The repercussions are starting to morph into political and policy actions, as this article from the Wall Street Journal reveals.
An excerpt.
'Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!"
“This quip by comedian Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" last week was a welcome break from the steady disclosures of science gone bad. So too was the instantly viral online video called "Hide the Decline," a mocking send-up of the scientists who tried to suppress data showing global cooling. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.
“Climategate began with the disclosure of emails and other documents showing how leading global-warming scientists had evaded peer review and refused to disclose data. Over the past week, there have been resignations and investigations of top scientists in England and the U.S.
“The British government is recalculating its historic weather findings in light of the now-suspect data from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia. Even the United Nations, which had claimed "unequivocal" evidence for man-made global warming, pledges that it will review the evidence.
“More details will come out as the leaked documents get fully parsed, but already one certainty is the end of certainty. The one-sidedness of the views of the most influential scientists had led many to believe in the gospel of global warming.”
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Auburn Dam
Those who are concerned about floods and water storage realize the continued need for the Auburn Dam, as this editorial from the Manteca Bulletin notes.
Also, the Auburn Dam remains a solution to ensuring the viability of the salmon in the Lower American River, as well as protecting the Parkway from flooding erosion, which is addressed in our research report.
An excerpt from the editorial.
“As water demands grow in Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, California will lose a portion of Colorado River water currently used in the south state.
“The California Department of Resources has offered three potential solutions — the political snake pit known as the Peripheral Canal, the long-stalled Auburn Dam, and raising the height of the Shasta Dam.
“The Peripheral Canal has long been the darling of Southern California metro water interests and the huge corporate agricultural interest in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
“Everyone in urban water planning looks at the amount of fresh water flowing into the Bay as a waste. Many farming interests share that position while environmentalists view any attempt to further stem the flow of fresh water as having the same impact on the Bay-Delta environment as dropping the atomic bomb had on Hiroshima.
“Save the water from flowing into the Bay. It is a dangerously simplistic solution. There are court mandates regarding salinity levels not to mention the protection order for the Delta Smelt. Salt intrusion has to be kept below a certain level or else the federal government hijacks fresh water to add to the flows flushing the Delta.
“If the Peripheral Canal takes Sacramento River water headed for Southern California and bypasses the Delta that leaves only the San Joaquin River system to make up for any shortfalls of fresh water. The most likely target for cleansing the Delta is the New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River.
“Raising the height of Shasta Dam is fraught with environmental concerns as is building the Auburn Dam.
“The Auburn Dam, though, can add the most storage and effectively handle one of the heaviest precipitation watersheds on the western slope of the Sierra. The reservoir could hold 2.1 million-acre feet — almost enough to meet statewide water shortfalls projected for 2025.
“The dam site already has had trees and vegetation removed and other improvements such as a foundation and bridges put in place. After hippies were unable to stop the dam from flooding a nude beach, the earth rumbled in 1972 to effectively stop Congress from authorizing the money for actual construction until seismic safety issues were studied further.
“The Auburn Dam — operated in tandem with Hell Hole, French Meadows and Folsom Dam reservoirs — offers a powerful one-two-three-four punch of expanding water storage and management for growing south state urban needs as well as enhancing flood protection.”
Also, the Auburn Dam remains a solution to ensuring the viability of the salmon in the Lower American River, as well as protecting the Parkway from flooding erosion, which is addressed in our research report.
An excerpt from the editorial.
“As water demands grow in Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, California will lose a portion of Colorado River water currently used in the south state.
“The California Department of Resources has offered three potential solutions — the political snake pit known as the Peripheral Canal, the long-stalled Auburn Dam, and raising the height of the Shasta Dam.
“The Peripheral Canal has long been the darling of Southern California metro water interests and the huge corporate agricultural interest in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
“Everyone in urban water planning looks at the amount of fresh water flowing into the Bay as a waste. Many farming interests share that position while environmentalists view any attempt to further stem the flow of fresh water as having the same impact on the Bay-Delta environment as dropping the atomic bomb had on Hiroshima.
“Save the water from flowing into the Bay. It is a dangerously simplistic solution. There are court mandates regarding salinity levels not to mention the protection order for the Delta Smelt. Salt intrusion has to be kept below a certain level or else the federal government hijacks fresh water to add to the flows flushing the Delta.
“If the Peripheral Canal takes Sacramento River water headed for Southern California and bypasses the Delta that leaves only the San Joaquin River system to make up for any shortfalls of fresh water. The most likely target for cleansing the Delta is the New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River.
“Raising the height of Shasta Dam is fraught with environmental concerns as is building the Auburn Dam.
“The Auburn Dam, though, can add the most storage and effectively handle one of the heaviest precipitation watersheds on the western slope of the Sierra. The reservoir could hold 2.1 million-acre feet — almost enough to meet statewide water shortfalls projected for 2025.
“The dam site already has had trees and vegetation removed and other improvements such as a foundation and bridges put in place. After hippies were unable to stop the dam from flooding a nude beach, the earth rumbled in 1972 to effectively stop Congress from authorizing the money for actual construction until seismic safety issues were studied further.
“The Auburn Dam — operated in tandem with Hell Hole, French Meadows and Folsom Dam reservoirs — offers a powerful one-two-three-four punch of expanding water storage and management for growing south state urban needs as well as enhancing flood protection.”
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Auburn Dam for Flood Protection, Graph
It is a good reminder, as Assemblyman Niello provided in a letter published in the Sacramento Bee, that the flood protection—from 100 year protection to 200 year protection—being touted from the Folsom Dam improvements are minimal in relation to what most river cities in the nation have, and especially to what we need to have, which is 500 year protection (the gold standard) which only the Auburn Dam can provide.
The graph says it all, and the print is small so the cities whose current levels of flood protection are listed, from the left are, Tacoma, St. Louis, Dallas, & Kansas City, who all have met the gold standard, while New Orleans has, after their recent improvements, a 250 year level, while Sacramento, in the red at a 100 year level, will have a 200 year level of protection after the Folsom Dam improvements.
The numbers on the left representing the level of coverage, starting from the bottom are 85, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600.
An excerpt.
“Re "Folsom Dam upgrade needs a new rulebook" (Page A1, Dec. 6): It's important to acknowledge the original intent of the Folsom Dam upgrade: flood protection. The article correctly states that "The project is expected to … double flood protection for the Sacramento region."
“It's also crucial for our area to know that after this project is completed, our area will suffer from the one or two lowest levels of flood protection as compared to other metro areas in the country. That's right, we will double our level of flood protection and we will still be about last place in the national rankings. In fact, most areas at risk for flooding have at least double the level of protection that we will have.
“We will never attain a level of flood protection beyond the inadequate standard with which we must suffer without the ability to store water on the American River above Folsom Dam. That was the Auburn Dam, which seems to have been concluded a dead issue by too many.”
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Environmentalism as Religion
This is an issue we wrote about in our 2006 research report, (see pages 19-32), and an article from the Wall Street Journal also finds deep fervor and apocalyptic visions within the environmental movement.
An excerpt.
'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." Is it not obvious that the vision of apocalypse as it was revealed to Saint John of Patmos was, in fact, global warming?
“Here's a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and "biocultural diversity."
“All this, of course, on top of the Maldives sinking under the waves, millions of climate refugees, a half-dozen Katrina-type events every year and so on and on—a long parade of horrors animating the policy ambitions of the politicians, scientists, climate mandarins and entrepreneurs now gathered at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen. Never mind that none of these scenarios has any basis in some kind of observable reality (sea levels around the Maldives have been stable for decades), or that the chain of causation linking climate change to sundry disasters is usually of a meaningless six-degrees-of-separation variety.
“Still, the really interesting question is less about the facts than it is about the psychology. Last week, I suggested that funding flows had much to do with climate alarmism. But deeper things are at work as well.
“One of those things, I suspect, is what I would call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar. Consider:
“• Revolutionary fervor: There's a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of "bourgeois" values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that "our lifestyles are unsustainable." Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that "civil disobedience has a role to play" in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.)”
An excerpt.
'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." Is it not obvious that the vision of apocalypse as it was revealed to Saint John of Patmos was, in fact, global warming?
“Here's a partial rundown of some of the ills seriously attributed to climate change: prostitution in the Philippines (along with greater rates of HIV infection); higher suicide rates in Italy; the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle in Somalia; an increase in strokes and heart disease in China; wars in the Middle East; a larger pool of potential recruits to terrorism; harm to indigenous peoples and "biocultural diversity."
“All this, of course, on top of the Maldives sinking under the waves, millions of climate refugees, a half-dozen Katrina-type events every year and so on and on—a long parade of horrors animating the policy ambitions of the politicians, scientists, climate mandarins and entrepreneurs now gathered at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen. Never mind that none of these scenarios has any basis in some kind of observable reality (sea levels around the Maldives have been stable for decades), or that the chain of causation linking climate change to sundry disasters is usually of a meaningless six-degrees-of-separation variety.
“Still, the really interesting question is less about the facts than it is about the psychology. Last week, I suggested that funding flows had much to do with climate alarmism. But deeper things are at work as well.
“One of those things, I suspect, is what I would call the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar. Consider:
“• Revolutionary fervor: There's a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of "bourgeois" values, a disgust with democratic practices. So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83% from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s—in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that "our lifestyles are unsustainable." Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that "civil disobedience has a role to play" in strong-arming governments to do his bidding. (This from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.)”
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Climategate Continues
As more time is spent on analysis of the emails that have shook the world of human caused global warming, the more cogent the thinking becomes, and this article from The Weekly Standard does not disappoint.
An excerpt.
“Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment.
“In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public--either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails--more than 1,000 of them--reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT's Michael Schrage, engaged in "malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings." In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, "Please write all emails as though they will be made public." Small wonder why. It's being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them "the CRUtape Letters."
“As in the furor over Dan Rather's fabricated documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the "fake but accurate" defense--what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don't you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. "The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. . . . I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them. . . . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely." Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.
“As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over the richly deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on dissenting scientists (NASA's James Hansen, for instance, compared MIT's Richard Lindzen to a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore and countless -others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the meaning of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU's Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails "do not read well." Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used "Mike's Nature [magazine] trick" to "hide the decline" that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU's work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than "hide the decline," expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists--otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming--there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.”
An excerpt.
“Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment.
“In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public--either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails--more than 1,000 of them--reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT's Michael Schrage, engaged in "malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings." In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, "Please write all emails as though they will be made public." Small wonder why. It's being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them "the CRUtape Letters."
“As in the furor over Dan Rather's fabricated documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the "fake but accurate" defense--what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don't you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. "The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. . . . I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them. . . . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely." Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.
“As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over the richly deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on dissenting scientists (NASA's James Hansen, for instance, compared MIT's Richard Lindzen to a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore and countless -others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the meaning of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU's Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails "do not read well." Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used "Mike's Nature [magazine] trick" to "hide the decline" that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU's work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than "hide the decline," expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists--otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming--there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.”
Monday, December 07, 2009
More Implications of Climategate
In this article from the Wall Street Journal, we get a sense of the impact this may have on the practice of science itself, and the politicizing of this issue can not be good news for the scientific community which we all rely on to base their positions on replicable data-based experiments and inclusive peer consensus.
An excerpt.
“Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
“I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
“Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
“What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.”
An excerpt.
“Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
“I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
“Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
“What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.”
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Sacramento Mayoral Politics Goes National
The largest daily newspaper in the country—the Wall Street Journal (they passed USA Today earlier this year)—has a story on the local politics around the strong mayor proposal.
An excerpt.
“SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- With California's capital city in deep economic trouble, Mayor Kevin Johnson wants to call the shots, just as he once did as a star point guard for the Phoenix Suns basketball team. But there's an obstacle: Sacramento has what is known a "weak mayor" system, making its mayor, in effect, just another city-council member.
“Mr. Johnson says Sacramento needs a "strong mayor" arrangement -- with the mayor as head of the government -- as do a majority of big cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. To get there, Mr. Johnson is campaigning for a controversial ballot measure that would boost his powers to lead this city of 480,000.
"If you have to do everything by committee, it gets bogged down and you miss a ton of opportunities," the 43-year-old Democrat said during an interview in his City Hall office.
“But those who oppose the measure accuse Mr. Johnson of making a power grab. "This initiative, if it passes, will put only one seat at the table," says Councilwoman Sandy Sheedy. "The checks and balances are lopsided" in Mr. Johnson's proposal.
]
“Mr. Johnson says Sacramento needs a mayor with clout to deal with its economic downturn, which has been exacerbated by furloughs of tens of thousands of state workers. The city faces a 15% unemployment rate, a depressed real-estate market, rising retail vacancy rate and a budget shortfall that is expected to hit $30 million for the next fiscal year.”
An excerpt.
“SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- With California's capital city in deep economic trouble, Mayor Kevin Johnson wants to call the shots, just as he once did as a star point guard for the Phoenix Suns basketball team. But there's an obstacle: Sacramento has what is known a "weak mayor" system, making its mayor, in effect, just another city-council member.
“Mr. Johnson says Sacramento needs a "strong mayor" arrangement -- with the mayor as head of the government -- as do a majority of big cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. To get there, Mr. Johnson is campaigning for a controversial ballot measure that would boost his powers to lead this city of 480,000.
"If you have to do everything by committee, it gets bogged down and you miss a ton of opportunities," the 43-year-old Democrat said during an interview in his City Hall office.
“But those who oppose the measure accuse Mr. Johnson of making a power grab. "This initiative, if it passes, will put only one seat at the table," says Councilwoman Sandy Sheedy. "The checks and balances are lopsided" in Mr. Johnson's proposal.
]
“Mr. Johnson says Sacramento needs a mayor with clout to deal with its economic downturn, which has been exacerbated by furloughs of tens of thousands of state workers. The city faces a 15% unemployment rate, a depressed real-estate market, rising retail vacancy rate and a budget shortfall that is expected to hit $30 million for the next fiscal year.”
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Importance of Climategate
The ramifications of this episode within the scientific and political community are and will continue to be, huge, and this article from First Things looks at its significance.
An excerpt.
“I have always thought that the global warming, or “climate change” debate, was as much about social psychology as science. Now we have the perfect example in the unseemly row over a thousand purloined e-mails to and from the scientists of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. It’s a significant scandal, and inevitably it is being called “climategate” (that ubiquitous metaphor). East Anglia is one of four centers worldwide which keep the more-or-less official records of world temperature and climate history. They were among the first to claim that human activity was causing global average temperatures to rise to dangerous levels, basing their claims on several research projects, notably on tree rings on an eastern Siberian peninsula; and they adopted Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph which claimed to show a sharp upward tick in recent temperatures. When pressed to share their basic data with other scientists, who might in true scientific method see if they could reproduce the conclusions, they refused.
“As I recall (and forgive my faulty memory) their lead researcher Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, told an Australian climate researcher whom he feared was skeptical, something like “I have 25 years invested in this data base; why should I share it with you who are only trying to find fault with it?” Then a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, showed that Mann’s graph was faulty and could not prove a sharp recent rise in temperature. And the Siberian tree rings turned out to have been cherry-picked (they weren’t cherry trees, though) to fit a premature conclusion, while most of the rest in the area told a different story. So the war was on.
“Now an enterprising hacker, unknown as of this moment, has released e-mails to and from the people at East Anglia which show some fairly surprising and dismaying unscientific behavior, dripping contempt for the scientists skeptical of the warming alarm and showing what appear to be attempts to manipulate data to yield a desired result. The unguarded, but now disclosed, ad hominem insults perhaps show the natural nastiness of academics whose theories, representing hard work and deep convictions, are challenged. It becomes personal. Maybe we can chalk that up to original sin. What’s really serious is the perversion of the methods of science to yield a result above all challenge. The CRU repeatedly refused Freedom-of-Information requests from other scientists for its data set. Jones and his colleagues discussed ways to manipulate figures and graphs to make the temperature record prove the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis. He even proposed organizing boycotts of journals that dared to publish anything that would undermine that thesis. And now all this shoddy academic, scientific behavior is on the public record, racing around the internet.”
An excerpt.
“I have always thought that the global warming, or “climate change” debate, was as much about social psychology as science. Now we have the perfect example in the unseemly row over a thousand purloined e-mails to and from the scientists of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. It’s a significant scandal, and inevitably it is being called “climategate” (that ubiquitous metaphor). East Anglia is one of four centers worldwide which keep the more-or-less official records of world temperature and climate history. They were among the first to claim that human activity was causing global average temperatures to rise to dangerous levels, basing their claims on several research projects, notably on tree rings on an eastern Siberian peninsula; and they adopted Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph which claimed to show a sharp upward tick in recent temperatures. When pressed to share their basic data with other scientists, who might in true scientific method see if they could reproduce the conclusions, they refused.
“As I recall (and forgive my faulty memory) their lead researcher Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, told an Australian climate researcher whom he feared was skeptical, something like “I have 25 years invested in this data base; why should I share it with you who are only trying to find fault with it?” Then a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, showed that Mann’s graph was faulty and could not prove a sharp recent rise in temperature. And the Siberian tree rings turned out to have been cherry-picked (they weren’t cherry trees, though) to fit a premature conclusion, while most of the rest in the area told a different story. So the war was on.
“Now an enterprising hacker, unknown as of this moment, has released e-mails to and from the people at East Anglia which show some fairly surprising and dismaying unscientific behavior, dripping contempt for the scientists skeptical of the warming alarm and showing what appear to be attempts to manipulate data to yield a desired result. The unguarded, but now disclosed, ad hominem insults perhaps show the natural nastiness of academics whose theories, representing hard work and deep convictions, are challenged. It becomes personal. Maybe we can chalk that up to original sin. What’s really serious is the perversion of the methods of science to yield a result above all challenge. The CRU repeatedly refused Freedom-of-Information requests from other scientists for its data set. Jones and his colleagues discussed ways to manipulate figures and graphs to make the temperature record prove the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis. He even proposed organizing boycotts of journals that dared to publish anything that would undermine that thesis. And now all this shoddy academic, scientific behavior is on the public record, racing around the internet.”
Friday, December 04, 2009
Global Warming—A Little History
This article in The American Thinker pulls together a brief history of the mistakes or misdirection’s—depending on your perspective—the environmentalists have been involved in with the discussion around human caused global warming.
With the latest email hacking as a reference, it is instructive.
An excerpt.
“The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It would be no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line.
“A short tour of previous AGW highlights would include:
“The Y2K Glitch. This episode involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists, a man who makes Al Gore look like a skeptic. (Among other things, Hansen has demanded that warming "deniers" be tried for "crimes against humanity".) While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, himself not so much a skeptic as an anti-warming Van Helsing, uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. McIntyre had no easy time of it, since Hansen refused to reveal what algorithm he'd used to process the data, forcing McIntyre to perform some very abstruse calculations to figure it out.
“Once notified, Hansen's team promised to correct the error, stating that it was an "oversight". When the corrected figures were at last released, they rocked the church of warming from bingo hall to steeple. Vanished was the claim that the past few years were "the warmest on record". Now 1934 took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WW II, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup.
“No explanation has ever been offered. We have a Y2K glitch that behaves like no other computer glitch ever encountered, uniformly affecting a large number of sources distributed almost nationwide. Although the incident trashed all recent data and raised uncomfortable questions about the warming thesis as a whole, NASA itself made no effort at an investigation or inquiry. All that we're ever going to hear is "oversight". I guess that's how they do things at NASA/GISS.
“The Arctic Ice Melt. We've been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years, depending in the hysteria level of the media platform in question. In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water. Everybody involved knew that this cycle occurred, everyone had seen it happen previously time out of mind. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern two years ago, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the "new" ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up. The media went along with the joke. The Germans have a phrase to cover such eventualities: this crew should be stripped of their trade. (Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.)
“The Poor Polar Bears. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming while, somewhere beyond the aurora, Gaia weeps bitter tears. This was evidently inspired by a single photograph (you've seen it -- the entire world has at this point) of a woebegone polar bear crouched on a melting iceberg. That bear had to be sulking over allowing a nice juicy seal to escape, because it was in no danger. Out of the twenty major polar bear populations only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000. The bears are becoming pests in municipalities such as Churchill and Point Barrow. (As clearly shown here.) Despite all this, last year the bear was put on the U.S. "endangered" list.
“The Hockey Stick That Wasn't. The "hockey stick" is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20th century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the "hockey stick" profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly-used media graphic.
“This chart creates immediate doubt in anyone knowledgeable about the climate of the past millennium, which more resembles a roller coaster than a straight line. It developed -- in yet another impressive McIntyre takedown, this time with an assist from Ross McKitrick -- that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks".) Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists.
“Tree-Ring Circus. Due to the fact that direct temperature measures for past epochs are lacking, climatologists utilize "proxy measures", such as tree rings, glacial moraines, and lake sediments. Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy, as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of measurements, utilized by Mann among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?
“The answer is twelve. A number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic, overthrow the capitalist system, establish a Green totalitarianism, and completely turn Western culture on its head.
“But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears into the same branch of the Twilight Zone as the blade of Mann's hockey stick. Another "oversight", you understand.
“We could go on to mention the automated U.S. weather stations chronicled by the tireless Anthony Watts, which were conscientiously placed next to air-con vents, atop sewage plants, in parking lots, and in one case, in a swamp (as many as 90% may be giving spurious high readings). The glaciers that are vanishing worldwide except where they aren't. The endless papers demonstrating that the coral reefs, along with various birds, animals, insects, and plants, are facing extinction even though no warming whatsoever has occurred for twelve years. (And in the thirty years before that, the total rise was 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit, easily within normal variation.) Powerful stuff, this warming -- it maims and destroys even when it's not happening.
“It's within this context that the East Anglia e-mails must be judged. The vanishingly small number of legacy media writers who are paying attention behave as if the messages comprise some kind of puzzling anomaly, with no relation to anything that came before. In truth, they stand as the internal memos from the East Anglia branch of the Nigerian National Bank, which can save us from the horrors of global warming after payment of a small up-front fee.
“There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then...”
With the latest email hacking as a reference, it is instructive.
An excerpt.
“The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It would be no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line.
“A short tour of previous AGW highlights would include:
“The Y2K Glitch. This episode involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists, a man who makes Al Gore look like a skeptic. (Among other things, Hansen has demanded that warming "deniers" be tried for "crimes against humanity".) While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, himself not so much a skeptic as an anti-warming Van Helsing, uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. McIntyre had no easy time of it, since Hansen refused to reveal what algorithm he'd used to process the data, forcing McIntyre to perform some very abstruse calculations to figure it out.
“Once notified, Hansen's team promised to correct the error, stating that it was an "oversight". When the corrected figures were at last released, they rocked the church of warming from bingo hall to steeple. Vanished was the claim that the past few years were "the warmest on record". Now 1934 took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WW II, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup.
“No explanation has ever been offered. We have a Y2K glitch that behaves like no other computer glitch ever encountered, uniformly affecting a large number of sources distributed almost nationwide. Although the incident trashed all recent data and raised uncomfortable questions about the warming thesis as a whole, NASA itself made no effort at an investigation or inquiry. All that we're ever going to hear is "oversight". I guess that's how they do things at NASA/GISS.
“The Arctic Ice Melt. We've been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years, depending in the hysteria level of the media platform in question. In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water. Everybody involved knew that this cycle occurred, everyone had seen it happen previously time out of mind. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern two years ago, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the "new" ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up. The media went along with the joke. The Germans have a phrase to cover such eventualities: this crew should be stripped of their trade. (Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.)
“The Poor Polar Bears. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming while, somewhere beyond the aurora, Gaia weeps bitter tears. This was evidently inspired by a single photograph (you've seen it -- the entire world has at this point) of a woebegone polar bear crouched on a melting iceberg. That bear had to be sulking over allowing a nice juicy seal to escape, because it was in no danger. Out of the twenty major polar bear populations only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000. The bears are becoming pests in municipalities such as Churchill and Point Barrow. (As clearly shown here.) Despite all this, last year the bear was put on the U.S. "endangered" list.
“The Hockey Stick That Wasn't. The "hockey stick" is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20th century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the "hockey stick" profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly-used media graphic.
“This chart creates immediate doubt in anyone knowledgeable about the climate of the past millennium, which more resembles a roller coaster than a straight line. It developed -- in yet another impressive McIntyre takedown, this time with an assist from Ross McKitrick -- that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks".) Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists.
“Tree-Ring Circus. Due to the fact that direct temperature measures for past epochs are lacking, climatologists utilize "proxy measures", such as tree rings, glacial moraines, and lake sediments. Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy, as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of measurements, utilized by Mann among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?
“The answer is twelve. A number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic, overthrow the capitalist system, establish a Green totalitarianism, and completely turn Western culture on its head.
“But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears into the same branch of the Twilight Zone as the blade of Mann's hockey stick. Another "oversight", you understand.
“We could go on to mention the automated U.S. weather stations chronicled by the tireless Anthony Watts, which were conscientiously placed next to air-con vents, atop sewage plants, in parking lots, and in one case, in a swamp (as many as 90% may be giving spurious high readings). The glaciers that are vanishing worldwide except where they aren't. The endless papers demonstrating that the coral reefs, along with various birds, animals, insects, and plants, are facing extinction even though no warming whatsoever has occurred for twelve years. (And in the thirty years before that, the total rise was 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit, easily within normal variation.) Powerful stuff, this warming -- it maims and destroys even when it's not happening.
“It's within this context that the East Anglia e-mails must be judged. The vanishingly small number of legacy media writers who are paying attention behave as if the messages comprise some kind of puzzling anomaly, with no relation to anything that came before. In truth, they stand as the internal memos from the East Anglia branch of the Nigerian National Bank, which can save us from the horrors of global warming after payment of a small up-front fee.
“There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then...”
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Data Thrown Out?
It appears raw data used to justify global warming has been thrown out, according to this report from the London Times.
An excerpt.
“SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
“It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
“The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
“The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
“The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
“In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
An excerpt.
“SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
“It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
“The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
“The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
“The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
“In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Climategate
This is a very interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, connecting the money dots and global warming supporters.
An excerpt.
“Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
“To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
“Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
“But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
“Consider the case of Phil Jones,[who has now steepped down from his position] the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
“Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
“Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
“And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”
An excerpt.
“Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
“To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
“Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
“But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
“Consider the case of Phil Jones,[who has now steepped down from his position] the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
“Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
“Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
“And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Worst Scientific Scandal in Our Generation?
That is what the UK Telegraph is calling Climategate.
An excerpt.
“A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
“The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
“Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
“Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
“Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
“The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.”
An excerpt.
“A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
“The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
“Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
“Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
“Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
“The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.”
Monday, November 30, 2009
Climate Change E Mails
They continue to roil the thesis and as more of them are brought to our attention and analyzed, it becomes clearer that the arguments being proffered that they are not an indictment of the entire process that many have used to convince a large part of the world that human technology is causing planetary warming, are suspect.
This Wall Street Journal Editorial comments.
An excerpt.
“The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They're ignoring the damage they've done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.
"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."
“Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.
“We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. He's right that it doesn't look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report said "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" Mr. Mann says he didn't delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.
“The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
“According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.
“This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.”
This Wall Street Journal Editorial comments.
An excerpt.
“The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They're ignoring the damage they've done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.
"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."
“Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.
“We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. He's right that it doesn't look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report said "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" Mr. Mann says he didn't delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.
“The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
“According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.
“This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.”
Sunday, November 29, 2009
16 Ships Pollute as Much as All Cars in World?
Yes, that is what this article claims and it is another in many strange government actions around the whole issue of global warming.
An excerpt.
“We've all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by funnels on cross-Channel ferries, cruise liners, container ships, oil tankers and even tugboats.
“It looks foul, and leaves a brown haze across ports and shipping lanes. But what hasn’t been clear until now is that it is also a major killer, probably causing thousands of deaths in Britain alone.
“As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.
“Because of their colossal engines, each as heavy as a small ship, these super-vessels use as much fuel as small power stations.
“But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use.
“Thanks to decisions taken in London by the body that polices world shipping, this pollution could kill as many as a million more people in the coming decade – even though a simple change in the rules could stop it.
“There are now an estimated 100,000 ships on the seas, and the fleet is growing fast as goods are ferried in vast quantities from Asian industrial powerhouses to consumers in Europe and North America.”
An excerpt.
“We've all noticed it. The filthy black smoke kicked out by funnels on cross-Channel ferries, cruise liners, container ships, oil tankers and even tugboats.
“It looks foul, and leaves a brown haze across ports and shipping lanes. But what hasn’t been clear until now is that it is also a major killer, probably causing thousands of deaths in Britain alone.
“As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.
“Because of their colossal engines, each as heavy as a small ship, these super-vessels use as much fuel as small power stations.
“But, unlike power stations or cars, they can burn the cheapest, filthiest, high-sulphur fuel: the thick residues left behind in refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land is allowed to use.
“Thanks to decisions taken in London by the body that polices world shipping, this pollution could kill as many as a million more people in the coming decade – even though a simple change in the rules could stop it.
“There are now an estimated 100,000 ships on the seas, and the fleet is growing fast as goods are ferried in vast quantities from Asian industrial powerhouses to consumers in Europe and North America.”
Saturday, November 28, 2009
California & Texas, Part Two
I posted on California and Texas a few days ago, and now this blog post from New Geography adds further insight.
An excerpt.
“I know there have been a lot of articles and references to Texas vs. California recently in this blog, but, well, there's a new one with some genuinely new contributions to the argument ("America's Future: California vs. Texas", Trends magazine, hat tip to Jeff). And it says some nice things about Houston too, so how can I pass on it? The beginning of the article is here - including an overview of both states' situations - but here are some key additional excerpts:
“...Both the Brookings Institution and Forbes Magazine studied America’s cities and rated them for how well they create new jobs. All of America’s top five job-creating cities were in Texas. It's more than purely economics and regulation can explain, though. Texas – and Houston in particular – has a broad mix of Hispanics, whites, Asians, and blacks with virtually no racial problems. Texas welcomes new people and exemplifies genuine tolerance. When Hurricane Katrina hit, Houston took in 100,000 people. Not surprisingly, Houston has more foreign consulates than any American city other than New York and Los Angeles.
...
“But, how did this happen? What’s wrong with California, and what’s right with Texas?
"It really comes down to four fundamental differences in the value systems embodied in these states:
“First, Texans on average believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility. Since the '80s, California’s policy-makers have favored central planning solutions and a reliance on a government social safety net. This unrelenting commitment to big government has led to a huge tax burden and triggered a mass exodus of jobs. The Trends Editors examined the resulting migration in “Voting with Our Feet,” in the April 2008 issue of Trends.
“Second, Californians have largely treated environmentalism as a “religious sacrament” rather than as one component among many in maximizing people's quality of life. As we explained in “The Road Ahead for Housing,” in the June 2009 issue of Trends, environmentally-based land-use restriction centered in California played a huge role in inflating the recent housing bubble. Similarly, an unwillingness to manage ecology proactively for man’s benefit has been behind the recent epidemic of wildfires.
“Third, California has placed “ethnic diversity” above “assimilation,” while Texas has done the opposite. “Identity politics” has created psychological ghettos that have prevented many of California’s diverse ethnic groups and subcultures from integrating fully into the mainstream. Texas, on the other hand, has proactively encouraged all the state’s residents to join the mainstream.
“Fourth, beyond taxes, diversity, and the environment, Texas has focused on streamlining the regulatory and litigation burden on its residents. Meanwhile, California’s government has attempted to use regulation and litigation to transfer wealth from its creators to various special-interest constituencies.”
An excerpt.
“I know there have been a lot of articles and references to Texas vs. California recently in this blog, but, well, there's a new one with some genuinely new contributions to the argument ("America's Future: California vs. Texas", Trends magazine, hat tip to Jeff). And it says some nice things about Houston too, so how can I pass on it? The beginning of the article is here - including an overview of both states' situations - but here are some key additional excerpts:
“...Both the Brookings Institution and Forbes Magazine studied America’s cities and rated them for how well they create new jobs. All of America’s top five job-creating cities were in Texas. It's more than purely economics and regulation can explain, though. Texas – and Houston in particular – has a broad mix of Hispanics, whites, Asians, and blacks with virtually no racial problems. Texas welcomes new people and exemplifies genuine tolerance. When Hurricane Katrina hit, Houston took in 100,000 people. Not surprisingly, Houston has more foreign consulates than any American city other than New York and Los Angeles.
...
“But, how did this happen? What’s wrong with California, and what’s right with Texas?
"It really comes down to four fundamental differences in the value systems embodied in these states:
“First, Texans on average believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility. Since the '80s, California’s policy-makers have favored central planning solutions and a reliance on a government social safety net. This unrelenting commitment to big government has led to a huge tax burden and triggered a mass exodus of jobs. The Trends Editors examined the resulting migration in “Voting with Our Feet,” in the April 2008 issue of Trends.
“Second, Californians have largely treated environmentalism as a “religious sacrament” rather than as one component among many in maximizing people's quality of life. As we explained in “The Road Ahead for Housing,” in the June 2009 issue of Trends, environmentally-based land-use restriction centered in California played a huge role in inflating the recent housing bubble. Similarly, an unwillingness to manage ecology proactively for man’s benefit has been behind the recent epidemic of wildfires.
“Third, California has placed “ethnic diversity” above “assimilation,” while Texas has done the opposite. “Identity politics” has created psychological ghettos that have prevented many of California’s diverse ethnic groups and subcultures from integrating fully into the mainstream. Texas, on the other hand, has proactively encouraged all the state’s residents to join the mainstream.
“Fourth, beyond taxes, diversity, and the environment, Texas has focused on streamlining the regulatory and litigation burden on its residents. Meanwhile, California’s government has attempted to use regulation and litigation to transfer wealth from its creators to various special-interest constituencies.”
Friday, November 27, 2009
Protecting the Salmon
The Sacramento Bee reports on an excellent new—and very common sense—program for helping salmon spawn in streams.
An excerpt.
“BROWNSVILLE – Little-known Honcut Creek is the one place where imperiled California salmon might be able to make a comeback.
“It's also where new logging rules soon will restrict how many trees can be cut on private land along this Feather River tributary, even though there aren't any salmon in its forested reaches.
“The goal is to protect potential salmon habitat by preserving shade along the creek – to keep the water cool – and to prevent erosion that could destroy spawning gravels downstream.
“The new logging rules were approved last month by the California Board of Forestry in a rare unanimous vote.
"The rules are full of new language asserting the duty of landowners to protect salmon and their habitat at all times – a major difference from old rules in which lumber production was the primary concern.
"This is a sea change," said George Gentry, executive officer of the Board of Forestry. "We are absolutely putting forward stewardship as a primary principle."
“Starting Jan. 1, private landowners in the Sierra Nevada will not be allowed to cut down trees within 30 feet of streams known to provide habitat for salmon and steelhead.
“In a second zone, 30 to 70 feet from streams, only 30 percent of the tree canopy can be removed. The seven largest trees on every acre must also be left standing. Slightly different buffer zones apply in coastal forests.
“It's a major change from old rules, which allowed landowners to remove half the tree canopy right to the waterline.”
An excerpt.
“BROWNSVILLE – Little-known Honcut Creek is the one place where imperiled California salmon might be able to make a comeback.
“It's also where new logging rules soon will restrict how many trees can be cut on private land along this Feather River tributary, even though there aren't any salmon in its forested reaches.
“The goal is to protect potential salmon habitat by preserving shade along the creek – to keep the water cool – and to prevent erosion that could destroy spawning gravels downstream.
“The new logging rules were approved last month by the California Board of Forestry in a rare unanimous vote.
"The rules are full of new language asserting the duty of landowners to protect salmon and their habitat at all times – a major difference from old rules in which lumber production was the primary concern.
"This is a sea change," said George Gentry, executive officer of the Board of Forestry. "We are absolutely putting forward stewardship as a primary principle."
“Starting Jan. 1, private landowners in the Sierra Nevada will not be allowed to cut down trees within 30 feet of streams known to provide habitat for salmon and steelhead.
“In a second zone, 30 to 70 feet from streams, only 30 percent of the tree canopy can be removed. The seven largest trees on every acre must also be left standing. Slightly different buffer zones apply in coastal forests.
“It's a major change from old rules, which allowed landowners to remove half the tree canopy right to the waterline.”
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Hacked Emails & Global Warming
The Wall Street Journal continues to produce the best follow up on the hacked emails from a human-caused global warming science group that appears to show methods being utilized to hinder, rather than further, full scientific review of the issue.
An excerpt from the editorial.
“'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."
“So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.
“The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.
“Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.”
An excerpt from the editorial.
“'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."
“So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.
“The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.
“Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.”
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Hacked Emails & Global Warming
This Wall Street Journal article really hones in on the implications of the information being uncovered on these emails we posted on the other day.
An excerpt.
“This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous debate but an attempt to suppress debate--to politicize the process of scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?
“It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation of the popular press's contention that global warmism is settled science--a contention that both the Times and the Post repeat in their articles on the revelations: "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument," the Times claims. The Post leads its story by observing that "few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate," and that "nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal." (As blogger Tom Maguire notes, this actually overstates even the IPCC's conclusions.)
“The press's view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused. But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific process, and a "consensus" based on the suppression of alternative hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.”
An excerpt.
“This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous debate but an attempt to suppress debate--to politicize the process of scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?
“It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation of the popular press's contention that global warmism is settled science--a contention that both the Times and the Post repeat in their articles on the revelations: "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument," the Times claims. The Post leads its story by observing that "few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate," and that "nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal." (As blogger Tom Maguire notes, this actually overstates even the IPCC's conclusions.)
“The press's view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused. But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific process, and a "consensus" based on the suppression of alternative hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.”
Monday, November 23, 2009
Global Warming E Mails
Now that the hacked emails have been available for awhile, the content is beginning to be explored and analyzed, and the results appear to be damming, with the major one being that there has apparently been a policy of not allowing contrary views to the narrative of human caused global warming—even though the contrary views are based on sound science—to be published in scientific journals, completely against scientific ethics.
An excerpt from today’s article in the Wall Street Journal.
“The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.
“The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.
“Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.
"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."
An excerpt from today’s article in the Wall Street Journal.
“The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.
“The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.
“Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.
"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."
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