Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

December 8, 2009 By Fausta

Yegads! Al Gore, poet?

poet_poster

Ooooh yeah, babeee….

Vanity Fair heaps praise on the Vanderbilt Divinity School drop-out and self-ordained pope of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Al Gore: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

Among the brilliance shared by Gore is this (not sure what to call it),

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Vanity Fair asks “Is Gore himself that shepherd?” He probably sees himself as the sheperd who will lead us like meek sheep to the promised land, along with the help of countless media tools like Vanity Fair, and other ones like the people who awarded him the Nobel Prize, and the hardcore believers who don’t want us to breathe because we exhale CO2.

On the breathing, Roger Kimball urges us, Don’t Hold Your Breath! Humans for Respiration, Unite! While you’re still allowed to breathe, hold on to your wallet: The AGW farce will cost us plenty, as you can see in these two articles,

James Pethokoukis writes on The EPA and Obama’s Uncertainty Tax

the only thing certain about the EPA ruling is more regulatory uncertainty leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Bad news, to be sure, for American businesses already flummoxed by the mercurial state of healthcare, financial and tax reform. Call it Obama’s Uncertainty Tax.

While a cap-and-trade bill has already passed the House of Representatives, few Capitol Hill observers expected the Senate to approve one, even by the end of 2010 thanks to the anemic economy and political risks for incumbent Democrats facing midterm elections. What’s more, expectations of a more Republican-leaning congress after 2010 made it seem like economy-wide carbon caps were sliding off the Obama agenda for the foreseeable future.

But now it’s conceivable carbon restrictions would be implemented as early as next year – even though the EPA itself admits its efforts would be more disruptive and less efficient than congressional action. Such an optimistic timetable assumes no legal challenges. But there will be plenty of those. Already, business groups are preparing to file suit against the EPA. It could fall to U.S. courts to determine the future of the nation’s approach to climate policy. This is a nightmare scenario for the private sector when it comes to planning for new expansion or hiring. Note that the big problem with the job market at the moment is not so much job losses and zippo new jobs being created. It will take a year of 4 percent growth adding 250,000 jobs a month to lower the unemployment rate to 9 percent.

Of course, about the only thing worse than regulatory uncertainty would be for the EPA to follow through with its top-down, command-and-control approach to dealing with perceived climate change.

While we’re dealing with that, the tools at the UN want our money: William Jacobson has the details, UN Climate Chief to US: “Show Me The Money”

Jacobson points out,

None of this is surprising. The global climate change industry is all about shaking the dollars and cents out of our pockets. From Al Gore’s profiteering off of the hysteria he has created, to the large corporate interests involved in selling “green” as a marketing tool, to researchers willing to stifle debate and tamper with data so as to justify funding, to an internationalist movement interested in transfer of wealth as a social policy, the global climate change debate is all about showing the money.

The “show me the money” line is from the movie Jerry Maguire, about a desperate sports agent willing to do anything. So fitting that the UN climate change guru now uses such a crass phrase

Perhaps the UN guy’s been reading Shakespeare, where Iago, one of the great villains, says,

Put money in thy purse; follow thou the wars; defeat thy favor with an usurp’d beard. I say put money in thy purse.

Thing is, that’s our money he’s talking about.

UPDATE, Thursday 10 December
Defused Lethal Al Gore Poem Released by Government

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Filed Under: Al Gore, Denmark, Global Warming, UN Tagged With: AGW, Anthropogenic Global Warming, CRU, EPA, Fausta's blog, University of East Anglia

December 5, 2009 By Fausta

UK: Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data

Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

Hmmm…. three years…

As A J Strata said,

You don’t invest 3 years rechecking into a supposed emergency unless the picture is really that bad. It is really that bad.

Why is the Met Office’s review important?

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

We’ll see how their analysis turns out. I share Richard’s skepticism, who asks, Three years to wait?

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Filed Under: Climate Change, Global Warming Tagged With: CRU, Fausta's blog, University of East Anglia

December 3, 2009 By Fausta

Climategate: “Oh, the irony!” VIDEO

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.

Has ClimateGate Changed Obama's Global Warming Strategy

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:

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Filed Under: Climate Change, Global Warming Tagged With: AGW, Climategate, CRU, Fausta's blog, University of East Anglia

November 29, 2009 By Fausta

If the data won’t fit, dump it!

The University of East Anglia scientists found the shortest distance between the facts and the results they were looking for: when the data didn’t fit, they dumped it.

Climate change data dumped

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

Why does this matter?

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

How come?

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

So much for the scientific method.

No science is possible, then:

So, basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few “scientists” whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?

Well, Obama’s heading to Denmark.

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Filed Under: Global Warming Tagged With: CRU, Fausta's blog, IPCC, University of East Anglia

November 28, 2009 By Fausta

The corruption of the peer-review process

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.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Climate Change, Global Orgasm Tagged With: Climaquiddick, Climategate, CRU, Denmark, Fausta's blog

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