Lord Stern- Scaremonger in chief?

Sunday telegraph Lord Stern, 'Scaremonger in chief', exposed by simple blunders How come "the world's leading expert on climate change" doesn't even know how much carbon dioxide there currently is in the air, wonders Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker Last Updated: 10:48PM BST 25 Apr 2009 Comments 51 Comment on this article Lord Stern predicts that global warming will make the Arctic an ideal habitat for alligators Confronted last week with the unfolding horror story of the Budget, we might have been grateful for the light relief provided by Lord Stern of Brentford, who told us how, unless we halt global warming, we can look forward to the sight of alligators gambolling at the North Pole, and Florida and Bangladesh sinking beneath the sea.
Since he produced the 570-page Stern Review in 2006, which Tony Blair described as a most important report on the future ever produced by this Government, this former Treasury official and chief economist to the World Bank has won extraordinary adulation. In the US Congress he is acclaimed as the worlds leading expert on climate change, vying with Al Gore to be the worlds Scaremonger-in-Chief.

Budget 2009: Government eyes end to higher rate tax relief for pensions Today Lord Stern is head of the LSE's Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, launched by a billionaire investment manager to advise on the fast-burgeoning global market in every kind of "low carbon technology", "emissions trading" and all the other growth areas associated with the climate change industry. Last week he was in the news for launching his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

Unsurprisingly, there is no one for whom Lord Stern has more contempt than those he calls the "deniers" of man-made global warming. He told The Daily Telegraph last week that they "look more and more like those who denied the association between HIV and Aids, or smoking and cancer". In his book, he criticises the media for giving any space at all to such people, when "the balance of logic and evidence is 99 per cent or more to one".
But for a man whose whole case rests on the damage supposedly being done to the planet by carbon dioxide, it was somewhat disconcerting to see him quoted as saying that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have now reached "430 parts per million [ppm]". He said exactly the same last year in an interview with Prospect. The actual level is 388.97 ppm. It may seem a tiny point, but one might have expected "the world's leading expert on climate change" to have a rather surer grasp of a fact so central to his case.

Similarly, one would not expect a man whose institute is claimed to be "a world-leader in low carbon technologies" to claim, as he does in his book, that by next year wind energy "is set to account for 8 per cent of electricity generation in the UK", when the current figure is scarcely 1 per cent; or that "wind accounted for 35 per cent of total installed power capacity in the US in 2007", when two minutes on the internet could have shown him that wind power that year generated less electricity in the US than a single large coal-fired power station.
In fact, when the Stern Review came out in 2006, predicting that global warming could soon account for the extinction of 40 per cent of all species of life on earth, far from being universally lauded it was savagely criticised by some of the very people who might have been expected to praise it his fellow economists. No one was more excoriatory than the man on whose work Lord Stern claimed to have based many of his most scarifying predictions, the noted Dutch economist Dr Richard Tol.

Far from being a global-warming sceptic, Dr Tol has played a key part in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and wrote the UN Handbook on Methods for Climate Change Impact Assessment. But he could not have been more withering about the way the Stern Review went out of its way to cherry pick the most alarming possible predictions about the impacts of climate change and then to exaggerate them still further. Where Tol had, for instance, given a range of costs up to $14 per ton of CO2, while saying that the actual cost was "likely to be substantially smaller", Stern had more than doubled his figure, to $29 a ton. Stern's report, Tol pronounced, could be "dismissed as alarmist and incompetent", and his doomsday prophecies were simply "preposterous". Yet this is the man, reverentially treated by the BBC, the media and politicians everywhere as "the world's leading expert on climate change" so lost in his apocalyptic dreams that he doesn't even know something so basic to his cause as how much CO2 there is in the air we breathe.


By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent Last Updated: 8:05PM BST 20 Apr 2009

Editor's note: Co2 at 388 ppm is at the lower scale. The world was at its lushest and most abundant at about 3 times that figure and in fact at 200ppm we would be in trouble. KP

Cost of Nottingham Declaration

CLIMATE TARGETS TO COST BRITISH FAMILIES £600 EVERY YEAR
Daily Mail, 22 April 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/Going-green-cost-families-600-year.html

By David Derbyshire

Tough new targets to tackle climate change will cost every household at least £600 a year, push more than a million people into poverty and send fuel bills soaring, experts warned yesterday.
The Chancellor announced the UK is to become the only country in the world to set legally binding 'carbon budgets' to combat global warming.

Under the scheme, ministers must slash Britain's greenhouse gas emissions by a third within the next 11 years - or face legal action and hefty fines.

The targets will be legally binding, even if every other country in the world continues to increase carbon emissions.

Critics said the targets, which include a drive to build more windfarms, would cost the economy £14billion a year by 2020 and would have only a negligible impact on climate change.
And green campaigners said the Government had squandered a chance to set
even tougher targets and help millions of households slash their fuel bills with improved energy efficiency.

The Government hopes it will set an example to other countries in the run-up to climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.

Environmental sceptic and author Bjorn Lomberg, of Copenhagen University, said: 'This is pure wishful thinking.

Green Budget: The Chancellor announced also announced £1 billion of funding for green initiatives and technologies, such as electric cars
'No country in the world has ever managed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by a third in just 11 years.

'It will cost billions of pounds and the net effect will be to reduce world temperatures by one-three thousandth of a degree by the end of the century.
'The financial crisis makes it even more unlikely that people will be willing to do this.'

The Government believes the bulk of the cuts can be made by improving energy efficiency, reducing petrol use and replacing gas and coal power stations with wind turbines.

However, its own advisers - the Committee on Climate Change - last year estimated the switch to a low-carbon economy would raise fuel bills, push more than 1.5million people into poverty and shrink the economy by around £14billion a year by 2020.

That is the equivalent of around £600 for every household.

FULL STORY at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/Going-green-cost-families-600-year.html

'Antarctic Ice is growing'

ANTARCTIC ICE GROWING, NOT MELTING AWAY

The Australian, 18 April 2009
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html

By Greg Roberts

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread style public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins
ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recentdecades".

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said. The melting of sea ice - fast ice and pack ice - does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica,
these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. "I don't think there's any doubt it is contributing to what we've seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica," he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

Copyright 2009, TA

Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

WE MUSTN'T WARM TO THIS MYTH

The Northern Echo, 14 April 2009
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/features/4288446.We_mustn___t_warm_to_t
his_myth/

Peter Mullen

EVERY totalitarian regime needs its defining myth. With the Nazis, it
was the "Aryan" fantasy of racial purity.

With the USSR, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. With
secularised, semi-pagan Western societies in historic decline, it is
global warming.

Sometimes comparisons among these are alarming. For example, Ed
Miliband, the climate change minister, has said that opposing wind farms is "socially unacceptable".

How long before global warming denial becomes an offence, like holocaust denial?

The Government seizes approvingly on outrageous remarks by such as Dr James Hansen, who wrote in a national newspaper: "The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death."

What I find bewildering is that the Greens, who claim to care for the environment, are so strongly in favour of wind farms, which are a kind of pollution of the countryside. What's more, they don't work very efficiently. So why ruin the countryside for the sake of obsessed
environmentalists' gesture politics?

Millions of British people enjoy our glorious countryside as a natural environment which provides an antidote to the stress of urban life. It is nothing short of wickedness to foul this delight with useless wind farms.

To their credit, some governments are coming to see the uselessness of the wind turbines.

Germany and Spain are losing their enthusiasm for wind power because, as reported by The Scientific Alliance, "...of the need to run back-up conventional power stations".

It is meteorologists and other scientists who point out that settled spells of either very hot or very cold weather - the weather that creates the greatest demand for electrical power - occur when there is no wind. So, when electricity demand is at its peak, wind turbines are static and produce nothing.

Global warming is not indisputable. Thousands of highly qualified and experienced scientists question it. But the problem is that global warming is not being treated as a theory, a possibility, but as a truth of nature on a par with the law of gravity. It is the unassailable myth of the new totalitarians.

I wouldn't want you to think this is just Mullen shooting from the hip. I have been avidly reading scientific papers and reports and, while there are those who believe global warming is taking place, there are thousands of reputable scientists who deny it.

This is entirely as it should be. Rigorous examination of hypotheses is the very basis of science. And this is what is being asked for by, among other intelligent sources, The Scientific Alliance. I quote: "The whole juggernaut of global warming is based on a framework which accepts the
International Panel on Climate Change's view of the enhanced greenhouse effect as indisputable truth. Hence the refusal to concede that any degree of scepticism or a different interpretation of evidence is legitimate.

So it is even more important for critical points to be raised and debate encouraged.

Scientific understanding will benefit from this: and the better the understanding, the better any necessary response can be formulated."

This is the reasonable approach and a long way from Ed Miliband's dark words about what is "socially acceptable" and the disgraceful invocation of "death trains".

Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London,
and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

Copyright 2009, TNE

And yes it is going that way too. Well said the good cleric. KP

Dr David Bellamy. Liverpool Daily Mail

Global warming theory has never been tested and is based on a series of computer models says Dr David Bellamy.

"Since 1998 there has been no rise in the average temperature of the world, although we pour 44 giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

"There are now three times more polar bears in the world than 20 years ago when I was working in the Arctic."

So come off it East Lindsey, dont play the gloople wombling scare card to ruin our lives.

The World has cooled: Predictable responses

THE WORLD HAS COOLED: PREDICTED RESPONSES me@davidwhitehouse.com
Although the data is not yet finalised, the WMO has said that the 2008 annual global temperature will be 0.31 deg C above the average, that is lower than the constant level seen since 2001. The world has cooled - it's official. There has now been ten consecutive and consistent data points less than the 1998 record.The press releases either do not mention the trend (Friends of Earth) or say, accurately, that 2008 is the tenth warmest year on record. However, none point out that this makes 2008 the first year for over a decade when the errors in the measurement overlap the errors in the measurement for 1980 which was before the current phase of global warming. The Met Office says the cool 2008 (and presumably 2007) was due to la Nina which although present has been declining in strength all year.Care must be taken when looking at Met Office press releases concerning global warming. On 4th Jan 2007 they said 2007 was to be the warmest year ever - it wasn't by a long way. On 14th Dec 2006 they said that 2006 was a year for the record books when 2006 was actually the 6th warmest year on record. To be fair it did say on 3rd Jan 2008 that 2008 would be in the top ten years which it is - barely. This very poor track record in prediction must be set alongside what Dr Peter Stott says in the Met Office's current release..."Comparing observations with the expected response to man-made and natural drivers of climate change it is shown that global temperature is now over 0.7 °C warmer than if humans were not altering the climate."It doesn't seem that the observations and the predicted response, as evidenced by the Met Office's track record, has been anything other than very poor.Dr Stott also says that the world is 0.7 deg C warmer than what it would be without man's activities. This is nonsense. Looking at their own graphs 2001-2008 is about 0.20 deg C at most above the level of the 1970s. Look for yourself, the link is here and here and here

The data for 2009 will be fascinating. Will the Met Office issue another

press release in January predicting that it will be another top ten year when there is no la Nina?...........Councillors to note.

Nottingham Declaration

The Odious and undemocratic Nottingham Declaration

Some 380 local Authorities, including Lincoln City, County, East & West Lindsey are signatories to the Nottingham Declaration. See Here. This ties them to a totally anti global warming agenda of policies. That there has been no global warming for ten years now and that CO2 is not a primary, only slightly a green house gas, how much is all this nonsense costing us the community? And what alternative science have any of our councillors bothered to read? Do they accept Al Gore and the economist Stern lemming like then? Are they being led by a tiny minority of, often un-elected liberal green elite? Did you think that you voted for a main political party or an independent at the last election? Think again. You got the liberal green Nottingham Declaration whatever your vote.


My concern is not about anything specific, like re-cycling, but so long as that decision and all others like it have been taken and passed on their own merit by our local councillors individually. Membership of this pact means that the Council has made a commitment to policy on virtually all issues which then removes its autonomy and curtails your authority by virtue of it. I find that very undemocratic and it means that the council is now hamstrung to an agenda that most of us did not vote for or even believe.

The carrot of course is tax payer funding via a company called Salix and the Carbon Trust.

But the questions I ask is: Why should the council have to sign away democracy to get funding and how many councillors voted to be hamstrung like this?

I think these are very fair questions from someone genuinely concerned about local democracy. My local East Lindsey councillor David Andrews didn't even acknowledge my concern but then he probably cannot manage anything more taxing than a blocked drain. Those that did acknowledge and promised to ask questions never did get back to me.

So if you find a wind-farm spoiling your Wolds, an estate of 'eco friendly affordable housing' on your doorstep, a reduction in your waste disposal allowance a rise in your rates, take it from me the Nottingham Declaration will have something to do with it.

WIND POWER IS A COMPLETE DISASTER

Financial Post, 8 April 2009
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx <http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx>

By Michael J. Trebilcock

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world's most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power's unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark's largest energy utilities) tells us that "wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions." The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that "Germany's CO2 emissions haven't been reduced by even a single gram," and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character. On the negative side of the environmental ledger are adverse impacts of industrial wind turbines on birdlife and other forms of wildlife, farm animals, wetlands and viewsheds.

FULL STORY at http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx <http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx>