THE SOCIAL INJUSTICE OF ENERGY POVERTY
Energy Poverty is devastating
Energy poverty is devastating for more than 2 billion impoverished peoples living without electricity for light and heat. Cooking happens the way it has for centuries before – over smoky indoor fires that do no favors for lungs or life expectancies.I witnessed the tragedy first hand working in the China countryside in the winter where peasants are forced to live with their animals in a vain attempt to keep warm. Their weathered faces from the harsh life in the dark without heat is very sad.


Once upon a time, social justice was synonymous with equal access to modern amenities — electric lighting so poor children could read at night, refrigerators so milk could be kept on hand, and washing machines to save the hands and backs of women. Malthus was rightly denounced by generations of socialists as a cruel aristocrat who cloaked his elitism in pseudo-science, and claimed that Nature couldn’t possibly feed any more hungry months.
Now, at the very moment modern energy arrives for global poor — something a prior generation of socialists would have celebrated and, indeed, demanded — today’s leading left-wing leaders advocate a return to energy penury. The loudest advocates of cheap energy for the poor are on the libertarian Right, while The Nation dresses up neo-Malthusianism as revolutionary socialism.
Left-wing politics was once about destabilizing power relations between the West and the Rest. Now, under the sign of climate justice, it’s about sustaining them.
Left-wing politicians like Al Gore, Obama and Naomi Klein crusading against cheap coal and efficient fossil fuels represents the greatest progressive reversal in history.
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/its-not-about-the-climate
This is immoral.
Climate movement’s immoral spending
By Tom Harris
The consequence of overconfidence about climate science is tragic. According to the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, of the $1 billion spent worldwide each day on climate finance, 94 percent goes to mitigation, trying to control future climate. Only 6 percent of global climate finance is dedicated to helping vulnerable people cope with climate change today. In developing countries, even less, an abysmal 5 percent, goes to adaptation. Based on a theory about climate, we are letting people die today so as to possibly help those in the distant future.
We all know how well its access could help lift those without it out of poverty.
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/22/is-the-focus-on-global-warming-immoral/
http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150504/OPINION/150509817
World Bank Document/IEA
With respect to electricity, the global access deficit amounts to 1.2 billion people. Close to 85 percent of those who live without electricity (the “nonelectrified population”) live in rural areas, and 87 percent are geographically concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (figure O.2). For cooking, the access deficit amounts to 2.8 billion people who primarily rely on solid fuels. About 78 percent of that population lives in rural areas, and 96 percent are geographically concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Asia, Southern Asia, and South-Eastern Asia.
The GWPF Think Tank Launches ‘Energy For Africa’ Week

Today, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is launching its Energy Justice project, seeking to highlight how reliable energy access is central to the problems of people and businesses in the developing world, and showing how it must be central to any attempts to change things for the better.
Energy Justice is centered around a new website, that will highlight our research into some of these areas through reports and videos. To kick off the project, GWPF has designated this “Energy for Africa” week.
In all the discussions about the developing world, about its poverty and its stuttering progress towards a developed future, it is all too easy to forget the ordinary people and their suffering.
So the first paper commissioned as part of the project attempts to put a human face on the question of energy access. Entitled, Heart of Darkness: Why energy poverty is a security issue, this is a deeply personal view of the problems of energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa by journalist Geoff Hill.
From blanket hawkers on the street corners of Johannesburg to a nyaradzo – a countryside funeral, Hill shows how lack of energy blights the hopes for Africa’s people, tempting the young away from the countryside, to emigrate, or sometimes even to take up lives of crime.
He also shows how new research into clean coal, often driven by Africans themselves, may offer a way out, while also highlighting Africans’ suspicions of the renewable energy “solutions” foisted on them by aid organizations and Western campaigners.
The project will continue with papers on the problems of South Africa’s energy utility Eskom, as well as a series of short videos, highlighting Africa’s energy poverty amidst Western obstruction.
Heart of Darkness: Why energy poverty is a security issue (pdf)
More than a billion live without electricity just like Medieval times where life expectancy was shattered by household smoke from cooking and disease.

The smoke from this dark age cooking has devastating impacts on lungs and health.
Study: Empowering women reduces exposure to indoor air pollution
BY LISA NIKOLAU ON 30 MARCH 2017 2

Women and girls cook with solid fuel sources in poorly ventilated rooms across the developing world. In this June 25 photo, women prepare meals in Buchanan City, Liberia. (Dominic Chavez/World Bank/Flickr)
Elevating the status of women reduces risk of exposure to harmful indoor air pollution – a leading cause of premature death in the developing world – according to new research.
Kelly Austin, a Lehigh University sociologist and lead author of the study, said reducing gender inequality will be critical if developing countries are to reduce the health impact of air pollution on women and girls.
“When women are economically empowered, or socially empowered, they’re much more likely to make cleaner fuel choices,” Austin said in an interview with Humanosphere. “They also likely spend less time in front of the hearth, or cooking, because instead they’re in school or they’re working in the formal sector.”
The study is the first effort to simultaneously consider both the causes and gendered health consequences of solid fuel use, which causes more deaths each year than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. In this regard, Austin says that researchers refer to pollutants from the use of solid fuels as a “silent killer” that is largely forgotten by aid groups and policymakers.
“There are hundreds or thousands of NGOs geared towards issues like HIV,” Austin said in an interview with Humanosphere, “but there really seems to be a gap in awareness about other more chronic conditions like household air pollution.”
Nearly 3 billion of the world’s people cook or clean by burning fuel sources like wood, crop wastes, charcoal and dung, which emit small soot particles that penetrate deep into the lungs, according to the report. Experts have linked long-term exposure to these pollutants with stroke, ischemic heart disease, cataracts, pneumonia and other health problems.
Use and exposure to these fuel sources is highest among women and young children within developing nations, according to the study, because traditional gender roles dictate that women and girls bear the burden of preparing meals near the domestic hearth in poorly ventilated kitchens.
Solid fuel sources are also inefficient, and unsurprisingly, the report said women bear most of the burden of collecting them for use in the household.
“Young women in households that cook with polluting fuels are found to spend 18 hours a week on average gathering fuel compared to five hours a week in those than use clean fuels – time that could be spent in school,” the report said.
The majority of women using these types of fuels live in countries across sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, where legal and social barriers prevent them from earning income, taking out loans or working in the formal sector. Without a substantial change in policy, the report said that the total number of people relying on solid fuels will remain largely unchanged by 2030.
Austin said reducing gender inequality in terms of income, education, use of contraceptives and employment can ease the burden on such women by reducing the time they spend at the hearth, enabling them to advocate for cleaner fuels and purchase safer cooking and heating sources.
“Just giving women access to property rights, legal rights, to have ownership of money or capital could be a huge step in propelling them into the formal sector,” she said, “or even just getting them out of the household and working in different context.”
Austin added that in most developing countries, tackling gender inequality is a daunting task. Even when policymakers support changes that promote gender equality, such as legalizing land ownership for women, she said it can take years for women to reap the benefits.
“We can hope that with an increase in women’s empowerment these numbers will change, but gender inequalities are a persistent issue,” said Austin. “And one of the scary things is often even when the law formally changes … it’s still not practiced on the ground.”
LOW PROBABLITY OF TOO HOT CLIMATE
Earth’s climate system is unfathomably complex. It is affected by innumerable interacting variables, atmospheric CO2 levels being just one.
The list of variables that shape climate includes cloud formation, topography, altitude, proximity to the equator, plate tectonics, sunspot cycles, volcanic activity, expansion or contraction of sea ice, conversion of land to agriculture, deforestation, reforestation, direction of winds, soil quality, El Niño and La Niña ocean cycles, prevalence of aerosols (airborne soot, dust, and salt) — and, of course, atmospheric greenhouse gases, both natural and manmade. A comprehensive list would run to hundreds, if not thousands, of elements, none of which scientists would claim to understand with absolute precision.

Canada’s national newspaper the Globe & Mail first published my research on the climate issue in 1991 ( ..) I urged a wait and see view as the science was not settled and any action by Canada would have no effect “like a drop in the ocean.”
I relied on the safety research of Aaron Wildavsky who said if the risk is predictable or low probability then resilience is the right action. Overconfidence has been called the most “pervasive and potentially catastrophic” of all the cognitive biases to which human beings fall victim. It has been blamed for lawsuits, strikes, wars, and stock market bubbles and crashes. I blame it for the devastating impact of misguided climate alarmism called human made global warming denying cheap electricity to > 2 billion living in the dark and needing coal fired power.
Overconfidence effect – Wikipedia My view hasn’t changed and the fear of unprecedented warming by fossil fuels is a very low probability and more untrue today than in 1991. Solar radiation has gone into decline making winters earlier, colder with more snow around the world. Climate is complex with many influencing variables.
Earth’s climate system is unfathomably complex. It is affected by innumerable interacting variables, atmospheric CO2 levels being just one. The more variables there are in any system or train of events, the lower the probability of all of them coming to pass.
The list of variables that shape climate includes cloud formation, topography, altitude, proximity to the equator, plate tectonics, sunspot cycles, volcanic activity, expansion or contraction of sea ice, conversion of land to agriculture, deforestation, reforestation, direction of winds, soil quality, El Niño and La Niña ocean cycles, prevalence of aerosols (airborne soot, dust, and salt) — and, of course, atmospheric greenhouse gases, both natural and manmade.
Measuring human impacts on climate is indeed “very challenging.” The science is far from settled. That is why calls to radically reduce carbon emissions are so irresponsible — and why dire warnings of what will happen if we don’t are little better than reckless fearmongering.
Why are climate-change models so flawed? Because climate science is so incomplete – The Boston Globe

WHAT THE ‘VAST BODY ‘ OF SCIENTIFIC ‘EXPERTS’ ASSURED US ABOUT SNOW
CRU :
IN 2000, climate expert Dr David Viner of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) assured us that :
Snowfall will become “A very rare and exciting event…
Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Dr David Viner – Senior scientist, climatic research unit (CRU)
SNOWFALL Will Become “A Very Rare And Exciting Event…” | Climatism
*
U.N. IPCC :
IN 2001, the UN IPCC predicted diminished snowfalls as human CO2 increased, claiming that “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” due to the activities of mankindpersonkind…
Ontario Actually Saw Loads Of June Snow In Some Places Yesterday (PHOTOS)
2 days ago

Well, this is a surprise we weren’t expecting. Northwestern parts of the province have had a pretty big hit of June snow in Ontario in the last couple of days. In particular, residents in Pickle Lake, Ont. residents were shocked to see the return of the fluffy white stuff.
Record snowy and cold winters deny the global warming thesis as predicted by alarmist scientists predicted moderate winters and the end of snow.

Big dig begins after Quebec slammed with record-setting blizzard
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre urges people to stay home as crews scramble to clear roads
Benjamin Shingler · CBC News ·
Posted: Mar 15, 2017 6:40 AM ET | Last Updated: March 15, 2017

Snow-clearing crews were busy in Montreal on Wednesday after a major snowstorm swept through the province. (Graham Hughes/Canadian Press)
LATEST
- Most schools to reopen Thursday, including those in EMSB, LBPSB
A major cleanup is underway in Quebec after a record-setting snowstorm that left hundreds stranded on a highway in Montreal and many schools, universities and daycares closed across the province. A total of 40 centimetres has fallen in Montreal since the snow began Tuesday, while other parts of the province were digging out from as much as 70 centimetres of snow. Many flights at Trudeau airport were cancelled or delayed, and most school boards in the province were closed Wednesday. Schools are expected to reopen Thursday, including those in the English Montreal School Board and Lester B. Pearson School Board.
Storm claims at least 4 livesAcross the province, at least four people died as a result of the powerful winter storm.
By Benjamin Shingler, CBC News Posted: Mar 15, 2017 6:40 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 15, 2017 9:34 PM ET
German research shows crumbling consensus on warming with the portent of an ice age coming because of the unusual colder weather of the past decades. Germany Warns Of Coming Mini Ice Age
Posted on July 5, 2016 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai in Sci/Environment
Solar physicists from Germany have issued a warning that Europe is about to enter a mini ice age in the next few years.
Scientists at the ultra-warmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) say that the current solar minimum suggests the continent is about to suffer a miniature ice-age.
The Berliner Kurier writes:
“That’s the conclusion that solar physicists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research reached when looking at solar activity.”
For an institute that over the past 20 years has steadfastly insisted that man has been almost the sole factor in climate change over the past century and that the sun no longer plays a role, this is quite remarkable.
The Berliner Kurier reports that the PIK scientists foresee a weakening of the sun’s activity over the coming years.
“That means that conversely it is going to get colder. The scientists are speaking of a little ice age.”
According to the PIK scientists, the reduced solar activity will, however, not be able to stop the global warming and only brake the warming up to 2100 by 0.3°C.
Given the extreme warnings of warming and sea level rise put out by the Potsdam Institute in the past, this still represents an extraordinary admission, one that has us suspecting a major climate turnaround may be ahead – despite all the efforts by the Potsdam Institute to play it all down. Here we see them possibly setting up a global warming postponement of a couple of decades. The sun plays a role after all.
The source of the Berliner Kurier report is the Austrian weather site wetter.at. The site writes that some solar physicists suspect the current solar inactivity may be “the start of a new grand minimum” like the one the planet saw in the 17th century and left Europe in an ice box.
Dozens of studies show Little Ice Age was global!
Though most scientists agree that the Little Ice Age took place, many dispute its extent. Some insist it was localized over the North Atlantic region. But now there are dozens of studies that show it was in fact a global event. That should make us worry.

Germany Warns Of Coming Mini Ice Age
The source of the Berliner Kurier report is the Austrian weather site wetter.at. The site writes that some solar physicists suspect the current solar inactivity may be “the start of a new grand minimum” like the one the planet saw in the 17th century and left Europe in an ice box.
Dozens of studies show Little Ice Age was global!
Germany Warns Of Coming Mini Ice Age

CO2 INCREASES WHILE TEMPERATURES DECREASE???
Global Land Temperatures Plummet In October
NOVEMBER 28, 2016
By Paul Homewood
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
end description
David Rose has put the cat among the pigeons!
Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record.
The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end.
The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Nino – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.
Why is coal growing rapidly in South and Southeast Asian countries?

First and foremost, coal consumption is accelerating because of sheer power demand growth, combined with coal’s rapid scalability. China offers a key example. It is already the world’s largest coal consumer and has a coal power fleet that is two and half times the size of the United States’ fleet. China also expects to move another 100 million people from the countryside to the city in the next 12 years and grow its middle class by 200 million by 2035. Given these projections, China estimates electric demand to roughly double by 2030. Let’s also consider India, a nation of 1.2 billion people—four times the US population—where the rapid growth of the middle class is also underway. It has only 211 gigawatts of installed electrical generating capacity, equivalent to approximately one-fifth of the capacity of the United States, and India is expected to triple its electric demand by 2030.
When power demand is growing that rapidly, you build what you can, and this very well may include taking all measures to improve efficiency, scale up renewable resources, and diversify the energy mix to include natural gas and nuclear. However, coal is readily available and transportable (no pipelines required), and coal plants can be built quickly—typically in 18 months. While figures have fallen from a much higher peak a few years ago, China still built approximately one large plant every week in 2013.
There is still considerable discussion about the wind, solar, and even nuclear boom in Asia (China is building 28 nuclear plants), yet these other power sources are slow to develop to scale, so coal is still the winner. This has played a big role in the projections for the coming years: 75 percent of the annual new generating capacity being added in Southeast Asia is expected to be coal-fired. It’s also important to remember that only about half of China’s coal is used for producing power, while slightly over 40 percent of its coal is used directly for industry—for example, cement and steel.
The second greatest contributor to the rapid rise in coal use is cost. Mining coal in China currently costs as little as $2–$4 per million British thermal units (mmbtu). Imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) costs $15–$20 per mmbtu in Asia, and limited domestic gas production—while in the $10 or more per mmbtu range—is husbanded for industry, not electricity. Ironically, global coal prices have dropped somewhat in recent years due to decreased electric demand from member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This trend has been bolstered by the shale gas revolution in the United States, which has freed up U.S. coal for export, helping further depress global coal prices. Even nuclear plants in China are two to three times more expensive to build than coal plants. Coal plants are cheap in China not only because of lower labor costs, but due to lower intellectual property and licensing costs as well as the high level of China’s construction management capability. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), despite recent price drops, wind and solar power in Asia remains three to five times more expensive per kilowatt hour to develop than new coal power plants, ignoring the costs of the generating capacity needed to back up these renewable resources when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow.
The third factor pushing greater coal use in Asia is availability. China has the world’s third largest coal reserves, after the United States and Russia. Australia and India are fourth and fifth. Globally, world proven reserves of coal are sufficient for over 100 years of consumption at current rates. True, India and China have substantial natural gas reserves as well, including shale gas, but they have been slow to scale up conventional production infrastructure, and lifting costs for gas are still much higher than for coal.The reality is the hypothesis of catastrophic global warming from carbon dioxide is at best unsettled science and at worst a hoax. Almost no projections by the alarmist scientists have happened. For example, the UN IPCC projected more moderate winters without snowfall. NO. Most importantly natural climate variation has arrested evidence of unprecedented global warming for the past decades and century. The time period needed for climate change analysis is in the hundred or thousands of years not decades.
Can Any Tech Stop Asia’s Coal Future? — Solar, CCS, Nuclear, and Natural Gas Not Scaling Fast Enough
Climate change is any significant long-term change in the expected patterns of average weather of a region (or the whole Earth) over a significant period of time. W.

The term ‘climate change’ has a scientific meaning that alarmists are perverting like Orwellian slogan [PEACE IS WAR – LOVE IS HATE] so that it has become meaningless.
“…..the phrase ‘climate change’ is now officially meaningless.”
Dr. Judith Curry view after UN National Climate Assessment Report as “The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change.”
SUMMARY
- We can observe the weather and feel temperature changes.
- Weather is chaotic, non-linear and primarily controlled by the sun, clouds and ocean currents with a myriad of other influencers.
- Weather and climate change are unpredictable.
- Climate change cannot be observed or felt as it is a statistical term in science that is a description of temperature averages over a long time frame at least centuries or much more where the averages show a trend that is a significant break with the past.
- The climate changes must include both warming and cooling climates because the climate swings in cycles constantly from hot to cold to hot and so on in.
- No one dead or alive has ever observed climate change because of the long time frame in centuries at least and because it is only a fictional statistic about weather averages. It is not observable.
- When the term ‘climate change’ is used by the media frequently to describe only man-made global warming or Anthropogenic Global Warming AGW ignoring the inconvenient alternative of global cooling this is an Orwellian conscious deception or DOUBLETHINK.
- The computer models of the climate built by the UN IPCC fail utterly
- REFERENCES
I submit that a key reason for total failure of alarmist predictions is failing to accept the science of the term ‘climate change’ with long time lines in centuries as a minimum. The reason for the alarmist rush to judgment is because they want to scare the public with immediate weather like hurricanes or droughts without letting natural variability the chaotic zig zag of temperatures and severe weather temper their analysis.
Obama committed this heresy in claiming the natural 3 year drought in California was global warming. Recent record snowfall showed he had jumped the gun – also research denied his view.


“When you look out a window, the weather you see is not climate. As with atoms and molecules you can only get some idea of it through indirect means. There may be palm trees, or there may be snow outside [or desertification] but you cannot actually see climate with your own eyes. Our knowledge and experience of it is fundamentally indirect…” page 64, Essex and McKirtrick, Climate Theory Versus Models and Metaphors, TAKEN BY STORM – THE TROUBLED SCIENCE, POLICY AND POLITICS OF GLOBAL WARMING.

If alarmists and media embraced the scientific meaning of ‘climate change’ where the words obviously cannot only describe change that is warming, the result would show no climate crisis. The reason is the short term zig zag of temperatures over the past 100 years have been either cold or hot not just one way. For example in the 1930s temperatures so high to cause world record draughts and then in the 1960s temperatures became record cold. Altogether when averaged temperatures no evidence of an unusual warming!


The next chart shows the idea that the LITTLE ICE AGE just had a pause in the non-linear unfolding of weather and in fact is continuing.
We do not know until we have a longer time frame in centuries not decades.




THE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT SETTLED
“We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.” Richard Feynman, The Value of Science, 1955.
Harvard-Smithsonian Physicist: Computer Models Used by U.N. Overstate Global Warming

Abstract
An irreducibly simple climate-sensitivity model is designed to empower even non-specialists to research the question how much global warming we may cause. In 1990, the First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expressed “substantial confidence” that near-term global warming would occur twice as fast as subsequent observation. Given rising CO2 concentration, few models predicted no warming since 2001. Between the pre-final and published drafts of the Fifth Assessment Report, IPCC cut its near-term warming projection substantially, substituting “expert assessment” for models’ near-term predictions. Yet its long-range predictions remain unaltered. The model indicates that IPCC’s reduction of the feedback sum from 1.9 to 1.5 W m−2 K−1 mandates a reduction from 3.2 to 2.2 K in its central climate-sensitivity estimate; that, since feedbacks are likely to be net-negative, a better estimate is 1.0 K; that there is no unrealized global warming in the pipeline; that global warming this century will be <1 K; and that combustion of all recoverable fossil fuels will cause <2.2 K global warming to equilibrium. Resolving the discrepancies between the methodology adopted by IPCC in its Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports that are highlighted in the present paper is vital. Once those discrepancies are taken into account, the impact of anthropogenic global warming over the next century, and even as far as equilibrium many millennia hence, may be no more than one-third to one-half of IPCC’s current projections.
March 18, 2015 – 1:13 PM
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant and the global warming debate has nothing to do with pollution. The average person has been misled and is confused about what the current global warming debate is about – greenhouse gases. None of which has anything to do with air pollution.

The Institute of Public Affairs has been a leading sceptical voice about the science of global warming for more than a decade. The Institute published a book, CLIMATE CHANGE: THE FACTS –
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED [NOT]
It is quite apparent from the emails that those lobbying for acceptance of the belief in human-induced global warming has worked very hard to create the appearance of a greater consensus than otherwise may have been the case. This has allowed the political slogan ‘the science is settled’ to gain substantial credence. Of course, it is very well-known that science itself is never settled. After all, if that were the case, the learned journals would all close down and scientists would cease their work and simply teach the history of science. Ludwig von Mises wrote on this very point.
There is no such thing as perfection in human knowledge, nor for that matter in any other human achievement. Omniscience is denied to man. The most elaborate theory that seems to satisfy completely our thirst for knowledge may one day be amended or supplanted by a new theory. Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought. A scientific system is but one station in an endlessly progressing search for knowledge. It is necessarily affected by the insufficiency The global warming lobby was not omniscient; they were extraordinarily arrogant. Not content with subverting the peer-review process, they peddled the notion that their view of the world was ‘absolute’ with a ‘final certainty’. Now it is true that the scientists involved probably did not use the term ‘the science is settled’ themselves. More likely others used the term, perhaps even without permission; nonetheless, the scientists themselves never corrected the usage of the term and their behaviour is consistent with them holding this belief themselves.
We now know from the emails—as recently as 12 October 2009— that the global warming lobby scientists themselves did not believe the science to be settled.
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.
There has been some debate as to the meaning of this comment. It could be a complaint that funding constraints have lead to a decline in the quality of observational date, or it could mean that the underlying scientific understanding is inadequate. Either of these explanations, however, is inconsistent with the idea that the ‘science is settled’. If the science were settled, scientists would be able to ‘account for the lack of warming’. The implicit bias in that statement (by Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the American National Center for Atmospheric Research) is worth noting, when confronted by a divergence between the data and the computer modelling, he chooses the modelling. Of course, what makes this statement suspicious is a somewhat similar comment by Phil Jones in 2005.
The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is
Professor Tim Flannery, interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Lateline program in November 2009, made this comment after the Climategate scandal had broken.
These people work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that’s when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, ‘We have to get on our horses and find out what we don’t know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it’. And that’s the way science progresses, we can’t pretend to have perfect knowledge, we don’t. We have to go forward and formulate policy Not only is this statement inconsistent with a ‘the science is settled’ argument, it is also inconsistent with Flannery’s statement on the same program in June 2005.
Well, you can’t predict the future; that’s one of the things that you learn fairly early on, but if I could just say, the general patterns that we’re seeing in the global circulation models—and these are very sophisticated computer tools, really, for looking at climate shift— are saying the same sort of thing that we’re actually seeing on the ground. So when the models start confirming what you’re observing on the ground, then there’s some fairly strong basis for believing that we’re understanding what’s causing these weather shifts and these rainfall declines, and they do seem to be of a
The emails do not contain a silver bullet that would kill off the global warming hypothesis. At the time of writing, computer programmers are in the process of examining the codes and data that were hacked at the same time as the emails. If it is shown that the data have been manipulated to show a warning trend, that would escalate what is already a scandal into a major scientific fraud. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

PRINCETON, NJ (January 3, 2011)—S. Fred Singer said in an interview with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) that “the number of skeptical qualified scientists has been growing steadily; I would guess it is about 40% now.”

Singer, a leading scientific skeptic of anthropocentric global warming (AGW), is an atmospheric physicist, and founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), an organization that began challenging the published findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 1990s. SEPP established the Leipzig Declaration, a statement of dissent from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that has been signed by over one hundred scientists and meteorologists.
Asked what he would like to see happen in regard to public opinion and policy on climate change, Singer replied,
I would like to see the public look upon global warming as just another scientific controversy and oppose any public policies until the major issues are settled, such as the cause. If mostly natural, as NIPCC concludes, then the public policies currently discussed are pointless, hugely expensive, and wasteful of resources that could better be applied to real societal problems.
NIPCC is the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, another group established by Singer. In 2009 NIPCC published Climate Change Reconsidered,an 880-page report on scientific research that contradicts the models of man-made global warming. Singer believes that global warming exists but that human contributions to it are minimal. In the interview Singer said he believed his efforts in the last twenty years had been successful in disproving the notion that “the science is settled.”
Joshua | November 02, 2012 – 8:28 PM
Climate change is obviously occurring, but what is not so obvious are the factors involved and their respective impact. We don’t know if man plays a major or insignificant role in the equation and we don’t even know if the effects we are currently witnessing are unique or cyclical.
The fact that we hear so much about the melting of the Arctic ice caps and hear virtually nothing about the growth of the Antarctic ice caps is telling- global warmers aren’t interested in data that doesn’t support their politicized campaign against pollution. Their cause is noble and I support the notion that we should take care of the resources given to us, but using spotty science to promote that cause is unwise. The ends do not justify the means.
Add to the fact that the “solutions” to a problem (which may be man made or man made-up) is cap and trade and carbon credits only further fuels the skepticism- particularly when the very ones who are pushing the global warming agenda are those who are in a position to profit from it (ie Al Gore). Furthermore, the green companies that have been given tremendous government subsidies have a track record of going bankrupt- so again, our “solutions” to a questionable problem do not seem to produce the desired results. They have nearly all been a colossal waste of (often taxpayer) money.
Maybe we should rethink our green strategies and stop using questionable science as a blunt instrument of change.

JAMES MATKIN | February 13, 2015 – 1:07 PM
Some scientists submit solar data contradicts the view there is any significant man made warming. Proponents of global warming are pushed in the corner with this data and refuse to countenance any room for doubt and rather resort to name calling with cult like religious overtones ie “deniers.” Fortunately, Canadian government sees the uncertainty in this debate and steps back from taking negative economic action. How is global warming responsible for record freezing winters with mountains of snow and two decades without any increase in warming? Indeed the data is contradictory enough to put in play the question are we entering the next ice age. It is entirely possible that the sun, and variations in the earth’s axis not man are wrecking havoc with our climate. Dr. Abdussamatov points out that over the last 1,000 years deep cold periods have occurred five times. Each is correlated with declines in solar irradiance much like we are experiencing now with no human influence. “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.” Another recent article by climatologist and former NASA Consultant, Joh L. Casey predicts “ICE AGE NOW” with 30 years of record cold temperatures around the globe.
I submit the first and last word on climate change should come from the sage advice of the famous nobel prize winning physicist, Richard P. Feynman.
“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darned sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” Nobel Prize Scientist Richard P. Feynman.
We must leave room for the “doubt” about mans role in global warming and question if it is real, especially as we struggle with the coldest winters around the world over the past decades.
Roald Larsen | October 01, 2015 – 5:15 PM
100% of real scientist knows there’s no man made global warming, cause, if you can’t empirical show the effects, real scientists know you have to go back to 0-hypothese. If you don’t, you’re not a scientist. That means; No Man Made Global Warming!
Les K | November 01, 2015 – 1:17 AM
Cooke’s 98% consensus amounted to 76 out of 77 self-described “climate scientists” agreeing.
Chris | November 20, 2015 – 4:49 PM
Dion, that 98% lie was proved fraudulent many years ago. Stop making up stats.
JAMES MATKIN | November 20, 2015 – 7:15 PM
There is no doubt S. Fred Singer’s estimate of sceptical scientists about the anthropogenic global warming theory are growing as the evidence of contradicts the theory. The Pacific Islands are increasing by 8% not abrading; the Antarctic ice is Incredibly gaining 100 billion more ice pack annually, there has been no hurricane in North America for > 10 years. The seas rise is only 5 inches over the past 100 years not 6” as thought. Most important the 97% “consensus” study Cook et al (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals.
Investigative journalists at Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified within Cook’s asserted 97 percent. The investigative journalists found Cook and his colleagues strikingly classified papers by such prominent, vigorous skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as supporting the 97-percent consensus.For example Scafetta explained. “What my papers say is that the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.”

Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and blogger at Climate Etc. talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about climate change. Curry argues that climate change is a “wicked problem” with a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the expected damage as well as the political and technical challenges of dealing with the phenomenon. She emphasizes the complexity of the climate and how much of the basic science remains incomplete. The conversation closes with a discussion of how concerned citizens can improve their understanding of climate change and climate change policy.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/judith_curry_on.html
‘I was tossed out of the tribe’: climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed
For engaging with sceptics, and discussing uncertainties in projections frankly, this Georgia professor is branded a heretic
It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quoted is Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. But on this side of the Atlantic, apparently, she is too ‘challenging’. What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from solid data and analysis.
Some consider her a heretic. According to Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a vociferous advocate of extreme measures to prevent a climatic Armageddon, she is ‘anti-science’. Curry isn’t fazed by the slur.
‘It’s unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a denier,’ she tells me. ‘Inside the climate community there are a lot of people who don’t like what I’m doing. On the other hand, there is also a large, silent group who do like it. But the debate has become hard — especially in the US, because it’s become so polarised.’ Warming alarmists are fond of proclaiming how 97 per cent of scientists agree that the world is getting hotter, and human beings are to blame. They like to reduce the uncertainties of climate science and climate projections to Manichean simplicity. They have managed to eliminate doubt from what should be a nuanced debate about what to do.
Professor Curry, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, does not dispute for a moment that human-generated carbon dioxide warms the planet. But, she says, the evidence suggests this may be happening more slowly than the alarmists fear.
In the run-up to the Paris conference, said Curry, much ink has been spilled over whether the individual emissions pledges made so far by more than 150 countries — their ‘intentional nationally determined contributions’, to borrow the jargon — will be enough to stop the planet from crossing the ‘dangerous’ threshold of becoming 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Much of the conference will consist of attempts to make these targets legally binding. This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.
Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn’t. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for ‘climate sensitivity’ —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a ‘best estimate’ of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its ‘likely’ range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.
This isn’t all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3˚C. ‘There’s growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,’ Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5˚C, not 3˚C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2˚C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5˚C makes it much less likely we will see 2˚C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’
Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2˚C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4˚C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. In any event, ‘the economists and policymakers seem unaware of the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity’, despite its enormous implications.
Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’
Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 ‘Climategate’ scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. ‘I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.’
She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede: ‘I think that by 2030, temperatures will not have increased all that much. Maybe then there will be the funding to do the kind of research on natural variability that we need, to get the climate community motivated to look at things like the solar-climate connection.’ She even hopes that rational argument will find a place in the UN: ‘Maybe, too, there will be a closer interaction between the scientists, the economists and policymakers. Wouldn’t that be great?’
A Famous Scientist Becomes a Skeptic
Meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson has long been considered a cool head in the often heated conflict over global warming. In an interview, he defends his decision to join an organization that is skeptical of climate change.
Interview Conducted By Axel Bojanowski

Lennart Bengtsson: “I do not believe it makes sense for our generation to believe or pretend that we can solve the problems of the future.”
ALARMIST SCIENTISTS MISBEHAVE
Spectacularly Poor Climate Science At NASA
Dr. James Hansen of NASA, has been the world’s leading promoter of the idea that the world is headed towards “climate disaster.” There is little evidence to back this up.
In 2008, Hansen wrote about “stabilizing” the climate :
Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 and climate requires that net CO2 emissions approach zero, because of the long lifetime of CO2
arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf
Yet in 1999, he made it quite clear that past climate was not stable, and that there was little evidence to support that idea that the climate was becoming unstable.
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Whither U.S. Climate?
In that same 1999 report, he showed that US temperatures peaked in 1934, and declined through the rest of the century.

In 1989, NOAA and the UK’s leading expert agreed with Hansen that US had not warmed.
February 04, 1989
Last week, scientists from the United States Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period.
Dr. (Phil) Jones said in a telephone interview today that his own results for the 48 states agreed with those findings.
Global Warmth In ’88 Is Found To Set a Record – New York Times
But in the year 2000, NASA and NOAA altered the historical US temperature record, which now shows that there was about one degree centigrade US warming during the century before 1989.
The animated image below shows the changes which Dr. Hansen made to the historical US temperature record after the year 1999. He cooled the 1930s, and warmed the 1980s and 1990s. The year 1998 went from being more than half a degree cooler than 1934, to warmer than 1934.

Hansen’s recent temperature data tampering is not limited to the US. He has done the same thing all over the planet. Below is one recent example in Iceland, where he dramatically cooled the first half of the century, and warmed the present. He appears to be trying to erase evidence that there was a very warm period in much of the Arctic around 1940.
Hansen has never provided any evidence to support the idea that skeptics are either well funded or intentionally misleading the public, yet he frequently repeats this claim.
Dr. Hansen has suggested that fossil fuel corporation CEOs are intentionally committing high crimes against the planet – because they don’t believe his spectacularly failed mispredictions.
Hansen went on to say: “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
James Hansen: Try Fossil Fuel CEOs For ‘High Crimes Against Humanity
Additionally Dr. Hansen has been arrested several times for committing crimes in “defense of the planet”

Spectacularly Poor Climate Science At NASA
Sadly, for political and financial gain the overconfident scientists and leading politicians have fudged and misrepresented the data to keep their alarmist warming hypothesis alive.
THE OVERCONFIDENCE EFFECT IN PLAY
How much confidence should we have in our own knowledge? Psychologists Howard Raiffa and Marc Alpert, wondering the same thing, have interviewed hundreds of people in this way. Sometimes they have asked participants to estimate the total egg production in the United States or the number of physicians and surgeons listed in the Yellow Pages of the phone directory for Boston or the number of foreign automobiles imported into the United States, or even the toll collections of the Panama Canal in millions of dollars. Subjects could choose any range they liked, with the aim of being no more than 2 percent off. The results were amazing. In the final tally, instead of just 2 percent of the respondents being wrong, 40 percent proved incorrect. The researchers dubbed this amazing phenomenon the overconfidence effect.
The overconfidence effect also applies to forecasts, such as stock market performance over a year or your firm’s profits over three years. We systematically overestimate our knowledge and our ability to predict—on a massive scale. The overconfidence effect does not deal with whether single estimates are correct or not. Rather, it measures the difference between what people really know and what they think they know (see The Black Swan, Taleb). What’s surprising is this: Experts suffer even more from the overconfidence effect than laypeople do. If asked to forecast oil prices in five years’ time, an economics professor will be as wide of the mark as a zookeeper will. However, the professor will offer his forecast with certitude.
The overconfidence effect does not stop at economics: In surveys, 84 percent of Frenchmen estimate that they are above-average lovers (Taleb). Without the overconfidence effect, that figure should be exactly 50 percent—after all, the statistical “median” means 50 percent should rank higher and 50 percent should rank lower. In another survey, 93 percent of the U.S. students estimated to be “above average” drivers. And 68 percent of the faculty at the University of Nebraska rated themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability. Entrepreneurs and those wishing to marry also deem themselves to be different: They believe they can beat the odds. In fact, entrepreneurial activity would be a lot lower if the overconfidence effect did not exist. For example, every restaurateur hopes to establish the next Michelin-starred restaurant, even though statistics show that most close their doors after just three years. The return on investment in the restaurant business lies chronically below zero.
What makes the overconfidence effect so prevalent and its effect so confounding is that it is not driven by incentives; it is raw and innate. And it’s not counterbalanced by the opposite effect, “underconfidence,” which doesn’t exist. No surprise to some readers: the overconfidence effect is more pronounced in men—women tend not to overestimate their knowledge and abilities as much. Even more troubling: Optimists are not the only victims of the overconfidence effect. Even self-proclaimed pessimists overrate themselves—just less extremely.
In conclusion: Be aware that you tend to overestimate your knowledge. Be skeptical of predictions, especially if they come from so-called experts. And with all plans, favor the pessimistic scenario. This way, you have a chance of judging the situation somewhat realistically.
OVERCONFIDENCE IN RENEWABLES IS DEVASTATING FOR THE POOR
1. Renewables do not work. They cannot provide baseload energy.
2. They are expensive and simply unaffordable for developing countries. A first world indulgence if you like.
3. Renewables “green” credentials are also fairly dubious. As an example, there is a school of thought that the amount of energy that goes into producing wind turbines is actually greater then the energy they produce.
4. There are emerging technologies that could well get coal back in the game for even 1st world countries
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
14th October, 2015. Lecture by Dr Patrick Moore in London at the Global Warming Policy Foundation outlining why our CO2 emissions are wholly beneficial, and may have even prevented the end of life on Earth.
The TRUTH about carbon dioxide (C02): Patrick Moore, Sensible Environmentalist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWEjSDYfxc Pragur U.
HIDING THE DECLINE IN TEMPERATURES

From the start the science of climate alarmism has been clouded with fudged and misleading data deliberately used to make the results show more warming when nature failed to cooperate. Stories around the world abound of record colder weather. As I write this article the US is under an unusual March blizzard burying many cities of snow.
Following storm, an icy morning greets Greater Boston
By John R. Ellement GLOBE STAFF MARCH 15, 2017
The return to work is an icy one – and that won’t change any time soon, the National Weather Service said Wednesday.
One day after a powerful nor’easter brought snow, wind and rain to the region, temperatures will remain below freezing throughout Wednesday as a wave of Arctic air keeps the region in an actual deep freeze at least into Friday.
“Unfortunately, we are looking at a kind of cold pattern and it just kind of keeps reloading,’’ said Frank Nocera, a weather service meteorologist. “Temperatures should be in the mid to upper 40s for this time of year, but we are not going to crack freezing today.”
Nocera said with the angle of the sun during March, some snow melting will take place even during the cold times only to refreeze overnight when temperatures drop into the teens. And the process known as sublimation, where snow naturally turns into a gas, will also help somewhat.
“There’s really only one day in the next seven days where temperatures will actually get where they should be at this time of year, in the 40s,’’ Nocera said. “It’s just going to stick around longer. You are not really getting rid of the snow through melting.’’
Winter returns with deep snow in parts of Mass.

Asia cold snap: Scores dead as freezing ‘polar vortex’ sweeps across eastern Asia
Asia’s ‘polar vortex’ has seen some regions hit by their coldest weather for more than half a century
Adam Withnall Jan. 25, 2016
My intention is to rely on the facts by using a vital compendium of science articles published by the prestigious INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS in Australia.

The Facts, featuring 22 essays on the science, politics and economics of the climate change debate. Climate Change: The Facts features the world’s leading experts and commentators on climate change. Highlights of Climate Change: The Facts include:
Ian Plimer draws on the geological record to dismiss the possibility that human emissions of carbon dioxide will lead to catastrophic consequences for the planet. Patrick Michaels demonstrates the growing chasm between the predictions of the IPCC and the real world temperature results. Richard Lindzen shows the climate is less sensitive to increases in greenhouse gases than previously thought and argues that a warmer world would have a similar weather variability to today. Willie Soon discusses the often unremarked role of the sun in climate variability. Robert Carter explains why the natural variability of the climate is far greater than any human component. John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy demonstrate how little success climate models have in predicting important information such as rainfall.
Nigel Lawson warns of the dire economic consequences of abandoning the use of fossil fuels. Alan Moran compares the considerable costs of taking action compared to the relatively minor potential benefits of doing so. James Delingpole looks at the academic qualifications of the leading proponents of catastrophic climate change and finds many lack the credentials of so-called ‘sceptics’. Garth Paltridge says science itself will be damaged by the failure of climate forecasts to eventuate. Jo Nova chronicles the extraordinary sums of public money awarded to climate change activists, in contrast to those who question their alarmist warnings. Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong compare climate change alarmism to previous scares raised over the past 200 years. Rupert Darwall explains why an international, legally binding climate agreement has extremely minimal chances of success. Ross McKitrick reviews the ‘hockey stick’ controversy and what it reveals about the state of climate science.
Donna Laframboise explains how activists have taken charge of the IPCC. Mark Steyn recounts the embarrassing ‘Ship of Fools’ expedition to Antarctica. Christopher Essex argues the climate system is far more complex than it has been presented and there is much that we still don’t know. Bernie Lewin examines how climate change science came to be politicised. Stewart Franks lists all the unexpected developments in climate science that were not foreseen. Anthony Watts highlights the failure of the world to warm over the past 18 years, contrary to the predictions of the IPCC. Andrew Bolt reviews the litany of failed forecasts by climate change activists.
A major amount of analysis is devoted to the more than 100 emails called CLIMATEGATE. The emails give valuable insight into how the distortion of science for political and monetary gain happened.
The classic cheating exposed by the “climate gate emails” is very troubling. Here is a primary confession of fudging from only one of more than 100 email documents –
November 16, 1999: email 0942777075
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
THE CLIMATEGATE EMAILS
The Institute of Public Affairs has been a leading sceptical voice about the science of global warming for more than a decade.
We don’t believe ‘the science is settled’. As a think tank committed to the ideals of free and open enquiry and debate we are not afraid to stand against the mainstream of prevailing elite opinion. Time and time again, the mainstream of elite opinion has been proved wrong.
Since its formation in 1943 the Institute of Public Affairs has a proud record of arguing for the principles of liberal democracy, personal responsibility, and limited government. Often our advocacy of these principles has been unpopular. For example, in the 1940s the IPA stood almost alone in its opposition to bank nationalisation and government control of the economy. In the 1980s the IPA argued passionately that empowerment for Aboriginal people was through education, employment, and individual property rights. The IPA’s view on Aboriginal policy was contrary to the mainstream of elite opinion at the time, and the IPA was attacked for having such a position.
Today, there is the issue of global warming. The IPA is proud to be sceptical about the science of climate change. The IPA believes in free, and honest, and vigorous debate about public policy. That is why the IPA has produced this book Climate Change: The Facts.
Scepticism should be a hallmark of science. A ‘sceptic’ was once defined as someone who asked questions. Science should be about asking questions. Unfortunately when it comes to the ‘science’ of climate change, those who dare to ask questions are too often labelled ‘deniers’.
(The use of the term ‘denier’ to describe those who question whether humans have in fact caused catastrophic climate change is a sad reflection on the condition of scientific debate in the twenty-first century.)
Climate Change: The Facts presents a range of analyses on climate change from some of the world’s leading scientists and analysts. Although these perspectives could broadly be described as ‘sceptical’, some of the authors do accept that humans could be responsible for changing the earth’s climate. But for them the issue is the extent of any human-induce climate change, and whether what is proposed by those such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to stop global warming will be either ineffective or will produce outcomes worse than any of the problems that might be caused by any anticipated climate change.
The IPA has published this selection of ‘sceptical’ viewpoints in Climate Change: The Facts because there has been so little debate about the science of climate change. The public has been told by politicians that ‘the science is settled’. In fact, as we know now, ‘the science’ is far from settled. And surely before something is ‘settled’ it should be the subject of rigorous argument, challenge, and debate. This has not happened.
Instead what has occurred is that a small clique of researchers have constructed a consensus and they have refused to consider the contributions of anyone who dares question that consensus. The recently revealed records of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, the so-called ‘Climategate’ demonstrate the extent to which some researchers have been willing to collude together to intimidate dissenters. Perhaps the most alarming revelation from Climategate is the revelation of the way in which the researchers on whom the IPCC has come to rely have refused to make public the evidence on which they have based their findings. To withhold or destroy evidence is a complete abrogation of the scientific method.
Those who read Climate Change: The Facts will quickly see that there is no such thing as a single or unified ‘sceptical’ position on climate change. Each contributor has a different perspective. From time to time the ‘sceptics’ disagree among themselves. And that is as it should be. The science of climate is complicated and uncertain and there are still many things we don’t know.
Only politicians are arrogant enough to believe they have all the answers.
Melbourne, February 2010
CLIMATEGATE
A failure of governance by
Sinclair Davidson
University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) web server and obtained several thousand documents and email files. These documents were subsequently republished on the
There is more to this story than the ‘ho hum, nothing to see here’ attitude being displayed by those who believe in global warming.
THE EMAIL CONTROVERSY
Early Climategate discussion centred on the contents of the emails. The authors of the emails have confirmed the emails are authentic and have attempted to explain what the emails ‘really’ meant. Some have argued that the emails are being taken out of context, and that the scientific jargon employed in the emails is different to the plain language meaning that laypersons might otherwise attribute to them. Yet it is difficult to explain away all the information that is contained in the emails by employing these arguments.
At face value, the emails suggest a sustained pattern of very poor behaviour; this includes attempts to subvert the peer-review process, refusal to make data available to journals, attempts to manipulate the editorial stance of journals, attempts to avoid releasing data following Freedom of Information requests, tax evasion, rejoicing at the deaths of opponents, manipulation of results, apparent misappropriation of grant money, and threats to physically assault rivals. Some of this behaviour may be illegal. To be sure, this behaviour does not automatically mean that the results of some of the authors’ scientific work itself are wrong or have been fabricated. Nonetheless, it does suggest that greater caution needs to be applied when translating the ‘scientific consensus’ to public policy.
Table 1.1: Selected quotes from Climategate emails
Quote
Author
Date
‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’
Phil Jones
November 16, 1999
‘I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’
Phil Jones
July 8, 2004
‘If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.’
Phil Jones
February 2, 2005
‘The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant … As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.’
Phil Jones
July 5, 2005
‘I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.’
Mike Kelly
October 26, 2008
‘Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.’
Ben Santer
October 9, 2009
‘When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests … Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school—the head of school and a few others) became very supportive.
Phil Jones
December 3, 2008
Source: All Climategate emails are available at http://www.eastangliaemails.com/
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND PEER REVIEW
In a society characterised by the division of labour and specialisation, mechanisms must be developed or evolved that facilitate trade. This is the classic ‘lemons problem’ in economics; how does anyone know that the person they are trading with is any good? The same problem applies to academic research; how can anyone know that any piece of work is competent and high-quality research? The mechanism that has evolved in academic circles is the peer-review process. Academic freedom, combined with the peer-review process, is an evolved mechanism that ensures that research produces, over time, scientific results that are more likely to have eliminated error and falsehood.
George Stigler has described academic freedom as being the trivially true, then having that argument challenged causes no harm.
Of course, the difficulty is that many arguments (and perhaps facts) are often uncertain. Stigler tells us that having the argument challenged helps to remove error, or helps to improve understanding of the initial argument. This is the common understanding of academic freedom and the peer-review process.
It is apparent, however, that the scientists involved in the Climategate scandal had a very different understanding of academic freedom and peer-review. When they did not agree with a particular author or work they would describe it as being ‘crap science’. An email between Tom Wigley and Timothy Carter (copied to Phil Jones and Mike Hulme) contained this extraordinary comment:
Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work … Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people
But these are serious scientists. David Legates is an Associate Professor in climatology at the University of Delaware. Robert C. Balling is a Professor at Arizona State University. Richard Lindzen is a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Patrick J.
Michaels is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at George Mason University and a past president of the American American Association of State Climatologists. Fred Singer is a Professor Emeritus of environment science at the University of Virginia.
Furthermore, stimulating debate is precisely what academic journals are meant to do. It is simply astonishing that a scientist could imagine that he was publishing the last word in any topic and that any disagreements were ‘crap science’ and that the editor needed to be removed and the editorial board be stacked with sympathetic voices—as opposed to unsympathetic voices. We see this in an email from Phil Jones:
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by
Phil Jones is the head of the CRU; in other words he wants to have his own work and that of his colleagues refereed by one of his own subordinates.
It is a comment in an email between Phil Jones and Michael Mann that has generated much media coverage: ‘Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer- IPCC process. Those same academics who are attempting to undermine the position of journal editors and editorial boards are in turn involved in establishing what the peer-reviewed literature is for external consumption and they arbitrarily exclude some or other papers of which they do not approve.
THE FALLOUT
In the first instance the integrity of the peer-review process has been challenged. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt asked ‘Is that the truth, or were you peer-reviewed?’ after yet another study Steyn had an entire column in the Washington Times on peer-review. It is worth quoting at length.
The more frantically they talked up ‘peer review’ as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: ‘How To Forge A Consensus.’ Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s ‘peer review,’ climate-style.
The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mr. Mann and Mr. Jones insisted they and only they represent the ‘peer-reviewed’ ‘consensus’ … ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask ‘Who peer reviews the peer reviewers?’ Mr. Mann peer reviewed Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones peer reviewed Mr. Mann, and anyone who questioned their James Delingpole, writing in the Telegraph, is far more expansive: It’s perhaps the single most important fact to emerge from the
Climategate scandal. Peer-review is dead. Meaningless. Utterly void of credibility. More irredeemably defunct than a Norwegian Blue…
What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions—capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say)—and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically
Both Delingpole and Steyn suggest there are fundamental problems with climate science and the peer-review process. Both of these individuals, however, are well-known to be climate change sceptics. George Monbiot, however, is decidedly not a climate change sceptic. Rather he is an global warming activist and columnist for The Guardian. In a column on 23 November 2009 he wrote,
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted
by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that
they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them…
I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Monbiot does not believe that the emails undermine the totality of evidence in support of the global warming hypothesis, but does believe that the emails are evidence of inappropriate behaviour. Indeed, he went on to apologise to his readers.
I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I
Writing in his The Guardian blog on 25 November, Monbiot again calls for the resignation of Phil Jones and expands on his earlier argument.
Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure This is, of course, the core problem identified by the Climategate leaks. The global warming lobby research is tainted by allegations that it is unscientific. This is precisely the charge the global waming lobby has been making for years against its own opponents.
The University of East Anglia, host of the Climatic Research Unit, has announced an inquiry into the whole affair. Similarly, Penn State University has announced an investigation into Professor Michael Mann—an employee who features very prominently in the praising his work on the now notorious hockey stick. Quite possibly this will not be a serious investigation.) Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the US Senate Committee on Environment and this is an American body, it will still have some jurisdiction in the matter—the CRU has accepted substantial funding from American government agencies. Senator Inhofe has written to the American academics and American government agencies that have been named in the emails and advised them that he will be conducting an investigation into the affair and that they will need to retain all records. This inquiry is likely to have greater impact than will the internal university investigations.
Donald Kennedy, emeritus president of Stanford University, has written a book entitled Academic Duty; one such duty he identifies is ‘to tell the truth’. He writes:
… the most interesting fact about research misconduct is that it tends to occur in places where the pace of activity, the size of the group, and the scope of work make personal accountability difficult. A terse but perhaps not terribly useful conclusion would be that fraud occurs when the right people aren’t paying enough In his 1966 classic, The Organization of Inquiry, Gordon Tullock made much the same point: ‘It is not that scientists are more honest clear that there is a governance failure at the heart of Climategate.
In the first instance, the publishers of the academic journals should have asked harder questions. Is it appropriate that individual academics can blackmail academic publishers into sacking editors and editorial boards? The publishers should have made a full and frank disclosure at the time these events occurred. We know that the CRU was able to avoid, delay or obfuscate on Freedom of Information requests with the full cooperation of those individuals at the University of East Anglia whose jobs it was to ensure compliance. Furthermore, we know that journalists did not investigate global warming claims as carefully as they should have.
CONCLUSION
Irrespective of whether Climategate develops into an even greater scandal than it already is, we know that the mechanisms to ensure that research results are more likely to be accurate and correct have been tainted.
But we can have no confidence in the observations that temperature has increased due to human activity because the mechanisms of science have been subverted. This is not rare in academia. As George Stigler has noted, in a different context:
It has gradually become evident that this community imposes sharp limits on the range of respectable opinion within its ranks.
None of this would matter much, but for the politicisation of climate science. Poor scientific behaviour has become the basis of economic policy making that is likely to have very large repercussions on the world economy and the Australian economy in particular. It is important that economic policy is formulated on a sound empirical basis. Climategate has damaged and perhaps undermined the claims of the global warming lobby.
The great economics writer, Adam Smith, believed that cartels and conspiracies against the public were unstable and would ultimately fall apart. Without the actions of an anonymous hacker (perhaps an internal whistleblower) we might never have discovered the full extent of the machinations of the scientists involved in Climategate.
Doomed Planet
Richard S. Lindzen
to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in a global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.
Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after twenty years of media drum-beating, many others as well.
Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been being lower than they are now.
More recently, we have had the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we do not fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The Earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the nineteenth Supporting the notion that man has not been the cause of this unexceptional change in temperature is the fact that there is a distinct signature to greenhouse warming: surface warming should be accompanied by warming in the tropics around an altitude of about nine kilometres that is about 2.5 times greater than at the surface. Measurements show that warming at these levels is only about three- quarters of what is seen at the surface, implying that only about a third of the surface warming is associated with the greenhouse effect, and, quite possibly, not all of even this really small implies that all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising, though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus stretching uncertainties in observations and models
That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.
It turns out that there is a much more fundamental and unambiguous check of the role of feedbacks in enhancing greenhouse warming that also shows that all models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity. Here, it must be noted that the greenhouse effect operates by inhibiting the cooling of the climate by reducing net outgoing radiation.
However, the in fact, lead to much warming (approximately 1°C for a climate models are due to the fact that, within these models, the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds, act to amplify is referred to as a positive feedback. It means that increases in surface temperature are accompanied by reductions in the net outgoing radiation—thus enhancing the greenhouse warming.
All climate models show such changes when forced by observed surface temperatures. Satellite observations of the Earth’s radiation budget allow us to determine whether such a reduction does, in fact, accompany increases in surface temperature in nature. As it turns out, the satellite data show that the feedback in nature is clear that even when all models agree, they can all be wrong, and that this is the situation for the all-important question of climate sensitivity.
According to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the greenhouse forcing from man-made greenhouse gases is already about 86 per cent of what one expects from a from methane, nitrous oxide, freons, and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far, even if all the warming we have seen so far were due to man.
This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modellers defend this situation by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming, and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the
Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the Hadley Centre research paper did not stress this. Rather, its authors speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. The fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modellers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ to Climate alarmists respond that some of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past decade. As we are in a relatively warm period, this is not surprising, but it says nothing about trends.
Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic global warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial.
Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal. Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980s, global cooling in the 1970s, Y2K and other panics.
Regionally, year-to-year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more.
This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.
In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past four years.
When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the true.. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the Earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages.
The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organisations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.
And finally, there are the numerous well-meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic global warming, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, their psychological welfare is at stake.
With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be
a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to humans, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed.
However, for more serious leaders, the need to resist hysteria courageously is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the Earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.
SOURCE: Climate Change: the facts Edited by ALAN MORAN Introduction BY John Roskam
http://**https://ipa.org.au/library/publication/1321487125_document_moran_climatechange-thefacts.pdf** (https://ipa.org.au/library/publication/1321487125_document_moran_climatechange-thefacts.pdf)
THE HOCKEY STIKE FUDGE
Climate scientists FUDGING data to support their warming hypothesis started at the beginning with the infamous Michael Mann hockey stick fraud. The misleading data has always been in one direction to overcome the reality of a naturally colder climate. The most infamous and effective deception was the hockey stick graph of Michael Mann showing a dramatic spike in global warming recently. Without the misleading hockey stick graph the Al Gore campaign of fear would not have happened.
”To understand the manipulation see the same time scale with the proper history represented also by the same IPCC below. In its 1990 report, the IPCC showed the following graph of global temperatures over the last thousand years.•

This was unexceptional. It showed the established science of the time. It was backed up by a huge amount of data and historical record. It showed the Mediaeval Warm Period, warmer than now, and the Little Ice Age, colder than now, and both entirely natural. But of course this did not suit the purposes of the climate alarm establishment. In its 2001 report, this new graph appeared.

The graph made an immediate sensation. It featured six times in the IPCC’s 2001 report. It was brandished around the world as proof positive of dangerous manmade global warming.
In Canada it was distributed to every school. It showed that the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age had not existed. It was exactly what every alarmist wanted to see. It was complete nonsense. It is called the “Hockey Stick” graph because the first flat part resembles the handle of an ice hockey stick, the sudden upturn the blade. The graph was based on two papers in Nature magazine (MBH98 and MBH99). It made the authors famous, especially the lead author, Michael Mann, and greatly advanced their careers in climate alarm. For a long time nobody questioned it or the data it was drawn from. Then a Canadian statistical expert, Steve McIntyre, asked to see the data. Eventually, reluctantly, it was ceded to him. He quickly showed that such data could not yield a Hockey Stick. The graph was pure quackery. The authors had used illegitimate statistical means, especially short-centring the data series for principal component analysis (a statistical method for identifying trends in a mass
This probably represents the worst corruption of science in the history of climate alarm.
Many scientists have been warning politicians for some time that the storm clouds are gathering, and that the IPCC saga is likely to be the biggest scandal in the history of science…
Worse, some scientists at the Climatic Research Unit appear to have been working in league with US scientists who compiled the climate data for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The latter data appear to contain numerous biases which inflate the supposed natural warming of the 20th century. (In fact satellite data shows there has been no global warming since the late 1970s and cooling since 2001, see graph.) In the USA the Competitive Enterprise Institute has now filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against the Goddard Institute over their 3-year refusal to provide documents requested under the US Freedom of Information Act.
Mathematician Christopher Monckton, former scientific advisor to Margaret Thatcher, describes those implicated by the leaked emails as a “Close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — and tampered with temperature data”. He adds “I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offences and, if thought fit, prosecute”.
Australia’s Professor Ian Plimer agrees with Monckton’s position, saying “Here we have the Australian government underpinning the biggest economic decision this country has ever made and it’s all based on fraud.” http://www.undeceivingourselves.org/I-ipcc.htm
It continues to this day. .
The most recent fudge happened last month. Here is the headline story –
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data
• The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
• It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
• America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
• The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
By David Rose for The Mail on Sunday
PUBLISHED: 22:57 GMT, 4 February 2017 |
“Dr John Bates’s disclosures about the manipulation of data behind the ‘Pausebuster’ paper is the biggest scientific scandal since ‘Climategate’ in 2009 when, as this paper reported, thousands of leaked emails revealed scientists were trying to block access to data, and using a ‘trick’ to conceal embarrassing flaws in their claims about global warming.
Both scandals suggest a lack of transparency and, according to Dr Bates, a failure to observe proper ethical standards.
Because of NOAA ’s failure to ‘archive’ data used in the paper, its results can never be verified.
Like Climategate, this scandal is likely to reverberate around the world, and reignite some of science’s most hotly contested debates.”
Once again natural climate variation shows a colder planet over the past decades which the alarmist scientists wanted to hide.


See this graph not publicized-
The reason? Because this is what it shows after 1961, a dramatic decline in global temperatures”
World leaders duped by manipulated global warming data
Without valid data the climate debate becomes impossible to assess. Some urge that based on climate history, reduced solar activity and recent colder winters globally with massive snowfall we are heading into the next ice age? Here is a recent book pitching that story.
The truth is the climate is chaotic and nonlinear and changes are measured in thousands of years not decades therefore we do not know. Uncertainty is the only certainty. In 1991 the Globe and Mail in Canada (our national newspaper) published my article urging caution because the science is not settled and any action is only a drop in the ocean. This opinion continues to be valid.
Coal is Essential for World Economic Growth and to Alleviate Energy Poverty
Dr. Roger H. Bezdek
Energy Economist and President of MISI
If you could pick just one thing to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy, business magnate and philanthropist Bill Gates has said. And few could find reason to disagree. I submit only coal can provide the large amount of affordable, reliable energy the world needs for economic growth to reduce energy poverty and to achieve the U.N. development goals. A recent report by the Australia Institute takes issue with this simple concept and that’s why the report is seriously flawed.
First, coal is vitally required to facilitate economic growth over the coming decades, especially in the developing nations. All major forecasts indicate that world energy consumption will increase significantly over the next three decades, that almost all of this increased energy will be required in the developing nations, that fossil fuels will continue to provide 80% of world energy, and that coal will continue to be the world’s most rapidly growing fuel.
As prominent energy analyst Vaclav Smil notes: “The most fundamental attribute of modern society is simply this: Ours is a high energy civilization based largely on combustion of fossil fuels.” In short, fossil fuels – especially coal – will continue to be the driving force behind economic growth for the foreseeable future. In fact, within five years coal will surpass oil as the world’s major energy source.
Second, coal is critically required to reduce energy poverty and to help achieve the U.N. development goals. Nearly 3.5 billion people globally lack sufficient energy for basic needs and 4 million die annually from the effects of indoor air pollution as a result of energy poverty. All forms of energy are needed to address this challenge – especially advanced coal.
A recent study by Robert Bryce emphasized coal’s role in alleviating energy poverty, concluding that, between 1990 and 2010, for every person who gained access to electricity from sources such as wind and solar, 13 gained access from coal.
Coal offers the unique attributes of large scale, low cost and lower emissions through advanced clean coal technology such as current supercritical plants. Affordable, reliable electricity is key to reducing energy poverty and to achieving the U.N. development goals, and within 25 years electricity use will double. Coal is currently world’s predominant fuel for electricity generation and will remain so.
Finally, coal power generation has been getting cleaner for decades and this improvement continues. For example, in the United States, since 1970 industry has invested over $100 billion in clean coal technologies, coal power generation has increased 170%, and the key emissions rate for SO2, NOx, and particulates has declined 90%.
This represents an incredible environmental success story according to any measure. Further, high-efficiency coal plant technologies are even cleaner: When equipped with advanced controls, these plants can have an emissions rate that is two-thirds lower than the existing fleet and a CO2 emissions rate that is up to 25% lower than the oldest plants, driving major environmental improvement. As the head of the International Energy Agency notes, “A single, large coal plant, if built with the best-available technology, can reduce emissions by the annual equivalent of taking a million cars off the road.”
In conclusion, and Dr. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, said “Energy use is essential for conquering poverty, and there is a need for increased power in poorer countries.” Only coal can provide the large amount of affordable, reliable energy the world needs for economic growth, to reduce energy poverty and to achieve the U.N. development goals.
Dr. Roger H. Bezdek
Dr. Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy economist and President of MISI, in Washington D.C. He has 30 years’ experience in research and management in the energy, utility, environmental, and regulatory areas, serving in private industry, academia, and the federal government. He has served as Senior Adviser in the U.S. Treasury Department, as U.S. energy delegate to the EU and NATO, and as a consultant to the White House, federal and state government agencies, and numerous corporations and research organizations. His most recent book is The Impending World Energy Mess.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimate that global energy consumption in 2014 was 13,699 Mtoe or 5.74 × 1020 joules. Mtoe stands for Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalent. The following pie charts, collated by IEA shows the estimated energy use around the globe between 1973 and 2014.

Comparison between 1973 and 2014 global energy consumption [Image Source: IEA]
Note with massive subsidies to wind and solar renewables over 30 years they have negligible increase in energy consumption from 0.1% to 1.4% while coal consumption moved from 24.5% to 28.6%. Natural gas shows the largest growth trend up 5%.
Power is essential for India’s long-term growth. But electricity is unlikely to flow fast enough

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Coal Trumps Solar in India
Activists hope for a renewable energy future but dirty coal remains cheapest
By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire | October 19, 2015
A failed solar experiment in the village of Dharnai has underscored the challenges of going solar in India.
Photo by Gayathri Vaidyanathan.
DHARNAI, India—One year ago, environmentalists hailed this tiny village as the future of clean energy in rural India. Today, it is powered by coal.
Dharnai, a community of about 3,200 people in eastern India’s Bihar state, had been without electricity for three decades. So when activists with Greenpeace set up a solar-powered microgrid in July of 2014, the excitement was palpable. But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately.
When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!”
By “real,” they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. By “fake,” they meant solar.
Analysts say the story of Dharnai illustrates how difficult it can be to provide reliable, high-quality electricity to the world’s poor without using the central grid.
Bringing coal-fired power to town
The microgrid operators scrambled to fix the mess. The village electrification committee decided to restrict electricity supply to five hours at nighttime. Greenpeace put up posters telling people not to use energy-hungry appliances such as rice cookers, electric water heaters, irons, space heaters and air coolers.
At present, solar power in Dharnai costs at least three times as much as grid power. It can support only expensive energy-efficient appliances, such as CFL bulbs. A CFL bulb in India costs 700 rupees ($10), while an incandescent bulb costs 10 rupees (15 cents).
Using the poor as a pro-coal argument
M.V. Ramana, a physicist at Princeton University who has studied energy access in India, questioned the ethics of foisting an expensive solution on the poor, who’ve historically contributed so little to global warming.
“I strongly encourage [microgrids] for urban, upper classes of people who can afford it,” he said. “But [I would] not do it on the backs of people who are poor and who can’t afford these experiments.”
Grid power, which in India’s case is mostly coal-based, generates enough electricity to power factories, agricultural processing, hospitals, schools and malls, all of which drive human development and create jobs, said Alex Trembath, a senior analyst at the California-based Breakthrough Institute.
Groups that claim that microgrids can fuel similar levels of development are “conducting clean energy and climate policy on the backs of the global poor,” he also argued.
Guay of the Packard Foundation strongly disagreed and said that even a single light bulb powered by a microgrid is valuable to someone without power. Decentralized grids are solutions of the future while the central grid is like “whale oil,” he said.
“It has everything to do with progress,” Guay said. “I don’t think you will see a single person say that the poor should continue to use whale oil in the 21st century and call that ethical and progressive.”
Only a small number of villages are too remote to be hooked to the central grid and would be good candidates for microgrid-only solutions, Ramana said. The government has identified 12,771 such villages. There are also thousands of hamlets where fewer than 100 families live that could benefit, other experts said.
A village’s gratitude for coal
As the sun set in Dharnai on a recent summer evening, Greenpeace’s solar-powered street lamps switched on and pooled white light along the thoroughfare. Villagers chatted on streets that would have once been pitch-dark. Life has improved after Greenpeace came, they said.
Not because the group brought solar. Rather, they said, they appreciate that the group brought the chief minister, who brought in the grid.
“Right now, if I were Prime Minister Modi, I’d be saying, ‘Gee, I can deliver coal-based electricity way cheaper than I can deliver renewables,” he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/
Solar, CCS, Nuclear, and Natural Gas Not Scaling Fast Enough
Coal will dominate China’s power landscape for decades to come and is increasing in Southeast Asia’s energy mix as well. The International Energy Agency reported that coal will replace natural gas as the dominant power-generating fuel in the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. At the same time, energy consumption in this region is expected to double in the next 20 years, and the Asian Development Bank estimates that coal will account for approximately 83 percent of electricity production in the Asia-Pacific by 2035. Armond Cohen, Cofounder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, discusses the implications of coal’s growing role in the fuel mix of China and ASEAN countries—as well as India—and assesses the tools and policy options available to reduce the environmental impacts.
April 30, 2014 | Jacqueline Koch
This April, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Slade Gorton International Policy Center, in collaboration with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, will co-host the 2014 Pacific Energy Forum, focusing on “New Frontiers in Trans-Pacific Energy Trade,” in Seattle, Washington. The forum gathers high-level policy makers, industry leaders, and government representatives from across the Asia-Pacific region to explore shifting dynamics in the trans-Pacific energy trade and the challenge to help Asia meet its energy demand while safeguarding the environment.
Coal will dominate China’s power landscape for decades to come and is increasing in Southeast Asia’s energy mix as well. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has reported that coal will replace natural gas as the dominant power-generating fuel in the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). At the same time, energy consumption in this region is expected to double in the next 20 years, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimates that coal will account for approximately 83 percent of electricity production in the Asia-Pacific by 2035. In advance of the 2014 Pacific Energy Forum, NBR spoke with Armond Cohen, Cofounder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, to explore the implications of coal’s growing role in the fuel mix of China and ASEAN countries—as well as India—and assess the tools and policy options available to reduce the environmental impacts.
Why is coal growing rapidly in South and Southeast Asian countries?
First and foremost, coal consumption is accelerating because of sheer power demand growth, combined with coal’s rapid scalability. China offers a key example. It is already the world’s largest coal consumer and has a coal power fleet that is two and half times the size of the United States’ fleet. China also expects to move another 100 million people from the countryside to the city in the next 12 years and grow its middle class by 200 million by 2035. Given these projections, China estimates electric demand to roughly double by 2030. Let’s also consider India, a nation of 1.2 billion people—four times the US population—where the rapid growth of the middle class is also underway. It has only 211 gigawatts of installed electrical generating capacity, equivalent to approximately one-fifth of the capacity of the United States, and India is expected to triple its electric demand by 2030.
When power demand is growing that rapidly, you build what you can, and this very well may include taking all measures to improve efficiency, scale up renewable resources, and diversify the energy mix to include natural gas and nuclear. However, coal is readily available and transportable (no pipelines required), and coal plants can be built quickly—typically in 18 months. While figures have fallen from a much higher peak a few years ago, China still built approximately one large plant every week in 2013.
There is still considerable discussion about the wind, solar, and even nuclear boom in Asia (China is building 28 nuclear plants), yet these other power sources are slow to develop to scale, so coal is still the winner. This has played a big role in the projections for the coming years: 75 percent of the annual new generating capacity being added in Southeast Asia is expected to be coal-fired. It’s also important to remember that only about half of China’s coal is used for producing power, while slightly over 40 percent of its coal is used directly for industry—for example, cement and steel.
The second greatest contributor to the rapid rise in coal use is cost. Mining coal in China currently costs as little as $2–$4 per million British thermal units (mmbtu). Imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) costs $15–$20 per mmbtu in Asia, and limited domestic gas production—while in the $10 or more per mmbtu range—is husbanded for industry, not electricity. Ironically, global coal prices have dropped somewhat in recent years due to decreased electric demand from member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This trend has been bolstered by the shale gas revolution in the United States, which has freed up U.S. coal for export, helping further depress global coal prices. Even nuclear plants in China are two to three times more expensive to build than coal plants. Coal plants are cheap in China not only because of lower labor costs, but due to lower intellectual property and licensing costs as well as the high level of China’s construction management capability. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), despite recent price drops, wind and solar power in Asia remains three to five times more expensive per kilowatt hour to develop than new coal power plants, ignoring the costs of the generating capacity needed to back up these renewable resources when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow.
The third factor pushing greater coal use in Asia is availability. China has the world’s third largest coal reserves, after the United States and Russia. Australia and India are fourth and fifth. Globally, world proven reserves of coal are sufficient for over 100 years of consumption at current rates. True, India and China have substantial natural gas reserves as well, including shale gas, but they have been slow to scale up conventional production infrastructure, and lifting costs for gas are still much higher than for coal.
As reported by the IEA, coal will replace natural gas as the dominant power-generating fuel in the ten member states of ASEAN. What does this transition represent in terms of the use of cleaner and more efficient coal-burning technology? What are obstacles to more widespread use of this technology, and how could they be overcome?
To date, China’s primary strategy has been to introduce more efficient power plants such as supercritical (high temperature), ultra-supercritical, and circulating fluidized bed plants, all of which have higher efficiency factors than the sub-critical plants dominant in OECD countries. Indeed, because of the relative youth of China’s coal plants (most have been built since 2000), these plants operate at higher average efficiency than those in the United States! Needless to say, they will not be scrapped any time soon. China is the world’s largest market for scrubbers—pollution control devices—and most new plants are equipped with them, although how often and how well they operate is a matter of dispute.
A second trend is towards gasification and polygeneration—the production of electricity as well as gas, chemicals, and transportation fuels through coal gasification. While this method can provide more economic output per unit of coal, the resultant combustion of the synthetic liquid fuels and synthetic natural gas results in a net addition of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere compared with use of oil for transportation or the use of natural gas.
Ultimately, to reconcile China’s large and growing coal fleet with any reasonable climate goals will require the application of carbon capture and storage (CCS), paired with either gasification or post-combustion capture. In addition, CCS or conversion to natural gas will be required for non-process industrial coal use.
Where will the ASEAN countries be sourcing their coal? What are their options?
China, India, and Australia are the world’s first-, third-, and fourth-largest coal producers, respectively. China and India supply most of their own coal, but imports from Australia and Indonesia are growing as domestic demand outstrips current mining capabilities. Japan has dramatically increased its coal use and imports since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011—25 percent alone in the last year—with a resultant increase in CO2 emissions, and is diversifying its supply source away from Australia and toward the United States and Canada in order to increase its market leverage.
Over the long run, there are many options for coal sourcing to the region. Indonesia, Australia, Russia, and the United States are the largest exporters in the world, while China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Taiwan are the top five importers. Partly due to slack demand in the United States and Europe—as well as gas’s displacement of coal there—and excess capacity in Australia, world coal prices have been on a steady downward trend for several years. Anyone counting on “peak coal” to reduce Asian coal demand will be sorely disappointed in the coming decades.
What are the projected consequences of this surge of coal consumption? What are the other tools or policies available to mitigate it?
The chief consequences of the region’s coal surge are environmental and primarily related to climate. Relatively inexpensive scrubbing technologies can reduce emissions of particulates, smog precursors, emissions, and mercury to very low levels. Nevertheless, CO2 is much tougher to address. Due to their enormous coal dependence, China and India are the world’s first- and fourth-largest emitters of CO2, respectively, with Indonesia ranked fifteenth; Malaysia and Thailand are also in the top 30. By 2035, the IEA estimates that non-OECD Asia plus Japan will account for 56 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions.
In principle, there are only three ways to reduce CO2 from coal-based electricity production. First, you can replace coal use with other fuels or increased energy efficiency. Second, you can increase the efficiency of coal combustion itself. The third strategy is CCS. China and India are beginning to deploy the first two strategies, but not fast enough to change the story dramatically in the next few decades. Japan, as noted, with its nuclear plant closures, is going backwards on reducing CO2 emissions by deploying more coal and gas. That elevates the importance of CCS. And, as noted before, CCS is really the only strategy available for coal use for certain processes in heavy industry.
Energy efficiency is important—but, given the surge in first-time demand resulting from urbanization and increased wealth, improvements in efficiency are not expected to significantly dent absolute demand growth. Indeed, substantial efficiency improvements are already “baked in” to the high-growth scenarios for Asia; growth would be even higher if efficiency lagged. Improving the efficiency of coal plants is useful, but will only reduce CO2 emissions at the margin.
Then there are renewables. Each year brings news and discussions regarding the dramatic percent increase in additions of wind and solar power in China, but this is from a very small base. In 2011, China derived 78 percent of its power from coal, and less than 2 percent from wind and solar. In 2013, China added in excess of three times more new coal electricity in kilowatt hours (kWh) than wind and solar combined. While China is building 28 new nuclear plants and aims to have up to 150 on line within two decades, this would still only produce a fraction of the power produced from coal. A recent Bloomberg study predicted that China coal use might peak as percentage of total power supply in the coming decades, but until then (and even after, according to the U.S. Department of Energy) would continue to grow in absolute amounts and still provide well over half of China’s electricity in 2030, even in the best-case scenario. Moreover, this scenario will not be significantly affected by the recent coal plant construction ban in parts of coastal China; substantial development is proposed in the western and northern provinces. Due to the long life of coal plants—lasting 50 years or more—and given that China’s plants are mostly less than a decade old, the current and soon-to-be-built plants will continue to retard climate progress for another half-century if nothing is done to address their CO2 emissions.
However, there are potential game-changers. They include modular, less expensive nuclear plants that could step in to replace coal boilers on an economical retrofit basis, or the “reforming” of natural gas, which removes the carbon and produces hydrogen to make price-competitive carbon-free liquid fuels like ammonia. My organization is working hard with developers to commercialize this technology. But CCS on coal-fired power plants seems like the most likely and necessary option in the near term.
If CCS is a viable option, why has it not gained greater traction?
CCS is a real option for China coal plants both new and existing. But there are two primary barriers for deploying CCS in China, and for that matter, anywhere in the world. The first is the high cost of capturing and compressing the CO2 emitted by a coal plant. Current CCS technology in the United States and China adds roughly 50 percent to the cost of operating a new coal plant, and as much as 70 percent to the cost of operating an existing plant. The second barrier comes in the task of disposing of the CO2 once it has been captured. CO2 disposal requires a dedicated network of pipelines and underground storage sites that can inject it miles underground. With the exception of certain regions in North America, this disposal network does not yet exist.
These two problems—high capture cost and the lack of pipeline and storage site availability—are interconnected. With the right strategy, they can be solved in China and the rest of the world.
A strategic approach to establish widespread CCS in China begins with using recovered CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) on a transitional basis. In this process, carbon is injected into a new or depleted oil field, where its properties free up the oil that would otherwise not be extractable. The revenue from EOR can pay for the cost of injection, pipelines, and a substantial portion of the cost of capturing CO2. After the oil from the fields is extracted, the second step is to inject the captured CO2 for permanent storage in the field itself, or in saline aquifers underneath. Shenhua Coal is already undertaking the second step and is currently injecting 100,000 tons of CO2 per year underground on a pilot basis. Japan also is starting up a pilot project to inject carbon into the seabed floor. My organization is bringing U.S. expertise to China to accelerate EOR using CO2.
To build this pipeline and EOR network, China needs to start with cheaper sources of CO2 than what comes from coal-fired power plants. Approximately 7 percent of the industrial CO2 that is vented worldwide comes from high-purity sources such as ammonia and methanol production. This industrial subset is economical for EOR without the need for subsidies. Conservative estimates show that more than 130 million tons of CO2 are vented from these sources each year in China alone. In Shaanxi Province, just nine methanol and ammonia plants together vent nearly 24 million tons of pure CO2.
Once this pipeline and storage site network is built with industrial sources, it will be cheaper and easier to add CCS to China’s vast coal power plant fleet. That’s because the network can act as a nucleus or hub for capture-cost innovation. This is another area where my organization is pairing companies in China and the United States to work together to develop and demonstrate novel CCS technologies that are more efficient and lower-cost. For example, China’s largest power producer, Huaneng, has partnered with U.S. technology start-up Powerspan to develop a lower-cost amine-capture system. With China’s manufacturing costs advantages, these partnerships have the potential to drive CCS deployment far faster than a “West only” approach.
A key point to keep in mind is that innovation isn’t limited to the back end of capture. In India and China, the use of underground coal gasification—where coal is gasified in the coal seam itself—could reduce CCS costs substantially; this process is being demonstrated at commercial scale and is highly suitable for China and India’s coal supply. Chinese universities and industries have substantial scientific and engineering innovation capacity, and we need to increase and pick up the pace of collaboration between East and West to accelerate our CCS options.
You have suggested that we look beyond China when evaluating the implications of increased regional coal consumption. Are there lessons China has to offer in the effort to address the environmental impacts for ASEAN countries or India? What would you highlight as the most promising examples of China’s efforts?
The principal lesson from China is that there are no easy or quick answers to the problem of rapidly accelerating energy consumption and the need to curb CO2. To tame this massive problem, we will need an unprecedented technological push on multiple fronts. Here, China has pointed the way and offers both lessons and concrete value.
China has shown the unprecedented ability to manage down the costs of all forms of energy, including clean energy. China builds highly efficient coal plants at roughly half the cost of those in the United States and Europe, and has also driven down the price of wind and solar installations to below OECD levels. This is not solely due to labor cost differences; it also has to do with technical innovation and proficiency in the management of large engineering projects. If this capability can be harnessed to CCS and nuclear power, the world will benefit.
On the nuclear front, we are seeing the beginnings of this innovation path. China has begun a substantial nuclear-power development program, with 28 power plants under construction, and is building reactors at much lower costs than in the West, in part due to using several standard designs and typically building several units at each nuclear site. China is constructing advanced Western reactor designs—such as the Westinghouse AP1000 (four units) and Areva EPR (one unit)—and doing so at approximately half the cost of current Western projects building these reactors. China’s AP1000 partnership with Westinghouse provides for China’s evolution of this technology and associated IP ownership—which has led to design of the larger CAP1400—the first unit of which recently began construction. In addition, China is ahead of the United States and Europe in developing and demonstrating a new generation of reactors that are potentially safer, lower-cost, and, in some cases, produce less high-level nuclear waste, including those using high-temperature gas coolant technology, as well as molten salt reactors that could use thorium (or uranium) fuel. India also has undertaken a thorium demonstration program—primarily focused on using thorium to fuel conventional light-water reactors. Combined with a strengthening of nuclear safety governance and practices through China-Western cooperation, nuclear could be a competitive and highly scalable replacement for new coal plant construction in Asia by 2025 and beyond.
China and India also offer the potential to scale up CCS rapidly, utilizing EOR as a near-term accelerant, and thereby drive costs down through learning. China and India also may have the ability to innovate new CCS technologies with their growing scientific and engineering innovation capabilities. Similar innovations could occur to decarbonize the region’s substantial natural gas reserves. For example, natural gas can be processed—sequestering carbon—to produce hydrogen that combines with nitrogen to create ammonia liquid fuel. Produced this way, ammonia is a “zero-carbon” fuel that can be burned in a power plant or car or truck engine. Another way to create zero-carbon ammonia is to use carbon-free electricity (such as nuclear power or renewables) to split water to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to produce liquid ammonia.
The ultimate hope that China, and perhaps all of Asia, offers to solve the global warming and energy problem is this: energy innovation historically tends to occur more rapidly where there is economic growth and the underlying need for more power. Asia’s energy demand will grow rapidly in the coming decades, generating the markets in which experimentation can take place. By contrast, shrinking OECD energy markets are largely saturated with existing supply, so producing clean energy involves the costly replacement of functioning equipment. The incremental cost of building something that is new and clean is generally lower than the total cost of replacing something old and dirty. If Asian nations put their strategic minds to finding solutions and collaborate with global companies and nations, the steep Asia energy growth curve could move from being a major global warming liability into a powerful asset.
Jacqueline Koch is the Pacific Energy Forum Communications Advisor. This interview first appeared on the National Bureau of Asian Research website, and is reprinted with permission.
James Grant Matkin · NO. Renewables are not even in the running. Pretending solar and wind as intermittent sources will fill the gap is a fairytale. Fossil fuels provide 86% of world energy resources and at best this will only fall to 80% by 2035. Coal has the lion’s share of fossil fuel energy and will triple over the next two decades largely from India and China expansions. Notwithstanding President Obama’s political push against coal and for a green technology revolution, “we remain deeply entrenched in a world dominated by fossil fuels, with the only true revolution now underway involving the shift from one class of such fuels to another.” Michael T. Klare – Salon. America’s green energy future is a pipe dream. Coal is at the top of the heap because it is cheap and plentiful where it is most needed at developing nations for economic growth and to alleviate energy poverty. “If you could pick one thing to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy, business magnage and philanthropist Bill Gates has said.” Economic research shows only coal can provide the large amount of affordable, reliable energy the world needs. As the article explains – “When power demand is growing that rapidly, you build what you can, and this very well may include taking all measures to improve efficiency, scale up renewable resources, and diversify the energy mix to include natural gas and nuclear. However, coal is readily available and transportable (no pipelines required), and coal plants can be built quickly—typically in 18 months. While figures have fallen from a much higher peak a few years ago, China still built approximately one large plant every week in 2013.” Power demand is growing rapidly in China and India the most populated developing countries in the world. Cost is the imperative for energy and there “really is no free energy lunch.” Evolutionary renewable technology may make a contribution to energy supply, but overall it will not make a difference. The coal hard truth is China’s new coal investment is 6 times higher than wind and 27 times higher than solar in 2013. India will be even more than China by 2030. http://thebreakthrough.org/…/energy…/the-coal-hard-truth. Fortunately climate alarmists have much exaggerated the impact of increased C02. Global tempertures are not increasing as predicted, glaciers are not melting that much and some are expanding as are the Pacific Islands. Over the last 100 years oceans only rose 5″ and polar bears are thriving. The only imperative is to be sensible and not weaken the economy for an unproved theory.
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/can-any-tech-stop-asias-coal-future
Dr. Richard C Willson Astrophysics Expert
Re: “…climate alarmists have much exaggerated the impact of CO2.”
The CO2 anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) hypothesis has proved to be false. The predictions of the global circulation models on which CAGW is based have failed to match observational data both during the ‘Industrial Era’ and previous history. The thrust of recent research has demonstrated that climate changes continually and is determined by natural forces that humans have no significant control over.
The CAGW hoax to curtail use of fossil fuels is perpetuated by (1) some cynical scientists that want to protect their CAGW careers and government grants; (2) cynical crony capitalists that make money related to carbon cap and trade fees, government subsidies or the related service industries; (3) Hyper-environmental activists who want to make feel-good gestures at public expense; (4) and political ideologues that want to redistribute wealth or impose population limits.
Alternative renewable technologies will not be commercially viable in the foreseeable future. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind supply only 3 % of our energy use and that only works when the sun shines and the wind blows. Significant expansion of renewables will require massive investments in research and infrastructure, potentially distorting other more important social and economic priorities.
Bottom line: Anti-fossil fuel policies based on CAGW are fools errands. There is no reason to sabotage world economies by failing to use fossil fuels, the most cost-effective form of energy, to the maximum extent possible.SUMMARY SESSION ACADEMIA
I submit research shows the green polemic is not grounded in reality. The world must depend on the lowest-cost energy at the end of the day. Market forces and investment will follow the economics. Coal power trumps alternatives because it is plentiful, cheaper and is the legacy fuel worldwide. Despite climate alarmists and environmental issues new coal plants will double or triple in the decades following (China opens a new coal plant every week). For the 3.5 billion people living in desperate poverty and in the dark today cheap electricity is a matter of social justice and must override the false hope of a carbon free economy, especially when the science behind the theory of global warming is very much disputed.
What’s Driving India’s Coal Demand Growth
1st Jun 2016
First published in Cornerstone, Volume 4, Issue 1
World Bank suggests India’s GDP will grow by 7.9% in 2016, more than twice the global average.2 Economic growth and modernization will in turn drive energy demand, especially for coal.
Moreover, Indian appetite for coal will rise as the government enacts policies to assist those affected by energy poverty. The IEA has estimated that around 240 million people, or 20% of the population, remain without access to electricity.1 Of equal concern, the agency estimates that 840 million people—more than the populations of the U.S. and the European Union combined—use traditional biomass for cooking
Like China before it, India’s economic growth will be fueled by coal. Thus, in 2012, 45% of total primary energy demand and 72% of generated electricity demand was met by coal. India currently has approximately 205 GW of coal-fired electricity generation capacity, which will soon be augmented by 113 GW of new coal-fired capacity currently under construction.4
GOVERNMENT POLICIES TO MEET GROWING ENERGY NEEDS
The Indian government’s policies to meet the growing need for electricity are focused, principally, on developing large-scale coal-fired power plants. Indeed, in March 2015, Arunabha Ghosh, head of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water think tank in New Delhi, told the UK’s Financial Times that “whichever way you cut it, coal is going to be front and centre of India’s future energy mix…”.6
Over the next 25 years, electricity demand in India is forecast to grow at over 4% per annum. Under its New Policies Scenario, which modeled energy demand and supplies if all new and proposed policies were fully enacted, the IEA estimates that installed coal capacity will reach almost 500 GW by 2040 (more than three times the 2012 installed capacity) (see Figure 1).
The dominance of coal in India’s energy mix can be attributed to two key factors: affordability and access. Although the competitiveness of renewables and gas-fired technology is likely to improve over time, coal is expected to remain the most affordable option through to 2035, driven by low domestic coal prices and limited gas availability.
What’s Driving India’s Coal Demand Growth
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Obama’s Climate Policy Is a Hot Mess
The president hails the Paris Agreement again—even though it will solve nothing and cost trillions.
By BJORN LOMBORG
June 30, 2016 7:06 p.m. ET
Obama’s Climate Policy Is a Hot Mess
When President Obama flew to Ottawa, Canada, on Wednesday to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, promoting their climate-change policies was near the top of the agenda. “The Paris Agreement was a turning point for our planet,” the leaders’ joint statement said, referring to the climate pact signed with fanfare in April by nearly 200 nations. “North America has the capacity, resources and the moral imperative to show strong leadership building on the Paris Agreement and promoting its early entry into force.”
Attracting rather less attention than the Ottawa meeting was a June 22 hearing on Capitol Hill. Testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy extolled the Paris Agreement as an “incredible achievement.” But when repeatedly asked, she wouldn’t explain exactly how much this treaty would actually cut global temperatures.
The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune but do little to reduce global warming. In a peer-reviewed article published in Global Policy this year, I looked at the widely hailed major policies that Paris Agreement signatories pledged to undertake and found that they will have a negligible temperature impact. I used the same climate-prediction model that the United Nations uses.
First, consider the Obama administration’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan. The U.N.’s model shows that it will accomplish almost nothing. Even if the policy withstands current legal challenges and its cuts are totally implemented—not for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century—the Clean Power Plan would reduce temperatures by 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
President Obama has made grander promises of future carbon cuts, beyond the plan’s sweeping restrictions on the power industry, but these are only vaguely outlined now. In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. In other words, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the very ambitious Obama rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.
Or consider the Paris Agreement promises from the entire world using the reduction estimate from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization responsible for the Paris summit. The U.N.’s model reveals a temperature reduction by the end of the century of only 0.08 degrees Fahrenheit. If we generously assume that the promised cuts for 2030 are not only met (which itself would be a U.N. first), but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop by 0.3 degrees—the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years at the end of the century. A cut of 0.3 degrees matches the finding of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the Paris Agreement last year.
The costs of the Paris climate pact are likely to run to $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually throughout the rest of the century, using the best estimates from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and the Asia Modeling Exercise. Spending more than $100 trillion for such a feeble temperature reduction by the end of the century does not make sense.
Some Paris Agreement supporters defend it by claiming that its real impact on temperatures will be much more significant than the U.N. model predicts. This requires some mental gymnastics and heroic assumptions. The group doing climate modeling for the U.S. State Department assumes that without the Paris Agreement emissions would be much higher than under any realistic scenario. With such an unrealistically pessimistic baseline, they can then magically show that the agreement will cut temperatures by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit—with about 1.5 degrees of the drop coming from a reduction of these fantasy carbon emissions.
The Climate Action Tracker, widely cited by Paris Agreement fans, predicts a temperature reduction of 1.6 degrees by the end of the century. But that model is based heavily on the assumption that even stronger climate policies will be adopted in the future—98% of the assumed reductions come after the current Paris Agreement promises to expire in 2030.
Even this wishful thinking won’t achieve anything close to the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) reduction that has become the arbitrary but widely adopted benchmark for what will be essential to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The Paris Agreement is the wrong solution to a real problem. We should focus more on green-energy research and development, like that promoted by Bill Gates and the Breakthrough Coalition. Mr. Gates has announced that private investors are committing $7 billion for clean energy R&D, while the White House will double its annual $5 billion green innovation fund. Sadly, this sorely needed investment is a fraction of the cost of the same administration’s misguided carbon-cut policies.
Instead of rhetoric and ever-larger subsidies of today’s inefficient green technologies, those who want to combat climate change should focus on dramatically boosting innovation to drive down the cost of future green energy.
The U.S. has already shown the way. With its relentless pursuit of fracking driving down the cost of natural gas, America has made a momentous switch from coal to gas that has done more to drive down carbon-dioxide emissions than any recent climate policy. Turns out that those who gathered in Paris, France, could learn a little from Paris, Texas.
Mr. Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007) and “Smartest Targets for the World” (Copenhagen Consensus, 2015).

Yes, a cost-benefit analysis highlights the climate alarmists debacle. This is important to head off government mania for new carbon taxes. Australians killed their carbon tax after seeing the gross waste of resources with no impact on the environment. The tax harms export industries subject to world pricing. The tax does not prevent “carbon leakage” when “emissions simply rise overseas” beyond the control of Australia.http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IER_AustraliaCarbonTaxStudy.pdf
Further, the whole mission of reducing C02 to save the planet is foolish. Dr. Patrick Moore explains – “CO2 is a pollutant only to politicians and bureaucrats…. By itself, it is incapable of warming the climate by more than a fraction of a degree. CO2 is an essential gas, without which there would be no life on earth. CO2 is plant food.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-biuanF5eY
Richard C Willson is a leading climate scientist and he sums up the weak science of CAGW and urges full use of fossil fuels in response to my posting on Academia.

Member, International Advisory Committee for Absolute Radiomtery (1988 – present) Member of NASA validation review panel for the EOS/SORCE experiments (2000). Presenter to the NOAA Panel on Strategies for Climate (Nov., 2000.) NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1981) Ph.D. Atmospheric Physics, University of California at Los Angeles (1975)
“The CO2 anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) hypothesis has not withstood the test of time. CAGW is based on predictions of the flawed, 1980’s vintage global circulation models that have failed to match observational data both since and prior to their fabrication. Climate changes continually and is determined by natural forces that humans have no significant control over.
Increased plant growth in CO2 enhanced environments is a demonstrated fact. Since CO2 is not a significant GHG for climate there is no reason not to use it.
Instead of wasting resources on crony capitalist and environmental extremist ‘green’ energy projects we should use fossil fuels, the most cost-effective form of energy, to the maximum extent possible. Using the CO2 byproduct in an intelligent way will be a contribution to taking the most intelligent possible path into the future.”
CONCLUSION
There is increased low probability of the earth becoming too hot from fossil fuels carbon dioxide. Now with declining solar radiation in play the concern will shift to the potential of a too cold climate. Scientists are increasingly tuning out the claims that the Earth’s temperatures are predominantly shaped by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, or that future climate is destined to be alarmingly warm primarily due to the rise in trace atmospheric gases. Instead, solar scientists are continuing to advance our understanding of solar activity and its effect on the Earth system, and their results are progressively suggestive of robust correlations between solar variability and climate changes.
For example, in 2016 alone, there were at least 132 peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting a significant solar influence on climate. Among them there were 18 papers that directly connected centennial-scale periods of low solar activity (the Little Ice Age) with cooler climates, and periods of high solar activity (the Medieval Warm Period and the Modern Warm Period [20th Century]) with high solar activity levels. Another 10 papers warned of an impending solar minimum and concomitant cooling period in the coming decades.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307894966_The_Influence_of_Solar_System_Oscillation_on_the_Variability_of_the_Total_Solar_Irradiance”
And this trend of scientists linking climate changes to solar forcing mechanisms — and bypassing an anthropogenic explanation — continues to rage on in 2017.
This reality must cause pause to ignore the plight of the energy impoverished of more than 2 billion needing the cheapest source of power to advance. Denying fossil fuels to them is immoral.