They just never give up - by Richard... Thursday, December 10, 2009

They just never give up - by Richard... Thursday, December 10, 2009

Next year will be the hottest on record, says the Met Office.

Is this the same Met Office that was telling us last year that "... it could be time to say goodbye to defining features of British life, like rainy picnics and cloudy sunbathing?"

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The "generosity" of the EU - by Richard...

With the EU claiming the crown of global environmental leadership, the greenie blog on the New York Times is taking a sniffy look at quite how much the "colleagues" have on offer.

Not much, according to a number of campaign groups, says the greenie blog. There are "three big loopholes" in the current EU goal of reducing emissions by 20 percent.

First, the EU could use excess carbon credits granted to some Eastern and Central European countries under the Kyoto Protocol. Those represent unearned emissions cuts from the collapse of communist-era industry. 

Second, the EU is promoting methods to account for emissions from land-use, land-use change and forestry that also make it too easy for the bloc to meet its current target. And thirdly, the EU is buying carbon credits from international projects that substantially reduce the amount of reductions in emissions it would otherwise have to make domestically.

Thus, the present offer actually means slowing down the current pace of emission reductions in Europe, we are told. The EU ends up with less on the table than the United States. Its offer to cut emissions by 17 percent by the end of the next decade, compared with 2005 levels, represents a bigger commitment.

What you see, it seems, it not always what you get – but then it was ever thus. Funny how the US is the bad guy though.

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MONCKIP! - by Richard...

Viscount Monckton, better known as Christopher Monckton, the journalist and author has today joined the UK Independence Party. UKIP Leader Malcolm Pearson said, "I am delighted that Lord Monckton has accepted my invitation to join UKIP as our chief spokesman on Climate Change.

"He was Margaret Thatcher's Special Adviser in Downing Street on a number of areas, including science. He is now perhaps the world's leading expert on the case against Man-made Global Warming, and as such is a household name in the United States and elsewhere."

Now, on top of Climategate, the media have another reason to ignore the party.

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Birds of a feather - by Richard...

So, we now have the great statement from "the UK science community", rent-seekers united, declaring that they "have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities."

What of course is not said is how many of the signatories received public funding or other grants for climate change studies, and how many would be out of a job if it was not for the elevated interest in Mann-made global warming. However, it is instructive to note that there are over 200 publicly-funded employees from the Met Office amongst the signatories.

Given that the organisation works closely with CRU, and jointly produced one of the temperature datasets, could we expect anything other than a resounding statement of confidence in what amounts to their own work? This is rather like Gordon Brown getting a vote of confidence from Labour MPs in the House of Commons, on a motion tabled by the Conservative Party. And the precise value of that is?

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Wonderful Copenhagen - by Richard...

You know you are beginning to make progress when there are websites dedicated to it ... and we now have Climategate.nl.

The site is currently displaying a weather map with the projected cumulative snow for upcoming Thursday in Denmark - 21cm snow. That's eight inches in real money.

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The Manchester heat island - by Richard...

Following on from our look at the heat island effect, we were pointed at a source of temperature data which included corrected and uncorrected temperatures for Manchester Ringway Airport.


The graph shown above (apparently from CRU) covers the period 1951 to 2001 and it can been seen that adjustments have made in the early period for a notional heat island effect, but the adjustments tail off from the 1990s, where there is hardly any difference between the two figures.


Yet, as can be seen from the two photographs, the difference between Ringway as it was in the early days (the top photo is undated, but looks to be late 40s early 50s) and Manchester International Airport as it is now. Yet the historic allowance is less than half a degree. This hardly seems enough, given the scale of the development.

The point that seems to escape many observers on this is that airfield weather stations are precisely that - weather stations. They are there to provide information to aviators, to enable them to fly safely. They are not and were never intended for long-term climatic research. Arguably, they should be excluded from the climate data sets.

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Feeding the green monster - by Richard...

HSBC research estimates that revenues from climate-related businesses could exceed US$2 trillion by 2020.

And the greenies reckon that big business opposes climate change? This is "big climate" in action.

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Real money - by Richard...

One can quite understand the focus on the pre-budget report in the media today, with the news of the chancellor's £7 billion "tax raid on jobs" gettingplenty of coverage.

Inevitably, though – as we suggested yesterday – the concern is classic short-termism, highlighting the issues of the day – which is, of course, exactly what you expect the media to do.

However, while we fret over such sums, considerably less attention is given to even greater raids on our pockets, not least the £18 billion annually the government estimates as the cost of dealing with "climate change". 

Then there is the £6.5 billion spent on our EU contributions (soon to go up), the £5 billion plus that we are to spend on the Afghan war next year, the £1 billion a year we are apparently to pledge to less developed countries to help the pay for climate change, to say nothing of the near-billion we give to India each year in aid (I had to get that one in). 

That is already the better part of £30 billion, and there is much more low-hanging fruit that could so easily be pruned. Concern, it seems, is always so very highly selective.

Another of these invisible "hits" the taxpayer takes is VAT fraud and, in a piece today in The Daily Scarygraph we see the conjunction of one fraud – carbon credits – with that hardy perennial .

We brought this up in September, when reassuring noises were being made, to the effect that the problem had been contained, yet now we hear from Europol, delivering a paper to the Copenhagen summit that Carbon trading fraudsters may have pocketed €5bn (£4.5bn) in their various scams.

They may, in fact, have accounted for up to 90 percent f all market activity in some European countries, mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland. Rob Wainwright, the director of serious crime squad, is saying that large-scale organised criminal activity has "endangered the credibility" of the current carbon trading system. 

Given that the credibility of the system is already shot to pieces with the legal scams, or would be if it was being reported correctly, this should be the last straw – but of course it will not be.

But the point we keep making on this is real money, money that comes out of our pockets – taken indiscriminately from little old ladies, the poor, the unemployed and the rich alike. This is real money and they are robbing us blind.

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Professional integrity? - by Richard...

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails, reports The Times.

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the "professional integrity" of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions, says the paper.

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

Thus, in concocting this faux testimonial, the Met Office is demonstrating with absolute clarity precisely the point it is seeking to rebut – that "global warming research" entirely lacks "professional integrity".

And who, incidentally, paid for this little exercise in deception?

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I think we said that - by Richard...

Referring to the daily stream of truck convoys that bring supplies into the landlocked nation, Hilary Clinton said to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"You know, when we are so dependent upon long supply lines - as we are in Afghanistan, where everything has to be imported -- it's much more difficult than it was in Iraq, where we had Kuwait as a staging ground. 

You offload a ship in Karachi. And by the time whatever it is - you know, muffins for our soldiers' breakfast or anti-IED equipment - gets to where we're headed, it goes through a lot of hands. And one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money. That has nothing to do with President Karzai." 

More on Defence of the Realm.

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"Very challenging" - by Richard...

"Very courageous, Minister," was the phrase Sir Humphrey used in order to keep Hacker in line. Roughly translated, it means: "electoral suicide". I tried it once in an e-mail in response to the suggestion of a very senior politician. I had a phone call back in minutes. "Why?" was the first and only word I heard.

Anyhow, from the same stable is the phrase "very challenging". Translated, it means just one word: "impossible". Yet that is the phrase being used by Dr Jason Lowe of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, when asked whether reaching the iconic target of a 2°C reduction in global temperature by 2020 is possible.

Michael McCarthy in The Independent does the translation. The pathways to the "C limit" – as he calls it - are simply too steep for the world to climb with its present level of ambition for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, even if this ambition is translated into a global agreement next week – something that is still far from certain.

What it means, he says, is that the radical prescriptions for climate change, the ones that come from the green pressure groups, the ones of which politicians instinctively think, "Nah, the electorate will never wear that" are the only ones that are actually going to work.

"Not being an eco-fundamentalist" - or so he says - McCarthy finds that quite hard to take on board. But, he adds, the implication is unavoidable. In the end it's a simple choice. One way will work, the other won't. It's going to take quite a time to filter through to public opinion, though. And as for the climate sceptic lobby, he concludes for good measure, the phrase "living in a parallel universe" comes more and more to mind.

Of course, there is an easy way out. If the scientists got honest and measured their global temperatures correctly - and also allowed for the cooling which some think could intensify – then the problem could be sorted in no time at all.

Failing that, the warmists are going to need some "very courageous" politicians. And that would never do.

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Urban heat island effect - by Richard... Wednesday, December 09, 2009

In its enthusiasm to convince us of the rectitude of the climate science trade, the Met Office has released data "from 1300 weather stations around the world which show that the globe is getting warmer." The Guardian, very helpfully, has extracted all the UK and US temperature change data and posted links on its site.

What is not said is whether these data are adjusted or not, but we've had a look at the British Isles (not the UK). What is immediately apparent from the 48 stations listed is the large number of airfield sites – at least 15.

Finding the exact location of the Stevenson screens is not easy, but we managed to locate the one at Bournemouth Hurn Airport, pictured above (click the pic to enlarge – centre of red rectangle). This is not my expert field, but doubtless the likes of Anthony Watts might readily assert that this particular station is somewhat prone to what is known as urban heat island effect.

Interestingly, the Met Office is claiming a continuous temperature record right back to 1850, but by no means all of the stations were in place then. Records for Hurn, for instance, are only shown from 1961, in common with London Gatwick Airport. 

Aberdeen/Dyce is another of the weather stations, for which records are listed from 1871 – although the site only became an airfield in 1934. It is now the world's busiest commercial heliport. Discerning readers might be able to detect a slight difference between the conditions pre-war and currently (pic above right and below left).

By contrast, the Met Office list includes such sites as Plymouth/Mount Batte, for which records are listed from 1865, Ross-on-Wye, where records start in 1877 and Fort William which has listings from 1884. 

Most of these sites were and are still in undeveloped rural areas, when there were very few recording stations in use. But most of the more modern sites, which came into use very much later, are in highly developed sites – and some (as with Aberdeen - weather station shown below) were intensively developed through their history.


What effect that might have had on the temperature record for the British Isles is impossible for us to say – and we have no information as to what adjustments the Met Office have made, if any, to regularise the record and eliminate what at first sight could be a very significant warming bias.

From what we know, however, and what is evident, it would be unwise to accept the record as is, unless and until the Met Office can supply satisfactory information on how the very real possibility of urban heat island effect has been eliminated.

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Reality bites - by Richard...

After the blood-curdling warnings, the hubris, the triumphal declarations and the drama, it looks as if the Copenhagen experience is about to undergo a mood change as the US chief climate negotiator Todd Stern arrives in town.

The United States is willing to pay its fair share towards a multibillion-dollar climate change accord, but would not accept American taxes ending up in China as a result, he immediately told reporters – who otherwise seem to be struggling for hard news, such is the paucity of material coming out of the summit.

This then is where the battle-lines are being drawn – just how much the "developing" countries feel the so-called "rich" countries should pay them to take part in their collective fantasy, as against how far the US and other governments are prepared to wreck their own economies.

It is one thing suspending the laws of science to produce fantasy graphs and lurid projections of doom, but quite another for elected politicians openly, in full public gaze, to throw billions at nations such as China.

Thus does Stern say: "China has a dynamic economy which has led to it sitting on $2 trillion of reserves ... I don't envision public funds, certainly from the United States, going to China."

Of course, such reservations do not apply to the UK. As Christopher Booker reminds us today, the British government has already committed us to spending in the order of £18 billion a year from now until 2050 on implementing the Climate Change Act, and is ready to put more on the table in order to stitch up a deal at Copenhagen.

Nevertheless, for all the demonstrations in that sad little Danish city, it does not look as if the US – even under Obama – is prepared to ditch its economy with quite such verve as the British. Reality might be about to get a quick airing, for a few days at least.

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More data manipulation - by Richard...

Over at The Virtuous Republic. One accepts that, under certain circumstances, raw temperature data have to be adjusted. But why is it that, whenever they are, the early results seem to end up depressed and the later temperatures seem to increase?

The above graph is the finished product, released in triumph to the Copenhagen summit. As a work of art, it might have some merit – I am not in a position to judge. But is it science?

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A wobbly warmist - by Richard...

"I have long said that climate science is far from certain, and that there are lots of unknowns that merit further study to gain better understanding. I have also said that there probably is enough known about climate change that we should do something about it -- because we'll never have perfect information, just as we never have perfect information about important issues that we must nevertheless decide upon, such as battle plans (or even going to war in the first place) or rescuing the financial system.

Unfortunately, both sides of the climate debate - passionate scientists and policy advocates vs. heated skeptics and supporters of the status quo at any cost - have moved beyond rational debate into the mystical." 

Richard Stuebi in the Huff-puff, for heaven's sake! So: "climate science is far from certain". Whatever happened to "the science is settled"?

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From the mouths of greenies - by Richard...

If you accept the argument that we've got, say 95 months left to save the world then yes, we have certainly passed the point of no return. Even if the politicians managed to cobble something together at Copenhagen - which they probably won't - it won't be kept to anyway because at the same time they've got to promote constant economic growth. 

As environmentalists, in our private conversations, we know this stuff, but in public we are saying we've got to hit targets, the problem is that when it doesn't happen, which it won't, we're going to be in big trouble because people aren't going to listen to us anymore.

Former deputy editor of the Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth.