Christopher Monckton Speaking in St. Paul

LA Times Changes Its Mind: Science Doesn’t Matter On Climate Bill

Published on NewsBusters.org

By Candance Moore

Created 2009-11-22 19:18

That thumping sound you hear is the Los Angeles Times moving the goal posts in the global warming debate.

On November 22, while responding to the growing scandal [0] about alleged proof that global warming is a hoax, the Times brushed it off with a puzzling claim that science should have no bearing on climate legislation.

What a difference a few leaked e-mail messages could make: just over a month ago, the exact same paper had insisted science was behind the push for regulation. Now with the validity of that science in doubt, the Times was quick to find a different angle.

In an article [1] titled “A Climate Change Dust-up,” writers Jim Tankersley and Henry Chu began with reassurance that the scandal was nothing to fear because the hacked e-mail messages would not make a difference either way:

Is it a “Warmist Conspiracy,” or a case of an email being “taken completely out of context”?

Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

The whole point of the meeting in Copenhagen has been to limit pollution that supposedly destroys the planet based on evidence gathered and purported by researchers specifically involved in the email scandal. If the very premise of global warming has possibly been exposed as a fraud, why would that not be of interest to those who want to legislate global warming?

Because, according to the Times, the fight to stop possibly nonexistent global warming would be about saving the economy:

But advocates of action to curb global warming dismiss those claims, and political leaders and analysts say the Senate bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions will sink or swim based on economics, not science.

“The scientists are going to fight about this for decades,” said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of several Senate Republicans who say they are open to some form of a climate bill. “We should be doing something to curb our emissions that would not harm the economy, and would in fact boost the economy,” he said.

So the Times believed in doing something about emissions whether or not we knew that they were harmful. It was suddenly okay for the science to remain unsettled, and in fact, the Senate was encouraged to limit greenhouse gases even if science was unable to prove a connection between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.

But if the entire logic of this effort to save the economy was based on the hope that green jobs would put Americans to work, someone should have told the Times that President Obama has already been funding green jobs [2] without a climate bill.

Equally preposterous, nowhere did the article explain exactly how limiting a company’s carbon dioxide output would cause it to expand payrolls.

Not to worry, for according to global warming activists it would all work with or without the data to back it up.

Most amazingly of all, though, was an explanation about the data offered by Phil Jones, one of the scientists involved in the email scandal. When asked about his use of the word “trick” when presenting data, Jones told the Times it was just clever wording:

In the 1999 e-mail, Jones wrote of using a “trick” to hide an apparent decline in recent global temperatures on a chart being prepared for use by a meteorological organization. But in a statement posted on the university’s website Saturday, Jones said that the e-mail had been “taken completely out of context” and that there had been no misrepresentation of the data.

“The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” Jones said.

The hard-hitting journalism force at the Times failed to ask how a trick was taken to mean anything other than a trick. What possible “colloquial” use of the word could have implied a trick that was not really a trick?

Thanks to the Times, Jones got away without having to expound.

This whole notion of scientific tricks being irrelevant to a major debate about international climate legislation represented a major change in thinking at the Times. It was just six weeks ago the paper criticized [3] Bush for hiding scientific data that could be used to sway the debate over legislation.

Back then, science had everything to do with it:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday released a long-suppressed report by George W. Bush administration officials who had concluded — based on science — that the government should begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions because global warming posed serious risks to the country.

The report, known as an “endangerment finding,” was done in 2007. The Bush White House refused to make it public because it opposed new government efforts to regulate the gases most scientists see as the major cause of global warming.

When scientific findings were there to warn that global warming would kill the planet, the Times was quick to support it; when science was later found to be riddled with tricks that tainted its credibility, climate legislation was suddenly all about fixing the economy.

This is one more example in the long list of ways the liberal media has played fast and loose with the global warming agenda.

Even when faced with plausible evidence the whole thing might be a fraud, global warming believers simply found a way to assert that evidence was not necessary.

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Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/candance-moore/2009/11/22/la-times-changes-its-mind-science-doesnt-matter-climate-bill

Links:
[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-climate-hacker22-2009nov22,0,913036.story
[2] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/18/BUU81AMKET.DTL&type=business
[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/14/nation/na-epa-climate14

All the president’s ClimateGate deniers

Original Link

By Michelle Malkin  •  December 2, 2009 09:54 AM

Graph via Steve McIntyre

My syndicated column today looks at the global warming cultists in the Obama administration who are working overtime to paper over the ClimateGate scandal. Yesterday, Phil Jones, the head of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia stepped aside while the university investigates. Penn State prof Michael Mann, purveyor of the infamous hockey stick graph of spiking global temperatures peddled by Al Gore, is also under investigation. GOP Sen. James Inhofe, vigilant watchdog over global warming shenanigans, wants Babs Boxer to investigate. As Obama heads to Copenhagen to crusade for massive interventions to stop global warming, a new Harris Poll shows a significant shift in public opinion away from the cult of climate change. Jonah Goldberg dissects the groupthink that has gripped the global warming industry and its media enablers. Ed Driscoll takes you on a tour through global warming evolution in six and a half minutes. Well now: “Moderate” (liberal) GOP candidates/lawmakers led by GOP cap-and-tax 8′er Mark Kirk are running as fast as they can from the global warming hot mess.

Hide the decline, hide the decline…

Oh, and just a reminder:

Former Vice President Al Gore had four White House meetings in April. The records suggest these were not social calls for Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to curb global warming. Two of the meetings were with John Holdren, Obama’s top science and technology adviser.

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All the president’s ClimateGate deniers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

“The science is settled,” we’ve been told for decades by zealous proponents of man-made global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world’s leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won’t be surprised by the Obama administration’s response to ClimateGate.

With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled.

Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation, and cult-like cover-ups to “hide the decline” in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. The science is settled.

Never mind what The Atlantic’s Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science email files of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, called the overpowering “stink of intellectual corruption” — combined with mafia-like suppression of dissent, suppression of evidence and methods, and “plain statistical incompetence” exposed by the document trove. The science is settled.

Never mind the expedient disappearance of mounds of raw weather station data that dissenting scientists were seeking through freedom of information requests from the Climatic Research Unit. The science is settled.

In March, President Obama made a grandiose show of putting “science” above “politics” when lifting the ban on government-funded human embryonic stem cell research. “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry,” he said during the signing ceremony. “It’s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Yet, the pro-sound science president has surrounded himself with radical ClimateGate deniers who have spent their entire professional careers “settling” man-made global warming disaster science through fear-mongering, intimidation, and ridicule of opponents.

*Science czar John Holdren, who will testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing on ClimateGate, infamously hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich. He made a public bet against free-market economist Julian Simon predicting dire shortages of five natural resources as a result of feared overconsumption. He lost on all counts. No matter.

Holdren’s failure didn’t stop him from writing forcefully about mass sterilization and forced abortion “solutions” to a fizzling, sizzling, overpopulated planet. And it didn’t stop him from making a living making more dire predictions. In 1986, Ehrlich credited Holdren with forecasting that “carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.” He went on to Harvard and the White House. On the David Letterman show earlier this year, Holdren fretted that his son “might not see snow!”

Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball notes that Holdren turned up in the ClimateGate files belittling the work of astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division. Holdren put “Harvard” in sneer quotes when mocking a research paper Baliunas and Soon published in 2003 showing that “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” First, deny. Next, deride.

*Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked derision as his weapon earlier this year when peddling the Obama administration’s greenhouse-gas emission policy. “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Chu. He dismissed dissent by asserting “there’s very little debate” about the impact of “green energy” policy on the economy.

There’s “very little debate,” of course, because dissenters get crushed.

*The Obama team’s chief eco-dissent-crusher is climate czar Carol Browner.

As I’ve reported and reminded over the years, she oversaw the destruction of Environmental Protection Agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records during the Clinton years.

Over the past year, the EPA has stifled the dissent of Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, who questioned the administration’s reliance on outdated research on the health effects of greenhouse gases – and also sought to yank a YouTube video created by EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams that is critical of cap-and-trade. Browner reportedly threatened auto execs in July by telling them to “put nothing in writing…ever” about their negotiations with her.

And she is now leading the “science is settled” stonewalling in the wake of ClimateGate. “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists,” she said. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.” Book-cookers are good at making it seem so.

In any case, last year, more than 31,000 scientists — – including 9,021 PhDs — signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.

But hey, who’s counting? The science is settled.

***

Australia rejects a massive cap-and-tax bill.

Richard Lindzen: No, the science isn’t settled.

Paul Driessen: Time to cancel Copenhagen.

Ron Bailey on the scientific tragedy of ClimateGate:

How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate the activities of researcher Michael Mann who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed. In Britain, Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has called for an independent investigation of the CRU. Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared, “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow…. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.”

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Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.