Hiding the decline, Parts III through V

All courtesy of Watts Up With That: the Tennessee edition (I can’t wait for the country song that this inspires), the California edition, and the Antarctica edition.

Cross-posted to VV

What the EPA’s carbon finding really means

Jonah Goldberg has the best analysis of this at NRO. Read the whole thing, but here are the crticial points:

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation.  The finding comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO₂ falls under the EPA’s jurisdiction.

A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox’s Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: “If you don’t pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation . . . the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. . . . And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

And such “uncertainty” is a huge “deterrent to investment,” which will hurt the economy even more.

Translation: We don’t want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn’t act, well, a-groin-kickin’ we shall go.

This is grotesquely dishonest.

The White House and Congress could, quite easily, do something about the EPA’s threat. President Obama could instruct Jackson to interpret the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision granting the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gases more loosely. He could ask Congress to simply rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to exclude carbon dioxide from its list of official pollutants — the policy the EPA followed for years until the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Clean Air Act.

But no.

As part of the enduring statist desire to penetrate ever deeper into every nook and cranny of our lives, greens have wanted to find a way for the government to regulate CO₂, a natural byproduct of fire and breathing, for decades. Now they can.

That is why the White House will use Jackson as a Medusa’s head, to petrify cap-and-trade opponents with the prospect of something even worse: the effective seizing of the means of production.

I know most of the blogosphere’s focus has been on health care – and more power to the folks fighting that good fight – but I have always believed this was the more dangerous issue, and the above is why.  The left has repeatedly used this issue as its excuse for permanent and massive economic regulation (and, in some cases, doing away with human rights and democracy – see Tom Friedman and Diane Francis, via LifeNews, for those).

Again, Goldberg sums it up perfectly in his column:

Indeed, some of loudest voices have a weird habit of telegraphing their priorities. Tim Wirth, a former senator and now chairman of the United Nations Foundation, once said: “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” New York Times columnist and prominent warm-monger Thomas Friedman has repeatedly said (most recently this week) that he doesn’t care if global warming is a “hoax” because, even if it is, the fear of it will force us to do what we need to do.

And it just so happens that with the exception of nuclear power — which most greens still won’t support — global warming fuels nearly every progressive ambition. Wealth transfers from rich to poor nations: Check. The rise of “global governance” and the decline of American sovereignty: Check. A secular fatwa not only to erode capitalism but to intrude on every aspect of our lives (Greenpeace offers a guide to carbon-neutral sex): Check. Weaning us off of oil (which, don’t let the Goregonauts fool you, was a priority back when we were still worried about global cooling): Check. The checks go on for as far as the eye can see, and we will be writing them for years to come.

There is some hope here.  Any regulation proposed by the EPA (assuming Congressional opponents of this nonsense remain unmoved) can be challenged in court (and it’s a sure bet it will be).  Unless I miss my guess, Congress can refuse to authorize any funds to enforce the regulation – and given Climategate, that could happen even before the November elections.  It can certainly happen after the elections (it’s almost certain the regs will still be tied up in lawsuits then).  Finally, there’s always 2012, and the chance to replace this Administration with one determined to let us live our lives again.

However, we have to make sure this regulation becomes Outrage No. 1 the moment it is announced (before then, I’ll be content with Outrage No. 2 – for now), so that no politician can claim ignorance of this.

Cross-posted to VV

Hiding the hiding of the decline

Now the global warming alarmists are trying to claim that the infamous “hockey stick” graph that brought them to fame and then infamy was never part of their argument.  Roger Pielke, Jr. makes quick work of that nonsense (via NRO Planet Gore).

Cross-posted to VV

Hiding the decline: Alaskan edition

Just in case you think the data manipulation was relegated to the Australian Outback, Dr Richard Keen of the University of Colorada has some illuminating analysis on temperature data in Alaska (Air Vent via Andrew Bolt, emphasis added by Bolt):

My averages show that the past three decades have shown no warming (since the PDO shift in 1977), and are in fact no warmer than the 1935-1944 decade.  This is very different from the IPCC which shows a substantial warming over the past three decades….

One can only guess what “corrections” were applied to the GHCN and IPCC data sets, but I can easily guess their magnitude – about 1 degree.  Curiously, the magnitude of the adjustments is about the same as the “global warming” signal of the past century.

The alarmists, meanwhile, have responded to all of this by browbeating scientists, apprently not realizing what got them in this mess in the first place (Times of London via NRO – Planet Gore, emphasis added):

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails.

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research . . . The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

. . .

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

Given that, they may not even be aware that they’re data-fudging is being exposed.

Cross-posted to VV

Hiding the Decline: Australian edition

Willis Eschenbach details how the climate data in and around Darwin, Australia was transformed from white noise into a hockey stick (Watts Up With That).  It’s a long post, but well worth the read.  Here’s the kicker:

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style . . . they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

It is now at the point where even the editors of the Free Lance-Star – who went through about half a barrel of ink to prevent my election to the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors – are calling for a reset on climate science and climate politics.  When you start to lose MSM . . .

Cross-posted to VV

141 scientists declare the climate science unsettled

My three favorite Climategate bloggers (Andrew Bolt, Kate at SDA, and the crew at NRO – Planet Gore) all came up with this within hours of each other.  These scientists made the declaration in an open letter to the UN Secretary General (Copenhagen Climate Challenge):

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

 Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

As Bolt puts it, “The qualifications of the signatories are impressive. Each one of them has better formal qualifications in the field than do Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri (head of the IPCC), Nicholas Stern (British alarmist) or Tim Flannery (Australian alarmist).”

Cross-posted to VV

The Bifurcated Russia, again

Russia’s duplicity is no surprise to anyone who’s been following it.  How it views its own history in the Putin era is particularly maddening to outsiders: the Putin regime remains the one entity on earth that faces the question, “Was Stalin a great leader or a bloody tyrant?” with the answer, “Yes.”

More evidence of that came from the Financial Times (UK), which in the midst of discussion Russia’s institutional memory of Stalin’s industrialization, includes this jarring juxtaposition:

Russia’s official approach to this tragic history is to extol the successes of the Stalin era while simultaneously lamenting the tragic loss of life. “This approach is schizophrenic,” says Ms Flige. “It is like: ‘Yes, it’s too bad about all these deaths. But hurrah! We built this canal!’ This is how it sounds.”

Still, there have been recent signs of a change to official policy. In September, for example, the education ministry made The Gulag Archipelago required reading in state schools.

Now, it helps that the author of The Gulag Archipelago (Alexandr Solzhenistyn) was himself an ardent Russian nationalist.  Still, it’s a heck of a combination for outsiders to fathom.

Al Gore has more trouble with the truth

Al Gore has spent the last nine years trying to rebuild his reputation as an international environmental activist – and in the process he has swallowed and advanced the nonsense that has now been exposed as Climategate.

In the rest of the world, this is how he is known – an advocate who, like nearly everyone else involved with this, put faith over facts and damaged his own causes with blatant hypocrisy.

However, those of us who remember Al as a politician (i.e., Americans) remember the other Al Gore, the one who never met a truth he couldn’t fold, spindle, or mutilate.

That Al Gore has come back with a vengeance in reaction to the Climategate fiasco (Andrew Bolt):

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 – just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.

How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?

Apologies to Andrew for scraping the link, but it was the last paragraph that struck me.  To the rest of the world, Al Gore repeating something that is categorically untrue – and unlike “climate change” in the pre-Climategate era, easily refutable – is a shocking event.

For Americans, by contrast, it’s just typical.

It makes me wonder how many Australians (or anyone else outside the U.S.) heard of the time Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

Cross-posted to VV

Well, I finally found a Liberal Party I can back

The Australian Liberal Party (see right hand column) has recently decided to turn Climategate into one of the leading political issues Down Under, and as Andrew Bolt reveals, it has already been rewarded for it at the polls in recent by-elections.

So, at long last, I have found a Liberal Party I can support.

CIA on the global cooling consensus in 1974

From Maurizio Morabito at Omniclimate (via Robert Costa of Planet Gore):

An eye-opening “global cooling consensus” CIA document dated 1974 has just been re-discovered in the British Library by Yours Truly and is extensively mentioned today in the (printed) pages of The Spectator (UK) and Il Foglio (Italy).

. . .

“A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems” will make quite an embarrassing reading, especially for:

• the most obdurate catastro-warmists (when they will notice that almost all AGW scares are a search-and-replace job from “cooling” to “warming”), and
• the history deniers fixated on ‘demonstrating’ that a scientific consensus about Global Cooling in the 1970’s were a ‘myth’(*)

And there is more (much more), from ever-improving climate models promising to become good in a few years’ time to the unsettling apparent ease with which Government agencies then (as now) could get scientists to agree on whatever they needed them to agree on.

Nobody aware of the CIA document’s contents should be able to avoid a good chuckle after reading any of the current AGW reports on famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena; on climate-related major economic problems around the world; on Africans getting in climate troubles first; and so on and so forth.

Why? Because it is all too clear that those scares cannot be real, since they have already been mentioned verbatim in all their dramatic effect, but about Global Cooling.

Of course, the cooling stopped, reversed itself for about a quarter-century, and the Global Cooling scare became a Global Warming scare.

Plus ça change, plus ça mème chose.

Cross-posted to VV