The (London) Times Online hurls a hard one at cap and trade advocates in World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown:. I am going to begin with the most important news, which was buried deep inside the article:
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. "I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF (Note: "WWF" is not defined in the article, and may be the World Wildlife Fund) report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about," he said.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science".
What is this all about? Here are the article's intro and excerpts. Please read it all by clicking on the above hyperlink.
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. . .
When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high". The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.
The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."
However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. "I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about," he said.
If you believe that comment, you may want to put in a bid for a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Voodoo science?
Hardly.
Etymologists will be aware that the English word "thug" has its roots in India (Wikipedia)
The English word "thug" comes from the Hindi word "thug", meaning "conman".
Coming on top of the revelations out of East Anglia and older scientific fraud to benefit the global warming moement such as the "hockey stick" lie to describe the last 1000 years of temperatures or Dr. Hansen's fudged NASA data, it is increasingly looking as though the high priests of global warming/climate change are intellectual thugs.
There are enough thoroughly legitimate, non-controversial aspects of natural resource utilization to point to without committing fraud. The obvious question is:
Why are these people doing this?
In view of the scam of financial system bailouts to benefit those who caused the meltdown and the current solution of the elites to benefit Big Finance with cap and trade rather than simply impose a straightforward tax on carbon use, the conclusion beckons that the answer is: to benefit Big Finance. Nothing else explains everything.
In this winter of discontent, the Coakley collapse in Massachusetts is of a piece with the recurrent revelations about the global warming activists, and of those who claim that healthcare "reform" is needed now even though few "benefits" will accrue for 3-4 years. The people "get it". They see that Barack Obama was a typical lying politician who was no more interesting in shaking up the status quo or governmental transparency than George W. Bush. At this point the public trusts its eyes and ears and little else. It sees a harsh winter and a series of gimmicks on what really matters to people-- the economy-- and so it increasingly perceives that the entire program of the liberal wing of the Establishment is designed for the powerful, not the people.
While from the standpoint of the 2010 midterm elections, which candidate prevails in Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts is not determinative, a victory by the insurgent Republican might just have a mini-effect on the markets similar to that which occurred when the Republicans scored big in 1994. Given that CNN is reporting that the White House is preparing the ground for a Coakley loss, one might want to take a flyer on a long position on SPY calls on Tuesday.
Interesting times, for sure.
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