Quote of the week #26

Wind Rider (20:33:16) : People didn’t kill climate change. Weather did.
Sweet, Wind Rider!

Neither climate nor weather kill people: poverty does.

Indian Express: Hasnain speaks: Didn’t set glacier deadline, says man at centre of row
“All that I said then was that considering the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding, the mass of the glaciers was likely to decline dramatically in about 45-50 years. The 2035 date and the reference to the entire glaciers melting away was the journalist’s own speculation. I do not have any control over what a journalist writes after talking to me,” he said, adding that he continued to stand by what he had said then.
Asked why he did not issue a clarification after the publication of the interview, Hasnain claimed that he had never seen the interview.
“In those days, these magazines were not readily available. Besides, with time one tends to forget these things,” he said. ..
Hasnain, a former vice-chancellor of Calicut University who was honoured by the government with a Padma Shri last year, attacked the IPCC for not cross-checking facts before including them in its report.
“The biggest question is that why did the authors of the IPCC report rely on a news report and not go through other peer-reviewed studies on glaciers. There are plenty of studies on glaciers readily available,” he said.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Didn-t-set-glacier-deadline–says-man-at-centre-of-row/569498
Hindustan Times: ‘IPCC has a lot of answering to do’
Environment and Forest minister Jairam Ramesh, the first to challenge the IPCC claim on Himalayan glaciers in November his stand vindicated. He spoke to HT exclusively on the issue.
What do you say now that the IPCC has been proven wrong on Himalayan glaciers?
I was right on dismissing IPCC’s claim on Himalayan glaciers in November 2009. Then they (IPCC) termed it a voodoo science but now my position has been vindicated. The IPCC claim that glaciers will vanish by 2035 was not based on iota of scientific evidence. IPCC has to do a lot of answering on how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare.
What about the glaciers’ health?
Most glaciers are in a poor state, which is precarious. Some of them are receding but the rate of retreat like that of the Gangotri glacier has slowed down. A few glaciers are also advancing..
Most studies on the glaciers are from the West. Why?
It is true. Our scientific input on glaciology has eroded in recent years. It is for the second time, western studies have been proven wrong. In 1990, US Environment Protection Agency reported that 39 million tonnes of methane emitted each year was from wet paddy cultivation (mostly from India). We then found that it was actually 2 to 6 million tonnes. It emphasises that we need to improve our scientific capabilities on climate science.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/newdelhi/IPCC-has-a-lot-of-answering-to-do/499568/H1-Article1-499098.aspx
Economic Times, India: IPCC imperialism on Indian glaciers
by Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar
It speaks volumes for the huge biases within IPCC that it took two years for this hoax to be exposed. Any hoax opposing the global warming thesis would be exposed in ten seconds flat. The IPCC is willing to swallow unexamined what it finds convenient, while raising a thousand technical objections to anything inconvenient. This is religious crusading, not objective science. The tactics being used to discredit and destroy heretics is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.
Climategate-II is also a sad example of green imperialism. Rather than accept the findings of foreign scientists alone, Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, appointed a panel of Indian scientists on Himalayan melting. “My concern is that this comes from western scientists … it is high time India makes an investment in understanding what is happening in the Himalayan ecosystem.”
The Indian panel, headed by V K Raina, looked at 150 years of data gathered by the Geological Survey of India from 25 Himalayan glaciers. It was the first comprehensive study of the region. It concluded that while Himalayan glaciers had long been retreating, there was no recent acceleration of the trend, and nothing to suggest that the glaciers would disappear. In short, the IPCC had perpetrated an alarmist hoax without scientific foundation.
Scotching IPCC claims that the Gangotri glacier was retreating at an alarming rate, the Raina Panel said this glacier, the main source of the Ganges, actually receded fastest in 1977, and “is today practically at a standstill”.
Raina said that the mistake made by western scientists “was to apply the rate of glacial loss from other parts of the world to the Himalayas… In the United States the highest glaciers in Alaska are still below the lowest level of Himalayan glaciers. Our 9,500 glaciers are located at very high altitudes. It is a completely different system.”
Justifiably, Jairam Ramesh felt vindicated. But the Raina report threatened the claim of IPCC scientists to omniscience and Nobel Prize status…
Goebbels once said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will think it is the truth. The glacier fiasco is the latest example of this.
Scientists are supposed to ask hard questions about spectacular new claims. Instead, the IPCC simply accepted without verification the reports of Himalayan glacial melting, and prominently highlighting this in its 2007 report.
Pachauri appointed Hasnain as a senior fellow at Teri. Together, they raised millions from international donors for research on glaciers at Teri. But when Climategate-II came to light, Pachauri declared that he had no responsibility for what Hasnain may have said! And Hasnain said, rather cheekily, that the IPCC had no business to cite his comments!
Pachauri is reported to have said in a telephonic interview, “We are looking at the issue and will be able to comment on the report after examining the facts. The science doesn’t change: Glaciers are melting across the globe and those in the Himalayas are no different. We’re not changing anything till we make an assessment.”
Clearly the true climate denier is Pachauri: he swears by glacial apocalypse even after its exposure as a hoax. When the Raina panel produced solid scientific evidence challenging the glacier melting thesis. Pachauri instantly decried it as schoolboy science and said condescendingly that it was not peer-reviewed. Yet he was happily willing to sanctify schoolboy speculation on glacial melting, and so were other members of the IPCC. All their high-faulting talk of peer-reviewed science proved to be just a tactic to keep out inconvenient views.
IPCC scientists responsible for this fiasco must resign. The 2007 IPCC report must be amended, preferably with an apology.
Various green NGOs — including one I respect, the Centre for Science and Environment — backed the IPCC against the Raina Panel. They blindly echoed western scientists with less intimate knowledge of the Himalayas than our own scientists. Stalin would have called this a case of Indian compradors acting as the lackeys of western imperialists, and on this occasion I would find it hard to disagree with him.
These green groups claim to be watchdogs for civil society, and often do a good job. But in this case they blithely allowed a hoax to go unchallenged for two years.
Glacier alarmism is not new. Greenpeace once published photos showing the rapid retreat of the Uppsala Glacier in Argentina, ascribing this to global warming. But when I visited the glacier, I was told that global warming was too gradual to account for the dramatic retreat of the glacier, and clearly powerful local causes were responsible. Of several glaciers descending from the South Andean Icefield, Uppsala was retreating, Perrito Moreno was advancing, and several others were stable. Such varying outcomes obviously reflected local geoclimatic variations, not global climate at all.
Will Greenpeace admit it? Not a chance. But if the IPCC wants to make amends for Climategate-II, perhaps it can start by apologising for glacier alarmism. That will help restore its scientific credibility.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/IPCC-imperialism-on-Indian-glaciers/articleshow/5478293.cms
Times of India: Glaciologist demands apology from Pachauri for ‘voodoo’ remark
India’s senior-most glaciologist V K Raina today said the chief of the UN climate body should apologise to the scientist fraternity for dubbing their work on melting of Himalayan glaciers as “voodoo science”. ..
“The IPCC had dumped our report that the glaciers have not retreated abnormally. Now, with the truth out in open, the IPCC should dump its own report which was based on mere speculation,” Raina told PTI…
IPCC must be answerable to all the scientists and experts associated who stand vindicated that glaciers melting is not being happening at the abnormal pace as declared by it, Raina noted.
“It only shows that IPCC has based its arguments on speculations and did not verify it before making it public,” the former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India said.
Raina, in his report, had maintained that glaciers have “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years and the reports of the glaciers demise are a bit premature.”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Glaciologist-demands-apology-from-Pachauri-for-voodoo-remark/articleshow/5477796.cms

The Vikings in Greenland perished as the weather turned against them, and they refused to adapt t the cooling climate.
Word to the wise: Don’t look to control the climate, adapt to the weather.
You do this instinctively when you wear lighter clothes in summer and heavier clothes in winter.
You don’t wake up one sudden winter day and say “Gosh, it’s terribly cold outside, what am I to do?”
We don’t need no stinkin’ 8 megawatt petaflopping MegaComputers with shady characters stuffing fudged data into them to know what to do about what’s gong on outside.

My money was on “peer speculation.” Oh well, easy go.

My vote: WindRider

All IPCC so called science is useless at this point. Soon the EPA will get the memo.
Lisa Murkowski Wants To Block The EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases, Has Democratic Co-Sponsor
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/lisa-murkowski-wants-to-b_n_428685.html

It *flows* better? Except you just killed the obvious hommage it is intended to be to “Guns don’t kill people –people kill people”

In my view none of the above matches the quote from a political observer who said, after watching the 19 January returns from the Massachusetts senatorial election: “Cap and Trade is a dead duck.”

I actually said this very thing on this blog a while ago under the handle “Ohioholic” (an inside joke about never leaving the state) in this thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/05/all-time-snow-records-tumbling-again-for-the-second-straight-year/
CTRL+F = Ohioholic (20:40:56) :
🙂

Global Warming: That feeling when backing up against the heater on a really cold day.