From the UK Telegraph:

30 Aug 2011

Much of Britain suffered the coldest summer for almost two decades, Met Office statistics show.

As Britons return to work today after a soggy Bank Holiday weekend, official weather data reveals that average temperatures were significantly down on recent years.

The UK’s average temperature from June 1 to August 15 was only 57F (13.9C) – the lowest for 13 years.

For central England the average was 59F (15C), making it the coolest summer since 1993.

Helen Waite, a Met Office forecaster, said: “The average temperature for central England this summer has been just 15C – this sort of temperature is normally typical of September.

“Generally speaking, you would expect to see temperatures of at least 17C for this time of year.”

Personal comments:  Funny how THESE stories are never picked up by the Associated Press.  Science calls this type of error a ‘selection bias,’ where only one outcome receives attention, and outcomes that refute the desired hypothesis are discarded as irrelevant.  This is but one reason that journalists should be educated– and one glaring proof that they tend not to be, at least anymore.  I hate to say it, but people are doing the right thing by abandoning their subscriptions, as you are more likely to be misinformed than informed by media from this time in history.

The BBC recently admitted to tilting the climate change discussion by giving preferential reporting to stories supporting global climate change.  This situation is a perfect example of the larger debate over climate change– of how political correctness can lead to scientific theory becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Science runs on grant funding.  Every grad student, post-doc, assistant professor, and tenured faculty depends on grants to pay the bills– and to impress the establishment where they are working to offer academic advancement.  To get funding, one must know where the money is– and where it is not.  Asking for funding to show the ABSENCE of climate change is a sure path to poverty– and to being labelled a heretic.

On the other hand, asking for money to show evidence for the emperor’s new clothes will guarantee that the money will flow in.  This creates a systemic bias where only one outcome is expected and published– and negative findings are ignored.  Twenty years ago, everyone knew that breast implants caused autoimmune disorders;  nobody did research to prove the opposite, and if you study anything long enough, you’ll have a few positive findings.  For those who don’t know the rest of the story, after 2 billion dollars were paid out to ‘survivors’ and attorneys, the matter was put to rest– with a huge study that showed very clearly that there was NO actual connection between implants and autoimmune disease.  Science is filled with similar examples.  Climate change is only another.

UPROAR AS BBC MUZZLES CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTICS

THE BBC was criticised by climate change sceptics yesterday after it emerged that their views will get less coverage because they differ from mainline scientific opinion.

In a report by its governing body, the BBC Trust, the corporation was urged to focus less on opponents of the “majority consensus” in its programmes.

It said coverage should not be tailored to represent a “false balance” of opinion if one side came from a minority group.

The report was partly based on an independent review of coverage by Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London.

Although he found no evidence of bias in BBC output, he suggested where there is a “scientific consensus” it should not hunt out opponents purely to balance the story.

He highlighted climate change as an example along with the controversy over the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine potentially leading to autism.

On climate change, Professor Jones said there had been a “drizzle of criticism of BBC coverage” arising from “a handful of journalists who have taken it upon themselves to keep disbelief alive”.

The report says: “In its early days, two decades ago, there was a genuine scientific debate about the reality of climate change. Now, there is general agreement that warming is a fact even if there remain uncertainties about how fast, and how much, the temperature might rise.”

But critics accused Professor Jones of using the report as a cover to “push the BBC’s green agenda”.

Among them are former Tory Chancellor Lord Lawson, who was accused by the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, of making “incorrect” claims in An Appeal To Reason, the peer’s book on climate change.

Lord Lawson, chairman of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the fact that carbon dioxide levels were rising leading to global warming was not under dispute. However, he added, its extent and effect could not be explained by majority scientific opinion alone.

He said: “The BBC is already extremely one-sided on this issue. They have a settled view which is politically correct.

“The idea that because scientific opinion falls largely on one side you can’t have a debate is outrageous. Because there’s a strong majority in basic science doesn’t mean the issue is off the table, yet the BBC says it should be.”

The foundation’s director, Dr Benny Peiser, said the report would lead to biased coverage of climate change and stifle any real debate.

He said: “This is nothing the BBC has not been doing for the past 10 years, however. They are completely biased on the issue of climate change and this is nothing more than an effort to push their green agenda.”

Dr David Whitehouse, the foundation’s editor and a former BBC science correspondent, said the corporation had “lost the plot” when it came to science journalism.

He said the corporation was “grouping sceptics with deniers” which would result in a lack of valid scientific input to its reports.

He said: “A sceptic is not a denier, all good scientists should be sceptics. The BBC has got itself into a complete muddle.

“In seeking to get the science right it has missed the journalism which is about asking awkward questions and shaking the tree.”

But the BBC Trust defended the report. A spokesman said: “The report is not suggesting that climate change sceptics will not have a place on the BBC in future.

“The point Professor Jones makes is that the scientific consensus is that it is caused by human activity. Therefore the BBC’s coverage needs to give less weight to those who oppose this view, and reflect the fact that the debate has moved on to how to deal with climate change.”

Everything changes– including, perhaps especially, our weather.  Over the last couple years, climate change alarmists have realized that the facts regarding ‘global warming’ do not support their economic and political aims (which include income redistribution and larger government).  So they have seized upon a quirk of human nature to trick people into supporting their cause– the tendency to assign reasons for random events.

When a significant weather event occurs that supports a person’s ideas, those ideas gain strength.  Events that are inconsistent with those ideas are discarded, rather than being applied to the ideas to introduce change and knowledge.  This is just how we are, and how we will always be;  we are more comfortable with reasons– even incorrect reasons– than with randomness.

This quirk of human nature is what spawned the change in strategy by the left, from talking about ‘global warming’ to instead talking about ‘climate change’.  They recognized that there is one thing about climate that will always be true– it changes.  And with their new strategy, they can post headlines for any weather event.  Too hot?  Must be ‘global climate change.’  Too cold?  climate change!  Too wet?  Too dry, too….. perfect?  Climate change!

Watch for this strategy going forward.  And be aware of your own tendency to see reason for things that are random.  The following editorial presents evidence for a climate that is changing–just as it always has.

The Weather is Not Getting Weirder

By ANNE JOLIS

Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter’s fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December’s blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. “There’s no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather,” adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.

We do know that carbon dioxide and other gases trap and re-radiate heat. We also know that humans have emitted ever-more of these gases since the Industrial Revolution. What we don’t know is exactly how sensitive the climate is to increases in these gases versus other possible factors—solar variability, oceanic currents, Pacific heating and cooling cycles, planets’ gravitational and magnetic oscillations, and so on.

Given the unknowns, it’s possible that even if we spend trillions of dollars, and forgo trillions more in future economic growth, to cut carbon emissions to pre-industrial levels, the climate will continue to change—as it always has.

That’s not to say we’re helpless. There is at least one climate lesson that we can draw from the recent weather: Whatever happens, prosperity and preparedness help. North Texas’s ice storm wreaked havoc and left hundreds of football fans stranded, cold, and angry. But thanks to modern infrastructure, 21st century health care, and stockpiles of magnesium chloride and snow plows, the storm caused no reported deaths and Dallas managed to host the big game on Sunday.

Compare that outcome to the 55 people who reportedly died of pneumonia, respiratory problems and other cold-related illnesses in Bangladesh and Nepal when temperatures dropped to just above freezing last winter. Even rich countries can be caught off guard: Witness the thousands stranded when Heathrow skimped on de-icing supplies and let five inches of snow ground flights for two days before Christmas. Britain’s GDP shrank by 0.5% in the fourth quarter of 2010, for which the Office of National Statistics mostly blames “the bad weather.”

Arguably, global warming was a factor in that case. Or at least the idea of global warming was. The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation charges that British authorities are so committed to the notion that Britain’s future will be warmer that they have failed to plan for winter storms that have hit the country three years running.

A sliver of the billions that British taxpayers spend on trying to control their climes could have bought them more of the supplies that helped Dallas recover more quickly. And, with a fraction of that sliver of prosperity, more Bangladeshis and Nepalis could have acquired the antibiotics and respirators to survive their cold spell.

A comparison of cyclones Yasi and Nargis tells a similar story: As devastating as Yasi has been, Australia’s infrastructure, medicine, and emergency protocols meant the Category 5 storm has killed only one person so far. Australians are now mulling all the ways they could have better protected their property and economy.

But if they feel like counting their blessings, they need only look to the similar cyclone that hit the Irrawaddy Delta in 2008. Burma’s military regime hadn’t allowed for much of an economy before the cyclone, but Nargis destroyed nearly all the Delta had. Afterwards, the junta blocked foreign aid workers from delivering needed water purification and medical supplies. In the end, the government let Nargis kill more than 130,000 people.

Global-warming alarmists insist that economic activity is the problem, when the available evidence show it to be part of the solution. We may not be able to do anything about the weather, extreme or otherwise. But we can make sure we have the resources to deal with it when it comes.

Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe

By MATT PATTERSON

If this keeps up, no one’s going to trust any scientists.

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world’s governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium — and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to “save the planet.”

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of “the best scientists and engineers worldwide” (as the group’s own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give “high-quality advice to international bodies,” has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices — and found them badly wanting.

For example, the IPCC’s much-vaunted Fourth Assessment Report claimed in 2007 that Himalayan glaciers were rapidly melting, and would possibly be gone by the year 2035. The claim was actually false — yet the IPCC cited it as proof of man-made global warming.

Then there’s the IPCC’s earlier prediction in 2007 — which it claimed to have “high confidence” in — that global warming could lead to a 50 percent reduction in the rain-fed agricultural capacity of Africa.

Such a dramatic decrease in food production in an already poor continent would be a terrifying prospect, and undoubtedly lead to the starvation of millions. But the InterAcademy Council investigation found that this IPCC claim was also based on weak evidence.

Overall, the IAC slammed the IPCC for reporting “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach ‘high confidence’ to the statements.” The critics note “many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective or not expressed clearly.

Some IPCC practices can only be called shoddy. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges ‘were not adequately considered,’ the InterAcademy Council’s investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report.”

Yet the Himalayan claim wasn’t based on peer-reviewed scientific data, or on any data — but on spec ulation in a phone interview by a single scientist.

Was science even a real concern for the IPCC? In January, the Sunday Times of London reported that, based in large part on the fraudulent glacier story, “[IPCC Chairman] Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi, was awarded up to 310,000 pounds by the Carnegie Corp. . . . and the lion’s share of a 2.5 million pound EU grant funded by European taxpayers.”

Thus, the Times concluded, “EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognize as bogus.”
All this comes on top of last year’s revelation of the “Climategate” e-mails, which revealed equally shoddy practices (and efforts to suppress criticism) by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — perhaps the single most important source of data that supposedly proved the most alarming claims of global warming.

Al Gore and many other warming alarmists have insisted that “the debate is over” — that the science was “settled.” That claim is now in shreds — though the grants are still flowing, and advocates still hope Congress will pass some version of the economically ruinous “cap and trade” anti-warming bill.

What does the best evidence now tell us? That man-made global warming is a mere hypothesis that has been inflated by both exaggeration and downright malfeasance, fueled by the awarding of fat grants and salaries to any scientist who’ll produce the “right” results.

The warming “scientific” community, the Climategate emails reveal, is a tight clique of like-minded scientists and bureaucrats who give each other jobs, publish each other’s papers — and conspire to shut out any point of view that threatens to derail their gravy train.

Such behavior is perhaps to be expected from politicians and government functionaries. From scientists, it’s a travesty.

In the end, grievous harm will have been done not just to individual scientists’ reputations, but to the once-sterling reputation of science itself. For that, we will all suffer.

Matt Patterson is editor of Green Watch, a publication of the Capital Research Center .

Is there any doubt about the real motivation behind Soros and Obama when they talk ‘climate’?  There shouldn’t be.  From Bloomberg:

By Alex Morales and Jim Efstathiou Jr. – Nov 5, 2010

At least $65 billion might be raised by taxing foreign-exchange transactions and auctioning pollution permits, a United Nations panel said today in a report recommending ways to finance aid for fighting global warming.

The panel, which includes billionaire investor George Soros and Larry Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, said selling carbon-emissions permits would generate $38 billion and a financial transactions tax an additional $27 billion, according to the report released today.

The findings are intended to guide envoys at UN climate talks that start this month in Mexico as they seek ways to pay for $100 billion in climate aid that was pledged by 2020 to poor nations at last year’s summit in Copenhagen. The report found that the goal is “challenging but feasible” to achieve.

“Without agreement on finance, we will not be able to reach agreement on other issues for climate change,” Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s prime minister and co-chairman of the advisory group, said at a press conference in New York. “Now we need the political will to take the decisions.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed the panel, called the High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, in February. It’s led by Stoltenberg and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. The 21-member group also includes Soros, Summers and Deutsche Bank AG Vice Chairman Caio Koch- Weser.

The report didn’t specify what financial transactions would be covered by the tax beyond saying the focus would be on international currency sales.

‘Court Of Government’

“The ball is really now in the court of governments to move forward on generating these resources,” David Waskow, senior adviser on climate finance for the development charity Oxfam International, said in a telephone interview from Washington. “One can raise substantial public finance from public sources and do it in a way that’s not going to place additional pressure on national budgets and taxpayers.”

The findings would add to the weight behind calls for a tax on financial speculation, sometimes termed a Tobin tax after James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economist who first suggested the idea in 1971.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and labor groups including the U.K. Trades Union Congress have supported the idea. President Barack Obama’s administration opposes it. A tax of 0.05 percent on financial transactions may raise as much as $700 billion a year, according to WWF, a Washington-based global environmental activist group.

A financial transactions tax would be “difficult to implement universally” and therefore “only feasible to implement among interested countries,” the panel said in its report.

‘Most Exposed’

Developing nations are “the most exposed” to the impacts of warming, Nicholas Stern, former chief adviser on climate change to the U.K. government and a member of the advisory panel, said in a statement. The UN in 2007 found that while developing countries have contributed the least to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they’re the most at risk from the effects of climate change, especially small, island states and nations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“As Africans, we’ve contributed virtually nothing to the environmental mess our planet is in,” Meles said at the press conference by telephone from Ethiopia. “We will, however, suffer the most.”

The panel assumed a carbon price of as much as $25 a ton on emissions in the levy it suggested. An additional $5 billion might be gained from a tax on carbon offsets in the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which polluters buy to make up for emissions elsewhere, according to the study. Private offsets may generate as much as $14 billion.

‘Necessary Transformation’

“Concerted global action and a carbon price of at least $25 is required to achieve the necessary transformation in the global economy,” U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said in a statement. Huhne is a member of the advisory group.

An additional $12 billion would come from a levy on shipping and aviation, the report showed. Waskow said the levies on transportation need to be structured so as not to harm developing nations.

Sources of finance identified in the report included direct contributions from government budgets, a measure it said may generate the full $100 billion while being politically “challenging.”

The panel also looked at a “wires charge” on electricity generation, which it said might provide $5 billion; the removal of fossil fuel-subsidies, which may raise $8 billion; and a carbon tax, which would garner $10 billion. Private finance could provide a net $24 billion, it said.

Soros Proposal Shelved

A proposal Soros made at last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, that the richest nations use $100 billion of foreign-exchange reserves to help developing nations fight climate change, was deemed not “politically acceptable” by the panel. The money is denominated in what are called special drawing rights, the IMF unit of accounting based on the dollar, yen, pound and euro.

Special drawing rights, created in 1969 to replace gold for large cross-border exchanges, are used by the IMF and other international organizations to account for financial transactions in different countries.

“We are simply asking those who created the problem to stop before it becomes too late,” Meles said. “The prospects for sanity and justice do not appear good, but I refuse to give up.”

Alarmist warnings about the planet are falling flat, according to Washington Times’ editors.

The editorial below from the Washington Times nicely summarizes the state of the current debate over global climate change.  Thank goodness for history!  How fun it will be to look back on Gore’s ‘inconvenient truth’ and marvel at the folly of humanity– that half of a country’s population can be taken in by a politician posing as a scientist… a politician whose hypocrisy is on full display.  “How did he do it?” people will say…. 

The shame is that Gore and and his friends on the Left will likely find a way to convince the media that they NEVER predicted all of those things…  that is what the left usually does, changing stance with the wind and lying about former positions.  I’m keeping ‘inconvenient truth’ around– for laughs.  The article:

Switching terminology from “global warming” to “climate change” to newly favored “global climatic disruption” was supposed to help revive the environmental left’s plunging poll numbers. It hasn’t worked. Nature has, inconveniently, failed to cooperate, with dire predictions of upcoming catastrophes falling flat. Desperation pervades a propaganda effort that has finally gone too far.

The radical green movement is all about scaring the public into adopting unpopular policy initiatives, such as hefty taxes on important sources of energy and increased government direction of our lives through regulation. The Chicken Little strategy can work if the possibility of major disruptions such as a devastating Katrina-style hurricane push people into embracing protection from Washington. Unfortunately for the scaremongers, the disruptions just aren’t happening.

On Thursday, Florida State University researcher Ryan N. Maue updated his index of tropical cyclone activity to reflect the fact that worldwide hurricane activity has reached a 33-year low. The Western North Pacific has seen tropical cyclone activity at a level 78 percent below normal, proving those seas haven’t been calmer since detailed records were first kept in 1945. Accurately describing this period of global climatic tranquility isn’t going to compel action.

That’s why British screenwriter Richard Curtis released a video on Sept. 30 for the “10:10″ campaign, which is intended to encourage people to cut their personal carbon-dioxide emissions by 10 percent per year starting in 2010. The short “No Pressure” film used techniques right out of a horror flick to depict a schoolteacher blowing up two children who failed to show any interest in pestering their parents to install insulation or squiggly light bulbs to “keep the planet safe for everyone.”

The 10:10 campaign issued an apology for the shocking video, which critics now dub “Splattergate” in reference to the film’s excessive gore. The incident highlights the degree to which supposedly mainstream environmentalists think mankind is a blight on the planet. This is the same radical ideology that motivated last month’s hostage-taking incident at the Discovery Channel.

No less than President Obama’s own top science adviser, John P. Holdren, is a long-term adherent to this strange doctrine. In 1969, Mr. Holdren co-authored an article for the journal BioScience entitled, “Population and Panaceas: A Technological Perspective,” which essentially predicted we’d run out of food by the year 2000. He warned that “man’s present technology is inadequate to the task of maintaining the world’s burgeoning billions, even under the most optimistic assumptions.” Just to stay even, Mr. Holdren calculated global food production would have to double or triple – an impossibility, he claimed, requiring a mass-sterilization plan.

Mr. Holdren’s dire prediction never came true, as none of the left’s self-indulgent fantasies do. The clock is indeed ticking; time is running out for the alarmists in academia, Hollywood and the White House.

From the Washington Times:

Noticeably absent from President Obama’s latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through “green” energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration’s original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful.

The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects – combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. – appear to have killed the administration’s appetite for pushing green projects as an economic cure.

After months of hype about the potential for green energy to stimulate job growth and lead the economy out of a recession, the results turned out to be disappointing, if not dismal. About $92 billion – more than 11 percent – of Mr. Obama’s original $814 billion of stimulus funds were targeted for renewable energy projects when the measure was pushed through Congress in early 2009.

Even some of the administration’s liberal allies have expressed skepticism over the original stimulus package’s use of green investments as a way to spur quick employment growth at home.

“Spending on renewables is slow to get out of the door. Leaks to foreign companies is an inadequate driver of jobs and growth and may not create a strong exporting industry,” said Samuel Sherraden, an economic analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based progressive think tank.

Only about $20 billion of the allotted funds have been spent – the slowest disbursement rate for any category of stimulus spending. Private analysts are skeptical of White House estimates that the green funding created 190,700 jobs.

The Department of Energy estimated that 82,000 jobs have been created and has acknowledged that as much as 80 percent of some green programs, including $2.3 billion of manufacturing tax credits, went to foreign firms that employed workers primarily in countries including China, South Korea and Spain, rather than in the United States.

Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, said much of the green stimulus funding was “squandered.”

“Large grants to build green buildings don’t generate many new jobs, except for a few architects,” he said. “Subsidies for windmills and solar panels created lots of jobs in China,” but few at home.

In one of several embarrassing disclosures for the administration, a report last fall by American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 11 U.S. wind farms used their grants to purchase 695 out of 982 wind turbines from overseas suppliers.

That report raised alarms in Congress. Leading Democrats insisted that the money be spent at home, but restrictions on the funds proved impossible without the specter of a trade war.

While lawmakers fumed, economists were not surprised that green energy companies used the funds to purchase inexpensive Chinese wind turbines. Renewable-technology firms are under the gun to bring down costs so they can compete with cheaper traditional fuels, such as gas and coal, for electricity customers.

But without restrictions that prohibit the funds from being diverted overseas, Mr. Morici said, any further spending on green energy would only continue to enrich foreign producers. Chinese manufacturers in particular have taken the lead in making renewable-energy components, just as they have come to dominate many other industries because of advantages derived from state subsidies and the country’s abundant pool of cheap labor.

In a trade complaint against China on Thursday, the United Steelworkers union charged that Beijing is trying to corner the market on green jobs by showering billions of dollars of subsidies on domestic producers and discriminating against foreign firms and goods.

With growing proof that green jobs are heading overseas, even administration sympathizers and environmental advocates have largely abandoned the idea of pushing green funding as a way to stimulate the economy.

While he requested no additional stimulus funding for renewable-energy projects this week, Mr. Obama now portrays his green-energy agenda as good for the economy and jobs in the long term, as the government assists the private sector in evolving away from dependence on oil and coal.

“We see a future,” he said in a speech Wednesday in Cleveland, “where we build a homegrown clean-energy industry, because I don’t want to see new solar panels or electric cars or advanced batteries manufactured in Europe or in Asia. I want to see them made right here in the U.S. of A. by American workers.”

Time magazine recently reported that the White House last year saw the stimulus bill as a vehicle for enacting the president’s ambitious, long-term environmental program, knowing that most of the economic effect would be felt years from now rather than immediately when the economy needed it.

The New America Foundation’s Mr. Sherraden said it was “unwise” of the administration and congressional Democrats “to rely so heavily on the renewable-energy sector to drive the recovery.”

The progressive think tank and other allies urged the administration to refocus its efforts on traditional road and transit projects, which economists say are more likely to provide quick jolts to the jobs market. The administration appears to have followed that advice in advancing a $50 billion program for building roads, transit and rail as the centerpiece of its latest stimulus plan.

“Green-energy projects in the United States are unusually slow to roll out because the industry is small and rife with political and market uncertainty,” Mr. Sherraden said.

Despite the massive infusion of government funding in recent years, renewable technologies have captured only a tiny share of the energy market and remain heavily dependent on government funding to be viable. Because of the need to constantly renew government funding, private investors remain skittish about committing to new projects.

Mr. Sherraden said the problem with job leakage overseas promised only to get worse, because governments in Europe and Japan – which in years past spent lavishly on renewable energy – now are drastically cutting back their green subsidies as they try to pare enormous budget deficits.

With the United States left as the only major developed country still flooding the market with government funding, competition from overseas suppliers promised to be more fierce than ever, Mr. Sherraden said.

“It is impossible to guarantee that clean-energy stimulus is not leaked abroad,” he said. “We have to recognize that we are funding job-creation programs in Germany, Spain, Japan and China.”

Even if the green-energy funding is viewed as a long-term investment to replace dwindling reserves of oil rather than as pure economic stimulus, advocates have greatly exaggerated the benefits, said Kerry Lynch, senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

“For all the hype over wind and solar, the reality is that they contribute very little to our energy supply,” she said, saying that wind accounts for less than 1 percent of total U.S. energy production and solar power for just one-tenth of 1 percent. “Together, they could power the country for all of three days a year.”

Don’t you wish we had honest news in the US?  An interesting article from the BBC:

By Pallava Bagla in Delhi

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″. The authors deny the claims.

The Himalayan Glacier: Around for another 300 years

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and “a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology”.

The Himalayas hold the planet’s largest body of ice outside the polar caps – an estimated 12,000 cubic kilometres of water.

They feed many of the world’s great rivers – the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra – on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

‘Catastrophic rate’

In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

“Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035,” the report said.

It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.

But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.

“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates – its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350,” Mr Kotlyakov’s report said.

Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035″.

“I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future,” says Mr Cogley.

He said the error might also have its origins in a 1999 news report on retreating glaciers in the New Scientist magazine.

The article quoted Syed I Hasnain, the then chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice’s (ICSI) Working group on Himalayan glaciology, as saying that most glaciers in the Himalayan region “will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming”.

When asked how this “error” could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the “outer year” for shrinkage of glaciers.

They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist.

Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.

Murari Lal, a climate expert who was one of the leading authors of the 2007 IPCC report, denied it had its facts wrong about melting Himalayan glaciers.

But he admitted the report relied on non-peer reviewed – or ‘unpublished’ – documents when assessing the status of the glaciers.

‘Alarmist’

Recently India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a study on Himalayan glaciers that suggested that they may be not melting as much due to global warming as it is widely feared.

He accused the IPCC of being “alarmist”.

Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as “voodoo science” and said the IPCC was a “sober body” whose work was verified by governments.

But in a joint statement some the world’s leading glaciologists who are also participants to the IPCC have said: “This catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology… has caused much confusion that could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected.”

Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich also said the IPCC statement on Himalayan glaciers had caused “some major confusion in the media”.

“Under strict consideration of the IPCC rules, it should actually not have been published as it is not based on a sound scientific reference.

“From a present state of knowledge it is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades. I do not know of any scientific study that does support a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century.”

Pallava Bagla is science editor for New Delhi Television (NDTV) and author of Destination Moon – India’s quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond. 

Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as “voodoo science” and said the IPCC was a “sober body” whose work was verified by governments.

But in a joint statement some the world’s leading glaciologists who are also participants to the IPCC have said: “This catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology… has caused much confusion that could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected.”

Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich also said the IPCC statement on Himalayan glaciers had caused “some major confusion in the media”.

“Under strict consideration of the IPCC rules, it should actually not have been published as it is not based on a sound scientific reference.

“From a present state of knowledge it is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades. I do not know of any scientific study that does support a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century.”

Pallava Bagla is science editor for New Delhi Television (NDTV) and author of Destination Moon – India’s quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond.

There goes el nino!

Politicians like to pretend that climate is pretty straightforward… especially when their climate predictions benefit their pet projects or campaign fund-raising.  This year especially, they like to pretend that there is such a thing as ‘big oil’– a faceless giant, destroying the planet, unless the President of the US sweeps in to save the day by ‘kicking ass.’  Of course, only OUR asses will end up being kicked, through the double-whammy of higher energy prices (from cap and tax legislation), higher unemployment (from higher business taxes and other expenses that stifle growth), and higher taxes at the gas pump and on April 15th.    Funny how something so unpredictable– like climate– is so closely paired with something so predictable– like the current administrations love for government and tax revenue.

I came across this paragraph this morning from the Browning Newsletter:  

Amazing. It was the vanishing act that completely changes this year’s climate. The El Niño disappeared!

More Amazing. Last winter’s El Niño has already been one for the record books. It usually takes a year or more for the Tropical Pacific to gradually warm up from a cool La Niña to a balmy El Niño. Instead, last year the ocean flipped from one to the other in only three months. By June, the trade winds had weakened, the ocean waters had warmed and the globe began to experience typical El Niño weather.

Amazing continues. Now, against all expectations, the Pacific waters have cooled equally rapidly.

To say that this development is a surprise is an understatement. It was completely unexpected. Until mid-March, most oceanologists were expecting the Pacific to cool and the El Niño to fade out by June. Most models then predicted that the Pacific would remain neutral for the rest of the year. Instead, the temperatures plummeted and the El Niño was gone by the end of March. By the end of April, the temperatures had dropped from above average to below average. By now, the temperatures are -0.9°C (-1.6°F) below normal – technically cold enough to be classified as a La Niña if the cool temperatures continue.

For the full report, click here.

You’ll note that the consequences of this dramatic cooling will include more intense weather in some parts of the country and world, and less intense weather elsewhere.  It’s complicated.  It’s too complicated, unfortunately, for reporters to understand, so it will be ripe for picking by those with an agenda.  The violent weather will be blamed on global warming– even when the actual cause is global cooling in another part of the world. 

Don’t assume, just because someone has a microphone, that he/she knows more than you;  If you read the Browning Newsletter, I promise you that you will know more than any newscaster you’ll see on television.

Today there was a confluence of articles that has occurred in similar fashion since I started the blog and companion web page.  I’ll copy them below to show what I am talking about– basically we have the heaviest snow in years in Spain on the same day that Al Gore is out spewing his crazy rhetoric.  I remember a couple years ago, when Gore gave a major speech in NYC on one of the area’s coldest days in decades. 

The global warming loonies, of course, will say that the cold weather in Barcelona is just one more sign that the earth is warming.   They have created a world that could not have existed without the help of our mainstream media playing along– a world so hot that it is cooling. 

The first article from the UK Telegraph:

Barcelona hit with heaviest snowfall in 25 years

Schools were closed, roads were blocked and power was knocked as Barcelona was hit with its heaviest snowfall in 25 years.

Snowfalls of up to 50 centimetres (20 inches) were forecast for the worst affected areas of the region of Catalonia, prompting the regional government to cancel classes for more than 142,000 students at 476 public schools.

Spain: Warm enough for snow!

Power was lost in homes throughout the region, with energy company Fecsa-Endesa reporting 200,000 clients without electricity, mostly in the province of Girona.

Emergency services workers helped evacuate some 500 passengers who became trapped on trains traveling between Barcelona and Portbou, on the French border, which became stuck due to the lack of power, said regional interior minister Joan Boada.

Thousands of commuters were left scrambling for an alternative way to get home after the blizzard forced the suspension of bus services in Barcelona and the closure of five suburban train lines in the Mediterranean port city.

Barcelona city hall ordered the metro system to stay open all night to help people move around the city.

Traffic on over 60 roads in Catalonia was either prohibited or restricted. Spain’s border with France at La Jonquera was closed because of the snow, leaving some 4,000 trucks stranded, public television TVE reported.

While Barcelona’s El Prat airport was operating normally, 21 flights out of the airport in nearby Girona were cancelled and nine others were diverted to other cities due to the snow and strong winds, airport officials said.

The second article:

Gore still hot on his doomsday rhetoric

By Jeff Jacoby

THE CASE for global-warming alarmism is melting faster than those mythical disappearing Himalayan glaciers, but Al Gore isn’t backing down.

In a long op-ed piece for The New York Times the other day, Gore cranked up the doomsday rhetoric. Human beings, he warned, “face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.’’ His 1,900-word essay made no mention of his financial interest in promoting such measures – Gore has invested heavily in carbon-offset markets, electric vehicles, and other ventures that would profit handsomely from legislation curbing the use of fossil fuels, and is reportedly poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire.’’ However, he did mention “global-warming pollution’’ no fewer than four times, declaring that “our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation’’ if we don’t move decisively to reduce it.

By “global-warming pollution,’’ Gore means carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a “pollutant’’ in roughly the way oxygen and water are pollutants: Human existence would be impossible without them. CO2 is essential to photosynthesis, the process that sustains plant life and generates the oxygen that human beings and animals inhale. Far from polluting the world, carbon dioxide enriches it. Higher levels of CO2 are associated with larger crop yields, increased forest growth, and longer growing seasons – in short, with a greener planet.

Of course carbon dioxide also contributes to the greenhouse effect that keeps the earth warm. But the vast majority of atmospheric CO2 occurs naturally, and it is far from clear that the carbon dioxide contributed by human industry has a significant impact on the world’s climate.

On the other hand, it is quite clear that the economic and agricultural activity responsible for that anthropogenic CO2 has been enormously beneficial to myriads of men, women, and children. In just the last two decades, life expectancy in developing nations has climbed appreciably and infant mortality has fallen. Hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese citizens have been lifted out of poverty. Whatever else might be said about carbon dioxide, it has helped make possible a dramatic increase in the quality of many human lives.

But there is no awareness of such tradeoffs in Gore’s latest screed. He brushes aside as unimportant the recently exposed blunders in the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These include claims that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, that global warming could slash African crop yields by 50 percent, and that 55 percent of the Netherlands – more than twice the correct amount – is below sea level.

Gore seems equally untroubled by Climategate, the scandal involving researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, who apparently schemed to manipulate temperature data, to prevent their critics from being published in peer-reviewed journals, and to destroy records and calculations to keep climate skeptics from double-checking them.

Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s errors and the Climatic Research Unit scandal have triggered major investigations, and opinion polls show a falloff in the percentage of the public that believes either global warming is cause for serious concern or that scientists see eye to eye on the issue. Yet Gore insists, against all evidence, that “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.’’

To climate alarmists like Gore, everything proves their point. For years they argued that global warming would mean a decline in snow cover and shorter ski seasons. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’’ one climate scientist lamented to reporters in 2000. The IPCC itself was clear that climate change was resulting in more rain and less snow.

Undaunted, Gore now claims that the blizzards that have walloped the Northeast in recent weeks are also proof of global warming. “Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms,’’ he posted on his blog last month.

Gore is a True Believer; his climate hyperbole is less a matter of science than of faith. In almost messianic terms, he urges Congress to sharply restrain Americans’ access to energy. “What is at stake,’’ he writes, “is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.’’

But while Gore prays for redemption, the pews in the Church of Climate Catastrophe are gradually emptying. The public’s skeptical common sense, it turns out, is pretty robust. Just like those Himalayan glaciers.