Climate change help for the poor ‘has not materialised’ November 26, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming
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Climate change help for the poor ‘has not materialised’
BBC News, November 25, 2009
Large sums promised to developing countries to help them tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, a BBC investigation has found.
Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration – but it is now unclear whether the money was paid.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise.
The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it.
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Australia: Longer November heatwave 130 years ago November 24, 2009
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Longer November heatwave 130 years ago
By Brett Dutschke
Weatherzone, November 24, 2009
The most recent heatwave was record-breaking for many areas, but in November 1878 a heatwave lasted almost twice as long, according to weatherzone.com.au.
Nearly all inland areas of New South Wales and South Australia and surrounding areas of Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory have had at least eight days of extreme heat, record-breaking for November.
But in some inland towns, records were not broken.
Inland weather stations which have measured temperature for the last 131 years or longer show that there was a November heatwave which lasted about two weeks.
Gunnedah, in northern NSW had 15 consecutive days of 35 degrees or hotter in November 1878. This month Gunnedah had nine in a row, the longest November stretch in 131 years. The northern NSW town only averages four-to-five days above 35 in November.
With this piece of evidence one could claim that this most recent hot spell is unprecedented in November in 131 years.
For some coastal areas of South Australia, including Adelaide this year’s heatwave is the longest on record for November. Official temperatures have been measured as far back as 1887 in Adelaide, but not as far back as 1878, like Gunnedah.
Climate Science Corrupted November 23, 2009
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Climate Science Corrupted
By John McLean
SPPI, 20 November 2009
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UNEP’s belief in manmade warming in the late 1970’s led to a stage-managed conference in Villach in 1985, which in turn led to the political decision to form the IPCC.
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Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out November 22, 2009
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Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
Spiegel Online, November 19, 2009
Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
Reached a Plateau
The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
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BBC dispatches 35 staff to climate talks – creating as much carbon as an African village does in a year November 21, 2009
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BBC dispatches 35 staff to climate talks – creating as much carbon as an African village does in a year
Daily Mail, November 20, 2009
The BBC is sending 35 people to next month’s climate change talks in Copenhagen – creating as much carbon dioxide as an African village does in a whole year.
The corporation said its delegation of 12 presenters, along with a backup team of researchers, producers and camera crews, will spend up to two weeks in the Danish capital on expenses to cover the global summit.
Critics said the numbers were ‘absolutely staggering’ and accused the BBC of playing fast and loose with licence payers’ money.
If all 35 BBC staff go by plane, they will generate around six or seven tons of carbon dioxide.
Conservative MP Philip Davies said: ‘It’s absolutely staggering. It’s yet another example of how wasteful the BBC is.
It begs the question what all of these people will be doing when they are there.
‘On the subject of climate change, the BBC seems to lose all its critical faculties and it will probably be just a fawning exercise over these environmentalists anyway.
‘It would be nice if one of these 35 people asked some pertinent and critical questions about climate change. But I suspect they will all be subscribers to the extreme environmental agenda.’
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BREAKING: CRU says leaked data is real November 20, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climate Research Unit, CRU, FOI, global warming, hacked CRU data, hacked emails, leaked CRU data, michael mann, Phil Jones, University of East Anglia
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HadleyCRU says leaked data is real
Via TBR.cc, November 20, 2009
The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.
In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
“Have you alerted police”
“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”
Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.
“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”
TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….
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Revenge of the Climate Laymen November 19, 2009
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Revenge of the Climate Laymen
By ANNE JOLIS
The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2009
Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.
But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang’s Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.
The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described “auditing” a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa’s much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists’ posters. Like other so-called “hockey stick” temperature graphs, it’s an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We’re burning ourselves up!
“It was the belle of the ball,” Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. “Its dance card was full.”
At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia’s Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.
Mr. Briffa denounces Mr. McIntyre’s work as “demonstrably biased” because it uses “a narrower area and range of sample sites.” He says he and his colleagues have now built a new chronology using still more data. Here, as in similar graphs by other researchers, the spike soars once again. Mr. McIntyre’s “work has little implication for our published work or any other work that uses it,” Mr. Briffa concludes.
He and his colleagues may well ignore Mr. McIntyre, but the rest of us shouldn’t. While Mr. McIntyre’s image may use data from fewer sites, it still has nearly three times as many tree cores representing the modern era as Mr. Briffa’s original.
Yet Mr. McIntyre is first to admit his work is no bullet aimed at the heart of the theory of man-made climate change. Rather, his work—chronicled in papers co-written with environmental economist Ross McKitrick and more than 7,000 posts on his Climateaudit.org Weblog—does something much more important: It illustrates the uncertainty of a science presented as so infallible as to justify huge new taxes on rich countries along with bribes to poor ones in order to halt their fossil-fueled climbs to prosperity. Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.
It all started in 2002 when—as many might given the time and Mr. McIntyre’s mathematics background—he decided to verify for himself the case for action on climate change.
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HIMALAYAN GLACIERS – BEHAVIOUR AND CLIMATE CHANGE November 18, 2009
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HIMALAYAN GLACIERS – BEHAVIOUR AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Via The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
Posted 18 November 2009
“Himalayan glaciers show variable behaviour over the past hundred years. Most have retreated, some have stayed almost static, and some have a record of advance and retreat. This parallels the rest of the world, where most glaciers have been retreating since the end of the last glacial period. Many have shown alternating periods of advance and retreat. ” Austraian glaciologist, Prof Cliff Ollier supports Indian scientist’s findings of nothing out of the ordinary.
LINK to download pdf file
Climate Change: Who Are The Deniers Now? November 17, 2009
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Climate Change: Who Are The Deniers Now?
Dr Tim Ball
By Dr Tim Ball
Canada Free Press, November 17, 2009
“When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.” Anonymous
Finger pointing rarely includes facts, especially in the climate debate. The first finger said we were global warming skeptics, but was turned back when it was explained all scientists are skeptics.
The second finger claimed we were climate change deniers. It was turned back because the opposite is true; we’re telling the public about the extent and speed of natural climate change. As Copenhagen nears, it’s evident no agreement is possible so rhetoric, and alarmism abound. Finger pointing has a new form, being a denier is now a disease. They never consider the failure is due to facts proving the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis wrong. With the left it is always someone else’s fault.
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After Versailles – The Copenhagen Treaty November 16, 2009
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After Versailles – The Copenhagen Treaty
by Peter Smith
Quadrant Online, November 15, 2009
Economic consequences of the Copenhagen Treaty
In the Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919, Keynes warned, among other things, of the ruinous consequences of war reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty.
No-one in those days, or up until recently, would have thought there might come a day when the debt of war would be replaced by the debt of climate ‘warming’, for which reparations were demanded. That day has certainly come with the UN’s “Framework Convention on Climate Change”, the so-called Copenhagen Treaty (‘the treaty’).
The first thing to say is that the treaty will not be signed in one of its current forms. There are many square bracketed alternatives and options in the treaty but it is fair to say that none of them will prove palatable to the major countries.
Leaving aside the posited creation of some kind of world ‘government’ and all of the administrative paraphernalia this entails, the treaty is basically about two obligations, both of which effectively fall on developed countries. The first is to cut emissions severely. The second is to pay developing countries – for past climate misdeeds of developed countries and for the efforts required of developing countries to contain their own future emissions. We are reminded though, in the treaty, that the “over riding priority” of developing countries “remains sustainable economic growth and poverty eradication, an effort which has been complicated by the effects of climate change”. So, the burden of cost and that of reducing emissions is squarely put on developed countries.
The economic consequences of cutting emissions have been heavily debated here in Australia and elsewhere without, of course, any consensus emerging. The problem is that no one actually knows what the economic consequences will be; it is mostly conjecture. It is claimed on one side that the loss of jobs in emitting industries will be made up for by green jobs and, moreover, that the costs of doing nothing about emissions will outweigh the costs of acting resolutely to cut emissions. On the other side, it is claimed that cutting emissions will result in economic dislocation and loss of wealth and, moreover, will make very little difference to atmospheric CO2 levels.
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