Patterico's Pontifications

11/21/2009

Hacked E-Mails Appear to Indicate Global Warming Fraud

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:49 am



Ed Morrissey explains:

Controversy has exploded onto the Internet after a major global-warming advocacy center in the UK had its e-mail system hacked and the data published on line. The director of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit confirmed that the e-mails are genuine — and Australian publication Investigate and the Australian Herald-Sun report that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming . . .

Via Instapundit, there is a summary of the relevant e-mails. The author cautions:

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

I don’t feel scientifically qualified to have a firm opinion about man-made global warming, but you can consider me a cautious “man-made global warming skepticism skeptic.” (That’s not a typo.) I have seen bad arguments on both sides of the debate — and I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming.

But if the advocates of man-made global warming wanted to undermine their credibility, this would be one of the best ways to do it.

P.S. I don’t support hacking anyone’s e-mail account. But the leftists and the press didn’t seem to care much when it happened to Sarah Palin. Let’s see whether news stories are more concerned with how this became public, as opposed to the information itself. Why do I have a feeling the hacking is going to be the only story?

196 Responses to “Hacked E-Mails Appear to Indicate Global Warming Fraud”

  1. As a commenter at another site (Volokh, I think) pointed out, this is unlikely to have been a hack. Ten years of emails winnowed down to only 1000, none of which are of the “happy birthday/don’t forget tomorrow’s meeting/holiday pictures” variety points towards a leak, not a theft.

    Phil Smith (4e586c)

  2. I also saw someone say that the information had been improperly withheld from an FOIA request, which could subject people to criminal charges. That seems a strong motive for a leak by someone not wanting to be a scapegoat when the truth was inevitably revealed.

    Stashiu3 (44da70)

  3. I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal

    Just how much you willing to give up to do this?

    Since the earths tempature is not static, it’s either warming or cooling, which side get’s the most grant money?

    If is wasn’t for grant money, most of ’em would have to go out and get real jobs.

    Gerald A (e1b7c0)

  4. I agree that reducing actual pollutants is a worthy goal.

    The biggest contributing greenhouse gas is water vapor. No one is talking about how tor educe water vapor are they?

    CO2, which is a fraction of greenhouse gas content, and may very well only increase after warming has occurred, is the gas that is currently being used to scare us into drastic action by governments to prevent its increase. This is what I suspect is a fraudulent cooking of data in order for those with a vested interest in their theories of evil Co2 being true to continue on the gravy train of government and foundation grant monies and to maintain their alleged prestige within the scientific community.

    If Co2 isn’t really a problem, which is what skeptics are saying, then we should not be passing laws which single out the producers of CO2 for punishment or to shut them down. Nor should we be talking about our “carbon footprint” as if it were something to be ashamed of or to be eliminated.

    In other words, it is not worthy or laudable to pass laws effecting us all based on what are most likely lies in order to feel good about “doing something” or “saving the planet”.

    You might as well be saying “I eliminated all the pink elephants infesting my yard. You should too so we can save the planet”.

    SGT Ted (c47cc2)

  5. I agree that this was an insider action. They are always the most dangerous to the perpetrators of a hoax since they know the details.

    I think global warming is the consequence of sun activity and the trend has been down the past decade. There is new evidence that the onset of an ice age can be sudden, even months. We will see how long the present sunspot minimum will be with us.

    The story is very interesting and I have a series of posts on my blog, as well.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  6. ohnoes I think I just gotted expsoed to carbon dioxide tell

    my wife

    I

    love

    her

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  7. oh. *exposed* I mean… it’s gettong hard to typing all the lettrs so mny lettrrs

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  8. On noes! Teh Co2 is causing happyfeet to make typos! Quick! someone get a houseplant next to him to consume the dreaded greenhouse gas!

    SGT Ted (c47cc2)

  9. It will take a veritable indoor jungle to keep happy from making typos (sarc)…

    AD - RtR/OS! (444f28)

  10. I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming.

    I would agree with pollution; however, the notion that CO2 is (or needs to regulated like one) is a load of C.R.A.P. [carbon really ain’t pollution].

    Carbon is one of the most important compounds for earths life cycle. If you think government controlled health care will be bad wait until the government starts to regulate your breathing.

    Poverty is the worlds #1 killer, and the AGW crowd with its

    I don’t feel scientifically qualified…

    fellow travelers are leading us toward a path of economic ruin.

    Love your stuff, but if you haven’t read up on the subject then get a firm foundation before you try and put millions into poverty based on emotional responses rather than science.

    Alex (303885)

  11. Actually, ending poverty and overturning command-and-control economies (think: Soviet Union) – in other words, advancing Capitalism – does more for cleaning the environment than all of the laws and regulations that you can pull out of AlGore’s a$$.

    AD - RtR/OS! (444f28)

  12. That’s not an honest text, the one about global warmings. You have to want to believe for the narrative to work. It’s Castaneda like that. You can tell this is so by watching what happens if you ask questions.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  13. If this was an insider job, then I think it was probably either “Andy” or that “Mel” person that are mentioned in the emails as “unpredictable.”

    I saw on a science show once (Star something, I think) that we are “carbon based life forms.” Does that mean that we are carbon pollution??? Maybe only if we get aerisolized. (A little spelling help there, please.) Could it be that this new fad of scattering people’s ashes is warming the world?!

    Gesundheit (47b0b8)

  14. Oh my. This might get almost as fun as the ACORN videos from BigGovernment. PowerLine has a nice summary of the emails that seem to show the Hadly CRC people deliberately deleting emails related to a Freedom of Information request.

    http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024996.php

    Gesundheit (47b0b8)

  15. and I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal

    Mixing the nature of “pollution” together with that of “greenhouse gases” reminds me of the dumbed-down grading in the school system, in which the B or C grade of 40 years ago is the “A” of today, and the D or F of way-back-when is the new “C.”

    To think that something every human exhales every few seconds (ie, carbon dioxide) is ranked by some (Hi, Al Gore!) on the same level with sulphuric acid, or sulfur dioxide, or mercury, or carbon monoxide, or arsenic, etc, is ridiculous.

    The only (repeat: ONLY) thing worthy about reducing so-called greenhouse gases is the need to lower our dependence on foreign countries — namely, of the Middle East — for energy. Any other reason is foolish and will guarantee even more of a huge waste of time and money.

    Mark (411533)

  16. What kinds of illegal behaviors are justified in the pursuit of your goals?

    The estimated costs of mitigating “global warming” is in the trillions.
    But it’s OK because we’ll all be sorting our trash better and my car will be government approved just like the Trabant was.
    And that fat toad Al Gore will be a billionaire.

    SteveG (97b6b9)

  17. I think global warming is the consequence of sun activity

    Ironically enough, I’m very skeptical about the connection between CO2 and global warming because I’ve long disliked warm, or certainly hot, weather. And as someone who’s resided in Southern California all my life, I’ve seen far too many days of overly hot weather. That’s why I’ve long been interested in, and wary of, the causes of heat in a weather forecast. So it’s those big ridges known as high pressure, often hovering over the West Coast like a big butt, that I’m fully aware of and ticked off by.

    Have climatologists made a connection between areas of high pressure and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere??!! Not that I’m aware of.

    What is laughable to me are people like John McCain, a general supporter of the concept of global warming, who apparently likes living in a sweatbox setting like Arizona. Sort of analogous to the Al Gores of the world, so concerned about environmentalism while flying around the world in their first-class, fuel-splurging jet accomodations and living in their big energy-hog mansions, in Tennessee or elsewhere.

    Mark (411533)

  18. I’m certain most reporting will fall on the side of reporting the leak, since the subject matter is too obtuse for the average reporter and reader; theft is a relatively understood crime.

    Jeff Weimer (952d52)

  19. Patterico-

    If I may, my explanation on why the Global warming business is junk science at best:

    A mere 30 years ago, on the basis of temperature data from about 1900 to 1976 or so, a new ice age was being predicted.

    It had to have been a real concern, because I read it in the newspaper, back when editors made sure articlkes weren’t just nonsense like on today’s Internet. Forget this digression, just gets in the way.

    Then on the basis of 20 more years of data in the mid-90’s they decided, no, it’s not going to be a new ice age, the Earth is actually warming up.

    So at that point, somebody made the deduction, supposedly brilliant, that the Earth’s climate was going to continue to trend as it had the last 20 years ad infinitum.
    (In other words, forget that the previous 70+ years predicted cooling, and that even a hundred years is less than the blink of an eye in terms of geological time and you don’t have enough data to predict what the next winter will be like, let alone the next century.)
    Carbon dioxide was made to be the scapegoat because it was convenient and the data could be fudged.

    Let’s have an analogy. I see on my gas bill that it was going down nicely from last March through the summer. Unfortunately, since August it has taken a major jump. If it continues to increase at this pace, We won’t be able to heat our home 2 years from now. If only we could get the leaves to stay on the trees everything would be fine.

    Short-sighted, foolish assumptions, etc. If I don’t go crazy first, I will see next May that I was wrong, and I will be happy.

    The problem with the global warming folk is they have their data from about ’96 until present to show they were wrong, too, but it upsets them because they had such good plans for the predicted disaster.

    “Between Heaven and Earth” is the name I think of a thoroughly documented scientific explanation why it is all bunk.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  20. AGW is a morality play. Back in the innocent days of horse drawn carriages, the earth was pristine. Then came capitalism. Capitalism produces CO2. Get rid of capitalism and you solve the problem and we can go back to horse drawn carriages.

    There are a few problems with this theory. The Medieval Warm Period is one. That was before capitalism but the earth was warmer and there were farms in Greenland, now a frozen waste. How do we solve that problem ?

    The hockey stick.

    If they really believed the stuff about CO2, they would be building nuclear power plants and we could have capitalism, too.

    Simple.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  21. The anthropological globe warming hoax will likely go down as the greatest scientific hoax since the Piltdown man

    Ron Olliff (0503a0)

  22. My understanding is the institution is publicly funded hence the emails are not private nor protected and for instance are subject to FOIA requests, which they have systematically stonewalled. Consider the material “liberated” not hacked or stolen.

    jeff (d629fd)

  23. Re Piltdown man, a commenter at Watts Up With That coined Meltdown Mann.

    jeff (d629fd)

  24. …and the lamestream media yawned.

    Patricia (b05e7f)

  25. Has anyone noticed that the left has their panties in a real knot over the “theft” of the emails via hacking? I don’t recall any of the usual suspects getting all that concerned when the NYTimes published classified material in the (ahem)Overseas Contingency Operations (nee G.W.O.T.). Why would that be?

    GM Roper (6afe02)

  26. As has been pointed out, this is not a hacker but a whistleblower. Don’t wait too long to see that in legacy media.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  27. You climate change deniers disgist me. You prolly think the Earth is only 6000 years old and the great spaghetti monster in the sky created the world from some hoochie’s rib. Get out of the way and quit celebrating the daily rape and pillage of Mother Nature and let us caring people do the Lord’s work in saving the planet for the kids.

    JD (d0d3cb)

  28. As a scientist and a long time AGW “denier”, this data dump has confirmed suspicions I have had for years.

    It all goes to the old statisticians saw “Correlation does not imply causation“. What is striking to me, as a scientist, that if I had tried to pull any of that crap while doing my graduate research, I would have been drummed out.

    Predicting GLOBAL temperatures using a cherry picked data set of 12 TREES in narrow geographic region and then heavily processing the data until they got the result they wanted is ridiculous on it’s face.

    Then submitting it to “peer review” to a journal where they knew it would not get any serious scrutiny, while organizing a boycott of journals that dared to publish studies that did not follow the party line is academic dishonesty at a minimum.

    Then to conspire to avoid FOI requests and claim the “data were lost”, was probably a bit much for the insider who probably leaked the data and e-mails. And now the “lost data” is now found. The actions of the head of the CRU would probably be considered criminal here in the US.

    All I know is that the next time someone refers to the IPCC report, I’ll know to respond with:

    Oh, you mean the one where the researchers who were responsible for the so-called science cherry picked the data to promote their worldview?

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  29. Lord as in Gaia?

    SteveG (ece883)

  30. I guess we have to give JD back his sandwich-board so he can go back out on the sidewalk and warn the hoi-polloi how we’re all going to Hell!
    Hope he dresses warm, wouldn’t do to have someone warning of global warming being frozen solid.

    AD - RtR/OS! (444f28)

  31. where the researchers who were responsible for the so-called science cherry picked the data to promote their worldview?

    How about the fact that all the land temp sensors are at airports ?

    No urban heart island effect there.

    This stinks and always has.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  32. So will we find out who this new Daniel Ellsburg is? The NY Times spent more time on the leak than the contents. Yet they had no problem with the myriad number of leaks they published, without a bit of concern about the legality, of our major national security projects. Hypocrites.

    Dave (ffb1f6)

  33. The emails have a broader implication than global warning. They depict scientists strategizing about how to hide their internal disputes to present a united front to the public, and how to assist PR campaigns. Science corrupted by politics.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  34. Bradley, as you will recall, I have been suggesting this for a long, long time.

    I’m not saying AGW—I’m sorry, Global Climate Change—isn’t happening. I am saying that the people who are beating the drum about this, from Al Gore on down (and I mean that awful person Hansen in particular) are selling a religious/political view, based on a pastoral fable about Nature.

    Eric Blair (bc43a4)

  35. The Woodstock Generation: “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden”

    No, it doesn’t work that way.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  36. You know, I remember in the early 70s, when I was quite the obnoxious little tweener, arguing about “saving the ecology” with my father, who was raised on a farm.

    His father, my grandfather, was very patient with me. I miss him very much. My father had gotten fed up, and gone for a walk. My grandfather and I just sat on the porch. Then he asked me what I was thinking.

    “Why is everyone so stupid about the environment?” I asked him.

    “Kid, most people are just trying to make a living,” he replied.

    “Don’t they care about the planet?”

    “Sure they do. Their kids live there, and so do they.”

    “Grandpa?”

    “Yes, kiddo?”

    “You had the truck farm. Did you use pesticides?”

    “Sure did, kiddo.”

    “But they are bad.”

    “Okay. Did you want me not to use pesticides?”

    “Yes. They are bad for birds and wildlife.”

    “Fair enough. I like birds and wildlife. I just liked feeding my family more, back during the Depression.”

    “Did you have to use pesticides?”

    “Nope.”

    “Then why did you?”

    “Because if I didn’t, I would have need to plant four times as much, and work four times harder.”

    “Why?”

    “Because the bugs would have eaten my crops. And I love my family more than bugs. And if you love the planet so much, why aren’t you doing more work to clean it up?”

    “Well…”

    “Unless it easier to tell people what to do than to do the work yourself, kiddo. That’s what these knuckleheads and politicians like to do: make one set of rules for us, and another for them.”

    And that is how my FDR voting grandfather made me think about being a conservative and weak libertarian. The politicians don’t know more than we do.

    And when scientists become politicians (and Hansen and his buddies have become)….

    Sorry for the long post, but it reminded me of my grandfather, who was quite the character.

    Eric Blair (bc43a4)

  37. I am saying that the people who are beating the drum about this, from Al Gore on down (and I mean that awful person Hansen in particular) are selling a religious/political view, based on a pastoral fable about Nature.

    I recognize your long-time advocacy of this view of science. That is certainly true about Hansen, whom you aptly characterize. As for the others, peer pressure, groupthink and lucre provide a strong disincentive to challenge the dominant narrative.

    Science is supposed to be done in the open, with repeatable observations, and data shared with skeptics for confirmation. The Hansens, with their close-the-debate mantra, have taken the opposite view.

    (I don’t include Gore in this, because that demagogue has done no research, isn’t a scientist, so he shouldn’t be part of a scientific discussion at all.)

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  38. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
    Just read Drudge now and then. Some places have early snow. Cold.
    That ends the discussion.
    Life is simple, if you keep it that way.

    Palin/Lieberman in 2012

    Larry Reilly (45c8f2)

  39. Palin/Lieberman in 2012
    Comment by Larry Reilly — 11/21/2009 @ 6:28 pm

    I think that would be your worst nightmare.

    Stashiu3 (44da70)

  40. Mary’s contact must be back in town?

    AD - RtR/OS! (444f28)

  41. This reminds me of another recent “ecolypse” (I dunno, “ecology” and “apocolypse”).

    Who here remembers all the blather about the ozone hole around the Antarctic around 15 years ago? You know the issue that resulted in outlawing Freon. When they were getting little traction, stories started appearing that there was a NEW ozone hole forming around the NORTH pole.

    One they outlawed the use of Freon, the northern hole mysteriously went away. For a non-existent problem. How much did THAT cost?

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  42. Palin/Paglia in 2012 would be even better!

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  43. Dr. James Hansen and his magical mystery numbers.
    Surface Stations placed in spots where they are washed with heat.
    Sunspot Cycles and the Maunder Minimum.

    Pollution, I agree, is a bad thing, which is why I heart the hell out of nuclear power. I REALLY love those shed sized nuclear power plants. I’ve begun a campaign to get my home town and workplace to think long and hard about them. What a brilliant way to cut down on our pollution AND save money AND stick it in the eye of Saudi oil. It’s like the trifecta of awesome. People wig out over nuclear though.

    Vivian Louise (643333)

  44. Love your stuff, but if you haven’t read up on the subject then get a firm foundation before you try and put millions into poverty based on emotional responses rather than science.

    OK. If I ever decide to “try and put millions into poverty” I’ll make sure to read up on it first.

    However, since I have not tried to put millions into poverty based on an emotional response — nor, to be quite specific, have I indicated support for any particular program — please don’t imply that I have. Thanks!

    Patterico (64318f)

  45. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
    Just read Drudge now and then. Some places have early snow. Cold.
    That ends the discussion.
    Life is simple, if you keep it that way.

    Indeed, Larry Reilly, I have seen arguments that go very much like that. And I think they’re silly.

    Patterico (64318f)

  46. People wig out over nuclear though.

    …except the French. Go figure.

    Palin/Paglia in 2012 would be even better!

    Sign me up!

    Dana (e9ba20)

  47. I got your dream ticketright here: Nancy Pilosi and Rachael Maddow.

    I just can’t think of a good place to put it.

    ropelight (962db0)

  48. Mixing the nature of “pollution” together with that of “greenhouse gases” reminds me of the dumbed-down grading in the school system, in which the B or C grade of 40 years ago is the “A” of today, and the D or F of way-back-when is the new “C.”

    To think that something every human exhales every few seconds (ie, carbon dioxide) is ranked by some (Hi, Al Gore!) on the same level with sulphuric acid, or sulfur dioxide, or mercury, or carbon monoxide, or arsenic, etc, is ridiculous.

    But I don’t. I don’t do that. When did I say they were on the same level?

    I do think that emissions from cars both pollute the environment (come visit L.A. if you doubt me) and contribute to greenhouse gases, which I believe contribute to global warming (the question is how much, i.e. whether the effect is negligible; and whether that is counteracted by any cooling trends).

    Patterico (64318f)

  49. Cars pollute the environment, I’ll give you that. Ozone from fugitive VOC, NOx, and a little SOx (much less of a problem than it used to be).

    I do not count CO2 as a pollutant. Why? Because it is a byproduct and raw material for life. Contributing to life makes it not count as a pollutant.

    CO2 as a GHG? Eh. Figure the atmosphere is 360 ppmv of CO2. That is 0.0320% 0f the total (10,000 ppmv is 1%). The largest GHG is good old H2O at about 4,000 ppmv. And, I believe it’s a stronger absorber.

    But here’s the rub. Most AGW models look at CO2 and temp to be highly correlated. So, as CO2 increases there can be no cooling trend.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  50. Oh yeah, let’s not forget methane (in the form of cow farts) which makes up about 700 ppbv.

    Yeah, that’s parts per billion.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  51. Wow.
    I just downloaded the purloined emails, and even a short look reveals they are damning indeed. Especially damning is how readily other climate scientists go along with unethical/unprofessional proposals.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  52. Like Ace said, BJF, follow the money here. There are billions of dollars in AGW funding out there. Algore has obvious reasons for pushing AGW because he profits greatly, and while he is not a scientist, his stupid film had a lot of influence. Plenty of people will look at his Oscar/Nobel prize laden shelf and just believe him. Same with Hansen. Two total buttwads out for profit, economy be damned.

    I’m just seriously thanking God that these emails came out before the Copenhagen vote.

    Vivian Louise (643333)

  53. I wonder if we got back to labor intensive farming would not only global warming subside but wouldnt our waistlines go down.

    I mean hoeing up the back yard has its benefits..

    Just sayin…

    EricPWJohnson (5ea958)

  54. Vivian Louise,
    The intellectual dishonesty in these emails is horrible. One of them, suggesting potential reviewers for a rebuttal to a skeptic article, says:

    “All of them know the sorts of things to say – about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.”

    At the bottom of the email are the instructions for suggesting reviewers:

    3) Suggested Reviewers to Include
    Please list the names of 5 experts who are knowledgeable in your area and could give an unbiased review of your work. Please do not list colleagues who are close associates, collaborators, or family members. (this requires name, email, and institution).

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  55. “To think that something every human exhales every few seconds (ie, carbon dioxide) is ranked by some (Hi, Al Gore!) on the same level with sulphuric acid, or sulfur dioxide, or mercury, or carbon monoxide, or arsenic, etc, is ridiculous.”

    “But I don’t. I don’t do that. When did I say they were on the same level?”- Patterico

    I didn’t think that comment was a direct reference to you, but to “them”. And that is essentially what they say and want to do, to treat CO2 as a compound that is dangerous so only a finite amount can be made, and people have to pay money in order to make it.

    But as said above, CO2 is in small concentration, and the plants of the world need it as a basic building block of life.

    People need their BS detectors tuned up. Someone says “expert” and we fall down in awe.

    To put it in terms familiar to your world, its like someone seeing the number of homicides in a week in LA go from 0 on Monday to 4 or 5 on Sat, and saying that is a terrible trend that is going to destroy LA if nothing is done within the next month. And it’s all because Microsoft launched a new OS on Tuesday. You know that is a ridiculous way to look at the data and interpret it, and you may even feel insulted to think that someone thought you could be fooled so easily.

    That’s essentially what these folk have done. They’ve looked at a ridiculously small amount of data, ignoring most of what they have seen, then claim to be able to predict long term trends while leaving out many serious factors. Sorry to be a broken record, but to predict ice age in 1976 based on 75 years of data, then given 20 more years predict global warming, then ignore 10 more years of data that conflicts with your theory- the question is whether those involved have intellectual integrity but are simply irrational, or that they know better but have an agenda to push.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  56. I mean hoeing up the back yard has its benefits..
    Just sayin…
    Comment by EricPWJohnson — 11/21/2009 @ 7:42 pm

    Good thought, but the harder we work the faster our CO2 production would be. I mean, if they really want to control the stuff, maybe they will not only check car admissions but people emissions. Put out too much CO2 and, you need to be put out of use, swallow sand or something.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  57. Washington Post has a fair article on Climategate.

    Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

    While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate over the debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies. . .

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  58. Seems vaguely reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers. Of course, the media supported that leak because it was anti war. This leak, not so much.

    rudytbone (bf178e)

  59. Patterico did a sloppy job on this particular piece, stating that a Murdoch-owned newspaper “reported” that these emails constitute a conspiracy, and citing, without a link or quote, an Australian outlet called “Investigative,” of which I’ve never heard before.

    Owen (700941)

  60. I will accept that these people are really serious about AGW instead of a war on capitalism when they start to advocate nuclear power. No CO2 and more electricity. Electric cars are a reasonable approach to reducing CO2 from auto emissions. Wind and solar will never produce more than 10% of the power needed by a modern economy. It is a bit like the spending being proposed with no consideration of the effects of huge deficits.

    It is religion. They have not been serious about this and there is no possibility that I will take them seriously until I see practical proposals.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  61. “Hacked E-Mails Appear to Indicate Global Warming Fraud”

    Appear to Indicate? Next thing you know Patterico will be talking about Hassan, the alleged shooter of Foot Hood.

    John Henry Eden (9284aa)

  62. Owen did a sloppy job in attacking the messenger.

    JD (2efd28)

  63. If Owen has never heard of it, it cannot be credible. You global warming deniers are just like the flat-earth new-earth godfreaks.

    JD (2efd28)

  64. The director of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit confirmed that the e-mails are genuine

    Owen should learn to read or he’ll beclown himself again.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  65. Ohnoes! The message got out! Kill the messenger!

    Uhmmm, who’s the messenger? Let’s see, that would be Patterico. Oh, and also Rupert Murdoch, him too!

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  66. What’s this that burbled up in comment #59?
    Patterico did not prove that he is telling the truth, therefore he is lying?

    Let’s see you apply that same standard to our Chimpanzee-in-Feces.

    Icy Texan (565b5d)

  67. I have seen bad arguments on both sides of the debate — and I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming.

    Any policy on reducing pollution has to be based on sound science.

    No one is talking about how tor educe water vapor are they?

    If there were a translucent layer of dust in the stratosphere, it would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, lowering the atmosphere’s temperature, thus lowering the evaporation rate of the oceans.

    The only (repeat: ONLY) thing worthy about reducing so-called greenhouse gases is the need to lower our dependence on foreign countries — namely, of the Middle East — for energy.

    How dependent are we on the Middle East as compared to Canada or Mexico?

    Get out of the way and quit celebrating the daily rape and pillage of Mother Nature and let us caring people do the Lord’s work in saving the planet for the kids.

    Saving the planet.

    It is almost certain that another Ice Age will occur in the next ten thousand years. What will that do to the planet?

    That is certainly true about Hansen, whom you aptly characterize.

    James Hansen actually publicly stated that global warming could actually destroy all life on Earth.

    Read about it here.

    I will accept that these people are really serious about AGW instead of a war on capitalism when they start to advocate nuclear power

    Have you ever heard of breeder reactors?

    For some reason, there are none in America. I wonder why.

    Who here remembers all the blather about the ozone hole around the Antarctic around 15 years ago? You know the issue that resulted in outlawing Freon. When they were getting little traction, stories started appearing that there was a NEW ozone hole forming around the NORTH pole.

    It was complete bullshit for one obvious reason- the South Pole is not downwind from any CFC source. If it was, why does not smog also migrate all the way to the South Pole?

    Michael Ejercito (6a1582)

  68. Aren’t the people who were involved in this fraud subject to legal action. If federal grants were made there are government oversight requirements. With AGW being on the receiving end of $4B in annual federal spending, where are the audits?

    Intentionally making false statements in technical reports in order to continue receiving grants and contracts is a serious violation of the Federal Acquisition Regulations. These guys should go to jail!

    arch (0cb096)

  69. # 33 Brother Bradley J. Fikes

    Science corrupted by politics.

    While Eisenhower’s ‘beware the military-industrial complex’ is well known, what is less well known is his other warning to the American people in that speech given on his leaving the Office of the Presidency.

    http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

    Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

    In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

    Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

    The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present

    * and is gravely to be regarded.

    Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

    In other words, Eisenhower was warning us about the dangers of the scientific/political complex. We see that warning writ large with the global warming/climate change hoax and the massive sums in government funding it engenders, both nationally and internationally.

    RickZ (c06fbc)

  70. I’m a little disturbed that the host seems to think the ends (reduce smog in LA) justify the means (fudging numbers, spending public grant money to produce data built on lies)
    But it’s OK because I can see Catalina better.

    This fudging the numbers and conspiring to obstruct FOIA requests and audits has to be illegal.
    Some Enron people did less and went to prison

    SteveG (ece883)

  71. I have been following and participating in a discussion over a Volokh, and this gem came up:

    Yes it appears an inside job, the initial nick of the person that released them was FOIA and reasons stated is that this shouldn’t be hidden from public.

    The last date on an email message is November 12, 2009.

    On November 13, 2009, Steve McIntyre was informed that his FOI request for data, much of which is in this data package, had been rejected.

    That doesn’t “prove” anything, but it certainly suggests that an insider who was aware of the contents of the data package, because he (or she) had been involved in assembling it to respond to the FOI request, decided to act as a whistleblower. The probability that it was an outside hacker seems very low, at least to me.

    http://volokh.com/2009/11/21/nyt-on-hacked-climate-e-mails/comment-page-2/#comment-692175

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  72. BJF – I’m totally not surprised to see the dishonesty and downright criminality in those emails. Considering the bullying nature of the leaders of the AGW pack – of course they lied. If they hadn’t, and if they didn’t have so much to gain financially and socially, they would have allowed the scientific process to investigate the theory properly. Instead, doubters and the curious were vilified, had their funding cut and were mocked as “flat-earthers”. The only reason to do that? It’s a religion and they lied.

    AGW has always been about getting the little people (us) to throw our virgins (industrial progress) into the volcano. Always.

    Vivian Louise (643333)

  73. Vivian Louise,
    It sure looks like you’re right. A few years ago, I’d say you were wrong, perhaps paranoid. But the e-mails are impossible to explain away.

    Some of the emails, such as those expressing doubt in the evidence for AGW, don’t bother me so much. That is the sign of healthy debate. (Although the public should have been clued in about the uncertainty). What’s truly outrageous is:

    – Refusal to share data with skeptics,

    – Blatant pressuring of scientific journals not to publish skeptical research

    – Hyping research to coincide with a green organization’s publicity campaign.

    and the massaging of data to achieve the desired results

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  74. Mr Frey, when you say “and I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming.”, I think you mean carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. You do realize it makes up about 3 hundredth of 1 percent of our atmosphere. How much do you think we should be regulated, taxed and forced into higher consumer prices to control .03% of atmospheric gasses?
    Pollution, right on. Check out where we should start
    http://www.asianoffbeat.com/default.asp?display=993

    richardb (592499)

  75. I’m a little disturbed that the host seems to think the ends (reduce smog in LA) justify the means (fudging numbers, spending public grant money to produce data built on lies)
    But it’s OK because I can see Catalina better.
    [–SteveG]

    No where does Patterico hint at that. I’m not an AGW skeptic; I’m an AGW denier, so I don’t agree with Patterico on certain aspects of this. But for you to chop off your reference to what Patterico wrote in that fashion, then go into your little “let’s make stuff up” game is Gleeeeenwald territory.

    From the article:

    I have seen bad arguments on both sides of the debate — and I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming.

    But if the advocates of man-made global warming wanted to undermine their credibility, this would be one of the best ways to do it.

    Did you notice that sentence that stood out all by its lonesome? Or did you ignore it so you could go into attack mode? (After all, the ends (make fun of Patterico’s statement) justifies the means (fudging Patterico’s statements, ignoring his statement that falsehoods destroy credibility) for you.)

    If someone says “every river in the world is polluted and it’s gonna kill us all,” that person’s lie will discredit the person. But the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, so that river was highly polluted and something needed to be done about it.

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  76. Even if one accepts AGW theory, reducing atmosphereic C02 can be delayed 40 years, under a proposal made by scientists at Scrips Institution of Oceanography.

    Abrupt and potentially deadly climate change can be delayed about 40 years without the need for enormously costly cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new study by a team including scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

    Cutting back on non-CO2 contributors to climate change will push back the threshold for reaching a dangerous level of global warming, stated the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its authors include Mario Molina and Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the institution, part of UC San Diego.

    Strategies such as reducing the levels of black carbon soot, ozone and hydrofluorocarbons, and increased trapping of carbon in vegetation provide the “fastest climate response” to counteract global warming, according to the paper. . .

    One would think this proposal would get eager attention from those wishing to forestall deadly climate change. But they’ve ignored it and stuck to their narrative.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  77. “Electronic files that were stolen…”–WAPO

    Stolen? Says who?

    UAE FOIA Guidelines say…

    “5 key facts that all staff should know about Freedom of Information”

    “The Act gives everyone both in and outside UEA a right of access to ANY recorded information held by UEA…”

    “…As all documents and emails could potentially be released under the Act, you should ensure that those you create are clear and professional”

    http://www.uea.ac.uk/is/foi/guidance

    Kinda hard to steal something that everyone has a right to access.

    Until someone is actually convicted of theft, I’d use the word obtained.

    And, I doubt if the WAPO has ever printed a fair article in its entire history. All propaganda, all the time.

    Dave Surls (3f3306)

  78. From the FIRST link on the list
    “Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.”

    Link to the following

    “Dear Professor Haughton,
    > The email below was brought to my attention
    >by the help desk of UKCP09 – the new set of UK
    >climate scenarios developed for DEFRA. It was
    >sent by the person named in the header of this
    >email. I regard this email as very malicious. Dr
    >Boehmer-Christiansen states that it is beyond her
    >expertise to assess the claims made. If this is
    >the case then she shouldn’t be sending malicious
    >emails like this. The two Canadians she refers
    >to have never developed a tree-ring chronology in
    >their lives and McIntyre has stated several times
    >on his blog site that he has no aim to write up
    >his results for publication in the peer-review literature.

    > I’m sure you will be of the same opinion as
    >me that science should be undertaken through the
    >peer-review literature as it has been for over
    >300 years. The peer-review system is the
    >safeguard science has developed to stop bad science being published.”

    The examples of fraud and bias in the denialiists are legion.
    This is grasping.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  79. This one is the most amusing.
    “Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!”

    The response
    But we don’t need proxy data from tree rings or any other source to know what the temperatures have been for the last century because we have actual temperature measurements, measurements that are in accord with the red line. Therefore, there’s something wrong with the data McIntyre has chosen.
    scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/10/do_i_play_hockey.php

    Yes between tree rings and thermometers thermometers win!
    Do you really want to argue that point?

    bored again (d80b5a)

  80. boring again,

    So you’re cool with hiding information from skeptics and massaging data to get the desired result. That says a lot about the fraud and bias you’re willing to accept. But you’re a fraud yourself, so big surprise.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  81. Seems to me an FOIA request is not to be denied based on how someone wants to use the information or not.

    The public has a right to see it, and this person is exercising that right. TPTB have decided that they are the gatekeepers of who is worthy.

    And anyone outside of their cabal is unworthy.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  82. Dr. K.
    It’s even worse than that. The AGW believers in the emails openly admit their data would look bad if skeptics ever got ahold of it. So they keep it hidden. This is from Michael E. Mann, Director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State:

    … p.s. I know I probably don’t need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of “dirty laundry” one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things…

    Sounds like boring again’s kind of scientist!

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  83. I guess the ends justify the means for you. Which is fine. It’s your life.
    I want to see the planet clean and smog free. I enjoy it’s beauty… I just don’t think going through all the AGW crap just to get a little collateral benefit is a good idea.
    AGW proponents are trying to implement a massive top down imposition upon basic freedoms in order to achieve their agenda… and I’m not about to sell my self out to get the promise of cleaner air.
    We were on the path to cleaner air, recycling, cleaner water etc. before AGW became all the rage and I’m all for continuing the the programs that work without conflating them with AGW.

    Oh yeah.

    I appreciate your loyalty to the host.

    Go ahead and keep sloppily connecting a cleaner locality with the AGW agenda and data manipulation… it’s what they want and need.

    mmmmm mmmm mmmm

    SteveG (ece883)

  84. If anyone wants to searchthe emails directly I have them up (with email addresses futzed) on my web server

    FrancisT (2837cf)

  85. One day, SteveG, you’ll learn what “reading comprehension” means. Maybe you might even decide to try it out for yourself. In the meantime, turn that projector off.

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  86. boring again in 79 – I knew you were a fucking moron but you just proved it. The reason the AGW cabal did not want to publish those findings were because the tree rings and the actual thermometers were saying two different things. You use their cover up and say, “Well we don’t need the tree rings because we have thermometers.”
    But that is not the point. The point is that the tree rings and the thermometers are saying two different things. If the tree rings are not accurately recording temperature now (and in the last decades) why would anyone assume they did ever did so.

    Have Blue (854a6e)

  87. BJF@83:

    I know, I was just putting into simple terms for BA’s simple mind to understnd. Not that he will take the help.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  88. boring again in 79 – I knew you were a moron but you just proved it. The reason the AGW cabal did not want to publish those findings were because the tree rings and the actual thermometers were saying two different things. You use their cover up and say, “Well we don’t need the tree rings because we have thermometers.”
    But that is not the point. The point is that the tree rings and the thermometers are saying two different things. If the tree rings are not accurately recording temperature now (and in the last decades) why would anyone assume they did ever did so.

    (Apologize for the double post if this shows up twice.)

    Have Blue (854a6e)

  89. Understood, Dr. K.

    There’s a lot in those emails about manipulating the media. It reads remarkably like political operatives trying to spin their candidate/party.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  90. Blood Alcohol Content sure loves him some switching datasets to make false points. Switching from tree-ring data to thermometer data midstream is unsound from the start. But we all need to ignore that little issue and focus only on the results of the unsound start-off point. Yup, yup we do.

    When I was in high school, I had a Chemistry teacher prove Math teachers are wrong. She proved 2+2=!4 even though Math teachers said 2+2==4. How did she do it? 2 liters of water plus 2 liters of alcohol equals less than 4 liters of solution.

    Of course, Blood Alcohol Content wouldn’t see what she did. But that’s the point, right?

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  91. I think reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is a worthy goal regardless of the truth of claims regarding man-made global warming

    There’s no “public policy” component in the scientific method, as there is in law.

    I’ve been in science most of my life, and I am now a 1L in law school. One of the most basic lessons is that the law will frequently modify outcomes in the name of “public policy,” because the law serves as the regulatory function of society. To maintain the trust of society, the law needs to ensure balance between strict adherence to principle and the good of society.

    Science serves no similar societal function, and there is no room in the scientific method to modify outcomes based on public policy concerns. The data are to be evaluated through the cold, hard lens of objectivity. Period. Policy concerns are left to others.

    These emails show that the “team” at CRU (Climate Research Unit) and their associates appointed themselves judges of science. They modified the science to fit their views of the greater good. Regardless of how one views the policy situation, Mr. Frey, we cannot allow scientists to carry on like this.

    Robert Arthur (78adbb)

  92. #69, RickZ said, “While Eisenhower’s ‘beware the military-industrial complex’ is well known…”

    Ike failed to identify the third component, government, that makes it the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex.

    ropelight (502cb2)

  93. “If the tree rings are not accurately recording temperature now (and in the last decades) why would anyone assume they did ever did so.”
    It’s the difference between the long term and short term, the large picture and the details. You use the best data you have. Thermometers are better.

    The man who posted the emails has written a book on climate science. Who is he?
    “He is an Englishman who lives in rural Scotland.”
    I could write a book on physics if I wanted I guess, and even get it published. The fact that all I have is an undergraduate degree in the humanities and never even got so far as calculus is irrelevant.
    scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/on_those_stolen_cru_emails.php
    scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/the_hacked_climate_science_ema.php#more

    But then again I’m in the world of people who think Sweden is the USSR and Switzerland is China, that that Obama may be the anti-christ and the Sarah Palin is qualified to be President, that G.W. Bush did a good job and that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on 9-11.
    “If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.”
    carbonfixated.com/newtongate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-renaissance-and-enlightenment-thinking/

    bored again (d80b5a)

  94. An interesting exchange on a discussion that started on 18 November began with this:

    Clean energy opponents believe global warming doesn’t exist because that is the only way their arguments make sense.

    Me:

    Care to re-evaluate in light of the data that has been liberated from the CRU?

    Seems the folks there were conspiring to refuse to accept FOIA requests in violation of US and UK laws. That’s criminal.

    Seems they were conspiring to marginalize journals that dared to publish anything that refuted their claims. That’s scientific misconduct.

    Seems they were cherry picking data to the point of absurdity (estimating global temperatures from a sample of 12 trees in 1 geographic region). That’s scientific misconduct.

    But we are all fools if we question their data, their results, and their motives.

    The response from someone with a PhD in Chemistry who is a true believer in AGW:

    A couple of fools in the climate sciences do not discredit the whole field. Deal with the facts, not the personalities.

    My question back to him:

    That is a interesting position to take once you consider that the folks involved are the Phil Jones of the CRU and Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame. These are the vanguard of the AGW crowd. We are not discussing some low level grad students behind this stuff. These are the guys vetting the information for the IPCC reports.

    So, please let us all know: Are they “fools” or “respected researchers”?

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  95. boring again – And again you prove you are a moron.

    Read carefully – I will type slowly so you can understand.

    If tree rings do not accurately reflect the recent past temperature record (and they don’t) THEN THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THEY EVER DID.

    Just because Mann, Jones, et al can force a curve out of cherrypicked data that matches the reconstruction they want to tell does not make that srory the truth.
    The fact that they refuse to show all of the data actually makes their reconstruction less credible.

    Have Blue (854a6e)

  96. bored again,

    if you can show me you are interested in intellectually honest dialogue I would be happy to respond, but if you are purposely being dense to give others a hard time, or really are that dense to not see the implications of what is said, there is no reason for us to bother
    (yes, yes, gang, I think he has demonstrated this way beyond satisfaction before)

    94.“If the tree rings are not accurately recording temperature now (and in the last decades) why would anyone assume they did ever did so.”
    It’s the difference between the long term and short term, the large picture and the details. You use the best data you have. Thermometers are better

    First of all, in the grand scheme of things, all they have is short term data, short term data that can say anything you want it to depending on which 20 year segment of the last century you want to pick (but if you want to show evidence for AGW, don’t include the last 15).

    Second, looking at current tree rings and looking for a correlation with temperatures over the last 50-100 years would show the soundness or error of using tree rings in the past to support anything.

    Third of all, I don’t know anyone with a brain that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and if you think that is why Bush decided to invade Iraq you are, indeed, either willfully or unwillfully stupid.

    As far as Sarah Palin being qualified to run the United States, at least she ran a state that is prosperous and is not in need of a bailout, while the only thing that Obama has run, that we know of, is:
    1. A household that needed help from a convicted felon to afford a mortgage for their new house
    2. A non-profit eduction foundation in Chicago responsible for over $100 million dollars that he left off of his resume
    and
    3. A campaign made successful by laundering contributions through untraceable credit card pledges

    and with that level of expereince, he is trying not only to run the US, but the US auto industry, the US health care system, the internal affairs of Iran and Honduras, the world’s climate, and the ocean level.

    Tell ya what, I’ll let him prove himself by doing just one of them- when he shows me he can control the world’s ocean level then I will let him run the US and anything else he wants to.

    Everybody knows that Al Gore will make a time travel machine in 2011, and then/will went back in time to tell Newton about Calculus. Every historian of science knows that Newton was too bust writing on theology to have done any serious science or mathematics.

    My goodness, what do they teach in schools nowadays?

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  97. The other facts that board will never understand is that not all tree rings supported the thesis so they used less than a third of them. They cherry picked data.

    Also, the land temperature monitors have shown warming while the sea monitors and the satellite monitors have not. The land monitors are all at airports which have lots of asphalt which is black and tend to be close to urban areas that have been growing. They call it “urban heat island effect.”

    There was a mini-scandal, which seems to have gotten hard to find recently, with a Chinese researcher who was supposed to be monitoring the land monitor stations in China. It turned out that he was in the US and hadn’t visited China in years even though he was being paid to supervise those stations.

    There has been a lot of small scandals in this thing that were passed over but might get more attention now.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  98. The Times has a typically clueless story on this focusing on the cap and tax bill.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  99. I have an idea. Let’s use tree rings from this one tree and forget about the other trees for this section and let’s use actual temperature data from suspect locations for this section over here. And while we’re at it, let’s use estimated temperatures for this time-span and this locale and let’s use actuall temperatures for this different time-span and locale.

    We don’t need no static baseline. We can use a floating, ever-changing baseline to bend the material to our will. And the poor saps will never know what hit them. But, let’s keep this on the down-low, alright?

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  100. The little president man is too cowardly to pursue his marxist climate change scheme right now. Him used to be really ballsy but now’s just quivering in fear. Dunno what happened.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  101. I do think that emissions from cars both pollute the environment (come visit L.A. if you doubt me) and contribute to greenhouse gases, which I believe contribute to global warming

    Pat, I won’t say you equate CO2 with traditional forms of pollution associated with automobiles, but if you truly do believe what we drive is somehow affecting the Earth’s temperatures — and I’d suspect that most who buy into that wouldn’t deem that a good thing — then are you really so far removed from those environmentalists who have ratcheted up (or dumbed down) the definition of pollution? IOW, are you necessarily very different from, or less squishy than, the way that a John McCain or Lindsey Graham would like to handle this particular controversy?

    I know fans of the idea of AGW believe that CO2 pumped into the atmosphere creates sort of a lid around our planet, resulting in a one-way pattern of the energy from the sun to enter but not depart. Well, how about the noticeable heat hovering around any vehicle’s engine to be just as much the cause, if not the greater one, of an increase in the heat of the Earth’s atmosphere? Sort of similar to the way that a large group of people gathered in a room will cause its temperature to rise.

    Such a theory wouldn’t be anymore off-the-wall than a theory based on the notion that manmade CO2 has a greater effect on Earth than the tremendous, powerful energy from the sun or, again, the areas of high pressure (and resulting compressional heating) that have been naturally floating in the atmosphere since well before the arrival of human beings.

    Mark (411533)

  102. It’s becoming obvious that the scientific community is about as honest as the politicians who fund them.

    At the very least, all papers published using government grant money should be required to release all data used to construct the report.

    Neo (7830e6)

  103. Patrick, I didn’t say anything before but if you think LA air is polluted, you should have been here in 1956 when I arrived.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  104. The love of money is the root of all manner of evil-
    even for scientists.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  105. Jumping in from about half-way back….
    There seems to be a lot of concern about the emissions from vehicles (Patterico in particular made this point) but, how many of you have actually looked at the results from your last Smog-Check?
    As someone who operated a repair garage for 20+-years, I think I have some familiarity with this problem (also, as someone who lived in Los Angeles County when they banned back-yard incinerators and the use of smudge-pots, which would solve the smog problem forever more, at least that is what they promised us).

    At my last Smog-Check (every two years for most gasoline-powered vehicles in Coastal CA), the following standards were in place:
    Hydrocarbons (HC):……… Max…122ppm…..Measured…65ppm…Avg…35;
    Carbon Monoxide (CO):….Max…0.72%…….Measured…0.37%…Avg…o.11;
    Oxides of Nitrogen (NO): Max…1010ppm…Measured…580ppm…Avg…332.

    Now, these numbers reflect a properly operating emissions system with a funcioning catalytic converter –
    and this was a PASS!, in a ’90 Chevy Astro van.

    Also measured were the tail-pipe levels of Oxygen (O2) and Carbon Di-Oxide (CO2): These were 0.1% & 15.2%, respectively.

    A “cat”, whey functioning properly, chemically breaks down the unburned HC, and CO (which is a natural exhaust product of combustion), and takes the component parts and combines them into O2, and CO2, and water-vapor (H2O – which is why modern exhaust systems have a very high proportion of stainless-steel components, or very effective coatings to prevent rusting).

    Without that working “cat”, the HC & CO numbers would be much higher; without proper mixture control the O2 number is usually much higher also – reflecting in-effecient combustion; and the CO2 number is much smaller, and H2O is virtually non-existent.

    As an engine tuner, what we try to do to insure maximum combustion efficiency, is to get HC & O2 as close to zero as possible, with CO2 as close to the “Stoichiometric Value” of combustion (that measurement of the proportion of oxygen and fuel – by weight – that ensures proper combustion) which is approx 14.7:1.

    Prior to “cats” and digital fuel-injection, it was extremely difficult – if not impossible on a practical level – to attain these numbers.

    The Los Angeles Basin has topographical, and meterological features that make the elimination of “smog” virtually impossible, which is why we still have “bad air” days. If you doubt the undoable, I would refer you to Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and his description of Los Angeles when he landed at San Pedro Bay in the early 1800’s.

    As to the “Hole in the Ozone”…
    This was always a joke, since it was a naturally occurring phenomona, and was just another “crisis” driven by the need for funding in the research community.
    We were sold the need to replace R-12 with replacements that were not as effective, and are now determined to be just as toxic. Plus, a great deal of our emissions regulation is to eliminate the creation of “ozone” in urban areas (BAD ozone), yet we had to eliminate a compound that was found to be destructive of “ozone” in the upper atmosphere (GOOD ozone). So, we are prevented from creating ozone at ground-level which would eventually migrate to the upper atmosphere, where it may(or may not) be destroyed by some other compound in world-wide use in refridgeration systems that contribute to us having the highest standard of living in human history.
    And, it’s basically all about the quest for research bucks!

    Are we crazy?

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  106. AD, those big enviro issues were always supported by the corporations that stood to gain, like the people who made the non-freon refrigerants and GE which has lots of “Green” technology ready to go once cap and tax passes. It’s not big guy vs little guy. It’s which big guy gets the gold.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  107. Yeah Mike, I know.
    I used to climb the walls arguing with other shop owners about the smog-inspection program, telling them that they were giving up a small bit of their freedom and independence for the possible increase in business from the program.
    They looked at me like I was speaking to them in Urdu; until they had to undergo an undercover-inspection from the Bureau of Automotive Repair, trying to trap them for contravening the regs.
    Once that happened, they understood; but of course, it was too late then.

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  108. 1- In the gotcha graph the changes are over a 20 year period on a graph covering 1402-1995.

    2- “I don’t know anyone with a brain that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and if you think that is why Bush decided to invade Iraq you are, indeed, either willfully or unwillfully stupid.”

    http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html
    2003
    “Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either “most” or “some” of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.”

    zogby.com/news/readnews.cfm?ID=1075
    2006 POLL OF US MILITARY
    According to Mr. Kull of PIPA, there is a strong correlation between those who see the Sept. 11-Iraq connection and those who support going to war.”

    The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

    3-“As far as Sarah Palin being qualified to run the United States, at least she ran a state that is prosperous and is not in need of a bailout”

    seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008154532_webpalin02m.ht
    “Palin’s earmark requests: more per person than any other state”

    abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=8294637
    Alaska Lawmakers Override Palin Veto
    “Lawmakers barely met the three-fourths majority threshold needed for the override, voting 45-14 to accept the money for the state, which holds much of the nation’s hydrocarbon wealth but also experiences its highest energy costs.
    Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said residents of rural communities were crying out for relief. He heard from some of them in a trip to Tanana, a Yukon River town of 250, where high energy costs were exacerbated this spring by flooding that damaged homes and businesses.
    “We heard tearful pleas for help in that community,” he said.”

    4-Obama “A campaign made successful by laundering contributions through untraceable credit card pledges”
    Wow, and I thought it was ACORN
    “McCain camp hits up Russian envoy”
    politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0808/McCain_campaign_to_return_money_raised_by_foreign_national.html?showall
    “McCain campaign to return money raised by foreign national”
    politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0808/McCain_campaign_to_return_money_raised_by_foreign_national.html?showall
    Politics is dirty business.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  109. …and another thing:
    For those who are concerned about not being able to “see Catalina”, it used to be (in an age of wooden, flat-bottomed cabin-cruisers) that the governing motto for voyages to Catalina was:
    If you can see Catalina, don’t go!”
    Which meant that when the visual was good, the weather on-the-water would be terrible (rough seas and high winds) and a less-than-desirable- voyage. With the improvements in boat design and construction, the voyage will be more comfortable, but those conditions will still prevail.
    But, when you ensconced within your hilltop manse above PV, you really don’t care about the “little people” who have to get out-and-about in the real environment.
    Heh?

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  110. “…you are ensconced…”

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  111. speaking of warmings what are hot

    are the swedish ones

    they press trigger they don’t press people button… yeah I know it’s a remake but the original sucks ass and also they aren’t swedish I don’t think. Maybe I guess.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  112. The data are to be evaluated through the cold, hard lens of objectivity. Period. Policy concerns are left to others.

    Precisely. It’s a church-state issue. Scientists, whose livelihoods and reputations depend on their research, should not be advocating political policy based on their research. The temptation to cheat — to further their careers with politics, not science — is too great.

    Here is another interesting letter. In it, a scientist at Scripps in La Jolla, Richard Somerville, objects to an editorial and article in New Scientist as “factually incorrect in many important respects,” and “shoddy and prejudiced journalism” — but fails to name any errors.

    Somerville urges colleagues to sign a protest letter, but says “I think it would be a mistake to attempt a detailed point-by-point discussion, which would provoke further criticism; that process would never converge.”

    If Somerville is so confident of the facts, why wouldn’t he want a point-by-point discussion of the errors?

    A NYT profile of Somerville has the revealing title, The Road from Climate Science to Climate Advocacy.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  113. 4-Obama “A campaign made successful by laundering contributions through untraceable credit card pledges”
    Wow, and I thought it was ACORN

    No, it was millions of untraceable donations by credit card after the web site turned off basic validation features. There were donations from all sorts of fake names (maybe that’s where the fake Congress districts came from) and locations. To this day we don’t know where the money came from and we never will unless some Obama minion does a Climate Research Unit leak on them.

    ACORN was in charge of vote fraud, not donations.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  114. 109.1- In the gotcha graph the changes are over a 20 year period on a graph covering 1402-1995.
    I thought you were talking about actual recorded temperature data. Where are the recordings from 1560 to 1575. You changed the issues.

    2- “I don’t know anyone with a brain that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and if you think that is why Bush decided to invade Iraq you are, indeed, either willfully or unwillfully stupid.”

    “Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either “most” or “some” of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.” etc.

    Perhaps I should have said no informed and thinking person. Your comment, in the context of those present, has little to do with what polls of the population show. (Those show, as we know, that vast numbers of the populace are very poorly informed, either because of what they watch or what they understand of it. They would be more informed if they visited here).

    I was assuming we were talking about present company, who know that the outline of why we invaded Iraq as given by President Bush had much more to do with dealing with a rogue nation that was violating terms of a cease-fire for over 10 years in a time where conventional defenses of distance and military greatly minimized threats to the US proper.

    3-”As far as Sarah Palin being qualified to run the United States, at least she ran a state that is prosperous and is not in need of a bailout”

    I’m not chasing down your references and verifying the information for you. Is Alaska as a state in a fiscally distressed or sound condition, especially if compared to states with Democrats in charge of both executive and legislative branches of government? That was my point, disprove it, not bring in extraneous material. When I go fishing it’s not for red herring.

    4-Obama “A campaign made successful by laundering contributions through untraceable credit card pledges”
    Comment by bored again — 11/22/2009 @ 1:05 pm

    Again, enough red herring for a canning factory. The point was comparing Palin’s ability to run something compared to Obama’s. You try to defend Obama by making claims about McCain. McCain was not in our discussion and you can’t blame Palin for what the McCain campaign did or didn’t do. And even if you did successfully defend Obama on this one point, 1/3 is good as a batting average, but not in defending the one you’ve been waiting for.

    And I thought of another two, Palin’s being a successful mayor (better experience than being a state legislator who can say “present”), and managing her husband’s commercial fishing business.

    When you want to address an argument on point I’ll pay attention.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  115. Another goodie:
    From: Ben Santer
    To: P.Jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
    Subject: Re: FYI
    Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:58:29 -0700
    Reply-to: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

    Dear Phil,
    I looked at some of the stuff on the Climate Audit web site. I’d really like to talk to a few of these “Auditors” in a dark alley. They seem to have no understanding of how science is actually done – no appreciation of the fact that uncertainty is an integral part of what we do.

    Mmmmmmmm . . . could that be because they keep saying the science is settled? Here’s Ben Santer in a cartoon about global warming, which sure doesn’t seem uncertain. Of course, it’s aimed at kids. When there’s a planet to save, who cares about accuracy?

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  116. ACORN was in charge of vote fraud, not donations.
    Comment by Mike K — 11/22/2009 @ 1:41 pm

    Thanks for the contribution. Hard to handle a discussion on one’s own when it is so slippery.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  117. “no understanding of how science is actually done”

    Indeed, that’s the oft used statement of the high priests.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  118. MD in Philly,
    The AGW cartoon nearly made me vomit my wonderful Stone IPA. It is naked indoctrination, aimed at those who don’t have the education to resist. AGW is not entirely a fraud, but I’ve reluctantly concluded that fraud is a significant part of it.

    Nothing the AGW deniers could say was quite so devastating to my remaining confidence in AGW theory as the uncensored words of the AGW zealots when they thought no one but the faithful was listening.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  119. “no understanding of how science is actually done”

    Sounds like “science” needs to be added to “sausage making” and “legislation” as things that should not be observed
    (if you want to keep your lunch down).

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  120. AD – RtR/OS!,
    To the contrary, this sickening evidence of coverup and fraud is precisely why science needs to be practiced in the open. All the data, all the code, needs to be made public so those eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil skeptics can give it their best shot. This should be a requirement of any taxpayer-funded research.

    This email, for example, reeks of fear that data might get out of their hands:

    From: Phil Jones
    To: Tom Wigley
    Subject: Re: FOIA
    Date: Fri Jan 21 15:20:06 2005
    Cc: Ben Santer

    Tom,
    I’ll look at what you’ve said over the weekend re CCSP. I don’t know the other panel members. I’ve not heard any more about it since agreeing a week ago. As for FOIA Sarah isn’t technically employed by UEA and she will likely be paid by Manchester Metropolitan University. I wouldn’t worry about the code. If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them. I’ll be passing any requests onto the person at UEA who has been given a post to deal with them.
    Cheers
    Phil

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  121. I thoroughly endorse your position, just trying to make a sarcastic reference to two notoriously non-transparent entities that were exposed for the frauds they were/are by previous generations of “muck rakers”.
    Keep up the good work!

    AD - RtR/OS! (e3cbb2)

  122. I apologize for words that I misinterpreted, misappropriated, mishandled; for the thoughts that I mangled.

    I feel passionate about putting a firewall between clean air in the South Coast Air Quality Management District, clean water at the beaches; and the religious aspects of AGW. The passion got away from me and I made a foul offensive hash of it.

    Steve

    SteveG (97b6b9)

  123. Bradley and others, two good books show just what science looks like when it is out of control and money takes precedence over truth.

    One is titled Science Fictions and is about the early days of the AIDS virus discovery. The other is Craig Venter’s book, My Life Decoded or The Genome Wars, a book about him and the Genome Project. None of these stories are as big as the AGW story but they are big and have lots of evidence of what happens when Big Science gets close to Big Money.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  124. Mike K.
    I have Venter’s book, but shall look into the others. I’ve finished “Going Rogue,” am now reading “Fumbling the Future” and next up is “The Strongest Tribe.”

    On the AGW front, the folks at Real Climate are struggling to minimize and misrepresent the bad news, instead of honestly confronting the evidence. I now am sorry I ever said a good word about RC.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  125. CO2 is photo sensitive, but not as sensitive as to the same frequencies as water vapor, where it pales in comparison! Nitrogen, Argon, Oxygen are the main components of our atmosphere, and as such can be commercially produced by harvesting them from the atmosphere. No so with CO2 because there is not enough present in the atmosphere as a trace gas. We can double the amount of CO2 (no one is speculating that that would ever happen), and CO2 would still be measured in ppm (parts per million). Lets just throw away our money for no sane reason. It is the same as paying a fortune for a evil spirit deterrent good luck charm, and claiming that it must be working because one hasn’t seen any ghosts!

    Dencouch (935f74)

  126. the whole concept of the global warming is deeply silly I think

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  127. happyfeet,
    Deeply tragic is more like it.

    I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I realize how naively I accepted what I was told.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  128. “no appreciation of the fact that uncertainty is an integral part of what we do.”

    What are the odds of this, or that? If you smoke 3 packs a day you’re not certain to get cancer. Maybe you should start smoking again.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  129. I’d love to start smoking again but the little president man taxed cigarettes to where if you smoke you’re complicit in his Soros-inspired dirty socialist degradation of our little country. Quitting smoking was easy. I didn’t give the little president man one cent. Not one.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  130. Global warming is a hugely apt illustration that yes it can happen here I think. We’re not nearly a vigilant enough people. Not nearly. It’s shocking how cheaply we value our freedoms.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  131. Boring again’s douchenozzlery is consistent.

    JD (082755)

  132. If we can ignore Bongwater Boy, Junior Troll, and keep to the topic…

    Science can be corrupted by politics. And that is what has happened here.

    I am NOT saying that AGW isn’t real. What I am saying is that a group of scientists has a vested, personal interest in pushing a point of view. And it is a political point of view.

    If carbon dioxide is the problem (and the modeling data is. um, unclear on that point), what to do about Brazil, China, and India? They are already matching the carbon release of the Western world, and will surpass it soon (if not now). And how about the fact—don’t take my word on, go look it up—that Europe hasn’t met its Kyoto goals. Guess which nation has reduced its carbon release?

    But that is neither here nor there. This topic is about politics. Specifically, economic control.

    If carbon dioxide was the problem, we would be all hell-bent for nuclear. But we aren’t. Funny thing, huh?

    What this is very much like is the “Nuclear Winter” business back in the 1980s. A group of scientists (some of whom are in this current AGW cabal) wanted to encourage the world to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. That’s a good thing. But they did so by claiming they had a climate model (sound familiar?) suggesting that even a small exchange of nuclear weapons would lead to global changes in climate—in some versions, dropping the temperature of the inland US to below -20 degrees C for months and months at a time.

    And here I thought that incinerating cities was bad enough.

    But not the Nuclear Winter crowd. They even massaged their data (which was based on the atmosphere of Mars, incidentally) to suggest that even very small numbers of nukes would lead to global climate calamity.

    And every one of these scientists had been very involved in disarmament protests and groups for years. So there solution was pretty obvious, and fit their politics. Surprising, huh?

    The closest that any of them ever came to apologizing for their politicized use of science was Carl Sagan, right before he passed away.

    And if you look around you will still find climate modelers making this argument. A snarky response would be to use nuclear explosions to offset global warming.

    But again: politics should not care about data. And models need to be predictive.

    I’m glad this information has been released. Yes, it gives scientists a black eye, but it also is a reminder of the danger of politicizing science.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  133. Eric, there might be GW, but I do not accept AGW. Especially not given the consistently changing climate of this ball of dirt in the multiple millennia it’s been spinning.

    For the record: I don’t think we understand enough of a system that has thousands year long cycles much less if it’s really going to be sunny on Thanksgiving to be able to point at my SUV and blame that. Just saying.

    Vivian Louise (643333)

  134. Vivian Louise, I don’t think we really disagree all that much. I have repeatedly said that there are three hypercomplex subjects on this planet:

    1. The human mind.
    2. Ecology on the large scale.
    3. Climate.

    The models for climate do not work, as you know. We know the carbon dioxide levels in the past, and we know the global temperatures from those periods. If the models the AGW people are using are accurate, we should be able to plug in those prior values and get past temperatures.

    But it doesn’t work.

    Computer models make me bilious, unless they are predictive.

    No, this is a weird mixture of political authoritarianism mixed with a “Mother Gaia” view of nature. Rousseau all over again.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  135. I would add that when you remove religion from the picture, it seems like the “atheists” scramble to create something quite similar to take its place.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  136. Er, gotta change the name back . . .

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  137. I think there may be something to AGW. For the past 10,000 years, we have altered the ecology of earth with agriculture. The Indians in the western US altered ecology quite rapidly by hunting horses and camels to extinction soon after they arrived via the Bering Sea land bridge. The horse only returned via the Spaniards in the 18th century.

    We may not have had another Ice Age because of the effect of agriculture. On the other hand, the Medieval Warm Period ended in about 1350 for reasons we don’t understand. We do know that people were aware of sunspots as early as 1100. The Maunder Minimum did correspond to the little ice age so there is real concern about the present quiet period.

    Also, Europe has regained a lot of forest that was formerly agriculture. Will that affect climate ? Nobody knows. CO2 is the least of it.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  138. Another winner, an email attributed to Andrew Manning:

    I’m in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurments here in the UK – looking promising, so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases – I thought we’d moved the debate beyond this, but seems that these sceptics are real die-hards!!

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  139. @137

    Hey! I resemble that snark. I’m an athiest and damn proud of it.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  140. Counting moi, that makes two of the godless on this blog.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  141. dude. You’re so going to hell. I saw it on YouTube.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  142. here you go. Pay it forward, dude.

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  143. it’s wrong wrong wrong how funny that is

    happyfeet (b919e7)

  144. I claim agnosticism not being self confident enough to render opinions beyond that. I like Oriana Fallaci’s philosophy which was to live as though God existed.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  145. I put “atheists” in quotations, because truly no one can be sure. I find that most people are comfortable with being agnostic. Bradley and Dr. K. (not the Mike K. I call “Dr. K.”), I meant no disrespect. But many of the “new atheists” annoy me with their absolute certitude coupled with ignorance of the philosophical underpinnings of the argument, mixed well with arrogance and what is (to me) clearly spite toward their own male parent.

    My point was that many “new atheists” sneer about AGW deniers, while accepting unconditionally arguments from human authority. Even when there is no such authority.

    Again, I am more comfortable with agnosticism. But I have never read Bradley or Dr. K. be insulting or superior toward people of faith.

    Eric Blair (bc43a4)

  146. “Science can be corrupted by politics. And that is what has happened here.”
    Yoiks!

    Yesterday, New York Times global warming ace Andrew Revkin broke the story of how an official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality–Philip Cooney, formerly of the American Petroleum Institute–has tinkered with the wording of government reports on global warming to exaggerate scientific uncertainty. Published on the front page of the Times, and coming just after Tony Blair arrived in the U.S. to pester Bush about climate change, Revkin’s article was bound to draw considerable attention. Indeed, in yesterday’s press gaggle, White House spokesman Scott McClellan had to put on an impressive display of public relations jujitsu just to head off a feeding frenzy of reporters peppering him with questions about climate science. It was truly a sight to behold.
    huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/the-stories-behind-the-st_b_2356.html

    Over the 7½ years of the Bush administration, it’s hard to name a major U.S. government regulatory agency that hasn’t seen some type of scandal involving science. From the Environmental Protection Agency to the Bureau of Land Management to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we’ve heard repeated complaints from government scientists who say their work on environmental issues has been inappropriately edited by political appointees, that they themselves have been muzzled, and that their agencies have put out rank misinformation to the public.

    To get a sense of just how extensive such problems have been, consider the findings of a 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which sought to survey federally employed climate researchers across several agencies. Almost half of the 300-odd survey respondents felt pressured to eliminate words like “climate change” or “global warming” from documents or communications; a similar number perceived inappropriate changes to their work that altered its scientific meaning. e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2033

    I know I should be writing all this out myself, but unlike you I’m not a climate scientist. And it’s not my job to interview them either.
    Yes science can become corrupted by politics even by scientists.
    But your record next to your opponents is laughable.
    Here’s a good description of a your working methods. It’s pretty funny. On Stephen Moore in the National Review.
    http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2003/03/01/its-academic/

    It’s called hackery.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  147. The little creep links to a 2003 piece that has nothing to do with the subject. Yes, that is a devastating argument. Could I ask you to go and mediate until something logical occurs to you?

    Thank you.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  148. “The little creep links to a 2003 piece that has nothing to do with the subject.”
    It’s called politicizing science. something you’re good at.

    The world’s largest ice sheet has started to melt along its coastal fringes, raising fears that global sea levels will rise faster than scientists expected.

    The East Antarctic ice sheet, which makes up three-quarters of the continent’s 14,000 sq km, is losing around 57bn tonnes of ice a year into surrounding waters, according to a satellite survey of the region.

    Scientists had thought the ice sheet was reasonably stable, but measurements taken from Nasa’s gravity recovery and climate experiment (Grace) show that it started to lose ice steadily from 2006.

    The measurements suggest the polar continent could soon contribute more to global sea level rises than Greenland, which is shedding more than 250bn tonnes of ice a year, adding 0.7mm to annual sea level rises.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  149. Bonged again can’t refute the evidence of corrupt science, so it resorts to tired scare tactics. We’ve seen that movie before.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (0ea407)

  150. But why should I be afraid of the ocean rising almost 3 inches over a 100-year span? Especially since, while one ice shelf is shrinking, another is growing?

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)


  151. “…It’s called hackery….”

    Indeed. Don’t you have an 8 AM Econ quiz tomorrow?

    Because you are sure as heck no science major. But I notice that it is Sunday night, and your syntax is off. Which is why I suspect cannabis is at work with you. Again.

    Oh, I’m sorry. Aren’t you also claiming to be a big investor, with lots of money in the bank?

    Please, dude. Someone spilled your bongwater all over the dorm carpet. It’s going to really smell if you don’t clean it up.

    Eric Blair (bc43a4)

  152. It is pretty clear that bonged again wants to talk about anything and everything but the abject dishonesty of the global warming pinheads.

    JD (3ae2fd)

  153. I think bored should get on the phone and call Michael Mann. They obviously need help and bored is the just the man/boy/girl to give it to them.

    Go for it, bored !!!

    Mike K (2cf494)

  154. “The world’s largest ice sheet has started to melt along its coastal fringes”

    I would imagine that that happens pretty much every spring.

    Dave Surls (f9b076)

  155. Seriously, “bored again” (what a great name for you…why, it is almost as good as “Assclown Pumpkinheads,” whom I suspect bears some kind of relationship to you), if you want to actually show your scientific knowledge and mad skilz at data analysis, take a gander over at this:

    http://www.climate-skeptic.com/

    Look around. Read. There is a even a primer for nonscientists like yourself. Since I am not impressed with your fact finding skills thus far, I will even give you the pointer to that primer:

    http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2007/09/table-of-conten.html

    Heck, there is even video for your generation.

    And remember that the author is NOT claiming that AGW doesn’t place. What he does amply demonstrate is how poor the data is, and how readily folks are being pushed to accept it.

    For purely political reasons.

    Of course, you would have to do some work, reading over that site and doing more background reading.

    But it is SO much easier to be, well, “bored again.” Right?

    Eric Blair (bc43a4)

  156. As far as the “ice is shrinking” theme goes-

    One reason that the surface area of an ice sheet may shrink is because the ice is actually getting thicker. As it does, the force of the gravitational pull causes the ice sheet to move toward the ocean or simply the increased weight over water causes the ice to break off. So, rather than being evidence of the ice “melting” due to warmth, the surface area is shrinking but it has nothing to do with melting.

    Now, that may or may not end up to be true, I would be interested in updated info on it either way.

    But whatever that detail may be, I stand by my basic argument, they were over-reaching when they talked about an ice age in the 70’s, and they were again over-reaching in the 90’s concerning GW. They have felt the trunk of an elephant and the shell of a tortoise, and are trying to extrapolate what the rest of the animals in the zoo are like.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  157. @149

    I have been an athiest before the term “new athiest” was fashionable. However, I have always taken the view of “believe in whatever you want, just don’t imose it on me”.

    My sister can attest to that. I was the only one in the family who supported her decision to study for a PhD in Theology. Dear old dad, a born again Catholic, stated the he “forbade” her to follow that path (like you can forbid a 30+ yo feminist). She works for the Church of England.

    Dr. K (adb7ba)

  158. So “Climate-Skeptic” is a scientist?
    No. He’s a “small business owner” and a Teabagger. He invents his own reality.
    And MD in Philly are you a climatologist?
    Why not have a dentist be your defense attorney and have a lawyer pull your teeth? Faith based politics, faith based war, and faith based science. That’s all you give us.

    Meanwhile here’s the sea Ice update for 2009:
    scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2009/11/ccw_-_2009_sea_ice_update.php

    bored again (d80b5a)

  159. Bored – What is your position about the dishonesty and perfidy of the AGW propnents discussed in the post?

    JD (1b5388)

  160. Bonged Again seems to have incorporated Big Al’s rantings on the environment, lock, stock and barrel. Unfortunately, Big Al won’t debate the skeptics nor take any questions from the press that aren’t completely adulatory.

    Also, Europe has regained a lot of forest that was formerly agriculture.

    As has the Eastern half of the US – funny how that’s never mentioned.

    Dmac (a964d5)

  161. bored again, you are the perfect example of my standard view: most people in public debate would not pass my sophomore speech class. Must be frustrating to be a (good, honest) teacher.

    What do they teach in those schools nowadays?

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  162. “most people in public debate would not pass my sophomore speech class.”
    That’s what you do for a living?
    I’m no fan of Al Gore. What was the carbon footprint for “Live Earth.”?
    But following the arguments here is like listening to the pot calling the dirty dishrag black.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  163. So “Climate-Skeptic” is a scientist?
    No. He’s a “small business owner” and a Teabagger. He invents his own reality.

    And Al Gore is a scientist?

    Michael Ejercito (6a1582)

  164. What this is very much like is the “Nuclear Winter” business back in the 1980s. A group of scientists (some of whom are in this current AGW cabal) wanted to encourage the world to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. That’s a good thing. But they did so by claiming they had a climate model (sound familiar?) suggesting that even a small exchange of nuclear weapons would lead to global changes in climate—in some versions, dropping the temperature of the inland US to below -20 degrees C for months and months at a time.

    They were right.

    Unlike global warming theory, nuclear winter theory is based upon the soundest of sciences, just like general relativity.

    Of course, this does beg the question- why has not President Obama ordered the detonation of hydrogen bombs at test sites, if we need to do something about global warming before it is too late.

    Michael Ejercito (6a1582)

  165. BA may be a college student (at best), but BA would never be able to pass a mid-19th-century 8th grade final exam.

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  166. “And Al Gore is a scientist?”
    WTF?
    This doesn’t begin with Gore it begins with NASA and NOAA,
    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
    with oceanographers and climatologists.
    Find yourself a plumber to do that open heart surgery you need.
    It’s cheaper.

    bored again (d80b5a)

  167. Shorter BA: I got nuttin.

    John Hitchcock (3fd153)

  168. When you want to address an argument on point I’ll pay attention.

    Comment #116 by MD in Philly

    He doesn’t have any argument on that point, but he does have an argument that plays it on TV…

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  169. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
    with oceanographers and climatologists.
    Find yourself a plumber to do that open heart surgery you need.
    It’s cheaper.

    How many climatologists have claimed that global warming could become irreversible, despite the fact that the TTAPS study, the most important groundbreaking scientific paper since Einsteins’ On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies flatly contradicts that?

    And have you heard about James Hansen’s claims about the “Venus Syndrome”?

    Michael Ejercito (6a1582)

  170. Quote

    By the way, though I know this will really mark me as an environmental Luddite, does anyone really believe that in 100 years, if we’ve really screwed ourselves by making things too hot, that we couldn’t find a drastic way to cool the place off? Krakatoa’s eruption put enough dust in the air to cool the world for a decade. The world, unfortunately, has a lot of devices that go bang laying around that I bet we could employ to good effect if we needed to put some dust in the stratosphere to cool ourselves off. Yeah, I am sure that there are hidden problems here but isn’t it interesting that NO ONE in global warming, inc. ever discusses any option for solving warming except shutting down the world’s economies?

    Michael Ejercito (6a1582)

  171. The story of scientists being seduced by money is an old one. I was reminded of this in a recent discussion. Robert Koch is the father of bacteriology. He established the basic principles of identifying the bacterium that causes a disease. They are called “Koch’s Postulates” and every physician learns them. However, late in his career, Koch announced that he had found a cure for tuberculosis. He had discovered the bacterium that caused it so his announcement was taken seriously and there was near hysteria since TB was a huge scourge.

    A year or so later, it was discovered that his treatment didn’t work. It was all a scam although there are still a few German publications defending him by saying “It worked in his lab but in no one else’s.” Eventually, the suspicion grew that his recent divorce and remarriage might have made him subject to a temptation to cash in on his fame. He and his new wife left Germany and his reputation was ruined for a while.

    As someone said, the love of money is the root of all evil. It can affect the greatest scientist; why not these people ?

    Mike K (2cf494)

  172. What are the odds of this, or that? If you smoke 3 packs a day you’re not certain to get cancer. Maybe you should start smoking again.

    You are correct, it is clear that there is at least one certainty in life — that you will attempt to deflect criticism of anything you hold dear with a senseless attempt to connect the most specious ideas to the facts as though they were somehow reasonable disproof of said facts.

    In fact, that your blatherings do nothing to disprove anything in any rational way is also a certainty.

    Clearly, certainties do exist. They are as self-evident as the point on your head.

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  173. Yes, it gives scientists a black eye, but it also is a reminder of the danger of politicizing science.

    Wrong, eric. It does not give scientists a black eye, it exposes two-bit charlatans claiming to be scientists for the non-scientists they really are, and have always been.

    Science has always been around us, and quacks and charlatans have been misusing it since the first Greek postulated the underlying logical rules on which it, and the Scientific Method, is based.

    Like every other good thing, it can be twisted in such a way to scare people into supporting, financing, and otherwise encouraging the thieves and crooks among us all.

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  174. Bored – What say you about the dishonesty evidenced in the subject post?

    JD (a71690)

  175. Bored attempts to push this as somehow relevant:

    The measurements suggest the polar continent could soon contribute more to global sea level rises than Greenland, which is shedding more than 250bn tonnes of ice a year, adding 0.7mm to annual sea level rises.

    Satellite data from the whole of Antarctica show the region is now losing around 190bn tonnes of ice a year. Uncertainties in the measurements mean the true ice loss could be between 113bn and 267bn tonnes.

    Notice the number of weasel-words there(“could soon contribute”), first off, and contrast it with the uncertainty-level of the measurements in question — 113 to 267 — so these measurements could be off by a factor of greater than 50%? Frankly, given the e-mails in question, I’ll want to see the data and the methodology that even managed to come up with these numbers. If they couldn’t be any more accurate than that then maybe it’s complete BS all around.

    Note first off that this “massive” amount of shedding amounts to roughly .7mm a year (vagueness means it’s at most equal to the Greenland ice sheet’s losses). So, in 50 years, it might add a foot to the sea level.

    But wait, there’s more — what does this number tie to? Does it include evaporation-and-re-precipitation? I cannot see how it can, considering that there is NO evidence of ANY substantial sea-level rise in the last century, AND that means that, if the numbers were accurate for Greenland alone that we should see some kind of rise in that period. Or are these numbers “instantaneous” — that is, accurate for one year but not for the next?

    In short, if you wanted to make a pro-AGW statement, it’s easy to make a blatantly misleading statement of “facts” which imply GW increases without validity.

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  176. 166.“most people in public debate would not pass my sophomore speech class.”
    That’s what you do for a living?

    Comment by bored again

    Hmm, let me see how to answer this…,

    No, I was talking about the one I took as a sophomore in high school, back in the last millenium.

    MD in Philly (227f9c)

  177. But following the arguments here is like listening to the pot calling the dirty dishrag black.

    That’s an interesting statement considering the quality of argument coming from you, to say nothing of contrasting it with the quality of that coming from the other side.

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  178. The Indians in the western US altered ecology quite rapidly by hunting horses and camels to extinction

    Somewhat correct. They hunted creatures in those niches, but who knows what animals they were like. One distinct difference between the Americas and Eurasia is the lack of domesticable animals. The Bison does not lend itself to treatment like the cow or the ox, the llama isn’t as “reasonable” as the camel, and so on — there are no creatures in NorthAm which are capable of supporting the weight of a man on its back, such as the horse does (despite what you’ve seen in movies, for example, you cannot ride a zebra, they won’t support the weight of an adult female, much less a male — the animal Tanya Roberts rode was a painted horse). Nothing like chickens, either.

    There were creatures in North-South-Am which were wiped out upon the arrival of the proto-indians. We know of them through the fossil evidence of them — but we have no idea as to the demeanor or domesticability of them.

    It’s been argued that one reason for the relatively primitive state of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, despite their clear industriousness (see the various civs of South-CentAm and Mexico) is the lack of animals to domesticate and put to use.

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  179. Bored – What say you about the dishonesty evidenced in the subject post?

    Comment#178 by JD

    Come now, sirrah! He’s been utterly clear on that point from the very start of his douchery:

    “Pay NO attention to that man behind the curtain!”

    I mean, really. How many times does he have to avoid the matter? Do all of you really, really have to insist on the point?

    OBloodyhell (811125)

  180. It’s been argued that one reason for the relatively primitive state of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, despite their clear industriousness (see the various civs of South-CentAm and Mexico) is the lack of animals to domesticate and put to use.

    Comment by OBloodyhell — 11/23/2009 @ 11:28 am

    Not quite. They had other people. The Caribs, for one tribe, penned Arawaks and slaughtered them for meat. The Aztecs used conquered tribes for both labor and meat.

    nk (df76d4)

  181. Not a problem. Bored again had that Econ exam. He knows he doesn’t know a darned thing, and has to project that onto others.

    This is all about being a contrarian partisan.

    Hey, bored? Since that small business owner bothers you, do you know anything about his educational background. Because I do. And I would love to compare your curriculum to his, regarding the ability to analyze data.

    Imagine that. A business owner who understands, well, numbers. Unlike some people I could mention who are looking for a new supplier of weed so they can spark up in their Che T-shirts.

    Don’t like insults? My, you sure like dealing them.

    I think you are also a sock puppet. It is the only exception I can think of to your general theme of intellectual laziness.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  182. Also: funny he would bring up “pot,” don’t you think?

    “listening to the pot calling the dirty dishrag black”

    What a loser. But that is his goal. Probably all irritated over his upcoming academic probation. Fight the power, dude!

    We also all remember how you have done well on Wall Street. Right?

    Poseur.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  183. Hey JD:

    “…Bored – What is your position about the dishonesty and perfidy of the AGW propnents discussed in the post?…”

    This Troll in Training Pants doesn’t mind, because he is down with dishonesty and perfidy. I mean, based on his posts.

    Eric Blair (0b61b2)

  184. Since no one reads upthread the same cackling taunts get repeated. How many times am I supposed to link to discussion of the issues including the hacked emails by actual scientists?

    http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017254414699180528062%3Auyrcvn__yd0&q=hacked+emails&sa.x=9&sa.y=3&sa=search

    “One email, however, from Phil Jones, has been singled out by the usual suspects because it appears to suggest someone’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes…”

    Go read the post. It’s at the top of the link. “The hacked climate science email scandal that wasn’t”
    Read the others too. None of them are by Al Gore.

    bored again (8e0e03)

  185. That seems not to work. Go to science blogs and do a search for “hacked emails”
    You’ll find what you need, if not what you want.
    http://scienceblogs.com/

    bored again (6e692a)

  186. “…Note first off that this “massive” amount of shedding amounts to roughly .7mm a year (vagueness means it’s at most equal to the Greenland ice sheet’s losses). So, in 50 years, it might add a foot to the sea level…”

    Correction: In fifty-years, it would add 1.4 inches to the sea level (0.7mm = 0.028″, X 50 = 1.4″).

    AD - RtR/OS! (222944)

  187. Boring – I asked you for your opinion of their dishonesty, not a link to someone else’s opinion. Now run along back to TPM for today’s talking points.

    JD (b5a4c1)

  188. One man’s “hacking” is another person’s “whistleblowing.” You might look up the Pentagon Papers, though you are way too young to know much about it. I’m sure that DCSCA was there, so he’ll tell you more about it.

    I find that the definitions of “hacking” shift depending on partisan affiliation.

    I’m much more interested in the e-mails where the authors discuss how to avoid scrutiny of their data, hide data that doesn’t agree with their so-called consensus, and contaminate peer review.

    But that’s different when you like their conclusions. Based on your broad and deep scientific background, of course. It couldn’t have a thing to do with your reflexively contrarian nature, and partisan service to the DNC.

    Oh, and by the way: are you actually sniffing about anyone at all issuing taunts? With your spotless background of non-insulting posts?

    On that subject, why are you and your fellow travelers of the Left so quick with the “teabagger” insults? I mean, since you are so much in favor of gay rights? Unless, of course, you don’t care about anything but undergraduate-level and content free snark?

    Or are closet homophobes.

    Final note: please, please, please keep flogging how much other people know. Your reliance on authority is amazing. I know you won’t take the time to, well, look at the freaking data. That would be, well, work. And to a Maynard G. Krebs like you….

    Eric Blair (c8876d)

  189. And to a Maynard G. Krebs like you….
    Comment by Eric Blair — 11/23/2009 @ 1:30 pm

    Oh, the insensitivity!

    AD - RtR/OS! (222944)

  190. I am shocked, just shocked, EB, that you could elevate the status of this POS to that of an educational icon such as the aforementioned Mr. Krebs.

    AD - RtR/OS! (222944)

  191. Well, Bob Denver did smoke a lot of weed before he passed on….

    But I appreciate your mild rebuke. Maynard G. Krebs made a lot of people laugh.

    Hmmm….

    Eric Blair (c8876d)

  192. Normally, scientific fraud is easily discovered because other scientists are not able to repeat the experiments and get the same data. In this case, all of the data was held in a few sets that were controlled and manipulated by a cabal.

    It’s not as though we could turn back the clock and do the measurements all over again.

    Orwell put it best. He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

    Amphipolis (b120ce)


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