A Dark Day for Solar Power

FROM-American Spectator

By Ross Kaminsky 

"Renewable" energy subsidies have become an unaffordable feel-good luxury.

First Solar Corporation was indeed first at something: It was the first solar company to lose more than $15 billion of market value. FSLR's stock plummeted from $140 per share a year ago, and $170 a few weeks before that, to under $21 per share early this week before rebounding modestly on Tuesday. In fact, $15 billion substantially understates the peak-to-trough drop in the company's value, as the stock traded above $250 per share for most of 2008, briefly peaking over $300. As of Tuesday, the company's value was just under $2 billion; at its all-time high stock price, that number was over $25 billion.

In a press release on Tuesday morning, the company announced that a massive decline in its business, especially its European business, will cause it to record about $300 million in restructuring charges while firing 2,000 employees, about 30 percent of its total work force. This is due primarily to Germany's recently cutting its solar subsidies, following a similar move in Spain.

According to the company's Chairman, Mike Ahearn: "After a thorough analysis, it is clear the European market has deteriorated to the extent that our operations there are no longer economically sustainable, and maintaining those operations is not in the best long-term interest of our stakeholders."

Further: "The solar market has fundamentally changed, and we are quickly adapting our market approach and operations to maintain and build upon our competitive advantage," said Ahearn. "After a period of robust growth, First Solar is scaled to operate at higher volumes than currently exist following the reduction of subsidies in key legacy markets. As a result, it is essential that we reduce production and decrease expenses to reflect the smaller volume of high-probability demand we forecast."

As usual, one has to wonder about certain stock analysts, with one firm reiterating a buy (how much has that cost the firm's clients so far?) and Goldman Sachs cutting from buy to hold (in a business where "better late than never" is not a wise approach). Amusingly, the Goldman analyst's cut preceded the stock's biggest percentage gain in months, as "short covering" and a sigh of relief that the company is at least recognizing that its business is a shadow of its former self brought buyers into the game. (Fully one third of the company's "float," the number of shares issued and available to trade, has been sold short, representing bets on the stock price falling.)

As worldwide government balance sheets have worsened in recent years, "renewable" energy subsidies became an unaffordable feel-good luxury. Particularly in the U.S., with our massive natural gas supplies, it is unlikely that solar power could ever be a competitive electricity source in terms of cost per kilowatt-hour without even larger subsidies than we have already seen -- and which are not likely to be tolerated by voters in this time of Solyndra and trillion dollar deficits.

There are physical limits to improvements in solar technology so that Moore's Law, which has described improvements in computer technology (or more specifically transistor density) over recent decades, does not apply despite the use of silicon in both. Gains in solar efficiency, both in how well panels work and how much it costs to make them, are limited by laws of physics, at least with all current solar technology. In other words, most of the gains in the price of solar electricity generation have already been achieved, and the industry still cannot compete without subsidies.

Most Americans probably know that "renewable" energy sources receive handouts of taxpayer money. These are true subsidies, not the common tax deductions used by oil companies, along with many other companies, which the left terms "subsidies." But do we understand the scale of these numbers and how fast they have been growing?

According to the Institute for Energy Research, subsidies for renewable energy (related to electricity generation) jumped 186 percent during the three year period from FY 2007 to FY 2010. Wind was the dollar leader in terms of picking taxpayers' pockets, going from $476 million in 2007 to $5 billion in 2010, making it the largest energy subsidy recipient. (Nuclear power came in second, at half the level of wind, and coal came in third, at less than one quarter the level of wind.) Solar, in fourth place in absolute dollar subsidies, made a very large percentage jump as well, going from $179 million to $1.1 billion over that same time frame.

The above data only include federal subsidies, however. Solar power receives state and local subsidies, including from utilities which pass those costs along to ratepayers, far more than other sources of power. In fact, there is a whole database of "State Incentives for Renewable and Efficiency," where you can find your particular state's waste of money on the solar swindle.

What really demands examination, however, is the subsidy per amount of electricity produced, and by that measure solar is the undisputed champion. Consider the top four recipients of subsidy dollars: wind, nuclear, coal, and solar: Coal's subsidy equates to 64 cents per megawatt hour and nuclear comes in at just over $3. Wind subsidies cost a shocking $56 per megawatt hour. But even that is a tremendous bargain when compared to solar which -- and again this is only the federal subsidies -- costs taxpayers $775 per megawatt hour. (What wind lacks in apparent costs, it makes up for in slaughter of birds, showing the true hypocrisy of so-called "environmentalists.")

A 2010 study by the Commonwealth Foundation of electricity costs in Pennsylvania showed that in 2009, electricity generated by wind cost 150 percent of the average electricity cost in the state while solar-generated electricity cost an incredible 706 percent of the average. Furthermore, while natural gas and oil prices declined from the prior two years, solar and wind power costs jumped 65 percent and 92 percent, respectively.

Another IER analysis determined that states which require a certain percentage of their electricity production to come from renewable sources have electricity prices "nearly 40 percent higher than states that do not have similar mandates."

Natural gas is more difficult to export than oil or coal because it has to be compressed or liquefied before it is shipped. But at a 13-year low price of $2 per million BTUs, the cost is so low that more international trade in natural gas will become economical, putting even more pressure on solar and wind power and highlighting the absurdity of subsidies, even without travesties like Solyndra.

Highlighting this near-revolution in energy markets, Cheniere Energy announced on Tuesday that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved its Sabine Pass liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal in Louisiana, making it the nation's first approved large exporter of natural gas. Two other companies, Sempra Energy and Energy Transfer Equity, also aim to build export facilities in Louisiana. Sempra announced on Tuesday that it will spend $6 billion on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal, which will be able to export 1.7 billion cubic feet of LNG per day beginning in late 2016.

Tuesday was a dark day for solar power, though a day that was obviously on the horizon. At least it would have been obvious to anyone willing to admit that solar (and wind) has only gotten as far as it has due to massive subsidies implemented by government members of the Cult of Global Warming, also known as the Algore Enrichment Society.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most committed, unquestioning (two of the several traits of cult members) followers of the Cult such as the Sierra Club -- a group with enough political clout, along with its co-religionists, to convince Barack Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline -- are already opposing LNG exports. (According to energy author Robert Bryce, the amount of energy that the pipeline would transport in any given time frame would exceed the total energy produced by all solar panels and all wind turbines in America, combined. So much for an "all of the above" energy strategy.)

Like Energy Secretary Steven "I don't drive a car" Chu, these are people for whom adherence to the Cult trumps the ability of ordinary Americans to affordably cook their food, turn on their lights, or heat their homes. This comes from the top, of course, as Barack Obama has made no secret of his desire to make electricity prices "necessarily skyrocket." If that is your goal, requiring solar power to be an important part of the national energy mix is a great start.

Staying in the realm of economic know-nothings, House Resources Committee Ranking Member Edward Markey (D-MA), with unfortunate moral support from T. Boone Pickens, says that we should not export natural gas because it might increase prices here. They ignore that foreign substitution of natural gas to replace oil or coal for electricity generation will lower the prices of those other commodities, as well as lower the atmospheric carbon dioxide (aka "plant food") concentrations that seem to concern them so greatly. They also ignore that even if natural gas prices doubled from here, it would still be a cheap form of energy, especially compared to the cult objects of solar panels and "bird blender" wind turbines.

First Solar's troubles remind us of Herbert (father of AmSpec's own Ben) Stein's wisdom that "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." When it comes to subsidizing renewable energy, we are now witnessing the realization -- including remarkably by European governments -- that the subsidy insanity cannot go on forever.

The Answer Really Isn't Blowing in the Wind

FROM-American Thinker

 By William Sullivan

 Ninety billion is a rather large number. To get a gauge of just how large, consider that 90 billion minutes ago equates to roughly 171,090 years, the moment in history when scientists believe our ancestors began preening their bodies of lice.

 Three hundred thousand kilometers per second is the speed of light. We all know that's pretty fast. Well, 90 billion kilometers per second is the speed of light-squared.

 And the vast, seemingly infinite yonder of the entire universe, some scientists postulate, is 90 billion light-years across.

 In the natural world, 90 billion goes a long way. But as we've discovered, a $90-billion investment to subsidize renewable energy sources in the natural world does surprisingly little. This amount, allocated in 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to subsidize green energy initiatives, has thus far yielded today's bustling "renewable-energy sector" that employs roughly 140,000 Americans. And even that dismal figure is wildly inflated. Consider that according to Hans Bader of the Examiner, "most of America's existing green jobs predate the Obama administration, which did not create them."

 That is not to say that this investment our politicians made on your behalf did not have positive results -- it just didn't have positive results for you. In the first year of this green stimulus, an estimated 79% went to foreign nations; among the larger of these payments went to Babcock & Brown, an Australian company that went bankrupt just two months after the passage of the stimulus bill. Couple this fact with notorious domestic failures like Solyndra and Beacon Power Corp., and the obvious conclusion is that this administration's green energy initiative has been a spectacular failure to this point.

 But in no other floundering green energy sub-sector is that failure so strikingly apparent as in wind energy. According to Andy Sullivan of Reuters, the wind industry has actually "shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms has doubled." Andy then takes the liberty of giving us context for those results by reminding us that meanwhile, "the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since Obama took office." And one can only imagine how much larger that figure could be if the president had not cauterized job growth in that time frame with a senseless drilling moratorium to appease environmentalists.

 To punish their success, the Obama administration is now seeking to hamstring the oil and gas industry further with a bevy of new taxes. The clearly impotent wind industry, on the other hand, may enjoy continued subsidization to the tune of $3.5 billion per year. Of this prospect, Louis Woodhill of Forbes has a different suggestion for Congress. "First, we end the subsidies" to the wind industry, he says. He continues:

This will stop new turbines from being built, and, over time, cause all of the existing ones to shut down. Second, we allow the free market to replace the electricity obtained by wind energy with power produced by burning cheap natural gas. Third, we hire 17,500 unemployed veterans at $100,000/year each, and put them to work as snipers to kill the 400,000 birds (including 70 golden eagles) that are now hacked to death by wind turbines each year. Voila, the same results as wind power, and a savings of $1.75 billion/year for the taxpayers.

Clearly, the devotion to wind power is not due to the fact that it's a lucrative investment. It's a Western fallacy that is the fiscal equivalent of selling your home to buy a much less efficient one for twice the price. And beyond being economically wasteful, global events have proven this fallacy to actually be deadly.

 In The Independent, Kevin Myers relates that on a weekend in late January, widespread blizzards hammered Europe. During this time, the Russian natural gas company, Gazprom, was unable to meet the demand, and 300 people died in the conditions. He asks, "Did anyone even think of deploying our [Europe's] wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?"

 "Of course not," he says. "We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure."

 Europeans, like American environmentalists, have an affinity for anything green. But that warm and fuzzy feeling that they get when they think about the good that wind turbines do for the planet will not keep them warm and "alive" when natural disasters strike and reliable electricity is the difference between life and death. Wind, he says, is "not so much a Renewable as it is an Unusable, and also an Unpredictable, an Unstorable, and - normally when it is very cold - an Unmovable."

 In frigid temperatures, wind typically does not blow, meaning turbines do not generate power in such conditions. Even when wind is generating power, there is a need to plan for the risk of those times it does not, meaning that you will still have to create "a parallel and duplicate energy supply to provide cover for when the wind stops." So the only way to possibly view wind power as a reliable energy source is to have another, more reliable power source readily available with a greater potential for delivery. And that should immediately raise the question as to why unreliable wind power is expected to be relied upon at all.

 Europe's devotion to the doctrine of environmentalism has compromised its energy independence -- much like American devotion to environmentalism has compromised America's energy independence through environmentally justified sanctions on domestic drilling. "To play such games with our energy systems to satisfy the whimsical gods of climate change," Myers offers, "is as intelligent and unscientific as the Aztec sacrifice of the young."

 And he is right. Thankfully, we in America have not become so devout in our efforts to appease the gods of climate change, and legislatively, we are in an earlier stage of transition to these inefficient and costly "renewable" systems. We can only hope that the winds of change are blowing in 2012, and with them we can put an end to the crippling subsidization of "renewable" systems like wind power -- until such time that free-market innovations dictate that they can be a viable addition to our energy infrastructure.

The Capricious Dr. Hansen

FROM-National Review

By Charles C. W. Cooke In 1988, the longtime head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) gave an explosive performance in front of the U.S. Congress’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee, during which he claimed that America and the world were on the brink of disaster. The earth’s surface temperature, Professor James Hansen contended, was rising in concert with carbon dioxide emissions, and the consequences would be increased drought, rising oceans, and an average rise in global temperature of ten degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. If the United States government did not act now, it would be sanctioning catastrophe, he warned. With this testimony, invited by the committee’s chair, Senator Al Gore, Hansen effectively started the modern climate-change movement.

 Professor Hansen came across as a scientifically minded Inspector Poirot, assembling the family in the library to explain how the murderer among them had hidden his crime. But within ten years, he had morphed into the hapless Inspector Clouseau. His own NASA weather satellites — the most accurate barometers of global temperature — showed that, despite his eschatological forecast, the Earth had warmed very little.

 So little, in fact, that Hansen retracted his prediction in 1998, conceding that he’d failed to take into account that forests, the soil, and the ocean absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide. “The forces that drive long-term climate change are not known with accuracy sufficient to define future climate change,” he acknowledged. In 2001, his U-turn was complete: Far from the ten degrees of change predicted, global temperatures would now rise by 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit, he wrote. Thus, the man who once urged an unimpressed Reagan administration to do its bit to “save the world” now stood against Kyoto because “it targets the wrong gas.”

 There is nothing wrong with a scientist repeatedly changing his mind — that is part of the game — nor should America’s researchers apologize for repeatedly altering their predictions as new evidence comes to light. In fact, given the sheer size of the issue, such movement is inevitable. But it all gets rather tricky when massive government programs are promoted and adopted on the back of inconclusive evidence, and it gets especially tricky when the imprimatur of a well-respected organization such as NASA is dragged into the fray and deployed to lend unassailable credibility to nascent and unproven ideas. It is one thing for a scientist to cook up ideas with abandon, but quite another to do so with the papers stamped by the government.

 In the words of this week’s strongly worded letter from 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts, publicizing the trial-and-error process in this way does “damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.” When any respected organization takes “an extreme position” and includes “unproven and unsupported remarks” in its public utterances, it is gambling recklessly with fate — and the stakes in this gamble, it turns out, have often been described by Hansen in terms rather unsuitable for the head of a government agency, especially when the topic is as vast and uncharted as climate science. Yet, in 2006, Hansen called climate change “a moral issue on a par with slavery,” labeled coal trains “death trains,” and asserted that they would be “no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.” Continuing the drama, Hansen was arrested last summer outside the White House for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It is unsurprising that many at NASA have criticized “ the GISS leadership” for overconfident pronouncements when, they point out, “the science is NOT settled.”

 In response to such criticism, Hansen has often complained he’s been censored, noting that staff reviewed his work after an inflammatory lecture at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. But he appears not to grasp that having a platform such as GISS requires that you assume a corporate editorial responsibility. Nor does he see that government employment entails an implicit obligation to err on the side of caution. This, and not Hansen’s various scientific conclusions, is why New York Times columnist Andrew Revkin — who agrees with Hansen on the scientific questions — complained that “Dr. Hansen has pushed far beyond the boundaries of the conventional role of scientists, particularly government scientists, in the environmental policy debate” and why many more of those on his side of the fence seem to worry about his proclivities.

 If this week’s letter from 49 former NASA scientists to the agency’s current head does nothing else, it should put paid to the popular lie that only rubes and antiscience types could possibly continue to question what is allegedly settled science. The world around us is extremely complex and our understanding of it limited. Professor Hansen is undoubtedly a talented scientist, and he is entitled to his conclusions; but it would behoove both his agency and his colleagues if he showed a little modesty. NASA’s reputation depends upon it.

Climate Change, Act Three

FROM-American Thinker

By Jeffrey Folks

Once upon a time, it was the contention of global warming alarmists that the earth was getting warmer -- a lot warmer. Now, after decades of such claims, the evidence points to a world that is, for the present at least, growing colder. When that fact became evident, alarmists shifted the ground of their argument. The earth's climate was not necessarily getting warmer; it was just "changing," and that was somehow a bad thing. No matter that the climate had been changing for more than four billion years, ever since the earth's formation.

Not to be deterred, climate alarmists insist that the climate is changing in new ways -- for example, in the "extreme weather" that has purportedly struck the U.S. since 2005. Focusing on Hurricane Katrina in that year and an outbreak of deadly tornadoes in 2011, alarmists contend that the weather is becoming more extreme and that climate change is the cause.

The facts undercut this claim. Only one hurricane has made landfall on the U.S. mainland since 2005, while tornado deaths in the 2000s were the least of any decade on record. Heightened media coverage of extreme weather events, not the weather itself, has made it appear that climate change is reaching epic proportions.

This is precisely the intent of such coverage: to manufacture a crisis so as to facilitate government takeover of large segments of the economy. In reality, the climate is no more extreme than it has been in the past. The deadliest hurricane in American history remains the great Galveston storm of 1900. The worst tornado was the Tri-State storm of 1925, which killed nearly 700 persons. The Joplin tornado of 2011 was the only U.S. tornado to kill more than 100 persons since 1953. It is true that lower death tolls are mostly the result of improved forecasting and warning systems, but if climate change really were producing monster storms of Al Gore proportions, death tolls would be higher than they are. The fact is that there were F-5 tornadoes in the past, and there are F-5 storms today. Today's storms are no stronger or more destructive than in the past.

The plain truth is that there has been no documented increase in the severity of storms in the U.S., or anywhere else, as a consequence of climate change. There has, however, been an explosion in the intensity of media coverage devoted to extreme weather events. (There is even an "extreme weather channel" for kids.) NBC news has its own Chief Environmental Affairs reporter, Anne Thompson, who is not shy about linking extreme weather events with climate change. Practically every story she has filed harps on the climate "crisis," pointing implicitly to the need for heightened government regulation of carbon-emitting industries and commerce -- which is to say, the entire global economy.

I suspect that correspondents like Thompson know well enough that in reality no such extreme weather crisis exists. That does not stop her and others from filing stories that purport to show polar bears drifting off into the sunset on melting chunks of arctic ice. One could feel sorry for those bears were it not for the fact that they can swim for up to 40 miles in the open sea. It's unlikely that they would allow themselves to be carried off to Havana.

Despite all that the media can do to maintain the fiction, the public is catching on to the climate change hoax. Every year, NOAA predicts a "more active than usual" hurricane season, and every year they are proven wrong. Come to think of it, how can it be that every year is "more active than usual"?

The American people are wising up to the climate change fraud. But climate change is a vast enterprise with trillions of dollars at stake. So what is a global warming alarmist to do?

One approach is to bury his head in the sand and deny reality, which is what the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has decided to do. In its latest report, issued on March 28, the IPCC has largely abandoned talk of global warming mitigation and shifted instead to what is termed "disaster risk reduction." That is to say, reductions in greenhouse gases are not really going to affect temperatures, as the IPCC claimed in 2007, but with a wink and a nod we're going to assume that rising temperatures, which have actually been falling since 2002, are responsible for every severe storm in the next few decades. And since the IPCC is determined to remain in business and continue attempting to control the affairs of national economies around the world, we're going to focus on risk mitigation.

It seems that the careerists at IPCC still think they can get away with flogging the dead horse of "extreme weather." More savvy alarmists, such as those in the American media, have decided that this will no longer do, and it's time to shift the terms of the debate.

The latest claim is not that the weather is warming or even that it is growing more extreme -- it is that it is growing more variable. And that variation is just more proof of climate change, according to Judah Cohen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research of Massachusetts. This year, winter temperatures in the eastern U.S. have been among the warmest on record. In Europe they have been among the coldest. Isn't that proof of climate change?

Well, no. It is proof that if you roll the dice a thousand times, you will probably come up with snake eyes twice in a row. Or an extremely warm winter in the U.S. accompanied by a cold one in Europe. Or any number of other "extreme" combinations, all of them the product of natural causes.

For the left, however, any sort of variation in the weather is evidence of climate change, and climate change is grounds for government takeover of the global economy. If it is warm in Boston but cold in Budapest, that is grounds for cap-and-trade. If a tornado strikes somewhere in the Midwest this spring, but not in the South, that is a basis for EPA regulation of the energy industry. If it strikes the South but not the Midwest, that is also grounds for government control. If it is drier in the West than the East, that is a catastrophe. If the wind blows in Wisconsin but not in Washington State, it's climate change at work. That is how desperate the left is to control the global economy.

Ultimately, of course, none of this has anything to do with the climate. Any rational human being, and even the irrational ones on the left, knows well enough that there have always been variations in the climate. In recent decades these variations have been minor and benign compared to changes that have taken place in the recent geologic past (for example, the Great Ice Age).

It seems, however, that the left is not really concerned with the facts. What they are really focused on is power. Ever since Marx published his Communist Manifesto in 1848 -- well before that, in fact -- the left has sought totalitarian control over the means of production, and indeed over all aspects of human life. Modern-day practitioners such as Barack Obama know that the best way to bring about increased regulation, and thus control, is through the fiction of a crisis that can be addressed only by government.

The only problem with that is that the climate is not changing -- not to any perceptible extent. But it is variable, and that is likely to be the message of climate alarmists for some time.

America’s Coming Energy Independence

FROM-Commentary

Max Boot

In this Wall Street Journal oped Ed Morse of Citigroup points out a little appreciated fact: that oil and natural gas production is soaring in the United States—and also in our neighbors Canada and Mexico. Thanks to technological developments such as the exploitation of oil shale, the U.S. has become the fastest growing oil producer in the world and is likely to remain that way for a decade or more. Already we produce almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia; soon we will surpass it. Already we have become a net petroleum-exporting country for the first time since 1949; in the future we have the potential to export far more, or to lessen even more our already declining dependence on oil imports.

That will make us increasingly energy independent and lessen the strategic importance of OPEC. It is also the latest of many reasons why predictions of American decline are so overwrought.


The country that is supposedly going to overtake us—China—has scant energy reserves of its own and is heavily reliant on imports brought by water along sea lines which are either now controlled by the U.S. Navy or could be in a time of war. That places China at a major strategic disadvantage in the long-term. When combined with America’s other advantages—especially the fact that our population is not aging nearly as fast as China’s—this suggests that there is no reason American cannot remain No. 1 for a long time to come, provided policymakers in Washington don’t mess it up. Of course, as seen from the Obama administration’s refusal so far to approve the Keystone pipeline that will bring oil from Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, official obstructionism remains a potent obstacle to exploiting America’s natural strengths.

Water torture springing another leak

nar·ra·tive   [nar-uh-tiv]
noun
1.a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.

A narrative is a story, true or not. The narrative of man made global warming was always, as the lawyers might say, based on facts not yet in evidence. The creation of that evidence has been one of the greatest scams and injustices in world history. Like all good stories the man made global warming theory was always based on a fact, this being that extra CO2 introduced into the atmosphere by industrialization was causing the Earth to warm. That is a fact which few serious people deny.

 Where the story became a narrative is when proponents of "catastrophic" global warming began to seek out and embellish reality in order to make the so called problem worse than it ever really was. is, or ever will be.

Like the theory of the Chinese water torture, "a process in which water is slowly dripped onto a person's forehead, allegedly driving the restrained victim insane" the scientist, politicians, and media over the past two decades have dripped countless unproven assertions upon the psyche of mankind pushing a belief in something which is insane.

The narrative has become the foundation for the theory rather than the evidence.

Basically how this is done is that some scientific study is done showing an extreme or possible extreme reult of global warming. This narrative will take hold and be widely publicized until it becomes accepted by the public and policy makers. Later studies might disagree or even disprove the original hyped study or studies but by then the premise of the original study has become the "mainstream" and accepted narrative.

Recently yet another aspect of this narrative has begun to untangle, the Himalaya glacier drip has sprung yet another leak. The first leak happened two years ago when it was revealed that  claims by the IPCC that the Himalaya glaciers would melt by 2035 was totally fabricated. The Daily mail pulls few punches in it's explanation

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in....’

This and subsequent revelations of the IPCC blatant misrepresentations, not to mention the two series of Climategate revelations should have destroyed this drag on human progress called climate science. but the torture of common sense and reason continued and continues still.

Using just the Himalaya Glacier melting meme of the Global warming narrative foisted on society as an example, lets look back at some of the drips that were used to torture ...well... the truth.

Back in 2002 the once esteemed National Geographic Magazine informed a trusting world that:

Melting Himalayan Glaciers May Doom Towns

Dozens of mountain lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are so swollen from melting glaciers that they could burst their seams in the next five years and devastate many Himalayan villages, warns a new report from the United Nations.

It's hardly news that the world's glaciers are melting—a phenomenon widely attributed to gradually rising global temperatures. But the possible consequences in terms of human deaths and loss of property have reached greater urgency in light of the findings of the new study.

There you have it back in 2002 due to global warming we were informed by reliable sources that:

Himalayas could experience intense flooding as mountain lakes overflow with water from melting glaciers and snowfields.

The lives of tens of thousands of people who live high in the mountains and in downstream communities could be at severe risk as the mud walls of the lakes collapse under the pressure of the extra water. Major loss of land and other property would aggravate poverty and hardship in the region.

They knew this and the world believed them because trusted scientist said it was so and they had the goods to back it up:

...based on three years of research involving site visits and studies of topographical maps, satellite images, and aerial photography. The scientists assessed the conditions of about 4,000 glaciers and 5,000 glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan.

 Yes the glaciers are melting, lives are in danger, catastrophic consequences are not five years away, the scientist told us so.

drip

In 2005 we learned from the always reliable BBC that it was even worse than was previously thought. After the flooding would come the droughts:

Himalayan glaciers 'melting fast'

The world's highest mountains hide vast glaciers. Melting glaciers in the Himalayas could lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people, the conservation group WWF has claimed.

In a report, the WWF says India, China and Nepal could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades.

".... in a few decades this situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India."

So after the floods come the droughts, "massive eco and environmental problems" are in the future or as the story points out in bold quotes half way through 'Catastrophe' awaits us. And how do we know this?

a study commissioned for the WWF indicated that the temperature of the Earth could rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in a little over 20 years.

So it must be true and concerned individuals from the halls of power to the halls of schools around the world spread the alarm and begin implementing policies to stave off the coming 'catastrophe".

drip

In 2007 the narrative goes full orbital

Himalayan Glacier Melting Observed From Space 

The Himalaya, the "Roof of the World" source of the seven largest rivers of Asia are, like other mountain chains, suffering the effects of global warming. To assess the extent of melting of its 33 000 km2 of glaciers, scientists have been using a process they have been pioneering for some years.

Throughout the article though, there is a sense of caution, perhaps because the Journal has the word science in it's masthead rather than just being a propaganda tool for the "cause", They inform us that the "study" though confirming that which we all should "believe" has some hurdles to conquer.

 The technique is still experimental, but it has been validated in the Alps and could prove highly effective for watching over all the Himalayan glacier systems. However, the procedure for achieving a reliable estimate must overcome a number of sources of error and approximation inherent in satellite-based observations.

drip

As  pointed out earlier, these concerns did not prevent the foremost science organization in the world dealing with climate change from releasing a report that boldly stated:

Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035

drip


As previously pointed out, this was not only not verifiable, it was a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intentionally deceive policy makers (and everyone else) "We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action." Knowing full well that the conclusion they were inserting into the report was not scientifically "robust",‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal].

All of this would be bad enough and indeed in of itself reason  for any thinking person to doubt the validity of anything coming from the IPCC in particular and the entire "climate change" community in general, but it is worse than that.

In the past month a new study has shown that all of these claims are not only exaggerated but simply  not true.

New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all

New scientific analysis of satellite gravity measurements has shown that ice is melting from glaciers around the world much less quickly than had been thought. The new research is important as worldwide glacier melt is thought to be one of the main factors which could drive rising sea levels in future....

...In particular, it appears that glaciers in the high Asian mountain ranges - the Himalayas, the Pamir and the Tien Shan - have been losing much less ice than was previously thought. Researchers visiting the region on the ground have previously suggested that the Asian mountain ice was depleting at rates as high as 50 billion tons per year, but Wahr and his colleagues' results show losses in the area of just 4 billion tonnes annually. They give the error in this figure as plus-or-minus 20 billion tons, so this much the same as saying that the Asian mountain ice - the planet's "third pole" - was unaffected.

What? There is not going to be any flooding? Or droughts? Hundreds of thousands of people are not being jeopardized by catastrophic "eco and environmental problems" ? Well it would seem not based on current science.

So what of those previous studies trumpeted over the past decade? They were either totally wrong or to be more accurate they were incomplete but "sold" as if they were authoritative, Why? Well because when a narrative is the foundation for science rather than facts it becomes totally acceptable to  "rush to judgement" with "facts that are not yet in evidence." The narrative must be maintained because once the narrative is questioned the foundation begins to crumble and when billions of dollars are at stake this is not an acceptable outcome for those with a vested interest.

For years to come people who do not keep up with the "shape shifting" nature of the climate change narrative will continue to believe that the Himalaya glaciers are melting away due to global warming when in fact there is now absolutely no scientific evidence to support it, But there once was, the National Geographic, the BBC, The WWF, the IPCC and a host of "scientist" said so. So it must be true...right?

The rest of this particular article is interesting in that it ties this development to the even bigger climate change scare tactic of rising sea levels and explains how they are corrupted science as well.

The IPCC says that "no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century data alone" but says that if limited 19th-century data is included then the rate of sea level rise can be shown to have started speeding up in 1870. However, recent research on tide-gauge readings indicates that the rate of rise is steady at the 20th-century rate of 1.7mm annually, or may even be decreasing slightly.

Since the early 1990s satellites have been used to monitor global sea levels. In contrast to tide gauges they have shown a steady, unchanged rate of rise of 3.2mm annually. This line is often added to the tide-gauge record up to 1990, showing a sharp upward curve.

If the rate of sea level rise remains steady at a few millimetres annually, there is probably no need to be much concerned about it: it would take centuries to rise by amounts comparable to the variations (tide, floods etc) which occur all the time anyway....

This may seem like mundane scientific squabbling over details, but it is far more than that. An entire generation has been subjected to this Chinese water torture. Drip,drip,drip  these tales of impending doom have been inflicted upon us, not by some cartoon villains but rather inflicted upon us and our children by peoples and institutions that we ought to be able to trust.

 But we can not. Not because of some conspericy theory but by their own admission of their own hyperbole, incompetence and worst of all purposeful fraud.

 They have shown themselves to be worthy of only scorn and the judgment of history on those who have perpetrated this fraud on mankind will and should be one of absolute disdain..

Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning

Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.

FROM-The Weekly Standard

Steven F. Hayward

March 5, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 24
The forlorn and increasingly desperate climate campaign achieved a new level of ineptitude last week when what had looked like a minor embarrassment for one of its critics​—​the Chicago-based Heartland Institute​—​turned out to be a full-fledged catastrophe for itself. A moment’s reflection on the root of this episode points to why the climate campaign is out of (greenhouse) gas.

In an obvious attempt to inflict a symmetrical Climategate-style scandal on the skeptic community, someone representing himself as a Heartland Institute insider “leaked” internal documents for Heartland’s most recent board of directors meeting to a fringe environmental blog, along with a photocopy of a supposed Heartland “strategy memo” outlining a plan to disseminate a public school curriculum aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

This ham-handed phrase (one of many) should have been a tipoff to treat the document dump with some .  .  . skepticism (a trait that has gone missing from much of the climate science community). But more than a few environmental blogs and mainstream news outlets ran with the story of how this “leak” exposed the nefarious “antiscience” Neanderthals of Heartland and their fossil fuel paymasters. But the strategy memo is a fake, probably created because the genuine internal documents are fairly ho-hum. It seems the climate campaign is now taking its tactics from Dan “fake but accurate” Rather.

Why Heartland? And how did the “leaker” get his hands on authentic Heartland board materials that are obviously the source for the faked strategy memo? The Heartland Institute sponsors the most significant annual gathering of climate skeptics, usually in New York, Chicago, or Washington, D.C.—a conference that attracts hundreds of scientists and activists from around the globe, including most of the top skeptical scientists, such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Yale’s Robert Mendelsohn, and career EPA official Alan Carlin. By assembling a critical mass of serious dissenting opinion, the Heartland conference dispels the favorite climate campaign talking point that there’s virtually no one of repute, and no arguments of merit, outside the -so-called consensus of imminent climate catastrophe.

The Heartland conferences have been too big for the media to ignore completely, though coverage has been spare and grudging. The conferences are also a morale booster for skeptics, who tend to be isolated and relentlessly assailed in their scattered outposts. It is worth adding that Heartland has always extended invitations to the leading “mainstream” figures to speak or debate at the conference, including Al Gore, NASA’s James Hansen, and senior officials from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Heartland typically receives no response from such figures.)

The most likely instigator of an anti-Heartland provocation would be someone from among the political activists of the environmental movement, such as the merry pranksters of Greenpeace, who have been known to paw through the garbage cans of climate skeptics looking for evidence of payoffs from the fossil fuel industry (which, contrary to left-wing paranoia, has tended rather to be a generous funder of the climate catastrophe campaign). But shortly after the document dump, Ross Kaminsky, an unpaid senior fellow and former Heartland board member now with the American Spectator, noticed something odd in the digital fingerprint of the “strategy memo.” It had been scanned on an Epson printer/scanner on Monday, February 13, on the West Coast (not in the Midwest, where Heartland is located), just one day before the entire document dump appeared online for the first time. Like the famous little detail of when and how Alger Hiss disposed of his old Ford, this date and location will turn out to be a key piece of evidence unraveling the full story, some of which still remains shrouded.

So how did the official Heartland documents get out? Someone claiming to be a board member emailed an unsuspecting Heartland staffer, asking that a set of board documents be sent to a new email address. This act may have violated California and Illinois criminal statutes prohibiting false representation, and perhaps some federal statutes pertaining to wire fraud as well.

Kaminsky and a second blogger, Steven Mosher, piled up the anomalies: The leaked board documents were not scanned but were original software-produced documents, which moreover have a time stamp from Heartland’s Central time zone. Hence the “strategy memo,” if authentic, would have had to be obtained by some other channel. These and other clues led both Kaminsky and Mosher to go public with the accusation that the most likely perpetrator was Peter Gleick, a semi-prominent environmental scientist in Oakland, California.

Gleick is known chiefly for his work on water issues, for which he enjoys a deserved reputation for his data-driven research (though he gets the remedies wrong). He has been as well a peripheral but aggressive figure in the climate wars, notable for the angry and politicized tone of his participation. Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was, until two weeks ago, the chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on scientific -ethics. He’s also a columnist for Forbes magazine’s website and a recipient of one of those MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants that typically go to the trendy and politically correct.

Making a direct accusation as Kaminsky and Mosher did is a strong and potentially libelous move, and the green blogosphere closed ranks quickly around Gleick. One poster wrote: “I hope that Mr. Kaminsky will be prepared [to] fully retract and apologize to Dr. Gleick once he is ruled out as the possible culprit.” But then the other shoe dropped: Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents. Gleick claimed, though, that he had received the phony strategy memo anonymously early in the year by mail. He explained in a column for the Huffington Post: “I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.”

Gleick’s story doesn’t add up, given that many of the details in the phony “strategy memo” could only have been composed by someone with prior access to the complete board materials that Gleick says he subsequently sought out. So far Gleick is the only person known to have had access to the Heartland internal board documents. And he has not been forthcoming about the details of the phony memo. Was there a postmark? Did he keep the envelope and the original document that he scanned? Why does he think he was singled out to receive this information, rather than a reporter? The only thing missing right now to make Gleick’s story weaker is an old Woodstock typewriter.

Then there is the content of the memo itself, which tellingly is written in the first person but bears no one’s name as an author. One is supposed to presume it came from Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, but it is not quite his style. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic sums it up nicely: “It reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.” Numerous observers have pointed to items in the memo that are strikingly inauthentic or alien to the conservative think tank world, but one in particular strikes me​—​a curious passage about the need for “expanded communication”:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as [Andrew] Revkin at Dot­Earth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW [anthropogenic global warming] communicators .  .  .

As curious as the reference to Gleick and Forbes is (Gleick shares space at Forbes with Heartland’s James Taylor, which is another interesting circumstance), the reference to Andy Revkin is more intriguing. Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners; one of the emails from the first cache of leaked Climategate documents in 2009 complained that Revkin wasn’t “reliable,” and University of Illinois climate alarmist Michael Schlesinger threatened Revkin directly with the “big cutoff” if he didn’t mend his ways. Was the language in the phony Heartland memo another attempt to try to shame Revkin into falling in line by suggesting he’s not hostile enough towards climate skeptics?

After Gleick’s semi-confession, Revkin wrote for the Times that “Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others,” and that his actions “surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary [strategy memo].”

Gleick looks set to be spending a good chunk of his MacArthur genius prize winnings on lawyers; he’s retained the same criminal attorney that Andrew Fastow of Enron used for his defense against fraud charges. And Gleick has hired Clinton/Gore crisis manager Chris Lehane. Heartland, for its part, has set up a legal defense fund to pursue a civil case against Gleick, presenting the ultimate irony: -Gleick’s attack may well help Heartland raise more money.

More than a few observers have asked why anyone should trust Gleick’s scientific judgment if his judgment about how to deal with climate skeptics is so bad. -Gleick’s defense of his motives would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts​—​often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated​—​to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Let’s take these in order. Anony-mous? True, Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”

The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources​—​and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do.

Finally, “coordinated”? Few public policy efforts have ever had the massive institutional and financial coordination that the climate change cause enjoys. That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

Fakegate: Global Warmists Try to Hide Their Decline

FROM-RCP

By Robert Tracinski

The promoters of the global warming hysteria never really recovered from Climategate, the release of e-mails and data which demonstrated that climate insiders were using questionable data, promoting misleading arguments, and conspiring to block dissenting views from the scientific literature. It was a fatal blow to the credibility of the warmists, and it has been followed by a steady stream of distinguished scientists standing up publicly to withdraw their backing from the global warming "consensus." The latest example is an op-ed by sixteen such scientists in the Wall Street Journal, followed up by a devastating response to their critics.

The global warming alarmists are losing the argument, and the latest scandal—James Delingpole calls it Fakegate—shows just how desperate they have become.

This was supposed to be a scandal that would undermine the global warming skeptics. In fact, it was supposed to be an exact parallel of Climategate, but this time discrediting the Heartland Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Chicago that has been a leader in debunking the global warming hysteria.

Someone calling himself "Heartland Insider" released a series of internal documents from Heartland. On the whole, the documents were unremarkable. They revealed that a think tank which advocates the free market and is skeptical of global warming was raising money to, um, advocate the free market and promote skepticism of global warming. As Delingpole put it, "Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree."

But there was one document, a "confidential strategy memo" that provided more inflammatory material, including an admission that one of Heartland's programs is aimed at "dissuading teachers from teaching science." See, those evil global warming deniers really are anti-science!

But if you are an actual global warming skeptic, this is a big red flag, because we skeptics view ourselves as the defenders of science who are trying to protect it from corruption by an anti-capitalist political agenda. We never, in our own private discussions, refer to ourselves as discouraging the teaching of science. Quite the contrary.

This is the dead giveaway that the "confidential strategy memo" is a fake, and that is what the real scandal has become. The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle helped break this open with an initial post raising questions, as well as a detailed follow-up. McArdle gets a little too far into the weeds of information technology, not to mention grammar and English usage, but the basic issue is that the "meta-data" in the Heartland files—data marking when the documents were created, on what machines, in what format, and in what time zone—don't match. Most of the documents were created directly as PDFs from a word-processing program, while the supposed "confidential strategy memo" was printed and then scanned. The genuine Heartland files were created weeks earlier in the central time zone, while the incriminating memo was created very shortly before the release of the documents and in the Pacific time zone. This corroborates Heartland's claim that the document is a fake.

McArdle also points out that the "confidential strategy memo" consists almost completely of facts and wording lifted from the other files, with the inflammatory quotes pasted in between in an inconsistent style. Moreover, some of the facts from the other files are used inaccurately. For example, the memo claims that money from the Koch brothers—central figures in any good leftist conspiracy theory—was being used to support Heartland's global warming programs, when it was actually earmarked for their health-care policy work. That's something a real Heartland insider would know; only a warmist creating a fake document would get it wrong.

So it was pretty obvious that the "confidential strategy memo" was not a Heartland document at all but a fraud pasted together after the fact by someone who wanted to discredit Heartland, but who didn't know enough about IT to cover his tracks.

Note one other thing: how this fraud self-consciously tries to recreate every aspect of the Climategate scandal, projecting those elements onto the climate skeptics. Climategate had: a) an insider who leaked information, b) private admissions of unscientific practices, like misrepresenting the data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and c) discussions of attempts to suppress opposing views. Further scandals that followed on from Climategate included one more element: d) using material from non-scientists in activist groups to pad out scientific reports for the UN.

The fake Heartland memo tried to re-create all of this. It was posted to the Web by someone who called himself "Heartland Insider." It contains admissions of things like opposing the teaching of science. It includes discussion of attempts to exclude global warming alarmists from the media, particularly an attempt to oust a fellow named Peter Gleick, described in the memo as a "high profile climate scientist," from his Forbes blog, because "This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out." And it describes a program to hire a "paid team of writers" to "undermine the official United Nation's [sic] IPCC reports." So this has all of the elements of Climategate, but in mirror image.

But it is all a lie. It took bloggers mere days to spot the document as a fake and less than a week to find the person who posted it and the other Heartland documents. He turns out to be...Peter Gleick, a climate scientist who is president of the left-leaning Pacific Institute. It's actually kind of pathetic, when you think about it. What gave Gleick away was the little touch of self-aggrandizement, the fact that he couldn't resist over-inflating the significance of his Forbes blog. In his own mind, clearly, he is the one man whose bold opposition keeps the Heartland leadership awake at nights.

So the "leaker" wasn't an insider, Heartland has not been exposed as anti-science, and it is not conspiring to silence opposing voices. In fact, days before the documents were posted, Heartland had asked Gleick to participate in a debate, and he refused the invitation. Oh, and those "paid writers" who were supposed to "undermine" the UN climate reports? They were actually a team of distinguished scientists who were compiling their own independent climate research.

After he was caught, Gleick confessed, but he's still trying the "modified limited hangout": confess to a small crime in the hope that this will mollify investigators and they won't dig up evidence of your big crime. So Gleick has confessed to obtaining the genuine Heartland documents through deceptive means. (He called Heartland posing as a member of the institute's board and talked a gullible junior staffer into sending him the handouts for an upcoming board meeting.) But he still maintains that the fake "confidential strategy memo" was sent to him by an anonymous source, and that he only obtained the Heartland documents in an attempt to verify the memo.

This won't hold up, because Gleick still doesn't understand the meta-data that tripped him up. The fake strategy memo was created about a day before the documents were released, which appears to be well after Gleick pilfered the genuine documents. That fits with McArdle's impression that the fake memo was created by cutting and pasting facts from the other documents. Which implies that Gleick was the forger.

All of this will come out, and in a much fuller way than in the Climategate scandal. With Climategate, the victim of the fraud was the public, which pays the salaries of the scientists who have been fudging the facts. But this means that the government and its scientific institutions were put in charge of the investigation, and they had a vested interest in whitewashing the story. In this case, the victims are Heartland and other independent scientists whose reputations were impugned by the forged document. They have a good criminal and civil case against Gleick for identity theft, fraud, and defamation, and they will be able to use the courts' subpoena power to dig into Gleick's computer records and get to the whole truth. So he's now going to suffer the same fate as John Edwards: admit part of his wrongdoing but cover up the rest, then be forced to admit more, then a little bit more. It's the most ignominious way to go down.

Which means, for us skeptics, that it's time to pass around the popcorn and enjoy the show.

Oh, and it gets better. Some global warming alarmists are lining up to defend Gleick. Judith Curry points to the blog where Gleick posted the fake memo, which is now declaring, "For his courage, his honor, and for performing a selfless act of public service, [Gleick] deserves our gratitude and applause." Another warmist adds that Gleick "is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him."

I certainly hope so. A lot of people deserve to go down along with Gleick.

Even many of those who deplore Gleick's fraud are still willfully blind to its implications. In Time, Bryan Walsh laments that "Worst of all—at least for those who care about global warming—Gleick’s act will almost certainly produce a backlash against climate advocates at a politically sensitive moment. And if the money isn’t already rolling into the Heartland Institute, it will soon." So yet another warmist has been exposed as a fraud—and the worst thing that can happen is that this will reduce the credibility of the warmists? But they deserve to lose their credibility.

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick's fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a "noble cause." It shows us that "hide the decline" dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.

Gleick wasn't just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on "scientific integrity," and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?

Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question.

/////////
I once noted that I ceased to be a liberal when I realized that in order to be so I continually was having to justify positions and arguments that I knew or learned to be untrue. Since that awakening I live a much easier life, I need only look for the truth to guide me rather than living in a make believe world. The entire Liberal/Progressive establishment that has infested our institutions can be illustrated no better than this undeniable truth from the article. [Peter Gleick ] "...was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union's Task Force on Scientific Ethics " and many in the scientific community are rushing to defend him.

We see this with continuing regularity, a person of the left is doing or saying something which by any previous standard would be considered shameful or even illegal and that person is either protected or defended by minions of self deceivers on the left. Whether it be Charlie Rangel who receives awards for lifetime service after being reprimanded for multiple ethics violations, John Edwards who is shielded from scandal as he runs for the Presidency or the fact that Reverand Jessie Jackson is held in such high regard by the left despite his many ethical and legal difficulties to name just a few. Consider the recent revelations of Saint John F Kennedy as a case in point.

My hope is that an ideology that is built on lies and maintained by liars will not stand forever, but on the other hand without the darkness what purpose has the light?