It’s been a tough couple of days for Al Gore. Anthropogenic global warming — his cash cow since leaving the White House — has been discredited thanks to leaked e-mails which show leading climate-change scientists merrily manipulating data. His chances of tiptoeing back to his solar-powered mansion to wait out the fracas, however, are small. Phelim McAleer won’t let him.
McAleer, as you may remember, is the Irish filmmaker who challenged the science behind Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth during a question-and-answer session with the former vice president in early October. Later that month, McAleer threw another dart Gore’s way — his film Not Evil Just Wrong. The documentary takes aim at Gore’s role in ginning up global-warming hysteria. McAleer tells NRO that he was spurred to make the film after a British High Court judge ruled in 2007 that Gore’s film contained several errors.
McAleer tells us that he finds it amazing that many members of Congress are still hoping to pass cap-and-trade legislation. “That’s the longest and least-read suicide note in American history,” he says.
“There is so much pressure to follow the European model,” says McAleer. “So, let me tell you about the European model of green jobs: It’s based on high taxes and high unemployment. Americans need to know this and think twice before they head down that road.”
An Inconvenient Truth, McAleer worries, “has flawed science, yet it’s shown to schoolchildren every day and pushed in classrooms.” Being Irish, he says, makes him skeptical of the British judicial system, but on its ruling against Gore’s film, “they got it right.”
The close-knit movement advocating for anthropogenic global warming — which, as we see in the leaked e-mails between top climate researchers, attempts to enforce its climate catechism on the rest of the scientific community — “has a lot of the elements of a religion,” says McAleer. “It’s bizarre. They have generated all this evidence about how the world is going to end.”
With more and more people raising their eyebrows about the science behind climate change, McAleer says he’ll continue to work on making skeptics out of true believers. “We need to get society to acknowledge the truth and get that truth into popular culture.”
[Jones] provided the comments in an interview with the alarmist-friendly Guardian, which also helpfully linked updated statements from Jones and vice chancellor for research Trevor Davies, where Jones elaborated:
My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.
So, "haste" and "heat" are to explain Jones's efforts to manipulate data. The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Myron Ebell understands:
For people who don’t know any better, this looks like Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, is saying that he has used a “trick” that he got from Professor Michael Mann in order to “hide the decline.” First of all, we know that Professor Jones is a man of high integrity (as well as high competence in his field), so he would never do anything dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous. Second, “trick” is a technical term often employed by the cream of climate scientists. It simply means employing a clever (or “slick”) method to accomplish some technical goal (in this case, “to hide the decline”). Anyone can see that “trick” is a much shorter and more elegant way to say that. And you’ve got to admire the verbal facility of these tip-top scientists. They are as articulate and literate as they are scientifically tip-top.
On October 22, Britain’s secretary of state for climate change, Ed Miliband, helped to launch a new exhibition called “Prove It!” at the venerable Science Museum in London. The exhibition promised to offer visitors “all the evidence you need to believe in climate change” and invited them to count themselves “In” or “Out” of the following statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” But most visitors aren’t convinced by the evidence: To date, 5,206 people have counted themselves in to that statement, and 7,607 have counted themselves out.
These embarrassing figures are an improvement on the earliest voting tallies. On October 24, two days after the exhibition opened, only 415 had counted themselves in and 2,385 had counted themselves out. As of the first of November, 1,006 people were in, and 6,110 were out. Following much handwringing by green commentators (one said the poll results showed that “climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease”), green bloggers told their readers to go and vote In. This has upped the In vote to 5,206, which means it’s still lagging behind the Outs by 2,401 votes.
The results are hardly scientific or electorally airtight. You can vote at the exhibition itself or on the accompanying “Prove It!” website. The Science Museum says there has been “repeat voting,” which is inevitable with this kind of thing. And yet the poll has caused much gnashing of teeth and soul-searching amongst greens, who cite it as evidence of the creeping victory of evil “denialism” over The Science.
In fact, after visiting the “Prove It!” exhibition, I can fully understand why people voted Out — it’s not because they’re irrational idiots, but probably because they don’t like being treated like wide-eyed five-year-olds.
“Prove It!” is spectacularly patronizing. As soon as you enter the Science Museum, a vast building that was opened in 1909 and receives nearly three million visitors a year, you see DayGlo orange arrows on the floors and walls saying “Prove It!” Clearly designed to distract visitors’ attention from the more serious stuff at the Science Museum — the decidedly grey or black machines, engines, airplanes, and so on — the arrows entice visitors to the “Prove It!” exhibition at the back of the museum in the same way Ronald McDonald might tempt children with fries and a shake.
“Prove It!” is not an exhibition at all. There are no exhibits, nothing in glass jars, no machines to look and wonder at. Nor is there any real scientific information: no graphs, pie charts, or papers to read and reflect on. Instead there is a seating area with a huge Sun-like object in the middle, a bright disc suspended from the ceiling by orange wires. And this Sun-like object flashes up various slogans, such as “The glaciers are melting,” and also “Climate Change” where the word “change” morphs into “Change the way we live.”
That we are expected to sit and stare at this “Sun,” to be passive recipients of some higher wisdom from a disc hovering above our heads, speaks volumes about how environmentalists view both “science” and ordinary people’s intellectual capabilities. For them, scientific fact is a kind of divine revelation, an unquestionable truth, which must be delivered from on high to us little people in order to wake us from our consumerist-induced stupor and make us rethink our destructive habits. In treating science as both Gospel and political weapon, the green-leaning organizers of this exhibition have committed an act of double violence against scientific truth and integrity.
Indeed, the “Prove It!” exhibition unwittingly, yet brilliantly, illustrates why climate-change alarmism has no place in the world of real science, an arena that ought to be marked by open-mindedness, truth-seeking, and intellectual seriousness. Where most of the Science Museum engages visitors through intelligent exhibitions, explaining in measured terms how things were discovered or how breakthroughs were made, the “Prove It!” exhibition screams slogans in our faces from an overhead projector. Where many of the rooms in the Science Museum take us through the various leaps forward that led to modern technology and medicine, the “Prove It!” exhibition contains no climate science at all (presumably it’s too complicated for us idiots), only ready-made, life-altering slogans.
When science is treated as given, unquestionable, and supremely authoritative, Sun-like in its obviousness, then it ceases to be science at all and becomes something closer to religious decree. The motto of the U.K. Royal Society, which helped to found the Science Museum 100 years ago, was “On the word of no one,” capturing science’s rejection of traditional forms of wisdom and authority and its embrace of experimentation, exploration, and the authority of the truth alone. Yet today, we are expected to uncritically accept the word of the Science Museum, and to vote in favor of using so-called scientific fact to drive an explicitly political agenda at Copenhagen in December.
In rejecting this sham, people have not behaved irrationally. In fact, they have exercised the very skepticism and suspicion of received authority that underpins all great scientific thinking.
I’m sure this alleged e-mail is just out of context, nothing to see here, there’s really an implausible meaning that's more reasonable than the plain reading and all the rest of what we’re being told about the ClimateGate e-mails, but, well, I’m just saying (emphasis added):
From: "Mick Kelly" <m.kelly@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> To: Nguyen Huu Ninh (cered@xxxxxxxxx.xxx) Subject: NOAA funding Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:17:15 +0000
Ninh NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN. How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious. Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not! Best wishes Mick ____________________________________________
When first enacted in 1975, federal mpg standards discriminated against American manufacturers who offered a broader range of models. The so-called CAFE standards forced U.S. manufacturers into costly adjustments even as their upstart Japanese counterparts did not, giving foreign competitors and their smaller vehicles a leg up in the U.S. market.
Thirty years later, the feds’ new CAFE laws will once again put American automakers at a disadvantage — even as Washington has spent billions bailing out the industry. The evidence is in EPA’s fuel-efficiency numbers released last week, showing the Detroit makers at the bottom in overall fleet efficiency — with Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota leading the pack.
This means it will be that much more costly for GM, for example, to meet the new fleet standard of 35.5 mpg by 2015 from its current average of 19.9 mpg. Honda, by contrast, will have an easier road geting there from its current average of 23.6 mpg.
If Washington were truly interested in helping America automakers, they would lessen (or eliminate altogether) mpg standards, playing to the domestic manufacturers strengths in a market in which consumers have traditionally preferred larger vehicles.
These days, however, green piety takes precedence over common sense.
Remember when the White House, deciding they weren't fighting enough battles on enough fronts, decided to take on the automotive site, Edmunds.com, for its criticism of "Cash for Clunkers"?
One of their points was, "we found out that motor vehicle output added 1.7% to economic growth in the third quarter — the largest contribution to quarterly growth in over a decade."
Er, not anymore. The revised numbers out today indicate that automotive consumption was less than half initially estimated, contributing 0.81 of percentage point to growth. The overall quarterly growth number was revised from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent.
I'm sure the White House will correct the record, eager as they are to "fight the smears" and all.
ClimateGate Development: CEI Notifies NASA of Intention to Sue [Chris Horner]
Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies' refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding "ClimateGate" scandal — revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries' freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate-science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked e-mails, computer codes, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit at the UK's University of East Anglia.
This material, sought for years by CEI, goes to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, "cap-and-trade" legislation, and the EPA's threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.
CEI seeks the following documents, among others — NASA's failure to provide which within 30 days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:
— internal discussions about NASA's quiet correction of its false historical U.S. temperature records after two Canadian researchers discovered a key statistical error, specifically discussion about whether and why to correct certain records, how to do so, the impact or wisdom or potential (or real) fallout therefrom or reaction to doing so (requested August 2007);
— internal discussions relating to the emails sent to James Hansen and/or Reto A. Ruedy from Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre calling their attention to the errors in NASA/GISS online temperature data (August 2007);
— internal discussions relating to the content, importance, or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or "blog" RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked "Hockey Stick" that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used "in any way you think would be helpful" to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt's active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by "skeptics" attempting to comment on claims made on the website. This and the related political activism engaged in are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.
Detroit — Amid all the press pom-poms, there is an occasional glimpse into why the “electric vehicles of the future” may meet the same fate as the battery-powered vehicles of the past.
Consider New York Times reporter Lindsay Brook’s account of her Chevy Volt test drive here at GM’s Milford test track recently — titled “For the Volt, How’s Life After 40 (Miles)?” First, a quick primer to disabuse anyone of the notion that the “plug-in” Volt is an electric vehicle. It is a hybrid. Not a hybrid like the Toyota Prius which uses an electric battery to assist the gas engine. The Volt uses a gas engine to assist the electric battery. Thus the “life after 40 miles” (the range of the battery). Thus this passage from Brook’s article:
With the dashboard icon signaling my final mile of range, I point the Volt toward a hill and wait for the sound and feel of the generator engine’s four pistons to chime in. But I completely miss it; the engine’s initial engagement is inaudible and seamless.
I push the accelerator and the engine sound does not change; the ‘gas pedal’ controls only the flow of battery power to the electric drive motor. The pedal has no connection to the generator, which is programmed to run at constant, preset speeds. This characteristic will take some getting used to by a public accustomed to vroom-vroom feedback.
A few hundred yards later, as we snake through the track’s infield section, the engine (revs) rise sharply. The accompanying mechanical roar reminds me of a missed shift in a manual-transmission car. For a moment the sound is disconcerting. . . . A few times later in our test, the generator behaved in similar fashion — too loud and too unruly for production — but there is time for the programmers to find solutions.
Ready to plunk down $40 large on this compact? Or even $32,500 after the generous taxpayer subsidy?
Here’s betting that most folks will spend that cash on a much larger, much more reliable, much faster, 23-mpg Cadillac CTS.
If you missed the story last month (which Ed discussed here), the USA Today has given it some more press this week. A dozen Gulf Coast property owners whose homes were damaged by Hurricane Katrina are being permitted to pursue claims that global warming is to blame for their property damage:
A group of 12 Mississippi Gulf Coast homeowners is using a novel legal strategy to try to recoup losses suffered during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The lawsuit seeks damages from a group of 33 energy companies, including ExxonMobil and coal giant Peabody Energy, electric utilities, and other conglomerates for allegedly emitting greenhouse gases that the litigants say contributed to global warming.
That, the litigants claim, caused a rise in sea levels and increased air and water temperatures fueling the Category 5 hurricane that destroyed their homes.
The lawsuit, considered a long shot by legal experts, cleared a hurdle last month when a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said it could continue, overruling a Circuit Court judge who had agreed with arguments from the companies that global warming is a political, not legal, issue.
The key to the appeal was in the legal strategy, said Robert Percival, director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland. Rather than asking the court to force the companies to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the lawsuit asks for a ruling on whether damage suffered by the homeowners can be traced back to those emissions, he said.
"Just because climate change is difficult, courts aren't going to shy away from their traditional role in weighing issues of harm," Percival said.
‘Blue Dress’ Update: Media Sat on ClimateGate Info [Chris Horner]
It turns out that the BBC has for over a month had the information constituting “ClimateGate” — the latest one, anyway, and one that should serve as the global-warming industry’s “Blue Dress Moment,” when the media can no longer ignore the fraud we have been detailing for years to scribblers and producers largely uninterested in pulling the curtain back on this most politically desirable and useful of all story lines.
For all that the establishment media have done in the past dozen years to enable the global-warming climate-change scam (coincidentally, it began at about the same time as the Lewinsky scandal broke) and disparage those who would challenge it, these revelations and the congressional investigations that are now being demanded will only make their plight worse.
Given how deeply invested they are — we already have seen among the posted information e-mails revealing the alarmists’ close working relationship with some of these reporters — it is unlikely they will pivot and suddenly begin exposing the long-running fraud. Both they and the global warming industry are in full damage-control mode, but the damage already seems beyond their ability to manage it. And I couldn’t imagine this fate befalling two nicer groups.
. . . in the wake of the emerging CRU scandal, as Greg notes below.
And on Fox, I call for a stay on all U.S. involvement in Kyoto II, cap-and-trade, EPA regulation of CO2, etc., until a full investigation is completed and the truth is out. Even my "eco-entrepreneur" counterpart agreed about the need for an investigation.
BRUSSELS — The UN's top climate negotiator voiced optimism Monday that a deal can be salvaged next month at world talks on global warming, but said US President Barack Obama must first get on board.
"I think we will have a very specific agreement," UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said ahead of a meeting with EU environment ministers in Brussels.
He has already ruled out the possibility that a comprehensive climate treaty can be reached at the UN-sponsored talks opening in Copenhagen on December 7.
The lesser deal he anticipates is likely to include "a list of rich country targets (and) clarity on what major developing countries like India and China are willing to do," he said.
De Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also said he expected to see "clarity on finances," with a list of pledged contributions, in particular to the poorest nations.
For these goals to be meaningful and attainable, however, major greenhouse gas emitter the United States would have to bring something concrete to the table.
De Boer expressed confidence, saying: "My sense is Obama will be in a position to come to Copenhagen with a target and a financial contribution."
Over on spiked, Planet Gore's favorite Marxist, Brendan O'Neill, makes the case against the Malthus cult; an excerpt below.
The language used to justify population scaremongering has changed dramatically over the centuries. In the time of Malthus in the eighteenth century the main concern was with the fecundity of poor people. In the early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments. Today they have adopted environmentalist language to justify their demands for population reduction.
The fact that the presentational arguments can change so fundamentally over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows that this is a prejudicial outlook in search of a social or scientific justification; it is prejudice looking around for the latest trendy ideas to clothe itself in. And that is why the population scaremongers have been wrong over and over again: because behind the new language they adopt every few decades, they are really driven by narrow-mindedness, by disdain for mankind’s breakthroughs, by wilful ignorance of humanity’s ability to shape its surroundings and its future.
The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else — including society, progress and discovery — stays roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only variable — mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: they are variables, too.
The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The nature of resources changes as society changes — what we consider to be a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to finite thinking, to a lack of future-oriented imagination.
And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met.
We don’t merely use up finite resources; we create infinite ideas and possibilities. The 6.7billion people on Earth have not raped and destroyed this planet, we have humanised it. And given half a chance — given a serious commitment to overcoming poverty and to pursuing progress — we would humanise it even further. Just as you wouldn’t listen to that guy who wears a placard saying ‘The End of the World is Nigh’ if he walked up to you and said ‘this time it really is nigh’, so you shouldn’t listen to the always-wrong Malthusians. Instead, join spiked in opposing the population panickers.
Public policy is about choosing priorities in the face of limited resources. That is the lesson Bjørn Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus try to make plain — a lesson rejected by the American Left, which likes to contend that focusing on one priority does not exclude others. But the Left’s own standard bearer, Barack Obama, has just proved the fallacy of that argument with his trip to China.
By its own actions, the administration has conceded the need to choose between the twin goals of climate change and human rights. Obama chose the former, diminishing the United States’ role as a beacon of liberty.
With the 192-nation Copenhagen conference on global warming looming, the White House had for months been laying the groundwork for a joint China/U.S. climate deal — while laying off liberals’ other longtime priority, religious freedom in Tibet. Even as Obama received the Nobel Prize in October, he shunned his fellow Nobel winner, the Dalai Lama, when he visited Washington. The president also ignored him on his China visit. In so doing, Obama de-emphasized brutality against Tibetans in order to focus on the phantom fears of climate change.
In return, Obama got . . . symbolism.
"The symbolism,” reported the New York Times, “of the world's two largest polluters pledging no half measures to” . . . to do what? End torture in China’s infamous Tibetan “black jails?” Allow Chinese the right to freedom of association? Of religious freedom?
No. The U.S. and China pledged to rally “the world around a solution to our climate challenge,'' said the president. Explained the Times: “With a civilization as ancient as China’s, (the administration) argued, it would be counterproductive — and reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s style — for Mr. Obama to confront Beijing with loud chest-beating that might alienate the Chinese.”
Heaven forbid a U.S. president raise his voice against injustice. So there you have it. President Bush thought torture was an imminent threat to those under the boot of Chinese communism. President Obama thinks it is rising sea levels.
Obama’s has made his priorities clear: polar bears over people.
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have been working overtime to craft a climate bill that can attract significant GOP support. But they aren’t exactly scoring points with their mutual best friend in the Senate, John McCain.
“Their start has been horrendous,” McCain said Thursday. “Obviously, they’re going nowhere.”
McCain has emerged as a vocal opponent of the climate bill — a major reversal for the self-proclaimed maverick who once made defying his party on global warming a signature issue of his career.
Now the Arizona Republican is more likely to repeat GOP talking points on cap and trade than to help usher the bill through the thorny politics of the Senate.
McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”
Thankfully, Planet Gore contributor James Delingpole serves up some nuggets and analysis on his Telegraph blog, a long excerpt of which is below:
When you read some of those files — including 1079 emails and 72 documents — you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science.” [...]
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because — though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room — he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think 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 in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September — I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” — Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which — in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community — spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC. . . .
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true, it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
I always appreciate straight talk on the climate-change agenda — which many of us know is really about achieving global governance, not lowering temperatures (much less saving the planet).
But don't take my word for it. Here's the new EU president, Herman Van Rompuy, saying just that:
There won't be any deal in Copenhagen, but how about you start paying for it anyway? Reuters:
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 19 (Reuters) - The U.N. environmental chief called on rich nations on Thursday to pledge $10 billion a year for three years at next month's Copenhagen summit to help poor states begin to tackle the impact of climate change.
Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference that was a short-term figure and that in 10 or 20 years hundreds of billions of dollars would be needed annually to cope with global warming.
The Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen had long been billed as the time when a new treaty to cap greenhouse gas emissions would be signed, but the United Nations has admitted that a legally binding deal will not come until later.
The slippage has been partly blamed on delays in the United States in pushing new climate change legislation through Congress, a move now anticipated early next year.
De Boer listed the $10-billion-a-year pledge as one of his three goals for the summit, along with the submission of emission targets for 2020 by rich countries and of planned actions by developing countries.
The Blue-Dress Moment May Have Arrived [Chris Horner]
I am not able to fully digest this at present, catching up with the boys from days away and then up at O-Dark-Thirty for a flight to California for a talk, but check out what Anthony Watts among others have posted.
Now, none of us can attest to the validity of what has been posted on a Russian server (nor can we even be sure of how it was obtained, though it purports to be non-classified data held by a purely public agency subject to freedom of information/transparency laws). But I'm told it's almost 61 megabytes of files, and after a few days of scrutiny appears (to the kind of people who would know) to be legitimate. And very revealing, both the data and what are represented to be comments and admissions by leading lights on Team Alarmist.
If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore. I didn't say impossible — they're fully vested partners in the global warming industry, because catastrophism sells. But so does scandal, and this appears to be the makings of a very big one. Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research. Then reflect that the taxpayer spends more on climate-related research than on the entire suite of AIDS programs, far beyond drug research.
What Consensus? Climate Scientists Can’t Even Agree on the Past Decade [Drew Thornley]
Turns out that some climate scientists are finally admitting that they don't have all the answers about climate. Many of us have being writing for a while about the unknowns of climate dynamics and the insufficiency of climate modeling, but apparently others are just now getting the memo. Spiegel Online reports:
Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."
But a few scientists simply refuse to believe the British calculations. "Warming has continued in the last few years," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, Rahmstorf is more or less alone in his view. Hamburg Max Planck Institute scientist Jochem Marotzke, on the other hand, says: "I hardly know any colleagues who would deny that it hasn't gotten warmer in recent years."
The controversy sends confusing and mixed messages to the lay public. Why is there such a vigorous debate over climate change, even though it isn't getting warmer at the moment? And how can it be that scientists cannot even arrive at a consensus on changes in temperatures, even though temperatures are constantly being measured?
These would be good questions — if the climate debate had anything to do with climate.
What was once the central political battleground for addressing global warming in the United States may be making a comeback.
While President Obama and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill continue to focus on legislation covering greenhouse gas emissions across broad sections of the U.S. economy, a small bipartisan faction of Senate moderates is examining the idea of passing a bill that deals only with the heat-trapping emissions from power plants.
"A power plant-only cap and trade could be doable on the Hill," Mark Helmke, a senior aide to Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), said today.
Senate Democratic and Republican staffers are studying a package that combines a mandatory limit on power plant emissions with separate programs outside of the cap-and-trade program aimed at cutting greenhouse gases from other sectors of the economy. "It'd be done with efficiency standards for buildings and stronger CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standards for transport," Helmke said.
For now, Helmke said, talks are in the early stages and do not involve drafting a bill. "We're doing a lot of research," he said.
Legislation focusing on power plant emissions alone is not new. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush both floated the cap-and-trade idea as part of more sweeping plans that covered traditional air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury.
But the power plant approach — aimed at about a third of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — largely ended when Bush reversed his 2000 campaign pledge to tackle climate change through mandatory limits.
Senate Democrats narrowly passed a "four pollutant" power plant bill out of the Environment and Public Works Committee in 2002 but that legislation never made it to the floor (E&E Daily, June 8, 2002). After that, the concept quickly took a back seat as Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) pressed for floor votes on the broader, economywide plan that went after major energy, transportation and manufacturing companies — accounting for more than two-thirds of U.S. emissions.
Obama and McCain campaigned last year in support of cap-and-trade legislation dealing with most segments of the U.S. economy. And the House-passed climate legislation, as well as the Senate bill approved earlier this month by the Environment and Public Works Committee, followed with language that deals with about 7,500 industrial facilities.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is taking the lead with Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in writing the broader climate legislation, said in an interview today that he is not planning to write a bill that goes after only power plants. That, he said, would not be a political winner, anyway.
"The problem is you lose countless numbers of entities," Kerry said. "It becomes far more expensive, and they don't get the help you get the other way. You get no transitional cost help that way, so it becomes more expensive. And in fact, you lose three-quarters of the support for the legislation."
Kerry added, "We're looking at all kinds of options, but the early take on that is that it's very problematical."
Robert Zubrin is still plugging away at the flex-fuel mandate, though it seems an uphill climb in our present political moment — with the Obama administration expecting Detroit to make cars that run on a blend of pixie dust and good intentions.
Here’s a fact that is worthy of lawmakers’ attention: Methanol is currently selling internationally, without any subsidy, for $1 per gallon.
Why is this important? Because methanol is a clean-burning fuel that can be made anywhere, from anything that either is or was once a plant, including natural gas, coal, recycled urban trash, crop residues, forestry residues, fallen leaves, seaweed, algae, swamp weeds or any other kind of biomass without exception. In other words, the potential global supply of methanol is unlimited, and with such varied sources of supply, it is immune to cutoff by any cartel. And it can be used, along with gasoline and/or ethanol, in any car with flex-fuel capability — a feature that can be added by manufacturers at a cost of $100 per vehicle.
To be sure, a gallon of methanol contains only about half the energy of a gallon of gasoline, so methanol at $1 per gallon is equivalent in miles per dollar to gasoline at $2 per gallon, but that is still a very attractive price. If a law were passed that all new cars sold in the USA had to be methanol-compatible flex-fuel vehicles, then this mark — $2 per gallon of gasoline equivalent — would represent a permanent competitive constraint on future gasoline prices. In fact it would do much more than protect Americans from a return of $4-per-gallon gasoline, because if such flex-fuel capabilities were made the standard required for new vehicle sales in the U.S., it would become the global standard, as foreign automakers would be impelled to conform to it to stay in the U.S. market.
Thus, in a very short amount of time, all cars being marketed in any serious way internationally would be flex-fuel, and gasoline would be forced to compete at the pump against both methanol and ethanol made from any number of possible sources, all over the world. This would put an enduring competitive constraint on the price of oil internationally at roughly the $60-per-barrel level, ending forever the ability of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to loot the world via artificially rigged up oil prices.
Archived posts on the Planet Gore's flex-fuel debate here.
Tom Friedman’s Mansion Echoes with Cries of ‘Where are My Green Technologies?’ [Stephen Spruiell]
Tom Friedman used to be really smart, so what explains passages like this? Laziness?
“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.
So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.
So we should raise the price of carbon to avert a disastrous increase in the price of carbon?
I’ve never understood this argument. It seems to be premised on the notion that a tax on fossil fuels would spur clean-energy innovation while an increase in the price of oil based on future supply constraints would not. Is it just about getting a head start? Misery today or misery tomorrow?
The market can be remarkably adept at responding to changes in the supply of commodities (witness the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager) — if government stays out of the way. I’ll take misery tomorrow, with a chance of market mitigation.
One Last Thought on Al Gore's Journey to the Center of the Earth [Greg Pollowitz]
If you haven't watched the video yet, please do so and pay special attention to Gore marvel at the advancements in drill bit technology "that don't melt" in the earth's super-heated crust. Conan then says we're "probably drilling deeper than we've ever drilled before." Um, no.
Gore might be able to say he misspoke when he said the earth's core was "several million degrees," but he also talked about drilling down two kilometers as if it were a breakthrough, when less-than-state-of-the-art drills have reach far greater depths. I'm not sure how he gets a pass from anyone in the scientific community on this one.
To put into perspective how far off Gore is here, the deepest hole ever drilled is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which reached a depth of 12,261 meters — that's more than 12 kilometers, Al. That breakthrough depth was reached back in 1989 — by the Soviets. And since Al is interested in how hot such a hole might be, the temperature at that depth was reported at 356°F, slightly cooler than Gore's stellar estimation.
As part of a newly announced $338 million boost for 123 geothermal energy projects nationwide, the Department of Energy will sink $25 million into what is called an “enhanced” or “engineered” geothermal demonstration project in Oregon being developed in part by AltaRock Energy, which recently halted work on a similar venture in California due to drilling problems.
The grant — by far the largest on the list — is for the development of the Newberry Project, which is near an Oregon volcano.
A joint venture between AltaRock and Connecticut-based Davenport Power, Newberry will begin as a 30-megawatt test facility that can develop into a 120 megawatt plant within the next two years. AltaRock had previously received a $36 million Energy Department grant, as well as venture capital from Google and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
An enhanced geothermal system seeks to tap the essentially bottomless storehouse of energy in the earth’s core. It involves drilling to depths of well over 10,000 feet and then injecting cold water to create networks of small fractures in the hot rock.
The concept is to pump water down into these fissures, capture the heat and bring it back to the surface to drive a turbine. Unlike conventional geothermal, which relies on subterranean pockets of hot water, proponents of enhanced geothermal systems say the technology is essentially location-neutral, meaning these wells could be sunk almost anywhere in the world.
In June, The Times reported that AltaRock, in its regulatory filings, had failed to disclose that a previous experiment in Switzerland had triggered a small earthquake. In a detailed response to the article, the company defended its Geysers project, in Northern California, and stressed that it had sought to avoid drilling near fault lines.
Excerpted below is "Galileo Silenced Again — The American Geophysical Union is sending science back four hundred years," by AGU members David Legates and Willie Soon:
Four centuries ago, “heretics” who disagreed with Church orthodoxy were burned at the stake. Many were the dissenting views that could send offenders to a fiery end.
In 1633, the astronomer Galileo Galilei came within a singed whisker of the same fate, for arguing that the sun (and not the Earth) was at the center of the solar system. He was saved only because he was already famous, had good friends in high government places, and agreed to recant his “heresy” (at least publicly) and submit to living under house arrest until the end of his days.
We’ve come a long way since then. The Church eventually adopted Galileo’s view of science as its own: Nature is the criterion of the truth about nature.
Unfortunately lessons learned 400 years ago have yet to be adopted where the Church of Anthro-Climatism is involved. Burning dissenters at the stake may no longer be an option — perhaps because it would send prodigious quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, many other ingenious punishments are often meted out, to ensure that dissent is at least kept within “acceptable” limits.
Just recently, as scientists who specialize in environmental science, climatology, and solar variability, we welcomed the acceptance of our scientific session, Diverse Views from Galileo’s Window: Researching Factors and Processes of Climate Change in the Age of Anthropogenic CO2. The session was to be hosted at the upcoming Fall 2009 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
Our session was to focus on “knowledge that spans an extremely diverse range of expertise” and provides “an integrated assessment of the vast array of disciplines that affect and, in turn, are affected by the Earth’s climate.” Our ultimate goal was to stimulate discussion at this professional meeting, prior to the upcoming UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fifth assessment report.
We developed this session to honor the great tradition of science and scientific inquiry, as exemplified by Galileo when, 400 years ago this year, he first pointed his telescope at the Earth’s moon and at the moons of Jupiter, analyzed his findings, and subsequently challenged the orthodoxy of a geocentric universe. Our proposed session was accepted by the AGU.
In response to its acceptance, we were joined by a highly distinguished list of scientists — which included members of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, France and China, as well as recipients of the AGU’s William Bowie, Charles Whitten and James MacElwane medals. Our participants faithfully submitted abstracts for the session.
But by late September, several puzzling events left us wondering whether the AGU truly serves science and environmental scientists — or simply reflects, protects and advances the political agendas of those who espouse belief in manmade CO2-induced catastrophic global warming.
Has a single pro-climate-change website or outlet said or written anything about Gore's claim that the temperature at the center of the earth is "millions of degrees"?
Imagine if George W. Bush, John McCain, or the hated politician of the moment, Sarah Palin, had said such a thing — spouting off some outrageous number in the course of arguing for their preferred energy policies.
Good Enough for Government Work, I Guess [Greg Pollowitz]
Over in the Corner, John Derbyshire caught a hilarious exchange between Al Gore and Conan O'Brien where Gore claims the center of the earth is "several million degrees."
[Me] The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that's a mile and a quarter if you're not as science-y as Al) you'll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it's much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.
If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was "several million degrees," we'd be a star.
The more of these sniveling (and, amusingly, poorly informed) pieces like this Der Spiegel item, the better, I say. And I hope Drudge links to every one. Europe has every reason to believe in Obama’s deep and — they hope — overwhelming desire to do whatever it takes to make Europeans love him, and the motive behind this cold petulance is obvious. I believe the psychologists call it "withholding affection." Though I wish they’d not be so brazen about it, as even he might realize what’s going on.
But the condescending anger with which our righteous superiors let America know just where they think we belong in the world — and how they just can't believe we won't behave — tells readers even more than we here can hope to do.
So keep it coming, Europe, straight through the COP. (Did you catch among the side-linked stories by Euro counterparts that the Copenhagen jails are too full so that they don’t know what to do with all the rioters next month to whom we’re supposed to listen? And that the carbon-offset regime on which the entire Kyoto enterprise and U.S. cap-and-trade are premised is a big swindle?) Keep it up through the spring, right up to that turn in the road where Sen. John Kerry has kicked the cap-and-trade can — now that Democratic pols are terrified about losing elections that are still decided by those wretchedly self-interested and commonsense American voters. Somehow this lack of political will on Capitol Hill is all Obama’s fault. OK. Just like it was Bush’s.
I've recycled the photos from my May 2008 "On the Rocks" post, but the story is new.
Yes, the Kapitan Khlebnikov eco-tour icebreaker is once again stuck in polar ice — excuse me "rapidly disappearing polar ice." This year, it happened off Antarctica.
But not to worry: I think we can safely assume the ship's crew still includes a bartender:
Many of the passengers are Britons who paid more than STG10,000 ($A17,901.9) for a tour whose highlight was seeing emperor penguins on Snow Hill island, according to Exodus, a British tour operator.
Around 50 mostly British passengers booked their tours through Exodus and have been well cared-for while the ship has been stuck, Rob Dixon, a spokesman for Exodus, told AFP by telephone from London.
"There's a lot of entertainment on board," Dixon said. He said the weather was improving and predicted the ship would reach Ushaia by the end of this week, two or three days behind schedule.
"They've certainly seen the penguins they came to see," Dixon added, noting that passengers had been able to leave the ship by helicopter.
A few more helicopter rides and maybe they can warm up things well enough to make way.
Big Auto: ‘This Is about Saving the Planet’ [Henry Payne]
The Left likes having Big Industry straw men to bash whenever their socialist plans run aground, but the fact is, Big Industry is embracing the U.S.’s leftward lurch. Better to secure your place at the Rentseekers Roundtable, to lock out new competition and guarantee a never-ending stream of government welfare.
Take Nissan-Renault, that international Big Auto giant.
In introducing the company’s electric plug-in for the U.S. market — called the Leaf — to the automotive press for testing this week (the 22-city Nissan Leaf Zero-Emission Tour), CEO Carlos Ghosn sounded like the Goracle’s ventriloquist dummy.
“This has to happen,” said Ghosn, contending that gas-powered vehicles are dead since oil will never again drop below $70 a barrel. “When you look at what’s happening in the world, when you extrapolate that, it leads to absurd results. This is not about the electric car, this is about saving the planet.”
No, it’s about Nissan’s bottom line. “What’s happening in the world” is that governments from Washington to Paris to Tokyo are mandating high-mileage vehicles and extending generous subsidies to help manufacturers build cars consumers may or may not want.
Ghosn has placed his bet on Better Place, a massively government-subsidized plan to build city infrastructures to accommodate electric vehicles produced by Nissan-Renault like the Leaf. The French government, 15 percent owner of Renault, has already ponied up half-a-billion for Nissan-Renault’s electric car development, the governments of Israel and Denmark are partners with Better Place, and Washington is subsidizing each plug-in purchase with a $7,500 tax gift.
The Better Place model however, faces substantial market barriers. Which is why the players need taxpayer skin. Which is why when it comes to the auto industry these days, there’s little difference whether the spokesman is from Big Auto or Big Government.
"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," President-elect Obama said of global warming last November. "Delay is no longer an option." It turns out that delay really is an option — the only one that has world-wide support.
Over the weekend Mr. Obama bowed to reality and admitted that little of substance will come of the climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. For the last year the President has been promising a binding international carbon-regulation treaty a la the Kyoto Protocol, but instead negotiators from 192 countries now hope to reach a preliminary agreement that they'll sign such a treaty when they meet in Mexico City in 2010. No doubt.
The environmental lobby is blaming Copenhagen's pre-emptive collapse on the Senate's failure to ram through a cap-and-trade scheme like the House did in June, arguing that "the world" won't make commitments until the U.S. does. But there will always be one excuse or another, given that developing countries like China and India will never be masochistic enough to subject their economies to the West's climate neuroses. Meanwhile, Europe has proved with Kyoto that the only emissions quotas it will accept are those that don't actually have to be met.
President George W. Bush, for all the obloquy heaped on him for walking away from Kyoto, tried to shift the climate-change debate toward policies that were realistic and achievable, in particular by insisting that benefits had to justify any brakes on economic growth. This strategy resulted in far too much taxpayer waste, including the green-pork subsidies that Mr. Obama loves and has ramped up. Yet it also prevented Mr. Bush from making grandiose if futile promises with no relationship to political reality.
Of course, the pointlessness of Copenhagen will now become part of Mr. Obama's argument that the Senate must inflict cap and tax on the U.S., as well as a justification for the EPA's nondemocratic carbon crackdown via clean-air regulation. If he and we are lucky, however, the Senate will fail to act too, the EPA will get tied up in court, and the economy will recover faster without the looming burden of higher energy taxes.
Alaska governor Sean Parnell said he intends to pursue the state's lawsuit against the federal government concerning the listing of the polar bear under the Endagered Species Act (ESA).
The lawsuit was initiated under former governor Sarah Palin, before she resigned in July.
Parnell said the ESA is being used as a "land use planning tool" and threatens the continued development of Alaska's natural resources. He said the state has a strong record of developing these resources and protecting its wildlife—a claim disputed by environmental groups who pushed for the ESA listing.
The listing was granted in part, as a result of research that estimates two-thirds of hte world's polar bear population will be gone by 2050—and all bears in North America—due to melting sea ice in the Arctic.
