The Stack effect - by Richard... Friday, February 19, 2010

The Stack effect - by Richard... Friday, February 19, 2010

If you do one thing today, after reading this, take the time out to read what the man had to say. Self-described as a "rant", I have seen much less coherent stuff on many a forum.

Draw your own conclusions.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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A total farce - by Richard...

Anyone following the global warming rhetoric coming out of India recently will be under no illusion that the official line is that it represents a major threat to the human race – and especially the peoples of India.

Then you see a piece like this in the Pakistani Daily Times (not by any means the first of its kind) and you know the Indian rhetoric for exactly what it is – rhetoric.

The report here tells us that India is in a fix over releasing "secret data" on the Himalayan glaciers to the scientists studying the phenomenon of ice melting in the region.

These data are so classified that government glaciologist Dr VK Raina was refused access to his own work that he had done during his tenure in the Geological Survey of India (GSI). He was bluntly told that all GSI data was classified, which also included the water flow from the melting glaciers.

Raina was able to use some of the data he had – though at the risk of being hauled up under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) – in his report, trashing the Pachauri's claims of fast disappearing glaciers by pointing out that some glaciers had in fact "expanded".

But the fact remains that many of the glaciers are in highly sensitive border areas so data on the areas are withheld on the grounds that its release might be a compromise on the country's security. This reflects the fears that it might get into "wrong hands" and be misused by the "neighbours" – meaning, of course, Pakistan, but also taking in China.

And, if India cannot even co-operate on a regional level over areas supposedly of vital interest to the mankind's survival, putting its own national needs ahead of the common interest, putting men with guns where there should be scientists, then the hopes of anything sensible coming out of the region are next to nil.

Even though the guns in the particularly sensitive areas – such as Kashmir – are most often silent, there is a proxy war between Pakistan and India going on in Afghanistan, driving the insurgency there. That the two countries should then put aside their enmities and allow free-roaming parties of scientists to release potentially strategic war material is too much to ask.

The tragedy is that this insecurity is doing more than anything else to hold back development in the region. Between then, Pakistan and India field more than two million men under arms, each country having to bear crippling military costs. Settling the regional disputes would do far more that any amount of "mitigation" to deal with the rapidly disappearing global warming.

That too points up another evil of the global warming obsession. Huge amounts of intellectual energy and resources are being expended on a non-existent or low-order problem, while the more important issues are tucked into the background, unresolved.

These obsessives do more damage than they even begin to realise.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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Holland's first climate exile? - by Richard... Thursday, February 18, 2010

"I am much more anxious about the cooling of the earth. The ultimate fate of this planet is a new ice age. If the main wheat belts of the Northern hemisphere fail to produce their much needed harvest, heaven knows how we will feed ourselves. Well, it could be that warming will lead to a disaster. I still want to accept that. But you must weigh this unknown risk against other problems."

Henk Tennekes, former Director of the KNMI (Dutch Meteorological Institute), forced out of his job in the '90s over his views on global warming – interviewed in De Telegraaf.

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Biased BBC - by Richard...

"In the corrupt world of climate change it's all very, very cosy for those who make the running." 

Comment on the resignation of Yvo de Boer.

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Saving the planet - by Richard...

Kidney disease sufferers and hard-pressed taxpayers generally will be delighted to learn that NHS Kidney Care is funding a one-year "Green Nephrology Fellowship" for a Specialist Registrar (SpR) to work on "sustainability in kidney care".

So it was that in September 2009, Andrew Connor was appointed to the post. He has been seconded to The Campaign for Greener Healthcare (which is in part funded by the NHS) and has been receiving training in project management and clinical systems improvement. 

Apparently a qualified physician, he is no longer wasting his time treating patients. Instead, he is now working with renal units "to look at existing approaches that aim to reduce carbon emissions, and to develop sustainable models of kidney care," busily "undertaking carbon modelling of clinical pathways." 

The cost of this one-year project, we are told, is a mere £135,700.00, including VAT and a provision for £20,000 for "footprinting work". 

However, this is not the end of it. Further projects include an analysis of the carbon footprint of kidney care, a survey of current sustainability within renal units and collaboration with the renal industry – at a cost so far undisclosed. 

Nevertheless, one is so pleased that the NHS has given up on the boring old task of saving patients' lives and is increasingly concentrating its scarce resources on saving the planet – a far more worthwhile venture.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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There's always a catch - by Richard...

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has been caught in flagrante delicto, or so it would seem.The Daily Telegraph reports that this department, specifically set up to tackle climate change has paid for more than 1,000 internal flights around Britain despite telling the public to cut down on air travel.

However, or so we are told, this is somewhat mitigated by the Government using £35,000 of our money to buy indulgences carbon credits to offset the flights – but that isn't even the half of it.

What we are not told is that the government is co-funding an EU project called CATCH headed by the transport consultancy MRC Mclean Hazel Limited, with the participation of the University of the West of England in Bristol and the public-funded Transport Research Laboratory.

For €1.94 million, of which €1.48 million is EU funding, the project will "develop a knowledge platform" to "provide travellers, businesses, planners and other mobility stakeholders with the tools to play their part in creating a new mobility culture promoting timely and informed climate-friendly travel choice and policies." 

The "Holistic Platform" (i.e., website) "will enable travellers to understand the climate change impacts of their choices, and take effective actions to reduce them, and enable policy decision makers to include carbon constraints into their actions." 

Nor indeed is this the full extent of the EU involvement. It also has on the go a project calledWISETRIP, in which the University of Aberdeen and the Angus Transport Forum is taking part. For €2.14 million – of which €1.44 million is EU funding – they are designing a network of interconnected Journey Planner systems to combine urban and Long-Distance Transport information services, all of which is supposed to integrate with the CATCH project.

Then there is the i-Travel project which for €2.27 million – of which €1.46 million is EU funding – is set to develop "a personalised, context-aware online 'virtual travel assistant' service for travellers, both before and throughout their journey."

This, in turn is augmented by CIVITAS, a €24.48 million project, with €15.29 million of EU money, aimed at improving "sustainable transport" and "pushing citizens towards the desired behavioural shift".

With all that effort, and something like €30 million being spent on guiding travellers towards making the "right" choice of journey plan, the very least DECC could do is take a little notice of what is going on. But then, I suppose, we are dealing with the mindset of our rulers, who subscribe to the dominant ethos of "do as I say, not what I do".

When CATCH goes online in 2012 and becomes available to the public, though, at least we will have some guidance in telling them what to do with it.

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Are the rats deserting the sinking ship? - by Richard...

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, has announced his resignation, according toAssociated Press. His departure takes effect 1 July, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases.

De Boer said from Bonn, Germany that he was announcing his departure now to allow UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon to find a successor well before the Mexico conference.

AP notes that his constant travel and frenetic diplomacy failed to bridge the suspicions and distrust between developing and industrial countries that barred the way to an agreement at Copenhagen in December.

It should also be noted that it was de Boer, rather than Pachauri, who first acknowledged the "Glaciergate" error, with the good doctor trailing grudgingly in his wake. Whether the two events are connected, we do not know but, no doubt, more will emerge.

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Diminishing returns - by Richard...

The latest "gate" - of a sort – has made an appearance, via Czech physicist Lubos Motl. He analyses on his blog the temperature record at the Clementinum in central Prague (pictured). 

The site hosts the world's second oldest continuously working weather station after the Central England dataset, with records going back to 1770 which have not been interrupted or modified since 1775. And, in 1794, the Clementinum's annual mean temperature was 11.50°C and in 2005 it was 10.88°C.

Effectively, there has been no statistically significant warming in Prague since 1800, and that is without taking into account the urban heat island. That may be as much as 0.6°C per century and which would probably revert the 200-year trend to a significant cooling.

Despite this, the records have been excluded from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), from which the climate records have been compiled. They have been replaced by some gapped and strangely artificially adjusted data from the Prague International Airport, which doubtless give a different picture.

If there was anything like an honest and informed debate going on, then this would be big news, not least because it confirms so much else, where the accumulated evidence points to a sustained and deliberate tampering with the historical temperature record.

Given the inherent dishonesty of the imperious "Gavin" over at RealClimate (which actually has two million hits less than EUREF, despite starting two years earlier), there is no possibility of dialogue with the warmists. Mockery of their pretentions is the only real option.

Far more important than the warmist claque, however, is the Economist blog which trots through the "gates" with a superficiality that the Beano would find it hard to emulate, making lofty, ex cathedra pronouncements as to the rectitude of the "climate scientists" RealClimate. That is "prestige" in action for you: sceptics versus climate scientists – no contest in the writer's mind.

A similar line comes from CBS News as the establishment seeks to recover its dominance, after the multiple hits it has taken, retreating into a smokescreen of clever-dickery which allows commentators to appear knowing, without addressing any of the issues.

Fortunately, we see items like this in the Washington Examiner, which follows the path of this blog, with a "daily outrage" column, highlighting in this case money misspent on global warming.

Andrew Alexander in The Mail on Sunday (which I missed at the time) also offers a insight on the power of the myth, although this one has a way to run on this side of the Atlantic before the establishment deserts it here.

It is in the States that real battle will be fought. The EPA lawsuit documents have been lodged (such as this one) and they make powerful reading. For the first time, we are to see the warmists challenged in a formal arena, where they cannot duck and dive.

Without that avenue available to us over here, and with our politicians resolutely keeping their heads down, we are stuck with the political condom of the EU, which ensures that no serious debate is ever born. Thus, as so often, we are relegated to the sidelines, hoping "our" side will win but unable to participate in the action.

As for the "gates", without political engagement, we are approaching the point of diminishing returns. Every new finding has less shock value, and soon enough the media will run out of steam – and interest. After their brief flurry, they will move on.

However, with Pachauri refusing to move, the IPCC is fatally wounded. Things will never be the same again. The warmist creed is on the wane and, eventually, the politicians will catch up, and bow to the inevitable. We can entertain ourselves, in the meantime, by baiting the warmists and supporting the Americans, but short of shooting the denizens of our political establishment – an option which looks increasingly attractive – we are mere bystanders.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

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A satisfactory model of complete ignorance - by Richard... Wednesday, February 17, 2010

This one, I couldn't resist. In June 2006, the EU decided to commission a project under the heading: "What poor information can tell: Analysis of climate policies under large uncertainty about climate change."

The research investigated "the usefulness of imprecise probability concepts for assessing and processing the large and diverse uncertainty that needs to be considered in climate policy analysis. Imprecise probabilities are constituted by entire sets of probability measures." 

I think I understand what they are talking about (just), but in case you have problems, they go on: "They provide a satisfactory model of complete ignorance, which is an important prerequisite for quantifying poor states of information such as encountered in climate change research. Classical probability theory faces severe difficulties in this field as the debate around quantifying uncertainties in the IPCC Assessment reports shows."

The project consisted of a theoretical part mainly conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and an applicational part to be executed at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, Germany (return host). 

And you will be pleased to learn that the theoretical part consisted of an analysis of the decision theoretical as well as evidential basis of imprecise probabilities in the light of climate change. In the applied part, it investigated how the presence of ambiguity, i.e., imprecise information, can alter the results of model-based analyses of climate protection strategies and policy instruments.

It seems they had their work cut out. Fortunately, the work – completed in May last year – only cost us €245,365.00 – excluding VAT of course. Mind you, I could have provided "a satisfactory model of complete ignorance," absolutely free of change.