Undoing knotted minds

FROM-Quadrant Online

by Peter Smith

December 6, 2009

Climate change is a “conventional wisdom”

Let us not be mistaken into thinking that the tide has turned against the global warming consensus because of some errant emails and a couple of opinion polls; it has ebbed a little, that is all.

There is powerful vested interest, on a global scale, among an influential section of the scientific community; among most politicians and bureaucrats; among all those who will benefit from a cap and trade system; and among most of the media; to resist any data or arguments which might undermine the man-made global warming thesis. It is clear that a "conventional wisdom", albeit with a scientific bent, has formed of the kind described and made famous by J K Galbraith. In The Affluent Society (1958) he wrote:

we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding … vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defence of what they have so laboriously learned … acceptable ideas have great stability … I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is not the property of any political group. On a great many social issues … the consensus is exceedingly broad.

All conventional wisdoms tend to start with a truth (the world has warmed slightly in recent decades - assuming that not all of the data has been fudged) but then, to one extent or other, develop a paradigm around that truth that may or may not be right and/or benign. For example, McCarthyism in the early 1950s in the US was not a benign extension of a truth that Russian communism was a potential threat.

Suppose a conventional wisdom is substantially astray from the truth (the way the world really is) and its impact is adverse. Never mind how it started, the important question is when and under what circumstances will it go away.

Given the nature of this particular conventional wisdom can we rely on new objective scientific inquiry? Not according to Galbraith; the keepers of the wisdom brook no challenge:

accepted ideas become increasingly elaborate. They have a large literature, even a mystique. The defenders are able to say that the challengers of the conventional wisdom have not mastered their intricacies ... The conventional wisdom having been made more or less identical with sound scholarship is virtually impregnable. The sceptic [note the use of the word] is disqualified … were he a sound scholar he would remain with the conventional wisdom.

According to Galbraith the “enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events”:

the conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret, but to the audience’s view of the world. Since the latter remains comfortable and familiar, while the world moves on, the conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence. This is not immediately fatal. The fatal blow … comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable.

If Galbraith was right, the outlook for undoing the global warming conventional wisdom is unpromising for two reasons. First, experience has not yet shown itself to be fatal – as Galbraith warned. Ten years during which temperatures have not risen (even fallen slightly) have failed to cool the ardour of academic global warmists. I listened to a conversation on the ABC program PM on the Friday evening when the Liberal Party in-fighting was underway. Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun was desperately trying to talk about the substantive point that the world was cooling – rather than the political drama - to absolutely no avail. Those wedded to the conventional wisdom are not listening and it is doubtful that another two or three years of cooling will have an impact. The keepers of the wisdom have already moved swiftly to build that in, as part of their paradigm.

The second reason is that this particular conventional wisdom is in process of engendering an elaborate and costly infrastructure that will fundamentally change the way the world works. It will be almost impossible to unmake. In itself this will also serve to buttress the conventional wisdom against experience.

If neither science nor the march of time is likely to undo the conventional wisdom; then what? In public opinion might lay the only promise. Opinion polls in Australia and, more importantly, in the US show some movement away from the conventional wisdom. At question is whether this movement will gather pace and conviction. This will depend principally on political leadership. Left without mainstream political leadership, public opinion is likely to revert to its former state, resuming a compliant posture under the umbrella of the conventional wisdom. What does that sorry state look like?

I have had numbers of conversations with ex-colleagues from the banking industry and with my neighbours. Without exception they have been true believers in man-made global warming. None had read or seen anything which challenged their view. None had been aware that the earth’s temperature had been broadly flat or declining since it peaked in 1998. I had lunch with an ex-colleague recently who I hadn’t seen for some years. He is now retired and helps run his son’s farm in Victoria. As evidence of global warming, he said that he understood that the current drought is as, or more, severe than the (then) record drought of the 1930s and 1940s. I replied that if such a severe drought occurred as far back as in the 1930s wasn’t this evidence that factors other than global warming might be at work, and also asked him whether he thought that the record drought of the 1930s and 1940s was bound to remain a record. While acknowledging the pertinence of my points, he remained unmoved, and the current drought clearly remains an important factor in his validation of global warming. He drew no distinction between global warming and man-made global warming and had formed no view on the effectiveness of the proposed counter measures. I have found this also to be the case in other conversations I have had.

As described by Galbraith:

the individual has the satisfaction of knowing that other more famous people share his conclusions … [he] knows that he is supported in his thoughts – that he has not been left behind and alone … articulation of the conventional wisdom is a religious rite … like reading aloud from the scriptures or going to church … a large part of our social comment – and nearly all that is well regarded – is devoted at any time to articulating the conventional wisdom.

The task of undoing this conventional wisdom will require political leadership of a resolute kind and on a bigger stage than Australia. The change in leadership of the Liberal Party and the defeat of the carbon reduction legislation might prove to be important but only as bit parts; the key is what happens in the US. Barack Obama offers no hope, of course, but the resurgence of conservatism within the Republican Party together with the cost of a cap and trade system, when set against the parlous and debt ridden state of US economy, offers a glimmer but only a glimmer. The only thing conservatives can do here is to keep hammering away on the weakness of the evidence supporting the kinds of measures and costs being contemplated, and the weakness of the case that they will do any good in any event.




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The climate-change travesty

FROM-WAPO

By George F. Will

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.

China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen

Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.

The Financial Times' peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming "is growing more rather than less compelling." If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" -- this "moment" is in its second decade -- "and it is a travesty that we can't."

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments' attempts to manipulate Earth's temperature now comprise one of the world's largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.



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Global warming's new clothes

FROM-American Thinker

By Rosslyn Smith

Some are unhappy that the Copenhagen conference on climate change is going forward. I think that it is entirely appropriate in light of the revelations coming out of CRU/IPCC. After all, Copenhagen was where Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published The Emperor's New Clothes in 1837. While we tend to remember the little boy who called out "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" we often forget that the entire story was about far more than a vain ruler.

It begins, after all, with two con men who promise they can weave cloth of unsurpassed beauty to the enlightened but which would be invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid. They would then tailor that fabric into a fabulous suit of clothes for the emperor. The emperor invested in the venture because such traits would be useful to someone like himself as emperors tend attract both sycophants and self serving manipulators.

The emperor gave the weaver/tailors all the luxury materials they asked for and they immediately began a lavish charade of diligent labor in front of empty looms. One by one the emperor sent trusted people to check on the progress as he fed more and more resources into the project. Lest they admit to their own apparent unfitness, one by one the trusted advisors returned to rave about the beauty of the cloth being made. To a man they had accepted the con men's premise that they could weave a magic cloth and they ended up doubting their own abilities, not those of the con men. Thus they were doubly wrong, Not only did they fall for the con, they also failed in their duty to the emperor. When the emperor himself came for a fitting, the con men acted every bit the tailors, working invisible fabric with imaginary pins and needles and even the vain emperor began to doubt himself.

I can almost excuse the politicians and the speculators who promoted AGW. Like Anderson's emperor, they invested in a tool that would advance their self interest. Representative democracies are supposed to have checks and balances to help keep such self-interest within reasonable bounds. In addition to the way the researchers themselves violated scientific standards, the actions of our journalists and educators who jumped on the AGW bandwagon made matters worse. People in these positions are supposed to promote healthy skepticism. Journalists see themselves as the guardians of transparency in government and educators in the pursuit of enlightenment. In fact, our legal system grants special rights to journalists because of their role as the watchdogs and whistle blowers.

So who are the weavers and the tailors in the tale of AGW? Certainly the scientists at CRU/IPCC, but they had a great deal of help.

For decades now appalling orthodoxy has been ossifying many academic disciplines. As a result students are never exposed to competing ideas and attitudes. Increasingly that orthodoxy has spread to the political class in general. Writes David Bernstein:

... it's clear that many liberal-leaning institutions, starting with the universities, are sufficiently engaged in groupthink that they lack the most basic curiosity about or knowledge of what their ideological adversaries believe, and are instead inclined to dismiss them entirely as mere evil reactionaries. [And they are sufficiently isolated from contact with conservatives that they don't have personal experiences to suggest otherwise; it's easy enough, for example, to go to a top university, on to a major journalism school, and from there to the New York Times or MSNBC or The Huffington Post without ever having had a serious intellectual discussion with a conservative colleague or mentor.]

The transformation of journalists from whistleblowers to cheerleaders became obvious to many Americans during last year's presidential election. So pervasive is the leftist atmosphere that ambitious people in other industries and in many urban settings have learned that to even express curiosity about conservatism instead of accepting the crudest of caricatures of the political opposition might stigmatize them as unpardonably stupid and unfit for their high status jobs. Those who used to love to say that dissent is the highest form of patriotism have been assiduously working to assure that dissent from the agenda they have been weaving will be considered the lowest form of stupidity.

The moral of the "Emperor's New Clothes" certainly applies to AGW and many of those who accepted the assertions by non scientists with political agendas that the science was settled. The emperor's advisors and subjects were so afraid of appearing stupid that they suspended their judgment. Thus they ended up demonstrating to the entire world that they were indeed stupid.

How appropriate that the busy weavers of the left and those who still refuse to see that there is nothing at all to see in AGW will be going to the home town of the emperor who put all his shortcomings on full display

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A Few Good Scientists

You want the truth? You can't understand the truth!

FROM- Pajama Media

by Frank J. Fleming

In every place of knowledge, there is a statue dedicated to one of the great martyrs of science. He carefully studied the data and came to the conclusion that his people were doomed if action was not immediately taken. For this effort, he was mocked, derided, and ultimately ignored. And, as a result, millions died.

I speak, of course, of Jor-El, Superman’s father (his biological father, not the Midwestern hillbilly who adopted him). The destruction of Krypton was the tragic result of science being ignored, and every scientist keeps the lesson of Jor-El in mind whenever he finds himself mocked for warning of an impending catastrophe or questioned for launching his children into space unattended.

And history repeats itself with climate change. We tell you people of the imminent dangers from the earth warming, and what do you do? You mock us. You question our motives. People who can’t even convert Fahrenheit to Celsius try and tell us we did the science wrong. Now emails have leaked from the Climate Research Unit that apparently show that scientists were fixing the data and trying to suppress the scientific research of dissenters, and you people demand answers from us. I have one thing to say to that. How dare you!

You do not understand the first thing about climate research. Man-made global warming is settled science. Disaster is imminent. We know this. It is a fact. We don’t waste time on studies that say otherwise, the same way we don’t waste time on studies that assert that the earth is flat. We are very smart people, and when we say something is so, you should just accept it.

So you think what is in those emails is important? Well, what exactly do you know? Do you see the white lab coats we wear? That color symbolizes pure science. Were someone like you to wear one, within five minutes it would be stained with neon orange powdered cheese and wet with drool from you trying to comprehend the data sets people like me look at every day.

We are out there trying to stave off global disaster, telling you what political and economic changes you need to make in order to survive. We do the things that you find too complex or too boring to do. One would think that would engender gratitude — or maybe even awe at our abilities — yet you troglodytes cling to everything you can use to second-guess us. Every time it’s a bit cold out, you doubt us. Every time one little piece of data has to be revised, you question us. And now some emails make you think you can just throw out everything we’ve done?

Let me tell you this: If it weren’t for scientists like me, you’d still be worshiping fire as an angry god. Every convenience in your life is thanks to us, so when we tell you something, you should just nod your head like you comprehend what we’re saying and shut up. And right now I am telling you those emails are unimportant.

Oh, that’s not good enough for you. You want us to explain them. You think you’re entitled to the truth.

You can’t understand the truth!

Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to have scientific equipment on them to gather data, and that data studied by men with computers. Who’s going to do it? A layman like you? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the global warming skeptics and curse the climatologists. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know — that the crushing of data contrary to global warming, while tragic, probably saved grant money. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to the layman, creates scientific consensus. You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about on Twitter, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall studying those measurements you can’t even begin to comprehend.

We use phrases like “peer review,” “overwhelming consensus,” “settled science.” We use these phrases as the backbone to a life spent studying something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket made by synthetic fibers my science creates, then questions the manner in which I provide that science! I’d rather you just said, “You’re such a genius!” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a lab coat and crunch data. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

Of course we hid dissenting data! We had to. So as not to confuse your simple minds from understanding the greater truth that man-made global warming is real! Now, excuse me; I have science to do.

There won’t be another Krypton on my watch.





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peregruzka

peregruzka

FROM- NRO

Assessing Pre-Blame for Climate-Change Summit

It’s time to start over, beginning with the science.

By Jonah Goldberg

Next week’s Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate. Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to use Climategate to scuttle the Democrats’ cap-and-trade legislation. Even the Saudis — who like fossil fuels even more than Tiger Woods likes the ladies — are getting in on the act, saying the scandal casts the entire case for global warming in doubt.

“Climategate,” aka Warmerquiddick, aka the CRUtape letters, aka the Mother of All Publicity Disasters, refers to the leaking of vast numbers of e-mails and other documents from a leading British global-warming outfit, the Climatic Research Unit. The e-mails show, depending on your outlook, anything from sloppiness, pettiness, and dishonesty to outright fraud among some of the world’s leading climate scientists.

The e-mails don’t show that the scientists don’t believe global warming is real. Rather, they show that the scientists believe in global warming so much, they think they’re justified in doing anything to fight it. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you never ask questions when Gaia’s on your side.

Climategate is a big deal, but we should be clear: It’s not why cap-and-trade should be scuttled, and it’s not why Copenhagen will produce nothing, save enormous expense-account submissions for cookie-pushing climate diplomats (and a massive amount of greenhouse gases; the U.N. estimates the twelve-day “green” confab will produce 40,584 tons of CO2 equivalents, roughly equal to Morocco’s carbon footprint in 2006).

Here is one simple, inconvenient truth: No developing country with significant and remotely accessible stocks of fossil fuels will agree to leave the stuff in the ground.

“Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves — about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion,” writes energy expert Peter Huber in City Journal. “If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.”

And it’s not just the nasty countries. Canada, the Dudley Do-Right of the international community, insists on exploiting its vast and dirty oil reserves in the so-called “tar sands” under Alberta. The intro to an article by British eco-scold George Monbiot declared: “Canada’s image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling.” If Canada, which has long been the U.N.’s Richie Cunningham, won’t play ball, does anyone think the Chinese, Indians, or Brazilians will?

Here’s another inconvenient truth: The United States will not agree to draconian carbon caps either, for the simple reason that it would be political suicide for all but a handful of politicians. Unless you represent hyper-wealthy liberal enclaves or the ethanol moonshine industry, it makes no sense to vote for anything like cap-and-trade.

That’s why the Kyoto Protocol never made it out of the crib in the United States.

It was often said that Pres. George W. Bush “refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.” This is technically true — because Bush couldn’t sign Kyoto. It was already signed during the Clinton presidency (Bush didn’t sign the Treaty of Versailles, either). The important point is that Clinton immediately shoved it in his desk drawer because he knew it would never be ratified by the Senate. Indeed, the Senate voted 95–0 to not even consider ratifying it so long as developing countries like China were left out of the scheme. (See inconvenient truth No. 1.)

Overlooked by the mobs who decried Bush’s “treason against the planet” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Krugman) is the fact that Barack Obama has opted to stay out of the Kyoto system for the same reason. Making carbon fuels more expensive for us while not making them more expensive for China and Co. means that fossil-fuel users will move their businesses to the developing world even faster while costs and taxes for consumers will skyrocket.

While it’s great fun — and entirely worthwhile — to make a big stink about Climategate, it would be a shame if people believed that Copenhagen’s inevitable failure hinged on this one scandal. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. Indeed, even if global warming is the threat the alarmists claim it is, it makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on “fixes” that will do little to fix the alleged problem.

It’s time to start over, beginning with the science.

******************************************

In other words Copenhagen should fail on its merits.

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Skeptics From Around the Globe

ISRAEL


FROM-JC.com

Israeli scientist denies global warming

By Robyn Rosen,

A leading Israeli scientist has renounced the concept of man-made global warming at a lecture given to the British Technion Society, just days before world leaders meet to discuss ways to halt it.

Professor Giora Shaviv, professor of physics at the Technion, claimed that the accepted level of carbon dioxide in the air is wildly exaggerated.

Last week he gave the eighth Ron Arad lecture at the Royal College of Physicians, for the British Technion Society, which raises funds for Israel’s science university.

The lecture was given in the same week that leaked emails appeared to show leading scientists at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit had manipulated data to exaggerate the impact of climate change.

Next week, 193 countries meet at the Copenhagen Conference to establish a global climate agreement for the period from 2012.

But Prof Shaviv said that though for years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has claimed that an increase in carbon dioxide has led to an increase in temperature, in fact, the reverse is correct.

He argued that the movement of the sun affects temperature, which influences the levels of carbon dioxide, and that these levels have risen and fallen for centuries, even before mankind.

He said: “CO2 is not responsible for heating the earth, the cause is the activity of the sun which we cannot control.

“However we are responsible for our environment on earth, for the future of our grandchildren, and therefore, we should all still act responsibly.”

The lecture was attended by Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up last week by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson to analyse global warming policies and its economic implications.

Dr Peiser, who was born in Haifa, said that too much money was being ploughed into climate change research and that politicians were stifling contentious research that opposed the commonly accepted views.

He said: “People talk about saving the world but no one crunches the figures. It has become an obsession and economic burden for many countries.

“There is a hysteria and exaggeration of the issue with people worrying that the end is nigh. People need to calm down. The reality is we haven’t got a clear idea what the climate is doing.

“Part of our agenda is that scientists like Professor Shaviv have to be allowed to research freely and without political pressure.”

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Do Smoking Guns Cause Global Warming, Too?

FROM-Townhall

by Ann Coulter

As we now know (and by "we" I mean "everyone with access to the Internet"), the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has just been caught ferociously manipulating the data about the Earth's temperature.

Recently leaked e-mails from the "scientists" at CRU show that, when talking among themselves, they forthrightly admit to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in the Earth's temperature since 1960 -- as one e-mail says. Still another describes their manipulation of the data thus: "[W]e can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Am I just crazy from the heat or were they trying to deceive us?

Global warming cheerleaders in the media were quick to defend the scandalous e-mails, explaining that, among scientists, the words "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage" do not mean "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage." These words actually mean "onion soup," "sexual submissive" and "Gary, Ind."

Boy, it must be great to be able to redefine words right in the middle of a debate.)

Also, of course, the defenders said that the words needed to be placed "in context" -- the words' check was in the mail, and they'd like to spend more time with their families.

I have placed the words in context and it turns out what they mean is: gigantic academic fraud.

The leaked e-mail exchanges also show the vaunted "scientists" engaging in a possibly criminal effort to delete their own smoking-gun e-mails in response to a Freedom of Information request. Next, the fanatics will be telling us that "among scientists," this behavior does not indicate knowledge of guilt.

If I recall correctly, their next move should be to fire the special prosecutor late Saturday night.

These e-mails aren't a tempest in a teapot. They are evidence of pervasive fraud by a massively influential institution that has dominated news coverage of global warming.

CRU was regularly cited as the leading authority on "global climate analysis" -- including by the very news outlets that are burying the current scandal, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. The CRU alone received more than $23 million in taxpayer funds for its work on global warming.

Having claimed to have collected the most complete data on the Earth's temperature for the last half century, the CRU's summary of that data was used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its 2007 report demanding that we adopt a few modest lifestyle changes, such as abolishing modern technology, reverting to hunter/gatherer status and taxing ourselves into servitude.

But then last weekend -- in the middle of the "Let's Cook the Books!" e-mail scandal -- the CRU said that all its data on the Earth's temperature since 1960 had been irretrievably "lost." (Although I suspect "overcooked" might be a more apt term.)

The way this episode is unfolding, the environmentalists may be forced to drop their phantom threat of global warming and go back to the phantom threat of global cooling

Most disturbingly, the CRU-affiliated "scientists" were caught red-handed conspiring to kill the careers and reputations of scientists who dissented from the religion of global warming. Indignant that scientific journals were publishing papers skeptical of global warming, the cult members plotted to get editors ousted and the publications discredited.

This sabotage of global warming dissenters may be more galling than their manipulation of the data. Until now, the global warming cult's sole argument has been to demand that everyone shut up in response to the "scientific consensus" that human activity was causing global warming.

That's their idea of a free and open debate.

It's always the same thing with primitive people -- voodoo practitioners, rain dancers and liberals. In lieu of facts, debate and a weighing of the evidence, religious fanatics respond to all counterarguments by invoking a higher authority: the witch doctor, a "scientific consensus," "the Constitution" or "historians are agreed."

Liberals won't tell us why Congress passed a law outlawing incandescent lightbulbs by 2014 -- a bill solemnly delivered to the president in a Prius hybrid (making it the slowest-moving bill in U.S. history). Instead, they tell us there's a "scientific consensus" that we have to use fluorescent lightbulbs or we'll all die.

They won't tell us why Ten Commandments monuments must be stripped from every public space in America. Instead, they tell us "the Constitution" says so (according to the high priests who interpret it to mean things the document doesn't remotely say).

They won't tell us what Sen. Joe McCarthy lied about. They say: Historians are agreed that McCarthy was a liar. (These are the same historians who also stated as fact that "few American Communists were spies" -- until decrypted Soviet cables proved that the Communist Party was awash with Soviet spies.)

This is precisely what liberals accuse Christians of doing, but which Christians never do. We don't cite the Bible as authority -- and then refuse to let anyone read it. We certainly don't claim to have "lost" it, so you can't check for yourself. But that's exactly what the CRU has done with its secret data allegedly showing a warming Earth.

Also, biblical data on the great flood and Noah's ark have held up remarkably well.

Even if the Earth were warming -- which apparently it is not -- the idea that humans using energy-efficient lightbulbs would alter the temperature of the globe is approximately as plausible as the Aztecs' belief that they were required to wrench the beating heart out of living, breathing humans in order to keep the sun on its path.

Sadly, the "human sacrifice deniers" lost the argument to Aztec CRU scientists, who explained that there was a "scientific consensus" on the benefits of ritual murder.

But at least the Aztecs only slaughtered tens of thousands of humans in the name of "climate change." The global warming cultists want us all dead.


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Pressure Grows

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Weathermen's Feelings

FROM- Talking About Weather

Phil Jones offers myriad reasons for not sharing data

Three months before “stepping aside” from his position atop the most prestigious climate change institute in the world earlier this week, Phil Jones made a number of interesting comments. The first was this: “In the UK I am not considered a public servant.”

It was August, months before the explosion of Climategate, and I was drawing to a close the research for my forthcoming book on climate, Don’t Sell Your Coat. Jones was good enough to respond to questions I had then about data sharing, transparency, and United States Department of Energy funding. For, although an English researcher, Jones counted on the United States Department of Energy for substantial sums of money – millions of dollars.

Public servant or no, Jones was evidently bound by the Department of Energy’s data-sharing protocols, which were stringent: “Open sharing of all program data among researchers (and with the interested public) is critical to advancing the program’s mission … a copy of underlying data and a clear description of the method(s) of data analysis must be provided to any requester in a timely way.”

As Jones dealt with several such requests, but principally from his arch-nemesis, the Canadian amateur climatologist Steven McIntyre, he found it distasteful in the extreme to share raw temperature data that would allow McIntyre to look for problems in his data and work. As the world recently learned reading the e-mails among Jones and fellow-scientists, Jones threatened to delete data if McIntyre ever learned of the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act.

But as the Department of Energy policy from this side of the Atlantic makes clear, no Freedom of Information request is even necessary in order to compel Jones, or any other DOE-funded scientist, to share all data as well as all code that is used in grooming the data for publication (in such documents as the IPCC 4th Assessment published in 2007). What Freedom of Information policy in the United Kingdom does require, however, is preserving any documents that are known to be sought via Freedom of Information request. Jones, in the trove of released e-mails, asks his peers to delete precisely these e-mails. Whether the internal investigation being conducted by the University of East Anglia determines that this was ethical remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether parliamentary investigations will be launched into the matter, as well as any inquiry by Scotland Yard.

As I said, Jones made several bizarre comments in August regarding unavailable data. Another regarded the meteorology agencies from which his Climatic Research Unit obtained data in the first place. “It is the Met services that you should be lambasting,” Jones wrote. “I have been for years, but have not gotten very far.” Two quick points: First, I never lambasted Jones but merely asked if he thought that greater transparency might better serve science, and himself, in the long run. Second, Jones, at least until today, could not verify his claim to have fought with European meteorological agencies himself. He had, however, alluded in one of the recently released e-mails to just such a gambit involving the agencies: “Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people,
so I will be hiding behind them.”

Just to be safe, however, Jones did have data removed from a University of East Anglia server during the summer of 2009. When pressed by me in our e-mail exchange in August, his reasons for making the data disappear seemed disingenuous, at best:

Our ftp site has had some data deleted from it. It is a site we use when working with other scientists around the world. The datasets were not explained. It seemed easier to stop people wasting their time trying to determine what it was.

The words “other scientists” here are code for “people other than the Canadian amateur climatologist Steve McIntyre.” While McIntyre is a statistician without a Ph.D. in a climate-related field, he has nonetheless proved himself to be a capable intellectual adversary of Jones. Jones’s e-mails allude, more or less obsessively, to the Canadian, as do those of many of Jones’s closest colleagues. Far from being at risk of wasting time deciphering what he had in front of him, McIntyre had by that point been veritably begging for Jones’s data and computer code for years. He had been joined in his pursuit of data, by the way, by Ross McKitrick, with whom he had also authored a peer-reviewed paper successfully dressing down American climatologist Michael Mann.

It was Jones’s 2009 summertime deletion of data that prompted me to ask him about transparency in the first place. One other reason Jones offered for refusing to share data appeared bizarre, to say the least:......

read entire article here


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The End of the Line for Climate Hysteria?

Global warming: the junk science of the modern age.

FROM- Pajamas Media

by David Solway

Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs. The evidence for data tampering and all manner of hocus-pocus was available some time ago for anyone who cared to look.

There is a rapidly growing adversarial bibliography on the subject of climate change which anyone interested in the global warming controversy might do well to consult. A partial list would include: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery; An Appeal to Reason, by Nigel Lawson; Climate Confusion, by Roy Spencer; Meltdown, by Patrick Michaels; Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick; Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer; Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, by Steven Milloy; and The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon.

The authentic scientific expertise assembled in such books cannot honorably be ignored or discounted. The last chapter of William Gairdner’s Oh, Oh, Canada!, “Global Warming in a Nutshell,” should also be required reading. It is the most effective short account of the global warming swindle that I have yet come across. Global warmists, I might point out, are not known for playing fair. Lawrence Solomon, the subtitle of whose book is “The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud,” refers to himself as “the most disinvited speaker in Canada.” In an article for the National Post, he provides a list of debates and conventions to which he was invited and subsequently disinvited once his convictions became clear. This is not surprising since in the few global warming debates that have thus far been arranged, “the skeptics have won convincingly, leading most in the doomsayer camp to boycott any debate in the future.”

The fact is, as these writers have amply demonstrated, we have become the willing dupes of a pervasive deception. To mention only a few of the red flags that have recently sprung up: Not long ago, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York perpetrated an embarrassing error — if error it was. The institute, on whose statistical data the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depends heavily for its reports, “typed in” the September 2008 temperatures for its October assessment, concluding that global warming had risen vertiginously. The finding was accepted in the major sites and media around the world as confirmation of the global warming dogma. The institute itself admitted that it does not conduct independent verification of the data it logs, regrettably rendering some or even many of its prognostications all but useless.

Frank Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, had some more intriguing news for us. The Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain “has begun to eliminate the daily temperature records from its public websites,” taking a page from the Goddard Institute, which has been deleting facts and figures unfavorable to the global warming hypothesis for some time now, as well as adding “corrections” to the data “to obtain global warming.” The big lie has reached the point where it must be maintained by the omission of details, the distortion of data, and the suspicious liability to error. And as we have seen, the plot thickened when the Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth. “Warmist scientists,” writes James Delingpole, may “have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.” Tipler has recently posted yet another convincing exposé outing the CRU’s counterfeit science, concluding that “most of the evidence for global warming was simply made up.” What we are hopefully observing is the unfolding of a major Climategate scandal.

Such practices, however, even after disclosure, do not seem to operate as a deterrent to persistence, and embarrassment is easily forgotten when there is a theory to uphold. Just as the Goddard Institute continues to abide by its errors, so does the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. This despite the fact that a faulty satellite sensor reading led it to estimate that the Arctic ice cap was receding dramatically — 500,000 square kilometers of lost ice covering an area considerably larger than California. While admitting its mistake, the NSIDC did not alter its view until April 2009, when it released a graph showing, in the words of Steven Goddard, that the Arctic ice cap had “actually increased by more than the size of Texas.” From the purported loss of California to the substantive acquisition of Texas represents a significant gain for the United Ice Fields of America.

Naturally, the mainstream media have not caught on as yet, or perhaps they simply refuse to acknowledge the evidence that would serve to discredit their years of advocacy and bring them into even greater disrepute than at present. For example, my local newspaper, the Montreal Gazette for November 25, 2009, banners “Prognosis on Climate Change Is Grim,” and retails bogus data, such as “the stunning retreat of the Arctic sea ice” as well as rising temperatures and sea levels, which have been reliably challenged by a host of credible agencies, organizations, and leading scientists. The only thing that is “stunning” is the sheer duplicity of such claims. There is — big surprise! — no reference whatsoever to the damning leaks in the climate warming dikes that threaten to flood the field of study. As the pressure continued to mount, however, the same newspaper for November 28 reprinted two articles side by side, one mentioning the email controversy but soft-pedaling its consequences, the other citing the already-exploded “unprecedented meltdown” data from the NSIDC.

The global warming movement most likely did not begin as a deliberate, well-organized scam, but as an expression of genuine concern by people of good intentions. But it was soon amplified by pseudo-religious zealots with a passionate animus against the free enterprise system, such as Canada’s David Suzuki, and eventually hijacked by unscrupulous entrepreneurs intent on abusing the free enterprise system to their own advantage, such as Al Gore. David Suzuki appears to believe what he says, carefully selecting data to reinforce a position in which he has invested emotionally. Al Gore plainly does not believe what he says or practice what he preaches, often falsifying his data to strengthen a project in which he has invested financially. A UK court ruled that his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, contains at least nine salient falsehoods and could not be shown in classrooms without a prior disclaimer. Gore earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Then there is the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in which Gore is a partner. KPCB has just floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” — the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an “oil wildcatter,” which is about as non-green as one can get.

In any event, it wasn’t long before governments, interested corporations, and the United Nations completed the travesty. The payoff for governments involved increased control over the private lives of their citizens, using the environmental scare to further their statist agenda. Companies saw new scope for enormous profits deriving from ventures in the cap-and-trade market and so-called “clean energy” alternatives. The United Nations recognized a golden opportunity to effect a massive transfer of wealth from the industrialized Western nations to the third world in various forms of carbon subsidies.

The long-term result is not hard to see: the growing infringement on personal liberties to the convenience of the state, the enrichment of shrewd individuals and energy consortiums coupled with the gradual impoverishment of punitively taxed Western electorates, and the hypothetical solvency of corrupt, backward, and inefficient third world countries at the expense of the developed world, except for the parasites and scavengers — those whom UK science advisor Lord Christopher Monckton bluntly calls “criminals” — whose fiscal and professional bolsters would be secure.

All this should be obvious to anyone willing to undertake a little impartial research. What is most alarming, however, is the extent to which the Western public has allowed itself to be bamboozled, conscripted into the cause, and, in effect, brainwashed. It is as if we are witnessing something like a collective hallucination at work, a mass psychosis not structurally different from the apocalyptic movements and revolutionary millenarianism of the medieval world analyzed by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. Only the initiating gradients are different.
For we have been pampered by the freedom, comparative prosperity, and multiplying amenities of a productive society the likes of which has never been seen before. We have too much time on our hands, more “life-enhancing” devices, services, inventions, medications, and pharmaceuticals than most of us know what to do with, more leisure than any previous culture has been able to afford its members, entertainment choices that leave us bewildered before their unstinting profusion, greater abundance in our food marts than probably all the granaries of the past combined — so that, inevitably, we have become a vast community of unthinking consumers spared the upheavals, scarcities, invasions, disruptions, and perpetual violence that has, until very recently, characterized life on the planet, as it still does in less fortunate regions of the globe.

Like the generation prior to the First World War, we have grown bored, stupefied with excess, ignorant of the blessings of plenty from which we have benefited, loath to engage in the quotidian struggle for normal existence or defend the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.” We have, in short, grown personally and culturally debilitated, a gaggle of effeminate narcissists determined to save the world but who cannot even save themselves. The upshot is baldly predictable. Having taken this rare interregnum in the war of survival for granted, we have become restless and dissatisfied, and find ourselves prone to every passing infatuation that promises a species of redemption from our own inner nullity. And environmentalism has arrived as the religion du jour to give substance and significance to the emptiness within, to rescue a cosseted populace from the apathy, lassitude, and cultural ennui that has descended upon it — and, of course, rendered it progressively exploitable by venal and power-hungry elites.

Meanwhile, from Kyoto to Copenhagen and whatever comes next, “we lay waste our powers,” to cite the poet Wordsworth in a context opposite to the one which he imagined, “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” The lemming reflex may now be undeflectable. And our competitors in the international arena, who have no intention of abiding by or even signing on to international protocols and agreements in order “to save the planet,” cannot believe their luck. The Chinese are rubbing their hands with glee. The Russians are chortling in their vodka. The Indians are performing namesté in a gesture of ineffable gratitude. Latin-American caudillos and African dictators are contemplating their numbered accounts and salivating.

The climate warming thesis has about the same degree of validity as the plot of the Hollywood SF clunker The Arrival, in which space aliens land on earth and begin heating up the atmosphere by generating greenhouse gases to accommodate their biology. Those of us who have paid attention know we have been fed a line. The question is whether people will awaken in time and put an end to this insidious design — for that is what it truly is — against our welfare and very preservation, or whether we will continue to acquiesce in the end of our privileged and hard-earned “lifeworld” as we know it.
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"Notable Quotes"

"If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it."

source

DANIEL HENNINGER
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Thar's money in them thar tree's....rings

FROM-American Spectator

Mann's Mad Money

By Paul Chesser

Since watching the Climategate scandal explode a week before Thanksgiving, debris from the mushroom cloud has rained upon the earth, and there are hints that some folks (other than me and my fellow climate realists) are getting curious about how the alarmists are funded. It used to be the narrative of the formerly mainstream media, when they deemed it worthy to include perspective from the "skeptic" side, always came with a "financed by Big Oil" disclaimer -- whether it was true or not. Meanwhile the warmists' financial gain from the game was irrelevant in the media's eyes.

It's been widely reported in the blogosphere about the millions of dollars in grants that East Anglia CRUnit director Phil Jones collected for his climate modeling, but so far I haven't seen much detail about his fellow email correspondents. What about 'em?

Inarguably the next-largest culprit is Michael Mann, Mr. Nature Trick, who is not to be confused with the Nature Boy or the other "Heat"-making Mann. He has had his grants available for public viewing for a while, so I'm surprised I've not seen those spread around the 'Net. They are right there listed in his curriculum vitae.

In these days of skulduggery and hack-for-a-hack frontier justice on the Wild, Wild, Web, it's a good idea to replicate things. You never know when public records on display at a public university might suddenly disappear. So for the benefit of those interested in climate science transparency and even Mr. Mann himself ("I would be disappointed if the university wasn't doing all [it] can to get as much information as possible" about the controversy), I will list here his funded proposals since 2006from his CV:

2009-2013 Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991

2009-2012 Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann; Co-Investigators: K. Keller (Penn State Univ.), A. Timmermann (Univ. of Hawaii)] $541,184

2008-2011 A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, DOE [Principal Investigator: T. Wagener; Co-Investigators: M. Mann, R. Crane, K. Freeman (Penn State Univ.)] $330,000

2008-2009 AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship (Anthony Sabbatelli), American Meteorological Society [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $23,000

2006-2009 Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, USAID [Principal Investigator: P. Tschakert; Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, W. Easterling (Penn State Univ.)] $759,928

2006-2009 Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $459,000

2006-2009 Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: K. Cobb (Georgia Tech Univ.), N. Graham (Hydro. Res. Center), M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.), Hoerling (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center), Alexander (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center)] PSU award (M.E. Mann): $68,065

2006-2007 Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), NSF-EAR [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: R. Alley, M. Arthur, J. Evans, D. Pollard (Penn State Univ.)] $100,000

2003-2006 Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U.Va), J. Cole (U. Arizona), V. Mehta (CRCES)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $102,000

2002-2005 Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: S. Rutherford, R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $315,000

2002-2005 Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, NSF-Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Oceans and Climate System [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U. Va), E. Steig (U. Wash.), D. Weinbrenner (U. Wash)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $133,000

2002-2003 Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, NOAA-Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR) Program [Principal Investigators: Rosanne D'Arrigo, Ed Cook (Lamont/Columbia); Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $14,400

2002-2003 Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: Malcolm Hughes (Univ. of Arizona); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann; J. Park (Yale University)] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $20,775

2001-2003 Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, University of Virginia-Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) [Principal Investigator: J.D. Albertson; Co-Investigators: H. Epstein, M.E. Mann] U.Va internal award: $214,700

2001-2002 Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, Office of Naval Research [Principal Investigator: P. Wiberg (U.Va), Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] $20,775

1999-2002 Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data Intercomparison, NOAA-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (U.Va), Co-Investigators: R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $381,647

1998-2000 Validation of Decadal-to-Multi-century climate predictions, DOE [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: H.F. Diaz, M.E. Mann]

1998-2000 The changing seasons? Detecting and understanding climatic change, NSF-Hydrological Science [Principal Investigator U. Lall (U. Utah); Co-investigators: M.E. Mann, B. Rajagopalan, M. Cane] $266,235K

1996-1999 Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally

Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, NSF-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, M.K. Hughes] $270,000

1996-1998 Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last

Millennium, DOE, Alexander Hollaender Postdoctoral Fellowship [M.E. Mann] $78,000

For those keeping score, that's almost $6 million total for various predictions, models and reconstructions over the last 13 years by Mann and his playmates. Note also the generally escalating grant amounts in recent years. A lot of that is from the government's National Science Foundation and NOAA teats. Wouldn't trains and Tinkertoys been just as much fun and cost a whole lot less?

Anyway, Pennsylvania State University, where Mann is currently housed, is investigating him now. Mann calls Climategate a "manufactured controversy." Some alumni are calling for his ouster. Will he follow Phil? Maybe they can carry on their pen pal-manship somewhere else off the taxpayer dime.



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"Notable Quotes"

"We need new climate assessments by climate scientists who do not have the blatant conflict of interest of the current leadership of the IPCC process and the professional societies. "


source


Roger Pielke Sr. Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado
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A Reason To Be Skeptical

FROM-
RCP

By David Harsanyi

We found out that respected men discussed the manipulation of science, the blocking of Freedom of Information requests, the exclusion of dissenting scientists from debate, the removal of dissent from the peer-reviewed publications, and the discarding of historical temperature data and e-mail evidence.

You may suppose that those with resilient faith in end-of-days global warming would be more distraught than anyone over these actions. You'd be wrong. In the wake of the scandal, we are told there is nothing to see. The administration, the United Nations and most of the left-wing punditry and political establishment have shrugged it off. What else can they do?

To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean -- at least temporarily -- ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated "new energy economies," among many other intrusive policies.

We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists -- even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.

In the same way, a conscientious citizen has little choice but to be uneasy when those with financial, ideological and political interest in peddling the most over-the-top ecological doomsday scenarios also become the most zealous evangelizers.

As President Barack Obama heads to Copenhagen to work on an international deal that surrenders even more of our unsightly carbon-driven prosperity to the now-somewhat-less-than-irrefutable science of climate change, shouldn't he offer more than a flippant statement through a spokesman on the scandal?

The talks, after all, will be based on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report, which partially was put together by the very same scandal-ridden scientists.

Now, I do not, on any level, possess the expertise to argue about the science of anthropological global warming. Nor do you, most likely. This certainly doesn't mean an average citizen has the duty to do the lock step.

Yes, you apostates will be tagged "denialists" -- because skepticism is synonymous with the Holocaust denial, don't you know -- or some other equally unfriendly moniker.

Don't worry; you won't be alone. Gallup recently found that 41 percent of Americans now believe global warming news reports are exaggerated -- the highest number in more than a decade despite the fact that this time frame has coincided with concentrated and highly funded scaremongering. That number is sure to rise as soon as word of this scandal spreads.

The uglier the names get, the more anger you see, the more that science-challenged politicians push invasive legislation, the more skeptics will join you. True believers will question your intelligence, your sanity and your intentions.

But as ClimateGate proves, a bit of skepticism rarely steers you wrong. In fact, it's one of the key elements of rational thinking.

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"Notable Quotes"

"...The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering...

...Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. "

source

Clive Crook
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class="collapse">

Whoops!

FROM-DC Examiner

Yet more trustworthy data from climate scientists

By: Mark Hemingway

Over at Pajamas Media, Charlie Martin notes one of the most dire predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Most people following the climate change debate are aware that many sources claim that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing “rapidly” — in fact, that they may disappear by 2035, a mere 25 years from now.

One slight hitch in the data, however:

The IPCC has been claiming Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035. The research paper they used concluded 2350.

Whoops!
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The Fraud Is Everywhere

The Fraud Is Everywhere: SUNY Albany and Queens University Belfast Join Climategate (PJM Exclusive)

Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won't discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.

FROM-Pajama Media

Some of the emails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that, and on something more important.

In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.

After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.

But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque

The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense used against my allegation, a defense obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise then that the university still refuses to release the report. (More details on all of this — including source documents — are on my site.)

My paper demonstrates that by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC.

Misconduct at Queens University of Belfast

Arguably, the biggest concern with global warming is that warming itself will cause further warming. For example, the polar ice caps reflect sunlight back into space, thereby cooling Earth. A global warming theory suggests that if the caps shrink due to warming, then they will reflect less sunlight and so Earth will warm even further. It is possible that Earth warms so much that it reaches what is called a “tipping point,” where the global climate system is seriously and permanently disrupted — like when a glass of water has been tipped over and the water cannot realistically be put back into the glass.

No one knows for sure how much Earth would have to warm before it reaches the tipping point — though about a thousand years ago, there was a time known as the Medieval Warm Period when much of Earth appears to have been unusually warm. It is not currently known just how warm the Medieval Warm Period was, but clearly the warmth then was below the tipping point because Earth’s climate continued without problem.

Suppose that during the Medieval Warm Period, Earth was 1°C warmer than today. That would imply that the tipping point is more than 1°C higher than today’s temperature. For Earth’s temperature to increase 1°C might take roughly a century (at the rate of increase believed to be currently underway). So we would not have to be concerned about an imminent disruption of the climate system.

Finding out how warm the Medieval Warm Period is thus of enormous importance for the study of global warming.

It turns out that global (or at least hemispheric) temperatures are reflected by the climate in western Ireland (for a short explanation of that, see my site). Trees grow in western Ireland, of course, and each year those trees grow a ring. Thick rings indicate climate conditions that were good for the trees; thin rings indicate the opposite. If many trees in western Ireland had thick rings in some particular years, then climatic conditions in those years were presumably good. Tree rings have been used in this way to learn about the climate centuries ago.

Queen’s University Belfast has data on tree rings that goes back millennia — and in particular, to the Medieval Warm Period. QUB researchers have not analyzed the data, because they lack the expertise to do so.

They also refuse to release the data. The story is scandalous.

I have been trying to obtain the data via the UK Freedom of Information Act since April 2007.

—————————————-
(Nature.com had a brief piece about my FOIA request. The piece has statements from QUB that are dishonest: see my comment posted there. Statements from QUB therefore should be checked. My site has source documents for its claims.)


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E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science

FROM- NYT



JOHN TIERNEY

If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:

Aarrggghhh!

That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”

Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.

While Harry is puzzling over temperatures — “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” — the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for details.)

In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.

Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?

Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.

In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the

British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:

Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

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