NC Media Watch

ClimateGate and Copenhagen - Bumpy Ride Ahead

Russ Steele

President Obama will soon be on his his way to Copenhagen and his Bagdad Bob moment in Air Force One.  Climategate is sure to create some turbulence.

H/T to The Chilling Effect for the cartoon.

Assemblyman drafting initiative to suspend AB-32

Russ Steele

Assemblyman Dan Logue, California 3th District, is drafting the California Jobs Initiative to suspend AB-32 until California's unemployment rate drops below 5.5%. This action is taken in light of the recent revelation from the leaked, or hacked, emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. Global warming science is in question and this suspension will give legislators time to sort out the issues and give California's economy time to recover.

From the Draft Initiative:

SECTION 1.  STATEMENT OF FINDINGS

A. In 2006, the Legislature and Governor enacted a sweeping law designed to combat Global Warming, also known as “AB 32.”  At the time the bill was signed, the unemployment rate in California was 4.8%.

 B. Since its adoption, California has been hit be a global recession and California’s unemployment rate has now surpassed 12%.

 C. Several studies predict that AB 32 will cost small businesses billions of dollars thereby slowing economic recovery and job creation.

 D. AB 32 contains a provision that would allow the Governor to delay implementation in the event of “extraordinary circumstances, including “significant economic harm.”  Unfortunately, the Governor has not agreed that a global recession and massive unemployment should give way to an untested environmental law.

SECTION 2.  STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
 
 A. The people desire to suspend the operation and implementation of AB 32 until the state’s unemployment rate returns to the levels at the time of its adoption.

SECTION 3. SUSPENSION OF AB 32

Division 25.6 (commencing with section 38600) of the Health and Safety Code is hereby added to read:

§38600(a) From and after the effective date of this measure, Division 25.5(commencing with section 38500) of the Health and Safety Code is suspended until such time as the unemployment rate in California is 5.5% or less for four consecutive calendar quarters.  
 (b) While suspended, no state agency shall propose, promulgate, or adopt any regulation implementing Division 25.5(commencing with section 38500) and any regulation adopted prior to the effective date of this measure shall be void and unenforceable until such time as the suspension is lifted.  

SECTION 4. GENERAL PROVISIONS

A. If any provision of this measure, or part thereof, is for any reason held to be invalid or unconstitutional, the remaining provisions shall not be affected, but shall remain in full force and effect, and to this end the provisions of this measure are severable.

Your thoughts are encouraged in the comments sections. Is this initiative strong enough, or is there more to consider?

Climategate goes viral on Microsoft's Bing (Updated 11--29-09)

Russ Steele

I found it interesting to compare how the different search engines are treating the term "climategate." If you type "climategate" into Google, the search results are: 11,600,000. If you type the same term into the Microsoft Search Engine Bing the search results are 50,900,000.

Bing suggested "climategate" straight up, while Google required that I type in the full phrase, at no time did Google suggest the term "climategate."

If you type "global warming" into Bing the search results are: 13,600,000. Goggle search results are: 10,200,000.  In all cases, Bing or Google, the term "climategate" now exceeds the search results for "global warming."    

Who's Who in Climategate - The video (Updated 11-29-09)

Russ Steele

If you want to understand the issues and who is responsible for the Climategate Fraud, then please take ten minutes to view this video by MagicJava.

H/T to Anthony Watt's who requested that MagicJava create a YouTube version of the video.

UPDATE (11-29-09): I posted a link to this video at the KQED Climate Watch webpage and it was removed. They are not interested in the facts, only in providing a defense forum for the offenders. Go figure!

What Story?

Russ Steele

Our local media guru, the Former Union Editor (FUE) often pontificates on the press and the Internet. He often points out that if you want the news read the blogs, especially his, as the local paper and radio stations are often a day late and dollar short.  Yet, one to the most interest clashes between the old time newspapers and bloggers is going on right under the FUE's nose, yet he has not even mentioned how  bloggers are driving the East Anglia Climate Research Unit scandal stories to the front page.

Mark Steyn writing at the National Review On line Corner notes the disparity:

Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.

You will not find it on the FUE's blog either, yet the clash between the old media and the Internet is one of his favorite subjects. But, he seem to have adopted the the big paper manta - What Story? 

Oh my rampant tribalism in climate science?

Russ Steele

East Anglia climate scientist Mike Hulme: The IPCC has run its course?

"But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. 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.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."

"A Climate Scientist Who Engages Skeptics" h/t Heliogenic Climate Change 

Still stumbling toward Obama's Bagdad Bob moment

Russ Steele

The Washington Times reports that Obama's  Climate 'czar' says hacked e-mails don't change anything

Obama administration climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected claims that e-mails stolen from a British university show climate scientists trumped up global warming numbers, saying she considers the science settled.

"I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," said Ms. Browner, who President Obama has tapped as his chief of policy on global warming.

The Chillyguy writes at Global Warming: A Worn-Out Hoax

It doesn’t matter how badly, and criminally, the science was done.

It doesn’t matter that scientists of other viewpoints were systematically prevented from publishing and participating in the “science.” (Settling is not science, in this and many other writer’s opinions).

It doesn’t matter that the scientists violated various national laws which provide for transparency.

It doesn’t matter that the Earth is really getting cold, while carbon dioxide continues upward.

It doesn’t matter that the Earth could be entering a prolonged period of bitter cold, which seems to be indicated by some of the legitimate science, publishing of which was interfered with by the AGW clique.

The Obama administration, according to socialist climate czar Carol Browner, will press forward with cap and trade, international treaties compromising the sovereignty of the United States, and skyrocketing energy prices to Americans. The means is justified.

Greenhouse gases not behaving politically correct

Russ Steele

John Mclaughlin writing in the American Thinker reports on the work of two German physicists that have determined that the term greenhouse gas is a misnomer and that the greenhouse effect appears to violate basic laws of physics.

Gerlich and Tscheuschner state without equivocation that there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect which explains the relevant physical phenomena. They call the terms greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases "deliberate misnomers" and a "myth beyond physical reality" and conclude:

The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.

Thus, scientific support for the man-made global warming hoax slowly collapses while politicians rush to lock in massive international wealth-redistribution in its name. Those pesky "greenhouse gases" just don't behave in a politically correct manner.

The day climate change peer review died.

Russ Steele

Some comments at Investigate Magazine on the fallout from the CRU e-mails and computer code reveal for the benefit of those who have insisted on peer review purity in their comments.

The Day The Science Died:

As the fallout from CRUHACK grows, the biggest story is not actually whether data was manipulated in individual cases, although in my view that's bad. And it's not that global warming scientists were so arrogant in 2004 as to mock the death of an opponent, although that too is bad.

It's not that some of these scientists were sitting on taxpayer-sourced slush funds worth tens of millions of dollars each, for an industry total of somewhere close to US$100 billion, whilst their supporters raised merry-hell about Exxon sponsoring skeptic research to the tune of a few million, although this too is massively hypocritical.

It's not that the scientists show signs of being political activists, and even helping promote a global governance agenda.

No, in my view the biggest scandal to erupt from CRUHACK is the death of peer-reviewed climate science.

We now all know – the entire industrialized world – that while global warming scientists and their supporters were publicly ridiculing skeptic's arguments as "not peer reviewed" because – by implication – the arguments were not good enough, that in fact some of the top scientific advisors to the UN IPCC were conspiring (and that is the right word) to sabotage any attempt by other scientists to publish peer reviewed papers challenging global warming.

We now know the UN IPPC/Global Governance lobby had sufficient political clout to intimidate scientific journals into submission and to run roughshod over the integrity of the peer review process.

The next global warming believer who raises "peer review" as a defence of global warming deserves to be metaphorically tarred and feathered and laughed at for the rest of his or her natural life.
The Wegman report to the US Congress found unhealthy links between the IPCC's scientific advisors. The CRUHACK emails now prove that festering scientific corruption beyond reasonable doubt.

Reply to Steve Frisch on Scientific American's smoke and mirrors (Updated 11-26-09)

Russ Steele

Steven Frisch said...

I am thankful today that the voices of Russ and George are a voice in the wilderness.
Read the response to the "climate change e-mail fraud" in the Scientific American.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-cover-up-you-better-2009-11-24

My Reply was rejected in the comments for reasons I have yet to understand, so I am posting it here:

Scientific American has fish to fry in this mess, they have a reputation to protect having been major promoters of global warming and the scientists in the e-mails. Scientists that have attempted to discredit pesky citizens who only wanted to replicate their work. Oh, my all they asked for was the raw data and the computer code used to calculate the temperatures.  Should take about 20 minutes to copy and send unless they were trying to hide something in the data and the code.

Replication is the holy grail of science, yet the scientist discussed in the e-mails appear to have been hiding data, deleting data files, hiding source code, manipulating data to make it more difficult to replicate their findings, and denied requests from scientist who were contributors to Climate Audit. These actions prevented the replication of critical papers that pointed to accelerated warming, when there was reasonable doubts based on other studies and satellite data. 

The scientists in these revealing e-mails and computer code acted more like political hacks chasing grants than true scientists.

Here are some links for readers that will put in perspective the crap in Scientific American, and evidence that George and I are not alone:

Men Behaving Badly

Heart of the Scandal

Willis Eschenbach’s FOI Request

Climategate: Pielke Senior on the NCDC CCSP report – “strong arm tactics”

And finally. Here is evidence that the CRU scientist wrote global warming fudge factors into their computer code. Climategate: hide the decline – codified

You can spin it all you want Steve, but the facts speak for them selves. Perhaps you have an alternative explanation for this code analyzed at the American Thinker: A Clear and Present Rearranger 

In two other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the "correction" is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the "adjustment" routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he or she wasn't kidding. Now IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I'm familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

Here's the "fudge factor" (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

These two lines of code establish a twenty-element array (yrloc) comprising the year 1400 (base year, but not sure why needed here) and nineteen years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding "fudge factor" (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960), but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU's "divergence problem" also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

There you have it Steve, we stand on the shoulder of the facts and the work of citizen journalist and scientists who are holding these rogue climate scientist accountable. We are not alone.

UPDATE (12:20PM) George has some thoughts in Steve's post at Rebane's Ruminations.