There is a very interesting BBC Q&A; between Roger "the Dodger" Harrabin and Phil "deceitful bastard" Jones. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the most significant section is the first answer. [Emphasis mine (other than on the question).]A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.Temperature data for the period...

Andrew Lacis: telling it like it is.Meet Andrew Lacis, a physicist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and colleague of James Hansen.Education:B.A., Physics, 1963, University of IowaM.S., Astronomy, 1964, University of IowaPh.D., Physics, 1970, University of IowaPublicationsGo to bibliographyLacis's bibliography is pretty huge, so I haven't represented it here; suffice to say that Andrew Lacis is not only prolific and well-respected but also "mainstream"—he is not "a denier".Bearing all of this in mind, I would like to call your attention to his comment on Chapter 9 of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Now, Chapter 9 is extremely important, as Bishop Hill explains...Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report - it's the one where...

As we all remain thoroughly amused at the barrage of attacks on the IPCC's rapidly waning credibility, it's all too easy to miss a dodgy citation or two.As such, and via Climate Sceptic, I am happy to point you towards a rapidly expanding compendium of all of the dodgy citations in the IPCC's AR3 and AR4 reports, hosted by the informative ClimateQuotes.com.In other news—just in case you missed it—55% of the Netherlands is not below sea level, as claimed by IPCC AR4: the figure is more like 20%. This may sound like nit-picking, but it's annoyed the Dutch; apart from anything else, the report made outrageous claims about the effect on the Netherlands's productivity should the sea rise a couple of inches.The worrying thing about the sudden outrage by the Dutch is worrying—as my...

Professor Philip Stott has an excellent piece questioning the wisdom in George Osborne's announcement that Nicholas Stern would be helping them to draft their environmental policy. Amongst other things, Professor Stott resurrects a particularly cutting quote about the Stern Review which I thought would be good to place here once again."If a student of mine were to hand in this report [the ‘Stern Review’] as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail. There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make. [...] Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates...

The pressure continues to pile on the IPCC with a whole raft of MSM and blog stories seeping through today. His Ecclesiastical Eminence resurrects his Climate Cuttings series to try to round up the events.In a story running in parallel in the Sunday Times and EU Referendum, Raj Pachauri is linked directly to a new set of erroneous statements in the IPCC reports. This time it's African rainfall they've been misleading us about. Since Pachauri is the author of the relevant part of the report and has repeated the claims elsewhere, he will find it harder to absolve himself of responsibility this time. Commenters noted a recent study that found that there has been a massive recent greening of the Sahel, with temperature rises leading to higher rainfall.EU Referendum has picked up on this last...

This has been a good year so far, certainly in the opinion of your humble Devil. The decision to prosecute even some of the thieving MPs is a small victory for those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money.But far greater vindication, as far as I am concerned, has come in the slow but steady collapse of the climate change alarmist camp; as someone who has been calling "bullshit" on this scam—in writing at least—for five years, watching the destruction started by the leak of the CRU documents has been a joy to behold.Whilst some of us swarmed over the emails and the data—delighting at the revelations about dirty tricks and shoddy statistical analysis that revealed the truth of our suspicions—EUReferendum was leading the charge against the High...

Wrote an article last night on the BBC’s increasing climate change denialism. Published today: After watching last night’s Newsnight, I can only come to one conclusion: the BBC has become this country’s most pernicious climate-change-denying media outlet in the UK. There is simple reasoning behind this grand statement. While the assorted commentators who regularly spout ill-informed propaganda across the media are usually taken with a pinch of salt, the BBC is broadly trusted as an impartial and trustworthy reporter of news. It sets the agenda. Which makes the rubbish it has been producing lately on climate change even more dangerous. Let me start by saying I believe that man-made activity is the prime driver behind global warming. I don’t have time for...

Forty Labour MPs have put their name to a document which lays out five key areas in which the government is deviating from the wishes of most Labour members, and calls for the restoration of party democracy as a means to ensuring that the voice of its members is heard in future. The signatories range from the MPs of the LRC and the Campaign Group to Compass and a couple of unaffiliated people added in. The key recommendations are as follows: A. The recession should be tackled not with cuts in essential public spending, but by massive public investment in house-building, infrastructure and the de-carbonisation of the economy. B. Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives...

Ed Miliband: bug-eyed twat refuses to sort out obvious thyroid problem—looks to kill millions instead.Seriously, Ed, you bug-eyed moron, when you're in a hole, the generally accepted advice is to stop digging—especially when you don't seem to understand practical philosophy."Every­thing we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk."Thus spake Ed Miliband, and it's bollocks. Look, Eddie-baby, the point of the precautionary principle is that actually doing something about the posited risk has little or no cost.As I have pointed out innumerable times, that is simply not the case in this instance.Counting Cats has pretty much filleted most of the rest of the article and, as always, is worth a read....

When "Glaciergate" broke, the response of the IPCC Chairman—multi-millionaire businessman Rajendra K Pachauri—was unequivocable: "you can't say it's careless science ... it's one mistake".You say one... I say more than one.For starters, the IPCC's ARA4 seems to be many, many assertions that only cite WWF reports.Many of those associated with the WWF are lovely human beings. But that doesn't change the fact that the WWF is not a neutral, disinterested party. It has an agenda, an ax to grind, a definite point-of-view. Rather than being a scientific organization, it is a political one. In the UK, the media aptly calls the WWF a "pressure-group."The IPCC, on the other hand, describes itself as "a scientific body" that provides "the world with a clear scientific view on the current state...

Like The Englishman, my copy of Bishop Hill's chunky book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, dropped through the door on Friday.I have barely begun to read it—I might take a couple of days off to get into it properly—but the first few chapters that I have perused have been clear, fascinating and eminently readable.Like many of my sceptic colleagues, I have followed this story for some years—but only in bits and pieces and, often, the statistical and scientific has been rather over my amateur head. His Ecclesiastical Eminence's book promises to pull the entire story together—plus much of the data released in the CRU documents—and to make it intelligible.This is going to be fun......

The IPCC is a political institution—which means that it is utterly corrupt. Worse, it is part of the UN, a body which is basically only good for one thing—pimping children.As such, the IPCC is a body that has been set up by an institution that, by its inaction, encourages the sexual exploitation of children by its officers, is paid for by governments (with taxpayers' money and without those taxpayers' consent) in order to lobby those same governments.It would be institutionally corrupt, even without what we know of its operatives' methods.However, the row escalating over "Glaciergate" (dear god, why?) is threatening to unseat the evil Pachauri and seriously destabilise the IPCC. The latter is, of course, a good thing: the former is not—for, with the hopelessly compromised Pachauri...

Now, those of you who have been paying attention to the UK climate debate over the last few years will have realised that the Stern Review is quoted quite extensively. Most people who quote it are either unaware or—rather more likely—trying to conceal the fact that this review was absolutely slated by both scientists and economists alike.And it was an economics report—it attempted to defend the current path taken by politicians against those who would rather adopt, say, the IPCC's A1 family of scenarios.The IPCC's SRES A1 quite clearly suggests that the best route for humanity to take includes international free trade and technological co-operation which makes everyone so rich that we can adapt to any changes that AGW—if it is actually happening—might make.This is not the route...

The Guardian reports: Ozone blowing over from Asia is raising background levels of a major ingredient of smog in the skies over western US states, according to a new study appearing in today’s edition of the journal Nature. The amounts are small and, so far, only found in a region of the atmosphere known as the free troposphere, at an altitude of two to five miles, but the development could complicate US efforts to control air pollution. Though the levels are small, they have been steadily rising since 1995, and probably longer, said lead author Owen R Cooper, a research scientist at the University of Colorado attached to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. “The important aspect of this study for...

The belief that many have in catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) is based, not entirely unreasonably, on faith: they themselves know little of science or statistics and trust that those who claim to do so are, in fact, telling the truth.Those of us who are—to say the least—highly sceptical of the alarmists' claims have constantly worried at not only the science but also the credibility of those presenting it. Because, if those people are themselves compromised then so is the quality of the evidence.This tactic might be—and is—dismissed as a series of ludicrous ad hominem attacks, but it has been forced upon us largely by the climatologists' refusal to release the raw measurements on which they have based their reports.What has not helped the alarmists' case is that...

The think-tank Centre for American Progress has some encouraging views on Obama’s moves on green issues: During President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition, the Center for American Progress proposed a 10-point clean-energy agenda for the president and Congress that would speed the economic transformation to a clean energy economy. A review of these items today finds that all were adopted or are working their way through the process. This is a startling achievement amidst the worst economy in 70 years, two wars, and an opposition party disinterested in cooperation. President Obama did much of what he promised, and he can do more in 2010 by cajoling Congress to do its part. These achievements will have real world impact. By 2011, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, P.L....

No, weather is not climate—remember that the next time that we have a hot summer (ha!)—but it's an amusing, impressive and instructive picture anyway (from the Beeb). But, believe me, it will not be a rare one in years to come...Last Monday, your humble Devil took part in the first House of Comments podcast of 2010—alongside Will Straw and organisers Stuart Sharpe and Mark Reckons.Here's a brief overview of what we discussed...The #KerryOut campaign to try and oust Labour MP Kerry McCarthy from her Bristol East seat at the next election. Is this a positive sign of the power of online grassroots action or a puerile spat between Twittering egos? Or a bit of both?Climate change continues to provoke controversy in the blogosphere. Chris and Will (who regularly blog on the subject...

Those who support AGW alarmism always make the appeal to authority when backed into a corner—this goes along the lines of "well, 205,000,000,000,000 climate scientists say that it's happening, so it must be true."Equally, when someone produces evidence that goes against the grain of AGW, the alarmists' argument goes along the lines of "well, that person isn't a climate scientist: he's a chemist/physicist/biologist/statistician, etc. [delete as appropriate]."To which, of course, I reply that the first reference to a degree in climatology that I can find is in 2001*, so it's doubtful that any of their heroes are accredited climatologists either.But what they really mean is that "these guys are scientists: they can think and join together the evidence, y'all.**"So, courtesy of Bishop Hill,...

As regular readers will know, your humble Devil is not a massive fan of democracy. However, whilst I object to its fetishisation—democracy is not the endpoint, it is only a method of trying to maintain liberty—I do recognise that it is the least-worst system that we have so far invented.Via Bishop Hill, as Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch helpfully point out it seems that many AGW alarmists simply don't agree: after all, democracy is so very inconvenient because a lot of the time people won't do what you tell them, eh? [Emphasis mine.]...the times are changing. Within the broad field of climatology and climate policy one is able to discern growing concerns about the virtues of democracy... it is an inconvenient democracy, which is identified as the culprit holding back action on climate...

I watched Avatar 3D on 1st January and loved it. Sure, the storyline was fairly predictable but that’s not what I wanted to watch it for. Also, forget the racial angle too, which several people have pointed out to me (see this tweet by Naadir). Sure you can always play the race card when you have different species / races involved but that wasn’t my main focus. My main focus was the strong pro-environmental message, for I have always been much more of an environmentalist than someone being obsessed by race (no doubt this will come as a surprise to many readers, but this blog was started to talk about identity, not whatever passes through my head). That aside, what I also loved about it was the strong anti-war message. Avatar could be crudely based on the European invasion...

Arse about tit given my last post but here’s the most popular posts on Zerochampion in 2009. A shout out to the team behind the East London refurbishment project who guest-posted during the year and proved plenty of value throughout the year. And to architectural student Benjamin Kinch for his thoughtful piece on BREEAM. Here goes: Dubai and Rethinking Growth Environmentalism as miserabalism Eco Refurbishment Part 2 The Carbon Reduction Commitment is Bonkers Refurbishment challenge: airtightness Existing challenge: the builder’s tale Celebrity architects and sustainability Should aesthetics be part of BREEAM? Nine people thoughts and quotes for 2009 Green refurbishment challenge part......

A little while ago, I posted about how the "greenhouse effect" was a complete misnomer and the phrase "greenhouse gases", therefore, was also wrong.Now a commenter points me to this article which highlights the revision and re-release of a paper that underlines this point rather more strongly.The peer-reviewed Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics (Version 4.0) [PDF], published on January 6, 2009, appeared in the March 2009 edition of the International Journal of Modern Physics.The central claims of Dr. Gerlich and his colleague, Dr. Ralf Tscheuschner, include, but are not limited to:The mechanism of warming in an actual greenhouse is different than the mechanism of warming in the atmosphere, therefore it is not a “greenhouse” effect and...

EUReferendum continues its unravelling of millionaire businessman and IPCC director Rajendra K Pachuri's labyrinthine and extensive network of influence.Today Richard has focused on Pachuri's TERI-Europe—a registered charity with an expenditure that far outstrips its incoming resources. The company secretary is a certain Dr Ritu Kumar—herself a woman with, it seems, considerable business interests in her own right. In particular, I was interested by this paragraph...But this cv also has Dr Kumar as a senior adviser on environmental, social and governance issues with Actis UK—a private equity firm investing primarily in Africa, China, India, Latin America, South and South East Asia - where "she has advised on weaknesses and opportunities in health and safety, as well as...

I got a bit annoyed with the ‘it’s all China’s fault‘ rhetoric that came out of the Copenhagen failure for various reasons. It turns out I wasn’t alone, and blogger Madam Miaow posted a message on CIF in response to such an article but had it curiously censored. Anyway, she says: The US and the rich nations use up almost all the carbon allowance in the atmosphere over the past 160 years, the US dithers over ten years of Bush, they refuse to ratify Kyoto, the Danish summit chair has to resign when she’s caught fast-tracking the rich nations’ deal, the West fail in their Kyoto pledges, Canada rips up its Kyoto deal and proceeds with exploiting its huge reserves of dirty oil, the US will only reduce emissions by 4% against the 1990 base year and not...

I have been meaning to do a comprehensive summary of the CRU emails and other documents but, via The Englishman, Jo Nova has done an stunning job.Mohib Ebrahim has created professional timelines for exhibitions, so it must have seemed only natural to him to want to visually piece together the full timeline of ClimateGate, laying out the analysis, graphs, emails and history of the scandal as revealed by dozens of researchers over the past weeks, months and years.You can download the PDF, which gives you a massive chart two A0 pages in size: I want to get someone to do a large format print of this for me, so if you know anyone who would do such a thing relatively cheaply...Further, Assassin Science has assembled a close analysis—with excerpts—of all of the CRU emails for your perusing...

I found this post about the CRU documents on Luke Marsden's blog, and also found a commenter who advocated slowing our technological advance.So what if we turned out to have less energy resources than we had hoped for the next 20 years , do we really need to develop as fast as we do ? If we play it safe we literaly have all the time in the world so whats the rush ?Naturally, I couldn't resist leaving a reply.Amias,So what if we turned out to have less energy resources than we had hoped for the next 20 years , do we really need to develop as fast as we do ? If we play it safe we literaly have all the time in the world so whats the rush ?We in the Developed World have no particular rush, no. But, for those in the Developing World, more energy means fewer dead people. In just one example,...

Yesterday Tory blogger Iain Dale posted a blog-post titled ‘Oxford is Cool’. Not long after, Unity posted an article on LibCon pointing out what a bunch of tripe the thinking and methodology behind that post was. Note, how Iain Dale then acted when others pointed this out. It’s worth noting, for a start, that Dale’s blogpost is just one in a long line of rubbish he has published about global warming (including a recent punt on the ‘Global Cooling’ myth). It’s a subject he clearly knows little about. But it has become de rigeur for global warming deniers to publish a continuous stream of bad science and rubbish claims, and obfuscate the debate while saying it is there just to further discussion and ‘challenge the consensus‘. On his own...

It seems that millionaire businessman Rajendra K Pachauri has taken exception to Richard North's Telegraph article."These are a pack of lies from people who are getting desperate," he tells the Times of India. They want to go after the guy whose voice is being heard. I haven't pocketed a single penny from my association with companies and institutes. All honoraria that I get goes to TERI and to its Light a Billion Lives campaign for reaching solar power to people without electricity. All my dealings are totally above board."...As for the link with the Tata group, Pachauri claims, "Our ties ended when Darbari Seth, who was on our board, died in 1999. We haven't received a single penny from Tatas for years and have no ties with them."Unfortunately for millionaire businessman Rajendra K...

Over at EU Referendum, Richard North started off by examining the multiplicity of connections enjoyed by the head of the IPCC—an Indian millionaire businessman (not a scientist) named Rajenda Kumar Pauchauri. And he really does have an awful lot of fingers in an awful lot of pies.See All Roads Lead To Pauchauri, A Busy Man and Global Warming: An Economic War...Then Richard started to detail the huge market created by the Kyoto Treaty—the trade in Carbon Credits. And as Richard has pointed out, this market is now pretty huge and Copenhagen was not about saving the planet—it was about saving the carbon market.In 2012 the Kyoto treaty falls, and with it the mechanisms which underpin carbon trading. Unless the protocols are renewed, a multi-billion dollar industry falls apart – the...

For the past couple of weeks, many big-wigs are meeting in Copenhagen for a chit-chat about climate change. This happens against the backdrop of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit email hacking. This is said by some to offer evidence that climate scientists have manipulated data in order to boost the case that climate change is man-made. The emphasis on whether or not climate change is man-made confuses me. For instance, the Met Office’s response to the hacking seeks to underline the fact that climate change is man-made: “The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it.” Why is there so much concern over whether or not changes in temperature, and the knock-on effects that result, are man-made? Would...

The Guardian reports: Victor Fodeke, head of the Nigerian special climate change unit, said any attempt to remove the Kyoto track would be disastrous for the talks. “Africa is on death row. It has been sidelined by some countries. If there is any attempt to remove one of the tracks of negotiations, then it’s obvious the train will crash.” “This is of paramount importance. We cannot, we can never accept the killing of the Kyoto protocol. It will mean the killing of Africa,” said another spokesman for the group. This is worth highlighting because a common excuse of climate denialists is that tackling climate change would condemn poor countries to their economic state and not give them the opportunity to become rich on the back of economic growth. Not...

When your humble Devil was first looking through the CRU emails, I highlighted a conversation that (mainly) took place between David Schnare and Eugene Gordon. When asked what he thought the motivations of the CRU Club were, Gordon summarised as follows: [Emphasis mine.]Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.Money is a massive motivating factor, and it seems that there are some people who are very keen on "proving" anthropogenic global warming (AGW).Via Bishop Hill, I came across this comment at Watt's Up With That: it's written by a scientist called Paul Vaughan who...

So the Met Office, the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA all say the noughties were the “hottest decade on record”. Apparently, according to some idiots, global warming isn’t happening and temperatures have actually fallen over the last decade. But even the Telegraph admits: Depending on what happens in the last three weeks of the year, [this year] could end up as the fourth, fifth or sixth hottest on record, but it will certainly be much warmer than 2008, which was anomalously low thanks to a cooling La Nina in the Pacific. And the jump between average temperatures in the 1990s and the current decade is one of the greatest ever. Temperatures only appear to have fallen if 1998 – an anomalously hot year – is taken as...

Around a quarter of Americans believe in creationism and only around 4 in 10 believe in evolution according to a recent poll. The % of outright creationists there is about the same as % of people here who think climate change is not driven by human activity. Rather coincidentally this week’s Economist has front-paged a special report on what to do about climate change. I for one am glad the leftwing conspiracy has managed to ensnare it and most of the western world’s media. The left to it’s credit is united on the issue other than a few silly people. Right-whingers on the other hand are hilariously all over the place. Climate change is very likely to become David Cameron’s crippling wedge issue like Europe. He faces a grassroots full of fools who trot out...

Your humble Devil has been travelling all over the country for the last two weeks, so I apologise for the lack of posts. I shall attempt to rectify this sad deficit at the weekend but, in the meantime, here's a neat little diagram—pinched from Prodicus—explaining how the consensus on anthropogenic climate change is sustained.A picture really is worth a thousand words, eh?...

The wife considers the politicos' attitude to democracy, and ain't that impressed.So when the demos vote to ban minarets or vote for parties you don’t like, it’s outrageous. But when the demos vote to pick your pocket, store your DNA on a database, lock you up for a month without charge, or demand you prove you’re not a paedophile every time you step outside your front door, that’s totally fine.Of course, my dear: how could it be otherwise...? Oh, and "representative democracy" is the biggest con on the planet.Apart from anthropogenic climate change, of course......

One of the limiting factors—in terms of the lack of impact that the CRU document leak has had on anthropogenic climate alarmists—is the simple fact that there are other temperature reconstruction projects.In this regard, one of the main research centres is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which is led by the egregious James Hansen. Those of us who have taken an interest in such things have, of course, been maintaining that the GISS temperature reconstructions are extremely dodgy too, e.g. see here, here, here and here for starters.However, via Bishop Hill (who is fast becoming the go-to man in these matters), I see that someone else has noticed that there are more than a few extra problems with the GISS records too.One of [those looking at other institutions] is EM...

[NB Author's note: I am not the Devil, merely a minor minion]While DK is on the road, I'll take the liberty of pointing readers in the direction of two unmissable posts on the unfolding Climategate scandal. First up is a superb piece at Climate Skeptic which warns of the dangers of the monoculture or groupthink that has grown up around AGW. In particular, Warren considers the idea of "peer review", which alarmists constantly brandish as proof of the indisputability of their findings:Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work. It is not a guarantee of correctness. It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to...

The Global Warming Policy Foundation logo…EU Referendum's round-up makes it clear that the MSM are just starting to pay attention to the CRU documents and coincidentally, Professor Philip Stott points me towards a new think-tank…Today, Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, will launch a new, high-powered, all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which he hopes, as he writes in this morning’s Times, “may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy.” And so do I; we have long-needed such a body to fight for common sense about climate change in the UK. At last, as the Times headline reads, there is a senior politician in the UK brave enough to state that “Copenhagen will fail - and quite...

One can only assume, given how much he constantly and irritatingly whines about how the blogosphere is ignoring the big questions (also neatly rounded up by my impecunious Greek friend), that Richard North is ignoring the blogosphere's reactions to the CRU documents out of some kind of misplaced spite. Or maybe he is just sore that he didn't get there first.*Whatever the reason, for once EU Referendum has praise for the MSM, in the form of James Delingpole, but pretty much ignores the blogosphere's reaction totally.Further, for a man who, apparently, prides himself on his accuracy, it must simply be a measure of the fact that he cannot be bothered to do anything other than regurgitate the postings from his favoured outlets that North makes an elementary mistake.How can they bring...