Among the events related to global warming were “Hurricane Katrina,” “California wildfires,” and “Asian tsunamis.” Because it’s self-evident that SUVs and coal-powered plants cause undersea earthquakes — at least to the folks at CNN.

The 2nd edition of Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick’s Taken By Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, can be now ordered from Canada stores. (International distribution next spring.) The first edition sold out.

From the foreword by the distinguished Sir Mortimer Long-Bore;

I had initially supposed this to be a book of independent thinking and skeptical attitude. My fears were well-founded. The authors recklessly question the widely-accepted doctrines of global warming and the conclusions of the very eminent International Expert Panel on Climate Change [sic]. This is deeply disturbing to me. We cannot allow people to undermine the consensus position on global warming, after all the effort that went into imposing it.
The greenhouse effect is lifting the global temperature to dangerous levels. This is proven by elementary Newtonian physics as used in our most advanced computer climate models. The global temperature is warmer today than ever before in the planet’s history; modern computerized climate models can predict future warming with impressive numerical precision; the greenhouse “fingerprint” has been positively identified in global temperature data. We have complete certainty that our future is imperiled. We observe that sea levels are rising, storms are increasingly violent, droughts and floods ravage the land, animals are dying, and the Arctic ice cap is gone, I am told. One reels at the horror of it all.
The authors are wrong to question any of this. Morally wrong. Nor are the authors even qualified to make commentary on this sublime topic. One is an applied mathematician who apparently works on topics in radiation and fluid dynamics. The other is an economist who studies environmental policy. What claim has either to expertise on global warming or climate change? For tutelage on issues of such importance I counsel reliance on the authority of qualified experts. You may find, as I did, the book An Inconvenient Truth to be greatly informative in this respect.

Just in time for your Christmas lawn chair!
Update – Dr. McKitrick responds to “critics” (that’s a polite word for it) in the comments.

Shrinking brains, great balls of methane fire, and wee helpless babies bursting into flame – can the global warming news get any worse?
Why, yes! It can!

An interview with “climate denier” Dr. John Christy on The World Tonight. (Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

O’BRIEN: I assume you’re not happy about sharing this award with Al Gore. You going to renounce it in some way?
CHRISTY: Well, as a scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, I always thought that — I may sound like the Grinch who stole Christmas here — that prizes were given for performance, and not for promotional activities.
And, when I look at the world, I see that the carbon dioxide rate is increasing, and energy demand, of course, is increasing. And that’s because, without energy, life is brutal and short. So, I don’t see very much effect in trying to scare people into not using energy, when it is the very basis of how we can live in our society.

Annually, the UK dumps….

6.7 million tonnes, meaning each household jettisons between £250 and £400 worth of food each year. Most of the waste – which nationally costs £8bn – is sent to landfill where it rots, emitting the potent climate- change gas methane.
Ms Ruddock, the minister for climate change, warned that, although many people had not made the connection between scraping food into the bin and climate change, waste food presented a bigger environmental problem than packaging. “We cannot fail to do what is necessary,” she said.
“At this rate we will not have a place to live which is habitable if we don’t address climate change globally and the UK has to make its contribution.”

C’mon Brittania – after all, natural vegetation ceased its Gaia-destroying practice of dying and rotting shortly after the Kyoto Protocols came into effect.
What’s your excuse?
Related – “scientists predict that by 2050 there will be 32.9 scare stories for every person in Britain”

For the ice…

Thanks, but no thanks;

Both halves of the [Nobel Peace Prize] honor promoting the message that Earth’s temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.
I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.
[…]
Mr. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

h/t

*

Blunder down under…

Guardian;

Ministers are planning a U-turn on Britain’s pledges to combat climate change that “effectively abolishes” its targets to rapidly expand the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20% of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces “severe practical difficulties”.

The things David Suzuki never told us…

They also reveal different priorities across government departments about how to get renewables to 20% of the electricity mix. Although Germany has increased its renewable energy share to 9% in six years, Britain’s share is only 2%, with its greenhouse gas emissions rising.

h/t National Newswatch

Slow to get with the global warming program;

Under the headline “Energy Crunch Threatens South American Nations,” reporter Alexei Barrionuevo’s lead graph grabs you and never lets go: “Santiago, Chile – For Chile and Argentina, it was the frostiest of winters, and not just the reading on the thermometer. During one of the coldest South American winters here in decades, neighboring Argentina cut at least 90 percent of the natural gas it sends to Chile 79 times along pipelines that connect the two countries.”

Windmills, amigos. You need windmills!

Good news for wooly mammoths.

Nobody’s going to be getting at their bones in Antarctica any time soon. Nosiree.

A Climate Audit project;

In 2002, Malcolm Hughes sampled bristlecones at Sheep Mountain and nothing has been reported or archived from this study. In 2003, Lonnie Thompson sampled ice cores at Bona-Churchill and we’ve heard nothing about it. One might guess that 20th century dO18 levels were not high as, at the nearby site of Mount Logan, 20th century dO18 levels were lower than earlier levels, attributed to regional changes in circulation rather than temperature.
I’ve obviously been very critical of what appears to be opportunistic reporting of results. With my experience in mining speculations, I fully understand how much temptation that there is to delay reporting of “bad” results in the hope that later drill holes in the program will salvage things. But you don’t have any choice in the matter – you’re obliged to report the results. Plus investors are smart enough to now that delayed results are virtually never good results.
Right now I have no idea what the sampling will show – maybe it will show a tremendous response by the bristlecones in the past 20 years – perhaps due to CO2, nitrate or phosphate fertilization, perhaps due to temperature increases. Maybe they won’t go up and we’ll hear more about the divergence problem. I don’t expect these particular measurements to settle anything. But jeez, doncha think that someone would have tried to find out?

Early results from the dendro lab in Guelph are now up. Here’s a teaser.

30A ring widths from 1124 to 2007.

“Here’s something American media are virtually guaranteed to not report: a British court has determined that Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” contains at least eleven material falsehoods.“

A parting comment from Roger A. Pielke Sr. of Climate Science;

… suppose a group of scientists introduced a new cancer drug that they claimed could save many lives. There were side effects, of course, but they claimed that the benefit far out weighed these risks. The government than asked these scientist to form an assessment Committee to evaluate this claim. Colleagues of the group of scientists who introduced the drug are then asked to serve on this Committee, along with the developers.
If this occurred, of course, there would be an uproar of protest! This is a clear conflict of interest.
Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process! The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.

Read this as well and be sure to bookmark the archives.

IBD;

George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.
How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?
That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.
That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.
Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

We’ve mentioned Hansen in the past;

NASA scientist James E. Hansen, who has publicly criticized the Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting “court jesters,” appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an impending ice age within 50 years.

“Species in vulnerable habitats may be going extinct before their existence is even known.”

Apparently, this has been going on for a long time!

Sydney Morning Herald;

ONE day, climate change could cost the earth. For now, it is a nice little earner for Russian hunter Alexander Vatagin.
In Siberia’s northernmost reaches, well above the Arctic Circle, the changing temperature is thawing the permafrost to reveal the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoths, woolly rhinos and lions that have lay buried for thousands of years.
[…]
Back in Chersky, Sergei Davydov, 52, a scientist, keeps the bones he collects to study climate change, but also because they fascinate him. “This tooth has an unusual bump here. The mammoth suffered from a terrible toothache. We can only imagine how he must have roared.”

And we can only imagine he broke it munching on ice.

USHCN station Titusville, FL

“On your scale of 1 to 5, this is an 8.”

Remember this?
August 14 – The Sound Of Settled Science

And now, Douglas J. Keenan raises serious questions about the Chinese surface station data (PDF)

The paper is titled “Wei-Chyung Wang fabricated some scientific claims”.
Sept 16 – 19 – The World Conference on Research Integrity

The controversies surrounding the recent assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change demonstrates how research integrity is a critical issue not only for the science community, but for politicians and the society as a whole as well. In August 2007 the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had to withdraw previous published historical climate data. The incident came after a British mathematician discovered that the sources used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have disregarded the positions of weather stations, plus intentionally using outdated data on China from 1991 and ignoring revised data on the country from 1997.

Nonetheless, the conference forgot to invite the people responsible for exposing both the Chinese fraud and the Y2K error;

Obviously the identification of the NASA data problem originated here as well. The conference communique has mixed up these rather different issues – something that might have been avoided had they invited people who were familiar with the details of these issues to the conference.

You can read the full entry here at Climate Audit.