Civilization, in every generation, must be defended from barbarians. The barbarians outside the gate, the barbarians inside the gate, and the barbarian in the mirror...
Former commie and angry hedonist, now a conservative Catholic Republican. After Scientific Materialism, Deism, and Buddhism, I stumbled across the 2,000-year-old Big Kahuna, the Roman Catholic Church. A couple of years before I became Catholic, exposure to the real world had replaced my Berkeley-induced leftism with a sort of sneering "I'm above it all" irony. After becoming Catholic in 1996, I turned conservative, and also became a much nicer guy. Eternal Optimism had won out over Radical Bitterness. Politics, current events, religion, and aviation, that's what's on the blog.
Creepy Statist Quote of the Day From the Folks Who Object to Being Called Creepy Statists
Nancy Pelosi:
In a recent press release, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., argues that constitutional objections to the individual mandate are "nonsensical," because "the power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited."
posted by Matteo | 9:02 PM
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Abortion is the most reliable issue there. If you're a Democrat, you better be pro-choice. No, that's not enough. You better be fiercely opposed to any restrictions whatsoever on abortion, and be in favor of the federal government paying for abortions if the unmother can't swing it. Otherwise, you're just another quasi-cancerous growth to be scraped off off the donkey's uterus.
posted by Matteo | 11:09 AM
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NIALL FERGUSON ON FINANCIAL WEAKNESS:
The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942. We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the war. Yes, I know, the United States is at war in Afghanistan and still has a significant contingent of troops in Iraq. But these are trivial conflicts compared with the world wars, and their contribution to the gathering fiscal storm has in fact been quite modest (little more than 1.8 percent of GDP, even if you accept the estimated cumulative cost of $3.2 trillion published by Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz in February 2008).
Like World War II, only with ACORN instead of the Manhattan Project. What could go wrong? Plus, Paul Krugman re-spins the deficit. But where Ferguson worries about a decline in U.S. military power as a result, I think some people in the Administration regard that as a feature, not a bug.
posted by Matteo | 9:56 AM
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posted by Matteo | 8:40 PM
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posted by Matteo | 4:51 PM
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It's almost a left wing harmonic convergence on global warming fraud. Chris Horner writing for Big Government reveals that the principle warmist blogsite, Real Climate, is a Fenton operation. Fenton Communications is the left wing PR operation that promoted the Alar scare and other bogus health scares, and are the people who created the infamous "General Betray Us" ad attacking Gneeral Petraeus. Horner writes:
It turns out that Realclimate.org is owned by an outfit that is in essence a non-profit public relations firm called Environmental Media Services (EMS), "dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues", whose Pittsburgh office houses the RealClimate server.[1] ActivistCash.com describes EMS as "the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications."[2]
EMA's listed registrant, Betsy Ensley, engages in the objective, non-partisan pursuit of "manag[ing] BushGreenwatch.org, a joint EMS-MoveOn.org public awareness website".[3] She also apparently ran WomenAgainstBush.org, and former Harvard string theorist (and still-hilarious climate blogger) Lubos Motl notes that when Ensley was campaigning against John Ashcroft her secretary was Kalee Kreider, now Al Gore's spokesperson.[4] MoveOn is of course in part a George Soros venture, and attentive climate realists recall the kafuffle over Soros supporting Hansen's alarmism.[5]
Motl describes EMS as "primarily an organization to pay for junk science about food and beverages, often hired by food companies to damage their competitors".[6] This is known as "black marketing."[7] [snip]
As critics note, the idea that RealClimate is just a bunch of unpaid "real scientists" is risible, given their methods of argumentation are often little more than smear, ridicule, cherry- picking science, and pronouncing themselves and their exclusive little climate clique as only the few "qualified' to have an opinion on man-made global warming. RealClimate's members, like Andrew Dessler of Grist and writers for the Soros-backed Climate Progress, perpetrate a unique form of "qualification thuggery" by which anyone skeptical of their agenda are unworthy to comment, typically because they skeptic does not affiliate with the UN IPCC. When the skeptic is an IPCC author or reviewer, well he's still unqualified. And "mere physicists" such as Freeman Dyson, or chemists, or economists, are also unqualified, but only when they disagree. After all, Dessler is a chemist, and the IPCC's "chief scientist" is no such thing at all, as you'll see.
Another example of leftwing propagandist doing well for themselves while "doing good". Activistcash.com has a long detailed history of Fenton in case you'd like to learn more about this operation.
posted by Matteo | 2:35 PM
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posted by Matteo | 2:20 PM
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The most obvious thing that strikes anyone wading through the CRU documents is how easy it was for a small number of "experts" to propel their data-raped conclusions first into a "peer-reviewed" "consensus" and then up through western governments into the international fait accomplis of Kyoto, the IPCC and now Copenhagen. I initially assumed stuff like this was just a bit of naked obstructionism toward a few troublemakers:
I find it hard to believe that the British Antarctic Survey would permit the deletion of relevant files for two recent publications or that there aren't any backups for the deleted data on institutional servers.
But no, it was systemic. Hysterical queens like Gordon Brown are demanding we introduce global taxation, micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, massive multi-trillion dollar transfers from the productive sector to eco-rackets and transnational bureaucracies, bovine flatulence levies and extraterrestrial surveillance of once sovereign states on the basis of fevered speculations for which there is no raw data:
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years...
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building...
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
No raw data, huh? But why let that stand in your way?
Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
But don't worry. It'll all be very scientific. Your carbon allowance numbers will be kept in a big database. Maybe in East Anglia?
posted by Matteo | 1:17 PM
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posted by Matteo | 1:00 PM
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This Just In!
On this Thanksgiving Day, let us give thanks that the two greatest all-purpose pretexts for government regulation of every single aspect of your life - "health care" and "the environment" - have now converged. Forget the global warming, global cooling, all the phoney-baloney tree-ring stuff - who can keep track of all that "settled science"? And fortunately we no longer need it, because we have a new rationale for the massive multitrillion-dollar Copenhagen shakendownen. Drumroll, please!
But slashing carbon dioxide emissions also could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet.
Government regulation of health care justifies government regulation of the environment: Ingenious!
posted by Matteo | 9:31 AM
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posted by Matteo | 5:31 PM
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posted by Matteo | 5:25 PM
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Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.
That's laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.
If anyone needs newspapers, it ought to be for stories like this. If there were no impending ecopalypse, then "climate science" would be a relatively obscure field, as it was up to a generation ago. Now it produces celebrity scientists living high off the hog of billions in grants. They thus have a vested interest in maintaining the planet's-gonna-fry line. So what do the media do? Instead of exposing the thesis to rigorous journalistic examination, they stage fluffy green stunts, run soft-focus "living green" features with Hollywood "activists", and at a time of massive staff cutbacks in every other department create the positions of specialist "climate correspondent" and "environmental reporter" and fill them with sycophantic promoters of the Big Scare to the point that, as Dr Mann coos approvingly to The New York Times, "you've taken the words out of my mouth".
What Gerson writes ought to be true. Warmergate demonstrates why it isn't.
posted by Matteo | 5:08 PM
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At Least The ClimateGate Scientists Didn’t Admit Going to Church
The silence of the ‘pro-science’ blogsphere on the ClimateGate scandal is remarkable.
For years, readers of Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, Neurologica, WhyEvolutionIsTrue, Denialism, Respectful Insolence, and other militantly ‘pro-science’ blogs have been treated to rants about the need to protect the integrity of science from frauds and ideologically motivated practitioners. Of course, ‘protection of the integrity of science’ in the faux 'pro-science' blogsphere has generally meant suppression of skeptics who question so-called 'consensus science' on Darwinism and on Anthropogenic Global Warming. ‘Protection of science’ has more often that not entailed personal invective, recourse to ‘consensus’, advocacy of professional destruction of skeptics, deference to scientific authorities, censorship, and judicial coercion.
The ClimateGate e-mails and data sets obtained from the Climate Research Unit in England reveal scientific misconduct and criminal fraud on a massive scale. This documented pervasive scientific fraud suggests a darker meaning of 'consensus' in 'consensus science'. The Brahmins of climate science are, by their own words, frauds. Data on global temperatures was faked, withheld, and, if sought by skeptics with sufficient vigor, deleted. Climate scientists conspired to undermine peer review and to destroy the careers of other scientists who attempted to replicate their results. Exhortation to integrity and transparency was utterly absent from the communications. The e-mail conversations, had they been those of business executives, would invoke R.I.C.O. statutes. Trillions of dollars, and the economies and even governmental structure of many nations, depend on the integrity of this science. And there is no integrity.
Yet the militant pro-science blogsphere has been silent about this enormous scientific scandal.
Compare the pro-science blogosphere’s silence about fraud and scientific misconduct in climate science to another recent controversy in science: the appointment of Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a scientist of the highest professional and personal reputation. His scandal, according to the science blogsphere, is this:
He’s a Christian who publicly talks about his belief in God.
The ‘pro-science’ blogsphere… exploded.
[examples follow]
None of these blogs, at the time my writing of this post, has any discussion about the massive scandal in Climate Science. What duplicity. A Christian is appointed to a government science post, and the ‘pro-science’ blogsphere explodes. When a movie- a freakin’ movie (Expelled)- is released, the pro-science blogsphere descends into a vortex of angst that persists to this day. Yet when the integrity of a major field of global science is destroyed- not threatened, but destroyed- by smoking-gun evidence of massive systematic scientific misconduct and fraud, the ‘pro-science’ blogsphere gets writer's cramp. Dead silence.
Note to the investigators pouring over the thousands of ClimateGate e-mails, computer code, and data: Keep up the scrutiny. The integrity of science must be protected. If you find any evidence that any of these scientists went to church or were planning to make a movie, contact the science blogs immediately.
posted by Matteo | 9:30 PM
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I’ve just had a great, very sympathetic interview about Climategate on LBC radio (London’s main commercial news and talk station) with Petrie Hosken. She told me she has been simply inundated with callers, all of them utterly unconvinced that human influence has made any significant on so-called “Global Warming”. She was desperate to get a few balancing calls from people who do believe in AGW but just couldn’t find any.
Can you imagine this happening a year ago? Or even a month ago? Until Climategate, we “Sceptics” were considered freaks – almost as bad as Holocaust deniers – beyond the pale of reasonable balanced discussion. Suddenly we’re the norm. Climategate has finally given us the chance to express openly what many of us secretly felt all along:
AGW is about raising taxes; increasing state control; about a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their carbon-trading; about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy.
We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it.
This is our Berlin Wall moment! They can’t stop us now!
posted by Matteo | 9:05 PM
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My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama "St Elsewhere" but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist." He's currently in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it. Anyway, Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit, in which the world's leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to "hide the decline" and other interesting matters.
Nothing to worry about, folks. "We'll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies," said Ed airily. "Those are the key words here, Stuart. 'Peer-reviewed studies.'"
Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Ed said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don't have a 76-inch HDTV, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a talismanic peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection. "If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it," insisted Ed. "Don't get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph.D. after their names. 'Peer-reviewed studies' is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies."
...
Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!
The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.
But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed."
Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review". When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers."
So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does!
"Re, your point at the end – you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the past week, you're as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?" Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer-reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc. (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out, glassy-eyed, into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled ..."
posted by Matteo | 2:15 PM
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You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.
You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.
This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.
This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:
Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.
You have suspected as much for years.
You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.
You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.
You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.
You disagreed when the slogans–and then the science–were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.
You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.
You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.
Your movement had been hijacked.
The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome’s 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
And when you looked at the Club of Rome’s elite member roster. And when you learnt about eugenics and the Rockefeller ties to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute and the practice of crypto-eugenics and the rise of overpopulation fearmongering and the call by elitist after elitist after elitist to cull the world population.
Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.
Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.
Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.
We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.
We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists’ wishes, not reality.
We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.
We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.
We now know, in short, that they were lying.
It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.
With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.
Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.
We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.
We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.
In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.
Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.
We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.
We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.
We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.
We can begin focusing on depleted uranium and the dumping of toxic waste into the rivers and all of the issues that we once knew were part of the mandate of the real environmental movement.
Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support ‘our’ side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.
It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.
We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?
posted by Matteo | 9:57 AM
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posted by Matteo | 9:44 AM
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posted by Matteo | 7:28 PM
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posted by Matteo | 4:35 PM
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posted by Matteo | 2:06 PM
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posted by Matteo | 1:47 PM
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posted by Matteo | 1:30 PM
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posted by Matteo | 12:22 PM
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Eric S. Raymond is a software developer and advocate of the open source software movement. He wrote a seminal paper called The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explained why open processes are more effective than top down ones. He has been studying the code used by the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose work raised serious questions about the quality of the research being used to underpin the proposed $1 trillion Cap'n Trade bill stalled in Congress. Here's what Eric found in the computer code:
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s -- see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.
All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn't just a smoking gun, it's a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.
They didn’t just cook the data; they marinated it for a week, put on a rub, laid it in the smoker for a day and a half, sliced it up, wrapped it in bacon, dipped it in batter, rolled it around in flour, and deep fried it.
posted by Matteo | 11:57 AM
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There is a lot to read about Climategate, but none of it is in the Mainstream Media, with the exception of the Obama-Administration described “not real news” organization. That would be Fox News, which is covering the story.
The New York Times, in a stunning bit of hypocrisy, says they won’t report on Climategate because they didn’t like the way the information was discovered. To the NY TImes, the real story, if they ever deign to cover it, will be about the method in which the story was found, and the ends not justifying means.
There is a valid nit to pick over hacking and how it threatens not just programs but governments and individuals. But when an entire global movement, with accompanying financial interests and public bullying has been founded on “science” that is -at the very least- now confirmed to be “unsettled,” that information, regardless of how it was brought to light, needs to be reported on and investigated.
The NY Times’ prim distaste for the means of disclosure on this issue rather reminds me of a few years back, when someone leaded a memo from the Senate Intelligence Committee, whereby Sen. Jay Rockefeller suggested strategies to undermine “Bush’s war,” and the mainstream media ignored the content of the memo, while waxing indignant over the leak.
The standard media, it seems, only like leaks when they serve their own agendas, or take down their perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.
So, they don’t like this Climategate Story, not at all. Troubling links and trouble, trouble for the narrative.
Let me tell you why the press is blacking out the Climategate story:
In a nutshell, Climategate is a destroyer of world-views. As someone who has always maintained that the AGW hype was a matter of politicians and grifters seizing an opportunity to use unsettled science as a means of getting filthy rich while imposing harsh measures against human freedom, I am very familiar with the world-view of the alarmists. Whenever I wrote about the “hoo-hah” of AGW (and particularly of Al Gore’s stupendous, international fake-out and hypocrisy), my email would load up with people telling me I was “a stupid hick,” unschooled in scientific method (just like Al Gore) and therefore unentitled to opine on anything, so I should just “shut up” and “go away” and of course, I was a “nazi.” These emails occasionally ended with a diatribe against George W. Bush for good measure, and suggested he and I were both “criminals” against humanity. One person even accused me of being Barbara Bush, in disguise.
All of that was standard-issue hate, but nowhere as amusing as the occasional “Sinner, fry in hell” emails I will get from a Jack Chicker, so I stopped reading them long ago.
But I also had a journalist I admired, and who I still consider a friend, privately and gently suggest that if I doubted the truth about AGW then I was as deluded (and perhaps as evil) as a “holocaust denier.”
Yes. The left went that far. The press went that far. They embraced this unsettled science, this unproven theory, with a fervor of moral righteousness; to dispute AGW was to be a bad and stupid person, even if were a dissenting scientist.
To question the point of “environmentally sound” lightbulbs that give bad light and create a dangerous and toxic risk when they break was to “not get the point,” which was that the planet was “dying” thanks to Hanukkah candles and incandescent lightbulbs.
To suggest that large-numbers of privileged people flying scores of private planes to exotic locals, gorging themselves on fine fare while deciding how the common folk ought to live, in order to “save” the planet from AGW was bizarre, wasteful and hypocritical in an era of video-conferencing, was to be sniffed at as “insipid.” Didn’t one understand the power of the Gore Indulgence carbon-offset? Just pay some money to the man with the absolute moral authority on all things green, and your sins are covered. Somewhere, a tree is planted.
The scam of AGW was permitted to gain the foothold it did, because of George W. Bush.
It’s Bush’s fault: if Bush had not fought back when CBS News called Florida for Al Gore before polls in the panhandle had closed, if Bush had not taken Gore’s selective re-count to the Supreme Court, if Bush had just taken those hanging chads like a man and allowed Al Gore to ascend to the presidency (as he’d been groomed to do before he sighed and fumed his way through debates, put his common sense into a lockbox and stumbled into the Buddhist convent, discovering the existence of “no controlling legal authority,”) whether the Vice-President actually won or not (the NY Times eventually admitted “not”) then Al Gore would not have had to seek redemption and his fortune in climate hucksterism, and the left would not have had to over-indulge him in it, overcompensating in order to “kick Bush in the leg.”
That’s basically it. The AGW/Climate Change question became a rigorous boondoggle that got out of control not because the scientist who first suggested a connection between human carbon emission and a change in climate were bad people, or that the question was not worth asking, but because bad people then took the uncertain hypothesis, put it on media-fueled steroids, demonized anyone who disagreed with them, made it political -so much so that even the scientists got caught up in the good/bad, smart/stupid, Gore/Bush, Left/Right identifiers- and found real power there; they allowed the AGW movement to become the dubious centering pole upholding the giant circus tent of their worldviews.
As such, it is not permitted to be shaken. Shake the centering pole, and everything could come tumbling down: Oh. My. Gawd! If the Gore-doubters were right about this, what else might they be right about? And if they’re all stupid, and I’m smart, but they’re right and I’m wrong . . .
Implosion.
If the true-believers of AGW got this wrong, and they’d attached it to all of their politics, all of their hate, all of their superiority, then everything is in a free-fall.
And this is why the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.
The press, who spent a huge portion of their credibility convincing America that President Bush was a “liar” and a “power-abuser” and an “arrogant chump who made the world (read Chirac and Schroeder) hate us” and then spent the balance of their capital carrying into office a man whose every utterance comes with an expiration date, who seems to have very quickly abused his power and has treated our traditional allies (who were partnering well with the United States from 2004-on) with contempt or disinterest. The press really cannot afford to admit that almost nothing they have said in the past 9 years has escaped ideological or political framing to suit their agenda. Implode, they will.
So the story must not be told, until it can be told from their self-protective angle which is undoubtedly under development as you read this.
posted by Matteo | 11:33 AM
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posted by Matteo | 11:11 AM
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One reason this seemed to me like less of a big deal at first was that the individual e-mails — "hide the decline" and so forth — while damning, also seemed open to interpretation. And I still think that's the case in some instances. But what seems incontrovertible at this point is that the global-warming industry (and it is an industry) is suffused to its core with groupthink and bad faith. For many of us, this is not shocking news. But it is shocking evidence. Proving bad faith and groupthink is very hard to do. But now we have the internal dialog of those afflicted made public (I hope some intrepid reporters are asking other climate institutions whether they are no erasing their files for fear of being similarly exposed). It is clear that the scientists at the CRU were more interested in punishing dissenters and constructing a p.r. campaign than they were in actual science.
This should be considered not merely a scientific scandal but an enormous journalistic scandal. The elite press treats skepticism about global warming as a mental defect. It uses a form of the No True Scotsman fallacy to delegitimize people who dissent from the (manufactured) "consensus." Dissent is scientifically unserious, therefore dissenting scientist A is unserious. There's no way to break in. The moment someone disagrees with the "consensus" they disqualify themselves from criticizing the consensus. That's not how science is supposed to work. Skeptics who've received a tote bag from some oil company are branded as shills, but scientists who live off of climate-change-obsessed foundations or congressional fiefdoms are objective, call-it-like-they-see-it truth seekers. Question these folks and you get a Bill Murrayesque, "Back off, man. We're scientists."
An even larger reason this is a journalistic scandal is that governments want to spend — literally — trillions of dollars on climate change. Industries want to make billions off it. The poor will be hurt. Economies wrenched apart. And journalistic skepticism is almost nowhere to be found. If you know people in the "skeptic community" (for want of a better term) or even just normal, honest scientists, the observation that federal and foundation funding and groupthink is driving, or at least distorting, the climate debate is commonplace. But it's given almost no oxygen in the elite press, because they are in on it.
posted by Matteo | 11:01 AM
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posted by Matteo | 10:47 AM
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posted by Matteo | 10:19 PM
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The reality is that you don't actually need to know very much about science to detect scientific fraud. I would go so far as to argue that non-scientists will tend to be better at noticing scientific fraud than scientists, for what should be the obvious reason that scientists tend to possess a lower level of people skills than the average individual. This means that scientific con men tend to be rather clumsy and obvious compared to the non-scientific variety in in the act and the subsequent excuse-making, and it's only because their fellow scientists are also so clueless about people that they are able to get away with as much as they do.
Of course, if you expect your science BS detector to work, it helps a great deal to not have your sense of identity ensconced in romantic notions of the sanctity of science and the inherently pure intentions of scientists.
posted by Matteo | 1:59 PM
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You see, 'neopaganism' has nothing to do with real paganism and everything to do with antichristianism.
Real pagans celebrated Saturnalia -- if they were Romans or Quviasukvik -- if they are Eskimos. The Germanic tribes had a winter feast day no doubt dedicated to Freyr or Baldr and the Patagonians no doubt have a feast day in honor of Setebos, but only an astronomer would celebrate the solstice because this is an astronomical term devoid of any cultural, ethnic, or religious meaning.
Real pagans were willing to fight for the ashes of their fathers and the altars of their gods, and practiced patriotism as indistinguishable from civic piety.
However, if you are a neopagan (and you joined the coven so that you could both rebel against your parents, find some comfort in a vague 'spirituality' that makes no spiritual demands of you, and continue your various perversions and sins without those nassty Christians condemning you) why, you dare not practice what real pagans practiced, because how could you indulge in pagan ancestor worship if your ancestors are Christian?
posted by Matteo | 12:12 PM
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posted by Matteo | 12:08 PM
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[B]asically Obama’s collapse is broad based and almost complete. He only polls favorably among the youngest adults (18-29), the lowest income levels, the non-religious, and non-white adults. It’s basically a portrait of the hard Left, which is exactly what his agenda represents, and the only political core he’s got. And if he sends more troops to Afghanistan, even some of these numbers may start to fall.
posted by Matteo | 12:06 PM
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But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the "peer review" process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to "rid themselves of this troublesome editor"-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II's knights. Michael Mann replies:
I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in "legitimate peer-reviewed journals." But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not "legitimate."
You can also see from these e-mails the scientists' panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, "It's one thing to lose Climate Research. We can't afford to lose GRL." Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted." That's exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that "The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there."
Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that "All of them know the sorts of things to say...without any prompting."
So it's no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN's IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming.
posted by Matteo | 10:57 AM
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posted by Matteo | 10:44 AM
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The economy is struggling, the unemployment rate is high, and many Americans are struggling to pay the bills, but one class of Americans is doing quite well: government workers. Their pay levels are soaring, they enjoy unmatched benefits, and they remain largely immune from layoffs, except for some overly publicized cutbacks around the margins. To make matters worse, government employees—thanks largely to the power of their unions—have carved out special protections that exempt them from many of the rules that other working Americans must live by. California has been on the cutting edge of this dangerous trend, which has essentially turned government employees into a special class of citizens...
posted by Matteo | 10:31 AM
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Who's Lying About Personal Spending?
Here are your possibilities:
* The BEA is lying. In the third quarter they claim that PCE changed +0.2, +1.4, and -0.6% for July, August and September, respectively, leading to an aggregate change of +1.2%.
* Business that remit sales tax are lying. The overall sales tax collections in the 3rd quarter were down 8.2% from last year's levels, and this is the fourth quarter in a row that year-over-year declines were posted.
One of these two reports is a lie.
One is a count of actual monies remitted by businesses in satisfaction of taxes collected by them from real consumers processing real retail transactions (that's the spending that matters in the real economy, right?)
The other, if you read the BEA methodology papers, has the word estimate peppered liberally throughout.
Which do you believe?
Do you believe that retailers are intentionally under-reporting and under-paying sales taxes?
Or do you believe the BEA's "estimates" are complete horsecrap and that the government is intentionally overstating economic activity?
When you have two radically different claims of measurement of the same activity (in this case consumer spending) that are impossible to reconcile within reasonable "measurement error" the conclusion one is forced to reach is that one of the two reports is false.
posted by Matteo | 10:23 PM
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As Obama’s popularity falls, expect his own partisanship to increase, and the Chicago brass knuckles to be more evident. Obama knows that he can hope and change only until he hits 35-40% approval ratings, and is rendered shouting to half-empty audience halls and a triangulating congress.
Full Steam Ahead
A final prognosis—or why Obama is in deep, deep trouble, since he won’t quit in his dream to transmogrify American into something like Belgium at best and Brazil at worse.
Millions of independents and swing voters went for Obama for five reasons: (1) they believed the media hype that Bush was the “worst” (fill in the blanks); (2) the sudden financial panic of September 2008 and the anger at Wall Street banditry and bail-outs; (3) Obama’s youth, charm, and oratory; (4) the feel-good novelty of voting in our first African-American president; (5) Obama’s centrist campaign message of paying down debt, working with allies, drilling, being tough against Al Qaeda, and being bipartisan.
It’s taken almost 11 months, but voters now know that propositions 1-5 are now refuted or irrelevant:
1) Bush is history. Like Truman, in time he will begin to look better not worse. More importantly, Bush’s sins that bothered voters— too much big government and big deficits—were simply trumped by Obama’s gargantuan deficits and federalization of health care, banking, and the auto industry. “Bush did it” doesn’t work any more. “Obama did it even more” is the new worry.
2) The panic that we would lose all our 401(k’s) and home equity has passed. What we are left with in its wake is a sinking feeling that badgering small business and the Chamber of Commerce, as if they are Goldman Sachs grandees, isn’t working. Raising income, payroll, and surcharge taxes at a time state, local, and sales taxes are surging, is, well, a good way to turn a recession into a depression—or at least a stagflating, weak recovery. Sometime around next March, “Bush’s did it” will transmogrify into Obama’s recession. Obama can’t run against the economy, but must fix it—or take the blame. His best hope is that the Republicans don’t run a demagogic figure such as he himself acted in 2007-8.
3) Obama’s smoothness is getting old. All of us can almost write the next Obama speech: a) “some” say/do, but “I” say/do… The bad straw man is set up, followed by the contrast of the annointed “I” and “me” ad nauseum. b) then comes the apology for the sins of the rest of us—mitigated somewhat by the election of , yes, Barack Obama, the first black President; c) third is the impossible: spending more on health care saves more; cap and trade massive taxes will result in economies; no more lobbyists means gads of them, Bush shredded the Constitution equates into I’m copying his anti-terror protocols; d) an end with hope and change ruffles and flourishes. Bottom line: the oratory is old and trite, given the lack of commensurate accomplishments.
4) On the matter of racial landmarks, some of the voters think, righty or wrongly, that they did their thing, proving America is not racist by the fact of Obama’s election. Now? A lot of independents, however, won’t seem obligated to vote in 2010 or 2012, motivated by the same sense of liberal assuagement of guilt. This been there/done that feeling will be accentuated should Obama’s supporters continue to play the race card as his popularity dips as a result of a statist and neo-socialist agenda.
5) We know now that the campaign was a centrist deception. Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright make logical the presence of the Truther Van Jones and Anita Dunn (cf. her encomium to Mao). His most partisan Senate record presages his near suicidal effort to ram through statist health care, tax hikes, and partisan appointments, in addition to polarizing rhetoric. His campaign promises to meet with Ahmadinejad were not only met, but again trumped by serial apologies, selling out the Poles and Czechs and outreach to Chavez and Castro. In other words, the so-called right-wing nuts who tried to scare the hell out of voters are proving to be Nostradamuses of sorts.
...
I think not merely the thrill is gone, but a righteous anger about an Obama trifecta— of serial apologies and bows abroad, massive borrowing and deficit spending, and government-take overs of private spheres of life—is swelling up in the electorate. I haven’t seen in my lifetime anything quite like it. And this furor of being had has the potential not just to take Obama down, but also his ideology and supporters along with him for a generation.
posted by Matteo | 10:55 AM
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Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:
“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”
But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”
posted by Matteo | 10:43 AM
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STAR TRIBUNE: At U, future teachers may be reeducated.
Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.
In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.
I thought loyalty oaths were out.
posted by Matteo | 10:27 AM
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Kepler resolved the issue by demonstrating that the best fit of the motion was not circles within circles, but rather simple ellipses. He came up with simple but powerful and explanatory laws that described the motion of the planets as a function of their distance from the sun. Newton in turn used this finding to validate his own universal theory of gravitation.
...
About a century ago, another physicist, Albert Einstein, came up with a new theory of gravitation. A key part of it is that Newton’s laws must be adjusted slightly to account for the near presence of large masses. By Einstein’s new theory of general relativity, of which Newton’s earlier theory was simply a special case for velocities much less than that of light and locations not adjacent to very large masses, Mercury’s motion was perfectly explained by its close proximity to the sun.
Over thousands of years, at each step, the response of the scientists was to continually adjust and refine their theories to conform to the data, not the other way around. This is how science is done and how we developed the knowledge that has given us such tremendous and accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs in the past century. It is occasionally reasonable to throw out a bad data point if it is in defiance of an otherwise satisfactory model fit, as long as everyone knows that you’ve done so and the rationale, but a deliberate and unrevealed fudging of results in an attempt to make the real world fit one’s preconceptions is beyond the scientific pale. Journal articles have been thrown out for it; PhD candidates have lost their degrees for it.
But such behavior, along with attempts to cover it up and dishonestly discredit critics, is exactly what was revealed in a leak of emails last Friday from a research facility in eastern England. And it was not the behavior of previously unknown researchers on some arcane topic of little interest to anyone outside their own field. It was the behavior of leading luminaries in perhaps the greatest scientific issue and controversy of our age: Whether or not the planet is warming to a potentially dangerous degree as a result of humanity’s influence. It is a subject on which billions — if not trillions — of dollars worth of future economic growth and costs hinge. It was the basis for the massive “cap and trade” bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in the spring and seems stalled in the Senate.
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It is hard (perhaps impossible) to know the motives of the people who would so betray the basic precepts of science. It is easy to postulate that they have political aims, and there are certainly many “watermelon” environmentalists (green on the outside, “red” on the inside) who see the green movement as a new means to continue to push socialist and big-government agendas, after a momentary setback with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago.
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[W]hat they did was not science, and they should be drummed out of that profession. They can no longer be trusted.
Many in the climate change community have condemned what they call “skeptics,” often to the point of declaring them de facto criminals and assigning them to the same category as Holocaust deniers. They tell us that “the science is settled” and that we should shut up. But every scientist worthy of the name should be a skeptic. Every theory should be subject to challenge on a scientific basis. Every claim of a model’s validity should be accompanied by the complete model and data set that supposedly validated it, so that it can be replicated. That is how science works. It is how it advances. And when the science is supposedly “settled” and they refuse to do so, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why.
Well, now we know.
In fact, when scientists become politicians but continue to pretend to be doing science, that is the real crime. The theory being promoted by these men was being used to justify government actions that would result in greatly diminished future economic growth of the most powerful economy on earth (and the rest of the world as well). It would make it more difficult and less affordable to address any real problems that might be caused in the future by a change in climate, whether due to human activity or other causes. It could impoverish millions in the future, with little actual change in adverse climate effects. And when such a theory has the potential to do so much unjustified harm, and it has a fraudulent basis, who are the real criminals against humanity?
posted by Matteo | 10:15 AM
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posted by Matteo | 10:01 AM
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