So, the results of the first Climategate enquiry are in. And guess what? It’s a word that begins with “W” and ending with “-hitewash.” Over at Climateaudit, the mighty Steve McIntyre is furious. Among those he holds responsible is Nigel Lawson, for having given away territory he certainly had no right to cede on the subject of that now-infamous phrase “Mike’s Nature Trick.”

Ed Miliband backed to the hilt by Gordon Brown is trying to restart Climate Change talks by offering what the Guardian call an olive branch to restart the AGW / Scam Global Climate Change Talks. EU Referendum: Depressing.

A renowned environmentalist, known for his advocacy of population reduction as a means of offsetting climate change, has called for “a more authoritative world” where freedom comes second to tackling what he sees as the devastating effects of global warming. Futurist James Lovelock, tells the London Guardian that he believes “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while,” in order to save humanity.

Only one third of TV weathercasters believe that there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Despite the strong scientific consensus among climate scientists, almost two-thirds (61%) of TV weathercasters think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening. Perhaps partly as a result, 79% of our respondents indicated that coverage of climate change science must reflect a “balance” of viewpoints just as coverage of political or social issues are covered. Prior research conducted by others, however, has shown that “balanced” news coverage about climate change is misleading in that it tends to give audience members the false impression that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.

The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value. Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December.

Dr. Costella’s study has been widely accepted by all sides of the global warming debate as a faultless assessment. Climategate publicly began on November 19, 2009 allegedly pointing to a conspiracy to fraudulently bolster greenhouse gas theory. The British mainstream media, more than any other nation, have widely reported on the scandal. The Australian physicist documents, step by step, flawed scientific procedure, over-arching concerns with personal and professional interests and how an elite of climatologists discussed immorally securing ‘research’ funding and evading tax payments. The emails cover correspondence between international climatologists over a 13-year period up to November 2009.

Soils release more carbon dioxide as globe warms. Twenty years of field studies reveal that as the Earth has gotten warmer, plants and microbes in the soil have given off more carbon dioxide. So-called soil respiration has increased about one-tenth of 1 percent per year since 1989, according to an analysis of past studies in today’s issue of Nature. The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number — about 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons) — will help scientists build a better overall model of how carbon in its many forms cycles throughout the Earth. Understanding soil respiration is central to understanding how the global carbon cycle affects climate.

The peer leading the second Climategate enquiry at the University of East Anglia serves as a director of one of the most powerful environmental networks in the world, according to Companies House documents - and has failed to declare it. Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal on Monday. But Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment. James Delingpole: Climategate: the parliamentary cover-up. Climate Audit: Globe International. EU Referendum: In the wake of the Oxfam/Prefero report, we now have Greenpeace weighing in with a report.

Climategate exposed the greatest scandal in the history of modern science but you’re never going to hear this from any of the official investigations. Andrew Orlowski at The Register has uncovered why. Turns out, that there’s this well-funded SPECTRE-like advocacy group called GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment) International which has co-opted leading parliamentarians from the main parties in both the Commons and the Lords into advancing the AGW agenda.

Sea level rise is a relative phenomenon. It can be caused by sea rising, or land sinking. Sort of like sitting on a train at the station, and you can’t tell if your train has started moving or the adjacent one. Quadrant: Once upon a climate: Jack and Jill and a bucket of weather.

Victory for Science: London science museum 'abandons' efforts to promote global warming fears: Now 'acknowledges that there are legitimate doubts'. The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months. The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists. The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Jean-Francois Cope, parliamentary leader of the governing UMP party, was quoted as saying the tax "would be Europe-wide or not (exist) at all". Prime Minister Francois Fillon told parliament that the government should focus on policies that increased France's economic competitiveness. France had been rethinking the tax after a court rejected it last year.

It’s pretty discouraging that yet another inquiry is tainted by the selection of their panel. The University of East Anglia, seemingly emboldened by getting away with Geoffrey Boulton’s appointment to the ethics panel, have become much bolder in choosing the science panel. Chairman Oxburgh, a former oil company executive, is a green entrepeneur. Kerry Emanuel is a Michael Mann coauthor who blamed Climategate not on the scientists who composed the emails, but on an adverse ‘public relations campaign’.

Cutting back on consumption of meat and dairy products will not have a major impact in combating global warming — despite repeated claims that link diets rich in animal products to production of greenhouse gases. That’s the conclusion of a report presented here today at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. “We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk,” said Mitloehner, who is with the University of California-Davis. “Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries.”

As Democrats secure historic healthcare reforms, fresh details emerge of proposed climate change bill. The chances of US climate change legislation passing this year received a major boost after President Obama secured victory in his historic battle to pass healthcare reforms late last night. The successful House vote on the legislation following over a year of intense and fraught negotiations will clear a path for the administration to turn to its next large piece of administrative business: climate change. Some senior Democrat Senators have suggested that following such a long battle to pass healthcare legislation the Senate will have "no appetite" to deal with a climate change bill that is likely to prove equally contentious.

Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market. James Delingpole: Climategate: the whitewash continues.

'If 1958 temps were similar to 1990's, it rewrites the entire claim of unprecedented warming'. The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later, this was reduced so far it became a mild warming against the detailed corroborating roabcore evidence. Raobcore measurements are balloon readings. How accurate are they? They started in 1958, twenty years before satellite temperature records (which are renowned for their accuracy). Put the two methods side-by-side, and they tie together neatly, telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools. WUWT: More on the National Geographic Decline.

If one wonders why the climate alarmist movement is suffering from a credibility problem, one only needs to read this. AWIP: Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 1 -MUST SEE VIDEO, Part 1 to 6. AWIP: CLIMATE Archive.

The United Nations' climate change panel is facing fresh criticism after new research contradicted the organisation's claims about the devastating effect climate change could have on the Amazon rainforest. The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland. The IPCC has already faced intense criticism for using a report by environmental lobby group WWF as the basis for its claim, which in turn had failed to cite the original source of the research. Scientists have now spoken out against the 40% figure contained in the IPCC report and say that recent research is suggesting that the rainforest may be more resilient to climate change than had been previously thought.

The British Meteorological Office has been forced to correct its global temperature records after a science blogger discovered that Australian weather data had been misused or discarded. The mistakes were discovered by Dr John Graham-Cumming when the temperature records were made public by the office in December in the wake of the East Anglia University email scandal. Dr Graham-Cumming, a London mathematician and computer programmer who describes himself as a ''computer geek'', found that data from seven weather stations in Australia had been accidentally discarded while another 112 Australian stations - or 28 per cent of the Oceania total - had not been fully included in the calculations. Daily Mail: Met Office 'manipulated climate change figures' says Russian think tank linked to President Putin.

What marvellous news to learn that the UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon is to launch a thorough investigation into the science behind climate change! It’s the equivalent of Kenneth Lay promising to organise a full and frank investigation into the accounts at Enron, or Herod ordering an urgent inquiry into the appalling and mysterious slaughter of infants in Judaea: all it will do is end up confirming the prejudices of the person who commissioned the report.

Make no mistake, we are accelerating at breakneck speed towards hell. There are now so many political entities dedicated to creating a regulatory system predicated on the existence on AGW – besides the UN these include the European Union, the Obama administration, the EPA, the terrifying Carbon Disclosure Project, the Labour government and the forthcoming Heath administration – that none of them is remotely interested in hearing any answers they don’t want to know. It will be like another of those EU referenda where the only acceptable answer is “Yes”, even when the people keep saying “No.”

Two government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.

The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.

The rulings will be an embarrassment for Miliband, who has tried to portray his policies as firmly science-based. He had commissioned two posters, four press advertisements and a short film for television and cinema, which started appearing in October last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks.

They attracted 939 complaints — more than the ASA received for any advertisement last year. The deluge posed problems for the ASA, which is not a scientific body, so it decided to compare the text of Miliband’s adverts with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Based on that comparison, it ruled that two of the DECC’s adverts had broken the advertising code on three counts: substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims.

Man-made carbon emissions are staving off a new ice age, says a leading environmental scientist. Climate-change expert Dr James Lovelock says the greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze that could last millions of years. WUWT: Aquatic ‘dead zones’ contributing to climate change.

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database. These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data. Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007. The reporter never published it.

There are only four climate datasets available. All global warming study, such as the reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), must be based on these four. They are: the NASA GISS dataset, the NCDC GHCN dataset, the CRU dataset, and the Japan Meteorological Agency dataset. Following Climategate, when it became known that raw temperature data for CRU’s “HADCRU3″ climate dataset had been destroyed, Phil Jones, CRU’s former director, said the data loss was not important — because there were other independent climate datasets available. But the emails reveal that at least three of the four datasets were not independent, that NASA GISS was not considered to be accurate, and that these quality issues were known to both top climate scientists and to the mainstream press. WUWT: Gallup: Americans’ Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop.

News has just reached me that the great Professor Ian Plimer, scourge of climate-fear-promoters everywhere, has been suddenly disinvited by the Royal Society of Artists (RSA) from a lecture he was due to give in May before an audience including the Duke of Edinburgh. [Prince Philip]

As Plimer puts it: “Strange that those who preach environmentalism at The Palace are feted as concerned scientists with no political agenda whereas those that try to speak rationality
are regarded as political.”

The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions. But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration. WUWT: NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing.

It has come to our attention, that last Monday (March 1), Dr. Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), in a hearing with the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee made a statement in regards to the alleged non-availability for disclosure of Swedish climate data. Dr. Jones asserted that the weather services of several countries, including Sweden, Canada and Poland, had refused to allow their data to be released, to explain his reluctance to comply with Freedom of Information requests.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

For months, climate scientists have taken a vicious beating in the media and on the Internet, accused of hiding data, covering up errors and suppressing alternate views. Their response until now has been largely to assert the legitimacy of the vast body of climate science and to mock their critics as cranks and know-nothings. “I’ll let you in on a very dark, ugly secret — I don’t want trust in climate science to be restored,” Willis Eschenbach, an engineer and climate contrarian who posts frequently on climate skeptic blogs, wrote in response to one climate scientist’s proposal to share more research. “I don’t want you learning better ways to propagandize for shoddy science. I don’t want you to figure out how to inspire trust by camouflaging your unethical practices in new and innovative ways.” “The solution,” he concluded, “is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science.” AWIP/WUWT: The Final Straw.

Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record. The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978. Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2. The bar chart below shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s. CFACT: After Copenhagen: Greens disappointed and directionless.