We credit the great Andrew Bolt down under for putting together these two quotes from ABC science presenter Robyn Williams.  Hilarious.

Robyn Williams in 2007:

Andrew Bolt: I’m telling you, there’s a lot of fear out there. So what I do is, when I see an outlandish claim being made…so Tim Flannery suggesting rising seas this next century eight stories high, Professor Mike Archer, dean of engineering at the University of NSW…

Robyn Williams: Dean of science.

Andrew Bolt: Dean of science…suggesting rising seas this next century of up to 100 metres, or Al Gore six metres. When I see things like that I know these are false. You mentioned the IPCC report; that suggests, at worst on best scenarios, 59 centimetres.

Robyn Williams: Well, whether you take the surge or whether you take the actual average rise are different things.

Andrew Bolt: I ask you, Robyn, 100 metres in the next century…do you really think that?

Robyn Williams: It is possible, yes.

Robyn Williams in 2010:

The issue has been bombarded with misinformation… And after Climategate – too much mea culpa. It’s time for (scientists) to get their skates on. To be aggressive in the cause of truth.

Thanks to:  Andrew Bolt

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What are the lessons of Climategate? More honesty and transparency in science? Not according to attorney Alan Nelson in the Guardian UK today.  To him, the lesson is how not to get caught next time.

So how do universities and academics ensure that their correspondence does not become the “smoking gun” that turns a simple FoI request into an international scandal?

It is not inconceivable that where a university is working on some research that has a commercial sponsor, pressure could be exerted on researchers to reach a certain conclusion, or to portray the results in a way that would be helpful to the sponsor. Where that is the case, do you really want email correspondence going on record about the way in which the results are portrayed? Careful consideration needs to be given to the tone of any email exchange, so the university's position is clear. The best advice is: think twice before you hit the send button.

Remember, informal email discussions that you have with a close colleague are no longer private and could be disclosed in the future. Will the possibly uninformed reader who asked for the emails be aware of the context in which they were written? Do you really want people to know the nicknames you have given to some of your collaborators?

For sensitive information that you would not want in the public domain, rather than putting it in email or in a document, it may be better to discuss it face-to-face or on the phone.

Careful consideration should also be given to how long emails are saved and when they are deleted. In some fields of work, there will be regulatory reasons for keeping emails (clinical work, for example) but do they all need to be retained and archived? A periodic review should be performed to ensure that, wherever possible and lawful, emails that could be that smoking gun are deleted.

When making handwritten notes or comments on documents, staff need to be aware that those scribbles could enter the public domain in response to a FoI request. Do you really want someone to see your exclamations of “Idiot!!!” or “Rubbish!!!” on a note? Probably not, so take care – and shred your notes once they have served their useful purpose. Imagine your embarrassment when comments about how doddery your head of department is, or how pompous your vice-chancellor is, or how adorable he or she is, come out in the open.

Another thing to consider is the evolution of a document from first draft to final agreed version. No doubt, along the way there will have been discussions that may mean the final version is very different from the first draft. Is it helpful to retain every draft and set of comments? What message do they give to the uninformed reader with a particular agenda?

Ah, those brilliant lawyers, always looking out for our best interest.

Full story: The Guardian

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Blogger TonyN at Harmless Sky has written up something I think you all should go take a look at. He’s done a very interesting analysis of the latest IPPC Assessment Report and has come up with some important questions, and invites others to help him answer them. It’s not your usual science debunking piece.

This paragraph describes the basis of his investigation:

The effect on the IPCC’s reputation, and that of its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has been devastating, but at every stage of this scandal we have been assured that the core science underpinning concern about anthropogenic climate change has remained unscathed. The IPCC and its supporters have been able to undertake this damage limitation exercise because attention so far has focused on only one of the three sections of the most recent assessment report: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. This deals with the symptoms and perceived consequences of climate change. The core scientific evidence that the climate is changing and that human influence is playing a part in this is contained in another section of the report, Working Group I: Climate Change 2007: the Physical Basis. But can we be confident that the same problems of sloppy authorship and exaggeration do not extend to this part of the IPCC’s assessment too?

The article goes on to look at how the IPCC authors assign words like “likely,” “very likely,” “extremely likely” and so on, to probabilities, in percentage ranges, of the likelihood of certain events occurring. It’s fascinating. And it begs comparison to how climate scientists are characterizing the chances of catastrophic events.

He introduces some common sense questions:

The conclusion that the IPCC draws from this is that, although there is a significant level of uncertainty as to whether the frequency of heat waves has increased during the last half century, and there is even more uncertainty as to whether, if the frequency has in fact increased, this can be attributed to human influence, a prediction can be made that heatwaves will increase during the next ninety years as a result of anthropogenic global warming. The ‘likelihood’ assigned to this is of 90-94%. Therefore according to the IPCC, confidence in the prediction is higher than confidence in either the observations or the hypothesis that the prediction is based on.

This makes no sense to me, but then I am not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist. It would be very interesting to hear the views of researchers from other disciplines, not on the merits of the scientific evidence, but as to whether this table does in fact defy logic.

This could be a simple, but very important analysis of the IPPC Report, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts on it. And so is the author.

Read the complete article: Harmless Sky

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USA Today reports that US schools are finally calling for both sides of global warming to be taught, because it is after all, a theory — not a fact:

The teaching of climate change is under attack in some U.S. public schools. This week, South Dakota’s Legislature passed a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming.”

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life,” says the resolution, which passed with mostly GOP votes. It also says global warming is “a scientific theory rather than a proven fact” and a variety of “astrological” and other “dynamics” affect weather.

That last paragraph is really going to send alarmists over the edge.

Source: USA Today

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Here’s another bit of EU-sponsored propaganda, starring Mads Mikkelsen (the guy with the bleeding eye in Casino Royale, remember?).

For more gut-wrenching crap, visit FightClimateChange.eu.

Oh, and Mads, didn’t your mother tell you not to play with matches? Europe is so hot and dry now, you’ll start a fire.

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Europeans have long traded excessive taxation for being taken care of by the government.  But I have a feeling that they too, like us Americans, are at a tipping point.  Damn the growing evidence that climate science hasn’t been so scientific, the EU is about to get hit with their first “federal” tax under the pretext of saving the planet for our children.

In a flexing of its federal muscle the European Union (EU) is reported as drawing up plans for its first direct tax with proposals expected to be announced next month that will provide the United States of Europe with its first funding derived from direct taxation.

Although many people are ignorant of the fact the EU has appointed a “commissioner for taxation” who is said to be planning a “minimum rate of tax on carbon” to be imposed across the federal union.

How will the citizens of the EU be taxed?

“We should have a mechanism which would serve to exploit the possibility, in a progressive way, to lead to direct funding of the EU”.

The proposed federal tax will lead directly to rises in petrol and energy bills and indirectly to price increases relating to the production and distribution of goods.

The think-tank Open Europe has calculated, on the basis of the shelved 2005 proposal, that based on a £9 levy on a tonne of CO2, that the cost of the new tax to British businesses and consumers would be at least £3 billion.

And what do the member nations of the EU think about this?  We don’t know about the rest, but France and Sweden are are enthusiastic supporters of an EU carbon tax “as a part of Europe’s fight against climate change.”

I have a feeling that European citizens are becoming less “progressive” than their governments, and are not ready to join the New Green Order.  How do you say Tea Party in Eurospeak?

Source:  The British National Party blog

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Warmers talk incessantly, and catastrophically, about the need to reduce greenhouse gases. If the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rise, so does the temperature, and soon enough we will all die, they say. But what would happen if the reverse were to occur? What if we were too successful at reducing greenhouse gases?  Can we actually calculate the correct amount by which to reduce, and what would happen to temperatures? Would a 1% reduction in CO2, for example, reduce temperatures by 1%.

No. Too much of a reduction could actually be quite — to use their the warmers second favorite word (the first is “settled”) — catastrophic.

David Archibald, writing for Watts Up With That today, tells us that the relationship isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic:

The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With (Read more...)

Read the full story: Watts Up With That?

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Britain is facing many problems, not the least of which is meeting its energy needs in the coming years. Christopher Booker of the Telegraph UK looks at Britain’s nonsensical energy policy. He questions how his country will be able to avert its looming shortage of energy, with 40% of their generating capacity set to disappear in the coming years as they close 14 major nuclear and coal-fired power stations.

He finds no real answers in the “four pillars” of the UK’s energy policy:

The first is that electricity companies should not be allowed to replace those coal-fired power stations which help provide us with 35 per cent of our electricity unless new ones are fitted with a system to pipe off their CO2 emissions and bury them under the North Sea. The Government has allocated some £4 billion for four new plants to pioneer this unproven technology (to be paid for by all of us through electricity bills), but the Tories say that no new plants should be permitted unless carbon capture is already in place.

The Tories’ second headline policy is what they call a “decentralised energy revolution”, subsidising millions of homeowners, firms, schools and hospitals to cover their roofs with solar panels and mini wind turbines. Again, the Government has already got on to this one with its new “feed-in tariff” scheme, appropriately due to start on All Fools’ Day. This will pay 34.5p to the owners of mini-turbines for each kilowatt hour (kWh) of power they feed into the grid, and 41p per kWh for electricity from photovoltaic panels. Even The Guardian’s green crusader, George Monbiot, has denounced this as a scandal, which he estimates will add £8.6 billion to our electricity bills over 20 years.

…the third pillar of their energy policy, which is to support the Government’s plan to see £100 billion spent on 10,000 giant wind turbines, in a further desperate bid to meet the EU’s requirement that, within 10 years, 32 per cent of our electricity must come from renewables. (Last Thursday, our 2,900 existing turbines met just 0.1 per cent of demand, or 1,000th of the electricity we were all using.) Again, even if it were worth doing, there is not the faintest chance that we could install three giant offshore and onshore turbines up to 650 feet high, each costing up to £4 million or more (and almost all produced and installed by foreign-owned companies), every day between now and 2020.

And what is the fourth pillar of the Tories’ energy policy? They want every home in the country to be fitted, at a cost of a further £10 billion, with “smart meters”, to allow for “better management of supply and demand”. Indeed, that is precisely the point about smart meters. They not only allow consumers to monitor their own electricity usage, they also allow electricity companies to “manage supply”, by cutting off the power when not enough is available to the grid.

It sounds like a plan dreamed up by some politically correct schoolchildren. You know, like those we have in the US congress across the pond.

Full story: Telegraph UK

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Chris Horner at Pajamas Media by Chris Horner writes on out an FOIA request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to help cover up two economic studies pointing to the failure of European wind energy programs.

As candidate and president, on eight separate occasions Barack Obama instructed Americans to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain [and] Germany” if they wanted to know what successful “green jobs” policies look like, and if they wanted to know what we should expect here in the U.S. from his agenda.

Some European economists took a look. In March, a research team from Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University produced a detailed, substantive, heavily sourced, two-method paper: “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.” The paper concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program was an economic failure, in fact costing Spain many jobs.

The president of Spain’s renewable energy association — along with a Communist Party affiliated trade federation — decried the paper’s lead author as being unpatriotic.

The former wrote in Spain’s leading paper, El Mundo, slamming the research paper. However, he did not critique the paper itself (Read more...)

Read the full story: The SPPI Blog

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From a Columbia University press release, here’s a case where the early speculation of science was wrong. Originally global warming was blamed, but it turns out to be El Niño helping along an already established pathogen.

El Niño and a pathogen killed Costa Rican toad, study finds

Challenges evidence that global warming was the cause

The Monteverde golden  toad disappeared from Costa Rica Pacific coastal forest in the late  1980s

The Monteverde golden toad disappeared from Costa Rica Pacific coastal forest in the late 1980s. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Scientists broadly agree that global warming may threaten the survival of many plant and animal species; but global warming did not kill the Monteverde golden toad, an often cited example of climate-triggered extinction, says a new study.  The toad vanished from Costa Rica’s Pacific coastal-mountain cloud forest in the late 1980s, the apparent victim of a pathogen outbreak that has wiped out dozens of other amphibians in the Americas. Many researchers have linked outbreaks of the deadly chytrid fungus to climate change, but the new study asserts that the weather patterns, at Monteverde at least, were not out of the ordinary.

Continue reading at Watts Up With That

Read the full story: Watts Up With That?

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The anti-James Hansen article ABC tried to ban

March 7, 2010

Professor Carter submitted his article, on James Hansen and the Hansenism cult, and the ABC has rejected his article – which Quadrant Online is privileged to publish.

3 comments Read the full article →

We like where global warming is taking us

March 7, 2010

I found this over at Red Ice Creations. Don’t know if they or someone else gets credit for is creation, but congrats to whomever–it’s brilliant.

6 comments Read the full article →

Spread the word through general interest websites

March 7, 2010

Climategate is going general interest, and more and more people are being exposed to the lies of the warmers; most of these readers would have never otherwise heard a skeptical word.

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Climategate II: The coverup!

March 6, 2010

Would you believe Climategate II is here? More emails have been disclosed, but this time they are from a National Academies of Science listserv.

8 comments Read the full article →

James Cameron declares war on Climate Change, a threat as severe as that of WWII

March 6, 2010

The “greatest generation” aren’t going to be too happy to hear that Avatar director James Cameron considers himself and other greens, warriors who are facing down a threat as severe as our World War II veterans did against Germany and Japan.

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The Weekly Standard weighs in on Climategate,
and wins the prize for Best Al Gore Cover

March 6, 2010

I was thrilled to see the global warming busting article, “In Denial” online at The Weekly Standard website. And then I thought I’d take a look at where it was in the print version of the magazine. That’s when I saw it was the cover story, accompanied by the best damn illustration mocking Al Gore I think I’ve ever seen. It’s a beauty!

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Al Gore spotted trying to escape blowback from his New York Times Op-Ed lies

March 6, 2010

Al Gore spotted trying to escape blowback from his New York Times Op-Ed lies

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Swedegate: Climate professor’s lies exposed By Swedish meteorologists

March 6, 2010

Disgraced Professor Phil Jones of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and his boss, Professor Edward Acton, head of the University of East Anglia appear to have been exposed in a blatant attempt to pervert justice. The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) has released evidence that proves Jones lied to Parliament during his testimony last week on the Climategate scandal.

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Way to go James: Warmists overwhelmed by fear, panic and deranged hatred as their ’science’ collapses

March 5, 2010

My God, we love James Delingpole:
Warmists overwhelmed by fear, panic and deranged hatred as their ’science’ collapses

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Snowball Earth!

March 5, 2010

Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected of occurring around that time.

0 comments Read the full article →