From Wapo, The GREEAAAATTTT News . . . . Copenhagen was an epic failure. The bad news, the highly politicized anthropogenic global warming (AGW) cabal is not slowing down in the slightest. All of the issues raised by Climategate are being studiously ignored, meaning the juggernaught of anthropogenic global warming rolls on. The really ugly news - the Obama administration is planning to send tens of billions of dollars of our money to third world kleptocracies. In other news of note, God, it seems, really does have a sense of humor - Obama and Pelosi had to leave the global warming conference early because two feet of snow is expected to fall in Washington D.C. overnight. And it bears repeating yet again that a world record for irony was set at Copenhagen - capitalism was saved by the communist Chinese.
The Copenhagen Conference had several ambitious goals - all centered around accreting power and transferring wealth. The AGW cabal wanted Copenhagen to end in a binding legal agreement with the finalization of a treaty in Mexico in 2010. The treaty would have brought the U.S. into a global carbon trading scheme, set draconian and binding carbon reduction targets, and set up a vehicle for transferring vast sums of wealth out of the West. It would have been an end to capitalism as we have known it and the beginning of a movement towards global government. It would have meant the transfer of countless American jobs to from out of the U.S. And if the movement towards the draconian carbon reduction targets actually came to fruition, it would mean energy prices through the roof and a reduction in our standard of living perhaps to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. All the while, socialists would regulate ever more of our economy and lives while rent seekers amassaed untold wealth picked from the pockets of every American.
As to the above, what came out of Copenhagen is, in all respects but one, a truly epic failure for the forces of . . . I will call them "evil." I do not think that word too strong, as they are attempting rape, pillage, enslave and conquer the world. The only difference between them and the Mongolian horde is that these guys are wearing ties. At any rate, no agreement was signed. Instead, all the UN IPCC managed to produce was an unsigned statement of aspirational goals. Moreover, the movement to sign a binding treaty in Mexico next year is now off the table. In its stead, all will be revisited in 2016.
As to the ugly news, we have Clinton, on behalf of the Obama administration, promising that we will begin transferring wealth on a vast scale - weath that we damn well don't have and that will have to come out of the pockets of the electorate - to third world countries. This from WaPo:
The United States backed what amounts to the single biggest transfer of wealth from rich to poor nations for any one cause -- in a sense offering compensation for decades of warming the Earth.
Clinton pledged that the country would help mobilize $100 billion a year in public and private financing by 2020 -- an amount that is almost equal to the total value of all developmental aid and concessional loans granted to poor nations by the United States, Europe and other donors this year. She did not specify how much the U.S. government would commit to giving, but a senior administration official said it would be 20 to 30 percent. Administration officials said they envisioned most of the money coming from private sources, or from revenue generated by a cap-and-trade scheme, but other sources could include redirecting existing subsidies or a tax on bunker fuel.
The real rub out of Copenhagen is the manner in which our MSM and our far left radicals in the government - not the least of whom is President Obama - have studiously ignored the issues raised by Climategate. It is clear beyond any doubt that those who take AGW on faith and those who look at AGW as a means to accreting power and wealth have no intention whatsoever of being slowed by facts or questions. They control all the levers of power in the West, and with but few exceptions, are aided by a fully complicit MSM. We defeated these socialists in the Cold war. We have now moved into a new, and equally existential phase of the same conflict. Call it the Warm War.
IF there is any doubt that greens are true watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside, listen to Hugo Chavez condemn capitalism to great applause at the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.
While outside, it was a reverse watermelon, with the red being worn on the outside.
Meanwhile, if you want proof of the existence of God, just look to Copenhagen. As the IPCC conference goes into its final day while Gore et al try to convince us that global warming is real and a hot catastrophe is just around the corner, a blizzard is going on outside:
World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.” . . .
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years . . . and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as . . . 25 Fahrenheit.
Ace of Spades ponders whether God may be trying to give all of us - and in particular the Goracle - a message? Could it be that bit about "Thou shall have no other God . . ."
At any rate, this led Ace to do a riff on the arguments for and against the existence of God from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. . .
The only thing standing in the way of a binding deal to soak the West and regulate carbon world-wide, all in the name of world socialism anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is, in what has to be the world's greatest irony in all of recorded history, communist China. The fact that the Chinese realize world socialism isin't such a great idea - since they practiced it in their own country until the death of Mao - ought to tell us all something. Amazing, isin't it, that the last stalwart defender of capitalism - and perhaps the savior of it if they remain firm - will be a communist country.
Interestingly enough, it was recently leaked that the UN IPCC's call for carbon reduction targets are insufficient to ward off their own most likely scenarios for catastrophe. If that is the case, then the primary motivaters at the Copenhagen conference must be something other than saving Gaia at all costs.
There are certainly many vested interests driving Copenhagen - and their motivations all boild down to power and money. As to the latter, the rent-seekers stand to profit immensely from carbon regulation and the global carbon trading scheme. That scheme is threatened if a new deal is not put in place tomorrow. At least one outlet is saying that the grand bargain today will be a deal to keep Kyoto in place amongst the signatories and add a non-binding agreement for non-signatories, such as the U.S. As EU Referendum points out, such a deal will keep the carbon trading scheme alive:
[T]he deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change - you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of "carbon" to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway ... except the greenies, and they don't matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.
If one wanted to truly regulate carbon, then there would be a simple carbon tax, perhaps varied by industry and based on the ease with which the particular industry could regulate carbon output. Instead, there is the carbon trading scheme that is, one a massive distortion of free markets, and two, an invitation to fraud, corruption, and gamesmanship.
According to a recent PJM article, the Europeant carbon trading scheme (ETS) that went into effect five years ago has driven up energy prices in Europe by as much as 20% for the rank and file. It has proven a cesspool of fraud, with organized crime exploiting the interplay between carbon credits and the EU VAT tax system. And indeed, "Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent." But probably the worst aspect of the ETS is how it has distorted the marketplace. This from PJM:
. . . For example, European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of up to 90,000 European workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of euros. As a result, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has gained windfall profits in the form of carbon credits worth nearly €1 billion, for which it paid nothing. By 2012, ArcelorMittal will have accumulated surplus permits for 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the pollution generated annually by all of Denmark.
ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus carbon credits on the market or to hoard them for future use. If it hangs on to them, the company will be able to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions possibly for decades, effectively undermining the ETS. According to Sandbag, a British NGO that campaigns to improve carbon trading, the EU’s ETS has been turned into “a system for generating free subsidies.”
Even Rajendra K Pachauri, who has been the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has been suspected of having a role in gaming the EU system to profit from the trade in carbon credits. The Mumbai-based Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate which has business ties to Pachauri (who accepted the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the IPCC (which it shared with Al Gore in 2007) for its work on global warming), may stand to make several hundred million euros in EU carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain. . . .
The WSJ expounds on the plant closing discussed in the above paragraph. That closing saw 1700 British workers loose their job and saw the plant moved to India - meaning that there was no reduction in carbon released into the atmosphere. Tata made a windfall. It would be hard to find any better example with which to indict the entire carbon trading morass. As the WSJ concludes:
To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.
If that is not market distortion on steroids, nothing is. And the people paying for it, in higher energy bills and lost jobs, are the rank and file.
The rent seekers won't be the only one's walking away from Copenhagen with their gravy train intact. The third world kleptocrats have a friend in the Obama administration, which, through Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the U.S. will take part in sending $100 billion a year to either the World Bank or the UN to distribute as they see fit to further the third world's fight against AGW. My ability to state all of the above without a single vulgarity has reduced to zero my reserve of self discipline. I will go Galt before I see a penny of my taxes to this socialist insanity.
Charlie Martin, writing at PJM, notes that, as more data is made public - even beyond the bombshell Russian reveleations of the other day - the more we are finding inexplicable anecdotes wherein AGW scientists have made large upward adjustments to raw temperatures that could not possibly be justified. These include:
- The Keenan study comparing raw temperature data for Alaska to the "corrected, homogenized and cooked IPCC data the IPCC is using for Alaska
- Nashville, where Anthony Watts finds a slight 130 year cooling trend from the raw data that the IPCC has somehow turned into a warming trend.
- Antarctica, where the GHCN has removed inconvienient data points. Digging into it further, it became apparent that the GHCN based its homogonized and cooked warming ternd on a single station in Antarctica - Rothra Station - the one in a heat island that shows anamolous warming.
And as Joseph D'Aleo points out at PJM, it would appear that the adjusted data used by the CRA - that we now learn was cherry picked in Russia and, as we see in the examples above, tortured above - is virtually the exact same figures used by Hadley, NASA, amd GHCN. Further, he points out all the difficulties apparent in trying to determine "global" temperatures, not the least of which are major declines in the number of monitoring stations, incomplete data sets, and the use of the remaining stations to extrapolate temperatures of locations at great distance away - indeed, 1000 kilometers and more.
Bishop Hill looks at the revelations from Russia yesterday - that the IPCC and Hadley have cooked the Russian books to show AGW in that country where the data indicates none exists - from the standpoint of "gatekeeping. As he notes:
. . .at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.
And lastly, perhaps the most criminal aspect of AGW science has been how they have committed a fraud on the public while stonewalling, refusing to provide their raw data, meta-data, computer programs to allow others to verify their work. Thank God for Steve McIntyre, the brilliant Canadian who has persevered for over a decade to correct this situation and set the records straight. Bishop Hill has a post detailing Steve's efforts to verify the fraudulent Yamal tree ring study for nearly a decade while the author, Briffa, stonewalled. It makes fascinating reading.
The goals of the post modern left - virtually all of whom can be found in the middle of the AGW movement or acting in full support thereof - are the accretion of power that will allow them to exercise near complete control over the lives of their subjects and the redistribution of wealth from "corrupt" capitalist countries. They make no real effort to hide their goals, though they frame it in the words of benevolent Kings acting wholly in the best interests of their ignorant subjects. As the IPCC's Chairman Mao said not long ago, the West is "corrupt" and must be made to "change its ways." A column in the NYT today is instructive. This from John Broder:
If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits.
So what is all this going to cost?
The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output. In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions that delegates to the United Nations climate change conference are expected to set in the coming days will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment from 2010 to 2030, according to a new estimate from the International Energy Agency.
As scary as that number sounds, the agency said that the costs would ramp up relatively slowly and be largely offset by economic benefits in new jobs, improved lives, more secure energy supplies and a reduced danger of climate catastrophe. Most of the investment will come from private rather than public funds, the agency contends.
“People often ask about the costs,” said Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management, who tracks climate policy for the bank. “But the figures people tend to cite don’t take into account conservation and efficiency measures that are easily available. And they don’t look at the cost of inaction, which is the extinction of the human race. Period.” . . .
We really are in an existential struggle at the moment. The plans of the AGW socialists will have us making a massive transfer of wealth and a vast expansion of the power of governments to regulate the economy and our lives, all based on unproven science. They ask this of us so that they may "save us from extinction."
Their plans will have us destroy our energy infrastructure and move into reliance on "green energy which, other than nuclear power, is both far more costly and unproven at scale. While the reality of green energy's inefficiencies will keep us dependant upon fossil fuels, our own fossil fuel industries will be attacked and dismantled - as the Obama administration is well on its way to doing with the coal industry in America. To quote from Don Suber, the "Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson has not only stopped future [coal mining] permits but she went back and retroactively pulled 79 existing mine permits, including 23 in West Virginia." Similarly, recall that Obama promised to allow greater domestic oil exploration during the campaign. That promise did not survive the swearing in. Thus, it is a virtual certainty that we will become ever more dependant upon foreign oil, and that the cost of that oil will rise exponentially once world wide demand reaches and surpasses 2007 levels.
The "cost savings and efficiencies" claimed by the individual quoted in the above NYT article are wholly illusory. The new "green jobs" foisted upon us would create a market distortion and come at the cost of a loss of "old jobs." Indeed, a Spanish study found that "[e]very “green job” created with government money in Spain over the last eight years came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job."
Likewise is the massive market distortion of cap and trade. There is no better example than that discussed in a post at EU Referendum. It concerns the decision made last week to close a seemingly cost efficient steel plant employing 1700 workers in Britain. As Dr. North writes, "[t]he EU's emission trading scheme (ETS) may have been the deciding factor in the closure of the Corus Redcar steel-making plant – . . . giving the company a windfall bonus of up to £1.2 billion from the plant closure – on top of other savings." In other words, the value of carbon credits exceeded the profit from actually producing steel with an otherwise viable profit margin for the industry. Dr. North explains the nuances of how this works, and further tells us that the slack in the companies steel production will be "off shored" to India, where the cost of carbon credits is significantly lower. Thus, through the perverse incentives of Europe's carbon trading scheme, 1700 British jobs were lost, no global carbon reduction was realized, manufacturing jobs were moved to a developing country, and the company that took these acts made a windfall profit in carbon credits. If that is not market distortion, nothing is. And the ones who bear the brunt - those sacrificed on the dual alter of greed and green - are the rank and file who likely stand no chance of finding work for similar wages.
It does get worse though. The carbon trading scheme has proven in Europe to be ineffective in reducing carbon, it is corrupt and it is an invitation to large scale fraud. To quote again from Dr. North, "I don't think the majority of people even begin to realise quite what how big a scam the "carbon" market really is."
As to "improved lives," you can ask the now unemployed British steel workers about that. The reality is that the only lives that stand any chance of being improved by this insanity are the lives of politicians and their "rent seeking" cronies. The average American struggling to make ends meet would see his costs of living going up significantly while Gore and his profiteering ilk would be enriched beyond their wildest dreams. The only way to make the average person sign up for this madness is, one, threaten them with the ultimate in dire consequences if they don't accept it, two, do not allow any dissent to creep in (thus making this a political, not a scientific issue) and "hide the decline," and three, if you cannot institute it by democratic means, then do it otherwise and present it as a fait accompli. That is what the far left has now managed in America through an activist Supreme Court and Obama's EPA. When someone as serious as Charles Krauthammer bandies about words such as "revolution" as a response to such an act - at least should the EPA begin unilaterally carbon regulation - it is a marker as to how existential this whole matter truly is.
As Daniel Henninger points out in today's WSJ, one of the significant ramifications for Climategate is to the perceived credibility of all hard sciences:
Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. . . .
As Henninger points out, the reality is that left wing post modernism has crept into the hard sciences. I blogged a few days ago on the politicization of anthropology to further the ends of our post modern left. Who knew that anthropologists who helped our military were demeaning their discipline, or that anthropology research leads directly to the conclusion that we should enact card check to resuscitate the ever shrinking unions. But that said, there are also signs that many highly respected academics are waking up to the dangers to their professions exposed by Climategate. One such example is memorialized in an article by CBS's Declan McCullagh - a journalist rapidly approaching, in my estimation, the rarified ground of an honest reporter in the MSM - a ground heretofore occupied by only Jake Tapper. Mr. McCullagh reports on the fallout from Climategate and how it has effected the American Physics Society. This from Mr. McCullah:
The professional association for physicists is facing internal pressure from some of its most distinguished members, who say the burgeoning ClimateGate scandal means the group should rescind its 2007 statement declaring that global warming represents a dire international emergency.
. . . Pressure on this venerable society of physicists, which was founded in 1899 at Columbia University, is coming from members who are squarely in the scientific mainstream and are alarmed at the state of climate science revealed in the leaked e-mail messages and program files from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.
Those files show that prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data, plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing, and discussed how to conceal apparently buggy computer code from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law. Internal investigations are now underway at East Anglia, Penn State, and the British government's weather forecasting unit.
One APS dissenting member is William Happer, a physicist who runs the Happer Lab at Princeton University. Another is Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A third is Robert Austin, another Princeton physics professor and head of a biophysics research group.
They've been circulating a letter saying: "By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen... We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done."
Some of the same scientists had asked the APS, pre-ClimateGate, to revise its climate policy statement. To the applause of like-minded bloggers who dubbed the petition "a silly distraction," the APS shot down that idea on November 10.
In the aftermath of the embarrassing data leaks, however, Princeton's Happer says that about half of the APS members they've contacted now support the petition (which, after all, is only asking for an independent analysis of the science involved).
Of the signatories so far, Happer says, 77 are fellows of major scientific societies, 14 members of the National Academies, one is a Nobel laureate, and there is a large number of authors of major scientific books and recipients of prizes and awards for scientific research. He adds: "Some have accepted a career risk by signing the petition. The 230 odd signatories can hardly be dismissed as lightweights compared to those who spread the message of impending climate disaster."
This has become a common refrain: Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research, calls the climate change axis a "cartel." A colleague, Eduardo Zorita, went further and said the scientists implicated in the e-mails "should be barred" from future United Nations proceedings and warned that "the scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas." One estimate from a free-market group says that 12 of the 26 scientists who wrote the relevant section of a U.N. global warming report are "up to their necks in ClimateGate."
Below are excerpts from e-mail messages that the scientists behind the petition to the APS sent me on Monday:
Princeton University's Robert Austin:
I view it as science fraud, pure and simple, and that we should completely distance ourselves from such unethical behavior by CRU, and that data files be opened to the public and examined in the full light of day. We as taxpayers pay for that work -- we are owed examination of the analysis.
. . . Hal Lewis of the University of California, Santa Barbara:
I think it behooves us to be careful about how we state the science. I know of nobody who denies that the Earth has been warming for thousands of years without our help (and specifically since the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago), and is most likely to continue to do so in its own sweet time. The important question is how much warming does the future hold, is it good or bad, and if bad is it too much for normal adaptation to handle. The real answer to the first is that no one knows, the real answer to the second is more likely good than bad (people and plants die from cold, not warmth), and the answer to the third is almost certainly not. And nobody doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for the better part of a century, but the disobedient temperature seems not to care very much. And nobody denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with other gases like water vapor, but despite the claims of those who are profiting by this craze, no one knows whether the temperature affects the CO2 or vice versa. The weight of the evidence is the former.
So the tragedy is that the serious questions are quantitative, and it's easy to fool people with slogans. If you say that the Earth is warming you are telling the truth, but not the whole truth, and if you say it is due to the burning of fossil fuels you are on thin ice. If you say that the Earth is warming and therefore catastrophe lies ahead, you are pulling an ordinary bait and switch scam. If you are a demagogue, of course, these distinctions don't bother you -- you have little interest in that quaint concept called truth.
So it isn't simple, and the catastrophe mongers are playing a very lucrative game.
I vastly over-quoted that entire article, but it is so good I wanted to preserve it on this blog.
In the same vein is an open letter sent to the UN's Secretary General by 141 scientists calling upon the UN to require climate scientists to answer some basic questions before the UN enacts any additional agreements regarding "climate change:"
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
1.Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2.Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3.Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4.Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5.The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6.Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7.Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8.Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9.Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10.Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.
In a surprising move, CNN has apparently taken a very fair and balanced look at Climategate. I did not see it, but Media Matters is effuse in their praise of CNN's work:
CNN made a real, day-long effort on Monday to address the climate-change debate as a debate, giving skeptics of manmade climate change a series of chances to match the leftist view, especially during its evening programming. CNN is also the only U.S. TV news outlet so far to send an anchor to the Climate Research Unit at the center of the ClimateGate controversy . . .
Lastly, Sarah Palin weighs in on Climategate in the pages of the Washington Post, where she reminds the President of his promises regarding science and calls for him to boycott the Copenhagen conference. This from Ms. Palin:
With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. . . .
This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development. . . .
In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.
Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.
Yesterday, on Dec. 7 ("a day that will live in infamy" indeed) the IPCC started its Copenhagen Conference with the goal of binding the Western world in an economic suicide pact (and, though I am not in any way a conspiracy theorist - I would have to say a move towards global governance based on evidence such as seen here). Meanwhile, perhaps explaining why Obama chose to attend Copenhagen at the end of the conference when all agreements will be announced, Team Obama doubled down. Dismissing Climategate with a wave of her chubby hand, Obama's EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson issued a final ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
What that means is that there is now no limit to our government's power to legislate and regulate on every aspect of our economy and every aspect of our individual lives. This is a power grab that our communists of yore could only imagine in their most blissful of dreams. (Update: See this fascinating article by Bret Stephens in the WSJ teasing out many of the similarities between AGW enthusiasts and the totalitarian and communist movements that were once thought to have been left in the dust bin of history.)
Before moving on to discuss the latest in Climategate, it is worth a moment to reflect on the role of our courts in all of this.
Virtually all of our environmental legislation was crafted to give standing - i.e., the right to sue - to aggrieved individuals. What may have seemed a good idea at the time has turned into a national nightmare, with far left wing organizations trolling for proxy plaintiffs then cherry-picking left wing judges in a plethora of law suits. Those law suits have probably cost this country trillions of dollars when you consider not merely the burdens each new decision proactively puts upon all and sundry, but also the lost opportunity costs from all of the things that do not get built, all of the resources that do not get exploited, etc. It is a travesty. It reached its zenith with the Supreme Court decision in the 2007 case of Massachusetts v. EPA. In that case, five unelected left wing judges, none of whom are scientists, substituted their judgment for that of the EPA and our legislature. Those five judges determined that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act and that the EPA lacked discretion in how to proceed. This was a supreme act of judicial activism every bit as radical - and likely to be every bit as damaging to our nation - as Plessy v. Ferguson was, as Roe v. Wade has been, and as the Boumediene decision portends to be.
If America is not to be litigated into full blown socialism, a new legislative motif needs to be created that allows cases of individuals actually damaged by an unlawful act under the environmental laws to go forward in order that they may be made whole while keeping questions of environmental policy and the discretion to make environmental policy judgments solely in the hands of our elected representatives. We must strike the balance of fairness to individuals while taking the keys to the courthouse out of the hands of the radical left and decision making authority far from the hands of activist judges. If our regulatory agencies are to be held accountable for acting or not acting, it must be through our legislature and executive branches over whom we exercise control by the ballot - and most decidedly not by ideologically motivated judges who are not accountable at the ballot box and who rarely, if ever, have a strong scientific background. < /RANT end >
Now back to your regularly scheduled Climategate update.
This from the EPA announcing the decision yesterday to make final the finding of carbon dioxide as a pollutant:
Action
On December 7, 2009, the Administrator signed two distinct findings regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act:
Endangerment Finding: The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)--in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.
Cause or Contribute Finding: The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare.
These findings do not themselves impose any requirements on industry or other entities. . . .
That is correct, these findings will not alone force EPA to act. But with the issuance of these findings, the EPA now has complete discretion to begin regulating to their hearts content. And if cap and trade is not passed by Congress, there will be another plethora of law suits seeking to make the EPA take action - if any such impetus is needed for the Obama administration. This is a back door completely around the legislature and our democratic process.
The most immediate ramification of the EPA Administrator's decision to issue the final ruling is on the outlook for jobs. Let's see how well the employment situation improves with this Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every employer in America. Further, once this regulation starts, watch for our energy infrastructure and industry to shrink, the cost of energy to go steeply upwards, and the cost of everything that uses energy (basically every good and service you will ever purchase) to rise concomitantly. This really should be renamed the Smoot-Hawley Carbon Tariff, as I strongly suspect it will have negative consequences for our economy equal to that of SmootHawley when that piece of economic brilliance passed into law in 1930.
In making the decision to issue her finding yesterday, EPA Administrator did so over the objections of several Republicans who asked her to refrain from final action until the issues raised by Climategate were investigated. Although Jackson relied heavily on IPCC 'peer reviewed' science to determine that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant - she dismissed the lawmaker's concerns out of hand:
There is nothing in the hacked emails that undermines the science upon which this decision is based,” Jackson said in announcing the finding this afternoon. She said the controversial messages dealt with only a tiny fraction of the strong evidence of global warming.
As an aside, I wonder how much of the timing of this decision was driven by the unfolding scandal of Climategate itself? The timing of this decision, though obviously connected to the opening of the Copenhagen IPCC meeting, could possibly be a way of getting out in front of Climategate before it has any further chance to fester and truly drive up the heat on the Obama administration. That would explain why Obama suddenly changed travel plans but a few days ago. That said, if indeed this is a counter-Climategate strategy, it is an incredibly risky one.
Obama and his team are courting disaster with this in many different ways. To pretend Climategate is insignificant is pure prevarication. Obama should realize, Americans who feel they've been conned usually display more then a bit of angst at the con man. Moreover, I can think of no bigger scandal at any time in history that so challenges the credibility of an entire class of science. The base climate data has disappeared, "peer reviewed" studies did not include a review of raw data and software programs and thus were as meaningless as a "hope and change" mantra (see this brilliant essay by Mark Steyn on "peer review"). Scientists that challenged any of this were silenced, their work going unpublished. On top of that, you have the deliberate manipulation of data to reach a predetermined conclusion. And this does not even touch on well grounded questions as to whether ongoing climate observations are even themselves corrupt. Add it all up and what you have is anything but credible science. As Robert Avrech so wryly noted, would you gamble your life by choosing to fly on "a plane designed by the University of East Anglia climate change frauds?"
On a different note, Andrew Revkin, writing at the NYT, acknowledges the reverberations of Climategate. That said, he grossly understates what is at stake if AGW is not reality, yet we still enact the AGW agenda. This from the NYT:
Politics, ideology and economic interests interlace the debate, and the stakes on both sides are high. If scientific predictions about global warming’s effects are correct, inaction will lead at best to rising social, economic and environmental disruption, at worst to a calamity far more severe. If the forecasts are wrong, nations could divert hundreds of billions of dollars to curb greenhouse gas emissions at a time when they are struggling to recover from a global recession.
That description of what may happen if the AGW crowd are allowed to bums rush through their agenda is a gross understatement. Just a few thoughts for Mr. Revkin:
- To allow the world's left to push through their agenda means an accretion of power in our federal government that would take us from a government with a few enumerated powers to a form of government with powers so expansive as to be an imperial in form. Indeed, it would be a form of government not acknowledged as legitimate in this country since July 4, 1776.
- To allow the world's left to push through their agenda would mean not just a "diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars," it would mean a massive change in the quality of life for each and every American (at least those not so fortunate as to be part of the left's rent-seeking AGW cabal). It would mean what amounts to a massive tax on each and every American family, not just to fund environmental insanity in the U.S., but also to transfer massive amounts of our tax dollars to third world countries.
- To allow the world's left to push through their agenda will mean the death of our energy infrastructure as the left's war on exploitation of our own resources grows, aging structures go unrepaired, and those that fall out of use are replaced by unproven "green energy." All forms of green energy, with the exception of nuclear, are so fraught with what are, at present, insurmountable problems that they are cost ineffective and not proven at scale. They cannot compete in the energy market today without sizable subsidies - something which is itself a form of taxation.
- To allow the world's left to push through their agenda means that those in the UN and elsewhere who want to see "global governance" just came a step closer. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but last week, a Fox story using two UNEP source documents, by their own words, discussed precisely that - in addition to using propaganda at schools to promote AGW to the level of a religion.
In sum, there is much more at stake than merely the "diversion" of several hundred billion dollars. Mr. Revkin's description of the downside if the AGW crowd are allowed to bums rush through their agenda is akin to saying, on the eve of its landfall, that Hurricane Katrina had some potential to cause damage.
The public seems to be getting the word, even if the AGW crowd is in full damage control mode. Rasmussens latest poll shows an America that believes that talk of a "scientific consensus" is false and that the veracity of climate scientists and the UN'sIPCC is questionable. A just released CNN poll shows that belief in man-made global warming has dropped from 54% in the summer to 45% now. The business world is going nuts over the EPA's decision to issue a final ruling on carbon dioxide. And on top of all of this, you have legislation to address global warming that is never going to make it out of the Senate. Indeed, so toxic is this whole issue that you have Democratic Senator Jim Webb writing an open letter to Obama warning him not to commit the U.S. to any binding agreements in Copenhagen. In addition, you have another letter from nine Democratic Senators telling Obama that their support for cap and trade is contingent on all other nations agreeing to similar legislation.
What Obama cannot get by democratic means, he is now seeking to get by an end run with the EPA. Jamming this down the throats of all Americans by non-democratic means, particularly in light of Climategate, seems more than brazen. We elected a President, not a King. I think that Charles Krauthammer hits the nail on the head when he uses the "R" word to warn of the dire consequences of such an action:
"Revolution" is a serious word. Krauthammer is a serious person. It should give one pause, though it seems to be having the opposite effect on the Obama administration. They are at a full gallop down the road paved with the best of intentions.
There is an excellent article in the WSJ, The Copenhagen Concoction, that does about the best job I have seen thus far in putting Climategate in context.
Dr. Richard North at EU Referendum, discusses the claim made by apologists for the CRU that their temperature records, even if the raw data was tossed, still comport with the records from other major agencies:
. . . If you have three or four major centres in the world doing climate analysis, why would they each set up and safeguard data from their own stations? Would a UK or US centre, for example, be allowed to set up its own weather station in Tibet? Would three agencies go through the financial and logistical pain of setting up their own instruments in Antarctica, say, when one could do it and share the data?
So all these "independent" organisations share the same data. And how does that make their results independent? And if they all apply the same "fudge factors", wouldn't their results all look very much the same? And unless we knew which raw data they used, what adjustments they made to those data, and what corrections they had applied during the processing of those data, how do we know what they are actually recording?
That is what Climategate was really all about – and none of the questions asked have been answered. . . .
I think Dr. North sums it up nicely indeed. On a different note, at the Daily Beast they have the Devil's Dictionary for Copenhagen:
D is for deniers. A mere notch above Holocaust deniers, these are the people who refuse to accept that climate change is largely man-induced. Heretics, they'd be burned at the stake if that were not such a bad thing for the ozone layer.
Heh. It is clever and worth the read.
Lastly, the editor's of the Guardian crafted a piece of AGW propoganda for reprint on the eve of Copenhagen. Fifty-nine newspapers across the globe printed it. Do read this post at Plumb Bob Blog commenting on the falsehoods and half truths littering the document. It is about as concise an overview of the status of AGW as you will find on the net. As the blog's author notes near his conclusion:
The left loves to yammer on about the scaremongering of Dick Cheney — a local candidate here in Massachusetts ran ads specifically naming this as his reason for running, despite the fact that Dick Cheney no longer holds office — but they never mention the real scaremongering, the hysteria of global warming alarmism.
I think what the left is doing is called projection - it is central to all the left does. Prior Posts:
The CRU's Phil "hide the decline" Jones gets canned by East Anglia pending an investigation. Another scientist proclaims that AGW "fraud is everywhere." And an MIT professor points out how the AGW crowd has cooked the books, how the science of AGW is anything but settled, and he tells us of what he sees as the real scandal: "the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams."
Climategate claims a major perpetrator. Dr. Phil "hide the decline" Jones, director of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), and certainly one of the most important player in the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) world, has stepped down from his position "pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change." I suspected that, when East Anglia and not Phil Jones announced the other day that the CRU would now make all of its work public, East Anglia had, in an effort to preserve its reputation, read Dr. Jones the riot act. Now, East Anglia is taking the next step. This is a measure of how seriously they view the substance of the allegations. It may prove another whitewash, but irrespective, given the timing, one wonders how this will effect the Copenhagen Conference. I doubt that the players in the Conference will do anything to even acknowledge Climategate given AGW is their entire rasion d'etre for existence. That said, the question is how will it effect press coverage of both Copenhagen and Climategate?
Over at PJM, scientist Douglas Keenan discusses how he was mistreated by the AGW cabal and his work supressed while Phil Jones, mentioned above, used knowingly fraudulent data to support IPCC conclusions:
In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.
After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.
But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque.
The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense used against my allegation, a defense obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise then that the university still refuses to release the report. (More details on all of this — including source documents — are on my site.)
My paper demonstrates that by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC.
Dr. Keenan goes on to discuss several other aspects showing rot at the core of AGW and its many advocates. Read his article here.
Then there is this highly informative article from MIT Professor of Meterology Richard S. Lindz explaining the major holes in the theory of AGW, showing how the Phil Jones and crew are cooking the books, and discussing why the increase in carbon is not something to become alarmed about:
The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
. . . The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. . . . It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree. (emphasis added)
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors. . . .
Several things seem to be happening at once as regards Climategate. One, scientists within the AGW community are turning on their own. Two, scientists ill-treated by the AGW cabal are coming out of the woodwork with stories of mistreatment and the silencing of their work. Three, those scientists in all disciplines concerned with the perceived legitimacy of science are coming out of the woodwork to condemn the way in which the AGW crowd has done business. Lastly, the institutions associated with AGW, those whose reputations stand to be most tarnished, are taking action. At some point in Climategate, critical mass will be reached. And we seem to be approaching that point with some rapidity - that despite every AGW player with a vested interest, including most of the MSM, doing all possible to see that critical mass is never reached.
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