As the new badger cull shows, we revert to irrational destruction as soon as our economic interests are threatened.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 19th January 2010

There’s a story which almost all of us believe: that beyond a certain state of development, we re-learn a respect for nature. It is true that some of the excesses of the early modern age – attempts by gamekeepers to kill all competing species, mass slaughter by white hunters in the colonies, the grubbing up of hedgerows and ancient woodlands – have lessened, though we still eat endangered fish and buy timber from clearcut rainforest. It is also true that we give more money to conservation projects and spend more time watching wildlife films than we have ever done before. But as soon as we perceive that our economic interests are threatened, our war against nature resumes.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. The Welsh Assembly Government is celebrating the occasion by launching a project to exterminate the badger. I won’t pretend that this story ranks alongside the catastrophe in Haiti or the meltdown in Afghanistan, but it casts an interesting light on humanity’s continuing impulse to conquer nature, and shows how, even when cloaked in the language of science, our relations with the natural world are still governed by irrationality and superstition.

--------------

too right...

from Paul Shehan, SMH

Here are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.

1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.

2. The US President, Barack Obama, supports building nuclear power plants.

Last week, in his State of the Union address, he said: ''To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.''

3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce.

The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-capitalist diatribe drew a cheering ovation from thousands of left-wing ideologues.

4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is being investigated for financial irregularities, conflicts of interest and scientific distortion. He has already admitted publishing false data.

5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.

After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

8. The Kyoto Protocol has proved meaningless.

Global carbon emissions are significantly higher today than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced.

9. The United Nations global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.

10. Kevin Rudd's political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed.

------------------------

CRAP. Mr Shehan and you know better...

1. the polar bear population fluctuates. An increase over one year does no prove anything, and the species has been "protected" rather than shot on sight.

2. Obama supports nuclear energy. This is a stylistic decision that can be agreed or disagreed with as a proper solution to "global warming" but is an iffy solution to reduction of emission of CO2...

3. The Copenhagen conference descended into a farce. Don't we know that!!!. From the start, the imagery was over the top and the seriousness of the problem was swallowed by fanfares, buffoonery and politics.

4. The reputation of the chief scientist, etc. There is certainly some data that has not been up to standard. But this is only a tiny drop in a sea of solid research (and we need more of it, not less). That there is financial irregularities et al who knows?

5. Many who challenge global warming theory have an agenda to pursue. There are far more "distinguished" scientists on the side of global warming theory than those who support "emission of CO2 are harmless".

6. Bringing in DDT in this debate is a low blow. DDT is a killer of life, including humans and insects. More could be said here including in the statistical record but I will leave this for another day...

7. The biofuel has exacerbated world hunger. Yes it has.. AND WE KNEW IT WOULD. The biofuel is only a cheapskate solution to a major problem. But the world hunger of recent time was sparked by the 95 % failure of crops of rice in Australia, due to "non-seasonal" continuing persistent drought, probably due to increase in climatic extreme event associated with global warming...

8. The Kyoto Protocol has helped reduced emissions that would have gone far more gangbusters without its controls — as not ideal Kyoto Protocol is...

9. The targets are costly but not as costly as the possible rise in temperature. You ain't seen the bill yet.

10. Kevin's bluff is no more bluff than trying to give industry time to fiddle their books and reduce their carbon footprint in the long term. Malcolm knew the terms for industry were 'generous" enough. The Green lobby were horrified because it was seen (it was not) as a licence to pollute. The Liberals (with marching Abbott) believed it was a way to hammer Australian industries — which the ETS were not.

--------------------

 Beyond that all the guff about Lord Monckton is a bit glib and buffoonery like the man himself, although i liked the bit:

In 2007 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the former US vice-president Al Gore. The prize committee, in citing its selection of the IPCC, said: ''Through the IPCC … thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of [global] warming.''

Thousands of people were thus collectively and anonymously part of the prize process.

So what lie did Monckton tell about the prize? Despite the gravity of the accusation, the Herald never published the offending remark. Here, for the record, is what he actually said:

Monckton: ''I found out on the day of publication of the 2007 [IPCC report] that they'd multiplied, by 10, the observed contribution to sea-level rise of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. By 10! I got in touch with them and said, 'You will correct this.' And two days later, furtively, on the website, no publicity, they simply relabelled, recalculated and corrected the table they'd got wrong.''

---------------------

Now that the table is corrected (I'd suggest the committee wanted to make sure Lord Monckton was paying attention and would get him a Nobel Prize at the same time), we can get on with life and deal with global warming SERIOUSLY.

Remember the ice in the whisky conundrum. As the ice temperature goes up, it may not melt just yet. Remember the old fashioned non defrosting fridges. the less cold efficient they are, the more ice they cake up...

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott plans to meet high-profile controversial climate change sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton, who will be visiting Canberra over the next few days.

Mr Abbott's planned meeting with the sceptic, who has been on a speaking tour of Australia, comes as the Opposition Leader tries to sell his new climate change policy as an alternative to the Government's emissions trading scheme.

Debate over climate change between Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott dominated Parliament yesterday, with the issue high on the agenda for both sides at the start of the election year.

Mr Abbott has branded the Government's ETS as a "great big tax" while Mr Rudd counter-attacked by describing Mr Abbott's plan as a "con job" from a man who thinks climate change is "absolute crap."

Lord Monckton, a former journalist and political adviser to Margaret Thatcher, disputes the UN Climate Panel's findings that the planet is warming.

--------------------------

Hopefully, the good lord will self-erase before the pencilled meeting... But may our climate crappist monk, in a leap of non-duplicitous faith, realise that global warming need for solutions is a serious issue — not just a cheap vote catching exercise to be dismantled once the budgie smuggling is in the saddle. May the liberal senators, those with the small l in their board shorts, vote with the government on the ETS. Not the best solution in the world but nonetheless a start to tackle what is a very SERIOUS issue... see serious comments above....

According to provisional figures from the Met Office, the Britain's national weather service, January 2010 was the eighth coldest on record for the UK - the worst since 1987. A swath of northern Europe and parts of the US also experienced unseasonably cold temperatures.

And yet, explains Met Office research scientist David Parker, many areas, including large parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and Canada, had a warmer January than usual.

It's all an issue of different patterns affecting the weather. In the UK's case, the culprit is wind.

"It boils down entirely to which way the wind blows, especially for the first half of the month," says Mr Parker.

"The winds blew from the north and north east, created an area of coldness, which covered Europe and a lot of Siberia, relative to normal."

THE ANSWER
In the UK, the typical westerly flow across the Atlantic was "blocked", enabling cold surface winds from the north and northeast

Key to the block was a persistent trough on the Jet Stream above the UK, bringing air straight from the Arctic

Throughout the Tropics - half of the area of the globe - El Nino has caused a warm January

------------------

see toon at top.

Are these signs of "global warming"? In the global warming models, the western flow across the atlantic is likely to slow down with a slowing of the gulf stream, leading to cooling in the UK. And El Nino is likely to intensify cycles and strength. Presently the temperatures of eastern Australia are "warmer" on average by 2 degree C (my observtion). Soon see what the Aussie met bureau says...

The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.

The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November.

The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.

And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and "now established as largely man-made".

----------------------

We cannot afford to let public opinion rule on this issue. What is at stake is far more important. Depending on what we do, we could limit global warming at plus 2 degree C by 2100 (this is a tall order — bigger than what we realise considering all the factors against us. including population growth and our inate sense of "greed") or we can let a temperature creep upwards in the magnitude of 0.05 to 0.1 per annum. "This creep is not really much per annum" but over 90 years ahead of us, the compounded temperature creep will become catastrophic, yet not Armageddonish... Trust me.

with ridicule...

see there for transcripts of Media Watch... But so should all the media cooks be charged with ridicule — like the Miranda Devine and of all people Alan Jones... Alan usually blurts rightwing stuff and anti-socialist stuff yet he, himself, is very generous to causes and individuals who are down on their luck. Media-wise, he sometimes hits the mark, but more often does not. When he supports buffoons like Lord Monckton and his dippy-silliness against a very important and serious subject, Jones falls in the pits of crap and takes his audience moronically with him and glorifies himself as if he was doing a public service! Sad sad sad... And when the ABC also talks to the silly Lord as if he had something right to say, I say bollocks to all the presenters and their producers. The controversy is not worth the time, nor the discussion but since the media has chosen to laud the Lord of the silly stand up, we have to respond and drag him throught the tar pits and feather him...

I present you here with the full transcript of the ABC MediaWatch...

Alan Jones: I mean that rubbish program which is called Media Watch, and it is rubbish, and the people in charge of it are rubbish, and the researchers are rubbish... They're rubbish, and junk, have been and always will be, but then they run around sniffing, as I think Paul Keating once said, sniffing bicycle seats to see if they can find out a little bit of rubbish and grub on someone.

— Radio 2GB, The Alan Jones Show, 5th February, 2010

======

Sniffing bicycle seats? Alan, I think you're getting over-excited.

Welcome to Media Watch, 2010. I'm Jonathan Holmes.

And even before we got to air we managed to upset Mr Jones.

We had the temerity to ask if he was being paid for MC'ing the appearances of the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley - free market ideologue, professional controversialist, and debunker-in-chief of climate change science.

Well, we're happy to pass on to you the news that...


Alan Jones: No, we don't get paid for doing any of this. Pleased to do it as a public service to offer a viewpoint that has been denied... Freedom of speech? You're kidding aren't you? Our ABC? You are kidding.

— Radio 2GB, The Alan Jones Show, 5th February, 2010

=====

Lord Monckton himself had a rather different take on that:


Lord Monckton: ... in fact let's be fair to ABC they have in fact given me quite a lot of coverage around Australia...

— Radio 2GB, The Jason Morrison Drive Show, 3rd February, 2010

====

They have indeed...


Deborah Cameron: He's here on a paid lecture tour and he joins me this morning. Christopher Monckton, good morning.

— ABC Radio 702, Mornings with Deborah Cameron, 25th January, 2010


Virginia Trioli: He's in Australia on a month-long speaking tour and he joins us now. Lord Monckton, good morning. Thanks for joining us.

Lord Monckton: Good morning, Virginia.

— ABC2 News Breakfast, 1st February, 2010


Fran Kelly: Also joining us in the Breakfast studio this morning is Lord Christopher Monckton. Lord Monckton, good morning.

Lord Monckton: Good morning, Fran.

— ABC Radio National, Breakfast with Fran Kelly, 28th January, 2010


Tracy Bowden: You say you are not a scientist, you're a mathematician. Would it be fair to say you're also a showman?

Lord Monckton: I don't think that's for me to say. But if you give me an audience, the larger the better, I do enjoy myself.

— ABC 7.30 Report, 3rd February, 2010

And enjoy himself, he certainly has.

Adoring crowds have flocked to his lectures, and climate change sceptics on commercial talkback radio around the country have fawned on him ...


Michael Smith: Lord Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is in Brisbane today. I met with him with two lovely blokes...

— Radio 4BC, Drive with Michael Smith, 29th January, 2010


Jason Morrison: This man has had an enormous impact, again not that you would necessarily know it in the broader media...

— Radio 2GB,The Jason Morrison Drive Show, 3rd February, 2010


=====

You wouldn't know it? It's been hard to escape his Lordship, wherever you looked and whatever you listened to.

What's worried us is not that he's been given airtime, but that some of his most contentious statements have gone almost unchallenged in the Australian media.

For example:


Lord Monckton: I think the United Nations Climate Panel is now a busted flush. For instance, Rajendra Pachauri, its chairman, Sir John Houghton, its former chairman, and a number of other people associated with it, are now under formal criminal investigation in the United Kingdom for filing false accounts of a charity known as TERI Europe of which they are all trustees. For the last three years they have under-declared their income of that charity saying there was less than ten thousand pounds income each... We've now discovered they were getting income certainly in the millions and this wasn't being disclosed.

— Radio 2GB, The Alan Jones Show, 25th January, 2010

=====

Those are serious allegations to be throwing around.

But Sir John Houghton has told Media Watch:


I am not and have never been a Trustee of Teri Europe...
I have never received any money at all from Teri Europe...
I am writing to Lord Monckton demanding an apology and a public retraction of the libelous statements about me that he has broadcast.

— Email from Sir John Houghton to Media Watch, 5th February, 2010

Read Sir John Houghton’s response to Media Watch’s questions


It is true that, following complaints made by Lord Monckton among others, the UK Charity Commission has, it tells us...


...contacted the charity and its advisers for further information and are currently assessing this to determine the Commission's role.

— Response from Sarah Gibbs (Press Officer, UK Charity Commission) to Media Watch, 1st February, 2010

Read the UK Charity Commission’s response to Media Watch’s questions


That's it. Hardly a 'formal criminal investigation'.

According to TERI Europe:


Neither TERI Europe nor its trustees have received any complaint from the Charity Commission about its activities, let alone any allegation of criminal conduct.

— Response from TERI Europe to Media Watch, 5th February, 2010

Read TERI Europe’s response to Media Watch’s questions


=====

And then there are Monckton's attacks on global warming science. Few interviewers are equipped to challenge his pronouncements.

And even when opposing experts take him on, they find it hard to puncture his iron-clad self-confidence.


Lord Monckton: The Barrier Reef Authority has established that sea temperatures in the region of the reef have not changed at all over the last 30 years.

Jon Faine: Rupert?

Rupert Posner: That's simply not true, I mean...

Lord Monckton: I have the figures from the Barrier Reef Authority. I have their chart. I've got it in my slides. I'll be showing it at the ball room of the Sofitel Hotel at 5.30 in Melbourne today.

— ABC Radio 774, Mornings with Jon Faine, 1st February, 2010

=====

Well, we weren't at his Lordship's lecture, so we don't know what figures were on his slide.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says it doesn't measure sea temperatures itself, and doesn't know where his figures come from.

But its chief scientist says that what's important is the trend over the past century or so.


The peer reviewed science we rely on indicates that there has been an increase in ocean temperatures in the last 130 years and this significantly impacts on the health of corals in the Great Barrier Reef.

— Response from Dr David Wachenfeld, (Chief Scientist, Great Barrier Reef Authority Marine Park Authority) to Media Watch, 5th February, 2010

Read Dr David Wachenfeld’s response to Media Watch’s questions


And in fact the leading authority on the topic has sent us this chart which does show a recent rise in sea temperature.


View the chart '10-year average sea surface temperatures: Great Barrier Reef'


=====

The fact is, Monckton is a superb showman, and radio is not the forum for complex scientific argument.

So he's enjoyed a free ride, especially on commercial talkback radio. His hosts bleat about how sceptics are excluded from the mainstream. But do you think any champion of the majority scientific view on this crucial issue is given similar access to their listeners?

As Alan Jones would say, you are kidding.

------------------

Gus: see toon at top and believe me: CLIMATE WARMING IS REAL AND 99 % human made... And Jonathan Holmes, please note that Lord Monckton is a silly showman full of holes, and that radio IS a forum for complex scientific argument. This has been the case with Robyn Williams' "The Science Show" for 30 years or so... Cheers.

U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist’s version of sainthood: A vegetarianUnited Nations’ climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri’s resignation last week.

Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.

They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.

The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.

------------------

Gus: etc... When dealing with flux science — that is to say a science where the data is so huge and shifting within various potential — one has to be cautious. One can make some small errors of compilation and interpretation that could influence our conclusions. Climate change science is thus more difficult to compute than Gallileo's earth orbiting the sun... So the deniers are out in force, and like the pope during Galileo's pronouncements, claim heresy and poop on the bastards who want to stop us burning fossil fuels till hell comes on earth... That the earth rotates around the sun or vice versa has no bearing on economic activity, just on beliefs systems that can be tweaked with fairy dust to suit the new narrative.

However, when dealing with Global Warming Theory, the first part of the game is very costly (in terms of dollars) and strongly interferes with our greedy bent, while nature could not care less in the end game. So, many intelligent people will shy away from the comprehension of the obvious: There has been warming, there is warming and humanity is releasing emission of CO2 far in excess of what can be reabsorbed naturally. Any sane person in tune with the totality of the problem would start worrying like hell, because the computation — even with the margins of error factored in and correction of the various "mistakes" made in the collection of the data — point to a warming of about 6 degrees C by 2100 IF WE DO NOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

But we're not a majority of clever people either, we are a majority of Thomases and don't-ask-don't-know greedy people. And as science goes, the theory of global warming cannot give the "killer argument" that says a = b + c. It's more complex yet the resultant is scary. The Global Warming Theory is still in its infancy. Yet if we wait for the "killer argument" there is a good chance it will be TOO LATE. I know it will be too late.

The present modelling is very CONSERVATIVE in order to account for small errors of data collection and interpretation, yet the truer pointers show that the earth is warming faster that we can predict. As mentioned on this site before, a rise of 9 or 12 degrees C by 2100 is not out of the question. A rise of say 0.05 degree C per annum (on average) represents a rise of 5.5 degrees C over 90 years to 2100 (with compounding efect). a rise of say 0.06 degree C per annum over the same period lead to a rise of nearly 7 degrees C by 2100. A rise of say 0.1 degree C per annum can lead to a rise of 12 degrees C average IF WE DO NOT DO ANYTHING about it...

Open your eyes Mr Jones, you are in the box seat. The future of this planet could be in your hands — actually in your motor mouth. Take care... Look at the details and talk with the real chimate change theory scientists who presently despair at not being heard because the chattering noise from you, the jocks, and from some of the vociferous political animals is clamouring way above the sounds the proper scientists can ever make.

Stop trying to demonise the science of global warming by using loonies like Lord Monckton and the likes. You got sucked in didn't you? I am waisting my time, Am I not?

From the Guardian

Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of ­context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.

Elizabeth May, veteran head of the Canadian Green party, claims to have read all the emails and declared: "How dare the world's media fall into the trap set by ­contrarian propagandists without reading the whole set?"

If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies. Here are a few examples.

The most quoted soundbite in the affair comes from an email from Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Prof Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in 1999, in which he discussed using "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". The phrase has been widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising.

The Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post on 9 December, attacked the emailers as a "highly politicised scientific circle" who "manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures". She was joined by the Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who has for years used his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to campaign against climate scientists and to dismiss anthropogenic global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people". During the Copenhagen climate conference, which he attended on a Senate delegation, he referred to Jones's "hide the decline" quote and said: "Of course, he means hide the decline in temperatures."

This is nonsense. Given the year the email was written, 1999, it cannot be anything of the sort. At that time there was no suggestion of a decline in temperatures. The previous year was the warmest on record.

------------------

compute the ooflah from his silliness, the Lord of Monckton... see toon at top...

from the SMH

Visiting climate change denier Christopher Monckton experienced a very real global warming moment while seeking some relaxation at a remote township in South Australia's Flinders Ranges at the weekend. Australia's very own champion of climate change scepticism, Ian Plimer, had taken Monckton to see the rock formations at Arkaroola. In Plimer's words: ''That's where there are no phones, that's where he can't be pestered and that's where he can have a bit of a rest.'' Well, not quite, as it turned out. The pair happened upon a crew shooting director Jim Loach's feature film Oranges and Sunshine, starring Hugo WeavingDavid Wenham, who persuaded Monckton to take part in an impromptu variety show as part of their celebrations at the end of their shoot. Apparently Monckton agreed to recite a Gilbert and Sullivan number - in Latin, no less. But come show time, Monckton - who is not usually shy of an audience - was a no-show. ''We were informed by his wife that he had needed to retire early, with suspected heat stroke,'' the film's stills photographer, Matt Nettheim, told the Diary. and

----------------

Arkaroola is the place where most of the uranium for the Manhattan Project (first US atomic bombs) came from... It is a mountainous part of the flinders wedged in between two huge salt lakes, Lake Eyre (9690 square kilometres) and Lake Frome. It is a place of rugged rock, of dusty tracks and when it's hot, it can be stinking hot... but not as hot as say Marble Bar in Western Australia. In places like those one needs to be ready...

May the good Lord of Brenchley recover fully and come to his senses: global warming is real.

Temperature so far this summer in Australia have been at least 2 degrees C above average in the mid and southern regions, following a "spring" where temperature was about 4 degrees C above average and a winter with temperature at least 2 degrees C above average. Sure, one can say "it's a one off", but there are reasons to bet your last dollar that it's not and the process is part of the trend of rising temperatures due to global warming.

Peace and be prepared.

Good Lord!. I thought that Lord Monckton of Brenchley had a tendency to be moronic when talking about global warming but, after having watched the debate with Tim Lambert, I have come to believe Lord Monckton is a fraud and he knows it. He parades as a knowledgeable count (easy to make a Freudian slip on this one) expert — a "mathematician", who in all fairness appeared to be confused about statistics 101... He just blabbed nonsense con brio.

One of his grandiose argument relates to an event that happened 750 million years ago when the earth started to freeze — a big ice age that nearly covered the entire earth with ice according to the geological record. The process was fairly complex but in a nutshell, the good Lord has not even bothered to understand why this event happened and how it sorted itself out. Tim Lambert had no idea about that particular event thus did not know what to say, leaving the awful Lord smug as a pork pie with tomato sauce oozing from the top.

I must say here that my knowledge of this time was also sketchy. I am far more familiar with what happened from 570 million years ago onwards till today. So I went back to my reference books and the net.
I knew that life-forms in the oceans had MODIFIED the atmosphere quite a lot earlier than this — around 4 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. There was of course a continuum of this process but probably less pronounced after this. The event 750 million years ago would have been part of this process too, possibly with a very small trigger — say a period of low activity of the sun, who knows. But from present serious theoretical analysis, one has to say that the ice was most likely encouraged to form by an over-abundance of oxygen created by photosynthesis of CO2 — oxygen being a cooling gas in the greenhouse atmospheric equation... So the atmospheric "balance" was tipped towards cooling. But as anyone knows when freezing a fizzy cool drink, the CO2 is somewhat rejected by the ice forming in the bottle. And sea water contains a lot of CO2. Thus as ice was formed on the surface of the earth, vast amount of CO2, dissolved in the water, would have been be pushed into the atmosphere, leading to the Lord Monckton's clamouring there was a cool period and oodles of CO2 in the atmosphere... (300,000 ppm was his tooted figure). Thus, according to him, CO2 in the atmosphere does not equate global warming... Idiot.

What probably ended this ice age, 750 million years ago, was that excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, creating a global warming... Allowing for the melting oceans to reabsorb the CO2... Thus this warming was decelerated by less CO2 in the atmosphere... SEE, less CO2 less warming.. etc. and more oxygen being pumped up by new photosynthesis. Thus the warming being complexed by a lot of conflicting elements, but warming nonetheless...
If one does not understand these processes (simplified here) one is either a moron or a fraud.

But in this debate the moderator, Alan Jones, of course was leaning towards the awful Lord of Whatever... When the Lord and Tim agreed on a figure, Jones encouraged the Lord to argue vigourously against it.  Mr Jones...!!! Bias???

More of Lord Monckton arguments could be debunked here but I reserve those for another day.

And considering the level of questioning from the audience, one can despair that either the crowd was full of morons or they only picked the moronic questions... Argh...

Cheers. Peace

From Tim Lambert

Peter Gleick argues that global warming skeptics are practising pseudo-science because no matter how much evidence piles up for warming, their position does not change. John Quiggin says that the latest evidence ends the scientific debate. Evidence for this can be found at Backseat Driving , where Brian Schmidt finds that warming skeptics just won't put their money where their mouths are and bet against future warming when when offered odds.

Meanwhile the Australian has printed a rather silly article by Ian Plimer:

Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 per cent, and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving. Greenpeace, contrary to scientific data, implies a static planet. Even if the sea level rises by metres, it is probably cheaper to address this change than reconstruct the world's economies.

Plimer omits to mention that those huge changes took place over hundreds of millions of years and that while the planet kept evolving, that evolving involved mass extinctions of things like the dinosaurs. Living through a mass extinction is unlikely to be pleasant. Plimer also pretends that the other side in the debate is just Greenpeace rather than pretty well all the climate scientists.

For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such as climate change to human-induced carbon emissions is pseudo-science.

Again he pretends that the other side is just Greenpeace. This may be a bit too complicated for Plimer, but the existence of natural climate change does not disprove the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Nor is the huge amount of research on the attribution of recent climate change "pseudo-science".

Meanwhile, Tim Blair has continued to tout his law that "global warming protests invariably result in local colding". He apparently generalized this "law" from the case of Montreal where global warming protests were followed by a snowstorm on Dec 16 where it was warmer that the average for Dec 16. Oddly enough, Melbourne's walk against warming was followed by Melbourne's warmest December ever recorded, while Sydney's walk against warming was only followed by Sydney's second warmest December ever recorded and hottest New Year's day. Not to worry, Blair counted this as an example of his law as well.

ONCE upon a time there was an evil genius who was worse, far worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao or the Bogey Man.

His name was Joseph Fourier and in 1824 he came up with a way to make the world a Marxist slave state - which shows just how evil his genius was, given that Marx was only six years old. But Fourier was a long-term thinker. His wicked idea was to frighten the world's population into abdicating the democratic rights that almost nobody had at the time - to hand over the government of the world to Marxist demagogues in the distant future. Fourier would monger fear via some spurious claptrap called the Greenhouse Effect, another pseudo-scientific "theory" like evolution. And now, 186 years later, we're just hours away from it happening.

I'm grateful to Britain's Lord Monckton for alerting us to the plot. Here's how it came into being. In the beginning, Fourier persuaded a few fellow scientists to join him in engineering his scary plans. A Dr Frankenstein gave up his scary plan - of building monsters from dead bodies - as did Dr Jekyll, who'd been turning his own body into a monster. The three of them started faking evidence of the so-called "effect" and signing up other scientists willing to lie and dissemble. Soon there were hundreds of them all over the world producing hoax research; by the middle of the next century there were thousands of them and, today, tens of thousands! This is the biggest conspiracy in history - bigger even than George Bush's conspiracy to blow up the Twin Towers. All these scientists, in scores of disciplines, are joined in a vast web of deceit funded by gulled governments, naive corporations and ignorant universities to cause global panic. Praise the lord for Lord Monckton! For Ian Plimer! For Andrew Bolt!

--------------

Hey Phillip, fair go... we've been hiding this tongue-in-cheek conspiracy for more than 180 years and now you let the world know all about it! Struth!... Yes...! I admit, my tantrums are fraudulent and the good Lord Monckton is a saint sleuth... My beans are baked... See toon at top and read more of Phillip Adams... 

from someone who does not like Tim lambert's views

Lefty computing lecturer Tim Lambert thinks Professor of Geology Ian Plimer has produced a silly, deliberately misleading article on global warming for The Australian – Lambert's scared of me for some reason and bounces my links; copy and paste http://timlambert.org/2006/01/global-warming-roundup/ . It's obvious from the tone and content of Lambert's post that he has no respect for Plimer or his position on global warming.

...

Lambert's research focusses is in three areas: algorithms for the triangulation of planar straight line graphs; algorithms for 3d convex hulss; and, virtual reality. The latter explaining his detachment from non-virtual reality.

A quick Google led me to Wikipedia, the entry confirming Lambert's status as self-appointed fact-checker of international repute. But there's nothing about any qualifications related to the study of global warming. Interestingly, Wikipedia does not have an entry for Ian Plimer: maybe Lambert's right about this guy.

Despite not having a Wikipedia entry Plimer is something more than your garden variety academic:[etc]

-------------------

PLEASE NOTE: Tim Lambert wikipedia entry has been "deleted" and one entry for Plimer exists.

------------------

from wikipedia

Plimer is a director of three Australian mining companies: Ivanhoe,[4] CBH Resources[4] and Kefi Minerals.[5] In 2008 and 2009, Plimer earned over AU$400,000 from these interests, and he has mining shares and options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.[6] Plimer rejects claims of a conflict between his commercial mining interests and his view that man-made climate change is a myth.[4] Plimer has said that the proposed Australian carbon-trading scheme could decimate the Australian mining industry,[3] and probably destroy it totally,[7] as well as creating massive unemployment.[7]

Plimer is listed as an associate of the Institute of Public Affairs,[8][9] a free market think tank. In 2007, Plimer was listed as an "allied expert" for the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, a Canadian advocacy group that opposes the Kyoto Protocol.[10]

In November 2009, Plimer was named as a member of the academic advisory council for Nigel Lawson's global warming skeptic group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.[11]

Plimer is a life member of the Australian Skeptics.[12][13]

-----------------

From wikipedia

Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC (born 11 March 1932), is a British Conservative politician and journalist. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Blaby from 1974-92, and served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Margaret Thatcher from June 1983 to October 1989. He was made a life peer in 1992.

Lawson is the father of the food writer Nigella Lawson and the journalist Dominic Lawson.

-------------------

Please note that the "Australian Skeptics" (see Plimer wikipedia entry above) make no mention of global warming theory being wrong or right — as far as I can gather...

I ment to explain with clarity in this article the links in this "family" of sceptics (skeptics, who knows?) from Nigel Lawson, his progeniture (Dominic Lawson — I'm not an agent for MI5), in-laws (Rosa Monckton — Princess Diana's "confidante") and Lord Monckton (a puzzling man) and by association such as Ian Plimer... But on the sideline of this sceptic (skeptic) family, George Monbiot, cousin of Dominic Lawson (via the Salmons) stands like a defying beacon of sanity...

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.

'Bunker mentality'

Professor Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a "bunker mentality".

He said "sceptics" who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.

-------------------

Read more at the BBC and see toon at top and all articles below it. Please note I forgot to highlight the ramblings of Ian Plimer quoted in Tim Lambert's piece and some confusion may arise... But I'm sure you can work it out...

-----------------

On another level one can understand the data not being well organised. Climate change theory is a flux-science in which there would be INCOMPLETE data. There is an immense amount of data but also large amount of information we should have is not recorded or not even studied at this point in time. Thus one has to make educated statistical guesses akin to making predictions in a "Chaos Theory" situation in which a system changes and those changes influence the system AND change THE FACTORS that changes the system in the first place. There is resonance, interference and stable levels... All this is child's play for proper mathematicians but still amazingly complex to achieve certainty.

As there is still a lot to be known and quantified about the process of global warming and the sceptics (skeptics) play on the uncertainty of what is known and the lack of data in other area and the relationship of influences — and, like Lord Monckton, make some silly prediction of the reverse effect —such as going towards an ice age (old "prediction" made till the late 1940s by some people and proven wrong).

---------------

In Sydney presently the temperature today (25) is about 1 degree C below maximum average and will stay at that level for most of the day (although forecast to be 26). But the minimum temperature (22) for the day is about 4 degree C above minimum average. And a temperature of 24 degree C at say 9 AM is already 2 degree C above average for this time of the day. Thus although the day maximum temperature will be below (or on) average, the heat-energy of the day is far in excess of an average day for that time of the year. But a day does not make a trend, although the trend has been similar all summer so far, with a few really stinky hot days in between.

It has been my humble observation that usually in summer the dominant weather patterns are coldish wet southerlies alternating with clear hot inland-coming windy days. So far, the dominant weather has been stinky humid hot days (a few with rain but mostly dry) from the north interrupted from time to time by weak southerlies, warmer than "usual". To me, this could be an indication of a shift between subtropical and temperate boundaries, by about 400 kilometres southward, especially after a winter at least 2 degrees C above average and a "spring" 4 degrees C above average..

This by no means is a certainty of global warming and could be due to local conditions including the Eastern Australian current, that is presently (15/02/10) running at 25.7 degrees C along the coast of Sydney and dipping slightly to 25.1 degrees C at the NSW/Victoria border. This current still runs at 21 degrees C at the tip of Tasmania while Bass Straight temperatures hovering between 18 and 19 degrees C. Temperatures of sea surface of the Barrier reef are between 29 and 30.3 degrees C.

--------------

But the major trends are :

glaciers have been retreating fast in the last 100 years.

There has been warming on earth — 1999 being the warmest on record

Human activity has increased the level of CO2 by 39 per cent (Lord Monckton and Tim Lambert own figures) in the atmosphere — although still below 400 ppm.

There is still warming happening but the distribution of air masses, of continents and the seas shifts (hides) some of the patterns — remixing weather events where some will be colder than usual and others warmer than usual at the same time. For the Winter Olympics, snow had to be trucked in, as Vancouver has a "warmer" weather than usual at the moment.

There is a warming of the seas, contrary to the ludicrous claims from Lord Monckton.

Remember the changes in global warming are only incrementally small. WE NEED TO MONITOR more the process rather than rubbish the science of global warming. We owe our existence to the greenhouse effect. But too much heat will make things more uncomfortable for some, and quite disastrous for some of nature's "things".

An organised cyber-bullying campaign, including abusive emails, is targeting Australian climate scientists who speak out on climate change, according to author Clive Hamilton.

The 2009 Greens candidate says the attacks are arranged by "denialist organisations" and are aimed at driving climate scientists from the public debate.

Professor Hamilton says aggressive, abusive and sometimes threatening emails are being sent to distinguished scientists each time they speak out on the subject.

"Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features - it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated," he wrote in ABC's The Drum.

Professor Hamilton quotes an email received by University of Melbourne Professor David Karoly which compares the scientist's actions to those of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

"It is called treason and genocide," the email says.

"Oh, as a scientist, you have destroyed people's trust in my profession. You are a criminal. Lest we forget."

But some attacks are more personal.

Professor Hamilton says a young woman opened her email to receive threats against her children.

Meanwhile at the climate change front:

The Bureau of Meteorology says Western Australia will have had its hottest summer on record by the end of today.

Duty Forecaster Graham Oakley says Perth will have also recorded the equal hottest summer.

He says the Perth will hit a maximum of 35 degrees today.

Mr Oakley says it should cool down for the official start of autumn.

"We've got tops of 35 for Monday and Tuesday but Wednesday 32, Thursday 29 and Friday also 29 so gradually cooling down during the week," he said.

-------------------------

I won't be surprise if the same is announced for New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The temperatures in Sydney have been constantly higher than average this summer (my observation)...

Meanwhile in the US:

-------------------

Feb 27, 2010; 5:00 AM ET

A massive storm lashed the Northeast with flooding, damaging winds, and heavy wet snow. Angelica Campos takes a look at the storm.

-----------------

But the Washington Times comes to the rescue:

-----------------

Mr. Chu took great pains in a Feb. 19 speech to a Denver energy summit in arguing the case for human-induced climate change. "We have to convince all of America that this is a nonpartisan issue. ... This is our economic future," he said.

You have to feel for a man of science trying to make the jump to politics. In science, facts speak for themselves. In politics, facts are often run to ground by baloney. As energy secretary, Mr. Chu has traded fact for fiction and now spends his days selling President Obama's discredited climate-change policy.

Surely, Mr. Chu must be aware that the case for human-induced climate change, the cause that he has embraced as the paramount mission of his secretariat, has been exposed as fraught with fraud. Two weeks ago, Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' pre-eminent climate-change official, announced his resignation amid a groundswell of derision over his failure to confront the global-warming hoax.

---------------------

And  a hoax it is not. Believe me.

Climate change is real and does affect fifferent parts of the world in different ways, including "cooler" weather than usual (in fact the weather is not so much cooler but gets saturated with water vapour — possibly from higher evaporation due to warming, then cooled by dry cold air mixing into it — that lead to snow storms and heavy rain. One needs to know the Washington Times ws created by the Unification church leader Sun Myung Moon to promote conservative ideals (mostly republican) in Washington in opposition to the Washington Post, a paper than tends to be a bit more "liberal" (left).

But as we sweat it out here in Aussieland, France, Spain and Portugal are getting strong winter storm as well... Nothing like The Day After Tomorrow though... Professor whatisname and his snow rackets got it totally wrong — but for making a movie sake, who cares... More science fiction in that movie than in Star Wars...

But I digress, I was thus astonished that the Washington Times got this article published...  Are they trying to stir the possum? A conspiracy theory trying to blame dark right-wing elements for 9/11, unless they eventually pin this on the evil democrats?...

From the BBC

A number of ships, including ferries with thousands of passengers on board, have become stuck in ice in the Baltic Sea, officials say.

The vessels are grounded in the waters between Stockholm and the Aland Islands, Radio Sweden reports.

Many of the vessels are not likely to be freed for hours, Swedish maritime authorities were quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.

It is reportedly the worst Baltic freeze for 15 years.

Both Sweden and Finland have deployed ice breakers in the area to help the stranded vessels.

"The ice wouldn't usually be a problem for the merchant ships, the problem now is that it's very windy, about 20 metres per second," Jonas Lindvall, controller of the ice breaking unit at the Swedish maritime authorities, told Radio Sweden.

---------------------

A field day for the skeptichsshhts... See, it's cooling up there... Let them have their cake... but remind them that cooling of the UK and some of the nordic areas is predicted in global warming models... Meanwhile I would not be surprised if somewhere else on the planet, there is an event that shows there are turbulent unusual atmospheric activity such as big waves in the Med???...In the Med???

No possible natural phenomenon could have caused the huge rise in temperatures experienced in last half-century

The study updates a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans, such as an increasing amount of water vapour evaporating from the warmer oceans into the atmosphere and a corresponding increase in the saltiness of the sea.

"There is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic [man-made] factors," the scientists concluded in their study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Climate Change.

Scientific observations based on temperature recordings on every continent, as well as thermometer readings on, in and above the oceans, leave "little room for doubt" that the earth is warming, but trying to attribute a cause for this global warming is not possible unless man-made activity in the form of carbon dioxide emissions is taken into account, the scientists said.

The review, led by Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, found the "fingerprints" of human activity on many different aspects of climate change, including the overall warming of the Antarctic recently documented for the first time by other researchers.

-----------------

So whar are we going to do about it? Do we need to do something about it? Carefully read all climate change related articles in this site, including the line of comments above...

One of the effect of global warming is an increase of moisture in the atmosphere at certain times and certain places...: here are a few more watery disasters...

------------------

Two Britons were among dozens of tourists on a luxury Kenyan safari holiday to be airlifted to safety after their camp was hit by flash flooding.

Campers staying at the popular Samburu National Park in the north of the country were forced to clamber up trees or onto roofs as 4x4s were swept away.

The Royal Air Force and UK army, who train in the area, joined the rescue.

Hours of torrential rain caused the Uaso Nyiro River to burst its banks, submerging luxury lodges.

The floods also destroyed an important elephant research centre.

------------------

Five of Britain's rarest butterflies are on the road to extinction after three sodden summers in a row, the charity Butterfly Conservation reveals today.

Headed by the rapidly vanishing Duke of Burgundy, a small but very attractive insect whose wings are a lattice of marmalade-orange and black, the threatened species continued to plummet in numbers or remained at near rock bottom levels during the course of last summer.

----------------

The entire population of the southern Queensland town of St George may have to be evacuated later today ahead of what is expected to be the area's worst flood in more than 120 years.

The town's Balonne River is expected to peak at 14 metres, almost a metre higher than the 1890 flood level, later today.

The weather bureau is also warning more water could be on its way, as rain clouds move westward again over the weekend.

Authorities say up to 80 per cent of the homes in St George could be affected by floodwaters.

Premier Anna Bligh says helicopters have gone to St George for evacuations and to supply isolated properties.

"We have two helicopters on their way, we've got the SES on standby should they be needed," she said.

"Right now the people of St George are working systematically house by house, doorknocking and moving people to safer ground.

---------------------

And the "worst flood in 120 years" is at least one metre ABOVE the level of 1890...

Meanwhile the report from the scientists is worrying...

-------------------

"[Our paper looks at] not just the temperatures but also the reducing Arctic sea ice and it includes changing rainfall patterns and it includes the fact that the atmosphere is getting more humid.

"And all these different aspects of the climate system are adding up to a picture of the effects of a human influence on our climate."

Extreme events

The Met Office study said that it was harder to find a firm link between climate change and individual extreme weather conditions - even though models predicted that extreme events were more likely.

According to the report: "Extremes pose a particular challenge, since rare events are by definition, poorly sampled in the historical record and many challenges remain for robustly attributing regional changes in extreme events such as droughts, floods and hurricanes."

The Met Office study comes at a time when some have questioned the entire basis of climate science following recent controversies over the handling of research findings by the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Stott denies that the study has been published as part of a fight back by the climate research community.

"We started writing this paper a year ago. I think it's important to communicate to people what the science is showing and that's why I'm talking about this paper."

ABC chairman Maurice Newman has attacked the media for being too willing to accept the conventional wisdom on climate change.

In a speech to senior ABC staff this morning, Mr Newman said climate change was an example of "group think".

He says contrary views on climate change have not been tolerated and those who express them have been labelled and mocked.

"It's really been the question of what is wisdom and consensus rather than listening perhaps to other points of view that may be sceptical," he said.

But he believes the ABC has been more balanced than other media organisations when it comes to reporting on climate change.

"I think that we've listened to the words of sceptics as well as those who are scientists in the field," he said.

"Climate change is at the moment an emotional issue.

"But it really is the fundamental issue about the need to bring voices that have authority and are relevant to the particular issue to the attention of our audiences, so that they themselves can make decisions."

Mr Newman has doubts about climate change himself and says he is waiting for proof either way.

----------------------

He will wait a long time for proof...

Climate change is not an emotional issue. Climate change is a flux-science issue. Only those who want to dispute the evidence of warming of the planet make it an "emotional" issue.

The deniers make it very difficult for the proper science to come out, in the same way as the campaign that "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" issue was touted when we knew he did not have any.

The media played along with the UK, the USA and Australian governments porkie departments because it was sexy to go to war. Presently, the scientists of global warming are dispairing that their message is getting muddled, muzzled even, by a media too eager to "balance" a strong scientific point of view with the flat earth theorists arguments for the sake of biffo... Should we follow the concensus of the Scientologists for example, then the reality of anything is an agreement, not a fact...

But in fact, the statistics are there to indicate  — (there is no proof and there will be "no proof" even if by 2100 the temperature has gone through the roof, say 6 degree C higher than now) — there is warming and there will be more warming with more CO2 from human activity. Meanwhile nature does not care, It's only our comfort that will suffer badly, as well as that of many other species...

And as far as "conventional wisdom", climate change theory is far from being "conventional" and it is not "wisdom". Global warming is proper science, very difficult flux-science to boot, that needs to be pursued with vigour so we don't muck up the future — too much.

In response to the ABC chairman errant ways (read above)...

A deputy director of China's most powerful economic ministry has come out swinging against climate change denial.

Senior Chinese government figures have described the view that climate change is not man-made as an "extreme" stance which is out of step with mainstream thought.

The comments were made during China's annual sitting of the National People's Congress.

During the congress, a series of press conferences are held which, in many cases, are the only chance to put questions to members of China's power elite.

Last night, one such press conference was held on the subject of climate change.

The ABC asked the panel what they thought of the view that climate change had nothing to do with human activity and was in fact a natural phenomenon.

Xie Zhenhua, a deputy director at China's powerful economic ministry, the National Development and Reform Commission, answered that he believed that made-made climate change denial is, at best, a very marginal view.

"Climate change is a fact based on long-time observations by countries around the world," he said.

"There are two different views regarding the causes for global warming.

"The mainstream view is that climate change is caused by burning of fossil fuel in the course of industrialisation.

"There's a more extreme view which holds that human activity has only an imperceptible impact on the natural system."

He said the responsibility for this climate change rested squarely with the Western world, so the onus was on it to clean up the mess caused in the rush to industrialisation.

"The climate in China is warming. It's something every one of us can feel," he said.

-----------------------

I trust the Chinese more than I trust Mr Maurice Newman, (Chairman of the ABC) who may never have investigated properly the concept of "global warming" but blurts idiotic crap about "balance" reporting about it...

And as Wikipedia tells us:

Maurice Lionel Newman AC is the current Chairperson of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation[1], as well as former chair of the board of the Australian Stock Exchange[2]. He was Chancellor of Macquarie University[3]. until 2008

He is a close personal friend of past Australian Prime Minister John Howard[4].

The UN called in the world's top scientists today to review a report by its climate body, four months after public confidence in the science of global warming was shaken by the discovery of a mistake about the melting rates of Himalayan glaciers.

In an announcement at the UN in New York Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and Rajendra Pachauri, the much-criticised head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the InterAcademy Council, which represents 15 national academies of science, would conduct the independent review.

The announcement follows months of controversy which, while not altering the scientific consensus on climate change, has given fresh ammunition to opponents of action on global warming.

Pachauri has faced calls for his resignation, a controversy he acknowledged obliquely today. "We have received some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that and we are doing something about it," he said.

The review, which is to complete its work by August, will not undertake a dissection of the 2007 report, which has been pored over by climate sceptics, or re-examine the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, said Robert Dijksgraaf, the head of the InterAcademy Council.

"It will definitely not go over vast amounts of data," he told reporters. "Our goal will be to assure nations around the world that they will receive sound scientific advice on climate science."

Instead, he said it would focus on putting in place better quality control procedures for the next report, which is due in 2014.

---------------------

Since the crunch dates in Gus' estimates are 1996, 2015, 2032 and 2070 before 2111, the 2014 report will need another report within a couple of years after its publication, pronto.