Protocole de Kyoto, fiasco 2009 Copenhagen... (Photo credit: Pierre Marcel)

Southeastern Georgia? (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)

FCC Open Meeting - Broadband Plan (Photo credit: wiredbike)

SHANKSVILLE, PA - SEPTEMBER 10: Ken Salazar, George W. Bush, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton, Jill Biden and Vice President Joe Biden walk along the Wall of Names at the Flight 93 Memorial, September 10, 2011 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The Flight 93 National Memorial was formally dedicated with Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Speaker of the House John Boehner and members of Congress in attendance. An estimated crowd of 5,000 watched as the memorial wall was unveiled with the names of the 40 passengers on the plane that crashed on September 11, 2001. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

English: Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Prize together with Al Gore, at a conference in Vienna, 22 June 2009. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MET Office (Photo credit: NguyenDai)

OZ To Loose Ministry Of Truth On Bloggers

Posted on March 3, 2012 by SOYLENT GREEN

I saw this first at Ozclimatesense, but the link is to Simon at ACM because he has created a new site to allow Aussies to fight this–while they still can…
They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!
While this super-regulatory agency is ostensibly designed to quash all anti-government policy speech, it is clearly aimed at climate skeptic blogs–and they really don’t like Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair…

4.33 One of the conclusions reached in the report was this: The two biggest News Ltd tabloids—the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph—have been so biased in their coverage that it is fair to say they ‘campaigned’ against the (CO2 Tax) policy rather than covered it.

Look out for our alien overlords in the FCC to make another similar move after the SCOAMF is re-elected.

Soylent Green new site

And leads off with pron

President “All Of The Above” Bans Oil Production in PETROLEUM Preserve

Not content to merely bankrupt the coal industry, His Wholly Reluctance has decided that all energy prices need to “necessarily skyrocket.”
To that end he has ordered his minion Ken Salazar to put 11 million acres specifically set aside by congress for oil production off-limits to…wait for it…oil production.

Salazar says his plan “will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives.” He added that the proposal will expand “safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that’s needed to bring supplies online.”

And what is he putting on federal land instead? You guessed it–Batshredders and Unicorn Fart Collectors.

The Interior Department set aside about 285,000 acres for commercial-scale solar in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The federal government will offer incentives for development, help facilitate access to existing or planned electric infrastructure and ease the permitting process in the 17 zones.

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it
Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict* future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

* The crystal ball has a crack in it. Wowsers. It's 'science', remember ? Bollocks. It's G.I.G.O. on steroids while busily violating Scientific Method.

The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996

At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.

.... according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert.

Treating ‘perfectly normal, degenerative changes in our spine as abnormal and painful conditions’ makes us anxious and fearful.
In turn, we treat our backs as fragile, delicate structures prone to damage and ‘require endless instructions on how to sit, stand, bend, work and lift’.
‘People also often misdiagnose themselves, or accept a mistaken diagnosis that attributes their back pain to an injury that occurred long ago that suddenly flares up again,’ he adds.
As a result of all this, we become anxious about our backs, says Sinfield. And that anxiety is creating what he calls Tension Related Pain (TRP).
This is where a slow accumulation of anxiety and stress over many months, even years, can cause the arrangement of muscles, nerves, tendons and ligaments to tighten and change — restricting blood and oxygen supply.
‘Muscles deprived of oxygen can build up deposits of lactic acid, triggering pain, spasm, tingling or numbness,’ he says, adding that this pain can easily be confused with the pain that caused the back problem in the first place.
All this prevents patients from recognising that pain is harmless muscle tension which, he says, can be dissipated through exercise (to stretch and build muscle, boosting blood and oxygen flow), relaxation and knowledge.
Knowledge means learning to stop worrying about your pain, and thinking about the impact of emotions on your health.
Unfortunately, he says, ‘as a result of the powerful and widespread misconception that backs are inherently fragile, most people will reject a diagnosis of TRP.
They refuse to believe their pain is not only from a physical cause and they fear a TRP diagnosis somehow reveals them as being emotionally weak.’
These views about the origins of back pain are controversial. But many experts agree that tension can exacerbate long-term pain, even if their explanation for why this happens differs from the one Sinfield proposes.

Heliogenic Climate Change

Trade war begins

Chinese government held off because it disapproves of the EU’s intention to regulate greenhouse emissions of foreign airlines operating to and from the 27-country bloc

Lewandowsky: ethical considerations for "moon landing denier" paper

The Freedom of Information documents received recently from the University of Western Australia (and discussed here) suggest that Prof Lewandowsky submitted a substantial amendment to an existing Ethics Committee ("EC") approval, which had already been used for one study, in order to use it for the now infamous "moon landing denier" paper (see here).
The amendment was approved by an administrative officer in the EC in less than 24 hours, and I currently have an email in to the head of UWA's Ethics Office with a number of questions regarding the conduct of the approval of the amendment. The text of the email is reproduced at the end of this post.
However, notwithstanding the above, I have spent a little time researching the Australian National Statement of Ethical Conduct in Human Research (which can be found here). The introduction provides some background to the Statement's purpose:

The purpose of this National Statement is to promote ethically good human research. Fulfilment of this purpose requires that participants be accorded the respect and protection that is due to them. It also involves the fostering of research that is of benefit to the community.
The National Statement is therefore designed to clarify the responsibilities of:

institutions and researchers for the ethical design, conduct and dissemination of results of human research; and

review bodies in the ethical review of research.

The National Statement will help them to meet their responsibilities: to identify issues of ethics that arise in the design, review and conduct of human research, to deliberate about those ethical issues, and to justify decisions about them.

.....
Does the research raise questions regarding "respect"? Given Prof Lewandowsky is on the record, well prior to the research being carried out, that he was of the opinion that climate scepticism was linked to far-fetched conspiracy theory ideation (see here), it could be argued that there was a substantial risk of humiliation or disrespectful treatment of participants, given that it may be argued that the intention of the research was to make that link - which in itself is objectively demeaning (either to the participants or a subset of the "wider community"). Even if it did not reach the threshold for "harm" could be regarded at least as a "discomfort".
The emails to "sceptical blogs" stated:

" … I am seeking your assistance with a web-based survey of attitudes towards climate science (and other sciences) and skepticism [sic]. The survey has been approved by the University's ethics committee and carries no risks for participants."

We will see what kind of approval the survey received in due course, no doubt.
What benefits did the research provide? Evidence that climate sceptics have a psychological inability to accept climate science, linked to an acceptance of wacky conspiracy theories? It would be easy to reach the conclusion that the purpose of the research was simply to confirm a belief already held and portray sceptics in a negative light, in order to make a political point.

Campaigns rise as carbon tax comes into play

Hat Tip Haunting the Library

Climate model output is now “data”

Both [Seth] Wenger [a fisheries researcher with Trout Unlimited in Boise] and [Dan] Isaak, a fisheries biologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Boise, were a part of a team of 11 scientists who said trout habitat could drop by 50 percent over the next 70 years because of a warming world. The paper, published Monday in the peer-reviewed science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, predicts native cutthroat habitat could decline by 58 percent.
The two men, who have devoted their lives to scientific research, say they depend on the scientific method and peer review to judge the quality of the research that underscores their findings. The climate predictions are based on 10 of the 20 climate models developed independently worldwide that all show the world is getting warmer.

AndyG55 says:

12/05/2011 at 1:31 am

Wasn’t there someone by the name of Jones, who commented in an email.. something like..” the problem is.. none of the models are correct” !
then.. ” Its only a model.. its doesn’t need to be correct”
That’s AGW for y’all !!!

Climate Depot

UK Met Office accused of Propaganda: 'Notice (Central England temp) graph begins just before 1780. Yet CET series actually began in 1659, so why did not Met show full graph?'

Campaigns rise as carbon tax comes into play

....protest against the carbon tax on the steps of state Parliament. Controversial broadcaster Alan Jones was joined by federal Liberal Victorian MPs, including Sophie Mirabella and Bruce Billson, to denounce the scheme.
Mr Jones said some businesses would collapse as they found themselves unable to remain competitive after passing the tax on.
He said Prime Minister Julia Gillard had shattered the public's faith in politics by backflipping on her pre-election pledge not to introduce the tax.

"What this one person has done ... is to diminish the image of parliament and politics in the eyes of the public," he said.
"The notion of global warming is a hoax, this is witchcraft.

CO2 Cannot Cause Any More "Global Warming"

These links;
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Saturated%20Greenhouse%20Effect%20Theory.pdf
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/01/13/ferenc-miskolczi%E2%80%99s-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-c02-cannot-cause-any-more-global-warming/
is a paper by Dr. Miklos Zogoni based on work done by Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi a Hungarian Physicist - SATURATED GREENHOUSE EFFECT THEORY - it is a brilliant piece of work that convincingly shows that the Earth's CO2 is automatically kept under control by natural processes involving mainly water vapour.
The conclusion is that, since the Earth’s temperature does not depend on our CO2 emissions in any way, trying to limit our emissions is bound to be entirely ineffective in protecting the climate from warming.
Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist, resigned from his post working with NASA because he was disgusted with the agency’s lack of scientific freedom. Miskolczi, who also presented his peer-reviewed findings at the conference, said he wanted to release his new research that showed "runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," but he claims NASA refused to allow him.

Solar Chord Science ( Book promo )

Frederick Bailey's innovative work of science (dubbed Solar Chord Science) very precisely explains all significant cycles of the past several hundred years and now presents as a reliable model for forecasting of forthcoming warming and cooling cycles of both global and regional impact.
Solar Chord Science is founded entirely on the fundamental principles of Solar System science defined by Isaac Newton in his Principia of 1687; Newton's brilliant analysis and discovery is even more relevant today than ever previously as the controversy over climate cycling continues. Were more within the formal scientific Establishments to revert to Newtonian science it is predictable the level of controversy would quickly recede.
Bailey's analysis has been positively reviewed by several leading scientists who have taken the time to study and understand it deeply. In 2007 Bailey co-authored a scientific paper, regarded by many peers as a classic work**, with Professors Will Alexander, David Bredenkamp, et al. The key principles in Bailey's Solar Chord science played a vital part in Alexander et al's research findings.
** Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource development - W J R Alexander, F Bailey, D B Bredenkamp, A van der Merwe and N Willemse. [Paper was originally published by Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering in June 2007 - a pdf copy is attached below]
Professor Alexander tendered this observation about his colleague Frederick Bailey's research -

Professor William Alexander, Professor Emeritus, University of Pretoria, South Africa

"For nearly two hundred years scientists have struggled to find explanations for the undoubted linkage between processes in the solar system, including the Sun itself, on our climate. Fred Bailey has studied the linkage and produced some new insights that are certain to advance our knowledge on this previously intractable problem - "Monumental"

Alexander, Bailey et al Paper (.PDF | 925K)

Climate Change Science

One of the goals of the Friends of Science Society is to educate the public through dissemination of relevant, balanced and objective technical information on the scientific merit of the Kyoto Protocol and the global warming issue. The science of climate change is complex. Unfortunately, politics and the media has affected the science. Climate research institutions know that they must present scary climate forecasts to receive continued funding - no crisis means no funding. The media presents stories of climate disaster to sell their products. Scientific research that suggests climate change is mostly natural does not receive much if any media coverage. These factors have caused the general public to be seriously misled on climate issues resulting in wasteful expenditures of billions of dollars in an ineffective attempt to control climate. This document gives an overview of climate change issues as determined by a comprehensive review of the state of climate science.