Keith D. Milby :: blog

Al Gore, the self-styled squeakiest-clean and deepest-green politician in American history, has some explaining to do this weekend. His environmental organisation has taken money to raise awareness about the need for clean water from a controversial chemicals company involved in the aftermath of one of the world's worst pollution disasters.

Dow Chemical, the US firm which now owns the leaking pesticides factory responsible for thousands of deaths in Bhopal, India, is sponsoring Life Earth events in 150 cities today. The event aims to raise money for clean water programmes. Research by environmental organisations has found dangerous levels of highly toxic chemicals in rivers, lakes and other water supplies close to several other factories owned by Dow and its subsidiaries in countries including the United States, Brazil and South Africa.

via Gore takes cash for water campaign from chemical firm – Americas, World – The Independent.

Mr. Clinton said he suggested to President Obama that he appear before the journalists assembled at the dinner anyway, to pitch his health bill again, but then added, in a reference to the senior status of journalists in the Gridiron Club, that he realized “they’re so old they won’t be helped by what’s in there.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, he noted he was speaking on the night before the start of spring, “otherwise known to Al Gore as proof of global warming.” Of the current vice president, he said: “Vice President Biden, God bless his mouth.”

via Clinton Returns to Washington, Needling Himself, Obama and the Press – Washington Wire – WSJ.

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

via Pajamas Media » Climategate Stunner: NASA Heads Knew NASA Data Was Poor, Then Used Data from CRU.

The world’s biggest scientific guns are being called in to mop up after a trickle of unsettling errors in the reports written by the U.N. climate panel.

The United Nations and the beleaguered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Wednesday that a Netherlands-based group of 15 national academies of science will study how the warming panel does its job.

via U.N. climate panel faces major review – Climate Change- msnbc.com.

Research by hurricane scientists may force the UN’s climate panel to reconsider its claims that greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the number of tropical storms.

The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming.

It followed some of the most damaging storms in history such as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and Hurricane Dennis which hit Cuba, both in 2005.

via UN’s climate link to hurricanes in doubt – Times Online.

CLIMATE scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the ­hottest January the world has ever seen.

The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK.

via Express.co.uk – Home of the Daily and Sunday Express | UK News :: Weather: Hottest January ever say climate experts.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is comparing climate change skeptics to those who disregarded the Nazi threat in America in the 1930s, adding a strident rhetorical shot to the already volatile debate over climate change.

“It reminds me of an event that took place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s,” said Sanders, perhaps the most liberal member of the Senate, during a Senate hearing Tuesday. “During that period of Nazism and fascism’s growth-a real danger to this country and democratic countries around the world- there were people in this country and in the British parliament who said ‘don’t worry! Hitler’s not real! It’ll disappear!’”

via Bernie Sanders compares global warming skeptics those to who denied the threat of Nazism | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

During the review of the Environmental Protection Agency budget in today’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, both Senator Barbara Boxer — the chair of the committee — and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson distanced themselves from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

via Pajamas Media » BREAKING: Senator Barbara Boxer and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson Throw IPCC Under the Bus.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

via Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Top U.N. climate change official Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was resigning after nearly four years, a period when governments struggled without success to agree on a new global warming deal.

His departure takes effect July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases. De Boer’s resignation adds to the uncertainty that a full treaty can be finalized there.

via My Way News – APNewsBreak: Top UN climate official resigning.

Big business support began to crumble on Tuesday — and in a big way. In separate announcements, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar dropped out of the main lobbying group for cap and trade, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). BP sent a letter to its fellow coalition members, Conoco Phillips sent out a press release, and Caterpillar had its name taken off the USCAP website and then confirmed that it was dropping out when media inquiries were made.

via Pajamas Media » Big Business Jumps Ship from the S.S. Climate Change.

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » A HISTORICAL OBSERVATION ON CLIMATEGATE: As this scandal runs on, it’s beginning to remind me of th….

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

via Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online.

The European Union seems to be ahead of America when it comes to the issue of climate change. The nations’ of that “union” were early proponents of that particular myth. They gave vast subsidies to solar power producers in Germany and planned to eliminate all its nuclear reactors. They rewarded the biofuel industry with huge government subsidies and mandates. American liberals looked to Euro-elites for guidance. Now, Europe is leading the way towards the realization that the ideology that they have adopted is wrong.

via American Thinker Blog: Europe ahead of America in ditching the bio-fuels boondoggle.

But back in Washington, the global warming scare-monger crowd is singing a slightly different tune. Facing record snowfalls, Time is reporting: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change.” But do not confuse this headline with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s column from two years ago claiming that global warming was causing “anemic winters” in the Washington region.

via Morning Bell: Global Warming – Is There Anything It Can’t Do? | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News..

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.

But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.

Seems most climate scientists are idiots.

via Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze – NYTimes.com.

Turns out the release was planned prepared ahead of the snowstorm, which shut federal agencies today and forced its senders to hold a press conference by telephone instead of at the National Press Club.

It’s not the first time inclement weather has put a chill on official efforts to tackle climate change. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to leave the Copenhagen summit early in December to get back to D.C. before the blizzard known as Snowpocalypse grounded all flights.

via NOAA: Blizzard Rearranges Climate Change Announcement – Washington Wire – WSJ.

Just like global cooling of the ’70’s, this is looking more and more like it will soon all just go away.

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

…

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

via The great global warming collapse – The Globe and Mail.