Climategate 2.0

"In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’s temperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming, and the destruction of internal emails."

Andrew Orlowski at the Register on the second release of email correspondence from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

First order of business is a reminder: it was precisely my mention of just these things, particularly the poor quality programming, for which Turton banned me from his blog in October last year. He deserves all the discredit he can get.

Second, I recall my attempt in September last year to discuss with David Reid his claim about rising sea-levels due to climate change and the risk they pose to Taiwan. It's quite likely that David Reid had simply bought the IPCC line uncritically, since, in attempting to support his claim, he had to rely on reports citing local factors for the erosion of Taiwan's coastline. The extraction of sand from Taiwan's rivers by the construction industry has nothing to do with climate change - which is a point I put to him at the time with no reply. Bearing that exchange with David Reid in mind, consider this quote:

"... the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story about sea levels worldwide and is worth quoting in some detail: ‘Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ‘inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries."

That is Nils-Axel Mörner writing in the Spectator*. Read the whole thing.

Oh and Matt Ridley has come out as a skeptic too, for which heresy he will now of course be continuously villified by the Left.

I am not surprised at all. The Left's obvious appetite for the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been, at least since Al Gore's "Earth In The Balance" (which I can still recall reading), explicable as an "objective" justification to fuel the expansion of the State. That is not to say that meterological research on climate change is all false or unnecessary, just that it has been hijacked for political purposes and this has been obvious for at least two decades now.

*Update: George Monbiot has a piece in the Guardian about Nils-Axel Mörner and his Spectator article. Now, I don't know whether this stuff about Mörner being involved with dowsing rods and other nonsense is true, but Monbiot's piece, whilst a damning hack job, does not challenge Mörner's claim I quoted above, that sea levels have "oscillated close to the present level for three centuries". This is the relevant claim. Having said that, I do now feel sick at having quoted Mörner without checking his background.