...it's pretty clear that the climate sceptics need to be far more transparent about their funding and donors. If sceptical research is being funded by tobacco or oil or other corporations, or wealthy folks associated with them, in whose interest it is to poo-poo AGW, we need to know just the same as we need to know if pro-AGW research is being funded by self-interested wind and solar farm tycoons and whatnot.

The US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.

Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/image ... _money.pdf

The Chicago-based free market Heartland Institute has called in the FBI and threatened other legal action against a global warming proponent who has admitted stealing emails from the institute in a bid to embarrass and discredit the group’s questioning of climate change.

Heartland officials tell Washington Secrets that they have been in talks with the FBI over the case against prominent global warming proponent Peter Gleick, co-founder of the respected Pacific Institute. Heartland is getting ready to reveal their probe of the affair, which they hope the FBI will act on.

Gleick posed online as a board member of the libertarian group to pry embarrassing emails and internal funding reports which ended up online this month. He also is suspected of writing a sensationally mistake-filled “strategy memo” based on the emails and posted online. The Pacific Institute's board has expressed concern about the case.

Heartland is also seeking legal action, both criminal and civil. Still, they are stumped at why he tried espionage to attack Heartland when he had been invited to publicly challenge climate change doubters at an upcoming benefit dinner. He didn’t RSVP.

What would you say if a scientist from Heartland tried to illegally obtain documents from the Pacific Institute by means of espionage and theft? Would you hail him an heroic whistle-blower, or a common criminal?

Wind turbines bring in 'risk-free' millions for rich landowners

The boom in onshore wind power, likened to a "new industrial revolution", is being dominated by a small number of private landowners who will share around £1bn in rental fees over the next eight years.

Rental payments vary and are secret but, say property agents speaking in confidence to the Guardian, landowners can now expect £40,000 a year "risk-free" for each large turbine erected on their land. Those set to benefit include senior members of the royal family and the Forestry Commission in Wales and Scotland.

Analysis of onshore wind power investments suggests that the 13GW of energy anticipated by the government to be installed by 2020 will pay landowners upwards of £100m a year in total rents, on top of the EU farm subsidies they automatically receive for owning land.

According to property consultancy CKD Galbraith, rents in Scotland have doubled since 2002, and increased 15% last year. "Landlords of pioneering windfarm sites will soon be undertaking rent reviews and evidence suggests that landowners can expect significantly higher returns," said the paper.

Feelings are running high as remote areas such as the Cairngorms and west Wales are the subject of dozens of proposals. Plans for more than 600 of the largest turbines have been submitted or approved in the Scottish Highlands, including 11 for the wild Monadhliath mountains on the edge of the Cairngorms.

"Opposition is growing as the applications flood in. We cannot keep up with the proposals," said Kim Terry from the campaign group Communities Against Turbines Scotland. "I know of 60 groups fighting windfarms in Scotland alone. The tiny bit of money being offered to communities are nothing but bribes. The landowners or developers decide what the money is spent on. We gain nothing, but our properties are devalued and the land is devastated."

In England, the Duke of Gloucester, the Queen's cousin, is likely to be paid nearly £120,000 a year from four turbines on his Northamptonshire estate, and Sir Reginald Sheffield, the prime minister's father-in-law, could receive £250,000 a year for the seven turbines on his Lincolnshire land.

Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has plans for 13 turbines on his Althorp estate.

Shush! It's a big secret conspiracy!

Hilarious. Those very same ineffective, expensive, taxpayer-funded, completely useless 'renewables' being argued for by trendy middle-class greenies are being subverted to line the pockets of the rich, land-owning minority. You really couldn't make it up.

If the scientific evidence really pointed toward the anti-AGW case, you'd think that the deniers would be using that science to convince other scientists.

It's easier to muddy the waters and cause confusion.

Oh, come, come. This is piffling nonsense. One could just as validly make the claim that if the 'settled' science' was so unutterably foolproof how come even the IPCC's own reports never, ever couch any of their 'conclusions' in certainties? If you've ever read an IPCC Assessment Report you'll find it peppered throughout with a sliding scale of probabilities. Nothing - and yes, this is true - nothing is claimed as fact by the IPCC. This is why we can consider anthropogenic climate change as still nothing more than a fanciful theory, cooked up to serve a largely political agenda. A theory still, twenty five years later, looking for its proof.

Since when was science ever couched in certainties? All we have are best guesses and competing theories, because science isn't actually about certainties per sé; even scientific theories like Evolution and Gravity might one day be overturned.

Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, today said critics who argue that climate change is not the result of human actions are "profoundly irresponsible".

As negotiating teams from 192 countries gather in Copenhagen for the climate change summit, Miliband admitted there was "further to go" on persuading climate change sceptics here and abroad. But he defended Gordon Brown's criticism of them in the Guardian as "behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics" .

Miliband told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The overwhelming consensus of scientists across the world is that climate change is real and is man-made and is happening. The people who do somehow want to suggest that the science is in doubt are profoundly irresponsible."


A muppet, earlier today

In an article in today's Guardian, the prime minister [This was Gordon Brown, at the time] underlines the historic nature of the [Copenhagen 2009] summit, which has been described as the most important international gathering since the end of the second world war. "Sometimes history comes to turning points," he writes. "For all our sakes the turning point of 2009 must be real."

[It wasn't - it was, as predicted by sceptics everywhere, an abject failure in every possible respect. And I get accused of using hyperbole!]

Brown calls on the 100 world leaders expected in Copenhagen on the final day of the talks to move quickly to reinforce an anticipated political deal with a fully-fledged treaty, which would be made legally binding in international law within six months.

[Lol. So much for that, then. - I trust you'll all remember the famous 'five days to save the world!' quotes doing the rounds of hysterical BBC newsrooms at the time.]

Miliband said that the central objective of the [Copenhagen 2009] summit was to secure a political agreement to cap global emissions by 2020. "We are going for something very big. I don't think it is guaranteed that we will succeed, but we will do everything we can in the next two weeks not just to get a deal but to get a deal that is consistent with the science," he said.

[They failed. Utterly. And the fight goes on.]

Do you know how complex weather (and by extension climate) science is?

Did you know that if we placed sensors one foot appart spanning the entire globe, measuring every assett of 'weather' fluctuation (air pressure,humidity'etc) measured on a computer with unlimited processing power we still wouldn't be able to predict the weather 3/4 hours in the future 100% accurately.

There will never, ever be 100% proof.

1. Yes, I'm well aware how unreliable climate predictions can be - in fact, most of the long term, multi-decadal climate predictions, delivered in serious tones by scientists of the 'settled consensus' kind, has more in common with simple astrology and horoscopes than with any reliable branch of science. It's that simple. If current climate prediction struggles on an annual basis (and The Met Office know a thing or two about that) how are we to take even remotely seriously gloom and doom predictions of 'climate catastrophes' some 50 or 100 years hence? It's plainly ridiculous.

And if you subscribe to the 'precautionary principle' then wasting £billions of taxpayer money on pointless 'renewables' (unreliable, expensive) whilst wilfully ignoring genuine environmental concerns (over fishing, forestry, pollution, endangered species and habitats, etc) and abundant, cheap, secure fossil fuel reserves (shale gas and oil) must make perfect sense.

Sceptics don't agree.

Do you care to quantify these claims of "expensive and unreliable" renewables?

'Green' debacle: Tens of thousands of abandoned wind turbines now litter American landscape

(NaturalNews) Literal beacons of the "green" energy movement, giant wind turbines have been one of the renewable energy sources of choice for the US government, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing their construction and use across the country. But high maintenance costs, high rates of failure, and fluctuating weather conditions that affect energy production render wind turbines expensive and inefficient, which is why more than 14,000 of them have since been abandoned.

Before government subsidies for the giant metals were cut or eliminated in many areas, wind farms were an energy boom business. But in the post-tax subsidy era, the costs of maintaining and operating wind turbines far outweighs the minimal power they generate in many areas, which has left a patchwork of wind turbine graveyards in many of the most popular wind farming areas of the US.

"Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy's California 'big three' locations which include Altamont Pass, Tehachapin and San Gorgonio, considered among the world's best wind sites," writes Andrew Walden of the American Thinker. "In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills."

Walden speaks, of course, about the birds, bats, and other air creatures that routinely get tangled in and killed by wind turbine propellers. And as far as the "post-industrial junk" language, well, if it costs too much to run the machines in the first place, then it definitely costs too much to uproot and remove them post-construction.

This whole wind energy mess just further illustrates how the American people have been played by their elected officials who bought into the "global warming" hysteria that spawned the push for wind energy in the first place. And now that the renewable energy tax subsidies are gradually coming to an end in some places, the true financial and economic viability, or lack of wind energy, is on display for the world to see.

"It is all about the tax subsidies," writes Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail. "The blades churn until the money runs out. If an honest history is written about the turn of the 21st century, it will include a large, harsh chapter on how fears about global warming were overplayed for profit by corporations."

The Admissibility Of Climate Models As Evidence In A Court Of Law

There are 5 relevant standards in the Daubert test of admissibility, but which the judge does not necessarily have to follow rigorously:

1. Empirical testing: the theory or technique must be falsifiable, refutable, and testable.
2. Subjected to peer review and publication.
3. Known or potential error rate.
4. The existence and maintenance of standards and controls concerning its operation.
5. Degree to which the theory and technique is generally accepted by a relevant scientific community.

In my opinion, two of the standards above (#1 and #3) are not met by climate models. In standard #1, climate models are not testable in any rigorous sense in what they are being used for: prediction of future climate change. We will not know whether they are right or wrong until the future happens.

And even then, we can’t be sure that warming which ends up being observed in nature occurred for the same reason the models predicted it. Just because they create average weather that is somewhat realistic does not mean they can tell us how average weather might change in the future.

And, contrary to what you might have heard, there is no obvious “fingerprint” of human warming. Natural warming from a slight change in cloud cover would look the same.

Also, the oft-mentioned missing “hot spot” of warming in the upper troposphere would be the theoretically expected result of ANY warming; its presence (or absence) does not demonstrate causation as to the source of the warming.

After all, the twenty-something climate models are all over the map in their predictions, and if one or two happen to be correct, what about all the other climate models which are also based upon “physical principles”, but which were wrong in their predictions? At some point, we have to admit that given enough different model predictions, one or two models are bound to be close to correct just by chance.

Standard #3, which I also believe is not met, is related to standard #1 just discussed: the methodology should have a known error rate. In other words, how likely is a climate model to be correct based upon its success in previous predictions?

“Predictions” of the past (e.g. what happened in the 20th Century) don’t really count because those are more exercises in curve fitting than prediction. What if the modelers did not know what the 20th Century temperature variations looked like, and were asked to use models to “hindcast” what happened. Would they be able to? Not likely.

And since future warming (if it occurs) is a one-of-a-kind event, we won’t know for many years whether any of the climate models are correct even once, let alone for a statistical sample of independent predictions.

If the climate system is always changing anyway, as some of us believe, you have a 50% chance of being right in a prediction of a warming trend by just flipping a coin.

While some might also argue whether one or more of the other Daubert standards are not met, I thought I would address the two most obvious ones.

I yearn for the day when the “scientific consensus” defenders are cross-examined in court. No longer will they be allowed to get away with demanding they be believed just because they are experts. That kind of attitude does not get you very far in court.

Offshore wind turbines could power the entire planet, says study

NaturalNews) Offshore wind turbines could provide enough electricity for the entire world if connected into the right kind of grid, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Delaware and Stony Brook University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

A major drawback of wind power is that as weather patterns fluctuate, the amount of power generated also fluctuates -- making electricity unreliable. To test a way around this problem, researchers examined five years' worth of wind speed data from 11 different monitoring stations along the East Coast of the United States. They found that as expected, wind turbines placed at any of these monitoring stations would fluctuate in their power-generating capacity over time.

The researchers then modeled what would happen if all 11 turbines were connected to each other into one power grid.

"When we simulate a power line connecting them, called here the Atlantic Transmission Grid, the output from the entire set of generators rarely reaches either low or full power, and power changes slowly," the researchers wrote. "Notably, during the five-year study period, the amount of power shifted up and down but never stopped."

The researchers said that for wind power to meet more of civilization's energy needs, turbines need to be strategically sited taking regional weather patterns into account, so that one turbine will be in wind while another is experiencing a lull.

"A north-south transmission geometry fits nicely with the storm track that shifts northward or southward along the U.S. East Coast on a weekly or seasonal time scale," researcher Brian Colle said. "Because then at any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus power) somewhere along the coast."

The study confirms that making wind power into a major energy source would require the construction of a massive new energy infrastructure. Critics of wind and solar power have pointed out that because these power sources require such large-scale construction, their fossil fuel and other environmental footprint is much greater than is usually supposed.

The other source is a propaganda site so I won't make any comments on that.