More garbage from Louise Gray in today's Telegraph. Fortunately all the comments seem to be from the more sane fraternity -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8168213/Polar-bears-spotted-swimming-with-cubs-on-back.html
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8169039/Cancun-climate-change-summit-UN-considers-putting-mirrors-in-space.html

This is climate the equivalent of American Black Friday. Every scientist around is crying havoc and disaster to push ahead of the others to get funding while that Cancun thing is in the news.

Global extinction within 100 years. Can anyone do better?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/30/3080628.htm?section=justin

James Hansen gave evidence today at the trial of 20 of the 26 people charged with conspiring to shut down Ratcliffe-On-Soar power station for a week last year. The 20 include leading figures from Greenpeace UK (e.g. its media director), Plane Stupid and Climate Rush. They admit the conspiracy but claim that they were acting out of necessity. The other six, including Simon 'Amazongate' Lewis and Danny Chivers, who developed the Guardian's 'National carbon calculator', will be tried in January. They say that at the time of their arrests they hadn't made up their minds whether to take part in the protest. Not much of a defence, seeing as it was all set to go later that night, but we'll see.

Anyway - the Ratcliffe On Trial support group has just posted an account of Hansen's evidence.

http://ratcliffeontrial.org/2010/11/day-5-hansen-says-governments-are-lying-on-climate-change/

The jury heard Hansen give detailed explanations, assisted by colourful graphs, of the seriousness of human-induced climate change, including the ‘dead certainty’ of sea level rise by 12 metres this century.

Can Hansen really have said that a 12m rise is a dead certainty? If so, he's lost it. (See today's papers from the Royal Society for a more believable scary warning - 2m very unlikely but should still be planned for.) But I doubt that he really said that. Hansen isn't quite as nuts as he's sometimes portrayed.

During the Kingsnorth trial, Greenpeace provided transcripts or summaries of what the expert witnesses said but, despite Ben Stewart's involvement, they are keeping their distance from this one. (The first version of a ROT report last week included a photo showing an activist wearing a prominent Greenpeace logo. That photo was later replaced with one showing smoking chimneys.) I wonder why. I'm fairly sure that somewhere I have a Greenpeace statement from last year saying that the Ratcliffe trial would more useful as propaganda than the planned protest. I wonder what's changed. The post-Climategate/Copenhagen mood? The government?

Does anyone have a source of more detailed info about the trial proceedings than that provided by ROT?

“Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world”
Hysterical article by Louise Gray in the Daily Telegraph -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/8165769/Cancun-climate-change-summit-scientists-call-for-rationing-in-developed-world.html

Checked the forecasts last night before retiring, it suggested temperatures around 0 to -1C, a clear night, and snow flurries today. I wake up to 5inches of snow at -5C. Now I know that atmospheric conditions are very variable, and predicting snowfall is not the easiest task, but this was a big big surprise. I'm delighted it came the day after the Met Office try and convince people it's really warmer than ever. (Yes I know climate/weather etc. etc.)

@steveta_uk

0.03 deg C - across the entire globe? Blimey, they must have thermometers absolutely *everywhere* to detect this! No?
And fantastically accurate ones! Er, no??
Taking thousands of readings every day! Nope
And world-leading knowledge of statistics, so that they know it's for real... ROFL

....and not something they had to massage and dissemble about because Argo data is worse (i.e. COLDER) than they dreamed, so the observational data once again didn't match the latest entirely inadequate model.

Slaps forehead in despair.

Today's Torygraph says Pollution Slows Global Warming yet the Graun has the headline World is warming quicker than thought in past decade, says Met Office

These both apparently cite the same Met Office report: which must say something about the standard of environmental journalism in our so-called quality broadsheets.

Lovely laugh-out-load bit in the Mail from the Met Office :

"Correcting the analysis of the sea surface temperatures could mean global temperatures as a whole could have risen by up to 0.03C above what has already been recorded."

Ooooo! 3 100ths of a degree! I'm Scared! Will my thermometers be able to cope!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1333225/Global-warming-slowing-say-scientists.html

Whoops! I seem to have over-promoted SIR Edward Acton.

Bish,

I believe that you would be interested in this episode of Newswatch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vjxv3/Newswatch_29_10_2010/