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French Revolution! Carbon tax ruled unconstitutional just two days before taking effect

December 30, 2009 2 comments
This new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on Jan1, 2010. The tax was steep: 14 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $20). In a stunning move, and surely a blow to warmists everywhere, the tax has been found unconstitutional and thrown out. Originally found here (Google Translation).

Lord Monckton was kind enough to assist me in deciphering the meaning of the ruling and writes:

In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to pronounce on the constitutionality of a proposed law – in the present case, the 2010 national budget of France, which contained enabling provisions (loi deferee) for a carbon levy. The Council found that these enabling provisions were unconstitutional on two grounds: that the exemptions contained within the provisions for a carbon levy vitiated the primary declared purpose of the levy, to combat carbon emissions and hence “global warming”; and that the exemptions would cause the levy to fall disproportionately on gasoline and heating oils and not on other carbon emissions, thereby breaching the principle that taxation should be evenly and fairly borne.

The Press release from the French Constitutional Council is here in English (Google Translated) and in original French

Here’s a Deustch-Welle news article on the reversal.

France’s Constitutional Council says the country’s proposed carbon tax is illegal. This is a severe blow to French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to fight climate change.

France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a carbon tax that was planned to take effect on January 1st. The council, which ensures the constitutionality of French legislation, said too many polluters were exempted in the measure and the tax burden was not fairly distributed.

It was estimated that 93 percent of industrial emissions outside of fuel use, including the emissions of more than 1,000 of France’s top polluting industrial sites, would be exempt from the tax, which would have charged 17 euros per ton of emitted carbon dioxide.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has argued the tax is necessary to combat climate change and reduce the country’s dependence on oil.

However, the council’s ruling is a severe blow to both Sarkozy’s environmental plan as well as France’s budget for 2010. The government now has to find a way to come up with about 4.1 billion euros in revenue that was expected from the tax.

h/t to WUWT reader Dirk H

Source by Anthony Watts

Maybe Premiere Gordon Campbell right here in BC will take notice...

Globalis Warminitis

December 27, 2009 2 comments
Globalis Warmanitis is a serious disease infecting hundreds of millions. The symptoms start slowly, even one or two of the early warning signs are cause for concern. If you have a family member or friend experiencing these symptoms, act quickly and get professional medical attention. They could be the result of early onset Globalis Warmanitis. Symptoms should be treated as an emergency, as the progress of the disease is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Serious end stage physical symptoms have been reported, including; dizzyness, blurred vision, urge to paint protest signs, hysteria, hot flashes, confusion, dementia, spontaneous nudity (leading to frostbite) and eventually psychosis.

If you have any of these early warning symptoms, please contact The Air Vent immediately for guidance. All inquiries are kept 100 % public, guidance will be handled in a tough love manner by Dr. Id – B.S….M.D.

End stage symptoms include:

1. Belief in the unbiased truth of government funded science.

2. Belief that snow is a significant sign of global warming

3. Belief that drops in global temperature are falsified by the guys drawing the squiggly lines.

4. The absolute knowledge that every credible scientist believes in CO2 global warming

5. A deep warm feeling that the UN IPCC has our best interests at heart

6. Knowledge of the complex science which shows that the sun does NOT heat the earth.

7. Belief that big energy wants global warming to go away, because sales of expensive renewable energy are not in their best interest.

8. Understanding the reasons why Al Gore deserved his Nobel Prize.

9. Belief that legislation of the right kind can regulate global temperature.

10. The belief that the earth has remained at the same temperature, unchanged for thousands of years.

If you, your family or friends are experiencing any of these symptoms, take heart because Dr. Id – B.S.M.D is here to help. Together we can stop this pandemic before it’s too late.

Source by Jeff Id

Record Snow Hits Again...And Again and Again in 2009

December 26, 2009 1 comments
America has been getting hammered with record snowfall on the east coast. Washington, D.C. and Baltimore received 16.4 inches and 21 inches respectively, and that’s just for Saturday.

This weekend’s storm was enough to top Washington’s record for the entire month of December, which was set in 1962, when the total reached 6.2 inches. For the month, Washington has received 16.6 inches. The storm was also notable for the amount of snowfall in a single day. Washington received 15 inches, the third-highest single-day total since 1884.

Here’s some other recent headlines:

The above headlines are just from December, most of the concerning storms that hit before the first day of winter.

This cold weather has been hitting around the world all year.

In February, the UK was hit with the worst blizzard in decades.

Washington, D.C. global warming protesters were greeted with a record foot of snow in March.

Montana took a snowy beating in April:

By Wednesday evening, the National Weather Service office in Great Falls had recorded 13 inches of snow for the day – that’s on top of 8 inches from the previous day – and the flakes were still falling.

The previous high for snowfall on April 29 in the city was 5.4 inches, set way back in 1913.

“So we broke that record pretty handily,” said Jerome Saucier, operation program leader for the NWS Great Falls office.

It was also the record for precipitation of any kind for the date in Great Falls, with the equivalent of .6 inches of rain falling. The old record, also in 1913, was .43 inches.

And the Electric City didn’t get the worst of it – not by a long shot. Around Duck Lake, near Babb, the storm dumped more than 4 feet of snow, the NWS reported.

In May, we saw “Record Early Season Snow in New Zealand.”

Remember when North Dakota had record snow…in June.

It’s been 60 years since there was snowfall in western North Dakota in June. According to reports, that record has finally been broken and it snowed in Bismarck.

I remember needing a jacket on July 4th because it was so cold. I wasn’t alone. It was the coldest July on record in six states.

In the Falkland Islands this August, “Forty-three centimetres of snow were recorded, a new record at Mount Pleasant.”

In October, Denver was hit with the worst snow in 12 years.

In November, “Italian ski resorts [were] killing it with record snow.”

With 2008 being the coldest winter in seven years, or as some like to put it, the coldest winter this century, and this winter being especially brutal already, I have to wonder why CO2 isn’t keeping this at bay.

Or, stick with me now, could it just have something to do with the lack of activity from a fiery mass that just happens to make up 98% of the solar system’s mass.

Seventy four percent of 2009 was without a sunspot. There were multiple months with record low temperatures.

I don’t think that is a coincidence. What do you think?

Source by Duane Lester

Three Cheers for Holiday Lights!

December 25, 2009 2 comments
Environmentalists critical of electrified America must have mixed emotions this time of the year. It may be the season of good cheer and goodwill toward all, but it is also the time of the most conspicuous of energy consumption. America the Beautiful is at her best in December when billions of tiny stringed light bulbs turn the mundane or darkness itself into magnificent beauty and celebration. Holiday lighting is a great social offering—a positive externality in the jargon of economics—given by many to all.

While energy doomsayers such as Paul Ehrlich have railed against “garish commercial Christmas displays,” today’s headline grabbers (Grist, Climate Progress, where are you?) have not engaged a public debate over the issue. [At least one enviro blogger has, however, as have SANTA (Sustainability Action Network and Toy Alliance) and the Energy Justice Network)].

Yet holiday lighting is a glaring exception to their goal of reducing discretionary energy usage to help save the world. If holiday energy guzzling is forgiven, why not excuse outdoor heating and cooling, one-switch centralized lighting, and instant-on appliances that “leak” electricity, not to mention SUVs? Prancing around to turn on individual lights or waiting for the paper copier to warm up wastes the scarcest and one truly depleting resource: a person’s time. Surely extra energy use for comfort and convenience has priority over purely celebratory uses of energy.

What about the holiday humbug that celebratory electricity depletes future fossil-fuel supplies, fouls the air, and destabilizes the climate? Good tidings abound!

World oil reserves are over 20 times greater now than they were when record-keeping began in the 1940s; world gas reserves are almost four times greater than they were in the 1960s; world coal reserves have risen fourfold since 1950. Political events can drive supply down and prices up, but the raw mineral resource base is prolific—and expanding in economic terms thanks to an inexhaustible supply of human ingenuity and exploratory capital.

Record energy consumption has been accompanied by improving air quality. Urban air quality is significantly better today than in the 1970s in the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that air emissions of the criteria pollutants declined by 60 percent from 1970, while energy usage increased by a third. Further air emission reductions are expected, but it will not be accomplished by forcing higher prices or inconvenience levied on consumers. It will be accomplished with market incentives, technological improvement, and regulation based on sound science, not alarmism.

Should good citizens think twice about holiday lighting given global warming and other suspected climate change from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide? Hardly. A moderately warmer, wetter world, whether natural or anthropogenic, such as experienced in the 20th century, is a better world. Carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels “greens” the biosphere through the well-documented carbon fertilization effect. But most importantly, the wealth created from affordable, plentiful energy provides the primary means for societies to improve the environment. In the final analysis, wealth is environmental health, which explains why increasing energy usage and environmental improvement have gone hand in hand in the Western world.

There is much to be thankful for this holiday season with our energy economy. But thoughts about the less fortunate should be with us too. An estimated 1.5 billion people do not have electricity for lighting, heating, cooling, cooking, or water purification. A Christmas tree for us is likely to be firewood for those living in energy poverty. For these people, there could be no greater holiday gift than affordable electricity itself, explaining why the developing world has flatly rejected proposals from environmental elites to forsake future energy usage in the quixotic quest to “stabilize climate.”

Energy consumption is good—for comfort, convenience, and even celebration. May one and all in good conscience enliven this holiday season with lights aplenty. With conventional fuels and energy technologies rapidly improving, Americans can look forward to even more energetic celebrations and shared goodwill in the holidays ahead.

Source by Robert Bradley Junior

Fido and Evergreen - True Canadian Corporate Alarmism

1 comments
The following is an email we sent to Fido Solutions (a Canadian cellphone carrier) and Evergreen (a Canadian environmental organization)
----

This email is in regards to the climate change page on your site. It's too bad your organization is capitalizing on the myth of manmade climate change, and you continue to spread false information about CO2. I just noticed your affiliation with FIDO, and am happy to announce that we have successfully cancelled 4 cellphone lines with Fido because of this partnership with Evergreen.

Two thirds of the public DO NOT believe climate change is a serious issue, and they are realizing that human beings have about as much influence on the climate as someone farting into a hurricane. CO2 is not pollution, the planet has been cooling for many years, extreme weather events are at an all time low, and Al Gore and the UN have become laughingstocks around the world.

Please update your "mission" page about "climate change". If you need proper, accurate information, feel free to peruse our site and the many others in the 'top sites' section here: www.ilovecarbondioxide.com

While we agree that planting trees and focusing on genuine environmental problems is a very good thing and is unfortunately often ignored by many people, the moment you throw the "climate" and "carbon" arguments into your mission it destroys any credibility you may have.

It's becoming mainstream knowledge that large environmental groups have used and are abusing the debunked climate change theory to increase exposure, donations, and sponsorships. Shame on you for joining that bandwagon. Here's a couple photos of what's happening to Greenpeace nowadays: http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/2009/12/greenpeace-ships-targeted-proper.html

Best regards and Merry Christmas,

Justin
--
Relax, your footprint is green.
www.ilovecarbondioxide.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/greentruth

Truth Or Lies?

December 24, 2009 2 comments

So what is the problem here, global warming, global cooling or global scamming?



Well we get spin from both alarmists and sceptics. So who knows what is truth and what is fiction? I for one do, having researched thoroughly both sides of the debate and all available evidence.

I am not a scientist, alarmist nor a conspiracy theorist. I am a lay person on the outside that took a look into, that looking glass and thought, hmmmm we have a problem, THIS JUST DOES NOT SIT RIGHT IN MY MIND.

As someone who is ex military I have seen a few things in my time. I will not discuss actual events but I will discuss propoganda and disinformation.

Propaganda is the use of all available media systems to disseminate information that conveys the message that you want those receiving it to believe.

Disinformation is similar to propaganda but you feed lies and truths into the machine to create confusion.

So how does this effect the issue of Climate Change?

The simple one word answer is MASSIVELY.

What we all must realise is that we are being fed a constant stream of information from mainstream media. It seems to me to be a mixture of both propaganda and disinformation. So we are fed, truths and lies by these media organisations, remember the owners of these organisations are power brokers and elite. So we are told what they want us to hear and we view what they want us to see. The end result has two outcomes, complete confusion or numbness, the I don't care attitude. Either result is acceptable to these power brokers.

However there are a lot of people who are now waking up to the sham and scam that is going on. More and more websites are springing up that attack the lies of mass media and governments ( notice that I did not use a G in government, we govern them not vice versa).

Do I believe in Global warming, hell yes I do, do I believe in Global cooling hell yes I do. You see it happens every year, winter, spring, summer, autumn and then winter again and that's only in one year! But if we look back 10, 20, 30 or 10,000 years we can see cycles of the change to the global climate. It is ALL COMPLETELY NATURAL and yet we are told otherwise.

So if we can accept thousands of years of data, real data I mean and not the, concoted data supplied by CRU in East Anglia, then as rational human beings we can see that peaks and troughs of the temp rise and fall are normal. Or do we? Well no we don't as the media using propaganda tells us otherwise. The information provided to the masses is critical and the information provided is one sided. When do you ever see the arguments provided for sceptics such as Lord Monckton shown on main stream media?

This article is not about educating you, this article has been written to make you ask yourself the same questions I asked myself when looking into Global Warming.

My beliefs are these:

Global Warming exists
Global cooling exists
Anthropogenic global warming does not exist
Anthropogenic global cooling does not exist
Cap and trade is a tax scam
Carbon trading is a scam

If global warming was real and CO2 was the cause of global warming then carbon trading means nothing. What it actually means is that Me Pete can buy Justin's unused carbon emissions and use them for myself. Thus, this means that emissions do not drop, instead the remain the same but money transfers and tax is applied. This is not global warming it is global scare mongering to make the rich even richer by taking what little the poor have left in the way of taxes.

The whole climate change operation and that is what it is, an operation, is a complete scam to strip people of their money by taxing those same people for a problem that does not exist.

But hey, don't take my word for it, go do some digging yourselves and as free thinking people, reach your own decision. You still have choice so use it and make your decisions wisely.

Peter T Laird

I am no longer afraid to show my name!

Peace Out.



P

Merry Christmas! 50 years of global cooling predicted

2 comments
Who said the science was settled?

Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming....”

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

Australian angle: Lu received his PhD in Physics from the University of Newcastle.

(Thanks to reader Thumbnail.)

UPDATE

If Lu is right, the US can expect more winters like this one, with more than half the country now covered in snow:

image

UPDATE 2

Another reminder that warming would be good, since it’s cold that is the bigger killer:

Winter freeze kills 79 in Poland

Source By Andrew Bolt

Video: Copenhagen was a 'wonderful failure'

December 22, 2009 1 comments
'Global warming skeptics all stood shoulder to shoulder with NASA's James Hansen in hoping Copenhagen would fail'

Watch Marc Morano on Canada's BNN here.

The crash and burn of the UN summit has become the most wonderful Christmas gift for the entire world.

Food for Thought

1 comments
The problem all along, of course, is that people jump to conclusions. Sure, concentrated CO2 exposed to infrared will get somewhat warmer than everyday air. But this only proves that everyday air (99.96% of which is nitrogen, oxygen and argon) is more transparent to IR and less apt to be heated that way. Air molecules, CO2 included, initially acquire heat by contact with warmer surfaces. Via mutual collisions and convective transport, this heat gets spread around within an airmass.

To some slight degree, CO2 also has the option of acquiring heat by radiative transfer. But, rather ironically, it cannot radiatively transfer this heat to the nitrogen, oxygen and argon molecules which surround it because, as said, they are largely infrared-transparent. As a result, an excited CO2 molecule is obliged to share its heat just like the rest of them do, by bumping into other molecules. In short, there’s nothing special about CO2 in a real-world context. Outnumbered 2500 to 1, CO2’s energy is lost in a busy buzz of collisions, its radiative properties wasted.

Moreover, any heated gas radiates infrared — and in this case 99.96% of the gas consists of molecules other than CO2.

Yet no one seriously imagines that back-radiation from 99.96% of the air has a role in raising the earth’s surface temperature.

Only when CO2 comes up do we lose touch with reality.

Here’s a succinct point: Immersed in the vacuum of space, the earth has but one means of losing heat: radiation. And what does carbon dioxide do? It radiates.

It’s amazing that so few people have bothered to give this theory a second look.

Via email By Alan Siddons

Europe shivers as travel is halted, death toll rises

December 20, 2009 2 comments

The death toll continued to rise yesterday in Europe as the severe Arctic cold, blizzards and snowfalls kept a grip on the continent, causing major transport and energy disruptions.

From northern Europe to the Balkans, weather officials reported temperatures plunging overnight to as low as -30 degrees Celsius, while further snowfalls created havoc with rail services and left motorists stranded for hours on icy and snow-covered roads.

In Warsaw, police officials said 15 people froze to death on Saturday alone, bringing to 57 the number of people who have died in Poland from exposure to the severe weather since early December.

A police spokeswoman, disclosing the casualties from the -20 degrees conditions, appealed to people to come to the aid of the homeless and those who were drunk on the street.

“In such cases nobody should simply pass on by,” she said. “They should inform the authorities.”

In Prague, police confirmed that six people, including three homeless persons, were believed to have frozen to death in the northeastern city of Ostrava at the weekend.

In Germany, officials reported a weekend death toll of six persons.

One was a homeless man who froze to death, while the other five were traffic fatalities blamed on ice road conditions.

In southeastern Europe, heavy snowfall, blizzards and freezing temperatures trapped dozens of cars on Serbian roads, disrupted rail services in Croatia and caused power cuts all around Bulgaria, local media reported yesterday.

Near the town of Pozarevac in eastern Serbia, some 50 automobiles were snowed in on a highway late on Saturday evening, stranding some motorists for hours before help arrived.

“I got stuck in my car and without the fuel. Ice everywhere,” one of the trapped drivers said.

In Bulgaria some 130 towns and villages as well as areas of the capital Sofia itself, suffered power shortages after heavy snowfall, Bulgarian media reported.

In Bosnia, snow caused a huge traffic jams, while in Croatia where trains running between capital Zagreb and coastal town of Split became stuck in the snow for hours.

Several roads in central Montenegro were closed due to heavy snowfall, while the traffic on other roads is slow and difficult due to ice and low temperatures.

The heavy snowfall also blocked several roads in Romania where some areas reported snow as deep as 2.5m.

In Germany, the country’s third-biggest airport in Dusseldorf was forced to close yesterday when a blizzard reduced visibility to almost zero.

A spokesman said there were no take-offs or landings after 9.15am (0815 GMT) because of the strong wind and falling snow. Some incoming flights were diverted. Others were cancelled at their airports of departure.

In Belgium, flights at Brussels international airport were delayed or cancelled altogether due to the snow conditions, while out on the roads, police reported numerous accidents amid treacherous ice and snow conditions.

In the Netherlands, heavy snowfall at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport caused flights to be cancelled or delayed by up to two hours, affecting thousands of air travellers.

In The Hague and other Dutch cities, tram and bus services were disrupted, while in the northern Friesland province many roads and towns were cut off by the snow.

The winter invasion was felt even in Mediterranean regions. In Spain, authorities reported temperatures dropping to as low as -20 degrees, with authorities issuing a cold weather alert.

In Italy, Arctic temperatures prevailed overnight not only in the mountain regions, but also in the central Abruzzo region, where temperatures of -25 degrees were measured.

At Paris Charles de Gaulle airport 40% of flights were cancelled and the remaining services were leaving an average of one hour late, while the city’s second airport Orly was the scene of a strike by security staff.

The most embarrassing scenes for transport operators hit cross-Channel transport between Britain and France, after the Eurostar passenger service from London to Paris was shut down following at least five breakdowns.

Eurostar, the operator of the Channel Tunnel passenger trains, admitted it could not say when services would resume, with more than 24,000 passengers attempting inter-city travel ahead of the Christmas break stranded.

French Euro MP Dominique Baudis said he would call for the European Commission to investigate after he and his family were among those stuck.

The weather problems in Europe came as the eastern US experienced an even more ferocious snowstorm, which blanketed several states, paralysed transport and cut off power to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Source

Vancouver Green Police State Update 2

1 comments
Email from a reader, last name withheld as per privacy request

Hi there Justin, I happened to come across your article posted on Dec 14, 2009 about the Vancouver Police Dept (VPD) giving you a ticket for leaving your car on idle. I came across it in a Google search as I just got ticketed for the same thing by the VPD yesterday. I started my car with an alarm auto-starter inside my house and maybe went outside 5 to 10 minutes later (I think, wasn't looking at the clock). The VPD cruiser was waiting for me on the other side of the street....which I thought was not good, but decided to walk to my car. They got out and ask me if I was me (I guess they ran my plate already).

They told me it was illegal to have my car running unattended. I told them I was warming it up and it's in front of MY House (my house is a house...it's in a residential area of East Van that isn't scummy! The road out front is pretty much, I guess unofficially assumed, for MY house). The VPD told me it was illegal and took my Driver's License and gave me a $81 ticket telling me this is how cars are stolen. I didn't argue it, but my car doors were locked, there's a red steering wheel lock engaged at the time, and the alarm is armed, and the car turns off if anybody touches the foot pedals or gears. They must have seen me with the car keys in hand, and me deactivating the alarm & unlocking the doors with my remote.

I agree with your article mostly. The police I dealt with was professional, and I know they only enforce the law, not make them. The law is retarded and whoever made and passed it is an idiot in my opinion. I'm not going to blame the police for this.

But here's the thing, I went to school in Chemical Sciences with my major in Environmental Chemistry, I've worked in the industry for 5 years, then I became an Senior Auto Adjuster for a private insurance company for 5 years. I remember when the Idling bylaw came out, some jerk neighbor told me it's against the law to leave my car idling, which pissed me off because she said it's killing the environment. This made me take a good look at the bylaw at the time. I agree with your assessment with Aircare (which is a joke & cash grab if you ask me, large vehicles like buses & semi produce way more Carbon Monoxide & etc and they're not tested. Even a lab instructor saw problems with their testing & told the class this). Also Idle vs driving the car for the same amount of time is the same. I also went another step, I talked to an Auto Appraiser who worked for my company who has over 50 years in the auto industry (he's since retired recently, but he knows the inside & out of vehicles and how they work better than any mechanic & bodyman, he’s highly recognized in our industry). He looked at the law and thought it was joke too, he suspects it's to prevent people from loitering downtown.

Anyways, he says everything the bylaw said about not needing to warm up and such was all BS, that you CAN damage your car by not warming it up, that the oil has to heat up and circulate.

Anyways it gets better though, so after I got the ticket....I went out for awhile, but when I got home I looked up the violation I was ticketed for under the Motor Vehicle Act (I worked as senior auto adjuster after all, I know how this stuff works). My violation is for MV 191(2)(a). Here's the link: http://www.bclaws.ca/Recon/document/freeside/--%20m%20--/motor%20vehicle%20act%20%20rsbc%201996%20%20c.%20318/00_act/96318_05.xml#section191

It says:
Leaving parked vehicle

191 (1) A motor vehicle must be equipped with a lock or other device to prevent the unauthorized use of the motor vehicle.

(2) A driver must not permit a motor vehicle to stand unattended or parked unless the driver has

(a) locked it or made it secure in a manner that prevents its unauthorized use, and

(b) if the motor vehicle is standing on a grade, turned the front wheels of the vehicle to the curb or side of the highway.

Hey guess what, my vehicle was locked....and if it says it's locked or secured in a manner to prevent unauthorized use....then it's NOT illegal. Nothing about time length of running idle or such.

So what am I going to do about it? Well I called the VPD Constable & left a voice message for him to call me back to discuss this. If he doesn't clear it up, I will dispute this. In my experience, I feel I should have a strong case in court if I can show my car was locked or secure at the time. I plan to prove this with pictures of my steerwheel lock, alarm, and alarm manuals. It will be dependent if they accept this evidence. Also I will question the attending constable in court if he checked the door to see if it's unlocked & looked inside to observe the steering wheel lock. But I'm hoping it won't have to go that far & he just fixes it now, as I’m going to talk to him all professional like….which I did at the time of the incident (doesn’t usually pay to freak out).

I'm telling you all this because you should check your ticket as well to see what you were ticketed for, as I don't see any other Violations in the Motor Vehicle Act talking about idling when I scanned through it. Regardless if there is another Violation for Idling or not....It doesn't matter as I was not ticketed for that, I was ticketed for supposedly not having my vehicle locked nor secure, but it was. If you know anybody else that has been ticketed for idling, you should tell them to check their tickets as well.

I hope you find all this helpful.

Thanks,

Henry


Also see: Scientist emails the City of Vancouver

Send your thoughts by contacting us.

Volcanoes, blizzards, and climate fools

December 19, 2009 2 comments
At the same time as the scam in Fraudenhagen ended in an anti-climax for the idiots believing in manmade climate change, the eastern United States is preparing for a major winter storm moving up the Atlantic coast. Also, in Sweden as well as most of Europe we’re seemingly facing one of the coldest X-mases for many years. In my recollection only the year I was in the military can measure up for the cold we’ve seen the latest week. Granted I’ve been living in other countries for many years, but I’m usually home over the holidays. Several football matches have been canceled and people in south of Europe is freezing to death. Warmer climate eh?

I wish for a couple of degrees warmer, that would benefit humankind and as back in the middle ages we could grow grapes in Sweden again. However, the signs recently seem to indicate we’re heading for colder times. I’m only waiting for the New World Order alarmists to start warning for a new Ice-age.

Anyway, the second worst ‘pollutant’ we have in the world, far worse than all the factories, planes and ships put together, have shown its face again. Of course this foe was, and is, ignored by the scheming tricksters in Fraudenhagen, but people of the island Tongatapu, Tonga, has first class tickets. The volcanic activity in that area has recently put up a magnificent spectacle that should scare the living daylights of any climatologist. However, such eruptions throwing out hundred times more carbondioxid than any country are not as fun to blame as mankind. Humans can be controlled, be told how many kids to have and what cars to drive, it’s slightly harder to tell a volcano to: “stop polluting so we can own you”.

The insanity our elected masters and bought for scientists tries to sell us have been found out many times over. It’s not only climategate or thirty thousand plus scientists suing Al Gore; it’s not only Russian investigators saying how it is or NASA being found out lying, it’s so much more. And what about common sense? Since there’s not a single evidence for the manmade global warming hoax and since we actually know - scientifically proven - that the sun runs our climate almost alone, how can anyone out there actually listen to the alarmists’ claims?

Source By The Oracle

Vancouver Green Police State Update 1

0 comments
Email to Vancouver green nazi squad

FYI.
Some comments I wrote to a specialist email group, composed of mathematicians and various academics. Use any info as you wish.

Should any of the recipients in the Vancouver bureaucracy have any information that clearly indicates that carbon dioxide has an effect upon either global temperatures or the climate, please let me know.

Best regards,
Hans Schreuder
(retired scientist, mMensa)
Darsham England
-----
What I can say though is that until such time that the scientific community comes to realise that their pet theory of a greenhouse effect (based as it is on greenhouse gases) is unreal, until that time will the climate alarm continue.

I know not what else to write to convince them of this fallacy. Neither water vapour nor carbon dioxide are GHGs; if anything at all, they are superb anti-GHGs; they cool the atmosphere!
Monckton himself writes : "[...] The predicted phenomenon is startlingly and entirely absent from the observational record – No “greenhouse warming” signature is observed in reality" - from http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/whatgreenhouse/moncktongreenhousewarming.pdf pg 7.

Yet he admonishes me for my "ignorance" with regard the basic radiative transfer formulae?! All formulae relating to radiative transfer in our open-to-space atmosphere are chasing their own tail, but how can I prove it?


G&T did a splendid paper, now peer reviewed; my summary: www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_of_the_Atmospheric_CO2_Greenhouse_Effects.pdf
Then I wrote the layman's guide to how the atmosphere works, with not one word of response by the RS. Nobody listens, nobody wants to know.

The GHE and the concept of GHGs are sacrosanct. Period.
Fact of life: both GHE and GHGs are fantasmas; exactly the same as phlogiston in its day.
Fact of life: no evidence for any hot-spot has ever been observed.
Fact of life: such a hot-spot will never be observed because it can not exist in the open-to-space atmosphere; only in lab flasks can it exist.

Alan Siddons summarised the behaviour of carbon dioxide rather succinctly yesterday:
The problem all along, of course, is that people jump to conclusions. Sure, concentrated CO2 exposed to infrared will get somewhat warmer than everyday air. But this only proves that everyday air (99.96% of which is nitrogen, oxygen and argon) is more transparent to IR and less apt to be heated that way. Air molecules, CO2 included, initially acquire heat by contact with warmer surfaces. Via mutual collisions and convective transport, this heat gets spread around within an airmass.

To some slight degree, CO2 also has the option of acquiring heat by radiative transfer. But, rather ironically, it cannot radiatively transfer this heat to the nitrogen, oxygen and argon molecules which surround it because, as said, they are largely infrared-transparent. As a result, an excited CO2 molecule is obliged to share its heat just like the rest of them do, by bumping into other molecules. In short, there’s nothing special about CO2 in a real-world context. Outnumbered 2500 to 1, CO2’s energy is lost in a busy buzz of collisions, its radiative properties wasted.

Moreover, any heated gas radiates infrared — and in this case 99.96% of the gas consists of molecules other than CO2. Yet no one seriously imagines that back-radiation from 99.96% of the air has a role in raising the earth’s surface temperature. Only when CO2 comes up do we lose touch with reality.

Here’s a succinct point: Immersed in the vacuum of space, the earth has but one means of losing heat: radiation. And what does carbon dioxide do? It radiates.

It’s amazing that so few people have bothered to give this theory a second look.
So, there you have it. In just a few sentences Alan manages to point out how impossible it is for CO2 to make the atmosphere warmer.

Yet Professors of Physics and UK MPs who have degrees in Physics are happily proclaiming that the atmosphere is warmer because CO2 "traps" heat.
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Lord Monckton Knocked Out by Copenhagen Cop

December 18, 2009 7 comments
So, the UN cops are now resorting to physical abuse to silence dissenters? Here's what Monckton had to say about the incident.

Is the European police state going global?

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Ugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.

Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.

Inside the conference center, “world leader” after “world leader” got up and postured about the need to Save The Planet, the imperative to do a deal, the necessity to save the small island nations from drowning, etc., etc., etc.

Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.

However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.

Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.

In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.

Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.

He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.

I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.

I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”

In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.

I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.

The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.

To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.

Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.

However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.

It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.

A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.

While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.

However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.

He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”

Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized.

Source

Blizzard Dumps Snow on Copenhagen

December 17, 2009 2 comments
THE GORE EFFECT STRIKES AGAIN!

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”

Delegates from 193 countries have been in Copenhagen since Dec. 7 to discuss how to fund global greenhouse gas emission cuts. U.S. President Barack Obama will arrive before the summit is scheduled to end tomorrow.

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit).

DMI defines a white Christmas as 90 percent of the country being covered by at least 2 centimeters of snow on the afternoon of Dec. 24.

Source

Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Dec. 17th 2009

4 comments

It’s all gone Pete Tong for alarmists in Denmark as the curse of Brown descends and the inconvenience of climategate refuses to go away. Greenpeace was punk’d, Phelim was unplugged and Al Gore turned into the Gaffeinator. It’s all good clean fun in this, your last round-up of 2009.

FYI, the latest Climategate Round-Up is here, and a Copenhagen Round-Up is here. The winner of the Most Alarming Alarmism by an Alarmist will be announced tomorrow, so if you haven’t voted yet, get to it.

Part One: Al Gore & Friends

Al traveled to Hopenchangen in Copenhagen and made some ‘remarks’. He has a link to his own self on his blog, if you care to listen to him for 42 minutezzzzzzzzzz

Copenhagen was supposed to be the crowning moment for the ecovangelist-in-chief, he even got to hang out with a man who won an election. Instead the world seemed more interested in Al’s gaffes:

It’s no wonder that Al refuses to debate, even if the people do want to see a cage match between him and Sarah Palin.

Al is much more comfortable ducking hard interviews and hiding behind security thugs rather than face questions about his belligerent denial about the importance of Climategate:

..

Bonny Prince Chuckles is also in Copenhagen, because the world needs to know what an inbred over-privileged and under-educated horse whisperer thinks about the planet. Or something.

Part Two: AGW Scaremongers

Oh noes, global warming kills salmon. Add the delicious-when-barbecued pink fish to the list.

You know why I hate dirty hippies? Because they want the rest of us to stop washing too. It’s called soap, hippies. Use it.

As Copenhagen rolls on, the nastiest of all the activist pop their heads up. The anti-human ‘optimum populationists’ want a China-like one child policy for the whole world. No word yet from idiotarian Diane Francis on which of her two children will be sacrificed for Gaia. Did these folks not learn from Paul Ehrlich’s epic fail?

Virtuous hippies might eco-shop, but they’re more likely to cheat and steal. Kinda like Prius drivers being more likely to cause a wreck.

Everyone’s favorite eco-terrorist group Greenpeace got a taste of their own activism when skeptics boarded the Rainbow Warrior. Heh.

How can you tell when a Green’s had enough? They drop the pretence at reason and start shouting and swearing. Profanity warning.

Watermelon is a nice descriptor for green activists who are motivated by socialism. Not that the greens are exactly hiding their commie roots.

Britain is doomed, there’s going to be no food and no water soon, so shut up and climb aboard the AGW bus.

Monckton deconstructs a Greenpeace hippies world belief. Excellent fun:

..

Will of the people, we don’t need no stinkin’ will of the people. Australia’s government was handed an embarrassing defeat over its ETS policy recently, but that can’t stop it. Zombie-ETS rises again.

Joltin’ Joe Romm went nuts when Jon Stewart called ecomentalistism a neo-religion, but Stewart’s not the only one suggesting that notion.

As most of the UK’s press focuses on Climategate, the Independent puts its fingers in its ears and pretends that the world will still buy the crap they peddled pre-CRU leak.

Protests in support of Hopenchangen broke out all over the world. In Toronto, 250 people showed up and Tom giggles.

Read the rest over at The Daily Bayonet!

Lord Monckton reports from Dopenhagen

3 comments
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen

In the Grand Ceremonial Hall of the University of Copenhagen, a splendid Nordic classical space overlooking the Church of our Lady in the heart of the old city, rows of repellent, blue plastic chairs surrounded the podium from which no less a personage than Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was to speak.

I had arrived in good time to take my seat among the dignitaries in the front row. Rapidly, the room filled with enthusiastic Greenies and enviro-zombs waiting to hear the latest from ye Holy Bookes of Ipecac, yea verily.

The official party shambled in and perched on the blue plastic chairs next to me. Pachauri was just a couple of seats away, so I gave him a letter from me and Senator Fielding of Australia, pointing out that the headline graph in the IPCC’s 2007 report, purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 150 years had itself accelerated, was fraudulent.

Would he use the bogus graph in his lecture? I had seen him do so when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales. I watched and waited.

Sure enough, he used the bogus graph. I decided to wait until he had finished, and ask a question then.

Pachauri then produced the now wearisome list of lies, fibs, fabrications and exaggerations that comprise the entire case for alarm about “global warming”. He delivered it in a tired, unenthusiastic voice, knowing that a growing majority of the world’s peoples – particularly in those countries where comment is free – no longer believe a word the IPCC says.

They are right not to believe. Science is not a belief system. But here is what Pachauri invited the audience in Copenhagen to believe.

1. Pachauri asked us to believe that the IPCC’s documents were “peer-reviewed”. Then he revealed the truth by saying that it was the authors of the IPCC’s climate assessments who decided whether the reviewers’ comments were acceptable. That – whatever else it is – is not peer review.

2. Pachauri said that greenhouse gases had increased by 70% between 1970 and 2004. This figure was simply nonsense. I have seen this technique used time and again by climate liars. They insert an outrageous statement early in their presentations, see whether anyone reacts and, if no one reacts, they know they will get away with the rest of the lies. I did my best not to react. I wanted to hear, and write down, the rest of the lies.

3. Next came the bogus graph, which is featured three times, large and in full color, in the IPCC’s 2007 climate assessment report. The graph is bogus not only because it relies on the made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia but also because it is overlain by four separate trend-lines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however – neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it – is that from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975-1998.

4. Pachauri said that there had been an “acceleration” in sea-level rise from 1993. He did not say, however, that in 1993 the method of measuring sea-level rise had switched from tide-gages to satellite altimetry against a reference geoid. The apparent increase in the rate of sea-level rise is purely an artefact of this change in the method of measurement.

5. Pachauri said that Arctic temperatures would rise twice as fast as global temperatures over the next 100 years. However, he failed to point out that the Arctic was actually 1-2 Celsius degrees warmer than the present in the 1930s and early 1940s. It has become substantially cooler than it was then.

6. Pachauri said the frequency of heavy rainfall had increased. The evidence for this proposition is largely anecdotal. Since there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years, there is no reason to suppose that any increased rainfall in recent years is attributable to “global warming”.

7. Pachauri said that the proportion of tropical cyclones that are high-intensity storms has increased in the past three decades. However, he was very careful not to point out that the total number of intense tropical cyclones has actually fallen sharply throughout the period.

8. Pachauri said that the activity of intense Atlantic hurricanes had increased since 1970. This is simply not true, but it appears to be true if – as one very bad scientific paper in 2006 did – one takes the data back only as far as that year. Take the data over the whole century, as one should, and no trend whatsoever is evident. Here, Pachauri is again using the same statistical dodge he used with the UN’s bogus “warming-is-getting-worse” graph: he is choosing a short run of data and picking his start-date with care so as falsely to show a trend that, over a longer period, is not significant.

9. Pachauri said small islands like the Maldives were vulnerable to sea-level rise. Not if they’re made of coral, which is more than capable of outgrowing any sea-level rise. Besides, as Professor Morner has established, sea level in the Maldives is no higher now than it was 1250 years ago, and has not risen for half a century.

10. Pachauri said that if the ice-sheets of Greenland or West Antarctica were to melt there would be “meters of sea-level rise”. Yes, but his own climate panel has said that that could not happen for thousands of years, and only then if global mean surface temperatures stayed at least 2 C (3.5 F) warmer than today’s.

11. Pachauri said that if temperatures rose 2 C (3.5 F) 20-30% of all species would become extinct. This, too, is simply nonsense. For most of the past 600 million years, global temperatures have been 7 C (13.5 F) warmer than today, and yet here we all are. One has only to look at the number of species living in the tropics and the number living at the Poles to work out that warmer weather will if anything increase the number and diversity of species on the planet. There is no scientific basis whatsoever for Pachauri’s assertion about mass extinctions. It is simply made up.

12. Pachauri said that “global warming” would mean “lower quantities of water”. Not so. It would mean larger quantities of water vapor in the atmosphere, hence more rain. This is long-settled science – but, then, Pachauri is a railroad engineer.

13. Pachauri said that by 2100 100 million people would be displaced by rising sea levels. Now, where did we hear that figure before? Ah, yes, from the ludicrous Al Gore and his sidekick Bob Corell. There is no truth in it at all. Pachauri said he was presenting the results of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report. It is quite plain: the maximum possible rate of sea-level rise is put at just 2 ft, with a best estimate of 1 ft 5 in. Sea level is actually rising at around 1 ft/century. That is all.

14. Pachauri said that he had seen for himself the damage done in Bangladesh by sea-level rise. Just one problem with that. There has been no sea-level rise in Bangladesh. At all. In fact, according to Professor Moerner, who visited it recently and was the only scientist on the trip to calibrate his GPS altimeter properly by taking readings at two elevations at least 10 meters apart, sea level in Bangladesh has actually fallen a little, which is why satellite images show 70,000 sq. km more land area there than 30 years ago. Pachauri may well have seen some coastal erosion: but that was caused by the imprudent removal of nine-tenths of the mangroves in the Sunderban archipelago to make way for shrimp-farms.

15. Pachauri said we could not afford to delay reducing carbon emissions even by a year, or disaster would result. So here’s the math. There are 388 ppmv of CO2 in the air today, rising at 2 ppmv/year over the past decade. So an extra year with no action at all would warm the world by just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 C, or less than a twentieth of a Fahrenheit degree. And only that much on the assumption that the UN’s sixfold exaggeration of CO2’s true warming potential is accurate, which it is not. Either way, we can afford to wait a couple of decades to see whether anything like the rate of warming predicted by the UN’s climate panel actually occurs.

16. Pachauri said that the cost of mitigating carbon emissions would be less than 3% of gross domestic product by 2030. The only economist who thinks that is Lord Stern, whose laughable report on the economics of climate change, produced for the British Government, used a near-zero discount rate so as artificially to depress the true cost of trying to mitigate “global warming”. To reduce “global warming” to nothing, one must close down the entire global economy. Any lesser reduction is a simple fraction of the entire economy. So cutting back, say, 50% of carbon emissions by 2030, which is what various extremist groups here are advocating, would cost around 50% of GDP, not 3%.

17. Pachauri said that solar and wind power provided more jobs per $1 million invested than coal. Maybe they do, but that is a measure of their relative inefficiency. The correct policy would be to raise the standard of living of the poorest by letting them burn as much fossil fuels as they need to lift them from poverty. Anything else is organized cruelty.

18. Pachauri said we could all demonstrate our commitment to Saving The Planet by eating less meat. The Catholic Church has long extolled the virtues of mortification of the flesh: we generally ate fish on Fridays in the UK, until the European Common Fisheries Policy meant there were no more fish. But the notion that going vegan will make any measurable impact on global temperatures is simply fatuous.

It is time for Railroad Engineer Pachauri to get back to his signal-box. About the climate, as they say in New York’s Jewish quarter, he knows from nothing.

Source

Climategate: the lawyers move in – those scientists are toast!

December 15, 2009 3 comments
By James Delingpole

God bless America and – can I really be saying this? – God bless the legal profession! Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration, most of the world’s other governments (save the plucky Canucks), the United Nations and the Mainstream Media (MSM) to sweep Climategate under the carpet, the lawyers are putting this shoddy scandal where it belongs: in the dock. (Hat tip: Platosays)

The US Department of Energy (DOE) – under pressure, most likely, from Senator Inhofe – has issued a “Litigation Hold Notice” to its various sub-departments asking them to retain any documents pertaining to the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia.

Below – reports Watts Up With That - is a copy of the notice sent to the DOE’s Savannah office in South Carolina:

“December 14, 2009

DOE Litigation Hold Notice

DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

What does it mean? Big, BIG trouble for the Climategate scientists is what it means. You don’t mess with US lawyers and the reason that what might seem an essentially British affair comes under their jurisdiction is because the DOE has provided funding for these scientists.

Here’s one example from the Climategate files:

From: Ben Santer < santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
To: lbutler@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Subject: Re: averaging
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:08:14 -0800
Reply-to: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cc: Tom Wigley < wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >, kevin trenberth < trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >


Dear Lisa,

That’s great news! I’ve confirmed with DOE that I can use up to $10,000
of my DOE Fellowship to provide financial support for Tom’s Symposium. I
will check with Anjuli Bamzai at DOE to determine whether there are any
strings attached to this money. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to use
the DOE money for the Symposium dinner, and to defray some of the travel
expenses of international participants who can’t come up with their own

travel money. I’ll try to resolve this question in the next few days.

Mmm. I expect you can buy quite a nice no-strings dinner for $10,000.

And here’s another one of the Climategate emails from Dr Phil Jones.

From: Phil Jones < p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
To: “Neville Nicholls” < N.Nicholls@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
Subject: RE: Misc
Date: Wed Jul 6 15:07:45 2005

Neville,
Mike’s response could do with a little work, but as you say he’s got the tone
almost dead on. I hope I don’t get a call from congress ! I’m hoping that no-one
there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25
years.
I’ll send on one other email received for interest.
Cheers
Phil

Gosh. I wonder why it can be that he doesn’t want congress to know about his DOE grant. Surely transparency and integrity were ever the CRU’s watchwords?

But if I were the DOE’s lawyers, I think one of the letters I’d most like to examine would be this one by the CRU’s former head Tom Wigley.

To understand its significance you need first to be aware of one of the most contentious points about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) – the reliability of weather station records and the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). For chapter and verse, your man is Anthony Watts – creator of the now legendary Watts Up With That and also of this wonderfully informative site Surface Stations.

Put very simply, there is great concern among sceptics that the data records used to support the IPCC’s claims about “unprecedented”and catastrophic late 20th century global warming are untrustworthy. Not only do these records rely on a dwindling number of weather surface stations whose readings have been skewed either by relocation or by the warming effects of the cities which have grown around them over the years. But also, the raw data may have been tampered with by activist scientists with a specific political agenda – as for example we saw in this story about some very dubious temperature records in Darwin, Australia.

In 2007 Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog had identified serious inconsistencies in one such data record – the GIStemp record at NASA, run under the auspices of Al Gore’s favourite scientist James Hansen. He wondered whether similar rules might apply at another surface record, HadCrut, run by Phil Jones of the CRU. But when McIntyre put in a Freedom of Information request for data on the weather stations used by HadCrut, this was – predictably and quite deliberately, as we now know from the Climategate files – rebuffed.

Meanwhile another researcher, British mathematician Dr Doug Keenan had also smelled a rat. His suspicions had fallen on 84 Chinese weather stations whose data was being used by CRU to inform their HadCrut record.

In 1990 – as Christopher Booker reports in The Real Global Warming Disaster – two papers had appeared on these stations, one in Nature by a team led by Jones, the other by a US scientist Professor Wei-chyung Wang, who also contributed to Jones’s paper. The Jones paper stated that HadCrut had chosen stations ‘with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times’. This was confirmed in almost identical terms by the Wang paper. Both papers referred to a report produced jointly by the US Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, making a similar claim.

As Booker describes it:

When Keenan examined this report he found that it contained information on only 35 of the 84 stations. But the locations of at least half of these had been moved during the period 1954-1983, in one case five times, by as much as 41 kilometres. This not only cast serious doubts on the reliability of their data but belied the claims made by Jones and Wang in their papers.

Bear in mind that Wang is one of the key players in the AGW debate – especially in the field of climate modeling and data analysis, as he describes in this biog. He is professor in Atmospheric Sciences Research at the University at Albany, in New York. He has received $7 million in grants from US federal agencies. And here he was being caught out in a case of alleged scientific fraud.

This is certainly what Keenan believed and submitted a report on the affair to Wang’s university. How did the university respond? It carried out an internal review, without interviewing – or even referring to – Keenan, and without giving any reasons, announced that the charges were baseless. For the full dirt on this cover up read this report at Watts Up With That.<

Now here’s that letter from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones giving his views on the affair:

(3) At the very start it seems this could have been easily dispatched.
ITEM X really should have been …

“Where possible, stations were chosen on the basis of station histories
and/or local knowledge: selected stations have relatively few, if any,
changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”

Of course the real get out is the final “or”. A station could be
selected if either it had relatively few “changes in instrumentation”
OR “changes in location” OR “changes in observation times”. Not all
three, simply any one of the three. One could argue about the science
here — it would be better to have all three — but this is not what
the statement says.

Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start?
Perhaps it’s not too late?

What we see encapsulated here is the corruption at the heart not just of Climategate but the whole IPCC process. Here we have the former head of one of the world’s leading climate research bodies apparently brainstorming with a colleague implicated in a fraud scandal on how best to conceal that fraud from outside investigation.

Meanwhile in a separate case, a US Senator has written to Penn State University warning that its funding may be withheld if it doesn’t properly investigate the activities of its associate professor Michael Mann.

As Senator Jeffrey Piccola rightly points out:

“The allegations of intellectual and scientific fraud like those made against Dr. Mann are serious against anybody involved in academics but the impact in this case is significantly elevated. The work of Dr Mann and other scientists at the CRU is being used to develop economic and environmental policies in states and countries across the world.”

Meanwhile in Copenhagen, the caravan rolls on. I’m not saying we’re going to win this one easily. Not with so many powerful vested interests backing AGW theory – among them the firms listed in this release from Open Europe: (Hat tip: Msher1 and Alexei)

EU environmental policy awards millions in windfall profits to oil companies and heavy industry
As national ministers meet this week in Copenhagen to discuss a new climate change deal, Open Europe has found that under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), oil and gas companies’ operations in the UK were granted a surplus of carbon permits worth €28.6m in 2008. For example, ExxonMobil received €4.3m and Total received €5.4m.

Meanwhile, heavy industrial polluters such as Corus received €47m, while cement firms Hanson and Lafarge received €17.3m and €20.2m.

Due to the economic downturn, many heavy polluters, such as oil and gas companies and heavy industrials, have been left with a surplus of carbon permits – essentially a free asset that firms can sell on to bolster their short term profits.

The glut of surplus permits on the market has driven down the price of carbon and led to a sharp increase in the number of permits being traded via carbon exchanges. Open Europe has found that the two largest carbon trading exchanges, European Climate Exchange and Bluenext, which includes members such as Barclays Bank, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Shell, have earned a combined average of €245,000 a day from the trading of carbon permits.


Source