Inside the conference for climate deniers in New York

Climate change deniers have gathered in New York City to discuss the latest science as well as the way forward for their movement.

It seems to me its all rhetoric - the climate change deniers have LOST the scientific argument. They draw spurious parallels between todays climate change with the Eugenics movement in the 1920s.

Facts melted by 'global warming' by Christopher Booker

CATscience says "Booker keeps up the pressure on 'warmists' by citing examples of current weather. But is he looking at the climate changing trends? Is the BBC involved in a 'warmist' conspiracy!?"

Reposted from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3883550/Facts-melted-by-global-warming.html

Something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website last weekend, writes Christopher Booker.

Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 4:30PM GMT 31 Dec 2008

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Butterflies and polar ice are enlisted in warmist cause
Photo: Getty

Last weekend, that heroically diligent US meteorologist Anthony Watts noticed that something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website that shows how much sea-ice there is in the Arctic. Without explanation, as he reported on his Watts Up With That website, half a million square kilometres of ice simply vanished overnight.

This might have brought cheer to all those, such as Al Gore and the BBC, who have been obsessively telling us that the Arctic ice will soon disappear altogether. They were dismayed enough last winter when, after reaching its lowest point in 30 years, the ice bounded back to near "normal". This winter the freeze has been even faster and greater, making the extent of the ice, according to the other main Arctic website, Crysophere Today, 500,000 sq km greater than this time last year. How better to maintain the chosen narrative than to lose that half-million square kilometres simply by "adjusting" the graph downwards?

The warmists are so locked into their general narrative that the plummeting temperatures and abnormal snowfalls of the past two winters have thrown their army of media groupies into quite a tizzy.

The BBC did at least deign last week to notice the worst snowstorm to hit Las Vegas for 30 years, but without mentioning the freak snow and ice storms affecting many other parts of the US, as far south as New Orleans. The BBC was also quick to pick up from Pravda the unusual lack of snow in Moscow, without mentioning Siberia's record freeze that lowered temperatures to -60C.

Elsewhere in recent days, there have been reports of seven species of penguin being put on the endangered list owing to global warming – although Antarctic sea-ice this year reached easily its highest level since satellite records began in 1979.

Another warmist perennial to get an outing, from Dr Martin Warren of Butterfly Conservation, is the threat to the survival of many of our butterflies. As a longtime student of butterflies, I am keenly aware of various factors leading to the alarming decline in their numbers, but global warming is not one of them. If it were, how did such dwindling species as the Mountain Ringlet and even the Small Tortoiseshell survive the much warmer temperatures 1,000 years ago, before SUVs were invented?

Perhaps the get-out for the beleaguered warmists was provided by Friday's Today programme, when it reported heavy snowfalls on the Cairngorm ski slopes, only two years after the BBC was excitably reporting fears that ski-ing in Scotland might soon be but a memory. A local spokeswoman helpfully suggested that the thing about "climate change" was that it was always coming up with the unexpected.

So whatever happens, hot or cold, wet or dry, it can all be put down to that pesky old "climate change". As the rest of us might observe with a wry smile, how very true.

Marcus Brigstocke examines the argument from climate change denier and environment minister Sammy Wilson

Reposted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/10/climate-change-marcus-brigstocke

Marcus Brigstocke makes the analogy between CO2 and human excrement.

Feb 10, 2009 15:32:32

Cool your boots Guardianistas and enviro-squakers. ­Before you board your sustainably sourced wooden pedalos and set off for Northern Ireland ­with organic vegetables in hand ready to pelt the Democratic Unionist party's environment minister, Sammy Wilson for daring to air his reservations regarding anthropomorphic climate change, let's hear the man out. What does he think? Why does he think it? He's not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity, well let's suppose he's right. Brilliant. What a relief. Woohoo!

Wilson believes the warming planet has nothing to do with us, so he must have read some pretty convincing science from some pretty reputable sources to arrive at that serene position – after all, he's advocating nothing short of an astonishing scientific paradigm shift. I can't wait for him to reveal his scientific sources.

But I doubt that Wilson is a bad man. I think he's wrong but he's not saying that we should spend all that extra money instead on having a big party where we soak a plane in oil , set fire to it and watch as it flies into a refinery. No, he wants to free up money to tackle poverty, Aids, education and any number of other worthwhile projects – seemingly anything other than the environment. All laudable causes, but perhaps odd ones for the Northern Ireland Assembly's environment minister.

Here's what he has to say: "Most of the people who shout about climate change have not read one article about it." Although I think what he must have meant is: "The people who shout 'Climate change is not man made have not read one article about it.'"

But my being facetious is not going to convince him he's wrong. Only science can do that, using things like facts and evidence and research and well, you know, science.

I've been very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with climate scientists on two trips to the Arctic with Cape Farewell in 2007 and 2008. One of the most interesting things I read while there was in Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunzig's excellent book, Fixing Climate, where they discuss the introduction of underground sewage removal and the resistance to it from people I imagine to be very similar to Sammy Wilson. As underground sewage removal was proposed and planned, these towering Wilsons of their day claimed that it was too expensive to take the filth from the streets and carry it away underground and that the links between ill health and crap all over the pavements were unfounded. They lost the argument, mercifully, it cost us some money, but on balance I'm glad that I don't have to navigate my way through my neighbour's excrement to reach the station. If only CO2 emissions were as visible as sewage. It's so hard to make the case for leaving crap all over the place when people can see you're standing on a heap of it.

Back with today's Wilson, he says, "In 20 years' time we will look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves How on earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds which are going into this without any kind of rigorous examination of the background, the science, the implications of it all?"

I'm trying not to resort to patronising sarcasm and abuse as I look at this, but it's getting harder and the heat under my collar when confronted by this level of mendacity or ignorance is enough to melt an ice cap. Read a book you idiot, or the UN Earth Audit, or the Stern review, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's findings, or Google it, just read something, anything. Well almost anything, not Jeremy Clarkson. Oh, and check the source of what you've read.

Of course scientific argument cannot be won by democracy. According to a survey last month the overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe global warming is manmade (97% in fact). Not because their huge grants depend on it either but because the evidence has led them to that conclusion. Please someone show me the climate scientist living in a 20-room mansion and rolling out of expensive nightclubs with Krug in hand to be driven home in an Aston Martin – those grants are not as large as some might have you believe. Even if you lump in the ones who work for oil companies, 82% of earth scientists believe the data on manmade climate change.

Writing about the survey, Peter Doran, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences University of Illinois at Chicago along with Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, conclude that

"the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes."

Wilson doesn't yet. But with further reading, I'm sure he will. In the meantime Sammy ­ show us your science or it's to the pedalos and organic veg.

David Flint writes to Piers Corbyn, climate change denier

Reposted from: http://climate-cassandra.blogspot.com/2008/05/open-letter-to-piers-corbyn.html

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Open letter to Piers Corbyn

Piers Corbyn is a physicist who has published research on superconductivity, cosmology, solar physics, Sun-Earth relations and the weather. He runs a commercial weather forecasting business (www.weatheraction.com) and disagrees with the IPCC consensus on global warming.

Piers has challenged the IPCC '...to admit that there is no observational evidence … that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change'. He’s issued a general challenge: 'If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it'.

Here is my reply to the challenge.

Dear Piers,

Let me respond to your request for evidence by explaining why I won’t be providing any.

Since I’m not a climate scientist I must, even though I have a science degree, approach the issue as an informed layman. How is the informed layman to proceed in such a case?

a) He can ask whether the claimed effect is plausible based on what he does know. For instance I know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that there’s more in the atmosphere than there was before the industrial revolution and that temperatures and sea levels are rising globally. Now that doesn’t prove causation but it is consistent with it.

I also know that most of the reports I see on advances in climate science (in New Scientist for instance) suggest that change is now happening faster than was expected in the last IPCC report.

b) He can ask whether MOST of those who are competent to form a genuinely independent scientific judgement are agreed. In this case there’s a very broad agreement that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. He’s entitled to note that there are always dissidents in science. Their existence is not evidence that the consensus is wrong.

c) He can ask whether the issue has thoroughly studied. Given the IPCC process climate change has perhaps been studied more thoroughly than any other comparable question.

d) He can ask whether the consensus is getting stronger or weaker. Plainly it’s getting stronger.

e) He can ask whether vested interests have been operating so as to undermine the science. In this case some of the world’s strongest vested interests have lobbied against accepting that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming:

• The White House has censored US government scientists.
• It has also pressed for the weakest form of words in IPCC drafting work.
• Major multinationals have paid supposed climate scientists to contest the consensus in just the way that Big Tobacco sought to resist the evidence on smoking. (NB I don’t, of course, suggest you have been suborned in this way.)

f) He can ask whether people he knows personally have well-founded views on the science. In this case I know you. But I also knew David King at UEA’s School of Chemical Sciences in the 70s. So let’s call that a tie.

g) He can ask whether prominent non-scientists who are well advised on the science have accepted the consensus. Here I see that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the UK Prime Minister, the US President and an overwhelming majority of senior business executives polled by McKinsey last year have either accepted or moved towards acceptance of the consensus. Insofar as any of these have a vested interest it lies for the majority in denying, not affirming, the evidence for man-driven climate change. Evidence against interest always weighs more heavily than the contrary.

So out of the seven tests that I, as an informed layman, can make six encourage me to believe that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. One is inconclusive. Actually, that’s about as good as it gets.

Now none of this creates certainty but neither, in practice, does science. Science is always somewhat provisional.

The real question now is that of public policy and here a version of Pascal’s Wager applies. If the consensus is right it would be dangerous to the lives of many people to wait the years that may be needed to approach certainty more closely. If the consensus is wrong and we act as if it were true we will waste money on insulation, wind farms and carbon offsets and some of us will take fewer foreign trips.

Morally, I don’t find that a difficult decision.