climategate

It particularly irritates me when people make strident claims and then, when the claims are found to be untrue, someone says "Oh well, maybe a few people said that, but not any of us level-headed chaps." In other words, they get the mileage from the absurd claim, but when the claim is caught out, it is downplayed and disowned.

Which brings me to this 2006 article (index.php/ archives/ 2006/ 03/ bush-on-the-debate) from realclimate dot org, the website that proclaims itself "climate science from climate scientists." The site seems to be funded out of the taxes of those of you in America, so it must be reliable (wink wink):

"...warming yes, but is it caused by humans? This position is equally out of step with science, where the debate over this question has also now been settled."

"Nature", which imagines itself to be the international weekly journal of science, published an absurd piece trying to make out that the bullies in the global warming scare movement are in fact a naive group of timid waifs being rolled over by a powerful movement that dominates the media. Try telling that to David Bellamy, one of the best and most popular media biologists, banned from TV for his disbelief in anthropogenic global warming!

There's a really good deconstruction of Nature's cowardly piece over here on Talking About the Weather, but a few additional remarks are in order. To give you the flavour of the thing, here's a sample of the Nature article:

In my last post I took apart the frivolous claim by scientists at the Hadley Centre, the University of Edinburgh, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, that global warming was increasing the salinity of the oceans. They claimed, remember, that they had 'studied' 100 scientific papers:

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate.

Apparently they forgot to 'study' this one by NASA's Earth Observatory: 

Researchers Link Ice Age Climate Change Records to Ocean Salinity

October 4, 2006

Sudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean, according to research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.

The Australian gives us this precious piece, reprinted from The Times:

Man-made climate change evidence stronger: study

EVIDENCE that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

I'll get to the bit that shows this "study" for what it really is in just a mo', but in passing, I note that real scientific work doesn't have an agenda, it attempts to find the truth. Yes, scientists do set up "devil's advocate" experiments in which they attempt to disprove theories, but the purpose is to test the strength of the theory: if it passes, it gains credibility. Or, of course, if it fails, it is disconfirmed. But one shouldn't set up 'studies' whose goal and methodology is designed to confirm what you already claim; science is tested by passing hard tests, not by being confirmed in 'studies' designed to be helpful. Moving on...

The "fingerprints" of human influence on the climate can be detected not just in rising temperatures but in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000sq km a decade.

Now let's just stop and think for a moment about this, and let's overlook the detail that Arctic sea ice has risen every year since 2007, because I just can't get my eyes off that "saltiness of the oceans" bit. For all intents and purposes the amount of water on Earth is constant. Yes, meteorites may deliver some, and some may be broken up by radiation in the atmosphere, some hydrogen atoms escape the Earth's gravity, and so on. But compared with the total quantity of water, these changes are, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years, minuscule. So much for two countries' erstwhile best newspapers.

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.

What's up with Google? The company motto is "Don't be evil". I would have thought that, for an information collecting and analysing company, that would include not putting your own spin on things based on your own political or other opinions. Just give all queries an un-spun answer regardless of whether people query "tiptoe tulips" or "torture babies". And yes, the latter can be asked by good people - for example those trying to document the harm done during partial birth abortions.

But Google has mistaken information collection with advocacy. See the shameless plug for Al Gore at http://www.google.com/landing/cop15. But now I am wondering whether the search results themselves are being distorted. What's going on with ClimateGate? For weeks Google has been persistently refusing to display "ClimateGate" as a suggested search term. (I notice it has turned up this morning, suspiciously late for a word with multiple millions of hits.)

But the number of hits brings us to our second problem: the disappearing Climategate links. When I first became aware of the term, I Googled it. I got around 10 million hits. Over the next few weeks the hits increased to around 40 million. Then last night, down to ten million again?

While the ideologues and ethics-free financiers gather in Copenhagen to set up an unelected socialist world government (suits the former) that runs a scam "market" in an invisible and unaccountable "product" - carbon offsets (certainly suits the latter, who will find lots of opportunities there for mtaking money -ours!), we repeatedly hear the allegation that the "deniers" (meaning the ones who say the climate always changes and always will) are well financed by "Big Coal" whilst the ones who believe in "climate change" (i.e. who assert the climate was magically constant for two thousand years) are strapped for cash and always fighting against overwhelming odds.

Yes, the odds are overwhelming in one sense, because the "deniers" - meaning the realists - have truth on their side, whilst the "good guys" - meaning the ones trying to starve the planet of CO2 plant food and thereby send a billion people into starvation - don't.

But as for money, no, sorry. "Big Coal" finances the alarmists, not the realists. Here is part of a press release from Australian "Big Coal" (The Australian Coal Association):

So 56 newspapers are putting up a common editorial pushing the climate hoax. Are these editors: (1) too lazy to investigate the facts for themselves, and/or (2) too incompetent to do so and see the dripping evidence of fraud and political and financial manipulation cloying to this issue like thick red mud, and/or (3) one of the hoaxsters, who knows that the truth is that reducing CO2 emissions will cost lives in reduced food production as well as put endangered species in peril as their wild areas are converted to foodmaking by famished human beings? In other words, are they lazy, stupid, or evil? There is one other possibility, which I'll get to at the end, so without further ado, here is the entirety of their nonsense, with a few comments from me to the 56 editors.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.

Newsflash: Truth is not decided by majority rule, nor by authority.

We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Yes. The proposed Copenhagen treaty establishes an unelected, socialist government in all but name, with the power to tax every transaction in the western democracies. It will reduce the output of carbon dioxide plantfood, thereby starving humans and animals. This treaty must be defeated. From Lord Monckton's speech about the treaty:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

"How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything."

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

A generation ago the lamestream media were telling us that there would be an ice age. Actually that was closer to the truth than your current alarmism, but in neither case was the lamestream opinion based on sound science. The Arctic icecap is actually freezing rapidly as we head into the northern winter, but taking the above misleading remark as a reference to the yearly meltback, the Arctic icecap is almost all the way back to the mean, having increased dramatically for each of the past two years [and notice, readers, how the Antarctic, doing well, is neatly forgotten]. So in what sense is it "melting"? It isn't melting right now, it is freezing. It isn't melting compared to last year, it is growing: 2008 was 10.6% more than 2007, and 2009 was 23.4% more than 2007. Editors, your statement is a lie pure and simple. Nextly, inflamed food prices can be directly traced to conversion of food crops to biofuel. What do you fools editors think will happen when you take a great chunk of the world's food off the food market? And we now know, thanks to climategate, that the insiders have been 'fixing' the peer-reviewed literature, thus making the record found in 'scientific' journals worthless from the point of view of a lay person simply looking for something to trust. It cannot be trusted, period!

Lord Christopher Monckton has come out with a condensed summary of some of the evidence in the ClimateGate papers.

Some highlights:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

Many are wondering why the mainstream media are so slow off the mark reporting the revelations of sleaze and obvious criminality now emerging about the climate scare ringleaders. I can tell you a few reasons. Just think about it. The wealthy capitalists who run the media will be perfectly positioned to become key players in the Carbon Plantfood Reduction Schemes, trading nothing, and making no real difference to global warming (which would be a good thing anyway), but starving the atmosphere of plant food and thereby starving the poor - but the capitalists, who just love a corruptible market, will be perfectly positioned to skim their percentage off the top and become even wealthier than they are. The rest of us, meanwhile, see our fuel and electricity costs go through the roof and watch our standard of living plummet.