“New government-funded research has identified the top 100 effects of climate change and their expected impact on Britain and magnitude over this century.
The “Climate Change Risk Assessment” found that if no further action is taken to address climate change, annual flood damage to buildings could reach between 2.1 billion and 12 billion pounds, compared to current costs of 1.2 billion pounds.
“If I had to pick one particular issue, the flooding issue is the most dominant,” said Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and one of report’s authors.
Britain is already at risk of extreme weather. In 2007, summer floods cost over 3 billion pounds and disruption from snowfall last year cost 600 million pounds a day over a several-day period.
More intense bursts of rainfall in summer and longer rainfall in winter will cause more floods, worsening damage and disruption to infrastructure and property. Over the longer term rising seas will bring coastal flooding, Watson added.
Annual insurance payouts and premiums will rise significantly, and more properties will find it harder to get insurance and obtain mortgages, the report said.
The government is spending 2.1 billion pounds on flood defenses over the next four years, but this represents a cut in funding of around 27 percent, the chairman of the environment agency said when the spending budget was announced in 2010.”
100 climate deniers go into a bar. Spencer goes up to the landlord and asks “do you sell pure alcohol?” “No mate, just the usual wines, beers and spirits” he replies. “Right lads, next pub” says Spencer.
The landlord is stunned. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Nothing mate” replies Spencer, it’s just we require 100% proof”.
Climate change summit accepts deal
After an all-night negotiating marathon, the 193-nation two-week conference ended at 1426 GMT on Saturday, December 19, 2009.
US-LED COPENHAGEN DEAL
- No reference to legally binding agreement
- Recognises the need to limit global temperatures rising no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels
- Developed countries to “set a goal of mobilising jointly $100bn a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries”
- On transparency: Emerging nations monitor own efforts and report to UN every two years. Some international checks
- No detailed framework on carbon markets - “various approaches” will be pursued
And some more..
Reaction to Copenhagen climate deal
COPENHAGEN, Dec 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama reached a climate agreement on Friday with India, South Africa, China and Brazil, a U.S. official said. The deal outlined fell far short of the ambitions for the Copenhagen summit.
CO-AUTHOR OF A U.S. SENATE CLIMATE BILL, SENATOR JOHN KERRY
“This can be a catalyzing moment. It’s a powerful signal to see President Obama, Premier Wen, Prime Minister Singh, and President Zuma agree on a meeting of the minds. These are the four horsemen of a climate change solution. With this in hand, we can work to pass domestic legislation early next year to bring us across the finish line.”
Whoa there.
Did he really say: Obama, Wen, Singh,and Zuma — the four horsemen of WHAT?!…
I’ve heard about the four horsemen of the APOCALYPSE —
Is that what we’re really expecting here?
The Last Penguin
The Last Penguin
- December 21, 2009
- This week in the magazine, Fen Montaigne writes about penguins and climate change. In this audio slide show, Montaigne shares images he took during the austral summer of 2005-2006 while working with the ecologist Bill Fraser, and discusses how global warming has caused a decline in the number of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2009/12/21/091221_audioslideshow_penguins#ixzz0a48gbG4n
Climategate TKO in Copenhagen?
Climategate TKO in Copenhagen? By Jane Jamison
Will “cooler heads” prevail in Copenhagen? Have the scientists who have been working overtime in the past two weeks to make “climate sense” out of the global warming nonsense carried the day? Or is the idea of cutting back drastically on industrial production as we know it and transferring billions of dollars from rich nations to poor nations as “reparations” for the “sins” of carbon emissions and drowning polar bears simply so stupid that it is finally failing for lack of merit? Is global warming getting a technical knockout in Copenhagen?
(Photo Credit: Garie’s Clay Creations)
The good guys may have won. Deep breaths, everyone. We won’t know for sure until Friday.
Today’s London Times carries what might eventually be considered the most important headline in the world for the last twenty years — and the most hopeful news for the next twenty years if it is correct:
Copenhagen Stalls Decision on Catastrophic Climate Change for Six Years
The key decision on preventing catastrophic climate change will be delayed for up to six years if the Copenhagen summit delivers a compromise deal which ignores advice from the UN’s science body.
World leaders will not agree on the emissions cuts recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are likely instead to commit to reviewing them in 2015 or 2016.
Leaders of “developed” countries will arrive on Friday, the last day of the summit.
Stay tuned…
UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About Climategate Scandal
A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.
McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.
THIS WAS A PRESS CONFERENCE! and McAleer (a journalist) was not allowed to ask questions…
The article continues:
McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour.
“It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.”
“These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”
Armed security to silence a journalist.
Sometimes people just can’t take hard questions.
McAleer did interview Schneider for “Not Evil Just Wrong” but has been told that Schneider was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used in the documentary.
This is not the first time McAleer has been silenced.
McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming.
His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.
As David Deming puts it,
“There is also much we do not understand about why Earth’s climate changes. It is possible that cosmic rays, modulated by the Sun’s magnetic field, cool Earth by inducing the formation of clouds. We don’t know why Ice Ages end so spectacularly and suddenly. Once they begin, Ice Ages should continue indefinitely, as cooling is reinforced by a number of positive feedbacks.
We ought to be intelligent enough to acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know. Science is never settled. We should keep in mind Seneca’s admonition. “Nature does not reveal all her secrets at once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet, but hanging around her outer courts.”
There has never been a time when the need for understanding the limits and nature of scientific knowledge is so compelling, or the ramifications of ignorance so consequential. Those who ignore history are apt to repeat its mistakes.”
David Deming is a geologist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His books on the history of science, Origin of Science I and II, are scheduled to be published by McFarland in 2010.
Global Warming and the Age of the Earth: A Lesson on the Nature of Scientific Knowledge
by David Deming
The world stands on the verge of committing itself to limits on the emission of carbon dioxide that would drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels. If this fateful decision is made, the economies of developed nations will be strangled. Human prosperity will be reduced. Our ability to solve pressing problems, both human and environmental, will be severely limited. We have been told that these shackles must be imposed to forestall a hypothetical global warming projected to occur some time in the distant future. But to date the only unambiguous evidence for planetary warming is a modest rise in temperature (less than one degree Celsius) that falls well within the range of natural variation.
The validity of warming predictions depends upon the questionable reliability of computer models of the climate system. But Earth’s climate system is complex and poorly understood. And the integrity of the computer models cannot be demonstrated or even tested. To anyone with an awareness of the nature and limitations of scientific knowledge, it must appear that the human race is repeating a foolish mistake from the past. We have been down this road before, most notably in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it appeared that mathematics and physics had conclusively answered the question of the Earth’s age. At that time, a science that had been definitely “settled” fell apart in the space of a few years. The mathematical models that appeared to be so certain proved to be completely, even ridiculously wrong.
The age of the Earth is one of the great questions that have puzzled people for thousands of years. In Meteorologica, Aristotle (384–322 BC) asserted that the world was eternal. But with the advent of Christianity and Islam, scholars began to assume that humanity was coeval with the Creation of the world. It followed that the age of the Earth could be estimated from a careful examination of sacred writings.
The first person to make a quantitative estimate of the Earth’s age was the Islamic scientist al-Biruni (c. 973–1050). al-Biruni based his chronology on the Hindu, Jewish, and Christian religious scriptures. He divided the history of the world into eras, and concluded that it had been less than ten thousand years since the Creation.
via INSTAPUNDIT.com
RESEARCHER: NASA Hiding Climate Data. “Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds at 9:13 am http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/89425/
It’s like the only thing being talked about is the embarrassing email exchanges. Oh, you haven’t heard? You’re forgiven. It hasn’t been given nearly as much mainstream coverage as it should.
In the next few days counting down to Copenhagen, we’re in for a ClimateGate virtual storm…
What’s really going on? It seems that you’ll have to follow the money. The following is excerpted from a Wall Street Journal article by Bret Stephens:
…”Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.”
Read the entire article, Climategate: Follow The Money.
And then, watch this video, at an Al Gore book signing in Chicago on November 24th, just a few days after the communications faux-pas had been leaked:
Global Warming Black Humor
Fallout Over “ClimateGate” Data Leak Grows
Global Warming? An Inconvenient Un-Truth.
Apparently, the networks of University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were hacked into last night. Approximately 160 megabytes of files, containing hundreds or thousands of e-mails and documents were leaked as a result of the security breach, reports The Guardian.
And read more from Boing Boing here.
Hacked climate scientists’ emails in context
A huge amount of email from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit was hacked and released onto the web, causing much rejoicing from the climate change denialists. They read through the corpus of email and found that the scientists working on climate change often have substantive disagreements with one another, which they debate vigorously in email, and cited this as evidence of a conspiracy to cover up dissent and present a scientific consensus on climate change.
And more added on Nov., 25, 2009
More Insight on Those Leaked Climate Change Emails
A few more key points and a “crap-ton of links” from Boing Boing.
