Free Republic

EXCLUSIVE / The US is considering a funnel of substantive elements of the Doha Climate Summit away from the UN framework and into the Major Economies Forum (MEF), a platform of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, EurActiv has learned. Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has provided an umbrella for talks to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, and on 26 November, will host the COP18 Climate Summit in Qatar. But it has been confirmed to EurActiv that Washington is increasingly looking to shift policy action to the MEF, whose members account for some 85% of...

Error #1: IPCC p. 110: “These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, but this was before the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.” -------------------------------------- RECOMMENDED CORRECTION: ““These previous national U.S. assessments, as well as those for normalised Cuban hurricane losses (Pielke et al., 2003), did not show any significant upward trend in losses over time, and this remains the case following the remarkable hurricane losses of 2004 and 2005.” CLA Finding: There is no error in the...

Perhaps greens just aren't the good guysAnalysis "Why should we sacrifice 10 per cent of our income today to make Bill Gates better off?" asked an MP. "As the world's [second] richest man, he doesn't need our sacrifice." The second richest man in the world, Bill Gates, is a proxy in this rhetorical question. The MP, a former Cabinet minister, is raising a fascinating and rarely asked moral question. Should we make ourselves poorer to save the rich of the future some insignificant amount of money: an amount so small, it will be a rounding error? The argument he builds...

On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had "complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world's science academies to provide advice to international bodies." Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are...

No, this is not another article about tree rings, hockey sticks, and rewritten history, although that is one tree in the climate forest. A group of scientists dismissed historical evidence and misled the public about temperature trends. Some dismiss their actions as bad science, but the evidence, particularly exposed in the leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), indicate differently. Many, including those claiming to be climate scientists were misled because they were experts on another tree in another part of the forest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not studying climatology, but specialists looking at some...

Sloppy George Orwell, Photo: WikipediaSloppy language works for cheats and charlatans. In the search for the truth only accurate language will do. Orwell understood the power of language to change the way we think, indeed to fence off some possible options completely.Roger Pielke Snr put out a call today asking for precise definitions and protesting about the misuse of the term “climate change”. But when did this nonsensical term start? Where else, but with the UN. All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):“Climate...

Many thanks for the invitation and for giving me the opportunity to address this distinguished audience. I am not for the first time in Chicago. It is also not for the first time that I am attending a conference organized by the Heartland Institute. But it is for the first time I am with Heartland here in Chicago.Some of you know that I came to Chicago for the NATO summit. Yesterday and today I was supposed to speak about what to do in Afghanistan, how to keep NATO going in an era of overall indebtedness and budgetary cuts, and about...

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time. I hope readers find it useful. I have also prepared a Kindle version of the post, for which there is a small charge - click here:Please also consider hitting the tip jar.The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known....

Have the 1990 IPCC predictions been proved completely, unarguably and utterly wrong? Yes. They predicted that if our emissions stayed the same, temperatures would rise by 0.3 C per decade, and would be at the very least 0.2, and the most 0.5. Even by the most generous rehash of the data, the highest rate they can find is 0.18 C per decade which is likely an overestimate, and in any case, is below the very least estimate, despite the world’s emissions of CO2 continuing ever higher.Climate Scientist Matthew England called that “very accurate”. Since when did 0.18 = 0.3? (Shall...

You may have seen headlines like this scary one in USA Today: “Experts say global warming is causing stronger hurricanes” What’s the science behind that? Not much, it turns out. In fact, . . .

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather." What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The...

James Delingpole of The Telegraph reports that the British Parliament heard devastating testimony overturning the global warming hoax from MIT's Richard Lindzen who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Prof. Lindzen sounded the alarm early over the systematic subversion of Climate Sciences in North America and Europe by a cabal centered around Al Gore and the UN's Maurice Strong. The Telegraph has published Prof. Lindzen's presentation here as the House of Commons undertakes to "Reconsider the Climate Change Act" --the provisions of which have decimated the British economy.

We wrote over the weekend about the “Global-warming skeptics gaining upper hand” and heard from readers who agree with and applaud the news, which always is good to hear. Then we were delighted to see the latest in the back-and-forth dueling columns in the Wall Street Journal advance the cause with clarity and truth. In short, the esteemed scientists who sparked the back-and-forth commentary in the Journal’s pages, summed up their case against global warming alarmism thus: . . .

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall. The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel...

The Wall Street Journal has a letter today signed by 16 noteworthy scientists who wanted to go on the record about global warming. What they had to say constitutes today’s Global Warming Oops Moment, one of those delightful public displays that reveal the emperor has no clothes. We quote:...

Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming - but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to...

A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States funded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel’s annual budget. The GAO also found that this funding information “was not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.” In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, “International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding,” the GAO...

The UN’s global warming unit, IPCC, is so discredited that “it is not clear how much additional benefit there is to having a huge bureaucratic scientific review effort under UN auspices” said Ken Caldeira in announcing that he is resigning as one of its leading authors on the next IPCC report. The previous one won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Outside of a few skeptical bloggers, you will not see this story anywhere else. If anyone doubts there is a bias in the media for the bright and shiny object called Global Warming (aka Climate Change, Climate Disruption and...

Should we act on climate change now or wait? While an international majority of scientists believes climate change is real, a minority of scientists and majority of politicians want you to wait. After all, behavior change should not be mandated or government regulated - especially without proof. UBS Wealth Management, a financial services company working with high/ultra high net worth clients, published a comprehensive report to its investors in January of 2007 titled "Climate Change: Beyond Whether." Its findings suggest we can follow one of three paths: 1) Take a wait-and-see approach 2) Act now and risk investment if nothing...

DURBAN, South Africa (AP) — An all-encompassing climate deal "may be beyond our reach for now," the U.N. chief said Tuesday as China and India delivered a setback to European plans to negotiate a new treaty that would bind all parties to their pledges on greenhouse gas emissions. The European "road map" toward a new accord that would take effect after 2020 is a centerpiece of negotiations among 194 countries at a U.N. climate conference in the South African coastal city of Durban. It has been presented as a condition for Europe to renew and expand its emissions reduction targets...