Tag Archives: Carbon Emissions

Australia rejects cap and trade tax, New Zealand caught hiding the decline

Story from the UK Times. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Australia’s plan to be at the forefront of efforts in Copenhagen to tackle global warming has been torn to shreds after the Senate voted against carbon emission legislation.

The Government’s Bill was voted down 41 to 33 this morning at the end of a marathon debate. The defeat became inevitable yesterday when the main opposition party dumped its leader and replaced him with a climate change sceptic.

Tony Abbott, a right-wing maverick, ousted Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal leader, by one vote in a backroom ballot. He immediately vowed to oppose the Government’s proposed carbon emissions trading scheme Bill.

[…]“The last thing we should be doing is rushing through a great big new tax just so Mr Rudd can take a trophy to Copenhagen,” Mr Abbott said minutes after taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Earlier this week, I blogged about the new opposition leader Tony Abbott.

A good summary of the week’s climate news is here at Michelle Malkin‘s blog.

New Zealand may be hiding the decline, too

And finally, Watts Up With That is reporting about a conflict between New Zealand’s official climate data and the raw climate data. (H/T MandM, Evolution News)

Excerpt:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century… But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result… Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.

[…]There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

Here we go again! If you click through, just compare the first two graphs. The first graph is the official data, the second graph is the raw data. They are completely different because of the apparently unjustified “adjustments”.

Before Climategate, Steve McIntyre forced NASA to correct its data

Let’s reminisce about the previous Steve McIntyre triumph, when he force NASA’s eco-moonbat James Hansen to admit that there were errors in NASA’s data.

This Townhall.com article by Amanda Carpenter has an interview with McIntyre.

Here’s the story summary:

Despite the fact that NASA tried to block him from accessing U.S. temperature data, persistent efforts by a climate change blogger forced the government to amend U.S. temperature data.

Because of the blogger’s efforts, NASA now recognizes 1934 as the hottest year in U.S. history, not 1998.

[…]Now, the ten hottest years on record in the U.S., beginning with the hottest year, are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939. Before the revision, that list read: 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921, 1931, 1999, 1953, 2001, 1990 and 1938. The re-ranking completely knocked 2001 off the top 10 list.This U.S. temperature revision could cause problems for former Vice President Al Gore. Assisted by Hansen, Gore asserted in his global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” that nine of the ten hottest years in U.S. history occurred since 1995.

[…]According to McIntyre, when he began downloading data from NASA’s website to compare the adjusted and the raw data from the polling stations, “this led to a bit of a fight with NASA in May. As I started downloading the data in sequence they cut off my access to the data.”

“They blocked my IP address,” McIntyre said.

[…]“After I was blocked and I explained myself they still didn’t want to let me have access to the data,” McIntyre lamented.

He continued: “They just said go look at the original data. And I said no, I want to see the data you used. I know what the original data looks like. I want to see the data that you used. But one of the nice things about having a blog that gets a million and half hits a month is that I then was able to publicize this block in real-time and they very quickly withdrew their position and allowed me to have access.”

When he got the data, McIntyre then compared the raw and adjusted data sets for all 1200 U.S. weather stations. “Probably 75 percent of the stations had jumps of at least a quarter degree in the year 2000,” he said.

One of the people who comments here occasionally e-mailed me this week to chastise me in response to the leaked CRU e-mails by saying that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record occurred recently. So the true believers are undaunted by the discovery that this whole mess is fraudulent – they just keep right on having blind faith in the teeth of scientific evidence. They hate science and want to remain in the Dark Ages. This commenter also believes in an eternal universe, an unobservable multiverse, etc.

Indian and Canadian governments defiant against global warming alarmism

Story from the UK Guardian. (H/T Celestial Junk)

Excerpt:

Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, released the controversial report in Delhi, saying it would “challenge the conventional wisdom” about melting ice in the mountains.

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN agency which evaluates the risk from global warming, warned the glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner”.

Today Ramesh denied any such risk existed: “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers.” The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not “historically alarming”.

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”

Ramesh said he was prepared to take on “the doomsday scenarios of Al Gore and the IPCC”.

Jairam Ramesh has gone above and beyond the call of duty in denouncing global warming hysteria. He is from the Congress Party, and from Andhra Pradesh, the same state as YSR Reddy, who I wrote about before. The Congress Party recently passed income tax cuts and Ramesh is an economist.

And Canada is also skeptical of global warming alarmism

I notice that Joanne over at Blue Like You has a round-up of articles, and this quotation from the Conservative Party Environment Minister Jim Prentice:

…Canada will not sign any deal that doesn’t force India, China and Brazil to meet negotiated targets for their own greenhouse gas reductions — a demand that may well be rejected by those countries.

“These countries are responsible for 97 per cent of the growth in emissions,” he says. “Canadians don’t want us to sign on to something that obliges us to reduce emissions, but doesn’t impose obligations on principle emitters.”

So it’s not just India, it’s Canada, too, although Celestial Junk says that India is a lot more defiant than Canada.

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