February 2010

(Revised Feb. 10, 2010. My conclusion was rushed, because I wanted to leave the office before the snowstorm suspended bus service from D.C.-area metro stops. Revisions below are in italics.)

If you missed it Sunday, the Audi Super Bowl ad is on Youtube, and it’s a hoot. The ad promotes the Audi A3 TDI clean diesel. The main selling point, surprisingly, is not that this car, which won a “Green Car of the Year” award, is good for the planet, but that if you drive it, you won’t be hassled, bullied, and jailed by the “green police.”

The ad tries to work both sides of the street. It attempts to appeal to those who believe SUVs are destroying the planet – and those who resent eco-elitists and busybodies telling them how to live.

The hilarious South Park episode, “Smug Alert” (Season 10), frames the issue with which the Audi ad execs seem to be wrestling.

In the episode, clouds of smug from ”Toyonda Pious” sales in South Park, George Clooney’s acceptance speech at the 78th Academy Awards, and San Francisco’s pretensions as a progressive city all coverge, creating a “perfect smug storm” that threatens to destroy everything in its path. The citizens of South Park scrap their hybrids just in time to avoid annihilation, although thousands of homes are destroyed. However, it is too late to save San Francisco, which “disappears up its own @!*hole.”

At the end of the episode, Kyle, echoing the famous NRA slogan (”Guns don’t kill people, people do”), argues that hybrids are a good thing, it’s only when hybrid owners become smug and act like they’re better than everybody else that the danger arises. However, like the liberals who don’t want a gun in the house, fearing they might use it, the people of South Park decide they are not ready to own hybrids without becoming  smug — “it’s simply asking too much.”

The Audi ad tells preening, greener-than-thou progressives ‘here is the car for you.’ At the same time, it lampoons the authoritarianism of green busybodies, allowing the rest of us to admire the car’s mpg rating without feeling we have to identify with Al Gore or the Sierra Club.

Or, at least, I think that’s the objective. Another way to put is the Audi folks want to have their cake and eat it. They want to be both green and independent of green.

My suspicion is it doesn’t work. Eco-activists are likely offended by the ad, whether because it mocks them or because it comes too near the mark of what life would be like in a society that heeds Al Gore’s injunction to make “rescue of the environment” the “central organizing principle for civilization.” On the other hand, people who resent officious bureaucrats may remember little about the ad except that Audi has something to do with “green police.”

Lastly, Audi is foolish if it expects to prosper under a green police state. The Audi A3 TDI gets above 40 mpg, but its fuel still comes from Big Oil. The Gorethodox won’t be satisfied until cars are all-electric, and the electricity comes from solar panels and wind turbines. Even if levened by tongue-in-cheek, greener-than-thou feeds the perception that global warming is a “planetary emergency” and government must restrict our liberties to save us from ourselves.

What do you think? Watch the Audi ad, and post a comment!

A sampling of stories (thanks to Climate Depot), since the Climategate story broke in November, that discredit “consensus” global warming science and the UN IPCC — many from British media:

Greenpeace cited as ‘sole source’ for ‘coral reef degradation’ claims

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

‘Researchers are still grappling to understand the balance of feedback loops’

UN IPCC’s Global Warming Report Under Fresh Attack for Rainforest Claims

Analysis: NASA GISS Rural US Sites Show No Temperature Increase Since 1900

BBC: Temperature and CO2 feedback loop ‘weaker than thought’

UN’s Amazongate’: ‘Made false predictions’ on Amazon rainforest, referenced non-peer-reviewed paper produced by WWF

Study: ‘Carbon dioxide appears to play a very limited role in setting interglacial temperature’

IPCC cited multiple Master’s Students in AR4, some unpublished

Chinese Scientist Qian Weihong of Beijing University: ‘Expects global temperatures will decrease continuously until 2030’

And that just scratches the surface, as they say. But what do the intrepid Society of Environmentalist Journalist template-followers at USA Today report about today? Butterflies, in another one of those “scientists say” articles:

A study of beleaguered butterflies in California provides some of the best clues yet as to how other animals may react to climate change, scientists say.

The unprecedented, 35-year analysis of butterfly populations in the Sierra Nevada details how several species are fleeing to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures.

Formerly mainstream American enviro-media sure know how to sniff out a scandal, don’t they?

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are back in the news. The two rovers, which had a 90-day mission, have been exploring Mars for over six years now. Spirit is now stuck in a sand trap. Since it is still mostly functional, NASA is working to make it a stationary research platform.

Besides searching of signs of life, the Rovers’ mission is to analyze the Martian climate. The raw climate data they are providing have been invaluable for NASA scientists.

This pursuit of truth and knowledge, uncolored by narrow political interests, will have far-ranging impacts on the understanding of our own climate. In the distant future, it may even help us to terraform Mars. This is the scientific method at its finest.

NASA also does climate research here on Earth. Unlike the Martian research, the data are being massaged and manipulated. The growing Climategate scandal has not been kind to NASA.

Why are the Earth and Mars data being treated so differently? Maybe because there is no predetermined outcome that must be obtained by the data coming in from Mars?

The findings from Penn State University’s investigation into Climategate scientist Michael Mann were due this week, and today the university announced today that one allegation warranted further scrutiny:

In looking at four possible allegations of research misconduct, the committee determined that further investigation is warranted for one of those allegations. The recommended investigation will focus on determining if Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” A full report (http://www.research.psu.edu/orp) concerning the allegations and the findings of the inquiry committee has been submitted.

In the investigatory phase, as in the inquiry phase, the committee will not address the science of global climate change, a matter more appropriately left to the profession. The committee is charged with looking at the ethical behavior of the scientist and determining whether he violated professional standards in the course of his work.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the university have informed climate skeptic Ronald Armstrong (and probably others), who requested Mann’s emails via a Freedom of Information Act request and under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law, that Penn State is not subject to either transparency law because it is not an “agency:”

Consequently, the information you requested will not be disclosed since it is confidential and not made available to the public.

Legal weasel words, of course. In a high-profile misconduct case Penn State could certainly choose to release the records, but much like the Climategate conspirators, they can’t afford to let the public see. So they hide behind lawyers who are willing to do their dirty work for them — in this case, Katherine Allen at McQuaide Blasko in Central Pennsylvania.

What’s the matter, doesn’t PSU have some attorney hack on staff who could have cranked out this deflection, rather than paying outside counsel hundreds of dollars an hour to be their bad guy for them?

Last week the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office-the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act-said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request by British amateur climate analyst Doug Kennan.

Today the Guardian reported how Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, withheld information requested under freedom of information laws.

The CRU scientist’s wrongdoing and cover-up were only revealed after thousands of University of East Anglia emails were leaked to the internet, in an incident now known as Climategate.

It should be noted that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is involved in helping to further uncover the scandal that Keenan discovered. CEI’s legal team already has submitted a number of FOIA requests to government-employed climate scientists involved in the Climategate emails.

According to the Guardian,

“Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?…

…The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then….

…But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim…

…But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be “unduly burdensome”, they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data…

…By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.

The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones’s colleagues about Wang’s missing data – and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: “It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.”

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri is chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And he has just released a brand new book. No, it isn’t a sequel to his 1976 Dynamics of Electrical Energy Supply and Demand: An Economic Analysis. It’s a novel, titled Return to Almora. It’s about an Indian climate expert in his sixties who travels around India, Peru, and the United States, making passionate love to women all along the way.

Yes, that’s right: Dr. Pachauri’s first novel is largely about sex; or, as The Daily Telegraph puts it, it’s about “a lot of sex – with a lot of women.”

Return to Almora’s publication comes at an interesting time for Dr. Pachuari. On January 20th, Pachauri was forced to publically apologize for a 2007 IPCC report which erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers would melt completely by 2035.

This week, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that the same IPCC report cites only two sources for its claims about the disappearance of mountain ice in the Andes and Alps. One source is an anecdotal article from a popular mountaineer magazine; the other is a Swiss geography student’s dissertation. Now Dr. Pachauri is being blasted in the press for permitting scholastic misconduct. He is also facing calls for his resignation.

Of course, in light of the release of Return to Almora, one can understand how Dr. Pachauri might be confused by the sudden fervent demand for factual accuracy. After all, novelists are encouraged to take creative license in their work—to expand upon the known and sacrifice truth to beauty.

Judging from Return to Almora’s first sex scene—which occurs on page 16, and which features a nubile “May” telling climate scientist “Sanjay” he is “absolutely superb after meditation”—I’d say it’s safe to assume Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has grown accustomed to embellishing fact with a little bit of fantasy.

Caleb Brown points to a study that finds a novel reason to oppose school choice: global warming. In a competitive educational marketplace, it is likely that fewer children would attend schools in their own neighborhood. That would mean less busing, and more driving in cars to get children to school. School choice, then, would contribute to global warming.

The study does not appear to be satire.