By Bill McKibben

You Can’t Bargain About Global Warming with Chemistry and Physics
 

By John O'Sullivan

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The controversy over ‘Satellitegate’ heats up as NOAA faces a court appearance for refusing to release evidence that would show whether one or more US satellites exaggerated global warming temperatures.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal agency focused on reporting the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere. When the story first broke NOAA bizarrely announced it would withdraw satellite ‘images’ from its archives, but failed to state whether reams of cooked data had also been withdrawn.

An official US Government statement last July confirmed that the NOAA-16 earth orbiting satellite used to measure surface temperatures suffered failure due to a “degraded” sensor system. But skeptics now fear that because government climate scientists won’t answer any more questions or reveal the discredited data archives, they may be guilty of fraudulently cooking the books to show super boiling temperatures.

The story broke after an anonymous member of the public contacted a skeptic blog when he stumbled across thousands of alarming readings on a government website. The website showed thousands of surface temperatures of over 400 degrees fahrenheit. Dubbed [b]Satellitegate[/b] the shocking revelations proved that all such bogus data had been fed automatically into data banks that the US Government then sold all over the world.

By James Heiser   

Canadian scientists are learning the truth of the old maxim, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” While the general public and most scientists believe that science should be a search for truth, government ministers in Ottawa have a different notion. Since March, the role of Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Christian Paradis has become that of scientific gatekeeper. According to the Vancouver Sun:

The Harper government has tightened the muzzle on federal scientists, going so far as to control when and what they can say about floods at the end of the last ice age.

Andrew Montford

Foreword by Lord Turnbull

We have to take a self-critical view of what happened. Nothing ought to be swept
under the carpet. Some of the inquiries – like in the UK – did exactly the latter. They
blew an opportunity to restore trust.1
--Hans von Storch, Professor of Climatology, 2 August 2010

When in November 2009 a large archive of emails and files from the Climatic
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia appeared on the internet a
number of serious allegations were made including:

• that scientists at the CRU had failed to give a full and fair view to policy
makers and the IPCC of all the evidence available to them.

• that they deliberately obstructed access to data and methods to those
taking different viewpoints from themselves;

• that they failed to comply with FOI requirements;

• that they sought to influence the review panels of journals in order to prevent
rival scientific evidence from being published.

Even if only some of these accusations were substantiated the consequences
for the credibility of climate change science would be immense. This was at a
time when the international negotiations on climate change were foundering
(though not to the extent that they have done subsequently), and when, in
the recession, the public and businesses were beginning to question the costs
they were being asked to bear in order to achieve fundamental changes in
our society.

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Global Research, August 21, 2010

The debate is over! There is a consensus! The time for discussion has ended and the need for action is paramount!

We have all heard this before.

Yet it is important to keep in mind that these types of statements are inherently inimical to scientific inquiry; the debate and discussion should never be over. As new information surfaces, it should be taken into consideration, analyzed, discussed, debated and ultimately it will aid in the advancement of knowledge and scientific understanding. To declare the debate as over is to declare information and knowledge as irrelevant. Progress has never come from holding onto antiquated ideas. The attainment of knowledge does not come from the refusal to reflect. Climate change is no exception. In light of events of the past year, it has become clear that there was a concerted effort on the part of a small clique of elite scientists at the UN and in supporting institutions, governments and universities to concoct the climate change “consensus” to pressure governments and public opinion into supporting the political, economic and social agenda of elites.

Farmland threatened by rogue municipal council in Saanich
 

The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.....

"They never did an analysis that took into account what turns out to be the very real possibility of a serious spill," said Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has reviewed the documents....

BP's exploration plan for Lease 206, which calls the prospect of an oil spill "unlikely," stated that "no mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources."...

BP has lobbied the White House Council on Environmental Quality -- which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agencies-- to provide categorical exemptions more often. In an April 9 letter, BP America's senior federal affairs director, Margaret D. Laney, wrote to the council that such exemptions should be used in situations where environmental damage is likely to be "minimal or non-existent." An expansion in these waivers would help "avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays," she added.
 

[1] Time to Drill Down Into Halliburton's Role in Big Oil Spill
May 1, 2010 Huffington Post
Charlie Cray, Director of the Center for Corporate Policy

[2]  Halliburton's role in the oil spill
By RUSSELL GOLD And BEN CASSELMAN
Wall Street Journal

fyi-janet

Statement: Sierra Club Canada Reacts to the Climate Change Accountability Act, Bill C-311, Moving to Third Reading

by Rady Ananda

Global Research, January 3, 2010

In what is being described as the first ever and most comprehensive study of the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers have linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto’s GM maize.

All three varieties of GM corn, Mon 810, Mon 863 and NK 603, were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities. Made public by European authorities in 2005, Monsanto’s confidential raw data of its 2002 feeding trials on rats that these researchers analyzed is the same data, ironically, that was used to approve them in different parts of the world.

From the mainstream press we read, “As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria. ^[1]

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the leading Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee said, “Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked. Today I have been vindicated.”

The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) has essentially been rendered inactive, yet many of its key priorities such as energy integration were part of the agenda at the recent North American Leaders’ Summit held in Guadalajara, Mexico on Aug 9-10.  Environmental concerns are being used to further advance North American integration and the U.S., Canada and Mexico have committed to a more continental approach in combating climate change.

Bill Gates Patents a Device Aimed at Halting Hurricanes

The applications made public by the U.S. Patent Office last week describe floating devices that could reduce the strength of hurricanes by drawing warm water from the ocean’s surface and channeling it down to the depths through a long tube. A second tube would reverse the process and bring deep, cold water up to the surface.

Canada has fallen to last place in the latest G8 Climate Scorecard, after the United States moved up in the annual rankings based on recent climate initiatives announced by the Obama administration.