Trust and credibility...

...are qualities we value highly in our advisers. Whether we are dealing with our mechanic, accountant, doctor or lawyer, we pay them on the basis of their reputations. Has greenpeace or the WWF or the IPCC earned our trust ? Do they enjoy wide public esteem ? In this editorial from Spiegel Online, authors Richard Tol, Roger Pielke jnr. and Hans von Storch itemise the fatal shortcomings of the IPCC and call for its reform and the resignation of its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri......

...We have seen a crisis of confidence gathering momentum around climate science in recent weeks. Following the unauthorized release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia, showing climate scientists not at their best, ( cue pathos alarm !) now comes a flurry of attention to errors in official reports and accusations of conflicts of interest. The crisis centers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Meteorological Organization, and its chair, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. Without significant institutional reform, the IPCC, and climate science as a whole, risks more than just bad press. It risks losing its credibility and trust...Sustaining a climate policy that is effective, acceptable and durable can only be based on sound and impartial advice from institutions that do their science sustainably over many decades. The IPCC was supposed to provide that advice, but its standards have slipped, its procedures have turned out to be insufficient and its credibility has been questioned. Climate policy matters, and so too does the IPCC. Its importance means that reform is needed before the reputation of all of climate science is irreparably damaged...more here...

...while a new broom may be perceived to be sweeping the IPCC clean, it is vital that a new ethos of open, accountable science is also instituted. Pachauri mustn't simply be a fall guy, taking the rap for the decades old pseudo-scientific scare of "global warming". If, as the alarmists say, man made climate change is the "issue of the century" we demand the highest scientific standards involving reports based on transparent and open science to help deal with it. The old tactics of corrupt science, fear and scare stories won't work any more. Without real reform we can be sure another whistleblower waits and another Climategate looms just around the corner...

...AND just who benefits from IPCC lies ?

Climategate, the scientific scandal of our age...

...many of us are appalled by the widespread acceptance of medical quackery, are awfully insulted by the unquestioning acceptance by the MSM of psychic charlatans, aura readers and other con artists, and have never been abducted and/or probed by alien beings or even seen a UFO. Us poor unfortunates are prone to scepticism and questioning, and have always therefore been wary of the green left campaign to destroy capitalism and the lies and media collusion that sustains their hypocrisy. The debunking of the green left climate change scare after the Climategate expose continues under its own accelerating momentum. Climategate offers the most significant evidence to date that the outrageous dogmatic certainty of Al Gore and others that the science explaining catastrophic climate change is settled is pure political hogwash. A very cursory examination of the issue reveals that much is still to be determined; the interaction of clouds and cosmic rays for example, the role of the oceans, and the influence and/or absence of sunspots. Amidst all this uncertainty, many of our most lauded scientists and brightest brains kept their doubts to themselves. In this respect alone they colluded with the hypocritical greens, displayed humble obedience to their paymasters and great disdain for their fellow citizens.

Of all the quotes from the leaked Climategate emails, the comments and plaintive questions from fellow Kiwi Kevin E. Trenberth (right) carry the most weight for me. Trenberth is one of the major figures within international climate science circles. He is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research. He was a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change and serves on the Scientific Steering Group for the Climate Variability and Predictability program. In addition, he serves on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme .He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Wearing his 4 star scientific general's hat Trenberth stands in the ranks of our best and brightest, aware since the third form in Christchurch of the most fundamental law of physics; that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed or transferred. He would always know that if the IPCC climate models do not even satisfy this elementary law, then it is questionable whether they are useful for anything at all. Trenberth openly admits that there are 3 sets of vital data that are "wanting" before they can understand how the climate functions...he writes on October 14th 2009...

"We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless, as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty..."
"Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go? …
"But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with sky temperature data. That data is unfortunately wanting, and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking, although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes, and burying heat at depth, where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later, and so we should know about it. "

These admissions and doubts by Trenberth seem to make him one of the most human of all the Climategate figures. After all these years of research he is saying, we still don't have a clue where all the energy is going. Without this knowledge, how can he or anyone else construct and obey computer models that will predict our climate destiny ? Unfortunately of course, Trenberth followed the lead of fellow catastrophist Dr Stephen Schneider instead who in 1989 advised "Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective,and being honest."

...For another stunning timeline summary of the most significant Climategate revelations, click here...

...and OffTopic, but unquestionably the quote of the day, courtesy and H/T Evan C., from Labour MP Kelvin Davis, responding to arch fool and racist nincompoop Hone Harawira...

"We (Maori) are generally dumber, sicker, poorer, more pissed, drugged and pregnant than any other group of people in New Zealand. We know the problem, but what's the solution? Well let's repeal the Foreshore and Seabed and put the F&S into Maori title. We can be dumber, sicker,poorer, more pissed, drugged and pregnant at the beach. That'll make all the difference."

What really drives the green left ?

...well international socialism of course, which makes their environmental "save the world" pose such an obvious and hypocritical sham. After the chaos and farce at Copenhagen can anyone really be in any doubt now that the only point of the whole climatastrophe scenario is to inspire fear and guilt and grease the wheels of the money train ? And can anyone now really believe deep in their hearts that "the science is settled" and that increasing CO2 levels will devastate our world ?...Although the war against the green left is by no means won, we have achieved a significant victory, a DDay of sorts that will proceed under its own accelerating momentum...this from the UK Telegraph...

...When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly. After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers...This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen...more here...

Something is very, very rotten in the state of Denmark...

...so says our brave but endangered columnist Jim Hopkins (aka Jam Hipkins) in his fortnightly offering (see also my posting 27.11.09) in this morning's NZ Herald...

...the heart's not singing 'cos there's sod all to sing about, sunshine! We can't even sing about that anymore without some sobbing celeb sanctimoaniously banging on about our bloody carbon footprint. It's hard to get a tingle in our Jingle Bells when there's a colossally wasteful, doom-on-steroids loath-in happening in Denmark. And tough to get the goodwill going with 30,000 and four hoarse men of the apocalypse screaming "Repent! Repent! The End is Nigh! Last chance to save the planet" at their taxpayer-funded religious rally in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. That's why we're not shopping,...because we're numb with despair. Because we feel hopeless, bludgeoned by shonky science and dodgy data into a state of abject grovelment - ashamed of our sinful selves and terrified our delicate little planet is going to hell in a (very hot) handcart.
It isn't and it won't. She's a tough old Mother, Earth...more here...

...and on the 10th day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...ten computer programmes, nine researchers dancing,eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming,six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs,three hockey sticks, two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

...I didn't intend to enlarge today's posting, but MUST ADD THIS remarkable and incredible exchange of emails between Tom Wigley of Climategate fame, and (the temporarily stood down) Phil Jones of the CRU. Read this, and judge the truth and integrity of these men for yourself...from Andrew Bolt...

...the person he was rebuking in this email, Michael Mann, was an
author of this same IPCC who had his now discredited “hockey stick” included
prominently in the third IPCC report to “prove” what now seems almost certainly
false - the today’s temperatures are the hottest for more than a 1000 years. The
Keith Briffa he attacked in the first email is also an IPCC author, whose
similar attempt to “prove” there was no medieval warming is now also regarded as
completely discredited. The Phil Jones that Wigley sent the first email to is
another IPCC author, who vowed to keep out sceptical papers from the IPCC, urged
the destruction of evidence and boasted he had used a “trick” to “hide the
decline” in temperatures in another graph used by the IPCC...more here...

The Emperor's new clothes...

...are on display. They're dirty threadbare rags, full of patches and holes. Even the pro-green NZ Herald has noticed, with climategate on the front page, and this amazing and very brave cartoon on the op-ed page...and now this in depth analysis and comment on what passes for modern day scientific ideals from the online Weekly Standard...

..Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming...The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment...
...One of the things the CRU emails prove is that the oft-cited figure of 2,000 top scientists is misleading; the circle of genuinely active scientists in the work of CRU and related institutions in this country is very small. Nonetheless, Al Gore and other climate campaigners have leaned heavily on the IPCC process as proof for their assertions that human-caused global warming is a matter of "settled" science. This, even though, in the last IPCC report on the science of climate change in 2007, the terms "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appear over 1,300 times in 900 pages, and the report describes our level of scientific understanding of key aspects of climate as "low" or "very low." The IPCC chapter on the climate models that are the principal tool predicting our future doom refers to "significant uncertainties" in all the models, and admits that "models still show significant errors..." more here...

...and on the first, second and third days of Christmas...my true love sent to me three hockey sticks , two tricks to play, and a cross section of a pine tree...

The inconvenient truth...

...will not go away, and it's thanks only to a broad media power base that the pretence of scientific impartiality still clings to so many of the so called scientists of climate science. This, from Real Clear Politics...Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed...What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences-physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering-came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences....more here...

...and who was responsible for the CRU leaks ? A discontented insider or an outside hacker ? A Samizdata writer feels it may be the work of the Russians...what if it does turn out to have been the former KGB? Would it not be an irony of historic proportions that an organisation formerly devoted to establishing a global tyrrany has thrown a big hammer-and-sickle into the works of their would-be successors? And, not just ironic, but also just. Because if the warm-mongers get their way, then it is not the powerful and the well-connected that need fear their zealotry. The Al Gores and Zac Goldsmiths of the world can afford to bask in the green glow of personal glory, safe in the knowledge that their opulent lifestyles will not be compromised by so much a sterling silver napkin ring. They will soar (both literally and metaphorically) above it all. No, it is the Average Joe/Jane who will be forced to endure the austerity that their new overlords will demand. It is those who struggle to make ends meet who will be told that the planet can no longer afford their humble family saloon or their two weeks a year in the Algarve. It is the little people who will be stepped upon because they can be stepped upon. Maybe, one day, we will know the true identity of the e-mail hackers. Or maybe we will never know. But I do sort of hope that it does turn out to be some guy called Yvgeny, acting on orders from the Kremlin, tapping away in a windowless room in a drab building on a military base in Krasnoyarsk because then, we will be able to say: congratulations, tovarisch! You have, at long last, established yourself as a Hero of the Proletariat.

Vested interests are an enemy of sound science...

As our politicians and green left celebrities jet away to Copenhagen the international climategate fiasco rumbles on. The weary electorate have long since dismissed Al Gore's eco-porn scenarios, and have lost confidence in so called climate science and its practitioners. How did we ever get into this farcical situation ? ...Follow the money trail... from todays WSJ ...

...the question is...why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them. Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"...

Please note, the image to the right is the property of Maggie Terlicki and can be found at her wonderful website, here...

Harry, the anguished computer programmer summarised the sad shonky mess that climatastrophe rests on..."I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!" This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble...more here...

Dr Roy Spencer weighs in...

...and comment from this man is received with a degree of respect...Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming...


My Top 10 Annoyances in the Climate Change Debate
1. The term “climate change” itself.
2. “Climate change denier”.
3. The appeal to peer-reviewed and published research.
4. Appeal to authority.
5. Unwillingness to debate.
6. A lack of common sense.
7. Use of climate models as truth.
8. Claims that climate models have been tested.
9. The claim that the IPCC is unbiased.
10. The claim that reducing CO2 emissions is the right thing to do anyway...read the full article, here...and quote of the day, from the UK Telegraph...

"...At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed..."