UN CLIMATE change boss says no one will care if Australia delays its emissions trading scheme. July 31, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Yvo de Boer
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UN CLIMATE change boss says no one will care if Australia delays its emissions trading scheme.
Yvo de Boer says emissions trading scheme details don’t matter
News.com.au, July 31, 2009
THE international community will care little if Australia skips its target date for finalising an emissions trading scheme (ETS), the head of the UN’s climate change office Yvo de Boer says.
Asked whether it mattered if Australia arrived in Copenhagen for climate change talks in December with an ETS in place – a key hope of the federal government – Mr de Boer replied: “Quite honestly, no”.
“What people care about in the international negotiations is the commitment that a government makes to take on a certain target,” he told ABC radio.
The Rudd government wants to go to the Danish capital with the details of its ETS locked in.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said Australia’s negotiating position would be weakened if the ETS was not passed before Copenhagen.
But Mr de Boer said what mattered to the international community was the targets set, not the domestic policies implemented to meet them. Domestic policies remained domestic issues, he said.
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THINK BEFORE YOU VOTE: FIELDING July 31, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Senator Steve Fielding
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THINK BEFORE YOU VOTE: FIELDING
Australia.to News, July 30, 2009
Family First Senator Steve Fielding has written to all senators offering them a scientific briefing on climate change with Professor Bob Carter before they vote on the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
“This is the biggest economic decision in this country’s history,” Senator Fielding said.
“I can’t see how any responsible senator could vote on an emission trading scheme without listening to what the world of science has to say on the issue.
The briefing will take place on 12 August, the day after Parliament resumes.
“I also wrote to the government’s climate change expert, Professor Will Steffen, but he declined my invitation to provide senators with a briefing,” Senator Fielding said.
“I’m at a loss as to why Professor Steffen doesn’t want to put forward his position if he believes in it so strongly.
“Given the science is still inconclusive I’m not willing to gamble with thousands of Australian jobs and escalating electricity prices.
“This decision is too important to be voted along party lines. If we don’t get it right we could be paying for the consequences for years to come.
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UK Media(including the BBC) turns on Met Office July 30, 2009
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UK Media(including the BBC) turns on Met Office
The Met Office should be sued
Times Online, July 29, 2009With its prediction of a blazing summer, it has helped to trash the travel industry abroad
Met Office cools summer forecast
BBC, July 29, 2009You will need a brolly on holiday in the UK in August – the Met Office is issuing a revised forecast for more unsettled weather well into the month.
It is a far cry from the “barbecue summer” it predicted back in April.
The news will raise questions about the Met Office’s ability to make reliable seasonal forecasts.
As millions of Britons holiday at home after that promise of a ‘barbecue summer’, how did the Met Office get it so wrong?
Daily Mail, July 30, 2009It was in April that the Met Office proclaimed the chances were ‘odds-on for a barbecue summer’. Rather like Michael Fish in October 1987, after he mockingly dismissed claims that a hurricane was on its way, the aptly-renamed ‘Wet Office’ was forced to confess its shortcomings yesterday.
Rain Set To Upset UK’s ‘Barbecue Summer’
Sky News, July 29, 2009It is a far cry from the prediction of a “barbecue summer” made in April and the revision raises doubts about the Met Office’s ability to make long-range forecasts.
Not only do the UK Met Office predictions fail, but they refuse to disclose Station Data.
UK Met Office Climate Prediction Model?
Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year July 30, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: africa, al gore, climate change, global starving, global warming
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Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year
Al Gore's Nashville home
Africa’s real climate crisis
By Fiona Kobusingye
Townhall, July 29, 2009Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year according to WHO (World Health Organization) reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.
And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.
…
However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s the almost total absence of electricity keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL.
The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming.
Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us the world needs to go on an energy diet. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!
Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished.
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Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites July 29, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Ian Plimer
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Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites
By Jonathan Manthorpe,
Vancouver Sun, July 29, 2009
Geologist Ian Plimer takes a contrary view, arguing that man-made climate change is a con trick perpetuated by environmentalists
Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.
Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.
Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.
It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend.
But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.
But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.
That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.
But he did eventually find a small publishing house willing to take the gamble and the book has already sold about 30,000 copies in Australia. It seems also to be doing well in Britain and the United States in the first days of publication.
Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.
While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years.
The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behaviour.
Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.
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Copenhagen in December: The Decline of the West – And Money July 27, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming
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Copenhagen in December: The Decline of the West – And Money
Jennifer Marohasy, July 26, 2009
IT is generally recognized that the west is in decline and that China will emerge as a superpower some time later this century.
It is also generally recognised that it is the west that has spear-headed the campaign against the so-called climate crisis. And the west is desperate to get the rest of the world to a United Nations meeting in Copenhagen in December to discuss solutions to this issue.
The UN’s top climate negotiator, a Dutchman Yvo De Boer, has already said the west will have to put $10 billion on the table to get the developing world – read China and India – to agree to anything at Copenhagen.
He doesn’t sound like much of a negotiator to me: More likely a bleeding-heart who can’t see that those in power in so-called developing countries like China and India are probably laughing behind closed doors. Indeed their GDP is already very large and growing relative to countries like Holland.
All the west really has on its side for this upcoming meeting in Copenhagen is its own smug, misguided sense of morality based on environmentalism.
Indians appears to better understand the science and the politics – at least better than Holland and Australia.
Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian and chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has explained, “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities and as it happens with the resources of coal that India has we really don’t have any choice but to use coal in the immediate short term.
Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, recent accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.
The west will of course continue to obsess over environmentalism and its tax payers continue to finance planned investments in renewable energy in countries like India and China that will continue to build coal power fire stations.
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AIR CON: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming by Ian Wishart – Video July 26, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Videos.Tags: Air Con, climate change, global warming, Ian Wishart
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AIR CON: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming by Ian Wishart
H/T Tom Nelson
Climate Money: Auditing is left to unpaid volunteers July 26, 2009
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Climate Money: Auditing is left to unpaid volunteers
Jo Nova, July 26, 2009
Billions for “the climate” but nothing left for audits?
It’s the most “important crisis” on Earth today, and we must rely on the science, yet it’s not quite important enough for anyone to independently double check those results. And just in case you think that the peer review process does that double checking, think again. Most papers are reviewed by only 2 or 3 colleagues who may be hoping to prove the same “theory” as the authors (so not especially keen to find holes in it), and who are unpaid and anonymous. (The saying “you get what you pay for” comes to mind. We pay to find a crisis, and we don’t pay to check the results).
The best examples of unpaid auditing are the work of independent scientists Steve McIntyre, and Anthony Watts. The irony is that skilled workers are providing a pro bono service, normally a service to help those who can’t afford it, but in this case, to assist the largest single financial entity on the planet.
Steve McIntyre and the misleading “Hockey Stick” graph
Steve McIntyre was trained in mathematics and worked in mineral exploration for 30 years (and despite claims to the contrary has never worked for the oil industry). Below is the Hockey Stick Graph from the 2001 IPCC Assessment Report.
McIntyre became suspicious of the Hockey Stick Graph because it was described in terms that reminded him of the Bre-X fraud. He is retired, and worked at considerable personal expense and without funding.
The infamous Hockey Stick Graph (Michael Mann et al 1998)
After dogged persistence to obtain the original data, McIntyre found embarrassing, crippling flaws in the Hockey Stick graph, a graph that wiped out centuries of recorded anecdotal history, archaeological finds, and data from almost every other source except unreliable “tree rings”. (Tree rings not only grow wider in warm years, but also grow wider in wet years, as well as being affected by soil nutrients, and by the level of CO2 in the air.) McIntyre found that the graph Michael Mann had produced, which was used repeatedly through the IPCC 2001 report, was so poorly constructed statistically that it was possible to feed in random “red noise” data and it still produced a hockey stick shape. A true peer review ought to have picked this up. Instead the graph occupied center stage for three or four years until a determined skeptical individual demanded the data (which was misplaced, then inaccurate, then inconsistent) and checked the statistics.
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Professor Garth Paltridge on The Climate Caper July 25, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Professor Garth Paltridge
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Professor Garth Paltridge on The Climate Caper
Via Quadrant Online
July 20, 2009
Garth W. Paltridge, The Climate Caper: Facts and Fallacies of Global Warming (Connor Court, 2009).
From the Foreword by Lord Christopher Monckton:
Nevertheless, when the history of the bizarre intellectual aberration that is “global warming” comes to be written, once it is even clearer than it already is that the disasters, catastrophes, cataclysms and apocalypses that have been so luridly and so widely predicted have not and will not come to pass, Dr. Paltridge’s little book will be regarded as one of the few, rare, precious beacons of enlightenment that prevented humanity from wandering through carelessness, ignorance and absent-mindedness into a new Dark Age.
An Honest Climate Debate 