The IPCC falsified satellite altimetry: "“We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.”

Dr. Nils Axel Mörner, former president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, again debunks the IPCC myth about rising sea levels in an article published by the Deccan Chronicle. The IPCC has according to Mörner e.g. dishonestly altered satellite altimetry upwards to imply a sudden rise level rise in 2003.

And now the IPCC is promoting its fake "science" at the Durban COP 17 conference:

This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.

No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads “an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon”.

Since chairing a meeting of his Cabinet underwater, Nasheed has been busy rallying other low-lying countries to make similar points. He chaired a summit of them in Bangladesh, to compare notes ahead of the Durban summit, and they agree to limit their own carbon emissions.

Ban Ki-moon, the head of the United Nations, was delighted — saying that it was unfair to ask “the poorest and most vulnerable to bear the brunt of the impact of climate change alone” and called for them to be given subsidies by richer countries to adapt. Such funds do not seem to be forthcoming. It seems the summit in Durban will, like so many climate summits, be disappointing.

I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career, recording and interpreting sea level data.

I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million “ecological refugees”. I have carefully examined the data of “drowning” Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

My latest project was a field expedition to India, to the coast of Goa, combining observations with archeological information. Our findings are straightforward: there is no ongoing sea level rise.

The sea level there has been stable for the last 50 years or so, after falling some 20cm in around 1960; it was well below the present level in the 18th century and some 50 to 60cm above the present in the 17th century. So it is clear that sea levels rise and fall entirely independently of so-called “climate change”.

Dr. Mörner then compares the facts with the IPCC´s version:

But the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story: “Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.”

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the International Union for Quaternary Reseach (INQUA) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an “inconvenient truth”: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries.

This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since.

So any of the troubles attributed to “rising sea levels” must instead be the result of other, local factors and basic misinterpretation. In Bangladesh, for example, increased salinity in the rivers has in fact been caused by dams in the Ganges, which have decreased the outflow of fresh water.

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that “there is strong evidence” of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: “Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data... This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century.”

Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: “We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.”

This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate.

Read the entire article here

Only 12 heads of state attending COP 17 in Durban

Not more than twelve heads of state or government are joining the thousands of climate tourists delegates attending the COP 17 climate change jamboree in Durban, according to the latest information:

Durban - Twelve heads of government and state have said they will participate in UN climate talks in Durban, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said on Friday.

African leaders from the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Senegal are set to attend the 12-day talks which wrap up on December 9, Figueres said.

Nauru, Honduras, Samoa, Monaco, Fiji, Niue and Norway will also be represented by their heads of state.

Well, Norway´s prime minister Stoltenberg really must be looking forward to joining this exclusive group of world leaders from such beacons of democracy and human rights as Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Fiji and Honduras ....

In addition, Stoltenberg will have an excellent opportunity to discuss climate change - and perhaps the profitability of the Casino in this adverse economic climate - with Monaco´s head of State, former playboy turned climate activist, Prince Albert II.

Swedish journalist: Vladimir Putin is a criminal

The Moscow correspondent of the Swedish quality daily Svenska Dagbladet confirms earlier reports - also reported on this blog - that Russia´s de facto dictator and future life time president, Vladimir Putin, is a criminal, who has become one of the richest men in Europe through corruption and bribery. In a chat one reader asked the correspondent Jan Blomgren, whether Putin is a criminal. Here is Blomgren´s reply:

Yes, that is what I believe. I would be surprised if Putin is not one of Europe´s richest men, and in that case it´s not his official salary which is behind his wealth. The rumours linking Putin to corruption, bribery and unlawful takeovers of companies surfaced already during his time as assistent to Sobtjak, the mayor of St. Petersburg in the beginning of the 1990´s. Putin´s position as the official responsible for foreign trade in St. Petersburg gave him undreamed-of possibilites "na leva" (to the left). As president from the year 2000 he has then had all the opportunities to enrich himself, his relatives and friends at the expense of either the Russian state or stateowned companies.

Putin, here together with his friend and supporter, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder

PS

It can be extremely profitable to be close to Putin. Vladimir Putin's right-hand man Igor Shuvalov is a rising star in Russian politics. He's also made a lot of money since joining the government:

While Shuvalov has gained prominence as arguably the government's second-most important leader, he's also gotten notice as Russia's wealthiest public servant. In required annual income declarations, Shuvalov's reported earnings rose from about $160,000 in 2008 to about $500,000 in 2010. Over that same period, however, his stay-at-home wife—Olga Shuvalova, a law school classmate—outearned him, some years reporting more income than all top government ministers combined. In 2008, Mrs. Shuvalova declared income of about $12 million. In 2009, about $20 million. In 2010, about $10 million. When the Russian press made note of Mrs. Shuvalova's earnings, and her registered ownership of some valuable property outside Moscow, the deputy prime minister said his wife was receiving dividends from investments that he'd placed in a trust before entering government service.

Read the entire article here

Human rights violations in Syria condemned, but the West remains silent about China and Russia

Western leaders ignore China´s gross human rights violations. Instead they choose to kowtow in the hope of better business deals and bailouts.

The UN Human Rights Council yesterday adopted a new resolution condemning human rights violations committed by the Assad regime in Syria.

The Assad regime, of course, needs to be strongly condemned. However, the UN Human Rights Council resolution now adapted, is more or less and empty gesture, because Russia and China voted against an attempt to refer Syria´s violations to the United Nations Security Council.

The Chinese and the Russian governments offer all kinds of excuses for their opposition to sanctions, but the real reasons become quite obvious, when one looks at their own human rights record:

Human Rights Watch on Russia:

President Dmitry Medvedev's rhetorical commitments to human rights and the rule of law have not been backed by concrete steps to support civil society. The year 2010 saw new attacks on human rights defenders, and the perpetrators of brazen murders in the previous year remained unpunished.

Amnesty International on China:

Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People's Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.

China and Russia oppose sanctions against Syria because they are afraid of being targeted for their own human rights violations.

The real question is: Why are the European Union (which initiated the UNHRC resolution) and the Obama regime refusing to take any action against the gross human rights violations in China and Russia?

The answer is clear: EU leaders and Obama do not want to disturb the trade and political relations with these two major human rights offenders. Instead of rightful condemnation, we even witness increasing western kowtowing, particularly towards China.

If important business deals - and bail-outs - are endangered, Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama and the rest simply choose to ignore human rights violations, like e.g. the state sponsored slave labour camps in China.

Sad, indeed.

The new European Council building in Brussels

Europe is full of ugly new office buildings, without the slightest relationship to the people working in them. Fortunately, there is at least one exception.

The new European Council building is still under construction, but one can easily grasp the genial idea behind the entire structure by looking at this picture:

What could better symbolise the work of the European Council (with its countless mostly useless "summits") than an empty bubble - or is it a balloon? - in the centre. The top eurocrats, who chose the winning entry, probably demanded that the architects hide the bubble in a box in order for it not to be too visible for ordinary passers-by.

We are told that the president of the European Council, a haiku poet by the name of Herman van Rompuy, will have his new luxurious offices in the building - on top of the bubble, perhaps?).

The European Council bubble is set to open in 2014, that is, if everything goes well. There is, of course the possibility that an even bigger bubble could burst before that, creating slight problems for the financing of the construction project.

Shale gas is clean - new Cornell University study rebuts a previous study

Flashback April 11,  2011:

Cornell University researchers say that natural gas pried from shale formations is dirtier than coal in the short term, rather than cleaner, and "comparable" in the long term.
The New York Times

Earlier this year most MSM media, among the the New York Times, were eager to publish stories about a Cornell University study purportedly showing that shale gas was dirtier than coal.

However, a soon to be published new Cornell University study completely refutes the findings of the earlier  widely cited study:

A research team from Cornell University finds that shale gas is better for the climate than coal, a conclusion that rebuts the earlier findings of other Cornell scientists.
During a Nov. 29 roundtable discussion with industry experts hosted by the American Clean Skies Foundation, Cornell's Lawrence Cathles III outlined the findings of a soon-to-be published study asserting that shale gas has a greenhouse gas footprint half or perhaps a third that of coal.
The Cathles study identified three errors in the widely cited study by Cornell's Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea. Cathles and other researchers said Howarth's findings were "seriously flawed" because of erroneous methane leakage data, a too-short methane global warming potential and because it compared coal and gas in terms of heat rather than electricity generation.
Specifically, Cathles and others have criticized Howarth's assumption that up to 7.9 percent of methane produced from a shale gas well is vented into the atmosphere. "That's such a huge and valuable volume of gas. To say that is the norm ... just isn't plausible," Cathles said.
Carnegie Mellon University's Paulina Jaramillo with similar research that debunked the earlier study, echoed much of Cathles' assertions and elaborated on others. Jaramillo joined Cathles earlier in the day to brief lawmakers in the Natural Gas Caucus about their findings

It is no use trying to find anything about this new study in the New York Times or most other mainstream media. The results of the new study do not fit into their fake environmentalist global warming agenda.

Frank Furedi on the EU oligarchy´s downsizing of democracy

My favourite academic, University of Kent sociology professor Frank Furedi, is as always spot on in his essay on how the EU oligarchy has downsized democracy and popular so:

Over the past month, it has become clear that the European Union doesn’t simply suffer from a democratic deficit; rather, it has decided that in the current climate of crisis and uncertainty, the institutions of government must be insulated and protected from public pressure. In Brussels, and among an influential coterie of European opinion-makers, the idea that ordinary people have the capacity to self-govern is dismissed as at best a naive prejudice, and at worst a marker for right-wing populism.

As we shall see, this desire to renounce the politics of representation is by no means confined to EU technocrats. To no one’s surprise, many businesspeople and bankers also prefer the new unelected governments of Greece and Italy to regimes that are accountable to their electorates. And such elitist disdain for nations’ democratic representative institutions is also shared by sections of the left and the intelligentsia, too. So in his contribution on the crisis of democracy, Jürgen Habermas, the leading leftist German philosopher, writes off national electorates as ‘the preserve of right-wing populism’ and condemns them as ‘the caricature of national macrosubjects shutting themselves off from each other’.

Indeed, it isn’t the old-fashioned conservative detractors of the multitude who are at the forefront of the current cultural turn against democratic will-formation – no, it is liberal advocates of expert-driven technocratic rule who are now the most explicit denouncers of democracy. The current political attack on the principles of representative democracy is founded on three propositions. First it is claimed that the people cannot be trusted to support policies that are necessary for the preservation and improvement of society. Secondly, it is suggested that there is an important trade-off to be made between democracy and efficiency, and that in a time of crisis the latter must prevail over the former. And finally, anti-democratic ideologues believe that governments, especially democratic governments, have lost the capacity to deal with the key problems facing societies in today’s globalised world.

Furedi ends his essay with the following observation:

The demotion of the role of national government is often presented as an enlightened and progressive thing, a way of challenging outdated and decrepit institutions. However, it is important to understand that the denunciation of the institutions of national government is not simply an attack on national but also on popular sovereignty. The claim that governments do not work is another way of saying that democratic representation within the context of a nation state does not work. The alternative that is proposed is invariably to have less democracy, not more. Habermas’s transnational democracy represents the institutionalisation of the rule of a cosmopolitan elite, which is merely a variant of the technocratic oligarchy that has recently been imposed upon the peoples of Greece and Italy.

Read the entire essay here