Climate Change Consensus?

[13820]

As for lower emission or cleaner coal technology, it doesn't exist. It might, but I don't see where the commitment is to get it done.

http://alberta.ca/home/NewsFrame.cfm?Relea...9127A999CB.html

[Guest woxof]

Woxof,

I've already answered those questions. Once again... I believe we should do whatever we can to mitigate environmental disaster and to ensure the surviveability of future generations. If handing money to China is the way to accomplish that, then we should do just that. However, I don't believe that will accomplish anything of the sort. ...

...Now to address your answers:

1- "If I am wrong, then apparently there will be no Arctic ice in 5 years according to Al Gore, a high chance of nuclear war according to Gwynn Dyer and a planet inundated by floodwater "

...and these possibilities are ok with you?

2- ...I don't work for a multi-national corporation.

3- ...Re: "It sounds like you are hinting that most are trying to stop any climate change accord." This should show you exactly what I meant about how poorly you read into what others are writing... absolutely that is not what I'm "hinting". On the contrary, if you'd been reading and comprehending anything I've written, you'd know that I'm certain multinational corporations have a huge vested interest in this issue and very likely love the carbon trading game. I'm sure they're all quite pleased with very weak, essentially meaningless accords.

4- To the query:

Are you sure you understood the question?

If you did, then you've pretty much admitted you'd devastate the planet if you believed it necessary to permit your own survival. You'd have identified your interest as being purely selfish. Which would mean your voice in this matter is worth only one in 6.8 billion.

Many of us are trying to take our undeniable responsibility to future generations seriously, so in effect, we carry their billions of voices as well. If we don't leave the world in any condition for them to survive, we'd be guilty of a more heinous crime than ever before committed on this earth.... and we wouldn't deserve to survive it ourselves.

5- Birth control in the third world? But you also said "sacrifice by all not some"? Which way would you like it?

I don't think you're a bad guy woxof. I just think you've misread a lot, and you've made a lot of assumptions in error.

Have a Merry Christmas.

Mitch

1. No they are not O.K. with me, I just don't believe any of this ridiculous hype and neither do a growing number of people. Natural global warming will have an effect. Just like in the Medeivel warm period...overall good for mankind.

2. Yes you do work for a mutinational(assuming you work for AC)-A multinational corporation (MNC) or transnational corporation (TNC), also called multinational enterprise (MNE)[1], is a corporation or enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country. It can also be referred as an international corporation.

3. sounds to me from another informative link that I posted that many huge multinationals are pushing for hard targets and large cuts in carbon emissions. No doubt many are the opposite. Bottom line, most are looking at their bottom line.

4. Now it's hinted that I'd "devestate the planet". Another typical remark made of skeptics. This from the man who repairs vehicles for a living what the green types consider a devastating industry. Oh the hipocrisy.

5. Birth control in the third world. The only area where there is rapid population growth, where there is starvation, not enough water for people. Aside from common sense, it is no sacrifice for them...it is a huge benefit.

Perhaps I have as you say..."misread" all those articles I have posted. Yet not one peep from anyone showing how they are erronous. Because they are not. The scandal gets bigger with time. More and more are dying from cold in Europe. Global temps have not risen this century. The little ice age and the Medeivel warm period did exist despite climate change scientists trying to erase history. It has been this warm before and after an appropriate cooling period it will be again.

Some will give in to the fear and guilt association of extreme predictions by political forces masquarading as science and others will use common sense. The alarmists overplayed their hand in their attempt to socially engineer the world. They should have known by their ridiculous predictions, their bringing in the worst of despots to chastise us at CPH and their inability to explain certain facts that we would not be fooled. Then again we almost were. The violent revolutions of the past failed in time and now this new type quiet revolution is failing. How will they try it next?

My answer to the third world demanding billions from Canada today is NO. We already give enough to partially make up for the theft of the leaders from their own people. I believe your answer Mitch is the same as mine. Is that correct or will there be no response?

[Guest woxof]

This article is from a while back but is as bang on today as when it was published.

Woxof....history in the making

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews...al-warming.html

The deceit behind global warming

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of "a new Ice Age".

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Ice Age", that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the "Little Cooling" between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

A scare is often set off - as we show in our book with other examples - when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials - essentially a political document - in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence. But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century.

In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

In the past three years, we have seen the EU announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines, to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced carbon emissions by 60 per cent. This is a pledge that could only be met by such a massive reduction in living standards that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it.

All this frenzy has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with CO2 and that, unless mankind takes drastic action, our planet is faced with the apocalypse so vividly described by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet recently, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of question marks being raised over Gore's alleged consensus. For instance, he claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 ft when even the IPCC in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches.There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by Kyoto, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly 10 per cent a year, with China likely to be emitting more CO2 than the US within two years.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

[dagger]

Sit on our ass indeed.

Calgary company helps deal with Ontario garbage.

http://www.stockhouse.com/tools/?page=%2FF...ewsid%3D7483834

Beats barging it to the U.S.

Yes, cleaning up our garbage.

We clean up our act. Why are they not processing Alberta garbage, too.

[E-HANDLE]

Yes, cleaning up our garbage.

We clean up our act. Why are they not processing Alberta garbage, too.

In Calgary, the methane from the landfills is collected and processed into fuel, which is used to generate electricity. Same principal, different technology.

[Steam Driven]

"Woxof...I love capitalism....within Reasonable rules."

"We see examples of spontaneous order around us all the time. Consider an open square on a college campus after an overnight snowfall. Over the course of the next morning, pathways will appear through the snow, most of which represent very efficient ways of getting from one building to another across the square. This collection of paths is, however, not the product of human design. It is a spontaneous order that emerged as a result of the self-interested behaviour of students who are only trying to get to class as quickly as possible. The early-rising trailblazers first tromp down the snow, which makes following in their footsteps the easier choice for the next group and eventually results in an easily navigable path through the snow. Without intentional human design, we get an orderly and socially beneficial outcome.

How is it possible that the independent decisions of millions of market participants just so happen to lead to beneficial outcomes for society as a whole, without any prior conscious agreement on what to do or how to do it? The answer is that prices and profits provide people with the incentives and knowledge they need in order to know how best to serve others. As people buy and sell in the market, the prices of goods move up and down, signalling to producers that their products are now more or less valuable, and providing them with information about which inputs are the most cost-effective. Profits are made when buyers value a product more highly than the seller values the inputs that went into making it. Profits signal that both parties believe they are benefitting from the exchange and provide an incentive for sellers to make the things that buyers want. These features of markets lead self-interested buyers and sellers to produce order without design.

However, individual freedom will only produce undesigned order if the institutional framework of a society is good. Self-interest will not lead to a beneficial order if people are free to steal and murder. Spontaneous order theory does not contend that greed is always good. What it does argue is that when individuals can own and freely exchange private property and their lives and property are protected against coercion, then their self-interest will be guided by market signals that lead them to take actions that cause a socially beneficial order to emerge. People’s actions will not produce spontaneous order unless their economic, political, and social institutions give them the freedom to act and protect them from the coercion of other individuals and the state."

Spontaneous Order

[E-HANDLE]

As for lower emission or cleaner coal technology, it doesn't exist. It might, but I don't see where the commitment is to get it done. I see it in the States - or are you going to sit on your ass and wait for the Americans to solve that for you too, so you can end up buying their technology.

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/c...3e-2e90e614c86c

Rather than ship money to sundry and assorted dictators and despots in the third world, would it not be better to spend the money at home? Heck, even the Americans might buy some of our technology.

Even the Pembina Institute doesn't outright hate this idea. Not sure what to make of that...

[Fido]

I am not sure that Dagger has ever been to Alberta. He obviously knows nothing about the province.

[Guest rattler]

I am not sure that Dagger has ever been to Alberta.  He obviously knows nothing about the province.

Dagger is always silent when he has been found to be lacking in facts and speaking from less that a position of strength.... but back on topic.

The Times  December 28, 2009

Wildlife struggle to cope in a changing climate but it’s not all badSimon de Bruxelles  Recommend? This was the year in which creatures that appeared to have benefited from two decades of mild winters were stopped in their tracks.

It began and ended with bitter cold spells that had catastrophic effects for local populations of some species. Others were granted a reprieve, though, thanks to a relatively dry summer, which followed two wet years that threatened many insects and the birds and mammals that feed on them.

Surveys conducted by National Trust wardens across England and Wales indicate that wildlife has struggled to cope with a changing climate and loss of habitat, but that there have also been winners.

Matthew Oates, the trust’s nature conservation adviser, said: “The big picture is that this was a far more typical year after two cool and wet summers. We also had more traditional cold and wintery spells that we hadn’t seen since the mid-1980s. Some people thought snow and ice were a thing of the past, but this year has proved them wrong.” The cold spell at the start of the year was bad news for frogs in the South West, where late frosts caught them by surprise. Other creatures, such as the Dartford warbler, which was once confined to small heathland areas in the South but had spread farther north in the past 20 years, were likely to be retreating to their traditional home after two cold winters in succession.

Related Links

Fresh snowfall predicted for New Year’s Eve

Cumbria farmers get extra help after floods

More snow to create chaos all week

Some less welcome species that had benefited from mild winters may also be checked by the return of colder weather. Landowners had struggled to control the spread of gorse, which had expanded remorselessly in the absence of severe frosts.

Regardless of whether the mild winters had been the result of global warming or a climatic blip, Mr Oates said that there were other important factors that we did not fully understand. He said: “Wildlife always has cycles of boom and bust that we don’t experience. Two poor summers in 2007 and 2008 knocked a lot of warmth-loving wildlife to its knees ... for many insects, and insect-feeding birds and mammals, this year has been a saviour as they were being severely tested.”

Some of our most familiar wildlife, including the cuckoo and the common autumn cranefly, or daddy long legs, however, have continued to struggle.

The National Trust surveys highlighted the big issues for wildlife during the year:

January Hard frost caused problems for frogs on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall. Choughs in Cornwall and Pembrokeshire also suffered, with the frozen ground making feeding difficult. The second half of the month was mild and saw bumble bees appearing.

February The coldest weather for 20 years in some parts of Britain. Many trees were lost to snow damage in North Somerset. Dartford warblers suffered in the South East of England. The first swallows appeared a month early on Holy Island in Northumberland. Swallow numbers overall were down on previous years.

March The cold winter and two wet summers had reduced the number of disease-spreading ticks. It was a dry month, with birds nesting earlier than usual.

April Dry weather resulted in moorland fires at Hardcastle Crags and Marsden Moor in Yorkshire. Caterpillars of the green oak roller moth defoliated many oak trees, especially in the South East.

May Swarms of green and white fly arrived in Northern Ireland unusually early on warm southerly winds. The tree bumblebee was a common sight at Runnymede in Surrey. This distinctive species was first recorded in Britain in 2001 and seemed to be spreading, especially in the East. There was a big migration of painted lady butterflies into Britain.

June A difficult year for cuckoos. Glow worms suffered at Arnside Knott in Lancashire because of wet conditions. Midsummer storms decimated the Arctic tern population at Beadnell Bay in Northumberland.

July The best year for the purple emperor butterfly since 1983. Thousands of seven-spot ladybirds were recorded at Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, with large swarms reported in East Anglia and Somerset.

August The wasp returned after two years of low numbers, thanks largely to a fine spring and mild summer. Leaves began to drop off trees at Ham House in London, an early start to autumn as a result of the dry summer in the South East. There was a second generation of Duke of Burgundy butterflies in Gloucestershire, only the third time this had happened in the past century. Bats had an improved year after two wet summers had affected their insect prey.

September Another poor year for the common autumn cranefly, otherwise known as the daddy long legs. This had a knock-on effect for bats as it is an important food source. A humpback whale was spotted, a very rare sighting, near the Farne Islands in Northumberland.

October Few fungi flourished at Hatfield Forest in Essex because it was too dry for them to fruit; by contrast record numbers of waxcaps were seen a month late at Cragside in Northumberland.

November There was flooding in Cumbria and particularly heavy rainfall on the Yorkshire moors. Wardens on the Farne Islands took 16 days to return to the mainland because of the stormy seas, which drove seabirds, such as storm petrels and Leach’s petrel, ashore along the South Coast of England.

December The first frost at Hadrian’s Wall occurred on December 1, five weeks later than normal. Snow and ice just before Christmas were a reprise of conditions in February.

[E-HANDLE]

Conrad on Copenhagen;

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...mal-decade.aspx

[AME]

[FireFox]

French Revolution! Carbon tax ruled unconstitutional just two days before taking effect

This new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on Jan1, 2010. The tax was steep: 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In a stunning move, and surely a blow to warmists everywhere, the tax has been found unconstitutional and thrown out.

[Guest woxof]

The last sentence in the article says it all when it comes to a carbon tax...

"However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax."

Woxof has a suggestion....4.1 billion euros in budget cuts. I bet any outsider could find that easily enough. I know...how about Airbus subsidies.

[Guest woxof]

The post Copenhagen experience...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8440601.stm

On Monday the National Grid issued a gas balancing alert (GBA) for only the second time, asking power suppliers to use less gas as more was sourced overseas.

Check for disruption in your area

Extra gas - including supplies from Belgium and Norway - was necessary to meet rising demand after a 30% rise on normal seasonal use during the cold snap.

However, shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark claimed that based on current usage the UK had only eight days worth of gas storage remaining.

Meanwhile....

http://www.examiner.com/x-25803-Natural-Di...ly-cold-weather

Deadly cold grips the northern hemisphere

Severe cold weather has enveloped the northern half of the globe from the United States to Britain to China. Across the continents, many places are reporting record setting temperatures and lives have been lost due to the Arctic chill.

The eastern half of the United States saw cold, Arctic air pulled down from the north plunging temperatures below freezing in normally mild places as far south as Florida. The widespread cold gripped most of the nation east of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Seaboard.

Across the Midwest, temperatures plunged to well below freezing as parts of Iowa recorded temperatures as low as -15 degrees. Jeff Johnson, National Weather Service meteorologist, told the Des Moines Register, “"We're a solid 30 degrees below normal.” Minneapolis, Minnesota and Chicago, Illinois were seeing wind chills below 0 degrees Tuesday morning.

In Miami, residents accustomed to short sleeve shirts and shorts bundled up as temperatures dropped to freezing. Further north in the state, Orlando saw a low temperature of 21 degrees.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Britain was seeing a cold snap worse than any seen in the past 30 years. London, Manchester and Birmingham all saw temperatures down to the 20’s with the Scottish Highlands being even colder. The country’s National Grid issued a warning yesterday that demand for natural gas, critical for heating and power generation, may very well outstrip supply. Heavy snow was forecast for London and other parts of the nation.

Asia as well was gripped by the dangerous cold. In India, 33 people, mostly children and the elderly, were reportedly killed as a direct result of cold in the northern part of the country. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) said the regions of Jessore, Kushtia, Tangail, Mymensingh and Madaripur will continue to experience unusually cold weather.

Heavy snow in South Korea paralyzed streets and resulted in flight cancellations at the nation’s airports. Workers at Gimpo International Airport in Seoul resorted to shoveling runways by hand to help keep the airport open. The unexpected cold weather was responsible for at least three deaths due to the dangerous road conditions. More than 11 inches of snow was recorded, the most since record keeping began on the Korean Peninsula in 1937.

In China, snow and cold affected much of the nation where the government ordered citizens to form groups to help clear the snow. Primary and middle schools in Beijing were closed and the snow shut down highways and forced the cancellation and delay of scores of airline flights. In Inner Mongolia, 1,400 people were trapped on a train after it struck a wall of snow and got stuck. Police and local farmers worked to dig out the trapped passengers. The nation’s meteorological agency reported that northern China has seen its worst snow in nearly 60 years.

Woxof...natural variation as it always has been.

[Mitch Cronin]

Woxof...natural variation as it always has been.

Actually.... what you just posted says nothing at all that would support that claim. In fact, it suggests a rather uncommon variation, and nowhere is "cause" addressed, or even suggested.

[J.O.]

An interesting argument re China.

Is China now greener than Europe?

[Guest rattler]

Hundreds rescued from stranded cars as snow slams Britain; longest cold snap in 29 years

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

at 11:36 on January 6, 2010, EDT.

By Raphael Satter, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Snow falls in the Hampstead area of London, in the early hours of Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Matt Dunham

LONDON - Unusually heavy snowfall stranded hundreds of motorists, disrupted trains and shut down schools and airports across Britain on Wednesday as the country suffered through its longest cold snap in nearly 30 years.

Airports across the country were paralyzed, with London's Gatwick and Stansted unable to operate and hundreds of flights cancelled. At Gatwick, where the only runway had been shut for snow clearance all day, more than 240 flights were cancelled. London Luton airport was closed until early afternoon. A dozen flights were also cancelled at London's Heathrow airport, Europe's busiest, with long lines building at check-in desks.

[FireFox]

This is too funny....if it wasn't so sad that some people believed this guy & his Inconvenient Truth.

Global Warm Mongers campaigning school boards to include his bogus film in the curriculum, etc, etc.

Gore's a bust - A frozen one

>>>

FAIRBANKS – In what might become an annual tradition, an ice sculpture of former Vice President Al Gore has taken its place in front of Thrifty Liquor along Airport Way.

The two-ton “Frozen Gore” sculpture isn’t exactly a tribute. It’s a tongue-in-cheek critique of Gore’s vocal belief in man-made climate change, complete with hot air pouring out of his mouth.

Local businessmen Craig Compeau and Rudy Gavora contracted the piece from award-winning sculptor Steve Dean and say they’ll keep erecting one each winter until Gore accepts an invitation to discuss the global warming issue in Fairbanks.

<<<

[Guest woxof]

snow slams Britain; longest cold snap in 29 years

In response to Rattlers article showing Britains longest cold snap for 29 years and more forecast....here is a classic example for the alarmists on how they are being duped by government officials in high places in certain countries.

The Met office in Britain several days ago put out a prediction of a mild winter...what a total farce that is being exposed.

The Met Office gives us the warmist weather

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columni...st-weather.html

The UK's official weather forecasters are determined that winters should be mild, in the face of the frozen facts, says Christopher Booker

Shortly after midnight on Friday morning, as 200,000 merrymakers were departing from the Thames after enjoying a spectacular fireworks show in sub-zero temperatures, flakes of snow began to fall on Whitehall. In light of the Met Office's prediction that this would be a "mild" winter, with temperatures above average, it seemed an apt way to start the New Year. But hasn't the time come for us to stop treating the serial inaccuracy of Met Office forecasts as just a joke and see it for what it is – a national scandal?

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world's major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

The year 2007, it predicted, would be "the warmest ever" – just before global tempratures plunged by more than the entire net warming of the 20th century, Three years running it predicted warmer than average winters – as large parts of the northern hemisphere endured record cold and snowfalls. Last year's "barbecue summer" was the third time running that predictions of a summer drier and warmer than average prefaced weeks of rain and cold. Last week the Met Office was again predicting that 2010 will be the "warmest year" on record, while Europe and the US look to be facing further weeks of intense cold.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

Scientific method has gone out of the window, to support a theory that looks more questionable than ever. The whole set-up – Met Office, Hadley Centre, the CRU, the IPCC – looks hopelessly compromised. It is a state of affairs so bizarre that it cries out for political intervention. Yet our politicians, from Gordon Brown and David Cameron down, are so in thrall to this new religion that they cannot see evidence staring them in the face – that the show has gone off the rails. How many more winters and summers will it take before sanity finally breaks in to put an end to this scandal?

Woxof.....leading the growing charge.

[mrlupin]

Climate quotation

If the climate was a bank

"If the climate was a bank, a capitalist bank, [the West] would have saved it by now."

Hugo Chavez.

[Guest rattler]

and recent headlines say:

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MSNBC-Weather - More Headlines

Frozen Europes longest cold snap 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 12:27 PM EST

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Yahoo! Weather - More Headlines

Snow, freezing weather hit Europe, disrupt travel 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 12:27 PM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

East Under Grip of Icy Chill, Howling Winds 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Cold Hangs on in the Midwest Today 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Southerners Shiver Saturday 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Jack Frost Visits Florida -- Details on the Freeze 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Some Relief in Sight for Frozen Midwest 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Latest Forecast for the Wild Cards 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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AccuWeather - More Headlines

Feet of Snow for the 2010 Winter Olympics Site 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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Yahoo! Weather - More Headlines

Strong earthquake strikes near Solomon Islands 

Sat Jan 9, 2010 04:27 AM EST

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Icy hazards persist through U.S. 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 10:27 PM EST

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Snow blows into East; deep freeze in South 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 8:27 PM EST

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Icy cold roars into southern, eastern USA 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 4:27 PM EST

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Winds carry snow, chill into the East 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 4:27 PM EST

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Bitter Cold Chills East 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 4:27 PM EST

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Icy hazards persist through US, deep into South 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 2:27 PM EST

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Bitter cold weekend in store, except for West, Southwest 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 12:27 PM EST

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Midwest in deep freeze -- with no end in sight 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 12:27 PM EST

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Mein! German parents fight for sleds 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 12:27 PM EST

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Snow pushes east after fatal course across Midwest 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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Snowstorm enters Northeast, complicating commutes 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 08:27 AM EST

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Snowstorm enters Northeast, imperils morning rush 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 04:27 AM EST

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Cold grips nation as crash in snowy Ohio kills 4 

Fri Jan 8, 2010 02:27 AM EST

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Cold grips nation; crash in Ohio kills 4 

Thu Jan 7, 2010 10:27 PM EST

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Arctic front chills US 

Thu Jan 7, 2010 8:27 PM EST

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Brutally cold in Midwest again 

Thu Jan 7, 2010 4:27 PM EST

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Intense cold hits Midwest, heads South 

Thu Jan 7, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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Thursday's forecast: Snow, bitter cold for central USA 

Thu Jan 7, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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Intense cold grips much of USA; Fla. races to save crops 

Wed Jan 6, 2010 4:27 PM EST

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Cold snap 'horrifying' for homeless 

Wed Jan 6, 2010 10:27 AM EST

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Hundreds rescued as heavy snow slams Britain 

Wed Jan 6, 2010 06:27 AM EST

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South struggles with record-setting freeze 

Wed Jan 6, 2010 12:27 AM EST

[Steam Driven]

Climate change is real and man-made, explains University of Waterloo professor Qin-Bin Lu, author of a new study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal, Physics Reports.

Professor Lu also explains that the climate change crisis is over. Thanks to an international environmental treaty, the planet is no longer in peril. We have, in fact, begun a long cooling period that will bring Earth’s temperatures back to normal.

The Ozone Hole did it...

[Guest woxof]

Sounds quite reasonable. So there you have it, if true...Mulroney and Reagan save the world from global warming.

How about that?

[Mitch Cronin]

That's rather illuminating woxof.... Suddenly, if it no longer means it might cost you anything, or otherwise effect you, you have no problem accepting the idea of anthropogenic global warming.

"Sounds quite reasonable" all of a sudden eh?

Hmmmmm.

[Guest woxof]

That's rather illuminating woxof.... Suddenly, if it no longer means it might cost you anything, or otherwise effect you, you have no problem accepting the idea of anthropogenic global warming.

"Sounds quite reasonable" all of a sudden eh?

Hmmmmm.

Just wanted to poke the lefties with Reagan and Mulrony(Thanks Brian and Ronnie and probably Maggie as well) saving the world from global warming....which by the way is happening as I've always said. Used to be an ice age. If there was ever proof, it is in this link....

http://archives.cbc.ca/economy_business/tr...nts/clips/2634/

Always knew the man-made part was bogus. Hmmmm....more truth revealed here by Woxof.

Climategate at Wikipedia

Since my Saturday column described how Wikipedia editors have been feverishly rewriting climate history over much of the decade, fair-minded Wikipedians have been doing their best to correct the record. No sooner than they remove gross distortions, however, than the distortions are replaced. William Connolley, a Climategate member and Wikipedia’s chief climate change propagandist, remains as active as ever.

How does Wikipedia work and how does Connolley and his co-conspirators exercise control? Take Wikipedia’s page for Medieval Warm Period, as an example. In the three days following my column’s appearance, this page alone was changed some 50 times in battles between Connolley’s crew and those who want a fair presentation of history.

One of the battles concerns the so-called hockey stick graphs, which purport to show that temperatures over the last 2000 years were fairly stable until the last century, when temperatures rose rapidly to today’s supposedly dangerous and unprecedented levels. In these graphs, the Medieval Warm Period – a period of several centuries around the year 1000 – appears to be a modest bump along the way. Before the hockey stick graphs began to be published about a decade ago, scientists everywhere – including those associated with the UN itself – viewed the Medieval Warm Period as much hotter than today. Rather than appearing as a modest bump compared to today’s high temperatures, the Medieval Warm Period looked more like a mountain next to the molehill that is today’s temperature increase.

The hockey stick graphs led to an upheaval in scientific understanding when the UN reversed itself and declared them bona fide. Soon after, the hockey stick graphs were shown to be bogus by a blue-chip panel of experts assembled by the US Congress. The Climategate Emails confirm the blue-chip panel’s assessment – we now know that Climategate scientists themselves doubted the reliability of the hockey stick graphs.

With the hockey stick graphs so thoroughly discredited, you’d think they would become a footnote to a discussion of the Medieval Warm Period, or an object of amusement and curiosity. But no, on the Wikipedia page for the Medieval Warm Period, the hockey stick graph appears prominently at the top, as if it is settled science.

Because the hockey stick graph has become an icon of deceit and in no way an authority worthy of being cited, fair-minded Wikipedians tried to remove the graph from the page, as can be seen here. Exactly two minutes later, one of Connelley’s associates replaced the graph, restoring the page to Connelley’s original version, as seen here.

Battles like this occurred on numerous fronts, until just after midnight on Dec 22, when Connolley reimposed his version of events and, for good measure, froze the page to prevent others from making changes -- and to prevent the public, even in two-minute windows, from realizing that today’s temperatures look modest in comparison to those in the past. In the World of Wikipedia, seen as here, the hockey stick graph, and Connolley’s version of history, still rules.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...-wikipedia.aspx