By Christopher Booker,
UK Telegraph
What is the link between a beautiful stretch of north Devon countryside, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, and that ever more curious body, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The starting point for teasing out this riddle is a hefty new report just published by the IPCC on renewable energy. This has engulfed the IPCC in controversy yet again, after a preview of the report made headlines by claiming that, within 40 years, nearly 80 per cent of the world's energy needs could be met from renewable sources, most notably through a massive expansion of wind and solar power.
What only came to light when the full report was published last week was the peculiar source of this extraordinarily ambitious claim. It was based solely on a paper co-authored last year by an employee of Greenpeace International and something called the European Renewable Energy Council. This Brussels-based body, heavily funded by the EU, lobbies the European Commission on behalf of all the main renewable industries, such as wind and solar. The chief author of the Greenpeace paper, Sven Teske, was also a lead author on Chapter 10 of the IPCC report, which means that the report's headline message came from a full-time environmental activist, supported by a lobby group representing those industries that stand most to benefit financially from its findings.
Not surprisingly, expert critics of the IPCC have been quick to point out how this seems to reinforce the revelations 18 months ago, which did more to discredit the UN body's authority than anything in its history. At the centre of those scandals was the discovery that the more alarming predictions made by the IPCC's major 2007 report – such as a claim that most of the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 – were not based on proper science at all. They were simply scare stories originating from environmentalist lobby groups, used in a way that broke all the IPCC's own rules, which insist that its reports should be based only on properly accredited scientific studies.
New Sea-Level Study Divides Climate Researchers
By Markus Becker,
Spiegel Online
For the first time, researchers have reconstructed the rise in sea level over the last 2000 years. Their conclusion: Never before have sea levels risen as fast since the beginning of industrialisation. But critics fault the study with resting on shaky foundations.
The rise in sea level is perhaps the most threatening consequence of climate change. A large part of the world's population lives in coastal areas. Especially in poorer countries hundreds of millions of people would be at risk from more frequent floods.
In recent years, the predictions of sea level rise knew only one direction: upwards. In its last report in 2007, the IPCC assumed that sea levels could increase by a maximum of 59 centimeter on a global average by 2100. But a United Nations report published last week mentioned already an increase of 90-160 centimeters.
Why Do We Pretend To Understand Climate Change?
By Ross Clark,
UK Express
THE winter of 1684 stands out as the most extreme in a spell of cold weather in the late 17th and early 18th centuries now known as the Little Ice Age.
The frost, records the diary of Londoner John Evelyn, had started in mid-December and by January 2 the Thames at London Bridge had begun to freeze over. By the 11th there were “streets of booths set up upon the Thames”. By February 3 “coaches plied the ice from Westminster to the Temple” and all London had taken to the ice. There were horse races, puppet shows and bull-baiting in a “Bacchanalian carnival on the water”.
The cold weather experienced in Europe and North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries is all the more fascinating for having coincided with a period in which astronomers noted an almost complete absence of sunspots.
