Sir, with the greatest respect, we beg to differ...

...Scientists with the courage of their convictions stand up to say; the science is definitely not settled, and the ongoing debate not yet resolved...click on ad. to enlarge, see full ad. text with signatories at WuWT link below...
“Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.” President-elect Barack Obama, November 19, 2008
With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.
We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.1,2 After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events.3 The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior.4 Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect...more from Jennifer Marohasy, here... and with elaboration and comments from WuWt here...

The greatest lie ever told...

... More debunking of Al Gore's already discredited eco-porn...If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish...But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story ... as someone said in the comments; "Where was all that water when Greenland was green ?...more here...

H/T DRH

What's a poor boy to do ?

...The election of Barack Obama sent green hearts fluttering last November, but it will all end in tears...
...his commitments to economic recovery and carbon reduction—to bringing the country out of recession while also reducing U.S. greenhouse emissions to seventeen per cent of their 2005 level by 2050—don’t pull in the same direction. Creating “green jobs,” a key component of the agenda, is different from creating new jobs, since green jobs, if they’re truly green, displace non-green jobs—wind-turbine mechanics instead of oil-rig roughnecks—probably a zero-sum game, as far as employment is concerned. The ultimate success or failure of Obama’s program, and of the measures that will be introduced in Copenhagen this year, will depend on our willingness, once the global economy is no longer teetering, to accept policies that will seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss...more, from The New Yorker, here...
...and the policies that "will be seen to be nudging back(wards) "will be roundly rejected, as scientific uncertainties, and public scorn and disdain grow...

...and Quote of the Day, (in answer to the question;) What will you be doing for Earth Hour ?
" I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to electricity, and how insane they must think we are."

Hot news... hot tip re hot air...

...from MandM...an invitation to join the campaign against Earth Hour. Totally free, and the chance to add a pithy statement about AGW BS to the greenie website , and be in to win a Toyota Prius !
If YOU are the lucky winner, you could trade the Prius in for a big old 4WD !
...Earth Day enthusiasts of course are very similar to the End Time fundamentalist Christians, sad souls burdened by guilt and searching for punishment and redemption. Both groups are hoping for the Messiah and The Rapture; The Messiah may be here, but us bloggers keep denying the greens their Rapture... Both groups too, feel that man's wickedness will lead to damnation and hellfire, and the deliverance from evil will come with such a thunderclap that all on Earth will repent and sin/consume no more...
... while waiting for rapturous times follow these instructions on Saturday night...
...at 8.30pm, on the 28th of March 2009, turn on every light in your house for one hour to protest at the rubbish you are being fed by the politicians and those calling themselves scientists and historians who are either lying to the public or are incompetent if they think that the fact we have just come off the little ice age is anything new......enter to win the Prius here...
...and post-mortem on Earth day in NZ; Orion New Zealand estimated the electricity saved in the city during the lights-out event was 8.1%, well short of last year’s 12.8%....

PPS...and you thought the hole in the ozone layer was caused by CFC's ?
maybe not...see WuWT here...

Violent green nihilists...

...will no doubt make themselves known this weekend with "earth day" featuring on the green calendar. We can expect to see plenty of noisy exhibitionism from loopy greens in costumes or masks. (The disguises of course, are necessary for greenies because many of them are easily led simpletons who lack the courage of their convictions, and are reluctant to let the TV cameras display their real emotions.) However, the Huntly power station is strongly tipped to be an exhibition centre for greenpeace and there will no doubt be some arrests. When the choreographed protest inevitably involves police reaction, the same cries will reverberate; that the police "over-reacted" and that the violence and property damage was justified by the self righteous green need to "raise climate awareness"...Ho bloody hum... (PostScript, 31st March...not a whisper,no protest, masked or otherwise, and certainly no attempted occupation of the Huntly power station as tipped. Greens in decline perhaps ?)

Climate Resistance posts today about green "direct action" and the sincerity/motives and sentencing one "activist" in the USA has received...

...We have argued previously that environmentalism is an ideology. Indeed it is, in the sense that it wants to reorganise the world around its principles, by force and coercion if necessary. But those principles are confused and arbitrary because at its heart, there exists a void.
CR commenter Robert Wood commented on our recent post about James Hansen’s understanding of ‘democracy’ that Hansen ‘thinks he is one of Plato’s philosopher kings’. But the strangest thing about Hansen’s rise is that he has been crowned by nihilists. The argument for the philosopher king is being made by ignorant philistines. It is their own empty outlook they are evincing, not their commitment to a particular philosophy, or even the supremacy of the philosophical method. They want to be told what to do, how the world should be organised, and what ’science’ says is right. This is because they cannot work it out for themselves. Environmentalism, whether it is setting fire to laboratories (so much for science then) or campaigning for laws to restrict human freedom, is a desperate search for meaning, in the same way that setting fire to things is a desperate attempt to assert control over a confusing world.
So environmentalism, in both its extreme expression of igniting fires, and it’s more mundane expression of elevating climate scientists to moral and political heroes and saviours, and its downright banal defence of criminal insanity in the press, shares just one thing: nothing...more here...

...and STOP PRESS...Al Gore admits he was wrong...

...Yesterday, in a stunning reversal, Al Gore broke down in tears in front of a throng of reporters at Chicago’s World Green Day conference, admitting publicly for the first time that the theory of Global Warming, which the former Vice-President has touted for the better part of three decades, has been nothing more than “hot air”...more here...

Hot air...hot topic...

...The bottom line is this: Just about everything the Greens advocate, when they are not trying to stop the drilling or mining or building of anything that might provide energy, will cost you more. It will also degrade life...because they are against building new roads, against the building of any new homes and apartment structures for our increasing population, against the use of pesticides to protect people from the diseases spread by insects and rodents, against the use of automobiles and trucks; against letting you enjoy our national parks and reserves except on their terms, against the use of plastic, against, against, against!
I am against stupid magazines offering stupid “solutions” to non-problems like global warming or what has conveniently been dubbed climate change as if the Earth’s climate hasn’t always been in a state of change for billions of years...thanks and greetings to Alan Caruba at Warning Signs...

Direct action/violence and the green/left...

...here in NZ the green left continue their slide into irrelevance. News in this morning's NZ Herald confirms the general public's growing disinterest in climate change. To add to green angst the Climate Change Minister, Tim Groser, is demonstrating a Sir Humphrey style skill at greenwash, and signalling minimal interest in this year's Copenhagen talks...

Meanwhile of course the green left grow increasingly fractious and alarmist...insider news is of an imminent greenpeace protest at the Huntly power station...watch this space...

Alarmists here are of course guided by hysterical emmissions from James Hansen as he watches public concern over climate change slipping away by the day.

...Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said.
James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.

Re Copenhagen Hansen said: "What's being talked about for Copenhagen is a strenghening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be guaranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions. They talk about goals which sound impressive, but when you see the actions are such that it will be impossible to reach those goals, then I can understand the informed public getting frustrated." He said he was growing "concerned" over the stance taken by the new US adminstration on global warming. "It's not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately i think that will be another case of greenwash. It's going to take stronger action than that." More here...

...and here (WuWT) ...

In other words; expect green/left agitprop to increase as global temperatures fall and their frustrations grow...and further to Hansen's tip re corporate lobbying, this blog is desperately short of corporate finance. All contributions will be gratefully and discreetly received...don't of course expect a GST receipt...

Our cooling oceans...

...Al Gore's preposterous statement that the science of global warming was settled continues to be defied by scientists. Ongoing studies into cloud and cosmic ray intereaction, (see CERN here) stratospheric temperature measurements (see the IBUKI programme here) and ocean temperature measurements will ultimately give us more definitive answers to climate questions.The latest results from the ARGO sea temperature measurement programme confirm ocean cooling over the last 5 years...

...THERE are 3,000 free-drifting buoys in the world’s ocean; first deployed in the year 2000 they allow continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean.There has though been some difficulty in interpreting the data from these buoys. Initial signs of cooling were dismissed as due to technical errors subsequently corrected based on a small sample of the 3,000 buoys known as profiling floats.

Craig Loehle has analysed the data from only the profiling floats for ocean heat content from 2003 to 2008. In a paper recently published in the journal Energy and Environment he has concluded that there has been ocean cooling over this period.

Dr Loehle’s findings are consistent with satellite and surface instrumental records that do not showing a warming trend over recent years...more from Jennifer Marohasy here... and WuWT here...

An end to alarmism...

...in 1989 Stephen Schneider was reported as saying "...We need to get some broad based support... to capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective,and being honest..." Today he is singing a different tune...

When it comes to making climate predictions he now states there is "a cascade of uncertainties" and the concept of dreaded "tipping points" has been thrown out the window. So what's to be done Stephen ? "Well, that's a value judgement," Schneider said.

A far cry from the 1989 statement above, and an obvious retreat from apocalypse now...and meanwhile, the NZ government has been urged to take its time on climate change policy...

...more here...

...The greens are all singing Paul Simon's song, Slip Sliding Away...

STOP PRESS: Helen Clark gets off with a slap across the wrist...A former Labour MP has been given a conditional discharge after being found guilty of using threatening words and behaviour to hotel bar staff...MORE HERE...

Where in the Middle East could this picture be taken ?

...off topic somewhat, but a picture speaks a thousand words, and the apologists for Islamic terror and oppression pillory Israel as a matter of course. So where is this picture taken ? in Israel...At the crux of the issue is Arab/Islamic Male Supremacy. While “pro-Palestinian” activists accuse Israel of Apartheid, implying that Israel practices institutionalized racial supremacy, they ignore not just the obvious fact that Israel is the most open, egalitarian and democratic country in the middle east but also the less obvious but far more telling distinction that the chief reason that Israel’s existence is contested so hotly by her neighbors is exactly because those Arab/Islamic nations are unwilling (unable) to accept the existence of a country in which Jews and Christians have rights and liberties equal to those of Muslims and where women and gay people have equal standing with men; in short, is the only place in the Middle East where they are not “free” to practice Arab/Islamic Supremacy...more from Breath of the Beast here...

Scepticism and ideology...

...a wonderful post from Climate Resistance...

...That ‘scepticism is rooted in a sustained and well-funded ideological movement’ is patently untrue. The environmental movement is far better funded, having at its disposal hundreds of millions for expensive PR and lobbying campaigns. Indeed, the likes of the European Union even fund such groups as WWF and Friends of the Earth to lobby its own MEPs.
No amount of ‘overwhelming scientific evidence’ can legitimise any political ideology. Contrary to George Marshall’s claims, there is nothing ideological about scepticism. Sceptics aren’t asking for the world to be reorganised around environmental ethics. George is. Where you stand on the climate issue does not determine where you stand on the merits or otherwise of conservative ideology. Sceptics object to environmentalism’s hiding of its politics behind ‘the science’ to claim that science produces moral imperatives, and that failing to observe them will cause apocalypse. Stop to ask if climate problems really demand the special politics of environmentalism - that we must swap development and progress for security, for example, or that living a ‘sustainable lifestyle’ really is the best way to express solidarity with the world’s poor and to lift them out of poverty...more here...

Sterns that go bump in the night...and urban heat islands...

...and frighten the anxious...Roger Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) comments...

...Last night I saw a talk in which the Stern Review estimates of the future costs of extreme events were cited. These estimates are based on a flawed analysis. So I thought I’d post up a mention of my paper making this case....

...The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change has focused debate on the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action on climate change. This refocusing has helped to move debate away from science of the climate system and on to issues of policy. However, a careful examination of the Stern Review’s treatment of the economics of extreme events in developed countries, such as floods and tropical cyclones, shows that the report is selective in its presentation of relevant impact studies and repeats a common error in impacts studies by confusing sensitivity analyses with projections of future impacts. The Stern Review’s treatment of extreme events is misleading because it overestimates the future costs of extreme weather events in developed countries by an order of magnitude. Because the Stern Report extends these findings globally, the overestimate propagates through the report’s estimate of future global losses. When extreme events are viewed more comprehensively the resulting perspective can be used to expand the scope of choice available to decision makers seeking to grapple with future disasters in the context of climate change. In particular, a more comprehensive analysis underscores the importance of adaptation in any comprehensive portfolio of responses to climate change ...more here...

...A phenomenon of growth in developed countries is the urban heat island (UHI). While alarmists have attempted to deny or minimise their significance, independent researchers such as the late Petr Beckmann (Access to Energy) have been aware of skewed temperature statistics due to UHI's for 20 years. Now, climatologists in the UK are catching up...

...Finally - an honest quantification of urban warming by a major climate scientist . This is a small bombshell. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started...more here...

Relax, melting Antarctic ice is normal...

...although the alarmists and the MSM like to pretend otherwise...

...Science is marvelous, it never rests and never accepts any simple answer at face value. Here we see confirmation of an alternate explanation for rapid ice melting in Antarctica. The latest paper “Recent Changes in Phytoplankton Communities Associated with Rapid Regional Climate Change Along the Western Antarctic Peninsula,” by Martin Montes-Hugo, et al, published in Science... cites thirty supporting references and cross referencing the older paper provides links to eighteen others—this paper's conclusions are not from a single group of “fringe” scientists. Yet have you heard this well documented explanation for rapid ice melting from any media outlet reporting on global warming? Of Course not! What is reported is “more unprecedented melting!”
To have reported that the melting ice could be explained more accurately by a scientific theory other than anthropogenic global warming would muddy the water, not to mention confuse the news anchor doing the reporting. This is what makes other scientists, myself included, so angry about the climate change clique—their lack of open mindedness, their willful disregard for any facts counter to their preconceived ideas, their out right lies. When the dust finally settles on the great global warming debate there will be a number of climate scientist with much to account for.
Meanwhile, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical...more here...

According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics...it's back to basics...

...We are led to believe that the physics of our planet's temperature control mechanism is the same as the heat retention in our garden greenhouse. Not so, say these researchers in The International Journal of Modern Physics...

...The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist ...more here...

...and an update on the growing number of sceptical scientists here...

...More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims... Outpouring of Skeptical Scientists Continues as 59 Scientists Added to Senate Report ... ‘The ­science has, quite simply, gone awry’ ... The 59 additional scientists added to the 255-page Senate Minority report since the initial release 13 ½ weeks ago represents an average of over four skeptical scientists a week...

Why, say the IPCC, won't they believe us ?

...with thanks to the great Canadian bloggers Celestial Junk...
(Click on image to enlarge.)

Quote(s) for the day...

...from Christopher Monckton at the Heartland Conference...

...Where are they all today, those bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency–those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds?The main message of this conference to the bed-wetters is this. Stop telling lies. You are fooling fewer and fewer of us. However many lies are uttered, the scientific truth remains unalterable.The Forces of Darkness, with their “global warming” chimera, came perilously close to ending the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. They almost ushered in a new Dark Age. Yet they have failed. Why? They have failed because you, here, have had the courage to face them down, to confront their falsehoods, and to nail their lies...

...With thanks to Slattsnews...

and from UK Labour MP Tom Harris...

who observes: ‘Politicians are not expected to talk about moral absolutes. Raising questions about other people’s choices, after all, could offend someone and nothing is less acceptable these days than causing someone offence....

...Cranmer goes on to say...Mr Harris has confronted his Labour critics head on, asking: ‘What kind of society have we created when the above paragraph will inevitably be seen by some as offensive, narrow-minded and intolerable? As for the accusation of giving comfort to the “Right-wing”, when did it become “Left-wing” to tolerate such a colossal waste of lives? Why is it “Left-wing” to allow millions of people to remain on benefits instead of working? When did “Labour” stop meaning “work” and start to mean “benefits”?..more from Cranmer here...

For the USA to meet its 2050 CO2 emissions target...

...the troglodytes of the green left will need to abandon their anti-nuclear phobia...Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we’ll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you’ll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it’s impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don’t know how to do—for when the wind doesn’t blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. “It would take an army,” he says. Obama promised green jobs, but still...more from Prometheus here...
Impossible targets and improbable science lead to confusion, economic ruin, social chaos and panic. Exactly what the greens have in mind...The Copenhagen talks later this year look doomed already. Where is the clear leadership to come from though? Perhaps the Japanese may show the way (see posting below) ...
...And from last years Best Science Blog, Watt's up With That...
Overnight, WUWT hit a new milestone with 10 million page views.
As of this writing, according to the WordPress internal counter shown in the ride sidebar, I’m at 10,016,144 page views.
This is since September of 2007....an indication of the world's hunger for information...more, here...

The power struggle between East and West...

...reached flashpoint in 1939, and involved possession and access to energy and mineral resources. Under the auspices of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan flexed its nationalistic muscles and went to war.

Underpinning its military boldness was immense national pride and self-confidence. It is this degree of independence that has led to a stubborn resistance within social and scientific circles to Western liberal guilt, and an insistence among many Japanese climate scientists that the IPCC science is flawed. Japanese nationalism and pride is also evident in the creation and launch of the Ibuki satellite programme, and stubborn Japanese insistence on maintaining a whaling programme.

Last month the Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) stated that IPPC forecasting was akin to astrology.... Three senior Japanese scientists separately engaged in climate-change research have strongly questioned the validity of the man-made global-warming model that underpins the drive by the UN and most developed-nation governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
"I believe the anthropogenic (man-made) effect for climate change is still only one of the hypotheses to explain the variability of climate," Kanya Kusano told The Weekend Australian.
It could take 10 to 20 years more research to prove or disprove the theory of anthropogenic climate change, said Dr Kusano, a research group leader with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science's Earth Simulator project.
"Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth," writes Shunichi Akasofu, founding director of the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Centre.
Dr Kusano, Dr Akasofu and Tokyo Institute of Technology geology professor Shigenori Maruyama are highly critical of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's acceptance that hazardous global warming results mainly from man-made gas emissions...more here...

Do you have confidence in our police force ?

The incomparable Cranmer has the ability to identify hypocrisy and articulate community concern like none other...

...The police are attuned to ‘homophobia’ and ‘Islamophobia’ to such an extent that they have lost sight of their function in society, and are oblivious even to the possibility of ‘heterophobia’ or 'Christianophobia’. The police are not there to discern morality or to distinguish between individuals or groups in the same action: they are there to apply the law equally to all of Her Majesty’s subjects and to ensure that all are treated equally under that law. It is not for them to choose à la carte who may be guilty and who may not, depending on the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation: such judgement is the preserve of the courts...Consider what the police would have done if a Christian group had protested at a ‘Gay Pride’ march, with placards which talked of sin or hell or dared to quote Scripture...more here...

The fight against climate change is like Tantric sex...

...fight the good fight. Use Tantric sex...favourite position ? The plumber....stay in all day and nobody comes...
Cartoon H/T WuWT

MIT scientists ask : Is global warming part of a natural cycle ?

Umm, well yes. At least I think so...although Al Gore and greenpeace don't agree, not to mention the IPCC...
...A team of MIT scientists recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels -the first increase in ten years. What baffles the team is that this data contradicts theories stating humans are the primary source of increase in greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. Since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, however, it is probable that this may be part of a natural cycle - and not the direct result of man's contributions...
... One thing does seem very clear, however; science is only beginning to get a focus on the big picture of global warming. Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at "alarming rates." We may simply be going through another natural cycle of warmer and colder times - one that's been observed through a scientific analysis of the Earth to be naturally occurring for hundreds of thousands of years...more here...

Astonishing facts from the Heartland Conference, New York, Session 2...

Highlights from Quadrant's Bob Carter...
...Terry Dunleavy (NZ Climate Science Coalition, Auckland) reported an analysis by John McLean (Melbourne) of the reviewers’ comments on the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report. Amongst other astonishing facts (against a claimed “2,500 reviewers”), of the 62 reviewers of the crucial Chapter 9 (attribution of cause of climate change), 55 were conflicted, and of the remaining 7 apparently independent persons, only ONE explicitly endorsed the most important statement about human attribution in the chapter....more here...
...sentiments which reinforced Richard Lindzen's earlier address...
...The process of coopting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science -- especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change...more here...
...and this from Ron Bailey of ReasonOnline...
...Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter...more here...

The international man of mystery...

...after selecting the masthead quote above I thought a quick validating search on Google would be worthwhile. I found this 1997 National Review article...
"The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man," declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the "Custodian of the Planet." He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, (left) of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of "global governance" that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the "indispensable man" at the center of this creeping UN power grab... It's not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of like-minded people fighting to save the world from less prescient and more selfish forces - namely, market forces. And though the crises change - World War II in the Forties, fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the "energy crisis" in the Seventies - the Left's remedy is always the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Strong has warned memorably: "If we don't change, our species will not survive. . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse." Apocalypse soon - unless international bodies save us from ourselves....more here...
And I wonder, does Maurice ever get together with that wonderful humanitarian George Soros ? Well, as a matter of fact, yes he does...

The Heartland Conference (1) ...from Bob Carter...

...Folks,
You may be interested in my reports from the NY climate conference which are being posted by Quadrant Online.
In my report on session one I comment that:
President Vaclav Klaus reports latest poll from the Czech Republic shows only 11% of people believe that man has a significant influence in warming the climate.
West Australian Joanne Nova’s Climate Skeptics Handbook launched, and a 150,000 print run announced.
“We will win this debate”, says Dr Richard Lindzen, “for we are right and they are wrong”.
More here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/03/heartland-2-session-one
Bob Carter, New York, 9th March, 2009

Comment of the day...

... from The San Diego News Examiner ...Google Physicist James A. Peden ( here ) and you will discover that he recently ran tests on manmade CO2 to measure the gas's absorption ability (atomic absorption spectrometry). The results showed that CO2 isn't capable of absorbing much more than two-thousandths of the radiated heat passing upward through our atmosphere. Therefore, it cannot be guilty of trapping heat and thereby causing "Global Warming." Ask yourself - why has the media not reported on this? Who stands to gain monetarily by continuing the myth of CO2? Why should we spend billions of dollars to control CO2? It's all a sham and junk science! Al Gore will not debate the science. Why? Because he can't prove any of his so-called global warming science. But, because he has formed a cap and trade company (GIM), mandatory cap and trade regulations will force companies to trade for green credits through companies like his. He stands (as written by Fortune and Forbes Magazines) to make billions...

Growing resistance in the US to Cap and Trade...John Key in the WSJ...

"The Obama budget did more to help us consolidate and coalesce the business community than anything we could have done. It's opened eyes to the fact that this is about a social welfare transfer system, not about climate..." ...more here... Williamk Kovacs, US Chamber of Commerce, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal... There in a nutshell from Mr Kovacs is what global warming hysteria is about, not just in the USA but internationally. "The climate" is the excuse, the reality is an unprecedented wealth transference. The deceived Obama supporters will respond with great anger when the truth becomes evident...
...and John Key and Helen Clark hit the bigtime in the same issue...
...in the 1980s, New Zealand's government implemented a wide-ranging program of economic liberalization, including deep reductions in tariffs and subsidies, and privatization of state-run industries. The plan, nicknamed "Rogernomics" after then-Finance Minister (now Sir) Roger Douglas, was akin to Reaganomics, and the island nation grew smartly.
But while the U.S. and Australia broadly continued their economic liberalization programs under both right- and left-wing governments, New Zealand didn't -- until now. Over the past nine years, Helen Clark's left-wing Labour government rode the global economic expansion and used the revenue surge to expand government welfare programs, renationalize industries, and embrace causes like global warming. As a result, the economy stagnated while Australia took off. "We have been on a slippery slope," Mr. Key says...
...more from The Wall Street Journal here...

The world is watching...

...The International Conference on Climate Change is devoted to answering questions overlooked by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Click on image to enlarge.) That panel concluded global temperatures may already have reached crisis proportions, and that human activity was a key driver in raising temperatures, primarily because of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But the 80 experts scheduled to speak at the Heartland conference say they will present a substantially different viewpoint.
“The number of people registered for this event is nearly twice as many as attended the 2008 conference,” noted Heartland President Joseph Bast. “And the presenters at this year’s conference are the elite in the world among climate scientists. We will be delighted to demonstrate once again the breadth and high quality of support that the skeptical perspective on climate change enjoys...updates to follow...Programme for Day 1 here...

The chorus of dissent is growing stronger...

...and the dissenters display significant courage by advocating an unpopular viewpoint when funding for institutions is under threat...
Dr. Kesten Green is a Senior Research Fellow with the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit of Monash University in Australia. Dr. Scott Armstrong a Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Willie Soon is a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Together they say...
...The tiny fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased through the twentieth century. And yet, during that time, global average temperatures rose till about 1940, fell till about 1975, rose again till 1998, and then dropped away again. It is not surprising, then, that despite claims “the science is settled,” thousands of scientists disagree with forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming.
The IPCC first projected a global warming rate of 0.03°C per year in 1992. The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. When the IPCC’s warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO₂ growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model.The models employed by James Hansen and the IPCC are not based on scientific forecasting principles. There is no empirical evidence that they provide long-term forecasts that are as accurate as forecasting that global average temperatures won’t change. Hansen’s, and the IPCC’s, forecasts, and the recommendations based on them, should be ignored.It would be irresponsible and immoral of policymakers to impose the heavy burden of costly anti carbon-based-energy policies, in the absence of any credible evidence that those burdens will result in net benefits to man, beast or tree...more here...

And from George Will, nationally syndicated columnist in the US...
...I’ve never seen anything quite like this in my now 40 years in Washington. I’ve never seen anything like the enlistment of the mainstream media in a political crusade — and this is a political crusade, because it’s about how we should be governed and how we should live; those are the great questions of politics. It is clearly for some people a surrogate religion. It’s a spiritual quest. It offers redemption. But what it also always offers, whether it is global cooling or global warming, is a rationale for the government to radically increase its supervision of our life and our choices. Whether the globe is cooling, whether it’s warming, the government’s going to be the winner and the governing class will be the winner...more, here...

Droolers, eye rollers, knuckle draggers and window lickers please note...

...What WILL they think of next? ...A few months ago, for a joke, Brendon O'Neil set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder (Facebook login required) ...HERE... It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 73 members. (Sign up !) An excerpt...
...The Science proves two things beyond a shadow of a doubt: 1) Planet Earth will be consumed by a furious hellfire unless we reduce our carbon emissions by 92.8 per cent within the next eight years, seven months and two weeks. 2) This warming is DIRECTLY caused by human beings shopping in supermarkets (especially Tesco) and taking cheap flights to Prague.
There is a clear, proven and unquestionable link between human "fun" and the melting of the glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula, which will cause floods in Bangladesh and an epidemic of diarrhoea in Botswana (see the "Fun/Death in Botswana" pie chart produced by Danish climatologists for more information). So why do some people still DENY global warming, and call for a debate (!!!) about it?...
This group believes that these people are mentally disordered. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics...more from Brendon O'Neil, of Spiked here, who observes...environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes....
... That is of course the reason that obsessive compulsive people like myself, who have to drink green blood every full moon, keep attracting, baiting, taunting and trapping greenies. Have a look at the Facebook site (link above) and add to the comments section...More ...here...

The green/left can relax now...

...it's business as usual. The honeymoon with the Obama presidency is over, and normal warfare can resume immediately....Hostilities re-commenced after Todd Stern, chief US climate negotiator in the State Department announced a split (read full text of Stern's speech here) between the US and the IPCC...

"...He argued that pushing for overly ambitious midterm targets is not required by the science and would undermine the political goal..."
NB. Climate Debate Daily featured this article from Quadrant in November 2008 predicting this split...
While we mustn't get too excited and read too much into this inevitable encounter with realism and discord, I predict that this schism marks (as Churchill said) "the end of the beginning."
What strikes me as particularly significant is the sentiment from Stern that the IPCC's mid-term goals were "not required by the science"... Hang on Sir...We have been led to believe that "the science" is settled, the scientists unanimous, and that "the science" predicts the end of the world as we know it, and furthermore that the Obama administration agreed with all the catastrophic scenarios...
Well they still do but.....as Prometheus points out...

...While many people have pointed to the fact that the science of climate change has advanced since the 2007 IPCC report, far more importantly, the ongoing discussion of policy options has rendered the IPCC obsolete. Pachauri has criticized the Obama Administration for its climate policies, so it will be interesting to see how the broader IPCC community reacts to the scaling back of expectations being set forth. This will be especially interesting as many IPCC scientists gather in Copenhagen later this month to “influence policy.” Will the Obama Administration be criticized by the scientists?
The second important point to take from this passage is a realization that climate policy must be governed by common sense and what is politically “possible” and “feasible.”

...so, the debate revolves around ongoing scientific advancement since 2007 and "common sense"and what is "politically possible"(ie, not everyone's fooled by this global warming/climate change BS) ...

...and meanwhile, the mainstream news media ignore the cooling planet...

...Temperatures have plummeted to record or near-record lows in 32 states this winter. On March 2, a global warming protest in Washington, D.C. was buried by nearly a foot of snow. And a new study warns that the Earth could be in for a 30-year cooling trend. Reality is not cooperating with the network news’ global warming theme, yet reporters are unwilling to even discuss the possibility that the Earth is cooling...more here...

Some light relief...

...click above to enlarge...and ditto for the stunning recruitment poster for the BNP. (Never mind that the Spitfire is flown by a Polish airman from a Polish squadron, and that the BNP is stridently anti-E.U...so why would they want representation there ? ) ...never mind, the spin doctors can handle the fall-out...

...and a candid picture of Al Gore (left) dispirited and down and out after the disappointing anti-global warming protest in Washington...

Weather forecasters have always been the butt of jokes...

...particularly in the UK, where foul weather is the national preoccupation...

The UK Met Office famously forecast this past winter to be milder than average...
25 September 2008 ...The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.

The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :

The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C - the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C...

...from "milder than average" to "the coldest winter in 13 years" is not just a slight blunder for a quasi-scientific body, on whom many individuals, businesses and institutions depend. Forgive the cynicism, but it seems that Met office personnel may just have made a guess, or let their ideology about global warming interfere with their objectivity, or perhaps just closed their eyes when they threw the dart...
Where are all the satirical TV shows of the past when they're needed ?

...and this, from another sceptic, William Happer Professor of Physics, Princeton University in a testimony to the US senate..."...Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative..." more here...

Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases...

...Al Gore, in his (in)famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet. This assumption is central to the General Circulation Models (GCMs) and the current consensus on climate change. Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental. In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.
Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning - on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.... more from Jennifer Marohasy, here...
...and this startling news too...
... It appears that global cooling recognition may be starting to make headway in the scientific community. We have this Discovery/MSNBC article about a NOAA scientist titled “Warming might be on hold, study finds“
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years...more, here... and here...

...and from William Briggs, statistician...

...Everybody knows it hasn’t been getting warmer, but it has been getting colder. So, are the climate models which predicted warmer and not colder wrong?
Well, Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says, “temperatures should have gone up”. But nobody told the temperatures. Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton said, “warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.” Not to worry, “we’ll have explosive warming” Held says.
In other words, the models have been wrong up to now, they are still wrong, but we still believe them....

The bitterness, anger and hysteria levels are rising...

...further to yesterday's post below, allegations have been made that to criticise Al Gore's position on climate change is akin to colluding in mass murder. The attempted imposition of political correctness, is (as predicted by many), a tool of totalitarian thought with its only aim to stifle dissent...
...Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) responds...
“I am beginning to get a better understanding why some scientists react so strongly to some of the things we write here at Prometheus. For instance, one climate scientist suggests that my calling out Al Gore for misrepresenting the science of disasters and climate change (as well as Andy Revkin’s comparison of that to George Will’s misrepresentations) to be morally comparable to killing 1,000 people. I kid you not. I wonder how many climate scientists share this perspective.” ...see the full exchange here... , and here...

How long before "climate change denial" becomes a thought crime ?

Not long at all...before the thought police come calling...more here...

The fear of global warming catastrophe...

...is the fuel that drives the motor of the green ideologues. If the natural cyclical warming of the planet isn't accompanied by threats of famine, floods, disease, mass migration, hurricanes and plagues of locusts then the non-problem is seen for what it is.
Roger Pielke Jnr. (blogging as Prometheus, right) is established as one of the world's foremost authorities in environmental studies. Al Gore is established as a politician and film maker...
Gore's premise, as expressed in An Inconvenient Truth, that AGW means calamity for humanity, has been discredited as factually incorrect on several counts by UK courts. Pielke Jnr. has been investigating Gore's claim that increased extreme weather conditions, ie hurricanes, are an associated phenomenon of AGW...
In this article, Pielke Jnr. concludes...
...I do not fault Gore for being selective in his presentation of evidence or relying on non-peer reviewed sources. This is of course what politicians do in trying to make the best case possible for the actions that they support. However, when they do so, they run the risk that someone will call them on it....more, here...

Another nail in the coffin of global warming alarmism...

Biography...Roger A. Pielke, Jr. joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in 2001. He is currently Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES Roger serves as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. He also served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the University's Graduate Program in Environmental Studies from 2002-2004. More, here...

Footnote...also see the trillion $ Porkapalooza, here...

The Germans have a pithy word for it...

...called "schadenfreude" (apologies to German speakers for earlier mis- spelling).

Schadenfreude means taking pleasure in others misfortune; an inside out umbrella on a windy day for example, Helen Clark getting a tongue lashing at Waitangi... stop it...I am taking a lot of pleasure from the fact that James Hansen's orchestrated agitprop exercise to draw attention to global warming has met with a frosty response...

...IntelliWeather Monday and hour by hour forecast for Washington, DC.
WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 2 PM EST MONDAY Includes the Counties: District Of Columbia, Arlington/Falls Church/Alexandria
Includes the cities: Washington, Alexandria, Falls Church
Tonight…Snow. Snow accumulation of 4 to 8 inches. Brisk with lows in the lower 20s. North winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Monday…Cloudy. Snow likely in the morning…Then a chance of snow in the afternoon. Additional snow accumulation around an inch. Total snow accumulation 7 to 8 inches. Brisk with highs in the mid 20s. Northwest winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow 70 percent...more from WUWT here...

Yes, yes I know weather isn't climate, nor is it always cooperative...