Nov 23 2009
President Obama dithers on global warming
The briefing for some weeks had been suggesting there is not going to be a great “deal to save the world” in Copenhagen. The President, worried over the economy, scarred by the health battle, and dithering over Afghanistan, may not be able to deliver votes for more green taxes and regulation from his Democratic majority in both houses. It felt as if he was shying away from opening up another difficult political front.
Now the other leaders have put pressure on him and on China. They say they will turn up at Copenhagen to try to get a deal after all. It will be a fascinating few weeks, to see how strong the President’s commitment is, and to see if he can be any more decisive on this issue which he used freely as part of his campaign. I guess the measures he thought it needed now poll badly. Higher petrol prices and higher fuel prices in the middle of a recession are unlikely to go down well.
The argument is swinging in the winds of public opinion. Even the BBC this morning ran a piece about the science of global warming, allowing Lord Lawson to point out there has been no warming for the last ten years. The representative from the University of East Anglia, now famous on the web for email exchanges on this subject, said he agreed with Lord Lawson, but went on to say it still confirmed the global warming theory. The emailers had apparently choosen their words foolishly, but he remained sure the evidence was strong with or without selection. This kind of incident does not make it easier for the scientific establishment to tackle the considerable scepticism of the public.
19 Responses to “President Obama dithers on global warming”
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Green taxes are stealth taxes designed to con more money from hard working people, we all know that!
Herman Van Rompy Pompy said “The financing of the welfare state, rrespective of the social reform we implement, will require new resources”…”the possibilities of financial levies at European level needs to be seriously reviewed”. Mr Rompuy further suggests that the two mechanisms he favours most are green taxes or a version of the Tobin Tax…
…and there you have it… Green taxes are not for environmental projects, they’re for the welfare state and social reform.. one big con!
We are all sick of being ripped off!
The research grants are all for researching the (alleged) effects of global warming, not for whether it exists.
Asking scientists who are part of the climate change gravy train about the subject is akin to asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Were they actually calling it global warming? I thought they now called it climate change so that it encompassed everything. It also helps advocates to then make such a seemingly nonsensical claim that a lack of warming for ten years supports the theory of global warming. The scientific method is to postulate a theory and confirm or disprove it by experiment and measurement but why let a few years’ measurements spoil a good story. There is massive money behind all this scientific research and others such as Gore who promote the scare are making themselves exceedingly rich.
The CRU, where the data on global warming mainly comes from, admit came from them. They have prominent scientists saying they “hide the decline” & “I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that” etc. This appears to indicate that the entire scare is built on fraud. The failure of the MSM, particularly the BBC, to seriously report what is, by definition, as important a story as all the scare stories we have had put together, while the net is humming with it, simply discredits the traditional media. We are seeing the electronic equivalent to the events leading to the fall of the Wall.
The refusal of APEC (Asia-Pacific economic Cooperation) to promise any action on cutting CO2 despite the EU pressure (also unreported by the BBC) shows how a completely different set of wheels are coming of the bandwagon.
The problem with the global warming debate is one of perception. The believers in this debate have screamed “wolf” for years. I am old enough to remember predictions of London being under water by the year 2000. Every weather event is taken as evidence of global warming and people like Lord Lawson are pillared for their views.
Now we hear that Lord Lawson is right, there has been no global warming for 10 years, but this is still proof of global warming!!
I would also suggest anyone interested in this debate look at the Nasa satellite data. It indicates that the upper atmosphere has cooled over the last 10 years. The man made global warming hypothesis requires the upper atmosphere to be heating at a fast rate than the lower atmosphere, therefore the current hypothesis is wrong and needs to be changed.
Governments, under the direction of the Intergovernmental conference, have jumped into the global warming debate for two reasons:
1. The opportunity to raise new tax’s
2. The ability to have control over what their citizen’s do, eg the carbon limit will allow government to have a much tighter limit on how far we travel, inside and outside the UK.
We now need an open debate on global warming that can be held in rational terms. The e-mails from the University of East Angelia prove that to date all efforts have been made to suppress rational debate. When that happens we all feel deprived and suspect a stitch up which will reduce our freedom and our wallets.
These scientists have always known their data did not support the “unequivocal” results they claimed, but they had to convince policy makers that they were right and so they embarked on a policy of “global warming right or wrong”.
In February 2005 Tony Blair ordered a propaganda Conference at the Met Office, Exeter to proclaim that dangerous climate change was here. Just prior to that the Met Office Hadley Centre produced this document:
Stabilising climate to avoid dangerous climate change — a summary of relevant research at the Hadley Centre January 2005. The summary says:
“What constitutes ‘dangerous’ climate change, in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, remains open to debate.
Once we decide what degree of (for example) temperature rise the world can tolerate, we then have to estimate what greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere should be limited to, and how quickly they should be allowed to change.
These are very uncertain because we do not know exactly how the climate system responds to greenhouse gases.
The next stage is to calculate what emissions of greenhouse gases would be allowable, in order to keep below the limit of greenhouse gas concentrations.
This is even more uncertain, thanks to our imperfect understanding of the carbon cycle (and chemical cycles) and how this feeds back into the climate system.”
That was in 2005. Eight years earlier the science was already settled. In 1997 our current Chief Scientific Advisor to Defra and Director of Strategy at Tyndall, Bob Watson, was asked at Kyoto about the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN, that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, Professor Watson responded by denigrating all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. “The science is settled” he said, and “we’re not going to reopen it here.” http://sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm
How about Tyndall? These extracts from a 2004 paper provide an insight into their propaganda agenda.
“The Social Simulation of the Public Perception of Weather Events and their Effect upon the Development of Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change” September 2004.
“Global warming (or climate change) is, without elaboration, a much debated and contested issue. Not only is it contested among scientists, but also among all those with vested interests.
We suggest that, in the realm of the public, forces act to maintain or denounce a perceived reality which has already been constructed. That is, an issue introduced by science (or media for that matter) needs continual expression of confirmation if it is to be maintained as an issue.
In this paper, we explore under what conditions belief in global warming or climate change, as identified and defined by experience, science and the media, can be maintained in the public’s perception.
As the science itself is contested, needless to say, so are the potential policy changes. So how then do people make sense or construct a reality of something that they can never experience in its totality (climate) and a reality that has not yet manifest (i.e. climate change)?
To endorse policy change people must ‘believe’ that global warming will become a reality some time in the future.
Only the experience of positive temperature anomalies will be registered as indication of change if the issue is framed as global warming.
Both positive and negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as indication of change if the issue is framed as climate change.
We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming.”
Sound familiar? The Institute for Public Policy Research, Labour’s favourite think tank, had this advice for public agencies interfacing with the public, Warm Words, August 2006.
“Treating climate change as beyond argument”
..it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won.
This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective.
The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.
The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach.It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.”
It was written by a PR consultant and a novelist.
Millions of pounds of our money are spent on social engineering to get us to accept environmental taxation, to “save the planet” including the current disgraceful adverts on TV.
Unfortunately the opposition are fully signed up as well.
But have we not been paying attention? Have not President Obama and Al Gore told us the science was “settled”.
Good for President Obama for not falling for the pseudo-science of Al Gore (who won the Nobel Prize for peddling such rubbish).
Cyclical changes to the climate have been going on for millenia and it is not man-made. Without CO2 we would all die anyway and “global warming green-housers” always forget the far greater 14% of the atmosphere that is a green-house gas and that is water vapour.
Don’t blame man – just look up at our own personal atomic reactor in the sky, better known as the Sun!
What is extremely worrying about the CRU data is not the content of the emails, but the content of some of the code comments and commentaries. From this you get a portrait of a young researcher struggling against insuperable problems, trying to make sense of the reams of data that the Centre has, and trying to make the codebase of the models function even vaguely properly.
From all this the impression I get is very like a dot-com boom ISP I worked for some years ago; everything was in permanent fire-fighting, dancing on the edge of disaster mode. The same seems to be true of these researchers; they have no House Style for computer code, no source control worth speaking of, no quality control, no data control; the whole thing is an utter shambles with one or two superstars trying to cobble together code quickly, then other people relying on the buggy, barely commented code that the initial guys did working (or not working in predictable ways) properly so that more hastily cobbled-together code can also produce a result.
Put just a couple of layers like this into a system, and pretty soon nobody knows what on earth is happening. Worse, because these guys are working on short-term grants they never actually get the chance to go back and thoroughly debug the initial code that everything is built on; there isn’t the time or the money to sit down and thoroughly audit the code.
They can’t opensource the code, because the moment anyone sees what a complete dog’s dinner the whole thing is, half the programmers (the competent half, mark you) are going to gasp, stare, scream and run off into the night. Furthermore all their competitors are going to capitalise on such an unveiling of their feet of clay and rubbish their reputations permanently.
Basically, these researchers are completely and utterly stuffed here. The sane thing to do is for a minister to step in and order them to have the entire codebase and data audited by competent programmers and Government appointed scientists; that sorts out the code, sorts out the models and unfortunately will probably completely and utterly destroy the reputations of a lot of senior scientists permanently.
This sane option isn’t going to happen. The Government here doesn’t do sane and intelligent, as we all know, and there is in any case way too much money to be made by pretending that Global Warming is a major threat and taxing hell out of everybody.
What I would ask is this: ask a question in the House, and somehow get an independent investigator to at the very least look at their computing code briefly. The leak seems to indicate that their coding skills are abysmal; before we commit trillions to this project, let’s at least fact-check it.
The Global Warming Gravy Train is now a tide which is old hat.
(How about that for a load of mixed metaphors!)
Hi John,
Do you actually think Climate Change is happening or not? Is it a problem that exists, and is going to screw the world economy unless we stop it?
You’ve never said in a straightforward way. You always use weasel words to avoid saying what you think.
Personally, I believe our scientists. I think that the bold, confident, conservative, grown-up thing to do is to act in response to the science. That the balance of risks is such that we have to change to a new energy system, to save our economy and way of life.
There are some cowardly, ostrich like people, who because they don’t like the consequences, try to pretend the science doesn’t exist. The same people probably would have been appeasers denying the need for war in the 1930s.
I don’t think you are one of those, John. David Cameron certainly isn’t.
It’s time for you to say.
Stuart Fairney Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I also believe ‘our scientists’ Most especially the private e-mails to each other which show a remarkable degree of frankness.
I am less impressed by ad hominem attacks however.
And as for the “time for you to say” remark ~ have you read this blog ?? Check the archives, you will find the author has plenty to say, though happily none of it is personal abuse.
Amanda Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
And there are cowardly, ostrich like people who, because they don’t like the much deserved consequences, try to pretend that the exposure of ‘fake science’, in email correspondence and computer code doesn’t exist. These are the same people who in the past would have said flooding in Cockermouth and Sheffield was an ‘act of God’, brought down on the heads of sinful people!! Unfortunately for them, 60% of the country don’t believe in MMGW, unlike in the past when most were Catholic believers!!
After the pre Copenhagen hype about “global government” of course Obama won’t go. He doesn’t want to get impeached.
I would hope that someone like you John would see that the whole global warming/climate change thing is a scam. Many blogs now are showing so much evidence that the CRU have refused FoI requests, got ‘deniers’ sacked., cheered when a denier scientist died etc etc. Now the TPA are going after the CRU. The Daily Mail may now finally be turning and saying that the CRU are no better than Blair in the Iraq war (lying). The trouble with your party is that Cameron is so hook line and sinker in bed with ‘climate change’ that he, and all politicians are going to look very very foolish. Unlike the general public (away from the Islington set and Greenpeace etc supporters) who have realised all along it is just a tax-raising scam.
It is not just the emails but now computer code geeks are pulling apart the code used by the CRU. They are in agreement that good 1st year A level students could do a better job.
I have written to my PPC and asked him his views. I suspect that he will say that global warming is for real and the ’science is settled’. If he does, I will no longer be a member of the Tory Party.
The only governments that are really serious about there being a danger from AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming ) are those in Europe. Surprise, surprise, these are also the highest taxing countries with the most rigidly controlled citizens in the sane world. Any old excuse for more Napoleonic intervention in people’s lives is fine, it seems.
Well, OK, the Kiwis are a shade concerned, but they don’t have any industry worth talking about, so have little to lose in terms of costs. The Aussies are discovering that their country is reverting to its natural state of being a very large dry place. This is not some sinister result of my driving to work in a car with a 2.5 litre engine, it’s a normal process. Farmers in the last 50 years or so have been blessed by living in an unusually wet period compared with historical records.
Computer models of the effects of climate change are worthless – believe me, I used to work in this area! I gave it up, as I could create almost any scenario I was asked to (or wanted to). Look at the evidence if you don’t believe me. The (now highly politicised) Met Office, with it’s relatively simple weather models and the largest computer in the country are unable to tell us if it will be a ‘barbecue summer’ or not this year. How can any sensible person believe predictions from them or anyone else about environmental catastrophe in 2050, or 2080, when they don’t even properly understand the processes involved (e.g. atmospheric CO2 is only increasing at around half the rate that would be expected from man-made emissions)?
It’s argued that a high cost strategy to limit the effects of potentially catastrophic AGW is justified, even if the probability of that catastrophic outcome is tiny. What complete rubbish when the whole topic has become so politicised that honest researchers cannot get a grant unless the aim of their study is to support the AGW vested interests. Make no mistake, that is why this is being pushed so hard. Governments of the leftist variety see this as a golden opportunity to milk their productive citizens of more cash, as well as making further inroads into their personal lives. Too many influential people have too much money invested in this global scam to let it die easily. But at the end of the day, it’s simply what the late Michael Crichton pointed out in his novel, that there is a lot of reward for governments and big companies that keep us all in a constant State Of Fear.
What the specialone said…..Moi, aussi!
No blue vote from me, if DC doesn’t develop some cojones, and confront the green scam. He will need to declare that every tax based upon this totally discredited scientific advice will be the subject of a very close examination. You ain’t gonna stop “global warming” by pasting £5 notes on the surface of the earth!!
Particularly as there ain’t any (global warming, that is).
Any reason why my earlier hasn’t appeared?
[...] I was tipped over the edge, and challenged him to say whether he thought climate change was happening or not. It seems others have asked him the same thing, as he replied in [...]