Articles Tagged "Headline Story"

The following extract COULD run into trouble for the MET OFFICE, they are quoted as saying that they can predict weather months in advance, and yet they DID NOT MENTION THIS FORECAST LAST WEEK!!!

Unlike the earlier part of winter, though, this next freeze was forecast by the Met Office months ago, thanks to an extraordinary chain reaction in the atmosphere across the globe.

The story begins with El Niño, the big warming of tropical seas under way in the Pacific. So much hot air soared up from the Pacific it punched through into the stratosphere and dislocated winds 20-50km high.

On January 20 this colossal jolt sent unusually warm air flooding into the stratosphere over the Arctic, where temperatures in the stratosphere soared by 40C in just a few days. The intensely cold stratosphere air normally over the Arctic was shunted over Europe instead. Eventually that cold stratosphere rippled down into the lower atmosphere, flipping our winds from west to east — and easterly winds in winter usually give us our coldest weather.

Updated below in comments section by Piers Corbyn & Stephen Wilde

Click source to read more

The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.

And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

Updated below from The Telegraph

Dr Rajendra Pachauri embraces Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, at a meeting in New Delhi Photo: MANISH SWARUP/AP

The British Government has been pouring millions of pounds into 'climate-related' projects all over the world.

In all the coverage lately given to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money into a bewildering array of "climate-related" projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why.

To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of "Glaciergate", the inclusion in the IPCC's 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story. Some glaciers were retreating, others were not. There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries.

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain's claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report.

I received this email this morning from Roger Harribin, the BBC’s environmental analyst. It’s interesting because I received an email from the Guardian yesterday asking if I’d like to write a 200 word guest piece. Unfortunately it somehow ended up in my spam filter (which I found this morning) so I missed the 3 PM GMT deadline today. Here’s what Mr. Harrabin wrote. I hope WUWT readers will come to aid, especially since skeptics are now apparently getting a voice in UK MSM.

Dear Mr Watts,

I am trying to talk to UK scientists in current academic posts who are sceptical about AGW.

I’m struggling to find anyone – but there may of course be a number of reasons for this. Please could you post my request on your website – and ask people to email roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.

We are looking for scientists, of course – not insults.

It strikes me that it might be useful to meet sometime to discuss a project I am planning on the weather.

I enclose my latest column Harrabin's Notes: Raising the error bar which touches on the difficulties of reporting climate change FYI.

I look forward to hearing from you

Yours Roger Harrabin

If you know of a skeptical scientist in the UK that may be interested, please advise them of this. Thanks to all for your consideration. – Anthony
Updated below by Piers Corbyn at WUWT

The Geological Society of America (GSA) has declined to endorse an official policy statement of the society which was proposed in October. At the national meeting of GSA in Portland last October, I strongly opposed adoption of the proposed endorsement of IPCC contentions and argued that "for a position statement of a scientific society of professional geologists, this statement is remarkably one sided and lacks the kind of depth and scientific analysis that one would expect from GSA. It totally ignores a wealth of well-documented data contrary to many of the statements made in the text and many of the contentions are not supported by any tangible data at all. This would be a much more credible document if it explored both sides of many of the issues and provided supporting evidence. The section on Rationale is shocking in its lack of scientific logic—it essentially claims that because we have had global warming (which no one denies), that in itself proves it is due to CO2. CO2. That shoddy logic must surely make T.C. Chamberlain and Hoover Mackin turn over in their graves!"

"To contend that glacier retreat proves warming due to CO2 is bad enough, but the authors clearly have very poor knowledge of glacier fluctuations since 1850.During the 1890 to 1915 cool period, glaciers extended almost to their Little Ice Age maximums, retreated during the 1915 to 1945 warm period, advanced again during the 1945 to 1977 cool period, and retreated again during the 1977 to 1999 warm period. None of these climate fluctuations prior to 1945 can be due to increase in CO2 so to contend that retreat of glaciers since 1850 is proof of warming due to CO2 is incredibly amateurish."

The Guardian Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures

• How the location of weather stations in China undermines data

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

Click THE GUARDIAN (yes, THE GUARDIAN) link to read FULL report from Fred Pearce

The Information Commission claims it is powerless to bring charges over the Climatic Research Unit 'conspiracy'

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".

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 climate secretary, Ed Miliband, last night warned of the danger of a public backlash against the science of global warming in the face of continuing claims that experts have manipulated data.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Miliband spoke out for the first time about last month's revelations that climate scientists had withheld and covered up information and the apology made by the influential UN climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which admitted it had exaggerated claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The perceived failure of global talks on combating climate change in Copenhagen last month has also been blamed for undermining public support. But in the government's first high-level recognition of the growing pressure on public opinion, Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.

"It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO2 concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us."

Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC's four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel's work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. "It's worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied," he said.

The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

Also: The big issue: Sceptics fiddle while the planet burns

Click to read more from Juliette Jowit, environment editor, The Observer

Updated below from the DAILY MAIL & BBC

The claim in an IPCC report that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could disappear through global warming turned out to be unfounded Photo: LEE FOSTER/ALAMY

The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

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.

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.”

Click source to read FULL report by Ben Webster