First the Himalayan glaciers, then the rain-forests and now mountain top ice.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

Oh sure, we're enjoying a good laugh and maybe there were a few corners cut in the effort to save Gaia but let's be cereal, the science is settled and anthropogenic ManBearPig is real. Remember, pointing out the unscientific nature of this stuff just proves that you are, um, anti-science. Or something. Now shut up and pay more for everything.

AoSHQ

(A series of weekly-ish roundups of the day's Climate news and commentary.)

This is by no means a comprehensive recap. The stories come from a variety of sources, and I highly recommend exploring the linked sites for more breaking news.

Anthony Watts & Joe D'Aleo have released a new paper reviewing worldwide surface temperature recordings, prompting JoNova to wonder:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for the cult of the carbon scare.

Now we need to ask if the world has even warmed?

From the press release:

...leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.

LauraW forwarded this link from some chap named Tom M. In it, we learn that the IPCC may have developed something of a habit of including non-peer-reviewed material in their official reports as more evidence that the science is settled.

Experts appointed by the United Nations said rising temperatures were to blame for an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

But it has emerged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the statement, made in 2007, on an unpublished report that had not been properly reviewed by other scientists.

Perhaps the habit is an addiction?

Ben Pile, guest blogging @ Roger Pielke Jr., finds yet another non-peer-reviewed finding written by non-scientists that somehow made its way into the IPCC report.

Steve McIntyre @ Climate Audit discusses how these non-peer-review findings, coupled with the incestuous peer-review process that the IPCC used to cook the books, fail to meet the standards required by the EPA in using scientific findings to create policy.

One of the more interesting knock-ons of the opportunistic IPCC reliance on WWF and similar “authorities” is that it may compromise the ability of the U.S. EPA to argue that IPCC peer review meets the statutory standards required of EPA peer review.

Any bets on whether the EPA lets a little thing like the scientific method get in the way of its desire to regulate plant food?

So you know those nature shows where a member of the pack is injured so the rest of the pack attacks and devours him?

IPCC chairman and Cricket enthusiast Rajendra Pachauri has come up lame, and the rest of the pack is circling.

When a guy who authored chapters of IPCC's 2007 report and described its contents as...

“[it] isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

now says this...

There has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

and this...

"I think the IPCC needs a fundamental shift."

...one can only marvel at the obliviousness, and take bets on the timing & success of the coup to come.

Read more of Weaver's comments here.

I'm all for a rededication of the IPCC towards the scientific method. I have no illusions that such a thing is possible. The UN is by nature a political animal. It was inevitable that its failings would taint the IPCC, and will do so always.

Can the IPCC be objective and independent of UN political maneuvering? Yes.

Will it be? Magick 8 ball sez "You should invest in NY bridges instead."

From Ace of Spades HQ

It looks like the Unions, Obama and Pelosi have struck a deal. And their deal will punish those that are not part of the Union Class. Right to Work states will soon be feeling the heavy hand of government for not being aligned with the Labor Unions if a new provision in the Health Care bill is allowed to pass.

Labor Union leadership was upset to learn that there would be an excise tax enforced on so-called "Cadillac" Health Care Plans. After they met extensively with Obama and Pelosi, a deal was struck to exempt Collectively Bargained Health Care Plans from any sort of "Cadillac" Health Care tax. Unions have cleared themselves from any extra burden and have shifted that onto non-union laborers.

There are 22 Right to Work states in the USA. 92% of the American labor force is not in a Labor Union. So, how much of an effect will this have on non-union, merit based laborers? According to Morning Bell, "Specifically, Big Labor reportedly has struck a deal with health care negotiators to exempt union members from the 40% excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums. By some estimates, the tax would hit one in four union members. Now Big Labor will get all of the big government health care spending they always wanted, but they will not have to pay for it."

That's right. Union members will not have to pay a 40% excise tax on their health care plans while merit-based laborers will be forced to pony up the 40% tax.

Absolute scumbags.

netRightNation

Video:The best South Park Christmas Episode ever. If you have never seen the infamous South Park "Woodland Critter Christmas" episode, enjoy it here now. Offensive? Yes, Funny? definitely. Click the links and enjoy!

Passengers stranded when modern-day trains fell victim to the freezing weather have been rescued by the crew of a steam engine.

About 100 passengers climbed aboard the first mainline steam locomotive to be built in Britain for almost half a century at London Victoria when electric trains were delayed.

The 1940s technology used to power Tornado, a £3million Peppercorn class A1 Pacific, was able to withstand the snow and ice that brought much of the South East to a standstill on Monday night.

You know a conservative argument has carried the day when even those Democrats most ardently claim to help say they would rather not have the helping hand of government in their lives.

So comes the shocking news on NPR this morning:

A Washington Post-ABC poll this week showed a majority of uninsured people thought they would be better off under the status quo than under the changes now being proposed.

The poll results are here, but I can't find the breakdown that NPR is refering to on either the Post or the ABC site. If NPR is right, this is huge.

The Washington Times

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.