Apparently Labour's refusal to pair the UK climate change secretary Chris Huhne with a Labour MP could force him LEAVE the climate talks in Cancun in order to take part in a tightly contested tuition fees vote tomorrow.

Chris Huhne needs to ly out by midnight tonight GMT if he intends to arrive back in time for the vote.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/08/labour-force-chris-huhne-return-climate-talks

Here's something curious from ScarletPumpernickel's comment on Steven Goddard's blog. Apparently you can send money to the KKK but not WikiLeaks.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/assange-denied-bail-for-not-using-a-condom/#comment-19108

It's a strange world.

Donna Laframbois has a post up today describing the work of a Canadian blogger and an Australian computer programmer. The dynamic duo has produced an annotated and hyperlinked version of AR4. The search capabilities are “robust!” Donna’s post is at nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/a-powerful-new-research-tool/

Please take a look at it. I think it is worth mentioning on B-H to publicize its availability. That should result in additional detailed scrutiny which I think that you will agree AR4 needs.

The mad Slingo is at it again - apparently the Met Office computers aren't up to the job:

"We recommend the creation of a small number (at least three) of highly connected multinational facilities with computer capability for each facility of at least 20 petaflops in the near term, 200 petaflops within five years, and 1 exaflop by the end of the next decade."

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2010BAMS2900.1

From the Department of Clutching at Straws:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8182279/Cancun-summit-cutting-carbon-emissions-will-help-combat-obesity.html

Apparently, even if AGW is a myth, cutting down on fossil fuels will still be good for us, because they cause obesity.

You couldn't make it up!

In the Telegraph - Louise Gray

Says sea level rises predictions halv halved from 14 feet...

She say 6 feet is the worst case..
.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8182278/Climate-change-Met-Office-halves-worst-case-sea-level-prediction.html

Mail, says 59cm......

Met office only has press releases up to the 3rd Dec, at the moment

Last years pre COP 15 6 feet (2m) alarmism has been officially called wrong by the Met Office.

Alarmist Doomsday warning of rising seas 'was wrong', says Met Office study

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335964/Alarmist-Doomsday-warning-rising-seas-wrong-says-Met-Office-study.html#ixzz17KZaXtHJ

"Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged."

"However, the report says the IPCC was right to warn of a sea level rise of up to 2ft by 2100, and that a 3ft rise could happen".

Note it says up to 2 feet, and that 3 feet could happen........

Where as the most likely scenario based on observed sea leavel would indicate the lower end of IPCC predictions - 1ft - which is totally within the realm of a natural rise in sea levels since the last ice-age.

Of course if you are the Met office, at a time when the UK is in a massive deficit, you need to try to justify your exisatnce and research (1 ft natural, why do we need to fund you - asks the Coalition) especially as the Met Office were predicting a mild winter for the UK as recently as October 2010, when all other forecaster were predicting an exceptionally cold winter (cold records being broken across Europe)

I complained to the BBC about the 6fett sea level rises and uncritical coverage of the COP 15 video, showing a tidal wave engulfing a small child...

I had this response from Richard Black BBC - (complaint email - attached)
(which did not cover my exact complaint, cop 15 tidal wave engulfing child video, the BBC uncritically showed it)

Dear Mr Woods,

Thanks for your email.

Yes, the IPCC said a maximum sea level rise of 59cm. But it also said it
was unable to include a contribution from accelerated ice sheet melting
as modelling was not yet advanced enough - so the 59cm was an
underestimate.

Best wishes,
Richard Black
--------------------------
I might ask them to be a bit mnore critical next time...

Who exactly says 6ft, on what authority was it said, and what evidence is there?
Also, is then any conflicting evidence or papers on sea level....?

Questions that might be expected of an public service (BBC) organisation, faced with PR from a political conference (Cop 15)


To me, it was ALWAYS only a scary 2m sea level rise announced to encourage policy makers at Copenhagen, with no basis in reality....

A good friend - co editor of the 2001 IPCC Synthesis report (Working Group 1 Science Technical Support - confirmed 59cm WORST case, at the time)

So on whose authority and where did 6m come from?

Also: "In 2007 the IPCC reported preliminary evidence that the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warm water north and keeps Britain relatively mild for its latitude during winters was breaking down."

The Met Office article also mentions that the atlantic gulf stream was not shutting down (Day After Tommorow doomsday scenarios) ?This was reported as a scare by the BBC this year as well, earlier (quietly) this year

BBC: Gulf Stream Not Slowing Down - Richard Black, March 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8589512.stm

This year at Cop 16, it has been reports of 4.0C of AGW by 2060...

No doubt some 'alarmism' to encourage the policy makers at Cancun to Do something

I take that announcement in the same vein as the previous pre Cop15 sea level scare...

Chris Huhne's trip to Cancun - like that of Vicky Pope - has also been delayed because of the "bad weather", according to the Graun: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/05/cancun-climate-talks-ghosts-copenhagen.

Excuse me while I snigger.

Recent quote from Ryan Air CEO on Global Warming
http://inquiringminds.cc/?attachment_id=2602

Has this been noticed yet!

A pretty solid article from the Daily Mail, very pertinent quotes, ie, 'little known' BBC Phil Jones Interview (ie statistically no warming, M Mann, saying there probably was a mediaval warm period....

They would appear to know most of the pertinent issues....

7 million readers, the MSM are looking for the next big think, pulling some politicians down another peg or 2... must have been the snow, again, that done it...
-----------------------------

Daily Mail: What happened to the 'warmest year on record':

The truth is global warming has halted

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html#ixzz17GxQOf4m

the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.

According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences.

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.
Grip of winter: A woman and girl sit under a tree on a bench in South Weald Park, Brentwood, Essex, this week
The maths isn't complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century's end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn't.

Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Nino' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.
When the Met Office issued its December 2009 preThere-diction, it was clearly expecting an even bigger El Nino spike than happened in 1998 - one so big that it would have dragged up the decade's average.

But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.

That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.

Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Nino was at its peak.

The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005.

There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)

But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ' consensus' that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.

One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.

He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'

After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2, and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1335798/Global-warming-halted-Thats-happened-warmest-year-record.html#ixzz17GyfQcsZ