…and what the Gray Lady did.  Sort of.  Some acute observing at Spector Vision:
All the climate change news fit to print?

…

Flipping to the New York Times, I read about a report issued this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency — which comes as news to me. In the on-line version of the New York Times, a link is provided to the actual report, which went largely unreported in our media.

Like the British investigation, it appears that the Dutch environmental agency “found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change.” However, the Dutch agency also concluded:

“the summaries in the IPCC Working Group II Report put an emphasis on projections of the more serious, negative impacts of climate change. This selection was an obvious choice, and also had been approved by the governments that constitute the IPCC. However, this meant that the less severe impacts and any positive effects did not make it into the summaries for policymakers, which made the overall tenor of the summaries more negative than that of the underlying chapters. For example, the possibly positive consequences for forestry in North Asia are named in one of the chapters, but they are not named in the summaries.

In addition, the investigated 32 summary conclusions on regional impacts do not mention other factors that play an important role, such as the influence of population growth on water shortages. The PBL recommends to present a broader representation of projected developments in the summaries for policy makers in the Fifth Assessment Reports in 2013 and 2014.”

The climate-gate e-mails had only a marginal influence at the Copenhagen conference: of the participating governments, only Saudi Arabia sought to give the ‘scandal’ any credence. The report of the Dutch agency, on the other hand, is something that all governments will have to mull over as they consider their next steps on the issue of climate change.

It’s snowing in Alberta in May. Which, of course, proves global warming is happening. Photo: Larry Wong/Canwest News Service

According to the Ottawa Citizen, more than 250 “prominent scientists”, including 11 Nobel laureates, are calling on people to cease personal political attacks and focus on the facts. For a moment, I welcomed the idea of ending the “politicizing” of climate change, and the personal attacks that come with not accepting the gospel of anthropogenic climate change.

And then I realized they didn’t mean an end to all political attacks. Just the ones directed at them.

So the 250 prominent scientists have turned around and called those who disagree with them “deniers”, a loaded term that is associative with those who disbelieve in the historical evidence of a holocaust against the Jews. Delightful company to be in, I’m sure.

“Recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence,” the scientists say in an open letter published the journal Science.

Special interests? What special interests? Who and what are these special interests they’re referring to? Speaking of dogma, using the term “special interests” is like invoking the catch-all bogeyman of rhetorical commentary.

Society, the letter says, has two choices. And only two, apparently. The first is to hide our heads in the sand and ignore that imminent devastation awaits our inaction. The second is to do precisely what they advise us not to do, which is to use guilt trips, distractions, and outright lies in order to encourage political influence to take action.

Two can play at the metaphor game, and if given the choice between the ostrich and chicken little, I’ll take the ostrich every time.

As for the 11 Nobel laureates, well, they’re members of the entire IPCC panel that shared in the 2007 prize with pop culture hero for a day, Al Gore, who has since become a little busy moving into a new mansion. The $8,875,000 gated villa on the beach with 1 1/2 acres, six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and 6,500 square feet of living space, has come from his considerable income in the climate change Armageddon speaking tour racket, and investment in “green” industries that he has used his political clout to get government to subsidize.

You can’t just break the public trust with a scandal like climategate, and then ask for an end to the “politicization” of science by telling the skeptics to shut up and stop being “deniers”. Where I come from, we call that elitism.

No, when you’ve earned the right to be trusted again, we’ll let you know. You could begin by accepting that there is no so-called consensus on climate change being attributable to mankind, that those who are skeptical of the so-called consensus are not deniers, and that the scientific community needs to work harder to provide evidence that the changes in climate are irrefutably linked to airborne hydrocarbon emissions caused by human beings.

Until that happens, right back at ya, “warmists”.

From the Greenpeace blog:

The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

Scratch an environmentalist, find a guy who really just wishes he didn’t miss out on the Bolshevik revolution.

RELATED

Berlin, wir haben ein problem! Germany, the country that recycles everything, may be losing support for anthropogenic armageddon. The widely read Der Spiegel has a series of articles that explain how the public confidence have been lost in scientist-politicians. Significantly, the new theory of the “Urban Heat Island Effect” will have explained much of the warming effect, as growing urban centres have seen temperatures rise mainly because cities get warmer as the population gets denser.

Somebody dig a shallow grave for Anthropogenic Global Warming, and hurry up about it. The end is near!

A new study, funded by NASA, has discovered that the most serious drought in the Amazon in over 100 years has had little impact on the rainforest. This flies in the face of the IPCC’s claims that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be significantly damaged by a small reduction in rainfall, potentially leading to replacement by tropical grasslands.

The IPCC proposed the dire possibility in 2007 of a warming Amazon climate that researchers attributed to human activity. The UN predicted that by 2025 or 2030, at least half of the Amazone Basin will disappear because of severe drought, fire, or logging. The report went on to say that by 2050, parts of the Amazon will be decimated, with an extinction of between 20-30% of the world’s plants and animals by 2100.

While we can’t exactly wait until 2100 to find out whether the IPCC was right or wrong, the new NASA research suggests that the 40% figure, also used by the World Wildlife Fund in fund-raising, has no scientific basis.

Scientists now believe that the rainforest, estimated to be 9.9 million years in age, could be more resilient than originally thought. Researchers from Boston University published a study of satellite data for the Amazon rainforest in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters, that looked at 2005 for the worst drought in a century.

Although people who depended on the water from the Amazon suffered, the researchers could find no evidence that the rainforest itself had been damaged. The level of “greenness” in the forest between drought years and rainy years were more or less indistinguishable, scientifically speaking.

The IPCC has been accused recently of using greatly exaggerated claims for global warming in order to politicize the cause, and get governments to take action to stop it. But the damage done to the credibility of the scientific community over climategate may be irreparable, and new reports of falsified data are not helping.

Climate scientist for Georgia Tech, Judith Curry, recently said in an interview with Discover magazine that she recognizes the damage that climategate has done to the reputation of scientists, but that it’s still worth pursuing action. When asked whether we should wait until all scientific uncertainty is resolved before taking action, she answered that the “probability of something bad happening is at least as high as the probability that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And while that threat turned out to be false, we addressed the threat anyway. So, Ms.Curry claims, we have a history of taking action on things that “have a low probability of happening.”

Here’s a little piece of advice. Comparing the need to act on climate change to the war in Iraq is probably not the best selling tool at the disposal of climatologists.

Ever since I appeared on the CBC in early December to argue about Climategate, a mountain of evidence has come forth to indicate that the story the CBC ignored for so long, has genuine scientific evidence backing it. Whether it be Glaciergate or Africagate or Naturaldisastergate [sorry, I made that last one up myself], the CBC is unrelenting in it’s intent to ignore the issue.

If you actually search for the term climategate on the CBC website, you’re given some very slim pickings indeed. There’s Rex Murphy’s editorial that aired the same day I was on TV, the Maxime Bernier open letter to the Gazette, and there’s a very belated explanation from the CBC ombudsman on the Delayed coverage of “Climategate”. But not much else in the way of reporting what’s going on the world on this critical story, other than a brief summary of events from a Canadian Press story in February.

Instead, we’re fed a steady dose of climate change articles and editorials from “experts”, authors, and scientists, giving an ample amount of coverage to David Suzuki and his foundation. Indeed, if you enter the term “climategate” into the CBC search engine you are returned with 54 results, one of which was my first and final appearance on the public broadcaster. But enter in the term “climate change”, and be prepared for a flood of 9,040 results. Granted, some are years old and, but I think my 0.6:100 ratio point is taken.

What the CBC does give plenty of face time to, is articles like this one, written by Richard Handler, entitled The burden of believing in global weirding. Using the same shamefully patronizing language of the subject of his story, Al Gore, he writes that it would be “wishful thinking” to believe that all this bad news about Climategate disproves the science of man-made climate change. He goes on to attribute the cold and snowy winter experienced by most of the Northern Hemisphere this year to, you guessed it, global warming.

One of the greatest shams of the “Inconvenient Truth” rhetoric is that it doesn’t stand up under the “follow the money” scrutiny. Climate scientists like Dr.Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC, and thousands like him around the world, have greatly benefitted from funding placed in climate research. And the CBC crown corporation has spent millions of dollars on programs promoting scientists, like David Suzuki, who fulfill an editorial directive. Meanwhile, those people like Al Gore, involved in the collusion between government and green energy corporations, have made millions of dollars on legislation aimed at shifting government spending into areas of green technology.

On February 5, the CBC Ombudsman, Vince Carlin, explained in a statement why the CBC delayed coverage of the Climategate story.

According to Esther Enkin, Executive Editor of CBC News, the explanation was merely a lapse in assessing the value of the story. Defending the move, she pointed to other mainstream news outlets that similarly ignored the story. To this I would respond with a simple comparison.

The CBC ran a story one day after University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran claimed, without evidence, to have seen the unredacted documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue that would prove Canada’s direct involvement in ordering the torture of captured combatants. The “value” of broadcasting unsubstantiated rumours of secret documents not meant for public consumption would, it seems, depend entirely upon whether other media outlets are doing the same thing. It isn’t as if CBC tried to scoop CTV on the Amir Attaran story, right? But climategate? Well, let’s just wait two weeks and see if anybody touches it with a ten-foot pole.

The ombudsman statement continues:

While it may be comforting to some to point to the lapse in coverage by other major main-stream outlets, I am afraid that CBC Journalistic Standards and Practices, and our own self-esteem, do not allow that as an excuse for poor journalism. Ironically, the story may have received more coverage than was really justified by the “real” scientific revelations contained in the documents–i.e., not many.

In any event, this was not the CBC’s finest hour. I trust that appropriate attention will be brought to bear on the weekend staffing of CBCNews.ca and other immediate response units of CBC News.

Not much has changed since this statement. CBC continues to ignore the scientific debate, and continues to editorialize the “consensus” view. While they can afford to pay journalists to give full-time attention to speculating about redacted documents pertaining to Afghanistan, it would seem nobody in the mother corp can spare more than a few moments to write about the ongoing scandals of the IPCC and the information wars on climate.

What the Earth won’t look like by 2050: Venus.

More then a few people mocked me for characterizing Climategate as “the biggest story of the 21st Century” when I appeared on CBC Television in December to talk about it. Or to put it more precisely, it was the biggest story not being talked about. Nobody wanted to admit that a conspiracy theory that attracted the support of bucktoothed rednecks in the nether regions of the United States could possibly have any merit whatsoever. The idea of the world’s foremost climate scientists exaggerating the claims of imminent global catastrophe in order to nudge spending into environmentalist causes sent convulsive shivers down the quivering spines of the CBC network brass. Needless to say, it was my last appearance on the Mothership.

Global warming came along at just the right time for the environmentalists. There was a conscious movement in western mainstream popular culture to shift our perception of ourselves from a mass production and mass consumption species, to one that was more cognizant of the effects of our disposable material possessions on the planet. Where the right sentiment was felt, it was placed awkwardly in a scientific theory without enough research. Before the world had even had time to adjust to the concept that humans could displace the finite carbon resources of this planet into the atmosphere, thereby effecting a planetary climate change, we were informed there was a scientific “consensus” on the issue, and that immediate action would have to be taken or else we would face catastrophe.

Some of us bought into it as a simple matter of logic. Humans are a consumptive, destructive, inefficient species that enacts few limitations on our excessive expansionary controls of the world’s resources; hence, it makes sense we are literally cooking ourselves alive by changing the temperature of the Earth. Nobody had to actually understand the science. It was enough to trust people like David Suzuki.

Riding that wave of popular support, Al Gore, a snake oil peddler with a vice-presidential curriculum vitae to back him up, decided to parlay his Presidential loss to George W Bush in 2000 into a multi-billion dollar venture to become a green spokesman. His 2007 film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, used the Michael Mann “hockey stick” graph along with an elevated platform scissor lift in order to hammer home the point that humans are killing themselves. Comparing us to frogs in a pot of boiling water, we wouldn’t notice the temperature until it was too late.

Al Gore got it half right. We didn’t realize until it was too late. We had already dumped billions of dollars into the same “green industry” in which Gore invested, created carbon taxes, carbon markets, and enacted regulations on carbon, all of which had done nothing to curtail man-made global warming, but had done much to transfer the wealth from ordinary citizens into the pockets of men like Al Gore. Like the story, “The Emperor Has No Clothes”, countries the world over now don the invisible yarn spun by the deceivers, and proudly proclaim it to be green energy, even as they stand there naked.

Now, scarcely a month after the ridiculous Copenhagen Conference on climate change, that jet-setting carbon-spewing junket of all-you-can-eat buffets and stretch limousine gridlock, the scientist at the centre of this whole Climategate scandal, the man responsible for the crucial raw data from which the world plucks it’s “consensus”, has now admitted there is a flaw.

Colleagues of Professor Phil Jones say that the reason he has refused Freedom of Information requests for the data is that he may have actually “lost” the papers. Yesterday he told the BBC that he is unable to produce data evidence that supports the “hockey stick graph” that is the basis for anthropogenic climate change. He also conceded the possibility that the planet was warmer in medieval times than it is now, and that the past 15 years has not been statistically warmer than previously.

The fraud that has been perpetrated on a gullible public has been thoroughly exposed. But don’t expect the western media to pick up on it as swiftly as the English have. That country has taken a personal interest in the story because the University of East Anglia and climategate is an issue that happened right at home for them. But for our media, it still isn’t happening. The CBC is still as up to date on this story as they weren’t in December, and if they bother mentioning anything about it, it’s to produce the same fallacious articles co-authored by Suzuki Foundation writers supporting man-made climate Armageddon.

Don’t expect our politicians to drop everything either. “Conservative” Environment Minister Jim Prentice is still sending Canada’s industry on a suicide pact with the United States’ own Obamachange legislation, and the province of British Columbia still has a carbon tax on fuel that isn’t making the unemployment rate any better right now. They don’t care. They still believe utterly that the public believes utterly in the science behind boiling pots of frogs and hockey stick graphs.

You can’t really blame them. They’re politicians. If Canadians believed that the world faced the grave danger of alien abduction and medical probing, you can bet the government would install some kind of alien-abduction and probing prophylaxis system that would make us feel better. Just like we do when we strip for the peek-a-boo cameras at the airport.

Eventually the world will catch on to the fact that the shoddy science behind climate change is not, in fact, the perfect example that capitalist globalization is a self-destructive force that will quite literally leave the verdant Earth a ruined Venusian hellscape. And when that happens, some of us will be demanding our money back. With interest.

Photo: Giordano Cavedoni

As the western world is slowly dawning on the realization that climate change theory is little more than a socialist wealth transfer to the third world, and a means of creating billionaires out of running industry into the ground, the so-called scientific consensus is finally catching up to the carbon criminals running the whole charade in the United Nations.

Never in the history of mankind has such a widespread fraud been perpetrated on so many people by so few. And the fallout will be brutal when people realize that their hard-earned dollars have been going into slush funds for international panels that fabricate numbers in order to perpetuate their own self-serving employment.

If the extension to the expired United Nation’s self-imposed “deadline” on tackling climate change doesn’t convince people that these tipping points are all a figment in the imagination of the IPCC, then perhaps the more blatant evidence of fraud will. Even the United Nations must admit that the jig, so to speak, is up, and that it’s only a matter of time before the last holdout of twenty-something University students in Greenpeace will come to the same conclusion.

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has used false and misleading claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting in order to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. That means that European taxpayers have been funding “research” into claims about glaciers that have since been thoroughly debunked.

Aside from the Arctic, the IPCC had used Himalayan glaciers as the poster child for anthropogenic climate change, claiming they would completely melt by 2035. We now know that prediction to be about as accurate as Barack Obama’s stimulus plans for jobs recovery. Even the scientist behind the claim that won the IPCC the Nobel Peace prize, admitted it was entirely based on creating political pressure on world leaders. This is consistent with the Maurice Strong ideology of lying to save the planet.

“What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment? Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?

“The group’s conclusions is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

But, of course, it gets worse. Much worse. The United Nations have lied, for years, about how global warming was linked to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wild fires. And every tier of government around the world has repeated the same lies to a believing and gullible public.

And now, like all criminals, they’re busy hiding the evidence. Hiding the decline in readings and temperature anomalies that don’t correspond to their prearranged view of how science should be acting. Like a snowball rolling downhill, the sound of all hell breaking loose continues unabated.

This is a profound level of spin on the climate change debacle. Environment Canada says that climate scientists who track global temperature data may be underestimating the amount of warming in the Canadian Arctic, because they are working from data samples that are few and far between.

In Canada the number of stations dropped from 600 to 35 in 2009. The percentage of stations in the lower elevations (below 300 feet) tripled and those at higher elevations above 3000 feet were reduced in half. Canada’s semi-permanent depicted warmth comes from interpolating from more southerly locations to fill northerly vacant grid boxes, even as a pure average of the available stations shows a COOLING. Just 1 thermometer remains for everything north of latitude 65N – that station is Eureka. Eureka according to Wikipedia has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Winters are frigid but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.

From this decline in resources to properly extrapolate temperature readings, Environment Canada concludes that while a smaller sample of stations may not prevent a clear understanding of global temperature change, it could be a problem for the Arctic.

“Missing observations in an area where the climate is expected to respond more quickly to external influences, such as the Arctic, may, however, result in underestimates of the amount of climatic change,” Environment Canada told Canwest News Service on Friday.

Really? Couldn’t it also “overestimate” the amount of climatic change, using the exact same logic? I mean, if we have a single reliable observation station for the entire Arctic region in Canada, isn’t it possible that we’re not getting a very controlled sense of temperature changes?

Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in one of the infamous emails extracted from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit database, that a smaller sampling of weather stations in the Canadian Arctic wouldn’t have a significant impact on the data.

He said any long-term temperature changes recorded at the high Arctic station at Eureka, would likely be “representative” of changes elsewhere in the region, even in a sub-Arctic city like Yellowknife.

“Temperature anomalies don’t vary that much from one (nearby) station to another,” he said. “You don’t need thousands of stations across Canada to know what the monthly anomalies are.”

Which is sort of like saying that if it’s -1 in Winnipeg, it has to be the same temperature across the millions of square kilometres around the station.

Meanwhile, the United Nations took some time off from apologizing over their shoddy “consensus” research on glacier melting, to lecture Canada about doing a better job on climate change. Which is sort of like Mark McGwire lecturing Sammy Sosa on steroid use.

You wanted Climategate on CBC, I give you Climategate on CBC. Not trying to plug myself, I just think this might be the first debate on the story on the CBC so far [notwithstanding Rex Murphy's solo effort]:

Power & Politics with Evan Solomon [Running time 10:22]

Update. Thanks to Jeff Jedras for uploading the video to YouTube so I could embed it.