Free Republic

A report by a private foundation on how the Obamacare website was designed reveals that cronyism and sheer incompetence is at fault for the spectacular failures of the rollout. InfoWorld summed it up: "It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT." ---------------- (snip) --------------- All the same, CGI Federal -- which received $88 million for its work since March of this year -- told Congress in September it was indeed ready for the onslaught of users that would come when Healthcare.gov opened to the public. The same was claimed...

The human race has prospered by relying on forecasts that the seasons will follow their usual course, while knowing they will sometimes be better or worse. Are things different now? For the fifth time now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims they are. The difference, the IPCC asserts, is increased human emissions of carbon dioxide: a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is a byproduct of growing prosperity. It is also a product of all animal respiration and is also essential for most life on Earth, yet in total it makes up only 0.0004 of the atmosphere. --------------- (snip) ------------------...

First, apologies to my readers for the diversion from the usual fare, but I’ll point out that this entry is covered under the masthead in the category of “recent news” and there’s a relevant WUWT category. Since like many of you, I’ve been forced to sign a document (at my radio station where I employed part-time) a document that confirms I’ve been given another document that advises me of my Obamacare rights, and of course being in tune to the news, I’ve been wondering if the claims about the Obamacare websites are as bad as claimed. I read an article...

Okay, they don’t do so in as many words. But in addition to being more confident than ever (despite a 16-year pause in warming and the growing mismatch between model projections and observations) that man-made climate change is real, they are also more confident nothing really bad is going to happen during the 21st Century. The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative popularized by Al Gore and other pundits are Atlantic Ocean circulation shutdown (implausibly plunging Europe into a mini-ice age), ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, and runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits. As BishopHill...

Over the last day or so, Julia Slingo has sent a polite, but somewhat evasive response to Nic Lewis regarding his critique of the UKCP09 model. It can be seen here. Nic Lewis's reaction is here. I don't think he is very impressed. The key exchange relates to the following paragraph in Slingo's paper: Having said that, it is true that the relationship between historical aerosol forcing and equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) depicted in your Figure B1 is based only on the PPE. But we disagree with your assertion that the results from HadCM3 are fundamentally biased. It is certainly...

Today, leading scientific organizations support the idea that the ocean level is rising due to man-made emissions. Further, they claim to be able to measure ocean level to a high degree of accuracy. But a look at natural ocean variation shows that official sea level measurements are nonsense. ------------ (snip) -------------- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2007, “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 mm per year.” This translates to a 100-year rise of only 7...

Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) "fifth assessment report," part of which will be published on Sept. 27. There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out...

From Duke University and the “I was sure those tree rings were linear indicators” department, comes this news: Climate Change May Speed Up Forests’ Life Cycles DURHAM, N.C. – Many climate studies have predicted that tree species will respond to global warming by migrating via seed dispersal to cooler climates. But a new study of 65 different species in 31 eastern states finds evidence of a different, unexpected response. Nearly 80 percent of the species aren’t yet shifting their geographic distributions to higher latitudes. Instead, they’re staying in place – but speeding up their life cycles. The Duke University-led study,...

Politicians pay for science, but scientists should not be politicians. Consensus is a political concept. Unwisely deployed, it can be damagingly anti-scientific. A reply to Naomi Oreskes (Nature, 4 September 2013). The celebrated mathematician, astronomer and philosopher of science Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, is justly celebrated as the founder of the scientific method. His image appears on Iraqi banknotes and on the postage stamps of half a dozen nations of the ummah wahida. Al-Haytham, unlike Naomi Oreskes,[1] did not consider that consensus had any role in science. He wrote that “the seeker after truth” does not put his...

A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950. A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” [Emphasis added] The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published...

http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/ (Sorry, I don't know how to embed the video. You'll have to follow the link.) Welcome to the 50 to 1 project! The best place to start is the video you see above, and after that feel free to explore by watching the full length interviews, checking out the source documents and joining the Facebook page and Twitter feed!

The timing couldn’t be worse. On 23-26 September, scores of representatives of the world’s Environment Ministries are scheduled to meet in Stockholm to wordsmith the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the key WG1 (physical science) portion of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). ------------------------------- (snip) -------------- The temperature standstill has been apparent in the data for many years, but the tribalism of climate science rendered it unmentionable until the public disclosures of early 2013. Once spoken, it demanded an explanation – and it then became clear there was...

A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds "strong evidence" of a link between thunderstorm and solar activity in Brazil from 1951-2009. According to the authors, thunderstorm "behavior with respect to the 11-year solar cycle suggest a global mechanism probably related to a solar magnetic shielding effect acting on galactic cosmic rays as an explanation for the relationship of thunderstorm and solar activity," which would corroborate Svensmark's theory of cosmoclimatology. The relationship between thunderstorm and solar activity for Brazil from 1951 to 2009 Osmar Pinto Netoa, b, Corresponding author contact information, E-mail the corresponding author,...

Marc Morano reported: ‘Senate global warming hearing backfires on Democrats’ — Boxer’s Own Experts Contradict Obama! — ‘Skeptics & Roger Pielke Jr. totally dismantled warmism (scientifically, economically, rhetorically) — Climate Depot Round Up ‘Sen. Boxer’s Own Experts Contradict Obama on Climate Change’ — Warmists Asked: ‘Can any witnesses say they agree with Obama’s statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?’ For several seconds, nobody said a word. Sitting just a few rows behind the expert witnesses, I thought I might have heard a few crickets chirping’

I’d like to bring some points to the attention of your readers that were raised in an article in the Independent published on 11th May 2013 It would appear to indicate a major shift in the UK’s government attitude to climate change. “The Government is facing an exodus of senior energy and climate change advisers amid growing concerns that decisive action to tackle global warming is falling victim to Treasury intransigence.” … “A Government offshore energy industrial strategy document, due to have been published this month, is understood to have been delayed after Treasury objections. At the same time as...

“We discovered that organic compounds such as those formed from forest emissions or from vehicle exhaust, affect the number of droplets in a cloud and hence its brightness, so affecting climate,” said study author Professor Gordon McFiggans, from the University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. “We developed a model and made predictions of a substantially enhanced number of cloud droplets from an atmospherically reasonable amount of organic gases. “More cloud droplets lead to brighter cloud when viewed from above, reflecting more incoming sunlight. We did some calculations of the effects on climate and found that the...

From the UK’s BBC comes this news item: Trillion-euro shortfall facing EU energy sector – Lords Committee Under the obligatory photo of chimneys spewing steam, is a totally uncritical article on the final report from an eight-month inquiry by the UK’s House of Lords into the EU power sector. The report accuses the EU of having a muddled energy policy, but the horribly disturbing aspect of this report is that their lordships are the ones that are muddled. For example, they say that a muddled Brussels energy policy is putting off big investors. Well, they really got that wrong. Brussels’...

I have made an 82% correlation between the sunspot cycle and the Global Temperature Anomaly. The correlation is obtained through a non linear time series summation of NASA monthly sunspot data to the NOAA monthly Global Temperature Anomaly.

Excerpt: The Equator Principles are ten principles for lending by international banks that work to the detriment of poor nations. Under pressure from environmental groups, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and 76 other banks in 32 countries adopted the Principles. These principles demand that banks lend in an “environmentally and socially responsible manner,” which sounds good. But a top objective of the Equator Principles is “to promote the reduction of emissions that contribute to climate change.” Lending capital is restricted for coal mines, oil refineries, and other hydrocarbon projects desperately needed to build the economies of developing nations....

Theories that can be easily tested should have a high degree of consensus among researchers. Those involving chaotic and less testable questions – climate change or economic growth, physiology or financial markets – ought to have a greater level of scientific disagreement. Yet this is hardly the case for climate science. In the Paradox of Consensus, we illustrate that the greater the level of consensus for certain classes of hypotheses (those that are difficult to test) the less truth we should assign to them. ------------------------------------------------------- In our view, the fact that so many scientists agree so closely about the earth’s...