A Russian scientist has found large amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere in the Arctic, far more than previously predicted.
It is speculated that these releases are the result of the Earth’s warming climate during the past several hundred years. And because methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, its release will feed into that warming.
Thugs: The Obama Justice Department has joined the UK government to go after the climategate whistleblowers.
This action once again shows how completely tone deaf the Obama administration is. Attacking the messenger here will do nothing to convince anyone that global warming is happening. Instead, it will help to convince everyone that the whole thing is a fraud, and should be shut down.
Attacking the messenger? The UK police have seized several computers belonging to the first blogger in England to break the story of climategate 2.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The IPCC scientist working group, meeting in San Francisco, has decided that Freedom of Information Act laws do not apply to its work.
Putting aside the absurdity of a bunch of individuals simply declaring they don’t have to obey the law, it is interesting to me that the lead scientists of the IPCC happen to be meeting in San Francisco the same time the UN climate conference was going on in Durban. This seems to me to be further evidence of how irrelevant science was to that Durban conference.
Climate theater of the absurd.
The key thing to understand about the climate talks is that they’re not really about the climate. They’re about power and money. They are about the desire of fast-growing emitters such as Brazil, South Africa, India and China to extract billions in so-called climate reparations from rich countries, especially the United States. These and other so-called developing countries now account for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. They want the rich countries to start cutting large amounts of carbon right away, while they do nothing. The rich countries are understandably reluctant. Hence the impasse.
One congressman’s take on climate change and climategate.
And it ain’t good for science. If anything should convince scientists that they have to clean up their act, it should be this interview. Here is a congressman who seems truly interested in the field, but who has grown skeptical of anything climate scientists say because he simply doesn’t believe them.
Follow the money: An environmental scientist is caught on film, agreeing to ignore her own data and to make up new and unproven claims, in order to win big cash in an environmental court case.
Now they tell us: Hurricane predictors admit they can’t predict hurricanes.
We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.
Another global warming activist who fakes it: Sir David Attenborough admits to shooting fake polar bear footage for a BBC documentary.
What’s worse is that he sees nothing wrong with what he did!
But wait, there’s more! The BBC, also in the tank for global warming, has also now admitted that a great deal of the footage in its nature documentaries is staged.
In a further blow to wildlife fans, corporation bosses yesterday confessed that staging footage was standard practice in natural history programmes. They insisted such editing tricks were necessary to create the documentaries, and added the programme met the expected editorial standards.
A spokesman said: “While the great majority of footage for Frozen Planet is filmed entirely in the wild, on occasion certain sequences need to be filmed in controlled conditions – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to bring these stories to our audiences. “This type of filming is standard practice across the industry when creating natural history programmes.”
It appears that Canada will announce on Monday that is it pulling out of the Kyoto climate treaty.
They might have cobbled together what they call a deal, but nonetheless (and for good reasons), there are long faces in Durban.
I like this quote best:
The leading alarmist among American scientists, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been as spectacularly wrong as Mr. Gore. Mr. Hansen said in a 1988 interview the sea level off Manhattan would rise 10 feet within 40 years (if atmospheric CO2 doubled). In the 23 years since, the sea level has risen just 2.5 inches. Sea levels fell over the past year.
But alarmism has been good for his pocketbook. Mr. Hansen failed to report $1.6 million in outside income, much of it in violation of NASA’s rules, according to Power Line’s John Hinderaker.
Bad news: A deal has been struck at Durban.
The proposed treaty sounds so complicated and obtuse that I can’t see how it can be enforced. More importantly, I don’t see the U.S. Senate ever agreeing to it, even today’s Democratically controlled Congress.
I hope this is good news: The Durban climate negotiations are now in overtime, with several negotiators from some countries having already left the conference.
Some of the madness contained in the draft treaty being proposed in Durban, as reported by Lord Christopher Monckton:
- A new International Climate Court will have the power to compel Western nations to pay ever-larger sums to third-world countries in the name of making reparation for supposed “climate debt”. The Court will have no power over third-world countries. Here and throughout the draft, the West is the sole target. “The process” is now irredeemably anti-Western.
- “Rights of Mother Earth”: The draft, which seems to have been written by feeble-minded green activists and environmental extremists, talks of “The recognition and defence of the rights of Mother Earth to ensure harmony between humanity and nature”. Also, “there will be no commodification [whatever that may be: it is not in the dictionary and does not deserve to be] of the functions of nature, therefore no carbon market will be developed with that purpose”.
- War and the maintenance of defence forces and equipment are to cease – just like that – because they contribute to climate change. There are other reasons why war ought to cease, but the draft does not mention them.
There’s more stupidity detailed by Monckton at the link.
All in all, this treaty draft once again reveals these activists for what they are: power-hungry socialists whose real goal isn’t to save the Earth but to take from some to enrich themselves and others. I pray the Obama administration and Congress refuse to go along.
The work of a modern global warming climate scientist:
An update on the climate treaty talks in Durban.
I gather from this article that the talks appear to be going nowhere. (The reporter desperately wants a deal, and you need to read between the lines to sense how unlikely the deal is.) Not only is the U.S. reluctant to sign anything, so is India, China, and Brazil. Furthermore, even if the Obama administration agreed to something, it is highly unlikely any treaty could get through the Senate.
Also, it appears that the $100 billion Green Climate Fund is is in trouble as well.
All good news, as far as I am concerned. None of these deals have anything to do with climate or science. Instead, they are designed to redistribute power and wealth, by fiat, from one set of countries to another.
The final results for the 2011 hurricane season show that the number of Atlantic hurricanes this year was completely average, not too many or too few, but well below what was predicted. See the graph at the bottom of the page.
The monthly update of the solar cycle graph produced by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center was released yesterday. I have posted the graph below the fold.
The fast ramp up to solar maximum is continuing. For the fifth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity leaped upward. Not only has the sunspot activity once again exceeded the prediction for this particular time period, the activity is shot way above the solar maximum peak predicted for several years hence. This behavior is far different then what we’ve seen during the just completed long and deep solar minimum, when the Sun consistently underperformed the predictions for sunspot activity. Now it appears to be outperforming the predictions.
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Speaking of press release journalism, they just ended a press conference at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting led by James Hansen, head of the NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. Hansen is a devoted global warming scientist, most well known to the public from his testimony to Congress in 1988 outlining the serious threat the world faces from global warming and carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere.
I had very much wanted to ask Hansen (as well as the rest of the panel) this somewhat challenging question:
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