Articles Tagged "Open Letter/Fax"
Sunday, January 27th 2013, 1:45 PM EST
BBC Radio 4 show, Thinking Allowed had a feature on the psychoanalysts perspective on climate change this week. Bishop Hill picked up the story. Thinking Allowed is one of my favourite programmes, so I was a tad disappointed to hear that thinking isn’t allowed if it’s thinking that contradicts climate orthodoxy. Here’s my letter to the programme.
Dear Laurie,
I refer to your section on climate change and psychoanalysis in your most recent programme.
Your feature frames the problem as a failure to recognise what one of your guests called ‘the reality of climate change’, which moved on to a discussion about ‘types of denial’. However, if psychoanalysis has anything to say in the climate debate, it must speak to climate sceptics as much as their counterparts.
Sally Weintrobe lets the cat out of the bag when she claims that we are ‘increasingly aware’ of ‘weird weather’, citing hurricane Sandy and the UK’s recent wet weather. Yet there was nothing remarkable about the weather last year. The IPCC’s recent special report on extreme weather found that there is no evidence of increased frequency or intensity of storms, floods or droughts, or losses caused by them attributable to anthropogenic climate change.
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Saturday, October 20th 2012, 10:27 AM EDT
Your Newsnight segment on Arctic sea ice (BBC2 TV, 8 September 2012) featured a “scientist” who said ice loss since a high point in 1979 would cut the Earth’s albedo and, by this feedback, cause warming equivalent to 20 years’ global CO2 emissions.
On the IPCC’s current central climate-sensitivity estimates, 20 years’ CO2 emissions would only warm the Earth by ¼ C°. But since the IPCC’s first projections in 1990, temperature has risen only half as fast as predicted: so make that just ? C°.
The glaciologist the programme relied on got the math wrong. Ignoring the growth in Antarctic sea ice since 1979, as the programme unwisely did, the loss of 2.5 million km2 of Arctic sea ice (measured as the linear trend on the NSIDC data) will warm the Earth by only 1/20 C°, and only then if the ice loss is permanent. Halve that to allow for the compensating effect of record Antarctic sea-ice growth: say, 1/40 C° of global warming, equivalent to just 2 years’ CO2 emissions on the IPCC’s current projections, not 20 years’ emissions.
Some relevant points your programme did not make:
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Monday, December 17th 2012, 6:37 AM EST
Over many years, the BBC’s treatment of climate change issues has been marked by bias, ignorance, credulity and – in the latest episode – unwarranted concealment. The behaviour of the Corporation throughout has failed to measure up to professional standards.
In their letter to Lord Hall, the GWPF Trustees have asked the Director-General Designate also to reconsider the implications of the controversial global warming seminar held in 2006 which has shaped BBC policy on climate-related issues ever since.
In their letter the Trustees write:
“We refer to the now notorious seminar on global warming held in 2006, involving 28 senior BBC staff and 28 outsiders. As the BBC Trust subsequently explained, ‘The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on climate change and climate change policies]‘. Ever since then, the BBC has fought tooth and nail, at considerable public expense, to keep secret the identity of ‘the best scientific experts’.
As you may be aware, it now emerges that, of the 28 present, there were only two (hand-picked) climate scientists; and the bulk of the rest were either green activists (including two from Greenpeace alone) or non-scientists with a vested interest in promoting renewable energy. So the BBC stands convicted not only of culpable imbalance, but also of rank dishonesty.
We hope that, once you have grappled with the more immediate challenges facing the BBC, you will revisit this important issue. We suggest that you might start by convening a new high-level seminar, this time a more balanced one, whose non-BBC participants would be qualified climate scientists, energy and environmental economists, and experienced policy-makers – whose names, incidentally, would be made known. The Global Warming Policy Foundation would be happy to be represented in any such seminar.”
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Sunday, July 8th 2012, 6:46 AM EDT
SIR – In your special report on the Arctic (“The melting north”, June 16th) you said polar bears are “struggling” and it is “nonsense” that they are thriving. Anything other than a cursory reading of the data shows no such thing.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates, polar bear numbers are at least twice as high as in the 1960s. Of the eight populations said to be decreasing, the official data table and map produced by the Polar Bear Specialist Group shows that two are only “thought” or “believed” to be declining entirely due to hunting; four are in decline only according to computer models, despite some claims by “traditional ecological knowledge” (ie, locals) that they are thriving; one has more than doubled but is now said to be “currently declining” because of crowding; and one showed a real decline that has recently been reversed. Meanwhile, the four populations you described as unknown include the huge Barents Sea population, which has seen dramatic increase in sightings, damage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard, all prima facie evidence of “thriving”. There is a strong smell of “policy-based evidence making” here.
Since the 1970s the population of white whales around Svalbard has increased, as have walrus and barnacle geese numbers. Protection from hunting has had, and is likely to have, a much bigger impact on Arctic wildlife than climate trends.
Matt Ridley
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Andrew Montford
Milnathort, Kinross-shire
Benny Peiser
London
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Sunday, November 11th 2012, 4:11 AM EST
To The Honorable Fred Upton: Chairman Committee on Energy & Commerce
To The Honorable Ed Whitfield: Chairman Subcommittee on Energy & Power
U.S. House of Representatives
From Professor Fred Singer and others
Dear Chairman Upton and Chairman Whitfield:
The recent election should be a time to return to fact-based policy making. This is especially true in energy policy.
Last week, a tropical storm intensified by meeting two other storms struck the East Coast. The storm battered the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states, devastating portions of New York and New Jersey and resulting in more than 8 million homes losing electricity from the Carolinas to Wisconsin. Experts are projecting $10 bn in damages and lost business.
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Saturday, December 1st 2012, 3:29 AM EST
Policy actions that aim to reduce CO2 emissions are unlikely to influence future climate. Policies need to focus on preparation for, and adaptation to, all dangerous climatic events, however caused
Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations
H.E. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, United Nations
First Avenue and East 44th Street, New York, New York, U.S.A.
November 29, 2012
Mr. Secretary-General:
On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015 … This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”
On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”
The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”
We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.
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Thursday, October 25th 2012, 5:49 PM EDT
Inhofe Letter to President Obama
Inhofe-EPW Senate Report Reveals Economic Pain of Obama-EPA Regulations Put on Hold Until After the Election
Washington, D.C. – On Fox News this morning, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, exposed that the Obama administration has failed to comply with the law requiring them to publish in the Federal Register their regulatory agendas. Inhofe, a guest on Fox and Friends, revealed that it has been more than a year since the administration complied with its legal obligation to issue such a report every 6 months. Senator Inhofe announced he has sent a letter to President Obama requesting the administration adhere to its next statutory deadline. As the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Inhofe expressed specific concerns about EPA’s regulatory agenda.
“As he works to preserve his own job, President Obama is covering up his administration’s job-killing regulatory agenda that he will unleash in a second term,” Senator Inhofe said. “The reason is simple: President Obama has spent the past four years working to kill American energy production of oil, gas, and coal. Today however, President Obama is running as fast as he can from his green energy agenda and trying to convince voters of his love of fossil fuels. Yet a look at the past four years, as well as what he has in the works at the Obama-EPA, reveals a very different story. The last thing President Obama wants to admit to is that his administration is currently actively working to regulate traditional energy resources out of existence. As bad as the economy has sputtered in Obama’s first four years, you haven’t seen anything yet.
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Sunday, July 22nd 2012, 5:53 AM EDT
Dear Archbishop Williams
There was a report this morning on the Today programme, to which I trust you paid due regard. If you didn't, you should have.
The report, concerning the effect of the current American drought on levels of grain harvests, aired a remarkable and arresting statistic - disturbing too, if you have a conscience. It appears that 40% of the grain production of the Western world's primary producer has been diverted to the generation of feed stocks for the so-called 'biofuel' industry. That this will result in hardship to countless within the developed world can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. That the already dispossessed, impoverished and disenfranchised will be the ones mainly to suffer, even unto starvation and death, is an absolutely foregone conclusion.
And the reason for this? Why, to be sure, to pursue policies common on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at sustaining the greatest scientific swindle in history. I refer, of course, to the much hyped issue of climate change, amongst the principal advocates of which has been organised religion in all its gaudy and rich variety. In pursuit of this fraudulent chimera, for the time being so beloved of duplicitous politicians, free loading scientific mountebanks, self-preening churchmen (senior ones especially) and wilfully ignorant pseudo-environmentalists, usually of a leftist persuasion, you yourself being a snappy exemplar:
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Tuesday, December 18th 2012, 7:39 AM EST
THE BBC was accused yesterday of “rank dishonesty” over climate change by an influential body of sceptics.
Former Tory chancellor Lord Lawson was joined by two other peers – one Labour, the other a Liberal Democrat – in urging the new BBC director general Lord Hall to review the Corporation’s coverage of climate change.
In recent years the BBC has been accused of an unquestioning approach to its coverage of climate change.
Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation yesterday claimed that its coverage has been marked by “bias, ignorance and credulity” and has failed to measure up to professional standards.
Source Link:
express.co.uk
views 19,571
Sunday, January 29th 2012, 11:34 AM EST
There's a great piece by David Rose in the Mail On Sunday nicely summing up what a lot of us here knew already: that the thing we really need to fear right now is not global warming but global cooling. And that, on current evidence, it's global cooling we're going to get.
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Rose's piece comes hot on the heels of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal signed by 16 distinguished scientists (proper ones: not "climate" "scientists") noting the continuing absence of ManBearPig:
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
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