What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000 delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

Turn out the lights, the party's over

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/2/pruden-turn-out-the-lights-the-party-s-over/

Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse. You can get all the hotel rooms you want this week in Cancun.

The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion. The United Nations is hanging the usual lamb chop in the window this week in Mexico for the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the Washington guests are staying home. Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes.

Everybody who imagined himself anybody raced to Copenhagen last year for the global-warming summit, renamed "climate change" when the globe began to cool, as it does from time to time. Some 45,000 delegates, "activists," business representatives and the usual retinue of journalists registered for the party in Copenhagen. This year, only 1,234 journalists registered for the Cancun beach party. The only story there is that there's no story there. The U.N. organizers glumly concede that Cancun won't amount to anything, even by U.N. standards.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, who wrote and sponsored the cap-and-trade legislation last year, says he'll be too busy with congressional business (buying stamps for the Christmas cards and getting a haircut and a shoeshine) even to think about going to Cancun. Last year, he joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi and dozens of other congressmen in taking staffers and spouses to the party in Copenhagen. The junket cost taxpayers $400,000, but Copenhagen is a friendly town and a good time was had by all. This year, they're all staying home, learning to live like lame ducks.

[Video]Quantitative Easing Explained

Stop Bashing Business, Mr. President

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704361504575552080488297188.html

Although I was glad that you answered a question of mine at the Sept. 20 town-hall meeting you hosted in Washington, D.C., Mr. President, I must say that the event seemed more like a lecture than a dialogue. For more than two years the country has listened to your sharp rhetoric about how American businesses are short-changing workers, fleecing customers, cheating borrowers, and generally "driving the economy into a ditch," to borrow your oft-repeated phrase.

My question to you was why, during a time when investment and dynamism are so critical to our country, was it necessary to vilify the very people who deliver that growth? Instead of offering a straight answer, you informed me that I was part of a "reckless" group that had made "bad decisions" and now required your guidance, if only I'd stop "resisting" it.

I'm sure that kind of argument draws cheers from the partisan faithful. But to my ears it sounded patronizing. Of course, one of the chief conceits of centralized economic planning is that the planners know better than everybody else.

Taxes, fees and fake corporate environmentalism

http://chuckdevore.com/2010/09/taxes-fees-and-fake-corporate-environmentalism-or-how-i-chose-budget-truck-rental-instead-of-u-haul/

“Environmental Fee?!?” I thought. I clicked on the link to explain this unexpected fee and U-Haul treated me to a rambling eight paragraph paean to their environmental consciousness, saying, in part, “For more than 60 years, the U-Haul Companies have provided an economical, sustainable and environmentally friendly means for families to move to a better future.” And that “sharing” trucks rather than buying one for the average family’s twice a decade move reduces “hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.” And “With 15,000 locations across the United States and Canada, U-Haul truck sharing helps to reduce the carbon footprint of many local communities.” So far, the $5 fee hadn’t been explained – I was on the edge of my seat for the punch line – until finally, in the last paragraph: “The Customer money collected as an environmental fee is expended to reduce the negative impact of our business on future generations. Aerodynamic fuel saving truck skirts, the fuel economy gauge, storage re-use centers, environmentally friendly truck wash soap, are examples of where these funds go.”

Ahh, I see.

Except that it’s a line of B.S. meant to make the customer feel better about forking over another $5 to U-Haul for the good cause of the environment – a fee I didn’t recall paying the last time I rented from U-Haul.

Climate Change Lies Are Exposed

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/196642

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.”

The Last Refuge of a Liberal

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/26/AR2010082605233.html

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them." That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

“Electron Laundering”: how British Columbia sells coal energy to California and calls it “green”

http://chuckdevore.com/2010/08/electron-laundering-how-british-columbia-sells-coal-energy-to-california-and-calls-it-green/

Enter government-owned BC Hydro and its Powerex subsidiary. With abundant hydro power potential, British Columbia is seeking to become the Saudi Arabia of “green” energy. California environmentalists don’t see the irony in British Columbia damming rivers to provide power to California, while in California, environmentalists fight to demolish dams as unsightly threats to salmon.

The irony gets even deeper, though. British Columbia, perhaps due to Premier Campbell’s business-friendly tax and regulatory policies, is growing. That, combined with a severe drought (yes, when California gets a good water year, British Columbia often sees a drought) means that BC Hydro will be importing $220 million more electricity than it did last year. You read it correctly, hydro energy colossus British Columbia will be importing almost a quarter billion dollars more electricity this year than last. In fact, BC Hydro has imported more energy than it has exported in 10 out of 11 years. And, from where does this energy come? Washington State and Alberta Canada. And, what is the source of this electricity? Brace yourself. Coal and gas-fired plants.

Electrons in a grid, like dollars in an account, are fungible, meaning that “clean green” electrons cannot be separated from “dirty coal” electrons and both are mixed in with electrons from nuclear power plants. So, when the Premier of British Columbia comes to California to urge us to continue to make our state even more dependent on his province for electricity as we strive to make the planet better we shouldn’t fool ourselves. The fact is, BC Hydro is buying “dirty” power and then, in an act I’ll dub “electron laundering” is repackaging it for the silly, naïve, environmental-minded Californians as pristine green hydro power—with a nice mark up, of course (Canadians have to pay for their national healthcare after all).

Does Barack Obama want to be re-elected in 2012?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/7958031/Does-Barack-Obama-want-to-be-re-elected-in-2012.html

When David Plouffe, President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign manager, wrote recently that his former boss was "not concerned with his re-election", there was predictable scepticism.

After all, it has long been a truism that every politician wants to cling to power and a reality that presidential campaigns are planned years in advance. Pronouncements about not looking at polls and concentrating on getting things done are, moreover, standard fare from poll-driven, election-obsessed politicians and their apparatchiks.
In this case, however, Plouffe may inadvertently be onto something. Almost everything Obama does these days suggests that he doesn't care much about being re-elected. Strange as it might seem, perhaps he wants to be a one-term president.

Obama was elected in 2008 at an extraordinary moment in American politics. Suddenly, this charismatic figure, elected to the Senate without serious opposition in 2004 and without any executive experience, was catapulted into the White House.

His presidential bid had been based on the power of his life story and his ability with the spoken word. Doubtless he was as surprised as anyone else that he pulled it off. Governing has been altogether more difficult for him and there are signs he is already tiring of it.

Obama's intervention on the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" issue is a case in point. There was no need for him to get involved - the Islamic community centre two blocks from the 9/11 site is unlikely to get built and there was no political advantage in his making a statement.

What he said about religious freedom was typically Obama - high-minded, principled and legalistic. He is, after all, a former constitutional law professor. What his words lacked were any real empathy with what Americans felt and practical considerations about resolving the issue - never mind the political downside for him.

[Video]Pat Condell: No Mosque at Ground Zero

Muslim Student Union members shocked by suspension

http://www.ocregister.com/news/university-253265-union-student.html

Campus officials at UCI have banned the Muslim Student Union for one year and placed the organization on disciplinary probation for an additional year, according to the Jewish Federation Monday morning.

Federation officials say they obtained documents from the university through the Freedom of Information Act, which show that the Muslim Student Union has been suspended on campus effective Sept. 1.

MSU members said contrary to the federation's statements, the student group has not been officially suspended.

The suspension is the result of a months-long internal review by the university following the arrest of 11 union students during Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's speech on campus. Oren was repeatedly interrupted by the union members.

Krauthammer: Those troublesome Jews

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304287.html

The world is outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.

But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel -- a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded ("quarantined") Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.

Oh, but weren't the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel's offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza -- as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel's inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Israel has already twice intercepted ships laden with Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?

But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because, blockade is Israel's fallback as the world systematically de-legitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself -- forward and active defense.

[Video]NJ Gov tells teacher she doesn't have to teach

[Video]Mexican President on Mexico's Immigration Laws

[Video]The MSA at UCSD

You have to watch it to the end.

Hating the government finally goes mainstream

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Hating-the-government-finally-goes-mainstream-90852389.html

Three years ago, the Republican establishment piled scorn on the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul.

Today, he is in a statistical tie with President Obama in 2012 polling. His son, an ophthalmologist who has never run for elective office, is well ahead of not only the GOP's handpicked candidate for Senate in Kentucky but also both Democratic contenders -- all statewide officeholders.

What happened? Did America suddenly develop an insatiable appetite for 74-year-old, cranky congressmen from Texas? Is the gold standard catching on?

Paul will not likely be the next president. And his son still faces the most arduous part of his journey as Democrats spend millions to paint him as soft on defense, lax on drug enforcement and too radical on welfare programs.

But there's no doubt that hating the government and the powerful interests that pull Washington's strings has gone from the radical precincts of the Right and Left to the mainstream.

It turns out that watching Goldman Sachs, the United Auto Workers, public employee unions and a raft of other vampires drain the treasury at America's weakest moment in a generation will make a person pretty hacked off.

Germans lose fear of climate change after long, hard winter

http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100327-26163.html

It seems the long and chilly winter has taken its toll on climate change sensibilities despite the fact that weather has nothing to do with climate.

The latest figure is a clear drop from the 62 percent of Germans who said they were scared of such changes just last autumn.

The new survey, carried out by polling company Infratest for Der Spiegel magazine, showed a quarter of those questioned thought Germany would profit from climate change rather than be badly affected by it.

Many people have little faith in the information and prognosis of climate researchers with a third questioned in the survey not giving them much credence. This is thought to be largely due to mistakes and exaggerations recently discovered in a report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC.

In Denial: The meltdown of the climate campaign

Full article (here).

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.

Head of 'Climategate' research unit admits sending 'pretty awful emails' to hide data

Full story (here).

Scientists at the heart of the Climategate row were yesterday accused by a leading academic body of undermining science's credibility.

The Institute of Physics said 'worrying implications' had been raised after it was revealed the University of East Anglia had manipulated data on global warming.

The rebuke - the strongest yet from the scientific community - came as Professor Phil Jones, the researcher at the heart of the scandal, told MPs he had written 'some pretty awful emails' - but denied trying to suppress data.

The Climategate row, which was first revealed by the Daily Mail in November, was triggered when a hacker stole hundreds of emails sent from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

They revealed scientists plotting how to avoid responding to Freedom of Information requests from climate change sceptics.

Some even appeared to show the researchers discussing how to manipulate raw data from tree rings about historical temperatures.

In one, Professor Jones talks about using a 'trick' to massage figures and 'hide the decline'.

[Video]Sen. Bernie Sanders Compares Climate Skeptics To Nazi Deniers

[Video]Frozen Wasteland

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Full story (here).

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

The great global warming collapse

Full story (here).

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

Full story (here).

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report

Full story (here).

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

[Video]John Coleman Explains Carbon Foot Print Fallacy