Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated. – Ottmar EdenhoferMore at Watts Up With That
'In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.'IPCC report, section entitled '14.2.2.2 Balancing the need for finer scales and the need for ensembles' Just wondered if important!
'India has once again challenged the UN's climate science body - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) --- through a new scientific paper.
The Environment ministry sponsored paper says that human induced global warming is much less than what the R K Pachauri headed IPCC had said. The cause is reduced impact of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) on formulation of low clouds over earth in the last 150 years, says a paper by U R Rao, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, released by Environment minister Jairam Ramesh.
The GCRs are the ones that enter solar system from outside, mostly from exploding of stars, and help in forming low-level clouds over the earth. The theory is that the solar magnetic field deflects GCRs, thereby impacting low-level cloud formation.
Analyzing the data between 1960 and 2005, Rao found that lesser GCRs were reaching the earth due to increase in solar magnetic field and thereby leading to increase in global warming.
"Consequently the contribution of increased CO2 emission to be observed global warming of 0.75 degree Celsius would only be 0.42 degree Celsius, considerably less than what predicted by IPCC," the paper said to be published in Indian Journal Current Science had said. This is about 44 % less than what IPCC had said.
Ramesh in 2009 had released a similar scientific paper saying that the IPCC's claim that most Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 was wrong. A few months later, after a review the IPCC regretted the error. If Ramesh latest bid gets globally recognition, it can alter the rules of UN run climate negotiations of 200 nations.'
'CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning.
Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration. CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth. Commercial greenhouse operators often use CO2 as a fertilizer to improve the health and growth rate of their plants. Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were about 1000 ppm, a level that we will probably not reach by burning fossil fuels, and far above our current level of about 380 ppm. We try to keep CO2 levels in our US Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 times current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels.
By William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Princeton University'
'#5 – Independent bloggers vs corporate environmentalists
30 years ago Greenpeace rented creaky fishing boats. These days it purchases $22-million custom-built mega-yachts. The shoestring voices in the environmental debate now belong to skeptical bloggers.
#4 – The Stern Review scandal – the IPCC breaks 3 of its own rules
Ten months after the official cutoff date, and well after the expert reviewers were out of the picture, climate bible authors inserted references to the Stern Review into 12 different chapters.
#3 – Politicians dressed in lab coats
When a forensic pathologist testifies at a murder trial he describes bruises, lacerations, and bullet holes. He does not decide whether the accused is guilty. Nor does he opine to the media about how such murders might be prevented. So why do climate scientists think it’s their business to prescribe solutions – rather than telling us about their data and only about their data?
#2 – An even younger senior author
If climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity, why have kids filled senior IPCC roles for the past 15 years?
#1 – Extinction fiction (PDF version here; original posts: Part 1, Part 2)
The claim by the IPCC that 20-30% of all Earth’s species are at risk of extinction relies on a research paper that has been demolished by experts in the field. It is highly debatable whether the authors of that chapter of the 2007 IPCC report comprise the ‘worlds top experts’. What is not in dispute is that five out of 10 of the lead authors have documented links to the World Wildlife Fund. So do three of the chapter’s contributing authors.'
'The IPCC should strengthen and enforce its procedure for the use of unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature, including providing more specific guidance on how to evaluate such information, adding guidelines on what types of literature are unacceptable, and ensuring that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged in the report.'
'Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).This would help stop broadcasters saying that sea levels 'could' rise by some ridiculous figure when the chances of this happening are minuscule.
The confidence scale should not be used to assign subjective probabilities to ill-defined outcomes.'
This sounds like an admission that up until now different points of view have been excluded from the IPCC's reports, thus allowing the 'narrative' that it is settled science.
'to make sure that all scientific criticism is addressed and different point of view are reflected in the final report.'
'To dismiss the implications of climate change based on an error about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting is an act of astonishing intellectual legerdemain. Yet this is what some doubters of climate change are claiming. But the reality is that our understanding of climate change is based on a vast and remarkably sound body of science – and is something we distort and trivialise at our peril.Yes because those were the only minor errors and everything else is based on cast-iron fact?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published four comprehensive assessments of climate change and several important special reports since its founding in 1988. The last such document, the fourth assessment report (AR4) from 2007, mobilised 450 scientists from all over the world to write the report. An additional 800 contributing authors gave specialised inputs and about 2,500 expert reviewers provided 90,000 comments.
In this mammoth task, which yielded a finished product of nearly 3,000 pages, there was a regrettable error indicating the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by the year 2035. This mistake has been acknowledged by the IPCC. Learning from this error, the IPCC has requested, in tandem with the United Nations' secretary general, an independent review of its procedures and practices by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC). This review was requested in part so that the possibility of similar errors can be eliminated as much as is humanly possible.
It is important, however, to understand that irrespective of the error on Himalayan glaciers and a few other questions about some specific wording in AR4, the major thrust of the report's findings provides overwhelming evidence that warming of the climate system is unequivocal. To quote the report: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG (greenhouse gas) concentrations."'
'The Climategate emails confirmed much of what the sceptics had been saying for years.Read the rest of the summary, read the full speech.
* They confirmed that the peer review process had been corrupted, that scientists were arranging friendly reviews.
* They confirmed that the science journals had been corrupted.
* That journals that refused to play ball with the doomsayers faced boycotts and their editors faced firing.
* They confirmed that sceptical scientists were being systematically excluded from the top‐tier journals.
* The Climategate emails confirmed that journalists were likewise threatened with boycotts if they didn’t play ball.
* The Climategate emails confirmed that the science itself was suspect. That the doomsayers themselves couldn’t make the data work. That they were debating among themselves some of the same points that the sceptics raised, and were privately acknowledging that they didn’t have answers to the issues that the sceptics raised.
* The Climategate emails confirmed that the doomsayers were so determined to hide their data from inquiring minds that they were prepared to break the law to hide it – and did break the law – by avoiding Freedom of Information requests.
* The Climategate emails confirmed that raw temperature data collected from countries around the world was destroyed. It appears the UK is missing raw temperature data going back to 1850.
The scientists at the heart of the Climategate emails aren’t fringe players on some periphery. They operate what’s known as the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK. This is the group that collects temperature data, messages it, and then feeds it to the UN and others. This is the data that we have been relying on to tell us if the globe has been warming or not. This same data is then used by virtually everyone in the climate science field who is concerned with historical temperatures.
Without the raw data, it is impossible to confirm that the planet has been warming over the last 150 years. The only ones who now know by how much the planet has been warming, if at all, are the same people who have destroyed the raw data. There are now six separate investigations underway which have been spawned by the Climategate emails. One of those six is by the UK Met Office, which partnered with the Climatic Research Unit in producing the data sets.
The UK Met Office – this is the UK government’s meteorological department – says it will need three years to recreate the data that has been destroyed.'
"TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.
The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.
The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again."
"The rulings will be an embarrassment for Miliband, who has tried to portray his policies as firmly science-based. He had commissioned two posters, four press advertisements and a short film for television and cinema, which started appearing in October last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks.So even when compared to the increasingly discredited IPCC report, Ed Miliband's department's claims were found to have broken the advertising code "on three counts: substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims". When will the 'warmists' stop lying to us?
They attracted 939 complaints — more than the ASA received for any advertisement last year. The deluge posed problems for the ASA, which is not a scientific body, so it decided to compare the text of Miliband’s adverts with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Based on that comparison, it ruled that two of the DECC’s adverts had broken the advertising code on three counts: substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims."
"The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.And yet still I meet people who 'believe' that Global Warming is settled science and that I am at best a sceptic at worst an evil denier.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
...
In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.
...
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising. "
"One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.
The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020". Yet it was Agoumi's claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC's Working Group II report in 2007.
What made this even odder, however, was that the group's
co-chairman was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to inform the IPCC's 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by "up to 30 per cent".
British taxpayers poured out money for the section of the IPCC report for which Dr Parry was responsible. Defra paid £2.5 million through the Met Office, plus £330,000 for Dr Parry's salary as co-chairman, and a further £75,000 to his consultancy for two more reports on the impact of global warming on world food supplies. Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work – including further expert reports by Britain's Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources."
"The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.
In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.
“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said."
"A panel of independent experts has officially begun its inquiry into the "Climategate" affair.But then immediately have to admit that:
The experts, headed by Sir Muir Russell, will investigate how e-mails from the UK's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) appeared on the web.
They will also consider if the e-mail exchanges between researchers show an attempt to manipulate or suppress data "at odds" with scientific practice. "
"even before the panel could start work, one of its members resigned.So if Dr Philip Campbell had not resigned would the BBC still have described him as unbiased?
Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief for Nature journal, stood down late on Thursday because of remarks he had made last year in the Chinese media in which he said the scientists mentioned in the e-mails had "behaved as researchers should". "
"Do any of the Review team members have a predetermined view on climate change and climate science?
No. Members of the research team come from a variety of scientific backgrounds. They were selected on the basis they have no prejudicial interest in climate change and climate science and for the contribution they can make to the issues the Review is looking at."
"We have the evidence, we have a consensus on scientific interpretation, we have the investment, we know (Stern) that mitigation now rather than later is cheaper. But, we have not sorted out the politics and started to adapt behaviour to minimize risks. We cannot do this without public support. If we fail, we will be risking the consequences of catastrophic climate changes."He sounds like someone with an open mind about Climate Change, does he not?
"BP is a strong supporter of cap and trade emissions trading, participating in the EU scheme and looking forward to the day when regional schemes are knitted together into a global system."and who wrote
"The challenge of climate change requires policy development at all levels: global, national and local. Our work with Princeton is an example of BP's commitment to collaborative research, and has already provided a vital contribution to the pace of policy development. We trust that governments will be successful in reaching a consensus for significant action, and we are working to inform their actions based on our experience of low-carbon technologies and businesses.""
"The Team stresses that its remit does not involve re-evaluation of the scientific conclusions of the CRU work"
"* spent 18 years at the school of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia
* works in an office almost next door to a member of the Hockey Team
* says the argument over climate change is over
* tours the country lecturing on the dangers of climate change
* believes the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2050
* signed up to a statement supporting the consensus in the wake of Climategate, which spoke of scientists adhering to the highest standards of integrity
* could fairly be described as a global warming doommonger
* is quite happy to discuss "denial" in the context of the climate debate.*
The idea that this man has no preconception of global warming science and has no connections with the CRU is clearly risible.
"Dr North takes the lead again in the fight back against the IPCC, with another revelation about the 2007 IPCC report which bogusly claimed that the Himalayan Glaciers would have melted in the next 25 years. That revelation showed that this was an entirely false claim and has rippled around the world and is what we know as Glaciergate.
Dr North now says that the very same report was again wrong with claims that food yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50% by 2020. The 2020 projection is in fact now exposed as based on nothing more than speculation that is sourced back to a Canadian advocacy group, and written by an obscure academic who specialises in Carbon Trading and citing references that do not support his claims."
"So, when we are being scared into thinking in a new way, we must ask two questions. Is this true and why is this claim made. Many of the claims are now being disproven or shown to be based upon unreliable and questionable data. Some, like Africagate, are rooted in the claims of those who stand to profit from Carbon Trading. The ‘why’ keeps leading back in the same direction each time these claims are exposed. They all tie back through scientific bodies to the architects of a global economy. We absolutely must question whether altruism or profit is the true motive here."I have more to say but work calls for the moment...
"The Dutch environment minister, Jaqueline Cramer, on Wednesday demanded a thorough investigation into the 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after a Dutch magazine uncovered it incorrectly states 55 percent of the country lies below sea level. The the Dutch national bureau for environmental analysis has taken responsibility for the incorrect figure cited by the IPCC. Only 26 percent of the Netherlands is really below sea level. "Is anything actually correct about the IPCC's reports.
"India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it "cannot rely" on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri."Apparently:
"last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.I doubt that the IPCC will be impressed by the Indian government's decision to investigate what is actually happening rather than regurgitating prejudice.
He announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's "third ice cap", and an "Indian IPCC" to use "climate science" to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report ... [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses ... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.
"I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA)," he said.
It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a "sort of Indian IPCC," he added.
The body, which he said will not rival the UN's panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India's long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal.
"Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science," he said."
"TREES will not uproot themselves and embark on blood-soaked killing sprees by 2035, global warming experts have admitted.Sometimes satire is just so close to the truth!
The International Panel on Climate Change confirmed the evidence had not been peer-reviewed and will now amend the section of its 2007 report devoted to 'killer trees'.
A spokesman said: "It appears the claim was not based on new data or field research but on that bit with the angry, talking trees in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
"We're reviewing our procedures to determine how it made it into the final draft, though someone should probably have noticed the vivid description of the attack on Saruman's underground orc factory.
"There is a supplementary source, and yes it is that bit with the angry, talking trees in The Wizard of Oz."
"There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be - indeed, must be - corrected.
This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientist in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.
The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.
The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.
The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’."
" An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus."
"There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into "Climategate", the leak of emails from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university's refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – "because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place".I sense something very wrong at the Information Commission re this matter.
Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities' attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.
The Commission is thus impaled on a hook of its own devising. By admitting that serious offences were committed, it is now legally obliged to bring charges. And if these were brought under the 1977 Criminal Law Act, alleging that the offences amounted to a conspiracy to defy the law, there is no time limit anyway.
The real mystery therefore is how the Commission came to misread the very Act which brought it into being. Undoubtedly a successful prosecution involving such world-ranking scientists would be extraordinarily embarrassing, not just to the Government but to the entire global warming cause. So what has persuaded the Commission not to do its duty? "
"The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.For some reason the phrase 'untenable position' comes to mind, along with other less flattering ones. Why is it that the more information that comes out the less savoury so many of the 'warmists' seem?
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.
Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”
Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”
However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”
The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.
Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.
Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350. "
"A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.And still the IPCC, the BBC and most politicians still claim that global warming is 'settled science'. When will they learn? When the money stops being funnelled to it?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.
The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.
This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report. "
"I reviewed relevant EPA policies on peer review and showed that IPCC peer review did not comply with statutory requirements for EPA peer review. This was based on my knowledge of IPCC peer review at that time, which was primarily the handling of chapter 6 of WG1.Read it all and spread the word; I have started to challenge 'warmists' and they don't like it, they really don't like it...
The peer review process for WG2 appears to be even worse. David Rose in yesterday’s Daily Mail reported that IPCC Coordinating Lead Author Lal knew the glacier claim did not rest on peer-reviewed research, but put it in anyway to “encourage” governments to take “concrete action”..."
