Thursday, February 11, 2010

BrightSource Alters Solar Plant Plan to Address Concerns Over Desert Tortoise - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com
“Looking at this new proposal, it will not do anything to protect the desert tortoise and they won’t be able to generate as many megawatts,” said Gloria Smith, a senior attorney with the Sierra Club in San Francisco. “We still support this project but just want it to have a more beneficial footprint.”

The Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife have proposed that the power plant be relocated to land less suitable as desert tortoise habitat.
It's almost as if nobody really believes that this project will prevent our grandchildren from perishing in CO2-induced hellfire.

Have reporters “played poodle to their sources” on global warming? | CEJournal
...to equate the bloggers with science journalists — and even to argue that they did a better job at sussing out this story is ridiculous.
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The IPCC is about as primary a source as sources get. And so it was reasonable to consider it an authoritative source.
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...in retrospect, should journalists have been more skeptical and probing? No question.
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So I will admit that I’ve often wondered whether we get too close to our sources as science journalists. It’s only natural. I think many of us often feel more affinity to the scientists we cover than we do to our colleagues who cover other beats. So if some of us were slow to engage with Climategate, and if we have been reticent to question the IPCC process, I think it stems at least in part from this. But I’d rather it be this way than to emulate the unrelentingly cynical and negative orientation of political reporters.
EU Referendum: Downstream comment
Would I be wrong in thinking that it would help if as much energy went into researching the faults in the IPCC AR4 as went into commenting about the material that has already been produced?
Hot Air » Blog Archive » Gallup: Obama only up 2 over generic GOP candidate
In this poll, only 31% of independents would cast a vote for Obama today, while 45% say they will vote for a Republican alternative.
WWF concocts its own beautiful set of numbers | The Australian
The conservation group has for years been playing fast and loose with the facts
A Blizzard of Global-Warming Hype - Patrick J. Michaels - Planet Gore on National Review Online
The fact of the matter is that global warming simply hasn’t done a darned thing to Washington’s snow. The planet was nearly a degree (Celsius) cooler in 1899, when the previous record was set. If you plot out year-to-year snow around here, you’ll see no trend whatsoever through the entire history.

But of course, there are those who insist that it snowed more when they were little. That’s partially a matter of physical perspective, as 20 inches of snow on the ground looks a lot bigger to a three-foot child than to a six-foot adult. It’s also a matter of lack of historical perspective. The three winters from 1977 through 1979 are the coldest in the entire U.S. record, and 1979 included the third-ranking snowstorm, the so-called President’s Day Mess.

Did I mention that the popular press back then, including Time and Newsweek, did not hesitate to blame the storms on the climatic bogeyman of that era — global cooling?

1 comment:

Dr Norman Page said...

IPCC Scientific Malfeasance.
The entire IPCC evaluation process is flawed to the point of fraudulence. The Summary for Policymakers was finalised and published before the WG1 (Science) section. The editors of the latter were under implicit pressure and in some cases ,I believe explicit instructions to make the latter fit the former instead of the other way around as should have been the case.Where this was not done the conclusions of WG1 were simply ignored by the editors of the Summary. The most egregious case goes to the heart of and in fact destroys the entire AGW paradigm. The key part of the science is in section WG1 8.6 which deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:
"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC says that we dont even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway.
Nobody ever seems to read or quote the WG1 report- certainly not the compiler of the Summary. In spite of the WG1 8.6.4. conclusion the Summary says:
"The understanding of anthropogenic warming andcooling influences on climate has improved sincethe TAR, leading to very high confidence7 that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m–2 "
This statement is fraudulent on its face when compared to 8.6.4.
Those of us interested in objective science should try to see that the 8.6.4 conclusion gets as much exposure as possible. It deserves to be on the front page of the NY Times, The Guardian quoted by the BBC and read into the Congressional record in the USA.