Germany in skeptical turmoil on both Climate and Solar/Windfarms February 11, 2012
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Fritz Vahrenholt, global warming, ipcc, skepticism, solar power, windfarms
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Germany in skeptical turmoil on both Climate and Solar/Windfarms
Watts Up With That?
February 6, 2012
I have two major stories out of Germany to report, one on the rise of Climate Skepticism into the mainstream, as Germany’s Top Environmentalist Turns Climate Sceptic, saying
“I couldn’t take it any more. I had to write this book.”
Doubt came two years ago when he was an expert reviewer of an IPCC report on renewable energy. “I discovered numerous errors and asked myself if the other IPCC reports on climate were similarly sloppy.”
….and the other major story is on the failure of solar and wind power in Germany. First, the mainstream skepticism:
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Helmut Schmidt calls for IPCC inquiry March 7, 2011
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Helmut Schmidt, ipcc
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Helmut Schmidt calls for IPCC inquiry
By Professor Bob Carter
Quadrant Online, March 7, 2011
Helmut Schmidt, the respected former Chancellor of Germany, has told an audience at the Max-Plank-Gesellschaft that a full inquiry needs to be held into the credibility of advice on global warming that stems from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Set up in 1988 in order to deliver policy advice to governments regarding global warming, ever since 2005 the IPCC has been become mired in controversy over the integrity and accuracy of its procedures. Most recently, in early 2010, a number of scandals erupted over the selective use of published literature by the IPCC, and also its practice of relying upon documents from environmental lobby groups rather than refereed scientific papers.
In his speech, Helmut Shmidt said:
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Why Are Climategate Charlatans Still Free? September 30, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, ipcc
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Why Are Climategate Charlatans Still Free?
By Alan Caruba
CFP, September 28, 2010
If I had engaged in activities that involved fleecing the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom of billions in public funds in the name of “climate research”, and it was found that I had manipulated the data to advance the “global warming” hoax, wouldn’t I be facing charges of fraud?
Or if the universities for which I worked had benefited from receiving those public funds had conducted hearings that exonerated me, wouldn’t those institutions be considered accessories to the alleged crime?
This is the case today for the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and Pennsylvania State University in America. If the CRU is above suspicion, why did the U.S. Department of Energy suspend funds for it in July citing scientific doubts raised by the Climategate revelations last November?
Leaked emails between the principal players, CRU’s Phil Jones and Penn State’s Michael Mann, documented their dismay over the fact that the overall temperatures of the Earth were not increasing and colluded to suppress any expression of global warming skepticism in respected science journals.
Indeed, one of Mr. Jones emails admitted that he had “deleted loads of emails” to avoid being exposed lest someone bring a Freedom of Information Act request. In July a Wall Street Journal commentary by Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, noted that at the heart of the yet unresolved issues are “professional misconduct, data manipulation, and the jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data.”
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Sloppy Science from BHP head September 20, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: BHP, climate change, global warming, ipcc
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Sloppy Science from BHP head
By Viv Forbes
CFP, September 19, 2010
Mr Kloppers of BHP says that the mainstream science is correct, and we need to stabilise (and eventually reduce) the carbon concentration in the atmosphere”.
This is an amazingly sloppy comment from the head of a company whose shareholders would expect it to rely on good science and accurate language to run its businesses.
Firstly, no power station these days puts “carbon” into the atmosphere. Carbon is a black sooty substance produced as a result of incomplete combustion of coal in open fires and dirty old fashioned boilers. In modern boilers, all carbon is completely burnt to produce invisible, non-polluting, life supporting carbon dioxide.
Secondly, to describe the shallow agenda-driven model manipulation and data-fitting from the IPCC that supports the case for de-carbonising Australia as “mainstream science” means his minders have not kept up with the science nor the debate.
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A cunning bid to shore up the ruins of the IPCC September 4, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, ipcc, Rajendra Pachauri
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A cunning bid to shore up the ruins of the IPCC
By Christopher Booker
Telegraph.co.uk, 4 September 2010
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Photo: EPA
A report on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on behalf of the world’s leading scientific academies, last week provoked even some of the more committed believers in man-made global warming to demand the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC. But is the report all that it seems?
Last winter, the progress of this belief – that the world faces catastrophe unless we spend trillions of dollars to halt global warming – suffered an unprecedented reverse. In Copenhagen, the world’s leaders failed to agree a treaty designed to reshape the future of civilisation. This coincided with a series of scandals that blew up around the IPCC’s 2007 report.
Since then several inquiries, including three into the leaked “Climategate” emails, have tried to hold the official line, all following a consistent pattern. Each has made a few peripheral criticisms, for plausibility, while deliberately avoiding the main issue. Each has then gone on to put over the required message: that the science of global warming remains unchallenged
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CO2 is Not a Pollutant but a Huge Benefactor August 8, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, co2, global warming, ipcc, Joseph D’Aleo
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Joseph D’Aleo
CO2 is Not a Pollutant but a Huge Benefactor
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
ICECAP, Aug 07, 2010
There is a wild debate in the skeptic community on whether CO2 plays a role in climate changes over time and if so how much. I am going to avoid getting embroiled in that discussion because no one knows, including the IPCC, which starts with the basic assumption that it does, that we understand the forcing and proceeds from there. They back into the forcing in their models which are seriously flawed with very poor understanding of the clearly important factors of water in all its forms in our atmosphere and in the role of the sun and oceans. Even with seriously contaminated surface observation data, their models are failing miserably even just a decade or two into the runs.
There was a very similar divisive argument in the meteorological community in early to middle part the last century as Dr James Fleming of Colby College documented in the book “Historical Perspectives on Climate Change”. The pertinent chapter was on the web and can be found here. This was before models and was based on theory as the write-up documents.
As a Synoptic Meteorologist and Climatologist over the years I have let the data do the talking. The data says that CO2 plays little or no role in climate change – which is cyclical and relates far better with the cycles in sun and ocean.
When correlating CO2 with temperature trends in various periods of cyclical warming and cooling the last 110 years we find a negative correlation from the late 1800s to 1917 (-0.35), positive from 1917 to 1940 (+0.43), negative during the WWII and post WWII boom from 1940 to around 1975 (-0.40), positive from 1975 to around 2000 (+0.36) and negative in the short period to 2009 (-0.56).
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The Tree Ring Circus July 28, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, ipcc, michael mann
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The Tree Ring Circus
By John Dawson
Quadrant Online, July 28, 2010
The Hockey Stick Illusion is the shocking story of a graph called the Hockey Stick. It is also a textbook of tree ring analysis, a code-breaking adventure, an intriguing detective story, an exposé of a scientific and political travesty, and the tale of a herculean struggle between a self-funded sceptic and a publicly funded hydra, all presented in the measured style of an analytical treatise. The hero of the story is Steve McIntyre, honourably assisted by fellow sceptics, especially by Ross McKitrick. The villain is Michael Mann, dishonourably assisted by global warming alarmists, especially by his “Hockey Team”. The bare bones of the Hockey Stick story are as follows.
In its First Assessment Report published in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented the conventional view of climate history: that around a thousand years ago there was a Medieval Warm Period, followed by a Little Ice Age, followed by the Current Warm Period that has not yet reached the temperatures experienced during the Medieval Warm Period. 
In 1995 the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report presented that view again but introduced some doubt about the Medieval Warm Period, suggesting that further investigation was required. It had dawned on global warming crusaders that the Medieval Warm Period was a huge problem for the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis and that fame and fortune awaited a scientist who could get rid of it.
The scientist who took the prize was a brash and ambitious American paleoclimatologist, Dr Michael Mann. With two of his more senior colleagues, Mann set about investigating the earth’s temperature over the last millennium by scouring the world’s research projects that had detected past temperatures by way of temperature “proxies” such as tree rings. The amount of data they collated and the sophistication of their statistical analysis, claimed Mann, ensured that their conclusions would be more “robust” than those of previous studies. Their first peer-reviewed paper (MBH98) was published in the prestigious journal Nature in 1998 and their second (MBH99) was published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) in 1999. The graphed summation of these papers wiped the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age out of the picture and replaced them with a flat-lined handle declining slightly from 1000 to 1900 then bending upwards into a twentieth-century blade of rapidly rising temperatures.
This “Hockey Stick” graph was immediately seized by AGW crusaders. Typical of the reaction was that of Gerry North of Texas A&M University who enthused: “The planet had been cooling slowly until 120 years ago, when, bam!, it jumps up … We’ve been breaking our backs on [greenhouse] detection, but I found the 1000-year records more convincing than any of our detection studies.” Almost overnight the Hockey Stick became the new gold standard of paleoclimatology.
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Dutch agency admits mistakes July 6, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, ipcc
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Dutch agency admits mistakes
News24.com
6 July 2010
The Hague – A leading Dutch environmental agency, taking the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal UN report on climate change, said it has discovered more small mistakes and urged the panel to be more careful.
But the review released on Monday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed that none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening and is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people.
Mistakes discovered in the 3 000-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year fed into an atmosphere of skepticism over the reliability of climate scientists who have been warning for many years that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases could have catastrophic consequences, including rising sea levels, drought and the extinction of nearly one-third of the Earth’s species.
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The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider June 15, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, ipcc
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The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider
By Lawrence Solomon
National Post, June 13, 2010
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
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Dr Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC – No Fossil Fool May 8, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, ipcc, Rajendra Pachauri
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Dr Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC – No Fossil Fool
Written by Dennis Ambler
SPPI, May 3, 2010
Much has been written over recent months about the enigmatic Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), Dr Rajendra K Pachauri. He has been labeled a crook and a fraudster by some, because of his extensive interests in companies that stand to benefit from carbon trading, but those searching for direct and actionable evidence of wrong-doing will be disappointed.
What they will find is someone who has used his position as IPCC Chairman to attract major funding to his own organization, The Energy and Resources Institute2 (TERI), known previously (and concurrently by some), as the Tata Energy Research Institute.
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An Honest Climate Debate 