Tag: Climategate

Climategate: The Crutape Letters, written by Steven Mosher and Tom Fuller has just been released:

The Climategate scandal covered from beginning to end–from ‘Hide the Decline’ to the current day. Written by two authors who were on the scene–Steven Mosher and Tom Fuller–Climategate takes you behind that scene and shows what happened and why. For those who have heard that the emails were taken out of context–we provide that context and show it is worse when context is provided. For those who have heard that this is a tempest in a teacup–we show why it will swamp the conventional wisdom on climate change. And for those who have heard that this scandal is just ‘boys being boys’–well, boy. It’s as seamy as what happened on Wall Street.

Mosher, widely known, as a “lukewarmer” is perhaps the one man outside of the Motley CRU, The Hockey Team, and the whistle blower/hacker to receive the file, and recognize the game-changing importance of what he was reading. Mosher’s story was told in vivid detail a couple of days ago by Steve McIntyre. Tom Fuller is a writer and self-described “liberal skeptic”, and was perhaps the first journalist to cover the Climategate story in detail as it was breaking. So, one is a liberal and the other is a “lukewarmer”, so it’s hard to dismiss them out-of-hand as right-wing ideologues. Undoubtedly, Joe Romm and others will smear them anyway – it’s what the alarmists do when they’re desperate. Hat tip: Many thanks to Steven Mosher for the heads up.
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Climate Change: A new study shows that Earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset.

A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the “tipping point” is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.

This “settled science” has been upended by an unsettling (for warm-mongers) new study out of the University of Bristol in England. Unlike the Climate-gate charlatans at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Wolfgang Knorr of Bristol’s Earth Sciences Department followed the data where it led instead of trying to manipulate it to “hide the decline” in global temperatures the earth has experienced in the last decade.

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I’ve been a little obsessed lately with trying to get up to speed on the whole climate change issue. I’ve been ignoring up until now. Nevertheless, my quick review of the available information tells me two things: 1) The link between increased CO2 and increased global temperatures is greatly exaggerated, and 2) The proposed fixes for the U.S. are a 90% reduction in our production of CO2 – and absurdly drastic and unrealistic remedy. I think the more people study up on this the more outraged they will become.

A couple of quick points bear mentioning. First, the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW)folks predicted that 2009 would be the hottest year ever and 2009 turned out to be an average year. Their prediction is based on the idea that increasing CO2 levels cause global warming. Since the world produces more CO2 each year, it would be shocking – from the point of view of their model – to see temperatures decline. The problem is that even their own data demonstrates that there is no causal relationship between these two factors. The cooler than predicted 2009 should cause grave doubts among the true believers who still think there is evidence of AGW. The video linked below will give you a nerdy look at the controversy going on behind the scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lt4vOp8QhY

Here’s another quick YouTube video that demonstrates the failure of the AGW hypothesis that I learned from John Stossel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7M4Hqwdbg

Take a look at Al Gore’s global warming chart in An Inconvenient Truth. You’ll see that increases in CO2 levels trail increases in temperatures. This is the EXACT opposite of what the ClimateGate folks’ beloved models are predicting will happen.

Apparently, this is why the folks at University of East Anglia were scrambling to “trick” up their models to match their theories…and looking for ways to discredit and cut out their critics. I guess their use of tree rings to measure past temperatures wasn’t so accurate looking into the past – during the Little Ice Age – or looking into the future – the last 20 years.

The reality is that climate change is a lot more complex than these folks suppose and they really don’t have a strong, predictive model in place yet. For example, as the folks at Powerline indicate, it maybe that the SO2/sulfate being generated by the rising emissions from China is having a cooling effect on the planet.

One of the reasons I’m an “award-winning” political scientist is that I’m not blinded by conventional wisdom. I look at the facts.

Among these facts is the truth that Greenland, in warmer – pre-industrial – times, used to be green, that is covered with grass. To a certain extent, there is evidence that mankind would be better off if the Earth was a little warmer because it would encourage plant growth and longer growing seasons.

At any rate, what is shocking is that so many political types, including Al Gore, have relied on this faulty, dishonest science to promote a political agenda which is destructive to individual freedom. (Al Gore, for example, was recently caught lying by suggesting that these controversial e-mails were all over ten years old.)

Nevertheless, I’ve seen this before during the welfare reform debates of the 1990s. I was personally attacked because I believed the evidence which showed that welfare programs created poverty. Just because liberals don’t have the evidence on their side never seems to keep them from thinking that they know best. Also, as a political scientist, I’m skeptical of scientists living off grants to study the AGW hypothesis. They are an interest group, pure and simple.

The Climategate e-mails are very helpful to all of us right now because they show how this modelling is completely dominated by politics – not hard science. I think anthropomorphic global warming is dead as a theory. It will take some time for the true believers to catch up to the reality that they’ve been had. As an ex-Marxist socialist myself, I feel their pain…

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Via email

On New Year’s Day I had a very annoying lunch with a family friend who works for something grisly called the European Climate Foundation. We talked about the scandalous revelations concerning the head of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. See if you can guess what my friend’s response was. Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t bothered in the slightest. “What you have to remember about the IPCC is that it has no power to implement policy. Governments are quite free to ignore its advice,” said my friend airily. He also took a very charitable view on the conflict-of-interest issues raised by Pachauri’s many and various business arrangements: “Well of course a man in a post as senior as that is bound to have acquired a few directorships over the years,” he said. This, my friends, is what we’re up against. So thank God for Richard North, for my money one of the most diligent, thorough and heroic bloggers on the planet. Once he’s got his teeth into something, he just won’t let go. And currently his jaws are clamped so firmly round Pachauri’s ankles I really see no escape for the jet-setting, troll-impersonating, cricket-loving, ice-and-meat-shunning millionaire beardie unless like some grubby poacher caught in a Victorian man trap Pachauri decides to get out his penknife and hack both his own legs off. There’s a good summary of North’s discoveries so far at Wolf Howling’s site. Alternatively, just go to North’s website and have a dip. Here’s one on Pachauri and Big Oil, and one on his potentially lucrative association with Deutsche Bank and Pachauri’s most agreeable home in one of the most expensive parts of New Delhi. But North is now largely concentrating his efforts on the activities of Pachauri’s main front organisation TERI (formerly Tata Energy Research Group, now The Energy Research Group). And one of the many shocking things North has unearthed is the extent to which Pachauri’s millionaire lifestyle (not to mention all that misleading “science”) is funded by the British taxpayer. He notes, for example, that:

earlier this year minister for International development Douglas Alexander launched a partnership with TERI-India, pledging up to £10 million to support the work of TERI over the next five years. Amongst other thing, the money would enable TERI “to focus on building its own institutional capacity, helping it to become an even stronger organisation than it is already.” Dr R K Pachauri was very pleased. And after he had offered his ritual comments about the “removal of poverty”, he no doubt retired to his multi-million dollar home at 160 Golf Links – further then to consider the plight of the poor.

Blogger Purple Scorpion is properly sceptical as to how these wodges of British taxpayer cash are going to be spent.

“Building institutional capacity” is an objective Sir Humphrey would be proud of. Impossible to quantify, too vague to be checkable, and all behind the scenes anyway. Nothing vulgarly visible that anyone could examine.

Yet as Purple Scorpion goes on to remind us, this is just the kind of vital and urgent foreign aid spending which Dave Cameron has promised to ring-fence, come what may, when he attains power. Is there anyone out there who still wonders why I’m so depressed about the prospects of a Conservative victory?Source by James Delingpole

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.What’s catastrophic about Climategate is that it reveals a science as broken as Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which despite Reid’s protestations, has been shown to be a misleading chart that erases a 400-year stretch of warm temperatures (called the Medieval Warm Period), and a more recent little ice-age that ended in the mid-1800s. No amount of hand-waving will restore the credibility of climate science while holding onto rubbish like that.Climategate reveals skulduggery the general public can understand: that a tightly-linked clique of scientists were behaving as crusaders. Their letters reveal they were working in what they repeatedly labelled a “cause” to promote a political agenda.That’s not science, that’s a crusade. When you cherry-pick, discard, nip, tuck, and tape disparate bits of data into the most alarming portrayal you can in the name of a “cause,” you’re not engaged in science, but in the production of propaganda. And this clique tried to subvert the peer-review process as well. They attempted to prevent others from getting into peer reviewed journals — thus letting them claim skeptic research wasn’t peer-reviewed — a convenient circular (and dishonest) way to discredit skeptics.Finally, people know that a fish rots from its head. The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was considered the top climate research community. It was the source of a vast swath of the information then that was funnelled into the supposedly “authoritative” reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.If scientific objectivity is corrupt at the top, there’s every reason to think that the rot spreads through the entire body. And evidence suggests it has. A Russian think-tank recently revealed the climate temperature record compiled by the Climatic Research Unit cherry-picked data from only 25 per cent of Russia’s climate monitoring sites, the sites closest to urban areas, biased by the urban heat island effect. The stations excluded data from 40 per cent of Russia’s total land mass, which is 12.5 per cent of all the Earth’s land mass.Reid’s indignation about Climategate is beyond ludicrous. “It is wrong,” intones Reid, “to castigate people for things said in private, and often taken out of context.” He equates the response to Climategate with a “lynch mob.” Funny, the professor seems to have highly selective indignation; he is apparently unaware of the unremitting attacks on people skeptical of climate science or policy by climate scientists and politicians.People skeptical of any aspect of climate change have long been called “deniers,” an odious linkage with Holocaust denial, and various luminaries have called for them to be drowned, jailed, and tried for crimes against humanity. One prominent columnist called skepticism treason against the very Earth itself.As for indignation about the release of private correspondence, where was Reid’s indignation when Greenpeace, looking for something to spin into an incriminating picture, stole skeptic Chris Horner’s trash? Where was his indignation a few years ago when scientist Steve Schroeder showed a routine letter of mine to another climate scientist (Andrew Dessler), who posted it to the Internet where it was spun into the scurrilous accusation that I was trying to bribe UN scientists? Reid’s indignation is the chutzpah of a man who kills his family then wants pity because he’s an orphan.The Climategate scandal, like others in biology and medicine erodes the credibility of both the scientists involved, and the institution of scientific research. And it should: it has become evident that there is a lot of rot going on in the body of science, and too little effort made to fix it.A start could be made. They should start by practicing the scientific method: release all data, and release all assumptions and methods used to process the data at the time of publication. Make it available to researchers (even lay researchers) who are outside the clique so the work can be checked. Had the researchers involved in Climategate done this from the beginning, instead of circling their wagons and refusing to allow outsiders to check their work, they would have taken less hectoring. As a bonus for them, Climategate would never have happened.Former IPCC reviewer Kenneth P. Green, has his doctorate in environmental sci ence and engi neering and is an Advisor to the Frontier Center for Public Policy, ( www.fcpp.org).Green is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.Source by Ken Green

Aside from ideologues, hydrocarbon haters, Gaia worshipers, profiteers and power-grabbing politicians, most of the sentient world is beginning to realize that the hysteria over global warming disasters is based on dubious to fraudulent temperature data, analyses, models, reports and peer reviews. Climate Research Unit emails, HARRY_READ_ME.txt computer memos, and blatant tampering with Australian, Russian, UK and US temperature data make the scandal impossible to ignore or explain away. They also helped ensure that Copenhagen descended into an expensive, carbon-emitting gabfest – and that China and India rejected any deal that would force them to curtail their energy generation, economic growth and poverty reduction programs. Senator Barbara Boxer is an exception. She is ignoring the obvious and doing her best to divert attention from the scandal, circle the alarmist wagons, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice – and ram through another legislative power grab. “This isn’t Climategate,” the California Democrat insists. “It’s email theft gate.” The problem isn’t the fraud; it’s that a hacker or whistleblower revealed the fraud. She needs to wake up and smell the cesspool. It’s not theft gate. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate. We, the taxpayers, We the people – paid for this bogus “research.” We paid billions of dollars for it – and providing the data, computer codes and analytical methods is a condition of the employment and research grants for these scientists. The work belongs to us. We own it. We the People, our elected representatives and our climate realist scientists have a right to examine this supposed evidence of planetary disaster, to ensure that it’s driven by science, and not ideology. That it’s complete, accurate – and honest. That it backs up the alarmist scientists’ call for draconian, life-altering restrictions on energy use. That the CRU cabal did not alter, lose, ignore, toss or destroy “inconvenient” data and evidence that might get in the way of their agendas and predetermined results. Not only were we stonewalled for years, while these UK and US scientists refused to divulge their data, computer codes and methodologies. Not only did the scientists who wrote these emails and did this phony research refuse to let taxpayers, other scientists, and even members of Congress and Parliament see their raw data and analyses. Not only did they prevent debate and replace peer review with a perverted system that allowed only a small network of like-minded colleagues to examine – and applaud – their work. They also excluded, denounced and vilified anyone who asked hard questions or challenged their actions. In short, they robbed us! They took our money, and defrauded us. Even worse, the Taxpayer Robbery Gate scientists are working hand-in-glove to pressure the United States, Great Britain and world into spending trillions of dollars fighting “catastrophic manmade climate change” … slashing our energy use, living standards and employment base … enacting unaccountable global government … redistributing wealth and technology … restricting our liberties and civil rights … and keeping millions of families deprived of energy and in permanent destitution. This is the same California Senator who berated an Air Force general for calling her Ma’am. Who treated scientist, physician and author Michael Crichton like a child molester, for daring to disagree with her on global warming and suggest that double-blind climate studies would guard against errors and fraud. Who displays an un-American intolerance for any witnesses who question her views. The Boxer-White House effort makes the Watergate cover-up and obstruction of justice look like a juvenile prank. It’s paving the way for cap-tax-and-trade laws that would nationalize the entire US economy – by the same divisive, dictatorial elements that are nationalizing our banking and healthcare systems. They understand, even if the general populace still does not, that by controlling carbon they will control our lives. Just imagine the Boxer, White House and media outcry and denunciations if these emails and fraudulent actions had involved oil companies and climate disaster “deniers.” But of course, if Boxer & Co. didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards “We’re honest. We have nothing to hide,” the accused scientists keep saying. That’s wonderful. But then they need to back up their protestations with action. They need to come clean. Stop manipulating data and hiding documents and emails. Cooperate with investigators. Honor FOIA requests. Share data and computer codes. Stop attacking scientists who disagree with them. Make all climate studies, for and against manmade global warming disaster claims, subject to real peer review and open to public examination. They need to engage in full-blown public debates with climate change realists and skeptics. The profiteering scientists, their highly suspect work and the institutions that sponsor them need to be investigated – thoroughly, by an independent, incorruptible team of knowledgeable scientists, modelers, statisticians and law enforcement officials. If they are convicted, they need to be penalized for defrauding and robbing us. They deserve jail time, dismissal and permanent bans from any future federal grants to them, their research labs and their universities or government offices. The hacker or whistleblower should get a Congressional Medal of Freedom or Nobel Peace Prize – not a congressional investigation. At the very least, he has revealed how petty, shameful and corrupt the four-alarm climate “research” establishment is, and how the hypothesis of manmade climate chaos is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand. In so doing, he may have prevented further unjust enrichment of the perpetrators of this billion-dollar funding and science scam. This bogus science is behind every US, EU and UN proposal to restrict and control our energy, economy, living standards and fundamental liberties – in the name of preventing computer-conjured global warming disasters. By inaugurating Climategate, the whistleblower may have forestalled or prevented wars over increasingly scarce energy and resources caused by this phony science. We need to start over on the global warming science – with honest scientists who do everything in the open. Or just scrap the entire process, accept that climate change is mostly natural and cyclical, and adapt to it the same way our ancestors did, using the wealth and technology that hydrocarbon fuels have given us. _______________ Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which sponsors the All Pain No Gain education campaign and petition against job-killing global warming policies and the ClimateDepot website for the latest news and views on climate change. He is also a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.Source by Paul Driessen