Bonus QotD: Climategate, the hack that failed

"Climategate is a name that will stick ... [But] Climategate is only like Watergate because previously unknown information was released. Beyond that, the events diverge profoundly because of the cover-ups....    "Watergate involved political actions for a political agenda ... [yet] the biggest sin and the reason it became exposed was that the cover-up failed. Climategate was a perversion of science for a political agenda. It was exposed, but unlike Watergate, the cover-up was deliberate, and coordinated, [and] was very successful because most of the public have no idea about the science, are unaware of the release of the emails, or [mis]understand their significance.
    "The deception, with its enormous cost and damage to the credibility of science, still continues."~ Dr Tim Ball, from his article 'Climategate is not like Watergate – Time for the Leaker to Try Again?'

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‘Climate of Freedom’ Tour

In just under three weeks from now, Christopher Monckton will begin traveling the country to knock over the many manufactured myths of the warmist “consensus.”  His method: identifying errors by the climate mainstream that, he says, always and invariably fall in the direction of “undue alarmism and flagrant exaggeration.”

Monckton is much bashed by his enemies, probably because instead of offering blancmange he takes the battle to his enemies—like he did earlier this year, for example, when he suggested the newly-inaugurated President Obama

has been taken in, hook, line and sinker, by catastrophic anthropogenic climate alarm [and would] continue to inflict crippling taxes and regulations in the name of saving the planet from 'global warming.'

One isn’t supposed to say these things.

Nor is one supposed to point out in plain English, as he did in two Open Letters to John Key (Letter One, Letter Two), what our Prime Minister’s ridiculous ’50 by 50’ policy on “emissions reduction” means  ….

This means that within 41 years - the working lifetime of a high-school graduate today - the policies which you propose to introduce will have shut down, deliberately, consciously, and to no environmental benefit whatsoever, more than one-half of the entire New Zealand economy. You propose to throw your nation back in the direction of the Stone Age - electricity one day a week if that, automobiles replaced by horses and carts, elevators replaced by stairs, all aircraft grounded, the conquest of space abandoned, factories silent, several hundred thousand jobs destroyed and transferred to China, the machine-press and combine-harvester replaced by the hammer and sickle.

… and, again, on the plain meaning of the the Emissions Tax Scam by which the Prime Minister hopes to bring this about:

your proposal to command the reshaping of the economy from the centre has no merit, not merely because there is no scientific or economic need for it, but because, even if there were, it cannot and will not work.
    By any definition, emissions trading is not really trade – it’s rationing. The government puts a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide industry is allowed to emit (a “cap”). and then unused quotas can be sold. It is certainly not a market operation because the key feature is not the buying and selling but the government limit.
    This is not a cap-and-trade system: it is more accurately called a “cap-in-hand” system; the important feature of the system is that productive people have to go cap-in-hand to people who have never done a day’s work in their lives to ask for permission to be productive. The truly bizarre part is that these finger-wagging clipboard-wielding people who have never raised a cow, laid a brick, or drilled for gas – who have done nothing except get in the way of those who have – still expect society to provide them with food and a warm house. Presumably by magic… 
    We can no longer afford the luxury of over-extended, over-ambitious, centralized government. The call for “action” in the face of climate change is overwhelmingly for government action to place limits on private action.
    Since this will of necessity concentrate vast additional powers in the hands of government it is not merely doomed to ignominious failure; it is not merely guaranteed to increase your nation's "carbon footprint" under the guise of taking steps to reduce it; it is an explicit and abject abandonment of the individual freedom for which the National party is supposed to stand.

No wonder his enemies don’t like him.

Catch up with from 1st April to 23rd April, anywhere from Whangarei to Invercargill.

IPCC sexing up more “science” [updated]

The UN’s IPCC climate panel relies only on reliable, well-researched, peer-reviewed science. Oh, and wish-fulfilment fantasies from Greenpeace.

Yes, that’s right. Turns out the UN’s favourite climate lobbying organisation (that’s the IPCC, not Greenpeace) has once again been caught fudging its figures, drawing up dodgy data, and trying to hide its decline as a serious scientific clearing house.

This time, the IPCC has been caught with its pants down “bigging up renewable energy as the power source of the future” in a report that “turns out to have been lead-authored by an activist from Greenpeace .”

That’s virtually the leitmotif of scientific credibility wouldn’t you say?

And remember “renewable energy”? That’s the kind of apologetic energy production whose working definition is that it is “energy produced by means that would be uneconomic without govt. tax breaks and subsidies”—energy that is not so much renewable as it is unreliable.

No wonder it’s so popular with the anti-industrialists.

Picture from Jo Nova's blog.

UPDATE: There is No Conflict of Interest Policy for the IPCC’s next scare-story official report, out soon. And no conflicts of interest at all. Honest, guv. Physicist Lubos Motl summarises the laughable situation:

It turns out that [disgraced IPCC head Rajenda] Pachauri also wrote a preface for the Greenpeace document that was renamed as the IPCC document. Pachauri rejected any kind of policy against the conflict of interests for the 5th report: no surprise, the whole work of the IPCC and Pachauri himself is all about the conflict of interests.

Or as Steve McIntyre puts it in accusing the IPCC of playing "Greenpeace Karaoke",

The IPCC Press Release on renewables [claims] “close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century …” The basis for this claim is a Greenpeace scenario. The Lead Author of the IPCC assessment of the Greenpeace scenario was the same Greenpeace employee who had prepared the Greenpeace scenarios, the introduction to which was written by IPCC chair Pachauri.

Nice.

Cancun, not Copenhagen

Several thousand people opposed to jet travel and profligate spending have flown to this Mexican resort to talk about how to make jet travel and any spending at all more difficult for everyone else.

Their hope, if not ours, is that they can get the whole global warming gravy train back on the track from which it was derailed by an icy blast of reality and RealPolitik at Copenhagen.

The reality is that the Climategate emails, the questionable behaviour of IPCC officials, the collapse of any market for carbon "offsets", and the climate’s failure to live up to the scariest IPCC predictions (not to mention a world in which economic reality has suddenly become far more important than climate fantasy) have between them conspired to make even confirmed warmists pessimistic about their chances of resurrecting their favourite scare stories.

Still, as Anthony Watts observes,

One benefit of meeting in Mexico is that the conference will avoid the embarrassment last year when the Copenhagen meeting ended in an unexpected blizzard. It’s harder to sell global warming to world leaders who have to flee the city before their flights are grounded by an ice storm. The worst the Cancun conferees will have to deal with is the threat of being kidnapped by heavily armed gangs of drug dealers.

Book me a front-row seat! [update 5]

Crikey, this is going to be fun to watch.

Court challenge to Niwa climate records – STUFF
    Climate change sceptics are taking the country's state-owned weather research body to the High Court over claims that its records are inaccurate.
    The government’ National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is being challenged about the data it uses to calculate climate change. The court action is being funded by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition … [who are] asking the court to order that records are invalid that show a 1 degree Celsius warming trend in nationwide temperatures during the past century, and wants NIWA to be ordered to produce another "accurate" record.
    It has also asked the court to order Niwa to stop using its current records to advise any government authority or the public.

The challenge is a simple one. As reported here several times before, the raw temperature records from New Zealand recording stations over the  last century shows no to only very slight warming. But, in a process begun by disgraced climatologist Jim Salinger, those raw figures have been adjusted upwards, well upwards, and the records justifying those specific adjustments are “no longer available.”

This is bad science, used to back up the most serious political attack on NZ industry since the war. Basically, the dog has eaten NIWA’s homework, and the best they can now do is point to general reasons for their dramatic upward adjustments, with no specific record available, they say, to justifying their fiddling of each figure.

And when that fiddling has been done by Jim Salinger, a certified climate alarmist who NIWA themselves described as “a stranger to truth,”  there’s good grounds to hope this bad science is as discredited by this case as it deserves to be.

It’s not even good enough for government work.

RELATED POSTS:

• CLIMATEGATE: Have New Zealand warmists cooked their books ...
• Soapbox Salinger sacked
• Warmist-in-chief Salinger a 'stranger to truth'
• NIWA should be shut down – Auer
• Cooking the decline?

UPDATE 1: Why is this important?

• Because NIWA are the source of the advice given to NZ governments on which they based their carbon taxes and emissions tax scam.  If that well is poisoned, their advice is moot.
• Because NIWA are the source of the advice relied upon by councils around the country that severely restricts (against right) what people may do on their own coastal property. If their advice is wrong, councils’ cases fall apart.
• Because the likes of the anti-development Environmental Defence Society (EDS) understand this perfectly, which is why they’re joining the action with NIWA. Without NIWA’s discredited advice, one less reason exists for the EDS to claim control of your land.
• Because the raw temperature records from the Met Service show no significant warming. Yet adjustments have been made by NIWA downwards pre-war and upwards post-war (the reverse of what you would expect as an adjustment for the Urban Heat Island effect). Talk about cooking the books! And the records for those adjustments"? They’ve been lost, says NIWA. This is either incompetence or dishonesty--and it’s certainly bad science—so in either case their advice to anybody should be ignored, and as the late Augie Auer maintained , they should be shut down. Because they’re not scientists, they’re shills.

UPDATE 2: Climate Science Coalition rep Barry Brill discusses the claim with Leighton Smith on air. Listen to the audio here. [Brill appears about 10:35am]

UPDATE 3: Apparently Radio NZ is finding it hard to find anyone to support NIWA on air, so this morning they went with truffle farmer Gareth Renowden, who does his best to fudge the story.  Listen to how carefully he dances around the disappearance of the log of adjustments, and the specific reasons for each.

UPDATE 4: Rational Capitalist has some links on the wider arguments:

Here is a Forbes article titled, The Death of Global Warming, and here is a great synopsis of the science by Dr. Roy Spencer titled, My Global Warming Skepticism, for Dummies. And, in case you are keeping track, here is some skepticism on the recent "independent review" of the Climategate controversy conducted by approximately the same people who were accused of the cover-up.

That should help give this all some context—and help you understand why warmists are getting so desperate.

UPDATE 5: I linked it indirectly, but it would be better if I liked directly to the Climate Science Coalition’s own release on this, which includes a backgrounder, a summary of the Statement of Claim, and a graph showing the effect of NIWA’s changes.  In fact, I’ll post that last one right here:

Don’t you think if you were a scientist who’d made that sort of huge and politically convenient adjustment—an adjustment made against the direction of adjustments for the  Urban Heat Island effect, a change that you would except to see—that you would want to explain step-by-step how you did it?  If you have nothing to hide, then why hide it?

Walls Closing In for “Hide the Decline” Mann [updated]

Poor old Michal “Hide the Decline” Mann.  Cleared by his university of impropriety in his science and his dealings with Steve McIntyre and others (many revealed in the Climategate emails, where scientists discussed “Mike’s Nature trick” to hide a decline in temperatures shown in data ), that inquiry by his university will now itself be reviewed by by the National Science Foundation.

And the Virginia Attorney General is now taking action, requiring Mann—the producer of the now infamous “Hockey Stick”--to produce "a sweeping swath of documents” relating to Mann’s receipt of sweeping swathes of taxpayers’ money used to produce his questionable graph.

    “Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, told The Hook.

What’s it all about? Put simply, “When temperatures records are revised in a way that creates a warming trend where none formerly existed, inquiring minds want to know what's going on.”

The unspoken word in he AG inquiry is, of course, fraud.  Story here.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving Mann. 

PS: The poor Mann must be feeling embattled.  He’s suing the makers of this now-classic video satire of his botched science.

So, naturally, the No-Cap-and-Trade Coalition has responded with a sequel.

“The question at hand, “they say, “is whether ‘Hide the Decline’ defames or defines Michael Mann.”

UPDATE: Pharyngula (a warmist) and Steve McIntyre (the chap who’s become Mann’s nemesis) both condemn the action of Virginian Attorney-General Cuccinelli.

“Cuccinelli is using the law to pursue a vendetta” says Pharyngula.

“This is a repugnant piece of over-zealousness by the Virginia Attorney General” says McIntyre at his blog.

Gore speaks! [updated]

Since the release of the ClimateGate emails, and the steady flow of revelations since about the dishonesty and frank incompetence of the IPCC Team, sightings of Al Gore have been as rare as confirmed appearances by the Yeti – only more venal, and much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more embarrassing, and mostly from the back as enablers so frequently allow him to avoid inconvenient questioning.

So having disappeared for several months, and become a figure of fun even to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show audience, the Senior Denier-In-Chief is back – back denying that anything has changed since he put his head below the parapet as the ClimateGate bullets started flying.

The New York Times is his latest enabler, publishing one-thousand words in which he talks up his stock portfolio, and denies anything just happened over the last few months to expose the incompetence and shoddy science of the IPCC and its fellow travellers upon whose wave of warmism he has ridden to become the world’s first carbon billionaire.

It’s a beautifully crafted piece of denialism.  The fraud of “consensus” has been exposed to daylight, but Al Gore would like you to carry on looking the other way.  Like he does.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, said on February 27 that “this apparent (global warming) consensus misled not only the media and the public, but also the wider scientific community, which had remained largely unaware of the ongoing debate and of the work of many reputable climate experts who disagreed with the IPCC.”  Dr. Singer summed up the entire global warming hoax as based on “temperature data (that) had been manipulated.”

Gore wants to continue the hoax.

Christopher Booker reckons, “'A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC: The emerging errors of 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental.”

Gore denies there are significant errors.

Bret Stephens says in the Wall Street Journal that the sound of ClimateGate “is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.”

Gore denies there are any cracks in the manufactured “consensus,” and no slowdown in the creation of billion-dollar edifices based on this climate fraud.

It’s his own edifice Gore’s Times piece is designed to protect –and that’s all you can really say about it. He doesn’t believe any of it any more than you do. As physicist Lubos Motl says, it’s “an op-ed that is bound to become a subject of jokes.”

He argues, in essence, that the World is about to end, and it’s Fox News that’s to blame.

And he concedes that the IPCC has made “at least two mistakes,” mentioning specifically “a flawed” overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, which we now know was based on little more than gossip; its unjustified hype about non-existent flooding in the Netherlands; and the law-breaking refusal of Phil Jones and his East Anglian colleagues to supply their scientific evidence when requested under the UK’s Official Information Act, which he downplays as “hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics.”

But he appears blithely unaware (or at least hopes that you are) of other revelations of IPCC lies errors that have appeared since he last stalked the world stage, including:

• the extent of sea ice around Antarctica, which has been increasing, not decreasing,
• Amazon rainforests,
• African agriculture,
• attribution of extreme weather damages,
• the corruption of the IPCC’s chief “scientist” (who is not a scientist but a railway engineer),
• revelations of manipulations of the modern surface temperature record in China, in Alaska, in Australia, in Antarctica, in Orlando, in Sweden, in New Zealand, in South Africa . . .
• revelations of manipulations of the historic temperature record,
• revelations of lost data,
• IPCC’s scientists were forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

And that’s not all he ignores. The IPCC’s beleaguered “keeper of the records,” Phil Jones admitted to the BBC’s environmental reporter, Roger Harrabin that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming” – something Al Gore is still at pains to deny – and that talk of science being settled is nonsense. [Asked by Harrabin to comment on the claim that ‘the debate over climate change is over.’ Jones responded: “I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.”]

There is no way that The Goracle could not know any of this, since the fallout from all of it overshadowed and  all but blew apart the Copenhagen climate conclave.  He just hopes that you don’t.

He hopes that the bandwagon can keep right on rollin’.

Too late, Al.

Al would like to think that the worst scientific scandal of our generation can be swept under the carpet so he can continue to pontificate all the way to the bank.

It can’t. It’s too late.  All that’s left, or should be, is to mop up the damage that’s been done scientifically, politically, and philosophically.

As philosopher Stephen Hicks says, “A sad thing about the ’Climategate’ or ‘Warmergate’ scandal is that we will now have to revise the textbooks and add our own politicized scientific culture to that sorry list [of scientific fraud],” including examples of the destructive effects of the politicization of science from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

    “We learned successfully why and how to separate politics and religion.
    “Will we be able to learn the exact same lesson about politics and science?
    “The lesson is not only about politics. The core lesson [that anyone with a brain and an honest use of it should be able to draw] is about the corruption of philosophy (especially epistemology), which has enabled an entire generation of journalists, activists, and politicians to be intellectually disarmed by a group of frauds — or to become enablers in disarming those who would challenge the frauds. A postmodern philosophical culture indeed. . .
    “Lysenkoism was ‘science’ in the service of an established political regime, while the Climategate people are ‘scientists’ in the service of establishing a new political regime. . .
     “I’m hoping Climategate will be a cautionary tale about politicized science rather than the end of science.”

Let’s hope so.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt reckons The Goracle’s op-ed “reveals just how religious is his mission, and just how theocratic would be any government he and his global warming followers controlled:

    ‘From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.’

“He will use the law to redeem your soul. To which the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witchhunters would have said: ‘Amen.’ ”

Wheels falling off the climate science deniers [updated]

Robert Bryce at the Master Resource blog provides a useful summary of ways the wheels are falling off the real climate science deniers—ie., The Team who have been part of “hiding the decline.”

The wheels have been falling off for several reasons. First of all, because even politicians interested in no more than their own careers are rational enough to recognise that in the middle of a Great Recession, with unemployment rising with each new report, this is no time to impose additional shackles on producers in the form of an Emissions Trading Scam.

But the science of the IPCC Team has also given new meaning to the saying “good enough for government work.”

    “Sloppy work has tarnished the reputation of the UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), perhaps irretrievably so. The most dramatic error was that 80% of Himalayan glacier area would very likely melt by 2035. But it is hardly the only one.”

It sure isn’t. As Chip Knappenberger explained yesterday at MasterResource:

    “Another new problem with the IPCC’s AR4 was reported earlier this week. This one involved the IPCC’s reliance on a book chapter instead of the peer-reviewed literature to conclude that sea ice extent around Antarctica had changed little since the late 1970s. In fact, it is well-established in the scientific literature, dating both prior to and subsequent from the production of the AR4, that there has been a statistically significant increase in the extent of sea ice in the Antarctic. That the IPCC AR4 projects Antarctic sea ice declines to accompany global warming, it is little wonder why the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4 authors wanted to downplay the actual behavior of Antarctic sea ice.
    “The Antarctic sea ice problem adds to an ever growing list of problems uncovered recently (since the EPA’s Endangerment Finding) that exist within the IPCC AR4 reports. Other errors involve IPCC findings on Himalayan glaciers, Amazon rainforests, African agriculture, Dutch geography, attribution of extreme weather damages, and several others.”

The list of errors is long.  The list of excuses for them is short, and increasingly shrill.  And as more and more errors come to light in the wake of the release of the Climategate emails--revealing as Bryce says, “an agenda at work where desired ‘science’ trumped careful, open, respectful scholarship”—much of Europe and the U.S. still lies under several feet of global warming, having been hit with “record-cold temperatures and record amounts of snow.”

And that’s not all. The IPCC’s “keeper of the records,” Phil Jones, has admitted that his record keeping is frankly appalling, and he has trouble “keeping track” of them all--a major admission when it’s solely on the basis of Jones’s manipulations of those records that so much of the manipulation of the world’s surface temperature records has been justified. 

And he also admitted to the BBC’s environmental reporter, Roger Harrabin that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming.” Yes, you read that right.

    “While that statement is enormously important, another Harrabin question was just as significant. Harrabin asked Jones to comment on the claim that ‘the debate over climate change is over.’ Jones responded:

    ‘I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.’

As Robert Bryce says, “All this has the establishment climate industry rethinking a number of things.” As it should. Because even the “denier” smear is beginning to backfire.

     “Last month, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of “the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.” The article, called, ‘The Climate Killers’ lambasted a range of people — Warren Buffett, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Oklahoma US Senator James Inhofe, and columnist George Will, among them.
    “Yet less than six weeks after Rolling Stone published its list of ‘climate killers’ Phil Jones, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, [can tell] the BBC that
    a) there’s been no statistically significant warming of the earth over the past 15 years, and  
    b) that the science of global warming is not, in fact, settled and that, in his words, ‘there is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.’”

So in the face of that admission then, who in fact are the real deniers?  They’re those who still insist the opposite—and who want to impose an Emissions Trading Scam on us regardless.

READ: The Rapidly Melting Case For Carbon Legislation   - Robert Bryce

UPDATE:  The avalanche of inconvenient truth emerges. The Guardian has news that “Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.”

    “Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown.”

Himalayan meltdown [update]

The world’s warmists are melting down. 

Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick is pucked.

“Hide the decline” is no longer just a phrase used in Phil Jones’s emails—and the world and his wife are now hip to the legerdemain of Jones’s CRU.

And the UN’s IPCC—the scientific central planning unit to whom every warmist and his wet dream make obeisance—are now exposed as desperate, if not yet dateless: New Scientist magazine exposes the IPCC’s scientific credibility as something approaching zero.  Tim Blair rounds up the story:

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

But that news story must itself have had some rigorous science behind it, right? Wrong:

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Still, Hasnain is a scientist, so he wouldn’t have just been offering idle speculation, would he? He would:

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

Yet surely the IPCC had the sense to review this claim and not overplay it? They didn’t:

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The London Times summarises: “If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.” Which is saying something.

Hence Blair’s headline: Ice Remain, IPCC Melts

UPDATE: Poneke has a must-read post.  In real life, Poneke is (or was) one of the country’s top investigative journalists.  His post should really be gracing the pages of one of the country’s top investigative journals . . . if we had one.

Instead, here it is: 13 years of Climategate emails show tawdry manipulation of science by a powerful cabal at the heart of the global warming campaign.  Says he in introduction:

    “This is the longest and most important article I’ve yet written for this blog and I make no apology for its 4600 words — more also than in any newspaper article. As a journalist, I believe the Climategate emails have exposed one of the most significant news stories of the decade. As the mainstream news media has so far barely gone beyond giving those who wrote them and their supporters time and space to deny their undeniable contents, I present here an extensive journalistic account of what they actually say in the context of the dates and events in which they were written, with full links to all the emails.
    “Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure. . . ”

Quotes of the day: ClimateGate in quotes . . .

The disinterested search for truth--the hallmark of real science--has taken a back seat to a political crusade."
       - Thomas Sowell, in ‘The Science Mantra’

If matters such as science are to be placed into the unanswerable power of a single bureau, what will guarantee the superior wisdom, justice and integrity of the bureaucrats?”
       - Ayn Rand, in ‘Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?’

Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly. . . [U]ntil climate science is cleaned up, it doesn’t deserve the worship so many in the media unthinkingly give its tainted practitioners.”
       - Bradley Pilke, in ‘From Global Warming Believer To Skeptic’

The crash and burn of the UN summit [in Copenhagen] has become the most wonderful Christmas gift for the entire world.”
       - Justin Credible, at the I Love CO2 blog

 

John Key’s ETS: Why the rush? [update 4]

So why was John Key’s National-led government so gosh-darned eager, just like Kevin Rudd was, to get that Emissions Trading Scam through parliament before Copenhagen? 

You thought it was all about looking good before other world leaders? Think again. As Michelle Grattan now  makes clear in The Age, the Copenhagen collapse (featuring the sweet sound of exploding watermelons) exposes the real reason for the rush.  For “Rudd” read “Key”; for “Australia” read “New Zealand”:

    “Rudd so hyped the need to get his scheme through before Copenhagen that, now the conference has ended with only a weak ‘accord,’ people will be inclined to say, ‘So what was the hurry? And why rush now?.’
    “The need for hastening the Australian legislation, which both Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull understood, was because of just what’s happened. If Copenhagen delivered little, it was always going to be hard to get the wind back into the emissions trading sails here.”

And here.

UPDATE 1: Where’s Phil?
[Pinched from Andrew Bolt]

Phelim McAleer, maker of the brilliant documentary Not Evil Just Wrong, scours Copenhagen for Dr Phil Jones, the most infamous of the Climategate scientists. If he doesn’t find Jones, he sure finds the mindset that both produced and protects him.

UPDATE 2: Speaking of emissions trading scams, take a look at this rent-seeking bastard, the beneficiary of his own multi-billion dollar links in and around the climate industry: the chairman of the IPCC, Engineer Pachauri. Read Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri [hat tip Owen McShane].

Hell, if it’s okay for Al Bore to lie for a billion-dollar living, why shouldn’t smaller fry try to make a buck the same way?

UPDATE 3: Anyone for a Hypocrisy Offset?

UPDATE 4: Australia’s ABC network started an opinion blog for their presenters, and were shocked to discover them expressing opinions.  Well, some opinions, goddamit.

Meanwhile, here in GodZone, the news networks simply had hyperbolic opinionising to the main news broadcast.  Here, for example, was the flatulent hot air TV3 used to announce the abject collapse of warmist hopes at Copenhagen. Balanced? Fair? True? What do you think of alleged news shows peddling propaganda?

CopenHuggin, where the wheels are coming off the dog and phony show

I must confess I was very disappointed to read the Herald’s four big news items out of Copenhagen this morning, very disappointed indeed.

• News that climate talks are “on the skids” with walk-outs all round, and UN Climate Chief Yvo de Boer resorting to talking things up.
• That Al Gore has resorted (again) to making things up (and the Herald are now reporting his fabrication!).
• That Tim Groser has repaired to talking himself up.
• And that Canadian activists are now reduced to faking their government’s “commitments.”

It’s all so disappointing, isn’t it. Just fancy if they can’t get any serious disagreement there this week.

Just imagine if the headline on the London Times article is true: that 'Copenhagen Stalls Decision on Catastrophic Climate Change for Six Years.'

Oh dear. How sad. Good bloody job.

How disappointing is to hear reports streaming in that are are oh-so-carefully-spun (there are more spin doctors per square metre in the Bella Center now than anywhere else in the world), but reveal nonetheless that the wheels are coming off the whole dog and phony show. It had all seemed so easy before ClimateGate, hadn’t it . . . yet we now have even Tony Blair admitting (as the ClimateGate emails revealed) that the figures on which the UN’s IPCC’s reply are “fudgeable.” Says Jane Jamison:

    “To hear a former head of state and global warming proponent finally admit to the ‘fudge factor’ of this discredited climate catastrophe theory is remarkable.
    “’Fudgeable’ figures are what the past twenty years of scientific furor is about. In the past weeks, the evidence showed conclusively that leading global warming researchers had e-mailed each other about removing certain results and changing others to achieve the desired "hockey stick" rise in global temperature predictions. They have refused to divulge their original data to experts for peer review.”

They have played fast and loose with science, and they’re now being bitten in the arse just when they most needed to be. Let’s hope for all our sakes that, as Jane Jamison puts is, this really is ‘Climategate TKO in Copenhagen.’

“The good guys may have won. Deep breaths, everyone. We won't know for sure until Friday.”

Conflict of interest? Not when you’re a climate alarmist [update 4]

The hacked ClimateGate emails “don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked” says a thorough word-by-word study by . . . Seth Borenstein, one of the very journalists whose cosy relationship with warmist “scientists” was exposed by the emails themselves.

And not only that, his dismissal of the oceans of hacked data and more than 2000 emails was based in large part on “reactions” from so-called “moderate” scientists, which those emails themselves showed not to be moderates at all but “full-fledged warmists.” As Andrew Bolt says, “Borenstein is sure the Climategate emails don’t amount to much because he asked global warming believers if they now admitted they were wrong.”

So much for journalistic integrity.

D’you think The New Deniers – who are legion – even understand the concept of conflict of interest? Or integrity. Or the first thing about confronting the real facts? Let me give them some advice. In fact, let George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, give them some advice:

Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. . . Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away. . . There is no helping it; Phil Jones [the source of most of the emails] has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. “

And AP’s science reporter Seth Borenstein has to go as well – if not from his job at AP, but at the very least from the pages of the Herald where his bullshit is being peddled.

Why not write and tell them so? It only takes a minute.

UPDATE 1: Andrew Bolt reports a similar theme from Aussie journos:

The ABC’s chief science reporter, Robyn ”100 metres” Williams, writes nearly 1000 words to dismiss the Climategate emails as a storm in a teacup. Of all those words, these are all you need read:

So what do the emails reveal? I hesitate to pronounce. I haven’t read them.

UPDATE 2: And Paul Walker reckons things haven’t changed much in sixty years.  Here’s peer-reviewed science circa 1945.

UPDATE 3: Maybe local journos are doing better than we think, at least at Newstalk ZB.  Petra Bagust, (yes, Petra Bagust!) put together the two scientists that Mark Sainsbury should have had on his Close UP programme recently: Jim Salinger and Bob Carter, over two hours last night.  Here’s the first hour, which was mostly Salinger, and here’s the second. (Scroll past the news at the start of each hour.)

And Kerre Woodham spent part of her Sunday programme harassing Jeanette Fitzsimplesimons. Good stuff, apparently. The interview starts around fifteen minutes into this this audio.

UPDATE 4: They faked the Siberian tree figures. They put their CO2 measuring meters next to volcanoes and exhaust systems. They warmed up the data in Wellington. They warmed up the data in Darwin.  They warmed it up in Alaska and Orland. And now they’re warming it up in Antarctica.

Crikey, it’s almost as bad as Bob Jones’ satirising The Beards in his novel Full Circle, in which a ship full of hookers parked up at the Pole for the winter to keep the Beards company raised weather temperatures to record levels by dumping hot water on the thermometers.

Warmist Witch Doctors [updated]

THE REVELATIONS OF CLIMATEGATE have bruised the Copenhagen conclave, but not battered it. Why would they, when everyone there has the same single ambition – which is anything but science.

But first, let’s just remind ourselves what was revealed by ClimateGate’s whistle blower.

Certainty, What Certainty?

CLIMATEGATE SHOWS THE LEADING warmists with their pants down – and I don’t just mean the free sex that delegates to Copenhagen are enjoying with their caviar wedges.

If the leading revelation of the entire treasure trove is the sort of jiggery-pokery exposed in the ReadMe file of Ian ‘Harry’ Harris and the fudge factors added to temperatures to jack up the temperatures of recent decade (and hold down those of the past), then the leading revelation of the emails published so far is that when talking in public the IPCC coterie and their model-makers evince absolute certainty -- “the science is settled!” they huff – yet in private they’re much more tentative. In fact, they’re downright uncertain.  Notes Robert Murphy,

The true signficance of Climategate [is that] . . . experts such as Lindzen, Michaels, and Spencer have raised serious critiques of the global climate models used by the IPCC, or at least of the conclusions that the IPCC has drawn from such simulations. In response, the IPCC’s standard bearers (such as the crew of RealClimate) have confidently stated that the consensus is in, the debate is over, there is no serious doubt about what the models are telling us, etc.
    “Now as an outsider with no formal training, I personally can’t truly judge these disputes. I can think of analogies in economics where the position of Phil Jones et al. is understandable. For example, a few years ago many critics of outsourcing were arguing that the standard economic case for free trade was based on flawed assumptions. Most economists–including me–dismissed these “dissenters” as making minor technical objections that didn’t really affect the final policy decisions, and worse they were feeding into the hands of politicians who cared nothing about economic models but wanted to pass pro-union protectionist legislation. So I thought it was certainly possible that the mainstream climate modelers were telling the truth when they said they had no doubt about the reliability of their models. Perhaps their critics–who may have been perfectly sincere–really were making mountains out of molehills, and worse yet were being used by politicians who didn’t really care about the truth of the science.
    “The revelations from Climategate have made me much more willing to believe the critics who claim that the global climate models cannot bear the weight that so many are putting on them.”

I think that’s true, and in their more honest public moments so too do the likes of Brit eco-warrior George Monbiot and even Aussie eco-worrier Tim Flannery, chairman now of the Copenhagen Climate Council, who admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."

They sure don’t, but they do pretend. At least when they’re out in public.

Instead of admitting it out in the open however, the high priests of warmist are instead circling the wagons. Like conjurers they’re playing with either misdirection or flat-out lies in response to the lid being lifted on their private doubts – or, like a little child or Al Gore, they’re just not reading them at all in the hope they go away.

Nothing to see here? There sure as hell is. What they most don’t want you to notice is the degree of their own uncertainty about their so-called science – their own knowledge that when you pull back the curtain on all their leading studies and assumptions (all the stuff backing up all the projections of disaster on which all the politics is based) it’s all held together with little more than string and sellotape and a lot of ‘white lies.’ 

Lies

MURPHY TALKS, FOR EXAMPLE, about the email exchange between Kevin Trenberth and Tom Wigley in which Trenberth stated, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

And so it is. But there was an even more jaw-dropping confession of their science’s uncertainty in that same email chain, [scroll down to ‘True Jaw-Dropper: The Wigley and Trenberth Exchange.’], and more examples in other Wigley emails of what Australian journalist Andrew Bolt reckons are scientists “choking on the deceit.”

As evidence, Bolt posts a series of emails in which Wigley

• attacks Keith Briffa’s hockey stick and tree-ring charade as “a mess,” which is being polite;
• expresses his concern over Phil Jones intention to withhold his data from outside study;
• tells off Mr Hockey Stick himself (Michael Mann) for sending a “very deceptive” graph, and suggests too many warmist scientists rely on “dishonest presentations”;
• and expresses extreme concern that his colleagues, the world’s so-called leading climate scientists, don’t appear to be properly addressing some very serious objections to how they address the Urban Heat Island Effect – i.e., the means by which modern temperatures are adjusted down (or are supposed to be) to account for the increasing heat of increased urbanisation – the importance of which was dismissed by Phil Jones in the IPCC’s report, based mostly on the now discredited work of a Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York.

And what did Wigley say when his bald statements going to the heart of his science were held up to the light of day? He thrice denied them. He said he didn’t say them. He said plain English was something else. He said data wasn’t destroyed when it and wasn’t withheld when it was; that what amounts to a record of his private doubts have “no significance”: that what he said he didn’t say. He went on Australia’s ABC and told a pack of lies to extricate himself and his colleagues from their richly-deserved opprobrium.

Andrew Bolt has the whole sorry saga.

Misdirection

SO THEY’RE LYING NOW in public attempting to cover up what they said in private. That what they’re peddling is literally Mann-made global warming. And to cover that up they’re now circling the wagons and pointing in all different directions, mocking “deniers,” uttering soothing reassurances, and talking all sorts of nonsense about one world government and the like simply to misdirect attention from the heart of the story: that the level of their private uncertainty about their science is as great as the skeptics’ public assertions of uncertainty – the chief difference is that the warmists don’t have their integrity.

The Pay-off

WHY DO THEY DO this? Why does their private uncertainty butter no public parsnips? Why does the climate bandwagon roll on regardless – right over the facts, and right over the real data?  The answer is simple: it’s power.  The answer is simple: it’s not science, it’s politics – as becomes clear when science and data not consistent with the politics are either suppressed or distorted or simply fudged to fit.

Don’t follow the money, follow the power.

It’s not about global government or anything so conspiratorial.  It’s all about simple human power lust. Climate scientists and politicians are natural allies against liberty.

Scientists want their research grants, true – CRU’s Phil Jones, for example, was sucking down 22 million dollars worth of those – which buys them more than just a good a meal ticket. But what it buys them chiefly is power and influence, celebrity and vanity, a place in the sun and a seat on a plane to every world warmist conference in every warming part of the world. 

And the politicians? They want the warmists’ science, no matter how tainted – a Lysenko-like science that gives them (they think) an excuse for socialism, central planning and big government. And what politician could resist such an invitation, especially when they get to play the hero?

Both the Witch Doctors of warmist science and the Attilas of politics need each other – and always have. As Ayn Rand noted,

Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other.

Attila and the Witchdoctor are a team, and have been for most of history – one the controller of men’s production, the other the controller of his ideas – one ruling his body, the other his brain - one preaching enslavement, the other carrying it out – one bearing a gun, the other bearing a parchment, or a clipboard.

Behind every King is his Priest extolling the ‘Divine Right of Kings’; behind every politician at Copenhagen is a Witch Doctor calling for action – for government action to ban private action. As Mike sums up:

The job of the Witch Doctor [has always been] to provide Attila with a moral justification or at least a rationalization for his continued rule by force.”

Neither the Attilas in their limousines nor the Witch Doctors eating caviar wedges are going to abandon that job voluntarily.

UPDATE: When Ian Wishart & Gareth Morgan clashed on TVNZ’s Close Up the other night, I and other bloggers said that while it was great finally seeing that sort of debate on prime time local  television, it was a pity that TVNZ hadn’t instead engaged two actual scientists for the debate.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer has gone to that trouble, putting two of the heaviest hitters in climate science head-to-head on his CNN programme to discuss ClimateGate, climate modelling and climate science: UAH’s John Christy (who collects the reference-standard satellite data) and Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt (who’s been running interference full-out on his blog since the ClimateGate storm broke).

Take-home message from Christy” when they say ‘hide the decline’ that’s exactly what they were trying to do – it even is in the computer code.” And then there was this exchange:

CHRISTY: “Our ignorance of the climate system is enormous, and our policy-makers need to know that.”
SCHMIDT: “Our ignorance of climate systems is very large . . . ”

And by the way, I’ve linked before to debates featuring both Schmidt and Christy in which the character of both men is starkly revealed.

• Here’s the link to watch Christy debating warmist William Schlesinger, and here’s my summary.
• Here’s a link to hear Gavin et al debating Richard Lindzen, Philip Stott, and the late Michael Chrichton, here’s a transcript, and here’s  my summary. PS: At the conclusion of the debate, which his team was declared to have lost convincingly, Gavin sniffily declared, "So are such debates worthwhile? On balance, I'd probably answer no." Guess why.

And just so you know, Gavin’s site Real Climate carries water for every single one of the people in those hacked CRU emails, as one of  them demonstrates:

From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Cc: Gavin Schmidt

guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we put up the RC post. By now, you’ve probably read that nasty McIntyre thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don’t go there personally, but so I’m informed).

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC comments as a megaphone…

You can only imagine the emails that are going around now that the wagons are circling.