United States Halts Gravy Train for British Global Warming Unit

British newspaper, The Sunday Times reveals that the U.S. government has announced it will stop funding U.K. university at the center of the Climategate scandal.

The Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia (CRU), the hub of the climate controversy over leaked emails discrediting research into man-made global warming, has been dealt a heavy blow from a key funding source: the U.S. Department of Energy.

Under the header, ‘US halts funds for climate unit’ (July 18, 2010) The Sunday Times report reads, “The American Government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds of stolen emails.” (Hat Tip: Barry Woods).

The CRU has been the primary source of information for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that world governments had looked to for the science to substantiate their cap-and-trade green tax policies.

Setback Comes After Official Reviews Give all Clear

The news is a particular blow for the UEA. The university had been upbeat in the wake of three British official inquiries which all cleared the much-maligned CRU of any wrongdoing. However, critics slated each of the inquiries for alleged whitewashing.

The article continues, “The US Department of Energy (DoE) was one of the unit’s main sources of funding for its work assembling a database of global temperatures…”

The announcement will gravely undermine confidence in climate scientists hoping for further research funds from the world’s largest funding source, the U.S. federal government.
Scandal Caused Adverse Public Reaction

Ben Stewart, head of media at Greenpeace, conceded the Climategate scandal influenced public opinion; “It’s pretty hard to say what the impact has been but it would be hopelessly naive to say it has not had an effect.”

Public concerns will not be assuaged by recent revelations that Lord Oxburgh’s committee failed to address the actual science.

Official Inquiries Dismissed as ‘Whitewashes’

Despite independent scientists finding evidence supportive of misconduct, a Parliamentary hearing and the Oxburgh Inquiry affirmed that researchers at the CRU were “subjective” and cherry-picked data, but had done no wrong. Although Lord Oxburgh did conclude that climate researchers were “poor data handlers” and would benefit by consulting outside statistical experts.

Dr. John P. Costella, an independent Australian scientist who studied the leaked emails, took a harsher line referring to what he found as proof of “shocking misconduct and fraud.”

Dr. Costella concluded that the “climate science” community was a facade and that “their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics, statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost.”

Government Investigators Ignore Key Witness

As reported on the Climate Audit blog run by McIntyre, Muir Russell review made no attempt to contact the Canadian who originally filed the Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests that CRU unlawfully denied over a three-year period.

Canadian climate analyst, Steve McIntyre had made a compelling impression on attendees at The Guardian debate on Climategate in London on Wednesday July 14, 2010.

By contrast, Phil Jones still looks a broken man despite his immediate reinstatement to his post upon his recent exoneration. Jones escaped criminal prosecution only on a technicality according to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) the agency charged with investigation the FOIA abuses in the scandal.

Accusations of Official ‘One-sidedness’

But the official British line appears to have cut no ice with the Americans. As The Sunday Times adds, “The DoE peer review panel will now sift through the (Muir Russell) report and decide if American taxpayers should continue to fund the unit.”

The review carried out by Sir Muir Russell, also condemned as a whitewash, was notable for the total absence of any evidence from the principal opposing witness, statistical expert, McIntyre.

The Sunday Times correspondent asked Trevor Davis (head of UEA) to confirm whether Phil Jones (head of CRU) attended a private meeting with Muir Russell in January before the investigating panel was convened in February. Davis confirmed Jones had met Sir Muir Russell privately in January.

Climate Scientists Accused of Cherry-picking Data

Skeptics of the man-made global warming theory point out that police found no evidence of any theft. They argue that the 1,000+ emails and 62MB of data that flooded the blogosphere on November 19, 2009 were not stolen but leaked onto the Internet by a whistleblower within university research department.

Dr. John P. Costella believes there is sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that a conspiracy existed between an inner clique of climatologists seeking to exaggerate the global historic temperature record.

It is alleged politicized researchers created the illusion that late 20th century global warming was potentially catastrophic and attributable to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

Repercussions for American Climate Researchers?

With British climate research in a financial pickle attention will turn next to those U.S. institutions also implicated in climate data shenanigans.

Currently NASA is facing a legal battle for also refusing to honor FOIA requests for the past three years. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has filed a legal challenge against the discredited space agency for also withholding crucial climate data requested by skeptical climate analysts.

While in addition, alleged key U.S. ‘climate conspirator,’ Michael E. Mann is currently in court being pursued for grant fraud by Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli.

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Slowest July Arctic Melt Ever

The NOAA is taking the liberty of declaring 2010 the hottest ever, even though it’s only July! So what’s all the hurry? Well, you have to get them scary global-hotting headlines out while you can, and any way you can. When you’re desperate - you’re desperate.

They’ve seen their own forecasts for the rest of the year, and so they know it’s their last chance. Just check the leading climatic indicators on my homepage and you’ll see why.

Now on Arctic sea ice, allow me to use the same NOAA “scientific” method and declare that the Arctic has experienced the slowest July ice melt ever! (Well, at least so far).

Look at the ice melts from June 30 – July 15 for the following years, taken from AMSR-E.

Sea ice melt

Year 6/30 to 7/15 ......... Daily rate

2002 1.126 million sq km 75,000 sq km / day
2003 1.014 ................ 67,000
2004 1.019 ................ 68,000
2005 1.152 ................ 77,000
2006 1.210 ................ 80,000
2007 1.742 ................ 116,000
2008 1.216 ................ 81,000
2009 1.413 ................ 94,000
2010 0.807 ................ 54,000

Never has ice melted so slowly in mid summer as it has this year. Indeed sea ice melt in July 2010 is less than half the melt rate in 2007. It’s far below anything we’ve seen on record. Would the NOAA already call it a record low melt for the month?

And as Lubos Motl pointed out 3 days ago here, total global sea ice is above normal. Also see here. Indeed sea ice is rebounding, and surprisingly just at a time when it’s supposively the “hottest ever”. Someone is wrong, obviously.

Do you think anyone in the media is going to run this story?

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Climate Change Scepticism Could Soon Be a Criminal Offence in the EU

People who are sceptical of climate change could soon be facing criminal charges in the European Court of Justice, British National Party leader and MEP Nick Griffin MEP has said.

Speaking in an exclusive Radio Red, White and Blue interview on this week’s “Eurofile” report, Mr Griffin told interviewer John Walker about a recent sitting of the European Parliament’s subcommittee dealing with the matter, which had passed a ruling which in effect placed legal sanction against anyone who dared question the origin, cause or effect of “climate change.”

Mr Griffin revealed how he could not get a straight answer out of the committee while it was in session, but that afterwards it was admitted to him that that intention of the rule was to criminalise dissension on the topic of “climate change.”

Listen to the full Radio RWB report by clicking here, choosing the RWB player launch icon and clicking on “Nick Griffin 14 July Brussels” in the pop-up menu.

SOURCE (See the original for links)






The Challenge for the Climate Change Savants

This VERY skeptical article by Joseph A Olson first appeared a year ago but has lost no relevance in the meantime (unlike the endless false prophecies of the Warmists)

The accuracy of any future prediction is limited to the completeness of the current understanding, which is based on empirical measurements. You may sense hot and cold but until the invention of the thermometer you could not quantify temperature. The same with the hydrometer for relative humidity, barometer for atmospheric pressure and anemometer for wind speed. As these instruments gained wider distribution there was an ever-increasing database to establish trend lines.

Physical Climatology, written in 1941 is considered to be the origins of this branch of science. Based solely on its predictive powers, this is far from perfected science. Realizing that less than a century of measurements from very limited regions of the Earth might be limiting their accuracy, a new branch was added called Paleoclimatology. There has been exponential growth in information on these new branches of science in the last few decades.

It is not internecine snobbery to mention the shortcomings of these new branches of science. Engineers had no method of calculating multi-bay, multi-story structural loads until the 1920’s and could not do three-dimensional analysis until the dawn of the computer age. It was the 1980’s before there were accurate calculation methods for seismic loads. We have all benefited from this information super highway.

To extend knowledge of past events beyond the limits of actual measurements, Earth scientists developed a range of proxy measurements. But every proxy has an unknown correction factor. Consider the use of tree growth rings as a proxy measurement of past precipitation. The actual tree ring growth is the measure of the total of all environmental factors. If volcanic ash limited sunshine, if volcanic particulates deposited harmful chemicals, if pest or disease were prevalent during the growth cycle, then the size of growth rings is not a direct indication of precipitation. Years with sudden, intense rainfall might actually have higher levels than years with more even distribution.

Without complete and accurate information all math models rapidly compound the errors and result in hopelessly incorrect future projections. The folly of the Warmist movement is that carbon dioxide is a primary climate factor and that the tiny portion of proposed reductions in the human emitted gas would have a measurable effect. Had the planet’s climate been stable for millions of years and there was a measurable link of temperature and atmospheric CO2 then there could be AGW plausibility. Such is not the case.

Humanity suffers from a greatly exaggerated sense of self-importance. While we can have minor impact on the environment and species extinction, it is nature that holds all of the trump cards in environment game. In his excellent book, Underworld, author, Graham Hancock documents literate, but due to our inability to translate, societies that are still labeled as prehistoric. The very real climate change that those ancestors faced would earn scorn for today’s Warmists. Plato’s tale of Atlantis and Noah’s struggle with a flood were very real events just now being proven.

Too numerous to list or detail in a single article, it is worth noting just a few of the geologic events which occurred independent of man or atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The Warmist could gain credibility if they could explain the Younger Dryas (the younger of three events), the Flandarian Transgression, the Dalton Minimum or the Malankovitch cycle. All of the events occurred in the last 400,000 years and are captured in Greenland and Antarctica ice core gases so touted by the AGW movement.

The Last Glacial Maximum lasted for 100,000 years and most of the northern and southern hemispheres were covered in thousands of feet of ice. Ocean levels were 400 feet lower than today. Then 21,000 years ago these huge masses began to suddenly melt, then refreeze, then melt, then refreeze. The final freeze, the Younger Dryas, began approximately 13,000 years ago. The final violent thaw began 11,000 years ago. Coincidently 90% of all large North American mammals disappeared at this time.

What we consider ‘terra firma’ is in fact more like a molten rock pudding with a thin plastic crust. The Ice Age overburden from up to 3.5 kilometers of ice deformed this crust. As the ice melted huge pools of water formed on top of and below the ice caps. At some point these trapped oceans of ice melt began to flow. Underworld then describes what happened:

“…as a glacial wave proceeded across an ice sheet…it could have attained heights of 600 meters and a cross sectional breadth of as much as 40 kilometers, and a forward speed of several hundred kilometers per hour.”

Suddenly relieved of over burden the Earth’s crust rebounded, fracturing the remaining ice cap and sending the even larger volumes of underlying ice melt and mountain sized glacial chunks to the sea. The entire Earth would have been racked with tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, all while oceans rose in meters almost instantly. While there were humans around to witness these events, there is no evidence that they in any way caused these or any of the numerous other major climate changes.

The LGM did not end as a result of massive carbon dioxide build up. Nor did the LGM end from massive increase of solar radiation from a 100,000 year long dormancy to a new 12,000 year long period of slightly higher relative stability. There must be an enormous Earth force which is always present, but subject to periodic and dramatic shifts in output.

Like planetary crime scene investigators we now know what did not cause this repeated shift, evidence is everywhere, and the suspect is still at the scene. Geo-nuclear has the opportunity but does it act randomly and alone. It is possible that cosmic rays, neutrino bombardment, planetary alignments, gravity waves or galactic radiation could all have a role in triggering Geo-nuclear reactions. Once again we are limited by empirical data from anything but speculation.

The Inter GOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change has given itself jurisdiction over world climate. Let’s see. A government panel of largely undeveloped nations is to decide if there needs to be additional government agencies funded by carbon use tax on only the developed nations. With that directive, the studies funded by the IPCC are predictable. The UN is hardly the oracle of objectivity.

‘Deniers’ are dismissed as energy industry paid hacks, when few have any links. Meanwhile the Warmist conflicts are everywhere. GE produces windmills, owns NBC who promotes AGW and its political supporters, who in turn direct government contracts to GE. A great article on these hidden economic forces is The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi in the July issue of Rolling Stone. The great carbon power point pimp Gore has Jezebel Nobel on one arm and Oscarina, the Hollywood Harlot on the other. These are a most unworthy set of champions for any cause.

“You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows” according to Bob Dylan. You don’t need a PhD to read the writing on the wall. If you gathered the worlds greatest experts on tile chips you could get endless reports on the base clays, the ceramic coatings and information on the firing methods and none would notice the mosaic. With each new chip the AGW mosaic is getting clearer.

As knowledge continues to increase exponentially we may soon have many more answers. We may reach the scientific harmonic convergence when all scientifically grounded Warmists will be converted. Those adherents with hatred for humanity or capitalism will await the next society-bashing trend. The elitists who envisioned this scam will surely have a fall back bubble-blowing position.

Our supreme leader flippantly dismissed questions on massive cap and trade tax increases with the phrase “Everyone is going to have skin in the game”. That can only mean one thing. We are all going to be skinned. If passed by the Senate, then the Waxman-Markey Bill will gladly distribute our fleeced skin to the moneychangers in the temple.

The Holocene (last 11,000 years) have been a wonderful time for humanity. That it will end is a certainty. That the end will be a violent climatic change with enormous challenges for all living things is also certain. That humans will cause global warming in defiance of the next pending Ice Age…what is that artificially colored sugar water that you are drinking?

SOURCE






The global warming nonsense is part of a larger syndrome

I wrote yesterday of intellectual fashions. The article below would seem to have identified what might be called an intellectual super-fashion: Belief in a "universal panacea of high intelligence" (or perhaps the infallibility of high education)

The Obama administration takes great pride in Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, because Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. In physics, too, which is a real science that has something to do with energy. Sort of. And he's Chinese, one of the oppressed people of color, and he's an immigrant whose papers are in order.

That's 3.5 gold stars in ObamaWorld.

Chu's research showed how to push around individual atoms with laser beams. Amazing stuff. But Nobel winners are not necessarily good at fixing oil leaks, as we have seen.

I don't know if Dr. Chu plays the fiddle like Fibonacci, or if he is a trained ballet dancer like Rahm Emanuel, or if he does brain surgery on the side. Whatever Dr. Chu's many talents may be, he doesn't know how to solve that oil leak.

When Saddam Hussein blew up hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait in 1992, George Bush #41 sent in Red Adair from Texas. Kuwait's burning oil wells got fixed. The media lost a big story, and the Left, which was all ready to accuse Bush # 41 of a planetary crime for making Saddam blow up all those oil wells, lost a big agitprop opportunity. They had to wait for Bush # 43 to work off their spleen.

The weirdness is that during the months of oil gushing from the BP leak, Obama and his spokesnoid Robert Gibbs kept reminding the world that Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. That plus five bucks will buy you a Starbucks French Roast on the Gulf Coast, right where you can watch the sunset reflecting off the oil slick. It's really pretty, and as some Obamanoid was saying the other day, if Louisiasans were smart, they would turn it into a tourist attraction. Fortunately, it looks like the oil leak has been plugged, and all that oil will be metabolized by the ocean in due course.

But the Leftist superstition about Harvard SmartCream will keep haunting us for years. The reason is that no matter what the emergency may be, the instinct of this White House is to apply the same panacea. Put some SmartCream on that, and it'll be fixed. Or at least it will look as if we are Doing Something.

Obama's adoring fans seem to share the superstitious belief that intelligence is a kind of oil slick that you just discover in places like Harvard and Yale. Take a problem, any problem -- global warming, the U.S. economy, race, and gender-baiting -- and smear it liberally with SmartCream from Larry Summers or Elena Kagan -- and behold! The answer pops out, just like that. It's amazing. For you, it's only $ 9.95, 'cause I like your face. Can't you see Obama selling that line on an informercial with his great photogenic smile?

This superstition about a universal panacea of high intelligence seems to be really widespread on the Left. Jozef Stalin used to lecture academic audiences on the topic of linguistics, even before Noam Chomsky transformed the base metal of syntax into the gold of leftist opportunism. Why does the world listen to Chomsky's radical politics? Because he is reputed to be a great linguist. It doesn't work for me, but apparently for millions of people it looks like logic.

This is so much like Anton Mesmer (the first "mesmerist") back in 1770 or so, who used to cure his medical patients by sweeping a long magnetic iron rod over their bodies. Poor people stood in line for a chance to sit around a magnetized tub of water with iron handles sticking out, just like socialized medicine. It all worked like a charm, because everybody knew that animal magnetism spread its healing rays wherever it touched your body.

Animal magnetism worked fine for Anton Mesmer in 1770. It still works, along with crystal therapy and pyramids for keeping your razor blades sharp. Ask just about anybody in Berkeley, California.

Don't knock the great con artists of history, because the media world is still doing the same thing today. What do you think the global warming scam is about? It is a mass hysteria stirred up by the media to make money without having to actually work, or to learn anything -- along with almost universal ignorance and superstition, also spread by the media and the education establishment -- plus deep corruption in Big Money Science.

In the U.K., the Labour Government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown practically had group hugs imagining how much the global warming rainbow would pay off -- they were officially demanding trillions of dollars -- so they pushed it and pushed it for decades using their poodle scientists at Hadley CRU, and their lapdog droids like the BBC and the Guardian.

In fact, the Guardian still believes in global warming today, but then they believed Stalin's lies for thirty years, followed by Mao and Pol Pot, and today, Gorbachev. For all I know, they still believe in Stalin's phony agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, who made all the real scientists in the Soviet Union applaud his scientific fantasy life on pain of exile in Siberia. Or a bullet to the head -- take your pick.

We are much too civilized to threaten scientists with execution or exile to Alaska, where they might run into the Palins and go native. We just give them millions of dollars if they sing along with the Party Line. And it works! They chime right in, and sometimes they even do a little dance.

That's how you earn credibility, buddy, and don't you forget it.

The Left is infinitely gullible, but they also spread gullibility in the schools. In the Clinton years, Al Gore had a hand in appointing NASA's witch doctor, James Hansen, the guy who wants warming skeptics to be thrown in jail "for crimes against humanity and nature." That just shows you world-caliber science at work. Where's Hansen's Nobel Prize? Why should Algore get one, and Barry the 0, but not James Hansen, who makes up all the climate videogames?

When it all fell apart in Copenhagen last year, Tony Blair showed up on TV telling us with his million-dollar smile that it didn't matter if global warming was true or not. There's your public confession of guilt, when politicians tell you that it's still a global emergency and yes, they still need astronomical new taxes from five billion people even if it doesn't happen to be true. Hold onto your wallet. Right now Tony is working for Muammar Khadaffi of Lybia, 'cause that's where the money is.

The media fall for this Dr. Science gag because they never read anything about real science. They're much too busy thinking up tomorrow's phony headlines. But even if they were literate they still would go on the belief that their audiences are mostly suckers. The mantra that "Obama is soooo smart" is supposed to shut them up and keep 'em voting Democrat. No proof is ever needed.

I'm not saying the media are wrong about their audiences. It works, as you can see right in front of your eyes. It's just that the audiences are complicit in the con job. The TV-watchers and newspaper-readers have dumbed themselves down. Every day they engage in willing suspension of disbelief, like kids listening to Santa Claus or good Soviet citizens in the Evil Empire.

In fact, Obama does keep telling them he is Santa Claus, and all his free goodies come out of that stash he keeps in the White House. The same liberals who fall for all other con jobs keep the Demagogues in power -- media scams like imaginary energy shortages, No Nukes campaigns, clean government in Detroit and Chicago, feminist malarkey, ObamaCare, and any conceivable qualifications Elena Kagan might have for the Supreme Court.

Ignorance can be cured with education; but self-imposed ignorance has no cure. It just rots your brain until you die from Donald Berwick Disease. If you don't know what Donald Berwick Disease is, you will -- you will, very soon.

I know highly educated folk who are so stuck at age 22 that they will never reach adulthood. You can find them all over the campuses, where scruffy hippies gather in little cafés to tell each other lies.

A month ago, forty-two members of the British Royal Society finally worked up enough integrity to protest the abject mendacity of Global Frauding. The Royal Society then withdrew its public support for the scam. Scientific societies around the world have fallen for it, either because they took somebody's word for it (and they know that scientists never tell a lie), or because they were bought off. But the Royal Society -- founded by Isaac Newton -- sacrificed four centuries of integrity for one big payoff. And now they've lost it. It couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd.

The Brits pioneered global warming. Before GW there was Mad Cow, a huge public health fraud that was based on unsupported computer modeling in the United Kingdom -- which should sound familiar. If you assume that prion infections like Mad Cow spread on an accelerating curve, just like the infamous global warming hockey stick, you can show that everybody is going to die tomorrow, or next week at the latest, based on a perfectly good math model that just happens to be totally wrong. It is the worst of GIGO disease, really primitive thinking, but it's good enough to swing a ton of money for the people who promoted it.

In the upshot, the formerly sane nation of Britain went Banana Republic over Mad Cow Disease, as propagated by the intellectual giants of Fleet Street. That's where the newspapers used to be located, right near the busiest pubs in the world. Take a deep breath in Fleet Street and you're drunk. News reporting used to be the professional disease of British alcoholics. Think of Chris Hitchens and you get the idea.

In any case, Mad Cow guaranteed a decade of scare headlines for the denizens of Fleet Street so they didn't even have to work. A whole generation of journos died of the DTs before somebody found out that no actual people were getting Mad Cow disease, and indeed, that mighty few cows were getting it, either.

Basically, they destroyed millions of cattle on the raw assumption that they might get sick someday. It was a purely imaginary epidemic; most mass hysterias are. If you kill the cattle before they get the disease, you can never find out if your math model was wrong. If you demand your trillions of bucks before global warming ever happens, there's no way to prove you are wrong. Right now, the scammers are recovering all their old power and prestige, because the last ten years of actual cooling is just covering up the trend toward the world coming to an end. They say. And by gum, they've got the computer models to prove it! They still want all that money, and they are still getting it. Phil Jones and Michael Mann haven't been fired, or even embarrassed in public. They still have their jobs, and they're looking forward to running another pricey scam sometime soon.

Across the Channel from London, the French never fell for Mad Cow, so millions of happy eaters kept chomping down on delicious sheep brains in wonderful wine sauces and finally died of gourmet ecstasy. The French got their meat cheap from British farmers who were forced to kill their cattle, or maybe to sell them for a few euros before the animal inspectors turned up. At the end, a total of about a hundred people were said to have died from Mad Cow over a dozen years, which is statistically right around zero. Given the integrity of the folks who spread the scam, I would not be surprised to find out that Mad Cow Disease record-keeping was strangely intermittent, amazingly like the CRU Hadley Climate records, the Russian meterology bureau, NASA, and NOAA. None of those scientific Holy of Holies seem to have kept their data, and they're not showing us their computer programs.

During Mad Cow days, the socialist Labour Government paid British farmers to destroy their cattle. The British taxpayers were subsidizing French cuisine, and the chefs were laughing all the way to their mistresses' mattresses, where they traditionally keep their money. Those crazy Brits!

Britain used to do world-class science, but socialism corrupts everything, because everything becomes politicized. Previous generations of scientists would be ashamed of the level of corruption in Britain, but these characters just keep coming. Today, socialist politicians have conquered science in Europe, as in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. The EU itself has never passed a financial audit in its fourteen years of existence, and it doesn't care to pass the next one. Nobody in the world can make them. They are the bosses, just as surely as the Soviet apparatchiks. So they don't bother with audits. It's like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Who's going to make them?

Historically, corrupt science kills people. It did so with AIDS (which the media lied about for years as a heterosexual disease) and with Saint Rachel Carson depriving Africa of DDT insecticide, thereby hurting tens of millions of African children but doing a lot of good for the tsetse fly. Then there is the abject Western surrender to street drugs, with the media and politicians constantly talking about getting it all legalized, in spite of the victims who show up at emergency rooms every day around the country -- especially teenagers and minorities, as it turns out. When lies are propagated as truths, and science colludes with the lies, people get hurt.

It's sad, but on the other hand, scientific corruption is a self-imposed disease. Scientists have an intellectual and moral duty to think skeptically and to demand evidence. When they fail to meet their most basic obligations over many years, that is not an accident.

Why was there only a small coterie of heroic global warming skeptics who demanded to see the original data? In science, that should be a standard practice -- but now that scientific institutions, including universities, have been proven to be much less trustworthy than your local drugstore, it's mighty strange that there is no movement afoot for all climate data to be put on the web, as a routine precaution against fraud and cherry-picking. Where's the outrage? It's exactly where it was during the Clinton years in D.C. In a Leftist Political Machine, public outrage never gets a hearing.

That kind of scientific ignorance is willful. It is a moral disease, not a mistake. Scientific institutions could purge their crooks any day they want. But they don't do that -- and that leaves us to draw our own conclusions, doesn't it?

Dr. Chu is not so unusual in a world of global warmists and Mad Cow chasers. I don't know the man, and I can't read his mind, but either he is not as smart as he's cracked up to be, or...

SOURCE






Maryland planning mandatory "environmental" indoctrination in High Schools

I put this up on EDUCATION WATCH yesterday but I think it has a place here too

Top state officials in Maryland are promoting a plan that would make the study of environmental education a requirement for all students to graduate from the state’s public high schools.

The proposal, which will be made available for public comment beginning today, is set for final consideration by the state board of education in the fall. If adopted, it would represent the first time a state has added a high school graduation requirement focused on environmental literacy, according to Donald R. Baugh, the vice president for education at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Annapolis, Md., that has been a strong champion of the measure.

“This is one step toward what we hope will be a stronger, more comprehensive effort in Maryland” to provide environmental education, said Mr. Baugh. “What we really like about the high school graduation [requirement is that] it’s for all students, it is a systemic solution.”

Nancy S. Grasmick, the state superintendent of schools, said the proposal—which still is subject to change before being taken up by the state board—enjoys widespread support among local superintendents in Maryland, and also is backed by Gov. Martin O’Malley.

She emphasized that the proposal would not mandate that students take a particular course, but instead would call on school districts to ensure that environmental literacy is “threaded through” the curriculum. “I think it has much more importance because it isn’t just, ‘Take one course, and that’s all you have to do,’” Ms. Grasmick said in an interview.

The Maryland initiative comes as advocates for environmental education are continuing a push to enact new federal legislation to advance the issue. Their goal is for companion bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, which would authorize $500 million over five years for environmental education, to be included in the overdue reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Mr. Baugh said.
Districts Have Leeway

The new Maryland proposal stems from the work of a task force created by Gov. O’Malley, a Democrat. The task force, called the Maryland Partnership for Children in Nature, was co-chaired by Ms. Grasmick and John R. Griffin, the secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources. In April 2009, the panel issued a final report and recommendations to the governor, including the call for a new graduation requirement on environmental literacy.

However, the task force had actually recommended requiring that all high school students take a specific course on environmental literacy, while the proposal moving forward calls for the topic to be “infused” into current curricular offerings.

To be sure, observers say, environmental education is nothing new in Maryland, and many schools have long included environmental literacy in the curriculum.

In fact, this would not be the state’s first mandate pegged to environmental education. The Maryland education code in 1989 was first amended to require a “comprehensive, multi-disciplinary program of environmental education within current curricular offerings at least once in the early, middle, and high school learning years.”

But Mr. Baugh, from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said that implementation has never reached all schools, especially following the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, the current version of the ESEA, with its emphasis on improving student achievement in reading and mathematics.

He also argues that the earlier measure required local systems simply to include environmental education within their instructional programs, but did not stipulate that all students must participate.

“A requirement tied to the ability for students to graduate high school will apply to all Maryland students, and carries greater weight and significance,” he said.

He added that the proposed new requirement also “provides much greater guidance regarding appropriate high school instruction and requires school systems to provide professional development for teachers to assist them in meeting the requirement.”

At the same time, Mr. Baugh said the proposal gives districts considerable leeway in how they choose to bring environmental education into classrooms.

Kevin M. Maxwell, the superintendent of the 75,500-student Anne Arundel County Public Schools, said he welcomes the proposed requirement. “We have an obligation to make sure that we equip our next generation with the tools they’re going to need ... to, quite frankly, clean up the messes that we’ve made,” he said, “and to make sure the Earth is a sustainable home for the people who inhabit it.”

SOURCE

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