Many on the right view the Toyota Prius as a tree-hugger's feel-good car. They are much more expensive than non-tree-hugger cars of the same size, and while the mileage is better, the added cost of the vehicle will never equal the gas savings over the life of the car. But the enviro-buyers don't really care about the cost savings (if they did, why would they overpay for the car?). It is really only about one thing: showing the world that they care more about saving the planet than you or I do. To those of us in the global warming denier camp, Prius drivers just make us think, Here's your sign.

Well, it turns out that a new study has proven the deniers correct; the hybrid drivers have been sold a bill of goods.

From, of all places, the Washington Post editorial page.

An Energy Department-funded analysis by the National Research Council, a congressionally chartered body, has concluded that plug-in electric hybrid vehicles probably will not produce significant savings in either greenhouse gas emissions or fuel consumption for at least another two decades -- even with massive government subsidies. . . .

So there goes the global warming angle. For those thick-headed warmists out there, that means you will not cool the Earth with a Prius.

Second strike is that they are a ripoff.

Therefore, plug-in hybrid vehicles will remain extremely expensive -- the gas savings more than canceled out by their sticker price. They'll probably account for only about 13 million of the 300 million vehicles on the road in the United States by 2030. Not until 2047 is it probable that the fuel savings of the entire fleet of plug-in hybrids would balance out the subsidies necessary to make them cost-competitive with conventional vehicles. And the government will have to spend $303 billion to get to that point.

Note that last part. Electric vehicles won't be competitive with normal cars for 38 years.

Don't get me wrong, hybrid drivers should be able to continue to buy these little scam-boxes. It is a free market and Americans are free to waste their money on whatever they want. Just note that if the the shoe were on the other political foot and conservatives were the hybrid lovers, the left would look at this study and ban hybrids as a fraud, a waste of money, and tell us that the ban was for our own good.

The Patriot Room

Heh.^TM

Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit.  The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win it over with a warm war.  By targeting Western (that is, capitalist) nations as the evildoers in the world’s imminent boiling destruction, and then playing on the fear, guilt and ignorance of those same Western nations, the Communists . . . er, global warming saviors . . . announced a solution:  the West should give up its wealth by transferring it en masse to poor nations.  The West should also give up its lifestyle, by abandoning electricity, gas and even toilet paper.  The West, in other words, should give true meaning to global warming by engaging in self-immolation.

The last month, however, has seen this Communist-inspired house of cards collapse as quickly as the Soviet bloc did back in 1989.  First came ClimateGate, which revealed to the whole world the fact that the most ardent climate “scientists” were, in fact, ideologues who cared little about science, and a great deal about achieving a political goal.  They lied about their data, destroyed their facts, and systematically set out to muzzle and destroy anyone who disagreed with them.

Second came word from Russia that the same “scientists” (and please understand that these “scientists” are responsible for almost all of the conclusions on which the hysteria was based) cherry-picked climate data from Russia.  This is no small thing.  Russia covers 12% of the earth, and it’s been the Siberian tree rings that have been at the centerpiece of the warmies’ claims.

And today comes news that definitively rips the mask off of this whole thing.  When Hugo Chavez, a man who seeks to turn his beleaguered nation into a Communist worker’s paradise, with himself as leader for life, announces in Copenhagen that capitalism is the real culprit, and is met, not with silence or boos, but with deafening cheers, everything becomes clear:

President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ – “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Let me translate Chavez’s speech:  “The capitalist pigs in the United States are the enemies of the people and need to be destroyed.”  Chavez’s speech, in other words, is pitch-perfect Communist Cold War rhetoric.  During the Cold War, however, non-Communist bloc nations would have been politely silent, even if they agreed with his sentiments.  Thanks to the brainwashing of global warming, however, people no longer feel compelled to hide their hatred for America and their desire for its destruction.

Bookworm Room

Source

COPENHAGEN, Dec 14 -- The Copenhagen climate talks will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output of more than half- -a-million Ethiopians, figures commissioned by hosts Denmark show.

Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.

This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries -- according to U.S. government statistics about per-person emissions in 2006.

Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference's carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees' flights to Copenhagen.

Way to lead, guys...

National Post

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles.

While other alternatives to gasoline include deriving biofuels from plants or from algae, both of these processes require several intermediate steps before refinement into usable fuels.

"This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction, either in the case of cellulosic biomass or algal biomass, which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production," said team leader James C. Liao, Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA and associate director of the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics. "Therefore, this is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach."

Interesting stuff.

Science Daily

The son of a prominent Pocono artist was arrested last night on charges of stealing approximately $20 million in paintings from the family-run art museum.

Alfonso Frank Frazetta, 52, of Marshalls Creek was arrested by state police at Swiftwater and charged with burglary, theft by unlawful taking and criminal trespass.

According to the police report, Frazetta, with the help of two men, including one operating a backhoe, broke through the museum door and took about 90 paintings on Wednesday afternoon.

He loaded the paintings in his trailer and vehicle, but was apprehended before he could flee the scene.

The museum contains paintings by Frank Frazetta Sr., 81, a well-known fantasy artist whose work has been featured in books, posters and album covers.

The elder Frazetta, who is suffering from dementia, was in Florida at the time of the alleged theft.

According to the police affidavit, Frank Jr. told the responding trooper he had Frank Sr.'s permission to enter his museum “by any means,” and move all the paintings to a storage facility. The trooper called the owner, who told the law enforcement official he had not given his son permission to either be in the museum or remove paintings from it.

The two men accompanying Frank Jr. were identified as Frank Bush, 49, and Kevin Clement, 54. Police said additional charges were pending on Bush, who operated the backhoe.

Frank Jr.'s wife, Lori Frazetta, said the incident was the result of family infighting that began after the death of Frank Sr.'s wife, Ellie, a few months ago. According to Lori, Frank Jr. and Ellie ran the family business until Ellie's death a few months ago – when the infighting over Frank Sr.'s paintings began.

Lori Frazetta said her husband, Frank Jr., notified state troopers of his intentions to inventory the paintings, pursuant to a civil litigation among family members. She also said Frank Jr. was planning to take the paintings to a secured location when he was apprehended.

Frank Jr. was arraigned and taken to Monroe County Correctional Facility in Snydersville. His bail was set at $500,000.

Sad.  I've always loved Frazetta.

The Pocono Record

Data from a worldwide network of monitoring stations indicates a warming globe; one presumably caused my man’s influence on the climate. In a video posted to YouTube, a sixth grader has demonstrated the problem with these climate records and shows how they are an unreliable indicator of global warming.

Anthony Watts, operator of the website Watt’s Up With That, completed an extensive analysis of the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). His book, “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” and the accompanying website document a host of wide-ranging problems with climate stations across the country.

Problems identified include stations on top of buildings, next to air conditioners and mechanical equipment, situated on large parking lots and more. The stations with these issues fail to even meet the National Weather Service’s own guidelines and yet they are considered accurate when used for the climate science that raises concerns about global warming.

Station moves as well can cause climate records to be thrown into question. In recent years, the climate record of Denver, Colorado was severely impacted when the official station for the city was moved 15 miles to Denver International Airport. In New Zealand, questions were raised recently about corrections made to climate records to account for station moves.

A young man known only as Peter created a YouTube video that highlights other potential problems with the surface station record. The video, posted in July of 2008, notes that while urban USHCN stations have shown temperature increases since 1900, rural stations have not.

That of course raises a big question: If the globe is warming, shouldn’t rural stations reflect it?

The video dovetails on the arguments many have raised about what is called the Urban Heat Island effect. Because urban stations are surrounded by development, they typically read higher temperatures and those temperatures will increase as more growth encroaches on them.

Given those facts, one wonders just how accurate the measurements from urban stations can be. If rural stations that have not been interfered with don’t show warming, then it reasons that the urban stations’ records are incorrect and cannot be trusted. The video below from Peter and his dad sums up the problem nicely.

Video at Climate Change Fraud.

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Some Wisconsin communities that have installed high efficiency traffic lights are discovering the energy-saving bulbs are a hazard in a snow storm.

City officials say the LED lights use less electricity and don't give off enough heat to melt ice or snow. So when the snow falls and the wind blows, the traffic lights are obscured.

That's led to some traffic crashes at intersections where drivers aren't sure whether to stop or go. It's happened in Ashwaubenon, near Green Bay, and West Bend.

City crews have manually been scraping the ice and snow off the traffic lights. Public works officials say the LED lights have saved thousands of dollars in monthly power bills.

Oooops.

Link

"Stop hyperventilating, all you climate-change deniers. The purloined e-mail correspondence published by skeptics last week -- portraying some leading climate researchers as petty, vindictive and tremendously eager to make their data fit accepted theories -- does not prove that global warming is a fraud.  If I'm wrong, somebody ought to tell the polar ice caps that they're free to stop melting."  Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post.

"I am thoroughly unimpressed with the belief that global warming scientists have been engaging in some kind of massive conspiracy to conceal the truth.  First, because we seem to be able to observe things like polar ice sheets melting, which point to warming."  Megan McArdle in the Atlantic.

"A pictures is worth a thousand emails and pictures of the polar ice caps show a 20% decrease since 1979."  Katie Couric in her Notebook.

"The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe.

"The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.

"‘One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),' said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University."

The Copenhagen summit is in full force, and so too is the idea that man-made global warming is incontrovertible. But Martin Cohen argues that the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear-mongering.

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers".

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and columnist for The New York Times, has said: "Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is - and that's why it's unforgivable ... the deniers are choosing, wilfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is."

Another columnist, this time for The Boston Globe, has written: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, although one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

Such pronouncements from these commentators and from other people highly placed in government, international organisations, the press, academia and science make the debate seem closed and the conclusion beyond dispute. Yet the plain fact is that there is something deeply unscientific about the theory of global warming. Despite this, it has gained such widespread, uncritical acceptance that any scientist expressing a doubt often finds his or her actions tarred with accusations of the rankest political and personal motivations.

How this situation came about says much about how science is co-opted to sway public opinion. The case is built, deliberately or not, on misleading images and interpretations that have been perpetuated by parties with a vested interest. It morphs into a tool for governments to intimidate their populations into passive acceptance of very real changes: from the tiny, such as accepting miserable fluorescent light instead of the incandescent light we've been used to; to the major, like welcoming nuclear power plants and obliging rainforest tribes to make way for biofuel plantations.

Indeed, much of what is presented as hard scientific evidence for the theory of global warming is false. "Second-rate myth" may be a better term, as the philosopher Paul Feyerabend called science in his 1975 polemic, Against Method.

"This myth is a complex explanatory system that contains numerous auxiliary hypotheses designed to cover special cases, as it easily achieves a high degree of confirmation on the basis of observation," Feyerabend writes. "It has been taught for a long time; its content is enforced by fear, prejudice and ignorance, as well as by a jealous and cruel priesthood. Its ideas penetrate the most common idiom, infect all modes of thinking and many decisions which mean a great deal in human life ... ".

But call it what you will, as long as you don't think that by calling it "science" it becomes irrefutable. Because that it ain't.

Consider the presentation in one of the most popular works arguing the case for global warming and the need for action. In Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, the scientists are reduced to a walk-on part: they are, in essence, an audience invited to applaud the decisions of politicians. The former Vice-President unveils as the "scientific" highlight of his presentation a graph offering a clear correlation between CO2 and temperature, as discovered in core samples of polar ice. He goes on to state that as levels of carbon dioxide rise, the Earth's temperature increases because the atmosphere traps more heat from the Sun.

Driving his point home, Gore extends the lines on the graph to terrifying, if distorted, levels (see box, opposite).

To show that these effects are already being felt, the film presents striking images of "global warming", from forlorn boats in dried-up seas to that haunting image at the end of the film of polar bears clinging desperately to a shrinking block of ice (see box, above).

The film - like the theory it is advancing - is not defensible in terms either of factual accuracy or of argumentative logic.

Fine, you may say, but even if the case for global warming really boils down to a few media tricks, how come everyone believes in it? Yet, as Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, discovered in the 1950s via a series of experiments, people are quite prepared to change their minds on even quite straightforward factual matters in order to "go along with the crowd".

You can't blame folk for doing that. Especially when to do otherwise would mean taking a close look at the scientific issues in climate-change theory. Much of the argument for global warming is based on modelling. The mathematics is sophisticated and certainly intimidating to everyone but experts.

As some of the top climate-change modellers have remarked: "Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear." (That comes from the paper "General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability", by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, Michael Mann and David Rind, published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.)

And there is an impressive degree of consensus in their predictions. Take the modelling of one of the key components of "greenhouse theory", the degree to which warming of the oceans leads to more water vapour in the atmosphere "trapping" the Sun's heat. Advocates of the theory rely on this to show how a little bit of warming owing to CO2 can create very significant changes in the way the climate system operates.

A paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, called "On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data", published in July 2009 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the modellers' case for CO2-induced global warming. It offered 12 graphs, 11 of them based on the most sophisticated climate models, all but one of which showed that as the temperature of the surface of the seas increases slightly, the amount of heat then trapped in the atmosphere by water vapour increases - a key element in accelerating the "greenhouse effect". We should be worried.

Yet there was that odd graph out, the 12th one. As Lubo? Motl, a sceptical physicist, joked, could it be that this was a tainted model - with its assumptions "tweaked" to fit prejudices by climate-change "deniers" funded by the oil industry? But no - the graph that contradicted all the others was the one based not on a model but on satellite measurements. It showed the Earth's oceans dampening the heating effect.

So what sort of factors mess up the models? Things like changes in ocean currents, changes in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, changes in cloud cover - just about everything that determines climate, really. Alas, there is as yet no way to calculate these. And so, the simple fact is, in our climate modellers' own words: "At present, no climate models have included the full range of effects."

Policymakers seem not to be aware of what the modellers know: that the results of their climate simulations are "likely to remain speculative for some time to come" and that people should be "extremely wary of extrapolating results to longer periods".

This demonstrates that the present climate-change models aren't just useless - by offering spurious precision, they are worse than useless.

How, then, does a theory that is incomplete and missing essential data become orthodoxy?

The reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - whose landmark 2001 report paved the way to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol - are not based on any new or original research, but merely reflect the efforts of participants, including government representatives, to overcome uncertainties in knowledge. Policymakers then use the IPCC reports, nuanced findings or not, to demand that the public change their ways. And most of the public are inclined to fall in line.

Social scientists call it "cascade theory": the idea is that information cascades down the side of an "informational pyramid", like a waterfall. It is easier for people, if they do not have either the ability or the interest to find out for themselves, to adopt the views of others. This is, without doubt, a useful social instinct. As it has been put, cascade theory reconciles "herd behaviour" with rational choice, because it is often rational for individuals to rely on information passed on to them by others.

Unfortunately, it is less rational to follow wrong information, and that is what can often happen. We find people cascading uselessly - like so many wildebeest fleeing a non-existent lion - in so many everyday ways. A lot of economic activity and business behaviour, including management fads, the adoption of new technologies and innovations, not to mention the vexed issues of health and safety regulation, reflect exactly this tendency of the herd to follow poor information.

Some people say that what is needed in response is to encourage a range of views to be heard, even when they are annoying to the "majority" - for instance, one should allow people to contest global warming. Or let teachers in schools and universities decide what they are going to teach. But more people say, on the contrary, that what is needed is stricter control of information to stop "wrong views" being spread. It is that view that is cascading down the pyramid now.

One of the best examples of cascade theory is that of the entirely false consensus that built up in the 1970s around the danger of "fatty foods". In fact, this consensus still exists, even though it has never had any scientific basis.

The theory can be traced back to a single researcher, Ancel Keys, who published a paper saying that Americans were suffering from "an epidemic" of heart disease because their diet was more fatty than their bodies were used to after thousands of years of evolution.

In 1953, Keys added additional evidence from a comparative study of the US, Japan and four other countries. Country by country, this showed that a high-fat diet coincided with high rates of heart disease.

Unfortunately for this theory, it turned out that prehistoric "traditional diets" were not especially low-fat after all - indeed, even the hunter-gatherers of yore, if they relied on eating their prey, would have had more fat in their diet than most people do today. As Science magazine pointed out, in the most relevant period of 100 years before the supposed "epidemic" of heart disease, Americans were actually consuming large amounts of fatty meat, so the epidemic followed a reduction in the amount of dietary fat Americans consumed - not an increase.

Keys' country-by-country comparison had also been skewed, with countries that did not fit the theory (such as France and Italy with their oily, fatty cuisines) being excluded. The American Heart Association (AHA), considered to be the voice of experts, issued a report in 1957 stating plainly that the fats-cause-heart-disease claims did not "stand up to critical examination". The case for there being any such epidemic was dubious, too - the obvious cause of higher rates of heart disease was that people were living longer, long enough to develop heart disease. But it was too late: the cascade had started.

Three years later, the AHA issued a new statement, reversing its view. It had no new evidence but it did have some new members writing the report, in the form of Keys himself and one of his friends. The new report made the cover of Time magazine and was picked up by non-specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, who then asked a supporter of the theory to draw up "health guidelines" for them. Soon, scarcely a doctor could be found prepared to speak out against such an overwhelming "consensus", even if a few specialised researchers still protested. And all this was good enough for the highest medical officer in the US, the Surgeon General, in 1988 to issue a doom-laden warning about fat in foods, and claiming that ice-cream was a health menace on a par with tobacco smoking.

It was a pretty silly theory, and certainly not one based on good evidence. In fact, in recent years, in large-scale studies in which comparable groups have been put on controlled diets (low fat and high fat) a correlation has at last been found. It turns out that the low-fat diet seems to be unhealthy. But no one is quite sure why.

The fact is, science has always been about PR, and as this example shows, it is easy for opinion leaders and experts to be misled. These days, it is not merely fellow researchers but professional marketeers vying to press their agenda and that of their clients (see box, page 34).

At the Kyoto summit in 1997, Fenton Communications, a New York PR firm, was working with "green NGOs and leaders", including Gore and the IPCC, to advise on how to "mainstream the climate threat" and to "harness the public 'tipping point'" on the issue and inspire action, as its website today boasts. And indeed, the public have been well and truly tipped.

The IPCC reports, which are dull but widely used by governments as the basis for their policy discussions, have become steadily more dramatic. (Not for nothing does the head of the IPCC, R.K. Pachauri, have his own dedicated marketing adviser.) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis says that "numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed (including) changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones".

Yet none of this is science. It certainly offends against the principle that Karl Popper calls "falsification" - in the case of climate change, there is no possibility of falsification. If you listen to proponents of climate-change theory, there is apparently nothing that counts as evidence against it. Increased rainfall in the northern hemisphere is evidence of climate change, but so is decreased rainfall in the southern hemisphere. Melting of ice in the Arctic is evidence of global warming, but cooling of the Antarctic is not evidence against, but attributed to "other effects".

The fact is, the IPCC report's statement quoted above is speculation and fear-mongering. So how did such language get in the report? Alas, it seems that the social and scientific reality is as Feyerabend describes, and that the language of fear has now "penetrated the most common idiom and infected all modes of thinking".

A long, but very enlightening read.  See the rest at Times Higher Education.

WASHINGTON -- In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.

Politically it's an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man's guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale too.

On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an "endangerment" to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Not everyone is pleased with the coming New Carbon-Free International Order. When the Obama administration signaled (in a gesture to Copenhagen) a U.S. commitment to major cuts in carbon emissions, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb wrote the president protesting that he lacks the authority to do so unilaterally. That requires congressional concurrence by legislation or treaty.

With the Senate blocking President Obama's cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d'etat served as the administration's loud response to Webb: The hell we can't. With this EPA "endangerment" finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There's the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society -- as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based -- you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn't lurking in CIA cloak. He's knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.

Krauthammer knocks it out of the park again.

Real Clear Politics

In 1998, Californians voted to pass Proposition 227, the “English for the Children Act,” and dismantle the state’s bilingual-education industry. The results, according to California’s education establishment, were not supposed to look like this: button-cute Hispanic pupils at a Santa Ana elementary school boasting about their English skills to a visitor. Those same pupils cheerfully calling out to their principal on their way to lunch: “Hi, Miss Champion!” A statewide increase in English proficiency among all Hispanic students.

Instead, warned legions of educrats, eliminating bilingual education in California would demoralize Hispanic students and widen the achievement gap. Unless Hispanic children were taught in Spanish, the bilingual advocates moaned, they would be unable to learn English or to succeed in other academic subjects.

California’s electorate has been proved right: Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Prop. 227 became law. But while the curtailment of California’s bilingual-education industry has removed a significant barrier to Hispanic assimilation, the persistence of a Hispanic academic underclass suggests the need for further reform.

Imagine that.

City Journal

This is why real scientists share their data, algorithms and code for peer review, to ensure there is no crazy fudging of data. More and more people are out looking at the raw temperature record and comparing it to the man-made global warming (AGW) alarmists’ ‘adjusted’ data and discovering the same pattern. This time it comes from Brisbane Australia:

The pattern emerging is one of alarmists having to ‘adjust’ the data because it shows there is no man-made warming, per their own highly vaunted climate models. The same models that have produced all the dire predictions of pending doom.

One thing you NEVER do in science is ‘adjust’ the data to meet your desired outcome. And one thing you also NEVER do is trust those whose careers and credibility rest on producing a desired outcome to do the verification and validation of their own theories.

How about that?  Climategate now has it's OWN Throbbing Memo...

The Strata-Sphere

Introduction

Time to get technical.

First, surf over to Willis Eschenbach’s gorgeous piece of statistical detective work of how GHCN “homogenized” temperature data for Darwin, Australia. Pay particular attention to his Figures 7 & 8. Take your time reading his piece: it is essential.

There is vast confusion on data homogenization procedures. This article attempts to make these subjects clearer. I pay particular attention to the goals of homogenizations, its pitfalls, and most especially, the resulting uncertainties. The uncertainty we have in our eventual estimates of temperature is grossly underestimated. I will come to the, by now, non-shocking conclusion that too many people are too certain about too many things.

My experience has been that anything over 800 words doesn’t get read. There’s a lot of meat here, and it can’t all be squeezed into one 800-word sausage skin. So I have linked the sausage into a multi-day post with the hope that more people will get through it.

Homogenization goals

After reading Eschenbach, you now understand that, at a surrounding location—and usually not a point—there exists, through time, temperature data from different sources. At a loosely determined geographical spot over time, the data instrumentation might have changed, the locations of instruments could be different, there could be more than one source of data, or there could be other changes. The main point is that there are lots of pieces of data that some desire to stitch together to make one whole.

Why?

I mean that seriously. Why stitch the data together when it is perfectly useful if it is kept separate? By stitching, you introduce error, and if you aren’t careful to carry that error forward, the end result will be that you are far too certain of yourself. And that condition—unwarrant ed certainty—is where we find ourselves today.

Let’s first fix an exact location on Earth. Suppose this to be the precise center of Darwin, Australia: we’d note the specific latitude and longitude to be sure we are at just one spot. Also suppose we want to know the daily average temperature for that spot (calculated by averaging the 24 hourly values), which we use to calculate the average yearly temperature (the mean of those 365.25 daily values), which we want to track through time. All set?

Scenario 1: fixed spot, urban growth

The most difficult scenario first: our thermometer is located at our precise spot and never moves, nor does it change characteristics (always the same, say, mercury bulb), and it always works (its measurement error is trivial and ignorable). But the spot itself changes because of urban growth. Whereas once the thermometer was in an open field, later a pub opens adjacent to it, and then comes a parking lot, and then a whole city around the pub.

In this case, we would have an unbroken series of temperature measurements that would probably—probably!—show an increase starting at the time the pub construction began. Should we “correct” or “homogenize” that series to account for the possible urban heat island effect?

No.

At least, not if our goal was to determine the real average temperature at our spot. Our thermometer works fine, so the temperatures it measures are the temperatures that are experienced. Our series is the actual, genuine, God-love-you temperature at that spot. There is, therefore, nothing to correct. When you walk outside the pub to relieve yourself, you might be bathed in warmer air because you are in a city than if you were in an open field, but you aren’t in an open field, you are where you are and you must experience the actual temperature of where you live. Do I make myself clear? Good. Memorize this.

Good stuff.  Go read the rest at William M. Briggs' blog.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2009) — The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be fueling more than climate change. It could also be making some trees grow like crazy.

That is the finding of a new study of natural stands of quaking aspen, one of North America's most important and widespread deciduous trees. The study, by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota at Morris (UMM) and published December 4 in the journal Global Change Biology, shows that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past 50 years have boosted aspen growth rates by an astonishing 50 percent.

"Trees are already responding to a relatively nominal increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 50 years," says Rick Lindroth, a UW-Madison professor of ecology and an expert on plant responses to climate change. Lindroth, UW-Madison colleague Don Waller, and professors Christopher Cole and Jon Anderson of UMM conducted the new study.

The study's findings are important as the world's forests, which cover about 30 percent of the Earth's land surface, play an important role in regulating climate and sequestering greenhouses gases. The forests of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, act as sinks for carbon dioxide, helping to offset the increase in levels of the greenhouse gas, widely viewed as a threat to global climate stability.

<snip>

"It's a change hiding right in front of us," says Cole, a biologist at UMM. "Aspens respond to all sorts of things we had to account for -- water, genetics and other factors -- but the strong response to carbon dioxide surprised all of us."

http://www.morris.umn.edu/academic/biology/facu lty.html" title="http://www.morris.umn.edu/academic/biology/facu lty.html" target="_blank"http://www.morris.umn.edu/aca...

Chris Cole



Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Professor of Biology
Interests: Conservation Genetics, Molecular Biology, Conservation Biology
Courses:
Molecular Biology, Biol 3121
Plant Biology, Biol 4301
Conservation Genetics, Biol 4311
Office: 2080 Science
Phone: (320) 589-6319
E-mail: colect@morris.umn.edu
Web: Christopher T. Cole homepage


WHAT IN THE FUCK IS A PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY, A SENIOR-LEVEL INSTRUCTOR OF PLANT BIOLOGY, doing expressing 'surprise' that boosting CO2 is a boon to plant growth??  --rayra

Idiots, all.

Science Daily

Introduction

Some time starting in mid November 2009, ten million teletypes all started their deet-ditta-dot chatter reeling off the following headline: "Hackers broke into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit...."

I hate that. It annoys me because just like everything else about climate-gate it's been 'value-added'; simplified and distilled. The contents of FOIA2009.zip demand more attention to this detail and as someone once heard Professor Jones mutter darkly, "The devil is in the details...so average it out monthly using TMax!"

The details of the files tell a story that FOIA2009.zip was compiled internally and most likely released by an internal source.

The contents of the zip file hold one top-level directory, ./FOIA. Inside that it is broken into two main directories, ./mail and ./documents. Inside ./mail are 1073 text files ordered by date. The files are named in order with increasing but not sequential numbers. Each file holds the body and only the body of an email.

In comparison, ./documents is highly disorganized. MS Word documents, FORTRAN, IDL and other computer code, Adobe Acrobat PDF's and data are sprinkled in the top directory and through several sub-directories. It's the kind of thing that makes the co-workers disorganized desk look like the spit and polish of a boot camp floor.

What people are missing entirely is that these emails and files tell a story themselves.

The Emails

Proponents of the hacker meme are saying that s/he broke into East Anglia's network and took emails. Let's entertain that idea and see where it goes.

There is no such thing as a private email. Collecting all of the incoming and outgoing email is simple in a mail server. Using: Postfix the configuration is always_bcc=<email address>, here are links on configuring the same for Sendmail, and for Exim. Those are the three main mail servers in use in the Unix environment. Two of them, Sendmail and Exim are or were in use as the external mail gateways and internal mail servers at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

When a mail server receives an email for someone@domain.net, it checks that it is authoritative for that domain. This means that a server for domain.net will not accept email for domain.ca. The mail server will usually then run checks on the email for spam, virus, and run other filters. It will then check to see whether to route the email to another server or to drop the email in a users mailbox on that server. In all examples examined in the released emails, the mail gateway forwarded the emails to another server.

The user then has a mail client that s/he uses to read email. Outlook Express, Eudora, Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, mutt, pine and many more are all mail clients.

Mail clients use one of two methods of reading email. The first is called POP and that stands for Post Office Protocol. A mail client reading email with POP logs into the mail server, downloads the email to the machine running the mail client and will then delete the original email from the users spool file on the mail server.
The second protocol is called IMAP, Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP works by accessing the mailboxes on the mail server and doing most of the actions there. Nothing is actually downloaded onto the client machine. Only email that is deleted and purged by the mail client is gone. Either protocol allows the user the opportunity to delete the email completely.

Most email clients are setup for reading emails with POP by default and POP is more popular than IMAP for reading email.

The released emails are a gold mine for a system administrator or network administrator to map. While none of the emails released contained headers, several included replies that contained the headers of the original emails. An experienced administrator can create an accurate map of the email topography to and from the CRU over the time period in question, 1998 thru 2009.

Over the course time, UEA's systems administrators made several changes to the way email flows through their systems. The users also made changes to the way they accessed and sent email.

The Users

Using a fairly simple grep¹ we can see that from the start of the time-frame, 1999, until at least 2005 the CRU unit accessed their email on a server called pop.uea.ac.uk. Each user was assigned a username on that server. From the released emails, we can link username to people as such:

• Prof. Trevor Davies was user e022
• Dr. Timothy Osborn was user f055
• Prof. Phil Jones was user f028
• Prof. Mike Hulme was user f037
• Prof. Keith Briffa was user f023

In the previously referenced grep comes some more useful information. For instance, we know that Professor Davies was using QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.3 (32) in September of 1999. (ref Email: 0937153268.txt). If you look at the README.txt for that version you can see that it requires a POP account and doesn't support IMAP.

As mentioned previously, POP deletes email on the server usually after it is downloaded. Modern POP clients do have an option to save the email on the server for some number of days, but Eudora Light 3.0.3 did not. We can say that Professor Davies' emails were definitely removed from the server as soon as "Send/Recv" was finished.

This revelation leaves only two scenarios for the hacker:

1. Professor Davies' email was archived on a server and the hacker was able to crack into it, or
2. Professor Davies kept all of his email from 1999 and he kept his computer when he was promoted to Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer in 2004 from his position as Dean of the School of Environmental Sciences.

The latter scenario requires that the hacker would have had to know how to break into Prof. Davies' computer and would have had to get into that computer to retrieve those early emails. If that were true, then the hacker would have had to get into every other uea.ac.uk computer involved to retrieve the emails on those systems. Given that many mail clients use a binary format for email storage and given the number of machines the hacker would have to break into to collect all of the emails, I find this scenario very improbable.

Which means that the mail servers at uea.ac.uk were configured to collect all incoming and outgoing email into a single account. As that account built up, the administrator would naturally want to archive it off to a file server where it could be saved.

This is a simple evolution. You just run a crontab to start a shell-script that will stop the mail server, move the mail spool file into a file somewhere else, nulls the live spool and restart the mail server. The account would reside on the mail server, the file could be on any server.
Alternatively you could use a procmail recipe to process the email as it comes in, but that may be a bit too much processing power for a very busy account.

This also helps to explain the general order of the ./mail directory. Only a computer would be able to reliably export bodies of email into numbered files in the FOIA archive. As the numbers are in order not just numerically but also by date, the logical reasoning is that a computer program is numbering emails as they are processed for storage. This is extremely easy to do with Perl and the Mail::Box modules.

An excellent analysis by Lance Levson.  Go dig through the rest at Small Dead Animals.

If you don’t know anything about “Climategate” (does anyone else hate that name?) Go ahead and read up on it before you check out this post, I’ll wait.

Back? Let’s get started.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Emails prove nothing. Sure, you can look like an unethical asshole who may have committed a felony using government funded money; but all email is, is talk, and talk is cheap.

Now, here is some actual proof that the CRU was deliberately tampering with their data. Unfortunately, for readability’s sake, this code was written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) and is a pain to go through.

NOTE: This is an actual snippet of code from the CRU contained in the source file: briffa_Sep98_d.pro

; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5  .+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75   ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'  yearlyadj=interpol(valadj  ,yrloc,timey) 

What does this Mean? A review of the code line-by-line

Starting off Easy

Lines 1-3 are comments

Line 4

yrloc is a 20 element array containing:
1400 and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in increments of 5 years…

yrloc = [1400, 1904, 1909, 1914, 1919, 1924, 1929, ... , 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994]

findgen() creates a floating-point array of the specified dimension. Each element of the array is set to the value of its one-dimensional subscript

F = indgen(6) ;F[0] is 0.0, F[1] is 1.0….. F[6] is 6.0

Pretty straightforward, right?

Line 5

valadj, or, the “fudge factor” array as some arrogant programmer likes to call it is the foundation for the manipulated temperature readings. It contains twenty values of seemingly random numbers. We’ll get back to this later.

Line 6

Just a check to make sure that yrloc and valadj have the same number of attributes in them. This is important for line 8.

Line 8

This is where the magic happens. Remember that array we have of valid temperature readings? And, remember that random array of numbers we have from line two? Well, in line 4, those two arrays are interpolated together.

The interpol() function will take each element in both arrays and “guess” at the points in between them to create a smoothing effect on the data. This technique is often used when dealing with natural data points, just not quite in this manner.

The main thing to realize here, is, that the interpol() function will cause the valid temperature readings (yrloc) to skew towards the valadj values.

More food for thought.  Go read the rest at Cube Antics.

“Climategate” is now more than the massive misconduct of one research institution.

Following the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) data dump on November 19, many other issues with the political science of climate change are now being let out of the darkness. (See the complete Pajamas Media aggregator and document repository here, and find another PJM exclusive on research misconduct in the climate science community here.)

Most people following the climate change debate are aware that many sources claim that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing “rapidly” — in fact, that they may disappear by 2035, a mere 25 years from now.

Today, in a guest post at Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, Dr. Madhav Khandekar discusses this bit of folk science (Dr. Pielke is also the subject of an upcoming PJM interview).:

The debate over global warming & “rapid” melting of world-wide glaciers and in particular the Himalayan glaciers is once again heating up. There were a flurry of reports, a few weeks ago, in the media and in particular on the BBC (UK) world-wide news service about the Himalayan glaciers melting rapidly in the face of global warming. As this debate was raging, a comprehensive report by Dr V K Raina (Himalayan glaciers: A state-of-the art review of glacial studies, glacial retreat and climate change) was released by the Indian Minister of Environment & Forestry in New Delhi, India.

Vijay Kumar Raina, a senior glaciologist and an avid mountaineer himself, has carefully analyzed some 20 glaciers to document retreat as well as advance of some of the glaciers and has cautiously concluded that it is premature to make a statement that the Himalayan glaciers are retreating abnormally because of global warming. …

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate (of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate. …

[Where] did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from?

According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

In other words, it appears that the immensely rapid decline of the Himalayan glaciers, so widely reported to be coming in 2035, was originally reported not to happen until 2350.

A flurry of corrections will no doubt be forthcoming.

Pajamas Media

Just a small sample of articles from the past year posted by Gateway Pundit on the undeniable global cooling trend… I have posted these before, but they warrant being posted again. There are many more that indicate that Earth is NOT warming up:

Brrrr… Global Temperatures Continue to Drop– Green Peace Caught in a Lie (Video)
Brrrr… Record Storm Dumps Foot of Snow on DC Global Warming Protesters (Updated)
Brrrr… Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Level in Recorded History
Brrrr… Record Low Temps in 31 States– 256 New Records
Brrrr… Denver Breaks 118 Year-Old Cold Record– Arctic Ice Refuses to Melt
Brrrr… It’s Snowing in the Desert But Gore Warns the North Pole Will Be Gone in 5 Years
Brrrr… Record Cold Wave Blasts Mumbai, India
Brrrr… Pakistan Suffers Lowest Temps in 70 Years– 260 Dead
Brrrr… Another Rare Occurence– Great Lakes Freeze Up Again
Brrrr… It’s Snowing in North Dakota– In June!
Brrrr… Ice Comes Early to Lake Superior For First Time in 17 Years
Brrrr… Sea Ice Ends Year At Same Level As 1979
Brrrr… CNN Meteorologist Says Manmade Global Warming Theory ‘Arrogant’ (Video)
Brrrr… South America Has Coldest Winter in 90 Years
Brrrr… Jerusalem Grinds to a Halt As Rare Snowstorm Blasts City
Brrrr… Arctic Sea Ice Levels Are Up By 1,000,000 Square Kilometers
Brrrr… Record Snow & Cold Causing Snow Plow Shoot-Outs In Spokane
Brrrr… Snow Falls in UAE For 2nd Time In Recorded History
Brrrr… Most Snow Cover Over North America Since 1966
Brrrr… China Suffers Coldest Winter in 100 Years
Antarctica Ice Cap Growth Reaches Record High Levels (Photos)
Iraqis See First Snow in 100 Years As Sign of Peace.
Record Freeze Means Only One Thing… Dems Push Ahead With Global Warming Legislation

So why is the global warming hoax being ignored by Washington and the media? Money, baby, lots of money. A short list of articles about who in our government is currently profiting and who stands to profit from pushing the global warming tax on Americans… this is only a small sample:

From Green Hell Blog:
Boxer pays off GE in climate bill
UN to US: $10 trillion for climate or else…
GE ’stimulated’ by $300 million water heater rebate
GE’s smart-meter profiteering
Calif. and Mass. out to screw America?
Kerry-Boxer: Overview, Summary & Text

More reading:
World Net Daily: The great ‘global warming’ hoax
GayPatriot: Climategate: ‘The Scandal Of The Century’
Telegraph: Climategate reminds us of the liberal-left’s visceral loathing of open debate and Climategate: BBC website still thinks it’s a story about computer hacking
Another Black Conservative: The Climate Change Hoax
VotingFemale Speaks!: Climate WARMer’s Global Conspiracy; Ugly Science of Lies Uncovered at Last
Pew Research Center: Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming
Gateway Pundit: Climategate Video & Children’s Book Released In Time for Copenhagen Junk Science Summit and Media Ignores Climategate Even as NASA Is Dragged Into the Scandal and Senator Inhofe Will Call For Investigation Into Global Warming Email Scandal and Global Warming Alarmists Doing Their Best to Help Local Prostitutes and Hundreds of Protesters Greet Al Gore at Florida Junk Science Speech (Video) and Save Earth – Eat Your Pet
The Anchoress: There has always been weather
Verum Serum: A Brief Summary of Climate-Gate
Nice Deb: The Left’s Universe Of Lies and Scientist’s Story From 1995 Corroborates With Hacked CRU Emails and Video: Glenn Beck Interviews Lord Christopher Monckton On World Government and Bombshell: Obama Poised To Cede Sovereignty According To British Lord
New York Times: Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute
Half-Baked Sourdough: About “Global Warming”
Start Thinking Right: Emails: Global Warming ‘Science’ Exposed As The Lie It Has Been All Along
Christian Toto, Big Hollywood: Interview: ‘Not Evil Just Wrong’s’ Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney
Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press: The Death Blow to Climate Science
Investors.com: The Day Global Warming Stood Still
Sister Toldjah: Goracle challenged once again on “Inconvenient Truth” claims
Prison Planet: Call For Independent Inquiry Into Climategate as Global Warming Fraud Implodes and IPCC Scientists Caught Producing False Data To Push Global Warming
Michelle Malkin: The global warming scandal of the century and Fighting “climate change”…with free condoms
Hot Air: Global warming goes … vegan
Ace of Spades HQ: Cow farts worse for global warming than initially suspected and Americans Still Cooling on Global Warming
The Daily Gut: MONDAY’S GREGALOGUE: SHAME
Frugal Café Blog Zone: Save the Polar Bears, Save the Prostitutes: Global Warming Hoax Escalates and Recommended ‘Green’ Diet from Enviro-Nutjobs: Eat Your Pets, Prevent Global Warming and Saw It, Loved It: “Not Evil, Just Wrong” Outstanding Exposé Documentary and No, Mr. Gore, Polar Bears Are Not in Danger When Their Numbers Are at 50-Year Highs (video) and Debunking Global Warming: From Idaho to Chicago… Early Snow! Global Warming a Political Tool, Mocked by Mother Nature’s Record Global Cooling Trend (video) and Polar Bear Numbers Surge to 50-Year High, Obama’s Approval Rating Plunges to New Dismal Low and Global Warming Study Suppressed by EPA: Discovered and Released and Cap-and-Trade Energy Tax Bill… We’re in the Middle of Pretending to Save the Planet, Baby
Ztower: President Outasync taking Global Warming dogma to Copenhagen. Should be easier to pack now that it’s fallen apart. and Pick the phrase that doesn’t fit and win a cookie … A-Coal, B-Fossil Fuel, C-Warren Buffett, D-Railroading, E-Profit, F-All of the above.
The Powers That Be: Ed Begley Jr. Upset We’re Not All Gonna Die
Politico: Barack Obama is going to Copenhagen
New York Times: Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor and To Cut Global Warming, Swedes Study Their Plates
Below The Beltway: Save The Earth, Eat Fluffy!
Darin Miller, Big Hollywood: Inconvenient Truths Surface in ‘Not Evil Just Wrong’
Vets On The Watch: Kyoto Part Deux
Patriot’s Mind: What’s with All the Crazies in the White House?

An excellent post and list of resources.

Be sure to go to Vicki McClure Davidson's Frugal Cafe Blog for the whole article.

Quote:

7. Removed 4-line header from a couple of .glo files and loaded them into
Matlab. Reshaped to 360r x 720c and plotted; looks OK for global temp
(anomalies) data. Deduce that .glo files, after the header, contain data
taken row-by-row starting with the Northernmost, and presented as '8E12.4'.
The grid is from -180 to +180 rather than 0 to 360.
This should allow us to deduce the meaning of the co-ordinate pairs used to
describe each cell in a .grim file (we know the first number is the lon or
column, the second the lat or row - but which way up are the latitudes? And
where do the longitudes break?
There is another problem: the values are anomalies, wheras the 'public'
.grim files are actual values. So Tim's explanations (in _READ_ME.txt) are
incorrect..

8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which
did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy - naming
two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location
to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:

Quote:

The deduction so far is that the DTR-derived CLD is waaay off. The DTR looks OK, well
OK in the sense that it doesn;t have prominent bands! So it's either the factors and
offsets from the regression, or the way they've been applied in dtr2cld.

Well, dtr2cld is not the world's most complicated program. Wheras cloudreg is, and I
immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for
completely unfathomable reasons, didn't include months! So we read 50 grids instead
of 600!!! That may have had something to do with it. I also noticed, as I was correcting
THAT, that I reopened the DTR and CLD data files when I should have been opening the
bloody station files!! I can only assume that I was being interrupted continually when
I was writing this thing. Running with those bits fixed improved matters somewhat,
though now there's a problem in that one 5-degree band (10S to 5S) has no stations! This
will be due to low station counts in that region, plus removal of duplicate values.

----------
It's justifiably immoral to try to deal in a moral fashion with an immoral entity.

If you trade based on what other people say, you will lose money. Especially what I say. I won't be held responsible. Festina lente.

Wow.  I've been fooling around with the code and datasets for a couple of days now.  While I'm not a codemonkey by any stretch, I'm seeing a LOT of crap programming and outright filtering falsifying of data to obtain desired results.  I encourage all of my more technically inclined readers to do the same, and reach your own conclusions.  R ain't the prettiest of languages, but it gets the job done.  You can get it here.  Personally, I'm running it on Linux Mint, but there is a Windows version available.  It still throws errors occasionally, and locks up now and again, but I'll see what happens.

Find the rest of this thread here.

Posted by Jeff Id on June 20, 2009

Updated to include Dr. Mann’s words.

———&mda sh;———& mdash;—-

The last time I did this, R was a brand new language to me. After 6 months messing around in my free time I speak rudimentary R with a C accent. R is a totally free language that anyone can download and learn. This post is a demonstration of the methods behind the Mann08 CPS hockey stick reconstruction. The difference between this and the numerous posts I did before is better R programming and a lot more comments in the code. If you’re serious about understanding vs advocating, you can figure this out. There is not one person I can think of who has ever commented here, incapable of figuring this out.

CPS is composite plus scale, which is an invented method for calibrating proxies to measured temperatures in paleoclimatology reconstructions. In paleoclimatology methods are too often invented to find the signal in the noise – this is not a new problem and it stems from the large signal to noise ration of paleo-data. If you happen to be a paleoclimatologist who does temperature reconstructions, please try your methods on ARIMA data with a known signal before employing it on whatever your proxy is.

I have hundreds of new readers, who didn’t get the day by day experience of my discovery of climatology math. Well some of my early work was a little rough, however it was correct and the specifics still stand uncriticized.

This post was prompted by some people in blogland (despite the complete lack of rational criticism) claiming that my demonstrations of the CPS hockey stick math is faulty rather than the actual hockey stick itself. An oddly reversed situation which could only exist in the new progressive anti-world. Actually, I don’t recall any real criticism of the method or the result other than statements around the AGW crowd that – ‘it’s been proven wrong’.

I’ve cleaned up the code and seriously over-commented it in the hopes that honest people will be able to understand what is going on here. I’ll do a short explanation for it but the primary explanation is in the programming code. To understand it fully you should to read it step by step and run it.

Michael Mann knows full well that this result exists, his explanation is as follows from an RC thread.

Actually, this line of attack is even more disingenuous and/or ill-informed than that. Obviously, if one generates enough red noise surrogate time series (especially when the “redness” is inappropriately inflated, as is often done by the charlatans who make this argument), one can eventually match any target arbitrarily closely.

You can note that this post uses his Actual data rather than red noise data. Dr. Mann’s continued explanation is here.

What this specious line of attack neglects (intentionally, one can safely conclude) is that a screening regression requires independent cross-validation to guard against the selection of false predictors. If a close statistical relationship when training a statistical model arises by chance, as would be the case in such a scenario, then the resulting statistical model will fail when used to make out-of-sample predictions over an independent test period not used in the training of the model. That’s precisely what any serious researchers in this field test for when evaluating the skillfulness of a statistical reconstruction based on any sort of screening regression approach.

So a potentially overstated statistical check is what determines if CPS works. This is in fact false, CPS is incapable of recovering an accurate signal from data. A fact which I will demonstrate in these next few posts. This post however, does not address the statistical validation issue, it does however demonstrate that Dr. Mann is correct that any signal at all can be made using Mann08 math and data. A truth for many of his hockey stick creation methods.

An explanation of Composite Plus Scale (CPS).

Proxy Data

The proxy data is noisy, the noise in proxies comes from other factors than temperature. Tree ring widths are a primary proxy in the Mann08 reconstruction and don’t only grow wider (and narrower) from temperature they also grow according to humidity, bugs, lightning, soil condition, sunlight CO2 and numerous other factors. This means that tree ring widths are naturally noisy data. The same is true for mollusk shells, interpretations of historic documents and a pile of other proxies.

Correlation and deletion.

In engineering, when you have noisy data you might just take an average or an area weighted average and hope you have enough data to make it work. This makes sense but you may choose to try other techniques to extract a signal based on foreknowledge of what created the noise, filtering, PCA, ICA and such. In this case with tree rings and mixed odd proxies, there is very little that can be done which can improve on averaging and filtering but whatever you do you don’t want to use a biased method for signal hunting.

If you are using a known biased signal extracting method as an engineer, and you want your product to actually work, you had better test it. I demonstrate here that Mann 08’s CPS method can pull any signal it wants from noisy proxy data. The CPS method which is likely only used in climatology, naturally distorts an artificial signal in the data but besides that it extracts the best match for whatever shape you wish to find.

Mann starts the process prior to CPS and measures correlation (likeness) of the proxy data to instrumental temperature data and deletes the proxies that don’t follow the measured temperature curve. This is very important, only a few of proxies (Luterbacher) used are demonstrated to be in any way related to temperature and they weren’t really proxies, but rather contain actual temperature data. Really a hard situation to imagine for an engineer.

Of the 1,209 proxy records in the full dataset, 484 (40%) pass the temperature-screening process over the full (1850–1995) calibration interval – Mann08

So we have noisy data which may or may not be related to temperature and in the case of 71 Luterbacher proxies is temperature data and to sort it we’re going to apply Mannian CPS math to find the hoped for signal hidden in the noise.

Step 1

Measure correlation between the most recent years of proxy data and the most recent years of temperature data. Throw away everyting that doesn’t at least weakly correlate.

- this step in Mann08 deleted 725 of 1209 proxys.

Step 2

All proxies are measured in their own units (i.e. millimeters or parts per million) so you need to recenter (change the mean of) each proxy in the calibration range to match the mean of the measured data.

Step 3

Rescale each proxy so that the standard deviation of the accepted proxies from step 1 match the standard deviation of the calibration signal. Standard deviation is basically how much a graph wiggles up and down around the average. So this matches the amplitude of the wiggles of something which may or may not be temperature to the amplitude of the wiggles of the measured temperature.

Step 4

Take the average.

———

Sounds simple, when I read about step 1 I actually didn’t sleep that night. Throw away the data that doesn’t fit your pre-determined conclusion of a match to temperature. Really, I was so mad I didn’t sleep, remember we’re paying big $$ for this stuff and we must not pretend it’s somehow ok. NOT good.

After the rescaling operation which makes the best possible fit of each proxy to the temperature signal and averaging, the calibration range signal is always found.

Here are some of the signals I was able to extract from Mann08 actual proxy data using their own methods.

Folks, this AGW stinks to high heaven.

Source code and enlightening discussion over at The Air Vent.

A new one from CNS featuring Kent Conrad, who’ll be spared a “worst person in the world” award on Olbermann’s show for this bit o’ demagoguery solely by virtue of his party affiliation. Consider this a sequel to Lindsey Graham’s grilling of Holder last week: In both cases, we’ve got a Democrat who’s (a) absolutely confident that civilian trials are the way to go and (b) plainly unprepared to address the rather significant constitutional implications of his preference. The search warrant question here is bait but the underlying point isn’t:

FrumForum interviewed former FBI and CIA agents to get their views on the Obama administration’s explanation on why a federal trial should be held…

Unless Holder and Obama have a crystal ball, they cannot predict how the judge will rule on evidentiary or constitutional issues. In fact, a former CIA official was sure that the defense attorneys will try to change the focus of the trial from KSM’s atrocities to his confession coerced by the harsh interrogation techniques. He and others interviewed used the phrase “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” referring to the doctrine whereby some evidence may be declared inadmissible. He further declared that “I am worried about a civilian judge because if that confession is thrown out the rest of the evidence will be as well. Will the judge allow this nonsense into the courtroom?”

Is it possible, as Holder has stated, that “classified evidence can be protected?” Unanimously, all felt that revealing classified evidence will put America’s national security at greater risk. A CIA operative was very emphatic that “we were able to track and eventually kill the bad guys through means that have not yet been revealed and we’d like to keep it that way. Additionally, we need to ensure that our joint operations with other services around the world isn’t made public.” Richard Marquise, an FBI agent who headed up the Pan Am Flight 103 investigation, said that during the Lockerbie trials, some of the documents turned over by the CIA were put into the defense’s hands and some evidence can get lost.” A former CIA official concurs and frustratingly told FrumForum that during the trial of one of the 9/11 terrorists, the CIA provided recanted documents to the defense. Unfortunately, the true identity of an operative was accidentally left in, showing that “there is always the possibility that classified information will be turned over.”

A new one from CNS featuring Kent Conrad, who’ll be spared a “worst person in the world” award on Olbermann’s show for this bit o’ demagoguery solely by virtue of his party affiliation. Consider this a sequel to Lindsey Graham’s grilling of Holder last week: In both cases, we’ve got a Democrat who’s (a) absolutely confident that civilian trials are the way to go and (b) plainly unprepared to address the rather significant constitutional implications of his preference. The search warrant question here is bait but the underlying point isn’t:

FrumForum interviewed former FBI and CIA agents to get their views on the Obama administration’s explanation on why a federal trial should be held…

Unless Holder and Obama have a crystal ball, they cannot predict how the judge will rule on evidentiary or constitutional issues. In fact, a former CIA official was sure that the defense attorneys will try to change the focus of the trial from KSM’s atrocities to his confession coerced by the harsh interrogation techniques. He and others interviewed used the phrase “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” referring to the doctrine whereby some evidence may be declared inadmissible. He further declared that “I am worried about a civilian judge because if that confession is thrown out the rest of the evidence will be as well. Will the judge allow this nonsense into the courtroom?”

Is it possible, as Holder has stated, that “classified evidence can be protected?” Unanimously, all felt that revealing classified evidence will put America’s national security at greater risk. A CIA operative was very emphatic that “we were able to track and eventually kill the bad guys through means that have not yet been revealed and we’d like to keep it that way. Additionally, we need to ensure that our joint operations with other services around the world isn’t made public.” Richard Marquise, an FBI agent who headed up the Pan Am Flight 103 investigation, said that during the Lockerbie trials, some of the documents turned over by the CIA were put into the defense’s hands and some evidence can get lost.” A former CIA official concurs and frustratingly told FrumForum that during the trial of one of the 9/11 terrorists, the CIA provided recanted documents to the defense. Unfortunately, the true identity of an operative was accidentally left in, showing that “there is always the possibility that classified information will be turned over.”

Remind me, who was that wingnut who opted not to “go somewhere else” three years ago but instead praised the idea of a military tribunal for KSM on the Senate floor? Oh, right.

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