Articles Tagged "Headline Story"

THE world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices.

A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed by research.

Independent climate scientist Peter Taylor said last night: “The IPCC’s credibility has been deeply dented and something has to be done. It can’t just be a matter of adjusting the practices. They have got to look at what are the consequences of having got it wrong in terms of what the public think is going on. Admitting that it needs to reform means something has gone wrong and they really do need to look at the science.”

Climate change sceptic David Holland, who challenged leading climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia to disclose their research, said: “The panel is definitely not fit for purpose. What the IAC has said is substantial changes need to be made.”

An independent investigation into the UN’s climate change body has warned it to stop lobbying and to restrict its role to explaining the science behind any changes in global temperature.

Senior officials at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have also been ordered to disclose their outside financial interests to avert any allegations that they may have profited from policies to tackle global warming.

New controls should also be introduced to ensure that the scientific claims made in influential international reports are robust in future.

The independent inquiry which delivered the rebuke was ordered after the IPCC admitted it had exaggerated the pace at which Himalayan glaciers were melting. Several other errors in its recent report were also uncovered.

The admission threatened to undermine the scientific basis used by Governments around the world to justify spending billions of pounds tackling climate change.

The report published yesterday found that although the IPCC’s findings were generally sound, parts of its conduct had “dented the credibility of the process”.

The international body which advises leaders on the threat of climate change needs fundamental reform in the wake of a number of embarrassing mistakes, according to an independent review of the body published today

Despite calls for a change in leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its chair, Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, said today that he wouldn't be leaving immediately.

The IPCC came under intense criticism in January when a number of errors were found in the body's most recent 2007 report. It stated, wrongly, that Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared completely by 2035.

The report also included evidence from news magazines and environmental NGOs that aren't subject to stringent peer-review. Elsewhere the 2007 report also stated that 55 per cent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when the actual figure is 23 per cent.

Speaking at a press conference at UN headquarters in New York, the review's chairman Professor Harold Shapiro of Princeton University said: "Operating under the public microscope the way IPCC does requires strong leadership, the continued and enthusiastic participation of distinguished scientists, an ability to adapt, and a commitment to openness if the value of these assessments to society is to be maintained."

But the review, carried out by the world science body the Inter-Academy Council, stopped short of calling for the IPPC chair to step down.

Click source to read FULL report from Tom Clarke

Even the UN and the EU are wising up to the greenhouse gas scam, "the biggest environmental scandal in history"

It is now six months since I reported on what even environmentalists are calling "the biggest environmental scandal in history". Indeed this is a scam so glaringly bizarre that even the UN and the EU have belatedly announced that they are thinking of taking steps to stop it. The essence of the scam is that a handful of Chinese and Indian firms are deliberately producing large quantities of an incredibly powerful "greenhouse gas" which we in the West – including UK taxpayers – then pay them billions of dollars to destroy.

The key to this scam, designed to curb global warming, is a scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and administered by the UN. It enables firms and governments in the developed world to buy "credits" which allow them to continue emitting greenhouse gases. These are sold to them, through well-rewarded brokers, from firms in developing countries that can show they have nominally reduced their emissions.

Easily the largest and most lucrative component in the CDM market is a peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases vastly more damaging than carbon dioxide. The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on producing a refrigerant gas known as HCF-22 until 2030. But a by-product of this process is HCF-23, which is supposed to be 11,700 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. By destroying the HCF-23, the firms can claim Certified Emission Reduction credits worth billions of dollars when sold to the West (while much of the useful HCF-22 is sold onto the international black market).

Last year, destruction of CFCs accounted for more than half the CDM credits issued, in a market that will eventually, it is estimated, be worth $17 billion. Of the 1,390 CDM projects so far approved, less than 1 per cent accounts for 36 per cent of the total value.

As clouds rise above the ITCZ, cloud tops create a reflective albedo, automatically limiting incoming solar radiation

WUWT provided a primer on cloud feedbacks on June 12th, 2009, followed by Willis Eschenbach’s “thermostat hypothesis” also recently published. This new paper by Spencer and Braswell is in the same theme as these.

There is too much conflict of interest built into the report-writing process

After the Climategate emails scandal of last winter, and discoveries of some embarrassing errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, asked the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) to review IPCC procedures. The IAC is a little-known branch of the Inter-Academy Panel, itself a little-known committee that connects national academic societies. It was a safe choice for Pachauri. The last IAC report was a glowing tribute to alternative energy schemes, coauthored by Pachauri himself, along with current Obama administration appointee Stephen Chu and a group of others. So I do not expect much independence of mind or hard-headed objectivity from the IAC. But with the report due out on Aug. 30, I guess we shall soon see.

I was one of hundreds of people asked to respond to a set of inquiry questions. The questions, and my replies, are available on my Web page (rossmckitrick.weebly.com). Here is a summary of some of my input.

IPCC policies, such as the requirement for an “objective, open and transparent” review process, sound impressive, but my experience is that the written policies are not always followed, and there do not appear to be any consequences when they are breached.

Updated August 27, 2010 This paper is, as intended, a work in progress as a compilation of what’s current and important relative to the data sets used for formulating and implementing unprecedented policy decisions seeking a radical transformation of our society and institutions.

Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.

That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.

Click source to download PDF file and read FULL report from Joseph D'Aleo & Anthony Watts

This year Russia was hit by a record-breaking heat wave that led to wildfires which killed dozens and left thousands homeless. Weather forecaster Piers Corbyn says this is a result of weather cycles, not global warming.

“What we have is a tremendous amount of activity on the sun and that affects the rush of particles from the sun to the earth and that changes the ionosphere and that also changes the circulation patterns of the globe in what is known as the jet stream,” Corbyn explained. “And that caused a shifting of the weather patterns so the south wind in Western Russia terminated and instead we got a northwestern flow of thunderstorms and cooling.”

Click source for a MUST SEE FULL 12 min interview video link with Piers Corbyn (inc. comments about SatelliteGate)

See below for YouTube

CLICK to download PDF and read FULL report from Piers Corbyn at WeatherAction.com

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Leading US Physicist Labels Satellitegate Scandal a ‘Catastrophe’

Respected American physicist, Dr Charles R. Anderson has waded into the escalating Satellitegate controversy publishing a damning analysis on his blog.

In a fresh week of revelations when NOAA calls in their lawyers to handle the fallout, Anderson adds further fuel to the fire and fumes against NOAA, one of the four agencies charged with responsiblity for collating global climate temperatures. NOAA is now fighting a reargaurd legal defense to hold onto some semblance of credibility with growing evidence of systemic global warming data flaws by government climatologists.

NOAA Systemically Excised Data with ‘Poor Interpolations’

Anderson, a successful Materials Physicist with his own laboratory, has looked closely at the evidence uncovered on NOAA. He has been astonished to discover, “Both higher altitudes and higher latitudes have been systematically removed from the measured temperature record with very poor and biased interpolated results taking their place.”

Like other esteemed scientists, Anderson has been quick to spot sinister flaws in official temperatures across northern Lake Michigan as revealed in my earlier articles.

I had proven that the website operated by the Michigan State University had published ridiculously high surface water temperatures widely distributed over the lake many indicating super-boiling conditions. The fear is that these anomalies have been fed across the entire satellite dataset. The satellite that first ignited the fury is NOAA-16. But as we have since learned there are now five key satellites that have become either degraded or seriously comprised.