An interview (mp3) on the reasons he left Greenpeace and more.
(h/t to reader Bill)

The Marshall Institute Funding Flows for Climate Change Research and Related Activities identifies the “leading suppliers and recipients of government and foundation resources in climate-based research”.

(Partial view)
The top recipients of foundation funding for the 2000-2002 period represent some of the most well-known names in the climate change debate. Ranking first on the list, having received more than $9 million, is Strategies for the Global Environment, which is the umbrella organization for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Center for SeaChange. The Energy Foundation also ranks highly on this list as it is the recipient of considerable support from other organizations. It received $7.6 million over the three years surveyed. Rounding out the top three is the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which brought in $6.7 million for climate change-related projects between 2000-2002.
[…]
These lists are indicative of the minimum amount expended in this area, but they are not definitive. The nature of the initial constraints on the quality of the data used for this analysis precludes definitive statements about maximum dollar values for climate change related activities, as many foundations do not identify the specific activities for which their contributions are granted. These general operating or support grants can be used for any purpose by the recipient; some of those uses may be in the area of climate change, but the specific proportions are not known.

See the PDF for full charts and analysis. Also in HTML.
Via CNS News – ‘Scientist’ Group’s Funding Comes with Liberal ‘Strings Attached’

The Stern Review: A Dual Critique (download PDF), for The World Economics Journal of Current Economic Analysis and Policy.
The abstract;

The Stern Review, described as the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change, was published on 30 October 2006. The twin papers from a combined team of scientists and economists present a critique in two parts of the Stern Review. Part I focuses on scientific issues and their treatment in the Review. It forms the point of departure for Part II which deals with economic aspects. Each paper has its own list of authors. In relation to both scientific and economic issues, the authors question the accuracy and completeness of the Stern Review’s analysis and the objectivity of its treatment. They conclude that the Review fails to present an accurate picture of scientific understanding of climate change issues, and will reinforce ill-informed alarm about climate change.
Two interrelated features of the Stern Review are that it greatly understates the extent of uncertainty as to possible developments, in highly complex systems that are not well understood, over a period of two centuries or more; and its treatment of sources and evidence is persistently selective and biased. These twin features have combined to make the Review a vehicle for speculative alarmism. In the judgement of the authors of the Dual Critique, the Stern Review mishandles data; gives too little attention to actual observation and evidence, as distinct from the results of model-based exercises; and takes no account of the failures of due disclosure, and the chronic limitations of peer reviewing, that have been characteristic of work relating to climate change which governments have commissioned and drawn on. As to specifically economic aspects, the authors note among other weaknesses that the Review systematically overstates projected costs of climate change, partly though by no means wholly as a result of its failure to acknowledge the scope for long-term adaptation to possible global warming; underestimates the likely cost—including to the world’s poor—of the drastic global mitigation programme that it calls for; and proposes worldwide adoption of a specially low rate of interest for discounting the costs and benefits of mitigation, on the basis of inadequate analysis and without regard for the problems and risks that would result. So far from being an authoritative guide to the economics of climate change, the Stern Review is deeply flawed. It does not provide a basis for informed and responsible policies.

The Stern Review online
BBC: Stern Review at a glance.

Or face excommunication;

The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program “The Climate Code,” is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their “Seal of Approval” for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
[…]
Cullen’s call for decertification of TV weatherman who do not agree with her global warming assessment follows a year (2006) in which the media, Hollywood and environmentalists tried their hardest to demonize scientific skeptics of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to “Holocaust deniers” and former Vice President turned foreign lobbyist Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as “global warming deniers.”
[…]
Cullen’s call for suppressing scientific dissent comes at a time when many skeptical scientists affiliated with Universities have essentially been silenced over fears of loss of tenure and the withdrawal of research grant money. The United Nations Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process has also steadily pushed scientists away who hold inconvenient skeptical views and reject the alarmist conclusions presented in the IPCC’s summary for policymakers.

There’s that “consensus” we keep hearing about.
Update – A challenge for Al Gore – declined;

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore’s tune.
The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore’s agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

Patrick Moore;

I soon discovered that trees are just large plants that have evolved the ability to grow long wooden stems. They didn’t do that so we could cut them up into lumber and grind them into pulp; they actually had only one purpose in mind and that was to get their needles or leaves higher up above the other plants where the tree could then monopolize the Sun’s energy for photosynthesis. When foresters create openings or clearcuts when they harvest trees, one of the reasons for doing it is so the new trees growing back can be in full sunlight. Trees are basically plants that want to be in the sun. If trees wanted to be in the shade they would have been shrubs instead, they would not have spent so much time and energy growing long wooden stems.
Forests are home to the majority of living species; not the oceans, nor the grasslands, nor the alpine areas, but ecosystems that are dominated by trees. There is a fairly simple reason for this. The living bodies of the trees themselves create a new environment that would not be there in their absence. Now the canopy above is home to millions of birds and insects where there was once only thin air. And beneath the canopy, in the interior of the forest, the environment is now protected from frost and sun and wind. This, in combination with the food provided by the leaves, fruits and even the wood of the trees, creates thousands of new habitats into which new species can evolve, species that could never have existed if it were not for the presence of the living trees.
This gives rise to the obvious concern that if the trees are cut down the habitats or homes will be lost and the species that live in them will die. Indeed, in 1996 the World Wildlife Fund, at a media conference in Geneva, announced that 50,000 species are going extinct each year due to human activity. And the main cause of these 50,000 extinctions, they said, is commercial logging. The story was carried around the world by Associated Press and other media and hundreds of millions of people came to believe that forestry is the main cause of species extinction.
During the past three years I have asked the World Wildlife Fund on many occasions to please provide me with a list of some of the species that have supposedly become extinct due to logging. They have not offered up a single example as evidence. In fact, to the best of our scientific knowledge, no species has become extinct in North America due to forestry.
Where are these 50,000 species that are said to be going extinct each year? They are in a computer model in Edward O. Wilson’s laboratory at Harvard University. They are electrons on a hard drive, they have no Latin names, and they are in no way related to any direct field observations in any forest.

Moore was a founding member of Greenpeace.
h/t Sheldon Kotyk.

Prepare to be creeped out.

Late Afternoon Update – (via radio) Police and emergency services are asking people not to use cell phones in the area unless necessary, as the system is being overloaded, and causing them problems. There are still a lot of drivers stranded on the roads, in and out of Saskatoon. Reports of 20 – 30 vehicles on the highway outside Rosetown, for example.
More U of Sask webcams. Noon Update - Current Sask highway conditions;

Saskatoon highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow North Battleford Area highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow. TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED In Unity, Kerrobert, and Rosetown areas. #3 Highway East and West of Melfort is CLOSED due to Zero Visibility, Loose Snow, Snow Drifts, Swirling Snow, Drifting Snow, TRAVEL NOT RECCOMENDED throughout the Prince Albert Area Meadow Lake Area Highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow.

There are also several streets in the Saskatoon closed or blocked by drifting, and motorists around the province reported stranded - including a Greyhound bus full of passengers bound for Edmonton that was forced to spend the night a few km outside North Battleford. More at the link. 2 PM (local time) UPDATE - believe it or not, this thing is getting worse. Saskatoon schools are not allowing children to walk home on their own, and are calling parents to get them. That may be difficult as there are multi-car pileups in various locations around the city. Winds at the moment are a sustained 70km/h. These are photos I took minutes ago on my street, looking west and east. (Click for larger version) Links to video and photos from listeners at CKOM radio. (link fixed) Update - two deaths reported at the Onion Lake reserve, when two people left their vehicle after getting stuck on a grid road. More, to the west of us (where things look postively sunny by comparison) Darcey asks you "take a little time out of your day to thank John Baird. He’s been Environmental Minister for just a short little time now but look at the difference"

WSJ, Jan 3 (behind subscriber wall);

“We are concerned,” said Mr. Kempthorne, that “the polar bears’ habitat may literally be melting” due to warmer Arctic temperatures. However, when we called Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery for some elaboration, he was a lot less categorical, even a tad defensive. The “endangered” designation is based less on the actual number of bears in Alaska than on “projections into the future,” Mr. Vickery said, adding that these “projection models” are “tricky business.”
Apparently so, because there are in fact more polar bears in the world now than there were 40 years ago, as the nearby chart shows. The main threat to polar bears in recent decades has been from hunting, with estimates as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. But thanks to conservation efforts, and some cross-border cooperation among the U.S., Canada and Russia, the best estimate today is that the polar bear population is 20,000 to 25,000.

It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear’s future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear’s range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” One of the leading experts on the polar bear, Mitchell Taylor, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory in Canada, has found that the Canadian polar bear population has actually increased by 25% — to 15,000 from 12,000 over the past decade.
Mr. Taylor tells us that in many parts of Canada, “polar bears are very abundant and productive. In some areas, they are overly abundant. I understand that people not living in the North generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears, but those who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like.” Those cuddly white bears are the Earth’s largest land carnivores.
There is no doubt that higher temperatures threaten polar bear habitat by melting sea ice. Mr. Kempthorne also says he had little choice because the threshold for triggering a study under the Endangered Species Act is low. The Bush Administration was sued by the usual environmental suspects to make this decision, which means that Interior will now conduct a year-long review before any formal listing decision is made.
Nonetheless, the bears seem to have survived despite many other severe warming and cooling periods over the last few thousands of years. Polar bears are also protected from poaching and environmental damage by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, so there is little extra advantage to the bears themselves from an “endangered” classification.
All of which suggests that the real story here is a human one, namely about the politics of global warming. Once a plant or animal is listed under the Endangered Species Act, the government must also come up with an elaborate plan to protect its habitat. If the polar bear is endangered by warmer temperatures, then the environmentalist demand will be that the government do something to address that climate change. Faster than you can say Al Gore, this would lead to lawsuits and cries in Congress demanding federal mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The rest of the article has been copied here.

Darcey has been busy collecting the imminent disaster global warming headlines. Best so far – “Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012”
That’s right – the process will be complete just five years from now. So, again – who needs Kyoto? It looks to me like this “human-caused global climate change” is a problem on the brink of solving itself.
Idiots.
Well, time to get moving. I’ve got to batten down the hatches in preparation for tonight’s forecasted blizzard.
Headline updated, h/t commentor Rob, who may have just coined the new word of the year ;

Your search –Y2Kyoto – did not match any documents.

What sort of world is Marvin leaving for his grandchildren?

If Stéphane Dion gets his way on the Kyoto Protocol we, too, could follow Britain and implement a Bovine Flatulence Mitigation Program:

Farmers will be told today they could be penalised if they do not stop their flatulent animals farting so much methane gas. The environment secretary, David Miliband, will tell a farming conference in Oxford that agriculture now contributes 7% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions…

Reader Manny writes [via email, and in the comments – slightly edited].

I created a composite between the photo of the beast from our own Radarsat (link below) and a map of Canada from MSN Encarta World Atlas (free online) to illustrate the size and distance of the thing.

full size
About the risk to the Hibernia oil platform[*], it is 4,500 km away from it (straight line). That’s the distance between Montreal and Calgary. Can everyone please relax?
PS: I was intrigued by Ice island vs Iceberg. From the Canadian Encyclopedia:

“In the Arctic Ocean, the term “ice island” is applied to pieces of floating shelf ice that form principally on the north coast of ELLESMERE ISLAND. These thin tabular icebergs are 20-60 m thick, often up to 100 km2 in area, and typically protrude 2-6 m above water.” …”The thinner arctic ice islands have a much lower natural period of oscillation and, having horizontal dimensions much greater than their thickness, tend to absorb ocean waves as filtered travelling waves, which induce flexing of the ice. As the ice island thins by melting, this process may lead to it fracturing and breaking into smaller pieces.” … “Since 1985 a Canadian station has been maintained on an ice island that calved from the Ward-Hunt Ice Shelf in 1983. Because many ice islands become trapped in Arctic Ocean current gyres, they survive for many years, melting and crumbling at the edges only slowly.”

More unmentioned data;

As this table indicates, the vast majority of ice shelf loss occured in the first half of the 20th century, assuming there’s been no difference in the Helocene ice shelves. from 4500 years ago to 100 years ago. To me, that’s a significant assumption.

Previous… Birth Of An Ice Cube

It’s not often one gets a chance to pack this much uncontested hyperbole into a news item;

Laval University’s Warwick Vincent, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the new ice island and couldn’t believe what he saw. “It was extraordinary,” Vincent said Thursday. “This is a piece of Canadian geography that no longer exists.”

Ice is geography now?

Vincent said in 10 years of working in the region, he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice.

And in 15 years of working in this region, I’ve never shovelled so much snow this early in the year. So what?

Scientists said it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years. They point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

And there they go again. Maybe they meant to say “3,000” years. Or maybe 300? In other words – what is the significance about any event of this type being the “largest” in 30 years and how does that legitimize the assertion that it’s an indication of global climate change? Are we to deduce that an even larger chunk broke free in 1976? Or that – more likely – data is insufficient prior to the mid-1970’s to make any meaningful comparisons.
Despite the article’s mention that this chunk of ice “travelled west for 50 kilometres until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter”, Mr. Vincent seems nearly inconsolable;

“We’re seeing the tragic loss of unique features of the Canadian landscape,” Vincent said, adding the global climate is crossing an unprecedented threshold.
“There are microscopic organisms and entire ecosystems associated with this ice, so we’re losing a part of Canada’s natural richness.”

It’s a good thing Dr. Vincent wasn’t around to witness the effects of the North American megadrought of the 1600’s. He’d have positively had a bird. In the comments, Cal2 makes this wry observation;

11000 football fields sounds way worse than 20 square miles […] just for comparison the area of Calgary is 300 square miles.the area of Red Deer Alberta 25 square miles or 14000 football fields.

Arctic weather map (It’s -36C in Alert this morning).
Back to our article. Just how did they learn of the momentous event? No one was on hand to observe it. Scientists “reconstructed” it “using high tech monitoring devices, including satellite images”. Presumably, the same ones that were in place prior to 1906, to enable widely quoted scientists like Dr. Vincent to place his “10 years” of regional observation in the broader climatological context.
With all due respect to the climate cultists – while it ensures the media attention you crave, the use of alarmist terminology like “tragic” and “unprecedented” to describe an ice cube floating in the arctic ocean isn’t likely to sway skeptics already desensitized to sensational overkill.

---

Related – Residents of Nunavut don’t seem as concerned about the polar bear population decline as the armchair activists are. In fact, they’d like to keep shooting them, thankyou very much.
Also related – The FCPP is hosting a lecture with historical climatologist, Tim Ball on January 27th in Winnipeg.

Kevin Vranes’ take on the American Geophysical Union;

To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.
What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. Sure, science is messy and always full of tension between holders of competing positions, opinions and analyses. That has always been the nature of science, and of course extends to climate science. Tensions come out at meetings, on listservs, on letters pages, and in the press. But these tensions normally surround a particular paper, or a particular question. While much more broadly-based tensions have existed for years on the state of understanding on global warming, they haven’t really been tensions internal to the climsci community, but tensions between the climsci community and interested outsiders.
What I am sensing now is something much broader and more diffuse, something that has less to do with particular components of the science in the field and is much more about how the field is composing itself.
What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a “hangover” or a “sophomore slump” or “buyers remorse.” None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the “it’s happening” side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they’re ready to take action. And now we’re wondering if we didn’t create a monster. We’re wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we’ve oversold the science. We’re wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as “skeptics.” We’re wondering if we’ve let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we’re wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}

Read it all. Via Iain Murray, who also points to this BBC viewpoint by Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research;

What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists?
I believe there are three factors now at work.
First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes – the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill.
Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.
Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity.
Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012.
The Exeter conference of February 2005 on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of “climate change is worse than we thought” news reporting and group-think.
[…]
Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets.
It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more “big push” of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively.
We need to take a deep breath and pause.

More – The media’s lust for “climate porn”.

Luboš Motl;

Using the WMO terminology, 2006 is set to become the “sixth warmest year” after 1998, 2005, 2002, 2003, and 2004: see WMO’s top five Nevertheless, when a naive and innocent girl would read most of the newspapers, she would most likely start to think that we live in an era of a spectacular global warming. In reality, we live in an era of a spectacularly inexpensive propaganda produced by unusually blinded zealots.
And that’s the memo.

Figure 1: Global cooling. This graph, depicting 6 warmest years since 1998 according to their rank, shows how Al Gore and other people with comparable moral and scientific standards would be presenting the recent temperature records if cooling became more convenient for their goals than warming.

h/t

Exerpts from an interview with Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World;

…I think what is happening now is that we are increasingly seeing a tailspin into hysteria over the global warming discussion, where it is almost commonplace to say things are worse than we thought.
It’s at the stage where people are saying its even worse than we thought yesterday, and that it is going to be catastrophic, and chaotic and disruptive – all these kinds of words. This has actually led to one of the lead modellers in the UK to come out and say it’s bizarre that before we had the debate between the climate change skeptics and the scientists, and that now we have the debate between the scientists, who are now becoming the skeptics, and those who are saying it’s all going to end in chaos, when it is going to do nothing of the sort – and this is not what the UN panel is telling us.
Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore. Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves – or New York, or Shanghai – leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm – about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we’re being told and what we’re actually seeing.
[…]
One of the top climate change economists has modelled – and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out – that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths.
There is a total lack of a sense of proportion about where we are in terms of the environment but also on non-environmental issues, which is of course what I am looking at now with the Copenhagen Consensus, where we try to look at what are the big issues of the world, and where can we do a lot of good, and where can we do a little good. And the bottom line is there are many problems in the world where we can do much more at much lower cost. So presumably, if our goal is to help people, then there are many other things we should do first. If our goal is to help the environment, then there are also many other things we can do first.

Here on the island of Borneo, a thick haze often encloses this city of 500,000 people. The cause: forest fires that have blazed across the island. Many of them were set to clear land to produce palm oil — a key ingredient in biodiesel, a clean-burning diesel fuel alternative.
At a new oil-palm plantation, the hillsides have been cleared and terraced.
The bluish smoke is at times so dense that it leaves the city dark and gloomy even at midday. The haze has sometimes closed Pontianak’s airport and prompted local volunteers to distribute face-masks on city streets. From July through mid-October, Indonesian health officials reported 28,762 smog-related cases of respiratory illness across the country.
[…]
In the 1800s, Dutch and British traders began carving up parts of the island to produce rubber and other commodities. Later, Malaysian and Indonesian timber barons devastated millions of acres of forest logging tropical hardwoods. Today, only a little more than half of Borneo’s once-ubiquitous forest cover remains, according to WWF, the global conservation organization.
Now, the palm-oil boom threatens what’s left. In West Kalimantan, a province along the western coast, the palms cover about 988,000 acres or more, up from less than 37,000 acres in 1984. Fleets of orange and mustard-colored trucks ply the province’s few paved roads, ferrying the oil to river ports.
[…]
As fires burn deep into the dry peat soil beneath Indonesia’s forests, centuries of carbon trapped in the biomass are released into the atmosphere. A study presented last month at a U.N. Climate Change Conference in Nairobi showed that Indonesia is the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter behind the U.S. and China, when emissions from fires and other factors are considered.

Currently behind a WSJ subscriber wall, I received the full article by email, but if someone finds a free access page, let me know.
Previous: “climate injustice”

Matthew Sheffield;

As already noted here on NewsBusters, the Senate held a hearing today examining the role of the media in promoting climate alarmism. With others covering the newsmaking part of the discussion, I decided to drop by to observe things from a blogger’s point of view.
I went into the hearing expecting it would be more interesting than your typical congressional hearing and wasn’t disappointed. Dr. David Deming, a geophysicist from the University of Oklahoma recount an experience he had with an NPR reporter who hung up on him after he declined to say that he thought global temperature increases were human-caused.
[…]
I also heard some interesting scientific debate as to whether ice core temperature readings can really be used as a reliable indicator of whether carbon dioxide is related to global climate changes. Don’t expect to hear much about this, though, since it the CO2 proponent, Dr. Daniel Schrag of Harvard, was less-than-articulate arguing the affirmative. As of the writing of this posting, I haven’t found a single news source that quoted from today’s hearing. I did see and converse with several reporters but so far have yet to read any coverage.

Don’t expect much in the way of first hand report from CNN anchor Miles O’Brien, either. He fell asleep during the hearing.
Update : Exerpts of the statement by David Deming;

“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
“I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” “The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” took hold in the 14th century. … The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be “gotten rid of.”
“In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the “hockey stick,” because of the shape of the temperature graph. “Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.
“There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed.”

Via Drudge.

Departing from the highly compelling and science-based arguments (“consensus! you’re an idiot!”) usually offered towards dissenters, global warming … er… “climate change” theologists are now demanding they be silenced. Or else;

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world’s largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

The Wall Street Journal response to Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe is scathing;

Let’s compare the balance of forces: on one side, CEI; on the other, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the U.N. and EU, Hollywood, Al Gore, and every politically correct journalist in the country. We’ll grant that’s a fair intellectual fight. But if the Senators are so afraid that a handful of policy wonks at a single small think-tank are in danger of winning this debate, they must not have much confidence in the merits of their own case.
The letter is so over-the-top that we also wonder if Mr. Rockefeller in particular has even read it. (He and Ms. Snowe didn’t return our call.) The Senator hails from coal-producing West Virginia, where people know something about carbon emissions. Come to think of it, Mr. Rockefeller owes his own vast wealth to something other than non-carbon energy. But perhaps it’s easier to be carbon free when your fortune comes from a trust fund.
The letter is of a piece with what has become a campaign of intimidation against any global warming dissent. Not only is everyone supposed to concede that the planet has been warming–as it has–but we are all supposed to salute and agree that human beings are the definitive cause, that the magnitude of the warming will be disastrous and its effects catastrophic, that such problems as AIDS and poverty are less urgent, and that economic planners must therefore impose vast new regulatory burdens on everyone around the world. Exxon is being targeted in this letter and other ways because it is one of the few companies that still thinks some debate on these questions is valuable.
Every dogma has its day, and we’ve lived long enough to see more than one “consensus” blown apart within a few years of “everyone knowing” it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they’ve made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it’s useful to have a few folks outside the “consensus” asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.
Imagine if this letter had been sent by someone in the Bush Administration trying to enforce the opposite conclusion? The left would be howling about “censorship.” That’s exactly what did happen earlier this year after James Hansen, the NASA scientist and global warming evangelist, complained that a lowly 24-year-old press aide had tried to limit his media access. The entire episode was preposterous because Mr. Hansen is one of the most publicized scientists in the world, but the press aide was nonetheless sacked.

Via Daimnation.

17: The number of named storms predicted May 31 by a team at Colorado State University led by Professor William Gray

More on the “creeping threat”. Or, I guess – less.
(Now, back * to regular shoveling.)