Climategate: Global Warming & Ridiculing The Ridiculous

How seriously is Copenhagen going to be when no one believes that global warming is really happening? Not too seriously. Iowahawk captures the spirit:

Narrator

This is the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, home of one of the largest nesting populations of climate scientists in Europe.

Gentle ant’s-eye scene of idyllic campus lawn, strewn about with drunken mating undergraduates

Each year it attracts magnificent migratory flocks of graduate students, adjuncts and visiting faculty from across the northern hemisphere.

Shots of jumbo jets landing at Heathrow; herds of climate researchers busily milling at Duty Free shops, retrieving baggage, phoning for prearranged limo service

Within minutes of arriving on campus, the migratory researchers approach the entrance of the Climate Research Unit and perform the secret credential dance, fiercely displaying their prominent curriculum vitae. This signals to the security drone that they can be trusted with the sacred electronic lanyard badge that will grant them entrance to the hive’s inner sanctum.

Paul at Powerline notes that the Washington Post has finally decided to cover the Climategate story:

Why did it take the Post so long to provide an account of Climategate? It seems to me that the authors, David Farhenthold and Juliet Eilperin, reveal the reason when they claim that the “scandal has done what many slide shows and public-service ads could not: focus public attention on the science of a warming planet.”

It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? The left-liberal community, including the Washington Post, has been unable (in its view) to win the hearts and minds of the public on “global warming” through calm reason. And now, a juicy scandal that cuts against the left-liberal position is about to capture the public imagination.

I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the Post finally decided to report the scandal at all.

Allah notes Al Gore’s Copenhagen behavior:

Beyond that, a guy who won a Peace Prize for becoming the high priest of this church simply isn’t going to turn on it this easily. The East Anglia boys will dump global warming — and each other, which they’re already doing — before Gore does. Nor do I think he’s ducking the lecture because he’s afraid to face questions about Climategate. Why should he be? He’s already got two pre-packaged “rebuttal” arguments to choose from, the savvy and the schmucky. Just today the UK’s climate secretary went the latter route by warning people not to be distracted from the crisis by skeptic “saboteurs.” That spin will be plenty good enough for a roomful of true believers, I’m sure.

If you don’t think this whole thing has descending into parody, here’s what Paul Krugman says today:

Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen on Monday. President Obama now plans to address the conference on its last day, which suggests that the White House expects real progress.

And over at NPR, the libs are trying to rationalize why citizens scoff at man-made global warming:

In a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, climate comes in dead last, No. 20 of the 20 big issues of concern to America. But that doesn’t completely explain why a number of recent polls show that people are less and less likely to accept the science of global warming. Here’s where psychology comes in.

Even as scientists become more confident that climate change is a serious hazard, public opinion is shifting the other way, says Kari Marie Norgaard at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash.

“This seems irrational,” she says. “And in that sense, it’s challenging the basic premise that we have of an enlightened, democratic, modern society.”

So, the American people are unenlightened rubes, that’s why they’re skeptical. Meanwhile, scientists have lost their ability to be skeptical and the left can’t quite get why the American people are scoffing, at this point.

It should get more ridiculous and ridicule-worry as time goes on….what time we have left anyway. With all the carbon being spewed by the Global Warming folks traveling to Copenhagen, life might be in peril even as I write this:

It is being hyped as the summit that will save the planet.

But according to critics, next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen are more likely to cost the earth.

Researchers have estimated that the bill for the 12-day jamboree will top £130million – and will generate as much greenhouse gas as an entire Africa country.

Yeah, it’s the people who are delusional, alright. The people will take Anthropogenic Global Warming seriously when the scientists and politicians preaching the religion take it seriously.

Posted in Environmentalism, We're All Gonna Die | 6 Comments »

Podcast: Tigers, And Crashers, And Climate, Oh My!

John Hawkins joins me to discuss the latest culture and politics stories.

Download MP3

To subscribe on iTunes, just click here!

When Melissa isn’t on the radio, you can find her at melissaclouthier.com and on Twitter. Her username is MelissaTweets.

Posted in Corrupted Culture, Crime, Environmentalism, Podcast, Sports | 1 Comment »

Climategate: They Threw Away The Raw Data? Where Is The American Media? And Why Are Liberals Silent?–UPDATED

The authors of the anthropogenic global warming theory threw away the original data upon which the theory was based. No one can reproduce non-existent data. No one can verify it. As horrendous as manipulating data or lying about the implications of the data might be, throwing out the original data is mortal scientific sin. [Background here.]

From the Times:

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.

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.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

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.

What in the world were these people thinking? Either they were malicious or lazy and neither bodes well for top level scientists. [More details from Climate Science Blog.]

People are smugly driving in smart cars because of this data and it can’t be verified? The government wants to control the thermostat in your home and the data can’t be verified. Nancy Pelosi stands to make millions on wind mills and this data can’t be verified. World leaders are about to sign economy killing agreements based on data that can’t be verified.

In short, the whole world has been turned inside out on a fear that may well be utterly baseless. And we’ll never know because the original data was destroyed?

And here’s my second concern: If you’re watching the news, do you know anything about this? If you read the newspaper, are you reading stories that reflect this knowledge? How much collusion is involved and at what point do major media become irrelevant–if they won’t report news such as this? Roger Simon says:

It was that UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as most of us recall, that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. And they are the ones with the “structural tendency to politicize climate change”. From a scientist to his colleagues, that’s a powerful indictment. So it should be no surprise that Hulme also has some rather cynical things to say about the coming Copenhagen climate conference:

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

Indeed they will. And indeed it isn’t. No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation.

And just like in Galileo’s time, the government seems to control the media. Just look at any news aggregator. Are any American news sources breaking stories on Glimategate? No. Why? Because to them, Global Warming is their religion, too.

What’s interesting to me is that the elites are once again (hello Barack Obama) the true believers while the average folks are the ones still skeptical. Who keeps making emotion based political decisions?

UPDATES:

Via Memeorandum Climate Change “Denier” will represent EU at Copenhagen Summit.

Jim Treacher has a conversation
with the Global Warming Zealot in his head.

From Scott Graves on Twitter, “I did a Google search for news about “climate emails”… the American MSM should be ashamed of itself!”

More from Stacy McCain [MUST READ the whole thing] who discusses the religion of global warming and how reason and faith intermingle:

Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation — zing! — let’s agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the “Population Bomb” hoax of the 1960s and ’70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.

He continues:

These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.

So, McCain asserts that the unreasonable fealty to science becomes religion because of the absence of the same. That makes sense to me. People will fill the holes in knowledge with something and if the plug in the hole of knowledge isn’t God, it’s often some theory that ends up either sounding conspiratorial, or, in this case, an actual conspiracy.

Further, the god becomes not truth but the nebulous “progress” which McCain fairly scorns:

This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and — by logical extension — today’s Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.

How humorous, then, that global warming is, in fact, global cooling. That is, the last ten years refute the assertions of some very zealous and self-protective scientists. Literally, the progress of heating has been inverted to cooling. If heating was progressive, is cooling conservative?

This is all nonsense. The temperature is the temperature. What it all means is another question entirely and one the Global Warming alarmists believe is “settled”. It is by no means settled at all.

Maybe Global Warming theory will be brought back into the realm of science and reason rather than faith and religion. Maybe. People invest a lot of emotion in religion and the global warming zealots are no different.

UPDATED AGAIN:

AJ Strata has a look a the data and concludes this [His whole post is crunching numbers and well worth examination and comment, please check it out.]:

I have been working on this post for about a week now, testing a hypothesis I have regarding the raw temp data vs the overly processed CRU, GISS, NCDC, IPCC results (the processed data shows dramatic global warming in the last century). I have been of the opinion the raw temp data tells a different, cooler story than the processed data. My theory is alarmists’ results do not track well with the raw data, and require the merging of unproven and extremely inaccurate proxy data to open the error bars and move the trend lines to produce the desired result. We have a clear isolated example from New Zealand where cherry picked data and time windows have resulted in a ridiculous ‘data merging’ that completely obliterates the raw data.

To pull this deception off on a global scale, as I have mentioned before, requires the alarmists to deal with two inconvenient truths:

1. The warm periods in the 1930’s and 1940’s which were about the same as today
2. The current decline in temperature, just when the alarmists require a dramatic increase to match the rising CO2 levels.

What is needed out the back end of this alarmist process is a graph like we have from NCDC, where the 1930’s-1940’s warm periods are pushed colder and the current temps are pushed higher.

So, if I understand AJ correctly, the CRU scientists used raw data mixed in with rigged data and the rigged data helped confirm the theory of global warming, but when taking away the rigged data, the temperatures are the same as usual.

Well. Whatever data is there to be examined, needs to be examined and thoroughly. AJ is doing the scientific thing and testing the data. Now, for the major media to get to work and for the skeptics to start producing their findings, too.

Tigerhawk has a Climategate video that goes through the cast of villains.

Posted in Bias, Economy, Environmentalism, Liberals | 13 Comments »

While You Were Feasting: A Lot Of Crazy Stuff Happened

What if the world markets had a hearth attack? They did.

What if Howard Dean said that this health care plan is bad for America and he agrees with Republicans? He did.

What if Global Warming was almost certainly disproved? It was.

What if Cap-N-Trade is declared dead? It was.

What if strangers [not terrorists] managed to sneak into a state dinner? They did.

The proverbial sh*t is hitting the fan. When looked at together, it looks like so much bad is happening. And according to some, it’s going to get worse.

These are troubled times. I don’t like being alarmist and I don’t know that there’s anything that one can do. But does anyone feel confident that our leaders will do the right thing? They seem determined to indiscriminately spend and drive up debt. They seem determined to pass a health care bill that will make everything worse. They seem determined to ignore the science and create ignorant public policy in the face of reality. And there is no business certainty so no business owner wants to step out and take risks.

Does this environment seem like a good time to take a business risk? How can economies recover in this position?

Posted in Economy, Environmentalism | 3 Comments »

Global Warming Fraud: An Environmental Disaster Of Epic Proportions–UPDATED

An environmental cataclysm occurred this week. Al Gore is somewhere howling in psychic pain. Global warming skeptics and any real scientists rejoice: the fable of Global Warming aka Climate Change aka Impending Doom has been revealed for a scientifically manipulated fraud.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters has an excellent wrap-up of the story (damning emails, links) and asks this:

For its part, NewsBusters has sent e-mail messages requesting comment from all of the scientists mentioned in this article. None have responded yet.

However, maybe more importantly, with cap and trade legislation currently before Congress, and an international climate meeting happening in Copenhagen next month, the question is what will America’s leading media outlets do with this news.

Should we expect investigative television programs like “60 Minutes” and “20/20″ to be all over this story interrogating the scientists allegedly involved in these e-mail exchanges?

Will America’s press be as eager to find out the truth of this matter as they were in fact-checking former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s new book?

Consider that at the time of this article’s publishing, only FoxNews.com, NPR.com, and WSJ.com have logged printed stories on this subject from this side of the Atlantic.

Will others follow, and if so, how will they report what on the surface appears to be a huge, developing story?

Think of all the people [Al Gore] who stand to make billions should this lie be the foundation for worldwide environmental policy. Think of how the government will invade Americans’ lives to “save a planet” that is in no need of saving. Consider how negotiations between governments will be changed when data gets reevaluated. Hello Kyoto?

The implications of manipulated science of this scale are breath taking. The government funds millions in environmental research. Millions of tax-payer dollars also go for medical research, it should be noted. Public policy is made by the outcomes of this research.

Are Americans supposed to trust so-called scientists, who take money from the government and then give the government self-serving recommendations? This is already a question with government guidelines regarding cancer. Environmental policy is equally pervasive in scope. Each American’s life is depending on the reliability of “science”.

This disaster will mean more than just environmental policy. This disaster calls into question the ethics of government sponsored research and the wall between science and policy.

UPDATED:

Powerline has more about how the alarmists closed ranks when new data discounted the accepted theory:

The story began when Steve McIntyre, the same researcher who was largely responsible for destroying Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph purporting to show unprecedented warming in the 20th century, turned his attention to a famous article published by Keith Briffa of East Anglia’s CRU in 2000. This article analyzed the diameters of tree rings, including rings from an area called Yamal in Siberia, and conveniently generated another hockey-stick shaped graph. You can read an account of the ensuing controversy here. McIntyre’s work appeared to show that Briffa had cherry-picked trees in order to get the result he was looking for. One fact that this story highlights is that global warming alarmists publish their results in scientific journals, but refuse to make the underlying data publicly available so that the validity of their analyses can be checked.

McIntyre’s revelations caused a firestorm of controversy, in response to which the alarmist community circled its wagons to fend off the threat from an outsider. This process can be clearly seen in the East Anglia emails.

And one of my favorite writers on the web, and smartest, Charles Martin, has much, much more.

Posted in Environmentalism | No Comments »

Podcast: Making Fun Of Liberals With John Hawkins

Too much fun. We talked Al Gore and his indulgences, The Bow, “V”, and toothless vampires.

Download MP3

To subscribe on iTunes, just click here!

When Melissa isn’t on the radio, you can find her at melissaclouthier.com and on Twitter. Her username is MelissaTweets.

Posted in Barack Obama, Environmentalism, Podcast | No Comments »

Cap-n-Trade Gives Obama Strong Man Powers?

Wanted to share this provocative tidbit from the Washington Examiner:

Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.

Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions…to address shortfalls” in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions.

Ever get the feeling that you’re unarmed and being assaulted on all sides?

Posted in Environmentalism, Isms | 1 Comment »