Blogs

2 February 2010

OPINION: In recent years those who have had the temerity to question the evidence for human-made global warming have been labelled as naysayers, Luddites and members of the Flat Earth Society. Now it is the ethics and integrity of climate scientists that is being called into question.

First it was the publication of hacked emails suggesting that leading climate change scientists conspired to keep data out of the hands of global warming sceptics and to play down the importance of information that did not fit their theories.

OPEN magazine 30 January 2010

It was presented as fact. The UN's Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, led by India's very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.

Telegraph.co.uk 29 January 2010

By Louise Gray

Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling, according to a new study that will spark further debate over the science of climate change.

The research by scientists at the American weather service found water vapour high in the atmosphere is far more influential on world temperatures than previously thought.

During the 1990s one third of the increase in global temperatures was due to an increase in water vapour. In the same way a drop in water vapour after 2000 could explain the recent slowdown in global warming.

The researchers insist their findings do not mean that global warming is not caused by man made greenhouse gases. But the effect of natural water vapour high up in the air may also be having an effect.

The research comes amid fears global warming has been exaggerated. The United Nations’ climate science panel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted last week that it made a mistake by claiming that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

Telegraph.co.uk 30 January 2010

by Richard Gray

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

Sunday 31 January 2010

He is the climate change chief whose research body produced a report warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas might melt by 2035 and earned a Nobel Prize for his work – so you might expect Dr Rajendra Pachauri to be doing everything he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.

But as controversy continued to simmer last week over the bogus ‘Glaciergate’ claims in a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which he heads – Dr Pachauri showed no apparent inclination to cut global warming in his own back yard.

The IPCC is beginning to melt as global tempers rise, says Christopher Booker.

Telegraph.co.uk 30 January 2010

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

Telegraph View: the case that global warming is man-made needs to be constantly tested and credible

Telegraph.co.uk 31 January 2010

The question of what, if anything, to do about global warming is one of the most important that humanity faces. Most people believe that the Earth is becoming warmer – but there are significant disagreements over the speed and extent of the process, the danger it poses, and its precise causes. The Government is convinced that the debate is over, won by the scientists who insist that climate change is the result of the carbon dioxide generated by human activity. It has now embarked on the project of "decarbonising" the economy; since carbon-based energy provides most of our electricity and powers nearly all of our transportation, this is a colossal, and colossally expensive, task.

The Australian January 28 2010

Ben Webster and Matthew Franklin

THE impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the British government's chief scientific adviser. John Beddington said climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

Australia's chief scientist, Penny Sackett, told The Australian last night she shared Professor Beddington's concerns.

Professor Sackett said climate change was a scientific reality but there was a need for absolute openness and rigour in the presentation of evidence, including recognition of which aspects of climate change science were imprecise and required further research.

Professor Beddington said public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly disputed issues.

Time Magazine

By Lisa Abend 25 January 2010

From Vermont, where veal and dairy farmer Abe Collins is developing software designed to help farmers foster carbon-rich topsoil quickly, to Denmark, where Thomas Harttung's Aarstiderne farm grazes 150 head of cattle, a vanguard of small farmers are trying to get the word out about how much more eco-friendly they are than factory farming. "If you suspend a cow in the air with buckets of grain, then it's a bad guy," Harttung explains. "But if you put it where it belongs — on grass — that cow becomes not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative." Collins goes even further. "With proper management, pastoralists, ranchers and farmers could achieve a 2% increase in soil-carbon levels on existing agricultural, grazing and desert lands over the next two decades," he estimates. Some researchers hypothesize that just a 1% increase (over, admittedly, vast acreages) could be enough to capture the total equivalent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.