Articles Tagged "Front Page News"

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.”

BRITAIN’S driest start to a year for almost half a century has led to the country’s first drought warning being issued amid fears of an imminent hosepipe ban.

The lack of rain across the UK in 2010 has already forced one water company to activate its drought plan after revealing it needs at least three months of rainfall to restock its dwindling reservoirs.

Other suppliers are now monitoring levels closely and urging their customers to use water wisely.

The Government’s environment watchdog last night said that reservoir levels in the driest areas of the country were “declining at a rate similar to the 1995-96 drought”.

The Met Office said UK rainfall totals in the first five months of the year were the lowest since 1964. And it offered little hope of relief, with June “on course to be another dry month”.

Between January and May this year, average UK rainfall was 318.9mm, compared with a long-term average of 424.1mm. Another forecaster, Positive Weather Solutions, predicted a dry end to June and said there would also be “less than average rainfall” across much of the UK in July.

Goods and services from the natural world should be factored into the global economic system, says UN biodiversity report.

The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.

The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

To mark the UN's International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum's director Michael Dixon warning that "the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded".

Click source to read FULL report from Juliette Jowit

The airport chaos that hit tens of thousands of travellers yesterday was based on a faulty ash cloud prediction.

Officials closed south-eastern airspace for ten hours following a Met Office alert about dangerous levels of ‘black’ ash.

Yet when the forecasters took fresh soundings, and sent up a plane to check, they found their assessment was flawed: there was no such ash.

So how did they get it so wrong? By DAVID DERBYSHIRE

The decision to close the airspace over southern England was based on the word of an inaccurate Met Office computer.

It led again to angry complaints that airspace bans are based on theoretical models – rather than real-time.

The final word on whether to close UK airspace is made by officials at the Civil Aviation Authority. In turn, they rely on forecasts of the size, density and location of the Icelandic ash cloud provided by the Met Office’s volcanic ash advisory centre in Exeter.

There, a team of ten – including only one forecaster – work around the clock to monitor the movement of the ash cloud and run a computer model called NAME III.

The meltdown of the climate campaign.

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

Click source to read FULL report by Steven F. Hayward

Staff at the Met Office were awarded more than £12 million in bonuses in the last five years, it has been disclosed.

The performance-related payout comes despite repeated criticism of the national weather service.

Forecasters were lambasted after their predictions of a barbeque summer turned into a washout. This was followed by forecasts of a mild winter which has turned out to be one of the coldest on record. The Met Office could be dropped by the BBC for the first time in 90 years when its contract expires in April.

However, staff members, including television presenters employed by the Met Office, received average bonuses of nearly £1,500 each in the past year.

The bonuses were revealed in a parliamentary answer by Kevan Jones, the Defence Minister.

Updated below from the Daily Express

CLIMATE scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the ­hottest January the world has ever seen.

The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK.

At the height of the big freeze, the entire country was blanketed in snow. But Australian weather expert Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University in Melbourne, said yesterday: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen.

“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen. November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen.” Veteran ­climatologist Professor Nicholls was speaking at an online climate change briefing, added: “It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years.”

His extraordinary claims came after the World Meteorological Organisation revealed 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850.

But UK forecaster Jonathan Powell, of Positive Weather Solutions, said: “If it is the case and it is borne out that January was the hottest on record, it is still no marker towards climate change.

“It’s all part of a cyclical issue and nothing should be read too deeply into that.

“It’s been the coldest for 30 years in Britain but we predicted that and climate change always tends t o throw up anomalies. It’s all in line with predictions and I won’t be sold on climate change at all. The data is either faulty or manufactured to make it look like it shouldn’t.”

See also A New Leaderboard at the U.S. Open by Steve McIntyre and 2010 to be a very warm year overall by Andrew Neil, BBC

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THERE has been no global warming for 15 years, a key scientist admitted yesterday in a major U-turn.

Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.

The admission comes as new research casts serious doubt on temperature records collected around the world and used to support the global warming theory.

Researchers said yesterday that warming recorded by weather stations was often caused by local factors rather than global change.

The revelations will be seized upon by sceptics as fresh evidence that the science of global warming is flawed and climate change is not man-made.

The Daily Express has led the way in exposing flaws in the arguments supporting global warming.

Last month we revealed how the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was “speculation” lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The influential IPCC then admitted it had got the key claim wrong and announced a review.

The Daily Express has also published a dossier listing 100 reasons why global warming was part of a natural cycle and not man-made.

Yesterday it emerged that Professor Jones, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, had admitted he has trouble “keeping track” of the information.

Colleagues have expressed concern that the reason he has refused Freedom of Information requests for the data is that he has lost some of the crucial papers.

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BRITAIN faces the risk of renewed snow chaos after councils admitted yesterday that salt supplies are “stretched”.


With heavy snow forecast from tomorrow until the end of the week, councils revealed they may need to share salt with neighbouring authorities if stocks get low.

One source warned: “This is serious” while the Local Government Association cautioned that everyone, including central government and the Highways Agency is going to “have to carefully manage the way they use salt”.

It said councils are replenishing salt stocks but stressed: “They can only restock as fast as salt suppliers can dig salt out of the ground.” The warning came as the Met Office issued an advisory of “severe or extreme weather”, forecasting up to six inches of snow across the South-east on Thursday and up to four inches on Friday.

It warned next week could bring “more substantial” snowfalls as weather fronts move in.

Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

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