Articles Tagged "Opinion"

THE Climategate scandal continues to unfold. The thousands of emails leaked to the internet from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal a tight-knit, influential group of scientists whose attitude to their profession is, to say the least, distorted.

It seems that a religious belief in disastrous climate change has destroyed their common sense and their appreciation of what is the appropriate way to carry out research.

Climategate may at least demonstrate that the concept of a scientific consensus with regard to global warming is nonsense. There may indeed be thousands of scientists contributing to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but on any particular aspect of the overall story all have to rely on the word of the few scientists who are directly involved. And when the particular aspect concerns experimental data on which the whole story rests, the data purporting to show the world is getting warmer, then the consensus argument is indeed on shaky ground.

On the evidence so far, there is not much doubt that the group of scientists linked to the CRU has behaved fairly badly. Any individual email from the Climategate pile may be explained and excused as a stupid mistake of the time, but when all are taken together it seems obvious enough that there have been lots of violations of what might be called the scientific code. The most glaring examples concern efforts to keep basic sets of data out of the hands of people who may not be sympathetic to the official story about the disastrous nature of global warming. This, when the CRU is specifically paid to collate the data gathered by national meteorological services across the world, and to make the data available to outside scientists to check and to use.

If you are not one of the cast of thousands getting to work in Copenhagen this week, it is easy to feel confused and more than a little bombarded.

As the world gathers for negotiations billed as likely to determine the very future of life on earth, many on the outside are feeling weary of the Doomsday prognoses and wary of the plodding process meant to prevent them from coming true. The world’s leaders ought to be noting that.

The easy thing would be to link those people to the sceptics who vocally deny the existence of a problem. I prefer to think of them as climate agnostics, or as the non-partisan millions still seeking clarity.

Whether they are a silent majority or a substantial minority depends on how you count them. But whether the next fortnight goes down in history rather than as a footnote to it will depend on how well the public at large receives the result. And the agnostics are a substantial presence in that public.

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning.

As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard.

The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd by the defenders of doctored and destroyed data.

As it happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now.

From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then.

I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton.

To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew.

If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do.

Calling Global Warming a hoax does raise some hackles! I have been accused of "parroting" my reasons for my skepticism of the accepted dogma of the environmentalist Cult of Global Warming (CGW). Goodness me! If I only had a brain!

For the record, only left wing chicken littles who believe that Man is making the planet "uninhabitable" actually "parrot." Right wingers, such as I, prefer to "cite."

Let's begin simply, with a fact that most of us learned in grade school. Man inhales oxygen and expels carbon dioxide. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. That process provides balance to nature, which is alternately a fragile ecosystem or a mighty force, depending on the point that CGW acolyte is trying to make. There is nothing delicate about it. The process sustains itself.

The sky is not falling

NEWS THAT more than 1,000 emails and hundreds of other documents created by scientists at the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) were leaked onto the Internet, allegedly after one of the organisation's email servers was hacked, sent the world into a spin last week.

CRU spinners and tree huggers shrugged their shoulders and claimed that some of the documents, which date back as far as 1996 and as recently as a couple of weeks ago, could have been tampered with, trying to suggest that the emails and other files had been carefully selected and perhaps even edited.

The fact that the vast majority of the emails, many of which were sent by leading climatologist Phil Jones, are dull almost beyond comprehension suggests otherwise. Surely if the hack attack or leak was a concerted effort by climate change nay-sayers to discredit the whole concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW - the theory that the Earth is rapidly warming and it's all our fault) then they would have spent more time cherry picking the several emails that have really set tongues to wagging.

Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.

It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria.

The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill, the Senate's version of Waxman-Markey, until the spring thaw has led Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the leading Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, to declare victory over Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the triumph of observable fact over junk science.

"I proudly declare 2009 as the 'Year of the Skeptic,' the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard," Inhofe said to Boxer in a Senate speech. "Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked."

Inhofe added: "Today I have been vindicated."

Global warming's most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang's Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described "auditing" a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!

THE Earth is getting warmer. That is not in dispute.

For the last 150 – 200 years since the end of the Little Ice Age, approximately 1850 – 1900 the global temperature has risen at 0.7*C per century.

This rise has not altered in the long term, there have been fluctuating periods when it has risen faster, and also periods when it has stopped or decreased.

These periods follow a 30 year cycle of alternate cooling followed by an equal period of warming.

The first global warming panic was in 1912 when the Washington Post posed these questions: "Is the climate of the world changing? Is it becoming warmer in the polar regions?"

Last spring Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn asked Al Gore during a House hearing if his investments in green energy meant he would benefit personally from cap and trade.

"If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don't know me," Mr. Gore responded (and, yes, according to two reporters present, he sighed).

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He's wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?