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UN Embarrassed as “Climate Refugees” Fail to Show

by Ivan Osorio on April 20, 2011

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming

It’s hardly novel to compare global warming alarmism to a doomsday cult, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison whenever yet another doomsday scenario is called off, or at least postponed. The recurring embarrassment renders doomsday cults, well….doomed, practically by definition. Now the latest such embarrassment seems bad enough to spark an exodus from the compound — or it should.

To make a long story short, 50 million “climate refugees” failed to materialize in 2010, as projected way back in 2005. Then the United Nations Environment Program deleted a map from its website illustrating where those climate migrations would occur. Then Gavin Atkins of Asian Correspondent asked, “What happened to the climate refugees?” and uncovered the map’s absence.

How could an error so large happen? Der Spiegel offers one likely explanation: sloppiness.

Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

“As far back as 1995 (latest date for a comprehensive assessment), these environmental refugees totalled at least 25 million people, compared with 27 million traditional refugees (people fleeing political oppression, religious persecution and ethnic troubles),” Myers said. “The environmental refugees total could well double between 1995 and 2010.”

“When global warming takes hold,” he added, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Myers’ report may have been the basis for the UN statements in 2005.

Forecasts in Doubt

But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. That appears to be confirmed by the behavior of victims of last month’s devastating earthquake and tusnami in Japan. Many survivors are returning to rebuild their ruined towns and villages.

Of course, the climate doomsday cult will go on. What is really crazy is the how commonplace such End Times claims are now — what Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill aptly calls, “the unexceptionable nature of apocalyptic thinking.” (Hat tip: Margaret Griffis)

LibertyWeek 101: Urban Beekeepers Unite!

by Richard Morrison on July 12, 2010

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome back long-lost co-host Michelle Minton to Episode 101 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We discuss the sobering recommendations of the White House debt commission, the intoxicating budgetary success of Chris Christie in New Jersey, the bunker mentality of UN climate scientists, the travails of urban homesteaders and the birth of scandal-based tourism.

No, Sen. Durbin, Choice Not Between Real Science and Political Science

by Marlo Lewis on June 10, 2010

in Global Warming

Sen. Durbin claims S.J.Res.26 presents the Senate a choice between “real science” and “political science.” Not by a country mile. See my previous posts on this point.

Actually, as a colleague reminds me, it is a misnomer to call EPA’s regulatory trigger the endangerment “finding” rather than the endangerment “rule.”  The Senate is voting on the “legal force and effect” of the endangerment rule, not trying to determine scientific truth via a head count.

Durbin claims that EPA made its endangerment rule after consulting with “scientists across America.” In fact, as the endangerment rule acknowledges, EPA largely based the rule on the IPCC reports. As the Climategate scandal reveals, the IPCC reports do not meet U.S. Government transparency and accountability standards.

If Sen. Durbin thinks greenhouse gas emissions are so dangerous, then he should follow the Constitution and do the hard work of trying to assemble legislative majorities capable of turning his agenda into law. 

Instead, Durbin wants EPA to ‘enact’ his agenda on its own authority, knowing that EPA won’t have to answer to his constituents for the economic impacts at the ballot box.

The Climate Peer-Review Process: Hopelessly Broken

by Iain Murray on April 1, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Global Warming, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

The Climategate scandal showed how several of the world’s top climate scientists were hell bent on keeping “skeptical” views out of the scientific literature and in particular, the IPCC reports.  If you wanted an illustration of how this actually worked in practice, then economist Ross McKitrick has a doozy for you.

Ross realized that one of the IPCC’s central claims, one that could be regarded as foundational, was fabricated and provably false.  He wrote a paper demonstrating this and proceeded to be given the run-around by every climatic journal he submitted it to, despite mostly positive reviews.  In the end he had to publish it in a statistical journal, where it will likely be ignored by the climate science clique community.

Ross concludes:

In the aftermath of Climategate a lot of scientists working on global warming-related topics are upset that their field has apparently lost credibility with the public. The public seems to believe that climatology is beset with cliquish gatekeeping, wagon-circling, biased peer-review, faulty data and statistical incompetence. In response to these perceptions, some scientists are casting around, in op-eds and weblogs, for ideas on how to hit back at their critics. I would like to suggest that the climate science community consider instead whether the public might actually have a point.

Read the whole thing by downloading Ross’s paper here (PDF link).

Roger Pielke Jr agrees with Ross here, noting:

This is exactly the situation that has occurred in the context of disaster losses that I have documented on numerous occasions. In the case of disaster losses, not only did the IPCC make stuff up, but when challenged, went so far as to issue a press release emphasizing the accuracy of its made up stuff.

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Cartoon from Cartoons By Josh.

Climategate Whitewash

by Iain Murray on March 31, 2010 · 11 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.  Only one MP dissented from its conclusions.  There seem to me to be some serious errors and omissions in the reports, but I’m not the only one.  For instance, Fred Pearce of New Scientist and The Guardian has some pretty serious things to say in his story, Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain:

in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

While Pearce is good on this point – essentially that Phil Jones fostered a culture of anti-scientific secrecy and collusion as head of the CRU – he is less good on the meaning of the “trick” by which jones aspired to “hide the decline” in one particular temperature series.  Bishop Hill is right on the money here:

Mike’s Nature Trick (66) – The committee’s
conclusions are eyewatering:

66. Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the
words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to
hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is
predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published
papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the
science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand
for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous. We expect
that this is a matter the Scientific Appraisal Panel will address.

I’m struggling to say something polite about this.  By way of an
illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in
the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a
nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine?
Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information
from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.

Indeed.  Did anything good come out of the report?  Well, as Roger Pielke Jr points out, a broad reading of the report reveals an indictment of the state of climate science:

Reputation does not, however, rest solely on the quality of work as it
should. It also depends on perception. It is self-evident that the
disclosure of the CRU e-mails has damaged the reputation of UK climate
science and, as views on global warming have become polarised, any
deviation from the highest scientific standards will be pounced on. As
we explained in chapter 2, the practices and methods of climate science
are a key issue. If the practices of CRU are found to be in line with
the rest of climate science, the question would arise whether climate
science methods of operation need to change. In this event we would
recommend that the scientific community should consider changing those
practices to ensure greater transparency. . .

. . . A great
responsibility rests on the shoulders of climate science: to provide the
planet’s decision makers with the knowledge they need to secure our
future. The challenge that this poses is extensive and some of these
decisions risk our standard of living. When the prices to pay are so
large, the knowledge on which these kinds of decisions are taken had
better be right. The science must be irreproachable.

And, as Climategate and the multiple subsequent revelations about the shoddiness of the IPCC’s science have shown, the science is in no way irreproachable as it stands.  Yet in the end, Prof. Frank Furedi is right about what the Committee meant in this segment:

In other words, the CRU’s real failing was to dent the authority of the
climate-change morality tale, with its idea that, with the end of the
world fast approaching, there is an urgent need to monitor people’s
behaviour and lower their horizons. A cynic might conclude that when
moral entrepreneurs say that the ‘prices to pay are so large’, their
investigations into public controversies will inevitably have a
perfunctory character, since there is allegedly a higher, more pressing
truth to be defended.

Which is exactly what happened here.

Does Climategate Undermine the Scientific Integrity of EPA’s Endangerment Finding? You Betcha.

by Marlo Lewis on March 3, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

Instead of exercising its “judgment,” as required by Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act, to determine whether greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, EPA largely deferred to the judgment of an external agency not subject to U.S. data quality and freedom of information laws — the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC developed three lines of evidence for its conclusion that GHG emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The first is based on the IPCC’s understanding of the physics of the climate system. The second is the claim that recent decades are unusually warm compared to previous centuries during the current interglacial period known as the Holocene. The third line of evidence is the asserted agreement between observations and computer model simulations.

Peabody Energy’s 240-page petition for reconsideration assesses these lines of evidence in light of new information not in EPA’s possession when it drafted the endangerment finding. Much of this new information is contained in the thousands of emails and other files that produced the Climategate scandal. The files and emails provide an insider’s look at the professional (or unprofessional) behavior of leading climate scientists at the UK’s Climate Research Unit and their colleagues in the United States. This scandal has led to the resignation (allegedly temporary) of Dr. Phil Jones as director of the CRU and an official determination that the CRU violated the UK’s freedom of information act. 

Peabody concludes that the Climategate files undermine each of the IPCC’s principal lines of evidence, and confirm what many climate “skeptics” had long suspected:

The CRU information reveals that many of the principal scientists who authored key chapters of the IPCC scientific assessments were driven by a policy agenda that caused them to cross the line from neutral science to advocacy. Indeed, they went far beyond even what is acceptable as advocacy, as they actively suppressed information that was contrary to the “nice, tidy story” that they wished to present, they refused to disclose underlying data concerning the studies in which they were involved to third parties who might use the information to critique those studies, they engaged in a wide variety of improper and indeed unethical tactics to manipulate the type of scientific information that appeared both in the IPCC reports and in the peer-reviewed scientific journals upon which the IPCC largely relied, and they relied on inaccurate and unverified information from secondary source material that was included anyway to advance the authors’ advocacy agenda. Moreover, the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), the agency that oversees and enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, after investigation, recently concluded that CRU broke those laws in refusing to respond to information requests.

EPA’s only reasonable course of action, Peabody argues, is to reopen the endangerment proceeding:

EPA has effectively delegated its judgment under section 202(a) of the CAA to an international body that acted contrary to basic U.S. standards of information quality, integrity and transparency. In the interests of good science and policy, and as required by law, EPA must now reconsider its Endangerment Finding in light of the CRU revelations. The importance of low-cost, reliable energy to the economy is too high for EPA to begin regulation based on such an uncertain foundation.

LibertyWeek 82: Lessons from Chile

by Richard Morrison on March 1, 2010

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Brooke Oberwetter unite to bring you Episode 82 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover lessons from Chile, heathcare legislation on life support, a perfect storm for the IPCC, underage iPod assemblers and Charlie Rangel’s fairy godmother.

U.N. Climate panel pummeled for misinformation, high and low

by Michael Fumento on February 15, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

From the very top of the earth to the bottom, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just can’t get it right.

I recently wrote of how the panel’s latest (2007) report, the one that split the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, was finally caught on what was an obviously false statement: That the glaciers atop the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 because of global warming. It would take an incredible amount of sustained heat to do that. The only question was what source the panel used, and that proved to be an off-the-cuff assertion by a global warming activist as reprinted in an environmentalist journal – with a mathematical error to boot!

Now it’s been revealed that the panel grossly overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

Its latest report says 55 percent of the country is below sea level, leaving it highly prone to flooding along rivers that would ostensible rise with warming temperatures. But Netherlanders can take off their clogs and relax. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding. You can see a lot of pretty maps regarding the subject by the Dutch Ministry of Transport here.

The IPCC insists that it’s a minor point in a report 3,000 words long and doesn’t affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe. Of course it doesn’t, any more than does the Himalayan nonsense.

But this latest wooden shoe to the butt again illustrates that this allegedly thoroughly documented reports by the allegedly top experts in world has a nasty tendency to simply include anything that will make its case seem stronger. Taken in light of the recent “Climategate” revelations that scientists who came to the “wrong” conclusions had their materially systematically excluded from the report and other IPCC documents, it shows just how shaky this house of cards is.

Fact and Fiction at the IPCC

by Nicole Ciandella on February 2, 2010

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And he has just released a brand new book. No, it isn’t a sequel to his 1976 Dynamics of Electrical Energy Supply and Demand: An Economic Analysis. It’s a novel, titled Return to Almora. It’s about an Indian climate expert in his sixties who travels around India, Peru, and the United States, making passionate love to women all along the way.

Yes, that’s right: Dr. Pachauri’s first novel is largely about sex; or, as The Daily Telegraph puts it, it’s about “a lot of sex – with a lot of women.”

Return to Almora’s publication comes at an interesting time for Dr. Pachuari. On January 20th, Pachauri was forced to publically apologize for a 2007 IPCC report which erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers would melt completely by 2035.

This week, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that the same IPCC report cites only two sources for its claims about the disappearance of mountain ice in the Andes and Alps. One source is an anecdotal article from a popular mountaineer magazine; the other is a Swiss geography student’s dissertation. Now Dr. Pachauri is being blasted in the press for permitting scholastic misconduct. He is also facing calls for his resignation.

Of course, in light of the release of Return to Almora, one can understand how Dr. Pachauri might be confused by the sudden fervent demand for factual accuracy. After all, novelists are encouraged to take creative license in their work—to expand upon the known and sacrifice truth to beauty.

Judging from Return to Almora’s first sex scene—which occurs on page 16, and which features a nubile “May” telling climate scientist “Sanjay” he is “absolutely superb after meditation”—I’d say it’s safe to assume Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has grown accustomed to embellishing fact with a little bit of fantasy.

My Two Cents on AmazonGate

by Marlo Lewis on January 27, 2010 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

Climategate, Himalayagate, Pachaurigate, and now NOAAgate — it’s hard to keep up with all the relevations and allegations buzzing around some of the biggest names in climate science.  

Earlier this week in the Telegraph, the intrepid James Delingpole debuted “Amazongate.” Like Himalayagate, this is a case in which the IPCC relied on a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, rather than a peer-reviewed scientific study, to make a scary claim about global warming.

The IPCC (Working Group II, Ch. 13, p. 596) says that, “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” due to global warming. The IPCC’s reference for this claim is Rowell and Moore (2000), which turns out to be an IUCN/WWF report, Global Review of Forest Fires.  

The IUCN/WWF report does cite a peer-reviewed study to support the 40% estimate: Nepsted et al. 1999. Large – scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire, Nature, Vol. 398, p. 505. The study is available here. 

But the Neptsed study doesn’t quite say what WWF suggests it does. The study says: “Because of the severe drought of 1997 and 1998, we calculate that approximately 270,000 km2 of Amazonian forest had completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil by the end of the 1998 dry season. In addition, 360,000 km2 of forest had less than 250mm of plant-available soil water left by this time . . .”

The IUCN/WWF report reproduces that statement almost verbatim:
“Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water left.”

However, IUCN/WWF’s paraphase adds something — the “up to 40%” estimate. That figure does not appear in Nepsted et al.

Since the Amazon rain forest is estimated at 8.2 million km2 (http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/), it would seem that about 8% (630,000 km2) of the region was threatened by the drought in 1998, not 40%.

Note also that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” do not appear in the text of the Nepsted study (although footnote 14 references a paper titled “Amazonian deforestation and regional climate change”).

Apparently, the IPCC recycled two claims in the IUCN/WWF report that the report’s supposed source – Nepsted et al. (1999) — did not make: namely, 40% of the rain forest is risk, and this is due to global climate change.

There may be other reasons to conclude that climate change endangers 40% of the rain forest, but they are not to be found in Nepsted et al. (1999) — the source for the IPCC’s source.

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