An Honest Climate Debate

Pachauri’s voodoo science

by John Izzard
Quadrant Online, February 8, 2010

They say that 24 hours is a long time in politics, well 7 days has certainly been a long time for the dedicated members of the World Climate Change Club. There is a “change” in the air and it sure as heck isn’t the climate.

There they were — the WCCC members — sitting on fabulous, unassailable scientific arguments like disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas; the snow, melting ice-cream-like atop Mt Kilimanjaro; rain-forests shrivelling in the Amazon, visions of Venice, only viewable via an aqualung and goggles and the poor old Great Barrier Reef turning into a barbecue-burnt-chop when suddenly their cosy little world changed. It was one of those rare moments you remember — like the day man landed on the moon.

It was as though a sort of “we-are-on-to-you.com” email hit their modelling computers. Suddenly the world changed and “chief scientists” around the world began emerging from their hibernation and started to say very chief-scientisty, re-assuring things. In the UK last week, their Chief Scientist John Bennington suddenly announced that climate sceptics “should not been dismissed”. He was immediately followed by Australia’s chief scientist Penny D. Sackett, who with an absolute straight face came out of nowhere to call for, yep, “an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change.”

With the post-Copenhagen month of January to mull over things, and some well needed investigative journalism in the UK (but not here), there has been a climate change of sorts.

Well, even those of us with an un-sceptical bent could catch the whiff of a PR campaign getting under way. Why the sudden concern? Why the sudden change of heart? Is this a Toyota moment? Are the brakes faulty? Is this a climate-change-re-call?

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The IPCC scandals: yet another coverup

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, February 08, 2010

Can the IPCC’s 2007 stink any higher?

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.

And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland… Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate.

But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.

Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.

They falsely claim it’s never been hotter – but won’t let you check their reasoning why. They demand we change the entire way we run the economy – but refuse to divulge how they came to that conclusion.

And this is the document on which Kevin Rudd relies most for his great green tax on everything.

IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks

By Marc Sheppard
American Thinker, February 04, 2010

Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors — be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.

Simply stated, we’ve been swindled. We’ve been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.

Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem — but rather, a solution.

For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the “last chance to save the planet” International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of “climate debt” reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes

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UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort
The Telegraph, 30 January 2010

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

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Terence Corcoran: Heat wave closes in on the IPCC

Financial Post, January 26, 2010

A catastrophic heat wave appears to be closing in on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How hot is it getting in the scientific kitchen where they’ve been cooking the books and spicing up the stew pots? So hot, apparently, that Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.

If Andrew Weaver is heading for the exits, it’s a pretty sure sign that the United Nations agency is under monumental stress. Mr. Weaver, after all, has been a major IPCC science insider for years. He is Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, mastermind of one of the most sophisticated climate modelling systems on the planet, and lead author on two recent landmark IPCC reports. For him to say, as he told Canwest News yesterday, that there has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

Not only is Mr. Weaver an IPCC insider. He has also, over the years, generated his own volume of climate advocacy that often seemed to have crossed that dangereous line between hype and science. It is Mr. Weaver, for example, who said the IPCC’s 2007 science report — the one now subject to some scrutiny —“isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

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