Phil Jones throws in the towel

The man at the center of the Climategate scandal is now admitting that the “science” behind global warming alarmism is not even a house of cards, but a house of mirrors (Daily Mail, UK):

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

. . .

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Those last two admissions essentially explode the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – the “scientific” term for global warming alarmism.

Consider that just three months ago, Jones was the AGW guru leading the world’s elites towards “Hopenhagen.”

Forget a bullet, I’d say the globe has dodged a very large missile.

Cross-posted to VV

How we know George W. Bush’s policy on Iraq was a success

Obama’s flackies are trying to steal it (Andrew Bolt).

Cross-posted to VV

It’s bad news for Robert Hurt . . .

. . . cleverly disguised as good news.

The news in question is the PPP poll of Virginia 5.  Outwardly, it looks good for Hurt, he is dead even with incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello despite 70% of voters having no opinion of him (Hurt, that is).

The trouble starts when the other Republicans are mentioned.  None of them have the name recognition Hurt does (such as it is), but all of them are within 10 points of Perriello.  In short, Tom Perriello is likely to lose to any Republican -  meaning Hurt’s biggest claims to fame – electability and recognition – are worth zilch.

Then things really get bad.  PPP also asked a threew-way-race question (Perriello, Hurt, and Virgil Goode – yes, that Virgil Goode) and found Hurt running a distant third (12%), with Goode and Perriello tied at 41%.

The translation is simple: so long as the Republicans can hold together behind one candidate, they can win.  If not, they’ll lose.

The question then becomes this: which Republican is most likely to hold the anti-Democrat coalition together in the 5th (i.e., keep Goode out of the race)?  The answer is clearly not the fellow who voted for both Warner’s tax increase and the dreaded HB3202.

Oh dear

I have a few friends and a great many in-laws in Texas, so I’m starting to pay more attention to the Lone Star State’s politics these days.  The interesting race out there was a three-way Republican primary for Governor (incumbent Rick Perry, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Paulist Debra Medina are the candidates).

As will happen when the top two candidates beat each other up so much, Medina was starting to get more attention.

Well, that all fell apart tody on Glenn Beck, who exposed her as a 9/11 “Truther” (Jim Geraghty).

Guess it’s Perry or bust for me, then.

Even the Australian elite notices something has changed

Andrew Bolt details how Paul Kelly (The Australian), one of the leading voices in Australian conventional wisdom, is backing down from the inevitabity of a carbon trading scheme.

One thing Kelly does not mention is Climategate.  No surprise there, but it does mean that Kelly et al will likely underestimate how much of a loser global warming alarmism will be a the polls.

Cross-posted to VV

Adding a bill to the right-hand column

I’ve been expanding the vision of the hallowed right-hand column as of late – beyond candidates for elective office to parties (where applicable, as in the Australian Liberals), candidates for party office (as is my good friend Steve Thomas), and today, bills in the legislature.

While the Health Care Personal Liberty Law certainly has my attention and support, there are as far as I know at least four versions of them, three of which have already passed the State Senate.  By contrast, I only know of one Assessment Accountability act (a.k.a. HB570), and it is a very worthy bill.  Anyone who remembers the Augusta County War can testify to the dangers of assessments run amok.  Nothing would improve the relationship locally between government and governed like openness and accountability – and HB570, by shifting the burden from the property owner to the assessor in a dispute – would go a long way to accomplishing that goal.

So . . . HB570 gets its place – well-earned – in the hallowed right-hand column, sure to be followed by the version of the HCPLL the House chooses to take up.

Defeat the Debt’s self-defeating move

I had never heard of the Employment Policies Institute until last night, when they put up and anti-deficit ad during the Super Bowl.  It was a decent ad, using a dystopic version of the Pledge of Allegiance to emphasize the dangers of runaway government spending.

They may have gotten a lot of good publicity with that ad.  We’ll never know, however, because the ad was run again less than 1 minute later during the same set of commercials.

Now, just about everyone who watches the Super Bowl knows that ad space during the big game is expensive (roughly $2.5M this year), yet as far as I can remember, EPI – in the name of thrift – was the only advertiser to run the same exact ad twice.  That would have been a waste of money even if they didn’t run them nearly back-to-back (which, and readers can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, is a network decision).

Even worse, EPI made no mention of their actual anti-debt campaign (Defeat the Debt) during the ad.

So, while I certainly appreciated the EPI message against government spending, it would have gone a lot farther if they themselves had been frugal, stuck to airing the ad once, and held on to the $2.5M.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because the Jets weren’t on the field.

Cross-posted to VV

India announces IPCC rival

This is one decline that can’t be hidden anymore (Telegraph via WUWT):

(Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh) announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s “third ice cap”, and an “Indian IPCC” to use “climate science” to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.”There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report … [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

How dramatic is this?  Keep this in mind: not only does the head of the IPCC (for now) call India home, but India’s governing Congress Party hails from the left.  The alarmists are in serious trouble.

Cross-posted to VV

Welcome to immortality, Carly Fiorina

Tom Campbell has been driving limited-government supporters nuts for nearly two decades now.  In his latest incarnation, he’s running for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senator from California.  Carly Fiorina slams him – hard and deservedly so – for his tax-hiking history.

Sadly, it may all be lost in the “demon-sheep” brouhaha (Weekly Standard).  Personally, I thought it was pretty clever, except that Tom Campbell isn’t nearly manly enough to be a wolf in any disguise.

Hiding the Decline, Part VII

Only one thing woud lead me to bump the delightful success of the Virginia Health Care Personal Liberty Law.

You guessed it: more evidence of global warming alarmists fudging the data, from – of all places – Britain’s left-wing Guardian (h/t – as ever – Andrew Bolt):

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

Of course, being The Guardian, they try desperately to minimize the impact:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

What the Guardian won’t tell you is that the “other studies” almost all depended upon this or other cludged-up reports for citations or evidence.  The studies were thus interdependent on one another – and now all suspect.

The global warming alarmists are hoping the world doesn’t notice.  Good luck with that.

Cross-posted to VV