GWPF | 2 Nov 2015
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. –Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, 8 August 1950
The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law. –Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), Article XI
A popular weatherman announced Saturday evening that he has been sacked by leading French news channel France Télévisions for publishing a book which accused top climate change experts of misleading the world about the threat of global warming. The announcement comes four days after France Télévisions chief Delphine Ernotte told French MPs that Verdier had been summoned to a formal interview that could lead to his dismissal. —France 24, 1 November 2015
Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution. “The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.” Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong? –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 2 November 2015
1) Back To The Dark Ages: Top French Weatherman Fired Over Climate Change Book – France 24, 1 November 2015
2) Enforcing The Dogma – Bishop Hill, 2 November 2015
3) Greenland Blowing Away All Records For Ice Gain – Real Science, 30 October 2015
4) NASA Study Challenges IPCC: Antarctic Ice Sheet Gaining, Not Losing Mass – NASA News, 31 October 2015
5) Why The Paris Climate Treaty Will Be The Flop Of The Year – The Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 2015
Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain this year. They have gained almost 200 billion tons of snow and ice over the past two months, which is more than 50% above normal. The surface of the ice gained more than 200 billion tons during the previous 12 months. Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a huge spread claiming that Greenland is melting down. —Real Science, 30 October 2015
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. —NASA News, 31 October 2015
At the end of this month 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and journalists from 195 nations will converge outside Paris – at Europe’s largest airport reserved only for private jets – for a conference that they hope will change the world. The chief obstacle to a binding climate agreement is exactly the same as it was at Kyoto in 1997 and at that last mammoth conference which so signally failed to get Kyoto renewed at Copenhagen in 2009. The only real question that will remain after the failure of this bid for a binding treaty in Paris is how much longer it can be before the most expensive and foolish scare story in history finally falls apart. –Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 2015
1) Back To The Dark Ages: Top French Weatherman Fired Over Climate Change Book
France 24, 1 November 2015
A popular weatherman announced Saturday evening he has been sacked by leading French news channel France Télévisions for publishing a book which accused top climate change experts of misleading the world about the threat of global warming.
Philippe Verdier, a household name in France for his daily weather reports on the France 2 channel, announced in an online video that he had received a letter of dismissal.
“My book ‘Climate Investigation’ was published one month ago. It got me banned from the air waves,” said the weatherman, who was put “on leave” from the TV station on October 12.
“I received this letter this morning and decided to open it in front of you because it concerns everybody- in the name of freedom of expression and freedom of information.”
His announcement comes four days after France Télévisions chief Delphine Ernotte told French MPs that Verdier had been summoned to a formal interview that could lead to his dismissal.
An employee who picked up the phone at France Télévisions on Sunday morning told FRANCE 24 that there were no PRs present to confirm or deny Verdier’s dismissal.
‘Many positive consequences to global warming’
The controversy around Verdier’s claims has likely been heightened by their timing, with his book coming just weeks before the start of a much-anticipated UN climate change summit, known as COP21, to be held in Paris at the end of November.
“I put myself in the path of COP21, which is a bulldozer, and this is the result,” Verdier told RTL radio station in October.
He said he was inspired to write the book after France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met with TV meteorologists and asked them to highlight climate change issues in their broadcasts.
“I was horrified by this speech,” Verdier told French magazine Les Inrockuptibles last month.
In his book, Verdier accuses state-funded climate change scientists of having been “manipulated” and “politicised”, even accusing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of publishing deliberately misleading data.
He also argues that there are “a great many positive consequences to global warming”, such as lower consumption of fuel used for heating and fewer cold-related deaths in winter.
“I am being punished for exercising my freedom of expression,” the weatherman told RTL.
2) Enforcing The Dogma
Bishop Hill, 2 November 2015
Andrew Montford
Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution.
The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.
Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong?
In related news another weatherman has announced that he is not a sceptic any longer.
Greg Fishel was once a Limbaugh-loving climate skeptic. Now he’s fighting global warming.
You can see why that might be an attractive option.
3) Greenland Blowing Away All Records For Ice Gain
Real Science, 30 October 2015
Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain this year. They have gained almost 200 billion tons of snow and ice over the past two months, which is more than 50% above normal. The surface of the ice gained more than 200 billion tons during the previous 12 months.
Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI
Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a huge spread claiming that Greenland is melting down.
Greenland Is Melting Away – The New York Times
Five hundred billion tons of snow falls on Greenland every year. All of that has to return to the sea by either melt or glacier calving. Otherwise the ice would be piled up to the top of the atmosphere. Anti-science hacks at the New York Times take pictures of that essential process, and attribute it to “climate change”
4) NASA Study Challenges IPCC: Antarctic Ice Sheet Gaining, Not Losing Mass
NASA News, 31 October 2015
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”
Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.
But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”
The study analyzed changes in the surface height of the Antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008.
Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.
5) Why The Paris Climate Treaty Will Be The Flop Of The Year
The Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 2015
Christopher Booker
The only real question that will remain after the failure of this bid for a binding treaty in Paris is how much longer it can be before the most expensive and foolish scare story in history finally falls apart.
At the end of this month 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and journalists from 195 nations will converge outside Paris – at Europe’s largest airport reserved only for private jets – for a conference that they hope will change the world.
Their declared aim is to agree a treaty committing everyone to such a massive cut in their emissions of greenhouse gases that this might somehow prevent the earth’s temperatures rising more than 2 degrees C higher than they were when the climate began naturally warming again two centuries ago.
The chief obstacle to such an agreement is exactly the same as it was at Kyoto in 1997 and at that last mammoth conference which so signally failed to get Kyoto renewed at Copenhagen in 2009. The vast majority of countries have argued all along that, if man-made CO2 is causing a problem, the fault lies with those “developed” nations that became rich before everyone else by burning fossil fuels to power their industrial revolution.
It is therefore up to the developed countries of the West to make the most drastic cuts, leaving the still “developing” nations to catch up. They say they are prepared to make some contribution to reducing CO2, but only if they are paid to do so out of a $100 billion a year “Green Climate Fund”, financed by the rich countries that originally created the problem.
Now, as Paris approaches – although scarcely noticed by the Western media – we can see just what the 20 countries responsible for 81 per cent of global CO2 emissions are proposing as their “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” to cutting emissions by 2030. These have been meticulously analysed on the Notalotofpeopleknowthat website, with further reporting on that site of the Global Warming Policy Forum.
China, now easily the world’s largest emitter, contributing 24 per cent of the total, plans by 2030 to double its CO2 emissions, not least by building 363 more coal-fired power stations. India, now the third-largest emitter, plans by 2030 to treble its emissions. The fourth-largest emitter, Russia, despite slashing its emissions after 1990 by closing down much of its old Soviet industry, now proposes to increase them from their 2012 level by up to 38 per cent.
Japan, the fifth-largest emitter, does claim that it will cut its emissions by some 15 per cent, but is still planning to build more coal-fired power plants. Although South Korea, the world’s seventh-largest emitter, claims that it will cut emissions by 23 per cent (not least by buying “carbon credits” that will allow it to “offset” its continuing production of CO2 for cash), even its proposed target will still be 100 per cent higher than it was 25 years ago.
As for the Middle East, the oil states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (the eighth and ninth-largest emitters) have not yet submitted any proposals. But the United Arab Emirates, which have more than doubled their emissions since 2002, show no sign of slowing that increase, apart from a promise to invest in more “carbon-free” solar and nuclear power. As for Brazil, which as the 11th largest emitter has been rapidly increasing its dependence on fossil fuels, it sees its main contribution as being to slow the felling and burning of the Amazon rainforest.
So which countries are obviously missing from this list? President Obama may talk the talk about his ambitious plans for the US, the world’s second-largest emitter. But there is no more chance of Congress agreeing to the proposed treaty than there was in 1997, when the Senate unanimously voted no to Kyoto.
All of which leaves the EU as the only part of the world committed to cutting its emissions by 40 per cent within 15 years. Even here, Poland is already refusing to sign the treaty, as it builds more fossil-fuel power stations to keep its lights on, while Germany, the sixth-largest emitter does the same.
The only government in the world wholly committed to meeting that 40 per cent target by 2030 is Britain, the 14th-largest emitter, responsible for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions. This is less than China or India are now adding every year, as we shut down those fossil-fuel power plants that still manage to provide 70 per cent of our electricity.
And what about that Green Climate Fund, supposed by 2020 to be dishing out $100 billion every year to help developing countries to “adapt to climate change”? Firm pledges received so far total just $700 million, leaving $99.3 billion still to go.
The only real question that will remain after the failure of this bid for a binding treaty in Paris is how much longer it can be before the most expensive and foolish scare story in history finally falls apart.
