Granny gets it right...AT LAST...

... repeated signals from the the NZ Herald indicate a new degree of realism and respect for the AGW sceptical cause. This editorial this morning calls for new leadership with the IPCC; criticises our own climate researchers and recorders, and the local and international network of green left agitators including the WWF, keen to make political capital from the fable of so called "global warming"...

Climate debate needs facts, not anecdotes...More than one mistake has been found recently in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations to provide authoritative reports on global warming, and the errors are hardly peripheral...If the Himalayan debacle was bad enough, the panel references to disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa are even more embarrassing. They turn out to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine...It is not encouraging to hear a New Zealand contributor to the report, climate scientist Jim Salinger, defending it on the grounds that it accords with interviews from somebody as illustrious as the late Sir Edmund Hillary...The IPCC's reputation is not helped now by the argument of authority its supporters have employed for so long. Criticism was dismissed as conceit in the face of a "scientific consensus" that by implication could not be wrong. Well the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points...Governments need dispassionate scientific assessments of it, not anecdotes, unchecked papers and agitators' propaganda. The IPCC urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again...more here...

What is missing from this editorial of course, is a mea culpa from the Herald for giving warmist hysteria such predominant cover for so long. What is also needed now are questions to the academies of science, including scientific publications of renown, who have colluded in this attempt to deceive the world. There is much more to come, and as the scandal unfolds fraud charges will need to be addressed...

...and The Washington Times editorial simply says...the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the "global warming" brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label "climate change," which is something the rest of us like to refer to as "weather." More, here...

...and this from the Irish Examiner...Careers, reputations, and bureaucracies now depend on there being a climate crisis. Al Gore collects a $200,000 fee for presentations, and that is possibly minor compared to what he will earn in carbon trading fees from Generation Investment Management, which he co-founded and which is an investor in the Chicago Climate Exchange. An article in The Wall Street Journal last October suggested that carbon permits could become the largest commodity market in the world, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2030. Bernie Madoff got away with his Ponzi scheme for so long because people were afraid to question what he was doing. Surely we should be questioning the so-called global warming scam. More here...

I always knew it. UK Tories are revolting...

...the UK Conservatives are discarding their cardigans, slippers and pipes in exchange for more radical accessories. While they aren't all scrambling to put on their chic black berets, they are displaying an independance of thought re climate change policies. The humiliating admission from the arch warmist propagandist cheerleaders at New Scientist (right) may well have something to do with it. According to a well placed UK source...

“The new generation of Conservative MPs due to take power after the election does not share [Conservative Party leader] David Cameron’s professed commitment to tackling climate change, a survey being published this week suggests.
“Reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was rated as the lowest priority, out of 19 policies, by 144 Conservative candidates responding to the survey of the 240 most winnable Tory target seats... The results of the survey … suggest a gap might be opening up between the leadership and rank-and-file MPs on the issue. Mr Cameron is under pressure to drop pledges such as his commitment to increasing green taxes, as the right questions the rationale for taking unilateral action to combat global warming.
“There’s almost no support among centre-right think-tanks for all this climate change … ,” Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservativehome, told the Financial Times.
“I’m confident the sceptics are going to win,” Mr Montgomerie said. “It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this – he’s lost the battle already.”
The survey reflects a belief that the leadership should rethink its stance on green issues …”

Of course greenpeace liars and Friends of the Earth are mortified...H/T's Jas.D. and Heliogenic...

...and the redoubtable UK blogger Bishop Hill takes the NZ Herald to task...

Glenn McGregor is a climatologist who is best known to sceptics from his appearances in the Climategate emails where Hockey Team members explain that he is willing to delay sceptic papers and pick "suitable reviewers" for warmist ones, in order to make life difficult for those who might question the global warming hypothesis.
McGregor made a brief appearance in the New Zealand Herald over the weekend, where he is quoted in an article about Kiwis' lack of confidence in global warming science:

"Dr McGregor said if climatologists explained their research processes better, they might be able to avoid popular criticisms, such as recent accusations of scientists "fiddling" with climate records."When people don't understand the process they just pick up on, 'oh they've adjusted the (climate) record'," he said. "That probably creates a lot of mistrust."

Professor McGregor has been caught red-handed and nobody is going to be fooled by an argument that they are too stupid to understand.
When in a hole, one is normally best advised to stop digging.

...AND talking about green screw ups, how's this for green pieces ?

The Emperor's new clothes...

...are on display. They're dirty threadbare rags, full of patches and holes. Even the pro-green NZ Herald has noticed, with climategate on the front page, and this amazing and very brave cartoon on the op-ed page...and now this in depth analysis and comment on what passes for modern day scientific ideals from the online Weekly Standard...

..Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming...The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment...
...One of the things the CRU emails prove is that the oft-cited figure of 2,000 top scientists is misleading; the circle of genuinely active scientists in the work of CRU and related institutions in this country is very small. Nonetheless, Al Gore and other climate campaigners have leaned heavily on the IPCC process as proof for their assertions that human-caused global warming is a matter of "settled" science. This, even though, in the last IPCC report on the science of climate change in 2007, the terms "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appear over 1,300 times in 900 pages, and the report describes our level of scientific understanding of key aspects of climate as "low" or "very low." The IPCC chapter on the climate models that are the principal tool predicting our future doom refers to "significant uncertainties" in all the models, and admits that "models still show significant errors..." more here...

...and on the first, second and third days of Christmas...my true love sent to me three hockey sticks , two tricks to play, and a cross section of a pine tree...

If this is the only surfing you do today...

...you couldn't do any better than spend a few minutes with the brilliant Bill Whittle, and his expose of media and academic political correctness. H/T and thanks to Slattsnews. Have a look at this superb commentary. This is outstanding and startling... Here...
...A note too, on a rarely seen commodity in NZ politics; political principle. Rodney Hide, Minister of Local Government, offered to resign his ministerial post if a new Auckland "supercity" was created offering designated seats to Maori only. Such racial separatism Rodney Hide observed, was contrary to the principle of "one man, one vote." What he should have added also is that it is contrary to what the left like to refer to as our founding document; The Treaty of Waitangi. (A fact conveniently forgotten by Maori protesters as they brandish their taiaha in street protests.) As always, lefty PC hypocrites within the media, particularly the craven NZ Herald and TVNZ, follow their PC guidelines and depict Rodney Hide as a bullying blackmailer and populist, not a politician of conviction. What utter hypocritical bullshit !
But now, the left have a fantastic opportunity to use the provision for a citizen's initiated referendum to test public opinion on institutionalised apartheid in outeroa... C'mon you leftie hypocrite scumbags, show your courage and let the people of Auckland vote on the matter... Some hope. ( Cartoon from NotPC with thanks.)
(Note to Rodney Hide. Well done, let's see much more of the same. Let's also see a press release about the futility of an ETS. Didn't you say last year that AGW was "a hoax" ?)

The failure of the green/left...

From this morning's NZ Herald editorial..."It must be galling to be green these days...clearly environmentalists have more work to do to convince governments and the public that climate change exceeds all other threats to their livlihoods and that the proposed solutions are worth the candle...
If governments are able to soft pedal on proposed solutions whenever their economies turn sour, the public will be left to wonder whether climate change is really to be taken seriously."

"...environmentalists have more work to do..."? ? I thought science was the driver of public policy in this issue ? No matter. The editorial above in a nutshell sounds the deathknell of AGW. As predicted green doomcasters will now have to summon up direr and more apocalyptic scenarios, compliant scientists will have to either acquiesce with more doom and gloom or cross the floor, and the climate better damn well start doing what the computer models say it should...
Better crank out another horror movie Al... Green scare tactics have been unsucessful. The greens have not won the battle for hearts and minds...
And, as an example of green stooges within the media overplaying their weak hand, check out this AP report and the scientific anger over it...H/T Crusader Rabbit...

The Spin Doctor's back...talking about Mumbai...

...arrgh no ! Last October 1st the NZ Herald carried an apology to Daniel Pipes, (see "Correction and Clarification" below,) dealing with a column written by Irfan Yusuf (interestingly an anagram for; A Fun Fury Is) an associate editor of Altmuslim.com. Mr Yusuf always devotes his energies to excusing and downplaying the beheaders and bombers, and I had hoped that after his earlier humiliation leading to the Herald apology we may have been spared his attentions. Alas no.

Mumbai's sufferings under the terrorists; (so the Herald's sub-editor opines) are due to "the forces of intolerance" (not terrorism, intolerance. Extreme intolerance.) Mr Yusuf develops the intolerance theme by explaining the Mumbai attack as the latest in an ongoing tit for tat retaliatory racist/religous war. No mention of the fact that the main slaughter targeted Jews, Britons and Americans, ...Kasab said the gunmen hoped to kill 5000 and that the militants were ordered to target Americans and Britons...(NZH 2.12.08) and that the attackers were the Deccan Mujahideen; ie,Pakistani Islamic militants.

Eyewitness snapshots here...

More here...The article in total is a weasle's apology for his fanatic jihadist brethren, and a pathetic and sad indictment of the Herald for allowing such a propagandist back into our midst.

More on the Islamist onslaught from Melanie Philips, here...

And from ProCommerce.. I see a cowardice in the vast numbers of people who deny the reality of this war...Mumbai is a case where a tiny militia, fully armed and trained, invaded by boat. This was a significant advance over previous terror tactics. The kill ratio was better than 10 to 1 of victims to perpetrators. Like the two planes and the Twin Towers in NY. Horrifying....

from LGF; Media excuses for atrocity...here...

Comment from Spiked...All of this goes some way to explaining the existential, non-etiological response to Mumbai: because what we have here is really the nihilism that dare not speak its name. The attackers disguise their teenage disgust with shiny Mumbai under grand names such as ‘Mujahideen’, while Western observers feel outraged by the attacks, yes, but also fundamentally estranged from the attackers’ targets: wealth, development, modernity itself. There is, I would venture, a shared, unspoken, unnamed nihilism here. It is far more convenient to label it a ‘mayhem’ that springs from nowhere, and spreads everywhere, than to interrogate its origins and influences. Those of us who believe in growth and progress – and who see in Mumbai a messy but brilliant desire to create a city that is a match for New York or Tokyo – should expose this contemporary unspoken nihilism, and form a firmer attachment to those things that it assaults... More here...

The heroes of Mumbai, here...

Now we can add Mumbai to the list... 9/11, Madrid, Bali, and London. The roll of terror grows while Irfan Yusuf, A Fun Fury Is, continues his apologetic smokescreen, and useful fools in the West continue to deny the reality of this war...

Correction and Clarification...This from The NZ Herald this morning...

"A pulled quote in Thursday's paper, attributed to Sir David King, former UK chief scientist, that 'GM...has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with devastating consequences,' was incorrect. Sir David's actual remark was that it was the Western world's move towards organic farming and away from GM that was having such a disastrous effect.

Two points...Sir David King has pointed again to the truth of Denis Dutton's 2005 claim that the despicable green political movement worldwide has the blood of innocents on its hands, and;
WTF is happening in our newspapers when such blatant misrepresentation and lying simply is noted as a "correction and clarification"? The general public quite rightly hold journalists in low esteem, ranking them with used car salesmen and politicians, turning away from the main stream media simply because of lies like this. I wonder if anybody at the source of the lie (where was the quote "pulled" from?) likely to lose their job ?
I doubt it...f***ing bastards liars, ratbags...