FoS Extracts - 2015

By: Ian Cameron                     TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

2015-12-28

 

Secret Deal on Alberta 's Oilsands Emissions Divides Oilpatch

As part of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley 's climate change plan [FoS Extracts - 2015-11-27] four oilsands companies (CNRL, Suncor, Shell and Cenovus) agreed to a hard cap of 100 Mt from oilsands emissions. In return environmentalists supposedly agreed to back down on opposition of oil export pipelines. However, the deal has created a great division in Canada 's oil and gas sector. Competing oilsands companies like Imperial Oil and MEG Energy were not consulted and worry that the agreement with the environmentalists is unenforceable. Also, there is the question of how the 100 Mt quota is to be allocated. When the four oilsands producers briefed the rest of the industry at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, tempers flared.
 
DeSmogBlog  supports the Imperial and MEG Energy assessment by quoting from some of the five environmental groups involved in the deal who say that Alberta 's new climate policy won 't buy market access for new oil pipelines.
 
<http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/News/11560202/story.html>
<http://www.desmog.ca/2015/12/09/why-alberta-s-climate-plan-won-t-stop-battle-over-oil-pipelines>
 

Alberta 's Environment Minister: We have taken our share of responsibilities 

Even as the federal environment minister endorsed a goal of keeping global average temperatures under 1.5 °C over pre-industrial levels, rather than 2 °C, Alberta 's Shannon Phillips said her province is under no pressure to toughen up its newly-released climate change plan. This plan will essentially stabilize emissions at their current level    by 2030. However, a poll shows that 68% of Albertans oppose the climate plan and its carbon tax.
 
<http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/environment-minister-says-alberta-isnt-under-pressure-to-beef-up-climate-plan>
 

The IPCC 's Post-Paris Political Rallying Cry

The IPCC is supposed to be an objective, policy-neutral, wholly scientific body staffed by experts with impeccable judgment. However, Chris Field, who heads the IPCC 's Working Group II (Impacts of Climate Change) celebrates the Paris Agreement with an email to his WG II colleagues stating that their report was a clear enabler  of the agreement and congratulating them for their invaluable role in setting the stage for a turning point in history.  This is far from summarizing already-published research.
 
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/12/15/the-ipccs-post-paris-political-rallying-cry/>
 

Republicans Fail to Block Money for Green Climate Fund

In a victory for the Obama Administration, a $1.2 trillion spending package released by Congressional leaders on December 16 won 't block US contributions to the UN 's Green Climate Fund. As the legislation neither explicitly approves nor disapproves contributions, the President can move funding from other spending areas to the GCF if he wants.
 
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/263447-spending-bill-wont-stop-funds-for-obama-climate-deal>
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/16/heres-how-congress-is-quietly-giving-the-un-money-for-its-global-warming-agenda/>
<http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/white-house-spending-deal-allows-obama-shift-money-green-climate>
 

Data or Dogma Testimony before US Senate

On December 8 the US Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness convened a hearing on:  Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth 's Climate. Speaking for the data were Drs. John Christy, Judith Curry and William Happer, together with journalist Mark Steyn. The only dogma witness was Dr. David Titley. Joanne Nova 's blog has a full 2 ¾-hour video of the hearing, which she says captures why the USA is the best hope for defeating the religious climate meme.   Watts Up With That  captures one of the livelier exchanges when Dr. Curry, supported by Mr. Steyn, responds to being called a denier  by Sen. Markey. A second WUWT clip shows Mr. Steyn rebuking the Democrats for enforcing a state ideology. 
 
In the final WUWT link Tim Ball uses the Senate hearing as an example why formal hearings on climate science have an inherent problem:  Politicians and judges are not qualified to determine a science confrontation, where the argument is about your paper  vs my paper.     Instead, skeptics must show, in terms the public can understand, how their paper  was deliberately falsified, whether by incompetence or corruption. In a debate with the leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May, Dr. Ball avoided trying to correct her errors. Rather, he used general comments and examples to undermine the credibility of the IPCC and counter the much-quoted 97% scientific consensus  on AGW.  
 
<http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?ID=CA2ABC55-B1E8-4B7A-AF38-34821F6468F7>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/12/find-the-climate-deniers-near-you-ted-cruz-mark-steyn-will-happer-judith-curry-in-congress/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/09/tables-turned-scientist-judith-curry-and-author-mark-steyn-question-school-sen-markey-on-climate/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/09/mark-steyn-rebukes-democrats-in-climate-hearing-youre-effectively-enforcing-a-state-ideology/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/19/the-recent-senate-climate-hearing-failed-because-it-continues-to-miss-the-point/>
 

The Economist 's  Hot Air on Climate Change

The November 28, 2015 issue of  The Economist  magazine had a 14 page special report on climate change. While it accepts the IPCC 's view on the science, accuses skeptics of being tools of fossil-fuel companies, ignores the benefits of having more CO2  in the atmosphere and falsely claims that this year is the hottest on record, it get one thing right. This is the fact the wind and solar are ruinously expensive and are not the answer to reducing CO2  emissions.  
 
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/emthe_economistsem_hot_air_on_climate_change.html>
 

Sunspot Activity Remains the Weakest Since the Dalton Minimum

November, the 84th month of the current solar cycle (No. 24), saw a solar sunspot number of 63.2, which is 72% of the mean for month 84 since solar cycle observations began in 1755. Based on accumulated monthly deviations from the mean, we are experiencing the weakest solar cycle since the Dalton Minimum of 1790-1830, which involved SC Nos. 5, 6 and 7.
 
<http://notrickszone.com/2015/12/16/november-2015-solar-report-remains-the-weakest-since-dalton-minimum-of-early-1800s/#sthash.CAo8t0n6.KIJp7euJ.dpbs>

 

2015-12-08

 

Ecojustice Goes After Friends of Science

On December 3, Ecojustice (formerly the Sierra Legal Defence Fund), on behalf of six leading Canadians,  filed a complaint calling on the Commissioner of Competition to investigate false and misleading representations made by climate change denier groups, such as Friends of Science.  In its application Ecojustice included copies of six of FoS ' billboards and a page from the FoS website and claims they constitute misrepresentations under the  Competition Act. The complaint alleges Climate science misrepresentations have affected the public understanding and acceptance of climate change science in Canada.  Therefore, in at least in Ecojustice 's opinion, the FoS billboard ads and its website must have been effective.
 
Ecojustice Canada Society is well-funded. According to Charity Intelligence Canada, it had revenues of more than $4.5 million in both 2012 and 2013.  
 
On December 4 FoS issued a statement on the Ecojustice complaint noting that the Competition Bureau of Canada conducts its investigations in private and keeps confidential the identity of the source and the information provided.  Thus, the publication of the complaint and attendant publicity prior to FoS receiving official notice appears to violate the nature and intent of the Bureau 's work.
 
<http://www.ecojustice.ca/pressrelease/leading-canadians-call-for-investigation-of-climate-change-denier-groups/>
<http://www.ecojustice.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/2015-12-03-Application-to-Commissioner-of-Competition-re-Climate-science-misrepresentations-updated.pdf>
<http://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/275-ecojustice-canada-society>
<https://friendsofsciencecalgary.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/friends-of-science-society-statement-on-ecojustice-complaint-to-competition-bureau/>
 

Canada 's Back  at the Paris Climate Talks

On November 27, at the Commonwealth leaders ' meeting in Malta, before the Paris conference started, Prime Minister Trudeau said I 'm here not just to say Canada 's back, but to show it,  before announcing a $2.65 billion donation over five years to the Green Climate Fund. It will come in five tranches: $300 million in 2016-17, $400 million in $2017-18, $500 million in 2018-19, $650 million in 2019-20 and $800 million in 2020-21.
In his address to the climate summit on November 30 the PM emphasized, Canada 's back and ready to help.  He may have been referring to the size of the Canadian delegation-383 people, more than Australia (46), the UK (96) and the US (148) together, and almost as many has host country France (396).
 
However, according to an IPSO poll reported by  Global News, climate change is a low priority for most Canadians, with only 13% chasing it as one of their top three worries. In the  Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente quotes Michael Hart, a veteran trade negotiator and author of  Hubris, The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change. Of the Trudeau generation, Mr. Hart says, This [climate change] is something they 've been taught in school. They believe in this stuff without ever understanding it.   
 
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/funding-for-climate-change-chogm-1.3339907>
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-address-climate-change-paris-1.3343394>
<http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/smyth-canada-sent-383-people-to-the-u-n-climate-conference-more-than-australia-the-u-k-and-u-s-together>
<http://globalnews.ca/news/2366032/climate-change-a-low-priority-for-most-canadians-poll/>
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-climate-talks-we-want-to-feel-good-about-ourselves/article27535885/>
 

The Truth about China

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a report by Toronto-based economist Patricia Adams under this title, with the subheading  Why Beijing will resist demands for abatement. One reason why according to the author: China 's Communist Party has as its highest priority its own self-preservation, and that self-preservation depends overwhelmingly on its ability to continue raising the standard of living of its citizens. With China 's economic growth faltering, the last thing the Communist Party wants is to hobble its economy further by curtailing the use of the fossil fuels upon which its economy depends. A major cutback in fossil fuel use represents an existential threat to the Communist Party 's rule. It simply isn 't going to happen. 
 
China does face intense domestic pressure to eliminate air pollution, but that can be dealt with cheaply by cutting NOx, SOx and particulates without reducing CO2  emissions. Nevertheless, many western governments falsely claim that reducing CO2  will improve China 's air quality.  
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/new-report-the-truth-about-china/>
<http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/12/Truth-about-China.pdf>
 

Ontario Auditor General: Billions for Wind and Solar

The Auditor General, Bonnie Lysyk, found that electricity costs for Ontarians rose 70% between 2006 and 2014, costing consumers $37 billion in so-called Global Adjustment payments, and these will rise to $133 billion in 2032. She reported that electricity consumers will pay $9.2 billion more for wind and solar under the 20-year guarantee to the producers than they would have paid under the previous program. An editorial in  The  Globe and Mail  commented that the Ontario government has for the past decade been running the province 's power sector with something approaching the skill of Soviet commissars.  The  Calgary Herald  wonders what lessons the Ontario experience holds for Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, who has vowed to transition that province to wind and solar power.  
 
<http://london.ctvnews.ca/ontario-auditor-finds-hydro-consumers-pay-billions-extra-for-liberal-s-decisions-1.2683494>
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/ontarios-liberals-have-completely-broken-the-electricity-system/article27571292/?click=sf_globefb>
<http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-powerful-lessons>
 

German  Energiewende   Modern Miracle or Major  Misstep

On Judith Curry 's blog, guest Davis Swan attempts to sort out fact from fiction regarding Germany 's energy transformation, or  Energiewende. The author concludes that it has achieved remarkable changes to the country 's energy economy, using a sub-optimal approach that has influenced other jurisdictions around the world (e.g., Ontario) to follow a similar sub-optimal path. The biggest failing has been the subsidies for roof-top solar panel installations. These work best at latitudes within +/-35 ° of the equator, while Germany lies between 48 ° and 52 °, where subsidizing roof-top solar panels are pointless. Also solar power production peaks during the summer when power demand is at a minimum. The converse is true during winter.  
 
The average annual generation by renewables stands at 25% of the total electrical energy produced. However, a lot of this energy is of absolutely no value if there 's no demand, and so has to be exported at low (even negative) prices. One of the claims by supporters of the  Energiewende  is that the growth of renewables will allow Germany to reduce its dependence upon coal-fired generation thereby reducing CO2  emissions. That has not happened over the past fifteen years and reducing coal-fired generation will not take place anytime soon.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/02/german-energiewende-modern-miracle-or-major-misstep/>
 

Germany Pays to Halt Danish Wind Power-To Protect Own Output

Germany 's wind farms are now producing so much electricity one of its grid managers is paying generators in neighbouring Denmark to shut down to keep its network from overloading. One German network operator paid Danish power producers  to withhold 37 GWh of output in November. When gusty weather floods the network with power and threatens stability, Germany can seek cuts, according to grid rules. If such reductions are still not enough, Germany will then start shutting its own turbines. This comes as Germany saw negative prices in the market for hours on at least ten days during the last month in high winds, forcing producers to pay as much as ‚ 116.99/MWh to users to take electricity.
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-01/german-wind-power-surplus-spurs-cash-for-neighbor-to-switch-off>
 

Electric Car Boom Fuels Demand for Coal

But behind the green growth is a filthy secret: In a nation famous for its windmills, electricity is coming from a far dirtier source. Three new coal-fired power plants, including two on the Rotterdam harbour, are supplying much of the power to fuel the Netherlands' electric-car boom. Alongside the boom has come a surging demand for power to charge the vehicles, which can consume as much electricity in a single charge as the average refrigerator does in a month and a half.
 
<http://www.smh.com.au/business/electric-car-boom-fuels-demand-for-coal-20151124-gl79hn.html>
 

Ten Reasons Why We Shouldn 't Fear Man-made Climate Change

Christopher Booker in  The Telegraph  lists ten common claims made by those gathered in Paris,  with a commentary on just how far their fears are really justified.
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/paris-climate-change-conference/12025836/Paris-climate-conference-10-reasons-why-we-shouldnt-worry-about-man-made-global-warming.html>
 

Mandatory Indoctrination for BBC Officials Who Broke Climate Rules 

The BBC broadcast an obscure programme on state radio August 5 called what 's the point of the MET office? , which allowed the voice of climate skepticism onto British broadcast radio. As a result of this massive breach of BBC policy, there has been a major internal inquiry, and several BBC officials have been sent on mandatory climate re-education courses.
 
Journalist Quentin Letts, who hosted the Radio 4 program, has written a response to this overreaction. He apologized because: Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio 's ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination in climate change.  Mr. Letts admitted that he certainly didn 't try to give listeners a reverential pr cis of prevailing scientific opinion ' didn 't think that was my remit. 
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/06/mandatory-indoctrination-for-bbc-officials-who-broke-climate-rules/>
 

The Climate on Campus

Matthew Lau, a finance and economic student at the University of Toronto, writes that university campuses are home to a sizeable contingent of climate justice activists, who proclaim loudly that climate catastrophe is imminent unless we cripple the fossil fuel industry and end capitalism. Much of the climate fanaticism is sponsored by the students ' unions. In addition to campaigning against plastic water bottles, they are lobbying for universities to divest from fossil fuels. Even the business departments, where one might expect to find some resistance to the climate zealotry, are beginning to succumb to the warmists.
 
Mr. Lau attributes the student attitudes to the conditioning they got from the education system to believe that the future of human welfare depends not on entrepreneurship and innovation; but on government regulation, redistribution, and living poorer lives. 
 
<http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/the-climate-on-campus>

 

2015-11-27

 

Alberta 's New Carbon Tax and Coal Phase-out

On November 20, the Alberta Climate Leadership Panel presented its report to the Minister of the Environment. Two days later (on Sunday) Premier Notley, flanked by oil industry and environmental leaders, held a news conference to announce that her government is going to adopt some of the panel 's recommendations including phasing out coal-powered generation by 2030 and instituting an economy-wide carbon tax of $20/t in 2017, increasing to $30/t in 2018 (to be revenue-neutral, fully recycled back into the Alberta economy ). The government will legislate a limit of 100 Mt/year of emissions from the oil sands (from the current 70 Mt/year.)
 
On pp. 6 and 30 the report recommends, as part of the coal phase-out by 2030, replacing it with natural gas and renewables, with the latter having a 30% market share. Rather than Ontario-style feed-in tariffs for renewables, it proposes (p. 49) adoption of a clean power call , an open, competitive request for proposals for government support. On pp. 50-51 the report suggests a price collar  of $35/MWh for this support. Since solar power would require more than $100/MWh (p. 56) the renewables would likely be limited to wind.
 
The report (pp. 11, 24-25, 29, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45 & 60) expresses concern about carbon/emissions leakage  for sectors of the Alberta economy trade-exposed to competing jurisdictions with less strict policies, giving the competitors an advantage with no overall reduction in emissions. On p. 37 it notes that BC and Saskatchewan are Alberta 's peers in terms of wealth and economic activity, but BC has a $30/t economy-wide carbon tax, while Saskatchewan has none.
 
In the Globe and Mail Margaret Wente hails Ms. Notley 's announcement as a climate-change marketing triumph that makes both Alberta and Canada look good. It also tells the world: Alberta is doing its fair share, so you can lay off now.  However, for all its ambitions, the Alberta plan won 't advance Canada 's climate goal of emissions 30% below 2005 levels, to which the previous government had committed. It is simply not possible to cut by 30% without massive economic damage-something no government will impose.
 
<http://alberta.ca/documents/climate/climate-leadership-report-to-minister.pdf>
<http://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xID=38886E9269850-A787-1C1E-A5C90ACF52A4DAE4>
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/notleys-climate-change-marketing-triumph/article27445009/>
 

Justin Trudeau Promises Canadian Approach  to Climate Change

The day after the Alberta announcement, Prime Minister Trudeau convened a meeting of the premiers to prepare for the Paris climate conference. While most of the premiers echoed the PM 's enthusiasm for a Canadian approach  to climate change, Saskatchewan 's Brad Wall was more concerned about job losses in the country 's energy sector. (He also faces a general election next April 4.)
 
Before the meeting, two scientists, Greg Flato of Environment Canada and Alain Bourque of Ouranos, gave a presentation of EC 's view on the science of climate change. This essentially reproduces the conclusions of the IPCC 's Summary for Policymakers. Under Annex 1 it provides the model-based justification for human influence on the climate system, and in Annex 2 selective observed changes in Canada.
 
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-first-ministers-meet-climate-change-1.3331290>
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/first-ministers-climate-change-scientist-1.3331884>
<http://climatechange.gc.ca/default.asp?Lang=En&n=7B08628B-1>
<http://www.ec.gc.ca/sc-cs/Default.asp?lang=En&n=A5F83C26-1>
 

US Senate Sends the World a Climate Message

Fifty-two US Senators voted to block an Environmental Protection Agency rule that would curb CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.  Passing the resolution without a  veto-proof vote (the President has already promised not to sign it) makes this act of defiance symbolic only. But with the Paris climate summit coming up, it 's powerful symbolism that the Senate won 't ratify any kind of binding global climate treaty. Also, the Senate will not contribute government money to the $100 billion/year Green Climate Fund, so the President is going to go to Paris with nothing to offer.
 
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/19/us-senate-sends-the-world-a-climate-message/>
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/overnights/260844-overnight-energy-senators-push-back-against-paris>
 

The Poles May Spoil Paris Party

Poland 's new conservative  government is threatening to veto an EU deal at the Paris  climate summit, making clear its determination to protect the country 's large coal industry. For Poland, the road is not signing that document,  said Piotr Naimski, an MP with  the ruling Law and Justice party who helped devise his party 's energy policy. Poland is the only European Union country to issue such a blunt warning so far. Its potential role as COP21  spoiler could  undercut the bloc 's  negotiating strength.
 
The Polish President vetoed an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol in October as a sign of Poland taking a tougher stance in defending its coal sector.
 
<http://www.politico.eu/pro/the-poles-may-spoil-paris-climate-summit-party/>
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/20/poland-energy-emissions-idUSL8N13F2EA20151120#q2AJFuf3mrUPhpd5.97>
 

The UN 's Coming Paris Folly

In this two-part essay, Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen examine the UN 's Deep Decarbonization Pathways  that will require a radical transformation of economic and energy systems by 2050, through massive declines in carbon intensity in all sectors. It requires major changes in every country 's energy and production systems, over both the mid-term and long-term.  For example, the US would have to reduce GHGs from electricity generation by 95% from 2010 levels. That would mean eliminating coal and natural gas generators that now provide two-thirds of all US electricity, even as nuclear and hydroelectric facilities face cutbacks. However, all major forecasts, including those of the EIA, IEA and OECD predict that, for decades to come, energy, the economy and CO2 emissions will be closely linked, and fossil fuels will continue to provide about 80% of world energy.
 
To keep global temperatures from increasing by 2 °C or 3 °C according to the computer models, the elimination of fossil fuels over the next 35 years would reduce world per capita GDP to only about 4% of what it is otherwise forecast to be, under a business as usual  scenario. Attempting to achieve this 2050 GHG reduction goal could reduce average 2050 world per capita GDP from its forecast $30,600 to a starvation level of about $1,200 per year. Nevertheless, world leaders gathered in Paris beginning November 30 are determined to hammer out a punitive treaty that will keep billions of people impoverished, send billions more into abject poverty, and ruin Western economies while the Islamist terrorism continues.
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/cop21-paris/un-paris-folly-1/>
<https://www.masterresource.org/cop21-paris/un-paris-folly-2/>
 

India Will Seek Climate Justice  for Billions of Poor in Paris

India 's environment minister said that his country will urge rich nations to deliver climate justice  for developing countries at the Paris conference. Last month India, the world's third biggest carbon-emitting country, vowed to slash carbon intensity the amount of pollution per dollar of GDP by up to 35% by 2030. But unlike top two emitters the US and China, India has balked at committing to major emissions reduction targets, instead defiantly vowing to double coal production by 2020.
 
India reacted strongly to US.Secretary of State John Kerry 's statement that the country will be a challenge  in the coming climate change talks in Paris. It is in a way unfair to say that India will be a challenge. It is actually not doing justice to India,  said the minister.
 
<http://www.firstpost.com/india/india-will-seek-climate-justice-for-the-billions-of-poor-of-this-world-at-paris-climate-change-meet-2517138.html>
<http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/paris-climate-change-summit-india-hits-out-at-kerry-for-terming-it-a-challenge-at-paris-meet/article7905442.ece>
 

US Kids ' Lawsuit over Climate Change Gathers Steam

Twenty-one plaintiffs, aged between eight and 19, have filed a suit to compel the US government to significantly reduce CO2 emissions and implement a science-based climate recovery plan.  They are calling on the US District Court of Oregon-the state where most of the plaintiffs live-to order the government to swiftly phase down carbon dioxide emissions  so that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are no more than 350 parts per million by 2100.  Industry associations, including the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers, have filed for permission to join the US government in opposing the suit.
 
<http://news.yahoo.com/us-kids-lawsuit-over-climate-change-gathers-steam-022539503.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma>
 

UK Green Power Firms Cash In on Diesel

Wind and solar power firms are being encouraged to install diesel generators, which pour out CO2 and toxic nitrogen dioxide, on their sites in order to provide standby generating capacity and prevent the lights going out during periods of peak demand. Diesel generators are typically built into shipping containers, each producing 2-3 MW of power-roughly the same as a large wind turbine.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/green-madness-renewable-energy-bosses-cash-in-on-diesel/>
 
 

400(?) Years of Warming

As Judith Curry notes, the IPCC 's AR5 made a very strong statement regarding the attribution of recent climate change: It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface  temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas  concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human induced  contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period. 
 
Dr. Curry has been arguing that the IPCC 's attribution arguments are unconvincing unless they can also explain the early 20th century warming, and the longer period of overall warming prior to the 20th century. She points out three periods where there is significant disagreement between the models and observations: 2000-present (the current hiatus), 1940-1970 and 1910-1940. The last is interesting because atmospheric CO2 concentration increased from 300 to 311 ppm, while ~40% of the total warming since 1900 occurred during that period. Examining various temperature reconstructions before then, Dr. Curry find that there have been large magnitude variations in global/hemispheric climate on timescales of 30 years, which is the same duration as the late 20th century warming, for which the IPCC does not have convincing explanations. Further, there is a secular warming trend at least since 1800 (and possibly as long as 400 years), that cannot be explained by CO2, and is only partly explained by volcanic eruptions.
 
Dr. Curry concludes: The politically driven push to manufacture a premature consensus on human caused climate change and create an argument based on bootstrapped plausibility has  misdirected climate science for the past two decades. 
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/11/16/400-years-of-warming/>

 

2015-11-15

 

The IPCC does not make recommendations 

On October 27 Friends of Science issued a press release to publicize its new billboard campaign. The press release referred to bad policies resulting from IPCC recommendations, which got the attention of Jonathan Lynn, Head of Communications and Media Relations for the IPCC. Mr. Lynn objected to any statement or implication that the IPCC makes recommendations and asked FoS to correct its billboards and press release. FoS responded to Mr. Lynn pointing out examples where the IPCC recommends specific policy actions.
 
Drieu Godefridi, author of  The IPCC: a scientific body?  saw the exchange of correspondence and wrote an essay in  Watts Up With That  supporting FoS, noting ample use of the term recommendation  in Part III of the latest IPCC assessment.  
 
<https://friendsofsciencecalgary.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/a-matter-of-public-interest-on-the-ipcc-does-it-recommend-or-not-recommend-that-is-the-question/
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/the-ipcc-does-not-make-recommendations-ipcc/>
 

Tensions Building over whether Paris Climate Deal Is Binding

France's leadership is bristling at US resistance to making a global climate accord under negotiation in Paris next month legally binding. US Secretary of State John Kerry said that an eventual agreement would have no legally-binding targets. However, French President Fran §ois Hollande told reporters if the deal is not legally binding, there is no accord, because that would mean it's not possible to verify or control commitments that are made. 
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/john-kerry-paris-climate-deal-will-not-be-legally-binding/>
<http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-says-paris-climate-deal-not-legally-binding-223424662.html>
<http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/11/12/world/europe/ap-climate-countdown.html?_r=1>
<http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20151113/world/Paris-climate-talks-are-not-just-hot-air.591972>
<http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CLIMATE_COUNTDOWN_PRETZEL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT>
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/12/paris-climate-deal-must-be-legally-binding-eu-tells-john-kerry?utm_content=buffer7b45a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer>
 

Obama 's Failure to Deliver Climate Funding Could Sink Paris Agreement

At a November meeting on climate finance the US announced that it would not be able to provide the pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund by December. It also emerged that the GCF has only $5.8 billion in its kitty and not the $10.2 billion that had been publicly pledged by developed countries through grand announcements in 2014. In what some observers termed as desperation, the Fund 's board hastily cleared its first eight projects, totalling $168 million, to developing countries ahead of the Paris climate change conference. It does not augur well for Paris. While developing countries are asking for a road map for enhanced financial obligations after 2020 we are witnessing the developed countries sliding back on commitments they made in previous years to provide funds by 2020,  said a senior Indian climate change negotiator.
 
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/green-climate-fund-faces-uncertainty-115111300600_1.html>
 

G20 Divided over Climate Stance

France is pushing for tougher pledges on climate change from the G20 group. However, a divide is opening on whether the group should back a more differentiated  approach where developed nations carry an extra burden, or shared  emissions responsibilities, which would require developing nations to make bigger cuts. A reference to differentiation was removed from an early draft of the communique, though it was cited in a separate statement from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the so-called BRICS developing economies.
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-15/france-said-to-push-for-tougher-climate-pledge-at-g-20-talks>
 

India 's Energy Challenge, or why Paris Climate Pledges Are Meaningless

The International Energy Agency has released its  World Energy Outlook 2015, which includes a detailed description of India 's energy economy. That country 's total energy demand is set to more than double by 2040, with oil use rising by 6 million barrels a day, and 260 million new passenger vehicles will travel on India 's roads. Over the period, 530 million people will gain access to electricity for the first time as coal use increases from 341 million tonnes of oil equivalent in 2013 to 911 toe in 2040.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/indias-energy-challenge-or-why-paris-climate-pledges-are-meaningless/>
<http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/weo2015/>
 

US Has Built the Equivalent of 10 Keystone Pipelines since 2005

While the Obama administration delayed action on the Keystone XL pipeline for seven years, before finally rejecting it on November 6, the US has built 12,000 miles of new pipeline since 2005. The new pipelines carry oil from Alberta to Chicago, Michigan and St. Louis. There is even a pipeline running to Cushing, Oklahoma and from there on to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. According to  investors.com. the real reason President Obama killed Keystone XL was based on nothing more than political opportunity. The announcement was timed to coincide with the United Nations climate talks, which begin in Paris at the end of the month.
 
<http://www.realclearenergy.org/charticles/2015/11/06/us_has_built_10_keystones_since_2010_108870.html>
<http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/america-has-built-the-equivalent-of-10-keystone-pipelines-since-2010-and-no-one-said-anything>
<http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110615-779636-real-reason-obama-killed-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-construction.htm>
 

Lomborg: Impact of Current Climate  Proposals

Bj ¸rn    Lomborg has a new paper out in the  Global Policy  journal in which he states: Current climate policy promises will do little to stabilize the climate and their impact will be undetectable for many decades.  He used the standard MAGICC climate model and assumed implementation of all the promised national climate policy proposals by 2030, with the emissions cuts extended throughout the century. The entirety of these promises would reduce global temperature rise by 0.17 °C by 2100.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/11/09/lomborg-impact-of-current-climate-proposals/>
<http://www.lomborg.com/press-release-research-reveals-negligible-impact-of-paris-climate-promises>
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/full>

 

2015-11-06

 

The Next Climategate? NOAA Refuses to Release No Hiatus  Emails

Last July scientists, using newly-adjusted temperature data supplied by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published a study that claimed there has been no global temperature hiatus in the 21st century. The head of the House of Representatives ' Science, Space and Technology Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, asked for both data and internal communications related to the study. While NOAA provided the publicly-available data, it refused to turn over the communications, citing long-standing practice in the scientific community to protect the confidentiality of deliberative scientific discussions.  Rep Smith then filed a subpoena on October 13.
 
What concerns Rep. Smith and other committee members was the timing of the release of the adjusted NOAA data: two months before the Environmental Protection Agency issued new regulations on CO2  emissions from power plants and six months ahead of the Paris climate conference.  
 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2015/1028/NOAA-refuses-to-comply-with-House-science-committee-subpoena-video?cmpid=TW>
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/28/climate-wars-govt-scientists-refuse-to-hand-over-internal-records-to-lawmakers/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/the-next-climate-scandal/>
<http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-science-chief-threatens-prosecution-over-climate-study/article/2575687>
<http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/11/05/is-government-tinkering-with-global-warming-data.html>
 

Putin: Global Warming Is a Fraud to Restrain Developing Nations 

The New York Times  is disappointed by Russian reports on widespread public doubt that human activities play a significant role in global warming, a tone set by President Vladimir Putin, who has offered only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December's UN climate summit in Paris.  Mr. Putin also believes that there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia.  Apparently Mr. Putin 's skepticism about the causes of climate change date from the early 2000s when his staff found that any climate change is cyclical and the anthropogenic role is very limited.
 
In  Watts Up With That, Tim Ball relates his Cold War experience working with Soviet climatologists. He explains why it was in President Putin 's interest to have Russia ratify the Kyoto Protocol (in order to get accession to the World Trade Organization). However, now he finds it advantageous to oppose the protocol 's replacement.
 
<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/10/29/world/europe/29reuters-climatechange-summit-russia-media.html?_r=2>
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/29/russias-putin-says-global-warming-is-a-fraud/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/30/vladimir-putin-climate-and-political-realist/>
 

The Tough Realities of the Paris Climate Talks

In a surprising opinion piece appearing in  The New York Times, writer Steven Kooning addresses two scientific and one societal realities. The first scientific one is that, according to IPCC scenarios to stabilize the climate at a safe  level, average per capita global CO2  emissions would have to fall from today 's five tonnes/year to one tonne-comparable to emissions from countries such as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. The second scientific reality is the logarithmic influence of atmospheric CO2  concentrations on climate. This means that eliminating a tonne of CO2  in the middle of the 21st century would have only half the effect it would have had 100 years earlier.
 
The societal reality is that energy demand is strongly correlated with rising living standards and is expected to increase 50% by mid-century as world population grows from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion. And fossil fuels, the least expensive and most convenient means for meeting that energy demand, are not going to run out anytime soon.
 
<http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/opinion/the-tough-realities-of-the-paris-climate-talks.html?referer=&_r=1>
 

Why the Paris Climate Treaty Will Be the Flop of the Year

To Christopher Booker, the chief obstacle to a Paris agreement this year will be the same as it was in Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009: The vast majority of countries have argued all along that, if man-made CO2  is causing a problem, the fault lies with those developed  nations that became rich before everyone else by burning fossil fuels to power their industrial revolution. It is therefore up to the developed countries of the West to make the most drastic cuts, leaving the still developing  nations to catch up. They say they are prepared to make some contribution to reducing CO2, but only if they are paid to do so out of a $100 billion a year Green Climate Fund, financed by the rich countries that originally created the problem.
 
China, currently the world 's largest CO2  emitter at 24%, plans to double emissions by 2030, by building 363 more coal-fired power plants. India, in third spot, will treble its emissions by 2030. No. 4, Russia, proposes to increase its emissions by 38% above the 2012 level. Oil states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (Nos. 8 and 9) have not submitted any proposals. There is no chance of the US Congress agreeing to any treaty. This leaves only the EU, committed to cutting its emissions by 40% within 15 years.  
 
The Green Climate Fund has received pledges of $700 million, leaving $99.3 billion still to go. In a  Watts Up With That  essay, Eric Worral calculates the cost of hosting the conference for 40,000 politicians and flunkies. It comes to $1.1 billion-more than has been pledged to the GCF.  
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11968064/Why-the-Paris-climate-treaty-will-be-the-flop-of-the-year.html>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/01/will-paris-cop21-cost-more-to-host-than-it-raises-in-green-pledges/>
 

Forget Paris: Asia Building More than 500 Coal Plants

The shine is coming off once bright prospects for natural gas as the future fossil fuel of choice in Asia as power companies in India and Southeast Asia tap abundant and cheap domestic coal resources to generate electricity. In Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards. Coal is not only cheaper than natural gas, it is often available locally and has no heavy import costs.
 
<http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/11/03/us-asia-energy-power-idUKKCN0SS0IF20151103>
 

China Burns More Coal than Reported, Complicating Climate Talks

According to new government figures, China has been burning as much as 17% more coal each year than previously reported. This could translate into a billion tonnes more CO2  into the atmosphere. The adjusted data, which appeared recently in an energy statistics yearbook published without fanfare by China 's statistical agency, show that coal consumption has been underestimated since 2000, and particularly in recent years. The revisions were based on a census of the economy in 2013 that exposed gaps in data collection, especially from small companies and factories.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/china-burns-much-more-coal-than-reported-complicating-climate-talks/>
 

Exxon Probed by New York in Toughest US Climate Crackdown Yet

In the most aggressive state action yet on the financial effects of burning fossil fuels, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena to Exxon on Wednesday seeking a lengthy list of documents and disclosures, including communications with trade associations and industry groups. The investigation is seeking information on whether the world 's biggest oil explorer lied to investors and the public for almost 40 years about the impact of climate change on profits. Besides Exxon, Mr. Schneiderman is also investigating coal producer Peabody Energy and other energy companies.
 
<  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-05/exxon-mobil-said-to-be-probed-by-n-y-over-climate-change>
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/11/05/exxonmobil-under-investigation-for-misleading-the-public-about-climate-change/>
 

Back to the Dark Ages: French Weatherman Fired over Climate Change Book

Popular  France T l visions  weatherman Philippe Verdier, who was put on leave for publishing a book accusing top officials of misleading the world about the threat of global warming [FoS Extracts - 2015-10-19], was formally fired from his job. As Joanne Nova puts it: The evidence for the Big Scare Campaign is so pathetically weak that it cannot cope with one weatherman who writes a critical book. 
 
<http://www.france24.com/en/20151101-france-top-weatherman-sacked-over-climate-change-book-verdier-cop21>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/phillipe-verdier-journalist-weatherman-sacked-for-daring-to-be-skeptical/>

 

2015-10-28

 

Climate Poker: Developing Nations Win Battle of Bonn

Five days of talks in Bonn on a final negotiating text for the Paris climate conference concluded on October 23. As India 's Business Standard reports, after pressure from developing countries to reinsert previously-deleted sections, the text is now more balanced.  Deutsche Welle notes that the original 20-page document morphed into 55 pages by the close of the session. The new document contains 1,490 pairs of brackets, each of which is a point of contention to be negotiated. According to the Times of India, what developing countries want is a clear financial roadmap containing predictable  and additional  resource flows to support their climate actions.
 
CFACT reports that the text resurrects the International Tribunal of Climate Justice to address cases of non-compliance of the commitments of developed country Parties  That is, developing nations will sit in judgement on the actions of developed countries without being subject to the tribunal themselves.
 
The UNFCCC link points to the final draft negotiating text (advance unedited version).  
 
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/a-more-balanced-draft-for-paris-agreement-emerges-from-bonn-115102400026_1.html>
<http://www.dw.com/en/outline-of-un-climate-deal-reached-after-fractious-talks/a-18802847?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf>
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/developmental-issues/india-asks-rich-nations-to-come-out-with-a-clear-roadmap-on-climate-finance/articleshow/49553461.cms?from=mdr>
<http://www.cfact.org/2015/10/23/un-climate-text-adds-an-international-tribunal-of-climate-justice/>
<http://unfccc.int/meetings/bonn_oct_2015/session/9195.php>
 

80+ World Leaders to Attend Opening of Paris Climate Summit

At least 80 world leaders, including those of the US, China, India, France, the UK, Germany, South Africa, Brazil and Canada, will attend the opening day on November 30. At the Copenhagen climate conference 110 world leaders joined for the two final days, which was partially blamed for its failure. This time round, "the idea is to provide a political impetus at the beginning" of the conference.  
 
<https://uk.news.yahoo.com/obama-xi-modi-among-80-leaders-paris-climate-172301192.html#dlwWR4h>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/climate-envoys-struggle-over-targets-before-paris-summit-on-global-plan/2015/10/27/1dfa4168-6e02-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html>
 

DC Court Could Pose Problems for Obama 's Paris Climate Talks

After months of delay, on October 23 the US Environmental Protection Agency published rules for President Obama 's Clean Power Plan. This publication makes them challengeable in court, and a 24-state coalition promptly petitioned the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington for a stay of the rules until it reviews their legality. If the court grants a stay within a month, it would come a few days before the president 's trip to the Paris climate conference.  
 
In Congress, Republicans prepared their challenge to the EPA regulations by announcing introduction of a resolution under the Congressional Review Act.
 
<http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/d.c.-court-could-pose-problems-for-paris-climate-talks/article/2574810>
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/257874-lawmakers-plot-challenges-to-obama-power-plant-rules>
 

New Polish Government Opposes EU Climate Deal

Poland 's Law & Justice Party, which is on course for an unprecedented parliamentary majority, will fight for special treatment of its coal industry under the EU climate pact. On October 27 the country 's president refused to endorse an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol that would entail further greenhouse gas reductions. Poland get about 90% of its electricity from coal.
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-27/poland-s-first-eu-fight-is-brewing-and-it-s-not-what-you-think>
<http://www.euractiv.com/sections/climate-environment/polish-president-says-wont-ratify-kyoto-carbon-cutting-pact-318941>
 

The Battle Against Global Warming: An Absurd, Costly and Pointless Crusade

French scientists of the Paris-based Mathematical Calculation Society, SA have published a 195-page white paper with the above title. Some quotes from the paper: There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world s climate is in any way disturbed. It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras.  Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust  buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past.  We are fighting for a cause (reducing CO2 emissions) that serves absolutely no purpose, in which we alone believe, and which we can do nothing about. You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human history to find such a mad obsession. 
 
<http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/10/23/fighting-agw-is-a-mad-obsession-new-195-page-white-paper-by-french-scientists-declares-the-battle-against-global-warming-is-an-absurd-costly-pointless-crusade/>
<http://www.scmsa.eu/archives/SCM_RC_2015_08_24_EN.pdf>
 

IEA: Climate Pledges Need $13.5 Trillion in Investments by 2030

The International Energy Agency says that the global energy industry needs to invest $13.5 trillion in efficiency measures and low-carbon technologies by 2030 to meet governments ' climate protection pledges to the UN. Countries representing more than half of global economic output will see their energy-related emissions flatten or be in decline by 2030 if they meet their pledges, the IEA said. By then, 70% of new electricity generation will be low-carbon, and the global power sector 's emissions will have flattened near current levels according to the agency.  
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/climate-pledges-need-13-5-trillion-investment-by-2030-iea-says>

 

2015-10-19

 

Adjudicating the Future: Silencing Climate Dissent via the Courts

Judith Curry weighs in on the UK Supreme Court 's climate conference where Prof. Philippe Sands urged the International Court of Justice to use its authority to settle the climate change issue [FoS Extracts - 2015-10-06]. She includes a link to the text of Prof. Sands ' speech, noting that it doesn 't adequately capture what he actually said at 39:30 of the video, as well as a response by lawyer Robin Guenier (2nd link below). One of Mr. Guenier 's conclusions: But, for the courts to purport to settle a legitimate scientific disagreement, would strike at the essence of the Scientific Method the basis of scientific practice for over 150 years. It would risk bringing international law into disrepute.  Moreover, he notes that the difficulty in reaching a global agreement to reduce GHG emissions lies in the fact that developing countries are responsible for 70% of emissions and comprise 82% of the world 's population-and they want to develop their economies and eradicate poverty.
 
Christopher Monckton has submitted a  Freedom of Information Act  request posing 20 questions to the Supreme Court in relation to the conference, participants and climate cases before the court.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/10/11/adjudicating-the-future-silencing-climate-dissent-via-the-courts/>
<https://ipccreport.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/notes-on-sands-lecture_ty.pdf>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/10/13/the-courts-the-climate/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/17/foiaing-the-u-k-supreme-courts-pantomime-of-hate-against-climate-skepticism/>
 

Leading Nowhere: The Futility and Farce of Global Climate Negotiations

This is the title of an essay by Oren Cass of the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute. Based on the IPCC 's carbon budget  needed to keep the global temperature increase below 2 °C by 2100, under a moderate growth scenario the developed world would have to cut emissions to zero immediately, while the developing world cuts its existing emissions in half. Just as unlikely is the hope that wind and solar could replace fossil fuels, for both economic and physical reasons. The essay considers three paths that could hypothetically lead to an agreement: Collective Action, Compensation, and Coercion. Developing nations won 't agree to the first and won 't be paid enough by developed ones to agree to the second. The only alternative left is coercion-economic sanctions and/or military action. Therefore, the most likely outcome in Paris will be, as in all previous climate negotiations, no agreement to meaningfully reduce emissions.
 
<http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1015oc.html>
<http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/eper_19.pdf>
 

Draft Climate Deal Dead in the Water

The G77+China group of countries is unhappy with the 20-page slimmed down (from 86 pages) draft negotiating text for the Paris climate conference   [FoS Extracts - 2015-10-06]. Meeting ahead of the October 19-23 talks in Bonn, they found the the latest draft omitted nearly all the issues of interest to them, while others inimical to their interests had been given higher priority.  
 
On the first day of the Bonn talks, the G77+China group, the Association of Small Island Countries, the Least Developed Countries, the Small Island Developing States, the Like Minded Developing Countries and the Africa Group formed a united front that forced the two co-chairs (from Algeria and the US) to back down. The developing countries will be allowed to reinsert their proposals into the draft agreement. Thus, the delegates will start their deliberations with a lot more than 20 pages of text in front of them.
 
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/g77-china-grouping-opposes-draft-for-paris-meet-115101800389_1.html>
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/after-an-ugly-battle-g77-china-developing-countries-win-the-day-115101900902_1.html>
 

France 's Top Weatherman Suspended over Book Questioning Climate Change

Philippe Verdier, weather chief at France T l visions, the country's state broadcaster, was reportedly sent on forced holiday  for releasing a book,  Climat Investigation,  accusing top climatologists of taking the world hostage.  Mr. Verdier is a household name in France for his nightly forecasts on France 2. In a promotional video for the book Mr. Verdier said: We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear. He said he decided to write the book in June 2014 when Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, summoned the country 's main weather presenters and urged them to mention climate chaos  in their forecasts. The last link contains a petition to reinstate Mr. Verdier.
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11931645/Frances-top-weatherman-sparks-storm-over-book-questioning-climate-change.html>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/frances-top-tv-meteorologist-writes-skeptic-book-gets-told-not-to-come-to-work/>
<http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-34543588>
<https://www.change.org/p/remy-pfimlin-pr sident-de-france-t l visions-pour-que-philippe-verdier-soit-confirm -dans-son-emploi-  -france-t l visions>
 

T. Boone Pickens Suing Ontario for $700 Million over Wind Power

Mr. Pickens claims that his wind-power company, Mesa Power, lost in Ontario wind-power auctions because of favouritism toward two Korean companies and NextEra. The latter got $3.8 billion in energy contracts, and Mesa Power contends that donations to the ruling Liberal Party in 2011 had undue influence on the auction. An international tribunal is to rule on the claim within a month.
 
<http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/legendary-texas-oil-tycoon-t-boone-pickens-is-suing-ontario-for-700-million-over-wind-power>
 

What I Learned about Climate Change: The Science Is Not Settled

Thirty years ago David Siegel became became vegan, hasn 't owned a car in 10 years and in 1993 wrote a book supporting Al Gore on global warming. Then, early this year he started looking into climate science, changed his mind and has written a 9,000-word essay explaining where the alarmists have got it wrong. Mr. Siegel begins with 10 short statements designed to challenge the conventional assumptions on climate change. He then expounds on these in eight chapters titled: Critical Thinking, Four Hard Questions, The Climate Consensus, Manufacturing Consensus, Who Can You Believe?, What Should We Do?, Summary, and What Do You Think?
 
Mr. Siegel 's essay, with many links to his sources, covers everything: the science, the climate hype, the IPCC, the warmists, the media, the consensus opponents, and how to fight back.
 
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/10/17/green-vegan-liberal-sees-light-climate-change/>
<https://medium.com/@pullnews/what-i-learned-about-climate-change-the-science-is-not-settled-1e3ae4712ace>
 

Chinese Academy of Sciences: Global Warming May Be Good for China

A research team from the academy said that global warming will benefit China by increasing rainfall in its dry northern regions while reducing flooding in the hotter southern areas. If the phenomenon continues the planet 's thermal equator will move northwards and push the rain belt associated with monsoons in East Asia and from the northern to the southern part of China. The researchers ' paper was published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  of the US.
 
<http://www.scmp.com/tech/science-research/article/1867515/global-warming-may-help-alleviate-chinas-drought-and-flooding>
 

The Climate Mafia Rewrites Science History

A bizarre position now being adopted by climate activists such as Harvard 's Naomi Oreskes and 350.org 's Bill McKibben is that ExxonMobil knew in 1977 that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously.  This assertion is contradicted by the fact that it wasn 't until 1988 that the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environmental Program established the IPCC. Even the IPCC in its 1990 Summary for Policymakers concluded that the size of the 0.3 to 0.6 °C  warming observed over the previous 100 years was broadly consistent with the predictions of climate models but was also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/rupert-darwall-the-climate-mafia-rewrites-science-history/>
<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425433/climate-mafia-rewrites-science-history>

 

2015-10-12

 

International Judges Plan to Outlaw Climate Change Denial 

In September the UK Supreme Court co-sponsored a three-day climate change conference, including a secret list of leading judges, lawyers and legal academics from 11 other nations. The second link contains a video link to what Donna Laframboise calls among the most terrifying 90 minutes I 've ever witnessed.  The chairman of the conference, UK Supreme Court justice Robert Carnwath, opened it with remarks strongly endorsing Prince Charles ' and President Obama 's views on climate change and the goals of the Paris climate conference.
 
A 45-minute keynote address by law professor Philippe Sands urged international courts to play a role here in finally scotching  non-mainstream climate perspectives. Particularly troubling for Prof. Sands is that some reputable scientists dissent from the mainstream consensus. Beginning at 39:00 of the video he outlines three factual, scientific issues that the International Court of Justice or the International Convention on the Law of the Sea could make a judicial determination on whether: climate change is happening; sea levels have risen; and anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been the main cause of warming. Further, the ICJ or ICLOS could determine as a scientific matter  what emission reductions are needed, nationally and globally, to keep the global temperature increase below 2 °C. A finding of fact on these matters by the ICG would be of great authority  in proceedings before other courts and tribunals.  
 
At 57:00 James Crawford, a judge of the ICJ from Australia responds to Mr. Sands ' remarks, comparing the climate change problem to that of the easier one on ozone. Concluding at 1:03:00 he notes that the ICJ has demonstrated a degree of scientific literacy  and if something can and should be done, I hope the court will have the guts to do it. 
 
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/10/03/climate-secrets-at-the-uk-supreme-court/>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/10/04/supreme-court-justice-carnwath-climate-activist/>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/10/07/the-unseemly-lord-carnwath/>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11924776/Judges-plan-to-outlaw-climate-change-denial.html>  
 

On Trial: The Social Cost of Carbon

Required by Minnesota state law to establish a dollar value for the environmental damage caused by power plants ' CO2  emissions, state utility regulators have sent the issue of the social cost of carbon to an administrative law judge. In 1997 the state Public Utility Commission established a SCC of $0.42 to $4.37/ton of CO2  updated annually for inflation since 2001. The Minnesota Department of Commerce recommended that the PUC adopt the federal SCC of $35/ton of   CO2, but the PUC commissioners decided that putting the federal value on trial would build acceptance and provide transparency.
 
Judith Curry 's blog describes the trial process as individuals (scientists and economists) testify for the energy companies/industries, followed by rebuttal by individuals for green groups. Then the other side rebuts, and this is followed by a round of surrebuttals. The chief scientific issue appears to be the equilibrium climate sensitivity, ranging from 1 °C to 6 °C for a doubling of   atmospheric CO2. Whatever the outcome of the trial, the verdict will be appealed.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/10/05/on-trial-social-cost-of-carbon/>
 

India Rejects Text for UN Climate Deal

In his first reaction to the draft text [FoS Extracts 2015-10-06] for the a Paris climate deal, India 's environment and climate change minister Prakash Javadekar said, I would like to underline that the first draft text of the Paris agreement is quite disappointing. It does not inspire.  Indian negotiators would certainly oppose it during the next round of negotiations in Bonn, October 19-23.  
 
The minister 's two main concerns are dilution of the element of equity  (i.e., rich countries should vacate carbon space  for developing ones and reduce excessive consumption) and the provision for the review of greenhouse gas emission pledges every five years. (Five years is OK for rich countries, but not for developing ones.)
 
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/pollution/India-disappointed-at-draft-Paris-climate-change-agreement/articleshow/49265889.cms>
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/pollution/India-will-oppose-the-Paris-text-rich-nations-cannot-have-an-action-holiday-Prakash-Javadekar/articleshow/49265776.cms>
 

 Climate Negotiators Give Up on Enforceable Paris Deal

Sanctions  and punishment  have been banned from the COP21 vocabulary. Instead, what negotiators are proposing are peer pressure  and cooperation.  To critics, the absence of a legal stick to enforce compliance is a deep  - if not fatal  - flaw in the Paris process, especially after all countries agreed in 2011 that an agreement would have some form of   legal force.  Even the European Union, which has long argued for a strong, legally binding deal, is increasingly talking about a  "pledge and review" system under which national commitments would be re-assessed every five years against a goal of halving world emissions by 2050.
 
<http://www.euractiv.com/sections/climate-environment/sanctions-and-punishment-barred-cop21-vocabulary-318407>
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/12/us-climatechange-summit-lawmaking-idUSKCN0S506A20151012>
   

IEA: Southeast Asia 's Fossil Fuel Boom to Last for Decades

The International Energy Agency has issued a report on the ten countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The report presents a central scenario in which Southeast Asia 's energy demand increases by 80% in the period to 2040. Despite policies aimed at scaling up the deployment of renewable resources, the share of fossil fuels in the region 's energy mix increases to around 80% by 2040, in stark contrast to the declining trend seen in many parts of the world.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/iea-southeast-asias-fossil-fuel-boom-to-last-for-decades/>
<http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2015/october/emergence-of-southeast-asia-as-energy-giant-carries-risks-opportunities.html>
   

Sierra Club 's President Squirms and Repeatedly Ducks Questions on Satellite Data

Sierra Club President Aaron Mair refused to answer or even acknowledge questions about data refuting global warming posed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during a US Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on October 6. When asked about satellite temperature data showing no significant warming trend over the last 18 years, Mr. Mair simply refused to admit the data even existed, instead repeating the mantra that 97% of the world 's scientists believe in AGW.
 
<http://www.mrctv.org/blog/watch-sierra-club-prez-squirm-and-repeatedly-ignore-cruzs-questions-satellite-data>
   

Carbon Dioxide: The Good News

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a 47-page report by former IPCC delegate and reviewer Indur Goklany, with a forward by Freeman Dyson (second link below), that addresses the question whether and how much increased CO2  concentrations in the biosphere have benefitted humanity and the biosphere by stimulating plant growth and increasing rainfall. Empirical data confirms that the biosphere 's productivity has increased by about 14% since 1982, in large part as a result of rising CO2  levels. The resulting increases in crop yields are very likely to have reduced the appropriation of land for farming by 11 17% compared with what it would otherwise be, resulting in more land being left wild.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits1.pdf>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/freeman-dyson-scientific-dogmatism-still-alive/>
   

There 's Life in the Old Pause Yet

One third of human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since February 1997, yet for 18 years and 8 months since then there has been no global warming at all. However, the current El Ni ±o may make itself felt during the current Northern Hemisphere winter, followed by a La Ni ±a cooling.  
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/08/theres-life-in-the-old-pause-yet/>

 

2015-10-06

 

IPCC Elects New Chair: Hoesung Lee of Korea

Dr. Lee, an economist, will be the new chair of the IPCC, replacing Rajendra Pachauri. He was one of six candidates for the job, and in his candidature statement. Dr. Lee listed three improvements he wants for the IPCC: enhancing participation of developing country experts, increasing policy relevance and neutrality, and focusing on concerns related to domestic challenges (including poverty alleviation.)  
 
Before the election, the blog  Carbon Brief  interviewed five of the candidates and prepared a grid of their responses.
 
<http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/10/ipcc-elects-new-chair-hoesung-lee-korea>
<https://www.ipcc.ch/nominations/cv/cv_hoesung_lee.pdf><http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/koreas-heosung-lee-succeeds-rk-pachauri-as-ipcc-chair/article7731609.ece>
<http://www.carbonbrief.org/ipcc-chair-election-how-the-views-of-the-candidates-compare/>
   

New Draft Climate Text is 20 Pages of Hedging

The co-chairs for the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action managed to slim down an 86-page negotiating text to just 20 pages. But, as the  American Interest  article notes, brevity and clarity are not the same, because much uncertainty remains in the form of bracketed verbiage with many opportunities for equivocation.  
 
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/10/06/new-draft-climate-text-is-20-pages-of-hedging/>
<http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/adp2/eng/8infnot.pdf>
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/05/un-publishes-draft-of-slimmed-down-paris-climate-change-deal>
   

India 's Proposed COP 21 Climate Plan

India was the last major economy to submit its Intended Nationally-Determined Contribution for the Paris climate conference. After outlining the country 's economic and social background, the 38-page document devotes one page (No. 29) to eight INDC goals, of which only three include numbers: (1) reduce GDP emissions intensity by 33-35% by 2030; (2) achieve 40% electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030; (3) create an additional carbon sink of 2.3 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent through additional forest and tree cover. The 40% installed capacity  in GW for electric power will be much greater than total energy produced in GWh (especially for low load-factor wind and solar.) Among the technologies needed (p.38) first in the list are clean coal technologies - not surprising as  Reuters  reports on India 's race to double coal output by 2020.
 
India 's INDC goals are contingent on additional means of implementation  (i.e., money) from developed countries, technology transfer and capacity building. Meeting the country 's climate change actions between now and 2030 will cost $2.5 trillion or $166 billion/year. As the BBC story makes clear, what 's important to India and other developing countries is money for both implementation of their climate pledges and for loss and damage.
 
<http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC/Published%20Documents/India/1/INDIA%20INDC%20TO%20UNFCCC.pdf>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/03/indias-proposed-cop21-climate-plan-will-triple-emissions-by-2030/>
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/pollution/India-submits-its-climate-action-plan-asks-rich-nations-to-cooperate-in-achieving-its-goal/articleshow/49189501.cms>
<http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/06/us-asia-coal-climatechange-idUKKCN0RZ2G020151006>
<http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34412647>
   

Smart Coal: Putting People Ahead of Climate Hysteria

Between 2007 and  2012, Japan  provided more than  $20 billion in financial support to build its Ultra-Supercritical coal-fired plants in places like Chile, Vietnam and India. It plans to replace its old coal plants with 40 new  advanced-design units, putting the interests of its people first. In contrast the Obama administration 's war on coal prevents the use of coal even in new highly-efficient Ultra-Supercritical installations. The US coal industry is promoting enormously expensive Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants that capture CO2  and sequester it underground. IGCC plants cost $6,000/kW, about the same as a new nuclear power plant.
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/japan-energy-policy/japan-smart-coal/>
   

Bank of England: Climate Change a Huge  Financial Risk

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said Britain's  insurers face potentially "huge" exposure to shifts in climate-change policy and the Group of 20 nations need to do more to combat associated financial stability risks. The writer of the  Watts Up With That  article agrees with Mr. Carney that climate change does pose a huge financial risk to UK-based businesses. However, the risk has nothing to do with the weather, but rather the risk of lunatic political interventions that destroy the financial viability of businesses.
 
<http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/climate-change-a-huge-financial-risk-warns-bank-of-england-20150930-gjy3th.html>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/30/bank-of-england-climate-change-a-huge-financial-risk/>
   

Greenpeace Plans Bid for Vattenfall 's German Coal Business

Environmental group Greenpeace is exploring funding options to buy Vattenfall's lignite business in eastern Germany that have been put up for sale by the Swedish state-owned energy giant. Greenpeace Sweden sent a letter to US bank Citigroup, which is charged with selling off the lignite operations worth ‚ 2-3 billion. Greenpeace would finance a potential acquisition with donor money, crowd-funding and other sources of financing - to ensure that the lignite stays in the ground.
 
<http://www.dw.com/en/greenpeace-plans-bid-for-vattenfalls-german-coal-business/a-18763586>
   

RICO!

The  Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO, is a US federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wants to use RICO laws against climate change skeptics and fossil fuel companies. An excerpt from his WaPo article: In the case of fossil fuels, just as with tobacco, the industry joined together in a common enterprise and coordinated strategy.  However, Sen. Whitehouse isn 't alone. A group of 20 academics signed a letter to President Obama, the Attorney General and the director the Office of Science and Technology policy endorsing the senator 's initiative. Judith Curry was so surprised by the naivet of the signatories that she composed a five-point response, supported by multiple links, to their letter.  
 
The academic signatories were led by Jagadish Shukla and four associates at his George Mason University-based Institute of Global Environment and Society. That the IGES is a government-backed non profit, and the Shukla family appears to have benefited from the grants, came to the attention of the US House Science Committee, which has requested turning over of all email, electronic documents and data created by IGES since 2009.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/17/rico/>
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fossil-fuel-industrys-campaign-to-mislead-the-american-people/2015/05/29/04a2c448-0574-11e5-8bda-c7b4e9a8f7ac_story.html>
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/global_warming_stopped_in_1998_no_it_didnt_if_you_say_that_youre_going_to_prison/?mt=1442591932699>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/29/climate-activists-want-us-prosecuted-under-rico/>
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/02/congress-investigates-scientists-wanting-to-prosecute-global-warming-skeptics/>
   

Why Leftist Greens Love the Pope 's Global Warming Speech

Supporting the view that global warming has become a religion, the Pope made a plea to protect our common home  from climate change. The Green Left, having abandoned formal religion of the Judeo-Christian sort, and having lost their faith in Marxism as a replacement, has joined the Church of Climate Change. That's why these green true believers so warmly embrace Pope Francis' message. The similarities between belief in global warming and organized religion include: faith, original sin, skeptics, indulgences, rituals, and heaven.
 
<http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/092315-772494-green-movement-finds-something-to-believe-in-popes-global-warming-remarks.htm>
   

The Devastating Corporate Response to Carbon Madness

When governments threaten to impose damaging new taxes, businesses like German utility E.ON split into two - a politically-favoured renewable  business and the old fossil-fuel assets. This catches green politicians in an economic pincer. They are forced to subsidize not only the renewables, but also the old energy-intensive businesses,to keep them (and the national economies) from closing.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/06/the-devastating-corporate-response-to-carbon-madness/>
   

Google Forecasts No Interest in Paris COP 21

Forbes  reports that, based on Google search statistics, the current world 's media blitz has failed to spark interest. Graphs of web searches for global warming  and climate change  over the past ten years show that interest in the former decreased substantially since mid-2010, while searches for climate change have been stable at their 2005 levels. As  Forbes  concludes: Put simply, the public simply isn 't searching about the topic anymore, suggesting they either aren 't interested or they feel they already know what they would like to know about changing climatic conditions.  Google News  searches exhibit a nearly identical downward slope suggesting that the public isn 't searching for the latest breaking climate news either, indicating an overall decreasing interest in the topic. 
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/26/google-forecasts-no-interest-in-paris-cop21/>
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2015/09/26/what-data-tells-us-about-public-interest-in-climate-change-and-its-global-news-coverage/>
 

New Book: Doubt and Uncertainty in Climate Science

Judith Curry reviews and recommends a new book by Alan Longhurst (a biological oceanographer)  Doubt and Uncertainty in Climate Science,  which is available for free downloading. According to Dr. Curry: The book is 239 pages long, with 606 footnotes/references.  The book is well written,  technical but without equations it is easily accessible to anyone with a technical education or who follows the technical climate blogs.  She provides a brief overview of the book with her comments, which include the observation: Very, very few climate scientists have personally dug as deeply as Longhurst over such a broad range of climate science topics. 
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/20/new-book-doubt-and-certainty-in-climate-science/>
<https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/longhurst-final.pdf>

 

2015-09-16

 

How the Next US President Could Dismantle Obama 's Climate Policies-Or Expand Them

After the Supreme Court gave the Environmental Protection Agency unprecedented authority to regulate US greenhouse gas emissions under the  Clean Air Act, President Obama has used that power to enact sweeping new climate rules, without having to get Congressional approval. However, their ultimate fate rests with the next president. A Republican president could handcuff the EPA, replace the Clean Power Plan, fail to defend climate regulations in court and decline to pass new regulations and loosen up fuel economy standards when they come up for review in 2017.
 
A Democratic president could strengthen efficiency standards for homes and buildings, start regulating industrial CO2  sources, crack down on methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure, expand fuel-economy standards for vehicles and set CO2  rules for aircraft.
 
<http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9110093/climate-change-2016-election>
 

California 's Climate Change Revolt

Governor Jerry Brown and the environmental lobby tried to turn climate change into a social justice issue even though its anti-carbon policies disproportionally harm the poor. This led to a revolt by Mr. Brown 's party. Even though Democrats hold super majorities in both legislative chambers, enough of them joined Republicans to kill a bill mandating a cut in state greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Democrats also forced Mr. Brown to scrap a measure that would have given the California Air Resources Board plenary authority to reduce statewide oil consumption in vehicles by half by 2030.
 
The defeat is all the more striking for the failure of appeals to green moral superiority. Liberal groups targeted Catholic Democrats with ads featuring  Pope Francis.  Mr. Brown demonized oil companies for selling a highly destructive  product. However, the most morally destructive product in California these days is green government. The chief beneficiaries of the Golden State 's green government have been the well-to-do, while low- and middle-income Californians have borne most of the regulatory costs.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/californias-climate-change-revolt/>
 

The Urgenda Ruling in the Netherlands

The Dutch government has decided to appeal the Urgenda  (from urgent agenda ) ruling directing that government to make deeper cuts (25% instead of 17% by 2020) in greenhouse gas emissions [FoS Extracts - 2015-06-30]. This article by Lucas Bergkamp, who is both a lawyer and a medical doctor, says the ruling sets a dangerous precedent for judicial activism, is inconsistent with European law and will even undermine international climate negotiations (because states may be reluctant to enter into legally-binding agreements.)  
 
Mr. Bergkamp notes: Urgenda is assisting climate action groups in other countries in Europe and elsewhere to launch similar lawsuits against their governments. Their objective is to push society away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy so as to achieve a circular, zero-carbon sustainable society.  Canadian groups are taking notice.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/09/the-urgenda-ruling-in-the-netherlands/>
<http://wcel.org/resources/environmental-law-alert/dutch-climate-court-win-what-does-it-mean-canada>
<https://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/15/activist-dutch-lawyer-says-climate-change-lawsuit-could-work-in-canada/>
 

Flashback to the UN Official 's Redistribution of Wealth  Statement

In 2010 Ottar Edenhoffer, the co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, gave an interview in which he said: But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world 's wealth by climate policy One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore 
 
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/09/flashback-ipcc-official-admits-un-climate-meetings-redistribute-wealth-largest-economic-conference-since-wwii/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/ipcc-official-climate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth/>
 

CO2  Emissions Reduction, Renewables and Recession

EU CO2  emissions have fallen by 17% since 2008. However, there is no correlation between the amount of installed wind + solar generation per-capita in each country and its emissions reduction over 2008-2014. What does correlate with CO2  reduction in member countries is economic growth. The countries with the highest degree of per-capita emissions reduction (Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) had negative aggregate growth since 2008.
 
<http://euanmearns.com/co2-emissions-reduction-renewables-and-recession/>
 

Eye-roller Study: Should Countries Honour their Climate Debts?

In an effort to help lead to a stronger and more meaningful global climate agreement in Paris , Concordia University researcher Damon Matthews devised a chart of national cumulative carbon debts and credits. He calculates that the countries that have accumulated the largest carbon debts on account of higher than average per-capita CO2  emissions are the US, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, the UK and Australia, with the US holding 40% of the debt. On the other side are the per-capital creditors, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil and China, with India holding 30% of the total world credit.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/08/eye-roller-study-should-countries-honor-their-climate-debts/>
<http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2774.html>
 

Is It Time to Stop the Insanity of Wasting Time and Money on More Climate Models?

Tim Ball explains why climate models can 't work: lack of data, lack of knowledge of major mechanisms, lack of knowledge of basic physical processes, lack of ability to represent physical mechanisms like turbulence in mathematical form, and lack of computer capacity. Without continued government and academic funding, computer modellers could not dominate the study of climate and the IPCC could not exist. In fact the IPCC 's Physical Science Reports (e.g., AR5-WG1, Chapter 9) provide a detailed explanation of why the models can 't and don 't work, but few read or understand them, preferring to read only the Summaries for Policymakers.
 
In the  National Post  article, physicist Freeman Dyson says that, while the models do a good job of describing fluid motions in the atmosphere and oceans, they do a poor one of describing clouds, dust, the chemistry and biology of fields, farms and forests. Moreover many of their components are parameterized , that is full of fudge factors to fit them to observed data.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/14/is-it-time-to-stop-the-insanity-of-wasting-time-and-money-on-more-climate-models/>
<http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=985641c9-8594-43c2-802d-947d65555e8e>
 

Three Trillion Trees Sucking CO2  out of the Atmosphere

According to a new assessment published in  Nature, there are 3.04 trillion trees (433 per person) on the planet, over eight times the previous best assessment of 400 billion. Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometre level. The highest densities of trees were found in the boreal forests in the sub-arctic regions of Russia, Scandinavia, and North America. But the largest forest areas, by far, are in the tropics, which are home to about 43% of the world 's trees. (Only 24% are in the dense boreal regions, while another 22% exist in temperate zones.)
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/03/trillions-and-trillions-of-trees-make-that-giant-sucking-sound-of-co2-from-the-atmosphere/>
<http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366>
 

The Pacific Blob and the Pause

The North Pacific is setting sea temperature records, scrambling weather patterns, damaging ecosystems, and nudging up the global temperatures. The abnormally warm water of the blob  influenced global surface temperatures adding more than enough to elevate 2014 into the world 's warmest year by the two hundredths of a degree it needed to beat  2010. Such a small increase is not statistically significant given errors of +/- 0.1 °C, but it emphasizes the point that without the Pacific blob  2014 would have been somewhat cooler than 2010, and probably cooler than other years as well. The blob  and the El Nino are developing and will make 2015 the warmest year of the instrumental era by a significant margin. It will be interesting to see how some protagonists try to wring out a resumption of long-term climatic change due to anthropogenic global warming out of two extreme weather events.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/the-pacific-blob-and-the-pause/>

 

2015-09-04

 

Eleventh Hour Panic: UN Summons Leaders to Closed-Door Climate Meeting

Frustrated by slow progress in global climate talks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to invite about 40 world leaders including President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as the leaders of France, India, Brazil and China, to a closed-door meeting on September 27, before the opening of the General Assembly. Some of the top issues on the agenda for the New York climate meeting will be how to get countries to increase the level of emissions cuts they 're willing to make and how often countries should be required to update their pledges after the agreement takes effect in 2020, according to one of the people familiar with the plans.
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-31/un-said-to-summon-leaders-to-closed-door-climate-change-meeting>
 

UK Signals End of Solar Handouts

In a surprise move on August 27, UK government ministers announced that they plan to slash payments to homeowners who install solar panels on their homes by 87%. Tens of thousands of people were trained to install the panels, and around 700,000 families had them put on their homes to take advantage of the subsidies. The annual cost of the scheme is now estimated to be in excess of £800 million a year - almost twice the level ministers originally anticipated, as a result of the early boom. The UK renewable energy industry has reacted with shock and anger.
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/solarpower/11829471/Ministers-signal-the-end-of-Britains-solar-revolution.html>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/energy-bills/11828078/Rooftop-solar-panels-to-lose-3840-payout-in-drastic-cull-to-green-subsidies.html>
<http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/national-news/126397-all-the-reaction-renewable-sector-left-reeling-after-government%5Cs-latest-attack.html>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/08/renewables-subsidies-are-slashed-in-uk-solar-wind-hydro-industry-shocked/>
 

Europe 's Greenest Government Readies U-Turn on Ambitious Climate Targets

Denmark 's widening budget deficit is forcing its policy makers to take some hard decisions in the very area where they are considered global role models: the fight against climate change. The government is to reverse ambitious CO2 targets introduced by the previous administration and drop plans to phase out coal-fired power plants and become fossil-fuel free by 2050.  
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/denmark-s-government-readies-u-turn-on-ambitious-climate-targets>
 

Germany 's Green Energy Revolution Fails Its Climate Goal

More than one million solar energy projects and 25,000 wind turbines are obviously not enough. Despite Germany 's green energy revolution, the federal government 's climate targets cannot be achieved. The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2020 compared to 1990 is unrealistic , says a report by consulting firm McKinsey. Any improvement is not in sight either, the report concludes: The prospects for a turnaround by 2020 are permanently bad.  In order to achieve the 2020 target, the average annual CO2 reduction rate would have to be quadrupled, compared to 2000-2014.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/germanys-green-energy-revolution-fails-its-climate-goal/>
 

Obama Rebuffed as China, India & Russia Refuse to Sign Arctic Climate Agreement

On August 30-31 foreign ministers and other international leaders met in Anchorage, Alaska to attend the Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement, and Resilience (GLACIER). As a sign of the importance the United States placed on the Alaska forum, President Barack Obama attended. He used the conference as a platform for urging swifter action on climate change and to focus attention on this year 's Paris climate summit.
 
While the representatives of the Arctic Council members signed a joint statement affirming our commitment to take urgent action to slow the pace of warming in the Arctic,  Russia, together with Council observer states China and India, opted out. The latter two consider themselves still-developing countries and therefore resist anything that commits them to cut emissions.
 
<http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/why-did-china-opt-out-of-the-arctic-climate-change-statement/>
 

Dark Clouds over Paris: India 's Climate Plan in Disarray

India 's delayed submission of a national climate plan is the result of increasing doubts that the country can meet an emissions intensity target pledged in 2009, plunging future commitments into disarray. At the 2009 climate summit six years ago,  India undertook  to cut its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity by 20-25% by 2020 compared with 2005 levels, which at the time was viewed by some rich countries as a poor substitute for an overall cap. But India looks increasingly likely to miss even that target, with the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change told that the current emissions intensity reduction from 2005 levels is 18.6%, with little scope for further improvement.
 
With India needing as many votes as possible to further its ambition of becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, diplomats have been urging the Prime Minister 's Office to formulate a climate plan that promises big cuts in energy intensity. But infrastructure ministries such as power and coal are strongly opposed to the idea.
 
<http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/09/02/indias-post-2020-climate-plan-in-disarray/>
 

The David Suzuki School of Irrational Thought

In the National Observer, Dr. Suzuki blames secretive organizations  funded by fossil fuel interests,  such as Friends of Science, for the fact that some people (including political leaders) stubbornly refuse to believe that climate change is a problem worth addressing. Joanne Nova picks apart his arguments, one of which is that because the deniers  don 't all agree on a single alternative theory to that of human-caused global warming, they must be wrong. Moreover, fossil fuels  are not one industry, and some of the companies give money to progressive  think tanks.  
 
<http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/09/01/opinion/deniers-are-all-over-map-climate-realists-all-over-world>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/09/the-david-suzuki-school-of-irrational-thought-on-the-climate-if-only-he-knew-what-science-was/>
 

Three Things Scientists Need to Know about the IPCC

Donna Laframboise addressed a meeting of the World Federation of Scientists in Erice, Italy. Her three main points were: 1) the IPCC is a political entity (but is trying to convince us that it 's a scientific one); 2) scientists are not in charge (they don 't write the all-important Summaries for Policy ¥makers-bureaucrats do); 3) the IPCC is a template that gets duplicated elsewhere (the UN is trying to set up IPCC-like bodies for agriculture and biodiversity.)  
 
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/09/01/3-things-scientists-need-to-know-about-the-ipcc/>
 

Surviving the Ice Age and Whatever Comes Next

During the last half-million years the cycle of glacial and interglacial conditions has repeated every 130,000 years. During the Eemian interglacial, between 130,000-110,000 years ago, the Earth's climate was generally much like that of today. Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. However, as the sequence of phases over the last 130,000 years shows, there was no orderly progression, with large changes occurring quickly enough to be notices during a person 's lifetime. This refutes many alarmists ' calling a few tenths of a degree change unprecedented  and irreversible. 
 
<http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/surviving-ice-age-and-whatever-comes-next>

 

2015-08-26

 

How to Address the Left on Climate Change

Yahoo Global News anchor Katie Couric, a believer in the need to attack  climate change, interviewed Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina about their views on the subject, and didn 't get the answers she wanted. Mr. Cruz confronted Ms. Couric, pointing out the false basis for the consensus argument and the recent miserable record on environmentalist predictions. To him climate change  is the perfect political pseudo-scientific theory, one that can never be disproven and for which the solution is always more and more government control of peoples ' lives. The Democratic party has forsaken its traditional base of union members in favour of the environmentalist billionaires.
 
Ms. Fiorina responded by noting the implications of US policy on climate change. The US, acting alone can 't affect the climate, and the Obama administration is asking Americans to sacrifice for no purpose, as demanded by the Left. She repeatedly stressed clean coal technology, noting that wind and solar create their own environmental problems. Ms. Fiorina ridiculed the Obama administration 's calling ISIS a strategic distraction , while labelling climate change the single most pressing national-security issue of our time.  For her there are more pressing issues than climate change.
 
<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422395/carly-fiorina-climate-change-left>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/24/the-stupid-party/>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/12/carly-fiorina-hits-the-sweet-spot-on-climate-change/>
 

The Brave Judith Curry

According to these  Master Resource  pieces, Prof. Curry is is arguably the most important voice in the  physical science side of today 's  climate  debate. Her abandonment of the climate consensus  inspired her to study the sociology of climate alarmism. Not only is Prof. Curry 's research at the cutting edge of the unsettled science, she regularly,  accurately, and fearlessly reports the latest in the science debates. These articles include a number of salient quotes from her blog.
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/debate-issues/the-brave-judith-curry-one-plus-the-truth-equals-a-majority/>
<https://www.masterresource.org/debate-issues/the-brave-judith-curry-part-ii/>
 

Barack Obama 's Quiet War on Oil and Gas

President Barack Obama 's enemies have long accused him of waging a war on coal.  But a very different war on oil and gas is coming next. The newest phase of the administration 's environmental agenda has the oil and natural gas industry in its crosshairs, with plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions from rigs and refineries, tighten oversight of drilling on public lands and impose a strict ozone limit that industry lobbyists slam as the most expensive regulation ever. 
 
The Environmental Protection Agency has issued its new rule to slash emissions of methane, a byproduct of oil and gas drilling. The industry will be required to cut methane emissions from new or modified wells by 40% to 45% over the next decade from 2012 levels.  
 
<http://www.politico.eu/article/barack-obamas-quiet-war-on-oil/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/obamas-next-target-natural-gas/>
 

Obama 's Coal Expropriation: George Soros Buys Up Cheap Coal Shares

George Soros is a hardball investor and philanthropist to myriad left-wing causes, including the activist and clean energy  rent-seeking movements that have helped take down the coal industry. Now that his friend Barack Obama has declared war on coal-fired generation through his Clean Power Plan [FoS Extracts - 2015-08-12] and made stocks in coal firms dirt cheap, Mr. Soros snapped up 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and half a million shares of Arch Coal.  
 
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/13/obamas-great-coal-train-robbery/>
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/17/the-new-king-coal-george-soros/>
<http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/19/billionaire-george-soros-warms-up-to-coal-as-stock-prices-hit-bottom/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter>
 

India to Double Coal Production by 2020

From 2005 to 2012 India 's coal production grew by 4.7%/year to about 600 million tonnes, while coal-fired electric power capacity expanded by 9.4%/year, reaching 150 GW. To resolve the shortfall in coal supply and support greater power generation, the country has set a production target of 1.5 billion tonnes by 2020.  
 
<http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=22652>
 

No One Showed Up for California 's Green Job Rush

In 2012 California voters approved Proposition 39, created and backed by wealthy environmentalist Tom Steyer, which sough to raise taxes on corporations to fund green energy projects in schools. Mr. Steyer promised it would create 11,000 new jobs per year. As it turned out, Proposition 39 created 1,700 jobs over three years, at a cost of $175,000 each. However, some benefitted-more than half of the $297 million spent has gone to consultants and energy auditors. Lawmakers from both parties are calling for oversight hearings on the measure.
 
<http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/no-one-showed-up-for-californias-green-jobs-rush/article/2570363?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20Opinion%20Digest&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20Opinion%20Digest%20-%2008/18/15&utm_medium=email>
<http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-california-measure-fails-create-green-jobs-050919689.html>
 

US Court Invalidates 30-Year Eagle Take  Rule

The eagle take  rule, adopted in 2009, offered wind farms a legal way to accidentally kill eagles, as long as they agreed to a suite of mitigation and monitoring requirements to ensure eagle populations remain stable. On August 12 the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the Department of the Interior violated federal laws when it allowed wind and other companies to obtain 30-year permits to kill Bald and Golden Eagles without prosecution by the federal government.  
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/cuisinarts-of-the-air/bald-golden-eagles-court-victory/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/obamas-wind-energy-lobby-gets-blown-away/>
 

Spin Cycle: Carbon Dioxide is Not Carbon Pollution 

President Obama is keen on calling carbon dioxide emitted from US fossil fuel-powered energy production, carbon pollution.  Clearly, he is trying to paint a picture for the American public whereby carbon dioxide emissions are thought of as dirty, noxious substances that invade the air we breathe and make us sick. First and foremost, carbon dioxide is a colourless, odourless gas that is non-toxic to humans at concentrations below some tens of thousands of parts per million (ppm). The current carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is 400 ppm and even worst case projections by the end of the century only put the concentration at 800-1000 ppm.  
 
Secondly, far from being sickened, the planet 's plant life is invigorated by carbon dioxide. High concentrations (~1,000 ppm) of CO2  are routinely used in commercial greenhouses to produce faster growing and more robust plants. Scientific studies have shown that as CO2  concentrations rise, plants become more resilient to environmental stressors, more efficient in their use of water, and more productive.
 
At a fundamental level, carbon dioxide is the basis of nearly all life on Earth, as it is the primary raw material or food  that is utilized by plants to produce the organic matter out of which they construct their tissues. Typically, a doubling of the air 's CO2  content above present-day concentrations raises the productivity of most herbaceous plants by about one-third; this positive response occurs in plants that utilize all three of the major biochemical pathways of photosynthesis.
 
<http://www.cato.org/blog/spin-cycle-carbon-dioxide-not-carbon-pollution>
<http://www.cato.org/blog/co2-induced-greening-earth-benefiting-biosphere-while-lifting-poor-out-poverty>
 

Climatologist: We Have a Moral Imperative ' to Burn Fossil Fuels

John Christy, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, questions the Pope 's recent encyclical, in particular its warning that we are facing apocalyptic disaster caused by human-induced climate change unless we forgo carbon-based energy. Instead, he writes: we are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so. 
 
<http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/climatologist-we-have-moral-imperative-burn-fossil-fuels>
<https://web.archive.org/web/20150703181333/http:/www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/06/uah_climate_scientist_question.html>

 

2015-08-12

 

Obama 's Climate Push

On August 3 President Obama unveiled his Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations that requires states to cut CO2 emissions from power plants by 32% from 2005 levels. The EPA used a complicated formula to set individual targets for the states, which must submit plans to the agency by 2018, with the cuts coming into effect during 2022-2030. Recognizing that the poorest will be hit by rising power prices, the plan requires states to engage with low-income, minority and tribal communities in developing their plans. However, according to The Washington Times black and Hispanic leaders fear the climate change policies will drive up poverty in low-income areas, kill jobs and raise electricity rates for families that can least afford it.
 
The Global Warming Policy Foundation summarizes the key issues and challenges. Among the latter are whether there will be a legally-binding agreement in Paris next December, the US presidential election, resistance from US states and legal challenges to the EPA 's authority. A Wall Street Journal editorial (published by the GWPF) call 's the plan regulation without representation, without a vote in Congress or public debate. According to The Washington Times a coalition of 15 states, including Democrat-led Kentucky, say they 'll sue the EPA over the new regulations. Another WSJ article published by the GWPF describes the legal challenges expected.
 
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/08/03/fact-sheet-president-obama-announce-historic-carbon-pollution-standards>
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-08-03/obama-sets-up-fight-with-states-with-power-plant-emissions-rule>  
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/6/obamas-clean-power-plan-faces-opposition-from-blac/?page=all#pagebreak>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/obamas-new-climate-plan-key-issues-challenges/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/wsj-obamas-climate-change-putsch/>
<http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/04/opinions/knappenberger/>
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/3/obama-blasts-lazy-critics-carbon-rules/?page=all#pagebreak>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/industry-us-states-set-to-fight-epa-greenhouse-gas-rules/>
 

Global Coal Boom Accelerating, Despite Obama 's Posturing

While President Obama announced his plan to shutter America 's coal industry, coal use is surging around the globe. A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences detects an unmistakable "coal renaissance" under way that shows this mineral of fossilized carbon has again become "the most important source of energy-related emissions on the global scale.  Some 1,200 coal plants are planned across 59 countries, with about three-quarters in China and India, and coal use has grown four times as fast as renewables.  
 
<http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-brain-trust/080615-765456-world-coal-use-surges-as-obama-tries-to-shut-down-us-coal-plants.htm?p=full>
 

Back to Square One: EPA 's Unlawful Collusion with Green Pressure Groups

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has released a report Back To Square One: Unlawful Collusion With Green Pressure Groups Should Doom U.S. EPA 's Greenhouse Gas Regulation. The report, which is based on e-mails and other documents obtained under numerous Freedom of Information requests and litigation, details illegal activities by EPA staff, colluding with certain environmental lobbyists to draft EPA 's greenhouse gas rules behind the scenes, outside of public view, and to the exclusion of other parties.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/30/back-to-square-one-unlawful-collusion-with-green-pressure-groups-should-doom-u-s-epas-greenhouse-gas-regulation/>
<http://eelegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EE-Legal-GHG-Collusion-Report-Final.pdf>
 

Fearing Negative Impact  on Power Rates, Nova Scotia Scraps FIT Program

Nova Scotia is ending its feed-in tariff program that pays local-level groups to generate power from biomass, wind and other renewable sources, The province 's energy minister said it 's at a point where the program could begin to have a negative impact on power rates.  The program pays 49.9 ¢/kWh for wind power from projects producing fewer than 50 kW; 13.1 ¢/kWh for wind power from projects over 50 kW; and 17.5 ¢/kWh for power from combined heat/power (CHP) biomass projects.
 
<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/08/11/nova-scotia-scraps-fit-program-fearing-future-negative-impact-on-power-rates/>
<http://www.agcanada.com/daily/n-s-halts-local-level-biomass-wind-power-plan>
 

$1.5 Trillion Climate Change Industry  Is Booming

The $1.5 trillion global climate change industry  grew at between 17% and 24% annually from 2005-2008, slowing to between 4% and 6% following the recession with the exception of 2011 's inexplicable 15% growth, according to Climate Change Business Journal. Policy, or the anticipation of new policy, has been one of the biggest drivers of the industry, the report (available for $995) shows. As Joanne Nova puts it: the lesson here is that if you have a dodgy theory, set up a dependent industry fast, and sit back while they lobby and push your theory for you. 
 
<http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/07/30/377086.htm>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/07/spot-the-vested-interest-the-1-5-trillion-climate-change-industry/>
 

Geotargeting: Climate Change Lobby Advises Location-based, Tailored Propaganda to Convince More People

A new paper on  climate  change has urged advocates and activists to develop tailored climate communication strategies for individual nations  reflecting on the fact that is mainly the world 's wealthier nations who are aware  of their propaganda, even though they see global warming  as less of a threat.  
 
<http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/07/28/geotargeting-climate-change-lobby-advises-location-based-tailored-propaganda-to-convince-more-people/>
 

Out of Europe: Steel Industry Plans Great Exodus

For the fourth trading period from 2021 the European Commission is planning to increase the standard values for CO2 emissions, cut back the number of available industrial emissions allowances and allow fewer exemptions for energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement and chemicals. As a result, primary steel makers are considering moving their CO2-intensive production abroad, with the result that European production of steel could eventually disappear. Then European manufacturers of cars and machinery would have to import, rather than use locally-produced steel-and there would be no effect on overall emissions.  
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/good-bye-europe-steel-industry-plans-great-exodus/>
 

The Trouble with Global Climate Models

Rud Istvan 's essay provides a short, clear explanation why the global climate models (GCMs) relied upon by the IPCC for its Fifth Assessment Report are unfit for purpose. There are two intractable problems with trying to model global weather out to 2100: (1) the grid size has to be 110 km x 110 km or larger (whereas it can be as small as 1.5 km x 1.5 km for local short-term weather forecasting), due to computational constraints; (2) physical climate processes like clouds and tropical convection cells occur at much smaller scales than 110 km and cannot be simulated from the physics by GCMs. Instead, these processes have to be parameterized,  which requires making assumptions and tuning the models to fit past observations in order to validate them.
 
Tim Ball examines the validation of GCMs and includes John Christy 's recent graph comparing models to observations for the past 25 years. He quotes some paragraphs from the IPCC 's latest assessment frankly describing the limitations and low confidence in the models. These quotes are buried in Chapter 9 of the assessment, which means that the media and policymakers don 't read them.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/09/the-trouble-with-global-climate-models/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/08/validation-of-a-climate-model-is-mandatory-the-invaluable-work-of-dr-vincent-gray/>

 

2015-07-27

 

UN Releases New Streamlined  Negotiating Text for Paris Deal

At a meeting of the Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) June 1-11, the ADP 's co-chairs were directed to produce a fully streamlined, consolidated, clear and concise version  of an 86-page document called the Geneva Negotiating Text of last February. The UN has released result of the co-chairs ' efforts, an 83-page text (see third link below) called A Non-Paper Illustrating Possible Elements of the Paris Package.  This non-paper will be the subject of the next ADP sessions August 31-September 4 and October 19-23. The document resulting from these two sessions will form the basis for an agreement at the Paris climate summit November 30-December 11.
 
The ADP 's non paper consists of three parts: 1) the draft agreement, 2) draft decision and 3) provisions requiring further clarity. It includes 278 formal options and 2646 alternative wordings between [ ], such as [shall][should][other].  On page 82 there 's provision for establishment of an International Climate Justice Tribunal to to oversee, control and sanction the fulfilment of and compliance with the obligations  of parties to the agreement.
 
<http://www.rtcc.org/2015/07/24/un-releases-streamlined-negotiating-text-for-paris-climate-deal/>
<http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2419294/fresh-negotiating-text-promises-strong-foundation-for-paris-climate-summit>
<http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/adp2/eng/4infnot.pdf>
 

Walter Russell Mead: Climate Diplomats Prepare for a Paris Fudge

Given the political impossibility of of the Paris climate summit in December 1) achieving a legally-binding treaty that puts the world on the 2 °C pathway  demanded by the ENGOs and 2) getting rich countries to fork over $100 billion/year to developing ones (with the US share being $20-35 billion), Mr. Mead speculates on the real outcome. It will be a legally-binding agreement to disagree about carbon, with each country bound to do exactly what it wants. Then diplomats can claim success as they avoid the humiliating result of Copenhagen.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/walter-russell-mead-un-climate-diplomats-prepare-a-paris-fudge/>
 

UN-Sponsored Poll Ranks Climate Change Dead Last

The UN 's MY World  initiative is    described as: a United Nations global survey for citizens. Working with partners, we aim to capture people 's voices, priorities and views, so world leaders can be informed as they begin the process of defining the next set of global goals to end poverty.  The initiative has recorded opinions for all countries and country groups, with 7.7 million votes tallied. Of the 16 concerns listed in the survey, A good education  was first, and Action taken on climate change  came last.  
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/17/despite-the-urgency-of-paris-a-u-n-sponsored-global-poll-rates-climate-change-dead-last/>
<http://data.myworld2015.org>
 

Green Climate Fund in Doubt

The GCF, whereby $100 billion/year from 2020 onward is to be transferred from developed to developing countries to help them deal with climate change, is key to a climate agreement in Paris next December. But, faith in the GCF is beginning to wane as the US is lagging and Congress is hostile, not enough money, talk of limiting grants and lack of transparency.
 
<http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20072015/paris-climate-change-treaty-finances-shaky-ground-green-climate-fund>
 

Billionaires Use Environmental Movement to Profit Handily

From Tom Steyer to Nat Simons, billionaires have hijacked the environmental movement to line their own pockets. Hedge funds and billionaire investors with a line into government contracts, grants and loan guarantees have built relations with these lobby groups to influence government to ensure taxpayer  largess flows to the green industries which they are invested in.  A new report,  Big Donors...Big Conflicts: How Wealthy Donors Use the Sierra Club to Push Their Agenda,    by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute examines some of the largest contributors to the Sierra Club and their self-interested dealing that gives new definition to the meaning of going green. 
 
According to E&E Legal 's general counsel, What is apparent from this latest report is that very wealthy individuals and family foundations use the Sierra Club as hired guns to beat up the coal industry, and to push renewable energy while these same individuals stand to gain significantly from this market manipulation. 
 
In addition to serving the obvious financial and generally ideological interests of Sierra 's donors, the Sierra Club 's policies also serve donors who succour population control. This includes the family foundation of William Hewlett, a Sierra Club supporter, which is dedicated to population control and view environmental issues as a means to curb and ultimately reduce human involvement in the world as well. This, of course, is nothing short of a war on the poor, the antithesis of a war on poverty.
 
<http://www.redstate.com/diary/dukefergus/2015/07/15/billionaires-use-environmental-movement-profit-handily/>
<http://eelegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Big-Donors-Big-Conflicts-Final1.pdf>
 

UK Government Cancels Green Deal 

In 2010 former Energy and Climate Change Secretary announced the Green Deal home energy efficiency program that (in the GWPF video) he claimed would create 250,000 jobs working on 26 million homes, and be a revolution, the first scheme of its kind in the developed world, the most ambitious energy-saving plan ever put forward.  The Green Deal may be the last of its kind, with less than 10,000 household loans in place as the UK government pulled further funding amid an investigation into alleged scams.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/bonfire-of-green-subsidies-uk-government-pulls-funding-for-green-deal/>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/11758707/Green-Deal-funding-pulled.html>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/11758746/Fiscally-sustainable-energy-abolishing-Green-Deal-is-a-victory-for-common-sense.html>
 

Papal Encyclical Intensifies Political Debate around Climate Change

Two contrasting British takes on Pope Francis' landmark environmental encyclical,  Laudato Si', are the latest examples of how the pontiff's call for a lower-carbon, lower-impact future has launched a global conversation about the role of religion in environmental policy talks. Church of England Bishop Peter Forster dismissed Francis' encyclical as naive and overly simplified. To us the encyclical is coloured too much by a hankering for a past world, prior to the Industrial Revolution. 
 
The Vatican 's financial chief, Cardinal George Pell, has taken the unusual step of criticizing Pope Francis ' groundbreaking environmental encyclical, arguing that the Catholic Church has no particular expertise in science. 
 
<http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060021898>
<http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2015/17-july/comment/opinion/francis-is-na ¯ve-on-climate-change>
<http://www.religionnews.com/2015/07/17/cardinal-george-pell-takes-swing-pope-francis-environmental-encyclical/>
<http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/07/brave-cardinal-pell-challenges-pope-franciss-dogma-on-climate-change/>
 

First They Came for Your Light Bulbs

Having mandated low-flow shower heads and toilets, the US government moved on to light bulbs, clothes washers and dryers. The latest appliances are dishwashers, and the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers is accusing the Department of Energy of a politically-motivated drive to increase dishwasher efficiency standards (e.g., limit water use to 3.1 gallons per load), which are so bad that they would cause consumers to re-wash dishes, erasing any efficiency gains.
 
<http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/first-they-came-for-your-light-bulbs.php>
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/248385-industry-rails-against-obamas-dishwasher-rules?utm_source=Cornwall+Alliance+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0c032ecc21-Dirty_Dishes_Coming_Your_Way7_21_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b80dc8f2de-0c032ecc21-131646441>
 

Arctic Expedition to Study Global Warming Put on Hold-Because of Too Much Ice

A carefully planned, 115-day scientific expedition on board the floating research vessel the CCGS  Amundsen  has been derailed as the icebreaker was called to help resupply ships navigate heavy ice in Hudson Bay. The research was being coordinated by the University of Laval 's ArcticNet, the goal of which is to study the impacts of climate change and modernization on the Canadian Arctic.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/22/arctic-expedition-to-study-global-warming-put-on-hold-because-of-too-much-ice/>
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/ccgs-amundsen-re-routed-to-hudson-bay-to-help-with-heavy-ice-1.3162900>
<http://www.arcticnet.ulaval.ca>
 

Hansen 's Backfire

Jim Hansen has co-authored an alarming new paper,  Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2 °C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous.  The biggest issue with the paper is a prediction of a >5 m sea level rise by 2100, due to collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet caused by human-caused global warming. Even climate establishment stalwarts like Michael Mann and Ken Trenberth have difficulty accepting the paper 's conclusions. Other commenters suggest a political agenda: that the paper is being rushed into public view in order to help build political will to act  on emissions reductions for the Paris climate talks.
 
False alarms are nothing new for Dr. Hansen, as noted in a  Master Resource  revisiting of his past declarations.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/26/hansens-backfire/>
<https://theconversation.com/study-predicts-multi-meter-sea-level-rise-this-century-but-not-everyone-agrees-45139>
<https://www.masterresource.org/hansen-james/james-hansen-false-alarms/>
 

Green Energy Plunders the Biosphere

The earth has  three significant sources of energy: geothermal, combustible hydrocarbon minerals, and radiation/gravitational pull from the sun/moon. Environmental  zealots, who  believe that we can and should run modern societies exclusively on green  energies,  have embarked on a war on hydrocarbons. These green  energies are just stealing from the biosphere. These include corn-ethanol, forest biomass, solar farms and wind turbines.  
 
In fact, hydrocarbons are the true green  energy source. They disturb less land per unit of energy produced, do not murder wildlife, and their combustion produces more supplies of water and CO2  for the atmosphere.
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/energy-education/green-energy-plunders-biosphere/>

 

2015-07-14

 

Germany 's Green Energy Transition May Be Running Out of Money

The expansion of Germany 's green energy has cost more than ‚ 100 billion over 15 years. At least ‚ 280 billion will be needed in the next 15 in order to promote the politically-demanded goal of the transformation of the energy system: from wind turbines, biomass plants and solar power plants to local, regional and national electricity distribution networks to large offshore wind farms. The traditional energy companies, that previously financed electricity investments through shareholders ' equity, have their backs to the wall. The transmission systems also require double-digit billion investments to bring power from offshore wind farms to southern Germany.
 
An essay in The American Interest examines how the country 's Energiewende turned sour, noting that it managed to do some good by serving as a cautionary tale to the rest of the world.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/is-germanys-green-energy-transition-running-out-of-money/>
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/30/germanys-energiewende-finds-the-sour-spot/>
 

Obama Dead Wrong  on Global Warming

In a July 1 speech at the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics, says the president is dead wrong  on global warming. Dr. Giaever was one of more than 70 Nobel laureates in science who signed a letter in 2008 endorsing Mr. Obama 's presidential campaign, but has since taken a more skeptical view of the so-called scientific consensus  on climate change.
 
In a 30-minute speech available on the Climate Depot link, Dr. Giaever covers the whole global warming issue, pointing out other nonsense statements from the alarmists, refuting them with common sense facts.
 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/7/nobel-physicist-obama-dead-wrong-global-warming/>
<http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/07/06/nobel-prize-winning-scientist-who-endorsed-obama-now-says-prez-is-ridiculous-dead-wrong-on-global-warming/>
 

Australian Government Bans Renewable Energy Subsidies

Australia has slammed the door shut on any new government-funded investment in renewable energy schemes as Prime Minister Tony Abbott extends his war on wind power . In doing so he has sent a clear message to the mendicant green renewable energy sector that there will be no more cheap state-supplied financing for its projects. Mr Abbott 's conservative coalition government has ordered the taxpayer-funded $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to immediately cease  any new investments in wind power projects.
 
The Australian Solar Power Council says it now aims to remove this government from office,  its chief executive stating: If the Abbott government is returned and has control of the Senate, our industry is finished. 
 
<http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/12/aussie-pm-tony-abbott-cancels-all-government-wind-farm-subsidies/>
<http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/14/solar-power-industry-vows-campaign-topple-abbott-government>
 

British Government Scraps Climate Change Levy Exemption

The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed on July 8 that he would remove the climate change levy in his first budget. This levy was introduced in 2001 with the aim of improving industrial and commercial energy efficiency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Effective August 1 the government will remove the climate change levy exemption for renewable-sourced electricity.
 
Reaction to the announcement was immediate. Shares in Drax, owner of a power plant that burns wood pellets plunged 28%, and the renewable industry 's association Renewable UK accused the government of moving the goalposts again. The Guardian said that the government 's actions will put the UK increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. 
 
<http://www.lse.co.uk/AllNews.asp?code=tgxhf6dd&headline=UK_Government_Scraps_Climate_Change_Levy_Reiterates_North_Sea_Support>
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/drax-shares-plunge-after-u-k-scraps-climate-levy-exemption>
<http://renews.biz/91505/industry-slams-illogical-budget-cuts/>
<http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/national-news/126251-renewable-energy-sector-reacts-with-fury-budget-plans-to-axe-levy-support.html>
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/clean-energy-switch-uk-falling-behind>
<http://www.moneyobserver.com/news/09-07-2015/renewable-energy-trusts-tumble-budget-changes>
 

China 's Climate Pledge

On June 30 China officially submitted its climate plan to the UN to the climate change talks in Paris this year. There are three parts to the pledge: (1) CO2 emissions to peak by 2030; (2) Use of non-fossil fuels to increase to 20% of total primary energy consumption by 2020; (3) Greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP to be cut by 60-65% from 2005 levels. But the kicker is money: Developed countries must provide new, additional, adequate, predictable and sustained financial support to developing countries for their enhanced actions.  This starts at $100 billion/year from 2020 onward and shall primarily come from public finance.  sAs a developing country  China would expect to receive some of this.
 
<https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/chinas-climate-pledge/>\
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/30/china-carbon-emissions-2030-premier-li-keqiang-un-paris-climate-change-summit>
< http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC/Published%20Documents/China/1/China's%20INDC%20-%20on%2030%20June%202015.pdf>
 

Bill Gates: Renewable Energy Can 't Do the Job

in an interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Gates said that the cost of using current renewables such as solar panels and windfarms to produce all or most power would be "beyond astronomical . He also poured scorn on another notion oft-touted as a way of making renewable energy more feasible, that of using batteries to store intermittent supplies from solar or wind.
 
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/gates_renewable_energy_cant_do_the_job_gov_should_switch_green_subsidies_into_rd/>
 

The Human Triumph from Fossil Fuels

Responding to the Pope 's recent encyclical, Indur Goklany argues that fossil fuels have not only benefited humanity but also the rest of nature, because fthey have allowed more intensive use of land, thus limiting the amount of wilderness that has to be diverted to agricultural use. Consequently, conversion of wild land to farm land has almost peaked worldwide, allowing some societies to reserve land for conservation.
 
Prior to the Industrial Revolution virtually all of humanity 's basic needs food, fibre, fuel, energy, materials were met by the rest of nature. Fossil fuel technologies and associated economic development increased the terrestrial biosphere 's natural productivity to provide these basic needs (through, for example, higher crop yields), shifted humanity 's demand for energy away from biomass and animal power, and increased its reliance on man-made materials.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/indur-goklany-the-human-triumpf-from-fossil-fuels/>
 

UN Predicts Food Supplies will Increase Despite Global Warming Fears

A new report by the the OECD and the UN 's Food and Agricultural Organization may unintentionally deflate the UN 's own claims that global warming will hamper world food production. The OECD-FAO report states: In real terms, prices for all agricultural products are expected to decrease over the next 10  years, as production growth, helped by on-trend productivity growth and lower input prices, outpaces slowing demand increases. Lower oil prices are a source of downward pressure on prices, principally through their impact on energy and fertilizer costs. 
 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/06/un-predicts-food-supplies-will-increase-despite-global-warming-fears/>
<http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4738e.pdf>
 
 

Earth Heading to Mini Ice Age  within 15 Years

Solar researchers at the University of Northumbria have created a new model of the sun's activity which they claim produces "unprecedentedly accurate predictions . They said fluid movements within the sun, which are thought to create 11-year cycles in the weather, will converge in such a way that temperatures will drop dramatically in the 2030s. Solar activity will fall by 60 per cent as two waves of fluid effectively cancel each other out. 
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-heading-for-mini-ice-age-within-15-years.html>
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3156594/Is-mini-ICE-AGE-way-Scientists-warn-sun-sleep-2020-cause-temperatures-plummet.html>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/07/is-a-mini-ice-age-coming-in-2030-and-does-the-sun-have-two-dynamos/>
 

Intermittent Grid Storage

From the utility grid perspective, a fundamental problem with wind and solar is intermittency-a median capacity factor of 31% in the US for wind and 23% for solar in California 's Mohave Desert. To make up the electricity supply the rest of the time, grids must either add otherwise unnecessary backup generation, or use inefficient flex base load generation. This essay looks at five ways of storing generated electricity, concluding that only one (pumped hydro storage) could could ever practically cover the intermittency of high penetration, utility-scale wind and solar.  
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/01/intermittent-grid-storage/>

 

2015-06-30

 

Petition to Silence FoS Facebook Page Gets over 3,000 Signatures

Climate change advocate and concerned citizen Laurent Cousineau has called on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Stop the Climate Change Denial Facebook Pages! . Citing the World Health Organization 's assertion that over 100 million people will die because of climate change within 20 years, Mr Cousineau has insisted that disinformation should not be allowed on Facebook especially if it is to deny the scientific consensus on climate change. Helpfully, Mr Cousineau lists a number of pages which he thinks should be removed from Facebook for promoting climate change denial. First and foremost among them is the Friends of Science page.
 
<http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/19/petition-to-silence-climate-change-deniers-gains-over-3000-signatures/>
<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-Science/244675788944611?sk=timeline>
 

Does EPA 's Supreme Court Loss Doom Obama 's Climate Agenda?

On June 29 the US Supreme Court blocked one of the Obama administration 's most ambitious environmental initiatives-an Environmental Protection Agency regulation meant to limit emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants. The Clean Air Act required the regulation to be appropriate and necessary.  The challengers said the agency had run afoul of that law by deciding to regulate the emissions without first undertaking a cost-benefit analysis. The court 's majority decision included this statement: It is not rational, never mind appropriate, ' to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefit. 
 
According to an article by the Cato Institute, this ruling is a very big deal that threatens the EPA 's Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut power plants ' CO2 emissions by 30% and force the phase out of coal-fired generation.  
 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/us/supreme-court-blocks-obamas-limits-on-power-plants.html?_r=0>
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/supreme-court-deals-blow-to-obama-environmental-agenda-20150629>
<http://www.cato.org/blog/does-epas-supreme-court-loss-doom-obamas-climate-agenda>
 

Dutch Court Orders Government to Make Deeper GHG Cuts

In a case brought by pressure group Urgenda, judges agreed that the Dutch government should do more to combat the threat of climate change. The verdict read: The State must do more to avert the imminent danger caused by climate change, also in view of its duty of care to protect and improve the living environment the State should not hide behind the argument that the solution to the global climate problem does not depend solely on Dutch efforts. Any reduction of emissions contributes to the prevention of dangerous climate change and as a developed country the Netherlands should take the lead in this. 
 
The Dutch government will appeal the ruling, fearing that it sets a precedent that a future court will interfere with political decisions.
 
<http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/24/climate-campaigners-win-court-case-against-dutch-government/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/dutch-government-to-appeal-courts-climate-ruling/>
 

Aussie Renewables Industry Furor at Wind Commissioner Appointment

The Australian renewables industry has reacted with fury to a leaked suggestion that a new wind commissioner  will be appointed, to handle complaints about turbine noise. This is a blatant attempt by the Abbott government to use taxpayer cash to appoint a propaganda agent for the anti-wind brigade,  said Andrew Bray, coordinator of the Australian Wind Alliance.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/19/renewables-industry-fury-at-new-wind-commissioner-appointment/>
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/18/abbott-governments-windfarm-commissioner-pledge-a-new-low?CMP=ema_632>
 

UK Abolishes Onshore Wind Subsidies a Year Early

The UK Energy Secretary announced that the government is phasing out subsidies for new onshore windfarms a year early (April 1, 2016). As a result, about 2500 turbines in 250 projects are now unlikely to be built. In a scathing attack Prince Phillip said the turbines were completely reliant on subsidies  and would never work .
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/britain-terminates-onshore-wind-subsidies-early/>
<http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/586219/Windfarms-cuts-taxpayer-subsidies-axed>
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2064054/Prince-Philip-blasts-useless-wind-farms-Lord-Lawson-backs-attack-wind-power.html>
 

Greece Turns to Lignite

After installing 1047 MW of photovoltaic capacity in 2013, and only 13 MW in 2014, the Greek PV industry is disappointed about their country 's U-turn away from renewables. The new coalition government between a far left party and a populist right party is at war with Greek NGOs and has approved a new 660 MW plant that burns lignite.
 
<http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/greece-turns-to-lignite-_100019886/#axzz3dgZQgFsw>
 

On Climate Change and Energy, Vatican advisers have lost their way 

A new paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation finds that the Vatican is being led astray by its advisers by statements on climate change that are scientifically lacking and ethically dubious. The author is Dr. Indur Goklany, an independent scholar and author, a former member of the US delegation that helped establish the IPCC. According to Dr Goklany 's analysis, the beneficial impact of fossil fuels has not only been on human well-being but also on nature, because fossil fuel use has allowed more intensive use of land, thus reducing the amount of wilderness that has to be diverted to agricultural use. This means that the Vatican 's backing of reductions in fossil fuel use would actually reduce human well-being and increase the human impact on the planet.
 
Dr. Goklany writes: Climate change is a moral and ethical issue, but it is a strange ethical calculus that would justify wiping out the gains we have made in human well-being over the last few centuries at the same time devastating the natural world. The Vatican 's advisors appear to have lost their way. 
 
<http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/06/Vatican-compass.pdf>
 

Pope Recruits Naomi Klein to Fight Climate Change and Capitalism

Naomi Klein, one of the world 's most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism, has been invited to attend a top-level conference at the Vatican, to advise leaders how to fight climate change and dismantle capitalism. She and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate-change action.  
 
For Ms Klein, the papal visit will mark a much-needed change in the way negotiators discuss the environment. There 's a way in which UN discourse sanitizes the extent to which this is a moral crisis,  she said. It cries out for a moral voice. 
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/28/pope-recruits-naomi-klein-to-fight-climate-change-and-capitalism/>
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/pope-climate-change-naomi-klein>
 

State of the Climate Debate in the US

Judith Curry was invited to make a presentation to the UK 's House of Lords on the state of the climate debate in the US. She began by comparing President Obama 's statements and actions on the issue with those of his opponents. Then, she describes the state of the science, listing the fundamental questions, stating that 52-85% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC and finally dealing with the question whether climate change is dangerous. DeSmogBlog gave a surprisingly objective coverage of Dr. Curry 's talk, referring to her as a mere skeptic,  rather than the pejorative denier. 
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/15/state-of-the-climate-debate-in-the-u-s/#comments>
<https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gwpf-curry-seminar1.ppt>
<https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gwpf-notes.docx>
<http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/16/uk-climate-deniers-invite-american-sceptic-judith-curry-speak-house-lords>

 

2015-06-14

 

Delayed Until Further Notice: G7 Leaders Shift Decarbonization to End of Century

On June 8, the leaders of the G7 countries called for decarbonization of the global economy over the course of this century.  The host country Germany, wanted something stronger, decarbonization of the G7 countries by 2050, but this was dropped under pressure from Japan and Canada. Peter Foster says this represents a clear victory for Prime Minister Stephen Harper 's refusal to inflict pointless economic damage and characterizing the commitment as kicking the can so far down the road as off the planet. 
 
Judith Curry 's blog summarizes reactions to the G7 announcement, including what matters and doesn 't. It contains a neat quote: And the idea that an 85-year goal will have much impact on present policy or investment is a bit ridiculous. (Had you told a physicist in 1905 that a fifth of U.S. electricity would be generated by nuclear fission within 85 years, they would have said, What 's a nucleus or fission? ) 
 
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/08/g7_summit_climate_change_world_should_phase_out_fossil_fuels_by_2100.html>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/peter-foster-g7-kicks-the-climate-can-off-the-planet/>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/11/what-matters-and-doesnt-in-the-g7-climate-declaration/>
 

Obama Moves to Regulate CO2 from Airplanes

The Obama administration announced another major effort to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from airplanes after the Environmental Protection Agency linked airliners to global warming. The EPA issued a proposal on June 10 declaring that CO2 from airliners threatens public health because it contributes to global warming. The agency says it 's doing this in conjunction with an international effort to bring the airline industry under global carbon dioxide standards for commercial jets.
 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/10/obama-moves-to-regulate-co2-from-airplanes/>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/business/energy-environment/epa-says-it-will-set-rules-for-airplane-emissions.html?emc=edit_na_20150610&nlid=71233884&_r=1>
 

Why Obama 's Big Global Warming Push?

This essay quotes Paul Driessen, a policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow: President Obama 's hubris is breathtaking. He now thinks an army of regulators can control our planet 's temperature and climate by tweaking emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, a mere 0.04% of the atmosphere. America 's communities do not need to be protected from climate change. They need to be protected from the excesses of authoritarian presidents and bureaucrats. 
 
<http://www.cfact.org/2015/05/27/why-obamas-big-global-warming-push/>
 

Inhofe: Climate Change Fight Is Really About Global Control

Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the US Senate 's Environment and Public Works Committee, said that he agreed with former French President Jacques Chirac 's statement that global warming is the first component of authentic global governance.  The senator noted that global climate change policies would give the UN its own funding source and make it unaccountable to its member countries.  
 
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/244667-sen-inhofe-climate-change-is-about-global-control>
 

Europe 's Crazy Climate Policy Threatening Forests and Wildlife

For the sake of a greener Europe, thousands of American trees are falling each month in the forests outside Oak City NC. Soaring demand for woody fuel pellets has led to the construction of more than two dozen pellet factories in the Southeast in the past decade, along with special port facilities to load the pellets on Europe-bound freighters.
 
However, studies point out that Europe 's appetite for wood pellets could lead to more CO2 emissions than the coal they replace for decades to come, while also putting some of the East Coast 's most productive wildlife habitats at risk. Whole trees, and not just tree waste as claimed by the pellet makers, is being used to make the pellets. Also, land is being converted from natural pine forests. with an understory of grass and shrubs that provide shelter for wildlife, into stands of fast-growing pines that are raised as a cash drop.
 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-europes-climate-policies-have-led-to-more-trees-cut-down-in-the-us/2015/06/01/ab1a2d9e-060e-11e5-bc72-f3e16bf50bb6_story.html>
<https://www.southernenvironment.org/uploads/audio/2015-05-27_BEAC_calculations_SE_hardwoods.pdf>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/06/what-green-vision-us-forests-burned-to-make-costly-uk-electricity-and-produce-more-co2/>
 

Lessons from Europe: Recipe for a High-cost Energy System

In 2000 the EU created the European Climate Change Program to meet the targets of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. It was based on an assumption that fossil fuels would become more expensive, allowing renewable energy to compete. The result is an energy system where everyone loses: consumers, traditional power plants and even renewable energy companies. Nations with the highest percentage of renewable energy pay the highest electricity rates. Renewable subsidies have been cut in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK.
 
<http://www.commdiginews.com/business-2/economic-politics/lessons-from-europe-recipe-for-a-high-cost-energy-system-42285/>
 

Has NOAA Busted  the Pause in Global Warming?

A team from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has released a paper re-analyzing global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) since 1998 and claiming that there was never a pause in temperatures since then. Judith Curry 's reaction is that the paper contradicts the results of buoy and satellite measurements during the period since 1998, and she questions the gap-filling and adjustments used by the paper 's authors. Her conclusion: So while I 'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don 't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on. 
 
In the American Thinker, Fred Singer thinks it a little suspicious that NOAA arrived at this discovery after years of messaging its own weather-station data just before the Paris climate change conference. He notes that dozens of scientists have published research papers on explanations for the temperature pause. Also, land temperatures show warming prior to 2000, but not since.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/06/04/has-noaa-busted-the-pause-in-global-warming/>
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/06/the_climate_warming_pause_goes_awol.html>
 

Ice-core Data Shows that the Feared +2 °C Tipping Point  Has Already Occurred

The Holocene epoch covers the ~11,700 years of the current interglacial, which was preceded by about 100,000 years of glaciation. According to Greenland and Antarctica ice core data the Holocene has seen global temperatures exceeding the UN 's feared +2 °C tipping point  on three occasions-the Holocene Climate Optimum  (~8,000 years ago), the Minoan (~3,000 years ago) and Roman (~2,000 years ago). In fact, since the Minoan warm period, the temperature trend has been -0.5 °C/millennium.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/01/ice-core-data-shows-the-much-feared-2c-climate-tipping-point-has-already-occurred/>

 

2015-05-27

 

Save the Date - June 2 - Nir Shaviv in Calgary

Please join Friends of Science on June 2 for a special presentation in Calgary, where the featured guest speaker will be Dr. Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist.  The title of his talk will be Solar forcing and our understanding of past and future climate change .   Dr. Shaviv will explain and demonstrate  that the sun is an important climate driver, but it is missing from the standard climate analyses. As a consequence, the standard (i.e. IPCC) models have a much higher climate sensitivity than the real Earth has, such that future climate response to anthropogenic forcing (human industrial activities or emissions that may affect climate), will be "much more benign than alarmists frighten us with." Dr. Shaviv's presentation will be of interest to the general public as well as those in the sciences.
 
Dr. Shaviv, is presently on sabbatical as an IBM Einstein Fellow in the field of astrophysics at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.   His home institution is The Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he is a full professor of physics in the Racah Institute of Physics
 
The event includes a ~30 min presentation with Q & A. It opens with light appetizers during the mix 'n mingle 5:45-6:30pm followed by opening messages. Dr. Shaviv's presentation starts at 7:00pm. Cash bar will be open during a short intermission followed by Q & A. Seating will be tables of 8.
 
Tickets are $35 each or $25 for students and can be purchased now at: https://dr-nir-shaviv-solar-forcing-and-climate-change.eventbrite.ca
 
<http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/05/prweb12739051.htm>
 

Obama: Climate Change Deniers Endangering National Security

In an address to graduates of the US Coast Guard Academy, President Obama said that climate change is a threat to global security, an immediate risk to national security and will impact how the military defends the country. He linked the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the civil war in Syria to rising temperatures.  
 
Republican Senator Jim Inhofe responded with a statement beginning with it 's no wonder that our  military personnel's trust in their commander-in-chief is at an all time low,  going on to note that the President has spent $120 billion on climate change initiatives and is proposing to set in motion $1 trillion in budget cuts to national defense. The Washington Times ran an editorial titled: Crying wolf to the Coast Guard.
 
<http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/242672-obama-climate-deniers-endangering-national-security>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/20/in-coast-guard-commencement-obama-to-link-climate-change-to-national-security/>
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/05/20/obama_at_us_coast_guard_academy_commencement_denying_climate_change_dereliction_of_duty.html>
<http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/inhofe-responds-to-presidents-speech-at-us-coast-guard-academy>
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/20/editorial-obama-accuses-climate-change-skeptics-of/>
 

EPA 's Dangerous Desire to Become America 's Energy Regulator

In a piece for Forbes, three lawyers argue that the Environmental Protection Agency 's proposed Clean Power Plan would give the EPA control over how every American gets and uses electricity service-through a plant to plug  approach to CO2 emissions. Instead of limiting emissions from power plants, under the new plan the EPA would reduce demand for electricity by requiring States to impose energy efficiency standards that meet EPA approval, as well as shifting generation from fossil fuel power to wind and solar. The EPA regards all forms of electricity generation as fungible  that can be substituted regardless of the effect on grid reliability and cost, bringing it into conflict with the States and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which have traditionally regulated the grids.
In short the EPA 's reach sacrifices the physical realities of the electrical grid to pie-in-the-sky notions of endless carbon-free green energy.  
 
Judith Curry 's blog comments on the Forbes piece and provides links to related articles and videos.
 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2015/05/11/epas-dangerous-desire-to-become-americas-energy-regulator/?ss=energy>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/05/18/overreach-at-the-epa/>
 

UK Energy Minister Announces New Law against Wind Farms

Local residents will be able to block all future onshore wind farms under new measures to be fast-tracked into law, the new energy secretary has announced.   It will mean no more onshore wind farm subsidies and no more onshore wind farms without local community support. 
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/uk-energy-minister-announces-new-law-against-wind-farms/>
 

Europe 's New Coal Rush

Balkan countries and Ukraine are making "substantial investments" in coal power stations to sell cheap electricity to the EU, as the bloc searches for new suppliers to reduce its dependence on Russian gas. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Ukraine are planning to build a total of 14.82 GW of new coal power capacity.
 
<http://www.euractiv.com/sections/energy/balkan-coal-rush-risks-lasting-damage-campaigners-warn-314665>
 

The Paris Poker Game: India and the $100 billion/year Climate Fund

Claiming that developed countries are nowhere  near the goal of providing $100 billion/year for the UN 's Green Climate Fund, the Indian Environment Minister said that all countries must know the quantum of international financial assistance as they prepare their Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions for the Paris climate summit. Besides finance, the Minister stressed that any agreement in Paris must maintain the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.
 
In another story the Indian Minister of State for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy said the developed world should bear the burden of the cross  for pumping out CO2 for the past 150 years. He also praised coal for providing cheap, base-load power. A Bloomberg article gloomily admits that erasing energy poverty means more coal for developing countries, noting that Indian coal demand could jump 42% by 2020. In a similar tone The Guardian notes that India, with the world 's fifth largest coal reserves, is determined to spread the benefits of economic development among its 1.3 billion people, of whom …“ have no access to electricity.
 
<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/india-raises-concerns-over-commitment-on-100-billion-global-climate-fund/articleshow/47346936.cms>
<http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-poor-in-india-can-t-pay-for-150-years-of-pollution-by-west-2088256>
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-21/the-grim-promise-of-india-s-coal-powered-future>
<http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/may/27/why-india-is-captured-by-carbon>
 

Cold Weather Kills Far More People than Hot Weather

According to a study published in The Lancet, which analyzed over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries, cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather. Of the deaths, 7.7% were due to non-optimal  temperatures, with 7.3% due to cold and 0.4% due to heat.
 
<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/study-on-74-million-deaths-cold-weather-kills-20-times-more-than-heat-does/>
 

Climate Activists Targeting Children with a Range of Cli-fi  Novels

Climate activists are targeting children through a new range of 'cli-fi' climate fiction - novels which seek to highlight the dangers of global warming. David Thorpe, author of the book Stormteller, said that children were more open minded and claimed that writers could infect  their minds with seriously subversive viral ideas .
 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11624736/Climate-activists-targeting-children-with-range-of-cli-fi-novels.html>

 

2015-05-17

 

Save the Date - June 2 - Nir Shaviv in Calgary

Please join Friends of Science on June 2 for a special presentation in Calgary, where the featured guest speaker will be Dr. Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist.  The title of his talk will be Solar forcing and our understanding of past and future climate change .   Dr. Shaviv will explain and demonstrate  that the sun is an important climate driver, but it is missing from the standard climate analyses. As a consequence, the standard (i.e. IPCC) models have a much higher climate sensitivity than the real Earth has, such that future climate response to anthropogenic forcing (human industrial activities or emissions that may affect climate), will be "much more benign than alarmists frighten us with." Dr. Shaviv's presentation will be of interest to the general public as well as those in the sciences.
 
Dr. Shaviv, is presently on sabbatical as an IBM Einstein Fellow in the field of astrophysics at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.   His home institution is The Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he is a full professor of physics in the Racah Institute of Physics
 
The event includes a ~30 min presentation with Q & A. It opens with light appetizers during the mix 'n mingle 5:45-6:30pm followed by opening messages. Dr. Shaviv's presentation starts at 7:00pm. Cash bar will be open during a short intermission followed by Q & A. Seating will be tables of 8.
 
Tickets are $35 each or $25 for students and can be purchased now at:  https://dr-nir-shaviv-solar-forcing-and-climate-change.eventbrite.ca
 

Canada Submits Its INDC to the UN

The Canadian government 's Intended Nationally Determined Contribution to the UNFCCC states that it intends to achieve an economy-wide target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.  Measures to implement this goal include more stringent standards for heavy-duty vehicles, phasing out of HFCs, reducing emissions from natural-gas fired electricity, and methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. One key assumption is that Canada may use unspecified international mechanisms  to achieve its target.
 
As the CBC news item points out, the INDC says nothing about the Alberta oilsands.
 
<http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC/Published%20Documents/Canada/1/INDC%20-%20Canada%20-%20English.pdf>
<http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/new-climate-change-targets-but-no-regulations-for-the-oilsands-1.3077081>
 

Ross McKitrick: Climate Change Consensus among the Misinformed Is Not Worth Much

In the lead-up to the Paris climate conference, one of the most powerful rhetorical weapons being deployed to get everyone onside is the claim that 97% of the world 's scientists agree that human-caused global warming is a problem and what we have to do about it. In this essay Dr. McKitrick describes the types of surveys to show that the 97% mantra is untrue. He concludes that we have to call out this use of false propaganda and demagoguery to derail a factual debate.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/ross-mckitrick-climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much/>
<http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much>
 

India, China Ask Rich Nations to Step Up Decarbonization & Climate Finance

On May 15, China and India, the world 's No.1 and No. 3 greenhouse gas emitters, presented a united common front in calling on rich countries to raise their pre-2020 emission reduction targets and honour their commitment to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 to developing countries. In other words, it will be business as usual.
 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/us-india-china-climate-idUSKBN0O00N420150515>
<http://inbministry.blogspot.in/2015/05/joint-statement-on-climate-change.html>
 

Why Greenpeace Got the Chop in India

As Greenpeace India struggles to stay afloat [FoS Extracts - 2015-04-18], the real reason why the government wants to shut down the global environmental NGO hasn 't got much attention: Coal, the single biggest source of primary energy in India, is at the heart of the Narendra Modi government 's ambitious plans to ramp up industrial production in the country. Worldwide, a total of 1,199 new coal-fired power plants, with a capacity of 1.4 million MW, are proposed. Of these, 455 plants will be in India.
 
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/why-greenpeace-is-first-on-modi-government-ngo-chopping-block-115051300246_1.html>
<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/investments-worth-250-billion-lined-up-in-coal-power-and-renewable-energy-says-piyush-goyal/articleshow/47264475.cms>
 

Some Guardian Myths about Climate Change

Since mocking skeptics and calling them deniers is not winning them over,  The Guardian  is trying a new tack. This time they drop the name calling, pretend to be balanced, and post up a list of eight Myths to explode  from both sides of the debate. Joanne Nova picks apart each of the myths.  
 
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/some-guardian-myths-about-climate-change/>
<http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/03/climate-change-myths-warming-ice-antarctic-arctic>
 

Bj ¸rn Lomborg Hounded Out of the University of Western Australia

The University of Western Australia has cancelled the contract for a policy centre that was to be headed up by controversial academic Bj ¸rn Lomborg [FoS Extracts - 2015-05-03] after a "passionate emotional reaction" to the plan. The UWA is returning the $A4 million grant from the Australian federal government. The Education Minister tweeted: What a sad day for academic freedom when staff at a university silence a dissenting voice rather than test their ideas in debate. 
 
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-08/bjorn-lomborg-uwa-consensus-centre-contract-cancelled/6456708>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/08/proof-positive-that-the-university-of-western-australia-is-an-intolerant-organization/>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/lomborgs-centre-cancelled-uwa-caves-in-to-bullies-who-fight-to-silence-debate/>
 

Australian PM Advisor: UN Using Climate Change for New World Order 

Coinciding with a visit by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, Maurice Newman, the chief business advisor to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, accused the UN of using debunked climate change science to lead a new world order. He said: The real agenda is concentrated political authority. "It's about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective. 
 
During her visit Ms. Figueres said Australia would have to move away from coal, the country 's second largest export earner. The Prime Minister has championed coal as good for humanity  and the foundation of prosperity  for the foreseeable future.
 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/08/us-climate-change-australia-idUSKBN0NT0E320150508>
<http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/05/08/asia-pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/australia-pm-advisor-says-climate-change-u-n-led-ruse-create-new-world-order/#.VU01vWCbFby>
<http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-will-have-to-move-away-from-coal-un-climate-head-says-20150506-ggvfvz.html>

 

2015-05-03

 

Save the Date - June 2 - Nir Shaviv in Calgary

Please join Friends of Science on June 2 for a special presentation in Calgary, where the featured guest speaker will be Dr. Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist.  The title of his talk will be Solar forcing and our understanding of past and future climate change .   Dr. Shaviv will explain and demonstrate  that the sun is an important climate driver, but it is missing from the standard climate analyses. As a consequence, the standard (i.e. IPCC) models have a much higher climate sensitivity than the real Earth has, such that future climate response to anthropogenic forcing (human industrial activities or emissions that may affect climate), will be "much more benign than alarmists frighten us with." Dr. Shaviv's presentation will be of interest to the general public as well as those in the sciences.
 
Dr. Shaviv, is presently on sabbatical as an IBM Einstein Fellow in the field of astrophysics at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.   His home institution is The Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he is a full professor of physics in the Racah Institute of Physics
 
The event includes a ~30 min presentation with Q & A. It opens with light appetizers during the mix 'n mingle 5:45-6:30pm followed by opening messages. Dr. Shaviv's presentation starts at 7:00pm. Cash bar will be open during a short intermission followed by Q & A. Seating will be tables of 8.
 
Tickets are $35 each or $25 for students and can be purchased now at: https://dr-nir-shaviv-solar-forcing-and-climate-change.eventbrite.ca
 

Inquiry Launched Into Global Temperature Data Integrity

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has launched a major inquiry, The International Temperature Data Review Project, into the integrity of the official global surface temperature records. The panel for this inquiry features experts in physics, climatology and statistics, and will be chaired by Professor Terence Kealey, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail carried stories on the inquiry, noting that it should address concerns about adjustments and extrapolations to the surface temperature records.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.org/inquiry-launched-into-global-temperature-data-integrity/>
<http://www.tempdatareview.org>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html>
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3055646/Did-exaggerated-records-make-global-warming-look-worse-Scientists-investigate-adjusted-temperatures-skewed-data.html>
 

Obama 's Green Obsession Opens Door for China 's Global Energy Strategy

Close on the heels of the inconclusive end to the Copenhagen Accord, the US government has stepped up pressure on the World Bank not to fund coal-fired power plants in developing countries. In a letter sent to the World Bank in 2010, and which has come to light, a US executive director wrote: The Obama Administration believes that the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have a potentially critical role to play in the future international framework for climate finance, and, in particular, to assist developing countries in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and strengthening their economies' resilience to climate risks. 
 
Now, India is hoping that a new China-backed multilateral lender, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, will allow funding of coal-fired power plants that the World Bank has blocked. The bank 's president was not impressed, saying: We have got to redouble and redouble again our efforts at fighting climate change. And our way of doing it is to just do everything we can to avoid coal. 
 
The Global Warming Policy Forum has a story from The New York Times on how the US is losing allies over the administration 's green energy obsession.
 
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/US-to-World-Bank-Dont-fund-coal-fired-plants/articleshow/5493089.cms>
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/06/us-india-aiib-insight-idUSKBN0IP2S020141106>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/obama-isolated-as-u-s-allies-join-chinas-new-coal-bank/>
 

Congressmen to NASA: Stop Wasting Money on Global Warming Research

Republican Congressmen chastised the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Friday, saying the agency 's obsession with global warming is undercutting space exploration programs. One noted that there are 13 other agencies involved in climate-change research, but only one that is responsible for space exploration. NASA 's Earth Science Division, which includes climate science, has increased its funding 63% over eight years, while the agency is cutting funding for human space exploration.
 
The House Science Committee has passed a bill that would cut funding for earth science at NASA while increasing funding for space exploration.
 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/17/congressmen-to-nasa-stop-wasting-money-on-global-warming-research/>
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/01/congress-to-slash-nasas-global-warming-research-budget/>
 

Green Fanatics Outraged over NPR Interview with Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson is one of the most famous names in science, and sometimes one of the most controversial. He spent most years since as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The interview on National Public Radio dealt with bioengineering of humans and his global warming skepticism. It was the latter that drew comments like:
Why are you giving this doddering dinosaur free advertising for his upcoming book? Why is NPR giving ANY airtime and credibility to a Climate Change sceptic?  and To give the correct balance, that would be 33 climatologists and expert science communicators before we hear from another denier. For NPR to let that fly unchecked was grossly irresponsible. And at this point, irresponsibility on this issue is going to look criminal in retrospect. 
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/green-fanatics-outraged-over-national-public-radio-interview-with-freeman-dyson/>
<http://www.npr.org/2015/05/02/403530867/a-veteran-scientist-dreams-boldly-of-earth-and-sky>
 

The Fury over Bj ¸rn Lomborg Down Under

The Australian government has given $A4 million to set up a climate change centre, headed by Bj ¸rn Lomborg at the University of Western Australia. No sooner had it been announced than Aussie and international academics were protesting and the liberal media were churning out pieces asking why university space and cash were being given out to someone who downgrades climate change.  Students at UWA have started an online petition to have him rejected by the university, in the name of science.  Since Mr. Lomborg doesn 't deny AGW, but thinks that there are more pressing issues, his critics can 't call him a climate denier,  so they 've named him a climate contrarian  instead.  
 
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-climate-contrarian#.VT7orc6bFbx>
 

The Greening of the Vatican

In mid-April the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences issued a statement Climate Change and the Common Good: A Statement Of The Problem And The Demand For Transformative Solutions. According to Peter Foster, The Vatican 's climate change statement peddles eco-liberation theology based on the tedious demonization of markets and capitalism.  The Telegraph reported that skeptics accuse the Pope of being ill-informed about global warming as he forged an alliance with the UN. Judith Curry canvassed various reactions to the statement.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/peter-foster-the-greening-of-the-vatican/>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/the-pope/11569839/Pope-attacked-by-climate-change-sceptics.html>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/29/pope-francis-climate-change-and-morality/>
 

Three Simple Facts that Scuttle the Global Warming Paradigm

The three facts in this essay David Solway are: (1) There has been no global warming for 18 years and counting. (2) The global warming dogma is based on discredited computer models programmed to advance the cause of global warming or climate change.  (3) CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under conditions of cyclical global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life improves immensely.
 
<http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warming-paradigm-scuttled/?singlepage=true>
 

Turtle Beats Turbine

An endangered species has won the power struggle over a wind farm in Prince Edward County 's Ostrander Point as Ontario 's appeal court has ruled in favour of the Blanding 's turtle over wind turbines.
 
<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/04/20/turtle-beats-turbine/>
<http://www.quintenews.com/2015/04/pecfn-wins-at-court-of-appeal/85403/>
 

From France: Wind Energy - The Big Swindle 

This 14.33 video, in French with English subtitles, shows a situation depressingly similar to the one in Ontario: the countryside being invaded by the turbines, backed by an immensely rich wind lobby, supported by the newspapers and comforted by politicians and local beneficiaries. There are 5,000 turbines currently installed, and their supporter want 25,000. As in rural Ontario, it 's the neighbours who suffer from the visual and audio pollution.
 
<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/04/14/from-france-watch-wind-energy-the-big-swindle/>
 

Cap-and-Trade: Warnings from James Hansen

Cap-and-trade has been lambasted by the father of climate alarmism, James Hansen, whose testimony in mid-1988 brought the issue of the enhanced greenhouse effect to a national audience. As he wrote in 2014 about Australia 's cap-and-trade: Did you know that cap-and-trade is by and for big banks?   The skilled trading units at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs can make enormous amounts from cap-and-trade, every dime coming out of the public 's pockets.  Dr. Hansen prefers a simple, increasing carbon tax to the fluctuating carbon prices under a cap-and-trade scheme.
 
<https://www.masterresource.org/hansen-james/quebec-ontario-cap-trade-hansen/>
 

Solar Cycle 24 Continues to be Weakest in 200 Years

Last month the sunspot number was 38.4, only 46% of what is normal at this time of the solar cycle, for all cycles observed since 1750. The current cycle is the quietest since solar cycle No. 7, which occurred around 1830. On April 30, the Sun was virtually blank.
 
<http://notrickszone.com/2015/04/12/solar-cycle-24-continues-to-be-quietest-in-almost-200-years-suns-polar-fields-weakest-since-1900/#sthash.xmezZ56K.QGpA5OsI.dpbs>
<http://vencoreweather.com/2015/04/30/845-am-the-sun-is-now-virtually-blank-during-the-weakest-solar-cycle-in-more-than-a-century/>
 

Huff Post: We All Need to Come Out  on Climate Change

Alarmed by a poll showing that the American public is hearing too little about global warming in the media, the Huffington Post thinks that 's because we 've all been keeping our climate alarmist views in the closet, stating if the vast majority of Americans are still not even talking about climate change, we will never break through these obstacles and put irresistible pressure on Congress and every other opponent to stop fighting all reasonable actions to combat climate change and finally take positive action-for the sake of their own children and grandchildren if no one else 's.  To cure this distressing state of affairs, the Huff Post conflates sexual freedom with climate change by proposing use of the model of gay and lesbian Americans in having people come out  on the issue.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/21/huff-post-we-all-need-to-come-out-on-climate-change/>
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/poll-shows-we-need-to-come-out-on-climate-change_b_7103098.html>
 

Invalid Forecasts of Dangerous Man-made Global Warming

J. Scott Armstrong is is internationally known for his pioneering work on forecasting methods, which he has worked on for 55 years. In this interview he explains what a forecaster is and how forecasting should be done. Speaking of the IPCC Prof. Armstrong says the IPCC relies on complex computer modelling o represent their assumptions about how the climate works, calling the results scenarios.  In effect, the IPCC tells stories, illustrated with computer graphics, about what would happen if their assumptions were correct. 
 
<http://alainelkanninterviews.com/j-scott-armstrong/>

 

2015-04-18

 

EU 's Green Energy Debacle Shows Futility of Unilateral Climate Policies

As the Ontario government announces new unilateral climate policies (see next story), Benny Peiser warns that, from the EU experience, power rates will soar while industries depart. For the last 20 years, Europe has felt a duty to set an example through radical climate policy-making at home. Political leaders were convinced that the development of a low-carbon economy based on renewables would give Europe a competitive advantage.
 
While the EU did manage to reduce CO2 emissions domestically, this was achieved by shifting energy-intensive industries overseas, where energy and labour are cheap and which are now growing faster than the EU. Of all the unintended consequences of EU climate policy perhaps the most bizarre is the detrimental effect of wind and solar schemes on the price of electricity generated by natural gas. Many gas power plants can no longer operate enough hours to recover their investment. They incur big costs as they have to be switched on and off to back-up renewables.  
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/benny-peiser-eus-green-energy-debacle-shows-the-futility-of-unilateral-climate-policies/>
<http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/eus-green-energy-debacle-shows-the-futility-of-climate-change-policies>
 

Ontario Joins Quebec and California in Carbon Market

Quebec joined California's cap-and-trade carbon market in 2014, and on April 13, Ontario announced it will do the same. In the announcement, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said her government was doing so as to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the health of our children and grandchildren.  She went on to say: Climate change is already hurting our environment, causing extreme weather like floods and droughts, and hurting our ability to grow food in some regions. Over the near term, it will increase the cost of food and insurance, harm wildlife and nature, and eventually make the world inhospitable for our children and grandchildren. 
 
In fighting climate change, Ontario has already been at war with the provincial economy. A chart in the Financial Post depicts six years (2009-2014) of nearly flat electricity demand as the cost goes up 50%. During that time the province shut its coal plants, reducing CO2 emissions by 10 million tonnes at an annual cost of $4 billion, or $400/tonne. That 's a long way from the $30/tonne cited by the Ontario government as an effective carbon tax.
 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/13/us-climatechange-canada-idUSKBN0N41X220150413>
<http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/ontario-and-quebec-to-sign-cap-and-trade-deal-today-to-curb-climate-change>
<http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/terence-corcoran-manufacturing-carbon-hobgoblins>
 

Germany on the Brink of an Energy Crisis

Some 39 power plants across Germany could be decommissioned later this year  which could jeopardize the security of supply,  precipitating a huge energy crisis in the coming years as more plants are shuttered, according to the German Association of Energy and Water Industries the country 's main utilities lobby. The reason: the flood of solar and wind energy on the grid has caused wholesale electricity prices to collapse all while retail rates have skyrocketed.  
 
As a result, conventional power plants run fewer hours than originally planned, in many cases acting as backup power only. So the utilities are asking for a bail-out.
 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/13/germanys-on-the-brink-of-an-energy-crisis/>
 

Judith Curry on Obama 's Climate Pledge

Dr. Curry was one of four witnesses at an April 15 hearing of the US House of Representatives ' Committee on Science, Space and Technology, titled: The President 's UN Climate Pledge: Scientifically Justified or a New Tax on Americans. Dr. Curry 's testimony stated that recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. She also touched on some questionable choices in defining the problem of climate change and its solution.
 
The testimony of two of the other witnesses, one representing the US Chamber of Commerce and the other an economist, were against President Obama 's pledge to reduce US emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 using executive orders under existing legislation [FoS Extracts 2015-04-05]. Only the witness from the Natural Resources Defense Council supported the pledge.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/15/hearing-presidents-un-climate-pledge/>
<http://science.house.gov/hearing/full-committee-hearing-president-s-un-climate-pledge-scientifically-justified-or-new-tax>
 

India Freezes Greenpeace Accounts

The   Indian government has frozen all seven bank accounts of Greenpeace India. The suspension order said the NGO under-reported and repeatedly mentioned incorrect amount of foreign contributions. According to the Deccan Herald, a dossier prepared by the government claims that foreign funded campaign and protest creation by Greenpeace India led to wastage of financial resources, prevented creation of productive capital and caused loss of jobs and incomes for locals, apart from depriving the country of energy.  The Washington Post 's story said that the NGO had mounted a massive protest against a coal mining project.
 
<http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/mha-suspends-greenpeace-indias-registration/article7084953.ece>
<http://www.deccanherald.com/content/470813/greenpeace-india-guilty-lobbying-says.html>
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/04/09/why-india-is-at-war-with-greenpeace/>
 

India to Double Coal Production by 2020

India, the world 's No. 3 emitter of greenhouse gases, plans to double coal production to 1.5 billion tons by the end of the decade. Refusing to bow to foreign pressure to cut CO2 emissions, the country 's prime minister said: "The world guides us on climate change and we follow them? The world sets the parameters and we follow them? It is not like that. We can lead the world. 
 
In the Financial Post, Peter Foster explains why coal looms big in Asia 's and India 's future. The new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will help finance an enormous burst of coal investment in that region, bypassing the anti-fossil fuel World Bank.
 
<http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Modi-looks-to-double-coal-production-by-2020>
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/06/us-india-climatechange-idUSKBN0MX0FF20150406>
<http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/peter-foster-why-coal-looms-large-in-indias-future>
 

A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development

A surprising piece in The New York Times. The US relies on coal, natural gas, hydro and nuclear for 95% of its electricity, but place major restrictions on financing all four of these sources for power overseas. American diplomats are upset that dozens of countries, many of them energy poor, have flocked to join China 's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The reason for the defiance is not hard to find: The West 's environmental priorities are blocking their access to energy.
 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/business/an-environmentalist-call-to-look-past-sustainable-development.html?_r=0>
 

The Environmentalists ' Civil War

This is a fight among the members of the green left for the intellectual and moral high ground. On one side are the pro-energy, pro-density humanists. They call themselves ecomodernists and are led by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist, Oakland-based environmental group. On the opposite side are the traditional anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists, that call for divestment in fossil fuel and claim that the threat of climate change trumps all other concerns.
 
The ecomodernists 's manifesto talks of the need to intensify farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement-in order to use less land and interfere less with the natural world.  
 
<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417070/environmentalists-civil-war-robert-bryce>
 

Conversations that Matter: The Earth is Actually Growing Greener

In its Conversations that Matter series, the Vancouver Sun has a video interview with Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of Princeton 's Institute for Advanced Study who says models do a good job of helping us understand climate but they do a very poor job of predicting it. After and introductory conversation, the interview with Prof. Dyson begins at 3:00. While acknowledging that humans have some effect on climate, he says we don 't know how much, and the main issue is that the Earth has been growing greener from the increase atmospheric CO2. The latter is easier to measure and more certain than any effects on climate.  
 
At 8:30 the conversation turns to the relationship between the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2.over the past 130 years and the recent concern about about what it will do to temperatures, based on computer models. Prof. Dyson says the climate is too complex for the models to predict accurately. At 12:00 he discusses the Sun 's variable activity and its effect on climate. He refers to work by visiting scientist Nir Shaviv.  
 
At 15:30 the conversation moves to temperature adjustments in the IPCC reports. At 21.00 the interviewer mentions a fellow in Vancouver  who has been explaining nature to Canadians for decades and who says that if you don 't believe in man-made climate change, you should go to jail. Prof. Dyson replies that man-made climate change is real, but the question is how much and whether it 's good or bad. In his opinion, it 's on the whole good. Having grown up in the 1930s, Prof. Dyson is optimistic about humanity 's future.
 
<http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Conversations+that+matter+Earth+actually+growing+greener/10944052/story.html>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/04/07/asking-the-wrong-question/>

 

2015-04-05

 

Save the Date, May 5, 2015 - First Annual Luncheon for the Environment [Canceled]

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Friends of Science are sponsoring this event hosted by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace and now Chair in Energy, Ecology and Prosperity for FCPP. The keynote speaker will be author and investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, whose topic is: The Road to Paris: Sex, Scandal & the IPCC - What the Pachauri Scandal Means for Climate Change Policy.  
 
For ticket details see the link below.
 
<http://friendsofscience.org/assets/images/Save_the_date.pdf>
 

The Climate Pledges

March 31 was the deadline for countries ready to do so  to submit their climate pledges-officially known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions-ahead of the Paris summit in December. As it turned out, according to the UNFCCC the only countries ready on March 31 were: Switzerland, the EU, Norway, the US, Gabon and Russia.  
 
Judith Curry 's blog tracks the pledges. After summarizing them, she reminds her readers of four elephants in the room:
  1. We don 't know how the 21st century climate will evolve.
  2. We don 't know, and whether reductions in emissions will actually  alter the 21st century climate in beneficial ways.
  3. The unintended consequences of these policies could act to increase vulnerability to extreme events.
  4. Deep, international focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an opportunity loss to deal with other more pressing and easily solved problems.  
 
<http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/indc/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/01/road-to-paris-tracking-climate-pledges/>
 

Obama 's Pledge

The US ' INDC is to reduce 2025 emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels using executive orders under existing legislation, mainly the Clean Air Act. At a news conference, the White House press secretary insisted that any Paris climate deal will not be a treaty  requiring approval by the Senate. Republican Congressional leaders said the administration lacks the political and legal backing to commit the US to an international agreement. They have urged US states not to comply with President Obama 's power plant rule. This rule faces its first court test next month.  
 
<http://www.examiner.com/article/white-house-insists-un-climate-change-agreement-is-not-a-treaty>
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-31/obama-s-un-climate-vow-relies-on-court-wins-cheap-natural-gas>
 

Putin 's Pledge

Russia outdid the US, stating that it would cut emissions up to 30% below 1990 levels, subject to conditions. One of these is the commitments by other major emitters. And the Russian commitment is subject to the maximum possible account of absorbing capacity of forests . As the blog Not a Lot of People Know That points out, Russian emissions are already 77% of their 1990 amount, and the remaining difference could be covered by the forest fudge factor.  
 
<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/climate-russia-sketches-emissions-cut-of-up-to-30/articleshow/46764115.cms>
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/climate-russia-sketches-emissions-cut-of-up-to-30-per-cent-115040100091_1.html>
<https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/putins-smoke-and-mirrors/>
 

US Senate 's Opening Salvo to the EPA

The Senate 's Environmental and Public Works Committee is considering the Environmental Protection Agency 's budget request for fiscal year 2016. Four members of that committee, dissatisfied with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy 's evasive responses to their earlier questions during testimony, sent a letter to the administrator with 12 questions related to verifying whether projected climate impacts are actually occurring.  These questions are broken down into four categories: drought, hurricanes/cyclones, temperature data, and climate impact monitoring. In their preambles, the questions refer to IPCC reports, Ms. McCarthy 's previous testimony, and EPA publications. The senators have asked her to respond in writing by April 21.
 
<https://junksciencecom.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/senate-to-epa-models-040115.pdf>
 

A Change in the UK

For the last election, Prime Minister David Cameron promised the greenest government ever  and promoted more renewable energy. Now, with an election looming he has vowed to repeal the loathed 2008 Climate Change Act. New feed-in tariffs and renewable obligation certificates will be abolished immediately, while existing ones will be phased out over five years.
 
<http://euanmearns.com/tories-place-energy-policy-at-heart-of-manifesto/>
 

UN Green Climate Fund to be Spent on Coal-fired Power Generation

At a contentious board meeting of the GCF-set up to help developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions-the board refused an explicit ban on fossil fuel projects. This allowed Japan to designate $1 billion in loans for coal plants in Indonesia as climate finance. A spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry said: "Japan is of the view that the promotion of high-efficiency coal-fired power plants is one of the realistic, pragmatic and effective approaches to cope with the issue of climate change. 
 
At the board meeting Japan was supported by China and Saudi Arabia.
 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/29/un-green-climate-fund-can-be-spent-on-coal-fired-power-generation>
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/UN-Climate-Change-Fund-to-Bankroll-Coal-Fired-Power-Plants-20150329-0013.html>
<https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/japan-uses-climate-cash-coal-030108847.html>
 

Friends of Science News Release Picked up by Bloomberg

In a surprising move, considering its usual politically-correct reporting on climate issues, Bloomberg picked up a Friends of Science press release promoting the society 's new report, Ideology or Evidence. This report was prepared to counter Ontario 's Climate Change Discussion document that rests heavily on statements and reports by advocacy groups and ignores the IPCC-recognized 15-year hiatus in global warming.
 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/research/markets/news/article.asp?docKey=600-201503311147CANADANWCANADAPR_C5925-1>
<https://friendsofsciencecalgary.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/ideology-or-evidence-asking-questions-about-ontarios-climate-change-policy-discussion-paper/>
 

25th Anniversary of Global Satellite Temperature Monitoring

On March 29, 1990, two scientists at the University of Alabama Huntsville-John Christy and Roy Spencer-publicly became climate skeptics by announcing that atmospheric temperatures based on satellite data disagreed with the climate models. While they agree that humans play a role in climate change, it is not a catastrophic event. To mark the silver anniversary of the event, al.com interviewed Drs. Christy and Spencer, posing seven questions on their research and reaction to it.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/25th-anniversary-of-global-satellite-temperature-monitoring/>
<http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2015/04/7_questions_with_john_christy.html>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/02/25-years-of-monitoring-global-temperatures-from-satellites-and-an-interview-with-christy-and-spencer-of-uah/>
 

The Difference between Real Science and AGW Science

 While science follows a defined scientific method,  AGW  uses political campaign tools  like polls, demonizing opposition, scare tactics, deception, and propaganda.  This article from the Australian Climate Sceptics Party offers 12 criteria that distinguish the two types of science.
 
<http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.ca/2015/03/differences-between-real-science-and.html>
 

Sustainable Companies Using Trade Associations to Undermine EU Climate Policy

DeSmog UK reports on a study by the Policy Standards Institute on how many international companies with strong sustainability policies are at the same time members of trade associations lobbying against EU climate policy. The study found that 61% of all companies studied and 77% of the largest 500 companies in the world used trade associations to lobby on climate policy. Eight trade associations were studied and they lobbied against unilateral action by the EU on climate change, pitting climate action against competitiveness, supporting shale gas extraction and ending support for renewables, arguing against reforming the EU emissions trading system, and in support of a single greenhouse gas emissions target with more support for innovation and technology development.
 
<http://desmog.uk/2015/04/01/sustainable-companies-are-using-trade-associations-undermine-eu-climate-policy>
<http://www.psi.org.uk/site/news_article/lobbying_report>
 

Climategate Investigations: Was There a Pattern of Cover-up?

Tim Ball summarizes the response to the release of 1,000 emails from the University of East Anglia 's Climatic Research Institute in November 2009, in particular the three UK inquiries, one in North America and one international. In the UK the House of Commons ' Science and Technology Committee effectively deferred to the UEA, which commissioned the other two inquiries. The Oxburgh panel was chaired by someone who was simultaneously a fellow of the AGW-supporting Royal Society, CEO of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, and chairman of Falck Renewable Resources. Their were no public hearings or call for evidence, and only 11 selected academic papers were examined. The Muir Russell inquiry was compromised at the start by conflict of interest of members and interviewed only CRU and UEA staff.  
 
In North America Penn State investigated Michael Mann, who was interviewed by three people (not the required five tenured professors with competency, but no conflict.) The inquiry 's report exonerated Dr. Mann, pointing to his success at research fund raising. The international inquiry by the Inter Academy Council was commissioned by the IPCC, but limited because of previous close and conflicting connections with the IPCC Chair.
 
In summary the mock inquiries achieved their objective, because the media stopped asking questions and allowed people identified in the emails to claim they were absolved of any wrongdoing.
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/31/climategate-investigations-of-ipcc-and-cru-was-there-a-patterns-of-cover-up/>
 

Earth Hour Interest Declining Worldwide

Saturday March 28 marked the latest Earth Hour with a record number of countries and cities participating, but with declining interest worldwide. There were particularly shocking  figures from Canada. In BC the energy savings in 2015 were 77% below those of 2014 and 90% below 2013 's. it was similar in Ontario, where some cities stated that reducing electricity consumption during Earth Hour was no longer a priority.
 
In 2009 a journalist asked Ross McKitrick for his thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour. He abhors it and wrote a short essay beginning with: Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. 
 
<http://www.dubaichronicle.com/2015/03/30/earth-hour-2015-dubai/>
<http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/earthhour.pdf>

 

2015-03-29

 

Save the Date: May 5, 2015 - First Annual Luncheon for the Environment

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Friends of Science are sponsoring this event hosted by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace and now Chair in Energy, Ecology and Prosperity for FCPP. The keynote speaker will be author and investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, whose topic is:  The Road to Paris: Sex, Scandal & the IPCC - What the Pachauri Scandal Means for Climate Change Policy.  
 
For ticket details see the link below.
 
<http://friendsofscience.org/assets/images/Save_the_date.pdf>
 

Van Ypersele: A Terrible Choice for IPCC Chairman

With the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri [FoS Extracts 2015-02-28] as Chairman of the IPCC, the vice-Chair since 2008 Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is looking for a promotion. In his campaign for election he is making ritual statements about the IPCC continuing to act in a scientifically rigorous yet policy neutral way. As Donna Laframboise puts it, an entity that is policy neutral doesn 't advocate any particular response to a given situation. Yet Prof. Ypersele 's piece in  The Guardian  states humanity knows it must stop ignoring the inconvenient truth ' of climate change,  something at odds with a UN-conducted poll of 7.2 million people ranking climate change dead last as a concern.  
 
Moreover, two years after he first became in IPCC official in 2002, Prof. Ypersele got into bed with Greenpeace by coordinating a report on how climate change might affect his home country of Belgium. As Ms. Laframboise says about the report: In van Ypersele 's vision of 2044, Belgium is in a state of emergency. It suffers from unbearable heat, drought, and over-flowing morgues. The high-speed train between Paris and Berlin has derailed because the rails have been deformed by extreme heat. The Mediterranean Sea has flooded the Nile Delta, making Egypt a land of refugees. And the UK 's King William has died of West Nile virus. 
 
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/03/16/van-ypersele-a-terrible-choice-for-ipcc-chairman/>
<http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/mar/16/climate-politics-does-the-ipcc-have-a-future>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/03/17/how-much-did-greenpeace-pay-van-ypersele/>
 

Most Nations to Miss Deadline for UN Climate Pledges  

Ahead of the UN deadline of March 31 for countries to file greenhouse-gas pledges necessary to keep a global climate change deal on track, only the European Union and Switzerland, representing about 10% of global emissions, have unveiled plans. The United States has promised to meet the deadline. The rest of the world 's major economies, including China, India, Australia and Japan, are unlikely to complete submissions in time, according to environmental groups tracking UN climate talks.
 
<http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/biggest-polluters-set-to-miss-deadline-for-action-on-climate-change-20150324-1m6xwz.html>
 

TVO Documentary  Big Wind  Available Online

The network TVO has published a 57-minute video (available until March 25, 2021) exploring the conflict over the controversial development of industrial wind turbines in rural Ontario. It centres around the fight of Sean Drennan, whose farm is being surrounded by 140 Samsung turbines. There are arguments at the mandatory, feel-good public meetings between those who host the turbines and their neighbours and wind company representatives stare down angry rural residents. Mr. Drennan and three other families, hired lawyer Julian Falconer to sue the Ontario government on constitutional grounds. They lost the first round, but plan to appeal.
 
<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/03/26/watch-tvo-documentary-big-wind-online/>
<http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/big-wind>
 

John Christy Fires Back at Those Trying to Intimidate Him

Dr. Christy responded to a recently-launched investigation by Democratic members of Congress into the sources of his and other climate scientists ' research funding [FoS Extracts - 2015-02-28]. He said that all of his research funds are derived from state and federal agencies and that he has never accepted research money from business or industry groups that have challenged the scientific findings of the IPCC, the US Global Change Research Program, the National Research Council and other expert bodies.
 
Dr. Christy earned the ire of the investigators for his testimony before Congress on numerous occasions criticizing the IPCC and knee-jerk remedies to combat climate  change through regulations on CO2.  
 
<http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060015776>
 

On Suppressing Scientific Inquiry

Judith Curry reviews an essay,  Climate Science Doubts: Not Because of Payment, but Because the Science is Bad, by Christopher Essex. Among the excerpts: Accusing scientists of venal motives when they raise questions about climate has come to be what passes for scientific debate.  and, for the dogmatists The objective is victory, not truth.  Dr. Curry regards the essay as particularly important in light of the investigations by congressional Democrats targeting funding of skeptical climate scientists.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/26/christopher-essex-on-suppressing-scientific-inquiry/>
<http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/25/not-because-of-payment-but-because-the-science-is-so-damn-bad/>
 

This is President Obama 's Science Advisor

The President 's choice of John Holdren, previously a professor at Berkley, to be his science advisor tells us something about his policies. Dr. Holdren wrote a 1975 newspaper article, entitled  Too Much Energy, Too Soon, a Hazard, about the dangers of having too much energy available for human use. In the article he wrote: Finally, less energy can mean more employment. The energy producing industries comprise the most capital intensive and least labour intensive major sector of the economy. Accordingly, each dollar of investment capital taken out of energy production and invested in something else, and each personal consumption dollar saved by reduced energy use and spent elsewhere in the economy will create more jobs than are lost.  Dr. Holdren is unaware that energy enables people to make things and provide services that other people want.
 
<http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/03/this-is-your-presidents-science-advisor/>
 

Reporters Explain Why Balance Isn 't Needed on Global Warming

Columbia University journalism students wrestled with the question whether it is morally-permissible to allow climate deniers  to appear in print and televised media. The students were shown the new documentary  Merchants of Doubt  that endeavours to smear skeptics of anthropogenic global warming as the henchmen of the fossil-fuel industry. After the screening a discussion with a panel of journalists, one from the  New York Times  said that any doubt about man-made global warming is a lie, so there is no need for balanced reporting on the subject. Another from the  Huffington Post  recommended that newspapers create a new propaganda beat  with reporters devoted solely to unmasking the deniers  as frauds.
 
<http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/24/reporters-explain-why-balance-isnt-needed-on-global-warming/>
 

Summary of the Infamous 97% Consensus Paper

Richard Tol has published a summary of the John Cook et al paper  Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Published in 2013, that paper was downloaded over 300,000 times and cited by scientists and politicians as definitive proof that the science of climate change is settled. Mr. Tol notes that the alleged consensus is about any human role in climate change, not the dominant role and any dangers it might pose.
 
Mr. Cook 's sample was padded with irrelevant papers and he recruited environmental activists to rate the claims of selected papers. The raters freely discussed their work and show systematic differences in their ratings. Requests for the data have been met with evasion. As Mr. Tol concludes, If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook 's paper is an excellent case in point. 
 
<http://richardtol.blogspot.ca/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html>
 

The Gulf Stream Debate

A new paper by Stefan Rahmstorf, Michael Mann et al prompted the  Washington Post  to run a story with the dramatic headline:  Global warming is now slowing down the circulation of the ocean with potentially dire consequences. The circulation in question is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which transports warm surface water north and returns the cooled water below. The paper 's conclusions are based on multi-proxy reconstructions of surface temperatures back to AD 900 and computer modelling and suggest that the AMOC weakness since 1975 is unprecedented in the last millennium.
 
However, as Watts Up With That reports, a 2014 paper based on actual ocean observations found no evidence to suggest that the Gulf Stream is slowing down. In 2010 NASA issued a press release titled:  NASA Study Finds Atlantic Conveyor Belt ' Not Slowing. As Judith Curry puts it: So, who you gonna believe?  Climate models and Mannian proxies, or direct and satellite observations of ocean circulation?  Even German warmist scientists slapped down the Rahmstorf-Mann paper.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/25/whats-up-with-the-atlantic/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/24/michael-mann-and-stefan-rahmstorf-claim-the-gulf-stream-is-slowing-due-to-greenland-ice-melt-except-reality-says-otherwise/>
<http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlantic20100325.html>
<http://notrickszone.com/2015/03/24/dead-at-birth-german-warmist-scientists-slap-down-rahmstorfmann-amoc-paper-offers-no-strong-indication/#sthash.N72Kffdb.Zh59YNcM.dpbs>

 

2015-03-06

 

Congressional Republicans Push Back against the Climate Witch Hunt

Responding to letters sent out by Democratic members of Congress to universities, private companies, trade groups and non-profit organizations asking for detailed information on their funding for climate science [FoS Extracts - 2015-02-28] James Inhofe and fellow Republicans on the Senate 's Environment and Public Works Committee sent their own letter to the same 107 recipients. The letter states: Rather than empower scientists and researchers to expand the public discourse on climate science and other environmental topics, the [Democrats '] letter could be viewed as an attempt to silence legitimate intellectual and scientific inquiry. 
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/27/congessional-republicans-push-back-against-the-climate-witch-hunt/>
 

Ontario Families Fighting Massive Legal Bill from Wind-farm Companies

A demand that four Ontario families pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs to billion-dollar companies is a thinly disguised warning to anyone pondering a challenge to industrial wind farms in Ontario, the families say. The families, who worry wind turbines near their homes could harm their health, had challenged the constitutionality of Ontario 's approvals process before Divisional Court. They are now hoping the province 's top court will hear the case, potentially adding more litigation costs. Their lawyer, Julian Falconer said that wind companies are blood-sucking, intimidating bullies. It 's not just a bar to justice, it 's actually a terror tactic. 

<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/03/01/julian-falconer-wind-companies-blood-sucking-intimidating-bullies-its-not-just-a-bar-to-justice-its-actually-a-terror-tactic/>
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-families-fight-massive-legal-bill-from-wind-farm-companies/article23238169/>
 

Europe Rolls Back Green Energy Subsidies

Governments in Spain, the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria have rolled back feed-in tariffs and failed to honour other guarantees to investors in the renewable energy sector. These investors are seeking compensation under the Energy Charter Treaty and other bilateral investment treaties.
 
<http://www.jonesday.com/international-remedies-for-foreign-investors-in-europes-renewable-energy-sector-02-19-2015/>
 

IPCC in Transition

In light of the resignation of the IPCC 's former chair [FoS Extracts 2015-02-28] Judith Curry wonders what it will mean to the future of the IPCC. For her, there are two issues: whether the IPCC can clean up its act, and the need to develop a rigorous conflict-of-interest policy. None of the current list of unofficial candidates to replace Rajendra Pachauri appear to have anything approaching his conflicts of interest. However, it appears that the IPCC 's lead authors will continue to assess their own research.
 
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/03/ipcc-in-transition/>
<http://business.financialpost.com/2015/03/03/junk-science-week-2015-time-for-post-pachauri-reform-at-ipcc/>
 

It 's OK to Lie About Climate Change-Yale Project

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has published a study on how to communicate the current global warming slowdown. The lead author of the study is quoted as saying that the vast majority of the public is unaware of the global warming pause or hiatus, or the arguments between the scientific community and the deniers.  He continues: There have been a number of studies that have shown that some people will change their views of climate change based on extreme weather. It 's not enough to simply experience a heat wave it then needs to be contextualized. It needs to be interpreted by thought leaders and trusted people in a community and by the media and scientists saying, This is an indication of global warming. ' 
 
In other words, it is now OK for scientists and other trusted people  to make claims they know are not true, and use any extreme weather event to support the theory.
 
<https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/now-its-ok-to-lie-about-climate-change-yale-project/>
<http://www.piercepioneer.com/officials-warn-global-warming-slowdown-actually-quite-misleading/38352>
 

Antarctic Sea Ice Did the Opposite of What the Models Predicted

Climate models can be good tools for predicting future sea ice levels unless, of course, they are completely wrong. In the case of Antarctica, the models were dead wrong, according to a study, Assessment of sea ice simulations in the CMIP5 models. Over 1979-2005 most of the models predicted that Antarctic sea ice would shrink, but instead the ice levels increased over that time. Since 2006 they have only increased, reaching an all-time high last September.
 
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/02/antarctic-sea-ice-did-the-exact-opposite-of-what-models-predicted/>
<http://www.the-cryosphere.net/9/399/2015/tc-9-399-2015.pdf>
 

On Natural Climate Variability and Climate Models

Roy Spencer dislikes using the word pause  in regard to global warming, because it implies knowledge of future warming, which no one has. One current explanation for the current lack of warming is a change in circulation between warm surface and cool deeper ocean waters. Dr. Spencer points out that, if changing ocean circulation can negate anthropogenic warming in the last 15+ years, an opposite change likely enhanced warming in the 1970s to 1990s. A graph demonstrates that climate models tuned to attribute that warming to increasing atmospheric CO2 turned out to be too sensitive post 1998.  
 
<http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/02/on-natural-climate-variability-and-climate-models/>

 

2015-02-28

 

Climate Inquisition Shows Its Totalitarian Face

The US Democratic witch hunt against scientists skeptical about official climate science lays bare the totalitarian mentality behind the radical climate agenda. Nobody must be allowed to dissent from the consensus.  If they do, it is because they are either suitable cases for treatment, victims of motivated reasoning,  or in the pay of the fossil fuel industry.
 
The last-mentioned came from Raul Grijalva, chair of the House committee in environment and natural resources, who sent letters to seven universities demanding details of the funding of prominent skeptical scientists. Meanwhile  Senator Ed Markey and colleagues have gone on a huge fishing expedition, demanding details from corporations of any funding for science that deviates from that sanctioned by the Democratic Politburo.
 
As Roy Spencer point out, the implication of Rep. Grijalva 's letters is that research money from fossil fuel companies to any skeptics is bad, even though much greater amounts of fossil fuel money go to green organizations. He wonders if Rep. Grijalva will also make similar requests of warmist researchers whose universities took money from energy companies.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/peter-foster-climate-inquisition-shows-its-totalitarian-face/>
<http://business.financialpost.com/2015/02/26/peter-foster-crushing-climate-thoughtcrime/#__federated=1>
<http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/02/the-skeptical-seven-witch-hunt-is-just-the-beginning/>
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/opinion-rich-lowry-climate-change-115518.html#.VPD9MUKbFbx>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/26/anatomy-of-a-climate-witch-hunt-letter-from-u-s-representative-raul-m-grijalva/>
 

Obama Administration Gives India a Shove on Climate Change

In a joint event the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency declared that they will expand the EPA 's AirNow pollution monitoring program to more US embassies, with New Delhi at the top of the list. While the official reason is the high levels of air pollution in that city, the  Washington Post  suggests that the real objective is to force India to cut CO2  emissions.
 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/02/20/the-obama-administration-gives-india-a-shove-on-climate-change/>
 

Germany 's 2014 Wind Turbine Report Card

As resistance to wind power is snowballing, a report on the 2014 performance of Germany 's 25,000 wind turbines found that they operated at only 14.8% of capacity. They ran at between 0 and 10% of capacity 45.5% of the time. The turbines, which the German government  says will become the workhorse  of the German power industry,  ran at over 50% of their rated capacity only for 461 hours, or just 5.2% of the time. The wind industry is ignoring all this, preferring to claim another successful record  year because of the number of new installations.  
 
<http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/07/germany-2014-report-card-is-in-its-25000-wind-turbines-get-an-f-averaged-only-14-8-of-rated-capacity/#sthash.4Afpemmi.esRbz0qY.dpbs>
 

The IPCC 's Bogus Evidence for Global Warming

Fred Singer summarizes the history of how the IPCC attributed 20th Century warming to human influence. The first three IPCC reports contain erroneous scientific arguments-never retracted or corrected-but at least abandoned by the IPCC. For example, AR3 used Michael Mann 's hockey stick graph, which was omitted in subsequent reports. The last two reports (AR4 and AR5) construct a model that tries to match reported surface warming in the last century, which they do by selecting the right amount of aerosol forcing (for the decades without warming) and climate sensitivity to CO2  (for the final decades of the century.) Then they replicate their graph without an increase in greenhouse gases and argue that the gap must must be due to those gases, a sort of circular logic.
 
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/11/ipcc_s_bogus_evidence_for_global_warming.html>
 

Pachauri: IPCC Should Take Official Role in Assessing Country Pledges to Curb Climate Change

IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri wants to take his organization in a more political direction by assessing countries' pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then totting up whether they add up to enough to meet global climate change targets. Dr. Pachauri submitted his  Chairman 's Vision Paper on the Future of the IPCC  as input to the 41st Session of the IPCC (Nairobi February 24-25, 2015).  
 
In this paper he says the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (the emissions pledges that all countries are supposed to make this year) give the IPCC a unique opportunity  to bring out a report on how the INDCs related to the goal of keeping temperatures 2 °C below pre-industrial levels. Dr. Pachauri also call for an increase in the IPCC 's outreach activities, which will result in a need to increase the capacity and staffing of outreach specialists within the IPCC Secretariat. 
 
<http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/02/pachauri-ipcc-should-take-official-role-in-assessing-country-pledges-to-curb-climate-change/>
<http://www.ipcc.ch/apps/eventmanager/documents/27/030220150343-p41_doc05_Future_IPCC_Vision_paper_Chair.pdf>
 

Pachauri Resigns

Facing allegations of sexual assault, stalking, harassment and uttering threats, Rajendra Pachauri resigned as head of the IPCC just before the panel 's Nairobi meeting. Donna Laframboise, author of two books critical of the IPCC and Dr. Pachauri, describes his resignation letter as a two-page love letter to himself.  Mark Steyn 's piece is even more biting.
 
<http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rk-pachauri-steps-down-as-ipcc-chair/article6929267.ece>
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/02/24/rajendra-pachauris-resignation-letter/>
<http://www.steynonline.com/6826/fake-nobel-laureate-facing-sex-arrest-for>
 

Down Wind Documentary-Now Available for Free

This is a 1- ½ hour documentary examining Ontario 's rush into wind farm development that turned into a nightmare for rural residents forced to live among the 50-storey turbines. It includes searing, personal stories of people experiencing mysterious health problems, insomnia, depression, even thoughts of suicide; their lives turned upside down by the constant noise and vibrations giving off by the turbines. The documentary also reveals the staggering economic costs of these wind farms to taxpayers with huge subsidies going to big wind corporations. And how inside connections have made some government cronies wealthy, while rural communities suffer.  
 
The first 18 minutes focuses on rural residents living next to the turbines, then turns to the politics behind the  Green Energy Act  that took away local planning powers, prompting 80 municipalities to declare themselves unwilling hosts  to turbines.. Economist Ross McKitrick points out that the turbines run on subsidies, not wind, replacing power that costs 3-5 ¢/kWh to generate with power costing 13.5 ¢/kWh. Wind power is costing the province $4 billion/year. At 35 minutes the program turns to the economic effects of wind power on the province, which is creating energy poverty as hydro facilities sit idle. At 43 minutes the program returns to the effects on residents, introducing two experts on the health effects of wind turbines. The last half hour examines the cosy relationships among the Ontario Liberal Party, wind power companies and associations, and the bureaucracy administering the program.
 
<http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/02/18/down-wind-full-documentary-now-available-to-watch-free/>
<http://www.epaw.org/echoes.php?lang=en&article=ns79>
 

Windfarm Study: Beginning of the End for the Industry?

Australian company Pacific Hydro, which bills itself as a global clean energy solutions provider,  commissioned a study by acoustician Steven Cooper on the health effects of wind turbines, thinking that it would find nothing wrong. As part of the study, residents living between 650 m and 1.6 km of the wind turbines were asked to diarize what they were experiencing, including headaches, pressure in the head, ears or chest, ringing in the ears, heart racing or a sensation of heaviness. Their observations were separated into noise, vibration and sensation using a one to five severity scale.
 
This was the first time that sensation, rather than audible noise, had been used as an indicator. The report found offending sound pressure was present at four distinct phases of turbine operation: starting, maximum power and changing load by more than 20% either up or down.
 
The wind industry went into damage control mode, claiming that hundreds of thousands of people live comfortably in close vicinity of windfarms  and that the study hadn 't been peer reviewed. Two of America 's top noise and vibration experts have endorsed the sophistication and rigour of the study.
 
<http://stopthesethings.com/2015/01/23/steven-coopers-cape-bridgewater-wind-farm-study-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-wind-industry/>
<http://stopthesethings.com/2015/01/24/pacific-hydros-monumental-own-goal-or-how-steven-coopers-wind-farm-study-helps-sink-the-wind-industry/>
<http://stopthesethings.com/2015/02/15/the-smoking-gun-top-us-noise-experts-paul-schomer-george-hessler-endorse-steven-coopers-wind-farm-study/>
<http://www.pacifichydro.com.au/english/our-communities/communities/cape-bridgewater-acoustic-study-report/>
 
Twenty Good Reasons Not to Worry about Polar Bears and Climate Change
To celebrate the first anniversary of Canada providing population estimates and trends independent of the pessimistic prognostications of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, Susan Crockford has updated and expanded her previous summary of reasons not to worry about polar bears. With 25,000 bears currently, there are more of them than 40 years ago.  
 
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/19/twenty-good-reasons-not-to-worry-about-polar-bears-and-climate-change/>
 

BP Energy Outlook: Just 8% Renewable Energy by 2035

One of the biggest miscalculations that the global warming alarmists have made is claiming that global CO2  emissions must reach their peak by 2020 and then begin falling rapidly in order to meet the 2 °C maximum warming target. However, energy giant BP has just released its  BP Energy Outlook 2035  that states in no uncertain terms that there is no chance of CO2  emissions beginning their decline by 2035, let alone 2020. The report shows a planet that is awash in energy and also projects strong growth in new energy forms  such as shale and oil sands which are thought to be abundant. 
 
<http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/18/bp-2035-outlook-foresees-only-8-renewable-energy-by-2035-no-end-in-fossil-fuel-growth-in-sight/#sthash.1BccNtwc.aoSc4G76.dpbs>
<  http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/Energy-economics/energy-outlook-2015/Energy_Outlook_2035_booklet.pdf>
 

US Solar Energy Subsidies Cost $39 Billion/year

According to a report released by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, American taxpayers spent an average of $39 billion per year over the past five year financing grants, subsidizing tax credits, guaranteeing loans and bailing out failed solar boondoggles. Government support for the solar industry is vast, with at least 345 different federal initiatives that spread across 20 agencies, with the Pentagon having the highest number: 63. The solar industry will contribute only 0.6% of total US electricity generation in 2015.
 
<http://freebeacon.com/issues/report-solar-energy-subsidies-cost-39-billion-per-year/>
<  http://protectingtaxpayers.org/assets/files/solar-report-february-12.pdf>

 

2015-02-14

 

The Geneva Climate Talks

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held what was officially called the eighth part of the second session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP)  in Geneva between February 8 and 13. The purpose was to build on what was agreed to at last December 's climate summit in Lima and turn it into an official negotiating text for the next climate summit in Paris, November 30 - December 11. Instead of shrinking the 38-page Lima document to a more manageable size, delegates from 194 nations increased it to 86 pages, so that all countries ' views were reflected. This negotiating text, with its 515 options and sub-options, will be edited, translated into the UN 's official languages and communicated to the world 's capitals by the UNFCCC.  
 
<http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/negotiating-text-for-paris-climate-pact-prepared-in-geneva-115021301939_1.html>
<http://unfccc.int/files/bodies/awg/application/pdf/negotiating_text_12022015@2200.pdf>
 

US Green Energy Scandal

Four-time Democratic Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, was forced to resign in an influence-peddling scandal involving his ambitious fianc e, billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and some handsome green energy contracts. While serving as an unpaid advisor to the governor, his fianc e, Cylvia Hayes, had been quietly collecting fees from the Clean Economy Development Center for work on low-carbon fuel standards legislation in Oregon. Mr. Steyer is a major supporter and bundler for President Barak Obama. One of his charitable trusts provided funding for the CEDC, which went out of business after losing its tax-free status.
 
The US Attorney 's office for Oregon served a subpoena on the state 's Department of Administrative Services to turn over records pertaining to the former governor, his fianc e, other individuals and companies Ms. Hayes did business with.  
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/12/oregon-gov-john-kitzhaber-fiancee-cylvia-hayes-pro/?page=all#pagebreak>
<http://news.yahoo.com/oregon-governor-resists-mounting-pressure-resign-085601228.html>
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/13/oregon-governor-resigns/23365451/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories>
 

Fiddling with the Temperature Data

In two  Telegraph  articles, Christopher Booker examines the data behind the claims that 2014 was the hottest year on record  and that global temperatures have suddenly reached their highest level in 1,000 years. There are five official data records, three based on surface measurements and two on satellites. The satellite records rank 2014 as the sixth warmest since 1997. However, the three surface records are run by passionate believers in man-made warming. Mr. Booker notes that only 20% of the Earth 's surface is reliably covered, and the number of stations has halved since 1990. There is evidence that the data has been adjusted,  downward in the case of earlier temperatures and upward for more recent ones.
 
These temperature adjustments have been used to transform Arctic climate history. The article in the  Not a Lot of People Know That  blog has animated graphs comparing the raw and adjusted temperatures for stations in Greenland and Siberia.
 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11367272/Climategate-the-sequel-How-we-are-STILL-being-tricked-with-flawed-data-on-global-warming.html>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html>
<https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/temperature-adjustments-transform-arctic-climate-history/>
<http://www.sealevel.info/Cowtan_unintentionally_vindicates_Booker.html>
<http://www.cfact.org/2015/02/11/temperature-tampering/>
 

Clean Air - Who Pays?

A guest on Judith Curry 's blog, writing under the name Planning Engineer, asks whether-assuming that emission reductions are necessary-focusing on energy utilities to achieve those reductions is the best policy. In the US, electricity makes up 38% of that country 's CO2  emissions, and so is an easy target. The author points out that low-income families, who emit on average 76% less CO2  than their affluent neighbours, pay a disproportionate cost of the cost of reducing emissions from electricity generation. As the experience in Germany, where millions live in energy poverty, has shown, emissions reductions meant a wasteful transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/09/clean-air-who-pays/>
<http://news.qtest.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/011615-735189-renewable-energy-a-wealth-redistribution-scheme.htm?ref=SeeAlso>
 

The Tar Sands Presentation

A presentation prepared for a July 2008 meeting of environmental groups and foundation funders has come to light. It was given by representatives from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Corporate Ethics International and the Pembina Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council. The presentation begins with posing the tar sands  (ignoring the fact that tar is a manufactured product) as a globally significant threat and then goes on to describe the campaign, with five strategic tracks, against it. The Pembina Institute 's portion looks at the Canadian context, while the NRDC describes the US campaign.
 <http://www.scribd.com/doc/82144578/Tar-Sands-Presentation-July-2008>
 

By Their Language We Shall Know Them

Donna Laframboise writes about a post by blogger Ben Pile of  Climate Resistance, whose latest effort examined the use of the epithet denier  in the official climate change lexicon. Its use is intended to service a political agenda, one that involves giving authority to entities that aren 't politically accountable.  
 <http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/02/12/by-their-language-we-shall-know-them/>
<http://www.climate-resistance.org/2015/02/about-denying-deniers-denial-and-denialism.html>
 

Roy Spencer: What Do You Call a NYT Reporter of Climate Science?

New York Times reporter Justin Gillis wrote an article What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change, which prompted Dr. Spencer to respond. Mr. Gillis 's piece began over a petition asking the news media to abandon the term skeptic  for those who question established climate science, calling them climate deniers  instead. Mr. Gillis considers climate scientists to be the true skeptics, and those who reject their consensus as phoney skeptics.    Dr. Spencer points out that the title of Mr. Gillis ' article betrays his bias. What skeptics are skeptical about is lack of certainty over how much of the recent warming was man-made vs natural and whether any observed changes in weather events is outside the realm of natural variability.
 <http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/02/what-to-call-a-nyt-reporter-of-climate-science/>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/science/earth/in-climate-change-whats-in-a-name.html?ref=science>
 

Vilifying Realist Science - and Scientists

This essay by Paul Driessen examines how the climate establishment is fighting back against recent bad news, as people realize that the problem is not climate change, but the costly policies imposed in the name of preventing it.  
 <http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/11/vilifying-realist-science-and-scientists/>

 

2015-02-07

 

Climate Change as a Political Process

Judith Curry writes about a PhD thesis,  The Rise and Fall of the Kyoto Protocol: Climate Change as a Political Process,  by long-serving Finnish member of the European Parliament, Eija-Riitta Korhola. It includes an overview of climate science, descriptions of the annual climate summits from COP 1 (Berlin 1995) through COP 18 (Doha 2012), an analysis of the solutions coming out of the summits, and EU climate policy.
 
Key messages from the dissertation are: during climate actions like the Kyoto Protocol, global emissions increased forcefully; UN climate conferences are a series of failures; climate change is a problem we would not know of without climate science; climate change has turned out to be a so-called wicked problem, which is hard to define, hard to solve, and whose solving does not have a clear end point and whose resolution attempts generate additional problems; and, poverty will not save the planet, which the environmental movement often seems to assume.
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/26/climate-change-as-a-political-process/>
<https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/136507/Therisea.pdf?sequence=1>
 

Europe 's $100 Billion Green Energy Mistake

For the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bain & Company produced a report  The Future of Electricity Attracting Investment to Build Tomorrow 's Electricity Sector.  This report, which was written with the goal of encouraging incentives for the right  kind of investments, examined the EU 's experience with renewables. It found that sub-optimal deployment of resources cost the EU about $100 million. For example, Spain gets 65% more solar energy than Germany (in kWh/m2  over a year). However, cloudy Germany installed about 600% more solar photovoltaic capacity than sunny Spain (33 GW vs 5 GW). While growth in EU electricity demand was flat from 2007 to 2012, 130 GW of renewable and 78 GW of conventional generating capacity was added, and so, utilities ' profits have suffered from the overcapacity.
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/01/23/green-incompetence-isnt-sustainable/>
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/22/europes-100-billion-green-energy-mistake/>
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/20/us-utilities-europe-davos-idUSKBN0KT2BC20150120>
<http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEFUSA_FutureOfElectricity_Report2015.pdf>
 

India Says No  to Obama Climate Deal

During President Obama 's visit to India he wanted it to make specific commitments including a peak year for a new climate treaty to be signed at Paris later this year. But India refused as it feared that would have resulted in the world putting India in the same bracket as China on CO2  emissions. China is the world 's biggest CO2  emitter, while India is fourth, with per capita emissions one-third those of China 's. Instead, the visit ended with a modest joint statement that set equally modest goals on clean energy and climate change.
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/no-indo-us-climate-deal-india-not-willing-to-treated-at-par-with-china-on-carbon-emissions/article1-1310900.aspx>
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/28/why-india-didnt-follow-chinas-green-lead/>
 

Paris Climate Summit: Missing 2 °C Target Would Not Be Failure 

Positioning themselves for a modest outcome at next December 's climate summit in Paris, the EU and UN climate chiefs said that they don 't expect a legally-binding treaty keeping global warming to 2 °C. Instead, they want ambitious  pledges on emissions reductions in a multi-year effort that will keep the UN process going. The EU will reveal its pledge on February 25.
 
In a further indication of her hopes for a drawn-out process, UN climate chief Christiana Figures said: This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time  to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 - you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation. 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/04/paris-climate-summit-missing-global-warming-target-would-not-be-failure>
<http://www.rtcc.org/2015/02/04/europe-to-reveal-un-climate-deal-pledge-on-february-25/>
<http://www.unric.org/en/latest-un-buzz/29623-figueres-first-time-the-world-economy-is-transformed-intentionally>
 

EPA Email Shows Desperate Climate Change Agenda

An internal email to top officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, obtained through FOI, noted that The number of Americans who say the global warming threat has been exaggerated is at an all-time high,  and urged the agency to shift its emphasis to respiratory illness justifications which will make this issue real for many Americans who would otherwise oppose many of our regulatory actions.  Thus the EPA pivoted from climate-based anti-fossil fuel arguments focused on CO2  to unrelated regulatory justifications based on particulate emissions.
<http://www.newsmax.com/LarryBell/climate-warming-epa-fuel/2015/02/02/id/622081/>  
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/26/outed-by-foia-epa-strategy-memo-reveals-deep-flaws-in-the-integrity-of-the-agency-and-lack-of-integrity-of-the-press/>
<https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/march-09-epa-strategy-memo-to-lpj.pdf>
 

Climate Grief

Joanne Nova has some fun with reactions of true believers having to deal with watching the wholesale destruction of the planet,  a public that doesn 't care and media that aren 't interested. One 3,000-word essay by an NGO stated: Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.  A professor wrote: My overwhelming emotion is anger; anger that is fuelled not so much by ignorance, but by greed and profiteering at the expense of future generations. There 's an angry professor calling other scientists who disagree greedy, lying bastards.   
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/climate-grief-believers-mourning-its-denial-and-anger-but-it-sure-isnt-science/>
 

How Green and Peaceful Really Is Greenpeace?

For the best part of 50 years, Greenpeace 's campaigning has brought it astonishing wealth and almost impeded access to decision makers. However, Andrew Montford wonders if, looking back over the NGO 's actions of the past few years, the wheels are finally coming off Greenpeace. Its members have issued threats of violence; some of its activists caused irreparable damage to the Nazca Lines World Heritage site in Peru as part of a publicity stunt; a Greenpeace director was discovered commuting to work in Amsterdam by air from the tax haven of Luxembourg; its former UK boss admitted running a campaign he knew to be inappropriate against genetically-modified crops.
<http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/andrewmontford/2015/02/how-green-and-how-peaceful-really-is-greenpeace/>

 

2015-01-25

 

US Senate Votes 98-1: Climate Change Is Real

Hoping to trap their opponents, Senate Democrats introduced an amendment to the Keystone XL bill stating that climate change is real and not a hoax.  Instead, the Republicans supported the amendment, with Sen. James Inhofe (author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future) co-sponsoring it. Two later votes on amendments linking humans to climate change were rejected.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/01/21/jim-inhofe-flips-the-script-on-democratic-climate-change-is-a-hoax-vote/>
<http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/230316-senate-votes-98-1-that-climate-change-is-real>
 

The Raw Politics of Climate Change in the US

In his State of the Union address President Obama said 2014 was the planet 's warmest year on record and claimed that the best scientists in the world  say human activities are changing the climate, predicting rising oceans, longer and hotter heat waves and dangerous droughts and floods. He even cited the Pentagon as stating that climate change poses immediate risks  to US national security.  
 
Judith Curry 's blog lists errors in the president 's statements, including one on extreme weather events that is not supported by the IPCC. She notes that he listens to scientists who either play politics with their expertise or respond to a political mandate from the administration. Dr. Curry hopes that one day there will be a grown up conversation about climate change, both natural and human caused.
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/21/raw-politics-of-climate-change-in-the-u-s/>
 

Defeat for the Green Lobby as EU Panel Rejects Cap-and-Trade Reforms

EU carbon permits fell 8% after the European Parliament 's industry committee rejected a recommendation to to withhold surplus allowances. The EU is seeking to strengthen its cap-and-trade emissions program after the price of permits plunged almost 70% since 2008 to levels that fail to deter industry from burning coal.  
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-22/eu-lawmakers-reject-carbon-fix-opinion-in-clash-over-ambition.html>
 

Countries Could Leave UN Climate Body if Paris Deal Falls Through

Todd Stern, the lead US climate envoy, fears a breakdown in negotiations if a new climate deal in Paris fails. If this occurs, people will start looking around for other ways to find international solutions.  This means that the UNFCCC   could be sidelined. Connie Hedegaard, the outgoing EU climate commissioner, warns that the credibility of the UN climate process is at stake.
<http://www.rtcc.org/2015/01/12/countries-could-leave-un-climate-body-if-paris-fails-todd-stern/>
<http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/us-climate-envoy-paris-114048.html>
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/28/connie-hedegaard-credibility-un-climate-process-2015-paris-talks>
 

The Effects of Cheaper Oil

According to HSBC cheaper oil could reduce the chance of a universal agreement on climate change policy this year. Lower oil prices mean increased energy consumption, as evidenced in the US by sharp spikes in demand for pickup trucks and SUVs. They also suggest a deflationary world economy and scarcer public sector funding for alternative energy.  
<http://www.cnbc.com/id/102323772#.>
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-08/oil-plunge-seen-eroding-emissions-ambition-carbon-climate.html>
 

India Cracks Down on Green NGOs for Harming Economic Security

Greenpeace and other US environmental groups have been trying to save  India from global warming, but the government is cracking down on them for protesting the use of coal-fired electricity, the country 's biggest source of energy. Last year India 's Intelligence Bureau issued a report declaring Greenpeace a potential threat to national economic security  for creating obstacles to India 's energy plans and pressuring the country to use only renewable energy. Recently the government has barred a Greenpeace staff member from travelling to London to speak to British lawmakers about alleged violations by a British-registered energy company.
 
With a quarter of its 1.2 billion people lacking electricity, India rejects arguments by green activists that it must move away from coal energy.  
<http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/14/india-cracks-down-on-greenpeace-for-harming-its-economic-security/>
<http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-crackdown-greenpeace-20150113-story.html>
 

The Pope on Climate Change: Man Has Slapped Nature in the Face 

Pope Francis said on January 15 that he is convinced that global warming is "mostly" man-made and that he hopes his upcoming encyclical on the environment will encourage negotiators at a climate change meeting in Paris to make "courageous" decisions to protect God's creation. I don't know if it (human activity) is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face," he said. "We have in a sense taken over nature."
<http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/pope-climate-change-man-slapped-nature-face-28240834>
 

When Journalists Question Catastrophe

Donna Laframboise writes about the trials of zoologist and journalist Matt Ridley who, while accepting that the recent warming is real and mostly man-made, is treated as a pariah by his peers for the sin of not believing that climate change will lead to a catastrophe. As Dr. Ridley wrote in an article for The Times: This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics. 
 
Dr. Ridley first started off writing about the the threat of global warming. Then he began to change his mind when the climate models ' predictions failed, the hockey stick  graph controversy came to light, and the Climategate emails showed the scientific establishment 's reaction.
<http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/01/21/when-journalists-question-catastrophe/>
<http://www.thegwpf.com/matt-ridley-a-lukewarmer-against-dogmatism/>
 

Climate Change Falling off the Public Radar

As The Guardian sourly reports: In a critical year for action to prevent runaway climate change, one would hope the issue would rank high on chief executives ' list of business risks to worry about.  Unfortunately for the newspaper, PwC 's 18th annual global CEO survey, released to coincide with the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, failed to even ask 1,322 business leaders about their global warming concerns after only 10% registered concern the previous year. In fact, what leads the CEO 's list of concerns is over regulation.
<http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jan/20/global-warming-business-risks-government-regulation-taxes>
 

Climate Alarmism as a Doomsday Cult

Appearing on a radio show, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen discussed the religious nature of the climate alarmism movement. He said: As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that 's what 's happening here.  Think about it,  he said. You 've led an unpleasant life, you haven 't led a very virtuous life, but now you 're told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It 's salvation! 
 
Dr. Lindzen considers himself lucky to have gain tenure just as the climate change movement was beginning, because now non-believers are often ostracized in academia.  
<http://www.thegwpf.com/richard-lindzen-climate-alarmism-is-a-doomsday-cult/>
 

Global Temperature Stalls for Another Year

According to NASA global temperature database 2014 was technically a record beating  2010 by the small margin of 0.02 °C. The NASA press release is highly misleading saying that 2014 is a record without giving the actual 2014 figure, or any other year, or its associated error.In reality of course it is no record at all as the error of the measurements is about +/- 0.1 °C showing the NASA/GISS statement to go against the normal treatment of observational data and its errors. Talk of a record is therefore scientifically and statistically meaningless.
 
<http://www.thegwpf.com/2014-global-temperature-stalls-another-year/>
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/16/does-the-uptick-in-global-surface-temperatures-in-2014-help-the-growing-difference-between-climate-models-and-reality/>
<http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/16/warmest-year-pause-and-all-that/>
<http://joannenova.com.au/2015/01/2014-noaa-nasa-produce-weakest-science-on-hottest-fantasy-in-modern-record/>
<https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/wmo-demolish-noaanasa-claims-of-hottest-year/>
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html>
 

The Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Policy

Much climate policy is based on an ethical approach to intergenerational equity, namely that the current generation should avoid passing on costs to future ones. But, as Andrew Montford points out in this essay, the result has been an array of unintended and unethical consequences, e.g.: clearing of rainforests, human rights abuses, transfers of wealth from poor to rich, destruction of landscapes, fuel poverty and death.
<http://www.thegwpf.com/new-paper-unintended-consequences-of-climate-policies-unethical/>
<http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/01/Unintended-Consequences1.pdf>
 

The Merchants of Smear

In an essay Paul Driessen policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow begins with how climate disaster proponents use the community agitator 's playbook: Never admit error; just change your terminology and attack again. Expand your base by giving potential allies financial and political reasons to join your cause. Pick enemy targets, personalize them, polarize them and vilify them.
 
Mr. Driessen follows that with examples of how the playbook works, referring to a policy brief, Merchants of Smear, by Russell Cook for the Heartland Institute, that begins with the statement: Global warming alarmists rely on character assassination as the central defense for their issue. How did that strategy work, and why does it fail?  This brief summarizes the whole issue in three, easy-to-remember points:
  1. A scientific consensus says the debate is settled, an unassailable fact, end of story.
  2. Skeptic scientists corrupted by the big coal and oil industries seek to reposition  the public into believing global warming is not a fact.
  3. Journalists should not give equal time to skeptic scientists because of the first two points.
<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/18/the-merchants-of-smear-3/>
<http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/10-06-14_cook_merchants_of_smear.pdf>
 

Susan Crockford: Faux Polar Bear Figures

Polar bears are a conservation success story. However, you 'd never know that from the output of polar bear researchers, who lately seem to have forgotten that the most crucial part of their job is the unbiased collection and presentation of scientific data. The most recent example of this came to light in a peer-reviewed paper by the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PGSG) that was hyped by the media. The PBSG used computer models and a cut-off year of 2010 to produce a misleadingly-low population estimate. During 2004-06 the polar bear population crashed, due to thick ice during the critical spring feeding period. By 2012 the population had recovered.
<http://business.financialpost.com/2015/01/15/faux-polar-bear-figures/>
 

Roy Spencer: How the Climate System Works

Dr. Spencer explains that workings of the climate system in terms of what happens to the sunlight energy, mostly in the visible spectrum, that reaches the Earth. Thirty percent of it gets reflected back into space and the rest is absorbed. This causes the temperatures of the oceans, land and atmosphere to increase until they emit enough infrared (IR) energy to balance the incoming solar energy. IR-emitting and IR-absorbing gases in the atmosphere (primarily water vapour and CO2) make the upper atmosphere cooler and the lower one warmer, analogous to the effect of a blanket.  
<http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/01/how-the-climate-system-works-for-dummies/>

 

2015-01-11

 

Threats to Obama 's Climate Efforts from GOP-run Congress

The new Republican-controlled Congress has several ways to frustrate President Obama 's climate-change agenda. He has threatened to veto any hostile bills on climate reaching his desk. However, his biggest steps rely on existing laws, and Congress could block them by requiring the president to certify that his power plant regulations won 't drive up power prices or eliminate jobs, defunding  EPA implementation of the regulations, or using the Congressional Review Act to block the regulations altogether. Congress will likely refuse the $3 billion pledged to the UN 's Green Climate Fund, which would be a devastating blow to hopes for a climate treaty next December.
<http://news.yahoo.com/gop-preps-plan-block-obama-climate-2015-194356070--politics.html>
<http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/19832-congress-may-block-obama-s-3-billion-pledge-to-un-climate-fund>
 

More Predictions of Coming Climate Disasters from the Medical Profession

The Huffington Post is pleased with a survey of members of the American Thoracic Society that found that an 89% majority believed that climate change is happening and 74% agreed with the statement: physicians should have a significant advocacy role in relation to climate change and health.  Physicians, because of their greater contact with the general public, are considered more effective advocates than climate scientists.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/07/doctors-climate-change-he_n_6432914.html>
 

Pachauri: IPCC Future Not Tied to Paris Climate Deal

The IPCC 's chairman Rajendra Pachauri assured the world that, regardless of whether or not countries arrive at a climate deal next December in Paris, the IPCC 's work will continue. This apparently was to quell speculation over the group 's future after having submitted its AR5 Synthesis Report. In February member countries will decide whether the IPCC will come out with AR6.
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Pachauri-IPCC-future-not-tied-to-Paris-climate-deal/articleshow/45683050.cms>
 

Scientists must be emotionally charged  about Climate Change

Chris Rapley, a professor of climate science at University College London, is urging colleagues to ditch academic, fact-based approaches  on the subject in favour of charged  narratives. He said: There is a growing recognition among the science community that results that are emotionally, ideologically or politically charged need to be communicated using a different approach to the traditional information deficit ' method. 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/scientists-must-be-emotionally-charged-about-climate-change-to-highlight-its-dangers-claims-expert-9950692.html>
 

Climate Change Scaremongering Won 't Trouble Oil Junkies

According to a team of respected researchers at University College London 's Institute for Sustainable Resources, we may all need to abandon our cars, switch off our electric lights and turn off the central heating urgently to avoid environmental catastrophe. However, according to the author of this Telegraph article, scaremongering people into conserving energy won 't work, because, according to the International Energy Agency, the world is expected to need more hydrocarbons over the next 50 years to power growing economies.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/11334289/Climate-change-scaremongering-wont-trouble-oil-junkies.html>
 

The Pope 's Mistaken Moral Calculus on Global Warming

Praising the UN 's recent climate treaty efforts in Lima and promising to issue an encyclical letter to the world 's bishops, Pope Francis has decided to make global warming an important papal cause in 2015. According to this article in the Heartland newspaper, the Pope has been misinformed on the climate issue and should focus his efforts on alleviating poverty and suffering, by alleviating energy poverty. The Climate Depot article contains numerous links to reactions to the Pope 's announcement.
<http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/01/02/popes-mistaken-moral-calculus-global-warming>
<http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/12/31/watch-morano-on-fox-news-on-pope-francis-climate-on-every-metric-from-polar-bears-on-down-the-global-warming-narrative-has-weakened/>
 

Climate Change Cassandras Need to Read More

Columnist George Will has some advice for catastrophic global warming Cassandras who are urging wagering vast wealth and curtailment of liberty in the cause of correcting the climate. He refers to two recent books dealing with the climate-caused crises of the 14th and 17th centuries. Neither book supports those who believe human behaviour caused the climate changes.
<http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2015/01/will_climate_change_cassandras_need_to_read_more>
 

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