Thugs: The Obama Justice Department has joined the UK government to go after the climategate whistleblowers.
This action once again shows how completely tone deaf the Obama administration is. Attacking the messenger here will do nothing to convince anyone that global warming is happening. Instead, it will help to convince everyone that the whole thing is a fraud, and should be shut down.
Attacking the messenger? The UK police have seized several computers belonging to the first blogger in England to break the story of climategate 2.
One congressman’s take on climate change and climategate.
And it ain’t good for science. If anything should convince scientists that they have to clean up their act, it should be this interview. Here is a congressman who seems truly interested in the field, but who has grown skeptical of anything climate scientists say because he simply doesn’t believe them.
Follow the money: An environmental scientist is caught on film, agreeing to ignore her own data and to make up new and unproven claims, in order to win big cash in an environmental court case.
Another global warming activist who fakes it: Sir David Attenborough admits to shooting fake polar bear footage for a BBC documentary.
What’s worse is that he sees nothing wrong with what he did!
But wait, there’s more! The BBC, also in the tank for global warming, has also now admitted that a great deal of the footage in its nature documentaries is staged.
In a further blow to wildlife fans, corporation bosses yesterday confessed that staging footage was standard practice in natural history programmes. They insisted such editing tricks were necessary to create the documentaries, and added the programme met the expected editorial standards.
A spokesman said: “While the great majority of footage for Frozen Planet is filmed entirely in the wild, on occasion certain sequences need to be filmed in controlled conditions – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to bring these stories to our audiences. “This type of filming is standard practice across the industry when creating natural history programmes.”
They might have cobbled together what they call a deal, but nonetheless (and for good reasons), there are long faces in Durban.
I like this quote best:
The leading alarmist among American scientists, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been as spectacularly wrong as Mr. Gore. Mr. Hansen said in a 1988 interview the sea level off Manhattan would rise 10 feet within 40 years (if atmospheric CO2 doubled). In the 23 years since, the sea level has risen just 2.5 inches. Sea levels fell over the past year.
But alarmism has been good for his pocketbook. Mr. Hansen failed to report $1.6 million in outside income, much of it in violation of NASA’s rules, according to Power Line’s John Hinderaker.
The work of a modern global warming climate scientist:
A collection of pertinent quotes from Climategate 2.
I come to two conclusions as I read these and earlier emails.
Both of these facts are important to recognize in order to decide what sources of information are reliable in studying this issue. And obviously, this means that almost any reports or press announcements coming out of Durbin this week are untrustworthy.
Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist who admitted to faking data in numerous published papers, has retracted the first paper of many, with more retractions sure to follow.
A day earlier, the Dutch university committees investigating Stapel issued a preliminary report that indicated that Stapel had fabricated or manipulated data in at least several dozen publications, but the report did not name specific papers (see Report finds massive fraud at Dutch universities).
The committees, at the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Tilburg where Stapel studied and worked between 1994 and 2011, plan to identify tainted papers in a final report that will not be completed until mid-2012 at the earliest, says Pim Levelt, head of the Tilburg committee and director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Why can’t the climate field do this? It would help them recover the trust they have lost resulting from the obvious research frauds uncovered by the climategate emails.
The gravy train is ending: Canada has joined the United States in raising objections to a planned $100-billion a year climate fund.
I like this quote describing the U.S.’s objections:
Heading into the United Nations climate conference in Durban this week, the United States has made it clear it will not support the current proposals for the climate fund over concerns about how the money would be raised, lack of verification of how it is spent, and an unwillingness of major emerging countries to commit to legally binding emissions reduction. [emphasis mine]
Other than these minor points, everything about the fund is above board and legitimate.
Two stories today from the Climategate 2 archives:
The first describes how Andrew Revkin, the Times’ primary environmental reporter, was entirely in the global warming camp, and worked with these corrupt scientists to push their agenda. It also quotes, from the climategate emails, Revkin’s contempt for anyone who expressed skepticism about the IPCC process and global warming.
The second describes how the BBC teamed up with these same corrupt scientists to keep any skepticism of global warming from being aired at any time.
» Read more
Further analysis of the climategate 2 emails: Michael Mann hides the decline.
Why Climategate 2 is important: a close look at one entire email thread, and how it proves these global warming scientists were trying to suppress knowledge.
The international development agency Oxfam is screaming disaster..
This year’s food shortages and famine are a sign of what’s to come if the world doesn’t get climate change under control, Oxfam is warning. The international development agency made a call for action the day before the UN kicks off its annual climate change conference in Durban, South Africa. . . .
» Read more
I had just posted, as a comment, a link to a searchable database of the climategate emails, including both the 2009 as well as the just released emails. However, I think it makes sense to post this separately, on the main page of Behind the Black, to make sure all my readers will see it and thus have access to it. The link is here.
Now the European carbon-trading market is crashing.
“Perpetuating rubbish”: a detailed analysis of one part of the new climategate emails.
I think the first comment sums up the tragedy of this situation very clearly:
So privately they said the series had a “dubious relationship to temperature”, but publicly they said it was “well calibrated”? I am just about to the point of never trusting any scientists at all.
The willingness of the climate field to whitewash the fraud and corruption revealed by the first set of climategate emails is now haunting this field badly. Why should anyone believe anything any global warming scientist ever says? It is very clear that too many of them put politics above science in their work.
One scientist’s perspective on the new Climategate emails.
Long time readers will recall that in 2004 and 2005 (before Katrina), I led an interdisciplinary effort to review the literature on hurricanes and global warming. The effort resulted in a peer-reviewed article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That paper, despite being peer-reviewed and standing the test of time (as we now know), was ignored by the relevant part of the IPCC 2007 that dealt with extreme events. Thanks to the newly released emails from UEA [University of East Anglia] (hacked, stolen, donated, or whatever) we can say with certainty why that paper was excluded from the IPCC 2007 report Chapter 3 which discussed hurricanes and climate change. Those various reviews associated with the release of the UEA emails that concluded that no papers were purposely kept out of the IPCC may want to revisit that particular conclusion.
Read the whole thing. It is worth it to get a real sense about how petty and political the IPCC process is. It has little to do with science, and everything to do with forcing a conclusion down everyone’s throat.
Having failed to clean up its act after the release of the climategate emails two years ago, the field of climate science is about to turned upside down all over again. Today there was another release of hacked emails, written by the same collection of global warming scientists. Once again, these emails show that these scientists are anything but scientists. Instead, they seem far more interested in campaigning for a certain result, regardless of the science. A few quotes:
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