New Unphysical AGW Simulator Available!

Attention warmists, the latest version 2.07 of the University of Colorado "Greenhouse Effect" java simulator is now available! It provides an animation you can control to find out the exact temperature from adding "lots" of "greenhouse" gases causing unphysical back radiation in violation of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. "Lots" of back radiating greenhouse gases will add enough work input to raise the global temperatures 7°C! Plus don't miss the second tab at the top to show that "greenhouse" gases are just like a pane of glass or even 3 panes! (please ignore RW Wood's classic 1909 paper which ripped to shreds the Arrhenius "glass pane" paper).




Radiochemist Alan Siddons alerted me to this simulator and writes, "not only does it falsely attribute radiative forcing to the IR-opacity of glass, but it also (and by necessity) shows less IR escaping from the earth as the greenhouse effect progresses. In fact, greenhouse theory asserts that the SAME amount of IR escapes as the greenhouse effect progresses. Consequently, more photons would have to appear out of nowhere in order to simultaneously hold photons in and also release them. Somehow the University of Colorado couldn't simulate that miracle." He also provided this IPCC diagram with his added notations to help clarify this phenomenon:

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New Study: Kerry-Lieberman climate bill to Destroy Up to 5.1 Million Jobs, Cost Families $1,042 per Year, Wealthiest Americans to Benefit

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham may no longer claim allegiance to the climate bill currently being debated in the Senate, but according to a new independent analysis released this week, the cap-and-trade proposal being advanced by Sens. Kerry and Lieberman does no better by the American consumer than previous iterations of the bill that bore his name.

In an effort to better understand the broad consequences of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act on the U.S. economy, the Institute for Energy Research commissioned Chamberlain Economics, L.L.C to perform an economic and distributional analysis of cap-and-trade portion of the proposal.

The following represent some of the study's key findings:

* The American Power Act would reduce U.S. employment by roughly 522,000 jobs in 2015, rising to over 5.1 million jobs by 2050.

* Households would face a gross annual burden of $125.9 billion per year or $1,042 per household, with costs disproportionately borne by low-income households.

* On a net basis, the top income quintile will benefit financially, redistributing to these households roughly $12.3 billion per year from the bottom 80 percent of earners.

* Households over age 75 bear the largest burden at 2.3 percent of income, followed by households aged 65-74 and under age 25 at 2.1 percent. By contrast, the nation's highest-earning households between age 45 and 54 years would bear the smallest percentage burden of just 1.5 percent.

* Contrary to the legislation's stated goal of reducing price volatility by excluding petroleum refiners from quarterly auctions, the Kerry-Lieberman bill is likely to significantly increase allowance price volatility from quarter to quarter, compared to an ordinary auction in which all covered industries bid for allowances.

At its core, the report examines the impacts that the American Power Act would have on the U.S. economy, the method by which emission allowances are distributed to corporations and the distributional cost of the bill on households by income, age group, region and family type. The authors also explore two specific propositions: the first, the potential for shareholders, and not consumers, to benefit from the distribution of free emission allowances; and, second, the expected consequences of the bill's creation of a separate pool of allowances for petroleum refiners, thus adding to the price volatility of those allowances. Both conclusions are contrary to Kerry and Lieberman's stated intent of the legislation.

"One of the most basic criticisms of climate policy is its regressive impact on low-income households," said Andrew Chamberlain, a co-author of the report and chief economist at Chamberlain Economics L.L.C. "The Kerry-Lieberman bill holds true to this by distributing most allowances freely to companies and government agencies for the purpose of securing political support for the bill's passage. Aside from the distributional impact of the bill, Kerry-Lieberman suffers from serious flaws in its policy design. The bill's exclusion of petroleum refiners from quarterly auctions-a provision designed to shield refiners from price volatility-is instead likely to have the opposite effect, increasing volatility faced by covered entities with no obvious economic or environmental benefit."

"These numbers speak for themselves: 522,000 lost jobs in 2015, up to 5.1 million in 2050," said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. "Promoting a policy that guarantees job loss and disproportionately impacts older Americans and those earning the least will have devastating consequences. Senators Graham, Lieberman and Kerry stated from the very beginning that their goal was to bring a coalition of big oil executives, Wall Street titans and environmental groups to the table - and that's exactly what they did. Unfortunately, as this analysis shows, the one person that wasn't at the table ends up footing the bill: the American consumer."

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Michael Mann: Cleared Of Charges That Nobody Made

By Thomas Fuller

Michael Mann was cleared on Thursday of the fourth in a series of questions investigated by his employer, Penn State University. He had been cleared of the first three in a preliminary phase of the investigation earlier this year.

(Michael Mann is the scientist who created the now infamous Hockey Stick chart that suggested that the current warming period is unprecendented over the past 1,000 years. Heavily promoted by the IPCC and published almost everywhere as an iconic symbol of global warming, the Hockey Stick has also been heavily criticised. That criticism has extended to Michael Mann's behaviour in defending the chart and his methods of constructing it. I have been one of the critics.)

It was clearly not a whitewash, and I'm sure that Mann is relieved. I didn't publish this article yesterday, sort of as a symbolic effort to give him one day of respite. Mann still has to go through an investigation led by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, which I think is really ill-advised, mean-spirited and ultimately destructive of the relationship between government and science going forward.

I have been very critical of Michael Mann since even before the release of the Climategate emails. None of the investigations held so far have answered my criticisms, nor the more thoroughly documented versions of the same criticisms leveled by Steve McIntyre.

That's because none of the investigations so far have examined the actual science in question. The closest this recent investigation came was interrogating a few witnesses about data handling procedures.

The Penn State investigation is no different. Shortly after the Climategate emails were leaked, they reacted to the media firestorm by announcing an investigation, but they created their own investigation scheme that did not include any of the accusations that have been made and repeated on weblogs for about a decade.

To be clear, even if McIntyre (after his exhaustive work) and my (more casual examination--I piggy-backed heavily on McIntyre's work) criticism's are 100% right, neither McIntyre nor I have written that Mann did anything illegal or that rose to the level of a 'firing' offense.

The crime that was committed (if it was committed--I believe it was, but no charges have been filed) was evasion of the Freedom of Information Act. This was done by Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom, as described in our book, Climategate: The CRUtape Letters.

What the hullabaloo about Michael Mann has been is about performing bad science and then trying to hide it during his defence of this science. The defence is normal--the hiding was not. But it was not criminal, and it's clear that Mann very consciously tried to stay right on the line of ethical behaviour as well.

The bad science consisted of choosing faulty evidence (in tree rings) to examine during his construction of the paleoclimatic temperatures that comprised the very level temperature history before modern times, and inventing a new and obviously inappropriate statistical analysis method that guaranteed that his result would have the shape of a Hockey Stick, no matter what data was input.

Mann's poor behaviour consisted essentially of bullying colleagues, reviewers and editors of scientific journals to support not only his science but the political view that drove it--that climate change is the challenge of the Millenium with potentially catastrophic results. As we wrote in our book, Mann clearly believes this.

The remedy we have asked for is a correction of the scientific record and more open sharing of data and calculations by researchers trying to replicate Mann's (and others') results.

A lot of harsh words have been written about Mann, and I have written some of them. Mann took it pretty close to the edge in defending flawed work, and the result has not been good for science, the politics of climate change, or our response to it. Mann was wrong to behave the way he did, in my opinion.

The Penn State investigation, while not a whitewash, clearly and appropriately was concerned with the risk Mann posed to their scientific reputation. The Hockey Stick controversy occurred before Penn State hired Mann, and although he showed up with a rock star reputation and the blessing of the IPCC, it is clear that their focus was on ensuring that he played by the rules of the game and was not a toxic asset that would become a liability soon.

It is telling that one of their criteria for establishing his probity was Mann's ability to write successful proposals.

Previous investigations of the Climategate affair were pretty much whitewashes. Another one, led by Muir Russell, is expected to report soon. However, it is not charged with investigating the science either. Which means that nobody from the established community will be able to make the point that Mann needs to hear. That his science was wrong, and that his attempt to hide his errors hurt the community.

While I congratulate him on his recent exoneration and hope that Ken Cuccinelli wakes up and abandons what I consider to be a witch hunt, the questions and criticisms posed by Steve McIntyre and many others, including myself, remain unaddressed. Which sadly means that this affair is not concluded.

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PSU officially joins Michael Mann's scam

By Lubos Motl

Penn State University is among top ten largest U.S. public schools. July 1st, 2010 will be remembered as a black day in its history.

An official committee has unanimously "cleared" Michael Mann of research misconduct even though explicit proofs of his misconduct are available to the whole world:

They claim that those 60 megabytes of proofs that Mr. Mann has not been an honest scientist essentially don't exist.

Prof Richard Lindzen has described the "clearning" of Crook Michael Mann succintly:
When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage of the RA-lO process, Dr. Lindzen's response was: "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?"

Indeed, the "accusations" that he has been "cleared of" are exactly the points that have been explicitly described in the CRU e-mails, in some cases by Michael Mann himself.

The complete lack of elementary morality of these people is just stunning. Those people may feel comfortable in their ivory towers but let me tell them that they're human trash and organized criminals and we will eventually give them what they deserve. No Tora Bora will be safe enough for them.

That's my message to Ms Ass-mann, Mr Castleman, Ms Irwin, Ms Jablonski, and Mr Vondracek. I have met people at Harvard who would behave in the same way and let me tell you that I am proud of my stomach that throughout those long years, I have never vomited.

Needless to say, the whitewash is being celebrated by the extreme blogosphere who try to lie and laugh into your eyes: Real Climate, Bad Astronomy, Eli Rabett, The Guardian, Climate Progress, and others.

See discussions at Climate Audit and WUWT

During an interview in front of a prison cell, Michael Mann claimed that he was happy that he was "cleared". But his mood makes it clear that he realizes that he wasn't cleared, cannot be cleared, and has no reason to be happy.

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'Climategate', 'Amazongate' - when will the truth be told?

Critical evidence from climate change sceptics continues to be ignored by the political and scientific establishments, says Christopher Booker

What are we to make of the efforts by the political and academic establishments to hold the line against all those revelations, such as "Climategate", which last winter rocked the authority of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The most obvious feature of the four official inquiries into the "Climategate" emails (a fifth report is due this week from Sir Muir Russell), is that not one has engaged with the central point at issue. This is the evidence from the emails and other documents confirming that the key IPCC scientists involved had been manipulating data to show temperatures having lately shot up to levels unknown in the past 1,000 years.

A familiar example was the IPCC's "hockey stick" graph, created by the American scientist Michael Mann, but shown by the statistics expert Steve McIntyre to be no more than a statistical artefact. Last week, a second inquiry by his own university cleared Dr Mann, again making no attempt to discuss the central issue. Instead, it merely asserted - while acclaiming him as "among the most respected scientists in his field" - that the techniques used to compile his graph were wholly acceptable.

Similarly, McIntyre was startled last week to get a dismissive email from Lord Oxburgh, whose Science Appraisal Panel also avoided the crucial issue in its perfunctory five-page report, bizarrely claiming that "the science was not the subject of our study".

Also defending the establishment line was last week's Panorama, with its "inquiry" into Climategate. This example of BBC propaganda at its most childish purported to be impartial, by pitching two advocates of man-made global warming against two "sceptics", who turned out to be believers in man-made warming.

Its centrepiece was yet another vindication of the "hockey stick", including a sycophantic interview with Dr Mann. Again, this gave not the faintest idea of how devastatingly the methods used to compile this graph have been challenged (for full accounts see A W Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, or my book The Real Global Warming Disaster).

Meanwhile, there has been a further twist to that other IPCC scandal, "Amazongate", on which I reported last week. This centred on the claim in its 2007 report - attributed only to a paper from green activists at the WWF - that a slight reduction in rainfall caused by climate change could kill up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. After exhaustive analysis by my colleague Dr Richard North of every document cited by the WWF to back its claim, it seems clearer than ever that there is no good evidence.

I have given the WWF one more chance to come up with that evidence, and will reveal its response next week. If it is unable to do so, the IPCC will again be convicted of having made a wildly alarmist claim it cannot justify. Yet this is the body on whose allegedly unimpeachable scientific authority our Government and others propose to land us with the biggest bill in history.

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Catastrophism collapses

G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy

Last week's G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world's leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change - and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 - which now carries more clout than the G8 - went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20's draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to "a green economy and to sustainable global growth."

These leaders' collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia's gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia's conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.'s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year's G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to "save the human race" from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister Jos‚ Luis Rodr¡guez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country's renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country's 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business. Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies - previously immune to cuts - must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs - the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, "every commitment made by the last government on renewables is under review." Some areas of the economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea - the U.K. granted a record 356 exploration licences in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show - as in Europe - that the great majority rejects global-warming catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion surveys now predict that this November's elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don't buy it.

In the lead-up to the Toronto meetings and throughout them, one country - Canada - and one leader - Prime Minister Stephen Harper - have stood out for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Dubbed the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups around the world, Canada - and especially Harper - are reviled among climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.

Not coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader played host to the meetings.

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