GregNews

[AFP] The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level — 26 percent — to the area threatened by river flooding — 29 percent — Vallaart said.

“They should have been clearer,” Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been “on the agenda several times” but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The UK Globe and Mail piles on:

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. [IPCC head Rajendra] Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri’s own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money.

Following the ClimateGate scandal the global warming scaremongers couldn’t get more unhinged, could they? Get a load of these recent articles putting the warmers in the spotlight. You can’t make this stuff up, except, well, they did make it up.

UK Times: The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

… In its [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Oh, it gets better. Honest mistake, one may say. Well, turns out the UN knew of the source issues prior to publishing their report, but they published it anyway. Just how stupid do they thing people are?

UK Times: The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Mr. Pachauri was sent several e-mails questioning the data as early as November of last year, but disregarded the critics saying, “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” Perhaps because he’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money..?

Among some other errors by the IPCC:

[WSJ] … that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that—well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails. For the record, most Himalayan glaciers do seem to be retreating, and they have been “since the earliest recordings began around the middle of the nineteenth century,” according to a report from India’s ministry of environment and forests.

Finally, you’ll never believe who’s become a global warming jihadist! Literally!

CAIRO (AP) – Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.

In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

Right, because Indians and Chinese don’t use a lot of energy… well, nobody ever accused bin Laden of being rational. Apparently, he values the lives of polar bears more than people. After all, he has no problem blowing people out of the sky or collapsing buildings upon them. Sounds like your everyday Earth Liberation Front sociopath to me. Maybe extreme leftists have more in common with jihadists than we first thought.

Via Michelle Malkin’s website I came across these clips from CNN Christine Amanpour’s show which pitted her and another high-brow opponent of waterboarding against former Bush speechwriter, author and proponent of waterboarding, Marc Thiessen. Generally, these types of things go bad for the waterboarding proponents because they don’t stick to the core logic behind laws of war and enemy combatants, such as:

* Geneva Conventions weren’t designed to “protect soldiers” but to give them incentives to follow the laws of war.

* What the CIA calls waterboarding isn’t the same thing as or as dangerous as or as barbaric as Khmer Rouge waterboarding or what other governments have done.

* If waterboarding is torture than we’re apparently torturing thousands of U.S. servicemen and women who go through SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, Extract) training.

Thiessen sticks to all these points and in short kicks the arse of his detractors. His point that the waterboarding actually allows Islamic extremists to spill their guts without betraying their service to Allah is fascinating.

Because he did so well, I doubt if CNN will ever have Thiessen back on.

What’s remarkable about this article is just how unapologetic and brazen the UN is about making claims — and thus promoting expensive, uneconomic policies — that aren’t remotely based on science. This is precisely the pattern that was fortified from the ClimateGate e-mails.

[Wall Street Journal] An influential United Nations panel is facing growing criticism about its practices after acknowledging doubts about a 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers were retreating faster than those anywhere else and would entirely disappear by 2035, if not sooner.Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said Monday that the U.N. body was studying how the 2007 report “derived” the information about glacier retreat, according to a spokesman at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, where Dr. Pachauri is the director. Dr. Pachauri said glaciers were melting, but the 2035 date was in question, the spokesman said.

It was unlikely that these revelations about the IPCC report would overturn the scientific consensus on glacial retreat, but they raised questions for the IPCC about how the data on Himalayan glaciers were collected and reviewed.

“There’s a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts,” said J. Graham Cogley, professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario, who is one of the first people to track down some of the apparent errors.

The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”

Dr. Hasnain presented a report on Himalayan glaciers in the summer of 1999, but it made no reference to 2035.

Earlier this month, Dr. Hasnain said in another New Scientist article that his previous assertions were based on “speculation,” rather than firm science.

It is said that President Barack Obama is fond of using problematic events as “teachable moments.” Well here’s a teachable moment for Republicans in the wake of Harry Reid’s pre-2008 election comments that Obama was “light skinned… with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”: In matters of racial politics Republicans should consider fighting back and sticking up for themselves instead of apologizing, genuflecting, and committing self-flagellation.

The utter hypocrisy shown in the reaction from the vast majority of liberals to Reid’s nonsensical and bigoted comments proves that they care nothing about race or stereotypes except as how they can wield it as a bludgeoning weapon against Republicans. Were a Republican to have said these things the 24-hour cable media, activist groups and Democratic politicians would be demanding their resignation and painting every Republican as an ignorant Klansman.

Instead we have the race-baiter in chief, Al Sharpton, deflecting criticism of Reid by saying he was far more offended (and if there’s ever someone who’s made a living by being offended it’s Al Sharpton) by the comments of Bill Clinton. In the same new book by Mark Halprin quoting Reid, Clinton is quoted as saying of Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Really, Al? He’s more offended by what was clearly a reference to inexperience (i.e., interns get you coffee or more if you’re Clinton, I suppose) than he was to “light-skinned, negro dialect”?

It’s preposterous. How does one expect to find any reasonable debate or common ground on race when the liberal masses champion idiocracy? Answer: Don’t bother.

Unless the remark is beyond the pale, and most of us have the common sense to judge that, do not apologize and pander to this foolishness. The next time a Republican is caught with their foot in their mouth, I’d hope they fight back just a little bit.