Something fishy in Cherrapunji

And the fish that giving off the stink is Subir Bhaumik, among other things BBC's East Indian correspondent.

He turns a tale of over-population and environmental degradation into one of man-made climate change by the magic of his words.

Robin Horbury has the goods on him. Must read. Also read the comments.

The heavy artillery of silence

Warmer winters in Delhi, we are told, means -help!we are dying of global warming!

But what about this-

All the experts say the effects of climate change will be felt most in Alaska, home of the ex-governor who contends climate change is no big deal.

Good thing she wasn't in Valdez this week when the citizenry got buried under a record snowfall.
-------------------
Yes, you read right.
Five feet, 8 inches; over the head of your average American woman

Obama, who escaped grim weather in Copenhagen, arrived to a warm welcome in Washington-

Record snowfall totals were reported Saturday afternoon at Washington Dulles and Reagan National airports -- and snow was still falling. Accumulation at Dulles reached 16 inches, breaking the old record of 10.6 inches set December, 12, 1964; 13.3 inches was reported at Reagan. The old record there was 11.5 inches set December 17, 1932.

Powerline has more images of global warming from Europe-

We 'skeptics' understand that the weather is not climate -unfortunately the greenies and their media-poodles don't. But even here they are dishonest in terms of their own premises.Every warmer than usual event means global warming, but record cold events - well, they are just ignored.Silence is a weapon- a heavy artillery- in this war. And the media uses it all the time.

Pachauri - eating away at the civilization

Indian media caught with it's pants and panties down again.Firangs(foreigners) doing the job they should.

I don't know why but  Rajendra Pachauri has a demi-god status among the media types here.The few times I have seen him on Indian T.V, the anchors(I remember well the expression on Prannoy Roy and Vikram Chandra's faces, both of NDTV) behave as if they are just about to tipple over, fall at his feet and say-
"Sirjee, joote polish kar doon?" (Won't you let me polish your shoes, sir?)




I'm glad that the Daily Telegraph is not in such a masochist mode. It has an article today by Christopher Booker and Richard North(of EUreferendum) on the amazing(really amazing) conflicts of interest of Dr.Doom-

Apart from the infamous TATA-Corus-1700 jobs lost connection(which, again, foreigners had to discover and report), it has much more. Eye-opening stuff for those in awe of Pachauri. Excerpts-

-----------------------

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.



What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

------------------------------------




Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India(sic-Indian) Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

-------------------------------------

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.
-----------------------------------------------

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

---------------------------
But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.

Wow! What a global web of influence this spider weaves.Like a seepage that keeps spreading over time and eventually destroys a building, I'm afraid Pachauri is playing the same role with respect to the industrial civilization.

There is much more.Go read the whole damn thing and weep over the fallen panties of the Indian media.

My 2nd comment at Carbon Footprint

Just left another comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by Samar Halarnkar. My previous comment here.

Samar,
as a journalist(and not an activist -I say this because the tenor and content of your 'reporting' is indistinguishable from reports put out by environmental organizations), could you have a look at satellite temperatures and see if you can make out runaway global warming?

The satellite measurements are here-
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/uah-msu-temperatures-for-2009-and.html
with the conclusion-
"A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future."

And could you also look into Pachauri's HUGE, way huge, conflicts of interests as reported in today's Daily Telegraph-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html

On the one hand,as the chairman of IPCC he has almost godly powers to influence the artificially created carbon markets.On the other, he has his fingers in the carbon pie at umpteen number of funds and organizations.

As the article in the Daily Telegraph put it-
"One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials. "

So much for accountability and transparency.

I know, rich countries are your bugbear but-
could you play the journalist - and not the activist- and investigate Pachauri's affairs?

And I haven't yet asked you to report on climategate- which your newspaper so partisanly dismissed . An event that caused furor in scientific and political circles is not to be dismissed by a newspaper -you know, "news"+paper.Your job is to report-whether you agree on one side of the issue or not.

Your(and your newspaper's) job is to report, not take sides.And even if you do take sides, that cannot be at the expense of blacking out the facts that support the other side. Am I right, Samar?

I hope you will make a start by publishing the incriminating emails.

I write this as a long-suffering reader.

Cheers and regards

Not yet published pending moderation.

Update -
  Not yet published even after about 20 hrs or so. So I have re-submitted it with the following preface-

Samar, you did not publish my comment -it was neither off-topic nor offensive, unless you consider certain opinions not in line with yours as one. So let me in good faith try again-

Update 2-
    Goodie good - now published.

Lessons so simple that even an environmental reporter can savvy

I think our friends in the media, who on this blog are lovingly called 'environmental poodles', can do with some educating - a look at satellite temperatures and other temperature anomalies:

UAH-MSU temperatures for 2009

------------------------
Among these 15 years, 2009 will be cooler than 1998, 2005, 2002, 2007, 2003, and maybe 2006, so it will be just the 6th or 7th warmest year - pretty much exactly in the middle of the last 15 years' scoreboard. A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future.

--------------------------
If there were some significant or urgent global warming, you would expect the record to be broken almost every year: that's what increasing functions like to do. However, it's been the 11th year in a row when the record reading wasn't rewritten. And according to UAH, 2009 was 0.25 °C below 1998. Because the 1979-2009 warming trend indicated by UAH is 0.13 °C per decade, we will need roughly 20 more years to return back where we were in 1998, assuming that the warming observed in the last 30 years will continue (it didn't exist between the 1940s and 1970s).

Even if there were a warming issue worth talking about, it doesn't sound terribly urgent given these numbers, does it?

And this is interesting-

As a bonus, I will list you the UAH warming trends (recalculated to temperature changes in °C per century) for various intervals:

1995-2009: +0.95 °C/century
1996-2009: +0.89 °C/century
1997-2009: +0.41 °C/century
1998-2009: -0.24 °C/century
1999-2009: +1.22 °C/century
2000-2009: +0.53 °C/century
2001-2009: -0.78 °C/century
2002-2009: -1.56 °C/century
2003-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2004-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2005-2009: -3.70 °C/century
2006-2009: -2.30 °C/century
2007-2009: -1.00 °C/century
2008-2009: +21.0 °C/century

Of course, the last one must be taken with a big grain of salt. ;-) Otherwise, you can see among these 14 trends, 6 are warming (generously counting the huge 2008-2009 trend as well) while 8 are cooling! ;-) I could be more quantitative but this is roughly what we mean by saying that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.

For some reason you won't see this reported in your daily newspaper. I guess, their environmental poodles reporters are too busy copying Greenpeace's press releases into their 'reports'.

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha, who has an utterly clueless article, CITY CRIBS - A GLOBAL WARNING, in the city supplement of the Hindustan Times today.Normally I would not be moved to react, but her photo is cho chweet that I could not help myself but respond.

DAMINI PURKAYASTHA

Cannot find the article online but here is it-

My letter-

Dear Ms. Purkayastha

I was going to write a long rebuttal but what the heck! there are so many things to do and so little time. So, in brief -

1) WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE-
so the warmth you perceive outside your window proves nothing, nada, zilch about global temperatures.If it did, then from the following you would have to conclude that the world is cooling-

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.

Due to weather complications #Obama leaves #Copenhagen before #cop15 concludes. Oh - the irony

and he (Obama)landed in washington He had raced back to Washington to avoid the worst of a winter storm barreling through the northeastern United States that threatened to dump up to two feet (61 centimeters) of snow on the last weekend of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

All of which, as I said, says nothing about Global temperatures -because WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE


2) DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE-
This article by Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology might be instructive-The inconvenient truth about malaria. Summary - environmentalists claim malaria is moving higher up in latitude where it had not been present before due to global warming. Conclusion -wrong!



As Prof.Reiter says-

The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them.

3) AH, THOSE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS, the poster boy of global warming, like Kilimanjaro earlier.

Kilimanjaro snow melting due to GW, as claimed by Al Gore,refuted here(Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming -reuters), but does it matter? Environmentalists and their sleeping partners(ideologically speaking) journalists keep parroting the same lies anyway.



Let me not delve into V.K. Raina's inconvenient study of these glaciers that caused Pachauri to have a fit.
A recent Nasa study-

New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming





A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

----------------------------
"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Conclusion -climate science is complex.Very complex. What is not known far,far outstrips what is, though Pachauri and Al Gore(both famous climate scientists, I'm sure) may disagree




4) YOUR FILM RECOMMEDATIONS-

 What to say.

35 Inconvenient Truths -The errors in Al Gore’s movie



A judge in Britain's High Court has ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes "partisan political views" and is riddled with errors.

Wish you would inform your readers about it.


For balance (journalists are supposed to maintain balance,right?)you might recommend -

The Great Global Warming Swindle

and Not Evil Just Wrong

No, Damini, my head is not in the sand or in the media bubble in which everything is the fault of America, West, Bush, neo-conservatives and where Obama, Gore, U.N. and Pachauri are gods.But last time I was in the sand I did glimpse a pretty face looking very anxious about the weather outside of it.

Cheers and regards,
gurmeet

Update-
             corrected a couple of spellings

My comment at Carbon Footprint

Just left a comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by Samar Halarnkar-

It seems you missed Ian Fry,the lead negotiator for Tuvalu, who is quite a theatrical persona.From another newspaper -

""I woke up this morning crying, and that's not easy for a grown man to admit," Mr Fry said on Saturday, as his eyes welled with tears.

"The fate of my country rests in your hands," he concluded, as the audience exploded with wild applause.

But the part-time PhD scholar at the Australian National University actually resides in Queanbeyan, NSW, where he's not likely to be troubled by rising sea levels because the closest beach at Batemans Bay is a two-hour, 144km drive away. Asked whether he had ever lived in Tuvalu, his wife told The Australian last night she would "rather not comment".


A career environmentalist who once worked as a Greenpeace political liaison officer, Mr Fry has found his niche in global climate change talks over the past 10 years, representing small Pacific nations and running the climate negotiations for the Association of Small Island States."

There's a lot of fakery going on at Copenhagen that the HT and yourself are blind to.Willingly blind, in my opinion.

How would you describe a gathering where thugs like Chavez, murderers like Mugabe, Ahmadinejad,Sudanese presidential assistant Nafi Ali Nafi (from one of the world's most blood-soaked regimes) are applauded and wined and dined with nary a pip-squeak out of the thousands screaming for 'justice'? You describe it in glowing terms. I say it is the gathering of wolves looking to kill capitalism in one, large blow.

By the way Samar, I had earlier written something about you on my blog that you might be interested in-
http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/exposing-environmentalists-bitches_27.html


Cheers and regards

Not yet published pending moderation.

Update -
      now published

My comment at Earthshastra

Just left this comment at Earthshastra, a Times of India blog by Amit Bhattacharya-

Amit, we might take what you write a bit more seriously when you and your paper report honestly on climategate and on skeptics' views(many of whom are excellent scientists).For you there is only one narrative - and it seems you will stick to it no matter what.

For a start, I would like you to explain this-

if the science of AGW is so settled, why do the climategate scientists have to keep out inconvenient studies from the IPCC reports? You may read about it here-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_this_time_al_gore_lied/


Hoping for a honest assessment.
cheers.


P.S. - just one more question -why is all the reporting on this issue always alarmist?
Aren't journalists supposed to find more than one side of any issue? Have you ever reported on Al Gore's or Pachauri's conflict of interests? Have you ever reported on discrediting of the infamous Hockey Stick? Have you ever reported on temperatures in a historical context -on the MWP(medieval warm period was warmer than now),the Roman warm period(grapes growing in England),on the little ice age(LIA) from which the world began to emerge sometime in the 19th century and perhaps still is emerging out of it?

Ok, that's a lot of questions- but why you or your paper do not point them out?Is it journalism?

Chuck the narrative, Amit, report, report! Even if what you report does not agree with your views. Don't black out the views of those who disagree with what you believe in .That's honesty.Just report.

Has not yet been published pending moderator's approval.


Update -
      now published.

Exposing environmentalist's bitches -The Hindustan Times, part 2

Part 1 of this post below.

The amazing story of Climategate broke 7 days ago. Indian media has been carefully avoiding it, just as if it were cow shit strewn on the road. I call these media whores environmentalist's bitches.Among the bitchiest is the Hindustan Times.The following is what it has 'reported' on climate change and related issues in the last 6 issues after the exposure of the climate scandal, starting from the 22nd of November(the story was too late to be included in the 21st's issue). These are from the Delhi print edition, not all of them available online-
(this is a really long post out of necessity, I apologize)
(if you want a quick summary -just scroll to the last)

22nd November

1) Page 1
             A story on 'green Tihar jail', conserving energy, bio-mass,solar,yada,yada,yada -surprisingly, the reporter manages avoiding any mention of global warming.



2) Page 11
            Inderjit Hazra attempts a humorous take on global warming-

Exactly a fortnight away from the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, the organisers have banned conference ‘gift bags’ and bottled water to conserve energy. But apart from a few who will be cycling, para-gliding, walking and crawling to Copenhagen, most of the 14,000-odd delegates, media, industry lobbyists and environmental activists descending on the Danish capital will be transported into the city by airborn e vehicles that burn a lot of jet fuel. Apart from the hot air to be generated, that’s a lot of carbon emissions for one event. I implore the powers-that-be (including the forest deity of the Sunderbans, Bon Bibi) to submerge Copenhagen by a freak tsunami. And what is the reason for hosting this catastrophe-triggering summit? Yes, global warming.

This is something many have pointed out again and again -that Global Warming is a religion of sinners. In fact, some really big sinners.We must reduce our carbon footprint drastically or else -except the saints of this religion who are exempt.Rajendra Kumar Pachauri will jet set all over the world endlessly even if his emissions(carbon emissions, that is) are killing the planet. Al Gore will live in a energy-gobbling huge mansion and flit about in private jets to give speeches on environment. UN will organize huge jamborees in top hotels at beautiful locations -the carbon footprint of which could exceed emissions of some countries.

As Andrew Bolt put it-

No one is gassier than a global warming alarmist

But hey, sinning  for a good cause is just fine.

This issue has never been raised in the Hindustan Times,AFAIK. Just as only a court jester could say inconvenient truths about the king and escape execution, so it is only in jest that a writer in Hindustan Times can take potshots at the climate scare industry.Because it is understood -it's all tongue-in-cheek, it's a joke, not to be taken seriously, nod-nod-wink-wink...

Hazra continues-

After a suggestion by the wise and wisecracking Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, beef-eating will stop in the West so as to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, a-fifth of which comes from meat production. As a result, rich westerners will move to a corn-based diet triggering a global food crisis that will wipe out poor people.

Is this an allusion to the food crisis that many said was caused by the idiotic policy of diverting farmland to produce bio-fuels instead of food? Those idiotic policies had been advocated by environmentalists for years.If you read the Hindustan Times then that fact might not have reached you.They don't like to cast greenies as meanies.They were too busy blaming and snickering at George W.Bush.

Again Hazra gets away because he is the court jester.

 Nothing this day on Climategate -maybe the HT is getting its facts right before reporting the story -although that never has stopped the media from headlining something sensational.

23rd November

1) Page 2
             A lament that not many people buy and drive electric cars in Delhi (cannot find this article online)-

We might take the HT more seriously when all the large luxury sedans parked in its office's parking lot are replaced by tiny joint-pain inducing Revas.




2) Page 10
          Environmentalist Darryl D'Monte gets the prime op-ed space to assault the very inconvenient study of the Himalayan glaciers by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, that says that "it was premature to make a statement that the glaciers were retreating abnormally because of global warming".

The study by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, has apparently not been peer-reviewed. No less a person than R.K. Pachauri, who chairs the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has rubbished the report as “totally unsubstantiated scientific opinion”.

 That the study apparently has not been peer-reviewed should interest the HT in more ways than one.Along with fudging and cherry-picking of data, the tight control of the peer-review process is the heart of Climategate.As Robert Tracinski says-

If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to "rid themselves of this troublesome editor"-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II's knights. Michael Mann replies:

I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in "legitimate peer-reviewed journals." But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not "legitimate."

Also interesting is that D'Monte resorts to argument by authority - the great maharaja-dhiraj* "R.K. Pachauri, .............. has rubbished the report." It's like Moses himself pronouncing the word of God!

So R.K. Pachauri must be a top-notch climate scientist -right?
Wrong!! He studied Industrial Engineering and Economics.

But don't worry - he can rubbish any report he doesn't like - he's the chairman of IPCC. And that is as close to God as it comes nowadays(after Obama, that is).


Just to note-
Activists of extreme left  -from greenies to marxists- regularly get large space in the HT. I have never seen a libertarian getting major space in this paper - it might have happened, but must have been a blink-and-miss-it moment.



 3) Page 13
             A moronic piece on turning veg to save the planet by Bharati Chaturvedi - I have read her for years (just don't ask why) and not once has she risen above parroting greenie talking points in an dull, schoolmarmish manner.


Still nothing on Climategate. Maybe the HT is working on it.Maybe.





24th November


Still nothing on Climategate!
At this point the climate scandal has become huge around the world -there are demands for investigations, there are chances of  U.S. congressional hearings, a flurry of articles from all sides all over.Accusations and calumny are flying thick and fast. But the Hindustan Times sleeps on the job -press, they say, is the watchdog of democracy. This dog lies and sleeps among the thieves.

But it gets worse!

One of the worst things about the Global Warming scare is the traumatization of young minds -whole countries will drown,  giant walls of water will engulf skyscrapers, millions will die in famine, floods,droughts, hurricanes, desertification(all of them at the same time  -somehow they left out the locusts) - all this cannot but leave deep psychological scars on kids.This is psychological terrorism practiced on children!

This is one of the worst forms of child abuse.

 Brendan O’Neill in the article Panic, little ones, it's the Carbon Monster-

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change. The children were most likely to be kept awake thinking about “the possible submergence of entire countries” and the “welfare of animals"…

And the Hindustan Times is fully complicit in it -not only by publishing screaming headlines in super-large font about the end of the world. Not just by shutting out reports and research and views that contradict the narrative.

It is now sending out its top honchos to schools to propagandize on Global Warming! This is criminal!

1) Page 4

India must show responsible leadership and go out of its way to act as a pioneer in the fight against climate change since it has begun to affect our lives directly.
This is the agreement a group of 25 Sanskriti School students belonging to Classes 8 to 12 arrived at during a discussion on climate change held in the school on Monday.

Hindustan Times managing editor Samar Halarnkar interacted with the students and discussed various ways and means — such as recycling and reusing — to reduce the climate change impact.

And the Hindustan Times is furiously peddling its narrative -

Halarnkar also discussed on the official stand India must take in the Copenhagen Summit to be held in December in Denmark.

Wow!No wonder this newspaper cannot be honest about climate change.It's not news but activism that clouds their minds -saving the world is so much better that just the facts, thank you ma'am.

And just for laughs-

“The discussion was very informative and it opened our minds to many things related to climate change which we were unaware of,” Aishwarya Shekhar, a Class 11 student, said.

In today's Orwellian times, group-think is debate, all agreeing with each other is 'opening our minds'. But Samar Halarnkar wouldn't know much about open minds anyway.He is an HT man.


Now for one of those regular end-of-world-is-approaching-faster-than-we-thought-so-give-us your-trillions-now! screamers-


2) Page 19

Scream of the day is -

Antartic ice loss vaster,faster than we thought

So is this study peer-reviewed? Darryl D'Monte wouldn't trust it, if not. The HT doesn't tell us. It also doesn't tell us that-

The latest data uses observations taken monthly between 2002 and 2009 from a pair of satellites flying in formation measuring gravity perturbations. Analysing data from the GRACE satellites is tricky and relating them to ice sheet mass estimates involves several steps and assumptions.
--------------------------------
The importance of this research is that it highlights the close scrutiny needed of the region, especially for the East Antarctic ice cap, to see if its rate of loss increases. At present it is not known if the loss is due to climate change or if such losses are in any way exceptional or cyclical. If the changes persist, and accelerate, then, “Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise”, the researchers write.

Others have expressed surprise at the results. A study in 2005 suggested that the East Antarctic ice sheet was actually gaining mass. What this latest work indicates is the need for more observations, an appreciation of the large uncertainties in individual measurements and the problem of relating them to each other. Overall it would be unwise to draw strong conclusions from this research.

Try telling that to the editors of HT!

Just curious - did that 2005 study about increasing Antarctic ice get screaming headlines?Small headlines?Really small headlines?Any headline at all? I didn't think so.We all know why -doesn't fit the narrative.

The HT also didn't tell us that(from the above link)-

East Antarctica, the researchers(of this study) say, is losing mass at about 57 +/-  52 GT/yr (note large uncertainty - it could be consistent with zero ice loss)

This is like saying my mother is 57 years old +/-  52, that is she could be 109 or she could be just 5, who knows but trust me I do!

Such 'research' is enough to get environmental 'reporters' howling away in their headlines.
They and their editors want to make an impact, save the world - no doubts will be admitted.To them, all 'studies' support the narrative. Those that don't, don't exist.(That's Kafkaesque)






25th November

No sign of Climategate in the HT. There is no doubt now. They are not reporting what they do not want to report.


1) Page 15
Environmental poodle Chetan Chauhan carries on the assault on V.K.Raina's study, this time in form of a 'report', not an opinion column.In our media, news and views mix freely.So who is saying that V.K.Raina is wrong?  -a  joint team of WWF-India and Birla Institute of Technology.

I suspect WWF have something to do with environmentalism and so have an agenda.But you wouldn't know it from the 'report'.


Mercifully that is all of climate change for this day.






26th November


I don't expect the Hindustan Times to honestly report on Climategate -but I thought they would do either a small side-column one paragraph whitewash or a little longer one minimizing the whole thing. But there is dead silence.The HT wants to pretend that Climategate didn't happen.Heads in sand. Will blow over,no publicity to the skeptics, storm in a tea-cup .....I can imagine what goes for thoughts in those crusading heads.

Meanwhile, business as usual continues-

1) Page 14
          Top HT honcho Samar Halarnkar continues his brainwashing of school kids, this time at the Tagore International School(cannot find this article online) -

I feel sorry for these children -so sincere, so full of passion to do the right thing.....and so brainwashed. They are unaware that they have become foot-soldiers in the war of Greenies against freedom and capitalism.



2) Page 17
            A small item (again cannot find this online) that tells us the solutions to climate change are good for India -we will get money!Lots of it! Other people's money! All free!
Hey, that's what we all dream of, no?

27th November


Still nothing on Climategate. Keep those heads in sand, guys, and have a nice time in there.But the fire is spreading. I expect a white-washing piece any day now.Even Moses R.K. Pachauri has issued a white-wash of a statement -all is well, nothing to see, move along.

Business as usual continues(this now has the quality of the band playing on a sinking Titanic)-

1) Page1, top news 
               The climate change is the main news -but not, as one would expect from objective journalists, about  Climategate.

Ramesh will meet Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Friday, a day after Beijing announced a “voluntary” and “binding” national goal of a 40-45 per cent cut in carbon intensity below 2005 levels by 2020. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic growth or GDP.

“China has given a wake-up call to us,” Ramesh told Hindustan Times
--------------------------------------------


“Biggest step forward,” said R.K. Pachauri, head of the UN’s panel on climate change. “Now rich countries should declare a financial commitment for saving the planet so that we can have a treaty at Copenhagen.”

Sounds impressive, no? A really serious commitment to cut emissions? Something substantial? That's the impression the writers(among them Chetan Chauhan again) seem to want to leave.

But- as with much about global warming 'reporting' -it's more smokes and mirrors.
After several such paras , the most revealing part is kept for towards the last part of the piece-

China’s new goal does not mean its emissions will reduce. With the new carbon-intensity cuts, Chinese emissions will keep growing with the economy, and faster than India, till 2020 or 2030 when emissions are expected to peak. Chinese officials have avoided announcing a year when emissions will peak before they start to decline.

So no effect on climate change(except the one of keep increasing it). So all that praise is for.....for what exactly? intentions?chanting the right mantra? Actually it's more devious than that. Planet Gore has the goods.



2)  Page 7
             Samar Halarnkar, Managing Editor, Hindustan Times , continues his whirlwind crusade through schools.This time hurricane Halarnkar hits Amity International School, Saket.I'm sure he had an open debate discussing all points of views.(Heh,heh, just kidding)

There are some sad stories of lost childhood due to global warming scaremongering - though I'm sure the HT does not see it that way-

As a school project, a group of students has meticulously calculated the carbon footprint of each student, faculty member as well as that of the whole school -- all in a pioneering environmental endeavor, now on display as a neat and structured report.

I remember, as kids we had much more fun.


3) Page 13
          Uh-oh.
               Here comes that full page scaremongering again. They love doing this.

This includes a softie interview with Dr.R.K. Pachauri in the style of a school master instructing a pupil.(No, the interviewer is not the schoolmaster).
No question of asking some real.....questions.About Climategate, for instance.About "hiding the decline".About a corrupt peer-review process. About why the earth hasn't warmed in the 21st century.About the quality of code. About the quality of surface station data. About the rise of CO2 historically following the temperature and not the other way round. About lucrative incentives to scaremonger -lots of free money.No way. That won't happen.

 Maybe the answers are so obvious to the HT that they assume that everyone knows. Maybe that is why they won't tell us -or ask questions.

Mr. Chetan Chauhan (yes, him again!), could you consider us all as all-out, full-scale, no-good ignoramuses and next time get us some answers? Of course, Mr. Pachauri may never speak to you again but.....or is it all about protecting the narrative?






 Whew, finished! This concludes my review of HT's marvelously biased coverage of climate change.And possibly the longest post on the LNC.

To summarize-

In 6 days-

1) 19 articles on climate change (including 1 related and 1 a satire)(note -there are multiple articles on pg19,on the 24th Nov and on page 13 on the 27th Nov)

2) 18 of them are scaremongering, follow the narrative,crusading to save the planet kind

3) no mention of Climategate -anywhere

4) No clue that not everyone believes the narrative -that there are thousands of scientists who are 'sceptics'

5) no questioning of the climate orthodoxy as represented by the IPCC.


No wonder, the Hindustan Times makes a splendid environmentalist's bitch.




*The colorful Indian language translator -

             maharaja-dhiraaj - king of kings


Update-
      4 ''it's" changed to "its" on the cue of the keen eyed Samar Halarnkar in the comments. Thanks, Samar.

Exposing environmentalist's bitches -The Hindustan Times, part 1

 Note - the meat of this post, the juicy bit, part 2, is here

This will be a series exposing the persistent lack of honest reporting on climate change in the Indian media.Starting with the Hindustan Times because this is the rag I'm most familiar with.

Climategate broke 5(I think) days ago -and for 5(I think) days I have searched the newspaper's site using keywords like - CRU... email... hack....Phil Jones..... And still-

nothing, zilch, nada!

Makes you wonder -

1)do they live in a cave with no internet connection?
2)have they not heard of Climategate( or Climaquiddick as some prefer it)?
3)if so do they not consider it newsworthy?

So the shocking story which(in Andrew Bolt's words)-

* caused an international controversy

* shocked world leaders in climate science

* triggered calls for an inquiry by a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer

* caused fellow Leftist and warmist crusader George Monbiot to call for the resignation of one of the warmist scientists, and complain that fellow Leftists who ignore it are in denial.

* helped to prompt a Liberal revolt against Malcolm Turnbull

* caused warmist crusader Tim Flannery to confess on ABC television for the first time that the world had indeed been cooling, and ”when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem” and “we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it”.

* revealed that one of the co-authors of the IPCC report that Faine(another environmentalist's bitch -ed) cites as gospel conceded ”we can’t account for the lack of warming, it’s a travesty that we can’t”.

is not worthy of being covered?

Or, as is more likely -doesn't fit the narrative.

This, in these last 5 days, has been the Hindustan Time's agenda(as it has been for past several years -they don't take their eyes off the ball)-


UH-OH! This is going to be long post.....a mere five days and so much warmingering......so will continue in the next post.


Update -

Climategate broke seven days ago -making media's silence all the more damning.So I will cover last 6  issues of the Hindustan Times in the next post.



Update 2 -

Part 2 of this post is now online.