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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

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

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

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

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

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 — he agreed with its conclusion. He was furious only that the study was publicized. By revealing the truth about Spain’s increasingly mythologized “green jobs” and renewable energy experience, the revealed study threatened the prospects for Spain’s companies to be bailed out by the U.S. repeating these mistakes.

Incidentally, this became a common refrain. After the Spanish study embarrassed the White House, prompting substantial media attention and even questioning at a press conference, Obama swapped out Denmark for Spain for later references to an enacted “green jobs” program.

Soon, Denmark produced a study (“Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark“) through the think-tank CEPOS. This paper also revealed tremendous costs, and that Obama’s claim about Denmark’s “renewables” experience was also steeped in mythology.

The response from windmill advocates in Denmark was similar: such studies threaten Danish industry by reducing the chances that the U.S. will serve as the hoped-for massive new market to make inefficient energy sources profitable for their foreign manufacturers (Danish Radio TV News, Thursday, February 25, 2010).

Back in the U.S., the American Wind Energy Association — the lobby for “Big Wind” in Washington, D.C., which includes a few Spanish wind giants — also attacked the publication of the Spanish paper.

Soon, the Obama administration published a five-page talking points memo assailing the economic assessment — written by two young, non-economist, pro-wind activists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.

There is much, much more to this Horner’s article.  Read the whole thing here.

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. 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

Quadrant Online previously reported that the ABC had invited Bob Carter to contribute to an online debate on The Drum following their publication of a series of five articles by Clive Hamilton.

Left internet newsletters and blog sites were outraged that sceptics were to be allowed to comment on their ABC.

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.

James Hansen is visiting Australia. We can only guess at the pressures which have been exerted on the ABC to close down criticism of Hansen – and the cowardice which saw them conform. So much for Australia’s brave freedom fighters of the press.

Read the essay the Left tried to ban, hear a voice the Left wants to silence:

“Lysenkoism and James Hansen” by Bob Carter here

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.

We don’t believe in warming, but we can certainly get behind this trend in panties.