When I was a kid, we were told that pollution was the worst threat to the world. This pollution was also supposed to be caused by greedy capitalists. The absolute environmental catastrophes behind the iron curtain were yet to be witnessed.

And all resources would end. According to the figures I was taught in school during the 70′s, it would be impossible to write this. Or do anything else today.

Then came the ozone layer. Anyone heard about that lately?

And then the climate scare.

The latter has probably been one of the most damaging political projects so far, and not even the backlash with Climategate, Copenhagen or Cancun seem to have any real sobering effect on politicians and activists. Instead they just gather their money and start preparing for the next conference.

But this industry is huge, so it’s good to have something to fall back on. At least one alternative is now being established. Reports euractiv:

“The establishment of a new UN body to advise governments on how to tackle biodiversity loss and protect ecosystem services was given the final go-ahead in December, paving the way for a global debate on new green taxes, biodiversity credits and the building of ecosystem businesses.”

The host country status is still up for grabs. Let the dog fight begin.

How can we ever forget the Climate-gate scandal that erupted right in time for the Copenhagen debacle. Or fail to note that, interestingly enough, some of the more stunning revelations – Holland-gate etc – were made just after the conference.

Now, during the count down for Cancun, it’s worth the effort to try to recall the events of  the past year, and what Climate-gate was really about. My admirable colleague, Professor Ingemar Nordin recently posted a reminderon the Climatescam site. Definitely worth reading. Nordin tracks back to some of the more peculiar early mail conversations revealed.

- Few have read the email from 2005 where Phil Jones writes John Christy, “The scientific group would no doubt come down on me if I had said that the world has cooled since 1998. OK, it has it but there are just seven years of data and it is not statistically significant “. Or where he concludes “As you know, I am not political. If anything, I hope that climate change occurs so that science will prove to be right, regardless of consequences.This is not to be political, just to be selfish. “

Comments not necessary. The Climatrescam site also provides weather forcasts for Cancun. Looks sunny.

The – most likely – last preparatory conference before Cancun kicks off today in China. The fact that the debate has changed quite substantially during the past year, that the IPCC’s credibility is at an all time low, that more and more scientists have started questioning the validity of the entire Man Made Global Warming theory, and that no warming has been detected during the last decade, does not bother the delegates. What bothers most of them, and especially the big whig politicians, is to avoid creating the same fiasco all over again. Consequently, everyone is talking about trying to find the common denominator between all countries. Interesting. What was the strategy last time? Trying to maximise conflict?

What will be interesting to see, is what political bribes will be distributed under the table this time. In Copenhagen, the Danes, desperate to fulfil their mission as hosts, during the meeting broke of with Dalai Lama, to appease the Chinese.  Will the Mexicans round up the usual suspects in the drug cartels, or increase control over the northern border, to make the US happy? And what will the Chinese do, in order to make sure everyone is happy with their common denominators? May I humbly suggest releasing some dissidents and improving civil liberties.

MALCOLM A. KLINE

Einar Du Rietz is happy to introduce his old tutor as a guest at CFACT.EU.

So entrenched is the belief in global warming in academia that even when critiquing its adherents, academics still feel compelled to pay it homage. “The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] does a very good job of reporting the climate science,” Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Friday, September 24, 2010. “It is a problem that will accumulate for centuries.”

“Ignoring it will leave you looking like Neville Chamberlain,” the ill-fated Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1930s, who attempted to appease Adolf Hitler. I asked him and his co-panelists why they did not mention the Climategate scandal in which e-mails show that global warming alarmists attempted to “hide the decline” in temperatures that occurred over the past two decades.

“It’s not very important,” he said, “and we’re not climate scientists.” That did not stop him from tacitly endorsing the now controversial findings of the IPCC.

He finds the IPCC’s “predictions” “a pretty accurate reflection of what is happening.” Yet even the evidence presented by Mendelsohn and his peers indicates that the science behind them is wanting for documentation.

For example, Mendelsohn himself avers that the IPCC “completely ignores the benefits from climate change.”

“People in Canada and Russia will be getting warmer instead of freezing,” he asserted. “They will benefit from global warming.”

As to the charge that Himalayan glaciers were melting, Maureen Cropper of Resources for the Future noted that, “No reviewers caught it in the first round.”

“In the second round, two reviewers criticized it but it wasn’t changed.” Cropper also teaches at the University of Maryland.

“You need someone checking this in real time,” she averred. Or any time. The Himalayan claim came from literature that was not peer-reviewed, a category that has been growing in IPCC annual reports.

The percentages of peer reviewed literature in IPCC reports I-III are:

• I-84 percent
• II-59 percent
• III-36 percent.

Of the manner in which his own discipline’s output is handled in the IPCC’s yearly offerings, Mendelsohn argues, “When it comes to economics, the IPCC completely ignores it.”

“They bury the economics. The last report that did a good job was in 1996.”

“They talk as if a third of remediations could be done for nothing. There is no evidence for that.”

The problem of global warming, as he sees it, is one of “relatively low damages with relatively high costs which suggests an approach of moderation.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia, where a previous version of this article is posted.

Here is Lord Monckton’s freshly issued, detailed written response to Prof. Abraham in PDF form.

When we watched Prof. Abraham’s video we were mainly struck by Prof. Abraham’s making much of Lord Monckton not always labeling his graphs with their source.  This was not a valid critique.  Lord Monckton was doing a power point presentation in which time or type size would not have made source labels legible to his audience.   Lord Monckton has always been completely willing, indeed eager to provide background information to his viewers and readers.  The graphs in question were mainly those most commonly used in the warming debate and were largely taken from the IPCC fourth assessment report.  They were familiar to those who follow the debate closely and we were surprised that they were not equally familiar to Prof. Abraham.  Former Vice President Al Gore often did not include source information when showing graphs during An Inconvenient Truth (not even when on a scissor lift) and unlike Lord Monckton hides from critics, avoids interviews and will not participate in open discussion.

Abraham’s other tactic is to go back to the IPCC’s sources and obtain emails from them stating their disagreement with Lord Monckton’s conclusions.  Lord Monckton faithfully presented the most commonlhy used graphs and makes his own interpretations relying on his discussions with climate scientists.  This data must be free for all to assess if sound science is to take place.  What did Abraham expect to get when he asked the warming folks for their interpretation and did not bother to contact anyone critical of their assessments including Lord Monckton?  Simply stating the conclusions of warming proponents as received wisdom no longer cuts it.  Too much propaganda has been exposed, too many scandals have rocked their foundations for anyone to take the warming argument on faith or authority again.

Lord Monckton raises essential questions that need to be raised.  His points should be fully debated.  Doubling down on the warming argument without substantive thought will not suffice.  Sorry Professor, time to move past worshiping your warming heroes and give your analytical training a go.  Do you really think the warming computer models will hold up?

…and the famous/infamous hockey stick got stowed away long before the latest world championship even started. Then occasionally picked out again.

The IPCC took out the hockey stick graph from two of their last reports. Somehow, it managed to creep back into the report submitted before Copenhagen, apparently picked up by one of the assistants, from Wikipedia.

Now, even the inventor of this symbol, Michael Mann, concedes that it was, if not altogether wrong, at least “misplaced”. In an BBC interview  summarized in the British Daily Telegraph by reporter Louise Gray, he concludes that “I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate.”

So, it’s misplaced in the debate? Thought for a while that it was misplaced on the chart.

There are a lot of things to say about this symbol, or myth, make your pick. In the original chart, it takes off at the same time as the country with roughly 1/4 of the world’s weather stations collapsed. And though there might have been a trend during the 90′s, this has certainly not continued during the current millennium.

But symbols and myths are powerful things with their own lives. So the stick will most likely be there, together with the poor polar beers (whose population is increasing) and those mysteriously melting mountain top ice caps that maybe someone sometimes spotted. And even if the dutch win the soccer finals on Sunday, they are probably drowning.

University of East Anglia

Exonerated, is a beautiful word. It means that all your trouble are gone and you can go back to sleep, with no accusations hanging over your head. Consequently, it is also frequently used in the comments after the UK parliamentary committee delivered its report on Professor Jones’ responsibility for the strange events at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University. The problems with Climategate are instead described as a lack of routines and a culture of secrecy, something the panel advises CRU to do something about. Note that this is only about the E-mails at East Anglia, not the peculiar coincidence that all the other mistakes made by IPCC  were only detected after the Copenhagen Climate Chaos.

However, the panel also voices understanding over Jones, most likely being frustrated about handing over data to climate sceptics who just want to undermine his research. Is this a university or a political youth organisation?

Don’t submit that dissertation! The opponents might attack you. Don’t publish your findings. Other researchers might quote your work, or even challenge it. Don’t discuss! The others might try to undermine your research.

If this is the guiding principle for East Anglia, or indeed for all universities in the UK, it’s quite remarkable. Stop researching ancient Greece! The Greeks might use your findings in their fight to remain in the EURO system. Stop teaching languages! Your students might use them for all sorts of purposes. 

Or might it be that climate research has really turned into ordinary brutal politics?

“An entire branch of science is in crisis.”

Der Spiegel has posted an in-depth article on the UN IPCC’s fall from grace as people around the world examine the exaggerations, mistakes and manipulations of climate science.

Can the global warming propaganda machine go back to saying whatever it wants and suppressing all dissent?  If the folks at Der Spiegel are willing to open their minds, who is next?  We suppose the BBC is too much to hope for……

Following the PNS concept, scientists are no longer striving after ‘truth’ but for ‘quality’ of their ‘narrative’, in other words for politically correct findings. While ‘normal’ science in the sense of Thomas S. Kuhn’s work ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962) is looking for economically useful objective knowledge within the framework of a generally accepted paradigm by means of experimental problem solving, ‘post normal’ science is guided by new created values like ecological righteousness. It is permitted to manipulate evidence (for instance by the ‘Hockey-Stick’ graph) in order to save the ‘narrative’ of man-made global warming and to achieve ‘good’ political ends, for instance establishing emissions trading or subsidising non competitive ‘renewable’ energies. Stalinist charlatan Trofim Lyssenko would not have done better.

Jerome Ravetz was defending against this interpretation of his work in a guest post on the sceptics-blog ‘Watts Up With That (WUWT)’  by explaining ‘Climategate’ as an unfortunate mixture of ‘normal’ science and ‘green’ advocycy in ‘post normal’ situation. More than enough stuff for the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that has quizzed the scientists at the centre of the ‘climategate’ scandal this week.