Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Dr Rajendra Pachauri's astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests


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

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

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

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

Full article here

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Friday, January 29, 2010

Two radio interviews with Lord Monckton. Professor Andy Pitman chickened out of one.

Have a listen to Lord Monckton and make up your own minds. It has been clear what tactic the alarmists have decided to use against him, ie try to avoid his substantive arguments and instead paint him as some kind of wild-eyed crazy. (Perhaps made easier by the fact that a thyroid condition does give him very prominent eyes.)

Two good radio interviews with Monckton. Here the ABC’s Karyn Wood notes that no warmist (including Professor Andy Pitman) would come on the show to debate Monckton, who then repudiates Pitman’s ludicrous claim about wicked corporations funding sceptics such as himself. They then discuss other scare claims.

And here is 4BC’s Michael Smith and his listeners exploring the issues with Monckton.

Tim Blair comments:

Several readers credit Readfearn for having the courage to actually appear. By contrast, the latest to dodge Monckton is Professor Andy Pitman, who apparently declined a radio invitation. It’s a curious thing; Al Gore travels the world to speak at events closed to media and routinely declines debate challenges, while Monckton travels the world looking for debates but finds people running away. This may say something about the relative confidence they have in their arguments.

It’s interesting, too, that leftists applaud the widespread reluctance to debate Monckton, but then tune in anyway to see comrade Readfearn get belted. Where’s the solidarity, brothers?

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The Courier Mail - Lord Monckton & Ian Plimer won the Brisbane debate "in straight sets"


This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who has been paying attention these last few years.

It's the real reason why alarmists tend to run for cover when challenged to open debate. As the Intelligence Squared debate in New York a couple of years ago and the more recent one at the University of St Andrew's have shown, once people are exposed to the counter arguments they begin to question how strong the case for anthropogenic climate change is, or at least begin to question whether it is as pressing an issue as it has been made out to be.

From the Bolter:

Bruce McMahon of the Courier Mail shows no mercy to green colleague Graham Readfearn, who foolishly agreed to join a debate in Brisbane with climate sceptics:

Aided by Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer, Lord Monckton cruised to victory before a partisan crowd of suits and ties, movers and shakers.

Hundreds of them were there for the sell-out, $130-a-head Brisbane Institute lunch – and scepticism was applauded.

Climate change scientist Professor Barry Brook and teammate Graham Readfearn, The Courier-Mail’s environment blogger, were stoic in argument (even if Mr Readfearn may have foot-faulted once or twice and had to be pulled into line by moderator Ray Weeks).
Readfearn has not commented on his ordeal, merely posting this audio extract and this.

Our alarmist friend Professor Barry Brook also took part in the debate, but he seems to have lost some of his old certainty.

In 2007 Brook claimed that while, yes, nature had been holding climate change at bay, ”all hell is about to break loose” from 2009, and he last month claimed ”2010 (is) looking likely to be the hottest ever”.

But in debate with Monckton and Plimer he conceded “we don’t know how much it (global temperature) is going to change in the future” (first audio clip), and urged instead that we cut our gases just in case.

Monckton’s retort to this citing of the “precautionary principle” is magisterial - that it is nonsense to consider only the risk of not Doing Something, without also considering the risks that Doing that Something involves.

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Osama bin Laden gets his Gaia on


From Tim Blair:

AL QAEDA’S AL GORE
 
Community leader Osama bin Laden gets his Gaia on:
Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, has condemned the US and other industrial economies, holding them responsible for the phenomenon of climate change.

In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.

“This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions - whether intentionally or unintentionally - and about the action we must take,” bin Laden said.

“Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury - the phenomenon is an actual fact.”
Argument by assertion, speaking to “the world”, blaming the west, a demand for unspecified “action” … this guy has read every page of his greenoid tactics manual, including the chapter on drastic solutions:
He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for “drastic solutions” to global warming, and “not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change” …

The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.

Among your deeper Greens, recycling bin Laden already holds a certain appeal. Now he’s just aiming for a formal Blair’s Law alignment.

UPDATE. James Delingpole:
Some commentators are suggesting that this is a just cynical, Steve-Hilton-style attempt to “decontaminate the brand” after over a decade’s poor press for Al Qaeda. By repositioning himself as Mother Gaia’s Caring Sharing Friend Bin Laden may yet win the hearts of a broad new constituency ranging from Al Gore and NASA’s Dr James Hansen to soap-dodging crusty climate activists and carbon-trading oligarchs all the way to fragrant Yummy Mummies from Notting Hill who are BFs with Samantha and Dave Cameron, only eat organic, and do most of their shopping at I Saw You Coming.

Others argue that this is a naked bid for the IPCC chairman’s position shortly to be vacated by his near-doppelganger Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

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Monday, January 4, 2010

Climategate: "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering"


Dr Tim Ball:

It’s beyond belief that the mainstream media can’t see the devastating importance of the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) known as Climategate. The blindness cancels the claim they’re society’s watchdog. Left wing journalist Amy Goodman said when writing about the Bush administration, You know governments are going to lie, but not the media.” Now, with a new administration she is silent, proving there are lies of commission and omission.

Most haven’t read the emails or summarily dismiss them because of political bias. Journalist Clive Crook illustrated an open mind, albeit on second look. “In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Full article here.

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Friday, October 30, 2009

I don't know if I buy this 'world government' claim, but...


...I do think people should at least watch Lord Christopher Monckton and John Bolton discuss the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change and what it may mean.

There is a killer arguement from Lord Monckton though to my scepticism on that point - Europe.

People in Europe, especially the British, have been told time and time again that claims that a particular treaty would cede sovereignty from a democratically elected government in Whitehall to unelected European officials were just right-wing or nationalist scaremongering.

And yet that is exactly what has happened. (Don't let the existence of a basically impotent and pointless European parliament fool you here.)

Treaties, just like charters of rights, are living documents that take on a life of their own once passed and very often have consequences that their framers never even imagined.

Mr Bolton is not as concerned as Lord Monckton about the particular significance of Copenhagen.

Part 7 seems to start with the same bit as part 5, but is longer.

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Sunday, October 4, 2009

351 Year British Temperature Record - UK summers cooler now


Dr John Ray comments: If people were interested in evidence, this would kill global warming stone dead.

The Central England Temperature (CET) record, starting in 1659 and maintained by the UK Met Office, is the longest unbroken temperature record in the world. Temperature data is averaged for a number of weather stations regarded as being representative of Central England rather than measuring temperature at one arbitrary geographical point identified as the centre of England.

A Scottish statistician, Wilson Flood, has collected and analysed the 351 year CET record. Here is the comparison of the 18th Century with the 20th Century:

Wilson Flood comments: “Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously.”

SOURCE

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Saturday, October 3, 2009

Climate Change: The 'Planned Recession' Strategy


Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda.

unemployment

The Telegraph offers an eye-catching sub-head: ” Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change.”

This should only surprise you if you have relied upon claims by the global warming industry — itself a consortium of activists inside and outside of government, Big Science, Big Academia, and other rent-seeking industry crafting schemes to profit in the near-term from the wealth-transfers — or the Obama administration, desperate to walk-back the president’s admission that his plan of cap-and-trade will “bankrupt” all sorts of facilities and cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

The rest at Big Government

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Guy with luxury home etc thinks poor people are happier

Of course the hypocritical wanker works for the WWF. And gee, the environmental protection racket obviously pays well!

Let's see, lives on Madagascar in a luxury home, has a $35,000 boat and sends his kids to boarding school in South Africa.

His "job" with the WWF is to oppose things like a coal mine that would give his happy little poor people a decent job themselves, and a chance to earn a decent wage for themselves and their families (though obviously no where near as much as he earns to keep them poor).

According to the WWF, this team will ensure that "government decision makers and political leaders worldwide lead the world towards a future using a cleaner energy supply."

However, can we really take these experts seriously?

In their previous documentary "Mine Your Own Business," Ann and Phelim interviewed Mark Fenn, WWF's Madagascar representative, who was leading the fight against a coal-mining project that would have provided 2,000 jobs to the impoverished village.

In "Mine Your Own Business," Fenn stated that people are happy to be living such impoverished lives. He believes they do not place a value on education, so lacking money to pay for their children's schooling is not a top priority or concern.

This, of course, couldn't be further from the truth. The average salary for people in Madagascar is a meager $100 per month, making it extremely difficult for parents to send their sons and daughters to school.

"Mine Your Own Business" featured George, an unemployed miner from Romania who thought he knew about poverty but was shocked when he saw the level of deprivation in Madagascar.

He asked Fenn the question that all humanitarians should ask, "What about the people who are very poor?"

Fenn's response has since become infamous around the world. He said that for poor people, measuring how often someone smiles is more important than wealth.

Okay, so this pretentious dickhead would be more than willing to give up the home and the boat and the private education of his children, because they'd be happier and would smile more?

I don't think so.

I think he is full of shit.

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Friday, October 2, 2009

The heart of the problem for Malcolm Turnbull & the Libs - religion


Tim Blair nails this I think. I've said exactly the same thing. Had the Coalition taken on the environmental nutcases and extremists years ago and actually engaged them in debate and thus exposed just how weakly based their scaremongering was, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
The politics are tough now because conservatives years ago allowed the debate to get away from them; frightened of being labelled nature-haters, they declined to attack anti-progress green arguments as they were being formed. Result: in 2009 they’re dealing with a full-blown religion, and they’re discovering that logic isn’t much of a weapon against faith.

Still, it’s difficult to have sympathy for a party containing many members who privately express doubt over climate change but only rarely voice those doubts in public. As Turnbull might advise: have the courage of your convictions.

Yes, religion never went away. It just mutated into an irrational form of environmentalism and then went completely crazy.

You see this when you point out to one of the faithful that some problem or other, say deforestation, on the available evidence, isn't as bad as they think it is.

(NUANCE ALERT! NUANCE ALERT! Nobody is saying deforestation ISN'T a problem.)

Now, you'd think this was good news wouldn't you? Well, any sane and rational person would.

But not your average greenie!

The idea that anything might not be as bad as they want to believe it is only produces dumb anger and incomprehension.

They almost get off on their own negativity.

And there's the rub. Malcolm Turnbull is at heart a believer in the new religion.

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The Not Evil Just Wrong blog - the true cost of global warming hysteria


Have a look. Now! Off you go.

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IPCC "is a four-legged stool that is fast losing its legs"


From the National Post:

T

he official United Nation’s global warming agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged stool  that is fast losing its legs.  To carry the message of man-made global warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection,  3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication.  None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.

Over the past month, one of the IPCC’s top climate scientists, Mojib Latif, attempted to explain that even if global temperatures were to cool over the next 10 to 20 years, that would not mean that man-made global warming is no longer catastrophic. It was a tough case to make, and it is not clear Mr. Latif succeeded. In a presentation to a world climate conference in early September, Mr. Latif rambled somewhat and veered off into inscrutable language that is now embedded in a million blog posts attempting to prove one thing or another.

A sample: “It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two, you know, when the temperature cools, all right, relative to the present level...And then, you know, I know what’s going to happen. You know, I will get, you know, millions of phone calls, you know —‘What’s going on?’ ‘So is global warming disappearing, you know?’ ‘Have you lied on us, you know?’ So, and, therefore, this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.”


Read the rest here.

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Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Most Influential Tree in the World?


The fall out from the disclosure about how tree ring proxy data has been misused in certain high profile palaeo-climate reconstuctions continues.

I've said before, if people knew just how poor the evidence is for the argument that something unusual is happening to the climate, there'd be an uproar!

Now we find out how one climate researcher carefully cherry-picked which trees to use out of a larger sample so as to get the "right" result - ie, that global temperatures began to increase sharply towards the end of the 19th Century after a relatively stable period of a thousand years or more.

His total data set comprised only ten trees.

Indeed, his results are largely based on one tree!

But if you look at the larger sample, guess what? The supposed spike in temperature disappears.

And of course, as is typical in this area of climate research, he did everything possible for years to hide his data from independent examination.

Now we know why.

MIRROR POSTING: YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World

1 10 2009
Climate Audit is getting hit with traffic again, so this is a mirror post for interested parties. – Anthony

YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World
by Steve McIntyre on September 30th, 2009

Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the difference between the CRU 12 and the Schweingruber 34. In making such comparisons, it’s always a good idea to look at the data in detail – something that obviously should have been done by Briffa and the Team before the widespread use of the Yamal proxy in so many reconstructions, rather than this late date, over 9 years since its original use in Briffa 2000.

In a previous thread, I showed a plot of the actual ring widths of the 10 CRU trees ending in 1990. Today I’m going to show a similar plot of the “dimensionless index” for the same 10 trees. It is the “dimensionless index” that is averaged to make the “chronology”.

Click on the heading above for the full post.

People are wondering if this is part of the reason that that price of carbon has collapsed to only 10 cents a tonne, down from a high of $7?

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Spending $40 trillion to fix $1 trillion damage makes sense?


Alan Wood | October 01, 2009

Article from:  The Australian

THE inconvenient truth is that there is no hope the UN climate change negotiations that start in Copenhagen on December 7 will deliver a new Kyoto treaty, with a global agreement on binding emissions targets. This was, of course, the original aim of the meeting but has been abandoned.

 

On Monday The Guardian in Britain quoted a top European official who described the idea of negotiating on targets as naive and said the best that could be expected was that countries would put up what they wanted to commit to.

Just as well, really, if we consider figures published in an article in The Washington Post, also on Monday, by Danish statistician and environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.

His Copenhagen Consensus Centre commissioned well-known climate economist Richard Tol, a contributor to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to estimate the cost of emissions targets needed to keep the rise in global temperature to under the 2C limit suggested by the IPCC's work. Tol's answer is a global price tag of $US40 trillion in 2100, to avoid expected climate damage costing $US1.1 trillion. These figures are based on mainstream economic models and subject to the usual limitations of modelling over long periods.

But the global warming projections behind all the alarm about climate change are based on complex climate models that also have serious limitations and, according to Lomborg, Tol's estimates are best-case outcomes. They aren't the only reason to be uneasy about the present thrust of UN climate change policy.

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Weather forecaster makes mincemeat of Greenpeace


[Not that Greenpeace showed up for the debate - they chickened out, possibly when they found out who they were up against. Kind of like Al Gore in that respect!]

For those of you who don’t know him, Joe Bastardi is one of the lead forecasters for AccuWeather. He’s also a global warming skeptic.

http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/images/products_services/bastardi/bastardi1.jpg

Fox news invited Greenpeace to come on and support their press reports here and here that:
“Climate change is driving a new generation of fires with unknown social and economic consequences,”

and

“With climate models predicting increased heat waves in the coming years, we are fast approaching a global emergency.”
These are statements from Miguel Soto, Greenpeace Spain forests campaigner. I think he’d be surprised to learn, and possibly even deny, that the biggest contributor to the cause of California wildfires was an ocean cooling event, La Nina.

Fox news invited Greenpeace to come on, they initially accepted. Then late declined. Perhaps they heard they’d be up against Joe Bastardi. Watch the video as Joe takes apart the Greenpeace argument and more.

For further background, see my arguments on 60 minutes recent re-run about global warming and wildfires.

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

While Exxon-Mobil pays $23 million to sceptics...


...billions and billions and billions of dollars flows the other way.
 
 
And this doesn't count the billions of dollars in income that the marketers of fear like Greenpeace and the WWF have made in trading on climate change concerns.
 
The WWF internationally took only five years up to around 2005 to make over $2 billion US. Greenpeace took twice as long to make a similar amount of money.
 
Extraordinary amounts of money in anybody's language.
 
As I understand though, the WWF no longer publishes its accounts online. Wonder why?
 
And yet it is the chicken feed handed out by Exxon-Mobil that everybody talks about.
 
Ask yourself this though, who has all of the high-profile and very well paid spokespeople? It isn't the sceptics is it?
 
Here in Australia the only people who's full time job it is to speak and lobby about climate change, whether for Greenpeace or the WWF or the Climate Institute etc, are all on the alarmist side.
 
Whereas the sceptics are either that unusual beast, a conservative journalist like Andrew Bolt or people, very often retired, blogging in their spare time.
 
There are powerful transnational interests seeking to influence the debate on climate change, (or more accurately, seeking to prevent any debate), which are very well funded. They are Greenpeace, the WWF and similar organisations.
 

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Friday, July 10, 2009

Rudd privately admits: climate deal a dud


An open mic, and a caught-out Kevin Rudd, have exposed the fantasy that the world is on the brink of a deal to slash the emissions we’re told are heating the world to hell.
 
Until yesterday, media reports tended - typically - to oversell the G8 claims of a breakthrough this week in agreeing to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. Downplayed this time by many was that the G8 leaders made no firm promises, agreed to no sacrifices, excluded giant emittors China and India, and came up with a wording that Russia promptly seem[ed] to disown.  
 
Full post here Andrew Bolt
 

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Global temperature falls again in June


Saturday, July 11, 2009 at 07:18am
image
Both the UAH and RSS statellite data show the globe cooled in June. Lucia now plots the temperature trend since 2001, and contrasts it with the trend you’d expect from the IPCC’s gloomy warning of a temperature rise of 2 degrees by the end of the century (brown line).
 
Meanwhile, a reporter goes to a far more authoritative source on global warming than a lousy satellite:
 
image
 
UPDATE
Yet Prince Charles says we’re just eight years to sayonara:
Delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, Charles said that without “coherent financial incentives and disincentives” we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
 
 
Eight years, five years, ten years etc etc. People have been saying we've only got this much time left for at least the past 30 years.
 
Why anyone would be stupid enough to pay any attention at all to these numbers, that are clearly just pulled out of thin air, is beyond me.
 

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Wednesday, July 1, 2009

More evidence the Sun drives climate change


image
Correlation recently reported between solar/GCR [galactic cosmic rays] variability and temperature in Siberia from glacial ice core, 30 yr lag (ie. ocean currents may be part of response)

Man may be innocent, after all. Jasper Kirkby of CERN [The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire)] explains new research into whether solar activity has caused cosmic rays to indirectly warm the earth:
This talk presents an overview of the palaeoclimatic evidence for solar/cosmic ray forcing of the climate, and reviews the possible physical mechanisms. These will be investigated in the CLOUD experiment which begins to take data at the CERN PS later this year.
UPDATE
A new paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics also fingers the sun:
In concluding, we find increasingly strong evidence of a clear solar signature in a number of climatic indicators in Europe, strengthening the earlier conclusions of a study that included stations from the United States (Le Mouël et al., 2008 ). With the recent downturn of both solar activity and global temperatures, the debated correlations we suggested in Le Mouël et al. (2005), which appeared to stop in the 1980s, actually might extend to the present. The role of the Sun in global and regional climate change should be re-assessed and reasonable physical mechanisms are in sight.
(Via Benny Peiser.)
 
 
As Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe asks No climate debate? Yes, there is
 

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