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 expected if the urban heat island effect was adding anomalous warming to the record. The small size, and its negative sign, supports the key conclusion of prior groups that urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change.”…

[continues in the LA Times]

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 skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions,” Muller added…

[continues at CNN]

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 of the things I’d not worry about is a carbon tax,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “I’d worry about big spiders eating New Jersey first.”…

[read the rest at Rolling Stone]

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 scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a “climate rapid response team,” which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows. (The effort by John Abraham is separate from the Geophysical Union’s.)

“This group feels strongly that science and politics can’t be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists,” said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.

“We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed.”

During the recent campaigns, skepticism about climate change became a rallying cry for many Republican candidates. Of the more than 100 new GOP members of Congress, 50% are climate change skeptics, according to an analysis of campaign statements by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank…

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 in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups. The Chamber of Commerce reportedly has raised $75m (£47m) for pro-business, mainly Republican candidates.

Read more here.

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 society. For example, only:

• 57% know that the greenhouse effect refers to gases in the atmosphere that trap heat;
• 50% of Americans understand that global warming is caused mostly by human activities;
• 45% understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Earth’s surface;
• 25% have ever heard of coral bleaching or ocean acidification.

Download the full report as a PDF here. Read the rest of the summary here.

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. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

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” and not backed by research.

Independent climate scientist Peter Taylor said last night: “The IPCC’s credibility has been deeply dented and something has to be done. It can’t just be a matter of adjusting the practices. They have got to look at what are the consequences of having got it wrong in terms of what the public think is going on. Admitting that it needs to reform means something has gone wrong and they really do need to look at the science.”

Climate change sceptic David Holland, who challenged leading climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia to disclose their research, said: “The panel is definitely not fit for purpose. What the IAC has said is substantial changes need to be made.”

The IAC, which comprises the world’s top science academies including the UK’s Royal Society, made recommendations to the IPCC to “enhance its credibility and independence” after the Himalayan glaciers report, which severely damaged the reputation of climate science.

It condemned the panel – set up by the UN to ensure world leaders had the best scientific advice on climate change – for its “slow and inadequate response” after the damaging errors emerged.

Among the blunders in the 2007 report were claims that 55 per cent of the Netherlands was below sea level when the figure is 26 per cent.

It also claimed that water supplies for between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa will be at risk by 2020 due to climate change, but the real range is between 90 and 220 million.

The claim that glaciers would melt by 2035 was also rejected…

[continues in the Daily Express]

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 are the main cause (of warming),” Prof Lambeck said. If emissions continued at business-as-usual rates, temperatures would rise significantly.

Records over millions of years showed that a stable climate could not be taken for granted. Measurements over the past 100 years showed that as CO2 levels rose, the Earth also warmed.
Scientists say it is important to have debate on climate change, but spurious attacks were taking up an increasing amount of time to debunk.

In NZ, the coalition’s statement of claim calls for the country’s temperature record to be set aside and for NIWA to produce a “full and accurate” temperature record.

NZ Climate Change Research Institute senior researcher Professor Andy Reisinger said NIWA had checked its records, validated long-term trends with thousands of meteorological stations around the world and answered innumerable queries.

“The coalition has not put forward any clear and consistent scientific arguments against this local or global temperature trend; has not published its views in scientific peer-reviewed journals; has not disclosed its own scientific methods by which it claims to show that there has been a cooling rather than warming; and its members have little credibility,” Prof Reisinger said…

[continues at news.com.au]

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 is definitely caused by human activity. Should you have blind faith in such a consensus?”

The app features work by climate skeptics including Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Richard Lindzen and University of Alabama research scientist Roy Spencer…

[continues at The Hill]

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 dioxide no matter what it costs. Higher performance cars must be devised. Full subsidies must be given for solar and wind power. If these measures aren’t taken, then, the words of Chicken Little, “The sky is falling.”

While there is nothing simple about predicting the weather or evaluation of the myriad of statistics available about it, here are some of the assumptions on which the calls to action are based:

1. All scientists have reached a consensus that Gore and the IPCC are correct.
2. The world is rapidly heating up.
3. The major cause of the supposedly increasing temperature is mankind’s increasing production of evil CO₂. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), which is caused by people, is to blame and Mother Nature is innocent.
4. Action must be taken immediately or we are doomed.
5. Primary threats include rising of the world’s ocean levels by as much as 20 feet as a result of the melting of various glaciers, especially on Greenland and in the Antarctic, leading to a huge loss of lives and habitats for residents of low-lying coastal areas, such as Bangladesh and Manhattan.
6. An increased number of very destructive hurricanes, cyclones, tornados—all as a result of global warming—will occur
7. Polar bears are decreasing in number because of the melting ice, and they need to swim greater distances to find food.
8. Islands, such as the Maldives Southwest of India, are slowly sinking as the ocean rises.

As it happens, in the real world, all of these assumptions are seriously being called into question by a growing number of so-called “deniers.” Though still difficult, it has become easier to publish papers that seek to replace widely held myths with facts in refereed scientific journals. A turning point may have occurred when BBC News published an article by Paul Hudson in October 2009, entitled “What Happened to Global Warming?” The BBC had previously been fully behind the “Kill CO₂” movement. Hudson noted that for the last eleven years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures and that the global climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. Note that, simply put, the temperature of the world has not risen for eleven years.

Hudson noted that according to research conducted in November 2008, by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. He says that they warm and cool cyclically. The most important cycle, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). This was in a positive cycle (warmer than usual) for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and global temperatures were warmer too. In the past, the cycles have lasted for about thirty years, with the period from 1945 to 1977 coinciding with one of the cool Pacific cycles. Now it is again in a cooling mode. In September 2009, Mojib Latif, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote that we may indeed be in a period of cooling that could last another ten to twenty years. The current level of CO₂ is about 380ppm. Some believe that we must do all we can to bring it back to 350. We know despite the fact that it has been higher in the past, we have survived.

Everybody knows that the weather changes from day to day and season to season, and that even local forecasts a day in advance can be wrong. The notion that the “sophisticated” computer models used to predict climate change over the next twenty to fifty years for our entire planet are accurate is mind boggling. They all have fudge factors. There are a number of reasons. Weather depends on many factors, including what happens in uninhabited land areas and over the oceans, which cover about three quarters of the planet. There are external factors, such as sunspots, cosmic rays, variations in the energy output of the sun, El Nino, Ocean Decadal motions, volcanic eruptions, pollution of the atmosphere, about which we are slowly beginning to learn. It seems strange, but we sometimes forget that CO₂ is not the most abundant greenhouse gas. Water vapor has a much higher concentration. Evaporation of water vapor is also dependent on many factors, which include cloud cover, changes in the surface characteristics of water and ice, winds, and temperature. There are the chlorofluorocarbons which were used in spray cans, methane from farm animals, exhausts from jet aircraft, radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere, ozone, and so on. In addition, we haven’t had many, many years’ worth of good data as to what the actual surface temperatures have been across the planet. Satellite measurements can be very useful, but obviously haven’t been available for many decades.

There is considerable concern with the effects of local factors on the surface measuring devices, especially near cities which tend to hold in heat, and even near structures out in the country. Some devices have even been moved to different locations, though not noted in their compilations. Many devices previously located in the country have been moved to airports.

There are, of course, some indirect means of trying to get a handle on past temperatures, such as the use of tree rings. Cores are taken and the thicknesses of the tree rings each year have a close, but certainly not perfect relation to the overall temperatures that year at the location of the tree. However, not surprisingly, tree rings and tree growth are influenced by other factors besides temperature. Rainfall, shade, root nutrition are among these. One almost bizarre example of the difficulty of using dendrochronology is when a dozen trees at one location were used (even though many more had been examined). Though all were growing in the same area, the results were nowhere near identical. There was also some indication that the data was cherry picked, so that only those trees giving certain results were used. This is not surprising for propaganda and politics, but is surely not the way of science.

There should be no surprise that politics has been such an important part of the global-warming warnings. Al Gore, after all, is not a scientist, but a politician. Likewise, the IPCCC is a much politicized body. The members are supported by their home governments. The actions that are being discussed all involve politics: How much should we reduce our CO₂ production, as though passing a law would accomplish the reduction? How many hundreds of billions of dollars should be spent on ameliorating CO₂ production? How much should the developed countries give to the undeveloped ones to assist in their attack on C0₂?

Most CO₂ is produced by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants. No government will tell its people to keep their houses much colder in the winter and turn off air conditioning in the summer, that industry should reduce its output, or that cities should be darkened. Closing all coal-fired power plants would be disastrous in many places, though some extremists have demanded such an action. One gets votes, after all, by making promises that one hopes will be forgotten once it’s seen that they cannot be kept. Politics has also been very important in determining the awarding of research contracts. The worse the situation is made to seem, the more research must be done. Thus, most publications discussed in the media provide a range of values for how much the temperature or sea level will increase. The focus is always on the high and usually unrealistic end. For example, some have claimed the sea will rise twenty feet; current rates are about a millimeter a year.

Not surprisingly, one doesn’t hear much about the benefits of higher CO₂ levels, such as increased plant growth and crop yields. Controlled experiments have demonstrated that increased CO₂ levels lead to increased crop yields. Many countries, such as Russia, would prefer to have a warmer climate. There has been great politicizing in what papers get submitted for publication, because contrarians risk losing their jobs or being denied future research grants if they speak out. A polar bear expert, Mitchell Taylor, who had attended a special conference of polar bear experts every years since 1981, had his paper rejected in 2009, because it didn’t follow the party line as to how much danger the bears were in from global warming. He wasn’t even permitted to attend and was replaced by people knowing nothing about polar bears.

Politically, it isn’t accepted to talk about the fact that water vapor is the most prominent green house gas, much more so than CO₂. However, it is very much more difficult to predict accurately the effect of water vapor on planetary temperatures. Far more of the planet is covered with water and ice than with power plants. When water evaporates into the atmosphere, clouds form, and they are blown by unpredictable winds. Clouds keep some solar radiation from reaching the planet by reflecting it back out to space, thus cooling the planet. However, the clouds also absorb some of the heat emitted by the ground and help heat the atmosphere.

It is certainly clear that there have been warmer periods of time than the present, which could not have been caused by CO₂, because so little industrialization existed then. There have also been lengthy cooler periods, which also obviously had nothing to do with CO₂. The famous “hockey stick” graph shows what seems to be level temperatures for a long time and then a steady increase because of CO₂. More careful and honest work shows that the curve just happens to omit periods of higher and lower temperature that could not have been influenced by the production of CO₂ and has discretely been left out of recent IPCC publications.

The history of environmental movements certainly includes examples of bandwagon jumping to take care of a perceived problem, often with severe and unplanned consequences. One of the better examples is the banning of the pesticide DDT in 1972. This was directly the result of the hue and cry stemming from Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring. Apparently, egg shells of predatory birds, such as hawks, were thinner because of DDT. The problem is that DDT was by far the most effective, inexpensive, and safe weapon against the anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria. Because of the banning, there have been literally millions of deaths, especially amongst young children in Africa. One might wonder if this is a fair trade off.

A much more recent example involves the production of biofuel to reduce the use of imported oil. Producing corn to be converted to biofuel greatly increased the income of farmers, but, unfortunately though predictably, substantially raised the cost and reduced the supply of food for people. In addition, more detailed calculations have indicated that sometimes more production of CO₂ was produced by all the activities associated with the farming and the extraction of the biofuel than would have been produced using the equivalent amount of oil.

In addition, the pressure for non–CO₂ producing (renewable) power plants, such as solar and wind power, has been dependent on major government financing, incentives, and subsidies. Because of these it has been profitable to build large solar and wind facilities, but operating them requires much higher expenditures than using non renewable resources. It was found in California, which does have abundant sunlight, that people bought solar swimming pool heaters when substantial tax and subsidy benefits were provided. They stopped when the benefits were eliminated, causing many companies to go out of business. Much repair and servicing of the solar heating systems could not be provided.

There are other strange aspects of the anti-CO₂ war. A number of anti-nuclear groups have loudly proclaimed the need to avoid building new nuclear plants and hopefully to shut down old ones. They are also against CO₂. But the nuclear power plants produce far, far less, CO₂ than do any other major sources of power production. Some countries in Europe, such as Germany and Belgium, have recently delayed earlier mandates to close their existing nuclear power plants by ten or more years because there aren’t reasonably affordable alternatives. Somebody has to pay the bill, though not the activists.

It should not be surprising, considering the examples given in other chapters, that there have been unexpected but significant new scientific developments concerning the factors that control global warming. It was announced on October 18, 2009, that the New Phytologist Journal (184:545-551, November, 2009) had published an article, “A Relationship between Galactic Cosmic Radiation and Tree Rings” by Sigrid Dengel, Dominik Aeby, and John Grace, concerning an evaluation of tree-ring growth rates as a function of various parameters, such as temperature and precipitation. It turns out that there was no significant correlation with temperature or precipitation. However, there was a significant correlation with galactic cosmic radiation. All the trees that were used, Sitka spruce, had been planted in 1953 and cut in 2006. Felling protocols had been laid out by Forest Research; North and West directions were marked on the bark and the discs were frozen as soon as returned to the research station. The rings were counted in their frozen state; otherwise discs can shrink and crack. To quote the authors so as not to bias the reporting: “There was a consistent and statistically significant relationship between growth of the trees and the flux density of galactic cosmic radiation. Moreover there was an underlying periodicity in growth with four minima since 1961, resembling the period cycle of galactic cosmic radiation.” They postulate that what might explain this correlation could be the tendency of galactic cosmic radiation to produce cloud condensation nuclei, which in turn increases the diffuse component of solar radiation, and thus increases the photosynthesis of the forest canopy. Diffuse radiation penetrates the canopy more than direct sunlight.

They found no correlation between temperature or precipitation and growth rates. It would seem that CO₂ had nothing to do with the growth rates since it had slowly and steadily increased during the period of growth. One can safely predict that the “warmists” will attack or ignore these results. It is also likely that the “deniers,” who have been getting more and more publicity, will cite these results.

It is interesting that the apparent hoax involving the flight in Colorado of a helium filled balloon, supposedly with a 6-year-old boy on board, receive world-wide attention in October 2009. In contrast, the hoax aspects of global warming have received very little attention. Senator Orinn G. Hatch of Utah did, however, compile a large number of anti-AGW statements by scientists, most of them actually involved with the IPCC. It was reprinted by The Science and Public Policy Institute in their SPPI Reprint Series dated September 18, 2009. The title is “UN Climate Scientists Speak out on Global Warming,” selected and edited by Hatch from the Senate Minority Report. It includes comments from 101 individual scientists sorted by backgrounds as follows:

• UN IPCC Authors: 9
• UN IPCC Scientists: 7
• UN IPCC Expert Reviewers: 12
• NASA: 10
• Other Government Scientists: 6
• State Climatologists: 9
• Academies of Science: l0
• Avowed Environmentalists: 4
• Noted Scientists: 27
• Other Nobel Prize Winners: 3

Hatch, in his introduction, states that the statements prove there is not a consensus, even at the UN, on the widely touted IPCC conclusion: “Greenhouse gas forcing has likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last fifty years.” Hatch notes that the chapter of the IPCC report making that conclusion was reviewed by only 62 scientists, not the 2500 scientist reviewers of the IPCC reports.

A very detailed report, “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),” refutes the IPCC conclusions. A PDF file of this 880-page volume can be downloaded at http://climatechangereconsidered.org. Printed copies are also available. It probably won’t be a best seller, but it includes the names of 31,478 scientists who signed a petition circulated to thousands of scientists, with a cover note by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences. In his note, Seitz said, “The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds. The treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful. The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over four billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.” These are strong words indeed.

Here are some comments from the petition that was signed:

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth”.

Obviously, the number of signers far outweighs the 2500 IPCC people. None of the circulation funding came from oil or gas companies or other interested parties. Among the signers were many physicists, chemists, climatologists and other scientists. It is certain that the widely repeated notion that the science of climate change is settled, and that the unquestioned consensus of the scientific community is that CO₂ is responsible for a rapidly growing worldwide temperature and must be stopped at all costs, is clearly not true.

A very important and detailed study was published by Dr. Habibulto Abdussamatov, head of Space Research Laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg, Russia. The observatory was built in 1839, was destroyed in World War II, and then rebuilt. For some time, it had the largest telescope in the world. He and his colleagues have done a detailed review of the data we have on sunspots and other activities on the sun. Dr. Abdussamatov’s focus was on the sun and solar radiation emission as a function of time. There is data on sunspot numbers going back to 1611. Its provocative title is “The Sun Defines the Climate”; the entire paper can be found at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id+4254. An except reads, “Experts of the United Nations in regular reports publish data said to show that the Earth is approaching a catastrophic global warming, caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, observations of the Sun show that as for the increase in temperature, carbon dioxide is ‘not guilty’ and as for what lies ahead in the upcoming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global and very prolonged temperature drop.”

These are strong words backed up by a great deal of information. A key point is that it had been thought that the amount of energy emitted by the sun was constant in time. Better measurements have shown this isn’t the case and there is a periodicity in the energy output of the sun. It had been known since the middle of the 19th century that the number of sunspots on the surface of the sun varies in an 11-year cycle. An English astronomer, Walter Maunder, in 1893, discovered that from 1645 to 1715, sunspots had been essentially absent. Only 50 spots were noted in that period, whereas it would have been normal for 50,000 sunspots to have appeared in that time period. We know now that there have been such minima many times in the past. He also noted that the Maunder Minimum included the coldest dip in temperatures that had been noted for thousands of years.

In 1976, an American astrophysicist, John Eddy, noted that there was a correlation between periods of significant change in the number of sunspots in the past millennium and large changes in the climate. In 1988, a soviet geophysicist, Eugene Borisenko, showed that in each of 18 deep minima of solar activity, there have been periods of global cooling. There were periods of global warming during periods of high sunspot activity. About every 200 years, there are such minima and maxima. It is this bicentennial variation in climate that is so important, even more so than the 11-year solar sunspot level. The primary factor here is that it has been discovered that the TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) is not, as has been thought, a constant, but rather varies in time in a periodical fashion. According to Dr. Habibulto Abdussamatov, the sun is a variable star, which changes its parameters under short and long cycles. The sun is never found in a steady state of energetic and mechanical equilibrium. He points out that an entirely new instrument, a solar Limbograph, is to be installed in the Russian Section of the International Space Station in 2011. It should be able to make the most accurate measurements ever of the radius and energy output of the sun, which will allow for much more precise predictions of climate than are now possible. He also points out that the gradual growth of ice caps at the poles has already begun, not the melting that some expected.

According to an announcement on October 27, 2009, NASA is also planning on much improved observations of the sun when it launches, probably by the end of 2010, a new instrument named EVE “The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment” on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Though the sun appears from Earth to be a consistent quite placid surface, in extreme ultraviolet frequencies, it is a seething caldron of storms and prominences and sunspots and faculae.

Two important events took place near the end of 2009. One involved the determination by careful observation by meteorologists that 90 percent of the 1100 official surface measuring thermometers in the United States did not meet official regulations as to their locations not being near sources of heat. The bias was almost always found to raise the apparent temperatures. The second problem was the hacking into the files of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University and the subsequent release of over a thousand e-mails. This has been described as an enormous scandal because they provide clear evidence of bias, deception, misrepresentation, and suppression of dissent by the CRU. Chairman Jones resigned at the beginning of December, as an outside committee will review the situation. Major media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, McLeans magazine and even CBC Radio’s “As it Happens” program, who had previously gone along with the warmists, have paid attention to the new information. How much impact these revelations will have on the looming Copenhagen International Climate Conference is not known.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions © 2010 Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.

About The Authors

Stanton T. Friedman has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from the University of Chicago. He has lectured on “Flying Saucers ARE Real!” to more than 700 college and professional audiences in 50 states, 9 provinces, and 16 other countries, and has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV programs including CBS Sunday Morning, Larry King Live, Nightline, and Unsolved Mysteries. Friedman has worked on classified, advanced technology programs for such companies as GE, GM, and Westinghouse. He has done research at 20 government document archives, authored TOP SECRET/MAJIC about Operation Majestic 12, and coauthored Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. He was the original civilian investigator of that very important event, and also coauthored Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience with Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill’s niece.

Educator and sociologist Kathleen Marden is Betty Hill’s niece and trustee of her estate. She has all of Hill’s papers and correspondence, and has transcribed the tapes of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions with psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. Marden has also met with the numerous scientists who investigated the case. For the past 10 years, she has served on the Board of Directors of the Mutual UFO Network, the largest International UFO organization and as director of Field Investigator Training for MUFON. Marden lives in Stratham, New Hampshire.

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 65.

“Assuming that the climate projections are correct, gradually over the next several decades heading toward the end of the century, it becomes one of the more important factors in driving Mexicans across the border, all other things being equal,” said study author Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University…

[continues in the Los Angeles Times]

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 nations, totally ignoring the fact that but for those nations said delegates would be sleeping in huts instead of five-star hotels. Certainly there was little room for science or the consequences of turning the economies of the world on their heads through instituting carbon-emission limits.

In stark contrast to the Copenhagen affair, the 4th International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, convened May 16, 2010 on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Without their hands in taxpayers’ pockets, attendees had to pony up $540 for the conference, and nearly $300 per night for a room. Some 800 in attendance came from over 40 countries, including a sizable contingent from “down under” where a “cap and tax” debate has been raging for the last few years and recently soundly defeated. But how many of you heard about the Chicago conference and the long list of experts who gave presentations there, making the case that global warming is not a problem?

Let’s look at some of the general subjects of inquiry and extract parts of many presentations that are applicable to those subject areas. First we’ll look at something simple: Is the Earth warming?

Is the Earth Warming?
Ha, ha. That’s my little joke, being as determining some mean temperature of the Earth is anything but a trivial problem. Where the heck are we going to stick the thermometer?

Surface Temperatures: As in most scientific matters, terrestrial temperatures are measured in degrees Celsius. So if we add the daily low temperatures for every point on Earth to the corresponding high temperatures, then divide by two, we should be able to get the average temperature for the Earth for that day. Then we add these up for a year, divide by 365 and get the average temperature for the year. We’ll compare this to previous years where this same procedure was done, and we can tell if we’re warming or cooling. Of course, we’re not measuring temperatures at all points on Earth, and in fact the number of weather stations has decreased. (In Canada the number fell from 600 in 1975 to 35 in 2009.) And to whom should we entrust these data?

There is, in general, much anecdotal information showing that the Earth has been warming in recent times. Both Revolutionary and Civil War records describe rivers that were frequently frozen during winters of their day, but do not freeze today. An example is the Arkansas River at Little Rock, where Union Army reports speak of an annual ice bridge across the river capable of supporting both foot and wagon traffic, something no one alive today has ever seen. As a result of these sources, there has been general agreement that we are in a warming trend since the 18th century, and this trend has continued into the late 20th and early 21st century. This was more or less a “given” in the debate over climate change.

On November 19, 2009, this house-of-concurrence over recent global temperature records came tumbling down when the holy-of-holies repository for all these records — not just the modern ones since we’ve had thermometers, but the paleotemperature analyses that give us a historical account of what temperatures were in the Middle Ages and earlier — was caught fudging data and committing other improprieties. Where were the records held? They were at the CRU — the Climatic Research Unit — located at East Anglia University in merry old England. And the chief keeper of records? None other than discredited Professor Phil Jones.

As Cato’s Dr. Patrick Michaels pointed out in his keynote address at the Heartland conference, we should have been suspicious of Jones all along…

[continues in New American]

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 vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.

“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”

Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions…

[continues in the New York Times]

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 warning of coastal cities being deluged by rising waters from melting polar ice caps “is utterly wrong.”

The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man’s role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations’ latest report on climate change.

“The tiger of global warming has lost its teeth. Maybe it’s not even a real tiger any more. Maybe it is a blown-up dummy,” Morner said at the conference.

For his paper, Morner looked at the sea-level changes in major metropolitan cities around the globe — including Venice, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Mumbai, as well as islands such as the Maldives. A total of 159 stations were used for the research. His study showed that there was a maximum of 3 millimeters of sea level rise in some locales around the world, and many coastal cities showed no rise at all…

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 evidence on evolution and global warming.

Oklahoma introduced a bill with similar goals in 2009, although it was not enacted.

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”…

[continues in the New York Times]

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 on which the contention of global warming has been based has been thoroughly discredited as manipulated and mangled beyond recovery.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Three official global surface temperature data sets exist. These include British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office). Another is maintained by the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. The third is maintained by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS).

Last October, Hadley-CRU admitted in response to Freedom of Information requests that they had actually thrown away the raw temperature data from which they constructed their historical surface temperature record…

[continues in the American Spectator]

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 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 change is man-made and suggesting it is nothing more than a myth.

“Well, if it is but a myth, and the global scientific community is involved in some sort of conspiracy, why is it then that around the globe sea levels are more than six inches higher than they were 100 years ago? This isn’t an opinion – it is a fact.”…

[continues in the Daily Express]

The movement claims the planet is heading to disaster because factories and cars are heating up the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The green industry feeds off our fears and urges us to spend billions on products that purport to be good for the environment.

This week, Jesse and his investigators are traveling around the world to expose the power-brokers who pull the strings and rake in fortunes. The Conspiracy Theory team aims to get to the bottom of claims that global warming is a powerful plot meant to extort, tax and control all of us.

From a remote wilderness location, where one critical scientist claims he is hiding from death threats, to Silicon Valley, where a company makes a bundle helping corporations avoid paying carbon tax, then all the way to China to learn more. Jesse also examines Al Gore’s role in all this, but he pushes further as he uncovers evidence that leads him to the man known as The Wizard, who just might be behind the whole global warming conspiracy.

The now-finished climate change summit in Copenhagen marks the “arrogance of man,” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said this weekend.

Palin, who had urged President Barack Obama not to attend the conference in Denmark, blasted the agreement world leaders made late on Friday to begin stemming emissions that contribute to climate change.

Palin tweeted early Saturday morning:

Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature’s ways.MUST b good stewards of God’s earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature

Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng

Those tweets and previous skepticism the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee has expressed toward global warming science has led some to label her a climate change “denier.”

But Palin has maintained that she does not deny that climate change exists, and that she only questions the extent of the change and what sort of policies should be put in place to address it…

[continues on The Hill]

While tens of thousands of NGO’s, environmental activists, government officials and journalists have descended on the climate talks in Copenhagen, a small but vocal number of energy industry lobbyists and climate change deniers are staging events to put forward their point of view.

At one such event held by Americans For Prosperity, a right-wing group with funding ties to Exxon-Mobil and oil interests. [disinfo ed.'s note: we know this sentence doesn't make sense.]

At their event in Copenhagen, a group of clean energy activists disrupted their meeting. In attendance was Lord Christopher Monckton, one of the most visible and outspoken voices against climate change science, who proceeded to call the protesters “Hitler Youth.”

So who is Lord Christopher Mockton? “Mother Jones” describes him as a “self-described former special adviser to Margaret Thatcher on matters ranging from hydrogeology to epidemiology [who] has more recently devoted himself to climatology.” The book “Climate Cover Up” notes, however, that he has no background in science whatsoever, and he’s studied only classics and journalism. He shows up at events to make his global warming-denying case at the behest of groups funded by dirty energy interests such as Friends of America and The Heartland Institute.

Despite the fact that he no scientific training, he’s been called upon twice by Republicans in Congress to testify before subcommittees as a climate “expert” — you can read his statement to the Ways and Means Committee here.

Global warming is not the first topic that Monckton has taken extreme positions on. He created an uproar in his 1987 article for The American Spectator when he wrote, “There is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

[continues at the Huffington Post]

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month’s United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.

The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

Predictions of Global Warming are Wrong

Listen to a Friends of Science radio ad

Download (.mp3)

A national campaign of this kind, if it featured 25 to 30 spots per day in each of the cities for its 30-second ads, would cost about $60,000 to $65,000 per week, according to an executive of an advertising agency, who did not want to be identified.

[continues the Globe & Mail]

The message seemed clear: natural variations in the long term warming, might be misinterpreted by the media, out of ignorance, or malice.

Climate deniers were quick to take Latif’s remarks, and begin doing exactly that.