The dam is cracking

by admin on January 27, 2010

Andrew Neil | 09:42 UK time, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures — and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas.

The dam began to crack towards the end of last year when leaked e-mails from one of the temples of global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, suggested that a few sleights of hand were being deployed to hide facts inconvenient to the global warming case. An official investigation into these e-mails is on-going.

But the flood gates really opened after theIPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole.

The truth, as seen by India’s leading expert in glaciers, is that “Himalayan glaciers have not in anyway exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.”

So the 40% of the world’s population that relies on the seven major river systems supplied by these glaciers can sleep a little more soundly in the knowledge that their water won’t run out in 25 years after all.

himalayan.jpgThen at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

The author, who didn’t actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his research, has now repudiated what he sees has its misuse of his work.

His conclusion: “There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss.”

Yet it was because of this — now unproved — link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes.

It was also central to many of the calculations in Britain’s Stern Report, which might now need to be substantially revised.

Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate — how many “gates” can one report contain? — comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

The WWF has yet to provide any scientific evidence that 40% of the Amazon is threatened by climate change — as opposed to the relentless work of loggers and expansion of farms.

Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that “2,500 scientists can’t be wrong”, referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus.

But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists.

They may — or may not — still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from “settled” and that there are important questions still to ask. The mainstream media has been slow to do this.

The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops — and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

Rajendra Pachauri says he will not resign – BBC News (26 January)

The sceptics may be about to get their first scalp. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairmanoften wrongly described in the media as the world’s leading climate scientist (he’s actually a railway engineer), at first attacked those who questioned the IPCC’s alarming glacier prediction as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science”.

He’s since had to retract the prediction but can’t quite manage an apology — and is now under mounting pressure in his Indian homeland to resign.

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EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study

by admin on January 27, 2010

William Yeatman

GlobalWarming.org
January 27, 2010

The Competitive Enterprise Institute today charged that a senior official of the U.S. Environment Protection Agency actively suppressed a scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

As part of a just-ended public comment period, CEI submitted a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position was put under wraps and concealed.

The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current “endangerment” proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.

“This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”

CEI’s filing requests that EPA make the suppressed study public, place it into the endangerment docket, and extend the comment period to allow public response to the new information. CEI is also requesting that EPA publicly declare that it will engage in no reprisals against the study’s author, a senior analyst who has worked at EPA for over 35 year

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JANUARY 26, 2010 · 18 COMMENTS

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy

Further damning revelations are pouring in from the gaping wound that has inflicted the fast unraveling theory of the green monster that is man made global warming.As reported today by By Marc Morano of Climate Depot, Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has split ranks with other members of the discredited “hockey team” of climatologists exposed for fraudulently hiding and destroying data in the Climategate scandal that broke on November 19, 2009.

Christy served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed in these new revelations heexplains how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the sciencefor political purposes. But he fell from favour for proposing that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for low climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007.

Christy’s statements carry even more weight when we examine the considerable pressure also being applied to him to keep quiet about the cracks appearing in the dodgy science dossiers being churned out for the IPCC. We get an insight into the conspiracy of secrecy Christy was opposing as he is one of the climatologists whose leaked emails are part of the Climategate scandal.

In the leaked CRU email dated Thu, 24 May 2001 11:33, Michael Mann was critical of Christy and scolded him for publicly showing dissent for not agreeing with Mann that 20th century temperatures were higher than the Medieval warm period:

“So do I [Mann] understand correctly that you are referring to the results of Dahl-Jensen et al as conflicting with what we say in the chapter? At the face of it, this argument has no merit whatsoever. I think we should all use a better explanation from you, since you seem to be arguing publically that the Dahl-Jensen et al record undermines what we’ve said in the chapter.”

Professor Phil Jones again tries to indicate the peer pressure they are all under not to make public admissions damaging to their ever more flawed theory in an email sent to Christy dated Tue Jul 5, 2005;

“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

The unrelenting peer pressure being applied to Christy continues, this time coming from Michael Mann. Climatologists, Neville Nichols and Phil Jones discuss the issue in another leaked CRU email dated Wed Jul 6 15:07:45 2005.

“I know I [Nichols] could have asked John [Christy] about all of this, but I suspect he feels a bit over-burdened and harassed at the moment, and I didn’t want to add to the pressure on him, so thanks for passing this stuff on to me.”

Further emails substantiate that the “hockey team” were systematically applying peer pressure to convince Christy that recent weather balloon data (out of kilt with dodgy ground thermometer readings) was, itself in error.

Phil Jones admits, “the sondes [weather balloons] clearly show too much cooling in the stratosphere.”

The fact weather balloons were detecting cooling rather than warming in the tropical stratosphere was a key signal that the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming was probably wrong. Thus, to avoid embarrassment the “hockey team” rounded on Christy to conspire to suppress these facts.

Professor Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces “a document designed for uniformity and consensus.” Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. “An alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed,” Christy said. “If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required,” he added. ‘The reception to my comments was especially cold’

Read the rest of the story at Climate Depot.

John O’Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated in government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain. Visit his website. He offers his services free to the site and is not a site employee. Any opinions he expresses are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the site owner.

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Haiti and the Seismic Weapon

by admin on January 27, 2010

Thierry Meyssan

Voltaire Network
January 27, 2010

The controversy that followed the publication on our website of an article entertaining the possibility that the earthquake in Haiti was caused artificially, calls for clarification. Yes, seismic weapons do exist and the United States, among others, have them. Yes, the U.S. military forces were pre-positionned to be deployed to the island. These facts are not conclusive in themselves but they certainly warrant heightened scrutiny into this matter.

In publishing “Was the earthquake in Haiti caused by the United States”, our purpose was to bring out an issue that is stirring military and media circles in several countries, but which is being ignored in others [1]. What matters here is not to take a stand. In keeping with our approach, though often misunderstood, we maintain that it is impossible to have a good grasp of international relations without studying what the leaders of this planet are thinking.

Prevailing conformity has led to a situation where, while no one is ruffled when we report on contentious issues kindling in Washington, a general outcry is fueled when the controversy stems from a non-aligned country. It would appear that Europeans have a preconceived opinion that only “western” concerns are pertinent while all the others should not be taken seriously.

One of our collaborators attempted to trace the origin of the allegation regarding the possible artificial causes of the earthquake in Haiti. He was concerned that the whole thing might have been a hoax launched by a certain David Booth (alias Sorcha Faal), which then penetrated government circles throughout the world. In the end, we are not sure exactly who is behind the allegation, but what we know for certain is that this issue is being heatedly discussed at the highest level in several countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

As editor-in-chief of Voltaire Network, I made the decision to research and translate the dispatch fromVivéTv, which had been disseminated as a communiqué on the website of the Communications Ministry of Venezuela, and to publish it together with the related video from Russia Today, preceded by the remark: “Oddly enough, the Venezuelan channel designates the Russian Army as the source of these claims whereas the Russian channel attributes them to President Chávez.”

While these elements were faithfully relayed by numerous newspapers, especially in the Middle East, they were distorted by the Atlanticist media which chose to reflect Sorcha Faal’s article. Faal pulled certain fragments from the VivéTv text, and by adding inverted commas put them into Hugo Chávez’s mouth. What was initially intended as a working hypothesis has been converted into the Government’s position. Some of these media outlets went so far as to completely fabricate the context in which President Chávez expressed himself, pointedly implying that the President and his audience suffer from acute anti-american frenzy and that Voltaire Network shares the same ailment.

But instead of yielding to this manipulation, let us go deeper into this hypothesis.

How much do we know about seismic weapons at present ?

During the Second World War, a group of New Zealand researchers attempted to develop a device capable of provoking tsunamis that could be unleashed against Japan. The research work was conducted by Thomas Leech, an Australian national, at Auckland University behind the code name of “Project Seal”. Several small-scale test explosions were carried out successfully, between 1944 and 1945, at Whangaparaoa off the coast of Auckland.

The United States deemed this programme to be as equally promising as the “Manhattan Project”, involving the development of the atomic bomb, and appointed Dr. Karl T. Compton to maintain the liaison between the two research units. Compton was an American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1930 to 1948.

The work started by Thomas Leech was pursued during the Cold War. In 1947, King George VI elevated him to the rank of Knight of the British Empire for his role in the elaboration of this new weapon. At the time, Project Seal was still a military secret and it was therefore not disclosed that Thomas Leech had in fact been rewarded for concocting the “tsunami bomb”. Subsequently, the US intelligence services covered it up by claiming that the research had never really existed and that the whole thing had been an artifice to impress the Soviets. However, the authenticity of Leech’s tests was established in 1999, when the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs declassified part of the documentation. The research studies are officially back on track and taking place at the University of Waikato. [2]

Officially, at the end of the Vietnam War, the United States and the Soviet Union gave up environmental wars (earthquakes, tsunamis, environmental balance destabilization, atmospheric modification – clouds, rain, cyclones, tornadoes -, modification of the climate, ocean currents, the ozone layer and the ionosphere) upon signing the 1976 “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques”.It is not known whether the research undertaken by the Anglo-Saxons continued during the 60’s, but it was resumed by force of circumstances when atmospheric nuclear tests were abandoned in favour of sub-marine tests. The United States were afraid of provoking earthquakes and tsunamis unintentionally. They preferred to learn how to do it intentionally.

Nevertheless, in 1975, the USSR embarked on a new research, this time in the field of Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) for the purpose of studying the earth’s crust and be able to anticipate earthquakes. The Soviets examined the possibility of provoking small quakes in order to forestall a big one. This research was quickly militarized and resulted in the construction of Pamir, the earthquake machine.

After the dismemberment of the USSR, those in charge of this programme decided to go to the United States for lure of money, but the Pentagon refused to pay them since their research was incomplete. In 1995, when Russia was governed by Boris Yeltsin and oligarch Viktor Chernomyrdin, the US Air Force recruited the researchers working at their Nizhny Novgorod laboratory. They built a much more powerful machine, Pamir 3, that was tested successfully. At that point, the Pentagon bought the men together with the material and shipped them to the United States, where they were incorporated into the HAARP programme.

Various instances where the seismic weapon might have been employed have been contemplated, especially in Algeria and Turkey. However, the most discussed one is the 12 May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan (China). During the 30 minutes that preceded the earthquake, the inhabitants of the region observed atypical colours in the sky. While some interpreted these events as a sign that the sky was repudiating the Communist Party, others reacted in a more rational way. The same energy used to provoke the earthquake is also likely to have perturbed the ionosphere.

Back to Haiti

Nothing distinguishes an artificial earthquake from a natural one; this being said, they have the knowhow to induce only superficial earthquakes, like the one in Haiti.

What is particularly disturbing is the reaction of the United States. While the Western media are immersed in a controversy over the violation of Haiti’s sovereignty, the Latin American media are perplexed about the swiftness of GI deployment: as of the first day, more than 10000 soldiers and contractors arrived in Haiti. This logistical feat can be easily explained since these troops were already pre-positioned in the context of a military exercise. Under the orders of General P.K. Keen, Military Deputy Commander of U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), they took part in an excercise simulating a humanitarian operation in Haiti after a hurricane. Keen and his staff had arrived a few days earlier. At the precise moment that the earth shook, they were already sheltered in the US Embassy, built in compliance with anti-earthquake norms; only two men who were not at the Embassy but at the Hotel Montana have been reported injured.

General Keen has granted several interviews to the US media, which has provided ample coverage mainly focusing on the relief operations. While Keen’s presence in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake has been referred to several times, the reasons for his presence were never mentioned.

Among the objectives of the military exercise was the application of a new software enabling the NGOs and the armed forces to coordinate their humanitarian efforts. In the few minutes that followed the catastrophe, the software was put on line and 280 NGOs readily signed up.

It is legitimate to question whether such coincidences are simply due to chance.

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By Michael Casey (CP) – 1 day ago

BANGKOK, Thailand — Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but rose to power thanks to big business leaders and other supporters who appreciated his vow to destroy communism and control workers, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone said Monday.

Stone, who is working on a 10-part documentary on the 20th century titled “The Secret History of the United States,” said the German dictator was “enabled by Western bankers” and managed to “seduce” Germany’s military industrial complex.

“Hitler is a monster. There is no question. I have no empathy for Hitler at all. He was a crazy psychopath,” Stone told reporters in the Thai capital. “But like Frankenstein was a monster, there was a Dr. Frankenstein. He is product of his era.”

Stone was in Bangkok to give a lecture to high school students on the role of film in peace-building as part of a visit organized by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation.

He said the aim of his documentary, which two historians are helping him with, was to offer a fuller understanding of the 20th century and how some of those lessons may be relevant to President Barack Obama in 2010.

“What has America become? How can we in America not learn from Germany in the 1930s,” the Oscar-winning director asked.

Earlier in the day, Stone told about 300 students that his 1991 movie “JFK,” was his most controversial to date and that the United States remains in denial over the possibility that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald could have assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Stone said exploring alternative theories over the JFK assassination remains too sensitive for those in the media or academia who “would be endangering their careers and their position.”

“To this day, many key Americans in power are in total denial about this story,” Stone said. “They don’t even want to know about the possibility that he was killed by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. It is a national fairy tale.”

“JFK” ridicules the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone and suggests a massive conspiracy.

Stone’s film centred on a theory by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that a CIA-led mutiny killed the president and the plotters walked away unscathed. Garrison’s theories went to court in 1967, but Clay Shaw, the alleged “evil genius” behind the assassination, was acquitted.

Stone said Monday he thought it was “a good thing” to revisit the JFK assassination. But he came under fire from the historians and film reviewers who contended Stone had fudged facts, invented characters and elevated speculation to truth to support his burning belief that the killing was a high-level government conspiracy.

“It’s an amazing story and I did it,” Stone said. “I thought I would be respected for it, and I was lambasted in the establishment press. I was called a myth-maker, a propagandist. I didn’t see it coming. I thought the Kennedy murder was safe.”

Stone is famous for several other movies, including the Vietnam War films “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Platoon,” which won four Oscars, including best picture and best director.

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More Claims of Data Rigging Emerge

by admin on January 25, 2010

Scientists using selective temperature data,

skeptics say

A weather research laboratory located on Ellesmere Island at Eureka, Nunavut.

A weather research laboratory located on Ellesmere Island at Eureka, Nunavut.

Photograph by: James R. Drummond/Dalhousie University/Handout,

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Yet as American researchers Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses “just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees.”

Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.

Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”

Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia — a high-altitude, landlocked country — but instead “interpolates” or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from “nearby” temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.

Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue.

This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

The revelations come only two months after the “climategate” scandal, in which the leak or theft of thousands of e-mails — private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain — showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other, contrary-minded researchers.

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UN Scientists Admit Using Unverified Data

by admin on January 25, 2010

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified

By DAVID ROSE
Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Glacier

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.

Raj Pachauri

Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri

‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.

Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.


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THE NEW CLIMATE CHANGE SCANDAL


Glacier melt claims were ’speculation’Monday January 18,2010

By Anil Dawar



FRESH doubts were cast over controversial global warming theories yesterday after a major climate change argument was discredited.

Story Image

The International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed up by research.

It was also revealed that the IPCC’s controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, described as “the world’s top climate scientist”, is a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics and no formal climate science qualifications.

Dr Pachauri was yesterday accused of a conflict of interest after it emerged he has a network of business interests that attract millions of pounds in funding thanks to IPCC policies. One of them, The Energy Research Institute, has a London office and is set to receive up to £10million from British taxpayers over the next five years in the form of grants from the Department for International Development.

Dr Pachauri denies any conflict of interest arising from his various roles.

Yesterday, critics accused the IPCC of boosting the man-made global warming theory to protect a multi-million pound industry.

Climate scientist Peter Taylor said: “I am not surprised by this news. A vast bureaucracy and industry has been built up around this theory. There is too much money in it for the IPCC to let it wither.”

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, a glacier specialist at Cambridge University, said: “The average glacier is 1,000ft thick so to melt one even at 15ft a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

The IPCC was set up by the UN to ensure world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change. It issued the glacier warning in a benchmark report in 2007 that was allegedly based on the latest research into global warming.

The scientists behind the report now admit they relied on a news story published in the New Scientist journal in 1999. The article was based on a short telephone interview with scientist Syed Hasnain, then based in Delhi, who has since said his views were “speculation”.

The New Scientist report was picked up by the WWF and included in a 2005 paper.

It then became a key source for the IPCC which went further in suggesting the melting of the glaciers was “very likely”.

Yesterday, Professor Murari Lal who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”

Last year the Indian government issued its own scientific research rejecting the notion that glaciers were melting so rapidly.

Before the weakness in the IPCC’s research was exposed, Dr Pachauri dismissed the Indian government report as “voodoo science”.

The revelations are the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus on climate change.

It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal in November last year when leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit appeared to show scientists fiddling the figures to strengthen the case for man-made climate change.

The scandal prompted critics to suggest that many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research.

Last month, the Daily Express published a dossier listing 100 reasons why global warming was part of a natural cycle and not man made.

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Brzezinski questioned on Covert Afghan War

by admin on January 15, 2010

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Fake gold bars in Bank of England and Fort Knox

It’s one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.

But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.

A recent discovery — in October of 2009 — has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the “big money” brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox — the US Treasury gold — that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an “m”) of gold bars are fake!

Who did this? Apparently our own government.

Background
In October of 2009 the Chinese received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is regularly exchanges between countries to pay debts and to settle the so-called balance of trade. Most gold is exchanged and stored in vaults under the supervision of a special organization based in London, the London Bullion Market Association (or LBMA). When the shipment was received, the Chinese government asked that special tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holed are drilled into the gold bars and the metal is then analyzed.

Officials were shocked to learn that the bars were fake. They contained cores of tungsten with only a outer coating of real gold. What’s more, these gold bars, containing serial numbers for tracking, originated in the US and had been stored in Fort Knox for years. There were reportedly between 5,600 to 5,700 bars, weighing 400 oz. each, in the shipment!

At first many gold experts assumed the fake gold originated in China, the world’s best knock-off producers. The Chinese were quick to investigate and issued a statement that implicated the US in the scheme.

What the Chinese uncovered:
Roughly 15 years ago — during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] — between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day.

According to the Chinese investigation, the balance of this 1.3 million to 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten cache was also gold plated and then allegedly “sold” into the international market. Apparently, the global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 oz salted bars”. Perhaps as much as 600-billion dollars worth.

An obscure news item originally published in the N.Y. Post [written by Jennifer Anderson] in late Jan. 04 perhaps makes sense now.

DA investigating NYMEX executive ,Manhattan, New York, –Feb. 2, 2004.
A top executive at the New York Mercantile Exchange is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney. Sources close to the exchange said that Stuart Smith, senior vice president of operations at the exchange, was served with a search warrant by the district attorney’s office last week. Details of the investigation have not been disclosed, but a NYMEX spokeswoman said it was unrelated to any of the exchange’s markets. She declined to comment further other than to say that charges had not been brought. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office also declined comment.”

The offices of the Senior Vice President of Operations — NYMEX — is exactly where you would go to find the records [serial number and smelter of origin] for EVERY GOLD BAR ever PHYSICALLY settled on the exchange. They are required to keep these records. These precise records would show the lineage of all the physical gold settled on the exchange and hence “prove” that the amount of gold in question could not have possibly come from the U.S. mining operations — because the amounts in question coming from U.S. smelters would undoubtedly be vastly bigger than domestic mine production.

No one knows whatever happened to Stuart Smith. After his offices were raided he took “administrative leave” from the NYMEX and he has never been heard from since. Amazingly, there never was any follow up on in the media on the original story as well as ZERO developments ever stemming from D.A. Morgenthau’s office who executed the search warrant.

Are we to believe that NYMEX offices were raided, the Sr. V.P. of operations then takes leave — all for nothing?

The revelations of fake gold bars also explains another highly unusual story that also happened in 2004:
LONDON, April 14, 2004 (Reuters) — NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd., the London-based unit of investment bank Rothschild [ROT.UL], will withdraw from trading commodities, including gold, in London as it reviews its operations, it said on Wednesday.

Interestingly, GATA’s Bill Murphy speculated about this back in 2004;
“Why is Rothschild leaving the gold business at this time my colleagues and I conjectured today? Just a guess on my part, but [I] suspect something is amiss. They know a big scandal is coming and they don’t want to be a part of it… [The] Rothschild wants out before the proverbial “S” hits the fan.” — BILL MURPHY, LEMETROPOLE, 4-18-2004

What is the GATA?
The Gold Antitrust Action Committee (GATA) is an organisation which has been nipping at the heels of the US Treasury Federal Reserve for several years now. The basis of GATA’s accusations is that these institutions, in coordination with other complicit central banks and the large gold-trading investment banks in the US, have been manipulating the price of gold for decades.

What is the GLD?GLD is a short form for Good London Delivery. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has defined “good delivery” as a delivery from an entity which is listed on their delivery list or meets the standards for said list and whose bars have passed testing requirements established by the associatin and updated from time to time. The bars have to be pure for AU in an area of 995.0 to 999.9 per 1000. Weight, Shape, Appearance, Marks and Weight Stamps are regulated as follows:

Weight: minimum 350 fine ounces AU; maximum 430 fine ounces AU, gross weight of a bar is expressed in troy ounces, in multiples of 0.025, rounded down to the nearest 0.025 of an troy ounce.

Dimensions: the recommended dimensions for a Good Delivery gold bar are: Top Surface: 255 x 81 mm; Bottom Surface: 236 x 57 mm; Thickness: 37 mm.

Fineness: the minimum 995.0 parts per thousand fine gold. Marks: Serial number; Assay stamp of refiner; Fineness (to four significant figures); Year of manufacture (expressed in four digits).

After reviewing their prospectus yet again, it becomes pretty clear that GLD was established to purposefully deflect investment dollars away from legitimate gold pursuits and to create a stealth, cesspool / catch-all, slush-fund and a likely destination for many of these fake tungsten bars where they would never see the light of day — hidden behind the following legalese “shield” from the law:

[Excerpt from the GLD prospectus on page 11]
“Gold bars allocated to the Trust in connection with the creation of a Basket may not meet the London Good Delivery Standards and, if a Basket is issued against such gold, the Trust may suffer a loss. Neither the Trustee nor the Custodian independently confirms the fineness of the gold bars allocated to the Trust in connection with the creation of a Basket. The gold bars allocated to the Trust by the Custodian may be different from the reported fineness or weight required by the LBMA’s standards for gold bars delivered in settlement of a gold trade, or the London Good Delivery Standards, the standards required by the Trust. If the Trustee nevertheless issues a Basket against such gold, and if the Custodian fails to satisfy its obligation to credit the Trust the amount of any deficiency, the Trust may suffer a loss.”

The Federal Reserve knows but is apparently part of the schemeEarlier this year GATA filed a second Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Reserve System for documents from 1990 to date having to do with gold swaps, gold swapped, or proposed gold swaps.

On Aug. 5, The Federal Reserve responded to this FOIA request by adding two more documents to those disclosed to GATA in April 2008 from the earlier FOIA request. These documents totaled 173 pages, many parts of which were redacted (blacked out). The Fed’s response also noted that there were 137 pages of documents not disclosed that were alleged to be exempt from disclosure.

GATA appealed this determination on Aug. 20. The appeal asked for more information to substantiate the legitimacy of the claimed exemptions from disclosure and an explanation on why some documents, such as one posted on the Federal Reserve Web site that discusses gold swaps, were not included in the Aug. 5 document release.

In a Sept. 17, 2009, letter on Federal Reserve System letterhead, Federal Reserve governor Kevin M. Warsh completely denied GATA’s appeal. The entire text of this letter can be examined at http://www.gata. org/files/ GATAFedRespon” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false;” onclick=”window. open(this. href);return false; … 7-2009.pdf.

The first paragraph on the third page is the most revealing.”In connection with your appeal, I have confirmed that the information withheld under exemption 4 consists of confidential commercial or financial information relating to the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks that was obtained within the meaning of exemption 4. This includes information relating to swap arrangements with foreign banks on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and is not the type of information that is customarily disclosed to the public. This information was properly withheld from you.”

above statement is an admission that the Federal Reserve has been involved with the fake gold bar swaps and that it refuses to disclose any information about its activities!

The above statement is an admission that the Federal Reserve has been involved with the fake gold bar swaps and that it refuses to disclose any information about its activities!

Why use tungsten?
If you are going to print fake money you need to have the special paper, otherwise the bills don’t feel right and can be easily detected by special pens that most merchants and banks use. Likewise, if you are going to fake gold bars you had better be sure they have the same weight and properties of real gold.

In early 2008 millions of dollars in gold at the central bank of Ethiopia turned out to be fake. What were supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem. The problem with making good-quality fake gold is that gold is remarkably dense. It’s almost twice the density of lead, and two-and-a-half times more dense than steel. You don’t usually notice this because small gold rings and the like don’t weigh enough to make it obvious, but if you’ve ever held a larger bar of gold, it’s absolutely unmistakable: The stuff is very, very heavy.

The standard gold bar for bank-to-bank trade, known as a “London good delivery bar” weighs 400 troy ounces (over thirty-three pounds), yet is no bigger than a paperback novel. A bar of steel the same size would weigh only thirteen and a half pounds.

According to gold expert, Theo Gray, the problem is that there are very few metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions they all cost as much or more than gold.

The first exception is depleted uranium, which is cheap if you’re a government, but hard for individuals to get. It’s also radioactive, which could be a bit of an issue.

The second exception is a real winner:
tungsten. Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.)

A top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don’t know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16″ layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out it’s fake.

Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about $50,000 to produce because it’s got a lot of real gold in it, but you’d still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth closer to $400,000.

What’s going to happen now?
Politicians like Ron Paul have been demanding that the Federal Reserve be more transparent and open up their records for public scrutiny. But the Fed has consistently refused, stating that these disclosures would undermine its operation. Yes, it certainly would!

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