Dr Phil Jones and supreme Spanish honorary irony

Oh the irony of it.  A regular reader in Norfolk kindly submitted this scan of a piece in the Norwich Evening News about University of East Anglia’s Dr Phil Jones dating back to last week (sorry for my delay in spotting the email).

So Dr Jones is ‘delighted’ at this recognition from such a ‘prestigious institution’.  Well, it’s great news that Dr Jones is feeling so much better than he was in 2010, when he told journalists he had considered suicide after the Climategate emails were released into the public domain.

But in giving Jones this honour, the faculty at Rovira i Virgili University now have some serious question marks hanging over them concerning their judgement when it comes to matters scientific.  It must have been a huge leap of faith to give Jones an honorary doctorate to recognise his work to ‘document global warming’ when Jones is noteworthy for having ‘lost’ the weather data he… erm… documented.  Either that or the academics at Virgili are paid up climate alarmists just doing their bit for the ’cause’ which sees the alarmist community giving each other feel good awards.

Also noteworthy is the Norwich Evening News’ determination to shill for UEA by repeating the demonstrably false assertion that Jones was cleared of hiding or manipulating data to back up his science.  The scope of the MPs ‘investigation’ was so limited and examination of the facts so cursory it would have been impossible to make any such declaration.

These people are seriously beyond parody.

Dr Michael E Mann – hoist by his own petard

Dr Michael E Mann is the high professor of rabid climate alarmism, a co-creator of the Hockey Stick with a dogged determination to hide data and emails, and a master of the delete button on Facebook and Twitter if anyone has the temerity to question him or critique his claims.

But today Dr Michael Mann stands humiliated, exposed as a liar at worst, or self aggrandising fantasist at best.  He has been hoist by his own petard, constructed on a foundation of arrogance, ignorance and self delusion.

As readers of ‘Watts Up With That’ will know, Dr Mann – a Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University – has filed a defamation law suit against National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with named writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.

In setting out his case Mann has desperately tried to appeal to that old chestnut ‘prestige’. He wants people to see him as so grand and prestigious that his work must be considered to be beyond criticism. For people like Mann, what could confer more prestige than the claim that he has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with other members of the International Panel on Climate Change? Mann used his Facebook page to announce the law suit in which he included this claim:

‘Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.’

He even proudly displays a citation from the IPCC in his office window for all to see, only the citation makes clear he was not awarded the Nobel prize, rather he only contributed towards its award. Even that is a spurious claim, created by the IPCC without any grounds from the Nobel Institute for doing so.  But now it has got even better.  Mann’s claim to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has been rejected by Geir Lundestad, Director, Professor, of The Norwegian Nobel Institute, who has made it clear Mann is not a Nobel Laureate, by emailing Tom Richard the following information:

1) Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
2) He did not receive any personal certificate. He has taken the diploma awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and to Al Gore) and made his own text underneath this authentic-looking diploma.
3) The text underneath the diploma is entirely his own. We issued only the diploma to the IPCC as such. No individuals on the IPCC side received anything in 2007.

Mark Steyn had already been mocking Mann for his claim, but having this clear statement from the Nobel Institute has nailed Mann for what he is.  He is clearly incapable to dealing with evidence and facts right that sit right under his own nose, or on his office door.  One wonders what Mann’s highly paid lawyers now think of being the counsel for a man who is so cavalier with the truth and seemingly has only a passing acquaintance with reality.  You can read all the instalments of this story over on Watts Up With That.

Irrespective of what happens in the legal action, the question raised here is one of personal and professional integrity. If Michael Mann is capable of fraudulently conferring upon himself awards in this way and providing false information in a claim to a court, what is he capable of when it comes to scientific research, data and findings? Can he ever be trusted or considered a reputable scientist?  Mann it seems has just outed himself as a Walter Mitty character in a science department office at Penn State.

Perhaps this is why Mann is doing everything in his power to prevent data and emails, that have been collected and created at the expense of the taxpayer in the US, from being released into the public domain.  Many people may very well think that. Of course, one couldn’t possibly comment.

No stigma

Over on Watts Up With That? is an interesting post about yet another attempt by a ‘psychoanalyst’ to portray man-made climate change sceptics (aka ‘deniers’ as the alarmists like to describe them) as in some way psychologically impaired.

It seems to be the likes of Dr Robert D. Stolorow are rushing to fill a gap in the puzzlement of the alarmists that a significant number of people are still refusing to suspend reality and join the true believers in accepting a hypothesis supported by questionable data as a factual reality.  His opinion piece in Psychology Today is lightweight at best and probably more deserving of a slot in Pseuds Corner:

On October 5, 2012, on the front page of the Huffington Post, appeared a terrifying image of melting arctic ice, accompanied by the chilling headline, “Arctic Ice Melt and Sea Level Rise May Be ‘Decades Ahead Of Schedule’”. Why have the majority of Americans and American politicians been largely oblivious to this extreme threat?

Perhaps it has something to do with many people preferring to see hard evidence of what is claimed, or having the awareness to grasp that dire warnings years ago of what would have happened by now have simply failed to materialise. Perhaps they are unconvinced by scientists who fight tooth and nail to conceal discussions and information about their research from a public forced to fund them.  Or perhaps they smell a rat when they see those same scientists challenged on the science and responding with personal slights and a refusal to address the questions raised.

Regardless, Stolorow’s ramblings are yet another example of true believers, who cannot win an argument due to the lack of evidence and reason, attempting to sigmatise dissenters with spurious ‘science’ and ‘analysis’.  The aim is to make dissenters question themselves in an effort to make them conform to pack mentality in case they are considered to be outside the mainstream.  It’s a form of psychological blackmail that seeks to erode inquiry, free thinking and opposite viewpoints.  It’s a form of control.  And the WUWT post points to other times in history when this approach formed an effort to unsettle those who held an opposing view to the ‘consensus’:

Its just more Political Abuse of Psychiatry, such as was practiced in the Soviet Union:

In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals known as “psikhushkas” were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. This method was also employed against religious prisoners and most especially against well-educated former atheists who adopted a religion. In such cases their religious faith was determined to be a form of mental illness that needed to be cured. Formerly highly classified extant documents from “Special file” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union demonstrate that the authorities of the country quite consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.

As Anthony Watts asks:  Sound familiar when looking at what is being written about climate skeptics today?  Too right.  But sceptics should take heart from this.  It demonstrates the true believers are rattled.  They are struggling, worried that their claims are being so easily challenged and increasingly dismissed.  Not having a solid scientific argument to deploy they are resorting to playing the man instead of the ball.

If namecalling and attempts to make people feel like an odd-one-out is all they have as a strategy to make people accept their supposedly scientific claims then they are losing the battle.  You see this all the time in politics – and that underlines that at the heart of all this climate change hysteria is a political objective.

Shock! Climate change laws survive ‘red tape cull’

Imagine our shock!

The Barclay Brother Beano reports that 53 environmental regulations relating to pollution, contamination and waste are being scrapped to save money, however the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey has said that the Climate Change Act is an ‘example of essential legislation’ and all its supporting regulations must remain unchanged.

Of course it must!

After all, it is a money making machine for corporations at the expense of consumers and taxpayers who are forced part with cash unnecessarily by the State  – and it is used as justification by the political and bureaucratic elite for the globalisation of government and erosion of that inconvenient and troublesome process known as democracy.  Nothing can be allowed to derail the agenda.  If every environmental law and regulation bar one was scrapped the lone survivor would be the Climate Change Act.

If this latest piece of evidence doesn’t prove the fact the political class and corporations couldn’t care less about the environment and that the climate change bandwagon is just a means to their ulterior ends, nothing will.  Climate change alarmism has nothing to do with the environment and it has nothing to do with science.  It’s about money and control.  End of.

And despite this smash and grab raid on our pockets, our democracy and our individual freedoms, the vast majority of the population continue to drift through life in a sleepwalk, leaving the politicians and corporations to empower and enrich themselves.  By doing nothing we will deserve what we get.

Yet they say sustainability is progressive

Germany’s Spiegel has an excellent article today concerning that country’s green fetish and how eco zealotry is causing adverse consequences for the population.  The introduction sets the tone and what follows is a realtively brief, but eminently sensible examination of just some of the effects of the authoritarian brainwashing, to which history shows Germans seem incredibly susceptible:

The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany’s efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that’s unlikely to change.

Perhaps it is worth highlighting that having been coerced into the costly adoption of ‘sustainable’ behaviour, the detrimental effects on the population require even more costly solutions for which the population will be forced to foot the bill.  Problems that industrialisation and the development of technology helped us to resolve and avoid are now coming for the fore as the sustainability bandwagon reverses progress made that brought real benefit to ordinary people.

Many corporations are getting very rich from their transit on the sustainability money train, aided and abetted by politicians who seek to out-do each other in the virtue stakes.  Yet too many people still believe all this manipulation of the markets, astronomic public spending and erosion of personal freedoms is being done to fight climate change – thus wilfully ignoring the stated aims and real objectives of unelected and unaccountable transnational bodies who are awarding themselves ever more power to control us and our lives.

If that sounds far fetched, see how the evidence is casually drip-fed into the public discourse by journalists who far from being impartial reporters of the facts are committed activists using blatant propaganda and bias by omission to push the party line.

Britain has not yet ventured as far down the greenwash path as the Germans.  It’s just as well because the Spiegel article, while only touching on some of the results of this eco fetishism, gives us a glimpse into what the future holds for us if the coalition’s climate change agenda is carried out.  This green extremism will plunge us into a nightmare.

The greens and the opportunist, self interested, authoritarian politicians and corporate officers all say what we are being forced to do is progressive.  After reading the Spiegel piece only the most deluded person would argue the realisation of the green agenda is anything other than regressive.  These watermelons are not just killing the planet, their insanity is killing people too.

Kiribati sea level story – Dr Nils-Axel Mörner responds exclusively

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph carried yet another climate alarmism story, this time about the government of Kiribati negotiating to buy land in Fiji ‘so it can relocate islanders under threat from rising sea levels’.

Autonomous Mind contacted the former president of the International Association of Quaternary Research’s Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Dr Nils-Axel Mörner to ask for his response to the story.  Dr Mörner has very kindly replied with an exclusive comment, below:

With respect to the article on March 7 by Paul Chapman on the future of Kiribati, I have to protest and urge all readers to consult the only “hard facts” there are, viz. the tide gauge record of the changes in sea level.

The graph reveals that there, in fact, is no ongoing sea level rise that threatens the habitation of the islands. This is the hard observational fact, which we should all face before starting to talk about future flooding and the need for evacuation.

If the president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, claims that the islands will soon be flooded and that there is an urgent need to buy new land for possible future refugees, it is the president’s own tactical idea in order to raise money from abroad. Let us respect the observational facts and stay away from invented disasters.

Once again the media rushes to print with an alarmist piece that is completely devoid of balance or contrary opinion and which completely ignores the overtly political motivations and background of what has been shared with the press.  The dramatisation of Earth’s ever changing climate for ulterior political motives needs to be challenged.

How long will it be also before people start to hold the media to account for acting as the propagandist mouthpiece of government and vested interests?

Climate alarmism money train attracts rent seeking sockpuppet

There is an amusing tale on the Watts Up With That? blog, also covered by Bishop Hill, concerning an ‘organisation’ calling itself The Arctic Institute.

The story is about an individual called Malte Humpert (readers of Viz magazine may immediately be thinking ‘crazy name, crazy guy’) who is the founder of this august body, but has been posting comments on WUWT using at least three different names – none of which are his own. The story is explained on WUWT, providing essential background for the follow up information that Anthony Watts has added with this comment.

While this tale provides readers with some entertainment and again reinforces the shameless unethical behaviour of those like Malte Humpert who are promoting climate alarmism, neither Anthony nor the Bishop nail the real story here, which would add more value to the taxpaying public.

The institute was set up last year and its website has an About Us page which outlines its objectives and key drivers. You will notice my emphasis in red which has particular relevance following some recent posts here on AM:

Malte Humpert contacted WordPress to demand that this post be removed or the content quoted here be removed, along with the screenshot of his page. Presumably Google will also be asked to remove their screenshot and the content Humpert wants removed from view here, because that is where I obtained it when it was removed from his site.

Yes, there it is again! The catch-all justification for imposing an anti democratic, internationalist system of centralised government on the world… sustainability – coupled with a nice dollop of alarmist scaremongering. When the day dawns that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change alarmism (CAGW) is confounded by Mother Nature, Humpert and his ilk will simply focus on some other sustainable development issue. But that is not the story here.

The story is how and why a vehicle such as The Arctic Institute can be created by someone like Malte Humpert. Set aside for a moment the fact Humpert claims to have been its Executive Director since November 2010, despite the Institute’s About Us page stating it was founded in 2011. His biography and work experience demonstrate absolutely no qualification for being the director of an institute focusing on scholarly research.

Image removed by request of WordPress after a demand by the very shy rent-seeker Malte Humpert. Google however continues to provide a screenshot of the page without threats of being closed down.

What his biography does show, however, is someone with a passion for political science and a self professed head for commercial ventures. Humpert would appear to be another member of the legion of politicised rent seekers jumping aboard the taxpayer funded money train to enrich themselves at our expense. The money train is creating opportunities for people like Malte Humpert.

Clearly being a teaching assistant wasn’t satisfying enough for our Malte, so he hit upon a way to make money from his apartment without producing anything tangible for the economy. Five months spent as a Climate and Energy Policy intern seem to be his only exposure to the ’cause’; but as the director of an institute created to spread the alarmist gospel he can be assured of attracting funding and being accorded ‘prestige’ by those whose interests he will serve.

This is the nature of so much of the CAGW community. It is amazing how powerful the incentive is to jump on a bandwagon when there are billions of dollars, euros and pounds of our money out there just waiting to be hoovered up by chancers like Humpert – and you don’t even need to have any form of scientific background or experience, as Rajendra Pachauri of the International Panel on Climate Change demonstrates. This is being facilitated by the politicians and despite claims we live in a democracy we have no way of stopping this scandalous waste. That is the real story here.

Having has his head put in the spotlight by Anthony Watts, it will be interesting to see what sources of funding find their way to The Arctic Institute. No doubt, with their commitment to transparency and openness, people like Dr Peter Gleick, Andy Revkin, Leo Hickman, Suzanne Goldenberg etc. will demand to know the sources of Humpert’s future funding. If not, they will surely be content with any ‘leak’ of documentation obtained via impersonation and deceit. It’s the way of things among the true believers.

Note to WordPress – do not mark this post ‘private’ again. You do not have any justification to censor this.

The tactics of the globalist warmists are legion

In the comments to my previous post about the article on melting Arctic sea ice causing colder winters, by Richard ‘Black is White’ of the BBC, is this response from fellow blogger, Dephius, who writes:

AM, if you haven’t noticed it, I sense a paradigm shift in the trend of the BBC’s output. Its not so long ago that a report like this would have rammed the AGW message home loud and clear with several references to it.

Instead we have just one paragraph related to how man made CO2 might skew the natural pattern of global climate cycles.

When natural cycles and the effects of the Sun on global climate are given more emphasis than warmist dogma, I just wonder if we’re seeing the tide finally turning.

I’ve seen more emphasis given to Chinese (no friends of the AGW cult) climate research now too, which is interesting.

And then on another post prior to that, where I invited readers to forget the climate science feeding frenzy and focus instead on the real issue of the globalisation of government, which is using climate change as a justification for its development, commenter Karl Hallowell, contributes these thoughts:

I have to disagree. Not that there are ideologies that move to overthrow the current democratic order, but rather the claim that the strategy for dealing with them are flawed. Coming up with a policy attack -based vehicle for ideological purposes is not a trivial task. It’s not like guessing passwords or trying different keys in a lock. Each attempt takes a great deal of effort, communication, and coordination. And exposes the participants to risk of humiliation, disfranchisement, and even criminal charges, if they go too far.

Dealing with the attacks rather than the ideology has three strengths. First, it builds up a body of policy for when a valid weakness is found. Ultimately, having an established, democratic plan for dealing with valid environmental or societal problems will do more to cut off these attacks than fighting the ideology directly. Democracy by itself has done much to weaken the power of these ideologies, precisely because it provides conduits for debate and action that ideologues can’t bypass.

Second, they lose something every time they fail. The more they cry “wolf” the more they discredit themselves in future assaults. They don’t have infinite resources at their disposal.

Finally, it means that the strategy remains effective, even if the ideology mutates or is replaced. It works as well against would-be theocrats (of any flavor), Marxists, or any new ideologies that haven’t yet had a chance to rear their nasty, little heads.

Both are very good comments and worthy contributions to the debate.  As I was about to write a post replying to these points I spotted a great blog post on Biased BBC by the ever excellent Robin Horbury.  It addresses both points at once.

Firstly is demonstrates the shift in approach by the BBC, explaining the point raised by Delphius.  As, for example, the comments section on Richard Black’s activist page are increasingly pock-marked with spaces where comments have been removed and comments that are allowed to remain that nevertheless pull Black’s warmist position and bias to pieces, the angle of the warmist attack has changed.

It seems the BBC is slowly giving up pushing such an alarmist narrative because it is increasingly rejected and derided by readers those who stop to think about the reality of the situation and provide counter evidence.  Why waste time trying to convert people who refuse to accept the party line?  Far better to seek the adoration of and nodding agreement of those who believe the alarmist argument on climate and stand to benefit financially from the UN mandated wealth redistribution programme under the guise of fighting climate change.

On to Karl Hallowell’s comment, the Biased BBC post shows that going toe-to-toe over the scientific arguments being used by the globalist warmists only serves to drive them down another avenue, while maintaining their direction of travel.  The opportunity to engage and challenge the science is being removed from the sceptics while the globalist agenda is furthered in a different way.

Ultimately our money and resources are still going where the UN wants it to, and we will still pick up the tab for the alarmists’ policies as we are forced to pay for wind turbines that don’t work and CO2 emission measures that make no difference to the environment.  Surely that demonstrates that focusing on holding the line in one theatre of battle is futile as the enemy troops elsewhere isolate you from the rest of the war.

Their tactics are legion.  Until we stop tackling the climate science symptom exclusively and go after the political root cause of this agenda, we will be swamped and lose the war.

Winters are colder because it’s getting warmer

And so the game goes on.  The useful idiots (and hard core activists) of the cult of sustainability continue to create new arguments at public expense to justify a political ‘solution’.

The subtle and blatant distortion of the facts in the article aren’t important, but they will keep opponents of the anti-science global warmists occupied for days or even months. And while they might win another battle against the warmist using proper scientific method, they are unwittingly still losing the war because behind the scenes the real agenda continues its advance.

This claim from Richard ‘Black is White’ is faithfully carried in support of the ’cause’ yet if it is ever falsified by other scientists the new research will be ignored, omitted from the record, buried – instead a new claim requiring the same political solution will rise to take its place in the narrative and the incessant march towards global government on the basis of controlling spending to fix a problem that isn’t really a problem, will continue.

Forget climate change, we must focus on the real issue

Over at Bishop Hill there is a post titled A Study in Groupthink that looks at an exchange of Twitter comments between Maurizio Morabito (@Omnologos) and Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ), the blogs editor at Scientific American.

The author of the Bishop Hill blog, Andrew Montford, explains in his post that Zivkovic is clearly very much out of the same mould as Peter Gleick, which I take to mean an unswerving true believer, a rigid in his views who sees anyone dissenting from what he chooses to believe in and argue for as ultimately evil or corrupted by vested interests.  Montford’s take is that Zivkovic perhaps views his cause as beleaguered by wicked big business, and opines that reading Zivkovic’s tweets it’s a fascinating study in groupthink.

Strictly speaking, when looking at the cabal of proponents of man-made global warming theory (AGW) and the band of sceptics lined up against them, you can see they are all in fact caught up in a groupthink.  Because both sides act as if the issue at hand is about whether mankind really is causing the planet to warm significantly and therefore endangering the earth.  Which is why I left the following comment on the blog:

Ultimately it is all meaningless. While people like Zivkovic, Gleick, Mann, Trenberth, Briffa, Jones etc try to make this into a scientific argument, because they are funded to churn out hypotheses about the climate and the ecosystem, it is nothing of the sort. It is all about politics.

Sceptics, and scientists who dissent from the ‘consensus’, could falsify, debunk and disprove every element of the AGW narrative and see off every member of the ‘team’ and make a laughing stock of the ’cause’, but we will still come under assault.  For this is all about politics and ideology, even if the prominent actors don’t realise it.

Ultimately if it is not climate change it will be some other vehicle connected to ‘sustainability’ that will be used as a means of controlling the population and redistributing wealth from the industrialised world to the developing world in a way that enriches the corporates.

From the United Nations down, every tier of governance has been tasked with executing the ‘progressive’ agenda, which in reality is regressive for all of us.  It’s not some crackpot conspiracy, it’s just the way those with power and wealth are steering the ship.

This direction of travel will not be defeated by butting heads with a small band of AGW blowhards who are lavishly funded to continue producing ‘findings’ and ‘projections’ that fit in with the actions needed to further the overarching agenda.  Until people start to tackle the root cause of the disease instead of the symptoms, we will continue to go round in circles playing ‘he said, she said’ while our democracy, liberty, wealth and individual rights ebb away.

Expose the distortions, errors, scientific flaws all you like, but don’t lose sight of what is really going on and why.

Politics has changed.  We no longer have a left-right paradigm, even if many who are politically active but unaware of what is going on around them still define themselves in such terms.  Today we have an authoritarian mix of progressive and fascist corporatism (rule by and in the interest of government and corporations) on one side, and mix of classical liberalism and libertarianism (limited government and individual liberty) on the other.

We can see the evidence of the corporatist approach.  It makes me laugh when the global warming fanatics try to undermine opposition to them by arguing the sceptics are in the pay of ‘big oil’.  One of the worst propagandists for spinning this line is Bob Ward, mouthpiece for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.  Australian Journalist Jo Nova reported that Exxon-Mobil had paid $23 million to sceptical groups over a ten-year period.  Big corporate Exxon-Mobil are therefore considered evil personified by warmists like Ward.

Ward’s employer is named after its benefactor – the uber wealthy fund manager, Jeremy Grantham.  In 2011 Grantham held 11,309,048 shares of Exxon stock.  Why would Grantham fork out to fund an institute researching climate change when he is making a fortune from the very company cited by his minions as evil big oil?  Perhaps because as a corporate animal his only interest is making money, and his hypocritical fence straddling is a means to that end.

Let’s compare Exxon’s oft cited $23m funding of sceptics to money poured into environmental interests.  How about another big corporate, BP?  They were investing $8 billion in biofuels, wind power and solar while building long term options in carbon capture and storage and clean technology. Five billion dollars of that had already been invested by 2011.  That money is funnelled into delivering exactly what the environmentalists want and also supports lobbying and activism.  But they are still considered ‘big oil’.

There are plenty more examples of these kind of inconvenient facts, where the supposed enemy is a friend and supposed ally is an opponent.  The bottom line is these companies will support whatever helps their bottom line.  They are super powerful and influential corporates, and with the subsidies on offer utterly committed to keeping the climate change gravy train on the tracks.  And we, the taxpaying consumers, foot the bill to increase the wealth of these corporations.

To believe the corporates have anything other than a vested interest in the centralisation of power and control that coordinates global action, to erode democracy and liberty which thus enables the transfer of wealth, is to reside in a realm of delusion.  No matter what the ‘science’ reveals and how much it is debunked, there will always be another line of attack from the sustainability playbook to further the political – and dare I say economic corporatist – agenda.  This is where the battle needs to be fought, not in the theatre of carbon dioxide emissions, raw and adjusted data or fractions of a degree of temperature change.

Guardian takes hypocrisy to stratospheric new heights

When giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in December the former Information Commissioner of the UK, Richard Thomas, said that offences committed under Section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998 (In the UK Section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998 concerns the unlawful obtaining of personal data – it is an offence for people, such as hackers and impersonators, outside of an organisation to obtain unauthorised access to someone’s personal data – an act otherwise known as ‘blagging’.) were:

[...] often at least as serious as phone hacking, and may be even more serious.

Mr Thomas went on to add that:

Interception of a telephone call or message is widely, and rightly, seen as highly intrusive, but a great deal more information can usually be obtained about individuals by stealing their electronic or written records – such as financial, health, tax or criminal records – than from a conversation or message.

Now think back to the Guardian’s obsessive pursuit of News International about the interception of telephone calls or messages – phone hacking – and its saturation coverage and condemnation that has demonised News Corp journalists and the Murdochs. Surely the Guardian, which has taken the high ground and occupied it so doggedly over such illegal behaviour can be relied upon to be consistent and condemn equally vigorously any instance of illegal activity, such as an individual impersonating another person to obtain unauthorised access to personal data?

Think again.

The Guardian is perfectly happy to go to war with competitors and ideological opponents, and grandstand in the most sanctimonious manner as it has over phone hacking. After all it is in its commercial and strategic interests and those of its friends, such as the BBC.

But when a climate change alarmist scientist, someone who says the things the Guardian says and like to hear and shares the same leftist worldview, admits he impersonated another person to obtain confidential documents and release them – a criminal act in the UK – the Guardian unbelievably describes it as a ‘leak’. That is how the Guardian is portraying the theft of documents from the Heartland Institute and their release, along with a fake document designed to misrepresent the organisation and stir up animosity to it.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance, it is a staggering escalation of the Guardian’s rank hypocrisy.  It is a deliberate and calculated distortion used and the dishonesty is approved by the senior editorial staff for ideological reasons.  Guardian journalists such as Suzanne Goldenberg, endorsed by the like of Leo Hickman, are engaging in a corruption of language in support of a political agenda.  They are showing themselves up as propagandists for thieves and climate change alarmists.

This is the measure of the Guardian, a reflection of its true nature, and the reason why it is wholly untrustworthy and unreliable. It is an insipid little rag.

Credibility of Rajendra Pachauri continues to retreat

In 2009, the Indian environment ministry was accused of ‘arrogance’ by Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), after the release of a government report claiming that there is no evidence climate change has caused ‘abnormal’ shrinking of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Vijay Kumar Raina, the geologist who authored the report, admitted that some: ‘Himalayan glaciers are retreating. But it is nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest as some have said that they will disappear.’  The response of Pachauri, a railway engineer often described as a leading climate scientist, was this:

We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.

Pachauri went on to say that such statements were reminiscent of ‘climate change deniers and school boy science’, adding this money quote:

I cannot see what the minister’s motives are. We do need more extensive measurement of the Himalayan range but it is clear from satellite pictures what is happening.

He also went on record describing the Indian government report as ‘voodoo science’.  In light of this, one wonders how Pachy is feeling right now given the publication of scientific research using satellite data that shows there hasn’t been any melt of those glaciers at all in the last 10 years.  One also wonders, considering this new evidence, just what satellite pictures Pachauri and friends had been looking at.  He certainly seems to be the school boy after this.

It would appear that what is retreating at record speed is not the glaciers in the Himalayan range, but the last shreds of Rajendra Pachauri’s shattered credibility.  The excellent cartoonist, Josh, captures the moment in his own inimitable style over at Bishop Hill…

Now let’s see if any of the British MPs who are jumping up and down about wind power subsidies have the gumption to challenge the government to distance itself from the IPCC and Rajendra Pachauri for being completely unreliable and discredited.

Want to get your own way? Play the climate change card!

Regular readers will know we occasionally get little nuggets of stories from correspondents living near the global hub of the climate change alarmism effort, Norwich.  Last week it was 4×4 fire appliances that had become necessary because climate change is causing more fires and flooding.  Today we have yet another instalment, but this time it is a variation on the usual climate change theme.

Opponents to a proposed housing development in Pinebanks, Thorpe St Andrew, have come up with the novel argument for not building houses on a particular parcel of land… namely that it could ruin ‘rare geology’ vital to research into climate change!

Forget Arctic ice cores, bristlecone pines, glacier retreat and the mating habits of hedgehogs. Cast them from your mind.

The key to unlocking our climatic past and modelling our toasty future resides in a gravel pit in Pinebanks, just down the road from the University of East Anglia (UEA).

A spokesman for Natural England said:

The gravel pit is an important regional geological site. Our role is to make sure any rare geology is protected. If we think the development may damage this then we may object to it.

We want it protected so future generations can benefit from the study of it and reveal more about the earth’s past.

It would be interesting to know if Natural England et al, expressed similar concern for this ‘rare geology’ when gravel was being extracted from the pit.  You know, before someone came up with the idea of building houses around it.

Given the enthusiasm for anything AGW related at Broadland District Council, it seems the gravel pits will be spared being turned into residential estate.  It seems when it comes to this corner of Norfolk, if you want to get your way on any subject, just suggest some far fetched linkage with climate change and your wishes will be granted.  Climate change is the trump card in the big game.

Perhaps the time has come for the Norwich Evening News to rename itself the Climate Change Digest, to better reflect its editorial agenda to brainwash the local population into a CO2 centric terror and relay propaganda from UEA.

More climate change hysteria from Norfolk

It seems there is a correlation between the climate change obsession of the media and local authorities in Norfolk and their proximity to the University of East Anglia.  Perhaps we could come up with a causal link that we could report as incontrovertible.

No matter what happens in Norfolk, they see the hot hand of anthropogenic global warming behind it.  So it is that the Norwich Evening News reports today that Norfolk’s Fire and Rescue Service is spending £3.2 million on new 4×4 vehicles:

because climate change is causing more floods and heath blazes in Norfolk.

No matter what weather condition is experienced, be it warmer, cooler, wetter or drier, the climate change moster is behind it all.  But given we keep hearing that the effects of climate change are yet to be experienced and it could be decades or more before nature wreaks her bitter revenge on mankind for burning fossil fuels, these new vehicles must be expected to last a long time.

It was fascinating to see that Norfolk fire chiefs are now experts in climate and are qualified to ascribe the sometimes challenging conditions they work in to changes in the climate.  At least it was until we see our old friends at the Met Office have lined their pockets with more taxpayers’ cash by drawing up a climate change impact assessment.  Norfolk Fire and Rescue now feel bold enough to state:

And we know from work that the Met Office has done that for every one degree summer temperature hike you get up to 23% more fires.

Presumably it has nothing to do with an increase in population and more people using the local heathland.  Perhaps an increase in arson cases is down to people driven mad by the changing climate and feeling the need to set light to things.  Norfolk’s fire overlords go on to explain that the new appliances are required because:

In somewhere like Norfolk we have got Thetford forest and the peat at Methwold, which are susceptible to fires and we need to be able to get to them.

One wonders if the fires in Thetford and Methwold only became a problem after a group of scientists decided we were causing the planet to heat out of control.

Well, I suppose it’s one way to get extra money for fancy new kit.  One wonders how long it will be before the Ministry of Defence and the militray top brass start justifying the procurement of new toys on the basis that climate change will make it harder to conduct operations with existing equipment…

Catastrophe Denied

With a hat tip to Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That? here is a short video critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, based on presentation slides used in a series of public presentations and debates in late 2009 and early 2010.  The author is Warren Meyer, author of the web site climate-skeptic.com.

As Watts makes clear:

While the world has almost certainly warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, and while it is fairly clear that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses may be responsible for some of this warming, climate alarmists are grossly overestimating the sensitivity of climate to CO2, and thus overestimating future man-made warming.

While the theory of greenhouse gas warming is fairly well understood, most of the warming, and all of the catastrophe, in future forecasts actually comes from a second theory that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by strong positive feedbacks. This second theory is not at all settled and is at the heart of why climate models are greatly over-estimating future warming.

While it dates back over a year we have not linked to this before.  It’s well worth a watch, especially as it will make sense to laymen.

Arctic Sea Ice – How Telegraph furthers eco spin against substance

Richard North, writing on his EU Referendum blog, has a stonking post that demonstrates the power of substance over spin – while underlining how far the media’s standards have fallen as it publishes assertions in letters columns that are demonstrably false; written by people posing as ordinary members of the public but who are in fact part of environmental organisations.

The letter (below, scroll down on this page), sent in by one ‘Roger Plenty’ from Gloucestershire, takes issue with Christopher Booker’s column last week:

North is having none of it, and rightly so, as the historical evidence-backed facts about the use of the North East Passage roundly pull to pieces Roger Plenty’s fanciful fiction.  North’s post is a triumph of substance over eco spin.

But perhaps there is more to this story.  It seems Plenty’s flight of fancy on the Telegraph’s letters page can be attributed to misleading ‘news’ reporting by the Telegraph itself.  Booker’s inconvenient truths have got under Roger Plenty’s skin before because this isn’t the first time Plenty has been motivated to send a letter to the Telegraph in response to Booker on the subject of Arctic Ice.  In September 2007, Plenty contributed this letter (below, scroll down on this page) citing a source for his inaccurate claim:

So it is not just sloppy fact checking by the letters editor, the Telegraph’s news editor let misleading information through into publication.  Small wonder the eco activist Roger Plenty felt on safe ground to make his assertion four years on.  Granted he is referring to the North West Passage back then and the North East Passage today, but there is a reason they are both known as ‘passages’ – namely that shipping could transit through them, which is a matter of record.

What this shows is that the media has a lot to answer for, publishing information without context, or omitting key facts, that falls apart under scrutiny of the evidence.  To his credit, North was making this point in respect of the Telegraph back in 2008.  But it is time we found out whether it is mere sloppiness or if the Failygraph is deliberately complicit in furthering the spread of misinformation?

Regardless, Roger Plenty and his ludicrous claims have been completely discredited, which is an important part of ensuring more people get the facts and are reminded not to believe everything they read in the press.

A new twist in the Wolfgang Wagner resignation saga

Following on from the previous post about the Spencer and Braswell paper… In an ideal world journalists like Richard Black at the BBC and Leo Hickman at the Guardian would try to find out if there was something more to the resignation of Wolfgang Wagner, which they reported in their traditionally biased fashion.

But given the BBC and Guardian acolytes, among others in the media, have an agenda  favourable to those who assert the world is warming and humans are to blame, what else can we expect? From to chairing conferences to delivering speeches and filing copy derived unquestioningly from press releases that enjoin people to accept at face value what they say, the BBC and Guardian.

Anything that raises questions about the actions of their friends in the alarmist ‘consensus’ is ignored or quietly shoved out of sight under the nearest convenient floor covering. Anything that goes beyond regurgitating the

This is why the blogosphere, so often derided by the oh-so-grand churnalists, is so important today.  This latest example of defacto censorship by the Guardian and outrageous bias exhibited by the UK’s taxpayer funded public service broadcaster, the BBC, can again be partially countered by bloggers who put the journos to shame and act in the public interest by searching for information and sharing the salient facts and background the media has deliberately omitted or tried to leave buried.

The lastest example of this can be found at the end of this post on Watts Up With That? which reveals information about a previously unmentioned relationship between Wolfgang Wagner and arch-alarmist who has been most affronted by the Spencer and Braswell paper - to the extent that Wagner issued an apology to him for publishing the paper – Kevin Trenberth.

What has been uncovered has the capacity to shed a somewhat different light on the motivation for Wagner’s resignation as editor in chief of Remote Sensing.  Yet the collective eyes, ears and mouths of the BBC and Guardian alarmists such as Richard Black and Leo Hickman will no doubt remain utterly immobile as they decide the information to be irrelevant and inconvenient to their agenda.

Dr Roy Spencer, adding to his previous thoughts on this incredible story and the reaction to the paper he co-authored, makes this comment (hat tip: Bishop Hill):

We simply cannot compete with a good-ole-boy, group think, circle-the-wagons peer review process which has been rewarded with billions of research dollars to support certain policy outcomes.

And as our focus on the media’s behaviour shows, it is an even more difficult proposition when those supposedly noble men and women of the news media – tasked with uncovering and reporting all the facts – are complicit in that group think and relay a distorted story to the general public.

How reaction to Spencer & Braswell underlines the corruption and politicisation of science

I want to tell you a story.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin…

Once upon a time there was a big, shiny, expensive computer system upon which programmes were run.  The programmes were written by very clever scientists to create projections of what things might be like in the future.  They called these projections ‘models’.

Some places had got very dry over the years so the very clever people wrote a programme to see what the models said was going to happen.  After the very clever scientists entered all the information and parameters they thought were important, they ran the models.  When the models came back they suggested that unlike in the past, the rain would no longer make anything outside wet.

Now, because the models were developed by a small group of some clever very scientists in very big universities who had been given a lot of public money to carry out research, they were accepted as actual fact by politicians who said there was a big problem that only they could solve.  Being part of the establishment, the media wrote lots of stories about this endorsing what the politicians said and telling people things would have to change.

Because of what the computer models had suggested, the government decided that everyone must install complex and expensive systems to use water from a brand new source to irrigate grass, trees, flowers, crops and bushes because lots of places were drier and the rain won’t make anything wet in future.  So with other governments around the world they made lots of new laws and created big plans and spent billions and billions of pounds, dollars, euros, roubles and yen to convince people of the need for this expensive change to watering things.

They also gave lots of peoples’ money to a lot of new campaign groups and businesses to go into schools and companies to tell them to had to change the way everything is watered.  It also gives lots more money to other scientists to start from what the small group of very clever scientists has already decided and find more reasons to agree with them and arrive at the same conclusion.

But all this seemed strange to a lot of people who thought there was still lots of rain and it was still making everything outside wet.  A lot of people were not convinced and they were called sceptics and they started to point out problems with the claims from the very clever scientists.  The governments were very angry because they were making lots of deals to spend money on big corporations they were friends with to develop solutions that everyone would have to use, making owners and shareholders very rich while ordinary people were left with less money. The media wrote lots of nasty things about the sceptical people and because the media was so clever and always right about everything they called those people ‘deniers’.

Not all very clever scientists agreed with each other.  Some of them became sceptical and started to examines in detail the real world observation of what happens when it rains.  Amazingly, when they looked outside and examined lots of data records, they found that not everything was drying up after all and the rain was still making things outside very wet and therefore the basis for everyone installing the government mandated water systems was flawed.

The sceptical scientists wrote a paper about this, and it was examined and tested by other very clever scientists in their discipline in a process called peer-review, before being accepted and published by a journal called ‘Remote Sensing’.  Those people who were not convinced by the need for watering change pointed at the paper as evidence that not everything was as the government and their very clever scientists made it seem.  They argued that the small group of clever scientists supported by the government might be getting things wrong and government should wait for more evidence before taking such sweeping, expensive and draconian action.

The media largely said nothing about the paper because after spending so long saying rain wasn’t making things outside wet anymore they don’t want to be proved wrong.  And besides, some of their pension plans depended on money made from investments in the new watering processes being made by the government’s corporate friends.

A little while later, the editor of the paper-publishing journal ‘Remote Sensing’ said he didn’t agree with the paper because of all those very clever scientists who believed rain wasn’t make things wet anymore because their computer models had been saying so for a long time now. So the editor resigned in protest and the media attempted to discredit the sceptical scientists, citing that one of them once had to alter a previous paper many years previously, and that he is in some way odd because he is a committed Christian.

The media agreed with another very clever scientist who said that the paper must by defintion be flawed until it satisfied all of the observations, agrees with physical theory, and fit the computer models.  He said this even though computer models are only as good as the data put into them by humans who are nowhere close to understanding all the complex relationships that causes nature to do what it does.  Although common sense and science in years gone by would have it that real world observation is the only reliable measure of any changes in nature and has the capacity to invalidate computer models, this very clever scientist and his friends had turned science on its head by claiming computer models have the capacity to invalidate observed reality.

It would have all been very confusing if one of the very clever scientists had not been caught out saying that even if they had to redefine what scientific peer-review is, they would somehow close down any views from sceptical scientists, even though doing so would utterly corrupt science and the correct way of furthering it.  But after putting complete faith in computer models and using them as the basis for lots of incredible projections that have never become reality, he had to put his own interests before his duty to science.

And for the ordinary people, nothing changed.  The governments continued to press ahead with their financially ruinous plans.  The media continued to exaggerate every story that fitted their narrative while refusing to cover any story that contradicted them.  The computer models continued to churn out projections that did not reflect observed reality.

——————————–

The real story is carried in the words of the sceptical scientist, Dr Roy Spencer on the excellent Watts Up With That? blog.  The media hatchet job is most prevalent in the Guardian and on its broadcast arm, the BBC.  Dr Spencer goes on to explain the findings in layman’s terms on his own website.   In response to the resignation of Wolfgang Wagner, Dr Roger Pielke Snr puts the politicisation of science into context.  And the ludicrous position on observations having to fit in with computer models as advanced by Dr Pete Gleick, and Dr Phil Jones’ comment about keeping sceptical papers out of the public domain, are both covered by Indur Goklany on WUWT.

What we are seeing is anti-science.  We are experiencing pseudo science that aims not to question or challenge, but to reinforce the validity of a body of opinion that is yet to make the jump from theory to fact.  It is being done to fit a political agenda.  It is a corruption of science and the latest example of why people should be sceptical of the claims made about climate change and its causes and effects

In closing, one comment left on Watts Up With That? sums up the situation superbly and deserves to be repeated widely to help others understand what really is going on:

This is all part of the same pattern that has characterized the warmists’ approach to climate “science” since the last century. They come up with models and use these to produce predictions which are then baptized as sovereign truth. In real science, they would have been required to demonstrate the predictive validity of their models before their predictions would be granted any confidence – and when observations contradicted predictions, they would have been expected to revise their models instead of beating the data until it fit the model outputs. Instead, thanks to Algore, Hansen, left-wing politicians looking for regulatory and legislative mechanisms to control the polity and extract more tax dollars, and a compliant left-leaning media hungry for “imminent disaster” headlines, the burden of proof has been shifted to those who challenge the modellers instead of being left where it belongs: with the modellers who still have not demonstrated the validity of their models. I simply cannot believe we are still discussing a theory that, 20 years after it went mainstream, has yet to produce a single scrap of confirmatory empirical evidence.

The extent to which the AGW true believers have warped the scientific method to serve their pecuniary and political ends is simply breathtaking. Climate science represents the greatest perversion of the scientific method since the Enlightenment. It is phlogiston, phrenology and Lysenkoism all rolled up into one big, fat, corrupt boil desperately in need of lancing.

Why we must check everything the media reports

A short tale from Bishop Hil about a 2008 Daily Telegraph article by Rosa Prince, in which she reported:

The UK is to be hit by regular malaria outbreaks, fatal heatwaves and contaminated drinking water within five years because of global warming, the Government has warned the NHS.

Following a major consultation with climate change scientists, the Government is issuing official advice to hospitals, care homes and institutions for dealing with rising temperatures, increased flooding, gales and other major weather events.

The reality, as Bishop Hill reveals, is rather different.  The message is clear, do not take what you hear in the news media at face value until you have personally uncovered and checked the facts.

Cost of My2050 tool becomes clear

Regular readers may remember this post back in March about Chris ‘Luhne’ Huhne’s launch of  the 2050 Pathways Debate.  To recap, this is what Huhne announced to Parliament about the latest strand of climate change propaganda directed at indoctrinating youngsters:

The 2050 Pathways Debate: having an energy-literate conversation about the UK’s options to 2050.’ Leading climate and energy experts will use the 2050 pathways calculator to present their personal view of how the UK can reduce its emissions by at least 80% by 2050, ahead of the online debate being opened to the wider public.

This blog submitted a couple of FOI requests to try and scratch the surface of the labyrinth of public money channels to understand how much has been spent on the My2050 website and where that money has come from.  Having had a quick look through some of the information on available websites it became clear two government departments and other organisations that provide ‘co-funding’ had a hand in the production of the My2050 site, so the following two requests were made:

Dear Department of Energy and Climate Change,

Please will you supply me with full details of:

1. The total cost of building, producing, maintaining and hosting
the My2050 website and tool

2. The sum total paid by DECC to Sciencewise-ERC and Delib in
relation to the production of the My2050 website and tool

3. The sum total of funding given to DECC from Sciencewise-ERC
through the co-funding arrangement

and…

Dear Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,

Please will you supply me with full details of:

1. The sum total of funding provided by BIS to Sciencewise-ERC in
2009 and 2010

2. Details of all BIS staff seconded to Sciencewise-ERC (non
steering group) for any duration during 2009 and 2010 and the
nature of the work they did

3. The sum total of funding given to other Government departments
from Sciencewise-ERC through the co-funding arrangement

4. The sum total charged to the Department for Energy and Climate
Change for work on the My2050 website and tool

While AM has been in hibernation, the responses have arrived.  We will look at the response from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) first.

So, in short the cost of the My2050 propaganda site to the taxpayer is £53,000 (excl VAT).  However, as question 3 shows, the cost of producing the ‘engagement’ activity surrounding My2050 is much higher, with £144,961 more (incl VAT) being pumped into DECC from Sciencewise-ERC.

Some people may think that is not so bad, after all that extra money has come from elsewhere rather than the public money allocated to DECC.  That is until you understand that Sciencewise-ERC is funded entirely by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). So what we have is a way of increasing the amount of money spent on climate change propaganda without it having been handed directly to DECC in the normal departmental funding arrangement.  A lot more money is spent on climate change than gets paid directly to the department responsible for pretending it can do a damn thing about it.

So that is why this blog submitted a separate FOI request to BIS.  The response from BIS is interesting for more than the sum it reveals is forked over to Sciencewise-ERC…

Question 4′s response is the most curious.  If you look above at the DECC response you see Sciencewise-ERC apparently devoted £13,000 of taxpayers’ money into the My2050 website and tool.  However BIS, while confirming the total grant funding of £144,961 that DECC mentions, seem to be at odds over the amount devoted to the website and tool.  The £13,000 DECC says it received specifically for the website and tool does not match the £17,625 BIS says was handed over for it.  But then, when it’s someone else’s money little things like accounting for its use don’t matter.

Is it any wonder the public pays so much to maintain the wheels of government when so much effort goes into adminstering this interdepartmental financial merry-go-round?  The waste, not only in terms of propaganda, but in terms of financing it through a complicated network of transactions that resemble something like money laundering, is staggering. And we foot the bill for politicians and their friends serving their own interests.