November 20, 2009

Cooking The Warming - Updated

A hacker dumps a trove of files from the UK's Climatic Reseach Unit (CRU), and the mask slips off the warmists.
(Update: subsequent reports indicate the leaker was more likely an inside whistle-blower, not an outside "hacker")

The story was broken by famed climate blogger Anthony Watts.

The Telegraph reports it as Climategate: The final nail in the coffin of anthrpogenic global warming.

Hardly...but it is helpful to have hard proof of the manipulation of evidence and the suppression of inconvenient findings to help counter the ridiculous insistence that "the science is settled."

Of course Ed's on it.

More from Richard Fernandez

UPDATE 11/23: Charlie Martin on what it all means

Rand Simberg: When Scientists Become Politicians

UPDATE 11/30:

So much good stuff is being written on Climategate every day that I'll only post a few of the better ones I've run across. The failure of the major media to even cover the story (with a couple of notable exceptions like the WaPo) is becoming almost as big a scandal and a story as the disclosures and the emails themselves. Note how most of the serious major media reporting has been in the UK, where there are already investigations underway, and calls for important heads to roll. Even when it hits home...like the White House, the US media are playing "see no evil".

An early (11/21) look at some of the emails at Power Line.

In The Telegraph, Christopher Booker has a pretty good summary of the implications, and of the key players...

Melanie Phillips is characteristically trenchant.

The (London) Times has been particularly good from the outset...see here and here, on the latest dog-ate-my-homework excuse for failing to produce their supporting data.

Iain Murray with three things you must know

Michael Barone is always must-read.

And the Wall Street Journal has been on top of it, including L. Gordon Crovitz yesterday and Bret Stephens today, summing up in one sentence the meat of the matter:

Climategate....concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.


More from the WSJ here, and daily with Taranto, like here, here, and here

See Ron Rosenbaum on the sick equation of AGW skeptics with Holocaust deniers.

Richard Fernandez is always interesting, and embeds some video of Michael Crichton's famous speech on environmentalism as religion. That's just video snippets...if you want the whole thing, here it is...and if you've never read it, don't miss it. (and if you like that one, you might like this one too)

PJM also now has a Climategate Document Database up for your reference.

Then there's about 200+ articles on global warming from my own archive.

UPDATE 12/1: (via Power Line) Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College, on how Obama could rise above partisanship and reposition himself and the U.S. on the climate change issue, during his trip to Copenhagen...(wishful thinking, I'm afraid...)

In the last few days, we have learned that what has long been suspected is all too true: that the work done by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which formed the basis for the four reports issued by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a sham -- that the data were doctored, that the computer simulation was a fraud, and that systematic efforts were made by the most prominent climate scientists to corrupt the peer-review process and suppress legitimate criticism: all for the purpose of imposing a straitjacket on the world economy.

As radical climate alarmist George Monbiot has acknowledged on his blog, "Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away . . . I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific . . . No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that" climate research be "unimpeachable, not the last."

This is precisely what President Obama could say in Copenhagen -- that some of the most prominent climate scientists have betrayed their calling, that the global-warming hypothesis remains, in fact, unproven, and that the reports issued by the IPCC provide no basis for the making of public policy.

That last phrase, I believe, is really the most important issue here. The so-called "international community" is poised, starting with Copenhagen, to set up a massive taxation regime that will have the effect of crippling economic development (and so, reducing carbon emissions) in the first world while transferring billions of dollars to the third world (ostensibly to help them cope with climate change), largely on the basis of reports from the IPCC. That these reports have been found to be materially flawed is reason enough to hold off on any U.S. commitments to inflict economic harm on itself.

Reading Christopher Horner's terrific book would suffice to disabuse most people of any notion that the IPCC is a scientific body anyway, as opposed to a purely political one. Add to that the standing refusals of the two largest carbon emitters of the 21st century, China and India, to go along with the proposed limits to their economic growth, and the unilateral economic suicide of the United States makes even less sense.

I remain open to anyone who can persuade me that the transfer of billions of dollars from the U.S. and other first world private sectors (via taxation, fines, penalties, carbon offsets, etc) to third world governments (after being skimmed by unaccountable U.N. bureaucracies) will have the slightest effect on the future temperature of the planet.

While they're at it, they might also inform me how it is that the calamitous warming that informs their alarmism has suddenly stopped since about 1998, while its purported cause, man-made CO2 emissions, continued to rise in the last decade. If the skeptics are willing to grant that human activity may be at least one factor in the 1 degree Celsius rise in global mean temperature over the past 150 years (and I am), don't the alarmists have to admit that, since the temperature has leveled off for over a decade, there might be other, perhaps even stronger forces at work on earth temperature?

And since far more people die annually from cold-related causes than heat-related ones, can the alarmists seriously suggest that a slight increase in global temperature is an unmitigated negative?

Most AGW skeptics that I know are, like me, more skeptical of the proposed "solutions" than they are of the fact that the planet is warming slightly. It is a conceit of the statists (and/or a deception by them) that they can or should attempt to control climate. That they propose to do it by creating a permanent, unelected and unaccountable global power base for themselves by taxing the remaining productive, wealth-generating segments of Western society is the height of audacity and hubris.

Here's the latest from Claudia Rosett, on how the U.N. stands ready to solve the world's climate problems...

Failing to achieve forward motion for peace or nonproliferation, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been grandstanding for more than two years about the UN’s war on the weather — and has made it his chief mission to persuade developed nations to “seal the deal” on a “climate” pact that would constrict production, transfer vast amounts to wealth to some of the worst governments on the planet, and put the unaccountable, opaque and too often self-serving bureaucracy of the UN at the switch.

[...]

Climate bureaucracy has become a major aspect of employment throughout the UN system, with almost every UN agency and program enlisting fresh bevies of staff to work the climate angles. On its climate “Gateway” web page, the UN lists more than three dozen UN-system “partners on climate change,” from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to the UN Development Program (star of the Cash-for-Kim scandal two years ago in North Korea) to the International Telecommunications Union. On the basis of calculations performed deep within the entrails of UN bureacracies that thrive these days by attributing the world’s troubles to climate and then allocating blame, penalties, bonanzas and UN commissions on the basis of the IPCC “scientific consensus,” this same UN climate Gateway web page informs us that “Seven of ten disasters are climate related.” To fix this, the UN tells us, we need only trust to the UN’s guidance. That would be the same UN that not so long ago dealt with its own propensity for corruption by disbanding its anti-corruption task force; the same UN that once claimed Oil-for-Food was the most heavily audited program it had ever run; the same UN that can’t tally its own global budget.

UPDATE 12/2: See also: Wizblog: Coming Unraveled

UPDATE 12/3: Kenneth Green, writing at The American (AEI), says it's time to clean house in the field of climate research, and that investigations shouldn't be limited to the UK. It's a pretty good short summation of the Climategate issue, so read it all...but here are his final paragraphs...

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open and transparent, and must adhere to the scientific method and the institution of science, which has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports, or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists, or holocaust deniers.

The climate scientists at the CRU have given not only climate science, but all of science, a massive black eye, and should the public lose faith in science, a great deal of the responsibility will accrue to them. The scientists involved in the Climategate scandal should be permanently removed from any position in which they can influence climate policy. They should be excluded from peer-review panels, banned from participating in the IPCC process in any capacity, and kept far away from editorial positions at journals. Their data and methods must be made absolutely transparent and available for outside inspection.

Similar attention must be turned to climate centers such as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, home of the deeply partisan, highly political James Hansen; the National Climate Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, now headed up by the equally partisan and political Jane Lubchenco; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, home to scientist Tom Wigley, also featured prominently in the Climategate emails. It’s time for climate science to clean house. Researchers at all of these institutions are also frequently in contact with the CRU, and collaborate with CRU researchers. Whatever investigations come of Climategate, they should not stop in the UK.

Posted by dan at November 20, 2009 11:57 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Oh, I must have missed this on the national news broadcasts.

Posted by: Ben K at November 24, 2009 08:34 PM

this is sooo cool.

Posted by: cream face at November 10, 2010 04:24 PM

Interesting thoughts here. I appreciate you taking the time to share them with us all. It’s people like you that make my day

Posted by: cheap conveyancing at November 14, 2010 04:35 PM
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