ClimateGate has drawn it’s first political blood: So the great climate e-mail fiasco has drawn blood — that of an opposition leader, no less, on the other side of the world. Australian Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has been replaced by a climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, after ten of its most senior politicians resigned over its support for the Government’s plans for fighting global warming. They were, it seems, fired up by the hacked communications from the University of East Anglia… Just the beginning. Just as the political and ideological motivations of the global warming movement dwarfed the meager and largely fraudulent science (cf. Darwinism), the blowback from the revelation of the fraudulent science will be largely political. In many countries, Read More ›
Jerry Coyne has an amusing post on philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Times Literary Supplement review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design. Nagel is a world class philosopher and University Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU who has made seminal contributions to philosophy of the mind, political philosophy, and ethics. Nagel has chosen Meyer’s book as one of the best books of the year for 2009:
This morning Discovery Institute announced their lawsuit against the California Science Center for unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents requested by Discovery Institute under the California Public Records Act. The petition, filed December 1, 2009, is available for viewing here.
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 2 — Discovery Institute has filed a lawsuit against the California Science Center (the “Center”) for unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents requested by Discovery Institute under the California Public Records Act. Discovery Institute filed the public documents request on October 9, 2009, following the Center’s October 6, 2009 cancellation of a contract with the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) to screen a pro-intelligent design video, Darwin’s Dilemma, at the California Science Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25, 2009. On November 2, 2009, the Center released 44 pages of documents claiming to have disclosed “all documents” and that “no documents have been withheld,” apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted. “California Science Center’s claims are not Read More ›
ClimateGate: Britain’s Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication?
Peter Hannaford has a great essay in Human Events on Obama’s Science Advisor John Holdren and ClimateGate. As you may recall, eco-activist Holdren has a long history of advocacy for coercive measures to reduce human population, and in the 1970’s he advocated forced sterilizations and even putting sterilants in public drinking water. His policies in support of forced sterilization were put into practice by India and China several decades ago, and millions of people were involuntarily sterilized. Holdren has also said that he was open to criminal prosecution of people who disagree with some of his eco-policies.
Hannaford’s essay:
Meet the White House’s Alarmist in Chief
If you had devoted your entire scientific career to predicting the end of the world, what do you think would be the symbol of success with which to crown that career? Why, to be President Obama’s choice as White House Director of Science and Technology. That’s his formal title, but what John Holdren is, in fact, is the nation’s Alarmist in Chief.
Al Gore thinks he invented global alarmism, but he’s a Johnny-come-lately compared with Mr. Holdren who, back in 1971 edited (with population alarmist Paul Ehrlich) a book titled Global Ecology. Also, he supplied one of its essays, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide” in which he predicted that such human-caused phenomena as agricultural dust, jet exhaust and smog would cause a new ice age. Thus, he wrote, “…a sudden slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
Nowadays, of course, the giant tidal wave will be caused by melting ice caps, not growing ones. One must move with the times.
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal has a fine essay on the financial roots of global warming fraud:
Climategate: Follow the Money
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called–without irony–the climate change “consensus.”
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts–amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion–you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data–facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.
Real climate scientists are sifting out the details of the data to which CRU director and warmist Phil Jones applied fellow warmist Michael Mann’s ‘Nature trick…to hide the decline…’.
The hidden data is that of Keith Briffa, a fellow climate scientist (and warmist) at East Anglia. Briffa compiled tree-ring data to obtain global temperature estimates back to 1400. But there was a problem with the tree-ring data, from the warmist perspective. The tree ring data showed pronounced cooling beginning in the mid-20th century. This was at variance with some ground temperature measurements (so we are told- the actual raw data from the ground stations was ‘accidently’ thrown in the garbage in the 1980’s, and all we have are ‘modified’ data from the CRU scientists themselves.)
So the method that the warmist climate scientists used to estimate temperatures over the past millenium or so (tree ring data) did not show warming that correlated with rising CO2. This leaves a couple of possibilities, neither favorable to the warmist hypothesis. Either the tree ring data in the 20th century that was inconsistent with temperature recordings meant that the older tree ring data was unreliable (eliminating the argument that the warming was unprecedented) or the temperature recordings were inaccurate (perhaps from the heat island effect, in which sensors situated near growing urban areas give spurriously high readings) and rising CO2 didn’t cause warming.
What to do?
Simple. Delete the tree rign data beginning in the mid-20th century, when the cooling became pronounced, and use (already CRU ‘modified’) ground station data more supportive of the warmist hypothesis in it’s place.
Senior Editor of Atlantic Monthly Clive Crook is revising his earlier sanguine view of ClimateGate. What happened? He read the emails.
In a post on ClimateGate that Crook wrote before he had read the emails carefully, he observed:
…nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much.
Over the weekend, he read the documents more carefully:
Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back..The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And… this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu. It goes to the core of that process.
