Yet another scandal involving Al Gore's pal, Rajendra Pachauri.

UN climate experts deny secrecy after new leak

Click here to read this story in full @ Trust: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/un-climate-experts-deny-secrecy-after-new-leak/

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), briefs the media at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva on June 7, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

* Climate sceptic publishes draft of report on global warming

* Panel says anyone can review its work

OSLO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - The U.N. panel of climate scientists has rejected criticism that it is too secretive after a blogger sceptical about global warming published a leaked draft on Tuesday of one of its massive reports.

The panel, whose work is a guide for governments deciding whether to make billion-dollar shifts away from fossil fuels, said it welcomed comments from all to fine-tune the report whose final version is due to be published in 2014.

"All scientific comments submitted through the review process will be considered and addressed by authors, and all comments are made public after publication," it said in a statement on Tuesday night.
Anyone signing up as a reviewer, however, has to promise not to quote from the report or hand it on.

Click here to read this story in full @ Trust: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/un-climate-experts-deny-secrecy-after-new-leak/

SCANDAL: United Nations internal wars over CO Certificates have the first casualty: "Rajendra K Pachauri" !

The United Nations denies access to the conference for Al Gore's other half

ONLY AT THE U.N.

Click here for this story in full at Gulf Times: http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=544308&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16

Dr Rajendra K Pachauri

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will not be attending the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) in Doha, chairman Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has said.
“For the first time in the 18 years of COP, the IPCC will not be attending, because we have not been invited,” he told Gulf Times in Doha.

COP18 is to be held from November 26 to December 7.

The IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, former vice president of the US and environmental activist, is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. Currently 195 countries are members.

Dr Pachauri first hinted about his ‘anticipated absence’ at COP18, while speaking at the opening session of the International Conference on Food Security in Dry Lands (FSDL) on Wednesday at Qatar University.

Later, he told Gulf Times he did not know why the IPCC has not been invited to COP18, something that has happened never before.

“I don’t know what it is. The executive secretary of the climate change secretariat has to decide. I have attended every COP and the chairman of the IPCC addresses the COP in the opening session,” he explained.

Carbon Cap-and-Trade Explained in 1 Simple Diagram

Click here to read this full article on MotherJones.com

House Votes To Eliminate US Funding For United Nation’s IPCC

The IPCC, of course, is the organization that was the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for its work on the “climate change” issue. The IPCC was also central in the “climategate” scandal.

And at 2:00am this morning, eastern time, House Republicans voted to end funding for the panel.

Just before 2 a.m. on February 19, the war on climate science showed its grip on the U.S.House of Representatives as it voted to eliminate U.S. funding for the Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change. The Republican majority, on a mostly party-line vote of 244-179, went on record as essentially saying that it no longer wishes to have the IPCC prepare its comprehensive international climate science assessments.

A positive development. The IPCC has become the politicized tool of the global warming crowd who would seek bigger, more powerful government with “saving the environment” as the justification.

The IPCC isn’t about science. The IPCC is about political agendas, and the US taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for funding it.

Climate panel needs reform: Review

click here to view this on Herald.co.zw

UNITED NATIONS. The UN’s climate panel needs to "fundamentally reform" its structure to prevent the kind of embarrassing errors found in a landmark 2007 study on global warming, a review said yesterday.

A UN-requested probe of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the Nobel Prize-winning body was largely successful, despite the political uproar that critics called the "Climategate" scandal.

But the five-month review called for changes including setting up an executive committee to replace the IPCC’s largely part-time structure and stricter guidelines on acceptable source material.

It also asked for checks on conflicts of interest by board members and stricter limits on the terms of the chairman — a position now held by Rajendra Pachauri.

The IPCC released a 938-page study in 2007 pointing to evidence that climate change was already hurting the planet, building momentum for global action to limit carbon emissions that mostly come from burning coal, gas and oil.

But in the run-up to a highly anticipated climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the IPCC was rocked by a scandal involving leaked emails which critics say showed that they skewed data.

One part of the report said that Himalayan glaciers which provide water to a billion people in Asia could be lost by 2035 — an assessment later traced to a magazine article.

The IPCC has admitted that the Himalayan glacier reference was wrong, but says its core conclusions about climate change are sound, an opinion shared by mainstream scientists.

The UN review focused primarily on the structure, not the substance, of the IPCC but gave its endorsement overall to the panel’s work, saying it has "been successful overall."

It said that guidelines on source material for the IPCC were "too vague."

It recommended "that these guidelines be made more specific — including adding guidelines on what types of literature are unacceptable — and strictly enforced to ensure that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged."

Pachauri, an Indian scientist primarily employed by the TERI think-tank, has come under criticism, with some arguing that he had a vested interest in proving climate change by business dealings with carbon trading companies.

The review recommended creating a more permanent and professional position of IPCC chair, changing the current part-time arrangement.

It also said that the IPCC’s chair tenure — two terms of six years each — was too long.

"Formal qualifications for the chair and all other bureau members need to be developed, as should a rigorous conflict-of-interest policy to be applied to senior IPCC leadership" and authors, it said.

"Review editors should also ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in the report and be satisfied that due consideration was given to properly documented alternative views," it said.

The IPCC’s study, known formally as the Fourth Assessment Report, helped earn it a Nobel Peace Prize which it co-shared with former US vice president turned environmental activist Al Gore. — AFP.

Bringing Al Gore back to Earth: Goldstein

torontosun.com

Writing recently in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times, Al Gore said: “I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion.”

Funny, that’s exactly what I wish about Al Gore.

Now reduced to preaching climate hysteria to the converted in the echo chamber of the liberal, warmist Times, the paper at least identified Gore thusly: “As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.”

Bingo! Gore, our would-be carbon billionaire, has a dog in this hunt, dressed in the colour of money — green.

This is a major reason I haven’t been able to take him seriously on man-made global warming since the first time I saw An Inconvenient Truth.

If the science of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change a la Gore is correct, and if we all lived as obscenely high-energy consumption lifestyles as Gore does, it’s quite possible we would already be dead.

Killed by either too much snow, or not enough, or cold snaps, or heat waves, or droughts, or floods, all of which and more have been blamed on global warming by the increasingly demoralized and petulant-sounding Al Gore Nation and its warmist media shills.

Gore — who doesn’t tolerate much questioning by non-sycophantic media — always dances around the key point made by British warmist George Monbiot in his book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.

That is, that the campaign to fight man-made global warming — such as it is — is a campaign for austerity. A rapidly decarbonized world will be a poorer one.

For you, that is. But not, alas, for Gore.

Think of Gore and his celebrity pals jetting around the world, hopping between their large and luxurious homes, attending never-ending global warming conferences and giving interminable high-priced speeches, while buying carbon offsets (the greatest scam since religious indulgences) to claim they’ve reduced their carbon footprint to zero.

Flying is particularly bad for the environment, according to the science of global warming, because it injects greenhouse gases (GHGs) high into the atmosphere, multiplying their effect.

What hypocrisy! Especially given that renewable energy projects like wind and solar power, prolific generators of carbon credits and offsets, need fossil fuel energy to back them up due to their intermittent nature, and only last for as long as the huge public subsidies it takes to keep them financially afloat.

To anyone who understands the science of man-made global warming, a carbon offset is as big a farce as, well, a carbon credit — the backbone of the world’s biggest cap-and-trade market in Europe, which is now embroiled in multi-billion-dollar frauds.

And that’s to say nothing of the rampant corruption in the United Nations’ carbon credit-generating Clean Development Mechanism.

The only real way not to emit GHGs is not to emit them. Period. Full stop.

You can’t emit them, then claim you cancelled them out after the fact by purchasing offsets or credits — essentially an accounting trick.

Once you emit GHGs into the atmosphere, you can’t recall them. Emissions remain in the atmosphere for anywhere from several years to thousands.

If it’s true, as warmists like Gore claim, that we only have a few years left before triggering irreversible, catastrophic climate change, then offsets make no sense from an environmental perspective.

Symbolically, they’re even worse — a way for the rich (and/or naive) to buy cover for their hypocrisy in preaching a low-energy consumption lifestyle for everyone else, while pursuing a high-energy consumption lifestyle for themselves.

Offsets contribute to the myth we can significantly reduce man-made GHG emissions and yet go on living much as we have.

If Gore and Co. want to know why they’re losing the public on climate change, they should stop whining about Climategate, Himalayagate, climate deniers and the Copenhagen fiasco.

They’re losing because “do as I say, not as I do,” is a lousy way to inspire the troops.

Personally, I haven’t flown anywhere in three years. I will fly again at some point, sure.

But not as much as I used to. You can talk the talk, or walk the walk.

lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca

Global Warming Causes Blizzards. Really?!

Click here for the story at the New American

WRITTEN BY CHARLES SCALIGER

Item: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm,” Bryan Walsh wrote in a February 10 Time magazine online article, commenting on the twin blizzards that buried Washington, D.C., within a few days of each other. He went on: “As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.”

Item: John M. Broder reported in the New York Times of February 10:

A federal government report issued last year ... pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.

Item: “Deniers have long taken advantage of scientists’ cautious statements, and ‘Climategate’ breathed new life into the movement, but the science stands: warming is real, and it’s caused by human actions” — so said David A. Graham on February 12 for Newsweek online, under the heading “Anthropogenic Global Warming Is a Hoax,” one of several allegedly false conspiracy theories detailed in “Know Your Conspiracies: Newsweek’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs.”

Correction: According to the very latest wisdom from the climate-change claque, the epochal blizzards that have hit the Northeast this winter in rapid succession are a likely consequence of global warming.

Really? As I was writing the first draft of this article, blizzard number two raged outside my window, combining wind and heavy snow to eventually deposit more than a foot of new white stuff on top of the nearly two feet visited on my zip code by the first storm. And these figures, coming from west-central Pennsylvania, are benign in comparison to the quantities of snow dumped on portions of Maryland and the Philadelphia and D.C. metropolitan areas during that same unforgettable stretch. The First Great Blizzard of 2010 set all kinds of snowfall records, including in the D.C. area. By the time the second had vented its wrath, parts of the Baltimore metropolitan area had received up to 50 inches of total snowfall from the two storms, amounts not seen in the mid-Atlantic since the Great Blizzard of 1888. Baltimore has already set new records for total winter snowfall, and many weeks of potential winter precipitation still lie ahead.

And it hasn’t just been the snow. December and January were unusually cold. In the wake of the first blizzard, temperatures plunged into the single digits for several nights in a row, ascending (in the bright sun) into the upper teens or low twenties by day. In short, if this is global warming, I’d hate to see what global cooling might entail!

Yet Time and the New York Times, among others, haven’t missed a beat in their latest contribution to what must be regarded as one of the most persistent mistaken orthodoxies in the history of science and politics. The argument, as Bryan Walsh explains, is that any spate of statistically anomalous severe weather is likely due to what is now being coyly styled “climate change.” The odds, argue global-warming acolytes, militate against unlikely events such as two record-breaking blizzards in rapid succession being caused by anything besides global warming.

Oh, so? What if the climate were in a cooling cycle? Or were the people who experienced the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago (or the Big Ice Age a few millennia back, for that matter!) merely being vexed by persistent flurries? What, in point of fact, produced those massive glaciers that overwhelmed the northern portions of what is now the continental United States and all of Canada, if not snow, and lots of it? While it is true that warmer temperatures can produce heavier snow — as anyone who lives within range of lake-effect snow, which mostly falls before the Great Lakes freeze over or become too cold to generate the condensation responsible for heavy snow, can attest — we have been seeing both heavier snow and colder temperatures, both in the United States and in Europe, and not merely this winter, but for a number of winters running. No less an authority than Professor Phil Jones, former director of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, has admitted, according to the Daily Mail, that “for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”

Ah, but weather and climate are two different things, insist the global-warming gurus. “It’s a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season’s worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of [this year’s] Winter Olympic Games … to global warming),” Walsh reminds his readers, in that infuriating way that global-warming pseudoscience has of avoiding falsifiability. “Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries.”

In other words, weather really isn’t a reliable indicator of long-term climate trends — but that isn’t going to stop Walsh and his ilk from making sweeping predictions and (which is much more important) insisting upon sweeping policy changes just in case they turn out to be right one of these millennia.

But quite aside from the vexing refusal of recent weather trends to cooperate with the gloomy prognoses of global-warming models, the credibility of the entire climate-change creed has been severely undermined by a cascade of recent revelations that climatologists have systematically massaged data and cooked statistics to produce politically desirable models. From the “Climategate” scandal — which has exposed the nauseating hypocrisy and duplicity of a whole gang of climatologists manufacturing “science” to fit the agenda of UN-connected environmental extremists — to the embarrassing disclosure that data on allegedly vanishing Himalayan glaciers was almost completely fabricated, the pseudoscience is finally being laid bare to public scrutiny.

None of which is to say that climate change is not occurring and has not occurred in the past. Quite the contrary: the historical and geological record both show inconvertibly that climate and weather patterns are in more or less constant flux, sometimes verging into drastic long-term shifts that create ice ages and warming epochs. At issue is whether such changes can be driven by human activity — as opposed to, say, sunspot cycles or other natural factors. The near-total absence of sunspot activity over the last decade has coincided with a return of significantly cooler winters both in North America and in Europe — in stark contrast to the active cyclicity of the eighties and nineties that coincided with a stretch of mild winters and hot summers. While correlation does not necessarily signify causation, the mass of evidence suggesting a link between sunspot activity and climate cycles certainly does not warrant the dismissive treatment of many climatologists determined to indict the human race for melting ice caps and sizzling summers. Whatever the case, the world’s climate is nowhere near either of the extremes attested by the geologic record; no glaciers are spilling across Eurasia and North America (as they did during the last Ice Age), nor do lush forests (or any trees at all) now grow on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic (as they did several million years ago during the late Tertiary, when the climate was up to 10 degrees C warmer than it is now). Not even the comparatively recent extremes of the Medieval Warming Period and the subsequent Little Ice Age have been breached (just ask any Dutchman whether any winter in living memory has produced wintry scenes like Pieter Brueghel’s famous ice skating tableau painted in the early 16th century).

In a word: Climate change happens. But with all due respect to the arrogant asseverations of Al Gore, Newsweek, and their Ph.D.-accredited epigones, the so-called science of anthropogenic or manmade global warming is far from settled.

President Obama, probably dismayed by the capacity of Mother Nature to shut down Washington, called the storms “Snowmageddon,” which media pundits were quick to seize upon. In a similar vein, the ancient Norse — drawing, perhaps, on some racial memory of climate change in the prehistoric past — insisted in their eschatology that the end of the world (Ragnarok, marked by warring among gods and men and great natural disasters) would be preceded by three great winters or “fimbulwinters.” The attribution of such forces of nature to divine wrath, while not scientific, at least has an internal logic that the doctrine of anthropogenic global warming — driven more by ideology than by level-headed science — lacks absolutely.

Al Gore Needs to Change Climate Language

Click here for the story on sparxoo

Ethan Lyon | Mar 02, 2010

Al Gore is taking some serious heat about global warming amid record winters. “I, for one, genuinely wish climate change were an illusion,” Al Gore said in a The New York Times article Sunday. “Climate change” might be the very thing fueling global warming opposition. As the international figurehead of climate change, Al Gore needs to re-think his marketing language if he’s going to curb growing opposition.

Even amid mounting scientific evidence, could the misconception about global warming stem from a simple word choice? As Google Trends illustrates, global warming dominates the lexicon (blue=global warming, red=climate change):

“Global” means everywhere and “warming” implies higher temperatures . Therefore, as Philadelphia and many other cities continue to break winter records, it’s difficult to believe anything is warming. The global warming language makes people question the reality of climate change. In fact, 57 percent of the American public believe global warming is true — down 14 points from October of 2008.

Gore repeatedly uses “climate change” language which is highly ambiguous. It could mean cooling or warming. Is that bad or good? To snuff ambiguity, Gore needs to have a straightforward, descriptive message that speaks to his pro-environment efforts. In fact, “the idea of climate change, actually, was introduced by conservatives, by Frank Luntz in the 2004 campaign,” says professor George Lakoff, a cognitive linguistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “He found that global warming alarmed people whereas climate change sounded fine. It was just change, as if it just happened, and people weren’t responsible.” To Luntz and conservatives surprise, the global warming language is working in their favor amid record winters.

If “global warming” and “climate change” are not effective, what is? Lakoff believes “climate crisis” conveys the right message. Climate speaks to the big picture (not just weather patterns) while injecting the urgency of “crisis.” As Luntz can attest to, changing two words can have widespread implications. For instance, Luntz helped conservatives alter public perceptions of the estate tax when Luntz re-labeled it, the death tax. Public perception of global warming could be easily changed by a simple word change.

“It’s very important for the scientists to know that they don’t know anything about communication,” says Lakoff. Therefore, it’s Al Gore responsibility to take the lead and convey the correct message. In fact, the relationship between Gore and scientists parallels advertising creatives and account executives. Research and insights from account executives informs the creative. The creative’s responsibility is to then craft a compelling message to sell the product / brand to consumers or businesses. Gore needs to re-think his “creative” to curb the mounting “climate crisis” opposition.

But is it too late? Global warming and climate change are already deeply embedded in the environmental lexicon. For Gore to change the growing global warming opposition, he needs to take a two pronged approach: 1) change his language to “climate crisis,” then tell scientists and other influential proponents of environmental sustainability to follow suit and 2) launch a public awareness campaign that explains why harsh winters can happen amid global warming — using the Lakoff’s “climate crisis” language. If Gore doesn’t convey a clear, self-explanatory, descriptive message, he could get burned.

Image by fortunefad from Stock.Xchng

Al Gore, ghost of climate change past

• 
• • Dan Kennedy
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 March 2010 17.07 GMT
  • Article history

Al Gore, the ghost of climate change past, showed up to haunt the New York Times's opinion pages this past Sunday. Eloquent and impassioned as ever, the former vice-president reminded us that the current controversy over scientific malfeasance won't change the fact that the polar ice caps are melting and the earth continues to heat up.

"I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion," he wrote. "But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Yet even though I admire Gore, on some level I couldn't help but cringe. His 2006 film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, helped bring the issue to prominence for millions of people. I'm afraid, though, that he has not only spent his political capital, but is running a deficit. Mocked by the right every time he pops up, he is no longer in a position to convince anyone who isn't already convinced – especially when he writes for our most liberal daily newspaper.

It started, of course, with the vicious lies told about Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign, the most notorious of which was that he claimed to have "invented the internet". Bob Somerby, Eric Alterman and others have documented the smear campaign that almost certainly cost Gore the presidency – a campaign driven at least as much by the so-called liberal media as by Gore's Republican opponents.

The hate stirred up by that effort has long since congealed into conventional wisdom. Now, whenever Gore speaks out on climate change, he is subjected to withering, fact-free scorn. It has its effect on those trying to figure out the truth. Go ahead. Feel the hate:

"Do you think of your breathing passages as spewing shit?" sneered Ann Althouse, referring to Gore's use of an "open sewer" metaphor.

Another rightwing blogger, Van Helsing, wrote that Gore had emerged "to demand totalitarian restrictions on economic activity in the name of a crisis that clearly does not exist".

And Andrew Breitbart's notorious Big Journalism site ran a commentary by Kyle-Anne Shiver, who said of Gore, "His life as a jet-setting, Nobel Peace Prize-sharing, Oscar-brandishing celebrity is on the line. Without the people's diehard faith in his religion of global warming, Al will be forced to trade his lifestyle of the mega-rich-and-famous for an ignominious and expensive defense of never-ending lawsuits brought by enraged sucker governments and private investors."

But if Gore's effectiveness as a climate-change activist has expired, there is nevertheless reason to hope. Because there, in the same edition of the Sunday Times, just a few inches away, was columnist Tom Friedman's interview with the ghost of climate change present, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham – living proof that it is possible for a conservative Republican not only to be sane, but to work toward real solutions to actual problems.

Graham, despite an 82% ranking by the American Conservative Union and a 100% ranking by the Christian Coalition, is working with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to shut down Guantánamo. He also voted to confirm supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, a moderate, pro-prosecution jurist who was portrayed by many of Graham's fellowRepublicans as a leftwing extremist more concerned with Latino identity politics than with the law.

On climate change, Graham is trying to work out compromise legislation with Massachusetts senator John Kerry, a Democrat, and Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, an independent. The price of Graham's support is that the US government must embrace "clean coal". Now, that may be an oxymoron. But in the Senate, where it now takes 60 votes to accomplish anything, giving clean coal a go may be a price worth paying.

"I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution is not a good thing," Graham said recently, according to South Carolina's largest newspaper, the State. "All the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day-in and day-out, will never convince me that's a good thing for your children and the future of the planet."

And don't kid yourself into thinking this is easy for Graham. His sensible conservatism places him well to the left of his fellow South Carolina senator, Jim DeMint, who recently posted to his Twitter feed, "It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries 'uncle'."

It also places Graham well to the left of many South Carolina Republicans. After the Charleston County Republican Party voted to censure Graham for being too liberal (one of several local groups to take such action), Will Moredock, political analyst for the Charleston City Paper, wrote that the party was travelling on the "road to extinction". Trouble is, Graham might find himself extinct first.

I'm not here to fetishise bipartisanship or to characterise the current standoff over healthcare and other issues as anything other than what it is: a concerted effort by the Republican party to bring down the Obama presidency, the public good be damned.

But, fairly or not, Gore has become a symbol of the harsh partisanship that is ripping Washington apart. Graham, by contrast, harks back to a better time, when Democrats and Republicans could occasionally work together for the common good. Let's hope there's a little of that in our future as well.

What the liberal elite feel you should know about 'Climate Change'

telegraph.co.uk

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: March 1st, 2010

Bishop Hill has a summary – at once fascinating, deeply revealing and rather chilling – of a recent workshop staged at Oxford University to discuss the role of the media in reporting Climate Change. (hat tip: Barry Woods)

It shows that EVEN NOW as far as the liberal elite is concerned, all public doubts about AGW are merely a question of “false consciousness” in need of correction rather than the result of evidence-based scepticism.

Here is the BBC’s Richard Black:

I’m not surprised at the level of UK scepticism as the main impacts of climate change are decades away and in other places. The problem is poor science awareness. We need to improve science education so people properly understand climate science.

Here is the Guardian’s David Adam:

The meaning of sceptic is very specific. It’s not taxi drivers or people who don’t want to pay higher electricity bills. It’s someone who knows better and takes a contrary view for pathological reasons. No journalists believe that climate science was undermined by the emails.

Here is the Financial Times’s Fiona Harvey:

Sceptics were clever in choosing their name. We do need a new name, denier won’t work because of Holocaust associations.

Later we find Ms Harvey yearning – inna Sir-John-Houghton-stylee – for a catastrophe that will show all us denier/sceptics JUST HOW WRONG WE ARE:

Climate scientists aren’t generally newsworthy; sceptics, IPCC problems and emails are making the news. “Climate – guess what? Still changing” is an unlikely headline. A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years.

You couldn’t make it up. By far the scariest contributions, though, come from a Sun editor called Ben Jackson. A notionally right-wing tabloid is not what you’d normally associate with the liberal elite, but his remarks betray exactly the same prejudices as those of the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC. I leave readers to speculate why this might be.

Here, for example, is yer Sun man’s remarkable bizarre statement about Jeremy Clarkson:

People listen to Jeremy Clarkson who’s sceptical (although eventually Jeremy will come round).

What’s he proposing? Blackmail? Thumbscrews? Contract withdrawal?

Still, it’s not all bad news. Here’s the Sun editor again on how the public mood is changing:

The other day a Sun driver talked to me about the Medieval Warm Period. That wouldn’t have happened 6 months ago. All climate science will now be tested and people will ask how strong the science really is. There’s been a perfect storm of things going wrong – Climategate, Copenhagen, Met Office predictions – it could only be worse if David Attenborough had been caught in bed with Lord Monckton.

The ultimate hoax?

BY SIMEON TALLEY | MARCH 01, 2010 7:30 AM

Is climate change not so much of an inconvenient truth after all?

For years, we have been subjected to prophets bearing witness to the incontrovertible truth of climate change and global warming. Al Gore — the world’s chief Jeremiah on climate change — has made a career (including a fortune, an Oscar, and a Nobel) persuading the public that the warming of the Earth’s temperature, if left unabated, will surely lead to our doom.

But if the Earth’s temperature is supposed to be getting warmer because of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, how do you explain this winter? All across the East Coast, winter was a lot more, well, wintery. There wasn’t just heavy snowfalls in New York, but in Houston. This certainly doesn’t seem like global warming. In fact, here in Iowa, we probably could use a little warming to get us through this stubborn remaining month or so of cold weather.

Furthermore, a series of gross errors and scandals have called into question the very science of climate change. In 2009, we learned that scientists at the British Research Center selectively withheld information that might conflict with their findings of historical warming — otherwise known as “climategate.”

And most recently, we have learned that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report exaggerated claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. The report was also flat-out wrong about the susceptibility of the Netherlands to rising sea levels. The document guides most of what we understand the science to be and what effective responses to climate change should be.

Climate change could be the biggest hoax ever perpetuated. Advocates of cap-and-trade could simply be pulling wool over all our eyes to feed their zealous environmentalism. Could it be?

While critics have gained new ammunition and a new target to attack in the international climate panel, the facts of climate change have consistently remained clear. Human activity is changing the climate in unsustainable ways. The warming of the Earth’s temperature— resulting in melting glaciers and rising sea levels — threatens our ability to exist as we know it.

It’s convenient for climate-change skeptics to point out regional fluctuations in weather, but the reality is that this decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept. And 2009 registered as the second warmest year we have on record. These are not the findings of scientists in European capitals, but of NASA (not to disparage Europe or scientists from Europe). Even the U.S. Defense Department recognizes that climate change exists and poses a threat to our national security.

While many people have come to understand climate change and global warming to be synonymous, there is some difference between the two. Global warming refers to a rise in temperature; climate change refers to changes in the Earth’s climate. So warming temperatures will increase the rate of evaporation from the ocean, putting more moisture in the atmosphere, creating the heavy snowfall we just saw in the Northeast. And that’s exactly the point: It’s not only rising temperatures, but abnormal weather that can be attributed to climate change.

But what about those errors in the climate-panel report? Well, science must be rigorous and held to a high standard. But the panel is not a body that conducts primary research; it collects and presents the scientific consensus of the overwhelming majority of the science. So errors within the report don’t undermine the science of climate change at all. To disprove the science of climate change, you would have to refute the body of work that has been done on the topic for several decades from scientists all over the world.

Climate-change deniers have used recent controversies to suggest that action be shelved until later or that nothing be done at all. But the truth is that we really can’t wait. The longer that we do, the more inconvenient it will be economically and politically.

The current generation — those born after 1980 — is often referred to as Millennials. And most of you, being a part of this group, get it: Climate change is a fact, and we have to act now.