RFK, Jr. 15 months ago: Global warming means no snow or cold in DC

By David Freddoso, Online Opinion Editor, Washington Examiner

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.

Having shoveled my walk five times in the midst of this past weekend’s extreme cold and blizzard, I think perhaps RFK, Jr. should leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.

Read more at the Washington Examiner

----------------------

India to drop out of IPCC, snubs Pachauri
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi, UK Telegraph

India has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

The Indian government’s move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing in the face of global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country. “There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses...they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added. The body, which he said will not be rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India’s long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science,” he said. Read more here.

The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about their health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.

-----------------------

Is Paul Dennis The Hero Of ClimateGate?
Posted by CBullitt, Soylent Green

The UK Guardian is reporting that Dennis, whose ice-core temperature studies are at odds which the Church of Carbon Come, has been questioned several times about leaking the emails and data files from the CRU at East Anglia.

Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus”.

University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.

Russian hackers? A conspiracy of denialist flat-earthers? Not so much. Bwuhahahaha

If Dennis is the leaker, he deserves a ticker-tape parade and all the rock-star accoutrements he can get. Great work, Paul - you may have saved science. See more here.
---------------------------

Acclaimed Climategate Analyst points to whistleblower rather than hacker
By John ‘O’Sullivan, Climategate

Climategate.com can now reveal the details of our exclusive interview with Australian physicist, Dr. John Costella, the acclaimed scientist who authored the accepted expert analysis of the Climategate emails. Costella wants to dispel doubts raised by those who clearly have not bothered to pay close scrutiny to what those infamous emails prove. Having directed my attention to the evidence cited below, I am convinced our readers will agree with Costella, that Professor Jones, the scientist at the center of the scandal, was having his correspondence closely monitored by the Freedom of Information Officer (FOI) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) before they were certainly leaked.

Costella’s statements will be seen as an embarrassing slight to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. On Monday, James Delingpole at the Telegraph exposed King for blowing off a lot of hot air about some hunch that nasty Russian or American spies hacked into the UEA’s Internet server. The bottom line is that the Information Commissioner’s Office has had to come clean and admit publicly that criminal conduct has taken place within the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, although no one in authority appears to want to do anything about it.

Dr. Costella, in his analysis, “Climategate Analysis,” has now published what is widely regarded as the best review of all 1,000+ emails and other documents contained in a 62MB upload to a Russian Internet server on November 19, 2009.

I asked John to comment on whether he believed it was the work of a hacker or an inside whistleblower that broke this most sensational scandal. He replied, “My only speculation on this comes from the following email,” and then directed me to read email 1228922050 of December 9, 2008 in which U.S. climatologist Ben Santer catches onto UEA climatologist, Phil Jones’s strategy of arguing that a greater number of requests implies lower credibility and validity, rather than the opposite:

Santer:

“I had a quick question for you: What is the total number of F[reedom] O[f] I[nformation (FOI)] A[ct] requests that you’ve received from Steven McIntyre?”

Jones:

“[I h]aven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at [the] U[niversity of] E[ast] A[nglia]. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails -unless this was “normal” deleting to keep emails manageable!”

Costella comments:

“Unless Jones volunteered this information to their FOI officer, this intriguing email may indicate that the FOI officer - who will generally have system-level rights to read all emails, as part of their job - may have been monitoring Jones’s emails, including the one above where he admitted deleting emails. This may lead to the identity of the Climategate whistle-blower, for those who continue to doubt their existence.”

Relatedly, Dr. Costella also confirmed that contrary to widespread misunderstanding, none of the emails were redacted: “The ZIP file I downloaded on December 6, 2009 has the emails intact. The files on my webpage are not redacted either.”

The continued to speculate on the confusion of this issue:

“I think that when some people decided to post them all online, they wrote a program to redact all email addresses to avoid them being picked up by spammers. But by the time I saw them, there were so many unredacted copies on the Internet that I knew it was useless to do that.”

Pointedly, Costella informed me that he found the full email addresses are “extremely useful” in deciphering the affiliations of the alleged climate conspirators. “They are also important in that they show that these people were (almost always) using their OFFICIAL work email, not personal email,” he said.

John left me with a few sobering words that shows that here is a man who thinks with the cool, objective head of a scientist: “Opinions on likely hackers are mere speculation, no matter how well-respected or honorable the speculator may be...it has been over two months now. Regardless of how the emails were leaked, they have been acknowledged as genuine, and provide evidence of astounding fraud. Investigation and potential prosecution or protection of the leaker or hacker is a separate issue, of no direct relevance to the issue of fraud.”

In this article we have dealt with facts, not the spin that warmists like Sir David King are spouting. Conclusions may only properly be drawn from evidence plainly presented. We have seen very little or any of that from the apologists of climate crime.

Dr. Costella has made a compelling factually-based case that Phil Jones’ unlawful deletion of emails was, he admits, well known to his FOI Officer. Jones was instructed to desist in breaking the law by that Officer. He continued to refuse to comply with the officer’s request. Thereafter, a vast amount of data (62MB) contained within a directory entitled ‘FOIA’ was uploaded onto the Internet. Absent any evidence to prove a hack we may thus infer a conscientious whistleblower, probably the FOI Officer, leaked the emails.” Read more here.

See Monckton’s debate on Australian ABC television here.

-------------------------

The End is Nigh
By Richard North

Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC’s credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the “Glaciergate” scandal, Pachauri’s own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Times accuses him of a direct lie.

This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri’s version on 22 January being that he had only known about it “for a few days” - i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.

However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla - who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) - claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month - as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates - early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”

According to Pachauri, “… within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never - and I can say this categorically - ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Without even Bagla’s input, we know this to be lies. Apart from anything else, there was the crisis meeting under the aegis of UNEP - which we reported on Thursday - which concluded that the 2035 claim “does not appear to be based upon any scientific studies and therefore has no foundation”.

Separately, we have Syed Hasnain, while stressing that he was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, claiming that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined TERI in Delhi, headed by Dr Pachauri. Then, he says, he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999. But, he claims, he did not tell Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

However, Hasnain’s assertions contrast rather sharply with a video interview given by him to NDTV (see clip above) on 9 November 2009 - the day that the Raina report on glaciers was published, challenging the claims made in the IPCC report. Then, he is seen to be defending the 2035 figure, and allowing himself to be styled as “author of the original IPCC report”.

According to The Guardian, V K Raina, formerly deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, has joined calls for Pachauri’s resignation.

The Guardian cites India’s Economic Times from over a week ago, which criticised the IPCC for damaging its own credibility, noting that “it would now seem that Mr Pachauri’s steadfast unwillingness to consider an alternate position could well have given climate sceptics a stronger footing.”

But today, the Deccan Herald also weighs in, declaring: “The [glacier] incident reflects poorly on the professionalism and scientific rigour of the IPCC and has done damage to its credibility.” The writing is not so much on the wall as obliterating it.

Adding to the graffiti, in yet another development, the popular Indian magazine Open rips apart global warming, labelling it: “The Hottest Hoax in the World.” Indian blogger Gurmeet in Liberty News Central thinks this could be the most hard-hitting article in the Indian MSM on AGW fraud ever.

Given what is about to descend upon him on Sunday, by the time the Indian media have absorbed the detail, Pachauri will be history. See Richard North’s blog here.

-------------------------

Global Warming: the Collapse of a Grand Narrative
By Philip Stott, The Clamour of the Times, Saturday, 30 January 2010

For over a month now, since the farcical conclusion of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I have been silent, partly through family commitments abroad in the USA, but also because, in this noisy world, in ‘The Clamour Of The Times’, it is on occasion better to be quiet and contemplative, to observe rather than to comment. And, as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty.

The Political And Economic Collapse

Moreover, the collapse has been quicker than any might have predicted. The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen debacle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska. 

And, as ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

The Scientific Collapse

And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades. The appalling pre-Copenhagen attacks by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his climate-change henchman, Ed Miliband, on those who dared to be critical of the science of climate change were some of the most unforgivable I can recall.

It is further salutary that much of the trouble is now emanating from India. Indeed, the nonsense written about the Indian Sub-Continent has been a particular nadir in climate-change science, and it has long been judged so by many experts on the region. My ex-SOAS friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Bradnock, a world authority on the Sub-Continent, has been seething for years over the traducing of data and information relating to this key part of the world. In June, 2008, he wrote:

“However, in my own narrow area of research, I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!”

The Media Collapse

One could indeed! But we may not need to do so for much longer. Why? Because the biggest collapse is in the media, the very ‘mechanism’ through which the greedy Global Warming Grand Narrative has promulgated itself during the last ten to twenty years. The break in the ‘Media Wall’ began in the tabloids and in the ‘red tops’, like The Daily Express and the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, but it is today spreading rapidly - yet once more as theory predicts - to the so-called ‘heavyweights’ and to the BBC. In the past, uncritical and apocalyptic stories and programmes were given the highest prominence, with any sceptical comment confined to the briefest of quotations from some benighted, and often snidely-mentioned, sceptic squeezed in at the very end of the piece ("For balance, you know"). Today, the reverse is becoming true, with the ‘global warming’ faithful firmly forced on to the back foot. Yet, in our post-modern world, it is the journalistic language being employed that is the true indicator of a new media order. Listening to good old Roger Harrabin this morning, reporting on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, was a revelation in this respect; the language, and even the style, had altered radically.

Potential Losers

The collapse is now so precipitate that there will inevitably be some serious losers caught out by it all. The UK Met Office could well be one, with the BBC rightly reviewing its contract with them. At the moment, Met Office spokespersons sound extraordinary, bizarre even. They bleat out ‘global warming’ phrases like programmed robotic sheep, although they are finding it increasingly difficult to pull the wool over our eyes. It is terribly 1984, and rather chilling, so to speak. It is obvious that the organisation is suffering from another classical academic state, namely that known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ [see here and here]. This is experienced when belief in a Grand Narrative persists blindly, even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, many of our public and private organisations have allowed themselves to develop far too great a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have too many politicians and activists. These are increasingly terrified, many having no idea how to react, or how to adjust, to the collapse. It will be particularly interesting to witness how, in the end, the Royal Society plays its cards, especially if competing scientific paradigms, such as the key role played by water vapour in climate change, start to displace the current paradigm in classic key role played by water vapour in climate change, start to displace the current paradigm in classic fashion. Icecap Note: This may be Susan Solomon’s bout with cognitive dissonance.

“For over a month now, since the farcical conclusion of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, I have been silent, partly through family commitments abroad in the USA, but also because, in this noisy world, in ‘The Clamour Of The Times’, it is on occasion better to be quiet and contemplative, to observe rather than to comment. And, as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty.

Certain newspapers, like my own DNOC, The Times, have also been a tad slow to grasp the magnitude of the collapse (although Ben Webster has tried valiantly to counter this with some good pieces); yet, even such outlets at last appear to be fathoming the remarkable changes taking place. Today, for example, The Times carries a brief, but seminal, critique of the ‘science’ from Lord Leach of Fairford.

What Will It Mean?

I have long predicted, and in public too, that the Copenhagen Conference could prove to be the beginning of the end for the Global Warming Grand Narrative. It appears that I may well have been right, and, indeed, I may have considerably underestimated the speed, and the dramatic nature, of the demise. Where this all leaves our politicians and political parties in the UK; where it leaves climate science, scientists more generally, and the Royal Society; where it leaves energy policy; where it leaves the ‘Green’ movement; and, where it leaves our media will have to be topics for many later comments and analyses. For the moment, we must not underestimate the magnitude of the collapse. Academically, it is jaw-dropping to observe.

And, the political, economic, and scientific consequences will be profound. See Philip’s site sinfonia here.

See also Dr. Vincent Gray’s view of the Decline of Science here.