Climategate leaker: Our civilization is being destroyed by lying "science" elitists

The first two "Climategate" email disclosures sent shock waves through the arrogant, imperialistic "manmade catastrophic climate change" power structure - and awakened the world to just how little "science" was behind the global warming scare . and the incessant demands that we tear down the hydrocarbon energy foundation of our economy, prosperity and living standards. And those two disclosures were just 5,000 emails apiece!

Now Mr. FOIA (as the purveyor of climate alarm dishonesty calls himself) has sent a massive cache of 220,000 encrypted emails to selected friends, who will gradually decode and distribute them. We can only imagine what sordid new details will emerge. He also issued a statement, explaining why he decided he had to make the world aware of the depravity he had discovered.

Ron Arnold

"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably."

This private musing between two climate scientist colleagues first surfaced along with a whole raft of embarrassing material in 2011, when the anonymous Climategate leaker who calls himself "Mr. FOIA" leaked his second set of emails from Britain's disgraced Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Now, Mr. FOIA has emerged for a third time, sharing with the world not only his entire batch of 220,000 encrypted emails and documents but also, for the first time, his thoughts.

Mr. FOIA had previously released two batches of 5,000 files each in 2009 and 2011. This enormous third batch went to a network of friends for decoding, sorting and publication.

The first and second email batches contained conversations among "scientists" who appear to have dishonored a once respectable discipline, documenting that their claims of a "man-made global warming crisis" look exactly like deliberate contrivances for academic career gain, research funding and positions of political power in "the cause."

Some big-name players are playing games with people's lives and livelihoods.

Biggest Player. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific panel whose reports contain the work of Glimategate figures - and are highly politicized and publicized to increase fear of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW): "imminent catastrophic man-made climate change." Many horrendously expensive and needless local, state, federal and international policies have flowed from IPCC's flawed reports.

Most Powerful Symbol. Professor Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick Graph" was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report. It alleged that global temperatures were flat for a thousand years before 1900, but then radically increased because of AGW. The chart looks like a hockey stick, a long straight line that bends sharply upward at the end. With recent IPCC admissions that temperatures have not increased for at least the past 16 years, the curve has now plunged downward to become as flat as the rest of the hockey stick, which is where public trust in climate science is headed.

The Game. "The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it," says an astounding, horrifying UK government-funded booklet leaked by Mr. FOIA titled "The Rules of the Game: Evidence base for the Climate Change Communications Strategy." Written by the UK public relations firm Futerra for six UK agencies - including The Carbon Trust - for use by ethics and public relations tone-deaf scientists,

"The Rules" teaches sophisticated behavior change tactics, including: "Climate change must be `front of mind' before persuasion works" . "Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations" . "Beware the impacts of cognitive dissonance" and "Use emotions and visuals" (e.g., scare people with the Hockey Stick Graph). It treats the public like gullible idiots who can be frightened and manipulated by seemingly trustworthy scientists to believe in AGW. For a long time, it worked.

The Team. Phil Jones, head of the CRU; Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office (the national weather service, originally the Meteorological Office) was joined by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis section head of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Tom Wigley, also of NCAR; and the litigious Penn State University Hockey Stick originator, Michael Mann.

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute, sums their actions up this way." The team consciously distorted and actively suppressed critical knowledge, then furiously tried to hide their actions by conducting a vicious smear campaign to discredit critics."

Consciously distorted: NCAR's Wigley once complained to Mann, "Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.."

Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office warned Phil Jones, head of the CRU: "Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere, unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary.. I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."

Suppressed critical knowledge: Phil Jones wrote, "I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working on the IPCC 5th  Assessment Report would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder [the U.S. Department of Energy] in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data." The U.S. government was colluding with the hiders, who received tens of millions of dollars over the years.

Jones wrote to Mann, "Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith Briffa re AR4 [the IPCC 4th Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. . We will be getting Caspar Ammann to do likewise."

Tom Crowley, a key member of Mann's global warming hockey team, showed crass disregard for the lying and hiding: "I am not convinced that the `truth' is always worth reaching, if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships." It's more important to keep the career back-scratching team happy.

The distortion, spin, suppression and smear campaign went on for years. In fact, the revelations sparked a furious "hide the lies" denial campaign that ironically calls skeptics "deniers." What the skeptics actually deny is that there has been much honest science involved in the IPCC process; that there is any evidence to support claims that we face an imminent climate crisis; and that humans are primarily responsible for weather and climate variations that have always been controlled by hundreds of complex, inter-related natural forces and processes.

"Hide the lies" generated lawsuits between climate science "believers" (what kind of real science requires belief?) and skeptics of "dangerous man-made planetary warming" - along with ridiculous conspiracy theories such as "Big Oil hired evil hackers in a plot to discredit angelic climate scientists."

Mr. FOIA denies these absurd allegations in his 3.0 message. "I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again," he said. "That's right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn't plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere."

"The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science - on the contrary," Mr. FOIA continued. "I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact." Reveal what he had discovered, or keep it to himself and let the lies continue?

Didn't he fear discovery? "When I had to balance the interests of my own safety, the privacy and career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades ... millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. ... the first two weren't the decisive concern."

Why did he do it? His answer was both angry and anguished: "Climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material `might' .... The price of `climate protection' with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations," he wrote. "We can't pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it's not [taking] away from something and someone else."

That's the most important statement so far in the decades-old climate debate: You're forcing us backward into poverty and ignorance - for nothing, except to further your careers, funding and power.

Less than a week later, London's Mail on Sunday newspaper ran an outraged feature based on the British Meteorological Office's recent admission that global surface temperatures haven't risen in more than 15 years. Citing a chart of predicted and actual temperatures, the Mail noted: "Official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed. The graph on this page blows apart the `scientific basis' for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. The chart shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions. The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data."

Is it improper to label the people responsible for this costly, miserable catastrophe as "eco-thugs"? And should we worry that the latest no-real-energy "energy security" proposal from the White House is telling us that President Obama has become America's "Eco-thug in Chief," who will continue to peddle fraudulent science and nearly worthless renewable energy to further his agenda? It's worth pondering.

A set of pro forma "investigations" claim to have exonerated PSU's Mann. The internal PSU inquiry - with no impartial truth-seekers involved - was not going to harm their grant-getting cash cow Mann; instead, it whitewashed the evidence to ensure the preferred conclusion. Professional science groups that relied upon public funding for their financial survival fell in line behind a huge Tom Sawyer campaign of "exoneration." There was no exoneration.

Summaries presented in court filings for the case of American Tradition Institute v. University of Virginia and Michael Mann - which demands release of Michael Mann's emails - say, "Mann has never been exonerated.. Exoneration requires investigation; investigation requires pursuit aimed at discovering material facts.  Mann's employer since 2005, Penn State University, has conducted no such thing. Neither has the University of Virginia."

The same conclusion applies to the UK's Muir Russell and Oxburgh inquiries, which didn't even mention Mann, because they were "investigating" only employees of the CRU.

I asked Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and attorney in the ATI v. UVa/Mann lawsuit for his take on the leaker's message. He told me, "Whatever prompted `Mr. FOIA,' I take it as a statement that, so far, the courts have failed us, as have our political institutions - and he has concluded that those in the public who have resisted the climate industry agenda should now have a chance to review these taxpayer-financed records, which are the subject of a remarkable campaign to subvert transparency laws."

We ourselves can't avoid blame for the science disaster uncovered by Mr. FOIA. As Peter Foster of London's Financial Times noted, we didn't heed President Dwight Eisenhower's warning. "Most people are aware of Ike's warning in 1961 about the military-industrial complex," Foster wrote. Our fatal error was to ignore what he said next: "In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." [emphasis added]

Americans won't take captivity. It's time to demote our climate masters to our humble servants. We won't kill them. But we should sentence them to prison - or Siberia, where they'll wish the climate was warming.

Via email




Flagship German Daily DIE WELT Stuns Germany: "Scientists Warn Of Ice Age", Cites New Peer-Reviewed Russian Study

Mentioning the lethal "100-year, record-smashing" spring cold and snow spreading across Europe over the past month has for the most part been avoided like the plague by Germany's mainstream media. The silence over the record cold and frost, which has killed thousands and cost billions, has been ear-ringing.

Yet some leading dailies are breaking ranks, and have begun to examine the phenomenon critically and openly.

For example veteran journalist Ulli Kulke at German flagship daily Die Welt today has stunned the rest of the German mainstream media with a piece titled Scientists warn of ice age.

Kulke writes that recently a growing number of scientific publications have been appearing in leading journals, and that they have been challenging the simplistic "one dimensional CO2 explanation" for climate change and showing that even the unlikely "doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration by 2050 would not have dramatic effects."

Kulke writes:  "Yet, papers with such content, even though they have passed the peer-review process, do not make any headlines. But they have been becoming much more frequent recently."

Increasingly it seems more and more scientists are now seeing huge opportunity in overturning one of the most ballyhooed scientific hypotheses of modern time, funding be damned.

In the Die Welt piece, Kulke asks if the record cold and snow over much of the northern hemisphere "is just a coincidence". The odds are increasing that it is not, and that it's not for nothing that a growing number of scientists are becoming friendly to other explanations and that the body of evidence supporting a combination of explanations is taking shape quickly. Kulke writes that it is therefore no surprise that 2 Russian scientists have recently joined the ever more thunderous chorus of alternative explanations on what drives climate. He writes:

"It's probably no coincidence that ever louder scientific opinions warning of an imminent ice period are coming also from Russia. Vladimir Baschkin and Rauf Galiulin have recently recognized the ice age possibility in a study. Both biogeochemists - a discipline that also includes the study of the Earth's atmosphere - have written a study for the Research Institute Vniigaz of the Gazprom concern, an address of course that cannot be said is free of lobbyists. However, their arguments are underpinned by findings that are gaining more and more acceptance from independent science: solar activity is weakening considerably - to an extent that was last seen several hundred years ago, the Little Ice Age, according to scientists."

Kulke writes that not only is the CO2-science for explaining climate change one-dimensional, but that also only looking at changes in solar irradiance is completely inadequate. The sun's fluctuating magnetic activity and its impact on the Earth's atmosphere, direct and indirect, though not well understood, are proving to have a far greater influence on the Earth's climate than many are willing to admit. This is all being backed up by leading research institutes such as CERN in Geneva and the Danish National Space Institute of Denmark.

SOURCE





Coldest Easter EVER for Britain: Arctic misery set to last a week as temperatures drop to -15C

BRITAIN is braced for the coldest Easter on record with the bitter Arctic blast showing no signs of easing.  Another week of freezing temperatures, gales and snow is forecast as the UK shivers in the chilliest spring for 50 years.

Heavy snow showers and strong winds have swept through the country causing mayhem on the roads, closing schools and downing power lines.

The extreme cold is thought to have caused the deaths of at least four people including two men, aged 25 and 33, at the weekend. Forecasters said the mercury was likely to fall below -10C (14F) this week but windchill could make it feel like -15C or colder across swathes of the country.

Central and northern regions have been worst hit with several inches of snow in many places and drifts several feet deep.

Thousands of homes in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Cumbria were yesterday without electricity for a third day as emergency crews struggled to restore supplies. Roads which became blocked on Friday were still impassible.

The Met Office issued severe weather warnings for ice today across much of the country.

With daytime temperatures likely to struggle above freezing, they last night extended a level-three cold weather health alert to Thursday, warning of a risk to the elderly and vulnerable.

They added that "heavy snow" threatens the Midlands and the South on Easter Saturday as a band of rain moves in from the Atlantic hitting cold air over the UK.

Forecaster Andrew Sibley said: "It is going to remain bitterly cold through the week with easterly winds keeping temperatures below freezing at night and just above during the day.

"There are likely to be more wintry showers along the east coast as this weather persists throughout the week.  "There is also going to be the problem of icy conditions on the roads as there is not likely to be any thaw in the next few days."

Forecasters have warned that next weekend could bring the lowest Easter temperatures since records began.  The record currently stands at -9.8C (14.4F) at Lagganlia, near Aviemore in Scotland, on Easter Monday 1986.

Jonathan Powell, forecaster for Vantage Weather Services, said: "We are expecting bitterly cold conditions right through the week and into next weekend.

"Temperatures are on course to beat the record low for Easter, sinking well below -10C in many parts of the country, possibly hitting -15C in the wind.  "This is all going to go on for quite some time, possibly until after Easter. It is a very grim and wintery picture."

SOURCE




Global Warming Causes Warmer, Wetter Winters Say Met Office (in 2007)

 

Rest of article here

The winter of 2006/07 was a warm and wet one for the UK.  Interviewed by the BBC, Met Office meteorologist Wayne Elliott had this to say:-

"It is consistent with the climate change message. It is exactly what we expect winters to be like - warmer and wetter."

Perhaps he should have added - "except when they are colder and drier".

SOURCE





Have politicians had a mental blackout?

There's a real risk of energy shortages in Britain, yet still the political class is obsessed with cutting fossil fuel use

`Britain faces gas supply crisis as storage runs dry', warned Reuters last week. Unseasonably cold weather has meant that demand for gas has shot up just as it should be going down with the arrival of spring. Just to add a little spice to the warnings, tens of thousands of homes were left without power as blizzards knocked out power lines in Northern Ireland and Scotland. A taste of things to come?

As it goes, the claim that gas supplies could run out by 8 April is very much a worst-case scenario. There is normally plenty of supply, from a combination of the North Sea, Europe and shipments of liquefied gas coming from countries further afield, particularly Qatar. Nonetheless, it is daft that a modern, highly developed economy like the UK should even be discussing such things. That we are is the product of years of inertia in central government and an obsession with self-imposed greenhouse-gas emissions targets.

So perversely, just as a set of circumstances was emerging that showed how close to the wind the UK is sailing on energy security, Britain has been closing power stations. For example, on Friday, Didcot A power station in Oxfordshire was disconnected from the National Grid after 43 years. The 2,000-megawatt plant got the chop because it burns coal. Older coal plants are being phased out under EU regulations. Indeed, according to Alistair Buchanan, the boss of energy regulator Ofgem, 10 per cent of the UK's electricity generating capacity is due to be switched off this month.

Buchanan notes the speed at which plant closures will now kick in: `If you can imagine a ride on a rollercoaster at a fairground, then this winter, we are at the top of the circuit and we head downhill - fast. Within three years, we will see the reserve margin of generation fall from about 14 per cent to less than five per cent. That is uncomfortably tight.' In fact, some of those coal plants are closing ahead of schedule because their remaining operating hours have been used up quickly to take advantage of low coal prices. At a time when complaints about domestic energy costs are getting louder and louder, we are turning our back on the cheapest form of power available.

We've known for quite some time that there was the potential for a major shortfall in energy supplies. Coal and nuclear stations have been shutting but alternatives have fallen short. Wind is expensive to build and intermittent in operation. At some of the coldest periods of the year, wind supply can fall to nearly zero. Renewable UK celebrated the fact that wind produced a record proportion of UK electricity in 2012 - but it was still just 5.5 per cent of the total. New nuclear stations should be being built now, but years of political indecision mean that not a single new plant has actually got agreement yet. Even now, suppliers are haggling with government over guaranteed prices, though planning permission for Hinkley Point C - a new station on the site of two older nuclear reactors - has at least been approved. Nonetheless, it will still take eight to 10 years to build the plant.

Producing new domestic supplies of fuel is also being stymied by the government's overly cautious approach to shale gas. There are certainly substantial supplies under Lancashire, but overreaction to any safety issue is delaying exploitation. The latest hold-up is the need for an environmental assessment and concerns about the effect on wintering birds. (The latter hold-up is odd, since wind turbines are known to kill a lot of birds, with a disproportionate effect on raptors like eagles and vultures.) Even if shale gas finally gets the green light, significant supplies are still years away.

Another worry has been storage. While France, Germany and Italy hold around three months' worth of gas in reserve, the UK holds just 19 days. Given that the Lib-Con government's energy policy relies on burning a lot more gas in the next few years - cleaner than coal, much more reliable than renewables and cheaper than nuclear - storing gas will become much more important in the future. That's not so much because the UK might actually run out, but because in the future, as the FT`s Nick Butler points out, we're more likely to buy gas on the open market as and when we need it. If we don't have reserves, we'll be forced to pay whatever the price is at any particular moment rather than being able to wait for short-term fluctuations to pass.

The underlying problem is that the successive governments have been caught between a rock and a hard place. In normal circumstances, energy policy would be easy: pick the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy. On that basis, coal wins hands down. It's cheap and it's very flexible to use. No wonder King Coal is back with a vengence worldwide - not just in fast-developing countries like China and India, but also in Germany, which is burning more coal to make up for its decision to close its nuclear power stations. In the UK, gas would come second and we might add in hydro and nuclear to ensure diversity of supply.

However, the tunnel vision in the UK about climate change has massively complicated the issue. The UK parliament has committed itself - in what may well be the most expensive and boneheaded act of all time - to cutting emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. So now the aim is to wind down coal use, while boosting wind power, with gas and nuclear as awkward compromises. But there has been such regulatory indecision that every option has been made more expensive. Big energy companies are now unwilling to invest in any particular energy source for fear that a new set of ministers will change the rules all over again. In future, UK consumers are not only paying extra for green energy but are forking out for an effective governments-can't-make-a-decision surcharge, too.

To put the tin lid on this ironyfest, this morning we had Sir John Beddington, the government's soon-to-retire chief scientific adviser, complaining that the problem of climate change was not being taken seriously enough. In a country experiencing its coldest March weather for decades, with power stations closing, energy prices rising and serious questions being asked about future security of supply - and all in the context of the fact that global temperatures have plateaued for the past 16 years - it is more the case that climate change has been taken too seriously.

That is not to let the political class off the hook. From the economy to energy production, the inability of governments to act decisively has become a material force in its own right, which holds back society. The real problem with UK politics today is that there's somebody home but the lights are off - and if the situation continues, that won't just be metaphorically.

SOURCE




Burning books, burning witches, burning corn

History is littered with ideology gone awry.  The most recent example? Burning corn as a substitute for fossil fuels in an effort to mitigate anthropogenic climate change (which supposedly has a negative impact on the production of crops such as corn).

This is about as logical as publicity-stunt burnings of Harry Potter books because of objections to the contents within, which only results in more people buying and reading the books to find out what got the book-burners so inflamed in the first place.

With Harry Potter it was the fantasy world of witchcraft and wizardry. With corn ethanol it is the fantasy world of agriculturally damaging climate change.

A few years ago, a paper was published in the prominent scientific journal Science by Stanford's David Lobell and colleagues that reported that human-caused global warming over the past 30 years resulted in a slowdown in global crop production. Modeling the climate response of the world's four largest commodity crops-corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans-Lobell's team calculated that as a result of rising temperatures and precipitation changes, global crop production was about 3 percent less than it otherwise would have been.

But consider this: The United States produces about 36 percent of the world's corn. And about 40 percent of U.S. corn is used to produce ethanol for use as a gasoline substitute in an attempt to lower net carbon dioxide emissions from driving and reduce climate change. Globally, corn makes up 30 percent of total worldwide production of the four crops studied by Lobell's group.

Multiply all these percentages out, and you get that the United States is burning a bit more than 4 percent of global crop production in an attempt to mitigate a climate-driven loss of 3 percent of the global crop production.

How crazy is that, you may ask?  About as crazy as burning witches because of climate change and associated crop failures (a popular pastime* during the Little Ice Age).

To make matters worse, the 3% slowdown in crop production (we use "slowdown" because during the 1980-2008 study period the total production of the four crops examined by Lobell et al. increased by about 75 percent, so global crop production is actually booming in the face of climate change), that calculation does not take into account the fertilization effect for crops of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (from our burning of fossil fuels).

When Lobell et al. made a rough estimate of the benefits of additional carbon dioxide, the slowdown dropped to less than 1 percent.

And even this less-than-1 percent impact was described by Lobell et al. as perhaps being "overly pessimistic" because it did not fully incorporate long-term adaptive farming responses to changing climate conditions (i.e., farmers are not as dumb as statistical models make them out to be).

What this means is that even under overly pessimistic scenarios, we still currently burn more than 4 times as much grain as climate change has taken away. Thinking about this in future terms, if we observe twice as much climate change from 2010 through 2038 as we did from 1980 to 2008 (Lobell's study period), all we would have to do is stop burning half as much ethanol as we do now to make up for the entire global climate-related crop reduction.

The irrational fear that climate change will lead to global crop failures is risible. Burning crops to alleviate that fear will ultimately condemn the perpetrators to permanent laughingstock status, alongside those fanning the flames under witches, warlocks, and other objectionable words.

SOURCE

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