Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

  A new, peer reviewed study published in “Energy And Environment” comes to the conclusion that global temperatures have actually been dropping since 1986 .  This conclusion, at best, obliterates the claims that there is a global warming consensus. The  “Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend  –  1982-2006” study took satellite derived temperature data from 1986-2006 that was collected using a European satellite system which measures thermal infrared radiation (similar to those red to blue heat maps that weather.com uses.)  “The amazing finding of the present study is that we do not observe global warming in the period 1982-2006, but significant cooling. What could be the cause? The satellite data are from a reliable origin supported by the European meteorological community. Their accurate calibration has received due attention and efforts from Eumetsat. Our processing of these data has been simple and straight forward, involving only noon and midni...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an intergovernmental body, set up at the request of member governments. It was first established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly through Resolution 43/53. Its mission: "to provide comprehensive scientific assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity , its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences, and possible options for adapting to these consequences or mitigating the effects." Note carefully that the mission of the IPCC clearly states "climate change caused by human activity" as a foregone conclusion - before it even begins to do any scientific research! The chief characteristic which distinguishes a scientific method of i...

  UN? Here’s how to get your mojo back on global warming: (1) Stop holding sustainability conferences in the world’s most exotic locales, like Rio, and stop booking yourselves into five-star hotels on everybody else’s dime. People’s BS detectors are pretty much set on “high” all the time these days, given the beleaguered state of the global economy. When you preach that everyone else needs to adopt a more modest lifestyle while living high off the public teat and emitting enough greenhouse gases to choke a whale, you undercut your credibility. (2) Stop organizing conferences attended by 50,000 people. Seriously, 50,000? That’s a fuster cluck, not a meeting. (3) Stop pushing ways to make fossil fuels more expensive (through carbon taxes and the ineffective and corrupt cap-and-trade market in Europe) and start pushing ways to make renewable energy less expensive. The economics are simple. Tell people your entire plan for saving the planet means they have to go ...

On Tuesday the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center sent the University of Virginia and Michael Mann copies of 40 emails selected as examples of the 27 categories identified as benefitting from the Court’s review of UVA and Mann’s claims that emails in the taxpayer-funded school’s possession are properly subject to the specific exemptions under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). These categories range from discussions of professional retaliation against other scientists who challenged Mann’s work, to those sent to or from Mann from or copying an email account covered by other FOI laws, such as the federal Freedom of Information Act. The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct...

A recent Pew Center poll reveals some interesting statistics about who believes global warming is mostly because of human activity. There is a large partisan gap in views about the causes of global warming: 51% of Democrats and 40% of independents say the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. But only 19% of Republicans say rising temperatures are mostly attributable to human activity. Of course, if you add all these numbers up based on the percentage of the US population who are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, you find out that most people do not believe that global warming is mostly because of human activity. Remember, this question is not about just "solid evidence of global warming" -- we already know the earth has warmed and cooled for billions of years -- its about "do you believe the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity" . What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, one obvious one is ...

If you thought the University of East Anglia email dump from two years ago was revealing, put your drink down and take a deep breath. There’s a whole new dump of 5,000 emails and documents leaked by FOIA.org, and they are just as damning – and more so – than the first batch. James Watts has the best synopsis here . Here’s a teaser sample from Michael Mann: email 1680.txt date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400 from: “Michael E. Mann”.. subject: Re: Something not to pass on to: Phil Jones Phil, I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too. I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigat...

Global Warming Hysteria, at least in the USA, has really hit hard times. Maybe it is because global temperatures haven’t risen in a statistically significant manner for more than 12 years, despite increases in carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps the bad economy is such that even believers don’t want more downward pressure to stop warming that might never come. Or, perhaps the credibility of global warming has been generally lost due to constant dire warnings, trying to make every weather event into global warming, incorrect computer model projections, or whatever, people are just not into the old panic anymore. Or perhaps, it is those evil Koch Brothers and their astonishingly effective propaganda machine. Whatever, the hysteria seems to have run out of gas. Here’s a small but very telling example: Three years ago Pacific Gas and Electric offered its customers the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are by paying a little extra to fund carbon offsets. Well, the program is...

The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. Publicists at the United Nations, Al Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few “skeptics” remain – skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global warming emergency. It is evident that 31,487 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs, are not "a few." Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is evident that these 31,487 American scientists are not "skeptics." These scientists are instead convinced that the human-caused global war...

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty. - Nancy Reagan When I first heard the Al Gore crowd talk about carbon credits as a solution to our purported climate problems, the first thought I had was to create a carbon credit trading web site and make a lot of money. Then I thought about it some more and I got a sense that something didn't compute. When supposed leaders, both scientific and political, believe that buying and selling what they call carbon credits will help solve the global warming problem (if it actually is a problem), then it is time to stop and question the whole shebang. Here’s the deal, in case you are curious. Let's say that Al Gore, with his private jets, mansions, etc., is afraid that people might call him a hypocrite for telling them to stop burning so much fuel while he is jetting around burning humongous amounts of it. He can assuage his conscience by taking a small sum of his money and buying what are called carbon credi...

"Oops! Wrong hat..." -- Bullwinkle It's interesting to observe the global warming debate and how easy it seems to be for various proponents on one side or the other to replace science with emotion - to the point of virtual hysteria in some cases (see my post on Al Gore ). I remember when I was doing research for my Ph.D. thesis, my faculty mentor and professor, Dr. James Gould, would exhort me "not to give up, finish the job" -- mostly because the data collection process was so time consuming and lengthy, and consequently I would occasionally get discouraged at how much work it can be to put together a first rate dissertation. I was collecting daily solar radio output data from NOAA, and developing programs to do all kinds of mathematical calculations on same (FFT, autocorrelation, various filters such as stochastic and Kalman, etc.). In this collection and research process I became acutely aware of the effect of the Sun on earth's climate, weather, and eve...

"An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar for best documentary. According to the NY Daily News, fewer than 300 people were eligible to vote in the documentary category for the award. As most are aware, in his movie, Gore claims that production of carbon-dioxide from human energy use will cause devastating changes to the Earth’s atmosphere within 10 years. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reported that Gore’s 20-room mansion in Nashville, TN guzzles nearly 20 times the energy of the average American home. Gore, who took more than a month to concede his loss to President George W. Bush in the Presidential election of 2000, has spent the past year promoting his film, making frequent use of private jets. One cross-country flight in a private jet produces nearly double the amount of carbon dioxide produced by an average American in an entire year. I'm not saying other people, Republicans included, aren't just as hypocritical - but Gore's presence in the global warmi...