The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science".Oo ee, oo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang . . .
Some of them are no doubt vaguely cognizant of the fact that they might have way overbet this hand and that there's now something much more important in play than the plight of the planet. And that of course would be their reputations and standing in the herd of man.
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In lieu of having the facts (i.e., the thermometer!) bear out their hypothesis, they are now going to have to get creative. They are going to have to press the bet now and steer into the delusional skid, and that sort of desperation makes for a really unsavory individual no matter how much good they are ostensibly doing for their fellow man.
Deniers will be disparaged, data will be fudged and theories will be advanced that are, if possible, even more wing-nuttier than some of the claptrap currently out there. If heretofore depictions of Manhattan under water in the year 2057 were shown to sixth-graders, they're going to have to drop it down to preschoolers in deference to the Gullibility Expansion Joint.
[Democratic Congressperson] Ed Markey said he would welcome the Republicans in Copenhagen because they would be “exposed to the consensus the world has reached…They are in a very, very, very small minority on the planet.”"Hey Ed, this purported "consensus" is built on the purportedly learned, unbiased, scientific conclusions of purportedly unbiased, honest scientists . . . premises all of which are severely in doubt based on the Climategate disclosures. What's there to "hide," Ed? What's there to "trick"erize? Since when does a scientist bury/destroy/misplace(!) data from which he's drawing conclusions?
"In fact, one skeptic raised [a concern about drawing conclusions from two sets of data grafted together] in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:I love how Mann writes "to our knowledge." Sounds like a press secretary's resort to plausible deniability.
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium."
"Do you really think you know more than scientists? They're scientists.
Yes, and science is a wonderful thing. It's improved our lives in countless ways. It also has nothing to do with what these frauds, and the useful idiots who believed them, have been pulling."
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:Emphasis added.
"This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."
The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.
As readers are now aware, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the main climate research center in Britain, has had 128 megabytes of secret emails and other data placed online by someone calling himself “FOIA.” A number of scientists have been trying for years to get the raw data possessed by CRU placed online, filing requests under the British Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although required by law to release this information, CRU has not done so, or has claimed that the data were accidentally erased. We now have proof in the emails that the illegal withholding of information was intentional, and that the erasure of data was also intentional.Emphasis added.
The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.
Mr. Gore says that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.It's one thing to be in business and another thing to be intimately involved in crafting the policies that lead to GOVERNMENT contracts. And you gotta love the word-smithing of "global warming pollution reductions." Read: Carbon Dioxide. Which reminds me of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”
In an e-mail message this week, he said his investment activities were consistent with his public advocacy over decades.
“I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service,” Mr. Gore wrote. “As a private citizen, I have continued to advocate the same policies. Even though the vast majority of my business career has been in areas that do not involve renewable energy or global warming pollution reductions, I absolutely believe in investing in ways that are consistent with my values and beliefs. I encourage others to invest in the same way.”
The Summer 2008 issue wrongly imagines a global warming crisis and blames it on CO2 released by combustion of fossil fuels:
“Houses, roads and airports buckle because the permafrost is no longer permanent.” The permafrost melts because the ground is heated by the structures themselves, not by CO2.
Polar bears “are drowning.” Like humans, polar bears occasionally drown because they spend a lot of time on the water. Polar bears survived warmer periods than the present, and their numbers worldwide are the highest in decades.
“The reefs are bleaching.” Some are, especially when people dump raw sewage on them. CO2 is not the problem. Reef corals evolved hundreds of millions of years ago when both temperatures and atmospheric CO2 were significantly higher than they are today.
“Kilimanjaro’s snow is melting.” A recent retreat was a function of reduced precipitation, not higher temperatures. As of May 2008, the Tanzanian government reported that snow cover on the mountain is increasing.
The “polar ice cap is retreating.” Which one? Antarctic ice sheets and sea ice are growing. The retreat of ice in the Arctic likely has been caused by ocean floor volcanic activity since 1999, wind patterns that have blown ice into warmer waters and heat-trapping soot from industry in Asia.
Sea levels are “rising.” So they are, at the same rate as they have been for decades.
Storms are “frequent and destructive.” No more than usual, except that we have put massive new coastal development in harm’s way.
Temperatures are “increasing.” Not since 1998 they’re not. After a very active period in recent decades, solar activity has begun to settle down, taking temperatures down with it even as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to climb.
Gregory A. Inskip ’77
Delaware
"From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way," Obama said in announcing his selections in his weekly radio address. "'Leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process. Because the truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources — it's about protecting free and open inquiry.And you gotta love the unintentional "internet inventor" shout out to the failed divinity and law school student Al Gore . . .
'It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology,' he said. 'I could not have a better team to guide me in this work,' Obama said."
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. The most glaring example of course is the multitrillion-dollar cap-and-trade anti-global warming scheme that would mandate an entire restructuring of our industrial economy. This plan, endorsed by both presidential candidates, would empower climate-change cops to regulate the energy usage and carbon emissions of every industry in America. If we do this, the best estimates are that we could reduce global temperatures by 0.1 degrees by 2050 and save on average about one polar bear a year from early death. But no burden is too great when it comes to helping the planet -- even if the progress to be made is infinitesimal. To weigh costs and benefits is regarded as sacrilege -- the refuge of global warming 'deniers.'By the way, McCain's susceptibility to stupid (and typically "populist") arguments like the "green" agenda is the most troubling thing about him.
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Many studies have shown that the environmental benefits from household recycling are minimal or at least highly exaggerated (because it uses a lot of energy and those recycling trucks emit a lot of greenhouse gases). America is not in danger of ever running out of landfill to store our garbage. For example, a study by Daniel Benjamin, an economist at Clemson, finds that we could store all of America's garbage for the next century within the property of Ted Turner's ranch in Montana, with 50,000 acres undisturbed for the horse and bison.
"In Washington, knowledge usually trumps opinion. 'All of us have opinions,' Corker says. 'To be heard in the Senate and break through the clutter,' it takes more than voicing an opinion. Senators who speak with authority, Corker says, are the ones who listen and learn, and are thoughtful and knowledgeable. 'I'm not saying I'm in that category. But that's my goal.'"
And why should the science of global warming be so uncertain? Mostly because it is a whole lot easier to make scientific measurements than it is to figure out what those measurements are telling us about how the natural world works. The famous humorist and writer Mark Twain once said, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”(emphasis added).
I consider the theory that global warming is caused by mankind to be just one more example of the continuing tradition scientists have of extrapolating well beyond what they think they know. In his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain also expressed perfectly the proclivity of scientists for turning observations of the natural world into long range predictions which were clearly outlandish.
Twain humorously extrapolated an observed change in the length of the Mississippi River forward and back in time by millions of years to demonstrate the absurdity of the conclusions one can reach when one assumes something currently observed will continue to happen at the same rate, indefinitely.
Twain famously concluded, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact.”
For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts, and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (Communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual Left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.
