Tag: AGW/CC

Research is hard

It appears global warming scientists are even more ignorant than biologists:

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday…. The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC’s numbers. The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The joke that is AGW/CC just keeps on giving.

Coddling the Climategate criminals

The so-called “six-month” statute of limitations that is supposedly protecting the Climategate charlatans doesn’t exist:

There is something very odd indeed about the statement by the Information Commission on its investigation into “Climategate”, the leak of emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Gordon Smith, the deputy commissioner, confirms that the university’s refusal to answer legitimate inquiries made in 2007 and 2008 was an offence under S.77 of the Information Act. But he goes on to claim that the Commission is powerless to bring charges, thanks to a loophole in the law – “because the legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place”.

Careful examination of the Act, however, shows that it says nothing whatever about a time limit. The Commission appears to be trying to confuse this with a provision of the Magistrates Act, that charges for an offence cannot be brought more than six months after it has been drawn to the authorities’ attention – not after it was committed. In this case, the Commission only became aware of the offence two months ago when the emails were leaked – showing that the small group of British and American scientists at the top of the IPCC were discussing with each other and with the university ways to break the law, not least by destroying evidence, an offence in itself.

I’m with James Delingpole on this. Prosecute and imprison the lying, thieving little bastards. Force them to repay the millions in grant money they fraudulently obtained. Actually, they deserve far worse than penury and prison, for they were at the heart of a scheme to reduce all of Mankind to serfdom in the name of science.

But don’t worry. There’s so much more fraud and chicanery left to be uncovered that the scientists will have to be thrown to the wolves before long.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based. 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.

As I have stated repeatedly, scientists are no more trustworthy than anyone else, their self-serving claim to objectivity by virtue of academic training is no more credible than that made by journalists. Scientists whose income is dependent upon achieving specific results are no more trustworthy than used-car salesmen. And peer review is a worthless method for policing science, as it is primarily useful for passing off non-science as science. Regardless, it is becoming ever more clear that the age of the scientist as sage and secular priest is over.

Scientific consensus = false

The fraud and deception of the “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change continues to pile higher:

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

I’ve been a total skeptic from the beginning and even I think this is beginning to get ridiculous. They haven’t gotten ANYTHING right! By the time this round of exposes is done, I half expect to be told that Al Gore and the climate change “scientists” are humanoid aliens from Europa who require a frozen climate to live comfortably.

Criminal scientists

So much for the Climategate denialists claim that the global warming email scandal didn’t reveal any wrongdoing or anything outside the scientific norm:

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The Climategate denialists are not only defending frauds and liars, but criminals. This is now a fact. I have known this from the start, because man-made global warming is simply not taking place and therefore anyone who claims it is is either deluded, mistaken, or lying. In the case of the so-called scientists, it’s quite clear that they fall into the latter category.

The fact of the matter is that scientists are no less likely to be full of BS than anyone else, and scientists whose access to outsized incomes depends upon reaching specific predetermined conclusions are no more trustworthy than investment bankers touting a company in which they hold significant equity. For example, Phil Jones, the lead charlatan at the heart of Climategate, is reported to have collected 55 endowments amounting to $22.5 million for his pseudo-scientific crimes. The more insidious problem is the possibility that the Climategate denialists are telling the truth and that these sorts of shenanigans probably is the scientific norm.

There is no global warming: glacier edition

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that “scientific consensus” means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you’re an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research….

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

So, telephone interviews are now science? That’s cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.

There is still no global warming

As I have said from the start, the significant point is not that Man is not causing global warming, although that is true, or that there are more important problems to be addressed than global warming, although that is true too. The significant point is that the so-called climate scientists are all incorrect, there is no long-term global warming trend, there is only a short-term and irrelevant warming spike, and all of the predictions of global warming based on the climacaustal’s scientific models will be proven totally incorrect over the next ten years.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Of course, the mere fact of being completely wrong won’t slow down the global government crowd, their scientific enablers or the scienthological faithful. I just wonder how long it will be before “global cooling is climate change too” becomes the new mantra.

Wikipedia and the warming scammers

The latest editing scandal underlines the inherent problem with Wikipedia and why it is intrinsically unreliable:

Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.

“When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,” Solomon wrote. “When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.”

….A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved.”

If Wikipedia doesn’t immediately remove Connolley’s administrative privileges and ban him from ever editing Wikipedia again, this will conclusively prove that it is nothing more than a propaganda device, not an encyclopedia. When one dishonest ideologue is permitted to run roughshod over 2,000 other individuals, the pretense of democratic openness simply cannot be maintained. Any doubts about the fictional nature of global warming should not be difficult to see by this point, as is the left-wing nature of the charlatans. Those who are telling the truth are seldom interested in scrubbing the history books, and rewriting accurate history is the one of the Left’s signature characteristics.

UPDATE: The good news is that apparently Wikipedia hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of providing accurate information to the masses:

In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.

Keep this in mind

Should you ever find yourself pondering the probability of evolution by natural selection being true:

PZ Myers: “Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round.”

For once, I quite agree with the chicken-hearted biologist.  The idea that global warming exists and has a significant anthropogenic component IS about as probable as the idea that evolution by natural selection creates new species.  It’s also about as probable as the reported economic recovery being anything more than a short-term statistical artifact caused by the fiscal and monetary authorities pumping a massive amount of liquidity into the financial system.

Climategate keeps growing

Skeptical economists and statisticians are simply killing the climate change charlatans:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

No wonder the climate “scientists” are so protective of their data. The more people look at it, the more it becomes obvious that they’ve been cherry-picking the data in order to “prove” what they’ve already decided will be reported. I don’t read Russian, but as far as I can tell, in order to calculate global land temperatures the CRU used only 121 of 476 Russian stations, 73 of which were among the 78 stations that had been moved, presumably because of proximity to heat-producing urban expansion. This would explain why the purported increase in temperatures that could not be observed in the United States, Asia, or the rest of Europe was appearing in Siberia, which accounts for about 12.5 percent of the global land mass. The upshot is that this would eliminate 31.1 percent of the reported global warming. So there is not only no statistically significant global warming from the long-term perspective. There has been a lot less of it in the short term than was previously claimed.

As for the reported consensus, it is now obvious that scientific consensus should be given no more credence than real estate consensus, economic consensus, or stockbroker consensus. Intriguingly, it is now clear that the climate scammers have at least known that the Russian data possibly incomplete for five years. Phil Jones, the suspended director of the CRU, incriminated himself in an email to to Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame in March 2004:

“Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.”

Ah yes, and here we also see the way in which peer review is so conducive to good science.

Fraud squared

Climate scientists aren’t the only climate fraudsters:

Copenhagen climate summit: Carbon trading fraudsters in Europe pocket €5bn. Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency.

I know I’m shocked. Who would have ever imagined that a scheme dreamed up by Enron would be susceptible to fraudulent activity? Global trading in securitized cow farts is going to make sub-prime mortgages and tulipmania look downright rational by comparison if it’s permitted to get rolling. All it really amounts to is one last desperate attempt to blow a bubble that will delay the inevitable debt-deleveraging a little longer.

I’d be a lot more disturbed and this obvious insanity if it weren’t for that side of me that loves the prospect of chaotic madness. We’re going well beyond interesting and approaching downright exciting times. Still, the fact that the fraud is being unmasked before the bubble even takes shape tends to suggest that it’s going to burst prematurely.