Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and the American Spectator’s Jim Antle collaborate on Episode 78 of the LibertyWeek podcast. Among other topics, we discuss Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC’s shameless response to the Himalayan glacier scandal (segment starts ~17:00).
Politics
Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and the American Spectator’s Joseph Lawler assemble to bring you Episode 77 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We talk about Myron Ebell’s recent global warming debate during the Detroit Auto Show and the future of cap and trade in Congress. Segment starts approx. 12:30 into the show.
The arrival of President Barack Obama and over one hundred other heads of state in Copenhagen for a photo op at the UN global warming conference has buried the really big story here. No, it’s not the fact that no agreement will be reached on a new international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That outcome was foreseen months ago.
The big news is that the grand alliance pushing global warming alarmism and energy-rationing policies has started to break apart here in a spectacular way. The official United Nations global warming bureaucracy have thrown out the twenty to thirty thousand environmentalists who traveled to Copenhagen to attend the meeting as officially-accredited delegates of non-governmental organizations (or NGOs). The environmentalists are extremely angry and have every justification for being angry.
This is potentially momentous because the two wings of alarmism are totally dependent on one another. The UN’s Kyoto bandwagon has been pushed along by the environmental movement and no new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol, when it expires at the end of 2012, will have a chance of being adopted without the continuing and unremitting backing of the environmentalists whom the UN has unceremoniously booted out this week. For the environmental groups, Kyoto and its successor treaty are the only viable vehicles for achieving their goals of reducing emissions and putting the world on an energy starvation diet.
What has happened this week in Copenhagen is not based on any ideological disagreements. It’s all the result of four things: the size of the room, the number of attendees, total incompetence, and poor manners. The UN chose to hold what was billed as “the most important meeting in the history of the world” in a conference center that only holds fifteen thousand people. The environmental NGOs sent lists of delegates that added up to over thirty thousand. The UN looked at these two numbers and decided everything would work out fine.
Everything hummed along fine last week because it was the first week of the conference, which is devoted to technical meetings. The majority always come for only the second week because that’s the glamorous part. The second week is when the heads of delegations arrive to begin high-level negotiations and when the media arrive in huge numbers to cover them.
Over the weekend the United Nations organizers of the meeting realized they had a big problem. They announced that each NGO was going to be limited in the number of its delegates that would be allowed into the conference center beginning Tuesday. A total of seven thousand passes were to be handed out. Thus for example the World Wildlife Fund sent approximately 120 delegates to Copenhagen and was going to be given 23 passes.
Then on Monday, thousands of people waited for up to nine hours outside in the cold to get into the building. They were trying to register and get their ID badges. In the huge crowd were the heads of a couple major environmental organizations. At the end of the day, the UN let in a few to register and told the rest to go home.
Luckily, I didn’t arrive until Tuesday and it took only ninety minutes standing in the cold and another ninety inside to get registered. That’s only partly because the UN started processing people much more quickly. It’s also because a lot of people gave up–and are probably still trying to get warm.
The reason given for restricting the NGOs to seven thousand attending at any one time was that it was necessary to keep the total below the conference center’s capacity of 15,000. It’s baffling that the UN’s global warming secretariat didn’t think of this weeks ago and send e-mails to the NGOs telling them that they couldn’t send so many people to the most important meeting in the history of the world (which it might be from the perspective of the environmental NGOs).
That was only the beginning, however. On Tuesday, it was announced that only 1,000 NGO delegates would be allowed to attend on Thursday and Friday and that the method for choosing the lucky few would be announced later in the day. A notice was posted that said the decision would be made by 6 PM. At 6, another notice said come back at 7. At 7, we were told that NGO representatives would meet with Yvo De Boer, the head of the Secretariat, at 7:30 and to watch our e-mails for an announcement of when we would meet. At 7:45, we were told to assemble at 8 to find out which lucky thousand would be allowed to attend the last two days of the conference. At 8, the meeting with Mr. de Boer was still going on. So we sat and waited. Ditto 8:30. Ditto 9. At 9:35, our NGO representatives appeared.
By this time, enough people had given up that I thought I had a good chance. of getting a pass (and I should explain that CEI for whom I work is one of the few accredited NGOs not on the global warming bandwagon). Then the NGO representative told us that UN security had advised Mr. de Boer that no NGO delegates should be allowed to attend the last two days, when over one hundred prime ministers and presidents, including President Obama, would be in the building. But de Boer had insisted on the rights of “civil society” to be represented and had secured a compromise. Instead of a thousand passes for NGOs, there would be three hundred.
Thus the approximately thirty thousand NGO delegates who traveled from around the world to Copenhagen to attend COP-15 were limited to seven thousand on Tuesday and Wednesday and to three hundred for the last two days.
The reason that UN security advised banning the NGOs altogether is that some of the environmentalists had been behaving badly. On Monday, there had been a small demonstration inside the conference center. I wasn’t there, but from television coverage it looked like the demonstrators were shouting at official government negotiators walking down the hall past them and that the demo was close to turning into a small riot.
Now, world leaders don’t like demos or riots close to them. Instead of glowing news reports all about them meeting with their fellow important world leaders, the stories from COP-15 would be about the protesters who are angry at them. One thousand NGO delegates in the building might include just enough malcontents to cause an ugly and highly televisable ruckus.
Consequently, there are many thousands of environmental activists in Copenhagen without a lot to do. Many of them are extremely angry. It snowed Wednesday night and gusting winds have made Thursday bitterly cold. The news reports say that four thousand protesters tried to push their way past police barricades and into the conference center. Two hundred sixty were arrested. I don’t know what might happen on Friday outside.
Inside everything will no doubt run smoothly where the heads of state are having their photos taken and making their speeches about how important it is to save the world from the ravages of global warming by agreeing to a new treaty. We will be expected to overlook the fact that after two years of negotiations begun at COP-13 in Bali, the major nations are further apart than they were then. The news from the conference center will be that these hundred-plus heads of state have pulled the world back from the brink of failure and a new treaty is now within sight. Sure.
The real news is that there is now a tremendous amount of animosity and distrust between the UN establishment and the environmental establishment. They know that they need each other, which is why the mainstream environmental NGOs have not made a stink and why the establishment press hasn’t made it a front-page story. But the fissure arising out of the UN’s incompetence is going to take a long time to heal and could easily grow much wider.
That is the very good news coming out of Hopenchangen.
Originally posted on Pajamas Media
When the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing [1] on the state of climate science on December 2, the Republicans were ready to focus it on the Climategate fraud scandal [2]. And the first witness, President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John P. Holdren, was ready to respond.
Instead of summarizing his written testimony in his oral remarks, Holdren read a prepared statement on Climategate. He said that the controversy involved a “small group of scientists” and was primarily about one temperature dataset. He said that such controversies were not unusual in all branches of science and that they got sorted out through the peer review process and continuing scrutiny. Holdren also said that openness and sharing of data was important, which is why the Obama administration is strongly committed to openness. In the case of the disputed dataset (the “hockey stick” graph [3]), the National Academies of Science (NAS) undertook a thorough review of it and all other similar datasets and concluded that the preponderance of evidence supported the principal conclusion of the research. Holdren concluded by predicting that when the dust settles on this controversy, a very strong scientific consensus on global warming will remain.
Well, that sounds pretty plausible, but anyone who has followed Dr. Holdren’s amazing career knows that he is a master of plausible buncombe that disguises his “outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices,” as my CEI colleague William Yeatman has put it [4]. Everything that Holdren said in his opening statement is incomplete and misleading. But explaining that is a job for another day. The point is that the alarmist establishment and environmental pressure groups have settled on these talking points in order to try to contain and sanitize the scandal.
When Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) and other Republicans on the committee challenged Holdren’s analysis of Climategate, the president’s science adviser responded by repeating that it was just a small group of scientists engaged in some narrow research. Any mistakes or misdeeds on their part couldn’t possibly compromise the scientific consensus, which is as strong as it is vast.
But when asked about some of his own extreme statements and predictions, Holdren replied that scientific research had moved on from the latest UN assessment report in 2007. The most up-to-date scientific research was contained in a report written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and released last summer. Holdren mentioned and referred to this report, Copenhagen Diagnosis [5], several times during the course of the hearing.
I remember when Copenhagen Diagnosis came out because nearly every major paper ran a story on it. Global warming is happening even faster than predicted, the impacts are even worse than feared, and that sort of thing. I also remembered that the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis included many of the usual conmen who are at the center of the alarmist scare. So I asked my CEI colleague Julie Walsh to compare the list of authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis with the scientists involved in Climategate.
I’m sure it will come as a shock that the two groups largely overlap. The “small group of scientists” up to their necks in Climategate include 12 of the 26 esteemed scientists who wrote the Copenhagen Diagnosis. Who would have ever guessed that forty-six percent of the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis [6] belong to the Climategate gang? Small world, isn’t it?
Here’s the list of tippity-top scientists who both wrote the authoritative report that Holdren relied on to support his statements and belong to the “small group of scientists” who are now suspected of scientific fraud:
Nathan Bindoff, also a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (hereafter LA-IPCC FAR)
Peter Cox, also LA-IPCC FAR
David Karoly, also LA-IPCC FAR and the Third Assessment Report (TAR)
Georg Kaser, also LA-IPCC FAR
Michael E. Mann, also LA-IPCC TAR (the hockey stick scandal made him too radioactive to participate in writing FAR)
Stefan Rahmstorf, also LA-IPCC FAR
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, merely “a longstanding member of the IPCC.”
Stephen Schneider, also LA-IPCC FAR, TAR, and the First and Second Assessment Reports (SAR) plus two of the IPCC’s synthesis reports
Steven Sherwood, only a contributing author to IPCC-FAR
Richard C. J. Somerville, co-ordinating LA-PCC FAR
Eric J. Steig, no connection to IPCC listed
Andrew Weaver, also LA-IPCC FAR, TAR, and SAR
In the interests of space, I’ve left out all of their distinguished positions as professors, editors of academic journals, and heads of institutes. You can search for their Climategate emails here [7].
Then there are those Climategate figures who didn’t help write Climate Diagnosis, but who have been involved in the IPCC assessment reports. Here are three that come to mind:
Phil Jones, contributing author IPCC TAR
Kevin Trenberth, co-ordinating LA-IPCC FAR and SAR, LA-IPCC TAR, and an author of the summaries for policymakers for FAR, TAR, and SAR
Ben Santer, convening LA-IPCC First Assessment Report
Now, I wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but it kind of looks to me like the “small group of scientists” caught out by Climategate are pretty much the same people who make up the vast and strong scientific consensus on global warming and write the official reports that the U.S. and other governments rely on to inform their policy decisions. I’m sure Dr. John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, has a plausible alternative explanation. He always does.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-obamas-science-adviser-confirms-the-scandal-%e2%80%94-unintentionally/
URLs in this post:
[1] hearing: http://globalwarming.house.gov/pubs?id=0014#main_content
[2] scandal: http://republicans.globalwarming.house.gov/Press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=2740
[3] the “hockey stick” graph: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3099
[4] put it: http://cei.org/webmemo/2009/01/13/dr-john-p-holdren
[5] Copenhagen Diagnosis: http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/
[6] Copenhagen Diagnosis: http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/authors.html
[7] here: http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=browse-events&event-type-id=10&event-id=1913&event-context-theme-id=1&c=10&s=coverage&r=true&p=1&t=overview
The Associated Press is reporting from London that Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia is temporarily stepping down as director of the Climatic Research Unit, which is at the center of the Climategate scandal.
No surprise there. Jones has been a goner for days. What is surprising is the reason that the AP gives for his “temporary” removal from his directorship:
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The AP story’s lead sentence is even more surprising:
Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
One wonders how long this reporter will last in the mainstream media. He’s clearly not with the MSM program to contain and sanitize this mushrooming scandal.
(Originally posted on Pajamas Media here.)
(Note: this is a copy of part of a post on Pajamas Media, which can be found here.)
When I read the Washington Post’s disgraceful editorial the other day on the Climategate scandal, I thought of how far they have fallen since their big moment in the sun, Watergate. In those heady days, Editor Ben Bradlee and a team of crack investigative reporters led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate coverup and brought down President Nixon. Of course, they were then on the side of the permanent Washington establishment, who loathed Nixon (as he loathed them), just as they are now on the side of the permanent Washington establishment, for whom global warming alarmism is a deeply held commitment.
If it were up to the Washington Post and the New York Times and the three major teevee broadcast networks, the Climategate scandal would be last week’s news. Their strategy is clearly to contain it and sanitize it. The “world’s leading climate scientists” and the environmental pressure groups and the mainstream media have all agreed on their talking points. Their story is: Critics are cherry-picking a few nasty e-mails and taking them out of context, but the vast edifice of scientific consensus is unshaken. And they’re sticking to it. But already this coverup isn’t working. The blogosphere is pushing forward with new revelations and connecting the dots. This is the work of tens of thousands of people, some of them with more scientific and statistical expertise than the tippity-top climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. And a lot more honest and dedicated to finding the truth, of course.
In the meantime, the Post editorial page editors are in denial. Today, the Post published three letters in reply to their editorial article. I’m not surprised that they didn’t print mine, which I sent the day the editorial was published. I copy it below. But they did print a letter from Associate Professor Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, one of the figures at the center of the Climategate scandal. I am tempted to repeat Mary McCarthy’s remark about Lillian Hellman (“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the“), but will restrain myself.
Mann’s effrontery knows no limits. In his letter, he advises readers to go to RealClimate.org to get the straight dope on the scandal. RealClimate is a a global warming alarmist propaganda effort run by Mann and several of the others implicated in Climategate. Going to Real Climate is like going to Nixon’s White House Press Office to get clear about Watergate.
Here’s the e-mail of my unpublished letter:
From: Myron Ebell
To: letters@washpost.com
Sent: Wed Nov 25 15:40:28 2009
Subject: Letter in response to editorial article, “Climate of denial,” page A18, 25th November
25th November 2009
The Letters Editor
The Washington Post
Via e-mail
Sir or Madam,
Your editorial article “Climate of denial” is remarkably ill-informed and tendentious. The article begins by claiming that, “A hacker stole and released….” Do you have any evidence it was a computer hacker rather than a public-spirited whistleblower from within the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England who finally grew so disgusted by the ongoing scientific fraud that he made the documents public?
Second, after tsk-tsking at a few of the e-mails and rebuking the scientists involved in the scandal for not responding to the scandal effectively, the article then proceeds to claim that the vast scientific edifice supporting global warming alarmism is unshaken. This is outrageous. The scientists implicated are at the center of producing the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Reports and are regularly referred to as some of the world’s top climate scientists. Have you looked at some of the three thousand files or just a few of the juicier e-mails? Here is just one comment in one of the files from the scientist working on one of the temperature datasets:
“What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no )’supposed’, I can make it up. So I have :-)…So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option – to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ’em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late. ” (From the “Harry Read Me” file, which may be found at http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME-30.txt.)
Dozens of similar comments have already been noted in the files. How does the Post know that similar corruption is not to be found in other major research supporting the so-called scientific consensus? After all, a number of the scientists implicated are at other institutions, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in NYC, and several U. S. universities.
There is certainly a climate of denial, and it includes the Post editorial page. Instead of joining the effort to stonewall this scandal, the Post should be leading the way and demanding that full civil and criminal investigations be undertaken of the scientists implicated. Or have you forgotten your role in Watergate?
Yours faithfully,
Myron Ebell.
The nation’s best science reporter, John Tierney, today publishes a great piece on Climategate on the front page of the New York Times’s Science section. He goes through some of the hilarious comments in one of the juiciest files unearthed in the scandal so far, the “Harry Read Me” file (which I earlier wrote about here). Anyone who thinks that the “world’s leading climate scientists” don’t have anything to hide might want to read Tierney’s article. Forget about the likely possibility that fraud was being commited. Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, must have known that the data was a mess and hopelessly compromised by ad hoc fixes, yet presented the Hadley/CRU historical global temperature dataset as authoritative. Phil Jones has now been removed as director of CRU. I think the new operating principle for dealing with climate research should be former President Ronald Reagan’s motto for dealing with the Soviet Union (AKA the Evil Empire): “Trust but verify.” With emphasis on verify.
The public posting on a web site of private e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England is going to cause an uproar. Just a quick look at a few of the e-mails provides some startling revelations. My colleague Julie Walsh lists a few of them in today’s issue of the Cooler Heads Digest. Much more detail is provided at Steve McIntyre’s web site, ClimateAudit.
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….
Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published a curious op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times titled, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Legislation).” The bill that they claim to support and that can pass the Senate is not the 821-page draft bill that Senators Kerry and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released two weeks ago. It is a fantasy designed to get the support of Senator Graham and other fuzzy-minded Senators with visions of lots of new nuclear plants, billions for technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, less dependence on imported oil, and tariffs to protect American manufacturing jobs in energy-intensive industries. We can have it all with a few waves of the federal government’s magic wand.
But even a glance at their article shows how little substance there is to any of these promises. No new nuclear power plants will be built unless there is somewhere to store the waste. Here’s what Kerry and Graham say about that: “We must also do more to encourage serious investment in research and development to find solutions to our nuclear waste problem.” In other words, not finish the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada that the federal government has already spent billions on, but which Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Obama oppose. Carbon capture and storage technology is more than a decade away from being commercially available. Even if it works and is affordable, environmental pressure groups will sue to block permits for the pipelines and underground storage sites necessary to transport and store the pressurized carbon dioxide. Here’s what Kerry and Graham say: “…we need to provide new financial incentives for companies to develop carbon capture and sequestration technology. ” Not a word about limiting lawsuits that would block projects.
Kerry and Graham support a border tax to protect American jobs from products produced in countries that don’t commit to reducing their emissions. That is an admission that energy prices are going to go up and so are the prices of goods and services that are produced with or use energy. Consumers will be poorer as a result and hence will be able to afford fewer goods and services. Bye-bye manufacturing jobs. They also claim that their as-yet-to-be-written bill will reduce our imports of foreign oil. That’s plausible, but not exactly correct. As our economy declines, we will need less oil. But it will reduce U. S. and Canadian production first because the production costs are much higher here than in Saudi Arabia.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee just began (at 10:00 AM eastern) the second day of marathon markups for the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act. In a “markup,” the Committee reads through the bill (or at least the titles and sections) and members have the opportunity to offer amendments.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act is an awful piece of legislation designed to tax energy. In order to win over Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), a co-author of the bill, had to buy them off by promising to redistribute the proceeds of the energy tax-which the Obama administration says will cost as much as $2 trillion through 2020-to industries in their districts.
The only highlight from day one was the opening statement of Rep. John Barrow (D-Georgia), which seemed to indicate that he will oppose this expensive energy bill. He becomes the first Democrat on the Committee to do so. Hopefully, he is not the last. Reps. Eliot Engel (D-New York) and Charlie Melancon (D-Lousiana) seemed to hedge. They are likely holding out for more booty from Waxman.
Today, the Republicans on the Committee, led by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), plan on introducing 450 amendments to the bill. Democrats will offer far fewer amendments.
As I write, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) is proposing an amendment to create a clean energy bank, despite the fact that the Department of Energy already administers a $40 billion clean energy bank. That bank, however, isn’t good enough for Dingell because it doesn’t transfer enough taxpayer money to auto companies in his district.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org