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UK Met Office getting ready to eat crow

Just a wee while ago, the UK Met Office told the Copenhagen summit, in headlines repeated around the world, that 2010 was likely to be one of the warmest years ever, and that the Northern Hemisphere winter would be mild.

Then Al Gore came to Copenhagen, bringing with him the Gore effect, restoring the ice caps to warming globes outside the summit:

By morning, there was so much warming love being shared that the Copenhagen globes looked like this:

Well, the good news is that as President Obama took the Gore effect with him back to the US…

The weather has now turned so foul that forecasters are now predicting the heaviest snowfalls in the Northern Hemisphere in a quarter century.

So much for the Met Office "mild winter". What does it say for the accuracy of a warm 2010?

James Delingpole reckons the Met would have a hard time beating a forecast based on cock entrails:

With friends like that, is it any wonder that the Met Office gets it so wrong so very often? Its computer models, like those of the IPCC, are so thoroughly committed to the idea of Man-Made Global Warming that they continue to predict it regardless of all evidence to the contrary from real-world thermometers. If it weren't so depressing – the Met Office, after all, plays a key role in informing public policy and therefore, in how your money is to be wasted by the government of the day (be it run by Green Gordon or Green Dave the disaster will be just as great) – it would almost be funny.

In fact it is funny, as this glorious Independent article dug up by Richard North reminds us. It was written in March 2000 and has various "experts" explaining how very soon in Northern Europe, the sight of winter snow will almost be as unfamiliar as marauding packs of wolves.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"."Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

Professor Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, says that even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important.

"We don't really have wolves in Europe any more, but they are still an important part of our culture and everyone knows what they look like," he said.

David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually "feel" virtual cold.

Tourist town relocates temp station to get ‘higher readings’

What would the team at Marc Morano's Climate Depot or WattsUpWithThat make of this, we wonder? (Hat tip, reader Trevor Walsh)

It seems the old location at a small rural airstrip was measuring "too cold" so the temp station is now in a prime urban heat island:

New weather station tells Taupo's true temperature

MEDIA RELEASE

23 December 2009

A new weather station on the Gascoigne Reserve is now able to tell the rest of New Zealand how hot (or not) it really is in Taupo.

The new weather station is the result of concerns raised by local residents to Taupo District Council about inaccurate temperatures and wind readings for Taupo on national news stations.

Not unlike most towns in New Zealand, the old weather station is situated at the Taupo Airport and tells a much bleaker story.  "It is very much out in the open there, so the wind factor can make up to two degrees difference in temperature," says Infrastructure Services Group Manager Ted Anderson. 

"People often felt it was not a true reflection of what it was like in town on any given day, so we decided it would be worth creating a better positioned station," says Mr Anderson.

Councillor Doreen Blyth, who has been requesting the move to happen for many years now, says that at the end of the day the weather readings should be done from where the people are.  "I'm happy that we are now able to provide TV weather people with an accurate picture of just how nice it is in Taupo."

The new weather station on Gascoigne Reserve

A little Christmas miracle

For those of you who weren't aware, last Friday our three year old daughter Isabella's middle finger on her right hand was amputated down to the first joint, in an accident at her daycare centre (see the editorial in TGIF).

It's one of the reasons I've been quieter this week as we deal with the medical dramas associated with the trauma.

Sadly, it wasn't a clean amputation. Isabella had climbed onto the middle of a plank being used as a makeshift see-saw across a metal rail acting as the pivot point. At the same time as she gripped the board, a bunch of other kids, two at each end according to the staff, raced for the seats on the plank, and as the board swayed under their weight it crushed, shredded and then amputated the finger.

In the words of Middlemore Hospital, NZ's best plastic surgery unit, the wound was "disgusting", so much so that the senior ED doctor made a judgement call on her own that the finger stood no chance of reattachment and therefore no priority was given my daughter for a plastics assessment when she arrived. The ED didn't inform us of its decision until three hours after we arrived in the ambulance.

Needless to say there was some fairly heavy foot-stamping going on from my part at this point, and at 4pm Isabella was finally seen for the first time by a plastic surgeon, more than four hours after the accident. She informed us that it wasn't ED's call, but nonetheless there was little chance of a successful reattachment. She took the fingertip upstairs to a senior surgical consultant and gave us three options: amputate finger cleanly (hospital's preferred option), sew the stump of the finger to the groin in the hope of growing flesh back around the bone that might later be moulded into what looked like a finger, sans nail, or reattach the finger and essentially pray for a miracle.

There was never a question. We took the reattachment option.

"The likelihood of this surgery succeeding is almost impossible as her finger is too badly damaged," the senior surgeon later told us just as Isabella was wheeled in to theatre, "but we'll give it our best shot because you've asked us to do this option."

While the surgeons worked, we and others prayed hard for the miracle the hospital kept telling us we were not likely to get.

This week, on the eve of Christmas Eve, those prayers were answered. The dressing was changed, and the fingertip was alive and thriving. The surgeons believe there's now an excellent chance Isabella's finger will survive intact, albeit as part of a long healing process.

I saw the reattached finger myself, and couldn't believe it.

A baby in a manger 2000 odd years ago has delivered us, via the hands of skilled but doubting surgeons, a Christmas miracle for our baby who'd been mangled.

She won't have a comfortable Christmas – the wound, the drugs and the confined to barracks, no swimming, not much playing – will see to that. We are mindful that others have far less this Christmas, and our hearts go out to you. For all those who sent prayers and good wishes, our thanks. For us, the spirit of Christmas has a truly different depth this year.

 

And so it begins…

"The shift happens as the United States backed what amounts to the single biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor nations for any one cause -- in a sense offering compensation for decades of warming the Earth." – Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, today

The deal expected at Copenhagen, highlighted back in May when I released my book Air Con, followed up by Investigate magazine and Lord Monckton before catching fire across the internet, has now come to pass.

No, it is not yet legally binding. But it will be.

You see, throughout this torturous process in the Danish capital over the last 14 days, the people pulling the strings have clung to their central core themes: wealth transfer, world governance. Climate was actually a distant third on the priority list.

Anyone wishing to trace back the longer history need only read Air Con, or any number of UN publications buried deep in the UN website with innocuous names that give no clue to the ambitions contained within their pages.

Here's why the US$100 billion wealth transfer is the wedge that will fundamentally overhaul the political landscape of planet earth forever:

It's not the amount of money that's the issue, it is instead the infrastructure required to administer the money and oversee its collection and expenditure. By agreeing to provide a vast sum on money in "climate compensation", the globalists have automatically created the need for a vast global bureaucracy to administer the programme. How else could it possibly be done?

And which global agency is perched to implant itself as this massive governance organization? Try this one for size.

What's integral to this is what administering this money will do for the UN. Currently, it has an 'official' budget of US$4.2 billion a year. I say 'official' because in partnership with donor countries the UN administers several billion more each year through the UN Development Programme and similar entities. But let's go with $4.2 billion for now.

For US$100 billion a year, you are talking some serious prestige and power for the UN. Assuming 80% of the funding reaches its destination (probably in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt Third World leaders), that's still 20% to pay the wages of a vastly increased UN field staff and 'peacekeeping' force to protect them as they administer the programme.

And of course, $100 billion is only a starting point. The UN and the Third World have talked of up to $1 trillion a year in climate adaptation and compensation.

Barack Obama talks about the 'mechanism' to deliver this pool of funds, that it needs to be global but it need not encroach on sovereignty too much. In principle, it won't at all – that's because sovereigns make a free will choice to sign and ratify the agreement and its conditions. They're still sovereign, but like any contract they are required to keep their promise to allow the UN agency access and control over relevant areas if required. Sovereignty in name only.

The Third World countries are suspicious because, much as they desire the cash, they know the UN will be demanding accountability for the cash, and perhaps even political reform. In this way, the UN hopes to drag the Third World up closer to the level of the First World, and it hopes to be hailed as a hero for modernizing and democratizing the planet, ready for full global government and the end of nation states.

This is, of course, is already on the UNDP agenda.

So while others label Copenhagen a "failure", I suggest you look a little more carefully. This is not really about specific emissions cuts, the bigger game is to sneak the infrastructure in. And there's every indication they are well on track to succeed on this.

NZ Study may hold key to faulty world temp data

A long-forgotten scientific paper on temperature trends in New Zealand may be the smoking gun on temperature manipulation worldwide.

Since Climategate first broke, we've seen scandal over temperature adjustments by NZ's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research, NIWA, which in turn prompted a fresh look at raw temperature data from Darwin and elsewhere.

Now, a study published in the NZ Journal of Science back in 1980 reveals weather stations at the heart of NIWA's claims of massive warming were shown to be unreliable and untrustworthy by a senior Met Office climate scientist 30 years ago, long before global warming became a politically charged issue.

The story is published in tonight's TGIF Edition, and has international ramifications.

That's because the study's author, former Met Office Auckland director Jim Hessell, found a wide range of problems with Stevenson Screen temperature stations and similar types of unit.

Hessell debunked a claim that New Zealand was showing a 1C warming trend between 1940 and 1980, saying the sites showing the biggest increases were either urbanized and suffering from urban heat island effect, or they were faulty Stevenson Screen installations prone to showing hotter than normal temperatures because of their design and location.

One of the conclusions is that urbanized temperature stations are almost a waste of time in climate study:

"For the purpose of assessing climatic change, a 'rural' environment needs to be carefully defined. Climatic temperature trends can only be assessed from rural sites which have suffered no major transformations due to changes in shelter or urbanisation, or from sites for which the records have been made homogenous. Urban environments usually suffer continual modifications due to one cause or another."

"It is concluded that the warming trends in New Zealand previously claimed, are in doubt and that as has been found in Australia (Tucker 1975) no clear evidence for long term secular warming or cooling in Australasia over the last 50 years [1930-1980] exists as yet."

Hessell divided weather stations in New Zealand into two classes, "A" and "B", where A class locations had suffered increasing urbanization or significant site changes, and B class locations had not.

"It can be seen immediately that the average increase in mean temperatures at the A class stations is about five times that of the B class", the study notes.

Among the studies listed as a contaminated A site is Kelburn, which was at the heart of the NIWA scandal a fortnight ago.

A link to the study can be found in TGIF Edition.

Other suggested reading: Air Con

 

UN’s Ban Ki-moon boasts: global government coming like it or not

In an interview with the LA Times, Ban Ki-moon says this:

Q: There has been talk of reducing the U.N.'s role in future climate change policy and allowing Western-led institutions to oversee how the developing world spends any money it receives from developed countries. Can there be a deal that excludes the U.N.?

A: "How can you scrap the role of the United Nations? The United Nations has global reach.

"The United Nations will be there and should be involved in this implementation process.

"One of the principles agreed upon is that all commitments should be reportable, measurable and verifiable. This is what has been agreed by both developed and developing countries.

"We will establish a global governance structure to monitor and manage the implementation of this. Experts from both worlds should participate."

This, of course, relates to the clause in the Draft Treaty that specifically talked of setting up a global government structure to regulate and control the world's usage of carbon and carbon trading, and to police the internal policies of member states.

In other words, a global government. The Draft records the proposed organization will have hefty enforcement powers, and the ability to levy taxes and fines on countries and their citizens for non compliance with the governing organization's edicts or climate targets.

Global coincidence theory?

None dare call it a conspiracy, but the globalists in Australia, China and the UK appear to be acting in concert to begin heavily censoring the internet, presumably once the great global governing structure is in place within 24 months or so.

The UK House of Lords is reportedly mulling the impact of proposed new legislation which would give British officials the power to shut down internet access to sites the government did not want people to access, or shut down internet service for citizens the government felt were against them.

11     Obligations to limit internet access    

After section 124G of the Communications Act 2003 insert—

"124H      Obligations to limit internet access

     (1)     The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—

    (a)     an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or

    (b)     any other consideration.

    (2)     An order under this section must specify the date from which the technical obligation is to have effect, or provide for it to be specified.

    (3)     The order may also specify—

    (a)     the criteria for taking the technical measure concerned against a subscriber;

    (b)     the steps to be taken as part of the measure and when they are to be taken."

UK legal advisor Francis Davey writes:

For example the power could be used to:

• order ISP's to block any web page found on the Internet Watch Foundation's list
• block specific undesirable sites (such as wikileaks)
• block specific kinds of traffic or protocols, such as any form of peer-to-peer
• throttle the bandwidth for particular kinds of service or to or from particular websites.

In short, pretty much anything.

I do not exagerrate. The definition of a "technical obligation" and "technical measure" are inserted by clause 10:

A "technical obligation", in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A "technical measure" is a measure that— (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

This follows hard on the heels of a similar stunt in Australia by the leftist Rudd regime under the guise of child porn (which is not generally accessible on websites anyway), the well known case of China, and of course the still on the table NZ proposal under the guise of protecting "copyright". The latter, of course, would have been an ideal weapon to block publication of the Climategate emails had it been in force at the time.

Trust me on this one, these socialist numbnuts will use any stalking horse they can, and by the time they've spun it through the useful idiots of the mainstream media even we will feel like low-lifes for even considering opposing the plans. Because that's how the best propaganda campaigns work.

Alternatively, we could listen to the leftist bloggers who will jump in anytime now and call the mysterious emergence of similar legislative agendas around the world a mere innocent coincidence, and the rest of us are "conspiracy theorists" for even considering otherwise.

I know "coincidence theory" is popular with some people, but coincidences are governed by the laws of chance, and the more coincidences the higher the likelihood of design. Most investigative journalists will tell you they don't come across many genuine coincidence theory cases.

Common theme in this is that Rudd's Australian Labor Party, Gordon Brown's UK Labour, and NZ Labour who initially proposed the NZ law, are all senior members of Socialist International who, as previously revealed in Investigate this year, just coincidentally are heavy hitters in the "new world order" (their words) proposal.

Hat tip: James Delingpole

The funniest environmental political debate you'll witness

The set-up:

David Parker, a former Minister on Climate Change and now on the Opposition benches as shadow Conservation, tries to make political capital at the expense of Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee, who has recently suggested some of New Zealand's vast conservation estate could be opened up to mineral, oil and coal exploration.

Specifically, Parker asks a question in Parliament inviting the Minister to come tramping with him in the wilderness this Christmas. What follows is possibly the most amusing interchange you'll see this year in an environment debate.

hat tip: Kiwiblog

Front page news - 100 reasons why climate change is natural

Britain's Daily Express has gone big on the alternative view of climate change, a sure sign that the news media are getting steadily more annoyed with the hype and exaggeration and hypocrisy from global warming believers.

H/t: ClimateDepot

UN IPCC boss has fingers in carbon trading pie

UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who assured the world the Climategate emails disclosed nothing serious, turns out to have a whole set of business interests that directly conflict his role as chair of the UN climate science advisory unit.

Not only that, those great anti corruption lobbyists Transparency International, whom we busted here earlier this week, are in this up to their miserable little necks as well.

This from Richard North:

As reported by Reuters – with a slight correction: The head of the Asian Development Bank (ADP), Haruhiko Kuroda, warned governments that a failure to reach a climate deal in Copenhagen could lead to a collapse of the carbon market, which would hit efforts to deal with climate change make carbon traders very rich.

It helps of course to know that Mr Kuroda is best known in greenie circles for setting up the ADB Advisory Group on Climate Change – chaired by millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri, part-time chairman of the IPCC.

An interesting member of that Group is Dr Klaus Toepfer, Founding Director, Institute for Advanced Studies Climate, Earth System and Sustainability Sciences and former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). And it was UNEP, of course, which set up the IPCC – which now has as its part-time chairman millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

One other member is professor Hironori Hamanaka, Chair, Board of Directors, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES). The IGES claims to be "a research institute that conducts pragmatic and innovative strategic policy research to support sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region." It will come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that the organisation works very closely with TERI, whose Director-General is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

Yet another is Ms Huguette Labelle, also a Board Member of the UN Global Compact organisation, the very same UN to which millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri belongs. Hilariously, Ms Labelle is Chair of Transparency International, the global civil society organisation "leading the fight against corruption." TI's mission "is to create change towards a world free of corruption."

The Board also includes professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University. This is the same Earth Institute which set up the Climate-Risk Center, inviting millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri to become its first Board Chairman.

One other interesting character is Dr. Emil Salim, an adviser to Indonesia's President on environment and sustainable development issues. But he is also a member of APFED – the Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development. One of its major activities is sponsoring the "Partnership Initiatives for Knowledge Network and Capacity Building" – in conjunction with TERI as a major partner, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

And last but not least is Professor Dadi Zhou, Director General (Emeritus) of the Energy Research Institute, which of course is otherwise known as TERI, the Director General of which is millionaire businessman Rajendra K. Pachauri.

No longer, it seems, does Rome hold a pre-eminent position. In this brave new world of climate change and sustainable development, all roads lead to Rajendra K. Pachauri.

James Delingpole makes some significant observations as well:

Particularly interesting is Dr Pachauri's connection with the "not-for-profit organisation" TERI. As we learn from its website, this used to stand for Tata Energy Research Institute, but was renamed in The Energy And Resources Institute in 2003. Nothing sinister, I'm sure, in its decision to play down the Tata connection; nor in the fact that Dr Pachauri makes no mention of the fact that he is funded by Tata on his website. And obviously, it is quite normal that TERI makes no disclosure on its website – or in its downloadable annual report (all you get is a pie chart with no figures on it) – about its financial arrangements: the pay scales of its 800 staff members and its esteemed director general are quite rightly hidden from the world's prying eyes.

Nevertheless, as Christopher Booker has noted elsewhere, one of the global business interests which will make – and indeed already has made – large sums of money thanks to the climate doom scenarios of the IPCC, is the Indian giant Tata. By fingering CO2 as the primary driver of AGW, the IPCC has been primarily responsible for creating the market in carbon trading. Dr Pachauri was, of course, the lead author on the IPCC's second report which paved the way to Kyoto – which in turn ushered in the world's first carbon trading schemes.

This is nothing short of a major scandal. The corruption of Climategate appears to grow, and the stench from the Copenhagen organizers gets worse.

Question: can the mainstream media join the dots so helpfully sketched for them here?