The low price, 6.3 Euro, is equivalent to about $8 Australian or US.
The Australian government signed us up to pay $23A with a floor at $15 (and they think that they are creating a “free” market.)
By Thomson Reuters Point Carbon
LONDON | Wed Dec 14, 2011 12:01pm EST LONDON (Reuters) –
EU carbon prices fell to their lowest ever level on Wednesday ...
The ICE ECX December 2011 EUA contract fell 73 cents to an all-time low of 6.30 euros, down 10.4 percent on Tuesday’s 7.03-euro settlement. By 16.30 GMT, the contract had recovered slightly to 6.41 euros on healthy turnover of around 15 million units.
The drop sends the contract into unchartered territory, falling well below its previous low of 6.77 euros on December 6 as market traders saw few signs of respite in the EU economy to boost demand for emission permits.
BREAKING: As Jeff ID says, “The Empire Strikes Back”
Industrial wall in Donetsk, Ukraine. Photo: Борис У.
UPDATED: See Washington Examiner story below.
Tallbloke’s computers were confiscated by police today, allegedly in the search for the climategate leaker. But it’s obvious that there won’t be any clues left on Tallbloke’s computer (it would have no record of comments dropped onto wordpress.com, a US service). See Watts Up.
The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers.
They don’t really want to catch the leaker, because a whistleblower is protected by UK legislation. The proof that this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker is the coordinated and pointless US dept of Justice action through wordpress. To wit:
Both Tallbloke and JeffID received “the following notification from the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and forwarded by Ryan at WordPress. ClimateAudit is also mentioned yet I’m not certain that Steve Received notice. It seems that the larger paid blogs may not have received any notice. On pdf –WordPress Preservation Request-1“
The notification apparently asks them not to make the information public or else... they may terminate their wordpress account.
This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hacker.
How would anyone feel knowing that agents may turn up at their home, take all their computers, phones, routers and records, and have a copy of all their emails, their tax records, letters to friends, music, photos, information about family and friends, and their passwords?
The inconvenience of living without their computer, software and everything else would cost potentially thousands but worse, for someone who values their privacy, just the knowledge that so much personal information was in the hands of strangers would be unsettling.
Furthermore, there’s the risk that a single malicious person in the government could “leak” the emails, photos, or letters, medical records and spread them on the internet. These are home offices, so everything is on the computer. It would only take one agent — someone thinking it was “only fair” to release all that information. There’s a perverse logic that though the climategate leaker carefully removed personal emails, and was releasing work related information from a work account, it was somehow “just” to release irrelevant personal information from the accounts of volunteers.
If the establishment was really in the mood to send a signal that blogging is a risky business, what’s next — Nixon style tax audits?
Now, more than ever, all the people that value their freedom need to stick together. Whistleblowers and radio personalities need blogger back up, big bloggers need small bloggers, every blogger needs commenter and emailer support, with letters to editors and friends. Every link in the chain helps. The establishment need to know that we will not be intimidated, there are many of us, and the more they push, the more we will tell the world.
Spread the information on the net while we still can
Geoff Sherrington analyzes the words in the Durban agreement, and finds a telling tale of politics, money and influence, but not one of probability, maths, food, shelter or freedom (which do not appear at all). The word science appears 6 times in 21,313 words. It’s the mere token excuse that underlies everything else. This is a legal style document, so it is to be expected that it’s dominated by “parties” and “reports” but given the uncertainties involved in predicting the climate, a rational document, designed to serve the people, would surely include statistics, cost benefits, and mentions of probabilities. But then, we always knew that the big greenhouse scare was not about the emissions or the atmosphere, but about status, power and money. — Jo
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By guest author Geoff Sherrington.
The killing fields of Durban have produced agreement by many countries to one of the more extraordinary and preposterous documents one could read. It is so contrived by the UN that it is hard to know if it is the correct document, or maybe an unadopted working draft in progress.
The winners and losers at Durban were? The losers were the John and Joan Citizens of the World, who became poorer as the curtain fell on Durban.The winners, a group of wealthy, heartless individuals, many with (shall we say, to avoid libel) interesting backgrounds.The political war was won by the early placement of key people in positions where, after 2 decades of promotion, many became influential enough to dominate the political numbers. Of course, this tactic took money, because the common driver was money. The wealthy seek to drive change because more money can be made during change than in the quiet periods between.
Alas, at Durban, the science was not discussed in this document. Discussion was overtly political and the outcome overtly communist in the worst sense of that word. The word ‘science’ appears 6 times in this document of 300KB and 56 pages with a count of 21,313 words.
Here is one of the paragraphs about Science from the Durban document, with 2 of the 6 uses of the word ‘science’ from a total count of 21,313 words:
“(Previous work) recognizes that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties, Recognizing that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a view to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions so as to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C above preindustrial levels, and that Parties should take urgent action to meet this long-term goal, consistent with science and on the basis of equity;……”
In the meantime, here is a simple word analysis of the content of the Durban document. For comparison, the word count use gives ‘and’ 175 times and ‘the’ 381 times.
Enron was jubilant when the Kyoto agreement was put forward
Here’s a legacy exhibit from the historical annals of How the Global Warming Scam Grew. You can see the cogs of the industrial machine picking up the “green theme”, becoming patrons of eco-legislation, and pouring money and influence into any big-government scheme that also promises them big profits. This is exactly the unholy alliance of Big-Finance with Big-Government that I described in the Climate Scare Machine Map. The email below documents one part of that self-fulfilling cycle where the taxpayers and citizens get screwed, corporates and politicians win, and the environment is irrelevant. The Greens ought be ashamed their naivety and ambition was so easily gamed by the real powers-behind-the-scenes.
Robert Bradley Jr. was working for Enron in 1998, and saw Enron lobbying for profits in the green sector. Bradley’s name was on the “to” list of this email below (perhaps with the wrong address because it did not arrive). He only saw the email when another man asked Bradley what he thought of it, and Bradley asked him to forward the message.
Subject: Implications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto & What Transpired
Implications
If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous. In addition, a carbon emissions trading system will be developed. While the trading system will be implemented by 2008, I am sure that reductions will begin to trade with 1-2 years. Finally, Enron has immediate business opportunities which derive directly from this agreement.
The endorsement of joint implementation within Annex-1 is exactly what I have been lobbying for and it seems like we won.
Good news. The talented strategists left the UNFCCC team before COP17 in Durban. The A-graders saw the trainwreck coming and moved on.
Everyone knows it’s a herculean task to get 190-odd countries to sign anything, and with a typical pragmatical approach the UN drafting team have gone for … not just a new “International Court” (crikey!) but rights for Mother Earth (can we be sued by a rock?), and oh boy, the holy grail, the whole kit and caboodle … we demand Peace On Earth, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree, as Part 47a, and starting by morning tea tomorrow.
Monckton reports that the funereal collapsing Durban talks still held the highest of ambitions. Godlike even. The real action behind the posters of parrots and pleas to save pygmy corals, or spotted limpets is the plea to make some unelected bureaucrats the totalitarian Kings of The World.
In part it’s chilling, a New International Court — which could presumably try you for crimes against coastlines, clouds, or (more likely) against endangered windfarms. Those with their hands on the legal wheel want the power to direct money (was that $1.6 Trillion?) from the richest nations to their friends, patrons, or pet causes. If they became the anointed Kings, it would swiftly become a crime to speak doubts of climate models upon which billions of trades depends. The darkest evil always comes cloaked with helpful intentions.
Fortunately, what’s left of the UN strategic team is even lower caliber than B-grade, beyond Z, somewhere into hexadecimal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the grown-ups in the IPCC-support-team left the party sometime after Copenhagen, and the Z++ team are left to guard the bones. No one can take this wild ambit claim seriously.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
The Gods of PR and marketing sing,
a landmark deal — lo and behold!
To wave and laud, and on which to cling.
Of course, at the 28th hour of extended play they had to announce something “landmark” and thus they did. All you need to know about their success is written in the following paragraph:
“The deal doesn’t explicitly compel any nation to take on emissions targets, although most emerging economies have volunteered to curb the growth of their emissions.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is they still got our money:
Sunday’s deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries. Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.
The reports from green observers offer us much insight:
Environmentalists criticized the package – as did many developing countries in the debate – for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions.
“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer, recalling predictions a few days ago of a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”
Local governments are ruling on what people can do with their own land if it happens to be near seas recorded as rising at a frightening 1mm per year. Home owners are losing options and home value, not because of the rising water, but because of rising nonsense.
Let’s assume that IPCC projections might, incredibly, actually come to pass — why don’t the councils just get all residents to sign a clause before they buy or renovate. We the residents and potential residents, won’t mind signing that we have seen The Official Council Climate Warning:
—————————————————–
“The IPCC estimates the oceans may rise by (insert wild prediction here).
The council cannot be held responsible for the weather, and will not hold back the ocean.
Buy or renovate at your own risk!”
—————————————————–
Who has more incentive to assess the threats to a house (your house): a/ you, the homeowner who just hocked yourself to the grave and wants to live in it, hand it to your kids, or on-sell it for a decent quid; or b/ the local councillors who will never set foot in it, and won’t be councillors by the time said threat may or may not occur?
Not to mention that Councillors are equipped to assess complex coastal threats just like any bricklayer, newsagent, pharmacist, teacher, unionist or minor career politician would be. In other words — Not.
In a true free society, people could make up their own minds about the likelihood of the predictions made by UN committees which quote Greenpeace reports, and whose own lead authors say things like: “All the models are wrong” (but only when they don’t think anyone is listening).
If the IPCC are right, only silly skeptical fools will have wasted their money (and why would the council care about them?). If the IPCC are wrong, the only losers are the bed-wetting patsies who believed them and sold out a bit cheap to move for an uphill house. I say, let the people decide.
Fifty years from now, no one would blame the current council if erosion, or even a storm surge led to property damage. In 2062, disgruntled home owners who have to fork out for a small sea-wall certainly won’t be suing the 2012 Council.
It’s time elected representatives stopped treating voters as if they were children.
A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.
In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).
Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will cool til 2068, then warm again, though not to the same warmth as 2006 levels.
On “tree-rings”
Now some will argue that skeptics scoff at tree rings, and we do — sometimes — especially ones based on the wrong kind of tree (like the bristlecone) or ones based on small samples (like Yamal), ones with aberrant statistical tricks that produce the same curve regardless of the data (Mann’s hockey-stick), and especially ones that truncate data because it doesn’t agree with thermometers placed near air-conditioner outlets and in carparks (Mann again). Only time will tell if this analysis has nailed it, but, yes, it is worthy of our attention.
Some will also, rightly, point out this is just Tibet, not a global average. True. But the results agree reasonably well with hundreds of other studies from all around the world (from Medieval times, Roman times, the Greenland cores). Why can’t we do solid tree-ring analysis like this from many locations?
Jo
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2,485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau [Chinese Sci Bull,]
Figure 5 Prediction of temperature trends on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau for the next 120 years. Blue line, initial series; orange line, calibration series, 464 BC–834 AD; purple line, verification series, 835–1980 AD; red line, forecasting series, 1980–2134 AD. (Click to enlarge)
There are beautiful graphs. Have a look at the power spectrum analysis and the cycles below…
Cover: Australian Resources and Investment Dec 2011
The key messages are not lost on the bright and influential, and even if the mass-media avoid the evidence, the facts are quietly storming their way through the echelons of power. For the future historians, here’s a glimpse of how information networks grow and evolve behind the scenes.
Once upon a time, the missing hot spot and the water vapor amplification were virtually unknown. In Jan 2009 2010, Tony Kelly (a member of the Royal Society) met David and me privately in Perth. He grasped the implications of the model amplification in a flash. There’s a world of difference between the certainty of the 1.2 C direct effect of CO2, and the highly uncertain assumptions that push it up to 3.3 C. Three months later, not coincidentally, the Royal Society was approached by deeply concerned skeptical members, and had to formally reconsider its position.
In June this year, we were lucky enough to dine with Matt Ridley, who likewise picked up the message, and is spreading it — see his acclaimed speech in November. A few weeks ago, I noticed Lord Lawson and Lord Turnbull similarly argued the same meme (though I don’t know that we deserve any direct credit for that).
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Internet is the gift of gifts. How easy would it have been for the government departments, coopted scientists, and obedient media to have gotten away with the outrageous scam of forcing us to pay to change the weather? Their lock on the mainstream media would have made it easy to disguise the truth. And yet, it crumbles (all bar the Antipodes).
Then last week, I met Gina Rinehart at the Mannkal Christmas party, and she was keen to let me know that she’d mentioned David and the key points of evidence in an article for the Australian Resources and Investment publication.
A day later, Gina Rinehart was disappointed and surprised that the editors decided to cut her description of the scientific evidence — though those of us who explain science have learnt to expect that. (It’s as if editors are deathly afraid a scientific argument might bore the readers, when here, below, if readers didn’t already know it, are the blockbuster points that back up her claims.) It’s clear she is well versed. She’s carefully picked out the most important points. I’m grateful she’s given me permission to reprint the excerpts of her article, most especially the unpublished parts. Naturally, any credit for what Gina knows belongs to Gina, but — credit where credit is due — thanks to Monckton, Carter and Plimer too.
And lest anybody misunderstand, I take no credit at all for shifting Gina to a skeptical view — given that she’s been surrounded by Geologists for decades — it’s hard to imagine she was ever un-skeptical.
Resources the life-raft in an economic storm
By Gina Rinehart
Gina Rinehart
See the published article here. Below is the scientific evidence that was in the original, but not in the final printed copy.
“Australia was able to withstand the global economic crisis of 2008/2009 due to its fundamental strength in natural resources…
“Now as a recession approaches is not the time to burden Australia with carbon (dioxide) tax and MRRT, and nor is a carbon (dioxide) tax necessary in any event.
Please consider the following scientific evidence:
1. The atmosphere currently has <0.04% CO2, in former times it was up to 30%. Six of the six great ice ages formed at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than now. Clearly, this did not drive warming.
2. For 80% of past geological time, planet Earth has been warmer than today, with far more CO2 in the atmosphere. Clearly, this warming was neither irreversible nor catastrophic.
3. At times in the past (Carboniferous, Cretaceous, Eocene) the Earth experienced sudden injections of CO2 into the atmosphere. In response, the planet warmed slightly but less than daily changes we experience now and not in an irreversible or catastrophic way.
What do skeptics have to do to break the spell of government appointed experts?
Many journalists are apparently trapped in a fit of ideological blindness — they can’t acknowledge emails leaked from their favourite scientists. What do you do when your religious idol turns out to be a mere fallible human — caught deleting emails, hiding data and pretending that their models are accurate when they privately admit they’re “all wrong”? The “overwhelming evidence” for the prophecies of a coming man-made disaster are exposed in the emails as based on biased research, petty trickery, flawed assumptions and an all too human desire to “keep me employed”.
The trance of big-government appointed prophets is so strong, skeptics such as Christopher Monckton and Craig Rucker (CFACT) are going to skydive into Durban to see if they can shake journalists out of their stupor.
The big jump will happen at 11am Durban time (5pm Perth, 8pm Sydney, 9am London, and 4am New York time.) Right now!
And if that doesn’t work, what next? Do they take off their clothes?!
From Marc Morano and Climate Depot:
Climategate 2.0 parachutes into COP17: – Skeptics risk life and limb free-falling from 3000 feet to draw attention to Climategate 2.0 — The skeptical skydiving team will land at Toti beach. Media and all interested persons are invited to the beach to observe the landing’ – (Parachutes will be double checked for potential sabotage by warmists 🙂
CFACT skydivers to tow banners into UN Durban conference
Lord Monckton, Craig Rucker, Climate Depot to parachute
Emails exposing biased science cannot be ignored
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
The other headline I could have used: Jo Nova and Watts Up graphs used in UEA lectures!
It doesn’t get much better than this. Imagine finding out your work helped to support a university course in a place right at the center of the dogma and unscientific reasoning you are working to expose? Well I’m chuffed. 🙂
Allan Kendall is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA) with principles and an open mind, who gave his students the whole story. I applaud his brave approach, he would have known he risked castigation and exile in his workplace, and that there would be little reward.
Curiously a small storm erupted on Bishop Hill. Alan Kendall is defending UEA, saying that not everyone or every branch of research at UEA ought to be tarnished with the poor behaviour of the Climate Research Unit. And his behaviour rather proves his point, but many commenters at UEA are bagging him for expecting anyone to take UEA seriously, and in a sense they are right too. Therein lies the rub.
People of Kendall’s quality are either rare or silent at UEA. As long as the Chancellor of UEA continues to deny that it was wrong for the Climate Research Unit to hide and lose data and methods, or wrong to destroy emails subject to FOI’s, or wrong to hide declines, or wrong to manipulate the peer review process, then UEA deserves a shellacking in my opinion, even as Allan Kendall deserves high praise. It’s been a lonely battle for him. The world needs to see more of the UEA workers and students protesting that one small group is dragging their reputation down. Those other good workers like Kendall did not do anything wrong, and did not ask for this reputational disaster to be imposed on them, but the test has come. Will the workers of UEA stand up for the tenets of science? Will they allow their university to be called the “University of Easy Access”, and the name UEA to be synonymous with corruption?
Sadly it’s not just UEA where scientific standards are haphazard. Can anyone name a university anywhere in the world where the Science Department maintains good practices and speaks out against? My alma mater, the University of Western Australia, allows Stephen Lewandowsky to utter anti-science, bizarre, “psychological” comments on how anyone who dissents from the government-approved-opinion has a mental condition and a faulty brain. The Soviets would have given Lewandowsky a job in a flash. Yet UWA Science stands silently by as if breaking laws of reason is a fair thing. (See The death of reason at UWAThe hypocrisy of the annointed,Picasso Brain Syndrome and other of my posts about Lewandowsky)
Kendall was the lone voice of reason working with UEA to do the right thing
(See the Hammer link below, for more information on this graphic).
If there is one topic that trumps all others in climate science, it’s ocean heat.
If there is a planetary imbalance in energy, and Earth is acquiring more heat than it’s losing, we ought to be able to find that heat. Energy can not be created nor destroyed. It has to be somewhere.
On this Water-Planet, virtually every scientist agrees that the vast bulk of the extra energy ought be stored in the water. The oceans cover 70% of the surface, and are 4km deep; water has a high heat capacity (meaning it can store a lot of energy), and, because water flows quickly (unlike rock), turbulence and mixing can take that heat energy away from the surface.
Every skeptic (and taxpayer) ought to know that since 2003 (when we started measuring oceans properly) the oceans have been cooling: Douglass and Knox 2010.
Five years of planetary heating amounts to a massive amount of energy. That’s 2,000 days of the sun bearing down on an atmosphere with growing levels of CO2. According to the IPCC favored models, the extra heat stored should be 0.7 x 1022 Joules per year (or 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules per annum or 7,000 quintillion joules).
The oceans cause a lot of “noise” in our climate — the water is 4km deep and mostly close to freezing, even in the depths under the tropics. When the ocean is “stirred” cold water wells up and sucks the heat out of the atmosphere giving us a La Nina and a cooler year. When the ocean is calm, the massive stores of “cold” stay sequestered below, the surface water warms faster, and satellite record an El Nino warm spike. Figuring out the effects of CO2 with surface thermometers is difficult because of this noise and variability. But the vast oceans are the giant storage depots for heat content year after year.
Positions of the floats that have delivered data within the last 30 days (AIC, updated daily)
The Argo buoy network uses 3,000 floating thermometers that spread through the worlds oceans and dive 2,000 m deep. They record the temperatures and radio them back when they surface every couple of weeks. It is the gold standard in measuring ocean temperatures. Argo became operational in mid-2003; before then we relied on erratic and highly uncertain measurements from boats. (See The UCSD Argo website.)
Figure 1. Ocean heat content from Argo (left scale: blue, original data; red, filtered) and ocean surface temperatures (right scale, green). Conversion of the OHC slope to W/m2 is made by multiplying by 0.62, yielding –0.161 W/m2. Figure 4 From Knox & Douglass page 1. OHC (Ocean Heat Content) From Douglass and Knox, 2010.
Sorting real journalists from sock puppets is not too tricky: real investigators tell you what the story is about; PR writers tell you what to think.
Do they “discuss” ClimateGate emails … without quoting the emails?
Who digs for details, and who hides the evidence?
The PR writers for Big-Government were quick to come up with excuses for ClimateGate II. Which is all very well, but it’s blindingly obvious where their own personal prejudices lie if they won’t print the emails that they are supposedly discussing. It’s not so much cherry-picking, but cherry-denial. “Don’t mention the radioactive cherries, but lets discuss how cherry farmers have been victimized, talk about the history of cherry tree farming, and hear their excuses and assertions that the cherries are an essential part of our diets. Don’t mention the Geiger counter. OK?”
The top 10 excuses for PR writers who pose as “journalists” to ignore ClimateGate emails
This is standard issue damage control for ClimateGate — protect the cheats and liars, attack the whistleblower, and use excuses and padding-fillers to cover a story without actually giving the public any information on the behavior of scientists who make statements that billions of dollars of public spending is guided by.
1. “The emails are old”
(No one has seen them before, and what makes two-year-old lies acceptable now?).
2. “The timing is suspicious”
(Alarmists release alarming stuff all the time in the lead up to big meetings, but look out, it’s suspicious when a skeptic releases alarming stuff about those scientists at the same time!)
3. “They’re out of context”
(We won’t explain the context, or quote the email, trust us, they just are, OK?)
4. “The emails show a robust scientific debate”
(But that is the whole point isn’t it? We were told the “science was settled”? It is dishonest to discuss uncertainties in private while you tell the public “the debate is over” and call anyone who questions that a “denier”.)
5.“They’ve been investigated”
(Even though the investigations didn’t have these emails, didn’t investigate the science, and were at least in one case, chaired by a windfarm expert, this point is supposed to have credibility?)
6.“They’re hacked” or “stolen”
(After years of investigation there is no evidence they were hacked. They could have been leaked. Police can’t or won’t say. Does this journalist “know” something the police don’t?)
7.“Aren’t the skeptics nasty people?”
(Crikey, imagine reading emails written by paid public servants on the job about their professional work? What victims! Those poor scientists can’t even threaten journal editors, conspire to ignore peer reviewed papers they don’t like, or discuss their ignorance in private… what’s the world coming too?)
8.“This doesn’t change the science”
(Since most of “the science” is merely a consensus of these same experts, whom we are told to respect, then actually it does change “the science” when they are caught cheating.)
9.The emails “mean nothing” according the scientists caught cheating
(The sock puppet earns bonus points if those same scientists also get to slur the whistleblower and skeptics with unsubstantiated implications that “they are funded by fossil fuels”.)
10. The public response is a “yawn”
(And given how few journalists are reporting the actual emails to the public, that’s entirely predictable eh? Circular reasoning strikes again.)
Real Journalists don’t try to hide the emails
Some journalists are not apologists for scientists who delete emails, hide results, talk about “the cause”, and try to get critics sacked. Bravo, and kudos to them and the news masts that invite coverage of both sides of the story.
Who are they sock puppets for? Take your pick: a political philosophy, their personal religion, possibly something more banal?
Richard Black, BBC: Leads the way in creative sock-puppetry , with the definitive whitewash within hours. Chalks up seven of the top ten excuses faster than virtually anyone else.
Associated Press (via The Australian and others): Does unabashed “damage control”. Publishes the responses of the accused without ever quoting the emails themselves. A.P. quotes the University of East Anglia spokesman, quotes Michael Mann, quotes Bob Ward (PR operative for the Grantham Institute). There is no effort to quote the hot-potato emails, to discuss their significance, or to phone up the people who might interpret the results differently from the accused. Associated Press (via CBC news) “‘Desperate climate change deniers’ blamed”.
Andy Revkin,New York Times.I think Revkin sincerely believes he is an investigative journalist, and he “investigates” in a half-hearted way: he links to a few skeptical sites, he asks “climate scientists” to respond to Pielke’s point, and asks the Norwich police how much they’ve spent. But there are no direct quotes of the emails, no phone calls to skeptics or people on the other side of the emails. By writing it all off as though the first emails were already “explained”, he implies that using tricks to hide declines is a reasonable scientific practice. If scientists distort the peer review process, bully and slur critics even as they hide their own debates and uncertainty, that’s apparently all fair too. Thus he is an apologist for corruption of the scientific process. His update relies on the intellectual vacuum of the precautionary principle: “You’re Driving a Bus Full of Kids With a Curve Ahead“.
(No Andy, just because we don’t know the magnitude doesn’t mean we automatically have to spend billions. We don’t know the magnitude of the next pandemic or asteroid hit either. Look up the phrase “cost-benefits”. The magnitude matters: is it 1, 3, or 5 degrees? We have to use the observations, with rigorous scientific process in the search for the best estimate we can make. The guys who lose data, delete emails, act deceptively and behave badly are estimating 3.3C. We can do better.)
Jason Samenow, The Washington Postalso won’t quote those emails, and uses at least five of the excuses above. (He scores a point for linking to skeptical sites, though he thinks he’s demonstrating “cherry picking”.)
David Wroe, Ben Cubby at The Sydney Morning Herald: Both were writing on climate change, Durban, the carbon tax and politics (here, and here) but won’t let the SMH readers know what the lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. There’s a few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. Otherwise it’s almost complete denial from the rest of “team environment”. The SMH can spare column inches to tell us what Desmond Tutu thinks about climate change, but not what Professor Phil Jones thinks about the models (“They’re all wrong”.)
The Age: It’s a carbon-copy of it’s sister, the SMH. Climate-gate was announced in one whitewash story copied from Bloomberg with four of the top excuses, but no quote. There’s the same few paragraphs of whitewash-in-passing from Adam Morton. But, as with other politically incorrect topics, The Age readers are in the dark. They get no clues as to what lead authors of IPCC reports have been caught admitting in private. If a junior Exxon secretary had said: “We need to get rid of global warming” it would be a headline story repeated in their columns for decades.
The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):I can’t even find any mention of the latest ClimateGate release on the abc.net.au site. Can anyone else? They have a dedicated “science” team, but like the SMH they seem to be in denial that their thought leaders could have broken the law, lost key data, lied about the “certainty” and the reliability of the models — or else, and it’s worse, the journalists know the scientists are behaving badly, but still think “the science is right”, they know best, and the stupid public need to be shielded from “confusing” information.
ABC News thinks Australians are better served by knowing the details of Tim Flannery’s tour than knowing what the IPCC lead authors have been caught saying, even though the men at the forefront of the supposed “science” disagree entirely with the Flannery-PR when they write emails to each other.
Australians may rightfully wonder why they pay a billion a year in taxes for this blatant censorship.
Australian Climate Madness summed the media response up so much faster than I have. 😉
Send in more examples of sock-puppet journalists. They need to be named and shamed, and real journalists rewarded.
Another sign of the times. Mark this one in your history books for studies on the Rise and Fall of the Great Warming Delusion. Yes, it’s another well written piece on the religious nature of the faith some have in our ability to change the weather. But this time there are sounds of the death knell…
Jo
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom
How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
The 27-nation bloc said it accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions and that it can’t act alone on emissions blamed for damaging the environment.
As far as Durban goes, most the rest of the major emitters want to delay things.
The US, Russia and Japan were already arguing for a longer timeframe.
To the anger of small islands states, India and Brazil have joined rich nations in wanting to start talks on a legal deal no earlier than 2015.
—————————-
UPDATE: Durban Warning: Public Will Soon ‘Lose Confidence In This Travelling Circus’
…within hours of the summit’s start, most of the major players made clear their unwillingness to negotiate their positions.
In the high powered risky game of whistleblowing there are ways to make the the leaker a less attractive target.
Pointman analyzes the ClimateGate whistleblower’s tactics and explains why he, she or they probably released those other 200,000 emails but kept them hidden behind the 4000-8000 character almost unbreakable password. He points out there are no emails released yet between key scientists and people in power, hence the worst, most damaging emails may be kept under a ” dead man’s hand detonator”. If politicians are afraid of what might be in those released-but-hidden emails, they may not want to expose or attack the whistleblower for fear of unleashing the other emails. The hidden emails buy the whistleblower protection.
Jo
Some thoughts and some questions about the Climategate 2.0 release
Two years ago, I did what can only be described as a highly speculative profile of the climategate leaker. You can find it here. I strongly suggest you read it now or you’ll have some difficulty following the rest of this piece. Reading it again in the light of what more can be deduced about them from the second release, it holds up surprisingly well. Where it falls down very badly is not so much in its broad conclusions, which I think are basically in the ballpark, but in the whistleblower’s intensity. Boy was I wrong on that.
They’ve sat on the new material for two years and apart from one possible communication, the ”no deal was done” comment on a blog, we’ve not heard a word from them. In that time, they’ve no doubt seen their motivations both lauded and slandered and have never came forward to either accept the plaudits or defend themselves from the attacks. That shows a level of patience and self-discipline only someone on a mission has. We’re very definitely looking at a person driven by integrity and conviction, someone who can’t be bought or sold, either by common coin or by popular recognition. People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.
“People like that never give up and they’re nearly impossible to either spot or stop.”
Keeping a secret that you know you can’t share with anyone else is a constant background stress. Keeping a very big secret is like having a giant boulder on your shoulders that gets heavier and heavier, grinding you down on a daily basis. It takes a huge toll on your resources but they’ve kept their secret successfully for two years. Believe me, that takes a mental and emotional strength that few people possess.
Looking at the “Background and Context” section of the readme file that came with the latest release, their motivation is plain for all to see, as are a number of other things. They are quite prepared to burn climate science down to its very foundations to stop it being used to justify environmental policies that they believe are killing people in the developing world. It is a motivation and strategy I share with them. My admiration of them is only tempered by my awe at the escalated level of risk they’ve now decided to take on.
A question I’ve always asked myself about the original climategate release and the new one too, is one that as far as I can tell, surprisingly no one else appears to ever have speculated on. I’ve never raised it publically because I feared it might intensify the hunt for them by forces more powerful than anything UEA or Norwich constabulary can bring to bear but as I’m now sure that with their latest release, they’ve taken care of that problem, I’ll share it now.
“These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate.”
Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.
I strongly suspect we now have them in our possession.
From the viewpoint of the political establishment, the original climategate was probably viewed as a squabble about the details of a branch of science and it was strictly confined to the blogosphere, since it was never reported on by the mainstream media. It looked like a one-off, so there was no ongoing political liability to worry about. Release 2 changes things, both for the whistleblower and the parties involved in the political emails. I’ve no doubt that at the time of the first release, the “scientists” assured the politicians that no significant political emails had been compromised and after two years of complete silence, it looked to be so.
With release 2, all bets are off. The release of explicit emails between scientists and senior political figures conspiring to deceive the electorate would not only be politically terminal but would also have to be reported on in the mainstream media. There’d be no way of ignoring them. The whistleblower is not going away and this means a real attempt is now going to be made to find them before they release any more emails. The last time, finding them was the last thing anyone wanted. This time, they simply have to be found and fast. Given the greater will and a lot more resources, there’s a real danger they’ll locate the leaker this time.
I don’t do conspiracy theories but have few illusions about what powerful political interests are capable of when they’re threatened, so I’ve no doubt that having located them, a point solution can easily be implemented. It would have to be something suitably grubby to completely destroy the credibility of the leaker. For instance, frame them up for downloading child pornography, try them, jail them and throw away the key. Who’d believe a word from a disgraced scientist sitting in cell because of their disgusting paedophile tendencies? Safely locked away and with absolutely no access to a computer, they’d be nullified. They simply wouldn’t be able to release any more material.
The leaker’s solution to this problem, and I have to say it’s rather neat, is to release all the remaining material now. Release 2 contains the political emails and all it needs is the magic pass phrase to unmask them. It could be uttered at some phony trial on trumped-up charges, it could be uttered to a fellow prisoner, it could be disclosed to their lawyer. It could be left with a few trusted friends with instructions as to who to send it to if anything untoward should happen to them. Allowing for the very worst, it could even be in their last will and testament.
Gillard — the Australian Prime Minister — got the timing perfectly wrong.
Within two weeks of the Carbon Tax finally becoming Law, it’s becoming hard not to notice that the whole Global Scam is fragmenting. This Carbon ship is on fire, the lifeboats are leaving, the rats are jumping, and the Australian team just turned up with the family jewels. Their policies are “take no prisoners” and “bring no life jackets”. Their exit plan is to have No Exit.
Sergey Abramov (ship, 1960) ...By Leksey
It’s hard to imagine how the timing could have been more quintessentially insane, or their “Leadership of Clean Energy” more poignantly inane.
After subterranean lakes of Shale Gas were discovered two months ago under Lancashire in the UK , even half-tinted-Green governments started stepping backwards from diabolical renewables deals. Nearly everyone popped up and said No No No to Kyoto. “Let’s be frank” said EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, “At best we could only get the EU, Norway and maybe two or three more countries to sign up for a second Kyoto period.” The Bloomberg article about the collapse of the Kyoto agreement discusses 14 nations and two continents, but Australia wasn’t one of them. So much for setting examples for the world.
Meanwhile, renewables are so openly on the nose that even the Duke of Edinburgh not only said windfarms are absolutely useless, but he got away with it. Windfarms are unpopular in Spain, the UK (here and here), Vermont, Scotland, New Zealand, and even the-iconic-home of-windmills the Netherlands. Solyandra sank like a concrete block. Google are pulling out of renewables, then on top all that, the IPCC shocked everyone by admitting they don’t know if the weather will get warmer or cooler for the next thirty years.
And that was just last week.
This week, FOIA popped up and released another 5,000 emails of self-serving scientists behaving badly (and another 200,000 encrypted ones, no password yet, just in case). Ross McKitrick put out a carefully cutting report on how the IPCC needs to be reformed or abandoned. Then another report pops out by Schmittner and co, saying that actually, the worst case scenario is just 1.7 – 2.6 degrees not 4 ,5, 6, or 11 degrees.
The EU is teetering on financial collapse, and panic selling sees the price of carbon is hitting record lows (€ 7.040 in the EU, and in New Zealand just $9US). The carbon price has dropped by half since June. There is an oversupply of carbon credits and trading houses are asking how low the price can go? UBS is suggesting a price of €3 (A$4). Australians will pay a fixed price of $15 per ton, set by people who keep telling us that a free market is the “best solution”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)
The word carbon is so unpopular that even the Carbon Market and Investors Association changed its name — they think “Climate Market” has a better ring to it (oh boy, do we have news for them).
Poetically, record snow is falling in the Northern Hemisphere (eg in Canada and Russia).
How times are changing
Headlines in The Australian newspaper rather put a fine point on it. The three stories below were all just on Friday; the top story about exaggerating the forecasts was on the front page. For the fans of man-made Global warming who say The Australian is biased in favour of skeptics, I say just wait until The Australian starts reporting the other side of the story for real (they look they might be working up to it). We haven’t seen anything yet. Fans of catastrophic warming prophecies will soon yearn for the days when The Australian only printed the occasional politically-skeptic article among their reprints of unquestioned government propaganda.
Behind the scenes, I’ve been playing with a new neat tool for hunting hypocrisy, corruption, bias and unprofessional behaviour and I’m pleased to announce its ready to share with the world. The kudos for this all belongs to, as usual, a skilled volunteer. Thanks to EcoGuy for turning his rapid-fire coding ability onto this.
On the EcoWho site he has helpfully placed all of Climategate I and II together into a combined searchable database. It’s fast, easy to scan, it copes with tricky search requests and provides a link to the full email from the results page of the search.
UPDATE: EcoGuy tells me that searches are coming in a stream about one-every-5-seconds. Do tell us what you find!
UPDATE: Ecoguy adds: you can put ‘.*’ between words you are looking for to find them apart but in the same order (i.e. paper.*fraud) – you can do what is called basic Regex matching, so if you know Regex you can really go to town. Putting a space at the beginning and end will just match the word enclosed only.
UPDATE: Ecoguy has just added in the ability to turn on matching by case or to restrict to just matching whole words – should make it easier to find exactly what you are looking for.
Up to £13.7 million in grants have been paid to Professor Phil Jones, from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, NATO, and the US Department of Energy. But the intellectual and philosophical climate is so weak that Jones doesn’t even consider himself to be paid to serve the citizens of those countries. No wonder he feels that people asking for “his” data are nuisances and pests.
Usually in Science-World, scientists don’t have to deal with pesky FOI’s — because they make their data and methods available for free upon request. It should never come down to legal action for citizens to get what is rightfully theirs.
Phil Jones is Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He’s one of the key climate scientists behind the IPCC reports (he and James Hansen of GISS in NASA are the two leading alarmist climate scientists).
Emails released in ClimateGate II that show he deletes emails, rationalizes that he is a not really a public servant, and discusses ways to hide from FOI requests, even as he admits the models are all wrong.
Five hours ago, FOIA left a link on my blog to a Russian site (I had been away). Emails and comments are streaming through to let me know that the Tallbloke, and Jeff ID have also got them. Tallbloke has opened it and checked for viruses. Jeff ID confirms there are thousands of emails readable and 220,000 more locked behind a password. (H/t Foia (!) Ripper, hunter, RoryFOMR, Janet J,… thanks!)
Assuming (I stress) assuming that these are indeed real, and not an elaborate hoax, wow.
It appears it’s all on again. The sordid details, honest thoughts, and human folly on display. (If true, thank you to Foia.) We need confirmation.
The BBC likewise is reporting this, and confirming it — it appears the emails are from 2009 or earlier, and if that’s the case, it means these were probably held back from the first batch. This will be described as being “rehashed old news”, which committee’s have investigated, blah blah blah, but what it shows is scientifically even more damning than the first batch. All of these people were saying it was “settled” beyond doubt, yet agreeing with the “deniers” behind the scenes about the uncertainties, the failure of the models, their inability to predict clouds, and the tropospheric tropical temperatures (ie the hot spot)…
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.
Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process
<1473> McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:
As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to
communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)
<1577> Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
<4085> Jones:
GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be
correct.
Wils:
What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]
<1485> Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Barnett:
[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer
<1982> Santer:
there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we’ve applied.
<5111> Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.
<5096> Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability
during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the
“Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly
in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have
seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.
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Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.
Australian sea level rises exaggerated by 8 fold (or maybe ten)
The Daily Telegraph exposed the NSW state government protecting the world from some dangerous scientific analysis of sea-levels. The officials pulled papers and posters within days of when they were due to be released, late in September 2011. Doug Lord examined 120 years of tidal data from Sydney Harbour, and found a 1 mm year on year rise which didn’t fit with the 900 mm rise projected by the Wizards of Climate Change at the Department. He finds the official figures exaggerate ten fold.
Ken Stewart has taken the dangerous data from 19 sites around Australia and finds it averaged 1.4 mm/year over the last 100 years. He finds about an 8-fold exaggeration. This is another sordid tale in the Science-perverted-for-PR category.
Sea Level Change in Australia: What’s Likely?
The mean sea-level rise recorded at 19 stations around Australia (warning, data is limited in the first half of the series). The trend is a steady rise. The last 20 years is not unusual.
Seas have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not unusual.
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