Surprising No One...

The Committee’s 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.

The above links to the full report of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Here is the short version.

H/t to an anon from today's first post. Is it just me or am I getting a better quality of anon these days?

Who The Heck Is Roger Pielke Sr.?

Roger Pielke Sr. does not like to call himself a global warming denier, believing rather that CO2 is merely one of the forcings (even merely one of the human forcings) that are having an effect on recent increases in the global mean temperature, which beliefs put him within but at the conservative edge of the international consensus on the issue.

Until recently, however, Pielke Sr. ran a weblog heavily frequented by climate change deniers called "Climate Science", in which he offered his comments on recently released papers, his own and those of other researchers, pertaining to the various aspects of, well, climate science.

This site was discontinued in early September but, and here is the point of the post, it has now returned as an "information service" (comments section closed). Whatever your position on these issues, I would heartily recommend frequent visits. Pielke's personal obsessions aside, there is probably no better or more inclusive on-line source of links to/information about new papers, which are often extremely difficult to track down otherwise.

In his latest post, Pielke discusses some of the projects he and his research team have been working on lately, including:

...a preliminary poll of climate scientists, we have found that a significant minority disagree with the 2007 IPCC conclusions, either concluding that is it too conservative with respect to the risk of human-CO2 caused climate change, or overstates the relative role of this specific climate forcing.

I wrote about this survey here, where I took issue with the way Pielke and his co-authors claimed their findings demonstrated that the "science was not settled". If I were to give my own interpretation of the significance of their findings, I would say they show that:

1) within the community of climate scientists, there are no pure deniers.
2) while a small minority of climate scientists believe that the IPCC conclusions "overstate the risk" of AGW, about 75 per cent believe that the effects are going to be at least as bad as the IPCC position.

...which is the sound of settled science to me.

Welcome To The Crystal Eye of Nunavit

This is what this story is about. From 25 miles up, via Google Earth:

"[Pingualuit Crater is] like a huge rainwater collector set out in the tundra, catching rainwater for 1.3 million years," said Prof. Pienitz, whose expedition was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. "This lake is really special."

Working with Inuit from the nearby community of Kangiqsujuaq, Prof. Pienitz's team travelled in freezing temperatures by snowmobile to the edge of the crater rim. They then slid down the rim and trekked to the centre of its ice-covered surface. They travelled on foot because the crater, located in a new provincial park, is subject to stringent conditions that ban fuel-powered vehicles.

The team then drilled a hole through the ice to open a window into natural history.

Lowering their equipment through the ice, scientists reached into the extreme depths of the lake bottom to extract a nine-metre sediment core. A scientific time capsule, it's filled with fossils of pollen, algae and tiny insect larvae that researchers hope will yield clues about climate change dating to the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago.

PS. Saw my pair of Northern Mockingbirds again today, out by Markham and Steeles. According to the Toronto Xmas Bird Count, two of 34 observed in and around the GTA. I didn't bring my camera however, but am going back again tomorrow morning. Hopefully I can get a couple of good stills (they don't seem to be afraid of people at all).