American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
Dana Loesch lists The Most Underreported Stories of 2009
Go to her post and read the rest. After you read Dana’s article, go read Gay Patriot‘s post on a related issue.
And Stewart rips the “value-added data”, even when he apparently still hopes we weren’t scammed.
Instapundit posted that video, along with another item, from P. J. Gladnick of NewsBusters:
Over at the HuffPo, Huffington Post Suffers ClimateGate Panic Attack since, even when the AGW gig is up, their mind was already made and can’t be confused with the facts. The HuffPo blogger even came out with this beaut:
RealClimate also explained that “the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear.
Being irony-poor liberals, the HuffPo crowd can’t seem to realize that whores also do “tricks”, for exactly the same purpose.
Also via Instapundit, Trust Science
A few general truths to keep in mind in the wake of Climategate.
2. Trust science, but don’t trust scientists.
And, if it can’t be reproduced, it ain’t science.
(Oh, and by the way, Al Gore did not invent the internet.)
Lots more reading:
The Anchoress is Staying on top of Climategate, and she’s got a great roundup, in addition to this video:
Was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal when I remembered this song from Dire Straits, where they said that to make real money you should be a rocker instead of someone with a real job, say, selling appliances:
We got to install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We got to move these refrigerators
We got to move these color TV’sNow that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on that MTV
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free
More on the song in a moment; first let’s talk about the article:
Climategate: Follow the Money
Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
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.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
That doesn’t include the $1.5 million Al got from his Nobel Prize, by the way.
It also doesn’t include wasteful government programs like the upcoming $300 million dollars’ worth “cash for appliances”: ‘Cash for Clunkers,’ household edition
Program expected to boost appliance sales as economy drags
Supported by $300 million from the economic stimulus, the program will offer rebates to consumers who buy energy-efficient refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioners and other appliances to replace their older models.
The timing will make a difference:
Although the $787 billion stimulus program was signed by Obama in February of 2009, much of the cash-for-appliances money won’t hit the streets until next February, March or April. The rebate program is being run by state governments, which must define and enact their rebate plans with federal government funding and approval. A survey of some of the largest states shows that California is planning to begin its program in March, New York in February, Pennsylvania in the spring, Illinois in January and April.
Under the program, Virginia is expected to receive $7.5 million, Maryland $5.4 million and the District $568,000, but the requirements and rebates have not yet been disclosed.
As Ed pointed out the other day,
This is called price signaling, and consumers would be crazy to ignore it.
Yes, indeed. Still, do you expect you’ll be able to replace your small fridge for a full-size Sub-Zero with what you’ll get from the “cash for appliances”? Nope:
While the programs will vary by state, some of the proposed rebates that have been announced so far range from $50 to $100 per appliance.
That $100 won’t go far if you have to pay for having the old fridge removed and the new one delivered.
The bottom line on all this “green”, global-warming related spending is budgetary policy made to spend huge sums of money are on what has been shown to be a fraud – the premise of anthropogenic global warming.
Think about it: $300 million to be spent on subsidizing appliance purchases to the tune of $100 per appliance? Do you expect that 3 million appliances are going to be replaced? Heck no, instead it’ll go down the sinkhole of government bureaucracy, bankrupt businesses that the government has found it expedient to bail out, and vested interests that exist in what the WSJ calls “an ecosystem of their own”
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
But back to the “cash for appliances”: Supposedly, it is based on the assumption that for every $92,000 expended, one job would be created.
Well, maybe Dire Straits was wrong in saying there’s no big bucks to be made in appliances, after all.
When tribalism trumps truth:
Mark Steyn: Cooking the books on climate
The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The “science” of the CRU dominates the “science” behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the “science” behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.
But don’t worry, it’s all “peer-reviewed.”
Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”
So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the “peer-reviewed” “consensus.” And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of “Andy” (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose “Climate Audit” Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph, “Andy” writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle:
“I’m going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
“peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?”
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
“Re, your point at the end – you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”
And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you’re as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.
As Erik puts it, One is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim.
Why did this happen?
Scientific fraudsters are not, in general, people pushing theories they know to be false. Outright charlatanism is not actually common, because it’s relatively easy to detect. Humans are evolved for a social competitive environment and are rather good at spotting lies, except when they’re fooling themselves because they want to believe.
In general, scientific fraudsters are people who are overinvested in a theory that they believe. Because they know it must be true, they interpret predictive failures as “The data is surely wrong”. It is only a short step from “The data is surely wrong” to fixing the pesky data until it looks right
As it is, The Entire Climate Warming Movement Stands Discredited. The data was clearly cooked, but we’ll be paying for the poor policymaking:
If the historical temperature data were generally known to be garbage (which I was pretty sure was true even before the leak), it couldn’t be used to justify public policy that is both bad and expensive – like the U.S.’s “cap-and-trade” bill in progress, which has so many giveaways and exemptions that it subverts its own ostensible purposes.
Obama’s heading to the Climate Change conference next, and he’ll be dictating policy after the facts were made to fit the theory.
Hold on to your wallet.
Related reading
A few thoughts on Climategate, via James Joyner, who’ll be on C-Span tomorrow at 7:30-8:30AM Eastern.
