Hot news about climate change. The picture rapidly changes as the curtains open on things long hidden.

Slowly the truth comes out, showing that the western world still has a vigorous and free flow of information. Today we examine 3 stories.

Remember the horrifying Stern Report? Watch this story for further developments: past warming exaggerated Quote of the Day, illustrating the political essence of the IPCC

(1) Remember the horrifying Stern Report?

Increased damage from natural disasters is an important aspect of the climate change story. Forecasts of massive increases in sea levels, more hurricanes and other natural disasters have been repeated so often that they can be assumed by alarmists — as in this 2 November 2009 Washington Post blognote by Bernard Finel. That these stories are exaggerated or false doesn’t affect their effectiveness as propaganda. Until the public learns the truth.

And about natural disasters. This was discussed in The floodgates slowly open and the foreign news media debunk climate change propaganda (24 January 2010), with recognition that the Muir-Wood report has been mis-used (for a summary see “UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters“, The Times, 24 January 2010). The effects of this continue to ripple outwards.

Remember the much-hyped Stern Report (2006), with its warning of massive impacts on world GDP from climate change? (Report, Wikipedia) Roger Pielke Jr. says “that as much as 40% of the Stern Reivew projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al. paper.” He documented this in “Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change“, Global Environmental Change (yes, it’s a peer-revied publication), August/October 2007.

As the media starts debunking climate change propaganda, quietly the UK government has revised their website. As Pielke Jr notes in What a Tangled Web We Weave, at his website, 24 January 2010:

As I was preparing this post, I accessed the Stern Review Report on the archive site of the UK government to capture an image of Table 5.2. Much to my surprise I learned that since the publication of my paper, Table 5.2 has mysteriously changed! The figure immediately below shows Table 5.2 as it was originally published in the Stern Review (from a web archive in PDF), and I have circled in red the order-of-magnitude error in hurricane damage that I document in my paper (the values should instead be 10 times less). … Now, have a look at the figure below which shows Table 5.2 from the Stern Review Report as it now appears on the UK government archive (PDF), look carefully at the numbers circled in red: There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away.

(2) Watch this story for further developments: past warming exaggerated

“Leaked Emails Inspired Data Analyses Show Claimed Warming Greatly Exaggerated and NOAA not CRU is Ground Zero“, Joseph D’Aleo (President), International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP), undated. Here’s a summary of the above report: “Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg“, Marc Sheppar, American Thinker, 22 January 2010.

This is an interesting analysis, but at this point nothing more. The foundation is sound, the known massive decrease in reporting stations in the major global surface temperature datasets (most are still there and reporting):. For some background on this see:

“Weather Stations Disappearing Worldwide“, Anthony Watts, Watts Up with That, 6 March 2008

“How bad is the global temperature data?“, Joseph D’Aleo (meteorologist), Watts Up with That, 13 October 2009

“What would it take?“, Jeff Id, The Air Vent, 22 January 2010 — The trivial cost of having a high-quality surface temperature measurement network

A picture tells the story (from Id’s 22 January post above):

(3) Quote of the Day, illustrating the political essence of the IPCC

Excerpt from “Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified“, Daily Mail, 24 January 2010:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Key background information about this, not widely known: the global temperature changes. Not just the present temperatures, but past temperatures change as well. For a brief introduction to this, see Rewriting History, Time and Time Again, Climate Audit, 6 April 2008.

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