• “The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot” - Washington Post story published Nov. 2, 1922
• Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” – New York Times, March 27, 1933
• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . . .” – Life magazine, January 1970
• “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” – Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day, 1970
• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, “the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” – Newsweek magazine, Jan. 26, 1970

Do our readers have any others you know of, not in Kirk’s article?

Almost 100 people rallied on Penn State’s University Park Campus Friday. Groups for an against were there. For complete coverage this go to WJACTV.com, where there is also a video of a TV report WJAC did.

Leading the local Young Americans for Freedom group requesting an external investigation, Samuel Settle told WJAC-TV Friday that he doubts the committee of peers could be unbiased.

“For the sake of the university, for the sake of his reputation, for the sake of our reputations as students and community members, we need to come out and make it clear to the university that this is not what we consider acceptable,” said Settle. “We ask; we demand an external investigation of this.”

Bette Jackson believes that an independent probe into academic misconduct allegations is necessary.

“I know if I were Dr. Mann, I would want impartial people to take a thorough look at my career and make sure that there were no blemishes on it,” said Jackson.

Dozens of others at today’s rally said the outcry from certain groups is nothing more than a distraction, including Peter Buckland.

“This going after Michael Mann is really just kind of this way of manufacturing a controversy which is meant to fuel denial of climate change,” said Buckland. “It is probably the greatest challenge to civilization that human beings have ever faced.”

National Wildlife Federation member Ed Perry told WJAC-TV Friday that the international coverage on the story is damaging Mann’s professional reputation.

Source: WJACTV.com

First, they address the little problem of eight billion pounds of investments that are counting on global warming and cap-and-trade:

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

And then on to the biased reporting. Veteran journalist and former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons recently said:

“The corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’ when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t. It is, in effect, BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC’s environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard.

“I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue.”

The Daily Express continues:

Official BBC editorial policy governing how its correspondents should cover global warming was revealed after a member of the public wrote in: “I have heard reports that the BBC has decided not to broadcast any news or reports which disprove, disagree, or cast doubt on global warming theory. Could you provide some form of justification for this?”

In a reply dated October 26 last year, Stephanie Harris, Head of Accountability at BBC News, said: “BBC News takes the view that our reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.”

She went on to quote from a BBC-commissioned report published in June 2007, which said: “There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made. The weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to opponents of the consensus.”

Calibrated reporting? Now that’s a new term to add to the lexicon of media bias.

The Royal Society is the prime scientific advisor to Her Majesty’s Government. Through its Science Policy Centre, the Society acts as an advisor to the European Commission and the United Nations on matters of science. But when we search the esteemed Society’s website for their latest pronouncements on the great global warming debate, they do no more than regurgitate the same old tired lies and shameful propaganda in its publication, Facts and fictions about climate change.

Shockingly the prime advisers to the British government draw on superseded and outdated science almost a decade old. Where are the references you’d expect to see from the IPCC’s last Report of 2007? Is the Royal Society in a time warp, blind to where the scientific debate now is, or are they tacitly surrendering to the inevitable skeptic victory?

We have to report that the Royal Society, that once great pillar of Britain’s scientific pre-eminence in the world has abandoned all pretense of furthering the intellectual argument for their once-beloved theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The fact that the Royal Society can find not a single nugget from the more recent 2007 IPCC Fourth Report that won the UN a Nobel Prize, betrays the entire alarmist cause as being weak and backward looking.

In a weak and tepid publication, this once strident alarmist scientific body wastes 9,155 words, 657 paragraphs and 19 pages performing little more than a copy and paste job of the outdated and superceded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report of 2001.

The first paragraph starts feebly and then is followed by capitulating dross,

“It has become fashionable in some parts of the UK media to portray the scientific evidence that has been collected about climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as an exaggeration.”

Just when the global warmers of the green lobby desperately need some heavyweight science for back up, this once revered institution is found seriously wanting. The Royal Society can muster not one single rebuttal. There are just no new bullets to fire; nothing is left in their armory. By not even waving as much as a paltry popgun from the most recent IPCC Report, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, and relying almost exclusively on the 2001 IPCC Third Report, we are left in no doubt that the intellectually bankrupt, battered, and bedraggled best of British warmest brains are beaten.

All in a rush we’ve seen victory upon victory for challengers to AGW. Since the East Anglia CRU emails broke free and introduced climategate to the world, we’ve hadwin after win over the warmers. But, this last week we’ve seen the momentum take on an acceleration I don’t think anyone expected.

We had the Glaciergate u-turn whereby the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to make a humiliating admission that its “evidence” for Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 was an off the cuff speculation rather than posited in genuine scientific research.

We then saw the truly shocking U.S. Senate election victory for Republican candidate, AGW skeptic Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-MA) who became the 41st and blocking vote against any U.S. climate cap and trade bill.

The UN then conceded it had dropped the January 31, 2010 deadline by which time all countries were expected to officially state their emission reduction targets accompanied.

But as we reported on yesterday, the clincher for the Royal Society’s abject surrender was the announcement from the UK’s Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee (STC) that it intends to ask very tough questions of British climatologists in its upcoming investigation into Climategate what’s been discovered in over 1,000 embarrassing emails, plus other files, extracted from the UK’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Now seeing the writing on the wall, we can be forgiven for thinking that those scientific generals at the headquarters of British global warming science have capitulated just in the nick of time leaving the politicians alone to defend their own crazy cause.

The STC’s probe will begin with an oral evidence session in March 2010. That very fine writer, James Delingpole has, in his customary fashion, been quick to note:

“This is very heartening news for taxpayers, rationalists, and everyone who believes in the integrity of the scientific process. More encouraging still is Bishop Hill’s suggestion that it might be used by climate realists in the US government to launch a pincer movement against the eco fascists in the Obama administration.”

There is no conceivable wriggle room out of those three highly probative questions that will be asked of climate science (1.) what are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research? (2.) Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate? And, (3.) How independent are the other two international data sets? That must surely have been the final straw to signal the Royal Society’s surrender.

Frank answers will no doubt heap huge disgrace on those who run the world’s oldest and proudest scientific society. For they have shamelessly thrown their hats into the warmist ring for so long and left them there even when the junk science was exposed as flim-flam. We can only hope there will soon be a clear out from that crumbling edifice and new blood will take their cue in earnest from the STC and endeavour to rebuild Britain’s scientific integrity. The Royal Society must explicitly come out and urge all climate scientists to speak up and show transparency, integrity and commitment to the scientific method and ensure hard lessons are learned from Climategate.

We ask the Royal Society to co-operate fully with the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and expose the snake oil salesmen of the IPCC who shamelessly and fraudulently promoted the theory of man made global warming. This should be taken as the first step towards developing a new and more transparent methodology in the way climate science is directed and funded by governments.

The Science and Technology invites written submissions from interested parties on any of the issues by noon on Wednesday 27 January.

Here’s how the Guardian explains it:

The UN has dropped the 31 January deadline by which time all countries were expected to officially state their emission reduction targets or list the actions they planned to take to counter climate change.

Yvo de Boer, UN climate change chief, today changed the original date set at last month’s fractious Copenhagen climate summit, saying that it was now a “soft” deadline, which countries could sign up to when they chose. “I do not expect everyone to meet the deadline. Countries are not being asked if they want to adhere… but to indicate if they want to be associated [with the Copenhagen accord].

“I see the accord as a living document that tracks actions that countries want to take,” he told journalists in Bonn.

“It’s a soft deadline. Countries are not being asked to sign the accord to take on legally binding targets, only to indicate their intention,” he said.

The deadline was intended to be the first test of the “Copenhagen accord”, the weak, three-page document that emerged at the end of the summit, and which fell far short of original expectations. It seeks to bind all countries to a goal of limiting warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial times and proposes that $100bn a year be provided for poor countries to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change after 2020.

But with just 10 days to go, only 20 countries out of 192 have signed up, with many clearly unready or unwilling to put their name to the document. Countries which have signed so far include India, Russia, Mexico, Australia, France and Norway.

Complete story: Guardian

Is this award intended to illustrate the the high-end products the greens would create if they could control manufacturing?

Damn! It’s too bad we’d only been publishing for a month last year, because we obviously weren’t even considered worthy contenders for the first annual Christopher Booker prize. If you haven’t heard, George Monbiot, who writes a blog at the Guardian, just awarded the 2009 prize to John Tomlinson, “the Michigan Mauler,” for his supposed vast lies about climate change. The criteria was to give the prize “to whoever in my opinion and assisted by climate scientists and specialists manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change.”

What’s the prize?

“The winner will receive this stylish trophy, lovingly fashioned by master craftsmen in mid-Wales, which, believe it or not, is made entirely of recycled materials!

Even more exciting is the super soaraway holiday of a lifetime (possibly the final holiday of a lifetime) which the winner will be encouraged to take, and which the Guardian is assisting with a fabulous THREE bars of Kendal mint cake. The intention is to help persuade the lucky recipient to take a one-way solo kayak trip to the north pole, to see for him or herself the full extent of the Arctic ice melt.”

And what was Tomlinson’s offending piece that earned him this recognition? An article he wrote “with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal.” You can read Monbiot’s “fact-checking” of each and every one of these 38 points. Read it and please feel free to debunk Monbiot’s debunking here in the comments.

Question for the 2010 contest: is George Monbiot’s allowed to be a contender as well?

Today reader Ronald Kitching made a comment that includes a link to an easy-to-read presentation that as he says is, “an easily understood presentation by Hans Schreuder. Please note that Mr. Schreuder is a member of Mensa. He is a genuine scientist and his logical arguments are irrefutable. A reasonably well educated person of 16 to 17 years of age could understand this presentation.”

It’s titled “Climate Change – So What” and you can download the PDF here, download the Powerpoint presentation here or go directly to its home at nothingtodowithco2.com.

The United States may be experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades, but things continue to heat up in the Southern Hemisphere. Science has obtained exclusive data from NASA that indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The find adds to multiple lines of evidence showing that the 2000s were the warmest decade in the modern instrumental record.

Roger Pielke, Sr. of Climate Science disagrees. He says their claim fails the reality check when even a cursory examination of the data (the ”multiple lines of evidence“) is made. Hop over to Roger’s site and take a read and check out his temperature anomaly maps.

The stand has infuriated green lobbyists desperate for some good news to resuscitate their cause from what appears to be fatal wounds inflicted by the Climategate scandal and the political disaster of the Copenhagen Summit. However, Australian skeptics are poised to stab again at the heart of the floundering green Goliath with evidence from none other than the Australian Meteorological Magazine (AMM), the country’s pre-eminent climate publication that wholly substantiates CSIRO’s neutral stance on this issue.

While the battle still rages among politicians over EPA (cap and trade) in the Australian Parliament, skeptic analysts have been perusing the handbook of Aussie climatologists, the Australian Meteorological Magazine’s publication and have found ‘Updating Australia’s high-quality annual temperature dataset [AMM; 53 (2004) 75-93]. This peer-reviewed paper proves that Australian climate scientists themselves cannot be certain about the facts on climate change in their nation. The paper vindicates the stand of CSIRO by admitting that climatologists plugged numerous gaps in the Australian temperature data records by using subjective methods rather than facts. Moreover, the report admits they are finding fewer reliable records and have nothing older than one hundred years to indicate any climate change trend. The magazine goes on to say:

“Unfortunately sixteen of the original records were found to have closed with no potential candidate station available to continue the record. Also, due to a decline or reassessment of data quality, 81 stations were removed from the dataset.” (Press et al. 1996).

One of CSIRO’s co-authors, hydrologist David Post, told The Canberra Times there was ”no evidence” linking drought to climate change in eastern Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin.

”At this stage, we’d prefer to say we’re talking about natural variability. The science is not sufficiently advanced to say its climate change, one way or the other. The jury is still out on that,” Dr Post said. Thus confirming what is known to be the case by the current generation of Australian scientists and what Australian Meteorological Magazine was forced to concede. AMM said, “Some records contain many years in which annual mean values were estimated. Often this amounted to more than twenty contiguous years of estimated data.” Thus it would appear to be utter folly, without evidence, to blame human carbon dioxide emissions for the decade-long Tasmanian drought despite water availability in northern Tasmania’s premier wine growing region having dropped by 24 per cent.

Just like climatologists at the UK’s Climatic Research Unit, at the University of East Anglia, their Australian warmist counterparts have also had to admit that they “fudged” the data to build their case for global warming. Skeptics are denouncing the ‘trick’ known as “homogenisation” whereby climate scientists, not in possession of the facts, resort to guesswork. AMM admit that,“The decision of whether or not to correct for a potential inhomogeneity is often a subjective one.”

But Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, has ignored such admissions from climate experts and immediately gone on the offensive. He has accused CSIRO of ”caving in to political pressure” to soften its stance on climate change in the lead-up to this year’s federal election. He points out that more than 80 per cent of Tasmania’s river catchments have been affected by drought, with the South Esk the island’s longest river and source of water for beer production most at risk.

”We should ask why CSIRO is prepared to turn an unaccountable blind eye to recent climate trends in Tasmania. This undercurrent of skepticism would seem to suggest the report has been politicised,” Senator Brown said.

Climate skeptics have long accused environmental alarmists of trumping up natural climate variation to attribute a man made influence. Skeptics will say that Mr. Brown may be guilty in this case or is perhaps unaware of the Australian Met. Office conclusions:

“The subjectivity inherently involved in the homogeneity process means that two different adjustment schemes will not necessarily result in the same homogeneity adjustments being calculated for individual records.” In other words the science that allegedly ‘proves’ man made global warming is little more than ‘GIGO’ (‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’) (source).

CSIRO’s critics will be well advised to look again at Australian climatologists’ admissions. In no way can it be inferred from the data that the science of man made global warming is “settled” in this vast area of the globe.

The famous Doomsday Clock, which illustrates how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction, has been fixed at five minutes to midnight since 2007. It will be reset again on January 14 at 3:00PM GMT (10:00AM EST). You can watch it live at TurnBackTheClock.org.

What just are the influencing factors this time around? International negotiations on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, expansion of civilian nuclear power, the possibilities of nuclear terrorism, and…

…wait for it…wait for it…

climate change! Of course.

And in the Daily Mail article that tipped us off about this event, the author even reserved the very last paragraph for what he must consider worthy of a closing statement on this tale of impending doom:

Just last month environmentalists criticised the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, after leaders failed to reach any real consensus.

The obvious biggest factor–climate change. Not Iran, loose nukes, Islamofacism.

We feel for the Doomsday Clock committee. On the one hand, the whole Climate Change thing is falling apart, and they have a sense of duty to warn the planet by moving the minute hand up closer to midnight; but on the other hand, America now has The Greatest President in the History of the World who has promised to bring peace and brotherhood to all–certainly worthy of setting the clock back many minutes. What to do, what to do?