IPCC begins to acknowledge mistakes in its reporting

From the WSJ:

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports.

Officials of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored network of scientists whose reports strongly influence global policy on greenhouse-gas emissions, initially played down some of the allegations. Increasingly, however, they are acknowledging the panel's mistakes and saying it needs to tighten its procedures.

VH: Since the IPCC is used by AGW advocates as a "scientific" international agency that legitimizes their position and which is used as justification to steer policy (re: billions of American taxpayer dollars) towards mitigating "climate change," one would hope that their reporting should be held to a higher standard. Apparently not.

Another Climate Panel Problem

After a week down with the flu, I'm back.

Here's an interesting piece I found in this week's issue of The Economist. Once again we see how fallible the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) really is:

The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC.

And shameful news for publications (like the once vaunted Economist) that parroted the IPCC warning without proper due diligence. What has happened to healthy skepticism? It seems that with the subject of Global Warming any pretense to question the science is seen as sheer heresy or a mark of stupidity. But again we see another example of where the IPCC, supposedly an authority on this matter, fails to properly carry out a simple review process. Quite frankly, no government should put any trust into anything the IPCC publishes.

The Hockey Stick Master

Here is a great article and profile of Steve McIntyre, the man who single handedly debunked Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" theory seen in Al Gore's horrible film. An excerpt:

The hockey stick, featured in the 2001 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had a profound influence on policy worldwide, and played a starring role in presentations like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The McIntyre-McKitrick critique called attention to uncertainties in its temperature reconstructions dating back before 1600, to certain problems with dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to estimate past temperatures), and to issues with the statistical calculations underlying the hockey stick. Some climatologists insist that the graph tells the same story when you correct for all this, but much of the critique is now accepted, and the hockey stick, whose weaknesses are better understood, has itself become a somewhat inconvenient distraction for climatologists and environmentalists.

Limos For AGW Hypocrites

"Baby, you can drive my car...."

Hot Air From Al Gore

Mr. Scaremonger is at it again. This time he's spewing more of his usual apocalyptic diatribe in Copenhagen. Mr. Gore outrageously claimed that a recent study predicted that the North Pole could be completely free of ice by sometime in the next decade. Unfortunately for Mr. Gore, the author of the study rejected Mr. Gore's wild conclusion.

Hide The Decline--ClimateGate

LOL!!!!

The Heat Is On!

Phil Jones, one of the scientists behind ClimateGate, temporarily steps down from his post. The ball is rolling, folks.

Politicians have incentives too

Do you really believe that politicians are being altruistic when legislating for global warming legislation?

More Climategate!

Hmmm. It seems that this whole Climategate has indeed gone global:

An agency of the New Zealand government has been cooking the books to create a warming trend where none exists, according to a joint research project by global warming skeptics at the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. The chief cook? Dr. Jim Salinger, considered one of the country's top scientists, who began the graph in the 1980s when he was at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

The plot thickens.

Climategate!

The mainstream media is working hard to downplay the Climategate scandal. I have noticed that one of my large local newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, has ramped up Global Warming articles too.

Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute was a guest on the Laura Ingraham Show and his comments on Climategate are quite revealing. In turns out that he had been physically threatened by one of the scientists involved in the scandal.

The Global Warming Mafia Strong-arms Against Dissent

What many who are skeptical of Al Gore's "Global Warming" hysteria have been complaining about turns out to have some teeth: The scientific consensus that climate change advocates tout has been achieved unethically by silencing dissent.

Another Reason To Hate Green Peace

How much damage did they cause doing this?

Unintended Consequences

From the WSJ:

This story begins with Congress's 2005 highway bill. It included a subsidy to encourage businesses to power their motor vehicles with "alternative fuels" such as ethanol, rather than fossil fuels such as diesel. Congress said businesses could receive a 50-cent tax credit for every gallon of gasoline if they used a blend of a traditional fossil fuel and an alternative fuel.
Then in 2007, Congress extended this largesse beyond highway vehicles to a wider range of alternative fuel users. Enter "black liquor," a carbon-rich substance the paper industry has used for decades to power its mills. It also qualifies as an alternative fuel. All the paper industry had to do was blend some fossil fuel in with their alternative fuel and -- voila! -- billions of dollars in federal subsidies were within reach. So they did.

Once again we have a clear example of the law of unintended consequences; Politicians attempting to “do something” about climate change end up creating a conflict of interest and a mess.

EPA Suppressed Scientific Evidence Against CO2 Regulation

Why am I not surprised?

Higher Taxes To Come!

House passes climate bill.

Democrats 219 votes; Republicans 212 votes. The final tally.

Up to the Senate it goes. Will it pass?

Climate Change Skeptics Unite!

Kimberley Strassel on the growing number of climate change skeptics.

Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Bill Fiasco

Jane Van Ryan brought this to my attention yesterday. It seems that two of the most liberal congressmen in America want to rush
an expensive cap and trade bill through Congress. Go figure. We've been through this before and here we go again. Cap and trade in any form is a tax increase, in my opinion. It doesn't even work to reduce emissions as promised and it threatens the economy. The Club For Growth stated:

This bill would set up several new government programs and regulations, redistribute money in the form of subsidies to individuals and for corporate welfare payments, and perhaps worst of all, it would slap "carbon trade barriers" on any country that doesn't implement a climate change scheme similar to this proposal. And, according to the Heritage Foundation, the direct and indirect taxes on a family of four would reach almost $3000 per year if Waxman-Markey passes. Heritage also reports that, in the aggregate, GDP would drop by over $9.4 trillion with unemployment increasing by 2.5 million. This bill should be vigorously opposed.

And from Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute:

As independent analysis suggests, this legislation will drive up consumer prices for gasoline and other fuels. At today’s prices, it would mean gasoline at more than $4 a gallon. It also will create huge disincentives for the production of America’s abundant natural gas resources, and force jobs and productive capacity overseas.

We know that environmentalists want higher energy prices (particularly fossil fuels) in order to make alternatives attractive...even if it wreaks havoc on our economy. E-mail your congressman today and urge him or her to vote NO on Waxman-Markey (HR 2454).

It’s not easy being Green

On Friday, the Obama administration declared that carbon dioxide (including five other industrial gases) was a grave danger to human health and a threat to the environment. The regulatory agency that will be in charge of crafting environmental regulation will be the Environmental Protection Agency. However, I surmise that it will probably be Congress that creates some sort of all encompassing environmental legislation. This is the moment that environmental groups were waiting for and it is for them a major step into crafting a "green" economy. This is huge. This ruling means that everything that you consume or purchase will essentially become more expensive--EVERYTHING. Congratulations, my dear taxpayers, our nation is now off to a new economic experiment that will never pay off and will bring grimaces of pain when citizens have to settle the bill.

By the way, the "green" experiment of ethanol hasn't worked out well at all yet our government will continue to subsidize it till someone notices the huge money pit that it is. Despite the fact that ethanol plants are closing all over the country, our government wants to mandate even more ethanol use. Of course, this means that the taxpayer remains on the hook to benefit ethanol producers and the states that have them.

Climate Change Reality

This just in--Al Gore has recanted his stance on Global Warming. Mr. Gore has said recently: "I have, after much studying of the scientific evidence, concluded that there isn't enough hard environmental evidence to support the theory of Global Warming. There are simply too many variables to take into account and several decades worth of data is simply not conclusive." Mr. Gore finished his statement by saying that he was going to turn his attention to alleviating the very real threat of poverty and hunger that continues to afflict the very poor of the world. APRIL'S FOOL!! I really had you going on that one, eh? Al Gore wouldn't come to his senses if an iceberg hit him on the head.

The Cato Institute published this full page ad in various newspapers around the country back in November, 2008. Since the Obama administration is now ready to get into the auto business and it is clear that it will push expensive "green" mandates--hybrid cars and a cap and trade scheme--it would be nice if "Mr. Pragmatic" would actually act like a pragmatist and be concerned with practical consequences and not political expediency or tendentiousness.

It’s not easy being Green

Now that Barack Obama is President and liberal Democrats feel an emboldened sense of political mandate, a test of competing liberal agendas comes to the fore with the issue of greenhouse gas emissions. In one corner we have the United Auto Workers and in the other we have the dreaded environmentalists:

The state of California and the automobile industry are pressing the Obama administration to decide whether states may impose their own limits on autos' greenhouse-gas emissions, an issue that pits President Barack Obama's allies in the labor and environmental movements against one another...

...Gearing up to fight California's request is the National Automobile Dealers Association, which is holding its annual convention this weekend in New Orleans, an event expected to draw 25,000 attendees and feature appearances by former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The group has prepared a report warning that the California law would impose "a costly and unnecessary burden on an industry already reeling" from the worst year of U.S. vehicle sales in more than a decade.

Mr. Obama expressed support during his campaign for California's bid to regulate auto greenhouse-gas emissions, so called because they trap the sun's heat in the earth's atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming. But he has avoided saying publicly how quickly his administration intends to act on the state's request.

In addition to the question of whether to let states regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, Mr. Obama's administration is bound by a 2007 Supreme Court decision to determine whether greenhouse-gas emissions "endanger" public health or welfare, the legal trigger for regulating them under the federal Clean Air Act…

…A decision in favor of the request would clear the way for more than a dozen other states to enforce laws they modeled on California's. But it also would risk antagonizing the United Auto Workers, which has complained that the law unfairly discriminates against companies whose product mix is skewed toward pickup trucks, sport-utility vehicles and minivans -- which guzzle a lot of gas. A spokesman for the union, which helped Mr. Obama clinch Ohio and Michigan in last fall's presidential contest, didn't respond to requests for comment on California's request.

With the economy in a slump, it will be interesting to see on which side of the fence the Obama administration forcefully lands on. Obama won’t be able to straddle the philosophical line with oratory flourish like he did during his campaign for the Presidency. He will have to make a tough decision and he will indubitably step on some very sensitive toes; the sort of toes that walked to the polls to elect him.

Update: Mr. Obama has chosen with the Greens. The American auto industry, already on the ropes, may have been dealt a final blow. Break out the popcorn, this may get interesting.