Here is CEI’s press release, and my colleague Chris Horner’s post is here.

Andrew Revkin’s story in tomorrow’s New York Times has already been posted on the Times’s web site.  Here is one interesting tidbit from Revkin’s story:

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

‘Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often use the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.” “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

Yes, that’s right, everyone knows that “trick” is used as a technical term in many professions.  For example, in prostitution “trick” means….

So now an actual hacker — or an insider — has exposed something similar in the global warming activism realm: scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (regarded as Britain’s top authority) caught in behaviors they would never want the outside world to see. Marc Morano at Climate Depot is developing the link archive and Australian reporter Andrew Bolt is harvesting revelatory remarks from emails and documents, as he explains:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

The clogosphere (climate blogs) is awash in this story (again, see Climate Depot). You ought to at least spend a little time this weekend (all us politico-infojunkies still get our fixes on Saturdays, right?) perusing what Bolt has unearthed. Amazing stuff which Chris Horner says could be alarmism’s “blue dress moment.” As Bolt notes, it’s not just the East Anglians — it’s the foremost global warmer scientists from all over, caught. Wow.

Obviously those interested in the Cooler Heads Coalition are focused on the pro-government, anti-freedom and anti-energy agenda-driven UN IPCC. The U.N. Population Fund, which today released a report titled “The State of the World Population 2009,” is another you should be wary of. This political body finds that “women bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, but have so far been largely overlooked in the debate about how to address problems of rising seas, droughts, melting glaciers and extreme weather.”

So global warming is sexist. More:

The report shows that investments that empower women and girls—particularly education and health—bolster economic development and reduce poverty and have a beneficial impact on climate. Girls with more education, for example, tend to have smaller and healthier families as adults. Women with access to reproductive health services, including family planning, have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run.

More promotion of a culture that promotes the eradication of humans for a phony cause. About as far as you can get from “be fruitful and multiply.”

However, Senator Gillibrand might have made several additional points.  Now that Enron has gone away, New York City is the center of financial wizards who’ve done much to mystify and confuse markets and regulations.  It is also the home of some of the most affluent individuals in the world along, of course, with some of the poorest urban dwellers in the world.  Thus, there will be great future market potential for NYC as energy rationing is extended from firms to individuals.  I raised this point with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, one of the creative capitalists championing energy rationing, at Wall Street Journal’s ECOnomics conference in Santa Barbara a few years ago.

I noted that my wife and I - for ecological reasons - had elected not to have children.  As a middle class American, our carbon footprint is a heavy one, undoubtedly that of our children would have been even heavier.  Thus, I believed we merited a reasonable allotment of carbon credits.  Immelt dodged the question but the logic is unassailable.  But, in NYC terms, Fran and I are light-footed indeed.  We don’t jet around the world as frequently, our homes are in the relatively less energy intensive areas south of the Mason Dixon line, we don’t watch television and have only one car.  Our allotments would thus be minimal compared to the affluent of New York.
The poor in NYC would not be entitled to such credits.  They have unfortunately less environmental conscious parenting practices and already experience to a degree the energy poverty that would be exacerbated by cap-and-trade.  But, this shortfall could readily be addressed by further taxes on the rich to fund the vital social services needed to offset this problem.

Thus, one can only urge Senator Gillebrand and her fellow social engineers.  As the late Peter Bauer noted, there’s lots of money in poverty programs - and even more in energy poverty programs.  Two Cheers for the Senator!

Thomas L. Friedman’s op-ed in the NYT today could have been written by Paul Krugman.  And that’s not a compliment.

Friedman, like Krugman, waxes hysterical about those who are opposing  the cap-and-trade energy bill - those “deniers.” And, also like Krugman, he sets up those opponents as straw men that he can readily knock down.  In today’s article, Friedman worries about U.S. dependence on foreign oil supplied by  ”petro-dictators” and he fears ever-rising prices for increasingly scarce fossil fuels.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Friedman’s terror about world population growth, especially growth in developing countries, is Malthusian.  (See Julian Simon on population and natural resources in “The Ultimate Resource II.”) . And Friedman  doesn’t seem to want those people to use energy to improve their standard of living.  Here’s what he says about that dream for a better life:

The world keeps getting flatter - more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” - with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

Such horror one can’t imagine for a person living at a subsistence level in India or China.

In his article, Friedman says that “clean energy” is the answer to the world’s energy problems.  He embraces  “E.T.” (no, not that visitor from another planet), but “energy technology”  that is carbon-less and efficient.

And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon - combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech - and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

His solution then is to tax conventional energy and subsidize alternative energy sources. Right.  That’s clearly an innovative solution that nobody has thought of.  And how would this affect the population bomb he fears?  Undoubtedly, raising the price of fossil fuels could indeed have an effect on developing countries’ populations.  While waiting for those alternative energy sources to develop, they’ll  continue to face poverty and resultant devastating diseases.  Not surprisingly, Friedman doesn’t address that problem.

We developed this session to honor the great tradition of science and scientific inquiry, as exemplified by Galileo when, 400 years ago this year, he first pointed his telescope at the Earth’s moon and at the moons of Jupiter, analyzed his findings, and subsequently challenged the orthodoxy of a geocentric universe. Our proposed session was accepted by the AGU.

In response to its acceptance, we were joined by a highly distinguished list of scientists – which included members of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, France and China, as well as recipients of the AGU’s William Bowie, Charles Whitten and James MacElwane medals. Our participants faithfully submitted abstracts for the session.

But by late September, several puzzling events left us wondering whether the AGU truly serves science and environmental scientists – or simply reflects, protects and advances the political agendas of those who espouse belief in manmade CO2-induced catastrophic global warming.

Could this AGU position have anything to do with it?

The scientific consensus on climate change was expressed in an open letter sent to the US Senate on last Wednesday, 21 October….

While the signatories represent a wide variety of scientific disciplines, they all came together to express their concern over anthropogenic climate change. The letter states: “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.”

What about the independent lines of evidence of no global warming the last ten years, which the vast body could not see below their extended gut?

He recently explained that the earth might be warming, but that it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.”

Hard to blame CAP, considering this is the kind of thing Pawlenty, a likely GOP presidential candidate, was saying two years ago:

Our global climate is warming, at least in part due to the energy sources we use. We cannot solve it by ourselves, but we need to lead and do our part. We also need to push for an effective national and international effort.

And only last year he assisted global warming activist groups, funded by the alarmist Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to produce this propaganda video. Key Pawlenty narrative:

I don’t think many people would disagree with the fact that what we’re doing is unsustainable — environmentally, economically, and from a national security standpoint. But we have a chance to try to make a difference, and to do good. (Emphasis Pawlenty’s)

Sprint to the right — the primaries start in only 26 months!

The Post’s editorial board today praises a move by Alice Madden, a cabinet-level adviser (think “czar”) on global warming policy for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, to give up a $3,000 monthly stipend she receives from the liberal Center for American Progress. This followed a Post editorial on Wednesday which chastened Madden for accepting the supplemental cash due to a perceived conflict of interest.

We think state Climate Change Coordinator Alice Madden has crossed that line by accepting a monthly stipend from the liberal research group Center for American Progress….

…it makes us uneasy that someone with sway over state climate change policy, an important and politically charged arena, would be paid by a group with such a defined agenda.

We think our government officials ought to have greater distance from those sorts of groups so as to have unfettered freedom to suggest action that might cut across the grain of accepted thought.

All fine and good, except (as the Post goes on to note) Madden’s entire $80,000 annual salary is privately funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the Energy Foundation, and the Denver Foundation. This has been the case for at least two years, when I discovered that Madden’s predecessor, Heidi Van Genderen, had the same arrangement to cover her compensation. But even though the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara and I spent more than a little time in a sit-down session last year with Post editorial page editor Dan Haley and his board explaining the problem with the arrangement, they see it differently, as they wrote on Wednesday:

Madden’s position in the Ritter administration already was something of an eyebrow-raising anomaly. Her $80,000 salary is being funded by the Denver Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Energy Foundation.

While at least two of these groups support sustainable energy, they don’t exhibit the same degree of activism as the Center for American Progress, whose leader was co-chair of President Obama’s transition team.

We hope Madden rethinks the nature of her relationship with the group so as to put to rest any potential future questions about her independence.

That the Hewlett and Energy Foundations don’t “exhibit the same degree of activism” as CAP on the global warming issue is so not true that the Post should be embarrassed and run a correction, because Haley and company obviously haven’t spent the five minutes it would take on the two foundations’ Web sites to get the story straight. A sampling from Hewlett’s climate change page (arrival time, 20 seconds):

In 2007, the Hewlett Foundation worked with five other foundations to sponsor a study of what could be done to fight global warming. The ensuing report, “Design to Win,” concluded that policy reform is one essential step toward stabilizing temperatures. Working with international foundations and organizations in regions with the largest greenhouse gas emissions, the Environment Program makes grants to help create efficient energy policies. This work targets Europe, the United States, China, and Latin America….

…National policy, supported in part by the scientific analysis of Hewlett Foundation grantees, will eliminate 320 metric tons of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2020. Our grantees continue to work on establishing sound energy and climate policies to increase energy efficiency and environmental health.

Also:

In Copenhagen this December, Hewlett Foundation grantees will join with representatives of approximately 170 countries and numerous other nongovernmental organizations to draft what participants hope will be a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

Hewlett spends tens of millions of dollars on climate initiatives annually. What degree of activism is that? Then there’s the Energy Foundation Web site, which is almost entirely about climate and sustainability (click-through arrival time: less than 5 seconds):

We seek to develop and promote a comprehensive, market-based climate change policy framework that creates jobs and puts the country on course toward a sustainable energy future. We focus primarily on national policy to cap and reduce carbon pollution, while also supporting precedent-setting state and regional programs.

EF issued over $107 million in grants during the last two years, almost completely related to energy and climate initiatives, since that’s the reason the foundation exists in the first place. The Center for American Progress should be so exhibitionist about their climate activism.

As Caldara and I told our Post pals 18 months ago, Van Genderen — and now her successor, Madden — could not have a more thorough and all-encompassing conflict of interest on their hands than they do by living off these foundations. Ritter also had a Utilities Commission liaison (sort of an additional “energy czar”) with a similar arrangement from the foundations — don’t know if he still does. Their positions either ought to be eliminated, or instead funded by taxpayers so they will be accountable to the public, not to environmental pressure groups.

Care to reconsider, Dan Haley?

Update 7:35 p.m. EST Friday: My friend, Independence Institute investigative reporter Todd Shepherd, broke the story last month that Gov. Ritter’s cabinet members all failed to follow an executive order for three years and file conflict of interest reports. It was in Madden’s report that her $3,000 payments from CAP were discovered. The Post reported on it four days later.

That’s the good part.  The bad part is that both he and Wallach want to combine the two issues - global warming and trade - and deal with them together. That was a recommendation that the Peterson Institute for International Economics made in a study earlier this year. What that would mean still seems a bit vague.  According to the op-ed, this synthesis would involve –

. . . a new code of “best practices” on greenhouse gas emission controls, including establishment of “policy space” for countries to limit emissions without sacrificing the competitive position of their industries. The institute also recommended that countries adopt a time-limited “peace clause” in which pursuit of new trade barriers would be suspended while the negotiations proceeded, and that a global climate accord be linked to a new global trade accord.

The synthesis would seem to involve  countries agreeing to a “code” that would address restrictions on CO2 emissions  and be generally consistent with WTO rules even if some technical rules would be violated.  Countries signing up for the code would agree not to bring those technical issues to the WTO for dispute resolution (the “peace clause”).

Those “technical” issues, in practice, however, are likely to become substantive issues, as countries enact  a broad array of restrictive  measures to protect their own industries.  But, never fear, the Peterson Institute also recommends in its book that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or some international arbiter decide when a code member isn’t in compliance with its international commitments.  Then, if that’s the case, other code members could take trade reprisals against that non-complying member.

Does this sound like a simple plan that would run smoothly?  Not in my book.

The article concludes with a bit of hyperbole — that the “only way to solve our problems is to treat them together.”  Otherwise, we’ll have “paralysis.”

Given the fact that global warming policy prescriptions have been extremely controversial even before the Kyoto Protocol 12 years ago, and the fact that the WTO’s Doha Round for 8 years has been mired down in disagreements among rich and poor countries, does it seem likely that putting these two divisive issues together will produce harmony?