Articles Tagged "Updated"

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

Scientists at the heart of the Climategate controversy face new allegations which cast further doubt about global warming. Analysis shows researchers had tried to suppress key details of their findings for twenty years

New allegations swirl in Climategate, which began last November with an email leak at the University of East Anglia, suggesting that one of the world’s foremost centres for climate research had been manipulating data to prove the existence of man-made global warming.

Now, it turns out data manipulation has been going on since at least 1990.

Updated below with YouTube

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 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 university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.

Clck to read FULL report from Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Jonathan Leake

Updated below from the Dail Mail & BBC

Click source link to see Video Link's

Updated below with 7 part YouTube

Never mind the failed putsch against Gordon Brown and England’s Test match heroics, the matter of the moment is the white stuff. We haven’t had snow all over the country like this for decades. What’s changed and why?

The first part — what’s changed — is relatively straightforward: a freezing draught has started coming in through the UK’s door from the North Pole and Siberia.

As Robin Thwaites of the Met Office describes it: “We have a large area of high pressure sitting over Greenland and Iceland and that is a block of cold air. Cold air is very dense and doesn’t like to budge very quickly, so that is acting as a barrier to the normal westerly flow of [milder] weather that we get off the Atlantic.”

The block has forced our typical weather south: our rain has instead been falling in Spain, which is having an unusually wet winter. “They’ve had the rain and instead we’ve had winds either from the Arctic or from Siberia via Scandinavia,” said Thwaites.

Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn

THE Copenhagen climate change summit closed two weeks ago in confusion, disagreement and, for some, disillusionment. When the political process shows such a lack of unanimity, it is pertinent to ask whether the science behind the politics is as settled as some participants maintain.

Earlier this month (The Australian, December 9) I commented on recently published results showing huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide, both up and down, at a time of global cooling 33.6 million years ago.

Paul Pearson and co-authors in a letter (The Weekend Australian, December 11) took exception to my use of their data and claimed I misrepresented their research, a claim I reject since I quoted their data (the veracity of which they do not contest) but offered an alternative hypothesis, namely that the present global warming theory (which was not the subject of their study) is inconsistent with the CO2-temperature variations of a past age.

Updated Below

SEPP SCIENCE EDITORIAL #30-2009 (Dec 19, 2009) By S. Fred Singer, President of SEPP

Note: This will be the first of a series of mini-editorials on the “junk science” influencing the global warming issue. Other topics will include the IPCC’s Assessment Reports 2, 3, and 4, the UN Environmental Program and some individuals heavily involved in these matters. ]

Junk Science #1: IPCC’s First Assessment Report

In 1988, two UN agencies, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), set up a climate science panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its Charter directs the IPCC to assess worldwide scientific, technical and socio-economic literature “relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.”