Mini Ice Age Predicted

December 21, 2010

Original Content Link: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/theres-a-mini-ice-age-coming-says-man-who-beats-weather-experts-20101221-1945a.html

Footprints remain after people walked on the snow-covered beach at Weston-Super-Mare, England. Photo: Getty Images

Piers Corbyn not only predicted the current weather, but he believes things are going to get much worse, says Boris Johnson, London's mayor.

Well, folks, it's tea-time on Sunday and for anyone involved in keeping people moving it has been a hell of a weekend. Thousands have had their journeys wrecked, tens of thousands have been delayed getting away for Christmas; and for those Londoners who feel aggrieved by the performance of any part of our transport services, I can only say that we are doing our level best.

Almost the entire Tube system was running on Sunday and we would have done even better if it had not been for a suicide on the Northern Line, and the temporary stoppage that these tragedies entail. Of London's 700 bus services, only 50 were on diversion, mainly in the hillier areas. On Saturday, we managed to keep the West End plentifully supplied with customers, and retailers reported excellent takings on what is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

We have kept the Transport for London road network open throughout all this. We have about 90,000 tons of grit in stock, and the gritters were out all night to deal with this morning's rush. And yet we have to face the reality of the position across the country.

Advertisement: Story continues below It is no use my saying that London Underground and bus networks are performing relatively well - touch wood - when Heathrow, our major international airport, is still effectively closed two days after the last heavy snowfall; when substantial parts of our national rail network are still struggling; when there are abandoned cars to be seen on hard shoulders all over the country; and when yet more snow is expected today, especially in the north.

In a few brief hours, we are told, the snowy superfortresses will be above us again, bomb bays bulging with blizzard. It may be that in the next hours and days we have to step up our de-icing, our gritting and our shovelling. So let me seize this brief gap in the aerial bombardment to pose a question that is bugging me. Why did the Met Office forecast a "mild winter"?

Do you remember? They said it would be mild and damp, and between one degree and one and a half degrees warmer than average. Well, I am now 46 and that means I have seen more winters than most people on this planet, and I can tell you that this one is a corker.

Never mind the record low attained in Northern Ireland this weekend. I can't remember a time when so much snow has lain so thickly on the ground, and we haven't even reached Christmas. And this is the third tough winter in a row. Is it really true that no one saw this coming?

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its "mild winter" schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year's mythical "barbecue summer", and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people - notably in farming - are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time - and he makes a prophecy.

I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

Is he barmy? Of course he may be just a fluke-artist. It may be just luck that he has apparently predicted recent weather patterns more accurately than government-sponsored scientists. Nothing he says, to my mind, disproves the view of the overwhelming majority of scientists, that our species is putting so much extra CO? into the atmosphere that we must expect global warming.

The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.

The Daily Telegraph, London

Original Content Link: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/theres-a-mini-ice-age-coming-says-man-who-beats-weather-experts-20101221-1945a.html

From 10 Years Ago - In Britain, Snow a Thing of the Past

By Charles Onians

Monday, 20 March 2000

Original Content Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain's biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. "It was a bit of a first," a spokesperson said.

Fen skating, once a popular sport on the fields of East Anglia, now takes place on indoor artificial rinks. Malcolm Robinson, of the Fenland Indoor Speed Skating Club in Peterborough, says they have not skated outside since 1997. "As a boy, I can remember being on ice most winters. Now it's few and far between," he said.

Michael Jeacock, a Cambridgeshire local historian, added that a generation was growing up "without experiencing one of the greatest joys and privileges of living in this part of the world - open-air skating".

Warmer winters have significant environmental and economic implications, and a wide range of research indicates that pests and plant diseases, usually killed back by sharp frosts, are likely to flourish. But very little research has been done on the cultural implications of climate change - into the possibility, for example, that our notion of Christmas might have to shift.

Professor Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, says that even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important.

"We don't really have wolves in Europe any more, but they are still an important part of our culture and everyone knows what they look like," he said.

David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes - or eventually "feel" virtual cold.

Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.

The chances are certainly now stacked against the sort of heavy snowfall in cities that inspired Impressionist painters, such as Sisley, and the 19th century poet laureate Robert Bridges, who wrote in "London Snow" of it, "stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying".

Not any more, it seems.

Original Content Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

Coldest Winter in Britian Since Records Begun

Original Content Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339149/Big-freeze-Temperatures-plummet-10C-bringing-travel-chaos-Britain.html

Coldest December since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10C bringing travel chaos across Britain

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:38 AM on 18th December 2010

• Millions begin the big Christmas and New Year getaway early as the AA urged motorists to beware of the ‘worst driving conditions imaginable’
• Quarter of train services disrupted, travel warning in Kent
• Experts warn of a backlog of up to 4 million of parcels which could remain undelivered this Christmas
• The NHS issues an urgent appeal for blood donors as concerns grow over shortages
• Councils reveal plans to share grit amid fears the cold snap could last until January 14
• Odds shortened even further on a ‘White Christmas’ in some parts of the country next Saturday

Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned - grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.

And tonight the nation was braced for another 10in of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures - with no let-up in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.

The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond and as temperatures plummeted to -10c (14f) the Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910.

Frozen: A dog and his walker enjoy the snow on Torquay beach today. The average temperature for December so far is -0.7c, making it on course to be the coldest since records began in 1910

Chilly: Christmas shoppers in Central London were caught in snow flurries today

The latest snowfall carpeted large swathes of Britain today - with up to 5in falling in places - paralysing roads and rail, and forcing airports and schools to close.
Forecasters warned the worst was still to come over the next 24 hours as the heaviest December snowfall for 30 years tightened its grip on the nation once more.
The South is expected to be worst hit with up to 10in falling during the course of tomorrow. By the start of next week temperatures are set to fall to as low as -15c (5f).
Met Office forecaster Barry Gromett said the average mean temperature for the first two weeks of this month was -0.7c.
The coldest ever average for this time of year - recorded in December 1981 - was 0.2c.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339149/Big-freeze-Temperatures-plummet-10C-bringing-travel-chaos-Britain.html#ixzz18mHjxB3O

Time for Delaware to “Abandon Regional Cap and Trade”

Delaware’s 2019 carbon dioxide cap and trade goals have already been exceeded and we can now end a program that adds millions of dollars to our electric bills! National cap and trade appears to be dying and the Chicago Carbon Exchange closed its’ doors to carbon trading October 29. But Delaware joined with nine other states to create the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) which auctions permits to electric power plants to emit carbon dioxide. This local version of the cap and trade program, along with other policies, is driving generating capacity to non-RGGI states. Electricity generation in Delaware has gone from 82% of electricity use in 1995 to a projected 38% in 2014. As generation moves further from the point of use, transmission losses and grid congestion increases raising costs and reducing efficiency.
We have far exceeded the RGGI goal of 10% reduction by 2019. Plans already in place will reduce Delaware electric generation emissions by 34% compared to the RGGI base amount by 2014! The Governor can now declare victory and withdraw from the agreement and return the $15 million to $35 million/yr carbon tax to Delaware consumers. Governor Markell was recently quoted as saying no one has suggested abandoning RGGI. Let us be the first, then.
We didn’t arrive at this 34% emission reduction by the expected route. The intent was to replace fossil fuel production with renewable energy sources, and this does play a small role. However, the effect of renewable energy is swamped by market changes. A combination of power plant closings and substitution of natural gas for coal as fuel has been the primary force behind the lower emissions. Huge new natural gas fields have reduced fuel costs to the point it doesn’t make economic sense to build anything else but natural gas plants. Natural gas emits 57% as much carbon dioxide as coal and petroleum products for the same amount of electricity.
We understand the motivations and goal to reduce CO2 production. However, local actions such as RGGI simply leave Delaware less competitive than states and countries without such regulations. Delaware residents wind up with a slower growing economy, fewer jobs, and higher energy prices. There are other ways to boost conservation without these downside effects.
Furthermore, there is a certain futility to the RGGI goals. Delaware’s goal is to reduce emissions by 755,000 metric tons. China increased CO2 emission by 1.4 trillion metric tons from 2004 to 2008 so the Delaware decade long reduction goal is replaced by China every 68 seconds!
 
David T. Stevenson
Director of Public Policy
Caesar Rodney Institute

What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted

Original Content Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html

By David Rose
Last updated at 4:17 PM on 5th December 2010

A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, 'is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record' - a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 19611990 average.

World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: 'Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.'

Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met.

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.

According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

The maths isn't complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century's end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn't.

Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Nino' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.
When the Met Office issued its December 2009 preThere-diction, it was clearly expecting an even bigger El Nino spike than happened in 1998 - one so big that it would have dragged up the decade's average.

But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.

That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.

Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Nino was at its peak.

The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005.

There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)

But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ' consensus' that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.

One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.

He wrote: '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.'

After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2, and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?

Original Content Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html

Climate Talks or Wealth Redistribution Talks?

Original Content Link: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/11/19/climate-talks-or-wealth-redistribution-talks/print/

Posted By Nicolas Loris On November 19, 2010 @ 11:55 am In Energy and Environment | 2 Comments

Typically the largest wealth distribution program that occurs in Cancun, Mexico, is college students spending their parents’ money. That could change at the upcoming United Nations climate summit if developing countries clamoring for money to cope with global warming get their wish. With each passing year, it’s clear that international climate change talks are less about climate and more about wealth redistribution.

The latest case in point comes from United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) official Ottmar Edenhofer. In a recent interview with Germany’s NZZ Online [2], Edenhofer lays out just what the climate talks are all about:

NZZ: The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

Edenhofer: That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

NZZ: That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

Edenhofer: Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet—and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400—there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

NZZ: De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

Edenhofer: First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

This shouldn’t be all too surprising. The Copenhagen conference last year quickly devolved from a discussion on how to cost-effectively curtail greenhouse gas emissions—the primary culprit behind global warming, according to the U.N.—into a browbeating session designed to get developed countries to accept massive economic costs arising from carbon dioxide cuts and to provide billions of dollars in wealth transfers (up to $100 billion annually was discussed in Copenhagen last year) to help developing nations cope with the projected consequences of a changing climate. Meanwhile, developing countries (even the large developing country emitters like India and China) were being exempted from emissions restrictions even though that would undermine any possibility of meeting emissions targets.

Last year in Copenhagen, Janos Pasztor, the director of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Change Support Team, admitted: “This is not a climate-change negotiation. … It’s about something much more fundamental. It’s about economic strength.” The nations at the negotiation, he added, “just have to slug it out [3].”

It goes to show how ill-suited the United Nations is at handling a climate treaty. The competing interests of U.N. member states make it extremely difficult to for the negotiations not to get sidetracked.

In the end, there is a reason why these conferences are often held in exotic locales. But instead of college kids spending their parents’ money on spring break, it’s international diplomats spending our taxpayer dollars on conferences focused on how to they can spend even more down the road.


Original Content Link: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/11/19/climate-talks-or-wealth-redistribution-talks/print/

Pelosi Climate Panel Dies in Republican Sweep of House

Original Content Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/pelosi-s-climate-change-panel-will-become-casualty-of-republican-takeover.html


By Jim Snyder - Dec 1, 2010 7:08 PM ET

Republicans will eliminate the House committee created by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to highlight the threat of climate change, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the top Republican on the panel, said today.

In one of her first acts as speaker in 2007, Pelosi, a California Democrat, created the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to draw attention to climate-change science and showcase how a cap on carbon dioxide needn’t be a threat to economic growth.

Republicans, who won control of the House in the Nov. 2 election, have opposed legislative efforts to regulate carbon emissions as a tax on energy. When the panel convened today, Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said that the hearing “will be the last of the select committee.”

Sensenbrenner had advocated extending the panel as a forum to scrutinize Obama administration actions. In an opinion column on Nov. 8 in the Washington newspaper Roll Call, he wrote that the committee was “more qualified than any other” to challenge Obama environmental initiatives that he said may threaten the economy. He acknowledged that other Republicans thought the panel should be eliminated to save money.

“We are going to get rid of waste and duplication in terms of how we run the Congress,” House Republican Leader John Boehner, who is slated to become speaker in January, told reporters today. “We believe the Science Committee is more than capable of handling this issue and in the process save several million dollars.”

‘Very Disappointing’

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said it’s “very disappointing” that House Republicans will shut the committee and won’t make energy independence and climate change a priority in the next Congress.

“Disbanding the select committee does not diminish the urgent need to act on these very critical issues,” Hammill said in an e-mailed statement.

The election increased the ranks of Republican climate- change skeptics in both the House and Senate, according to ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group allied with Democrats.

Committee Chairman Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, criticized the attitude among many Republican lawmakers.

“While members of Congress may question the science of global warming, the rest of the world does not,” he said in his final statement as chairman.

The panel held 75 hearings, creating a record of evidence showing that humans are causing the planet to warm and that the United States is in danger of falling behind in the race for clean-energy technologies, Markey said. China plans to invest $738 billion on clean-energy technologies, he said.

“The politics may change but the problem isn’t going away,” Markey said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Snyder in Washington at jsnyder24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net.


Original Content Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/pelosi-s-climate-change-panel-will-become-casualty-of-republican-takeover.html

Top UN climate official resigning

Original Content Link: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/18/climate-official-yvo-boer-resigning/

Published February 18, 2010
| AP


Top U.N. climate change official Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press Thursday that he was resigning after nearly four years, a period when governments struggled without success to agree on a new global warming deal. His departure takes effect July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases.

De Boer is known to be deeply disappointed with outcome of the last summit in Copenhagen, which drew 120 world leaders but failed to reach more than a vague promise by several countries to limit carbon emissions -- and even that deal fell short of consensus.

But he denied to the AP that his decision to quit was a result of frustration with Copenhagen.

"Copenhagen wasn't what I had hoped it would be," he acknowledged, but the summit nonetheless prompted governments to submit plans and targets for reining in the emissions primarily blamed for global warming. "I think that's a pretty solid foundation for the global response that many are looking for," he said.

De Boer's resignation comes in the wake of the continuing Climate-gate scandal -- a story that began with the leak of stolen e-mails from top climate scientists and led to revelations of sloppy science, efforts to suppress dissenting opinions and ultimately flaws in the U.N.'s top climate policy document.

Original Content Link READ MORE: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/18/climate-official-yvo-boer-resigning/

New Climate Agency Head Tried to Suppress Data, Critics Charge

Original Content Link: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/22/tom-karl-tried-to-suppress-data-critics-charge/#/scitech/planet-earth/ci.New+Climate+Agency+Head+Tried+to+Suppress+Data%2C+Critics+Charge.opinion

By Ed Barnes

Published February 22, 2010
| FOXNews.com

The scientist who has been put in charge of the Commerce Department's new climate change office is coming under attack from both sides of the global warming debate over his handling of what they say is contradictory scientific data related to the subject.

Thomas Karl, 58, was appointed to oversee the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, an ambitious new office that will collect climate change data and disseminate it to businesses and communities.

According to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the office will "help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change. In the process, we'll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs."

Karl, who has played a pivotal role in key climate decisions over the past decade, has kept a low profile as director of National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) since 1998, and he has led all of the NOAA climate services since 2009. His name surfaced numerous times in leaked "climate-gate" e-mails from the University of East Anglia, but there was little in the e-mails that tied him to playing politics with climate data. Mostly, the e-mails show he was in the center of the politics of climate change decisions

According to a school biography published by Northern Illinois University, Karl shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and other leading scientists based on his work at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he was "one of the 10 most influential researchers of the 1990s who have formed or changed the course of research in a given area."

His appointment was hailed by both the Sierra Club and Duke Energy Company of North Carolina. Sierra Club President Carl Pope said, "As polluters and their allies continue to try to muddy the waters around climate science, the Climate Service will provide easy, direct access to the valuable scientific research undertaken by government scientists and others." And Duke Energy CEO Jin Rogers said the new office, under Karl, will "spark the consensus we need to move forward."

But Roger Pielke Sr., a climatologist affiliated with the University of Colorado who has crossed horns with Karl in the past, says his appointment was a mistake. He accused Karl of suppressing data he submitted for the IPCC's most recent report on climate change and having a very narrow view of its causes.

The IPCC is charged with reviewing scientific data on climate change and providing policy makers and others with an assessment of current knowledge.

Pielke said he agrees that global warming is happening and that man plays a significant role in it, but he said there are many factors in addition to the release of carbon into the atmosphere that need to be studied to fully understand the phenomenon. He said he resigned from the IPCC in August 2005 because his data, and the work of numerous other scientists, were not included in its most recent report.

In his resignation letter, Pielke wrote that he had completed the assessment of current knowledge for his chapter of the report, when Karl abruptly took control of the final draft. He said the chapter he had nearly completed was then rewritten with a too-narrow focus.

One of the key areas of dispute, he said, was in describing "recent regional trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures," and the impact of land use on temperatures. It is the interpretation of this data on which the intellectual basis of the idea of global warming hangs.

In an interview, Pielke reiterated that Karl "has actively opposed views different from his own." And on his Web site last week, he said Karl's appointment "assures that policy makers will continue to receive an inappropriately narrow view of our actual knowledge with respect to climate science."

He said the people who run the agencies in charge of climate monitoring are too narrowly focused, and he worries that the creation of the new office "would give the same small group of people the chance to speak on the issue and exclude others" whose views might diverge from theirs.

Responding to the criticism, Karl told the Washington Post, "the literature doesn't show [Pielke's] ideas about the importance of land use are correct."

Calls to The Commerce Department and to Karl's office went unanswered.

The IPCC in recent weeks has come under severe criticism after e-mails, hacked from a prestigious climate center, revealed some of the political infighting that occurred as its assessments were being put together and called into question its impartiality.

Climate change skeptics, meanwhile, say Karl's appointment was unnecessary and pulls scarce resources from more pressing needs.

"The unconstitutional global warming office and its new Web site climate.gov would be charged with propagandizing Americans with eco-alarmism," wrote Alex Newman of the Liberty Sentinel of Gainesville, Fla.

On the popular skeptic site "Watts Up With That," Anthony Watts called the climate.gov site a "waste of more taxpayer money" and charged that it is nothing more than a "fast track press release service." He wrote that putting Karl in charge was an issue, because he had fabricated photos of "floods that didn't happen" in an earlier NOAA report.

Original Content Link: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/22/tom-karl-tried-to-suppress-data-critics-charge/#/scitech/planet-earth/ci.New+Climate+Agency+Head+Tried+to+Suppress+Data%2C+Critics+Charge.opinion

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels

Original Content Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown

• Read the full story of the hacked climate emails
• Jeffrey Sachs: Sceptics recycle anti-tobacco control arguments


Share7670 Comments (670) David Adam guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 February 2010 18.00 GMT Article history

The Maldives is likely to become submerged if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. Photograph: Reinhard Krause/Reuters

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper's estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: "It's one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science." He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study's conclusion.

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

Nature Publishing Group, which publishes Nature Geoscience, said this was the first paper retracted from the journal since it was launched in 2007.

The paper – entitled "Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change" – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.

In a statement the authors of the paper said: "Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

"One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes."

In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for "bringing these issues to our attention".


Original Content Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/21/sea-level-geoscience-retract-siddall

World may not be warming, say scientists

Original Content Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece

From The Sunday Times February 14, 2010

Jonathan Leake

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

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

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

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

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

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

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.

“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”

Original Content Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece

Climategate U-Turn as scientist at center of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Original Content Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. 

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Original Content Link READ MORE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

Original Content Link: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.8d6e5773c60565dfc6e882b0a8dcbf18.4e1&show_article=1

Feb 5 08:36 AM US/Eastern

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.
According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The IPCC's 938-page Fourth Assessment Report spurred politicians around the world to vow action with its warning that climate change was on the march, but the body has faced fierce criticism over the glacier mistake.

Glaciologists have discredited the Himalaya claim, which is being withdrawn, and the controversy has given fresh ammunition to climate sceptics.

No evidence could be found to show the claim had been published in a peer-reviewed journal and reports in Britain have said the reference came from green group the WWF, who in turn sourced it to the New Scientist magazine.

Original Content Link: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.8d6e5773c60565dfc6e882b0a8dcbf18.4e1&show_article=1

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

Original Content Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

Officials were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers Photo: GETTY By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

Original Content Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

Original Content Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece

From The Times January 30, 2010

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Original Content Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece

Glacier scientist says: I knew data hadn’t been verified

Original Content Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html

By David Rose
Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.
The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.
It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’
In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.
Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.
‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.
Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri
‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’
One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’
When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.
Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.
It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’
However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.
For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.
In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.
The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.
The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.
Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.
Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.
The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.
Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.
Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’
Last night, Dr Pachauri defended

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz17l1tkxgL

Global Climate Report – Facts on CO2

Original Content Link: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/

The Web’s Longest-Running Climate Change Blog
December 8, 2010

CO2-induced Vegetation Growth Slows Global Warming
Filed under: Adaptation, Climate Models, Plants —
We are continually deluged with talk about positive feedbacks leading to even higher levels of global warming, but aside from the great water vapor debate, we rarely hear much about negative feedbacks which could act to slow the rate of temperature rise.

Well that is about to change.

A new study has identified a negative feedback between carbon dioxide-enhanced vegetative growth and global warming—the denser that vegetation becomes, the greater the cooling influence it has on any global temperature rise. The enhanced vegetation doesn’t offset all of the projected warming, but a sizeable chunk of it—13% globally, 20% over land areas, and more than 50% over the eastern United States. And this negative feedback is not included in current climate models.

A research team of scientists from NOAA, NASA, and the University of Maryland, led by Lahouari Bounoua set out to study how changing vegetation characteristics induced both directly by enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (recall that CO2 is a plant fertilizer) as well as by climate changes that are favorable for plant growth (increased temperature and/or precipitation) may feedback on the projected climate changes. The authors note that there has been some previous work on this topic, but that their current work (just published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters) uses a different modeling approach and includes plant responses not included in earlier studies.

The Bounoua team coupled a plant vegetation model to a climate model that allowed plant characteristics to change and in turn feedback on the climate system. The model was run for a case of doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration (700ppm).

The biggest changes to the plants were an increase in water use efficiency and an increase in the Leaf Area Index (LAI) (the LAI is the total area of all the upper surface of all the leaves on a tree divided by the area on the ground covered by that tree—the more and larger the leaves, the greater the LAI ). Figure 1 shows that the LAI increased by more than 50% at each of three different scales/regions—all global land areas, U.S.A., and the eastern United States. The increased LAI indicates overall denser, more vigorous, vegetation.

Figure 1. Increase in Leaf Area Index (LAI) in the doubled CO2 scenario. (from Bounoua et al., 2010).

The changes in LAI influence the earth’s carbon cycle and its climate. The authors describe the impacts this way:

[I]ncreases in LAI not only affect the carbon uptake, transpiration and interception rates, but also alter surface albedo and roughness and so affect the exchanges of carbon, energy, water and momentum at the land-atmosphere interface. Furthermore, the model’s vegetation physiological growing season is controlled by low-temperature stress levels below which photosynthesis is inhibited. As temperatures increase with CO2, these stress levels become less severe earlier during the onset of vegetation greening and later during the dormancy phase, increasing thus the length of the growing season.

Clearly a wide range of influence.

And taken together, the net result of the modeled vegetation influences is an overall cooling which offsets some of the modeled CO2-induced warming.

The mechanism is somewhat complex, but basically, the increased LAI intercepts a greater percentage of the incident precipitation and redirects it for use of the vegetation. This has a two-fold impact, 1) it increases evapotranspiration and 2) it decreases the volume of run-off. The former produces a cooling effect on the climate and the latter lessens flash flooding.

While the authors don’t discuss the flooding (or reduction thereof) aspect of their findings, they do look into the temperature effects. Using their climate model (which they admit has a fairly low climate sensitivity), they find that the effect of increasing LAI has a pretty large effect on lessening the CO2-induced warming. Compared with a global average temperature rise of 1.94°C (for a CO2 doubling), they find that incorporating climate/vegetation interactions into the model produces a rise of 1.68°C—or that increased LAI offsets about 13% of the projected warming on a global average. As you may imagine, the cooling influence is greater when only averaged over land areas. There the non-interactive model produces 2.80°C of temperature rise, while the interactive model produces only 2.23°C, or some 20% less. The impact can be even larger on regional scales. For instance, over the eastern U.S., Bounoua et al. find that LAI increases from the effects of increasing CO2 act to offset a whopping 52% of the projected warming—a large, noteworthy, and significant (in more ways than one) impact.

The authors sum up their findings this way:

When we combine these interactions in climate simulations with 2 × CO2, the associated increase in precipitation contributes primarily to increase evapotranspiration rather than surface runoff, consistent with observations, and results in an additional cooling effect not fully accounted for in previous simulations with elevated CO2. By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6°C. Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2-induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration.

True, these results are produced from a modeling study—but they clearly show that current climate models (which do not incorporate interactive vegetation models) fail to include an important climate feedback.

As eminent climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. is fond of pointing out time and time again over on his excellent blog, the earth’s climate system and its interactions with the rest of the world’s environment are far more complex than current climate models come close to handling—and what’s worse, is that organizations like the IPCC and the EPA, rather than embracing this fact, try to hide it under the rug.

Papers like the new Bounoua et al. study make this plain as day and should be required reading for all folks considering action based on climate model projections.

Original Content Link: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/

U.S. temperature sensors are biased to read warm – a comprehensive report on faulty temperature sensors

Original Content Link: http://www.surfacestations.org/

NEWS Updated 07/16/2009
Surfacestations project reaches 82% of the network surveyed. 1003 of 1221 stations have been examined in the USHCN network. The Google Earth map below shows current coverage.

Click here to view:
http://www.surfacestations.org/

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

Original Content Link: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/30/nasa-data-worse-than-climategate-data/
By Blake Snow

Published March 30, 2010
| FOXNews.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each state's high temperature record

Original Content Link: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wheat7.htm


As you would expect, the highest statewide records are from desert locations in California, Arizona and Nevada.

The coolest two statewide high records, shown here, aren't as obvious. Alaska in the far north and Rhode Island, with no part of the state far from the cool Atlantic, are no surprises.

But tropical Hawaii, with the same high record as Alaska, isn't as obvious. Credit the ocean. Even in the tropics, ocean waters stay cooler than land. Almost all of Hawaii is cooled to some extent by ocean breezes.

The complete list of state records below shows that the Plains states, far away from the ocean, can be hotter than the humid Southeast.

The USA's highest temperature, 134° on July 10, 1913 in Death Valley, Calif., is also the official highest temperature in the Western Hemisphere.

Ordinary summer heat makes much of the Southwest, including Death Valley, sizzle from June through August. But, Death Valley's unique geography turns this hot weather into extreme heat.

Winds off the higher surrounding land, known as the Great Basin, often blow hot, dry air thousands of feet down into the long, narrow valley, which is 282 feet below sea level.

As the air moves downhill it encounters increasing atmospheric pressure, which squeezes the air, warming it at a rate of 5.5° for every 1,000-foot drop in elevation. Some of the mountain ranges around Death Valley are 7,000 - 9,000 feet high, and the surrounding land between the ranges is 4,000 - 5,000 feet above sea level, which means the air can warm at least 20-25° by the time it reaches the bottom of the valley.

In addition, the steep walls of the valley heat up and radiate that heat back into the valley, causing the already hot air to grow even hotter. July's average high in Death Valley is 115°, but nearly every year the temperature reaches 125°, or higher.

USATODAY.com has been reporting each day's high and low temperature in the USA since we began in April 1995. Our extremes archive will let you follow the ups and downs of each season's highs and lows. (Related item: Temperature extremes archive)


The world's highest official temperature is 136° recorded at El Azizia, Libya, on Sept. 13, 1922.

Not everyone agrees that the Death Valley and El Azizia records are valid. Some meteorologists say that a sandstorm was going on at the time 134° was measured at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley and that very hot sand and dust could have hit the thermometer inside its shelter, pushing its measurement higher than the actual temperature of the air.

The Weather and Climate Extremes booklet published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has more information on these and other records. This booklet is available for download from the U.S. National Technical Information Service.

We also have a list of each state's low temperature record.

State high temperature records

State    Temp    Date          Station                   Elevation (feet)
Ala.     112   Sept. 5, 1925   Centerville               345
Alaska   100   June 27, 1915   Ft. Yukon                 420*
Ariz.    128   June 29, 1994   Lake Havasu               505
Ark.     120   Aug. 10, 1936   Ozark                     396
Calif.   134   July 10, 1913   Death Valley              N/A
Colo.    118   July 11, 1888   Bennett                   5,484
Conn.    106   July 15, 1995   Danbury                   450
Del.     110   July 21, 1930   Millsboro                 20
Fla.     109   June 29, 1931   Monticello                207
Ga.      112   July 24, 1952   Louisville                132
Hawaii   100   April 27,1931   Pahala                    850
Idaho    118   July 28, 1934   Orofino                   1,027
Ill.     117   July 14, 1954   E. St Louis               410
Ind.     116   July 14, 1936   Collegeville              672
Iowa     118   July 20, 1934   Keokuk                    614
Kansas   121   July 24, 1936   Alton                     1,651
Ky.      114   July 28, 1930   Greensburg                581
La.      114   Aug. 10, 1936   Plain Dealing             268
Maine    105   July 10, 1911   N. Bridgton               450
Md.      109   July 10, 1936   Cumberland and Frederick  623, 325
Mass.    107   Aug.  2, 1975   New Bedford and Chester   120, 640
Mich.    112   July 13, 1936   Mio                       963
Minn.    114   July  6, 1936   Moorhead                  904
Miss.    115   July 29, 1930   Holly Springs             600
Mo       118   July 14, 1954   Warsaw and Union          705, 560
Mont.    117   July  5, 1937   Medicine Lake             1,950
Neb.     118   July 24, 1936   Minden                    2,169
Nev.     125   June 29, 1994   Laughlin                  605
N.H.     106   July  4, 1911   Nashua                    125
N.J.     110   July 10, 1936   Runyon                    18
N.M.     122   June 27, 1994   Lakewood                  N/A
N.Y.     108   July 22, 1926   Troy                      35
N.C.     110   Aug. 21, 1983   Fayetteville              213
N.D.     121   July  6, 1936   Steele                    1,857
Ohio     113   July 21, 1934   Gallipolis                673
Okla.    120   June 27, 1994   Tipton                    1,350
Ore.     119   Aug. 10, 1898   Pendleton                 1,074
Pa.      111   July 10, 1936   Phoenixville              100
R.I.     104   Aug.  2, 1975   Providence                51
S.C.     111   June 28, 1954   Camden                    170
S.D.     120   July 15, 2006   Kelly Ranch/Usta          2,339
Tenn.    113   Aug.  9, 1930   Perryville                377
Texas    120   Aug. 12, 1936   Seymour                   1,291
Utah     117   July  5, 1985   Saint George              2,880
Vt.      105   July  4, 1911   Vernon                    310
Va.      110   July 15, 1954   Balcony Falls             725
Wash.    118   Aug.  5, 1961   Ice Harbor Dam  475       475 
W. Va.   112   July 10, 1936   Martinsburg               435
Wis.     114   July 13, 1936   Wisconsin Dells           900
Wyo.     116   Aug.  8, 1983   Basin                     3,500

*Elevation estimated.

Source: U.S. National Climatic Data Center (last updated August 2006)