After playing a news clip stating, “University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out” Daily Show host Jon Stewart declared, “Why would you throw out raw data from the ’80s? I still have Penthouses from the ’70s! Laminated!”
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Bureaucrash Crasher-in-Chief Lee Doren and CEI Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell take to the streets and offices of Washington’s environmental establishment as citizen reporters to find out what the global warming alarmists thinks of the Climategate scandal.
>>>Watch the video HERE.
(This just in from our good friend, Ray Evans, in Australia. Ray is an officer of the Lavoisier Group, a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition. Their web site address is: http://www.lavoisier.com.au/index.php. Ray and the Lavoisier Group have waged a brilliant and determined fight against cap-and-trade in Australia. They deserve much of the credit for today’s stunning vote.)
Ray Evans reports:
1130 hrs AEST
The Australian Senate voted this morning to defeat, for the second time, the Rudd Government’s CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) Bill thus creating a second trigger for a double dissolution election. A DD election means that every senate position is declared vacant, and that after such an election a joint meeting of both houses could pass the contested Bill by a simple majority.
In reaching this position the former Liberal Leader Malcolm Turnbull was deposed (he had declared his full support for the CPRS Bill) and by one vote his successor, Tony Abbott, a long-time if mostly silent sceptic, was elected as leader. The party room then declared overwhelming support (54 – 29) for deferring or voting down the Bill.
The Liberal Party is now ready to fight an election on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) (an Australian version of cap-n-trade) which is at the heart of the CPRS Bill. Whether Prime Minister Rudd will call a DD election is open to doubt. But for the first time in Australian politics we have a situation where the electorate now gets to have a say. It has been a bad week for the chattering classes.
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.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C70EK4RfPgA 285 234]
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, globalwarming.org was hacked. Some blog posts were deleted, some were changed, and a few tabs were re-labeled. Today the site is back to normal.
The hackers appear to have been motivated by our ongoing coverage of “climategate,” the burgeoning scandal that has exposed the sketchy science used by a few prominent global warming alarmists. That we are being targeted is perhaps the surest sign of our effectiveness.
For a recap of climategate, see the newest issue of the Cooler Heads Digest. Also, globalwarming.org teamed up with Pajamas Media to create a searchable database of climategate documents and commentary. For more coverage, check out our friends in the blogosphere-Climate Audit, Wattsupwiththat, and Ice Cap.
Whoa! Did we just have a hurricane season? Doesn’t seem that way. “2009 hurricane season ends quietly with fewest storms since 1997,” declares one headline. “The season featured nine named storms, the fewest since 1997, and for the first time since 2006 no hurricanes made landfall in the United States,” states the article.
That’s quite a change since 2005, when the coincidence of two major hurricanes striking the U.S. and causing lots of damage, Katrina and Rita, led to a storm of allegations that global warming was causing cyclones to rise up in revenge against man. Most notable was far-left science writer Chris Mooney’s Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, which Amazon.com informs us is “bargain-priced” and probably for good reason. Mooney not coincidentally is also author of “The Republican War on Science” and “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.” Perhaps it threatens our future, but in the meantime it’s very good for his wallet.
Not that Mooney was alone by any means. In my 2005 Scripps Howard column “Green Hotheads Exploit Hurricane Tragedy,” I provided what in retrospect proves an interesting blast from the past.
“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a Boston Globe op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.
Granted, as I’ve written recently there’s been no warming in the last decade. But there’s been no cooling since 2005, either. Same temperatures, far fewer hurricanes.
So as the Kingston Trio might sing, “Where have all the hurricanes gone . . . ? And where are all these blowhards now? Presumably blaming global warming for some sort of disastrous problem caused by a lack of hurricanes.
Breaking news: At a meeting of the Liberal Party’s Members of Parliament today, Malcolm Turnbull was turned out as Leader and replaced by Tony Abbott on a 42 to 41 vote. Abbott then immediately called for a vote of his colleagues on the Labour Government’s cap-and-trade bill to ration energy and raise energy prices. The vote was 54 to 29 against.
A number of Liberal Members have risked their careers to stop cap-and-trade, including Cory Bernardi and Nick Minchin as well as Tony Abbott. They should all be honored for their courageous stand.
Toppling Turnbull was a necessary step, but it isn’t the end of the story. It is likely that the Senate will now defeat the cap-and-trade bill for the second time. However, a few disgruntled Turnbullite Liberal Senators could provide the votes needed to pass it. If it is defeated, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could then call a general election of both the House and Senate. So the fight is still to be won or lost.
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