The One & Only Global Warming Thread, Part 9 (-gates unlimited edition)

[movielib]

We have seen how the British Institute of Physics (IoF) wrote a submission to the British council investigating the CRU (Climatic Research Institute) and UEA (University of East Anglia). The Institute has been harshly attacked by alarmists for this.

A top American climate scientist (who happens to be a skeptic) wrote to the IoF, urging them to not back down and to question their own premises.

A physicist supports sound climate physics
From Professor Fred Singer

To the Institute of Physics, United Kingdom:

I am an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and a co-organizer of a Petition drive to the APS Council to modify or withdraw the published APS Statement on Climate Change [see Nature 460:457, 23 July 2009]. Some 250 members and Fellows of the APS have now joined in signing this Petition, including members of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Nobelist, and many other prize winners.

I urge you to ignore all of the insubstantial criticisms leveled against your submission to the House of Commons’ inquiry into ClimateGate. All scientists should applaud your call for openness and sharing of data – even without the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, and regardless of one’s position on the causes of global warming. To echo Margaret Thatcher’s admonition to President George Bush: “Don’t go wobbly!”

It is strange that such fierce criticism of the IOP submission has come mainly from avowed promoters of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) myth, who have attacked the IOP as “misinformed and misguided.” (Some have even advocated breaking the law by ignoring the “Freedom of Information Act.”) But why should there be any connection between the sharing of scientific information and the cause of GW?

Your submission criticized the practices of the climate scientists at the center of the Parliamentary inquiry. These include primarily Dr Philip Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Dr Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. The submission of the Royal Society of Chemistry says “that a lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods used are not robust enough to face scrutiny.” So what are they trying to hide? We have yet to discover just how Jones et al managed to produce a substantial surface warming [between 1979 and 1997] when satellites showed practically no tropospheric warming – a disparity which is in conflict with every greenhouse climate model.

You state that the Institute “has long had a clear position on global warming, namely that there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now.” However, I know of no valid evidence to support such a position and would urge you to carry out an independent investigation. In due course we may learn how the temperature data underlying the IPCC conclusions have been manipulated. In the meantime, I would caution you against relying on the IPCC.

I am aware that the UK Meteorological Office has published a review of the latest climate-change science. Their report says it is “very likely” that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the climate to change and that the changes bear the “fingerprint” of human influence. But as far as I know, the fingerprints point the other way and suggest that the human contribution is only minor. In other words, the empirical evidence contradicts both the IPCC and the Met Office. [See here the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2008 and 2009, at www.NIPCCreport.org]

The most direct way to resolve this obvious disagreement might be for the IOP Science Board to arrange one or more debates and scrutinize the evidence presented by both sides. I have no doubt whatsoever that they will agree that Nature rules the climate, not human activity.

Sincerely yours,

S. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
Former director of the US Weather Satellite Service

[movielib]

Press (most of) still entirely clueless about global warming.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/arti...317145920.aspx

Christian Science Monitor: Public Just Doesn't Know Enough About Climate Change

Writer says Hollywood will help get environmental message out, as if it doesn't already.

By Anthony Kang
Business & Media Institute
3/17/2010 3:02:34 PM

Of all the claims made in the ongoing debates over environmental issues and global warming, the assertion that the public hasn’t been told or told enough about climate change is laughable at best. But that’s what Gregory Lamb wrote in The Christian Science Monitor March 15.

What had Lamb troubled was that the American public’s concern for global warming is at its lowest level years. According to a new Rasmussen poll, just 28 percent of Americans think it’s a serious problem. To Lamb and the scientists he interviewed, that means the message isn’t getting through, and scientists must look to new means of publicizing their work.

“The importance of getting the word out has science organizations scrambling to explore news channels, from souped up websites to asking Hollywood for help,” he wrote.

“One effort … will recruit Hollywood to help scientists tell their stories. NAS (National Academy of Sciences) and the University of Southern California will team up to draw on USC’s expertise in film, TV, websites, and video games. The partnership will be the first between a federal agency and a film school.”

Lamb was reporting from the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he apparently found that scientists are apparently the only people in the world who haven’t been bombarded with green messages from the media, corporations and academia.

Science, he lamented, is getting short shrift in news organizations. CNN “dismantled its entire science reporting staff,”

And the climate change propaganda that does trickle out just isn’t sexy enough. “Today’s climate story is often framed as a sober warning, not as an exciting adventure,” Lamb wrote.

Lamb attributed the rising skepticism of anthropogenic-caused global-warming (ACGW) to a “communications gap,” and forwarded usual talking-points about the phantom consensus in the science community:

“The current climate-change furor has become the poster child for what happens when there’s a communications gap between scientists and the public,” Lamb wrote. “The vast majority of scientists see compelling evidence that the world’s climate is about to change significantly, and that the change is largely driven by human activity.”

“Contributing to that swing have been efforts by skeptics to point out flaws in specific portions of the landmark 2007 report from the IPCC and question whether other findings have been manipulated,” he wrote. Apparently the Christian Science Monitor hasn’t heard there’s actual proof of manipulation, in the guise of ClimateGate (not to mention ChinaGate, SternGate, PeerReviewGate, HimilayaGate, AmazonGate … ).

Lamb also noted how the education system and universities like MIT concurrently stepped up their “communication efforts” as well. “Even the U.S. government has joined in with a new site called climate.gov, aimed at being a reliable source of data and facts on climate change,” he noted.

The government is going to get involved? That should solve everything.

As usual the alarmist press gets it exactly backwards. After their decades long propaganda crusade where very little of the opposition got through (except on the internet), they were still losing, even before Climategate, which only began to hasten the death spiral.

[kvrdave]

Good stuff. It seems to be more of a trickle these days, but it is still trickling in the right direction. Climategate spoiled me.

[movielib]

Part 2 of the series begun in Post #174:

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/0...ing/#more-7994

The Texas Petition against the U.S. EPA’s Endangerment Finding: A User’s Guide (Part II in a series)

by Chip Knappenberger
March 18, 2010

“Texas’ challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science….”

- Andrew Dessler, Gerald North, et al….., “On Global Warming, the Science Is Solid,” Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2010. [Also see yesterday's Part I post on Dessler/North.]

Last month, the State of Texas filed a petition for reconsideration in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (summary here) against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Petition lays out why the EPA’s reliance on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide an assessment of climate change science was a very bad idea.

After documenting flaws in the scientific literature, flaws in scientific behavior, flaws in the IPCC process, and flaws in the IPCC’s conclusions, Texas asks the EPA to re-examine its conclusions regarding climate change and its potential impacts on human health and welfare, and this time, not to rest its conclusions on the biased opinion of the IPCC. In other words, Texas asks the EPA to do the work themselves—something they are mandated to do anyway.

The complete Texas Petition is available here in a single pdf file. But to make it easier to navigate, we have broken the full Petition up into its individual sections, and linked them into the Table of Contents page, which we reproduce below. Hopefully, this will enable you to read through it in a more directed fashion so that you can go straight to which ever section you may be most interested in and see how Texas lays out its case for Reconsideration.

The Texas Petition

I. Introduction
II. Overview
III. Standard of Review
IV. The State of Texas’ Commitment to the Environment
V. The Endangerment Finding
VI. The IPCC Report’s Central Relevance to the Endangerment Finding
A. The Relationship between the Endangerment Finding, the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University’s Hadley Center
B. The IPCC’s—and the CRU’s—Expanded Footprint
C. The Central Relevance of the IPCC, USGCRP, and the NRC
VII. Improper Conduct Revealed by Disclosure of CRU Emails
A. The Lack of Integrity of the IPCC’s Data
1. The IPCC’s Manipulation of Its Climate Change Data
2. Loss or Destruction of Critical IPCC Records
B. IPCC’s Routine Reliance on Questionable Source Materials
1. Conclusions on Glaciers Admittedly Wrong
2. Findings on Chinese Weather Tainted by Allegations
3. Rain Forest Conclusions Based on Non-Peer Reviewed Sources
C. The Lack of Objectivity & the Suppression of Dissent
1. The Abuse of the Peer Review Process
2. Suppressing Dissent
D. Conflicts of Interest between The IPCC and Some Who Profit from Its Climate Change Conclusions
E. Lack of Transparency at IPCC Points to a Result-Oriented Process
VIII. Harm to Texas
A. Farming and Ranching
B. Revenue from Mineral Interests
C. Oil and Gas Sector
IX. Fallout
X. Conclusions

Here is a taste of what you will find inside—in this case, from the “Overview” (Section II):

Despite the Endangerment Finding’s remarkably broad impact, EPA’s Administrator relied on a fundamentally flawed and legally unsupported methodology to reach her decision. And although the Administrator is legally required to undertake a scientific assessment before reaching a decision that is supposed to be based on scientific conclusions, the Administrator outsourced the actual scientific study, as well as her required review of the scientific literature necessary to make that assessment. In doing so, EPA relied primarily on the conclusions of outside organizations, particularly the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”).

EPA’s reliance on the IPCC’s assessment to make a decision of this magnitude is not legally supported. Since the Endangerment Finding’s public comment period ended in June, 2009, troubling revelations about the conduct, objectivity, reliability, and propriety of the IPCC’s processes, assessments, and contributors have become public. Previously private email exchanges among top IPCC climatologists reveal an entrenched group of activists focused less on reaching an objective scientific conclusion than on achieving their desired outcome. These scientists worked to prevent contravening studies from being published, colluded to hide research flaws, and collaborated to obstruct the public’s legal right to public information under open records laws.

In addition to the improper collusion and cover-ups revealed by the release of these emails, since the public comment period ended, some of the IPCC’s methodologies and conclusions have been discredited. Not surprisingly, respected scientists and climatologists from around the globe have roundly criticized and correctly questioned the IPCC’s process, while calling for programmatic reforms.

Indeed, there has been worldwide fallout from scandals enveloping the IPCC. In Britain, four separate investigations have been launched, and the British Broadcasting Corporation has convened an inquiry into the journalistic appropriateness of its IPCC coverage. India has announced that it will create its own climate change institute rather than rely exclusively on the IPCC. And the United States Department of Commerce has created a new Climate Science Institute—though it has remained noticeably silent on the scandals plaguing the IPCC.

As a result, bipartisan legislation has been introduced in both chambers of Congress to prevent implementation of the Endangerment Finding and the related regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Notwithstanding the multitude and scope of these responsive measures, EPA has not indicated a willingness to review allegations that have shocked and appalled policy makers, regulators, scientists, and concerned citizens worldwide. Thus, while the State of Texas remains committed to work in cooperatively with EPA to protect the environment, this State must exercise its legal right to challenge a fundamentally flawed and legally unjustifiable process that will have a tremendously harmful impact on the lives of Texans and the Texas economy.

In light of the disturbing revelations detailed in the State’s Petition which strike directly at the heart of the objectivity, procedural legitimacy, and scientific validity of the assessments relied on by the Administrator—EPA should grant the State of Texas’ Petition for Reconsideration, conduct the rigorous, agency-led assessment that fully complies with Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) rules governing federal agency processes, and then rely on that scientifically—and legally—sound mechanism before reaching a potentially trillion-dollar decision as to whether greenhouse gases from mobile sources constitute a danger to the public health and welfare.

The filing of the Petition prompted an op-ed article in the Houston Chronicle by Texas A&M’s Dr. Andrew Dessler and five of his colleagues who accused the Texas Petition of containing “very little science.”

This is a hollow accusation.

Texas’s Petition is not about presenting new science. It is about asking the EPA to do its own review of the science of climate change in light of the fact that the organization it has mainly relied on for assessing the science—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—as been shown in recent months to have been guided more by preconceived ideas of how they wanted the science to be, rather than what the actual science itself is. And further, and perhaps even more serious, are allegations that some aspects of existing climate change science may not even represent good, clean science, but instead, manipulation of the science by a prominent collection of influential scientists (who also are involved in the IPCC).

It seems that everyone understands this except Dessler and co-signers. A few days after the Texas Petition was filed, the Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy Eric Berger. Berger asked AG Abbott this question:

I noted that the state of Texas has a number of eminent climate scientists. Did he ask any of them about these issues before proceeding with a legal brief?

To which Abbott responded:

“Not yet and here’s why. At this stage we’re not focused on, nor need we be focused on, needing to prove anything from a scientific basis ourselves. An unceasing flow of waves in which the scientific information the EPA relied upon has been discredited. We need to be able to put to rest all the flaws in the information the EPA relies upon. There’s an unmitigated taint to the information the EPA has relied upon. The EPA can’t stick its head in the sand and ignore that, it must address that.”

Dessler and co-signers overlooked this justification in their op-ed. Abbott once again, in his own op-ed this past weekend, made perfectly clear the intent of the Petition:

The Environmental Protection Agency recently concluded that man-made greenhouse gas emissions — including carbon dioxide — are harmful pollutants and must be regulated. The lawsuit I filed challenging that finding does not address the disputed science surrounding global warming. Instead, it focuses on the indisputable fact that the EPA relied on information that has been discredited, manipulated, lost or destroyed, and sometimes evaded peer review. The lawsuit does not attempt to show that the globe is not warming. It does, however, show that the process used by the EPA in deciding to regulate greenhouse gases is riddled with errors that render its conclusion untrustworthy.

And that is the heart of the matter.

The Texas’ Petition is not supposed to be about the science (nor should it be). It is about building a case why the EPA ought to take another look at the science in light of the recent indications that the science isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.

While Dessler and colleagues want to discuss the existing science—in their Chronicle letter they present their own ideas of the current state of climate change science, (some details of it are somewhat debatable, see tomorrow’s post)—the issue is much broader than that.

The bigger, and more unknown problem is in the non-existing science—that is, what should be part of the current science but isn’t because of the improper practices which have taken place as evidenced in the Climategate emails and described in the Texas Petition.

Here is how I summed up the situation a few months ago:

It is not so much what has appeared in the scientific literature after ‘decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world’ regarding human-caused climate change, but what has not appeared in the literature. The Climategate emails [as described in the Texas Petition] reveal signs of manipulation of the peer-review process, and what’s worse, intimidation of individual researchers, from a group of prominent scientists who seek to closely guard their view of the evidence and are who are largely intolerant of countervailing hypothesis or interpretations. The degree to which the extant scientific literature can be judged a fair representation of what our scientific understanding may have been like absent these tactics is impossible to ascertain. The unfortunate, but undeniable side effect, is that the foundation of state, national, and international assessments of the potential impacts of climate change and considerations of what actions may be necessary to mitigate them has been shaken—not by what our knowledge is, but by what it should be. The latter of which, through the actions revealed in the emails, has been rendered largely unknowable.

This is the aspect that Dessler and co-signers want to brush under the carpet, because this aspect is particularly difficult, if not downright impossible to overcome in the short run—and thus may set back the EPA’s ability to make an defensible assessment of the potential impacts of climate change for many years to come. It is that bad.

See for yourself by exploring the Texas Petition above. And when you are through with Texas’ submission, you can look through the eight other Petitions for Reconsideration received thus far by the EPA. They can be found, in their entirety, here.

[See original link for its links.]

The EPA has inevitably gotten the Endangerment Finding it wanted because it is exactly what it wanted, the science be damned. And it has gotten it by flouting even its own rules. This is so obvious it should not even have to be said but, of course, the opposition has to go through proper channels even though the EPA didn't.

I think tomorrow's point by point rebuttal of the Dessler/North op-ed will be the most interesting of the series.

[movielib]

Greenpeace livid about Koch's gift to the Smithsonian.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thehu...ithsonian.aspx

Posted Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:04 PM
Global Warming Heats Up at the Smithsonian
Eve Conant

I thought I was just dropping my kid off at school this lovely St. Patrick’s Day morning, but instead we stumbled onto an environmental scuffle. My son attends kindergarten inside the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, but this morning it was the scene outside that grabbed our attention.

Greenpeace activists were staging a “climate-crime-scene investigation” at the entrance to the museum. We had to pass “climate-crime unit” squad cars (with flashing green signals) and emergency vehicles, yellow crime-scene tape, and a line of activists holding up WANTED signs for a billionaire by the name of David Koch and his brother Charles.

Of course, the first thing that needed to happen was for me to get my son to school on time, but I went back outside to ask them what on earth was going on.

It turns out today was the opening ceremony of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, a new (and I would say, fabulous), $20.7 million permanent exhibit showcasing 6 million years of human evolution.

Some $15 million of its budget came from Koch. On its WANTED poster, Greenpeace accuses him and his brother of “Fueling Catastrophic Climate Change, Peddling Fossil Fuel Addiction, Funding Junk Science to Deny Global Warming, Endangering People, The Planet and Our Future.”

According to a Washington Post story earlier this month “Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group founded by David H. Koch, will kick off a campaign aimed at pushing lawmakers to block the EPA's scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The multi-million dollar campaign, which will include social networking and e-mail appeals as well as live events and paid radio and television advertising, will start March 22 in Hot Springs.”

This morning, Greenpeace activists left disappointed after Koch didn’t show. But they say their investigation continues, and they point to what they describe as a successful effort in 2007 to stop the American Petroleum Institute’s effort to fund the museum’s Ocean Hall as an example of vetting practices they hope the museum would practice.

Meanwhile, inside the museum, a private tour of the new exhibit was given to the press and, for a few hours today, the exhibit was opened to the public before its full opening on March 19. Smithsonian press officer Annalisa Meyer, standing next to one part of the exhibit detailing rising carbon-dioxide levels explained, “Donors do not have any influence on exhibits. They are not consulted, they are not part of the discussion of what goes into what you’re seeing here.” Another part of the exhibit, which also deals with climate change, shows how our bodies have evolved over millions of years, with examples of earlier, shorter skeletons and now the taller version of ourselves. “We got longer and linear as our bodies evolved over time and adapted to a warmer climate,” Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program, told me. (Moments earlier he had been fielding questions on intelligent design and whether the exhibit explored it in any way, which it does not. Expect this to be a much-discussed exhibit in the weeks to come).

Randall Kremer, director of public affairs for the Natural History Museum, says they are thankful for Koch’s gift. “There are not many philanthropists who have given as much as Koch to arts and science. I think his interest lies in the scientific verification of a whole range of things.”

One irony of this is that the exhibit is to showcase human evolution while one of the alarmists' favorite tactics is to compare skeptics to creationists even though only a vanishingly small number of alarmist scientists disgree with evolution.

One interesting point is that David H Koch was the Libertarian candidate for vice president in 1980, still the Libertarian ticket that got the most votes.

[movielib]

From the "For What It's Worth" department: Greens come up morally short in psychology experiment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...e-likely-steal

How going green may make you mean

Ethical consumers less likely to be kind and more likely to steal, study finds

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Monday 15 March 2010 19.42 GMT

A consumer of 'ethical' products such as organic food might be more inclined to cheat and steal, the study found. Photograph: David Sillitoe/Guardian

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to "green" type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics".

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. "Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours," they write.

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, "green products do not necessarily make for better people". They added that one motivation for carrying out the study was that, despite the "stream of research focusing on identifying the 'green consumer'", there was a lack of understanding into "how green consumption fits into people's global sense of responsibility and morality and [how it] affects behaviours outside the consumption domain".

The pair said their findings surprised them, having thought that just as "exposure to the Apple logo increased creativity", according to a recent study, "given that green products are manifestations of high ethical standards and humanitarian considerations, mere exposure" to them would "activate norms of social responsibility and ethical conduct".

Dieter Frey, a social psychologist at the University of Munich, said the findings fitted patterns of human behaviour. "At the moment in which you have proven your credentials in a particular area, you tend to allow yourself to stray elsewhere," he said.

I think a reasoning flaw may be in thinking being green is morally superior, in and of itself. I certainly don't think so. The greens do but that doesn't make it so.

[movielib]

DOE wants to repeat European "alternate energy" disasters. Damn the facts!

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...aspx?id=527214

The Big Wind-Power Cover-Up
Written by Investor's Business Daily
03/12/2010

Spain exposed the boondoggle of wind power in 2009, discrediting an idea touted by the Obama administration. In response, U.S. officials banded with trade lobbyists to hide the facts.

It was a cold day at the Energy Department when researchers at King Juan Carlos University in Spain released a study showing that every "green job" created by the wind industry killed off 4.27 other jobs elsewhere in the Spanish economy.

Research director Gabriel Calzada Alvarez didn't object to wind power itself, but found that when a government artificially props up this industry with subsidies, higher electrical costs (31%), tax hikes (5%) and government debt follow. Fact is, these subsidies have the same "Cuisinart" effect on jobs as wind-generating propeller blades have on birds. Every green job costs $800,000 to create and 90% of them are temporary, he found.

Alvarez made no bones about the lessons of Spain for the Obama administration, which has big plans for "green jobs." His report warned of "considerable employment consequences" from "self-inflicted economic wounds." It forecast that the U.S. could lose 6.6 million jobs if it followed Spain, and it "should certainly expect its results to follow such a tendency."

A few months later, Danish researchers at the Center for Politiske Studier came to the same conclusion about subsidized wind power from their own country's experience.

"It is fair to assess that no wind energy to speak of would exist if it had to compete on market terms," their report said.

Straightforward experience, facts and the logical conclusions about policy failure in Europe should be de rigueur in science, and the reports coming from nations with long experience in wind power ought to be taken seriously.

But they had no place in the Obama administration, which had declared a "green jobs" agenda with $2.3 billion in tax credits to create 17,000 "high-quality green jobs."

"Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future," said President Obama.

So at the release of the reports — as well as publication of a critical column by the Washington Post's George Will — bureaucrats at the Energy Department went into defensive mode. Instead of doing like John Maynard Keynes (who changed his conclusions when the facts changed), they "huddled" with left-wing activists and trade lobbyists to hide the facts and smear the truth-tellers from Europe. They cooked up their own "memo" to discredit the foreign academics, effectively making the Energy Department a taxpayer-subsidized arm of green activists.

Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, obtained the bureaucrats' e-mails through the Freedom of Information Act, and published the details:

"It's critical we respond, this thing won't die and its (sic) doing a good job of undermining our green job message. If we put together a call with CAP (Center for American Progress), can ucs (Union of Concerned Scientists) participate on a comprehensive response?" wrote Elizabeth Salerno of the American Wind Energy Association in a panicky e-mail to Suzanne Tegan of the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Tegan called for a phone meeting the next day to draft a response.

In her e-mail called "Follow Up," Tegan then wrote: "we are working with AWEA (who is working with UCS and others) to put out a response to this report, which is methodologically unsound, and states that renewable energy policy in Spain (and therefore the U.S.) is a waste of money and actually costs jobs rather than creates jobs.

The report directly addresses the Obama administration's ideas and policies," she added, urging nine names on her list to look over her report and send her their comments so it could be passed up the chain of command at Energy.

"Hi guys, This is a great document!" gushed AWEA wind lobbyist Jessica Isaacs to the Energy officials. "Very clear and concise. Mostly I wanted to write 'good point!' or 'nice refutation' in the margins but tried to keep it to some constructive feedback, please find attached."

Tegan referred to the lobbyists at AWEA and private think tank CAP as "colleagues." In another twist, showing that she wasn't just part of a rogue group, she reported pressure from Assistant Energy Secretary Cathy Zoi. She wondered how Zoi had learned of their memo plans, suggesting that someone from outside the agency had told her.

"Heard 2nd hand that Rob Gramlich has a new wind/jobs study that could counter George Will's crappy op ed of this week. How close are we? Can we get it out now?" Zoi e-mailed to the group.

What this shows is a shameless politicization of what should be a professional bureaucracy. Instead of staying objective, they sought to scupper facts for ideologically motivated junk science. It also shows how influential radical activists and trade lobbyists are in the Obama administration, something the president had promised to hose out during his presidential campaign.

Among the outsiders at Energy's "in" crowd was the Center for American Progress, a think tank partly funded by billionaire investor George Soros and led by John Podesta, a man who visitor logs show was at the White House 31 times over two months in the fall of 2009, the only period from which records are available. Two of his visits were with officials prominent on green issues.

Whatever that means, it amounts to an authentic scandal in the league of Climate-gate, where leaked e-mails exposed the fraud of global warming data at the University of East Anglia and the effort of academics to cover it up.

"The least revelatory aspect of this was the hollowness of the Obama administration's claims to having driven lobbyists from the executive branch. Providing an inside role for politically favored industries in developing official administration statements falls even further from the rhetoric," said CEI's Horner, in an e-mail to IBD.

"Worse, with direct communications with ideological activists like CAP and UCS undoubtedly the anticipated and regular subject of FOIA requests, we also see how the Obama administration employed an industry lobby to channel the influence of such groups into the administration's inner workings to circumvent the expected pathway for scrutiny," said Horner, who also noted that Energy officials have since misled Congress.

With that the modus operandi of Energy now, questions are raised as to how objective any of its reports are. Can we trust what it says? Or shall the department be written off as out-of-touch politicians are?

The green jobs myth just keeps rolling along thanks to the pseudoscientific Obama administration that had vowed to bring back science to America after its supposed destruction by the Bush administration. It's not often I have anything good to say about Bush but comparing his administration's science to Obama's is like comparing Mendel to Lysenko. Save us from the green "saviors" of science.

[kvrdave]

So long as there is other people's money, there can be green jobs.

[OldDude]

"Damn the truth. Full agenda ahead."

That seems to be the administration's response to the really inconvenient truths about the lies.

[movielib]

Part 3 of the series begun in Posts #174 and #179:

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/0...ernorth-op-ed/

Reconsidering the Dessler/North Op-Ed on Settled Alarm, Climategate-as-Distraction (Part III in a series)

by Robert Bradley Jr.
March 19, 2010

Scientists find themselves fighting science when it comes to the highly unsettled physical basis of climate change. An example of this is the March 7th Houston Chronicle editorial by two Texas A&M climate scientists (et al.), “On Global Warming, the Science is Solid.”

I took general exception to their piece in Part I in this series, titled “Andrew Dessler and Gerald North on Climategate, Climate Alarmism, and the State of Texas’s Challenge to the U.S. EPA’s Endangerment Finding.” Chip Knappenberger yesterday took issue with their claim that the Texas Petition was flawed because it “contains very little science.”

This post critically reconsiders the above editorial that argued, in effect, that the science behind climate alarmism is settled and that Climategate is a distraction from the core issues. Just the opposite may well be true.

Some Background

Evidently, Dr. Dessler wrote this op-ed and got sign-on from other Texas scientists to made it a ‘consensus’ statement. Here is how the Houston Chronicle attributed it:

This article was submitted by Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas A&M University; Katharine Hayhoe, research associate professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas Tech University; Charles Jackson, research scientist, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin; Gerald North, distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences, Texas A&M University; André Droxler, professor of earth science and director of the Center for the Study of Environment and Society, Rice University; and Rong Fu, professor, Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin.

I refer to the piece as Dessler/North because the activist-oriented Dr. Dessler is the leader, and the most distinguised climate scientist of the six named authors is Dr. North.

Criticism of Dessler/North (et al.) Piece

A critique follows with the exact language of the (entire) op-ed in quotation and black and my comments in blue for ease of reading. [I will simply indent the responses.]

————————————————–

“In recent months, e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom and errors in one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports have caused a flurry of questions about the validity of climate change science.”

Comment: Why not use the term that everyone knows–Climategate? And if you know the emails were stolen, can you solve the mystery for the rest of us? If this presumption is not informed speculation, what does this say about your scientific belief system? You are speaking as professional scientists, after all, and not public relations specialists.

“These issues have led several states, including Texas, to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (also known as greenhouse gases) are a threat to human health.

However, Texas’ challenge to the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide contains very little science.”

A straw man argument? As Chip Knappenberger explained yesterday, the Texas Petition was not supposed to present science, it was filed to ask the EPA to revisit the science based upon recent revelation that many aspects of the process which produced the current state of science, were flawed.

“Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott admitted that the state did not consult any climate scientists, including the many here in the state, before putting together the challenge to the EPA.”

The climate science world does not revolve around College Station, Texas any more than it does/did Norwich, England (the home of the East Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia of Climategate infamy). There is no reason to believe that the best climate scientists of all climate scientists reside here in Texas. Non-Texas scientists regularly challenge Texas scientists, as the Richard Lindzen-Gerald North debate here in Houston in January attests.

There are other issues lurking below the surface–is a “skeptic” or just “non-alarmist” hirable in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences or the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M? Is there groupthink going on? Are any junior members staying quiet in these or the College of Geosciences on on campus? Why is there no such statement at, say, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Harvard University? Is climate science politicized where there are such statements?

“Instead, the footnotes in the document reveal that the state relied mainly on British newspaper articles to make its case.”

Again, the case being made is about challenges to the state of existing climate science. It doesn’t matter where those challenges are presented, but rather their merit. Along with the investigative and summary reporting from some British newspapers (and other sources), the Texas Petition also includes much direct evidence of scientific misconduct found directly within the Climategate emails themselves.

“Contrary to what one might read in newspapers, the science of climate change is strong.”

“Strong”? Compared to what? Can science be “strong” but not settled? Is it being claimed that the science is settled too?

The error bars around past and future temperature projections are large, even huge. The whole range is in dispute. (Dr. North’s warming estimate has a range that lies outside of the IPCC range, for example.) Aerosols? Oceanic thermal lag? Cloud feedbacks? Stratospheric water vapor? And last but not least, given the slowdown of warming in the last decade or more–what about natural variability? These crucial areas are in open dispute with profound implications for sensitivity estimates of greenhouse gas forcing.

Are today’s climate models “strong”? The IPCC report stated in its last assessment:

“The set of available models may share fundamental inadequacies, the effects of which cannot be quantified.” - IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 805.

That does not sound like “strong science” to me. (Whether or not it is “best science” is another question.)

“Our own work and the immense body of independent research conducted around the world leaves no doubt regarding the following key points:

• • The global climate is changing.”

“A 1.5-degree Fahrenheit increase in global temperature over the past century has been documented by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Numerous lines of physical evidence around the world, from melting ice sheets and rising sea levels to shifting seasons and earlier onset of spring, provide overwhelming independent confirmation of rising temperatures. Measurements indicate that the first decade of the 2000s was the warmest on record, followed by the 1990s and the 1980s. And despite the cold and snowy winter we’ve experienced here in Texas, satellite measurements show that, worldwide, January 2010 was one of the hottest months in that record.”

This general recitation of facts about the earth’s climate behavior ignores the details that matter to human health and welfare–exactly what is being considered the EPA. And it is in such details where Climategate and the IPCC error (as laid out in the Texas Petition) have the most potential to disrupt our scientific knowledge (for example, the melting of Himalayan glaciers).

Whether or not this past winter was warm globally is small consolation to many Americans who dealt with harsh winter weather. Certainly, a bad winter in the South doesn’t disprove anthropogenic global warming. But what it does disprove is the notion that weather/climate events that most impact us are eminently knowable and preordained by “global warming.”

“• • Human activities produce heat-trapping gases.

Any time we burn a carbon-containing fuel such as coal or natural gas or oil, it releases carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide can be measured coming out of the tailpipe of our cars or the smokestacks of our factories. Other heat-trapping gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are also produced by agriculture and waste disposal. The effect of these gases on heat energy in the atmosphere is well understood, including factors such as the amplification of the warming by increases in humidity.”

Again, what is really important is in the missing detail.

Yes, human greenhouse gases lead to a general warming pressure on the earth’s climate. But there are many processes in between a higher GHG atmospheric concentration and higher temperatures. And it is within the complex interaction of these processes (many of which are not fully understood, or perhaps even recognized), that the ultimate climate response is determined. And the science is far from settled in precisely this “money” area.

” • • Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century.”

“There is no question that natural causes, such as changes in energy from the sun, natural cycles and volcanoes, continue to affect temperature today. Human activity has also increased the amounts of tiny, light-scattering particles within the atmosphere. But despite years of intensive observations of the Earth system, no one has been able to propose a credible alternative mechanism that can explain the present-day warming without heat-trapping gases produced by human activities.”

As Chip Knappenberger has carefully argued at MasterResource, the use of the term “very likely” to describe a human role in “most of the warming over the past half century” is unjustified—rendered so by recent scientific findings. Dessler/North/EPA/IPCC are behind-the-times on this claim. Again, the details matter.

“• • The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.”

Is this a ‘maybe’ or ‘possibility’ statement? Could increasing concentrations also improve benefits, even with extreme scenarios such as man-made warming preventing a new ice age (as suggested may have already occurred by environmentalist James Lovelock)?

“A recent federal report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, commissioned in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration, presents a clear picture of how climate change is expected to affect our society, our economy and our natural resources. Rising sea levels threaten our coasts; increasing weather variability, including heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall events and even winter storms, affect our infrastructure, energy and even our health.”

This Report is hardly the bastion of scientific credibility that Dessler/North make it out to be. Knappenberger described a draft if this report as “a fantasy piece on how [the authors] wished the state of climate science to be, rather than how it actually is.” The final product was little better—empasizing the potential negatives over the positives, and presenting, in general, an overly pessimistic view of the potential impacts of potential climate change on the U.S.—when there is plenty to be optimistic about.

“The reality of these key points is not just our opinion. The national academies of science of 32 nations, and every major scientific organization in the United States whose members include climate experts, have issued statements endorsing these points. The entire faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M as well as the Climate System Science group at the University of Texas have issued their own statements [here and here) endorsing these views. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there are no climate scientists in Texas who disagree with the mainstream view of climate science.”

This is the argument from authority. Consensus is not science, and if there was clear science and a ‘consensus,’ Climategate would be unknown to history.

There have been previous “consensus” views across the sciences that have been proven wrong, from central planning as a social ideal to the false alarms of Malthusian/neo-Malthusian scares (the “population bomb,” mineral resource exhaustion, etc.).

There was a consensus that Enron was a great company too (I fell for that one …), which brings up the parallels between Enron and Climategate for students of fads and fallacies.

The global cooling scare was not a consensus, but don’t tell that to such ferocious climate alarmists such as Stephen Schneider and Obama science advisor John Holdren. Humility is is order to those who want to say the science speaks with one voice for climate policy.

“We are all aware of the news reports describing the stolen e-mails from climate scientists and the errors in the IPCC reports. While aspects of climate change impacts have been overstated, none of the errors or allegations of misbehavior undermine the science behind any of the statements made above.”

Talking about Climategate? Why not use the term–even in quotation marks to indicate that it is a catch term, in your opinion?

“Errors”–what and how severe? In fact, what the “stolen” emails reveal is a hurried, panicked push to spin the science toward alarm. And if the authors have not read the emails (as North has admitted), are you sure there is not fire where there is smoke?

“In particular, they do not alter the conclusions that humans have taken over from nature as the dominant influence on our climate.”

Is nature optimal and the human influence bad, much less catastrophic? What value system is being snuck into the physical science debate? Many fear, myself included, that the natural scientists sounding the climate alarm have an unwavering, almost religious, notion that the natural world is fragile and the human influence, whatever and whenever, is bad and worse. But the history of failed mini-climate alarms, as stated by Dr. North on other occassions, gives pause for such a gloomy view of the world.

And the Sins of Omission …

If they chose to do so, these scientists could have trumpeted the positives of the human influence on climate (and in particular CO2 as the “green” greenhouse gas); the benign distribution of the enhanced greenhouse effect (toward nights and the coldest regions’ winters); and the less-than-linear (logarithmic) effect of greenhouse forcing on temperature. But that is the detail–detail that goes missing when a case for alarm is condensed into a 750-word op-ed.

Conclusion

As is true of many polarized debates, the truth is somewhere in the middle. That middle has been explored by none other than Gerald North, the subject of Part IV in this series. His long held personal views suggest that the alarm of his colleague Dr. Dessler is exaggerated.

The alarmists have been reduced to reciting a sort of litany since Climategate. You can see the same elements in almost everything they write which still reduces to the science is settled and everyone but a few "deniers" says so. It's gotten old and stale and is as false as ever.

[Bandoman]

There's way too much information and too much to read on the subject of global warming. Can someone just tell me what to think? thx

[movielib]

Barbara Boxer getting into a bit of trouble.

http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal...boxer_sudd.php

Poll: Boxer Suddenly In Trouble
March 18, 2010 9:41 AM
By Steven Shepard

A day after Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) camp announced that Pres. Obama would be traveling to Los Angeles for a joint fundraiser next month, a new Field Poll shows Boxer locked in tight races with each of the GOPers vying to challenge her in Nov.

Ex-Rep. Tom Campbell (R) leads the GOP field, posting a 6-point advantage over ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (R). But Campbell, Fiorina and Assemb. Chuck DeVore (R) each run virtually even with Boxer in general-election matchups.

The Field Poll surveyed 748 likely voters from Mar. 9-15, with a margin of error of +/- 3.6%. There was an oversample of 353 likely GOP primary voters, with a margin of error of +/- 5.2%.

Primary Election Matchup (GOPers)

Campbell 28% (-2 from 1/17)
Fiorina 22 (-3)
DeVore 9 (+3)

General Election Matchups

Campbell 44% (+6)
Boxer 45% (-5)

Boxer 43 (-5)
Fiorina 44 (+9)

Boxer 45% (-6)
DeVore 41 (+7)

Boxer's favorability has taken a big hit. A majority, 51%, of likely voters now view her unfavorably, with only 38% having a favorable impression of the incumbent. In the previous poll, taken in Jan., 48% viewed Boxer favorably, with 39% having an unfavorable image of her.

The GOP candidates remain little-known, with a majority of likely voters having no opinion of each of them.

"I could have put your name against Boxer, and you'd have gotten half the votes," Field Poll dir. Mark DiCamillo told a McClatchy reporter. "It's really not about the candidates themselves."

In a possible sign of Dems' concern over Boxer's re-election, the Boxer camp announced late yesterday that Obama would attend a joint fundraiser for their camp and the DNC in mid-April, though details have not yet been finalized.

The poll's findings are consistent with numbers released yesterday in the GOV race that showed ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman (R) claiming a slight lead over AG/ex-Gov. Jerry Brown (D).

The GOP primary, meanwhile, remains fairly open, with 41% of likely voters still undecided. Fiorina leads among Boomers, but Campbell runs stronger with voters 65 and older. In Jan., Campbell held a similar, 5-point lead over Fiorina, just days after switching from the GOV race to challenge Boxer.

It's early so I'm not getting my hopes up too much yet. But would I like to see Boxer canned (or boxed!).

[movielib]

Originally Posted by Bandoman

There's way too much information and too much to read on the subject of global warming. Can someone just tell me what to think? thx

Like me. You're welcome.

[Bandoman]

Originally Posted by movielib

Like me. You're welcome.

That's all well and good, but if you and kvrdave ever disagree on something my head is going to explode like Norman's in "I, Mudd".

[movielib]

Originally Posted by Bandoman

That's all well and good, but if you and kvrdave ever disagree on something my head is going to explode like Norman's in "I, Mudd".

Are you kidding? Try religion.

It's like Madalyn Murray O'Hair vs. John Calvin. Sort of.

[movielib]

We are being told that in the US, we're feeling the effects of global warming all over.

Here are the scary facts:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/1...in-us-climate/

Devastating non-trends in US Climate
19 03 2010

From Warren Meyer, who was discussing the recent announcement from the White House Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

If one wonders why the climate alarmist movement is suffering from a credibility problem, one only needs to read some of the claims:

Climate change is already having “pervasive, wide-ranging” effects on “nearly every aspect of our society,” a task force representing more than 20 federal agencies reported Tuesday.

Here are some of the devastating non-trends in US Climate:

This is so scary I think I'll move to Spain, Germany or Denmark where at least they're doing something like creating all those green jobs.

[movielib]

More states are joining in fight to block the EPA.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/po...gainst-the-epa

More States Join Alabama’s Fight Against the EPA

Written by Rex Springston, WRBL
22 March 2010

Additional states are backing Virginia’s legal battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over climate change, while environmentalists are siding with the EPA.

Twelve states have filed motions to join court challenges previously filed by Virginia, Texas and Alabama, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Charlottesville-based Southern Environmental Law Center said yesterday that it is seeking to enter the case and argue on behalf of the EPA.

The states are challenging an EPA decision in December that greenhouse gases, which scientists say contribute to global warming, endanger the public.

The decision opens the door for the EPA to crack down on cars, power plants and other sources of heat-trapping gases. Cuccinelli says those regulations would hurt jobs and the economy.

Morgan Butler, a senior attorney with the law center, said the effects of climate change — for example, rising sea levels — can hurt people and their property.

The center is representing Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk-based environmental group.

The states’ challenges are before a federal appeals court in Washington. Oral arguments could be held this winter, a spokeswoman for the law center said.

The 12 states that have filed motions to join in the challenges are Nebraska, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah, according to Cuccinelli’s office.

That's 30% of the states willing to oppose the EPA power grab. The heat on the EPA is increasing, more than was thought.

[movielib]

Would the US be stupid enough to reject Canadian oil sands oil?

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62H4MB20100318

U.S. mustn't discriminate against Canadian oil sands
Ayesha Rascoe
Thu Mar 18, 2010 4:23pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States should not discriminate against the Canadian oil sands industry, Canada's ambassador in Washington said on Thursday, warning that trade restrictions could cause the top energy supplier to U.S. markets to seek out other customers.

Canada's abundant oil sands resources have been threatened in the U.S. market with proposed climate change policies that would place additional costs on fuels that emit higher levels of carbon dioxide.

The policies are unfair to Canada's oil sands industry, Ambassador Gary Doer said in a wide-ranging interview with Reuters, especially since both countries have signed on to an international agreement to lower carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

"We absolutely want states and provinces to not discriminate against one sector without looking at the big picture," Doer said.

With an estimated 173 billion barrels, Canadian oil sands are the largest source of crude outside the Middle East. But development of these reserves requires open pit mines and carbon-spewing processing plants, placing oil sands producers at a disadvantage under any fuel standard that rewards low-emission sources.

California has already adopted a so-called low carbon fuel standard, which attempts to limit the carbon intensity of transportation fuels burned in the state. At least 11 other states are considering similar measures.

Ultimately if the United States becomes less open to oil sands, Doer said the fuel can go elsewhere.

"This is a commodity that can sold somewhere else. It's not as if the United States is the only country interested in purchasing oil," Doer said.

Plans are already in place to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline to Canada's West Coast, where tankers could ship oil sands-derived crude to refineries in Asia, although the industry has said it could supply both markets.

Pointing out that emissions from U.S. coal plants are much higher than emissions from oil sands, Doer said both Canada and the United States have to work to limit the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"We're not saints. We don't discuss this issue as holier-than-thou," Doer said. "We all have challenges. The United States has challenges in coal. We have challenges in the oil sands."

Despite the actions from states, Doer said the Obama administration demonstrated its commitment to oil sands when it approved the $3.3 billion Alberta Clipper pipeline project last year. The pipeline will mostly transport crude from the oil sands to the United States.

President Barack Obama has voiced support for developing a national low carbon fuel standard in the past, but he has not taken a hard line against oil sands.

It doesn't appear so, at least right now, but I wouldn't put anything past this crowd.

[movielib]

Support for nuclear energy highest in US for 16 years.

http://thechillingeffect.org/2010/03...king-brighter/



Despite polls such as this and a little movement by the Obama administration, I'm still not holding my breath.

[movielib]

The BBC is all over the place. It's for the birds.

http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/201...limate-change/

BBC More Confused Than Birds About Climate Change
22 03 2010

Are milder winters good for wildlife? Yes? No? Who knows? Certainly, nobody would know it were the BBC the main source of information…

Latest: Mar 19, 2010: “The harsh winter in Britain may have had a devastating impact on wildlife, particularly on birds like the kingfisher“. But on May 28, 2003: “increases in spring temperatures in temperate areas of Europe” mean “long-range migrant birds ‘in peril’“, even if “short-haul migrational birds could benefit“.

And if on Nov 3, 2005, “scientists showed that migration and breeding of the great tit, puffin, red admiral and other creatures are moving out of step with food supplies“, on May 8, 2008, as already reported here, “great tits cope well with warming“. Didn’t they know? On Dec 19, 2001, Alex Kirby had written “The populations of some common wild bird species in the UK are at their highest in more than a decade. Woodland birds and several rare species are also doing better than they have. [...] Scientists say mild winter weather helped many species“.

On the other hand, wasn’t it on Aug 12, 2000 that we were told that “the hunters say the drop in grouse populations during the past two years was mainly due to an unusually wet summer in 1998 and a mild winter in 1999“?

The overall impression is of course that few at the BBC (or amongst the esteemed scientists and various interviewees for several years) understand about the topic they are writing about, so they end up contributing to an absolutely confused mess where too much uncritical reporting demonstrates everything and its opposite.

If one waits long enough, literally anything will appear on the BBC News website on matters of climate.

Of course the BBC doesn't really care what it reports as long as it can blame everything on global warming (or climate change).

[movielib]

Stark raving mad. Probably the stupidest global warming claim of the year.

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2010/...-claim-of.html

Monday, March 22, 2010
Really Stupid Climate Change Claim of the Year (So Far)-Global Warming Causes Violence`

My son is working on a research paper about video games and violence. He found much information on the subject on the site of Iowa State who has a Center for the Study of Violence. But that is not all he found. Last night in the midst of the health debate he sent me a link to a press release from the Center for the Study of Violence, contained one of dumbest Global Warming claim that I have ever seen, Global Warming causes violence.

Researchers Present Study on How Global Climate Change Affects Violence

Newswise — If global warming is a scientific fact, then you better be prepared for the earth to become a more violent place. That's because new Iowa State University research shows that as the earth's average temperature rises, so too does human "heat" in the form of violent tendencies.

Co-authored by Craig Anderson, a Distinguished Professor of psychology and director of Iowa State's Center for the Study of Violence; and Matt DeLisi, an associate professor of sociology and director of ISU's criminal justice program, the paper was presented by Anderson this week (March 15-19) at the Sydney (Australia) Symposium of Social Psychology.

Using U.S. government data on average yearly temperatures and the number of violent crimes between 1950 and 2008, the researchers estimate that if the annual average temperature in the U.S. increases by 8°F (4.4°C), the yearly murder and assault rate will increase by 34 per 100,000 people -- or 100,000 more per year in a population of 305 million.

And while the global warming science has recently come under fire, the main premise behind the Iowa State researchers' paper is irrefutable.

"It is very well researched and what I call the 'heat hypothesis,'" Anderson said. "When people get hot, they behave more aggressively. There's nothing new there and we're all finding the same thing. But of the three ways that global warming is going to increase aggression and violence, that's probably the one that's going to have the most direct impact -- even on developed, wealthy countries, because they have warm regions too."

The ISU researchers analyze existing research -- including an update on a study Anderson authored in 1997 -- on the effects of rising temperature on aggression and risk factors for delinquency and criminal behavior.

In addition to the "heat hypothesis," they report that rising global temperatures also increases known risk factors for the development of aggression in violence-prone individuals -- such as increasing poverty, growing up amid scarce resources, malnutrition and food insecurity. They contend that one of the most catastrophic effects of climate change will be food availability, producing more violence-prone individuals in the process.

An author and editor of two new books on delinquency and the development of serious criminality -- "Criminological Theory: A Life-Course Approach" and "Delinquency in Society: The Essentials" (Jones and Bartlett Publishers) -- DeLisi's found that it's a layering of risk factors that ultimately lead to a person becoming a serious offender. In fact, one of his new books promotes a life-course understanding of antisocial conduct -- from prenatal through adulthood -- and how various risk factors contribute to persistent offenders.

And food scarcity is one of the risk factors.

"While there is some link between temperature and aggression, really the effects [of climate change] are going to be more indirect if those temperature changes affect the amount of food we can produce, coupled with population growth," DeLisi said. "Then where the real damage will be done is malnutrition, because that sets in motion these other developments [risk factors] that then lead to crime."

DeLisi also cites the forced migration from the damage of Hurricane Katrina as an example of how criminal activity may be exported by an increase in extreme weather caused by global warming.

"It's not just normal folks who left New Orleans. It's also criminals," he said. "And so as a lot of the people from New Orleans relocated to Houston, what you also had was displacement of gangs from New Orleans and confronting Houston gangs -- resulting in an increasing number of homicides from their conflicts."

The authors cite ecomigration, civil unrest, genocide and war as the third way global warming is going to increase violence. They report research finding that rapid climate change can lead to changes in the availability of food, water, shelter and other necessities of life. And such shortages can also lead to civil war and unrest, migration to adjacent regions and conflict with people who already live in that region, and even to genocide and war.

"There have been some recent reports [cited in the paper], and one was a U.N. report on climate change and women and children," Anderson said. "It pointed out that whenever there was an ecological disaster, women and children tend to be the most victimized in terms of violence. The reasoning is that women, in most of the subsistence cultures, are often more responsible for food and the children, and so they can't pack up and leave as easily. And so they're left vulnerable to violent activities."

Anderson plans to continue studying the effects of climate change on resulting violence.

Allow me to suggest that the only thing about global warming that may cause violence, is that people are still hanging on to the hoax and making these really asinine claims make people want to hit someone.

Yes, this is the same guy who has pseudoscientific studies saying video games cause violence. He is just as sure about that as he is about global warming causing violence. See:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/15327..._part_one.html

[movielib]

We evil denialists have been "on a rampage" since Climategate. Poor Pachauri.

[movielib]

You have to waste money to get more green taxpayer money to waste.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com...ZkN2UwMWFjNTA=

Monday, March 22, 2010
Some Dark Green Humor
Chris Horner

My old stomping grounds for about 15 years (Alexandria, Virginia) is insisting on moving forward with a project to spend 173,000 scarce taxpayer dollars in these lean times — even as taxpaying families are setting aside the frivolous and even what they consider basics — on a new "green roof" to replace a 13-year-old roof with no history of problems and a 25-year life expectancy. The other $200,000 is being paid for by all taxpayers through the EPA. OK, mostly by future taxpayers.

If Alexandria doesn't spend the $173,000 they don't have, you see, they won't qualify for EPA giving them $200,000 the federal government doesn't have. So they have to do it. They won't get that bag of money from the federal government if they don't undertake this expenditure.

Seriously. That's what Alexandria is saying, according to the Washington Examiner. The city's argument in support of such irresponsibility, on the heels of outraged taxpayers finding out about it, is that in the future the EPA might not consider Alexandria responsible enough to receive grants if they decided against this expenditure which, apparently, is the embodiment of responsibility.

"Pulling out of the project would also jeopardize Alexandria's future requests for grant funds, according to City Budget Director Bruce Johnson.

'If we were to tell the EPA, "Oh I'm sorry, we've changed our mind," do you think they would give us a grant in the future?" Johnson said. 'We can't do business that way.'"

No. Of course not. The only proper way to do business is to spend money you don't have because otherwise you won't get a bag of money from the feds to pay for the other half of something. And everyone knows we have to do something. This roof is something. Ergo . . .

That's a liberal government's idea of "business".

And it's happening all over the country. A perfect story for these times. Absolutely perfect.

The one thing government is efficient at: wasting money.

[movielib]

There is a new panel set to investigate the CRU Climategate files.

Problem is, at least two of the members are raging alarmists. A W Montford (AKA Bishop Hill) comments:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/bl...-interest.html

Oxburgh's conflict of interest
Mar 22, 2010

Commenters are also noting the background of Ron Oxburgh, the chairman of the RS panel. Lord Oxburgh is:

* President of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association
* Chairman of wind energy firm Falck Renewables
* A member of the Green Fiscal Commission

So we have a chairman with a direct financial interest in the outcome. I'm not sure this is a surprise.

Update on Mar 22, 2010 by Registered CommenterBishop Hill

For the avoidance of doubt, the financial interest is in Falck Renewables - AFAIK, the Carbon Capture thing is an honorary position. I have no idea if Green Fiscal Commissioners are remunerated or not.

Perhaps worse:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/bl...te-emails.html

Emmanuel on the Climategate emails
Mar 22, 2010

Reader Mac notes Kerry Emmanuel's comments on the Climategate emails, delivered at an MIT debate on the subject:

"What we have here," says Kerry Emanuel, are "thousands of emails collectively showing scientists hard at work, trying to figure out the meaning of evidence that confronts them. Among a few messages, there are a few lines showing the human failings of a few scientists…" Emanuel believes that "scientifically, it means nothing," because the controversy doesn't challenge the overwhelming evidence supporting anthropogenic warming. He is far more concerned with the well-funded "public relations campaign" to drown out or distort the message of climate science, which he links to "interests where billions, even trillions are at stake..." This "machine … has been highly successful in branding climate scientists as a bunch of sandal-wearing, fruit-juice drinking leftist radicals engaged in a massive conspiracy to return us to agrarian society…"

I'm speechless. Even after the debacle of Philip Campbell's resignation from the Russell panel, no lessons appear to have been learned.

Emanuel hasn't already prejudged this, has he? Wanna bet what he says above will more or less be the conclusion of the panel, with the language tempered a bit?

Not only that, Emanuel has even published at least one study with the Hockey Stick's Michael Mann:

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/share...anuelEos06.pdf

Every "investigation" so far has been stacked.

[movielib]

We haven't won yet and must remain ever vigilant. They won't give up.

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-Envir...olicy-Examiner

Global warming: How skeptics can win every battle but lose the war
March 22, 2:04
Thomas Fuller

Again in keeping with my assessment of climate change as a 30 year war, it's important to keep the last three months in perspective. Skeptics have been whooping and hollering as proponents suffered a series of blows in the media (Climategate), politics (Copenhagen) and reality (a cold winter in the northern hemisphere).

The science? Glad you asked. It ebbs and flows, as data is examined and hypotheses challenged and new technology makes different measurements possible. Mistakes found in IPCC publications are good PR for skeptics, but correcting them is good for science. Likewise, discovering that much of the observed loss of Arctic ice is due to wind rather than melting may make skeptics smile today, but better understanding of what happens to ice up north will help us all tomorrow.

But back to the more entertaining sideshows. Although skeptics have had the best of the past three months, the establishment is now bringing its vastly more powerful apparatus to bear and I think most of the rest of this year will leave skeptics scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong.

That is because many of the problems discovered by the skeptics will now be 'addressed' institutionally. This means that the scope and cause of these problems will be massaged to fit into the theoretical frameworks needed to sustain the institutions that are examining them.

We now see investigating committees that will have the scope of their investigations severely limited in terms of time and budget. They will not have the resources to interview the most relevant principals. The committee chairs will be veterans of institutional life, acutely aware that politics is the art of the possible, and the constitution of these committees will guarantee that a certain vision of scientific practice--and hence, the way we have approached global warming--will emerge more or less unscathed.

Two sacrificial lambs have been prepared and shorn, ready if needed to take the fall. Rajendra Pachauri and Phil Jones may have to bear the burden for others, and although their actions may have been bad enough to justify their departure from the stage, that doesn't mean that everyone else should get off scott free. But they probably will.

The inertia developed over a decade of sympathetic coverage of the proponents' view of global warming insure that both the media and the politicians will revert to the default position of support for the mainstream view, which will comfort them no end. It may even be more comfortable for skeptics--many of whom seem to relish the underdog, David vs. Goliath position.

The institutional mechanisms of science are best grasped and handled by the establishment. They hold the data. They commission the projects. They disburse the money. They publish the results. It's a huge advantage.

And it will take far more than a cold winter for skeptics to beat them.

As was mentioned during the recent inquiry by the UK House of Commons, Steve Mosher and I have written a book about the leaked emails that have caused so much controversy. The title is Climategate: The CRUtape Letters. It is available on Create Space here, Amazon here, Kindle here and Lulu here. One Amazon reviewer wrote, "Mosher and Fuller do a good job putting the ClimateGate documents in context, and the book is a riveting read. I received my copy yesterday, and find the book to be faithful to the climate war events that I have followed over a period of years. It reports actual email communications of a small group of paleoclimatologists and their roles in perhaps the biggest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man."

As is being shown, after a brief flurry of British real journalism, things are settling down and the alarmists are recapturing the MSM (they never lost it in the US). They still have the big guns and we have to peck them to death from the blogs and our few press allies if we are going to have a chance.