Lord Monckton snacks on George Monbiot & John Abraham

At Last, the Climate Extremists Try to Debate Us!

Here's an extract

First, the IPCC also says, on the very page quoted by Abraham, that even if there were a major collapse of the ice the Greenland ice sheet would not entirely disintegrate for millennia, a phrase that was also used in the IPCC’s 2001 report, where it was made plain that surface temperatures at least 2 Celsius degrees higher than today’s would have to persist for several millennia before either the Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt away.

True, the British Antarctic Survey disagrees with the IPCC and maintains that the WAIS is in imminent danger of collapse, but so far even the IPCC has not bought that alarmist story.

Secondly — as I said in my talk, but as Abraham very carefully failed to point out in his — both sides of this particular argument have been carefully heard in the impartial forum of the British High Court. The British government, unsuccessfully attempting to defend Gore on this point, had eventually been compelled — when confronted with what the IPCC actually says about several millennia — to concede that Gore’s 20 feet of sea level rise was a flagrant exaggeration.

And the judge’s finding could not have been blunter:

The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.

Read the rest of the article, it's worth it.

....

A change of climate at the Royal Society.

Bishop Hill points out in several recent posts that the Royal Society is to fully rewrite its statement about climate change.

This seems to have happened because 43 Fellows of the Royal Society

... complained that it had oversimplified its messages.

They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.

and

One Fellow who said he was not absolutely convinced of the dangers of CO2 told me: "This [RS pamphlet 'Climate Change Controversies'] appears to suggest that anyone who questions climate science is malicious. But in science everything is there to be questioned - that should be the very essence of the Royal Society. Some of us were very upset about that.

"I can understand why this has happened - there is so much politically and economically riding on climate science that the society would find it very hard to say 'well, we are still fairly sure that greenhouse gases are changing the climate' but the politicians simply wouldn't accept that level of honest doubt."

The result is a carefully worded statement from the Royal Society "New guide to science of climate change", with this as the closing paragraph:

There is a wide variety of views across the Fellowship on any active area of science, not just climate science, and this diversity is an essential component of the testing that scientific knowledge must always undergo. Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect – there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements, etc. However, the existence of some uncertainty does not mean that scientific results have no significance or consequences, or should not be acted upon. The enormous beneficial impact of science over the last 350 years is testament to the success of this balancing of uncertainty with action in the application of science.

The Times suggests that Rebel scientists force Royal Society to accept climate change scepticism and the Telegraph says Royal Society to publish guide on climate change to counter claims of 'exaggeration'.

In the light of the Royal Society's decision to acknowledge that different scientists (of equal calibre) can and do interpret results differently, and are capable of having informed differences of opinion and debate, can anybody truly say, "The science is settled", and call those of a different opinion 'deniers' and 'flat-earthers'?

It will be interesting to see what happens next, and how world governments will react.

....

Ostrich syndrome?

The other day Mrs Rigby found herself talking at length to somebody who said they were a proactive Liberal Democrat. In amongst all the ordinary conversational stuff Mrs R had asked what they thought about the new government - because it's something people are talking about 'these days'. Any other time Mrs R would have been more careful, and wouldn't have touched politics with a barge pole, especially with somebody she had only just met. Anyhow, this other person said they were quite happy with the coalition because it's given the Lib Dems power, and their policies will be in the government timetable.

They then said their main political concerns were about climate change and reducing CO2 emissions. They thought this government's priority should be to build lots of green, renewable, electricity generators (wind turbines) then get rid of the fossil fuel power stations and decommission the nuclear power stations. They thought there should be cash set aside to research alternative energy sources, including heat sinks and solar power.

They weren't worried about things like money, they said it would be found somewhere because the government is rich.

It's quite hard to be too serious about a person's political views when combatting AGW is the sum total of a person's political aspiration. It's hard to be too serious about an individual's political opinion when they only had a Lib Dem campaign board outside their house because there wasn't a 'Green' candidate - which might help explain stuff like this.

Anyhow, to keep the conversation ticking over we became typically British and turned to the weather - in particular the long, freezing, winter followed by an unusually cold spring with frosts and snow in May, leafless oak trees and, of course, the impact of that volcano nobody can pronounce. All those things are, apparently, our fault - because there are too many people breathing out CO2 and because cows are putting too much methane into the atmosphere. Heavy machinery is causing earthquakes and aircraft are destroying what's left of the atmosphere after the cows have done their worst.

Mrs R is eternally grateful that this article was published today, not last weekend!

The leadership of Climate Camp – which is opposed to flying and airport expansion – have been accused of hypocrisy after they sent two members on a £12,000 mile round-trip to Bolivia.

In retaliation Ben Hart, one of the activists who flew to Bolivia, wrote on Facebook

‘Get over it, if you wanna play this liberal self-denial game...I’ve been vegan for 17 years of my life and gone many years without a car.

‘If I died tomorrow and didn’t take my return flight or any others in the future, the planet would still be being ruined.’

Lovely to see a purist in action, Ben. Fantastic to see somebody prepared to take a stand and make personal sacrifices for what they truly believe in and, of course, for the good of the planet.

Mrs Rigby thinks you're a wonderful example to all the kiddies who've been told their puppies and bunnies will drown because of all the selfish grown-ups!
..........

Oh, and thanks to CF and American television, we know that Bolivia is in South Africa! No, it's true, it must be because it was on the television and CF has a screenshot.

P.S.
Bolivia is in South America. CF's screenshot shows South America, it has been wrongly labelled, which is why it's funny.
South Africa looks like this.

....

Hot shingle.

According to a report in the Times Branscombe beach in Devon has lost a lot of shingle this winter. So much has gone (been washed away by winter storms) that the level of the beach has dropped by 4 ft, exposing bits and pieces from WW2 as well as the wreck of the Napoli which foundered in a storm in 2007.

Some locals think the new groynes at Sidmouth might have something to do with this, because they change the direction of water movement.

A lady who lives in the area might have the true answer though, because tucked away in her comment is this gem :-

maybe it’s global warming,

I wonder how many people they had to ask before they got the right words to quote?

It's going to be a long time before either "climate change" or "global warming" are unfashionable excuses for nature's idiosyncrasies.

Climategate: The CRUtape Letters

There's a book with a very clever title if anybody remembers C.S. Lewis.

Climategate: The CRUtape Letters (Volume 1) (Paperback)
~ Steven Mosher (Author), Thomas W. Fuller (Author)

Check out WattsupWithThat here

Predicting snow.

Amazing isn't it!

Last year we were told that

Britain’s gas storage capacity is 4.3 billion cubic metres, providing no more than 15 days of supply

On Tuesday 5th January the National Grid announced an energy alert - maybe not enough gas to go heat all the fires and all the central heating systems and all the power stations unless somebody got some more gas from somewhere, fast.

Here's what the National Grid site says

The purpose of the Gas Balancing Alert (GBA) is to provide a signal to the market that demand-side reduction and/or additional supplies may be required to avoid the risk of entering into a Network Gas Supply Emergency. The trigger level for a Gas Balancing Alert is based on a combination of the absolute Supply & Demand levels and the impact of a potential breach of a Safety Monitor.

Hmm, well, we knew there wasn't a lot of storage space, we knew there wasn't much in February 2009 - but what was done to fix it? What department took responsibility to make sure Britain would survive a period of high demand - such as prolonged cold weather? It would seem nobody did anything, maybe they didn't think they needed to - probably because the Met Office predicted both a mild winter and a period of warm weather for the foreseeable future.

Over the last 24 hours people have been running around like headless chickens, emptying supermarket shelves of almost anything they can get their hands on, including torches, thermal underwear, thermos flasks and sleeping bags. Some people have resorted to using cat litter to 'grit' icy garden paths because there's no salt to buy, and have ended up making a terrible mess of their carpets. Halfords is doing its best to keep up with demand for antifreeze, but deliveries are held up by snow. And guess what, these retailers weren't able to plan ahead - because the Met Office predicted a mild winter.

Where the Rigby family lives it's difficult to get any fresh food, which is a bit of a nuisance because we emptied our fridge before Christmas and could do with refilling it again now we're back home. We Rigbys are without potatoes, carrots, green vegetables and not surprisingly there's no chance of buying salad of any sort. We have no milk, no pet food and very little breakfast cereal - and no prospect of getting any because the supermarkets (which are our only food source, all the little shops are long gone from Rigbytown) aren't getting deliveries because the roads aren't working properly. There's nothing to put in the Rigby's bread making machine because other people emptied the supermarkets of flour and bread mixes. The supermarket looked, in Mrs R's mind, like something out of the worst time of Soviet Russia.

It's a good job we've got a decent sized freezer and a cupboard stocked with things in tins, otherwise we'd be very, very, hungry.

Why has this happened?

Mrs R thinks it's happened because the supermarkets weren't able to predict demand - because the Met Office predicted a mild winter.

The main roads through Rigby town aren't too bad, but pavements are treacherous and side roads have been ignored by the council - because the council hasn't got enough salt or grit to deal with them, and anyway they're too bothered about making sure the motorways work. They probably haven't got enough salt or grit because they didn't think they'd need any - because the Met Office predicted a mild winter.

Who had to rescue people stranded on the motorways?

Up to 1,000 stranded motorists had to be rescued by the Army today after some of the heaviest snowfalls in 20 years left drivers trapped in their cars overnight.

It was the Army, the same one that joined the bits of Workington together again after their bridge got washed away and the same Army that's had it's finances messed with, whilst the office dwellers of the MoD got bonuses.

There seems to be a pattern here somewhere, because it's reported that the chap in charge, John Hirst, gets given a whopping financial bonus, taking his salary to :-

between £195,000 and £200,000 in pay and bonuses in 2008/9

and

The figure is a 25 per cent increase on the £155,000 to £160,000 "pay equivalent" for Mr Hirst in 2007/8. Mr Hirst had joined midway through the previous financial year in September 2007.

Now I don't care how much this man earns, as long as he does his job properly. I don't care how much anybody earns, as long as they do their job properly - more especially somebody who's paid out of the public purse.

Mr Hirst heads an organisation that has publicised and encouraged belief in global warming theories, and that has linked breathing out CO2 to climate change. Even the top Google weblink says "Met Office: Weather and Climate Change". Mrs R doesn't think the Met Office's job to be involved in either politics or pressure groups, she thinks they should concentrate on getting short term weather forecasts right.

They used to be able to do it.

The Met Office was originally set up to help seafarers. In 1944 the forecaster's strands of seaweed, thermometers, maps and barometers were capable of accurately predicting a clear weather window that would allow the Normandy Landings to go ahead. These days, with their multi-million supercomputer, they can't even tell us when we're to expect enough snow to bring the country to its knees.

Is it too much to ask that high-earning Mr Hirst does his job, and ensures that the Met Office does its job properly too - so that supermarkets can get the right stuff onto their shelves, so that local councils can stock up on salt and grit and so that we ordinary folk can have a good idea of what we might see when we look out of the window in the morning?

It shouldn't be too hard for them because, after all, they reckon they've got clever brains that can predict both climate and weather for 50+ years in the future!

When Mrs Rigby was little her Mum told her that whatever happened to the weather in America was likely to happen in the UK within a week or so - and in the last few weeks all sorts of US snowfall records have been broken. WattsUpWithThat tells us that ... over 1200 new cold and snow records set in the last week in USA. Even Florida and Miami are expecting the "longest stretch of cold weather in 15 to 25 years", so I sort of expected a bit of snow here.

And now, based on her own life experience coupled with her Mum's words of wisdom, Mrs R predicts that the current cold spell, along with the snow, will probably last more than a week - and no, there's no supercomputer at Rigby Towers, just a good memory and brains that still work.

Let's see if I get it right.

2009 December was coldest for 30 years?

Surely the BBC must have got it wrong, they must have misunderstood the Met Office data

"Provisional Met Office figures for December show temperatures for much of the UK were 1.5C and 2.5C below the mean temperatures for the last 30 years. Scotland saw temperatures dip still lower - from 2.5C to 3.5C. On Tuesday, temperatures in Scotland plunged to -15C in places, while parts of Germany dropped to -19C."

Read more here.

There's a nice picture or four too, but they won't transfer to this blog.

Maybe the meeting of like minds in Copenhagen did the trick after all, and warmist 'groupthink' made the weather gods turn down the planet's thermostat.

Or maybe all the stuff about warming was a load of twaddle, designed to find an easy way of taking money away from lots of gullible people so it would line the pockets of a select few.

Dr. Richard Lindzen interview

Via Witterings from Witney whose link took me to The Purple Scorpion and on to the SSPI Blog which carries this transcript which Mrs Rigby thinks is worth sharing.

... From the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche

• We are delighted to reproduce this recent translation of an interview with Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Planetary and Meteorological Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most eminent climatologist alive today. The interview reveals something of the exasperation of the true scientist at the naive, religious belief of his colleagues in propositions that are either unknowable or unproven.

Professor Lindzen, you are called a “climate denier”. Does that make you feel like an outcast?

I am no outcast. If you want to soak up propaganda, that’s your problem. I work at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I have the respect of my colleagues. Think for a moment about what you have just said. I am a survivor of the Holocaust. My parents fled Germany in 1938. Anyone who calls me a “climate denier” not only insults me – he also insults his own intelligence.

Why?

Because the topic of the climate is so complex. It has so many facets. Or do you really believe that every scientist rushes to goosestep in al Al Gore’s footsteps? Do you really believe that all of us ought to agree with him? Anyone who has even one or two neurons still working between his ears should know that anyone who uses the expression “climate denier” has lost the argument.

Have you received death threats, like some of your colleagues who have expressed their skepticism publicly?

Yes, there were a few emails that told me to go to hell, but that is not a death threat.

Why do people hate your point of view?

You have to expect to be hated when you ask questions in such a climate. People like to think that they improve themselves when they believe with their whole hearts that the world will end unless they save it immediately. They develop a quasi-religious enthusiasm, like Islamist extremists. Anyone who winds people up to that extent should be ashamed of himself.

Had you expected that you would be criticized?

Naturally. I once wrote in the Wall Street Journal that scientists have been silenced, and have even lost their positions, because they dared to express doubts about what we are told are the “facts” of the climate controversy. Laurie David, the producer of Al Gore’s film, wrote in her blog that she was happy that those scientists were finally silenced. She also wrote that any scientists who seek to investigate their scientific doubts should not receive any funding.

Surely that contradicts the way that science is understood to work: that its hypotheses always have to be tested again and again, and can be disproved but cannot be proved.

Quite right, but it is easy to corrupt science. It has happened many times. I was at the international meeting of the American Geophysical Union last winter in San Francisco. Al Gore spoke. And his message was this: “You ought to have the courage to join the consensus, to support it publicly in everything you say, and feel free to silence anyone who disagrees with the consensus. The audience gave these remarks an enthusiastic reception.

What did you do?

I shrugged my shoulders and went out and read George Orwell.

What would you do? You are upset about about an Oscar winner, Al Gore, who says things like “The continued existence of our civilization is at stake.”

There is indeed plenty at stake: namely companies like Generation Investment Management [founded by Al Gore], Lehman Brothers, Apple, and Google, Gore has major financial interests in all of these. Al Gore combines lunacy and corruption.

Wait a minute: those are serious accusations.

First, he fosters hysteria. And secondly, he has a major financial interest. He is simply not independent.

OK, you say that climate change is not so alarming because the models overestimate the influence of CO2 on climate. In saying that, surely you are contradicting 95% of all scientists?

But it is so. The influence of CO2 is much smaller that the models have predicted. You then have two choices. The model is false or the model is right and something unknown makes up the difference. The modelers have unfortunately taken the second way and claim that aerosols make up the difference. But, as the IPCC says, we don’t know anything about aerosols. The current models are tuned. If there is a problem, then call it aerosol. That is a dishonorable way out.

The head of the Natural Environmental Research Council in Great Britain said something remarkable. Climate change must be manmade because he can’t imagine anything else that might be the cause. That is a statement touching on intellectual incompetence, which a scientist should never utter.

Professor Lindzen, what, then, are the facts?

Physics does not lie about the greenhouse effect. The CO2 concentration has increased. The 20th century was warmer overall by 0.5 C.

How do you explain the most recent warming?

I don’t believe it. The warming occurred from 1976 to 1986, then it plateaued.

Do you accept that in general it has become warmer?

Yes, but we are speaking of tenths of a degree. If you take into account the uncertainty in the data, there was warming from 1920 to 1940, cooling until 1970, and warming again until the beginning of the 90s. But you can’t say it as preciselu as that, whatever you think. There is no real difference between the temperatures of today and those in the 1920s and ’30s. The system is never constant. And to declare the end of the world because of a couple of tenths of a degree is a joke.

But surely it is just this tenth of a degree that can have monstrous consequences?

Yes, it could – provided that you ignore all reality. The problem is that the media make a big show out of these very small temperature differences – differences that fall within the error-bars of the measurement. The fact is that our methods of measurement are simply not precise enough.

To recap: it has gotten warmer in the last century, but climate is a system that always varies. It is a turbulent system. You cannot think about it dogmatically. The main question remains, are these 0.5 degrees a large or a small variation, is it serious or not? We don’t know. No one should be ashamed to say that we still simply don’t know. And a couple of degrees still don’t make an eternal summer.

You took part in the Third IPCC Assessment Report. What is your opinion of the Fourth Assessment Report?

First, I would have to see the report. Up to now we know only about the Summary for Policymakers. The report itself was finished last October. Now they need several months in order to bring it into agreement with the Summary. If a corporation did that with its annual report it would be front page news in all the papers. And not at all to the corporation’s advantage.

Why did you not participate in the preparation of the Fourth Assessment Report?

I had no time. I had participated – by writing a couple of pages. There were hundreds of scientists, in teams, where two or three were responsible for a couple of pages. They flew all over the world for years. You can’t work that way.

Assume you are right that everything will not be very bad, and that the data are not good enough to prove the alarmist case. In that event, what is all the fuss about?

Many interest groups have discovered climate change. Everyone will profit from it except the ordinary consumer, who must be maneuvered by propaganda. The scientists profit: their funding has increased more than tenfold since the early 1990s. Then there is the ecological movement, a multi-billion-dollaroperation with thousands of employees.

The problem is that we have solved the problems of air and water pollution. We eliminated those. So the ecological movement desperately needed problems that could not be eliminated. That made climate change attractive to them.

And industry, which you assume is against curbs on CO2 emissions, also profits. Corporations are perhaps opposed to the alarmist position, because it gives them problems they have to accommodate to. But they can make money from it. The large corporations live off climate change.

Last year I spoke with someone from the big coal producer Arch Coal. He said he is all in favor of cutting CO2 emissions. I asked him, whether a coal company seriously wanted CO2 restrictions. He said, “Sure, we’ll manage it, but our smaller competitors won’t.”

The energy giant Exxon Mobil was against it.

Yes, the previous CEO fought CO2 restrictions on principle. But what industry wants is this. 1. They want to determine the restrictions themselves. 2. They want all corporations to be subjected to the same restrictions. 3. They want to know in advance how to prepare themselves. Then they can lay off the huge costs on consumers.

And what are your interests?

I have been working for decades in this area. We were beginning to understand how things work, how the atmosphere and the climate really function. Then we were rolled over by the simplified claim that climate depends only on CO2. Thus every hope of finding out, for example, how ice ages work was destroyed. Suddenly everyone said, “All scientists are united,” as if we still lived in the Soviet Union.

Today Russian scientists are moving away from the consensus, aren’t they?

Some yes, others no. It is a question of which generation they belong to. The older ones break away, the younger ones get in line. Russia has a long tradition in climate research. The older scientists were world leaders. And they knew that this simplistic way of looking at things made no sense. The younger ones are not distinguished but they want invitations to visit Europe – so they collaborate and do what Europe wants.

Is the world so simple?

Sometimes yes. In 2004 there was a meeting in Moscow, organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sir David King, who was then the chief scientific advisor to the British Government, was invited. When he heard that they had also invited people like me, he wanted to cancel. But he was already at the airport. So he came and spoke first and said that he would invite Russian scientists who shared his point of view to come to England.

You laugh. Do you find it funny?

No, but that’s the way the world is.

When did you get mad for the first time?

In 1987 I received a letter from a man by the name of Lester Lave, a well known economics professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He wrote that he had testified in a Senate hearing. Al Gore had also been there, by the way. Lave said then that the science was still very uncertain about what the causes of climate change were. Al Gore threw him out of the hearing with the words that anyone who said that didn’t know what he was talking about.

But Al Gore is really not a scientist.

Well, he was on TV after his film opened in the movie theatres. The interviewer asked him, why he believed that sea level could go up by about six meters, when science talks about 40 cm. He answered that science did not know what it was talking about but he did. I think Al Gore is crazy.

You are annoyed when a politician says something about science?

Yes. I reassured Lester Lave that science really can never be certain. But it all turned serious in 1988, shortly after Newsweek came out with a front-page article about global warming. I began to say publicly that I thought the data too weak to reach a final conclusion. Many colleagues said that they were happy that someone had finally said what I had said.

But, as the older Bush raised the funding for climate research from 170 million dollars to 2 billion, the institutions figured out that their future was connected with climate change. Even at MIT there exists a difference of opinion about this. We all agree about the basic idea that temperature will increase, because CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But we differ on whether climate change is an important topic. And there I differ from most of my colleagues. I believe that it is not a serious topic. I think it is important to think about the causes of the Ice Ages.

What do you know about the Ice Ages?

Very little. The Ice Ages correlate somehow with orbital parameters, but we don’t know how this has influenced climate change. Those are serious topics in atmospheric dynamics. I can tell you that we know very little.

How should we approach the solution?

No one wants to solve the problem, because then the money will stop flowing.

Listen, Professor Lindzen, what really is your opinion about human nature?

I see it this way, the way it is, not as I would like it. After the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 for protecting the ozone layer, research support disappeared. Ozone was not a problem any more – even though it still is. The stratospheric chemists work today in the area of stratosphere and climate. Politics pays science: we are very dependent on it.

Who pays for the necessary research?

NASA. Sometimes no one. I tell you, they don’t want to solve the problem. Uncertainty is essential for alarmism. The argument is always the same. It may perhaps be uncertain, but whatever is uncertain is also possible.

Are you saying that we cannot do anything about climate change? Are we doomed?

I say: We should not do anything. We really have other problems. If I, as an American, look at Europe, then I see a continent that does not care about terrorism, that Iran could become a nuclear power, that Islam is expanding. Instead, Europe worries about climate change. That is a form of societal stupidity. Europe wants to feel that it is good and important. That is dumb. And, at the same time no European country will meet the Kyoto goals. No, I don’t understand any of this. We need to buy new electric lights? How could that possibly help? Is everyone going to screw them in? I hope that this stops soon.

Why should it? That is human nature.

What – that someone proclaims the end of the world every couple of years and then everyone forgets that it hasn’t happened? That can’t go on. Sooner or later people get tired of the story and turn to something else. Surveys in the US already show such a trend. The reality is that Honda has built a small, very good hybrid car. It does not sell. People want a fat Toyota Prius so the neighbors will know that they have bought a hybrid.

What kind of car do you drive?

An old Honda Accord 1998.

What do you really believe?

I am somewhat religious, more of a believer in any case than an observer. Something besides mankind exists.

And in spite of that you also cannot be sure that mankind has no influence on climate?

No one says that. But anyone who says that people are the cause of this or that is wrong. No one doubts that CO2 absorbs infrared, and thus has an influence. But if you double the CO2 concentration, the temperature would rise by less than one Celsius degree – so little that we could not even measure it. I cannot believe that the world was so poorly constructed that it could not withstand such a minuscule change – it has already survived many changes on that scale.

Do humans believe that the world must die because we are mortal?

We live in a time of pessimism. It was the same in the 19th century. Then the Royal Society wrote in a report to the government that the electrification of England was too dangerous for normal people, and that one would do better by choosing gas. People profit today more than ever from scientific progress but don’t have the slightest clue how their equipment operates. That is a loss of control. This is why Al Gore puts forth a highly simplified picture of global warming, that every five year old can understand. It gives people the feeling that they understand what is going on, and that they can do something about it. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Mrs R thinks Dr. Richard Lindzen is a fairly sensible sort of chap.

Climategate - equality means a backward step

It's interesting to ponder whether these scientists have muddled their scientific analysis and research with sociology and social manipulation when looking at these extracts from some of the Climategate emails :-

"A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation." - Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies

"The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are." - Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

And this next one is, maybe, why there has been such an apparent reluctance to develop alternative fuels that are truly alternative, that don't depend on electricity or oil. Some people don't seem to realise that electricity almost always come from power stations.

"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." - Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

These extracts come from here

Climategate in the Mail ...

The Mail carries a lengthy article analysing the "Climategate" emails.

It's well worth reading but, unless you're one of Mr Brown's 'flat-earthers', it'll probably raise your temperature.

Mrs R was interested to read this red-arrowed comment,

Whatever the sceptics say about the validity of climate change claims,they cannot deny is that mankind is causing extreme damage to the biosphere by extensive deforestation & air polution,rapid depletion of natural recources. Also unfettered population growth is a serious threat to the wellbeing of mankind {or to be politically correct,personkind} These are important issues & I certainly hope they are all included in the current discussions& not just about carbon emissions.

Whilst Mrs R doesn't necessarily agree with the whole of this comment the general idea does seem about right, because it seems that the force and focus of the 'green' movement's propaganda has shifted away from the damage we know man is doing to the planet, and it's been shifted to support a clever scheme involving carbon dioxide and carbon trading - which is making some people a lot of money. It's that scheme and that trading, and phenomenal amounts of money changing hands, that seems to have been the basis of the Copenhagen meetings.

If it's true that data has been manipulated to present a particular politically acceptable outcome it means that we, the public, will be ever more sceptical when honest scientists want to tell us something important.

Crying wolf has always had a downside.

... when global cooling was all the rage

Iain Dale asks a few questions about "Back when global cooling was all the rage". In amongst the comments is one from Shinsei, who doesn't appear to have a blog.

Let's look at Shinsei's comment in a bit more detail. (my comments in italics).

Shinsei - I'm sorry to sound slightly irate Iain but it is incredible that you keep posting comments about global warming that are factually incorrect and that you keep posing questions that you claim "no one has ever been able to explain to me" when a couple of minutes on the internet would explain these things simply.

The internet is a wonderful thing, and is also full of inaccuracies, but even so a 'couple of minutes' online will find articles that confirm Iain Dale's memories. A search will also discover many recent publications that ignore earlier scientific discussion and debate - something that's unusual in Science.

There is, of course, personal knowledge too - and that's what Iain Dale is referring to, and so he is not 'factually incorrect'.

It's remarkable how many of the adult population were at school in the seventies, or even earlier.

A high proportion of those were capable of reading independently even before they left primary school and had an interest in things climactic and scientific, especially as at that time there was a significant dip in temperatures and deep snow (40cm) in March 1970, for example. These people's memory is still remarkably acute considering they must all now be, oooh, at least 45.

The best science is checked by peer review - but some of the AGW people still don't want to share their data, maybe that's because when other real scientists check the figures and draw their own graphs a bit of figure-fiddling is easily spotted - WuWT - 'The smoking gun at Darwin Zero'

Shinsei - 1) There was a mediaeval warm period, no member of the IPCC would deny that, however it was a lot less warm then than the temperature today.

Oh really? Less warm? Lookee here on WuWT

Shinsei - 2) Grapes have been grown in Yorkshire ever since the Romans brought grapes to England.

No, sorry, grapes have not been "grown in Yorkshire ever since the Romans brought grapes to England."

The internet has your answer, with a little help from the Domesday Book

"... Of the Domesday vineyards, all appear to lie below a line from Ely (Cambridgeshire) to Gloucestershire. Since the Book covers all of England up to the river Tees (north of Yorkshire), there is therefore reason to think that there weren’t many vineyards north of that line."

Shinsei - 2) (contd) ... There are plenty of vineyards there [in Yorkshire] today. ....

Another quick search of the internet discovers a few modern vineyards in Yorkshire, at Ryedale, Holmfirth, Leventhorpe, Skellow and Great Hammerton Mrs Rigby has no knowledge of either them or their wine, she's sure it's tasty - but she doesn't really think that five vineyards in the whole of Yorkshire (2,941,247 acres/4,945 square miles) is "plenty" - but that's her subjective opinion and so is open to debate.

Shinsei - 2) (contd) ... All the documentary evidence though is that the wine made from these grapes in Roman times was pretty dire stuff, as you'd expect from a cool northern climate

How do you know that grapes from Roman wine was "pretty dire stuff"? Have you tasted any? Are your tastes the same as those of the Romans of that period? Have you made wine made from the same variety of grapes and the same species of yeast?

Where is all this 'documentary evidence'? - You ask other people to show their sources, but don't produce any of your own to support your sweeping statements - which, if unsupported, are merely opinion, not fact.

Did you read a book, an article in a newspaper or a scientific or archaeological journal, and was that information backed up extensive practical and physical research or was it merely written by a person with twentieth or twenty-first century ideas and opinions of how horrible it must have been to have been a wine-drinking Roman living in Britain?

Shinsei - 3) I doubt you were ever TAUGHT at school that the world was going to cool rapidly. There was never a serious or consistent enough scientific consensus for global cooling to get into school textbooks or exam syllabuses. ...

The thing is, it looks as if you weren't there, so can only "doubt" what was or wasn't taught. Try asking people who were, and see what they say. Iain Dale is one of them.

Anyhow, why the big capitals? Not everybody who was alive in the seventies is now visually deaf!

Back in the dark, unenlightened, old days, including the seventies, eighties and early nineties, children were taught Biology, Physics and Chemistry. They did Cookery/Domestic Science and used scarily sharpened knives. They did metalwork, with help from a metal-meltingly hot forge. In woodwork they using hard, heavy, hammers and newly whetted chisels, as well as needlework where fine, sharp metal needles and big pointy scissors helped make new clothes.

Back then school science teachers let children 'experiment' with nasty things like copper sulphate - because it obligingly changed colour on demand, let them chase mercury with magnets, let them make things go bang and cut open dead creatures to learn how they worked. Schoolchildren didn't die because of it. They were allowed to cook food in hot ovens, then take the meals home to be reheated. Nobody died of food poisoning - and nobody died of overwork either, even though Maths happened before calculators could be carried around in your pocket.

Schools taught how to do practical Science, how to analyse results and how to draw conclusions from those results. It was seriously frowned upon if results were fiddled with or ignored in order to make them fit a hypothesis or theory.

Children were taught to question their results and investigate oddities and anomalies - not to hide them and presume they were wrong, because the best science teachers knew that it's always wise to look for the unusual result in case it's important. They'd heard of people like Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin 'by chance'. (Even Wikipedia can be your friend, sometimes.)

Maybe all this is why so many 'oldies' are questioning the science behind climate change and global warming, because many of them have always been inquisitive and have always asked questions because their scientific education was based on finding out rather than being spoon fed - and because they've heard it, or something like it, before and also lived through the banning of CFCs.

Modern schools are struggling to find suitably qualified, knowledgeable and experienced Science teachers, especially those who are capable of teaching across the three disciplines of Biology, Physics and Chemistry to A-level standard. Some secondaries limit the amount of practical work their students can do because an H&S person says it's potentially too dangerous to let them get their hands on chemicals, which is why so few school labs have fume cupboards and bits of glass that might break.

Modern 'Science', as dictated by the National Curriculum, teaches theories and dogma instead of encouraging investigative, independent and original thought. This, at its' worst, leads to unquestioning acceptance of new theories as scientific fact - many of today's students are never taught the difference, never taught to question the 'experts', never either expected or allowed to form their own opinions, especially not if their ideas run counter to current accepted thinking, and can in fact lose marks in exams if they don't produce the right answer containing the appropriate key words.

And, actually, Mrs Rigby knows that "Global Cooling" was taught in schools - but as a theory, as a possible, as a likelihood, not as a proven fact.

Shinsei - 3) (contd) ... However it probably appeared on a couple of Panorama programmes in the mid 70s. The media gave the global cooling thesis far greater prominence than the actual climate scientific community which, even then, were publishing far more research showing evidence of AGW.

It looks as if you're guessing. My clue is the use of the word "probably". If you don't know, keep quiet otherwise you make yourself look silly.

Shinsei - 4) Even if the world has been hotter in ages past without any man-made influence (which it no doubt has) that doesn't mean that current warming is not caused by human influence. ...

... and of course you have to accept the counter argument that if indeed there is current warming it could be a natural process, that we meddle with at our peril.


A theory is just that, it's an idea, it's ephemeral until it is proven - just like Darwin's Theory of Evolution. As we can't go back to see what happened to the dinosaurs we will never know, for sure, how some of them got to be so big, what they looked like, what colour they were and we'll never know why they seemed to have died out in a hurry. And nor will we know, for sure, why the Galapagos finches have different beaks, although we can make a jolly good guess.

Shinsei - 4) (contd) ... Climate is dependent on numerous factors - solar activity, moon orbits, tectonic plate shifts, tidal movements etc ...

As for tectonic movement affecting climate - I think you're misleading yourself. Tectonic movement theories are positional and have nothing to do with climate, although it can be, and probably is, related to volcanic activity which over millions of years has caused landmasses to move to areas that are either warmer or colder than where they originated. That isn't climate, it's a mixture of geophysics and geology.

The timescale involved is incomprehensible to most people, who think that maps are always going to be accurate because they're written on a piece of paper, and who worry when nature moves a bit of coastline to make it look different from an old picture.

Nature does things mankind doesn't like and things that mankind doesn't understand. Science is our way of trying to make sense of the planet and its' natural forces.

Shinsei - 4) (contd) ... AND man-made CO2 emissions.

Really? Is climate controlled by man-made CO2 emissions?


Prove it!


I haven't yet seen a single jot of incontroversial evidence that mankind has made things on Earth worse by breathing out.


I do, however, know that man's activities used to be a lot dirtier than now, with factories and homes belching out a mixture of sulphur gases that, according to scientists of the time, caused acid rain which killed inland fish and the European pine forests.


The filth spewing out of both homes and industries mixed with bitterly cold, damp, air causing poisonous smogs that killed people. The Thames was so dirty that salmon stopped breeding in it about 200 years ago. If you fell in and were rescued you were likely to succumb to poisoning, and it's mainly because London was an embarrassment that there were the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968, (which extended to the creation of smoke control areas and closure of urban power stations, with new ones built out of sight in the countryside) and also the beginnings of serious regulation of hazardous waste.


I also know that without CO2 plants will die and animals will starve - even primary school children are meant to study food chains, webs and pyramids these days, so there's absolutely no excuse for ignorance.


We need plants to survive, more CO2 possibly means more, healthier, plants - which is a good thing.

Shinsei - 4) (contd) ... The issue at the moment is that all these non-man made activities are not significant enough currently to explain present warming conditions.

Really? How do you know? Who told you, and who told them. And what "warming conditions"?

It isn't being widely reported that USA has had its earliest snowfall for years.

The BBC didn't mention the hard frosts in Southern England last week, that froze some ponds deep enough to support a human - I saw it, I did it, so it happened.

Why are they not telling?

It's mind-numbingly arrogant of mankind to believe that a single successful species - Homo sapiens - that is only capable of inhabiting a tiny proportion of the surface of this planet, can have a greater influence on climate than to quote "... solar activity, moon orbits, tectonic plate shifts, tidal movements etc"

Have you any real idea how utterly insignificant animals of any species are when the planet gets angry? Hollywood got it wrong - running away from a volcanic eruption and pyroclastic flow isn't a viable option, as the people of Pompei and Herculaneum discovered and more recently the people living near Mount St Helens.

Did you know, for example, that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1833 resulted in a serious dip in temperature due to particular atmospheric pollutants?

Did you know about Constable's paintings depicting weather patterns related to volcanoes?

How about other painters? - Look here where it says, "Many of Joseph Turner's works depicted sunsets. It is now clear that he was painting glowing skies caused by sunlight scattering off volcanic dust from the immense eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815."

They called that year the "year without a summer" because it got a bit cold and a bit dark, and crops failed.

And you say nature can't change weather patterns because it is not significant enough!

Shinsei - 5) There are snow drops out in Hyde Park today. I don't remember reading in Tacitus anything similar happening in the first century AD.

It's thought that snowdrops (Galanthus) were brought to Britain by the Romans, who will also have known of autumn and winter flowering variety, Galanthus reginae-olgae, that is native to Greece and Sicily. There's even a picture of some here, nestling amongst autumn leaves.

And anyway, even if Tacitus did mention the odd flower or two, he had much more important things to write about.

Separately, did you ever learn about trading in Dutch Tulips or South Seas investments, and did you hear of the Emperor's New Clothes?

Climate and Copenhagen

It looks as if Mr Gore has decided not to go to Copenhagen, maybe he thought he might get an icy reception.

A bunch of emails from East Anglia University were put online, they've been analysed by all sorts of people who are seriously questioning the validity of the "research" outcomes. Mrs R thinks it's a pity that some still think it's okay to call "sceptics" rude names and turn science into a political football - especially as surveys suggest that "Almost half of Britons believe there is no proof that global warming is caused by man". (even though the term 'global warming' is outdated they still manage to use it to raise emotions) I suppose that'll be the half of the population that don't vote for any political party then!

Will Mr Brown save the world this week when he goes to Copenhagen? He said he would, but maybe he'll just turn up late like he did in Lisbon. Mrs R has noticed that some bloggers think that when Mr Brown offers support to almost any cause it goes wrong, which is a bit like what's happened to the (in)famous hockey stick graph in the article on WattsUpWithThat now they've rediscovered the data for the Mediaeval Warm Period.

Mrs R found this on Obo's site it's well worth watching

Maybe by the end of the week the politicians will have discovered a sense of perspective, and will have stopped throwing our money into schemes that resemble in part both the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch bulb fiasco. Mrs R is more and more convinced that we should remember the expression cui bono - because she's pretty sure it won't be her and her family.

(And if anybody reading this can tell me how to shrink the graph to a sensible size I'll be eternally grateful - and promise to write your name in big, pretty coloured, letters by way of a thank you.)

The new religion.

Mrs Rigby was interested to read in the Telegraph that :-

Chinese snowstorms kill 40 and leave thousands homeless

Up to 40 people have been killed and thousands more left homeless after unusually early winter blizzards hit north-central China.

which

caused nearly 10,000 buildings to collapse and destroyed almost 500,000 acres of winter crops

It's an historical event, because

The snowfall is the heaviest in the northern and central provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong and Henan in living memory.
Hebei's provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, has received nearly two feet of snow in three days, the heaviest fall in the city since 1955.

Without being too sarcastic, and trying frantically to link to the story she intended to write about, Mrs R wonders if the people of China should have taken care to switch to the new religion of the green god. They might have been saved from the snow, because the AGW prophets of the green tell us it's getting warmer and so they wouldn't have allowed snow to happen.

You see Mrs Rigby remembers reading about Tim Nicholson who, according to the BBC, said :

... his beliefs had contributed to his dismissal and in March a judge ruled he could use employment equality laws to claim it was unfair

The firm that had dismissed him disagreed, hence their appeal in October against the earlier ruling in March because they felt his views were political.

Mr Nicholson's appeal against his dismissal was upheld by the Tribunal in London because, his solicitor said :

"Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations."

The company, Grainger plc, on the other hand thinks that

"This decision merely confirms that views on the importance of environmental protection are capable of amounting to a philosophical belief.

"Grainger absolutely maintains, as it has done from the very outset of these proceedings, that Mr Nicholson's redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company during a period of extraordinary market turbulence, which also required other structural changes to be made within the company.

"Grainger rejects outright any suggestion that there was any other motivation relating to Mr Nicholson's beliefs or otherwise."

Mrs R had a rummage around the internet. The 'Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003' are here and apply to employers and employees, but the rules apply outside employment too. According to Human Rights legislation, as outlined on CivilRightsMovement website :

... religious discrimination is unlawful.

That means we are free to choose our own religion, and should be able to express ourselves because :

The Human Rights Act 1998 sets out the fundamental rights with regards to religion and beliefs

but it would seem that :

... the right to freedom of thought including religion and beliefs that are covered in the act only pertains to public bodies (my bold)

That bit, Mrs R thinks, is quite important, but left a loophole that lawyers later closed, because :

In Britain the Race Relations Act 1976 was amended in 2000 to include the clause that discrimination in employment due to religious beliefs is unlawful.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 provided extra protection to those with or without religions beliefs in everyday life. (my bold)

So ... and please understand that this is a very tortuous train of thought that gets there in the end ...

Mrs Rigby thinks that last sentence is also very important, and should be looked at very carefully.

You see, Mrs Rigby thinks that, if the legal ruling means that Tim Nicholson and AGW-believers can say they hold a 'philosophical or religious belief' in relation to their employment then this has to be supported by all other aspects of Human Rights Legislation, so this ruling suggests that government and other 'public bodies' must also accept and acknowledge that a counter argument against AGW could amount to being without a 'philosophical or religious belief' in the same way as the 'there is a God' and the 'there is no God' believers have their rights respected and supported by law.

The law says that 'philosophical or religious belief' of ordinary people are protected in 'everyday life'.

Mrs Rigby thinks this means that government, public bodies, and other people are not allowed to presume that everybody in the country subscribes to any single one, group, or set of religious or philosophical beliefs. She thinks the government has to allow, and has to encourage a diversity of belief and philosophical ideas, as do all public bodies.

Following on from that, Mrs R thinks that government and other public bodies are not allowed to promote one 'philosophical or religious belief' over another - and they are not allowed to punish or disclaim or attempt to discredit those who do not place one, or another, 'philosophical or religious belief' in a position of greater esteem to or above another. It should also mean that people can choose, whether at work or in their homes, not to believe anything at all, if they don't want to, and nobody should be allowed to put pressure on them to change their minds.

Phew!

Mrs Rigby thinks the law also means that the government and other 'public bodies' cannot force people to subscribe to a particular religious or philosophical belief - if they could do that they could force us all to be Christians, or Muslims, or Buddhists, or Scientologists. Couldn't they?

They wouldn't ever do that, nobody would allow them to get away with it. Would they?

So Mrs Rigby would like to know ...

Why are government, and other public bodies, allowed to spend a lot of public money trying to force us all to believe in Climate Change and Anthropomorphic Global Warming - when there has been a legal judgement that that this is a 'philosophical or religious belief'?

... Still with me?

And why are those people who do believe in the 'religion or philosophical belief' of Climate Change or AGW allowed to call people who don't believe in this 'religion or philosophical belief' horrible names?

How would it work out if, say, somebody who regularly attended a church criticized a person who regularly attended a synagogue for being 'in denial', or said 'we still have a way to go in informing' them about Christianity? Mrs Rigby thinks that somebody would probably be told off, and very quickly too - quite rightly, because nobody has the right to force their 'religion or philosophical belief' onto another. The law says that too.

We are free to believe whatever we choose, that's what the law says, and it says nobody can be forced to follow a religion or philosophical belief. No individual, no employer and no public body is allowed to force their religious or philosophical belief on another, and try to force them to abide by that religion or philosophical belief. The law says we may all practise our religions and beliefs freely, by exercising personal choice - that's what 'freedom to choose' means.

So, because Tim Nicholson has been told that his views on AGW and climate change amount to a 'religion or philosophical belief', and he must be allowed the freedom to practice those beliefs, the same freedom must now apply to those who don't believe in AGW.

Ah, but it seems not!

Thanks to Iain Dale Mrs Rigby read The Times article announcing that :

Global warming is not our fault, say most voters in Times poll

It goes on to say that :

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

According to Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office :

growing awareness of the scale of the problem appeared to be resulting in people taking refuge in denial.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said

We know that we still have a way to go in informing people about climate change

So much for freedom of 'religion or philosophical belief'. We have both a government minister and an important person with their own department at the Met Office both being paid to promote what a Judge has said is a 'philosophical or religious belief'.

It would seem, at the moment, that only the believers are allowed to have an opinion, and the 59% of the population who do not subscribe to the new 'religion or philosophical belief' and are 'uninformed' or 'in denial' must be converted, at all costs, otherwise the planet will burn up.

Mrs R wonders how long it will take before another Judge comes along and changes the ruling, otherwise Britain will no longer be a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, it will be a country with only one 'philosophical or religious belief' - with the state ensuring we all bow low to the green deity of Climate Change and Anthropomorphic Global Warming.

Airborn CO2 and Bristol University

From Watts Up With That

Bombshell from Bristol: Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? – study says “no”

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO₂ than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO₂ should start to diminish as CO₂ emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

Read the complete article here

Fifty days to save the world ...

Mr Brown suggests that we probably won't, after all, need any lovely new power stations to make electricity to run Britain, because if we don't do something about climate change by 9th December 2009 we'll all either drown or burn.

Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the "impasse".

Maybe those eco-warriors are right after all, maybe the Police should have let them go ahead and shut down Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station instead of setting their nasty dogs with big teeth onto them, because Mr Brown is bound to be right. Al Gore says so.

Aren't we lucky to have a prophet like Mr Brown leading our country, whose foresight will save the world from an environmental catastrophe, in the same way as his financial acumen saved the world (including Britain) from economic disaster.

So you see, Mrs Rigby really hopes that when Mr Brown was talking about his "50 days to save the world" he wasn't referring to the almost 50 days until he and other leaders will be getting together for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen - which runs from 7th to 18th December 2009.

Mrs R wonders which day Mr Brown is due to speak - it wouldn't be 9th December would it?

Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change

Apparently today is "Blog Action Day"

"Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web."

This year they want the hot topic, discussed by all bloggers round the globe, to be "Climate Change", and they want blogs to register with their site too.

Mrs Rigby notes that quite a few people are already talking about Climate Change, for example Samizdata, which is where she read about this 'action day' - she'd never have heard of it otherwise.

It's interesting that the BBC has decide to join the party, with an article telling us that in a very few years the North Pole will be ice free. Bit of a contrast to last Friday's article

You see, that's one of the problems.

The experts who want to convince us the planet is doomed, and doomed very soon if we don't pay a lot of money into carbon credit schemes, don't keep to their own script. They don't talk about "Global Warming" any more because they realised it isn't happening, although all the populist, high profile, reports say that it is. Today's piece on the BBC is a case in point, it directly contradicts the earlier article. Something within it has also been picked up within the comments on Wattsupwiththat The Top Ten Reasons why I think Catlin Arctic Ice Survey data can’t be trusted

Alan the Brit (06:07:15) :

timbrom (04:07:53) :
“The seasoned Arctic Explorer, who was the first person to trek to the North Pole alone, was forced to continue with just a simple ice drill. During the 73 day trek he took 1,500 readings, often during pitch blackness and with windchill factors down to -70 degree C. The team also took thousands of visual observations to give an impression of how the shape of the ice sheet is changing. ”
“Mr Hadow insisted the effort was worth it. He pointed out that no other readings of this year’s winter sea ice was available to scientists and surface readings can pick up changes in the ice that were not being picked up by computer models.”

Changes like recovery I presume!
Presumably they made those “observations” in daylight or they might have got a rather different impression in the dark! Taking “accurate” readings by torchlight would be tricky in most cases too.
1500 holes/73 days is around 20 holes a day. Is it feasible in those conditions to walk 6km (3¾ miles) per day for 435km & do that back breaking, arm twisting work, day in day out, breaking open the equipment, setting it up, drilling, reading, packing away again, loding up the back-packs, trudging off again, etc???? I am presuming for now that it was all manual work as battery life would be critical in such conditions for power tools. I have my doubts. As I understand it the exteme cold can play tricks with the mind for even the fittest of us, how do we know they were not so affected? Come to think of it, if they were using radar electronics for the first week or so that bumps it up to almost 23 holes a day. (They should have gone a year earlier & they could have hitched a lift with Jeremy Clarkeson & James May in their 4 x 4, although I somehow doubt that those two would actuallly want them aboard.)
Good job the good Professor managed to mention satellite data, or Pen would be right!

Another thing all these experts forget is that not all ordinary people are ill-educated. Some went through school, college or university before government got their hands on the curriculum and started massaging it to suit an agenda. It's very difficult to remove all traces of a good education, and bullying makes some people very stubborn.

There are people who don't trust government, and who don't trust big businesses. There are people who think they can see through global environmental policies, and believe they're just money-making scams. There are people who believe that wind turbines are a visual PR con, costing more to make than they'll ever give back.

All these people get called names by the establishment, they're almost as bad as the 'vile' cigarette smokers.

There are also people who are old enough to have lived through tough times caused by very cold, very long, winters. These people have personal knowledge of the cycles of climate - hot followed by cold - but they only see this data mentioned as an anomaly, because otherwise the upwards graphs wouldn't work. These people don't believe that anomalies cause snow to lay on the ground for several weeks, and normally ice-free rivers to freeze over. They believe low temperatures and climatic conditions cause it.

When people read weather reports of the earliest snowfall for x years they're again sceptical. Maybe the powers-that-be can explain this, reported on Wattsupwiththat

Early start to winter ≈20% of USA is covered in snow already

Here is the accompanying table and discussion:
October 13, 2009

Area Covered By Snow:	19.9%
Area Covered Last Month:	0.0%
Snow Depth
Average:	0.7 in
Minimum:	0.0 in
Maximum:	728.8 in
Std. Dev.:	2.1 in
Snow Water Equivalent
Average:	0.1 in
Minimum:	0.0 in
Maximum:	403.4 in
Std. Dev.:	0.4 in

By way of comparison, here is the October 13th USA snow cover for the last few years:
2003- .7
2004- .3
2005- 1.7
2006- 3.7
2007- .3
2008-12.7
2009-19.9

Mrs Rigby believes that climate changes, it's been changing for millennia.

Why should mankind be so arrogant, and believe we can mess with what the planet is doing naturally, and change natural cycles solely for the advantage of one single species of animal.

Getting cooler?

Tucked away on the BBC Science pages, and 'last updated' at 15:22 GMT Friday 9th October, is an article that's failed to thrill the media, who are instead much more interested in the "Green" protesters who've managed to avoid the Police who guard our Parliament against attack from terrorists, and have climbed onto the roof.

The article is written by Paul Hudson, the BBC Climate Correspondent, and this is part of what it says.

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

So all those graphs they keep showing us that say the earth is warming have been porkies? Surely not, "they" are all honourable people, with our best interests at heart.

Now Mrs R can remember being very worried when, in the sixties "they" told us it was so cold because Earth was entering a cooling phase and we could expect a mini-Ice Age. The same sort of thing happened in the eighties, and "they" told us we might be going back to the days of a frozen River Thames - with ice thick enough to hold parties. Anybody else remember?

When "they" first started saying scary things about our climate, mentioning CFCs, the Ozone Layer and so on, Mrs R was slightly sceptical because "they" all talked as if they knew what things were like before. They didn't ever mention that the hole in the Ozone Layer, that could only be seen from space, couldn't have ever been "seen" or measured before we were able to go into space and take a look. The CFCs were blamed for the ozone hole, so they took them out of our fridges and out of our aerosols, and put in something that could go bang instead.

Other stuff has happened, including taking lead out of petrol, which meant other chemicals had to be put into it to keep the engines working, so they invented catalytic converters - which chuck out sulphur dioxide. Mrs R remembers acid rain, and all the damage apparently caused by sulphur gases produced from burning coal - but apparently it's now just fine to have the same gas coming out of our cars - although smoking filthy cigarettes in the wrong place is a criminal offence.

"They" tell us that CO2, the horrible stuff that we all breathe out, has made our planet warmer - because it's capable of trapping heat. But few of "them" ever seem to say that lots of CO2 is good for plants and makes them grow bigger and better, which in turn might mean we can grow more food crops and so feed the world's increasing population of people.

"They" never mention that loads of CO2 might have led to the giant plants that were eaten by the massive plant-eating dinosaurs, and these days they never, ever, mention the atmospheric pollution from volcanic eruptions. They only ever blame mankind, and modern mankind at that, and tell us we're naughty.

None of "them" ever seem to look at history and find information about the Romans being able to grow grapes as far north as Hadrian's Wall. And none of "them" ever seem to mention that once almost all of Britain was covered with a huge layer of ice. None of "them" ever seem to mention continental drift and other geological forces beyond our control, but try to scare us into believing that earthquakes and tsunamis can be caused by too much CO2.

"They" brought in a lovely new law recently that said we'd all got to have energy saving lightbulbs, that contain mercury vapour, but we mustn't have mercury in either barometers or thermometers because it's a deadly poison that pollutes the environment.

Is it any wonder there are sceptics and nonbelievers - but not amongst the young who have been brainwashed by the national curriculum, and are no longer encouraged to think for themselves.

All "they" seem to want to do these days is make us feel guilty and find a way of punishing us, by making us pay lots of money for trying to keep warm in the winter, to have lights that are bright enough to read by, and enough electricity to keep our computers working.

These "green" people, not the ones from Mars, have (apparently) successfully managed to stop the new power station at Kingsnorth - but where do they think we're going to get our electricity from?

Energy supply is critical, British power stations desperately need replacing and here we have a French company (which employs Ed Milliband's girlfriend) deciding Britain doesn't need any more generating capacity - they even say there's been a drop in consumption. (Maybe that was because it was summer!) But, maybe it's because Eon has got plenty of power to spare, but I wouldn't mind betting it'll cost a heck of a lot more for it to cross the Channel once we can no longer make electricity for ourselves.

The new name of "Climate Change" can mean either upwards or downwards - so "they" will be right whatever happens, and us mugs will be footing the bill.

We're going to need that power to keep warm, because Global Warming isn't happening and few houses these days can be heated by either wood or coal - they don't have chimneys, and gas fires don't work without that little electrical spark.

Either we pay more or we'll seriously have to cut back and lose some of the benefits of 21st century life, because the lights will start going out - and very soon too.

.....

Added later.

A post written by Goodnight Vienna on "Calling England" says:-

"In the Times today a curious piece centred around the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. They maintain that in order to meet the targets for CO2 emission reduction, living standards in Britain and the West in general must fall dramatically.

The wealthier parts of the world, including Britain, will have to seriously consider reducing their levels of consumption over the next 10-15 years while we put in place low-carbon technologies.

That may mean having only one car per household, a smaller fridge, buying fewer clothes and electronic goods and curtailing the number of weekend breaks that we have.

Read the rest of it here, and make of it what you will.

Media silence is cold as ice.

Not a peep in the media, so Mrs R will link to Wattsupwiththat and the latest from Antarctica.

Here you go!

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.
Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

Read the rest here

Mrs R wonders why we aren't all being told about this, surely it's good news?

But, umm, mebbe not if you're deeply into carbon offsetting or carbon futures!

You know, Mrs Rigby remembers learning about Tulip Mania with single bulbs changing hands at tens of thousands of pounds each ... somebody got rich. There was a scam called the South Sea Bubble ... it made some people a lot of money. How about Charles Ponzi?
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