Climate Skeptic Admits He Was Wrong
Muller demos a Van de Graaff generator.
You have to admire a scientist who stands up and admits he backed the wrong strain of dogma. The LA Times reports on Richard Muller’s change of heart:
Remember when scientists who had cast doubt on global temperature studies boldly embarked on an effort to “reconsider” the evidence?
They have. And they conclude that their doubt was misplaced.
UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller and others were looking at the so-called urban heat island effect — the notion that because more urban temperature stations are included in global temperature data sets than are rural ones, the global average temperature was being skewed upward because these sites tend to retain more heat. Hence, global warming trends are exaggerated.
Using data from such urban heat islands as Tokyo, they hypothesized, could introduce “a severe warming bias in global averages using urban stations.”
In fact, the data trend was “opposite in sign to that…
New Study Says Global Warming Is Real
Author: Robert A. Rohde (CC)
CNN labels the study a “blow to skeptics”:
An independent study of global temperature records has reaffirmed previous conclusions by climate scientists that global warming is real.
The new analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project examined 1.6 billion temperature reports from 15 data archives stretching back over 200 years in an effort to address scientific concerns raised by climate skeptics about the data used to inform reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Researchers found “reliable evidence” of a rise in average world land temperatures of one degrees Celsius since the mid-1950s.
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the United States and the UK,” professor Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth’s scientific director said in a statement.“This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change…
Rick Perry Believes Climate Change Can Be Solved With Prayer
Rick Perry. Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)
That and more revelations from Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry via Rolling Stone:
No politician who aspires to the Oval Office has shown any courage when it comes to talking frankly about climate change – President Obama won’t even say the words. But Perry’s view that the consequences of a changing climate – such as the hot, dry weather that has devastated farmers and ranchers in Texas and driven wildfires that have burned up millions of acres – is best handled by praying to God for relief puts him in a category of his own. Craven political move or sign of a return of the Dark Ages? Either way, it’s safe to say that a man who believes he can solve drought with prayer is not going to be big on pushing any kind of government action to reduce carbon pollution. “If Perry was President, one…
Scientists Vow To Fight Back Against Climate Skeptics
Neela Banerjee of the Tribune Washington Bureau reports that The American Geophysical Union plans to announce that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. Other scientists plan a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Via the Los Angeles Times:
Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.
On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate…
Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters
The Guardian reports:
BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.
An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy…
Yale University Poll Shows Americans Are Confused On Climate Change
Click image to download PDF of full report
I’m not sure which camp the results of this poll by Yale University helps the most, the climate change believers or their sworn enemies, the “deniers:”
Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change reports results from a national study of what Americans understand about how the climate system works, and the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to global warming. Among other findings, the study identifies a number of important gaps in public knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change.
Overall, we found that 63 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, but many do not understand why… These misconceptions lead some people to doubt that global warming is happening or that human activities are a major contributor, to misunderstand the causes and therefore the solutions, and to be unaware of the risks. Thus many Americans lack some of the knowledge needed for informed decision-making in a democratic…
Physics Professor: ‘Global Warming is the Greatest and Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud…’
The professor’s letter of resignation speaks for itself and deserves to be reproduced in full, so here it is:
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists.…
Climate Change Lies Exposed
It’s certainly quite a sea change in media coverage of climate change issues in the UK! From the Daily Express:
The world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices.
A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.
It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.
The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation”…
Climate Change Wars Heating Up In Court
In the southern hemisphere the dueling camps of climate change believers and non-believers are starting to take their grievances to court, as reported by news.com.au:
Scientists have hit back at climate change sceptics, with a paper affirming the case that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause of warming.
The Australian Academy of Science yesterday went on the front foot to clear up confusion after challenges to warming theories.
It came as New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research faced a legal challenge by sceptics group Climate Science Coalition.
The coalition has launched high court action over the institute’s climate data.
Academy past president Kurt Lambeck said the scientific statement aimed to boost climate change understanding.
The role of CO2 in the atmosphere was well understood and unless greenhouse gas emissions were reduced, an upward trend in global temperatures would continue.
“The available evidence implies that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities…
A Handy iPhone App For Climate Change Skeptics
For all you climate change skeptics (who also happen to have an iPhone), The Hill reports that a new app will allow you to post stinging responses to any posts on disinfo.com that even hint of a belief in man-made global warming or other climate change:
Recent weeks have been up-and-down for climate skeptics: The “climate-gate” scandal fizzled as several probes cleared prominent scientists of faking warming data, but the big climate bill also died on Capitol Hill.
As the battle continues, climate skeptics now have a new tool: a recently launched iPhone app called “Our Climate.”
“You have all the information at your fingertips, wherever you go, to help you get a more complete picture on what is happening to our climate!” states the app’s website.
The app notes that, “In the current debate on our climate, you often hear that the ‘debate is over’ or that the consensus of scientists is that global warming…
Global Warming: Man or Nature?
Stanton Friedman
Kathy Marden
[disinformation ed.'s note: The following is a chapter from the new book by Stanton T. Friedman & Kathleen Marden, Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions, courtesy of New Page Books.]
Rarely has a subject received so much attention as has the notion of “global warming,” especially since the publication of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize award received by him and the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007, and the media hype. If one were to believe the propaganda, CO2 (carbon dioxide) is public enemy number-one. Its increasing production by the world is leading to disastrous consequences, and hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent as soon as possible to reduce the warming and all the damage that will be accompanying it. Use of fossil fuels must be reduced or eliminated. Countries must sign agreements to reduce their emission of carbon…
Catch 22 For Right Wing Conservatives: Support Climate Change Actions Or Suffer Mass Immigration From Mexico
You have to love the irony of this: right-wing conservatives in America tend towards the climate change denial camp and refuse to support measures to combat global warming, yet a new report suggests that if we don’t arrest the warming trend, there will be unprecedented mass migration from Mexico into the U.S. — another issue that drives this crowd crazy. Reported in the Los Angeles Times:
Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.
Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.
Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to…
Dubious Climate Change Science
Here’s a pretty good summary of the current state of affairs in the increasingly acrimonious debate about global warming, or the lack thereof, by Ed Hiserodt in New American:
Last December, as even every cloistered monk and Third World inhabitant probably knows, there was an International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, attended by government functionaries from around the world. The pampered delegates, who evidently weren’t worried about their own carbon footprints, caused a Scandinavia-wide shortage of black stretch limousines.
The conference actually had very little to do with climate change, ignoring almost out-of-hand the prominent news at the time: the Climategate scandal — the release of the e-mails indicating top global-warming scientists were skewing temperature data and engaged in a smear campaign against climate-change skeptics. But the conference had much to do with money. So-called Third World countries demanded reparations for damage done to their satrapies by CO2 emissions from industrial…
Climate Change Skeptics Gain Ground In Britain
Image from Global Warming Art (GNU)
What’s going on in the UK? First the new government swears off spying on its citizens and now Britons are changing their minds about man-made climate change. Report from the New York Times:
LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is…
Scientist Claims Sea Level Is Not Rising At All
More from the “no man-made climate change” gang at Fox News, whose Gene J. Koprowski counters reports that rising sea levels will soon drown Venice by profiling a scientist who says he’s got the data to prove that wrong:
In a new scientific paper, Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, says that observational records from around the world — locations like the Maldives, Bangladesh, India, Tuvalu and Vanuatu — show the sea level isn’t rising at all.
In a NASA "what-if" animation, light-blue areas in southern Florida and Louisiana indicate regions that may be underwater should sea levels rise dramatically – which may not be as likely as scientists once thought. Photo: NASA
Morner’s research, revealed Monday at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, demonstrates that there is no “alarming sea level rise” across the globe, and it says a U.N. report…
Critics Of Man-Made Global Warming And Evolution Theories Join Forces
The anti-establishment science movement is truly gathering momentum in the United States, making the front page of the New York Times today:
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
The bill, which has yet to be voted on, is patterned on even more aggressive efforts in other states to fuse such issues. In Louisiana, a law passed in 2008 says the state board of education may assist teachers in promoting “critical thinking” on all of those subjects.
Last year, the Texas Board of Education adopted language requiring that teachers present all sides of…
The Disappearing Science of Global Warming
For those who have asked that we feature a wider variety of articles on climate change, here’s a “special report” from, of all places, the American Spectator:
Establishment figures intone about the substantial “body of science” supporting the notion of man-caused global warming. But based on recent events, they need to check the body’s pulse. The body is dead, and rapidly wasting away before our very eyes.
Over the past 3 months, a circus of scandals has played around the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its periodic Assessment Reports on global warming. The latest report issued in 2007 proclaimed a consensus regarding a 90% probability that mankind’s activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were causing global warming that would lead to catastrophic results if drastic steps were not taken to reverse it.
The lasting scientific upshot of that circus of scandals is that the historical global surface temperature record…
IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks
Marc Sheppard for Science & Public Policy Institute:
Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors — be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.
[full report available as a PDF download.]
Prince Charles On Climate Change: Global Warming Skeptics Are All Liars
Britain’s Prince Charles seems worried that decades of man-made global warming propaganda is being discredited… this report from the Daily Express:
Prince Charles rejected mounting evidence that climate change is a myth and insisted there is overwhelming proof of global warming today.
In his first riposte to the furore over claims that scientists have covered up research casting doubt on the greenhouse effect, Prince Charles voiced his dismay and alarm at those who question the science behind climate change.
The heir to the throne raised the controversy in a speech in Manchester, where he launched a new initiative, called Start, to provide the public with advice on how to lead more environmentally sustainable lives.
Charles, who has campaigned on global warming for more than 20 years, said: “I have watched with growing dismay and alarm the glee with which the sceptics have leapt upon the recent news stories that question the science that climate…
