About 10 years ago, December 20, 2002 to be exact, we published a paper titled “Revised 21st century temperature projections” in the journal Climate Research. We concluded:

Temperature projections for the 21st century made in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a rise of 1.4 to 5.8C for 1990-2100. However, several independent lines of evidence suggest that the projections at the upper end of this range are not well supported… The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low end of the IPCC TAR projections.

We examined several different avenues of determining the likely amount of global warming to come over the 21st century. One was an adjustment to climate models based on (then) new research appearing in the peer-reviewed journals that related to the strength of the carbon cycle feedbacks (less than previously determined), the warming effect of black carbon aerosols (greater than previously determined), and the magnitude of the climate sensitivity (lower than previous estimates). Another was an adjustment (downward) to the rate of the future build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide that was guided by the character of the observed atmospheric CO2 increase (which had flattened out during the previous 25 years). And our third estimate of future warming was the most comprehensive, as it used the observed character of global temperature increase - an integrator of all processes acting upon it - to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a collection of climate models. All three avenues that we pursued led to somewhat similar estimates for the end-of- the-century temperature rise. Here is how we described our findings in paper’s Abstract:

Since the publication of the TAR, several findings have appeared in the scientific literature that challenge many of the assumptions that generated the TAR temperature range. Incorporating new findings on the radiative forcing of black carbon (BC) aerosols, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity, and the strength of the climate/carbon cycle feedbacks into a simple upwelling diffusion/energy balance model similar to the one that was used in the TAR, we find that the range of projected warming for the 1990�2100 period is reduced to 1.1�2.8C. When we adjust the TAR emissions scenarios to include an atmospheric CO2 pathway that is based upon observed CO2 increases during the past 25 yr, we find a warming range of 1.5�2.6C prior to the adjustments for the new findings. Factoring in these findings along with the adjusted CO2 pathway reduces the range to 1.0�1.6C. And thirdly, a simple empirical adjustment to the average of a large family of models, based upon observed changes in temperature, yields a warming range of 1.3�3.0C, with a central value of 1.9C.

We thus concluded:

Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0C, with a central value that averages 1.8C across our analyses.

Little did we know at the time, but behind the scenes, our paper, the review process that resulted in its publication, the editor in charge of our submission, and the journal itself, were being derided by the sleazy crowd that revealed themselves in the notorious “Climategate” emails, first released in November, 2009. In fact, the publication of our paper was to serve as one of the central pillars that this goon squad used to attack on the integrity of the journal Climate Research and one of its editors, Chris de Freitas.

The initial complaint about our paper was raised back in 2003 shortly after its publication by Tom Wigley, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Toronto�s L. D. Danny Harvey, who served as supposedly “anonymous” reviewers of the paper and who apparently had a less than favorable opinion about our work that they weren�t shy about spreading around. According to Australian climate scientist Barrie Pittock:

I heard second hand that Tom Wigley was very annoyed about a paper which gave very low projections of future warmings (I forget which paper, but it was in a recent issue [of Climate Research]) got through despite strong criticism from him as a reviewer.

So much for being anonymous.

The nature of Wigley and Harvey’s dissatisfaction was later made clear in a letter they sent to Chris de Freitas (the editor at Climate Research who oversaw our submission) and demanded to know the details of the review process that led to the publication of our paper over their recommendation for its rejection. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

Your decision that a paper judged totally unacceptable for publication should not require re-review is unprecedented in our experience. We therefore request that you forward to us copies of the authors responses to our criticisms, together with: (1) your reason for not sending these responses or the revised manuscript to us; (2) an explanation for your judgment that the revised paper should be published in the absence of our re-review; and (3) your reason for failing to follow accepted editorial procedures.

Wigley asked Harvey to distribute a copy of their letter of inquiry/complaint to a large number of individuals who were organizing some type of punitive action against Climate Research for publishing what they considered to be “bad” papers. Apparently, Dr. de Freitas responded to Wigley and Harvey’s demands with the following perfectly reasonable explanation:

The [Michaels et al. manuscript] was reviewed initially by five referees… The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the [manuscript] back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual.

This did little to appease to those wanting to discredit Climate Research (and prevent the publication of “skeptic” research) as evidenced by this email from Mike Mann to Tom Wigley and a long list of other influential climate scientists:

Dear Tom et al,

Thanks for comments - I see we’ve built up an impressive distribution list here!
...

Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit.

This should be justified not on the basis of the publication of science we may not like of course, but based on the evidence (e.g. as provided by Tom and Danny Harvey and I’m sure there is much more) that a legitimate peer-review process has not been followed by at least one particular editor.

Mann went on to add “it was easy to make sure that the worst papers, perhaps including certain ones Tom refers to, didn’t see the light of the day at J. Climate.” This was because Mann was serving as an editor of the Journal of Climate and was indicating that he could control the content of accepted papers. But since Climate Research was beyond their direct control, it required a different route to content control. Thus pressure was brought to bear on the editors as well as on the publisher of the journal. And, they were willing to make things personal. For a more complete telling of the type and timeline of the pressure brought upon Chris de Freitas and Climate Research see this story put together from the Climategate emails by Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That.

Now, let’s turn the wheels of time ahead 10 years, to January 10, 2012. Just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper with this provocative title: “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” by Nathan Gillett and colleagues from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis of Environment Canada (not a group that anyone would confuse with the usual skeptics). An excerpt from the paper’s abstract provides the gist of the analysis:

Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model’s projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851�2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2).

Or, to put it another way, Gillett et al. used the observed character of global temperature increase - an integrator of all processes acting upon it - to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a climate model. Sounds familiar!!

And what did they find? From the Abstract of Gillett et al.:

Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3�1.8C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.

The Transient Climate Response is the temperature rise at the time of the doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which will most likely occur sometime in the latter decades of this century. Which means that results of Gillett et al. are in direct accordance with the results of Michaels et al. published 10 years prior and which played a central role in precipitating the wrath of the Climategate scientists upon us, Chris de Freitas and Climate Research.

Both the Gillett et al. (2012) and the Michaels et al. (2002) studies show that climate models are over-predicting the amount of warming that is a result of human changes to the constituents of the atmosphere, and that when they are constrained to conform to actual observations of the earth’s temperature progression, the models project much less future warming (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dashed lines show the projected course of 21st century global temperature rise as projected by the latest version (CanESM2) of the Canadian coupled ocean‐atmosphere climate model for three different future emission scenarios (RCPs). Colored bars represent the range of model projections when constrained by past 160 years of observations. All uncertainty ranges are 5�95%. (figure adapted from Gillet et al., 2012: note the original figure included additional data not relevant to this discussion).

And a final word of advice to whoever was the editor at GRL that was responsible for overseeing the Gillett et al. publication - watch your back.

References:

Gillett, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.

Michaels, P.J., et al., 2002. Revised 21st century temperature projections. Climate Research, 23, 1-9.

And what about a guy with a clash of financial interests and the spouse of a radical Marxist wife?

Climate activist blog Mother Jones has posted this interesting video that complains about the conservative attitudes of the Republican Party (and the G.O.P. presidential candidates) to the issue of climate change:

The video was created ahead of the New Hampshire primaries.

If you listen to 4:00-5:00, you will hear a lot from MIT climate alarmist Kerry Emanuel. He describes himself as one of the few Republican scientists in the U.S. His impressive punch line is that he is ashamed to be an American because the Republican party that he votes for (much like Obama whom he chose in 2008) isn’t alarmist enough.

Instead, Kerry tells us, the Republican party is all about responsibility. And the main responsibility of the conservative people is to act collectively, share the wealth with the whole world, introduce and increase taxes, kindly ask the anointed people in the government to take care of everything, and to adopt the opinions about the climate that were held by Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, and (today) Fidel Castro.

Well, I thought that one of the defining features of the Republican Party is that it usually does not share these opinions, and even if it believed that there is a problem related to the climate (which it shouldn’t because there’s none), it should adopt totally different solutions than those that are proposed by the most radical left-wing forces in the world. In other words, if many of the candidates for the Republican Party were paying lip service to the climate jihad and propaganda, it wouldn’t really be a conservative party.

Fine. These things are probably obvious to most readers. But Kerry Emanuel paints himself as a heroic climate alarmist inside a party that rejects the climate hysteria. Is he really brave? Is his formal political affiliation the most important fact he has to consider when he decides what opinions he should promote?

Not at all. There are more important things than your (very loosened) party affiliation - for example, the stability of your marriage and your banking account.

Let me start with the latter. If you make a Google search, you will need a minute to find out that Kerry A. Emanuel is either a board member or director of two insurance companies that are making money out of many things including the hypothetical climatic threats:

�AlphaCat Fund Ltd

�Homesite Insurance Company

Click the links above to see the sources including the name of the MIT professor.

Homesite is insuring landlords against things like floods (the first thing in the title of their web page). For example, you may be afraid that your house in Boston will be destroyed by the rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet (or from a “divine wind”, see the book above) and to pay some money to Homesite. Do you think that its director, Kerry A. Emanuel, will care about the money?

Rick Santorum, a flavor of the month, sensibly presents a rational, Republican attitude to a problem in NH

If you need to verify that it is the same Kerry Emanuel of MIT who is a director of this flood insurance company, try this page. He became a director in June 2011.

If the insurance against rising sea levels, hurricanes, and floods isn’t enough for your insurance company, or if you’re not satisfied that you’re just a director, Kerry Emanuel doesn’t rely just on HomeSite Insurance company. He is also a board member of the AlphaCut Fund, owned by Bermuda-based Validus Holdings, which is described in this way:

The AlphaCat Fund and the AlphaCat High Return Fund invest in private reinsurance transactions as well as catastrophe bonds, a common type of ILS issued by insurance and reinsurance companies. Validus Managers leverages the Validus Group�s extensive business sourcing, underwriting, research and analytic capabilities to construct ILS portfolios with a superior long-term expected return subject to prudent risk constraints.

Thanks to Junk Science.COM for the discovery of this insurance company; I found the Homesite. I can’t rule out that you will find additional insurance companies with a Kerry Emanuel on their board.

In the Czech Republic, we call Kerry Emanuel’s positions on global warming a “clash of interests” ("stret/konflikt zajmu” if you want the original words). I just happened to think that a few hundreds thousands or millions of dollars may be more important than some loosened relationship to any party - that Kerry Emanuel only uses to mask what he really cares about.

Wife

But the bizarre financial interests are not the end of the story. There’s something else that is decisively non-Republican about Kerry Emanuel: his wife. Susan Boyd-Bowman was born in Boston in 1950 but according to her CV (thanks, Steve!), she actually gave up her U.S. citizenship around the 1960s and she actually lived in the U.K. between 1974 and 1989. Her primary residence is in Lexington, Massachusetts (a small town I know pretty well, too, and have hundreds of photographs from there: we often biked there with a friend of mine and I’ve visited about two parties thrown by a co-author I share with Stephen Hawking who lives there) but she only lives in the U.S. on resident visa. Her secondary residence is in France.

Your humble correspondent has spent 6 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the same town where Kerry Emanuel works. So even though I may have never met him, I know many things. You know, one talks to many people in 6 years. One of the things I know is the reason why she abandoned the U.S. citizenship. She’s been a real hardcore left-wing activist and she was just ashamed to be an American at least since the 1960s. You know, America is a symbol of the evils of capitalism! Google Scholar is enough for you to check that Susan has belonged to the Marxist structuralist tradition whenever she wrote about TV. She’s always thought that good films should always mention “gender” and stay inside feminist and neo-Marxist perspectives.

I can give you another hint that nothing much has changed about her political views since the 1960s.

So Kerry Emanuel isn’t the first member of his family who is ashamed to be an American, so I guess that you don’t need to pay any attention to such big words. However, he may be the first member of his family who is superficially ashamed to be an American but who has flagrant financial conflicts of interests that actually drive his dishonest claims about the climate.

I urge Kerry Emanuel not to hide the facts that really matter in his future interviews and texts; his questionable links to the G.O.P. are not among the primary things that matter; it was inconceivable that no one would notice the things that actually do matter. Thank you very much for your understanding.

Kerry a decade ago was part of a panel on the Perfect Storm. He was asked with the rest of us of Global Warming was real. He like the rest of us replied the evidence was not there. He later went that direction because as he implied to colleagues that was where the grant money was. And the accolades. When he crossed over to the dark side, the AMS awarded him with three presigious awards the FIRST year. And this ‘republican’ had a party celebrating Obama’s election in 2008.

Consumer Reports has painted an ugly picture of the Nissan Leaf, as did an early enthusiast based in Los Angeles, who described his frustrations with the heavily subsidized, all-electric car in a recent column.

Now comes what must be the definitive example of the Leaf’s impracticality - this time from a (still) hard-core advocate, whose 180-mile Tennessee trek to visit family over the holidays required four lengthy stops to keep the vehicle moving.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, set out from Knoxville on Monday with his wife and son, headed for the Nashville area. His plan (appropriately) was to follow Interstate 40 West, where a series of Cracker Barrel restaurants - equipped with so-called “fast” vehicle chargers (if you want to call 30 minutes or more “fast") along the route - would provide an electricity security blanket as the Leaf’s charge diminished.

Only problem was, the Leaf’s charge dropped more rapidly than promised. In what has to be a public relations disaster for Nissan, Smith’s EV was unable to travel no farther than 55 miles on any leg of the trip - and for the most part, much less. The company, and its government backers, proclaimed the Leaf was “built to go 100 miles on a charge” (large print), with a footnoted disclaimer (small print) that it travels shorter distances (like, 70 miles) if the air conditioning or the heater is used. Turns out even that was an exaggeration.

It was about 35 degrees in the Volunteer State when Smith departed Knoxville on Monday, and Mrs. Smith and his five-year-old son apparently were not willing to forgo heat in order to make the EV cause look good. A trip that should take - according to map Web sites - less than three hours, ended up lasting six hours for the Smiths because of all the stops they had to make. The approximate intervals where they paused for recharging were as follows:

�Knoxville to Harriman: 45 miles
�Harriman to Crossville: 31 miles
�Crossville to Cookeville: 31 miles
�Cookeville to Lebanon: 50 miles
�Lebanon to destination in Antioch, just south of Nashville: 22 miles

Hence the Smiths required four recharges in order to travel approximately 180 miles. According to the account in The Tennessean, they experienced their first “hair-raiser” range anxiety before they even reached Harriman.

“The display on the dashboard of their Nissan LEAF showed a drop in available range from 100 miles to about 50, when they had only traveled about 40 miles,” reported the Gannett-owned newspaper, which also owns USA Today, a cheerleader of all “clean” energy projects regardless of viability.

If the specs promised by Nissan and Leaf advocates were to be believed, the Smiths should have been able to travel about 25-30 miles past Harriman (where it took 20 minutes to boost the battery to 80 percent) before they�d need a recharge, even when using the car heater. But because of the limited availability of so-called “fast chargers” (440 volts, 30 minutes), the intermediate stop was necessary in order to climb the upcoming Cumberland Plateau and reach the next Cracker Barrel “fast charger” in Crossville. The chargers (which, by the way, don’t work for the Chevy Volt and won’t for many future EVs planned for release) are sparse because they cost $40,000 each, and companies like Ecotality apparently can only do so much with the $115 million Department of Energy grant it received to deploy the equipment.

At Crossville, according to The Tennessean, the Smiths’ battery gauge failed them again. The reading at Harriman said they could go another 70 miles, but after 31 miles, the gauge indicated they only had 20 miles of range remaining. Obviously that wasn’t to be trusted.

“It was a little nerve wracking,” Stephen Smith told the Nashville-based newspaper. “I’m finding the range is not 100 percent accurate.”

But heading west from Crossville, according to Smith, would not be as taxing on the Leaf: “Cookeville will be about the same distance but it will be flat or downhill.” It turned out his battery gauge maintained accuracy on that leg of the trip, but when he reached Lebanon (50 miles), he found that the Ecotality “Blink” fast-charger at the Cracker Barrel was, uh, on the blink (he should have known that was possible, if not likely). So instead he had to plug in to another slower charger at the restaurant, which took an hour to boost the battery enough (they hoped) to travel the remaining 22 miles to their destination.

The Smiths arrived at their destination in Antioch with what the Leaf told them was six miles of range remaining. All that after an anxiety-filled six-hour trip that was more than twice as long as it would take in a gasoline vehicle, which could probably have been accomplished with a single stop for a bathroom break.

The Smiths’ experience echoed that of a Consumer Reports reviewer and Los Angeles columnist Rob Eshman, who called his Leaf his “2011 Nissan Solyndra.” Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal, experienced the same gauge inaccuracies and range anxiety that came from traversing hills and mountains and the use of his air conditioning in hot, smoggy L.A.

“My life now revolves around a near-constant calculation of how far I can drive before I’ll have to walk,” Eshman wrote. “The Nissan Leaf, I can report, is perfect if you don’t have enough anxiety in your life.”

Of course, you won’t hear words like that from the lips of passionate “Green” energy advocate Smith, who chalked up the experience to being an “early adopter” and a pioneer.

“It’s good knowing we didn’t use a drop of oil getting down here,” he said. He must have had a similar fuzzy feeling on his return trip, which “only” took five hours, since the Lebanon charger was working later in the week.

As for the heavily coal-generated electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority that powered his trip, well, let’s not go there. Let’s just pretend that windmills and solar panels could have just as easily done the trick, if the EPA and Department of Energy would just do their jobs and eliminate all coal power plants and “invest” billions more taxpayer dollars in “renewables” deployment.

As for “why Tennessee” as part of this EV system rollout, you might ask? Thanks be to taxpayers there, also, as Nissan has in its back pocket a $1.4 billion federal loan to retrofit a plant in Smyrna - just outside Nashville - to mass-produce the Leaf. As company CEO Carlos Ghosn has said publicly, Nissan will produce EVs wherever government will produce the financial incentives.

And that’s what it takes in order for the “Green” energy industry swindle to survive.

Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center.

By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner

This article, the second in a series, focuses on the misleading performance claims surrounding the “more energy efficient” compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs now replacing traditional incandescent bulbs. These potentially harmful mercury-filled lamps (see my previous column describing the dangers) are being forced on consumers by the U.S. congress with support from the Green Lobby and light-bulb manufacturers like GE, Sylvania and Phillips. These and other manufacturers stand to make huge profits selling the more expensive CFLs (more on that issue in my next column).

There is a growing body of evidence undermining claims of the EPA, environmental lobby and light bulb manufacturers touting the performance advantages of mercury-laced CFL bulbs.

Exaggerated lifespan

Real-world reports from the home front show that the claimed extended lifespan of CFLs is often greatly exaggerated. There is ample data indicating that the frequent switching on and off of CFLs greatly shortens their life. A study by H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and co-author Amanda Berg concludes

“Unfortunately, except under a fairly narrow range of circumstances, CFLs are less efficient than advertised.  Manufacturers claim the average life span of a CFL bulb is 10,000 hours. However, in many applications the life and energy savings of a CFL are significantly lower.  Applications in which lighting is used only briefly (such as closets, bathrooms, motion detectors and so forth) will cause CFL bulbs to burn out as quickly as regular incandescent bulbs . . . When initially switched on, CFLs may provide as little as 50 percent to 80 percent of their rated light output and can take up to three minutes to reach full brightness.”

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Pacific Gas & Electric originally estimated the useful life of CFL bulbs at 9.4 years. But based on real-world results, the company was forced to lower its estimate to 6.3 years, meaning that it had overstated bulb life by 49 percent. “The early burn-out rate, along with several other factors, meant that the actual energy savings were 73 percent less than the 1.7 billion kilowatt hours projected by PG&E,” the Journal reported.

Less bright, more dim with age

As many consumers have noticed, CFL bulbs grow dimmer as they age. In a 2003-2004 study, the U.S. Department of Energy reported that one-fourth of CFLs, after only 40 percent of their rated service life, no longer produced at their rated output.

And according to Wikipedia: “CFLs produce less light later in their lives than when they are new. The light output decay is exponential, with the fastest losses being soon after the lamp is first used. By the end of their lives, CFLs can be expected to produce 70-80% of their original light output.”

After conducting its own tests on bulbs from several manufacturers, The Sunday Telegraph in London “found that under normal conditions, using a single lamp to light a room, an 11W low-energy CFL produced only 58 percent of the illumination of an ‘equivalent’ 60W bulb - even after a 10-minute ‘warm-up.’”

The European Commission, which led the effort to ban incandescent bulbs in Europe, said that claims by manufacturers that CFL’s shine as brightly as old-fashioned bulbs are “not true.”

Posted on its website for consumers was the warning that “exaggerated claims are often made on the packaging about the light output of compact fluorescent lamps.”

Higher heating bills

Go-Green advocates like to complain about the fact that 90 percent of the energy from incandescent lights is given off as heat, with only 10 percent providing illumination. But they ignore one important fact:  The extra heat given off during the winter months can actually lower energy bills.

According to a study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “The heat of incandescent lights - more than 341 Btu per bulb per hour - can help to warm a room.  Therefore, if the cost of electricity is low relative to the cost of home heating fuel, there may be an economic case for changing to incandescent bulbs in colder seasons.”

In other words, on a cold day when you’re running your electric heater, it makes sense to flip on all those incandescent heat sources. Of course, the contribution of incandescent bulbs to lower heating bills is conveniently missing from pro-CFL literature.

Unsuitable for outdoor lighting

What about the use of CFLs for outdoor lighting? Forget it. Most do not operate well in low temperatures, a performance shortfall that makes them virtually useless for home-security lighting, including as lights in motion detectors. By signing the incandescent bulb’s death warrant, congress has effectively rendered useless outdoor lighting systems that keep away intruders and discourage home break-ins.

Myth of mercury reduction

One of the most misleading arguments advanced in defense of CFLs is the assertion that they reduce harmful mercury levels (a dubious proposition given that the bulbs themselves are laced with mercury).

Case in point: In a letter to the Wall Street Journal in December, CFL advocate Nicole Lederer claimed that “coal-fired power plants produce about half of all mercury.”

In his Jan. 5 response, Charles Battig of Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment-Virginia called the statement “scientifically vacuous and misleading.”

Battig cited data from an op-ed ("The Myth of Killer Mercury” by Willie Soon and Paul Driessen) that broke down mercury contributions as follows: �U.S. coal-fired plants, about 41-48 tons per year; forest fires, about 44 tons per year; Chinese power plants, 400 tons per year, while recurring geological events such as volcanoes and geysers emit 9,000-10,000 tons per year.�

“With these missing pieces of information, wrote Battig, the U.S. power plant contribution of mercury is closer to a 0.5% value than the “half of all mercury” claim by Ms. Lederer.”

Battig then offered this advice:

“Would that Ms. Lederer and the Environmental Entrepreneurs expend an equal amount of environmental anguish over placing compact fluorescent lamp bulbs indoors in homes, schools and factories. These mercury-containing, stealth-pollution bulbs bring the mercury threat right into your living room and nursery.”

No good reason for switchover

The fact is there is no good reason for consumers - even energy-conscious go-green enthusiasts - to replace their old incandescent bulbs with the much-overhyped and potentially dangerous CFL lamps. The sole beneficiaries of the forced switchover are light bulb manufacturers who stand to make huge profits selling CFL bulbs whose shelf price has been artificially lowered (but still is higher than incandescent bulbs) through hefty subsidies paid to them by taxpayers.

In light of the facts, the switchover to CFL bulbs has become a real consumer turn-off.

By Nir Shaviv, Science Bits

A few days ago I had a very pleasant meeting with Andrew Bolt. He was visiting Israel and we met for an hour in my office. During the discussion, I mentioned that the writers of the recent IPCC reports are not very scientific in their conduct and realized that I should write about it here.

Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them). In the global warming “science”, this is not the case.

What do I mean?

From the first IPCC report until the previous IPCC report, climate predictions for future temperature increase where based on a climate sensitivity of 1.5 to 4.5C per CO2 doubling. This range, in fact, goes back to the 1979 Charney report published by the National Academy of Sciences. That is, after 33 years of climate research and many billions of dollars of research, the possible range of climate sensitivities is virtually the same! In the last (AR4) IPCC report the range was actually slightly narrowed down to 2 to 4.5C increase per CO2 doubling (without any good reason if you ask me). In any case, this increase of the lower limit will only aggravate the point I make below, which is as follows.

Because the possible range of sensitivities has been virtually the same, it means that the predictions made in the first IPCC report in 1990 should still be valid. That is, according to the writers of all the IPCC reports, the temperature today should be within the range of predictions made 22 years ago. But they are not!

The business as usual predictions made in 1990, in the first IPCC report, are given in the following figure.

The business-as-usual predictions made in the first IPCC report, in 1990. Since the best range for the climate sensitivity (according to the alarmists) has not changed, the global temperature 22 years later should be within the predicted range. From this graph, we take the predicted slopes around the year 2000.

How well do these predictions agree with reality? In the next figure I plot the actual global and oceanic temperatures (as made by the NCDC). One can argue that either the ocean temperature or the global (ocean+land) temperature is better. The Ocean temperature includes smaller fluctuations than the land (and therefore less than the global temperature as well), however, if there is a change in the average global state, it should take longer for the oceans to react. On the other hand, the land temperature (and therefore the global temperature) is likely to include the urban heat island effect.

>
Enlarged

The NCDC ocean (blue) and global (brown) monthly temperature anomalies (relative to the 1900-2000 average temperatures) since 1980. The observed temperatures compared to the predictions made in the first IPCC report. Note that the width of the predictions is �0.1�C, which is roughly the size of the month to month fluctuations in the temperature anomalies.

From the simulations that my student Shlomi Ziskin has carried out for the 20th century, I think that the rise in the ocean temperature should be only about 90% of the global temperature warming since the 1980’s, i.e., the global temperature rise should be no more than about 0.02-0.03�C warmer than the oceanic warming (I’ll write more about this work soon). As we can see from the graph, the difference is larger, around 0.1�C. It would be no surprise if this difference is due to the urban heat island effect. We know from McKitrick and Michaels’ work, that there is a spatial correlation between the land warming and different socio-economic indices (i.e., places which developed more, had a higher temperature increase). This clearly indicates that the land data is tainted by some local anthropogenic effects and should therefore be considered cautiously. In fact, they claim that in order to remove the correlation, the land warming should be around 0.17�C per decade instead of 0.3. This implies that the global warming over 2.2 decades should be 0.085�C cooler, i.e., consistent with the difference!

In any case, irrespective of whether you favor the global data, or the oceanic data, it is clear the the temperature with its fluctuations is inconsistent with the “high estimate” in the IPCC-FAR (and it has been the case for a decade if you take the oceanic temperature, or half a decade, if you take the global temperature, not admitting that it is biased). In fact, it appears that only the low estimate can presently be consistent with the observations. Clearly then, earth’s climate sensitivity should be revised down, and the upper range of sensitivities should be discarded and with it, the apocalyptic scenarios which they imply. For some reason, I doubt that the next AR5 report will consider this inconsistency, nor that they will revise down the climate sensitivity (and which is consistent with other empirical indicators of climate sensitivity). I am also curious when will the general public realize that the emperor has no clothes.

Of course, Andrew commented that the alarmists will always claim that there might be something else which has been cooling, and we will pay for our CO2 sevenfold later. The short answer is that �you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time!� (or as it should be adapted here, �you cannot fool most of the people indefinitely!�).

The longer answer is that even climate alarmists realize that there is a problem, but they won�t admit it in public. In private, as the climate gate e-mails have revealed, they know it is a problem. In October 2009, Kevin Trenberth wrote his colleagues: �
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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate. �
However, instead of reaching the reasonable conclusion that the theory should be modified, the data are “surely wrong”. (This, btw, is a sign of a new religion, since no fact can disprove the basic tenets).

When you think of it, those climatologists are in a rather awkward position. If you exclude the denial option (apparent in the above quote), then the only way to explain the �travesty� is if you have a joker card, something which can provide warming, but which the models don�t take into account. It is a catch-22 for the modelers. If they admit that there is a joker, it disarms their claim that since one cannot explain the 20th century warming without the anthropogenic contribution, the warming is necessarily anthropogenic. If they do not admit that there is a joker, they must conclude (as described above) that the climate sensitivity must be low. But if it is low, one cannot explain the 20th century without a joker. A classic Yossarian dilemma.

This joker card is of course the large solar effects on climate. 

Drew Cline, Union leader

A group called Carbon Solutions New England has circulated a petition that it says was signed by 50 scientists urging the Republican presidential candidates and all other candidates for public office “to acknowledge the overwhelming balance of evidence for the underlying causes of climate change, to support appropriate responses to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, and to develop local and statewide strategies to adapt to near-term changes in climate.”

The petition lists recent temperature and weather trends, such as warmer autumns and winters and more storms, and asserts such indisputably rigorous scientific assessments as: “These shifts in New Hampshire�s climate are clearly connected to changes in global climate.”

To respond with equal scientific authority: No, they’re not.

That is, some seem to be, others might not be, but where is the proof of a connection to human behavior? They provide none.

It is a funny little bit of propaganda made all the more humorous by its labeling as “scientists” a historian, a sociologist, two political scientists, a professor of health economics, several civil engineers, two medical doctors, and some Ph.D. candidates.

Nothing says “We are serious scientists; heed our doomsday predictions!” quite like the overstating of credentials. If they’ll overstate their credentials, then why wouldn’t they overstate the connection between recent weather events and human behavior?

Nonetheless, the petition got written up in The Hill, which lent it some undue legitimacy. Voters ought to ignore it.

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Even the Warmists Don’t Believe In Global Warming
By Louis Woodhill, Forbes

Much was written about the most recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was held in Durban, South Africa November 28 through December 9 of this year. However, most commentators gave short shrift to the most important - in a sense, the only - outcome of the meeting. This was, of course, the agreement to hold yet another conference in yet another nice location (Qatar) about a year from now.

The Durban conference was the seventeenth conference of its kind. They have been held annually since 1995 in places such as Geneva (in July 1996) and Bali (in December 2007). Don�t hold your breath for one to be held in Newark, New Jersey, or Fargo, North Dakota.

The meeting in Durban provided an opportunity for Progressives to make their latest argument that ordinary people should surrender their freedom and hand all money and power over to unelected, unaccountable “experts” like, well, the people at the conference. This is, of course, in order to “save the planet” from “climate change”. (The issue that had for years been called “global warming” was rebranded as “climate change” when the most recent decade’s worth of data proved uncooperative.)

First, let’s get the known and knowable facts out of the way. Is the climate changing? Yes. One feature of the manifested universe is the impermanence of all things. The climate has changed over time and will continue to change. Is the change good or bad? Like all change, it is both good and bad.

But, overall, is it good or bad? We can’t say. We don’t even have a conceptual framework that would allow us to answer that question, or even to adequately describe how the climate is changing. “Climate” is an abstraction, and all abstractions are untrue (or at least incomplete).

Is human activity causing the climate to change? We don�t know, and there is no way, even in principle, that we can know. It is difficult enough to determine the “what” of climate change. To determine the “why”, we would need to do controlled experiments. And, for this, we would need another planet, identical in every way to our own earth, which we could use as a “control”.

But wait! Isn’t the science “settled”, thus making anyone who questions the climate change “consensus” an anti-intellectual Luddite? No. Nothing in science is ever settled.

“Science” consists of nothing but theories that have not yet been disproved by evidence, but which, in principle, could be so disproved. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has been validated by thousands of experiments and measurements over almost a century, was recently called into question by experiments involving neutrinos that appeared to travel faster than light.

If something is “settled”, it is not science. It is religious dogma, and an assault upon freedom of thought and inquiry.

But don’t the climate scientists’ computer models prove that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing climate change? No. First, no computer model can ever prove anything (see the definition of “science” given above). Second, we do not have the capability to model a system as complex as the earth.

The most any computer model can be is a useful tool. As it happens, all of the computer models that have been developed over the years by climate change proponents have already been invalidated by events that they did not accurately predict. For example, given the fast rising CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere, global temperatures should have gone up much faster than they have over the past ten years. (And, it is not even clear that they have risen at all,)

So, we don’t know what is really happening to the earth’s “climate”. Even if we did, we could not be sure why it was happening. And, we have no way of knowing whether the change was good or bad for mankind as a whole.

But what of the Progressives’ argument that, because the effects of climate change are potentially so disastrous, we should surrender our freedom and move to a centrally planned world economy managed by experts, “just in case”?

Two points about this: first, it’s not going to happen. The Progressives will have to content themselves with extracting a few billion dollars per year from taxpayers to fund cushy “research” and “advocacy” jobs, and to hold climate change conferences like the one that just concluded in Durban. Second, the climate change advocates obviously don�t believe in climate change themselves.

You can’t necessarily tell what people are truly committed to from what they say. However, you can always tell what they are truly committed to by how they negotiate. If someone really wants to do something, they will react to a suggestion by engaging it. They will “work with” the suggestion, trying to see how it can help them do what they say they want to do. If someone says that they want to do something but they really have some other agenda, they will respond to a suggestion with an instant, “Yes, but�”

The climate change crowd has been frantically “yes, butting” geoengineering, which involves using technology to control the climate directly. Their efforts in this regard would be hilarious if the stakes in terms of money and freedom were not so high.

It is obvious that even if “climate change” is happening, and even if it is a bad thing, it is not going to be reversed by reducing CO2 emissions. Despite decades of climate change conferences, protocols, and agreements, fossil fuel use has been rising rapidly as people all over the world have adopted free market economics as a way of escaping poverty. So, if anything at all is going to be done about climate change, it will have to be done by “geoengineering”.

Geoengineering is a far more logical response to “global warming” than are efforts to curb CO2 emissions. First of all, geoengineering does not require that our assumption that it is man-made CO2 emissions that are causing the problem be correct. It would work regardless of what was “really” causing global temperatures to rise. Second, there are geoengineering approaches that could cool the earth at a cost of a few billion dollars per year, rather than tens of trillions of dollars per year. And, third, geoengineering does not require that the people of the world surrender their personal and economic freedom.

Given that geoengineering has the potential to actually do something about the climate change “problem”, the reaction of the climate change crowd to it has been illuminating. They have gone all-out to stop geoengineering experiments from being conducted, and they are doing everything they can to prevent geoengineering from even being discussed.

Climate change proponents recently mounted a desperate effort to stop an experiment in Britain designed to spray 40 gallons of pure water into the upper atmosphere (the so-called SPICE project). Thus far, they have managed to delay the test, and they are arguing that even if the experiment goes ahead, the results should not be made public.

The Progressives are well aware that their opposition to geoengineering experiments exposes their entire game, which is all about money, power, and central-planning control of people’s lives, and has nothing to do with concern about the earth. Unfortunately (for them), they have no choice. Geoengineering solutions might actually work, but they do not require that Progressives be given taxpayer money to hold lavish conferences in lovely places like Durban, South Africa.

Don J. Easterbrook, Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA

The recent Portland State University study of glaciers on Mt. Adams by is a good example of bad science, i.e., how a dogmatic bias and selectively leaving out contrary factual data can lead to bad conclusions.  As an exercise in critical thinking, I used to have my graduate students take a paper like this apart, piece by piece, to show any scientific errors.  Here is an analysis of bad assumptions and errors in the Mt. Adams study.  First, what are the basic contentions in this study?

1. Washington’s gradually warming temperatures have caused Mount Adams to shrink by nearly half since 1904.
2. The Mt. Adams glaciers are receding faster than those of nearby sister volcanoes.
3. The glacier recession is another sign of gradually warming temperatures.
4. The study lends urgency to an earlier federal report that shows the water content of Cascade Mountain snowpacks could dwindle by as much as 50 percent by the 2070s.

Let’s take a careful look at each of these.  Have the Mt. Adams glaciers indeed shrunk by nearly half since 1904?  How do we prove such a statement?  The best way is to have photographic evidence of where the glacier termini were in 1904 and where they are now.  For the moment, let�s assume they have shrunk significantly since 1904. But the rest of the conclusion (gradually warming temperatures have caused them to shrink) isn�t a logical consequence of smaller glaciers.  Two important aspects of this question are (1) has the climate gradually warmed over the past 100 years and (2) what were the glaciers doing before 1904? 

The answer to the question, has the climate gradually warmed over the past 100 years, is no, the climate has not gradually warmed - it has oscillated back and forth between warm and cool periods four times during the past century (Figure 1), and the glaciers have fluctuated back and forth with the climate changes. The inference that the Mt. Adams glaciers began to retreat near the turn of the past century and have gradually shrunk because of gradual warming due to increased CO2 is false. 

>
Figure 1.  The climate during the past century has fluctuated through two periods of global warming and two periods of global cooling.  Each time the climate cooled, the glaciers advanced; each time the climate warmed, they retreated. 

The answer to the question, what were the glaciers doing immediately prior to 1904 is that they were strongly advancing during the 1880 to 1915 cool period, and many reached terminal positions close to their maximum extent during the Little Ice Age (1300 AD to this century) (Figure 2). Most of the subsequent retreat of the glaciers occurred during the following warm period from 1915 to 1945, well before CO2 began to rise sharply after 1945. 

Figure 2.  Position of glacier termini of the Easton and Deming glaciers on Mt. Baker (another Cascade volcano similar to Mt. Adams).  The glacier termini in 1906 were close to their maximum Little Ice Age extent because of 30 years of strong climatic cooling from 1880 to about 1915.  The recent glacier termini are at their minimum extent because of the preceding 20 years (1978 to 1998) of climatic warming. 

Figure 3.  Successive positions of the terminus of the Deming glacier on Mt. Baker from the Little Ice Age to 1979.  Each of these terminal positions corresponds to strong readvances of ice during periods of climatic cooling, separated by periods of glacial recession.  The climate has been generally warming for 500 years coming out of the Little Ice Age, well before atmospheric CO2 began to rise after 1945, and has been characterized by alternating periods of warming and cooling to the present, not gradually warming because of increased CO2. The glaciers on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams show similar fluctuations.

Let�s look at the second contention--Mt. Adams glaciers are receding faster than those of nearby sister volcanoes.  The advance and retreat of glaciers on two of those sister volcanoes, Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier, has been well documented (Figure 4) (see references in Easterbrook 2011 and 2010). 


Figure 4a.  Advance of more than 1 km of the Emmons glacier terminus on Mt. Rainer from 1958 to 1984. Figure 4b. Advance of the Easton glacier from 1956 to 1979

Glaciers on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker advanced strongly during the 1880 to 1915 cool period, retreated strongly during the 1915 to 1945 warm period, advanced again during the 1945 to 1977 cool period, and retreated during the 1978 to 1998 warm period.  The contention that Mt. Adams glaciers are retreating faster than those on nearby volcanoes and that they have been retreating gradually since 1904 is false.  Glaciers on Mt. Adams have not been gradually retreating and are �not retreating faster than the others�--all of these volcanoes have fluctuated strongly back and forth during each period of warming and cooling.

The third contention of the study, that glacier recession is another sign of gradually warming temperatures is only partially true.  Although climatic warming does indeed cause glacier recession, the inference that gradual warming has caused gradual glacier retreat since 1904 is not true.  The glaciers have clearly been periodically advancing as well as retreating.

The forth contention of the study, that the study lends urgency to an earlier federal report that shows the water content of Cascade Mountain snowpacks could dwindle by as much as 50 percent by the 2070s is totally unfounded.  It assumes (1) that gradual climatic warming dating back to 1904 will continue at a constant rate until 2070, (2) that the supposed warming is continuous, (3) that the climate will continue to warm, and (4) that it is caused by increasing atmospheric CO2. The first assumption of gradual warming since 1904 has been shown above to be incorrect-there have been warming and cooling periods that have caused glaciers not only to retreat, but also to advance during this time.  The assumption that the climate is presently warming is also not true--in fact, the climate has been cooling slightly since 2000, not warming, so projecting continuous gradual warming into the future is not warranted. 

Figure 5.  Winter temperatures in the US over the past decade.  Note that temperatures in the Pacific NW have cooled at a rate of 2.22F per decade, not warmed. 

The assumption that CO2 is causing climatic warming is also not true.  Much of the glacial retreat was caused by climatic warming that occurred from 1915 to 1945, well before atmospheric CO2 began to rise sharply, so this warming cannot be attributed to rising CO2. In addition, the glacier readvance from 1945 to 1977 was caused by climatic cooling during the same time that CO2 was rising most rapidly, just the opposite of what should have happened if CO2 caused climatic warming.

So what credence can be given to the contention that Cascade Mountain snowpacks could dwindle by as much as 50 percent by the 2070s?  Temperatures in the Pacific NW have been cooling over the past decade, not warming (Figure 5, 6) and the snowpack in 2010 was about 70-200% above normal.  In the late summer of 2011, some areas normally snow-free were still covered with 30 feet of snow. Thus, the conclusion of Cascade snowpacks declining by 50% by the 2070s is not credible.

Figure 6.  The trend of global temperature since 2001 has been cooling at a rate of -4.0C (-7F) per century.  Computer models had predicted a 1F rise in temperature during this same period- that did not happen, showing that the computer models are invalid.

Summary
1. Rather than glacial retreat since 1904 due to gradual warming, glaciers have advanced and retreated four times in the past century.
2. Glacier termini advanced from 1945 to 1977 during the time of most sharply rising atmospheric CO2,. showing that rising CO2 does not cause climatic warming.
3. Glacier recession on Mt. Adams does not prove a gradually warming temperature.
4. No climatic warming has occurred during the past decade. Instead a cooling trend of -7 F per century has occurred.
5. Cooling during the past decade is not consistent with a claim of 50% reduction of Cascade snowpack caused by climatic warming.
6. The 1904 position of glacier termini resulted from strong cooling from 1880 to 1915.  Comparing the position of recent minimal glacier termini following 20 years of warming from 1978 to 1998 with 1904 maximum glacier termini gives an exaggerated view of glacier recession.
7. Because glaciers on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker advanced and retreated four times in the past century, there is no basis for assuming that glaciers on Mt. Adams are retreating faster than those on nearby volcanoes.

References
Easterbrook, D.J., ed., 2011, Evidence-based climate science: Data opposing CO2 emissions as the primary source of global warming: Elsevier Inc., 416 p.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2011, Geologic evidence of recurring climate cycles and their implications for the cause of global climate changes: The Past is the Key to the Future: in Evidence-Based Climate Science, Elsevier Inc., p.3-51.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2010, A walk through geologic time from Mt. Baker to Bellingham Bay, WA: Chuckanut Editions, Bellingham, WA, 329 p.

PDF has enlarged images

Spectacular on a clear, sunny day, Mount Adams rises a scant 53 miles from Yakima.

But the mountain holds what until now has been pretty much a secret.

In the first comprehensive study of its kind, a Portland State University study has found Mount Adams’ 12 glaciers have shrunk by nearly half since 1904 and are receding faster than those of nearby sister volcanoes Mount Hood and Mount Rainier.

It’s another sign of gradually warming temperatures that - if continued as expected by researchers - will mean significant problems for the water-dependent Yakima Valley.

The study lends urgency to an earlier federal report that shows the water content of Cascade Mountain snowpacks could dwindle by as much as 50 percent by the 2070s.

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The Portland State University study suggests that Washington’s gradually warming temperatures have caused Mount Adams� to shrink by nearly half since 1904 and are receding faster than those of nearby sister volcanoes Mount Hood and Mount Rainier, but the National Climatic Data Center figures copied below indicate the following:

� Washington�s annual temperatures trended downward slightly at a rate of 0.07 degrees F per decade from 1895 through 1985.

� Washington�s annual temperatures trended downward more rapidly at a rate of 0.39 degrees F per decade from 1986 through 2011.

Portland State University suggests that Washington has been gradually warming since 1904, but the National Climatic Data Center data indicates that Washington�s annual temperatures trended downward slightly from 1895 through 1985 and then trended downward more rapidly from 1986 through 2011.  These two periods of downward trending Washington annual temperatures were separated by a curious and unexplained temperature step change increase of 3.6 degrees F occurring between 1985 and 1986.

Ken Schlichte

Gordon Fulks adds: “The quilty party is likely Andrew Fountain at PSU.  He has hawked this sort of rubbish for years by picking those cases where glaciers have retreated and ignoring those where they have advanced.  He also chooses the period of record as the entire 20th century, when he knows that much of the retreat occurred up to and during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s before CO2 could have been a “problem.” When I nailed him about this at a seminar at PSU last summer, he refused to answer and quickly ducked out of the room.  He clearly knows that he is vulnerable but has gotten away with this poor excuse for science for many years.”

Annual Temperature
Washington

------------

Some of the following data are preliminary and have not been quality controlled.
For official data, please contact the NCDC Climate Services and Monitoring Division at ncdc.orders@noaa.gov.

Annual 1895 - 1985 Data Values:


Annual 1895 - 1985 Average = 47.81 degF
Annual 1895 - 1985 Trend = -0.07 degF / Decade
(Enlarged)

Annual Temperature
Washington

-----------

Some of the following data are preliminary and have not been quality controlled.
For official data, please contact the NCDC Climate Services and Monitoring Division at ncdc.orders@noaa.gov.

Annual 1986 - 2011 Data Values:

Annual 1986 - 2011 Average = 48.85 degF
Annual 1986 - 2011 Trend = -0.39 degF / Decade
(Enlarged)

Another example of bad reporting by Seattle Times.

UPDATE: First snow in 40 Years in North India
From Madhav Khandekar

For the first time in 40 years, Pathankot in Punjab state, at the foothills of the Himalanyan range of mountains, experienced snow fall.

My simple assessment; snow and colder condions have beceome more frequent in Himalayan foothills in the last ten years. In 2010 and also in 2011 January several hundred people (mostly elderly living in poor houses, ) died due to long exposure to low temperatures. Last January ( 2011) when I was in India, max temp in many north Indian cities would be just at 12C to 15C! This is COLD for North where about 250 to 300 M people live and most of the houses have NO heating at all!  At best some small room heaters! Also the houses are NOT well insulated, so the cold wintry weather is felt inside the houses day long!

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(CNSNews.com) - A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States funded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations� authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel�s annual budget.

The GAO also found that this funding information �was not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.�

In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, “International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding,” the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years—$31.1 million so far.

The IPCC runs an annual budget of $7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, making the United States a major benefactor for its global warming agenda.

An international body, the IPCC was created in 1988.  Though thousands of scientists contribute to the panel, only 11 working members support the organization.  Set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the IPCC is an “effort by the United Nations to provide the governments of the world with a clear scientific view of what is happening to the world’s climate,” according to its Web site.

The organization has been the subject of controversy in the last several years when thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were stolen and released in 2009, and again in November 2011, on the eve of climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

The e-mails included those between Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that apparently showed global temperatures reaching “unprecedented” levels, and Phil Jones, director at CRU, which brought into question the validity of the IPCC’s work, with the reported statements “hide the decline,” and “Mike’s Nature Trick.”

In explaining its reason for auditing U.S. funding of the IPCC, the GAO said, “Interest in IPCC’s activities increased after the theft of e-mails among IPCC scientists was made public, and with the discovery of several errors in its 2007 set of reports.”

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), released in 2007, included several errors, including claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035, which the IPCC, in a statement, later admitted was based on inconclusive data.

After facing “key challenges” in determining the amount of funding to the IPCC, the GAO now recommends that U.S. funding be reported annually to Congress with “accurate and consistent information.”

The report said documents on U.S. financing for the IPCC were “not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.”

Conflicting State Department numbers also made it more difficult for the GAO to assemble the data.  The GAO “reviewed documents and interviewed officials from federal agencies and IPCC” to reach its findings.

A 2005 GAO report entitled “Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should Be Clearer and More Complete” found that federal funding for climate change was not adequately accountable.  “Congress and the public cannot consistently track federal climate change funding or spending over time,” the report concluded.

The report also found federal funding for global warming had increased by 116 percent between 1993 and 2004, to $5.1 billion.

The $3.1 million annual U.S. funding goes towards the IPCC’s “core activities”: meetings of the governing bodies, co-ordination meetings, support for the developing country co-chairs, the IPCC Web site and Secretariat.  The IPCC assesses scientific information, but does not conduct any research of its own.

According to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the United States “has made the world’s largest scientific investment in the areas of climate change and global change research” with a total of nearly $20 billion over the past 13 years.

Time to defund the entire UN and climate science program.. since they claim the science is settled. We are not spending billions trying to confirm gravity. While the world worriies about paying their energy bills and finding jobs, Gore, Pachauri, Hansen, Mann, Trenberth, Gillard, Solomon, Karl, Stern, Huhne, the demonic trio of Holdren, Van Jones and Jackson not to mention the faceless EU bureaucrats in Brussels and their brainless UN counterparts in New York and at the enviro fascist groups with gentle appealing names like Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra club are committing global sovereign ecocide at our expense.

If ‘sovereign debt’ is now acceptable as economic jargon popularised by the global financial meltdown, let me have a crack at inventing a new term, ‘sovereign eco-cide” as descriptive of how nations can inflict on themselves economic suicide by means of carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, cap-and-trade madness , etc, caused by the myth that human and animal emissions of carbon dioxide can cause ‘dangerous global warming’. For what led to this invention, see three links below - Terry Dunleavy, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

As 2011 comes to a close, climate science celebrates an important landmark. It has now been 33 years, or a third of a century, since sensors aboard NASA and NOAA satellites began measuring temperatures throughout the earth’s lower atmosphere.

For 33 years, we have had precise, objective temperature data that do not require guesswork corrections to compensate for uneven thermometer placement and non-climate surface temperature biases such as expanding urban heat islands and land-use changes. The satellite data, moreover, tell us the earth is warming at a more modest, gradual, and reassuring pace than was foretold by United Nations computer models.

The satellite sensors became operational at a time that is very convenient for those who believe humans are causing a global warming crisis. Global temperatures declined from the mid-1940s through the late 1970s. As a result, the sensors coincidentally began measuring global temperatures at the very beginning of our most recent global warming trend. Had the sensors been in place 33 years earlier, during the 1940s, the overall pace of warming shown by the satellite sensors would be less than half what is shown by the post-1978 temperature data.

Even so, the measured temperature trend is quite modest. John Christy, who along with Roy Spencer oversees the NASA satellite sensor program, reports temperatures have warmed at an average pace of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade since the satellite sensors became operational. This is merely half the pace predicted by computer models utilized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Christy appears to be making a generous concession regarding the warming that has occurred. The temperature data seem to show warming closer to 0.3 degrees over the 33 year period, or 0.09 degrees Celsius per decade. But why quibble over the difference? A warming of 0.14 degrees per decade, or 1.4 degrees per century, is still significantly less than predicted by UN climate models and far from an impending global warming crisis.

Importantly, the satellite sensors show less warming in the lower troposphere (approximately 10,000 feet above the earth’s surface) than is reported by surface temperature readings. Global warming theory holds that one of the fingerprints of human-induced global warming is more rapid warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface. The reason for this is carbon dioxide molecules reside in the lower troposphere and have their greatest heat-trapping effect there.

As a result, if global temperatures are rising as a result of human carbon dioxide emissions, the satellite sensors should report more warming in the lower troposphere than is actually occurring at the surface. In essence the satellite sensors should report a warming trend somewhat more severe than is actually occurring at the surface of the earth.

Surface temperature measurements, however, indicate more rapid warming at the surface of the earth than in the lower troposphere. According to James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, temperatures at the surface of the earth rose twice as fast during the past 33 years as the satellite data show. Surface temperatures compiled by the UK�s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit reflect a similar warming trend.

With temperature data indicating more warming at the earth’s surface than in the earth’s lower troposphere, one of the following must be true: (1) the surface temperature data is more corrupted by heat biases such as expanding urban heat islands and localized land-use changes than the IPCC admits, (2) the warming of the past 33 years is primarily the result of factors other than greenhouse gas emissions, or (3) longstanding, widely believed assumptions about greenhouse gas theory are wrong.

Regardless of which one or more of the three options are true, the satellite sensors have contributed greatly to our scientific understanding of the earth’s ever-changing climate. Thirty-three years and counting, we rightly celebrate the scientific advances provided by satellite temperature sensors.

Never before has a Canadian politician challenged the hitherto saintly protectors of the environment in such direct language

Through most of 2011, Canadian energy officials in politics and industry watched with bewildered helplessness and some shock as Washington allowed environmentalists to seize control of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline issue. They stood by aghast as President Barack Obama, a captive of U.S. green activists and Hollywood movie stars, caved in to political pressure and postponed a decision to approve the project, a potential economic bonanza that promised to deliver thousands of jobs to Americans and billions of barrels of Canadian oil sands production to Texas.

No such green hijacking is going to take place in Canada, at least not without an official fight. On the eve of hearings, which begin Tuesday in Kitimat, B.C., into the $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline - to carry the same oil sands production from Alberta to the West Coast and on to China - the Harper government clearly aims to do what Barack Obama cannot or will not do in America, namely stand up to the growth-killing professional green movement. See more here.

Wind Power: Unreliable, Costly & Ineffective

Europe’s focus on wind power is crippling British energy users with additional costs as it is not a cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a report has found.

The EU has directed governments to generate 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, leading many to focus on wind. But wind power is unreliable and requires back-up gas power stations to maintain a consistent electricity supply, the Civitas think-tank study found.

It means energy users pay twice - once for the ‘window-dressing’ of renewables and again for fossil fuels the energy sector continues to rely on. The study, written by economist Ruth Lea, uses Government-commissioned estimates of the cost of electricity generation to calculate the most cost-effective technologies.

Gas-fired power is the most cost-effective in the short term, while nuclear power stations become the most cost-efficient in the medium term, more than twice as cost-effective as wind. The report concludes: ‘Wind power is expensive and yet is not effective in cutting CO2 emissions.

‘If it were not for the renewables targets, wind power would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity or cutting emissions. The renewables target should be renegotiated with the EU.’

The study attacks Government claims that wind power is one of the more cost-effective means of generating power. In fact, it says, it is ‘unreliable and requires conventional back-up capacity’.

The report also says wind power, backed by conventional gas-fired generation, can emit more CO2 than the most effective gas turbines running alone.

To understand how the Environmental Protection Agency operates, one must first understand that it lies all the time. Its “estimates” are bogus. Its claims of lives saved are bogus. 
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It thrives on scare-mongering to a public that is science-challenged, but the science remains and the EPA must be challenged to save the nation from the loss of the energy it needs to function. It must be challenged to unleash the huge economic benefits of energy resources - coal, oil, and natural gas - that can reverse our present economic decline.

The latest outrage is the MACT rule - an acronym for “maximum achievable control technology” intended to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. The rule is 1,117 pages long. Its purpose is to shut down coal-fired power plants that generate over fifty percent of all the electricity used daily in the United States of America.

The value of the total benefits asserted by the EPA is alleged to be $6 million. Not billion, but million. The MACT rule would force 14.7 gigawatts - enough power for more than eleven million households - to be “retired” from the power grip in the 2014-15 period when the rules take effect.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works says, “The economic analysis of the Obama EPA�s MACT paints a bleak picture for economic recovery as it will cost $11 billion to implement, increase electricity rates for every American, and, along with the Cross-State rule, destroy nearly 1.4 million jobs.”

MACT is all about mercury in the environment of the nation. On May 25, 2011, the Wall Street Journal published a brief opinion piece by Willie Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, co-authored by Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. It was titled “The Myth of Killer Mercury.”

Here are a few of the facts it offered.

“Mercury has always existed naturally in the Earth�s environment. A 2009 study found mercury deposits in Antarctic ice across 650,000 years.”

“Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and trees, which absorb it from the environment.”

There is “200,000,000 tons of mercury naturally present in seawater” that “has never posed a danger to any living thing.”

“U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons (of mercury) per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons; Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”

“Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.”

This is the same EPA “logic” that insists on reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere when all life on Earth depends on it as plant food for all vegetation. More CO2 mean more crops for humans and livestock, healthier forests and jungles, and food for the Earth’s wildlife population.

In a foreword to “Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry”, Dr. Jay Lehr, the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, wrote, “This administration is pushing an unprecedented radical environmental agenda.”

The EPA, along with major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others, have engaged for decades in a massive propaganda effort to convince Americans they are imperiled by the nation�s air and water. It is a lie. As the author of “Regulators Gone Wild”, Rich Trzupeck notes, “Though our world is actually cleaner than ever, most Americans are convinced it is dirtier.”

“Toxicity,” wrote Trzupeck, “is a matter of dose, as sober scientists have observed since ancient times. A particular compound may kill you if you drink it, but a few parts per billion of the same compound can have no effect at all�one can find toxic air pollutants in the parts-per-billion level in human breath.”

The EPA’s latest rule, which will no doubt be subject to lawsuits, is a killer MACT. It is not about mercury or other trace gases. It is about deliberately depriving the nation of energy which in turn means less jobs, less growth, and a third world lifestyle being imposed on Americans by the radical environmentalists inside the Obama administration.

Remember that when you are in the election booth on November 6, 2012.

See also Dr Charles Battig WSJ editorial here.

James Hansen:

We conclude that recent slowdown of ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo​ aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era is readily accounted for by ice melt and ocean thermal expansion, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate acceleration of the rate of sea level rise this decade.

A couple of months ago the missing heat was due to Chinese aerosols. Now it is due to Pinatubo aerosols from 20 years ago.

Earth to Jim - Pinatubo aerosols were gone by 1995. There has been essentially no warming since then.

The sun didn�t affect the temperature when it had record high activity last century, but now it affects the temperature since temperatures stopped rising.

Hansen said this in October:

“the solar forcing is too small to make the net imbalance negative, i.e., solar variations are not going to cause global cooling.”

Antigreenblogspot chimes in

Hansen’s explanation of why the oceans are not warming

Excerpt:

Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 � 0.15 W m−2 during the 6-year period 2005�2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change. Observed surface temperature change and ocean heat gain together constrain the net climate forcing and ocean mixing rates. We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols. Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be -1.6 +- 0.3 W m-2, implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes. Continued failure to quantify the specific origins of this large forcing is untenable, as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to understand future climate change. We conclude that recent slowdown of ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era is readily accounted for by ice melt and ocean thermal expansion, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate acceleration of the rate of sea level rise this decade.

More HERE

One doesn’t need to go into the physics involved to see that this is bad science. It is in fact a particularly egregious example of a post hoc explanation—being wise after the event in layman’s terms. Such explanations get as little respect in science as elsewhere.

Such explanations are given when something predicted by theory fails to occur—and when there is one clear confounding factor they can have some status. But Hansen’s paper has no such status. He has to invoke a whole range of special influences, some of which seem to be entirely imaginary. Without any evidence for it he extends the influence of the Pinatubo eruption to two decades, which is wildly outside the normal expectation of a couple of years at most. The paper is a patent work of desperation.

On the amusing side, he admits an effect of solar variations, something long denied by Warmists, including himself.

Michael Fox died very recently after a long battle with cancer.  I think he deserves a mention on ICECAP and I hope you will too.

An article at Hawaii Reporter talks about him. We at Icecap were big fans of Michael Fox

Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the start of the article
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When Nuclear Scientist, Dr. Michael R. Fox, first contacted Hawaii Reporter several years ago, the then Kaneohe resident was concerned that the public was not getting the correct information about such controversial science topics as man made global warming, sea levels, sun spots, nuclear science, nuclear power, solar and windmills.

He was passionate about changing this by publicizing real science, and as a result, launched a column called Fox Energy and Environment Reports in Hawaii Reporter in 2003.

Mike wrote dozens of articles over the years that comforted scientists and many conservatives with his exposes on what he called corrupt and phony science and he angered many man made global warming believers. He took no prisoners when it came to taking on powerful people like former Vice President Al Gore and the claims Gore made about climate change.

More recently, Mike’s family notes that he became a strong advocate for the position that “global climate change is a natural phenomenon which is not influenced by any human activity,” and one of his favorite sayings was “Everybody is entitled to his own opinion: No one is entitled to his own facts.”

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Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse�.isn’t it our job to bring that about”

Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Richard Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”

Peter Menzies in the Calgary Herald, Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister for the Liberal Party of Canada, said in 1998 that “No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits”

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010 admitted “one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world�s wealth...”

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One hero

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, visited Australia in July 2011.  In referring to the ideological orientations of those individuals and organisations who have significant financial and other vested interests in propagating the ‘Doctrine’ of anthropogenic induced climate change, President Klaus said: “They want to change us, to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences, they want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. What is endangered is freedom, the climate is okay."After noting that today’s human-induced climate change alarmists are the ideological descendents of the zero and negative population growth advocates of the 1970s who erroneously forecast that human population pressures would lead to increases in global poverty and growing shortages in resources, President Klaus went on to add: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world - called communism - and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”

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Neglected truths of climate change
By Walter Starck

September 9, 2011

When contentious issues become long standing and widely discussed their public debate tends to become fixated on particular understandings of certain issues.

Ancillary matters that should be of obvious importance often seem to be strangely ignored.  The public debate over climate change is rife with such neglected considerations. Here is a selection of a few of the more obvious ones. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING!!!

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Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, explains the scientific dishonesty of scientists participating in the Hide-the-Decline scandal.

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A catalog of collected papers from SPPI has just been updated through February 2011 and posted on our website. Papers cover many aspects of the energy/environment and science/policy arena. Click on the PDF file to open the catalog, and then click on the link to any particular paper to open its PDF for reading or printing. Many of the papers have a Summary for Policy Makers, convenient for highly busy readers.

The sets of papers once called “BlogWatch” , “ScareWatch” and “Commentary and Essays” have been replaced with postings at the SPPI Blog. The SPPI Blog has a pretty good search engines for key words.

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See John Coleman’s excellent video summary ”There is NO Significant Global Warming” on KUSI Coleman’s corner. No one communicates better to the public.

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See Dr. Doug Hoyt’s Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.

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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.

Heartland VI conference videos are now available for viewing in the web.

NOTE: Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV.  If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additonal scientific youtubes here.

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900+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming Alarm and here a list of 1000 stories suggesting global cooling has begun.

“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”

The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.

See still more annotated here.

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Many more papers are catalogued at Pete’s Place here.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.

Also available now some items that will gore your alarmist friends (part of the proceeds go to support Icecap):

See full size display here.

And “My carbon footprints are bigger than yours and plants love me for it” items here and here

See sister sites:

WeatherBell Analytics here.

Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here.

Coleman’s Corner here.

Science and Public Policy Institute here.

RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)