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.

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

Are you &(*%@($^(#%!! kidding me?

The Lakers lose the lead, trail by 4 with 9.3 seconds left.

No problem, a Fisher three, foul Wade (who hits one of two), and then a Kobe three . . .

. . . at the buzzer . . .

. . . off the glass . . .

. . . and in to win the game.

Like I said: are you &(*%@($^(#%!! kidding me?

From the Times of London, via Andrew Bolt:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

Of course, we couldn’t have a story like this without a government trying to get in the way of real science (same link):

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

Putting politics before science? I thought only Texans did that.

Cross-posted to VV

Robert Grenier (Cube Antics) takes aim at the computer code used as “correction for decline” (via WUWT).  It is a genuine eye-opener.

In effect, the “value added” to the data was a wave designed to make current temperatures look something like this.

 Or, as Edward John Craig from NRO – Planet Gore put it:

CRU would adjust series of actual temperature readings so that they would be skewed toward these values. Add a little fudge, and it’s eternally hockey season.

Cross-posted to VV

Of all the places where I expected MSM to give Climategate its due  . . . well, actually, I didn’t expect any to do so.  Still, one of the absolute last places I expected it to appear was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (which combines the worst aspects of MSM and PBS).

Yet Rex Murphy takes aim at the scandal, and does a terrific job.

(h/t Andrew Bolt and Kate @ SDA)

First up: Gore’s claim of ManBearPig melting the Kilimanjaro ice is debunked (Pajamas Media):

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of  “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Whoops!  Maybe Gore was talking about the other Kilimanjaro peak (Flying Circus via Youtube).

Meanwhile, the professors at the heart of Climategate are beginning to resemble, shall we say, rattlesnakes committing suicide (Daily Telegraph):

One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”

This may start to get ugly.

Cross-posted to VV

Thanks to winning four out of their last five games (including completing  a sweep of back-to-back games tonight – always  a hard thing to do), but also due to the weakness of the Eastern Conference, the Washington Wizards are tied for 8th – the last playoff spot – in the East.

That said, they’re still 7-10 (I told you the East was weak), but if the last two weeks are any indication, they should be above .500 fairly soon, which in the East all but automatically clinches a spot in the postseason.

I’ve heard more than a few Republicans express the hope that the president’s date to begin a withdrawal was conditional, i.e., dependent upon the situation on the ground.  Apparently, that even includes the Defense Secretary (CBS News):

During the Senate Armed Services hearing today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was pressed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. on whether the July 2011 date for beginning to withdrawal troops is “locked in.”

Gates seemed to suggest there was some flexibility, that “it was a clear statement of his strong intent” and that “the president always has the freedom to re-evaluate his decisions.” After the hearing Graham said he took that to mean the date is “not locked in” and will depend on conditions on the ground.

As it turns out, the Secretary of Defense is no longer the authority regarding the actions of troops under him – that’s White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ job in the hope-and-change era (same link):

After the briefing, Gibbs went to the president for clarification. Gibbs then called me to his office to relate what the president said. The president told him it IS locked in – there is no flexibility. Troops WILL start coming home in July 2011. Period. It’s etched in stone. Gibbs said he even had the chisel.

Be afraid; be very afraid.

Just on time for Copenhagen to host the Climategate-denier summit, the Copenhagen Post reveals a massive fraud operation in Denmark’s CO2 quota market (h/t SDA):

Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

The “billions of kroner” total 8 billion, which translates to more than $1.5 billion.

Cross-posted to VV