The Climate Summit in Copenhagen Must Be Cancelled!

[FiveParadox]

The shameful role that Her Majesty’s Government for Canada has played in these delegations and conferences is one that should be vehemently condemned — we, as a developed and envied nation, are sabotaging the work of the global community on the environmental front. Let us hope that this work continues notwithstanding our Government’s incompetence.

 

[SirJosephPorter]

The shameful role that Her Majesty’s Government for Canada has played in these delegations and conferences is one that should be vehemently condemned — we, as a developed and envied nation, are sabotaging the work of the global community on the environmental front. Let us hope that this work continues notwithstanding our Government’s incompetence.

FP, Harper is a strong Disciple of Bush, he also believes that global warming is an Al Qaeda plot to ruin Canada’s economy. Then there is the oil patch in Alberta, doing anything to improve environment is like waving red rag to the bull to them.

Also, religious right is an important constituency of Conservative Party, their Bible tells them that mankind (note that with them it can never be humankind, only mankind) has the right to pollute to his heart’s content.

All these factors combine together to explain the overt hostility by the Conservatives towards anything to do with environmentalism.

 

[darkbeaver]

Why bother it's already in the burning in the ditch.

 

[gopher]

Observations: Climate change cover-up? You better believe it


SA knows a lot more about the subject than do the paid anti-climate change pundits.

 

[Mowich]

I just caught the tail end of a news item on the National tonight about the video in this link. What drew my interest was comments made by some Inuit stating that the sun, moon, and stars had shifted. One old fellow said he felt as it the land had tilted over. I can't watch it online as I have dial-up but thought I would post it for anyone interested in what they have to say.

Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change | IsumaTV

 

[Cliffy]

I just caught the tail end of a news item on the National tonight about the video in this link. What drew my interest was comments made by some Inuit stating that the sun, moon, and stars had shifted. One old fellow said he felt as it the land had tilted over. I can't watch it online as I have dial-up but thought I would post it for anyone interested in what they have to say.

Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change | IsumaTV

Very interesting web site there Mowich. These people are our canaries. I find it amusing to listen to all these big city clowns in their centrally heated mausoleums thinking they know something about the "scam" of climate change. Go listen to the Inuit. They are experiencing it first hand. If you still think it is a scam, go up north to Hudson bay and see for yourself. Tonington's cartoon said it all.

http://www.americanprogress.org/cartoons/2009/12/img/120809.jpg

 

[SirJosephPorter]

Very interesting web site there Mowich. These people are our canaries. I find it amusing to listen to all these big city clowns in their centrally heated mausoleums thinking they know something about the "scam" of climate change. Go listen to the Inuit. They are experiencing it first hand. If you still think it is a scam, go up north to Hudson bay and see for yourself. Tonington's cartoon said it all.

http://www.americanprogress.org/cartoons/2009/12/img/120809.jpg

Quite so, Cliffy, the Inuits have been complaining about global warming for a long time now. There lifestyle is seriously threatened by any warming at the poles, so it is understandable that they would be worried more than anybody else.

For Canada in general, global warming is bad news. Most plants, animals here are adapted to tough winters, lots of snow etc. If as a result of warming we get mild winter, only a little bit of snow etc. no doubt a few animal and plant species will adapt. But many of them (starting with the polar bear) face almost certain extinction.

Of course, some conservatives would argue what is the big deal about it, who needs polar bears anyway.

 

[darkbeaver]

No the Inuit haven't been complianing about global warming, they've been complaining about regional warming. If you want to cherry pick one indiginous climate change situation and use it to support planetary warming you'll of course have to ignor entirely the other regions where there is unseasonal cooling. There is no deficit of polar bears. They (the bears) have survived every natural climate shift since day one, being in tune with nature they are very adaptable.

 

[darkbeaver]

The shameful role that Her Majesty’s Government for Canada has played in these delegations and conferences is one that should be vehemently condemned — we, as a developed and envied nation, are sabotaging the work of the global community on the environmental front. Let us hope that this work continues notwithstanding our Government’s incompetence.

There is no global community there is only global commerce and that is be definitition certainly not a community but rather a combine, a cabal, a conspiracy. Maybe you mean the internationalists who jet about the planet sucking up everybody elses resources and have no alligence to anything but wealth and power.

 

[JLM]

Money's involved. Do you really expect money mongers to give up their opportunity to fleece those who probably can't afford it?

I would think that smart money mongers would concentrate more on fleecing those who probably CAN afford it. :lol::lol::lol::lol:

 

[Blackleaf]

It turns out that at the Climate Change Summit, there will be at least 1200 limousines reserved by those attending. There is such a demand for limos that providers are having to head to Germany and Sweden and drive the cars hundreds of miles back to Denmark for the week.

Attendees are also being taken there in 140 private jets. This is so far above the airport's ability to handle that after dropping off passengers the planes must fly off to regional airports or Sweden to park.

The summit will produce as much CO2 as a town the size of Middlesbrough (which has a population of 143,000).

This month's issue of The Spectator has done a good job printing various articles written by several climatologists in which they debunk global warming.

One of the articles talks about the fact that many Global Warming enthusiasts - including those connected to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - are saying that Global Warming will increase the rate of tropical diseases, especially malaria. But the author makes a good point - malaria is NOT a tropical disease.

Anyone who knows a bit about history will know that, centuries ago, countries such as England were once plagued by malaria, and this was during a period that was known as the Little Ice Age, when frost fairs were regularly held on the frozen Thames at winter (it would have been natural warming, of the sort that causes the end of ALL ice ages, rather than man-made which ended the Little Ice Age).

Malaria was particularly rife in Essex, in southern England. People such as Robert Talbor, an English apothecary's apprentice, pioneered the use of cinchona - a South American flower - in malaria treatment. His secret remedy cured many sufferers in the Fens and Essex marshes before it was administered to King Charles II and notable European royalty. Talbor received an honorary knighthood and was appointed Royal Physician.

People in 17th Century England often called malaria the "ague." Oliver Cromwell died of malaria in 1658.

Oliver Cromwell died from malaria in 1658

Russia also suffered from an epidemic of malaria in the 1920s.

So if Climate Change enthusiasts ever try to have you believe that malaria and other "tropical diseases" will get more prevalent as a result of Climate Change, just let them know that malaria isn't a tropical disease and that it was once rife in Europe during the Little Ice Age. Though they may just choose to ignore this incovenient truth.

 

[Tonington]

A blog? You would be the first to denounce it if it didn't support your ravings....

Emails that rocked climate change campaign leaked from Siberian 'closed city' university built by KGB | Mail Online

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/un-blames-professional-hackers-20091207-kffs.html

 

[Avro]

Emails that rocked climate change campaign leaked from Siberian 'closed city' university built by KGB | Mail Online

UN blames professional hackers

Here's another one.

 

[Avro]

Great Richard Grave piece on Huffington Post points out the parallel's between the curret "gate" - Climategate - and the original paranoid right wing break-in that gate rise to the unimaginative, but in this case appropriate suffix.
As Graves points out, Watergate showed the worst side of a paranoid right-wing group clinging desperately to power. They committed a quite famous break-in, got nothing useful for their troubles and then crashed historically trying to cover their tracks.
This "gate" began the same way. We can only hope it ends with similar calamity for the perpetrators.

 

[Avro]

The same smart woman who exposed Palin as an idiot.

YouTube - Notebook: Copenhagen

 

[Tonington]

So if Climate Change enthusiasts ever try to have you believe that malaria and other "tropical diseases" will get more prevalent as a result of Climate Change, just let them know that malaria isn't a tropical disease and that it was once rife in Europe during the Little Ice Age. Though they may just choose to ignore this incovenient truth.

Where do you find malaria in the world today? Who cares where it once was, where is it now?

 

[Avro]

According to an AFP story out today, the Obama White House has dismissed as "silly" the idea that climate science is in jeopardy over the Climate Research Unit leaked emails.
"I think everybody is clear on the science," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.
"I think scientists are clear on the science. I think many on Capitol Hill are clear on the science. I think that this notion that there is some debate ... on the science is kind of silly."
Of course it is, but it hasn't stopped Republicans, their friends in the free-market think tanks and Fox News from trying to make this minor controversy into some kind of worldwide conspiracy.

 

[Avro]

One of the more egregious examples of the public relations spin on the East Anglia hacked email story involves a six-year-old research paper authored by Sallie Baliunas, an American astrophysicist affiliated with at least nine oil-industry-funded organizations.
In the stolen East Anglia emails, there is a conversation between scientists about and her paper, which argues that the current global warming trend is not unique and that an even more dramatic episode occurred centuries.
The conversation contained in the email is being made to appear like it was an attempt by climate scientists to “muzzle” the Baliunas research paper. Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), claimed last week that the exchange between academics amounts to a case of “scientific fascism.”

 

[Avro]

One of the more egregious examples of the public relations spin on the East Anglia hacked email story involves a six-year-old research paper authored by Sallie Baliunas, an American astrophysicist affiliated with at least nine oil-industry-funded organizations.
In the stolen East Anglia emails, there is a conversation between scientists about and her paper, which argues that the current global warming trend is not unique and that an even more dramatic episode occurred centuries.
The conversation contained in the email is being made to appear like it was an attempt by climate scientists to “muzzle” the Baliunas research paper. Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), claimed last week that the exchange between academics amounts to a case of “scientific fascism.”

 

[Avro]

Elizabeth May: A Response to Comments on East Anglia Emails

Tags: Emily Murgatroyd, General, Ipcc, Lobby Groups, Science, Think Tanks
Last week, in response to the hacked emails at East Anglia, Elizabeth May took the time to read every single email.
Providing context and analysis, her report goes a long way, giving us more than just the cherry picked nuggets that skeptics have taken out of context and doggedly been holding on to.
Here, she follows up with a response to the comments on her original posting...
DeSmogBlog comments require response:
I am a neophyte in the blogosphere. The first time something I have written for the Green Party site has been widely picked up was my article on the East Anglia scientists and the stolen emails. James Hoggan, Kevin Grandia, and Richard Littlemore do a powerful lot of good on “DeSmogBlog” and through James’ and Richard’s new book Climate Cover-Up.
Posting my CRU email blog on the DeSmogBlog site got it some attention, including in the New York Times. Reading some of the posted comments led me to want to rebut and share that rebuttal with Greens. You may need these points to do your own sand-bagging against the rising tide of skeptic/contrarian propaganda. Here is a sample of the nonsense with my response…
Ms May, with all due respect this is pure nonsence.(sic)
If you read the entire set how come you missed the emails of threats to those at ClimateAudit? How come you missed the one where they cannot account for the current cooling? Or how about the MANY where they conspire to black ball journals that keep publishing skeptical papers, get certain editors removed, and changing the peer reviewed process?
Or how to change the data mixing unrelated data, that hides the decline the treering data showed after 1961? How come you did not comment on these? JR Wakefield
Thanks to JR Wakefield, (although the message “with all due respect” would ring more sincerely if your headline had not been, “Lizzy, you missed the juicy stuff.”)
My point is there is no “juicy stuff.” There are intemperate messages from people writing in private about the levels of frustration created by years of harassment. None of us like to be besieged. Few of us have had to endure the levels of targeted harassment of the scientists in the CRU group at East Anglia.
There is one message where a colleague expresses concern that the models do not seem to account for the where the heat forcing of the trapped solar energy is going.
The discussion is started when Dr. Stephen Schneider, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, expresses concern that the BBC is mis-leading the public on current science:

Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and
sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author" from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino
year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a
few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another
dramatic upward spike like 1992-2000. I heard someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was
willing to bet a lot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10
years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in
reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big
retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my
student suggests below.​

Translation: BBC has seized on one year “cooling” and ignores the issue of time lags in the global climate system. As I tried to point out in the Munk Debates, climate modelling is not about a one year at a time climb in temperatures. It is significant at the level of decades.
You have to grasp time lags. The GHG we release today will have an impact on the climate for the next 100 years. The system is nearly infinitely large and complex, with land heating faster than oceans. As well, there can be confounding factors -- sunspots on 11 year cycles or El Nino (referred to in the East Anglia emails as “ENSO” El Nino Southern Oscillations) that heat things up, volcanoes (like Mount Pinatubo or sulphate and particulates from burning coal that ironically) can act to mask the warming trend. These impacts are temporary and the climate models seek to screen them and see what anthropogenic forcing is doing to the climate. All the models for decades have shown that it is impossible to produce the warming trends the planet has seen when you exclude anthropogenic forcing.
Dr. Kevin Trenberth from the Boulder, Colorado National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) replied to Schneider. He has been for some time interested in better methods to account for the physics of the issues: where does the heat go when trapped at the earth’s surface by warming gases.
His work is described on the NARC website as “being used to validate coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models and understanding heat flows that are so important in climate change. He has continued to improve estimates of the global hydrological cycle. A particular focus is on changes in precipitation type, frequency, intensity and amount, and thus on how droughts and floods, and climate extremes change.”
In other words, in the following email, he is promoting is own area of research, not attacking the fundamentals of climate science.
The oft-quoted email sentence from his message of October 13, 2009 said:
“The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
A discussion ensues.
Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Centre at Pennsylvania State, replied the next day,

Kevin, that's an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily
account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in
the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense,
we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going
on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of
internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I'm not sure that this has been addressed--has it?
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division, also at NCAR, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote:

Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
and it is a travesty that we can't".
I do not agree with this.

Tom.

(Emphasis added)

Other scientists point out that we are still not clear on how many sulfates are being emitted, particularly in the rapidly industrializing developing world. It is clear that sulfates (particulates) provide a cooling effect, even while carbon dioxide levels keep growing. In another post, the scientists discuss why NASA results show higher global temperature than the Hadley results from the UK. One conclusion is that the Hadley data does not have as many Arctic data points. Warming in the Arctic is 2-3 times faster than the global average.
By the next day, October 14, Trenberth writes that he is not challenging anyone, just making a point about the fact his area of research needs more attention.
In an open letter defending the East Anglia scientists (December 3, 2009), he wrote:
I am proud of what Phil and I did for Chapter 3 in AR4, and it is disappointing that the IPCC has not been more forthright in standing up for its procedures.
Dr. Trenberth’s private email is being distorted and touted globally as some sort of “smoking gun”, or to hear the industry-funded Pat Michaels “a mushroom cloud.”
There is no “smoking gun” here. It reads, as do all the email threads on closer examination, as scientists exchanging candid, off-hand, messages. They know each other well and often speak in short-hand. Clearly Dr. Trenberth is NOT arguing that the models have been cooked up to avoid a climate cooling trend. Nor is he denying that there is an urgent need to reduce GHG. He wants to see a clearer understanding of the energy dynamics on the planet.
Sadly, I see it has taken three pages of text to counter the one sentence “How come you missed the one where they cannot account for the current cooling?”
For JR’s other points, forgive me for just replying without copying and pasting in all the emails. There was no effort to “blackball journals.” There WAS a sad realization that one journal, in particular, had ceased to exercise the appropriate level of scientific rigour. It was publishing papers that could not have passed peer review anywhere else. The CRU emails did no object to the publication of the paper because the scientists disliked the authors or their conclusions, but because obvious and large mistakes had been made. “Shoddy work” was an apt description.
The journal, Energy and Environment, was discussed on a number of emails, especially after it published a terrible paper by Baliunas and Soon. The group of scientists, whose emails make up most of what was stolen, decided to put a serious peer-reviewed effort into debunking that article. The Energy and Environment Journal is not a top journal. It is not included in Journal Citation Reports which covers the top 6,000 journals. The name of the editor rang a bell. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, who is mentioned by the scientists concerned about the sloppiness of the work, was the source of a key footnote in Lomborg’s Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg claimed that negotiations to arrest climate change were driven “not, as you may have thought, [by] the prospect of possibleglobal warming” but by windmill manufacturers, climate researchers and other “institutionalized interests.” His source? Solely her name. No published article. Nothing. Just Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.
The data problems plague people in many areas of science. Techy issues with computers and managing different platforms etc could drive a sane man mad. If this were a serious problem at East Anglia, clearly other scientists would not have the same results using their own systems and intellectual property to put the raw data into computer friendly formats.
The key point here is that the raw data (at least 95% of it) is available in the public domain, and has been for years. Independent scientists all around the world, sliced and diced in a wide variety of ways, keep pointing out that the planet has never had as much carbon dioxide in one million years, nor has it been this warm in the last 1,000 years.
Turning to another critic of my post:
In this instance it appears that this case will certainly be changing from Hackergate back to Climategate.
As it turns out, the source of the information in the e-mails and the data files at CRU is an employee at CRU Hadley. This individual is now in contact with Steve McIntyre over at ClimateAudit. The mole has even shared a highly sensitive data file that McIntyre requested under British FOIA laws but was denied. The data file contains all of the station data from around the world (unaltered) that McIntyre tried to get for quite some time.
To show how quickly this issue is disintegrating in the UK, the Met (the UK’s equivalent to the U.S. National Weather Service) is opening up all of their data and investigating the last 160 years of world temps de novo. This will take until sometime in 2012. That’s quite a while. In the mean time I am watching the sea ice data in the Arctic blow right past the last few years. The sea ice returneth despite what you may have seen or heard on TV or radio.
DJ
“The ice returneth?” That’s quite the claim. Quiksat imagery has shown a continuing of the dramatic trend towards thinning ice. Much of the multi year ice is now gone in the Arctic. Areal extent was a little larger than 2007 in both 2008 and 2009. But,
volume was way down and both 2008 and 2009. There was some hope, blown up by the ironically named “Friends of Science,” that a small recovery in annual ice would support some polar bears, but Dr. David Barber of University of Manitoba, made a voyage to check and found the whole area was like “swiss cheese,” or “rotten.”
The millions of square kilometres of disappearing Arctic ice are visible through satellite data. Visible in photographs from outer space. So would you have us believe that those wily scientists at East Anglia has intercepted satellite images and doctored with the photos? Or maybe there are no satellites! Maybe they just use a sound studio outside Norwich and have a planet earth look-alike that they can film as though they were in space!
As for the idea that an “insider” stole the emails, I suppose anything is possible. But the credibility of this claim is more than a bit undermined by alleging the “mole” to be “an employee at CRU Hadley.” Fascinating that. CRU is the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia located in Norwich. No connection whatsoever to the Hadley Centre of the British Government in Exeter. (Established by the wild-eyed radical, Margaret Thatcher.)
None of this means that we should be dismayed there is an investigation underway. Failing to hold a full investigation will only allow the climate denier crowd and the Fossil Fuel Lobby to attack the science and use a few intemperate, overly human outbursts by good and honest men, to hurt the legitimacy of their work. But we should be prepared.
There will be more emails stolen. More scientists attacked. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for the investigation of the CRU emails to be completed. Nor should we think for one moment that a full investigation of the CRU that exonerates the scientists will end the matter. The climate denial-contrarian effort is well-funded and fuelled with rampant paranoia, fears of global government (how do we get them interested in the WTO instead?), conspiracy theories and a deeply held commitment to NOT accept the clear science.
There is no way to reach those people, but there are some legitimately confused members of the public. They want someone to be clear about what it going on. That is our job as Greens.
Defend scientists who have done nothing wrong. Work for an effective treaty at Copenhagen. Ensure that we avoid runaway global warming by demanding cuts sufficient to, at least, stop the rise in global GHG by 2015-2016.
We have a lot of work to do. Sadly, now, some of our time must be spent in rear-guard actions to protect the truth. .