How to separate creative genius from creative mistakes? Not with peer-review. It is a consensus filter. Classical peer review is a form of scientific gatekeeping (it’s good to see that term recognized in official literature). Unpaid anonymous peer review is useful at filtering out some low quality papers, it is also effective at blocking the controversial ones which later go on to be accepted elsewhere and become cited many times, the paradigm changers. And the more controversial the topic, presumably, the worse the bias is. What chance would anyone have of getting published if, hypothetically, they found a consequential mathematical error underlying the theory of man-made global warming? Which editors would be brave enough to even send it out for review and risk being called a “denier”? Humans are gregarious social beings, and being in with the herd affects your financial rewards, as well as your social standing. Even high ranking science journal editors are afraid of being called names.

Lord Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley || This memorandum sets out evidence of falsehood with intent to mislead a court by Dr Michael E. Mann in a case in the District of Columbia against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.

■ First, it will be demonstrated that Dr Michael Mann, the plaintiff and appellee in the case, materially misled the court in his Brief of Appellee filed 3 September 2014 by falsely stating (1) that the finding of Sir Muir Russell in an inquiry into revelations of malpractice by climate scientists in the “Climategate emails” that a depiction of three graphs of northern-hemisphere temperature changes from 1000-2000 AD, reconstructed from tree-rings and published on the front cover of the World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999 on the WMO’s 50th anniversary in 2000, was misleading “had absolutely nothing to do with Dr Mann or with any graph prepared by him”; and (2) that “Dr Mann did not create this depiction”.

■ Second, it will be demonstrated that Dr Mann had reason to know each of these two statements was false in every material particular and was calculated to mislead the court on issues central to the proceedings.

■ Third, it will be demonstrated that a graph by Dr Mann and a depiction by him and others of his graph together with two similar graphs on the front cover of a widely-circulated official publication gravely misrepresented the scientific data so as to mislead policymakers into the adoption of costly regimes of taxation and regulation calculated to occasion substantial losses to taxpayers, and that Dr Mann knew the depiction was misleading, and that he was given an opportunity to correct it but did not correct it.

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -- Carl Sagan

Andrew Montford ■ CONSENSUS? WHAT CONSENSUS?

Scientists will have to find alternative explanations for a huge population collapse in Europe at the end of the Bronze Age as researchers prove definitively that climate change – commonly assumed to be responsible – could not have been the culprit. ● Archaeologists and environmental scientists from the University of Bradford, University of Leeds, University College Cork, Ireland (UCC), and Queen’s University Belfast have shown that the changes in climate that scientists believed to coincide with the fall in population in fact occurred at least two generations later. Their results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that human activity starts to decline after 900BC, and falls rapidly after 800BC, indicating a population collapse. But the climate records show that colder, wetter conditions didn’t occur until around two generations later.

NCAR’s Dr. Kevin Trenberth was a lead author of the IPCC’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th Assessment Reports. Near to the publication of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report 7 years ago, Dr. Trenberth penned a blog post at Nature.com Predictions of climate — a blog post that exposed many critical weaknesses in the climate models used by the IPCC for divining the future of climate on Earth. The post was filled with extraordinary quotes, including:

• …none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.
• In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models.
• Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors.
• … if the current state is one of drought then it is unlikely to get drier, but unrealistic model states and model biases can easily violate such constraints and project drier conditions.
• However, the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.
• So the science is just beginning.
• We will adapt to climate change. The question is whether it will be planned or not?

Those are powerful statements. Please read Trenberth’s blog post in its entirety. You’ll find those quotes were reinforced by much of the remaining text. Occasionally, Trenberth interjected what could be considered global warming dogma to temper the critical aspects of the remainder. One of Trenberth’s statements stands out as self-deception, plain and simple: "The current projection method works to the extent it does because it utilizes differences from one time to another and the main model bias and systematic errors are thereby subtracted out. This assumes linearity." Seven years later everyone knows the “current projection method” does not work. The climate science community has known all along that Earth’s climate is chaotic and non-linear. It was only a matter of time until their “current projection method” failed, and it didn’t take long.

The Abbott government's chief business adviser says too much time has been spent focusing on global warming and as a result Australians are "ill prepared" to deal with the prospect of global cooling. Maurice Newman, who has been vocal in his climate change scepticism, has attacked governments, including the former Labor government, for pursuing "green gesture politics" by introducing carbon price signals in an opinion piece for the Murdoch-owned News Corp publication The Australian. He likened the measures to "primitive civilisations offering up sacrifices to appease the gods".

Eric Worrall ■ Maurice Newman, Aussie PM Abbott’s most senior advisor, on the dangers of global cooling

CLIMATE change forecasts may be overestimates due to a failure to take into account how plants absorb carbon dioxide, scientists warned today. ● They said the impact of rising CO2 levels on plant growth has been underestimated by 16 per cent. And as plants absorb CO2, this has led to overestimates of how much of the greenhouse gas is left in the atmosphere. Climate sceptics said the study by American scientists is yet more proof that the science of climate change is not settled and is instead much more complicated than previously thought. And one leading climate scientist said the paper suggests that cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases may not need to be as deep to keep global warming below what is seen as the critical increase of 2C. This casts doubt on the drive for costly anti-pollution measures such as wind farms. Climate change is widely blamed on man's burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas which release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that trap the heat in the atmosphere. The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focusses on the slow diffusion of CO2 in plant leaves, with particular attention to the mesophyll or their inner tissue. It concludes: "Carbon cycle models that lack explicit understanding of mesophyll diffusion will underestimate historical and future terrestrial carbon uptake. "Consequently, they will overestimate historical and future growth rates of atmospheric CO2 concentration due to fossil fuel emissions, with ramifications for predicted climate change."

Sea ice surrounding Antarctica has reached a new record high. Nasa says it now covers more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. They say that even though Antarctic sea ice has been increasing, 'the planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming.' The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The new Antarctic sea ice record reflects the diversity and complexity of Earth's environments, said NASA researchers.

Earth Day — an annual event first launched on April 22, 1970. The inaugural festivities (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded. Sound familiar? Behold the coming apocalypse, as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970.

Steven E. Koonin Climate Science Is Not Settled
WUWT: The de-evolution of climate activism

National Review’s Katherine Timpf interviews protestors at the Flood Wall Street climate march. Some segments are just unbearable to watch. The video pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Roy Spencer ■ 10 Ways To Tell Tuesday’s UN Climate Summit Isn’t About Climate

As President Obama attends the UN Summit climate summit in New York City, a fellow member of his Democratic Party, who is also a scientist, is publicity renouncing the Presidents climate change claims as “delusional.” Rossiter reversed his view on man-made climate change and now says belief in a climate catastrophe is “simply not logical.” Climate Statistics Professor Dr. Caleb Rossiter of American University, is an outspoken anti-war activist, has a flawless progressive record on a range of political issues – and he is a climate skeptic. Rossiter is a former Democratic congressional candidate and he campaigned against U.S. backed wars in Central America and Southern Africa. In an exclusive interview for the upcoming documentary Climate Hustle, Rossiter, an adjunct professor in American University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, explained how he converted his views from accepting to challenging the so-called “consensus” on climate change after examining the scientific evidence.

National Review: Robert Kennedy Jr., Aspiring Tyrant || He’d like to charge the Kochs with treason and send climate-change dissenters to jail. Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.” Thus did a scion of one of America’s great political dynasties put himself on the same lowly moral, legal, and intellectual plane as the titillation website Gawker.

CNS News: RFK, Jr.: Climate Skeptics 'Should Be at the Hague with All the Other War Criminals'

The numbers are rolling in…and they’re impressive in a odd way. Based on numerous news reports, somewhere in the neighborhood of 310 to 400 thousand people participated in the People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21, 2014 in New York City. The parade was, of course, a precursor for the U.N. Climate Summit 2014, which begins tomorrow. Yet the results of the U.N.’s Global Survey for a Better World, also known as MyWorld2015, show “Action taken on Climate Change” at the very bottom…the abyss…of things that matter most to families around the globe. Looks like the 310 to 400 thousand people who marched in Manhattan yesterday have priorities that are out of touch with the rest of the occupants of this lovely planet. Considering the object of the U.N. meeting, maybe the marchers should have been calling for “honest and responsive government“, which ranked much higher than climate.

Steven Koonin ■ Climate Science Is Not Settled
WH fence jumper was “concerned that the atmosphere was collapsing” and wanted to alert the president

And then they came for The Holocene: New paper suggests “removing the Holocene Epoch from the geologic timescale”. ● Is there any limit to the extremes some climate propagandists will go?The Climategate team removed the warm 1940’s “blip”, erased the Medieval Warm Period, Hid the Decline, and tortured temperature & sea level data until it confessed, but a paper published Monday in Earth’s Future could take the cake by suggesting removal of “the Holocene Epoch from the geologic timescale” and replacing it with the fictitious, scary-sounding “geologic” timescale “The Anthropocene.” [...] There is no valid reason whatsoever to remove the Holocene Epoch “blip” from the geological timescale, despite how convenient it would be for the climate propagandists.

The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research. A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy. Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases. (Source)

Tim Ball ■ Green Journalism; Mainstream Media Creating Climate Stories

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’ Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change. But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012. To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

Rossiter wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called notions of climate catastrophe “unproved science,” and shortly thereafter received word from the institute that his position was terminated. ● “I am simply someone who became convinced that the claims of certainty about the cause of the warming and the effect of the warming were tremendously and irresponsibly overblown,” he said in an exclusive interview Tuesday with The College Fix. “I am not someone who says there wasn’t warming and it doesn’t have an effect, I just cannot figure out why so many people believe that it is a catastrophic threat to our society and to Africa.” For this belief – based in a decade’s worth of statistical research and analysis on climate change data – Rossiter was recently terminated as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington D.C. think tank.

Professor Lennart Bengtsson says recent McCarthy-style pressure from fellow academics forced him to resign from his post on a climate sceptic think-tank. ● The research fellow from the University of Reading believes a paper he co-authored was deliberately suppressed from publicatoin in a leading journal because of an intolerance of dissenting views about climate change by scientists who peer-reviewed the work. “The problem we have now in the scientific community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of climate activist,” he told the Times. Professor Bengtsson claims a scientist advised that the paper, which challenged findings that global temperature would increase by 4.5C if greenhouse gases were to double, should not be published in a respected journal because it was “less than helpful.” The unnamed scientist, who was asked to peer review Professor Bengtsson’s paper, said in his comments: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate sceptics side.”

Roy Spencer: The Bullying of Bengtsson and the Coming Climate Disruption Hypocalypse
Adriana Cohen: Climate change yet another excuse for the ‘Nanny State’

ANTARCTIC sea ice has expanded to record levels for April, increasing by more than 110,000sq km a day last month to nine million square kilometres. ● The National Snow and Ice Data Centre said the rapid expansion had continued into May and the seasonal cover was now bigger than the record “by a significant margin’’.

Steve Kates ■ A Chilling Appraisal Of Climate Change (Book review) || The book reminds me just how viciously stupid have been the left’s attempts to gag debate on global warming. Had the only evidence available supported the warmists’ cause, there might have been something worth continuing to discuss. Instead, with the abrupt end to the warming phase between fifteen and twenty years ago [...], we should actually be looking at the effects that may follow if a solar minimum is about to recur, as it did during the Little Ice Age which ended not all that long ago. Suppose the Thames were to begin freezing over again, as it last did in 1802, how will we get on in a world of such cold and reduced growing seasons? Try that out in conversation the next time some propaganda-programmed dimwit brings up climate change. ■ Global warming is climate change for idiots. A cooling climate may be the real thing and the possibility should be treated with the utmost seriousness. The subtitle, “Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish and Short", is exactly what the book explains. It’s a book with a message we should all be thinking about, and not just here in Australia but across the world.

Europe is unhappy with Australia's decision to drop climate change from the G20 agenda and is lobbying the Abbott government to reconsider. || European Union officials say Australia has become completely “disengaged” on climate change since Tony Abbott was elected in September last year. They are disappointed with the Prime Minister’s approach, saying Australia was considered an important climate change player under Labor. One well-placed EU official has likened the change to “losing an ally”. The EU has a long-running emissions trading scheme which was going to be linked to Australia's market. But Mr Abbott has pledged to scrap the carbon price in favour of his direct action policy.

Dr. Woodcock declared there was 'professional misconduct by Government advisors around the world' when it comes to man-made climate change claims. ● “The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis’ – water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04% – ‘Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out, plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion.” Woodcock continued: “The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

Yorkshire Evening Post: ‘Global warming’ is rubbish says top professor
Denis G. Rancourt: Climate science is a "Zombie science" +
The global warming movement is "Strictly an imaginary problem of the 1st World middleclass"

Mike Rivero ■ Climate scientist ridicules U.N. report as junk || Nobody is going to be convinced to pay a "Cloud tax" or buy "Mist credits." Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but most methane comes from deep crust microbes, termites, and cows, life forms far too intelligent to listen to Al Gore. Carbon dioxide was selected for demonization not because it is a problem, but because it could be blamed on human activity to sell carbon credits and levy carbon taxes, and exert more government control over our private lives. The fact that the UN is still pushing this global warming hysteria despite several record-setting winters in a row proves that this is not science, but a political agenda.

Rupert Darwall ■ It needs catastrophe scenarios to sell their ideas || Its most eye-catching claim (in the new WGII report) is that negative impacts of climate change on crop yields are more common to date than positive impacts are. This improbable claim finds only the weakest support in the main body of the report, with its qualification that climate change played a “minor role.” It is, the report states, “extremely difficult” to define a clear baseline from which to assess the impact of climate change, and many non-climate factors are often difficult to quantify. More egregiously, the summary speaks of rapid price increases following climate extremes since the 2007 report. This negligence amounts to downright dishonesty, as the summary omits mention of one of the principal causes of the 2007–08 spike in food prices, which is highlighted in the main body of the report. It was not climate change that increased food costs, but climate policies in the form of increased use of food crops in biofuel production, exacerbated by higher oil prices and government embargoes on food exports. Source

Tony Thomas: Finally, Some Real Climate Science

This week, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is releasing its latest report, the “Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report.” Like its past reports, this one predicts apocalyptic consequences if mankind fails to give the UN the power to tax and regulate fossil fuels and subsidize and mandate the use of alternative fuels. But happily, an international group of scientists I have been privileged to work with has conducted an independent review of IPCC’s past and new reports, along with the climate science they deliberately exclude or misrepresent. Our group, called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), was founded in 2003 by a distinguished atmospheric physicist, S. Fred Singer, and has produced five hefty reports to date, the latest being released today (March 31). So how do the IPCC and NIPCC reports differ? The final draft of the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers identifies eight “reasons for concern” which media reports say will remain the focus of the final report. The NIPCC reports address each point too, also summarizing their authors’ positions in Summaries for Policymakers. This provides a convenient way to compare and contrast the reports’ findings.

Humans are NOT to blame for global warming, says Greenpeace co-founder, as he insists there is 'no scientific proof' climate change is manmade. ● There is no scientific proof of man-made global warming and a hotter earth would be ‘beneficial for humans and the majority of other species’, according to a founding member of environmental campaign group Greenpeace. The assertion was made by Canadian ecologist Patrick Moore, a member of Greenpeace from 1971 to 1986, to U.S senators on Tuesday. He told The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: ‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.’

Richard McNider & John Christy ■ In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the "Flat Earth Society" for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts." But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today's scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round? [...] We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

Charles Battig: Mass destruction of science: John Kerry at work!

The 2004 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union saw evidence that proved beyond doubt that a devastating and abrupt change in climate happened 5,200 years ago. Now when I say abrupt I really do mean abrupt. A massive and profound global cooling event happened 5,200 years ago, and one of the leading scientists in the field of ice core analysis thinks it’s about to happen again. Not much was said about this outside of scientific circles, certainly nothing was said by the government. Even the words and research of a world renowned expert count for nothing. As far as the warmist government is concerned, we are all to believe we will die of heatstroke in the next 50 years. Thompson even mentions the Sun, and it’s role in climate forcing, and once again, just like 5,200 years ago, the Sun is showing the lowest activity for a century. Predictions for solar cycle 25 are that there may not be any sunspots at all.