Articles Tagged "Newspaper Article"

Liz Hunt is repelled by the behaviour of both sides of the climate change argument, and hopes that Lord Lawson's review can inject some sense.

With less than two weeks to go before the climate change jamboree in Copenhagen, I'm bored senseless with the tit-for-tat rantings of the believers and the deniers. Both sides have exhaled enough hot air to fast-forward global warming a decade or five, to the detriment of what I understood to be reasoned, scientific debate.

The problem is this: I'm as repelled by the smug, self-righteous certainty of those holding the consensus view – well, they claim it's a consensus – that the world is getting hotter and that man is to blame, as I am by the twitchy naysayers who insist that a Left-wing, anti-business conspiracy is behind it all.

The scientist at the heart of the climate change scandal was under growing pressure to quit last night.

George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist, said Phil Jones should resign from the Climatic Research Unit over leaked emails that appear to show researchers suppressed scientific data.

More emails came to light yesterday, including one in which an American climatologist admitted it was a travesty that scientists could not explain a lack of global warming in recent years.

In another note, UK researchers dismissed the work of scientists challenging global warming as 'crap'.

Another appeared to call for pressure on the BBC after a reporter suggested that evidence for rising temperatures since 2001 was thin.

I thought I would include this article from the other side of the fence by Andrew C. Revkin, as it puts forward several interesting points of view.

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments -in some cases derisive -about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.” Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

The Met Office collaborates with the East Anglia unit on a variety of research projects, including global temperature records.

Spokesman Dave Britton said the two organisations had to turn down numerous Freedom of Information requests because they did not hold the copyright to the data.

‘There is a feeling we are hiding something,’ he said. ‘But we are not, we just can’t release the data.’

Click source to read FULL report from the Daily Mail

Like it or not, it will soon be time to start placing bets for a white Christmas. If most climatologists are to be believed you are almost certainly throwing your money away.

The onward march of global warming is consigning such traditional Christmas card scenes to history. No more deep and crisp and even winters for Britain, replaced instead by damp and slush and stormy.

But, if a small group of maverick scientists are right, the chances of Yuletide snow may rise dramatically over the coming decades.

The difference of opinion hinges on what role — if any — the Sun plays in climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists maintain that the solar influence is limited or even negligible, and it is the unsustainable growth of industrialised nations that is driving the climate into chaos. The mavericks contend that the Sun’s activity dwarfs the human contribution, and that there is nothing we can do except wait for the Sun to change.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate change, a scientist has claimed.

Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.

He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.

"We cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes," he said. "It is a normal element cycled around in the earth and my science, which is looking back in time, is saying we have had a planet that has been a green, warm wet planet 80 per cent of the time. We have had huge climate change in the past and to think the very slight variations we measure today are the result of our life - we really have to put ice blocks in our drinks."

AN escalating political row over the views of outspoken Coalition climate change sceptics is threatening ongoing negotiations between the government and opposition over Labor's emissions trading legislation.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday accused Malcolm Turnbull of a failure of leadership after Coalition Senate leader Nick Minchin claimed a majority of opposition party members did not believe in man-made global warming, which he called the new "religion" of the Left after the demise of communism. Senator Wong said the Opposition Leader had to repudiate Senator Minchin if he were to live up to his declaration that he would not lead a party less committed to action on climate change than he was.

"The question is whether or not he can match the talk with action," Senator Wong said. "Unfortunately for him, many members of his party have directly attacked his authority."

President Obama’s headed to Copenhagen next month to talk climate change. Al Gore’s headed toward profits that could make him the world’s first "carbon billionaire." But where’s global temperature headed?

Nowhere, it seems. The most reliable readings of the Earth’s temperature show that it peaked back in 1998. This was not widely reported in America, where the state of science reporting is dismal. But over in England, where they take that sort of thing more seriously, the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined "What Happened to Global Warming?" In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes "that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years."

‘Al Gore, who art in thy fully offset private jet; Nobel-prized be thy name; thy carbon-free kingdom come; on planet Earth (otherwise known as Gaia) as it should be after Copenhagen; give us this day our daily meat-free diet; and forgive us our emissions, though we don’t forgive any other big fat Americans who emit against us; lead us not into exotic holiday flights; and deliver us from climate denial; for the science is settled. Amen.”

That lacks a certain resonance, I must admit; but now that a British judge has ruled that believers in man-made global warming catastrophe should be protected under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, we should try to come forward with some suitable prayers for this newly identified faith.

Mr Justice Burton, of the High Court, is the man behind the ruling. He found for a “sustainability officer” called Tim Nicholson, who claimed he had been made redundant by the property company Grainger because of his beliefs in imminent man-made climate catastrophe. To be precise, the judge did not say that Nicholson had actually been sacked for that reason; only that he had the right to sue for unfair dismissal under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations.

So that's it, then, we're all doomed. The chances of a new deal on 'climate change' at Copenhagen appear to be dead in the water, marooned like an albatross in an oil slick.

Better start laying in supplies of baked beans and bottled water, since environmental armageddon must surely follow.

Gordon Brown told us weeks ago that we had only 50 days to save the planet.

Failure to reach a legally-binding global agreement to cut carbon emissions would mean the end of the world.

By that reckoning, we've got about a fortnight before the Earth turns to molten lava and we're eaten by marauding packs of polar bears, floating into town on what's left of the ice caps.