Amid controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on melting glaciers, Xie Zhenhua, Vice-Chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, today urged the UN panel to make the fifth assessment report comprehensive by also citing contrarian views. He said there is a view that climate change is caused by the cyclical element of nature itself. “Climate change concerns survival and development of people. We need to adopt an open attitude to scientific research and incorporate all views,” said Xie, while addressing a conference of BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) countries here today. |
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Chinese Official: Next IPCC Report Should Incorporate Sceptical Views
Monday, January 25, 2010
The influence of the WWF on the IPCC must be investigated
The scandal deepens – IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers24 01 2010All the years I’ve been in TV news, I’ve observed that every story has a tipping point. In news, we know when it has reached that point when we say it “has legs” and the story takes on a life of its own. The story may have been ignored or glossed over for weeks, months, or years until some new piece of information is posted and starts to galvanize people. The IPCC glacier melt scandal was the one that galvanized the collective voice that has been saying that the IPCC report was seriously flawed and represented a political rather than scientific view. Now people are seriously looking at AR4 with a critical eye and finding things everywhere. Remember our friends at World Wildlife Fund? Those schlockmeisters that produced the video of planes flying into New York with explicit comparisons to 9/11?  The caption in the upper right reads: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.” Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.  A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking. Here’s an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report: You can read the list here, but right at the end two IPCC sources are mentioned, one by "Leisure" and the other by "Event Management." |
Obama shuts up the singing terrorist
From Andrew Bolt: Feel safer in the air, now that Barack Obama is leading the war on Islamist terrorists?
|
After lying to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels...
...today's revelation is about the Amazonian rainforest. And guess what? It's involves another one of the seemingly endless torrent of reports commissioned and paid for by the WWF. Gosh, they really do seem to have lots and lots of money to splash around. And yet again the IPCC has been caught out using, (despite what it has always claimed), "research" that has not been peer reviewed. Oh, and the "experts" that produced it? A 'policy analyst' and a freelance journalist! From Watts Up With That?: De Jour-gate flavor: Amazon25 01 2010 The IPCC “Flavor of the day”-gate is now the Amazon Rain Forest. What will tomorrow’s flavor be?  James Delingpole of the Telegraph says this better than I ever could, so I’ll provide his summary here. Note that there are plenty more cases of unsubstantiated non peer reviewed references in the IPCC report, a list of which you can see here. For those wondering what “Load of porkies” means, see this. Delingpole relays North’s analysis: Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.
It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:
And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist:
But the IPCC’s shamelessness did not end there. Dr North has searched the WWF’s reports high and low but can find no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change. (Logging and farm expansion are a much more plausible threat). I recommend adding them to your blog roll. I have. |
Sunday, January 24, 2010
NASA and Nicholas Stern start to purge their websites
The fallout from what appears to be a cascade of revelations about the sloppy and dishonest goings on at the IPCC begins. NASA here. Lord Stern here: Last night I pointed out how NASA had quietly purged IPCC AR4 referenced glacier melting claims from its climate.nasa.gov website, especially since they upped the year from 2035 to 2030 on their own. Now Roger Pielke Jr. points out that another curious purge has been spotted: Excerpts:
I’m betting that instituions around the world are working fast to distance themselves from some of the IPCC claims. We’ll likely see more of this. |
Lord Monckton debates Ben McNeil on Sunrise
| It's a shame there wasn't more time. You could see how nervous McNeil was and that Monckton would have taken him apart. You can alsp listen to his interview on Alan Jones' program here http://2gb.com/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=5507 |
Eh, @KevinRuddPM gave $1 million of our money to IPCC head's company?
And let’s not forget which warmist dupe - and wannabe UN secretary general - has also tipped Pachauri’s TERI another $1 million of taxpayers’ funds:
When wild and baseless scares are pushed by a man who makes serious money from them, it’s time to call in the auditors. Pachauri may be innocent of any wrong doing, but only a fool would be blind to the danger of corruption when so many millions are being thrown at pushers of the warming faith. Question: could the Nobel Prize be withdrawn from the IPCC if more such revelations come to light? |
High-Fat Diet Ends Epileptic Seizures For Boy
From the Food & Health Skeptic: A lot of people don't realize that we need cholesterol for brain function. It is a scandal that such a well-documented diet is not tried more quickly more often. The fat phobia has a lot to answer for. Note that the high fat diet did NOT elevate serum cholesterol, contrary to the usual superstitionA trip to the doctor is all good news these days for 4-year-old Max Irvine. Just a year ago, however, Max was enduring more than 100 seizures a day. Even a barrage of tests at the famed Mayo Clinic's Epilepsy Laboratory revealed no clear medical explanation. Epilepsy was consuming every waking hour of Max's life. "It got to the point where he couldn't walk or talk or function, or even eat hardly," said Max's father Troy Irvine.Medications control epilepsy for 75 percent of children, but not for Max. His family watched helplessly as the light disappeared from his eyes. Max's playful nature vanished. Priceless intellectual developmental time was being lost.Finally, Mayo Clinic Pediatric Neurologist Elaine Wirrell, an epilepsy specialist, proposed trading all of Max's meds for a radical change in diet. Full article here |
Saturday, January 23, 2010
BREAKING NEWS: scientist admits IPCC used fake data to pressure policy makers
Bloody hell, I can't keep up with this anymore! Looks like the wheels are well and truly starting to come off the whole IPCC/climate change bandwagon! This follows on from disclosures that the company run by the head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, had received grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds based upon the false glacier claims referred to here. You can follow the link below to the story in the Daily Mail, but here is a perfect example of the "science" as practiced by the IPCC:
Now, I can tell you that while this may be the first time this sort of complaint has made it into the mainstream media, it has been one repeated again and again by numerous people involved with the IPCC over the years, ie, that objections that undermined the political message that it wanted to send where routinely ignored. And here is the whole problem with the IPCC - it's a agency of the UN and nothing at the UN is ever free from the effects of politics and ideology. It was always doomed to this outcome. From Watts Up With That?: The IPCC is now damaged goods. Pachauri is toast, and nobody will be able to cite the IPCC AR4 again without this being brought up. The Daily Mail’s David Rose in the UK broke this story, it is mind boggling fraud to prod “government action” and grants. Emphasis in red mine. From the Daily Mail The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’ Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035 Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation. According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’. The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF. It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source. The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121. Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’. Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’ In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air. |
"should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war"
Pardon?
You'll see the irony here immediately of course. Poor George W Bush was the focus of a relentless and merciless campaign from the media and the Left about the oh-so-shock-horror crime perpetrated against the inmates held in Guantanamo Bay, whereby it was asserted that they should be treated like common criminals via the regular criminal justice system. Except it never was going to be that easy or that simple. Now that reality has caught up with Mr Obama and the Democrats. There is indeed a cadre of highly dangerous men, committed to violence as a means of advancing their religious ideology, who for one reason or another simply cannot be dealt with in this way. So it turns out the Bush Administration was right when it claimed that it not only had the right under the 'laws of war' to detain these men, it had a duty to do so. But you can guarantee that Mr Obama wont get anywhere as much grief from the media and human rights activists as Mr Bush did over this. |
"Chef" Pollan's Daily Special: Lousy Advice on Food
From the Food & Health Skeptic: Self-styled food guru Michael Pollan’s latest rant against modern farming, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, lists 64 rules for healthy eating. Pollan says they are meant to be taken as “Food Don’ts” -- for the sake of our health and the environment. And as usual, America’s “foodies” are going ga-ga over someone whose claim to fame is repeatedly lecturing others to “Eat Food.” So let’s take a close look at what this journalism professor has to offer in his latest diatribe on what you eat.Pollan admits he ignores nutrition science, which he derides as inexact. But perhaps the real reason he avoids citing actual research is because he knows it doesn’t support his pseudo-scientific beliefs.Take Rule #22, “Eat mostly plants.” Pollan claims vegetarians are “notably healthier” and live longer than meat-eaters. Yet, a 2006 study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that vegetarians died of strokes and cancers of the colon, breast and prostate at the same rate as omnivores. The mortality rate, the Oxford team wrote, “appears to be similar in vegetarians and comparable non-vegetarians.” In other words, vegetarians don’t live longer than meat-eaters – though life may seem interminably long if you spend most of your time choking down Tofurky and soy-cheese lettuce wraps.Pollan blows it again with Rule #27, which holds that meat from “wild” free-range animals eating grass is more nutritious than from grain-fed animals raised in feedlots. Before you drop half your paycheck on “artisanal” porkchops, know this: Free-range meat carries health risks that slow-food advocates like Pollan won’t tell you about.A study published in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease found significantly higher rates of salmonella in free-range pigs when compared with pigs raised on larger farms. Pigs raised in the roof-covered, environmentally-controlled surroundings of the much-maligned Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are actually less conducive to disease. And pigs that spend time outdoors are more likely to come into contact with disease-carrying animals.And if you don’t eat for your health, how about the health of Planet Earth? Pollan’s advice may actually lead to greater environmental damage. The CAFOs that he demonizes use less land to raise more animals than the free-range method. Grass-fed cows, for instance, can require up to 10 acres of pasture per head. If today’s cattlemen exclusively used 1950s technology, they would need an additional 165 million acres of land – roughly the size of Texas -- to produce the same amount of beef. And since niche-market cows don’t grow as big as their more conventional counterparts, a wholesale backpedal to old-school farming would increase levels of animal-waste pollution by nearly 30 percent.Is this the environmental outcome Pollan seeks?Maybe it’s not fair to criticize Pollan for his scientific illiteracy. After all, he gives himself an out in his final Rule #64, “Break the Rules Once in a While.” If there’s a sequel, we think it should begin with Rule #65: Break most of Pollan’s rules most of the time. |
Overheard after lunch at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan recently
Speaking of Al, Lauri B. Regan reports:
And then mysterious F-350 fumes filled the room. |
Friday, January 22, 2010
Hey @KevinRuddPM, what do you think about those 4,000 guys in white coats measuring stuff now?
(And not that I would suggest that our dear prime minister, K R Puff'n'Fluff, would ever be untruthful - *cough, cough* - but when did even the IPCC claim it was composed of 4,000 scientists?
It never even (officially) used the much more frequently quoted wrong number of 2,500.
Love the final reference to Rudd's claim he saw Colin Cowdrey batting in a game he didn't play in 
)
)Things have changed since 2008, when Kevin Rudd was the IPCC’s leading yay-boy:
Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There’s a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them. Guys in white coats who run around and don’t have a sense of humour. They just measure things. And what they say to us is it’s happening and it’s caused by human activity.They also said that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035. More 2008-era Rudd:Well, I stand by what the International Panel of Climate Change Scientists have had to say. There will always be argy-bargy about elements of the detail.Such as elements so bogus that the head of the UN’s climate change is now talking about “taking action” against IPCC authors. One more line from our newly climate-shy PM:Here’s a measurement which people should just sit back and pay a bit of attention to - the 12 hottest years in human history have occurred in the last 13 years. That’s a fact.It’s also a fact that Rudd once witnessed Colin Cowdrey stride out to smite global warming in Brisbane. Kevin seen it with his own eyes, he really did!
New York's crusade against salt based on false assumptions & doomed to failure
Another example of a puritanical fad dressed up as science, when the reality is that the hard evidence does not support it. Interesting that there does appear to be evidence that our bodies "know" how much salt they need and adjust our appetites accordingly. Maybe there is more to those cravings for potato chips than we imagined? From the Food & Health Skeptic: On Monday, city officials rolled out an initiative to curb the salt content in manufactured and packaged foods. But the idea behind it -- that salt intake has reached extreme levels in America -- is a myth, and this "solution" wouldn't work, anyway.City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley aims to lead a national campaign to reduce the amount of salt in manufactured foods by 25 percent over the next five years. Cutting salt intake is supposed to reduce hypertension-related health problems. But while doctors may advise particular patients to cut down on salt, the science tells us that this is not a public-health problem.Nutritionists at the University of California/Davis just published the first and only study to address salt intake and public policy. They found that people are naturally inclined to regulate salt intake to physiologically determined levels by unconsciously selecting foods to meet their needs -- and even the most extreme interventions don't do much.The UC Davis study (published in the October issue of The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology) looked at data from more than 19,000 individuals from 33 countries worldwide. It determined that daily sodium intake ranges only from 2,700 milligrams to 4,900 mg, with the worldwide average of 3,700 mg.It also determined that the average American consumes about 3,400 mg a day -- disproving the claim spread by advocates such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest that US salt consumption is out of control.In other words, Farley's trying to fight a problem that doesn't exist. Worse, his new guidelines say that daily sodium intake for most people shouldn't exceed 1,500 mg -- which is a ridiculous 45 percent below the bottom of the normal consumption range the UC Davis study identified, and a full 60 percent lower than the worldwide average.The researchers also cite decades of research describing the specific mechanism by which the central nervous system, acting together with several organ systems, controls our appetite for salt. One of the studies they cite involved hundreds of participants in what was to be a three-year sodium-intake intervention, with the goal of reducing daily intake to 1,850 mg.But after six months, researchers noted that participants were simply unable to cut sodium intake below about 2,750 mg a day -- close to the bottom of the range the UC Davis study identified.Another study had used intensive dietary counseling to get participants to cut daily sodium intake to an average of 1,775 mg over four weeks. After that, the subjects, while still receiving counseling, were randomly split into two groups -- one getting a sodium tablet, the other a placebo.Those who got the placebo still raised their intake by nearly 1,000 mg, while those on the sodium tablet actually cut their dietary-sodium consumption to compensate.These people didn't know how much sodium they were getting -- they unconsciously changed their diets to match what their bodies "knew" they needed.The UC Davis study also cites surveys showing that sodium intake in the United Kingdom has "varied minimally" over the last 25 years, despite a major government campaign to reduce it.Overall, the researchers found, salt intake "is unlikely to be malleable by public policy initiatives," and attempts to change it would "expend valuable national and personal resources against unachievable goals."The New York guidelines are voluntary -- for now. But the city's ban on trans fats started that way, too. And the federal Food and Drug Administration has also been looking to get in on the action -- it may classify it as a "food additive," subject to regulation, sometime this year.But this campaign isn't about public health -- it's about grandstanding on a pseudo-issue ginned up by activists, when science clearly shows that there's neither a crisis nor a way for the government to actually alter our salt intake. All these initiatives do is win headlines for ambitious policymakers (New York's last health commissioner parlayed his trans-fat activism into a promotion to FDA chief), while making food slightly more costly and leaving a bad taste in the mouths of consumers -- literally.SOURCE |
Aussie water bills to spiral thanks to desalination plants
HOUSEHOLDS will pay hundreds of dollars extra for water as state governments splash $9 billion of taxpayer funds on energy-guzzling desalination plants that will produce nearly a third of capital-city supplies within two years. The seawater purification "factories" - which can pump out enough drinking water each year to fill Sydney Harbour - will operate around the clock at taxpayer expense, even when high rainfall means their expensive output is not required. SOURCE for full article Via Greenie Watch Again, I suspect that we are seeing politicised "science" spooking politicians and bureaucrats into bad policy choices. Maybe not here in Western Australia. Our average rainfall does indeed seem to be declining and has been for thirty or more years. But elsewhere I'm still not convinced that we are not mistaking natural variability as long term trends produced by climate change. But of course, this is the problem when people decide to jump on a bandwagon. However, by the time people start to realise that maybe they jumped too soon, (and I think that is starting to happen now), it will be too late. So much money will have been spent on such projects and it will be impossible not to use, no matter how expensive. Not saying that as our population rises such plants wont be necessary, and I suppose you can say that at least they are there to cater for this, but I still reckon we could have done much more to use water more effectively and reuse and recycle it more completely. |
Ontario to throw money to the wind
In a signing ceremony Thursday for a $7-billion deal with Samsung to build wind and solar facilities, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said: “This means Ontario is officially the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America.” Quite right. Texas lost that title last week when billionaire T. Boone Pickens abandoned his plan to build 4000 MW of wind capacity in Texas — twice as much as the Samsung wind plan — when no financier could see how building the things made any financial sense. Other jurisdictions have also seen plans for wind vanish, along with plans for solar and other forms of renewable energy. Stock prices of most players in the wind industry, such as Broadwind Energy, GE’s supplier, are heading south. But Ontario is different. Just as it built nuclear reactors into the 1990s after everyone else in North America bailed out to stop the bleeding — Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear complex was the last to be completed — Ontario has positioned itself to be the last gung-ho jurisdiction for so-called green technologies. |
How to catch up with Lord Monckton, @KevinRuddPM yet to answer challenge
| Christopher Monckton, who conducted this brilliant Socratic dialogue with a Greenpeace supporter, is touring Australia from next week. Lecture dates and booking details here. When Kevin Rudd answers Monckton’s challenge, I’ll post that, too. |
Spot what's missing from K R Puff'n'Fluff's Australia Day speeches?
| Last year Kevin Rudd claimed global warming was the “great moral challenge of our generation” But the climate sure has changed since Climategate and the farcical failure in Copenhagen. This year global warming is the scam that Rudd barely dares to mention:
Remember how Malcolm Turnbull last year warned his Liberal Party to pass Rudd’s emissions trading scheme or face a double dissolution election on the issue that would wipe them out? Just months later, climate change is in fact so smelly that Rudd would like it to disappear as an election issue completely. So fast has this faith imploded. Tim Blair recalls the days when Kevin Rudd hailed the IPCC as a serious, sober arbiter of global warming truth. Let’s see if he dares repeat those claims this year, after the IPCC crashed in the Himalayas. |
Demonstrate outside a university's social anthropology department instead?
It’s probably not enough to argue the Chestertonian point that the decline of organised religion has led to paradoxical irrationality, “misinformation packaged as fact”, although there is an element of truth in it (organised religions do at least have mechanisms for dealing with phoneys). Part of the reason that increasing numbers seem to reject western medicine – mankind’s greatest legacy, as anyone who has attended a birth will attest – has to be the wider anti-Westernism in the air, especially coming from the education system, where even established medical and scientific facts are presented as merely “subjective” because these bodies of knowledge are overwhelmingly European. So maybe the anti-homeopathy protesters should get to the root of the problem and demonstrate outside a university’s social anthropology department instead. Full article here |
The root-rat of the bird world
Most promiscuous bird 'exposed' By Jody Bourton Earth News reporter A bird living on the coast of the US is the world's most promiscuous bird, say scientists. The saltmarsh sparrow, a bird that lives in the marshes of Connecticut, was found to have extreme levels of multiple mating. Full article here |
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