Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

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We are entreated daily that the West must cut its industrial base because the planet is in danger from our CO2 emissions and our politicians happily fall into line to impose draconian energy taxes. There is somewhat of a disconnect when we read that industrialisation is proceeding apace in developing nations, with money from the industrialised nations. The announcement from Fiat, Italy, is another example of global corporations moving their operations to the developing world where they can emit to their heart's content without penalty and get paid by us for doing so, with money we give to the UN for "development".

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THE 16TH CONFERENCE of the Parties, said Ms. Christiana Figueres, its president, “is a litmus test of global-governance capacity”. There it was, right out in the open. Yet the few commentators who pointed out that the Cancun agreement established several hundred new bureaucracies all over the world, all answerable to the shadowy but now immensely wealthy and powerful Secretariat of the States Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, were pilloried by the Fascists of the “green” movement as mere world-government conspiracy theorists.

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THERE IS a general obligation on policymakers to think first and spend later. It is other people’s money we are spending, and the hard-pressed taxpayer, especially in difficult times, expects those who govern him to use his money wisely.

However, as soon as the label “green” is attached to any proposal to spend our money, policymakers simply switch off their minds and cease to think or check. As a result, some profoundly unwise spending decisions have been made.

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A recent re-posting on the SPPI blog from the HockeySchtick site, with the title, “The 97% ‘Consensus’ is only 75 Self-Selected Climatologists” was a second look at the claim first made in January 2009, in a paper called “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Peter Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, from the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.

This was their stated aim:

“The objective of our study presented here is to assess the scientific consensus on climate change through an unbiased survey of a large and broad group of Earth scientists.”

It was roundly de-bunked at the time by several commentators and it would have been forgotten and consigned to its proper place in the dustbin, if it hadn’t been continually quoted by activists as fact.

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Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself.

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Former Republican Congressman and former chairman of the House Committee on Science, Sherwood Boehlert, launched an attack last week on the Republican Party and its stance on global warming science. He made great play of the contributions of Climate Scientists and National Academy of Sciences reports on climate matters. It seems he does not have much idea of the make-up of the NAS panels and how they are stacked with activist scientists and NGO’s to deliver the right message, whilst carrying the scientific imprimature of the NAS.

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Deutsche Bank Group published a report purporting to respond to skeptic arguments. I took issue with a number of points in that document, and DB has responded with a revision to its original report (available at http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/_media/DBCCAColumbiaSkepticPaper090710.pdf) accompanied by 2 weblog entries at http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/climate-matters. I will discuss their response, indicating where some meeting of minds has occurred, as well as places where I think it falls short; also I would like to raise a few points not taken up earlier.

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The scientific literature fails to support the hypothesis that the trace amount of naturally occurring mercury in the fish we eat in any way endangers or threatens health, especially that of expectant mothers and their babies. Exactly the opposite appears true: those alarming people away from fish pose the real danger to public health.

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This ocean acidification hypothesis has gained great momentum in recent years, because it offers an independent path to regulate fossil fuel emissions in addition to that provided by concerns about global warming. For even if the models employed by climate alarmists are proven not to be correct with respect to their predictions of unprecedented temperature increases, more frequent and more destructive extreme weather events, accelerated glacial melt, rapid sea level rise, or any other environmental catastrophe, those who seek to regulate and reduce CO2 emissions now have a fall-back position, which posits that no matter what happens to the planet's climate, the nations of the earth must reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of their direct negative impacts on marine organisms via ocean acidification.

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This colossal PR disaster was 20 years in the making, and it took a special set of conditions to achieve a true marketing black hole. Never before in the history of public relations has so much star-power, money and kudos been used to score such a monstrous global own-goal. The campaign to dehumanize skeptics laid the groundwork and somehow, fittingly, the eco-terrorists own name-calling has come back to bite them.

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On September 21, 2010, US Senator Bingaman (D-NM) introduced a bill1 that would create an insidious national “Renewable Electricity Standard” (RES). Bingaman now has 32 cosponsors but expects 60. The bill would result in higher monthly bills for millions of home owners and renters, farms, businesses, industries, hospitals, educational institutions, and any other organization that uses electricity.

Despite the intense citizen displeasure with Congress, Bingaman’s RES bill shows that both Democrats and Republicans, while in Washington, are eager to favor special interests and their lobbyists while ignoring the adverse impact of their actions on the nation’s ordinary citizens, consumers and taxpayers. The bill belies Republican claims that they favor less federal government intrusion, control, and damage.

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In the next few weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to rule on a proposal to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent the amount of ethanol that may be blended into gasoline. If the EPA approves the move, the U.S. motor-fuel market would yet again become the victim of misguided federal intervention. Since the 1970s, Congress has justified subsidies to the corn ethanol industry with the oft-repeated claim that boosting domestic production of ethanol will increase America's energy security by reducing U.S. oil imports. That claim has no basis in fact.

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How many excuses does it take? The Western Climate Establishment has allowed egregious mistakes, major errors, and obvious biases to accumulate — each factor on its own might be hard to pin down, but the pattern is undeniable.

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The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area” relationship actually works to predict extinctions. Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

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In order to understand recent behavior of polar ice and have some visibility into the future, we need to look at it from an historical perspective. A good place to start the investigation is Greenland, which is often described by official sources as experiencing a meltdown. The BBC has famously warned us "If the ice cap were to completely disappear, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet)."

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The current debate is a public policy debate with enormous implications. It is no longer about climate. It is about the government, the politicians, their scribes and the lobbyists who want to get more decision making and power for themselves. It seems to me that the widespread acceptance of the global warming dogma has become one of the main, most costly and most undemocratic public policy mistakes in generations. The previous one was communism.

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On 6 September 2010, Dr. John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor, gave a speech in Oslo, Norway, entitled Climate-Change Science and Policy: What Do We Know? What Should We Do? The speech contained numerous scientific errors and exaggerations, all pointing towards invention of a “climate crisis” where none exists, and overstatement of those problems that may exist.

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In late September 2010, five “scientists” wrote a turgid and prolix response to four straightforward pages of written scientific and economic testimony that I had submitted in May 2010 to the Congress of the United States, and had presented at an oral hearing, at the request of the ranking minority member of the House Global warming Committee.

The purely political character of what was superficially dressed up as a “scientific” response to my testimony may be gauged from the fact that the five spent many months assembling their tedious and scientifically-regrettable document without having contacted either me or the great majority of the scientific authorities I had cited before they circulated their tract to friendly news media and blog sites. This calculated furtiveness does not betoken honesty.

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The inclusion of erroneous and inconsistent material in the section dealing with Himalayan glaciers has highlighted some serious flaws in how the IPCC creates its highly influential assessment reports. Firstly, the IPCC has a procedure for using documents that are both non-published and non-peer-reviewed but none for material published without peer review. Secondly, no members of the author team for each chapter are responsible for checking the work of other authors.

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