Suzanne Goldberg displayed the establishment media’s inexcusable ignorance and/or willful distortion of the global warming debate in a Thursday ‘news’ article in the prominent UK newspaper The Guardian.

Writing about an effort by the Obama administration to politicize the global warming debate and direct public ridicule at Republicans who are skeptical of alarmist global warming claims, Goldberg describes that effort as one that will “shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.”

Expressing skepticism about alarmist global warming claims and alarmist future predictions by one segment of the scientific population whose prior alarmist claims and alarmist predictions have routinely proven to be false is not “denying the science behind climate change.” Subjecting theories, predictions, and scientific claims to critical scientific scrutiny is the lifeblood of science. Attempting to vilify, stifle, and shut down critical scientific analysis of scientific theories, predictions, and claims is the very definition of anti-science.

A COMMON feature of debates about global warming is that extreme claims often go unchallenged. At best, criticism is impolitic. Worse, critics are portrayed as tools of malign fossil fuel interests. Being impervious to push-back leads to what I describe in my recent book as climate change derangement syndrome, when normally sane people say dumb things. Examples include the claim that global warming is a greater threat than terrorism, shortly before the Tube bombings. Another is that warming could lead to war between the US and Canada (yes, there was one – in 1812).

The latest example is the spectacularly ill-timed claim that global financial markets are dangerously exposed to a giant “carbon bubble”, representing the value of fossil fuels that will have to remain locked in the ground – and here comes the big “if” – if governments around the world stick to their promise to keep the rise in average global temperature below two degrees Celsius.

Waterfront property owners need not flee inland just yet

AFTER alarming predictions that coastal properties would be swamped by monster tides and capital cities would run dry -- if they weren't ravaged by hurricanes first -- Australia's actuaries have looked at the figures to work out what climate change might cost in claims. The results are reassuring.

The Actuaries Institute, representing about 4000 members, predicts that the impact on private insurance premiums will be marginal over the next 60 years.

A Senate Finance Committee white paper on possible federal tax code changes for energy suggested establishing a carbon tax in place of most or all energy tax incentives.

The paper offered the carbon tax with a range of other policy options to help chip away at a Congressional Budget Office-estimated $16 billion of foregone energy-related tax expenditures in fiscal 2013.

The paper, released Thursday, came with the disclaimer that the policy suggestions “do not necessarily have the endorsement” of committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) or ranking member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Are those that so adamantly state that “climate change” and man-made global warming are caused primarily as the result of human activity aware of the facts?  If you, like them, believe that man-made global warming is a fact, the following will test your knowledge.

We do know that the atmosphere is constantly in a state of flux.  It attempts to achieve equilibrium, but never gets there.  Global temperature variability is the norm. 

Those who say, for example, that man-made greenhouse gases are the culprit for creating “monster tropical storms” are not considering all the facts.  Atmospheric motions in the upper troposphere, weak vertical wind shear, and normal warm oceanic temperatures are the main factors that enhance the likelihood of tropical storm development.   

I have been neglecting you. Things have quietened down. I am 91 and it is high time I retired, like my friend Will Alexander in South Africa or my major protagonist, former Professor Martin Manning. I thought I would call it a day on Newsletter No 300.

When I began, in 1991 I was still in China. I got involved in commenting on the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and I just completed those on the Fifth Report which will surely be my last.

To begin with I was the only critical voice in New Zealand. Last week I attended a packed meeting of the Press Club in Wellington to hear Lord Monckton tear apart the IPCC and everything connected with it. The University scientists will not listen to him. But one of the organisers of the meeting was from the Music Department.

Anti-science alarmists and pro-global warming ('AGW') scientists are very enamored with multi-proxy temperature reconstructions, which allows "researchers" to statistically blend and torture different forms of data to force a "confession" that modern warming has been "unprecedented" - however, as expert skeptics have discovered, these studies are often found to be empirically and statistically-challenged garbage and end up being a cornucopia of unintended contradictions...the new PAGES2K paleo-torture study is the latest example.

(source of images, CO2 data source)

Chart 1, Chart 2

The new Kaufman et al. study (aka as the 'PAGES2K' research) is getting its initial web-wide forensic review in multiple articles across the web, including here, here, here, here and here.

Malthusians can breathe a sigh of relief: If current trends hold, human beings won’t fulfill doomsday predictions by making like rabbits after all. Thanks to the success of incessant fear-mongering, the world’s population is expected to peak soon and then begin a long slide downward. That’s fewer of us “defacing” the planet.

A research team from the Autonomous University of Madrid and CEU-San Pablo University in Spain predicts the global population will begin to decline by the middle of the 21st century. Their study, published in the scientific journal “Simulation,” used computer models to project population based on current fertility and death rates. It predicts that global population will reach its high-water mark around the middle of the century, then decline. By 2100, there will be only about 6.2 billion of us, about the same number as in 2000.

Under President Obama, two women have been the director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Carol Browner, who served in the Clinton administration and was one of the "czars" Obama appointed; her acolyte Lisa Jackson, and up for the post is Gina McCarthy. Browner and Jackson went out of their way to conceal their internal communications from Congress and McCarthy lied to the committee considering her nomination.

How bad is the EPA? The Society of Environmental Journalists, on the occasion of the April 11 hearing on McCarthy’s nomination, released a statement that said, “The Obama administration has been anything but transparent in its dealings with reporters seeking information, interviews and clarification on a host of environmental, health and public lands issues.” The SEJ accused the EPA of being “one of the most closed, opaque agencies to the press.”

Where is all the rapidly accelerating global warming that is supposed to be gripping the world?

It’s not in the air. Atmospheric temperature readings show global temperatures have been flat for more than a decade.

It’s not in the upper ocean. Sea surface temperature readings similarly show no recent warming.

It’s not in the polar ice caps. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data show polar ice is currently more extensive than the long-term average.

Global warming activists have finally come up with a last line of defense they know nobody will able to prove wrong: The missing global warming is in the Bermuda Triangle.