We all know that every time we purchase a new car, or new home appliances, that the new ones are more energy efficient than the old ones.  The only problem is that the cost savings often don’t justify the cash we have to lay out to get the new energy efficient models.  The same is true with businesses.

In many cases, when a businesses makes capital investments to upgrade a plant to make it more productive, a by product of that is replacing old, energy sucking, environment-polluting equipment with newer, more efficient, greener varieties.  However, like the consumer, it can be difficult to justify the capital outlay.

Christopher Horner of Big Government explains how President Obama’s plan to allow businesses to accelerate their deductions for capital expenditures will not only help the economy, but also help his green agenda:

The logic is simple and the Dutch actually showed (again, accidentally) how this works to reduce emissions: business do not replace capital equipment as early or often as they might like because the tax code disincentivizes it, with depreciation schedules instead of treating it like other business expenses. They therefore postpone purchasing newer, more efficient (and typically more energy efficient) equipment.

Change that, and they will pull through new technology into use.

In a way that is moving investments forward, a la cash for clunkers. But in other ways it is just smart and the right thing to do.

Here’s the downside: yes, you get emission reductions and not by harming economic growth, but actually encouraging it. However, the political class do not get to reward their constituencies with cap-n-trade wealth transfers from you and me to them, don’t increase the cost of energy, and obtain no new control over our lives.

And as many of you know, that is the whole point behind the scheme urgently needed to combat “climate change” (why not continental drift?) that actually would have no detectable impact, according to anyone, on climate.

It will be interesting to see if the President promotes this as helping America move to a greener economy, or if instead shies away from that type of statement.  While if he was true to his convictions about reducing carbon emissions and having a greener economy, he would embrace this type of change without mandate, the tax credits have two major flaws when viewed by his liberal base:  first, they will be seen as pro-business by his base who believe corporations should pay more tax, not less.  Second, it fails to redistribute wealth, which is one of the main goals of cap and trade, or cap and tax as many call it.

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When a conference is held to actually discuss and debate climate change and what impact man is having, the main stream media is nowhere to be seen.

Rick Tzupeck of Big Journalism describes the Heartland conference and the utter lack of coverage by the main stream media:

You would think that a conference that features some of the world’s leading scientists talking about a hot-button issue like global warming would attract a bit of old media attention. The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, currently being held in Chicago, features distinguished scientists like the University of Colorado’s Dr. William Gray, Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, former astronaut and United States Senator Dr. Harrison Schmitt and the guy who broke the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre. But, while there are a number of bloggers here, while Pajamas Media is here, while the European press is here – including the BBC – and while I’m here, the MSM is nowhere to be found.

…

It’s refreshing to write about climate change and note a lack of consensus. That’s science the way it’s supposed to be: researchers attacking a problem from different angles, finding different answers and learning from each other’s work. It’s one-hundred eighty degrees the opposite of the cheerleading competitions that the IPCC conferences, like the most recent one in Copenhagen, have become.

So why does the old media ignore the rich, diverse opinions and research that this conference offers? Not only is there no one here from the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN, the Chicago Tribune didn’t even send a reporter (one of their columnists did show up however), even though the venue is within walking distance of Tribune Tower. Remarkable. Is the MSM drinking its own stale Kool-Aid, convinced that the science really is “settled” and that oil money just has to be behind any contrarian opinion? Or are they just so embarrassed now that the wheels are coming off of the global warming bus that they just can’t face the public? Probably a little of both.

Is anyone that watches the main stream media coverage of climate change surprised by this?  Like with recent political elections, the mainstream media has transitioned from disinterested observer that reports the facts to political activist.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems that unlike the polar bear, reporters with integrity are becoming an endangered species.

There are few people, even among devout global warming skeptics, that state unequivocally that man is not at least part of the problem of global warming.  However, contrary to what Al Gore may have told you, the debate isn’t over and those scientists that are putting politics aside are simply asking for an honest debate where science and fact are the basis for that debate, rather than politics and winning government grants being the primary motivation.

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Over the last month, they were breaking about a story a week, but in the last week the pace has been picking up.  Including two new examples of shoddy research or possibly intentional scientific fraud that has been reported on this week.

In addition, on Saturday, the former head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, made a number of shocking admissions.  He claimed that he ‘lost’ the source temperature data that had been requested via freedom of information requests, and that is the reason why he failed to comply with those requests.  It’s important to note that in one of the leaked Climategate emails, he told Michael Mann (Penn State climate researcher)  that he would delete data files before releasing them via freedom of information requests.

The other revelations that Jones made were that there has been no statistically-significant warming in the last 15 years, and that he admitted that the medieval warm period might have been warmer than today.

Now on top of Jones’ moment of honesty, combined with his “dog ate my research” excuse, we have two major IPCC  Armageddon claims used by Gore and company that have now been proven false.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air details the first one, which appears to be a case of scientific fraud:

Another key element of the IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) turns out to be based on deliberate decisions to use the most hysterical claims by advocates rather than on science.  The IPCC warnings of the African crop projections have a more demonstrably corrupt basis, as the report deliberately ignored actual science that showed little risk of crop yields — science funded by the British government at a cost of over £2.5 million.  Who compiled the IPCC Synthesis that ignored peer-reviewed science for the speculation of one Moroccan activist, whose report didn’t even agree with its cited sources?  Rajendra Pachauri’s own business — and he got over £400,000 for the work:

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for “carbon credits”. As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, “agricultural production will more than double by 2020″. Yet it was Agoumi’s claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC’s Working Group II report in 2007.

What made this even odder, however, was that the group’s co-chairman was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to inform the IPCC’s 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by “up to 30 per cent”.

British taxpayers poured out money for the section of the IPCC report for which Dr Parry was responsible. Defra paid £2.5 million through the Met Office, plus £330,000 for Dr Parry’s salary as co-chairman, and a further £75,000 to his consultancy for two more reports on the impact of global warming on world food supplies. Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work – including further expert reports by Britain’s Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources.

On to the second false claim.  The Register in the UK did a story yesterday on a statistical review of  the raw data that debunks the IPCC claims of increased hurricane activity and intensity, which they claimed was more likely than not caused by human activity:

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community – his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an ‘A-level’ statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He’s published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither “a warmist nor a denialist”, but a scientist.

Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases.

“When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances.” This isn’t indicative of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.

Even the North Atlantic increase should be treated with caution, Hatton concludes, since the period contains one anomalous year of unusually high hurricane activity – 2005 – the year Al Gore used the Katrina tragedy to advance the case for the manmade global warming theory.

…

Thre IPCC’s WG1 paper states: “There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater.” Hatton points out the data quality is similar in each area.

The IPCC continues: “It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.” But, as Hatton points out, that conclusion comes from computer climate models, not from the observational data, which show no increase.

“The IPCC goes on to make statements that would never pass peer review,” Hatton told us. A more scientifically useful conclusion would have been to ask why there was a disparity. “This differential behaviour to me is very interesting. If it’s due to increased warming in one place, and decreased warming in the other – then that’s interesting to me.”

Al Gore used the deaths of all those Katrina victims as nothing more than power-point aids to keep selling his global-warming snake oil.  He, and other global-warming activists  trumpeted how increased hurricanes would lead to countless death and destruction, and how the 50% reduction in African crop yields would lead to mass starvation.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air gives his take on the suspect hurricane claims:

In this case, it appears that the IPCC ignored readings from below the equator to bolster their claims.  Unlike in the MWP, we have plenty of measurements of storm activity in the Southern Hemisphere for that period.   If Hatton’s calculations are correct, the IPCC either ignored them or discounted them in the calculations.  Either way, the claims on storm intensity are now suspect, as is much of the IPCC’s claims and supposedly scientific process.

What some have long suspected, is being revealed as truth a little more every day.  Instead of the ‘debate being over’, we are finding that Gore and company are simply guilty of using fabricated scientific conclusions to continue their fear-mongering and Godless profiteering in their pursuit of making billions from their green empires.

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And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

…

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

A Twitter follower, @redostoneage, pointed out a couple peer-reviewed studies documenting MWP in both China and South America.

Here is Asian temperature data from 2,300 year old trees that shows the Medieval Warm Period was Hotter Than today:

“Zhang et al. conclude that their proxy climate data “reveal that the North Atlantic MWP and the LIA were accompanied by climate changes on the northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau,” while their comparison with Esper et al.’s data indicates that their data are also well correlated with long tree-ring chronologies from much of the Northern Hemisphere. The research team thus provides important evidence for the broad geographical reach of both the MWP and the LIA.”

In addition, C3 Headlines details this peer-reviewed study that describes the South American MWP:

“In the words of the research team, “the reasonably good correlation between our results (particularly SST) and other continental and marine archives from central-south Chile, Peru, and Antarctica … confirms the occurrence of globally important climatic anomalies such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.” And, of course, their SST data indicate that the current level of warmth in that part of the world still has a long way to go before equaling the warmth experienced there a thousand and more years ago, which suggests that the region’s current level of warmth is neither unprecedented nor unnatural…”

It’s not just the MWP that global warming advocates try and hide.  They also attempt to remove any mention of the Little Ice Age (LIA), because the famous hockey-stick fabrication graph and other ‘proof’ showing rapid temperature increases, typically start during the latter stages of the LIA.  The Little Ice Age was an extremely cold period that spanned 500-600 years from roughly the middle of the fourteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth century.  During that 600 years, there were three distinct temperature minimums at 1650, 1770 and 1850.

By starting temperature graphs during the latter stage of a mini ice age, people like Al Gore are able to show what appears to be alarming increases in temperatures, but that is only because they are out of context.  The inconvenient truth that Gore and company fail to come clean with is that during a period around 800-1100 AD (just a couple hundred years before the beginning of the LIA) temperatures were much warmer than today.  During this time, England was full of vineyards and farming was abundant in Greenland (which has green in its name for a reason).

If man is causing warming now, what caused it 1200 years ago?  Was it all the gas-powered cars on the road?  Was it the coal-powered power plants?  Or, just possibly, was the warming then, like today, simply part of cyclical temperature changes the earth has gone through for millions of years?

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Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has dug up another story that broke in England today in the Times of London. This one is in regards to the inaccuracy of the temperature data at the heart of the claim that global temperatures have risen dramatically in recent decades.

The Times of London delivers a separate blow to the AGW movement today in a report on scientific review of the data used to claim man-made warming of the planet over the last few decades. Several researchers have found that the measurements of temperatures in the AGW record that showed temperature increases mainly came from land development and urbanization, not from actual temperature increases. They have made their findings public through peer-reviewed studies that come at a very bad time for the IPCC and AGW advocates:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Morrissey goes on to talk about Anthony Watts who runs the Watts Up With That site, and how he has been doing research to detail how construction of heat retaining and producing structures around monitoring stations have resulted in artificially high temperatures.  You can read about Watts’ project where he is doing a survey, including photographs, of every USHCN temperature station.

Here are a few pictures from http://www.surfacestations.org/ where the data and photographic evidence is being collected:

Now, in reality there are two factors that plague the temperature data in regards to urbanization around the temperature monitoring stations.  First, we have the general heat island effect, which is related to the heat retaining and producing effect that urban construction has and the ‘island’ of heat that surrounds urban areas.  Second, are the more direct impacts (pictures above) on the quality of temperature data, such as air conditioning units being installed a few feet away from a temperature gauge, or paving the area underneath a gauge.

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Phil Jones was the director of the East Anglia Climate Research Center (CRU) in England that was the site of the climategate scandal that broke last December.  In fact, many of the emails at the heart of the controversy were directly sent or received by Jones.  Shortly after the emails were leaked, Jones stepped down as the head of the CRU as an investigation of any wrong doing was conducted.

This weekend, in a conversation with the BBC, Jones admitted there are some questions about the facts that form the foundation of their claims of global warming, and he gave a flimsy excuse for why he failed to honor freedom of information requests.

The key revlelations were:

The dog ate my homework — Jones says that he has ‘misplaced’ the data and research used to make the ‘hockey stick’ graph that Gore and others used to scare the world into believing an armageddon was upon us.

What most of us already knew — that there has been no global warming since the mid ’90s, or as he says, no “statistically significant” warming.

He admitted that the Medieval Warming Period might have been warmer than today and that modern temperatures might not be unprecedented.

The UK’s Daily Mail has more on the revelations from Jone’s conversation with the BBC:

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.

…

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.

The “hockey stick” graph has already been shown to be mainly a creation of graph-scaling bias, but this gets to the heart of the entire argument.  During the MWP, farmers grew crops on Greenland for a couple of centuries.  Until now, AGW advocates insisted that the warming only took place in the northern hemisphere.  If that warming was indeed global, then it dwarfs anything seen in the 20th century, as these two charts from Climate Audit, via  Sonic Frog, demonstrate:

While it may seem like Jone’s revelation about the MWP is a minor one, it is important to note that it was a major theme in the leaked CRU emails.  There were numerous emails between Jones and other global-warming scientists discussing how important it was to not talk about the MWP.  They discussed using only temperature data after the MWP to avoid highlighting the extreme warming of the MWP.  When they did need to produce long term temperature data, they discussed picking and choosing which temperature proxy data to use so that they could tailor the data so that the MWP appeared ONLY as warm as modern temperatures, or even slightly cooler.

Rich Trzupek of Big Journalism explains how the Medieval Warm Period was buried:

Some proxy data indicates that the average planetary temperature was much higher than it is today, specifically during the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 1000 – 1400 A.D.). Indeed, the IPCC’s first report acknowledged that the Medieval Warm Period existed. (See the chart, taken from the first IPCC report). Since then, the IPCC, CRU, Al Gore and others have done their damnedest to “disappear” this event, chiefly by picking and choosing friendly proxy data that would make it go away.

If you want to see the emails for yourself, go to http://eastangliaemails.com/ and search on MWP or “Medieval Warming” and you will find plenty of emails where Phil Jones and others talk about how to keep the data and even the term Medieval Warming Period, out of the public’s view.

There are plenty of other revelations in the text of those emails.  While Jones yesterday said he may have ‘lost’ the data that was used to create the famous hockey stick graph, some of his emails tell a different story.  In this 2005 email between Phil Jones and Michael Mann (head of Penn State climate research department currently under investigation), Jones says that he will delete climate data before complying with the UK’s freedom of information law and releasing it:

Mike,

I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does !

The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.

We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

…

Phil

[emphasis added]

It will be interesting to see how much press coverage Jone’s admissions receive in the US.  Over the last two months, there have been verified reports of inaccuracies and failures to rely on data from peer-reviewed journals in the UN’s IPCC reports almost weekly, but they are barely being covered in the US press.

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An excerpt from the British Guardian via Watts Up With That?:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

…

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.

The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.

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They described a radical climate change in the artic area, with never before seen warm temperatures.

Here is the story from WattsUpWithThat:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Ok, before you man-made global warming skeptics jump out of a window, or worse, send a check to Al Gore to help him achieve his goal of being the first billionaire created from his world wide global warming panic, I should point out that the article in question was published in 1922.

If you head over to WattsUpWithThat they have links to the full story from 1922 which makes for interesting reading.

While I mostly posted this for its comedic value, it does reinforce that the earth continues to go through heating and cooling cycles (as it has for millions of years), which man both does not fully understand and has little impact on.

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One of the key elements of the complex global warming models touted by global warming proponents like NASA and the East Anglia CRU is the assumption that the oceans and plants (for a variety of reason, including deforestation) are losing their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and the man made or anthropogenic fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing.

The University of Bristol recently conducted a study where they researched the anthropogenic fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere and found that there has been no statistically significant change in the last 160 years.

Science Daily reported on the new study:

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

Watts Up With That provides analysis of the new study:

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO₂ than had been previously expected.

The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO₂ should start to diminish as CO₂ emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

You can also view the complete study at wattsupwiththat.com.

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It seems that cap and trade legislation is crucial to the survival of the planet — just not in an election year.

Democrats in congress are speaking out and sending a message to President Obama and Harry Reid that attempting to pass cap and trade legislation in an election year wouldn’t be smart.

It leads to the obvious question:  If cap and trade is such a great idea, why do the Democrats have to carefully time the passage of legislation to avoid a backlash on election day?

Politico reports on the message Democrats in Congress are sending to the President:

Fearful of a backlash against the costly healthcare overhaul and bracing for huge losses in the 2010 elections, Democratic leaders are urging the Obama White House to abandon efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year.

“I am communicating that in every way I know how,” Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., told Politico. She’s one of at least half a dozen Democrats who’ve told the White House or their own leaders that “it’s time to jettison the centerpiece of their party’s plan to curb global warming,” Politico reported.

…

“I’d just as soon see that set aside until we work through the economy,” said Nelson, D-Neb. “What we don’t want to do is have anything get in the way of working to resolve the problems with the economy.”

“Climate change in an election year has very poor prospects,” added Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. “I’ve told that to the leadership.”

“In an election year”?  Maybe Senator Conrad and other Democrats should consider ‘why’ it has ‘poor prospects’ in an election year.  If it was a good idea – a good bill — they wouldn’t have to worry about making sure there was enough time between the passage of the bill and their re-election campaigns.

As always, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air sums it up nicely:

The very last thing the American economy needs is a new set of massive taxes on energy production.  Energy costs are multipliers in the distribution chain, and price hikes would cause prices to escalate rapidly on almost every product for sale in the US.  We would have runaway inflation at the same time we would have either negative or anemic growth, hardly a combination that wins elections for the party in power. And that doesn’t take into account the regional electoral issues in states that rely on coal for their economies — states like Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Ohio, who have Democrats representing them in the Senate … for now.

The price escalation is what I have been trying to explain to people all year.  A cap and trade tax will not just make your heating, air comditioning and gas more expensive, but will go far beyond.  That Turkey you bought last week will cost more next year.  The potatoes that you mashed will cost more.  The computer you are reading this article on will cost more.  Every product you buy or service you use, will cost more.

If the cost of energy goes up, then it will cost more to manufacture products and more to ship those products.  Who pays?  President Obama and the rest of the gang of three (Reid and Pelosi), would want you to believe that it would come out of the profits of the evil corporations, but that simply isn’t true.  Consumers will pay for it in the form of across the board price hikes.

There have been some estimates that put the cost per household in the $4,000 a year range, when looking at both the increase in taxes that will be paid directly by American families and the increased costs of goods (due to the taxes that manufacturers, shippers, etc. will pay).

What Democrats like Senator Conrad are saying is that passing legislation that will cost American families $4,000 a year is a good thing, just not in an election year.  Some would argue that imposing legislation based on dodgy, possibly doctored, science that will cost American families thousands of dollars a year, is never a good idea.

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When you think about it, how ironic is it that Gore’s film was named “An Inconvenient Truth”?  While he accused global warming skeptics of ignoring inconvenient truths, what many of us have known, and now is documented in the Climategate emails, Gore, the IPCC, liberal media and other global warming activists have ignored any truth that was inconvenient or failed to support their ‘theory’ of global warming.

Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post documents how the Climategate gang doctored thousands of Wikipedia articles and barred thousands of people from correcting the misinformation published in Wikipedia:

The [Climategate] emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

…

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

The real question that should be asked is why the Senate, Congress, President Obama and the main stream media are completely ignoring these facts.  Even before Climategate, there was clear evidence that prominent climate researchers were selectively publishing data that would exaggerate modern warming trends.  Now, with the release of the Climategate emails, we know that the manipulation and fraudulent activities were far more insidious than originally thought.

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The Telegraph reports on the Russian announcement:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

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It is not clear what has prompted this, but it would seem that someone has filed a lawsuit and it could signal that what we have seen of Climategate to date could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks to Watts Up With That? for breaking this story:

December 14, 2009

DOE Litigation Hold Notice

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium on which the information exists. The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communication (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, PDAs (like Palm Pilots and Blackberries), internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All ESI should be preserved in its originally-created, or “native” format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Further, information that is reasonably accessible must nonetheless be preserved, because such sources will, at the very least, need to be identified and, under compelling circumstances, may need to be produced.

If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.

Any employee who has information covered by this Litigation Hold is requested to contact Madeline Screven, Paralegal, SRNS Office of General Council, 5-4634, for additional instructions.

Michael L. Wamsted
Associate General Council

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Today, while giving a speech in Copenhagen, Gore misrepresented the research of Dr. Wieslav Maslowski.  Wizbang might be right when they say, Al Gore is a big fat liar:

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

Once again it’s apparent that with Mr. Gore, the truth really is irrelevant, or you might say ‘ inconvenient.’  Time and time again, at best Mr. Gore is guilty of manipulating the facts (ironically, much like the researchers at the East Anglia CRU) and at worse he is guilty of intentionally making false statements.

Will the arctic ice be gone in five, ten or forty years?  Who knows?  The best chance we have of finding out is to get the politics and greed out of global warming, and start encouraging open and honest research, rather than only giving grants and publishing studies that support the theory of man-made global warming.

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“The deniers want to create a Siberian tree ring circus,” Markey said. “They want to take a small percentage of this entire study, a couple pages of it — 1,000 pages — and throw out the conclusion. … The real scandal will be is if we don’t solve this problem for coming generations.”

It would seem that rather than cracking jokes and calling those asking for answers, “deniers”, Congressman Markey is himself in denial.  As one of our elected representatives and chairman of the global warming committee, he should be the very person calling for an investigation into the possibility of wrong doing at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University.

The leaked emails and files have raised a lot of questions, but only for those truely seeking the truth.

A review of code files and emails, show what appears to be temperature data being changed to show an increase in temperatures that the data does not show.  The programmer that did the work used the term “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL
correction for decline!!” when describing a ‘fudge factor’ he applied to show an increase in temperature readings, because the raw data did NOT show an increase.

If manipulation of data (that the EPA used to justify its rulings to regulate CO2 output) wasn’t enough, the emails also show that Michael Mann (Penn State), Phil Jones, the head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and others worked to keep any researched that didn’t support their position out of peer reviewed journals.

Writing this I am becoming more convinced we should do something – even if this is just to state once and for all what we mean by the LIA and MWP. I think the skeptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes unchallenged.

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it
until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but
papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

Cheers

Phil [Jones]

And Michael Mann’s reply:

In fact, Mike McCracken first pointed out this article to me, and he and I have discussed
this a bit. I’ve cc’d Mike in on this as well, and I’ve included Peck too. I told Mike that
I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They’ve already achieved what they
wanted–the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but
the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the
community on the whole…

It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the
presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, …). My
guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he’s an odd individual, and I’m
not sure he isn’t himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their
side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision.
There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that
couldn’t get published in a reputable journal.

This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the
“peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a
legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also
need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently
sit on the editorial board…

What do others think?

mike [Mann]

Congressman Markey and other Democratic Congressmen and Senators keep saying the emails don’t change the fact that it is a scientific fact that the earth is warming and man is the prime cause.  They stick with Gore’s the “debate is over on global warming” line, and refuse to even acknowledge opposing viewpoints and research.

If the Democrats in Congress are really interested in the truth, rather than just furthering their political positions, they should be leading the cries for an independent review of the data that Congress, the IPCC and EPA have relied on.  If the data is innacurate due to intentional manipulation, or incomplete due to suppressing opposing views, then how can Congressmen like Markay KNOW that their conclusions and subsequent legislation are in the best interest of the citizens of this country.

Congressman Markey’s job is not to defend questionable ethics by the VERY scientists that Congress has relied on when writing and passing global warming legislation.

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The Washington Times reports on the tip of the Climategate iceberg:

Contrary to the whitewash job conducted by propagandists, there are 450 academic peer-reviewed journal articles questioning the importance of man-made global warming. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has collected more than 30,000 American scientists urging the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto Treaty, which pushes draconian measures to reduce carbon emissions. Much hay is made of 2,500 United Nations scientists who back Kyoto, but there are many more scientists with Ph.D.s among the 30,000 skeptics than there are among the oft-cited 2,500, most of whom are government bureaucrats without advanced degrees

You can see the 450 peer-reviewed journal articles at Popular Technology.net.

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While the early reports focused just on the easy to read emails that hinted at the manipulation of data, specifically trying to show that the Medieval Warming Period (roughly 900-1100 AD) was not as warm or warmer than modern times.

Here is part of an email exchange between Tim Osborn, Michael Mann (Penn State researcher) and Phil Jones (Jone ran the East Anglia CRU and has stepped down pending an independent review of leaked emails) in which they talk about removing some data points (proxy data), jokes about it being considered science and talks about the fact that it is only “likely” that the modern temperature rise they have used to scare people is actually warmer than that of the Medieval Warming Period.

Mike,

yes, you’re right: figs S4-S6 in our supplementary information do indeed show results leaving out individual, groups of two, and groups of three proxies, respectively. It’s attached.

I wouldn’t say we were immune to the issue — results are similar for these leave 1, 2 or 3 out cases, but they certainly are not as strong as the case with all 14 proxies. Certainly in figure S6, there are some cases with 3 omitted (i.e. some sets of 11) where modern results are comparable with intermittent periods between 800 and 1100. Plus there is the additional uncertainty, discussed on the final page of the supplementary information, associated with linking the proxy records to real temperatures (remember we have no formal calibration, we’re just counting proxies — I’m still amazed that Science agreed to publish something where the main analysis only involves counting from 1 to 14!

).

But this is fine, since the IPCC AR4 and other assessments are not saying the evidence is 100% conclusive (or even 90% conclusive) but just “likely” that modern is warmer than MWP.

In another email, Michael Mann appears to share data with a colleague that doesn’t show the temperature rise they want, and instructs him to not share this “dirty laundry” with anyone else without Mann’s permission:

The incremental changes are modest after 1600–its pretty clear that key predictors drop out before AD 1600, hence the redness of the residuals, and the notably larger uncertainties farther back… You only want to look at the first column (year) and second column (residual) of the files. I can’t even remember what the other columns are!

Let me know if that helps. Thanks,

mike

p.s. I know I probably don’t need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of “dirty laundry” one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things…

Now that more time has passed, programmers in the private sector and universities have begun to review leaked files that contain actual code.  What they have found is that in some cases the code contains correction or ‘fudge’ factors to artificially increase the output, which in this case is temperature readings.

If you look at JUST the correction figures and graph them, it actually forms a hockey stick, very representative of Jone’s ‘hockey stick’ temperature graph that created the global panic about global warming.

Marc Sheppard of the American Thinker explains in detail how the temperature data was manipulated to achieve the result they wanted.

In two other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the “correction” is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the “adjustment” routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he or she wasn’t kidding. Now IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I’m familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

Here’s the “fudge factor” (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75         ; fudge factor

These two lines of code establish a twenty-element array (yrloc) comprising the year 1400 (base year, but not sure why needed here) and nineteen years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding “fudge factor” (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960), but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU’s “divergence problem” also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

There appears to be a clear manipulation of data and attempt to suppress any data or research that doesn’t support man-made global warming.  I encourage you to read Sheppard’s full (link above) and to read through the raw emails yourself, since other than some internet sites and Foxnews there is very little coverage of what they contain.

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To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. But the noise machine built by the climate deniers often seizes on what they can blow out of proportion, so they’ve thought this is a bigger deal than it is.

He went on to twice more refer to the emails as being over 10 years old:

So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

The fact is that the most recent East Anglia email was mid November and there are hundreds of emails within the last few months or years.   You can view the emails yourself via the searchable database at http://eastangliaemails.com/

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This past weekend, the networks finally gave minimal coverage, after news agencies around the world reported on the ‘lack’ of reporting by the US news agencies.

ABC refused to report ANY of the content of the leaked emails, and instead stated that “The science is solid, according to a vast majority of researchers, with hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, and rising sea level providing the proof.”

NBC in reports over the weekend stated that the scandal may end up “giving politicians from coal and oil-producing states another reason to delay taking action to reduce emissions”  and stated “the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change.”

Once again, the network executives have allowed their news departments to shape the news to fit their political views, rather than simply reporting it.

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The global warming “the debate is over” line is one of the best examples of the liberal’s belief that if you say something often enough, it will become a fact.  The sad thing is that with the help of the liberal media they have been very successful.

While temperatures haven’t risen in 11 years, and the ‘scientist’ in East Anglia are calling it a travesty, and trying to keep any mention of the Medieval Warming Period (much warmer than today) from all literature and media coverage, we should be looking up.

As Dean Grubbs points out the deep solar minimum is not getting enough attention:

One environmental subject that is going relatively unnoticed is the deepening Solar Minimum.  The number of sunspotless days has continued to expand over the past three years despite the solar cycle 24 to have been expected to have revved up by now.  In 2008 73% of days featured o sunspots.  2009 stands at 76% and still growing. This makes 2009 second only to 1913 in terms of spotless days.  The trough of Solar Cycle 23 and 24 has reached 768 days which is 58% longer than the average of 485 long term average.

So… why should we be concerned?  A long term quiet sun is well correlated with cold,  A relatively dull solar cycle through the 1960′s ultimately led to Ice Age fears in the late 1970′s.  What can happen if Solar Cycle 24 is a dud?  Do we know enough about the sun to be assured that IF 1960-1970′s style cooling does take place that Cycle 25 will come to our rescue with warming irradiance?

The earth has been going through warming and cooling cycles for billions of years, and the research that Nasa and East Anglia have successfully buried shows that CO2 follows, rather than precedes warming temperatures.

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