Tag Archives: Scientific Method

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Chairman of UN’s IPCC used bogus claims to grab global warming cash

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Story from the UK Times. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

What about Syed Hasnain, who was the source of the now discredited claim?

The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

He now heads Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

Last week’s story about Himalayan glaciers is here.

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MUST-READ: UN IPCC claim of Himalayan glaciers melting revealed to be a hoax

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Story from the UK Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

There was no research backing a pronouncement of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. No research. And yet this was pronounced as dogma by the Holy Church of the United Nations. Because they believe what they want to believe, and their whole agenda is to hide the decline in order to get more research grants and greater control over businesses and individuals. This is the politicization of science. Science guided by big government research grants and academic peer pressure.

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Does global warming increase the frequency of hurricanes?

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Story by Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine. (H/T ECM)

Do greenhouse gases corelate with increases in hurricane frequency?

Here’s the data we have today:

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote a paper to demonstrate that hurricane frequency was independent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society… that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

How did the global warmists at the IPCC respond to Pielke’s paper?

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke’s paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there’s been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was “unequivocal” and things were “apt to get much worse.” And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke’s Bulletin article was “shameful” and should be “withdrawn.”

My recommendation is to test everything by watching debates. Unless you hear both sides in a debate, you just can’t have any degree of confidence about what is really true. Be wary of people who say that “the debate is over” or that “everyone agrees” or that “there is no case on the other side”. That’s how people lie. Find the two best people you can on either side and watch them duke it out. A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.