The WUWT Hot Sheet for Monday October 7th, 2013

AR5 heralds the beginning of the end

It’s the beginning of the end. Watch the Giant with Feet of Clay crumble. A train wreck in slow motion. There’s more sense being said about AR5 than would have been imaginable eighteen months ago when drafts were available. In fact some of the media coverage (e.g. Newsnight) has been jaw-droppingly almost balanced in both invited participants and the line of questioning.

As the CAGW frenzy whipped up by the overstatement of zealous believers and compliant shut down of debate in the media was increasingly untenable, reasoned debate has begun to happen and the imperative ‘need’ to blog melted away.

Life Takes Over – from Verity Jones at Digging in the Clay

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Being confident means you can ignore other scenarios

The IPCC has a very bad case of confusing the probability inside their argument with the probability of the question as a whole (e.g. 20th century attribution, 21st century projections, climate sensitivity). Dangerous anthropogenic global warming is one possible scenario of the future; there are many other possible scenarios that the IPCC completely ignores (heck, we cant predict solar variations, volcanic eruptions, and natural internal variability so we might as well ignore them).

Confidence levels inside and outside an argument from Dr. Judith Curry at Climate Etc.

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Biggest load of plonkers from a celebrity mouthpiece – evar

‘We’re facing a mass extinction event,’ claims Bob Geldof

Live Aid founder and activist Bob Geldof has warned that the human race may be extinct within 15 years because of climate change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/10353206/Were-facing-a-mass-extinction-event-claims-Bob-Geldof.html

[Fortunately, this prediction can be verified – Anthony]

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People 1 wind turbines 0 – Couple win wind turbine ruling

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From Nature Geoscience Giant channels discovered beneath Antarctic ice shelf

Scientists have discovered huge ice channels beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. At 250 meters high, the channels are almost as tall as the Eiffel tower and stretch hundreds of kilometers along the ice shelf. The channels are likely to influence the stability of the ice shelf and their discovery will help researchers understand how the ice will respond to changing environmental conditions.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uoe-gcd100313.php

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Christopher Booker: Climate Scientists Are Just Another Pressure Group

The IPCC and its reports have been shaped by a close-knit group of scientists, all dedicated to the cause

Last weekend, something very odd happened. On Friday we were told that in Stockholm the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) had published a report saying that it was now “extremely likely” that the world faces disastrous man-made climate change. But this was merely a “summary” for politicians and the media of a scientific report that was not published until three days later.

We then learnt that this “Summary for Policymakers” had been argued over for days and sleepless nights by hundreds of politicians, officials and scientists, but, weirdly, that the scientific report it supposedly summarised had subsequently been amended to bring it into line with the summary. One obvious change from previous drafts was the marked downplaying of any reference to how, in recent years, global temperatures have so notably failed to rise as the IPCC’s computer models predicted.

This was an uncanny replay of the first scandal to hit the IPCC back in 1996, when again the “summary” thrashed over by politicians and a few key scientists was made more alarming than the report proper by inserting a claim that there was now “a discernible human influence” on the world’s climate.

Scientists who had approved the report protested that there was nothing in their text to justify this. But, to their amazement, they discovered that their agreed version had been amended to include this very phrase, citing as its authority two papers not yet published by Ben Santer, an American scientist who had also played a key part in drafting the summary.

All this, and the revelation that Santer had deleted 15 passages casting doubt on man-made warming from the agreed text, famously prompted Prof Frederick Seitz, a revered former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, to protest that never in 60 years as a scientist had he “witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process”. Last weekend Dr Santer was again playing a part in the events that led to a virtual repeat of what happened in 1995.

http://www.thegwpf.org/christopher-booker-climate-scientists-pressure-group/

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Another FOIA fight brewing – Environmental group sues to get UA records

By Patrick McNamara Arizona Daily Star

A Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group has sued the University of Arizona demanding the release of a cache of documents — including two professors’ emails — related to climate change and global warming.

The Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which until recently was known as the American Tradition Institute, first requested the documents in December 2011. It sued in Pima County Superior Court in September, after the university released some of the documents, but withheld most on what the institute considers questionable grounds.

“The taxpayer is paying for this in many ways,” said Christopher C. Horner, a Virginia-based attorney for the organization.

Horner said the public is entitled to see the emails because employees of the state university system created them as part of their official duties, and they remain stored on publicly funded computers.

UA Professors Malcolm Hughes, of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, and Jonathan Overpeck, with the department of geosciences and the department of Atmospheric sciences, wrote the emails. They were sent to other academics across the country and in Europe, and to organizations such as the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/environmental-group-sues-to-get-ua-records/article_b7dd22e6-7171-5af5-a26a-4e2f00ae8b44.html

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