December 5, 2009
Margaret Thatcher: Speech to Conservative Party Conference 1988 Oct 14
Margaret Thatcher: Speech to United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment)1989 Nov 8
Margaret Thatcher: Speech to the Royal Society 1988 Sep 27
Understanding and Attributing Climate Change
Observations — Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change
Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes — a new dataset from 1850
(Dec. 5, 2009) The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data. Continue reading
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
December 5, 2009
The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data.
How much falls from Climategate, whose participants read like a Who’s Who at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not much, says CRU’s disgraced director, Phil Jones, pointing out that CRU’s data for global temperatures is but one of several datasets, all in general agreement. Besides, many argue, CRU was no linchpin to the science. The IPCC relied on numerous other sources. Throw CRU out, they say, and the IPCC’s conclusions remain unshakable.
In truth, if you throw CRU out, you’ve eviscerated the findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the most recent and most definite opus from the UN. This is the report, received with universal acclaim in 2007, which scarily stated: “The warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
The argument over global warming requires evidence that the globe is warming in dangerous ways. This evidence the IPCC presents forcefully in its third chapter on surface and atmospheric warming, which rests overwhelmingly on the official global temperature record of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, called the HADCRUT3 temperature dataset.
And who produced the HADCRUT3 dataset for the World Meteorological Organization? The Hadley Centre of the UK government’s meteorological office (the HAD of HADCRUT3) and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the CRU).
With HADCRUT3 in hand, the IPCC’s warming chapter confidently pronounced that “The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years,” that “2005 was one of the two warmest years on record,” and that “Changes in extremes of temperature are also consistent with warming of the climate.” With HADCRUT3, the co-authors of the IPCC warming chapter could show the temperatures going up, up, up.
Who were the IPCC co-authors who decided to use the HADCRUT3 temperature data? None other than two of the most questionable characters in the Climategate cast: the head of CRU, Phil Jones himself, and his cross-Atlantic correspondent, Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the IPCC. Trenberth in 2004 also had a starring role in another noteworthy IPCC episode, held in the swirl of an active U.S. hurricane season. Not one to pass up an opportunity to sway the public to the urgency of global warming, Trenberth called a press conference to link global warming with hurricanes even though the IPCC’s own hurricane expert, Christopher Landsea, pleaded with Trenberth not to — the link of hurricanes and global warming had no basis in science.
If any chapter in the IPCC opus is more important than the warming chapter it is chapter nine, which concludes that man is the culprit “based on analyses of widespread temperature increases throughout the climate system and changes in other climate variables.” The source for the temperature data? HADCRUT3.
The centrality of HADCRUT3 data is no coincidence. The two British organizations, Hadley and CRU, have worked hand-in-glove since the Hadley Centre was created in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher. One year earlier, in a major address that established the UK’s early promotion of the global warming issue, Thatcher — a foe of the coal mining union and a fan of nuclear power — had pledged to tackle the greenhouse effect by replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. She then promoted climate change science with funding and diplomacy, placing her people in senior positions at the nascent IPCC and elsewhere at the United Nations.
Hadley and CRU became major players in every IPCC report, in the World Meteorological Organization, in the IPCC’s iconic hockey-stick graph and in the UK government’s Stern Review that predicted economic calamity. In the minds of many, the Hadley-CRU datasets are the most authoritative source of global temperatures, both because their temperature records date back to 1850 and because they produced the first-ever synthesis of land and marine temperature data — the first truly global temperature record.
Except now we’re told that CRU disposed of the raw data some 20 years ago after it was manufactured into “homogenized” and “value added data.” The manufacturer 20 years ago? Another Climategate star, Tom Wigley, who was then the head of CRU.
But what of Phil Jones’s argument, that the Hadley and CRU datasets are nothing special. “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others,” he says. “Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves.”
The answer to Phil Jones comes from the Hadley Centre itself, through another fact that speaks for itself. “The datasets are largely based on the same raw data,” the FAQ page at the Hadley Centre website states, in explaining that NASA, the National Climate Data Center and Hadley-CRU all use the same data. The different results these organizations sometimes obtain, it elaborates, stems not from the data but from its absence — where the data is poor or non-existent, the different agencies employ different types of guesswork.
There is no unimpeachable raw data in which we can have confidence. There is a large cast of impeachable characters in the Climategate drama with an evident appetite for cooking the books.
And there are but two honest options for our governments to now employ. They can choose to redo the studies, with data, scientists, and a peer-review process that can be trusted. Or they can recognize that the IPCC process has been politicized from the start, and that the prima facie evidence for dangerous global warming does not meet the threshold required to prolong the scientific sham of the generation.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud
David Solway
mensnewsdaily.com
December 3, 2009
Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs. The evidence for data tampering and all manner of hocus-pocus was available some time ago for anyone who cared to look.
There is a rapidly growing adversarial bibliography on the subject of climate change which anyone interested in the global warming controversy might do well to consult. A partial list would include: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery; An Appeal to Reason, by Nigel Lawson; Climate Confusion, by Roy Spencer; Meltdown, by Patrick Michaels; Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick; Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer; Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, by Steven Milloy; and The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon.
The authentic scientific expertise assembled in such books cannot honorably be ignored or discounted. The last chapter of William Gairdner’s Oh, Oh, Canada!, “Global Warming in a Nutshell,” should also be required reading. It is the most effective short account of the global warming swindle that I have yet come across. Global warmists, I might point out, are not known for playing fair. Lawrence Solomon, the subtitle of whose book is “The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud,” refers to himself as “the most disinvited speaker in Canada.” In an article for the National Post, he provides a list of debates and conventions to which he was invited and subsequently disinvited once his convictions became clear. This is not surprising since in the few global warming debates that have thus far been arranged, “the skeptics have won convincingly, leading most in the doomsayer camp to boycott any debate in the future.”
The fact is, as these writers have amply demonstrated, we have become the willing dupes of a pervasive deception. To mention only a few of the red flags that have recently sprung up: Not long ago, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York perpetrated an embarrassing error — if error it was. The institute, on whose statistical data the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depends heavily for its reports, “typed in” the September 2008 temperatures for its October assessment, concluding that global warming had risen vertiginously. The finding was accepted in the major sites and media around the world as confirmation of the global warming dogma. The institute itself admitted that it does not conduct independent verification of the data it logs, regrettably rendering some or even many of its prognostications all but useless.
Frank Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, had some more intriguing news for us. The Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain “has begun to eliminate the daily temperature records from its public websites,” taking a page from the Goddard Institute, which has been deleting facts and figures unfavorable to the global warming hypothesis for some time now, as well as adding “corrections” to the data “to obtain global warming.” The big lie has reached the point where it must be maintained by the omission of details, the distortion of data, and the suspicious liability to error. And as we have seen, the plot thickened when the Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth. “Warmist scientists,” writes James Delingpole, may “have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.” Tipler has recently posted yet another convincing exposé outing the CRU’s counterfeit science, concluding that “most of the evidence for global warming was simply made up.” What we are hopefully observing is the unfolding of a major Climategate scandal.
Such practices, however, even after disclosure, do not seem to operate as a deterrent to persistence, and embarrassment is easily forgotten when there is a theory to uphold. Just as the Goddard Institute continues to abide by its errors, so does the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. This despite the fact that a faulty satellite sensor reading led it to estimate that the Arctic ice cap was receding dramatically — 500,000 square kilometers of lost ice covering an area considerably larger than California. While admitting its mistake, the NSIDC did not alter its view until April 2009, when it released a graph showing, in the words of Steven Goddard, that the Arctic ice cap had “actually increased by more than the size of Texas.” From the purported loss of California to the substantive acquisition of Texas represents a significant gain for the United Ice Fields of America.
Naturally, the mainstream media have not caught on as yet, or perhaps they simply refuse to acknowledge the evidence that would serve to discredit their years of advocacy and bring them into even greater disrepute than at present. For example, my local newspaper, the Montreal Gazette for November 25, 2009, banners “Prognosis on Climate Change Is Grim,” and retails bogus data, such as “the stunning retreat of the Arctic sea ice” as well as rising temperatures and sea levels, which have been reliably challenged by a host of credible agencies, organizations, and leading scientists. The only thing that is “stunning” is the sheer duplicity of such claims. There is — big surprise! — no reference whatsoever to the damning leaks in the climate warming dikes that threaten to flood the field of study. As the pressure continued to mount, however, the same newspaper for November 28 reprinted two articles side by side, one mentioning the email controversy but soft-pedaling its consequences, the other citing the already-exploded “unprecedented meltdown” data from the NSIDC.
The global warming movement most likely did not begin as a deliberate, well-organized scam, but as an expression of genuine concern by people of good intentions. But it was soon amplified by pseudo-religious zealots with a passionate animus against the free enterprise system, such as Canada’s David Suzuki, and eventually hijacked by unscrupulous entrepreneurs intent on abusing the free enterprise system to their own advantage, such as Al Gore. David Suzuki appears to believe what he says, carefully selecting data to reinforce a position in which he has invested emotionally. Al Gore plainly does not believe what he says or practice what he preaches, often falsifying his data to strengthen a project in which he has invested financially. A UK court ruled that his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, contains at least nine salient falsehoods and could not be shown in classrooms without a prior disclaimer. Gore earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Then there is the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in which Gore is a partner. KPCB has just floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” — the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an “oil wildcatter,” which is about as non-green as one can get.
In any event, it wasn’t long before governments, interested corporations, and the United Nations completed the travesty. The payoff for governments involved increased control over the private lives of their citizens, using the environmental scare to further their statist agenda. Companies saw new scope for enormous profits deriving from ventures in the cap-and-trade market and so-called “clean energy” alternatives. The United Nations recognized a golden opportunity to effect a massive transfer of wealth from the industrialized Western nations to the third world in various forms of carbon subsidies.
The long-term result is not hard to see: the growing infringement on personal liberties to the convenience of the state, the enrichment of shrewd individuals and energy consortiums coupled with the gradual impoverishment of punitively taxed Western electorates, and the hypothetical solvency of corrupt, backward, and inefficient third world countries at the expense of the developed world, except for the parasites and scavengers — those whom UK science advisor Lord Christopher Monckton bluntly calls “criminals” — whose fiscal and professional bolsters would be secure.
All this should be obvious to anyone willing to undertake a little impartial research. What is most alarming, however, is the extent to which the Western public has allowed itself to be bamboozled, conscripted into the cause, and, in effect, brainwashed. It is as if we are witnessing something like a collective hallucination at work, a mass psychosis not structurally different from the apocalyptic movements and revolutionary millenarianism of the medieval world analyzed by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. Only the initiating gradients are different.
For we have been pampered by the freedom, comparative prosperity, and multiplying amenities of a productive society the likes of which has never been seen before. We have too much time on our hands, more “life-enhancing” devices, services, inventions, medications, and pharmaceuticals than most of us know what to do with, more leisure than any previous culture has been able to afford its members, entertainment choices that leave us bewildered before their unstinting profusion, greater abundance in our food marts than probably all the granaries of the past combined — so that, inevitably, we have become a vast community of unthinking consumers spared the upheavals, scarcities, invasions, disruptions, and perpetual violence that has, until very recently, characterized life on the planet, as it still does in less fortunate regions of the globe.
Like the generation prior to the First World War, we have grown bored, stupefied with excess, ignorant of the blessings of plenty from which we have benefited, loath to engage in the quotidian struggle for normal existence or defend the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.” We have, in short, grown personally and culturally debilitated, a gaggle of effeminate narcissists determined to save the world but who cannot even save themselves. The upshot is baldly predictable. Having taken this rare interregnum in the war of survival for granted, we have become restless and dissatisfied, and find ourselves prone to every passing infatuation that promises a species of redemption from our own inner nullity. And environmentalism has arrived as the religion du jour to give substance and significance to the emptiness within, to rescue a cosseted populace from the apathy, lassitude, and cultural ennui that has descended upon it — and, of course, rendered it progressively exploitable by venal and power-hungry elites.
Meanwhile, from Kyoto to Copenhagen and whatever comes next, “we lay waste our powers,” to cite the poet Wordsworth in a context opposite to the one which he imagined, “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” The lemming reflex may now be undeflectable. And our competitors in the international arena, who have no intention of abiding by or even signing on to international protocols and agreements in order “to save the planet,” cannot believe their luck. The Chinese are rubbing their hands with glee. The Russians are chortling in their vodka. The Indians are performing namesté in a gesture of ineffable gratitude. Latin-American caudillos and African dictators are contemplating their numbered accounts and salivating.
The climate warming thesis has about the same degree of validity as the plot of the Hollywood SF clunker The Arrival, in which space aliens land on earth and begin heating up the atmosphere by generating greenhouse gases to accommodate their biology. Those of us who have paid attention know we have been fed a line. The question is whether people will awaken in time and put an end to this insidious design — for that is what it truly is — against our welfare and very preservation, or whether we will continue to acquiesce in the end of our privileged and hard-earned “lifeworld” as we know it.
Financial Post
December 4, 2009
59% of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, according to a Rasmussen survey released yesterday. 35% say it’s Very Likely and just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
“This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called Climategate scandal,” notes Rasmussen. “Just 20% of Americans say they’ve followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely.”
Rasmussen speculates that the UN’s credibility problem undermines the credibility of the scienctists associated with it. “One reason for this skepticism may be the role the United Nations has played in promoting the global warming issue. Only 22% of Americans consider the UN to be a reliable source of information on global warming. 49% disagree and say the international organization is not reliable on that topic. 29% aren’t sure.”
The Rasmussen survey also finds just 25% of Americans believe most scientists agree on global warming.
It appears that British Columbia is also blowing it with the GHG reporting rule that the province announced recently. But the BC and Ontario rules, as proposed, are quite different and blow it in quite different ways. As a starting point, the fact that the two leading provincial members of the Western Climate Initiative clearly cannot agree on a common GHG reporting standard is a pretty bad sign.
The GHG reporting threshold is 10,000 under the BC reporting rule that was announced last week, as well as in the climate change bills under consideration in Congress right now. Under the existing US EPA reporting regulation (which became law last September) there is a general reporting threshold of 25, 000 TCO2e, but all operators have to report all facility GHGs (i.e. there is no threshold) if:
Note, as well, that affected parties in the US have to count both their production emissions and emissions that will be discharged at the point of consumer end-use of the products they sell—not just the emissions that are released from their plants—to determine whether or not they meet the reporting threshold test.
Finally, the existing US GHG law obliges any entity that imports (but does not domestically produce) any of the regulated carbon intensive energy and commodities to report foreign supply chain GHGs to the US EPA—as if those GHGs occurred within the US boundaries—if the foreign supply chain plus US consumption GHGs arising from the consumption of those imports exceed 25,000 TCO2e/year.
So the GHG reporting thresholds and inventory coverage in the existing US GHG reporting law are much, much, much more stringent than those Ontario recently introduced. For this reason, the US will have a sound legal basis on which to discriminate against any Ontario GHG allowances or credits, and or any Ontario exports of the regulated products, even if Ontario’s cap and trade laws prove entirely consistent with all other aspects of final US cap and trade law.
Before the GHG reporting were made law, every power generation and manufacturing plant that was already covered by Titles VI and V of the US Clean Air Act was obliged to report the following data to the US EPA, which reporting obligation continues:
If Ontario or any other Canadian province collects only GHG emission data and fails to collect fuel use and equipment data (which the US EPA deems essential for cost-effective verification and enforcement of emission standards), the US EPA will elect not to accept any GHG allowance, offset credit or REC originating in those provinces as compliance units under any US cap and trade rule.
In this regard, the US EPA will operate consistently as it has in respect to Ontario’s NOx and SO2 cap and trade rules for the last 11 years. As you know, Ontario allows Ontario regulated entities to surrender US NOx and SO2 allowances as compliance units under the provincial NOx and SO2 caps, but the US still does not allow US regulated entities to surrender Ontario-issued NOx and SO2 allowances. I would hope that Ontario’s NOx and SO2 market experience to date will inform Ontario’s final GHG reporting rule-making.
To sell Ontario energy and goods, let alone GHG allowances or credits into the US, the US will demand that Ontario collect the same fuel use and operating data.
Also, be very careful to define "reporting facility" and reporting boundaries precisely in any final regulation. In BC, the pollutant and GHG reports currently filed by three similar coal production operations differ by +/- 200%. That is because the existing provincial and federal definitions of "reporting facility" and boundaries are either vague or, where they are not vague (in the provincial permitting context) they differ. So the emission reports from these otherwise similar operations are not comparable.
If/when the US can prove this to be true, they—again—have a sound legal argument for discriminating against our exports and our emission quota instruments.
(Dec. 2, 2009), There is nothing like a royal visit to get Canadians excited. Continue reading
(Dec. 2, 2009) In doing some research on my modest energy investments, I came across a link that led me to a website called Energy Probe where I discovered a very interesting article entitled Endless Oil by Canadian environmentalist, Lawrence Solomon, which if true, could cause anti-fossil fuel Greens to turn hotly red. Continue reading
Ross Andrews
The Tillsonburg News
December 2, 2009
There is nothing like a royal visit to get Canadians excited. The full colour photo of Tillsonburg chefs Jonathon and Cynthia Collins talking with Prince Charles on Page 1 of last Wednesday’s Tillsonburg Independent News gave us a sense of pride, didn’t it?
Canadians have very different ideas about the monarchy. Those who think monarchy is archaic perhaps outnumber those who consider themselves to be loyal subjects of the Queen.
Andrew Coyne, national editor of MacLean’s, did a fine job of reminding us why the Queen is important in the government of Canada.
It’s hard to convince people that Canada is not ruled by the Queen of England and so still a colony. The highest court of appeal in political matters is no longer the Privy Council of the House of Lords in Britain. It is the Supreme Court in Ottawa although the not withstanding clause gives our parliament the last word. Queen Elisabeth II is the Queen of Canada and the Queen of England. These are separate offices.
Coyne points out the fact that Canada has been ruled by monarchs since 1534, nine French and nine English. Prince Charles will be our nineteenth King of Canada.
The powers of the person who wears the crown have changed gradually down the centuries. King Louis XIV took a very personal interest in his Canadian subjects. He sent young women from France to be wives of settlers, calling them The King’s daughters.
Parliaments created Magna Carta and other constitutional acts to protect the people from the power of the monarch. Today the Queen or her representative in Canada is the last one to protect Canadians from a parliament that gets too uppity. Last year when politicians tried to oust the government and replace it with a coalition it was the governor general who exercized those powers. Many who have little knowledge of constitutional powers in this country criticized her.
The Queen has a great deal of influence beyond constitutional powers. Last week she urged leaders of the Commonwealth to work together to help control climate change. Did that have something to do with the announcement that some sort of agreement has been reached? Even Steven Harper indicated some sort of change of heart, hedged by reminders that it is by no means a done deal.
In this particular instance it’s to be hoped the Queen hasn’t fallen for the machinations of opportunists who see ways of funneling tax dollars into private pockets. We need to listen to Lawrence Solomon and Lorrie Goldstein. Even crusty Michael Corren is warning about "Climategate" as the Copenhagen conference draws nearer.
Some Canadians resent the money spent on royal visits. Political cartoonists have a ball with this. In a world where tourism is a major source of money we should remember the money spent on the visits stays in Canada and provides income for many people, even political cartoonists. People who are paid for serving the royals spend the money and as it percolates through the economy each dollar is multiplied several times.
Some people are calling for a resident monarch living in Canada and wearing only one crown. Choose a member of the royal family and start a new line of succession, sort of like slipping a geranium and putting it into a new pot. As Andrew Coyne wrote, changing the monarchy for a republic would require a revolution because of the convoluted way monarchy is woven into the constitution. Even splitting off a clone of the crown would be tough.
As an example of how the Crown fits into the rule of law, our police officers carry the Queen’s warrant. They do not swear allegiance to any politician and that is a great comfort to us who read about warlords with private armies in other countries or elected sheriffs in the USA.
When you think about it, how could we be better served by a resident ruler when the one we have lives on the far side of an ocean and only pays occasional visits?
Do we really want a Louis XIV living amongst us?
At high doses, radiation kills. Of this there is no scientific dispute. But scientific dispute does lie at low exposures to radiation.
There are two competing theories about the effects of low-level radiation.
Under the Linear No-Threshold model, the risk of contracting cancer is proportional to the exposure. The more radiation, the greater the risk, the less radiation, the lower the risk. Under this model, there is no absolutely safe level of radiation, only reduced risk.
Under the Hormesis model, at very low doses radiation is actually beneficial to human and animal health, lowering risk of not only cancers but other causes of mortality. The hormesis model, which is gaining currency in scientific circles, only applies to low doses. At high doses, the LNT and Hormesis models converge.
Energy Probe has historically accepted the LNT model as the more prudent one on which to base our regulatory systems for radiation. Because new evidence is emerging in radiation safety, we will be investigating both sides of this debate.
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