Free Republic

The Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing down, say US scientists who have used satellites to monitor tell-tale changes in the height of the sea. Confirming work by other scientists using different methodologies, they found dramatic short-term variability but no longer-term trend. A slow-down - dramatised in the movie The Day After Tomorrow - is projected by some models of climate change. The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The stream is a key process in the climate of western Europe, bringing heat northwards from the tropics and keeping countries such as the UK 4-6C...

For all you folks out there who take an interest in the doings of George Soros, here’s one I missed a few weeks ago — but just came across while catching up on some UN press releases. On March 4, the UN announced that Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had picked a panel of “high-level experts” to form a UN “Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing.” Their assignment is to help “mobilize” the funding promised at the Copenhagen Climate Carnival this past December. Here’s the list. It includes an interesting mix of public and private officials, ranging from the prime minister of Ethiopia, the president of...

I attribute much of the recent rapid rise of the skeptics to the ongoing effects of ClimateGate. Yet, in a sense, the e-mails that were sprung from East Anglia did nothing more than confirm what most skeptics already suspected. Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers, has written an unusually good summary in the form of a speech for the Colorado Mining Association.With his permission, I’ve included my favourite points here, as well as a copy of the full speech. His blog is a part of the Energy Probe team. The Climategate emails confirmed much of what the sceptics had been saying for...

It is well-known that RealClimate.org is one of the premier websites for global warming scare-mongering. For more than six years, several of the most infamous characters in the global scandal have pumped out politically laden junk science articles attacking “skeptics” and offering model arguments and defenses for the propaganda effort. The bloggers at RealClimate.org are difficult to satisfy. They play a high pressure game and do not tolerate dissent. They are drowning in their own self-destructive, well over the top nature, and from the looks of it may take many of their followers with them when they finally unceremoniously...

Rajendra Pachauri said he would focus in future on presenting the science on climate change rather than advocating policiesThe outspoken chairman of the UN’s climate change body is to adopt a neutral advisory role and has agreed to stop making statements demanding new taxes and other radical policies on cutting emissions. In an interview with The Times, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, apologised for his organisation’s handling of complaints about errors in its report. He also apologised for describing as “voodoo science” an Indian Government report which challenged the IPCC’s claims about the rapid melting...

Yesterday, I wrote that the IPCC should be shut down and that the core conspirators should be hunted down and prosecuted. That commentary did not go far enough. To avoid break-down of the modern world, the IPCC must be condemned and steps taken to assure that similar activities are not started in the future. The IPCC agenda supports large-scale theft of public funding, a path to international economic chaos, and a plan for a New World Order devoid of freedom and effective democracy. These are issues often discussed and without a doubt pose a global threat. Another highly destructive...

Loehle on Hoffman et al and CO2 trajectoriesCraig Loehle sends word of a new publication that looks at CO2 trajectories in the context of Hoffman et al. Excerpt posted below. A link to the full paper follows. THE ESTIMATION OF HISTORICAL CO2 TRAJECTORIES IS INDETERMINATE: COMMENT ON “A NEW LOOK AT ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE”Craig Loehle, PhD, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc., Naperville, IllinoisAtmospheric Environment doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2010.02.029 Figure 2: Projected exponential, quadratic, and saturating models compared to IPCC scenario values. Over the calibration period 1958-2009 the 3 models and data are indistinguishable from each other, but then diverge.AbstractA paper...

Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change. Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it. Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it...

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.The cow-burp hysteria reached a crescendo in 2006 when a United Nations report ominously entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” claimed: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 per...

In 2005, the late Dr. Michael Crichton wrote a book of fiction called State of Fear. The plot of the storyline is the exposé of the fraudulent science behind the global warming theory in the middle of a fictitious court case. The book was a bestseller, and in a strange twist of circumstances, it landed Dr. Crichton in front of a Senate committee. Now it seems that life is indeed imitating art. In the past few years, there have been many court cases concerning the actions of governments to the alleged threat of global warming. The latest has been filed...

A 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, claimed meat production was responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – more than transport. Its conclusions were heralded by campaigners urging consumers to eat less meat to save the planet. Among those calling for a reduction in global meat consumption is Sir Paul McCartney.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has announced yet another “flaw” in their reports. It's time – once and for all – to be very clear about the obvious. There are serious conclusions to be drawn from the fact that the “flaws” in the UN reports produced bias in only one direction. The latest announcement admits an error that supported Vegan propaganda against the meat industry. Researchers have also admitted that there is no scientifically supportable case for the IPCC's exaggerated worst-case sea-level rise (which by the way has been orders of magnitude lower than Al Gore's),...

What exactly is "balance"? Our society rightly strives for balance, and many issues are deservedly considered by presenting a balanced set of opinions. There are however clear cases in which the only balance that matters is the balance of evidence rather than of opinion: Serial killer Ivan Milat's protestations of innocence should not — and did not — balance the evidence arrayed against him. The desire to cure AIDS with garlic and beetroot does not balance the medical consensus that the disease is caused by HIV and can only be beaten by retroviral drugs. And the current wave of sensationalism...

Endangered FindingsThe unsettled state of EPA’s borrowed climate science.  Now that health care is done (for the time being), expect global warming to be high on the Obama administration’s “to do” list. But cap-and-trade legislation and its alternative, a direct tax on carbon-based fuels, can’t be passed via “reconciliation” and are far short of the needed 60 Senate votes. As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is itching to step in and dictate how and how much we can drive, fly, consume, or make. This the agency made clear in its “endangerment finding,” a necessary precursor to regulation, released...

(OREM) – A former advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher says scientists and the media have falsified data and exaggerated conclusions suggesting that mankind is behind climate change. Speaking at a forum at Utah Valley University on Tuesday, Lord Christopher Monckton attacked a Brigham Young University geochemistry professor and his colleagues, who have taken state lawmakers to task for over-relying on climate skeptics, like himself, for their information. He accused the BYU scientists of being terrified of “non-political” and scientific arguments refuting mainstream climate science and said “post-normal science” is being practiced the way science was done under Hitler’s...

Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit. An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia. The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says he is not abandoning negotiations on a comprehensive energy and climate bill even as he warns of partisan gridlock following the Democrats' push this week to pass health care reform. "It's going to make it very difficult to do anything complicated and controversial," Graham told reporters yesterday. "I'm still committed to trying to roll out a vision of how you can price carbon and make it business-friendly. We're still going to do that. ... But the truth of the matter is, I think you're going to find most of our colleagues around here risk adverse."...

According to recently disclosed e-mails from a National Academies of Science listserv, prominent climate scientists affiliated with the U.S. National Academies of Science have been planning a public campaign to paper over the damaged reputation of global warming alarmism. Their scheme would involve officials at the National Academies and other professional associations producing studies to endorse the researchers’ pre-existing assumptions and create confusion about the revelations of the rapidly expanding “Climategate” scandal.The e-mails were first reported in a front-page story by Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times today. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has independently obtained copies of the e-mails. A...

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd. A December 18 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.” Nor is the poll an outlier. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable).Many of the doubt-inducing climate...

Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats to pass a climate bill this year during their weekly luncheon on Tuesday, arguing that legislation would spur innovation and create new jobs. Clinton aimed his remarks at moderate Democrats, who fear taking up another controversial bill in the midst of an economic recession and just months before the midterm elections. To reassure them, Clinton distributed polling data showing support for a comprehensive climate bill. ‘We need all the pep talk we can get,” said Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who has expressed concerns about the impact the bill would have on her...