned editorial titled “No new nukes – plants, that is.” The piece declares that nuclear energy “is not a reasonable solution because plants take too long to build and cost far too much.” California’s paper of record recommends, predictably, that the US invest more money in “renewable power sources such as solar, wind and geothermal,” as well as “solar thermal storage facilities and plants that generate electricity using biomass.” It concludes that “Nuclear power is a failed experiment of the past, not an answer for the future.”

That piece reminded me of another Los Angeles Times editorial that I found during some recent research at the Library of Congress. While looking for articles about federal price controls on oil and natural gas, I came across another unsigned editorial from the Los Angeles Times, published in May 1975 called “Natural Gas: What to Do.” At that time, the US was facing a shortage of natural gas, a problem that was largely caused by federal price controls on interstate gas sales. The Times declared that a windfall profits tax should be imposed on the gas producers who “failed to plow most of the profits back into the hunt for new supplies.” The paper went on to conclude that “The choice is not between cheap and expensive natural gas, because there is no such thing as a plentiful supply of cheap gas.”

Of course, there’s no way that the Times could have foreseen how the shale gas revolution would overhaul the US natural gas sector. But the paper’s stance on nuclear power is of a piece with the myopia of America’s most influential environmental activists. (Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune)

A multi-million pound wind farm built off the Kent coast to provide energy for 100,000 homes has suffered repeated mechanical problems in the four years since it was built.

The Kentish Flats Offshore Wind Farm, which provides power to houses in Whitstable, Herne Bay and Canterbury, has undergone numerous upgrades to try and deal with setbacks that have caused a reduction in the amount of energy produced.

Gearboxes in all 30 turbines had to be replaced in 2006 and 2007, but just a year later 20 were changed again with another 10 due for replacement in 2010.

The gearboxes are vital for transferring power from the blades to the generator and are monitored by Vestas, a Danish producer of turbines.

A spokesperson at Vattenfall Wind Power, the Swedish owner of the wind farm, said despite the “teething problems” it is still one of the most efficient offshore farms in the world.

She added: “The turbines still work when there are problems with the gearboxes, but as a result there is less energy produced.”

The company was unable to reveal the amount of money spent on fixing the turbines or the amount lost through the reduction in energy. (Kent News)

PARIS - The number of deaths in mainland France from the H1N1 swine flu virus jumped in the last week, according to official data on Thursday.

The toll rose to 68 deaths as of Nov. 22, with 22 new deaths last week.

Six of the 68 victims had no underlying health problems, the country's health monitoring institute said.

Health minister Roselyne Bachelot said 750,000 people had already been vaccinated but admitted that many vaccination centres were facing long waiting lines.

The H1N1 pandemic continues to spread and has killed thousands of people around the world. (Reuters)

* Latest fatalities bring global toll to at least 7,826
* More than half of deaths in past week in the Americas
* Hospitalisations and deaths increasing in Canada

GENEVA - More than 1,000 deaths from the H1N1 swine flu virus were officially reported in the past week, a sharp rise which brings the global total to at least 7,826, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday.

More than half of the latest fatalities were reported by health authorities in the Americas region.

The winter flu season arrived early in the northern hemisphere this year and continues to be intense across parts of North America and much of Europe.

"In the United States and Canada, influenza transmission remains very active and geographically widespread," the WHO said, adding that the disease now appeared to have peaked in all U.S. regions. (Reuters)

* Study: reducing close contacts cuts transmission by 21 pct
* But benefit should be weighed against macroeconomic harm

LONDON - Closing schools could cut the transmission of H1N1 pandemic flu by a fifth but the negative macroeconomic impact of closures must be balanced against the benefits, scientists said on Friday.

Researchers looked at data from eight European countries and found closing schools in the event of an infectious disease pandemic like H1N1 would reduce close contacts by 10 percent and cut virus spread by 21 percent.

"Children are important spreaders of many close contact pathogens due to their frequent and intimate social contacts, (and) their general hygiene," said Niel Hens, from Hasselt and Antwerp University in Belgium, who led the research team.

"The reduced opportunity for contact ... would be a great benefit in a pandemic situation." (Reuters)

Recently, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas--a fraternal association "dedicated to the joy of being Santa"--made headlines by requesting that its members receive priority status for the H1N1 flu shot.

The story was gently mocked by the media criticism site Mediate as an early and ho-ho-hokey seasonal gift for local television, a not-so-novel way to exploit what seems to be turning into the biggest non-story of the year, brought to you by a combination of media panic and government overreaction.

But hokey or not, the Real Bearded Santas were on to something more than hype: Managing risk in public health is inseparable from communicating risk. (Trevor Butterworth, Forbes)

JUPITER was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-center trial conducted at 1315 sites in 26 countries, involving 17,802 patients. The trial was financially supported by Astra-Zeneca, manufacturers of Crestor®. The sponsor collected the trial data and monitored the study sites, but played no role in the conduct of the analyses or drafting of the manuscripts submitted for publication, and had no access to the unblinded trial data until after the manuscript was submitted for publication.

Initial results from JUPITER were presented November, 2008 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The findings were that Crestor reduced heart attack, stroke, need for bypass or angioplasty procedures, and cardiovascular death by 45 percent over less than two years. It is noted that the patients in the study had healthy cholesterol levels but high levels of a protein associated with inflammation and heart disease (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein), suggesting the drug may have substantial benefits even for those who do not have high levels of bad LDL cholesterol.

Additional analyses of the JUPITER data were presented recently at the American Heart Association Annual Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Florida. A key finding emerged for the ladies...

In a cohort of 6,801 women, Crestor reduced cardiovascular (CV) events [defined as the combined risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack), stroke, arterial revascularization, hospitalization for unstable angina, or death from CV causes] by 46 percent in women without cardiovascular disease, but at increased risk of a cardiovascular event as identified by age and elevated levels of the protein mentioned above.

The largest benefit for women was for arterial revascularization (76 percent reduction). This analysis also showed a 42 percent reduction in CV events for men.

Inasmuch as post-menopausal women are now getting heart disease at about the same rate as men, and outcomes for the ladies are worse, it's about time that someone took a look at the efficacy of statins in the fair sex.

As with all meds, they may not be for everyone, but it pays to consult with your physician to see what makes sense for you.

Read the complete HND article.

NEW YORK - People who work in detergent factories are at increased risk of developing respiratory problems, including asthma, probably from exposure to chemicals contained in detergent, two new studies hint.

But a spokesman for the detergent industry argues that the findings from these studies don't apply to the US and European detergent industries at large. "Over the years, the detergent industry has developed successful product stewardship programs to promote the safe use of enzymes, using appropriate risk assessment and risk management strategies to avoid unacceptable risks in the workplace," Richard Sedlak, vice president of technical and internal affairs for The Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), said in a prepared statement.

While the author of one of the new studies agrees that the industry overall has done a good job protecting workers, he said regulatory agencies' current exposure standards are too high.

Exposure to chemicals found in powdered detergent was first recognized in 1969 to cause job-related asthma. Since then, the industry has introduced measures for limiting workers' exposure, although outbreaks of occupational asthma still occur.

In the latest issue of the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Dr. Frits van Rooy of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and colleagues note that workers exposed to detergents in liquid form are not considered to be at risk of these lung problems. But their findings suggest that they should be. (Reuters Health)

It looks like we struck a nerve with at least one Greenie, on our recent Chinese drywall posting. Lloyd Alter, writing for treehugger.com protests that the Greens have not been ignoring the problem at all, and then cites three of his own articles, along with another that merely reports existing news. Forget for a moment that him citing himself, and one other treehugger posting, is hardly an unbiased survey of the Green blogosphere.

Perhaps he missed this, but the obvious point of my piece was that the usual suspect "Green" fear entrepreneurial fund-raising groups, such as NRDC, EWG, and US-PIRG have thrown none of their normal vitriol in the direction of Chinese drywall.

Alter is an architect, who does tend to comment on building issues, but even his postings lack the strident tone one would expect if the perp were, let's say, a chemical company. Alter is doing nothing more than reporting news that appeared elsewhere, and that was my point: Where is the outrage?

Rest assured that if NRDC, EWG, and US-PIRG saw the potential to raise money by harping on Chinese drywall, they would already have done it. But, there is no potential, since their donor base wants to see an evil American company as the perp. If not, there's no appeal. (pun intended)

A side issue is that the Greens loved the idea of removing manufacturing industry from our shores, in their simple minds, the perfect solution to achieve clean air and water. They hate to be reminded of the other consequence—besides job loss. That other consequence is importing polluted products from places like China. (Shaw's Eco-Logic)

NEW YORK - With the help of their doctors, women planning to become pregnant should take an inventory of the medications they take, researchers from Canada advise.

In a study, they found that many pregnant women still take medications long known to cause birth defects.

Some medications with known fetal risk, such as drugs that control epilepsy, are essential during pregnancy, Dr. Anick Berard, at the University of Montreal in Quebec, noted in an email correspondence to Reuters Health.

Other medications, such as those that treat severe acne, anxiety and psychiatric drugs, antibiotics, and many drugs prescribed for heart disease and medical conditions, "can and should be avoided," according to Berard.

Women should understand the side effects of any drug they are taking -- especially drugs treating a chronic condition -- and plan pregnancies to avoid or minimize risks such drugs pose to babies, Berard added. (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK - Children born to relatively older mothers or fathers may have a higher risk of autism than those with younger parents, a new study finds.

In a study of 7.5 million births in California between 1989 and 2002, researchers at the state's health department found that a child's risk of developing autism increased along with the age of the parents.

For each 10-year increase in a mother's age between the ages of 20 and 40, the risk of her child developing autism climbed by 38 percent -- with the father's age and other factors, like race and parents' education, taken into account.

Similarly, each 10-year increase in a father's age between the ages of 20 and 60 was associated with a 22-percent increase in autism risk.

The findings, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology, add to a conflicting body of research on what role, if any, parents' age plays in autism development. Past studies have either found that older age may increase the risk, or has no impact at all.

Autism spectrum disorders include several developmental brain disorders that, to varying degrees, hinder a person's ability to communicate and interact socially. The precise causes of autism are not fully understood, though researchers believe that genetic susceptibility plays a key role.

These latest findings suggest, but do not prove, that older age in parents may be an additional risk factor.

"The big problem," lead researcher Dr. Judith K. Grether told Reuters Health in an email, "is that we don't know what factors explain the link." (Reuters Health)

Once upon a time--this week, actually--mothers all over the world woke up and wondered whether their little boys were increasingly behaving like little girls. The cause for this sudden concern: a new study claiming chemicals in everyday plastics might be feminizing their brains.

Was this a feminist plot to end patriarchy and violence? A cunning plan by doll manufacturers in a hitherto-hidden war with toy-truck makers? A long-term strategy to improve the growth potential of grooming products for men? No, it was just another study that the media rushed into publication without any pause to examine how it was assembled. (Trevor Butterworth, Forbes)

SYDNEY - Understanding how kangaroos repair their DNA could be the key to preventing skin cancer, according to Australian and Austrian researchers.

The teams are investigating a DNA repair enzyme found in kangaroos and many other organisms, but not humans, that is very effective in fixing a particular type of damage linked to many skin cancers. (Reuters)

DNIPRODZERZHYNSK, Ukraine -- Twenty years ago, when the Iron Curtain came down, the world gagged in horror as it witnessed firsthand the ravages inflicted on nature by the Soviet industrial machine.

Throughout the crumbling communist empire, sewage and chemicals clogged rivers; industrial smog choked cities; radiation seeped through the soil; open pit mines scarred green valleys. It was hard to measure how bad it was and still is: The focus was more on production quotas than environmental data.

Today, Europe has two easts -- one that has been largely cleaned up with the help of a massive infusion of Western funds and the prospect of membership in the prosperous European Union; another that still looks as though the commissars never left. ( Arthur Max, Associated Press)