The final humiliation from Climategate

When the Climategate material was made public the warming crowd circled the wagons, insisted they meant nothing, and claimed they were the victims of climate skeptics acting as criminals who "hacked" into their sites. As the material made the rounds of the media, reports defending the warming advocates were replaced with more skeptical reports. Media outlets now saw a pattern of abuse. While the media was still on-board about warming panic the top warming scientists had lost their luster in the ideas of the press. The result has been more skepticism about the entire process and how material is being reported, as this blog has reported on recently.

When the material first materialized the scientists, whose actions were exposed, screamed criminal conspiracy. They were sure they were the victims of some sophisticated hacking effort. Recently the David King, a political appointee and a scientist, claimed that some foreign intelligence agency must have been behind the exposure. The hints were that it was the Russians.

But the U.K.'s left-0f-center Guardian newspaper, says that police investigations aren't turning up evidence of a hack job at all: "So far, the police investigation has got nowhere. It is not even clear whether the crime of computer data interception has actually occurred." The Guardian says that the University of East Anglia "has confirmed that all of this material was simply sitting in an archive on single backup CRU server, available to be copied."

The article notes that previously a warming skeptic had posted some data from the Climate Research Unit, which had been denied to him by the CRU. It was assumed that he, or someone helping him, had hacked the data. It later turned out that the data was on-line but that the CRU had deleted the links but leaving the data up for anyone to browse through if they stumbled upon it. In other wrods, there was no hacking, just the CRU was as careful with storing data as they appear to be with analyzing it.

One of the nasty skeptics stumbled across something similar. In an attempt to go to the CRU's site he came to the directory of all material on the site istead. This was due to an error at the CRU. This horrible skeptic then called the CRU and informed them that their own site was basically leaking information that they were hiding from the public. The Guardian says that after that warning the "CRU failed to batten down the hatches."

The Guardian quotes one skeptic on how such things happen. He said that files get put "in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserve, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available."

If true that is the final humiliation for the warmers from Climategate. As the warming loyalists at the Guardian put it, if this proves to be the case, as it is increasingly starting to look like, then "UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest." This is precisely the reason this blog refused to call the release "hacking" as the mainstream media rushed to do. I stated that all we knew was that the data was out there. We had no proof it was hacked. It could have been intentionally leaked as well. We just didn't know. But since the media was quite anxious to make the warmers look good, and skeptics look villianous, they rushed to an unwarranted jugment—and not for the first time either. As a final precaution, we STILL DON'T KNOW.

SOURCE




A letter that is unlikely to be answered

Recently, NASA Director James Hansen was challenged by Hungarian Physicist Dr. Miklos Zagoni and Dianna Cotter, a Contributing Editor to FamilySecurityMatters.org, to release the raw numbers data Hansen used to report that 2009 was the warmest year on record. NASA incorrectly states that our surface atmosphere can hold infinite amounts of heat. Instead, the discovery of Atmospheric Equilibrium by Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi proves Global Warming by CO2 emissions a hoax.

The challenge can be found in this open letter to Dr. Hansen, made public by the authors for the first time.

Open Letter to:Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS)

Dear Dr. Hansen:

On January 22, 2010 you published a statement: “2009: Second warmest year on record.”

As we all know, the global average surface temperature is a sum of two quantities. One is the so-called effective temperature, determined by the available incoming energy (depending on the solar constant, planetary albedo [reflectivity] and internal heat sources as ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, industrial heat generation and so on), now about 255 Kelvin or minus 18 Celsius.

The other is the greenhouse temperature, coming from the presence of infrared-active gases (H2O, CO2, methane, ozone, etc.) and clouds in the atmosphere, generally accepted as about 33 degrees Celsius. These two give up the known 288 K (+15 C) global average surface temperature.

Would you be so kind as to produce a separation of your temperature data, year by year, into the above mentioned two parts? This would show us whether Global Warming is happening in the effective, or in the greenhouse part of the global temperature.

After the results of Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, former NASA Langley Research Center senior research scientist, stated that the observed warming is happening in the effective temperature while the greenhouse addition fluctuates around its 33C equilibrium value, this shows no growing trend in the past half century.

The opportunity for such a project is given, as the White House said NASA will be directed to concentrate on Earth-science projects – principally, researching and monitoring climate change. We suggest here not to research and monitor the conventional climate change issue, but greenhouse effect itself.

Looking forward your answer,

Dr. Miklos Zagoni, Dianna C. Cotter -- Budapest, Hungary; Portland, Oregon USA

SOURCE





Little Robby the Weatherboy

Suppose you were trudging through (or, worse yet, shoveling out of) two-to-three feet of a record-setting snowfall (for the second time in ten weeks), and some idiot told you that it never snowed anymore in your neck of the woods – and worse yet, he knew the real reason: global warming.

Well, if you live in the Washington, D.C., area, you’re the guy (or gal) knee-deep in white stuff. And that idiot is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That’s right, the snot-nose, spoiled-brat little know-it-all spawn of Bobby and Ethel who spent his childhood cascading down the snow-covered slopes of Hickory Hill -- so the nanny or butler could pull his sleigh back up the snow-covered crest, with him perched imperiously upon it, no doubt.

Here’s Little Bobby’s own account, written just 15 months ago, of his much-lamented marshmellow world of yesteryear. I’ve bold-faced my favorite paragraph to make sure you don’t miss the trust-fund bantling’s afflatus (or, would that be effluvia?) as to what caused an end to his idyllic winter wonderland:

“In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don't own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

“In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington's C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

“Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.”

Now, I’ll let you pause a second to contemplate Little Robby’s revelry – including the highly unlikely imagery of Uncle President “standing erect” as he rode a toboggan (which can reach speeds of 15 to 20 miles per hour on an average slope) whilst “never faltering.” Really, Robby, not even an occasional shift of weight or bended knee? Sounds like brother David wasn’t the only member of the RFK clan snorting the white stuff.

But, let’s get back to the bottom line. Just think, were it not for those big nasty meanies at Exxon Mobil – and their “carbon cronies” (a catchy alliteration no doubt supplied by one of Little Robby’s highly paid ghost writers) – there would still be snow at Hickory Hill, Ballantrae Hill, and all of the other in-crowd hot spots where Little Robby, Uncle President, Daddy Attorney General, and the inevitable Eskimos used to frolic in the fresh-fallen cover. (All of this while we gloveless waifs watched in envy, longing for the days when global warming would prevent us from freezing our keisters off.)

Let’s face it: Robert Kennedy is an idiot. When he is not cutting backroom deals with El Dictador Supremo Hugo Chavez to make millions on phony oil-for-the-oiless scams, he is flying around the world in his private jet to admonish us all for wasting energy. But, wherever he is, you can be sure there is one place he isn’t: out in the parking lot with you shoveling out from under two-to-three feet of snow he assures us all doesn’t really exist. Punk.

SOURCE





Weatherboy says you can only use anecdotes if they support global warming

He repudiates his own method of argument -- quite eloquently! And doesn't seem to be aware that he is doing so!

A record 32.4 inches of snow fell on northern Virginia over the weekend, with a second wallop expected tonight. David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner used the blizzard as an opportunity to question an old Robert F. Kennedy Jr. column that cites personal anecdotes to make a broader argument about global warming:

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don't own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington's C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.

Freddoso cracks that Kennedy’s “anecdotal evidence seems to be falling flat this year.” He also gibes that Kennedy — a man “who flies around on private plane so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet” — should “leave weather analysis to the meteorologists instead of trying to attribute every global phenomenon to anthropogenic climate change.” Freddoso’s post was quickly picked up by numerous blogs, including the Drudge Report, where, as of midnight Monday, it was ranked as the number-one most-read story on the popular news-aggregator site.

Kennedy tells National Review Online that all of this attention over one of his old columns is “ridiculous.”

“Idiots on the right like Rush [Limbaugh] like to point to any cold-weather anomalies as proof that global warming doesn’t exist,” Kennedy says. “They are either deliberately blind to science or trying to protect their corporatist interests.” Kennedy also sticks by the anecdotes from his childhood in Virginia. “It used to snow consistently in McLean — enough to have a ski hill,” he says. “It wasn’t just a single season.”

“Climate change is occurring,” Kennedy says. “A single snowstorm doesn’t change that. Let me put it this way: If you sit on a beach for a few minutes and watch the waves come in, you’ll see lots of waves of different sizes. If you sit there for six hours, you’ll see the tides going in and out. The same is true with global warming: A weather anomaly doesn’t tell the whole story of what is happening. Sometimes you’ll see thicker snowstorms in places you’d never expect, often due to an increase in coastal precipitation and greater evaporation.” RFK Jr. concludes: “It’s like if you hear that a person didn’t die from smoking, now you want to believe that smoking doesn’t cause cancer?”

SOURCE





"Time" magazine spinning like a top

They still think that they can persuade people that blizzards are caused by global warming. See below. Amusing that they too now say that you can't use weather events as information about climate

As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years [i.e. BEFORE the alleged CO2 disaster of the late 20th century]. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, [I live in the middle latitudes and I can assure the writer that there is no lack of storms here. We are having them just about daily at the moment. Where is the writer's evidence for his claim? I suspect that he is talking theory, not evidence] the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall.

Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well intensify the storms that do occur and make them more destructive. [The models do suggest that -- but the evidence doesn't]

But as far as winter storms go, shouldn't climate change make it too warm for snow to fall? Eventually that is likely to happen — but probably not for a while. In the meantime, warmer air could be supercharged with moisture and, as long as the temperature remains below 32°F, it will result in blizzards rather than drenching winter rainstorms. And while the mid-Atlantic has borne the brunt of the snowfall so far this winter, areas near lakes may get hit even worse. As global temperatures have risen, the winter ice cover over the Great Lakes has shrunk, which has led to even more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow in the already hard-hit Great Lakes region, according to a 2003 study in the Journal of Climate.

Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate. Of course, that doesn't help you much when you're trying to locate your car under a foot of powder.

SOURCE






Government’s New Climate Service Shouldn’t Be Used as Doomsday Device



The Washington Post reports that The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed to create a new climate service and website that would provide the public with information and predictions about the impact of global warming. If this turns out to be yet one more source of apocalyptic government press releases and other such hype, it’s the last thing we need. Just look at the cover of NOAA’s already-existing National Climate Data Center report showing a photoshopped house under water to get a sense of how much are tax dollars are already being wasted on NOAA scares, not to mention those from NASA, EPA and other bureaucracies with a piece of the climate action.

What we really need is more scrutiny of such scary claims. Climategate – the release of emails showing exaggerated temperature increases and other misconduct among key contributors to the UN’s major global warming report, may well implicate some of NOAA’s work. But don’t expect to hear too much of that on the new website. Recent revelations show that claims of Himayalan glaciers melting and hurricane damage increasing due to global warming are also suspect, but again this is the kind of thing federal global warming researchers are busy trying to ignore. Rather than focus on bringing truth and transparency to the scientific debate on climate change, the government officials continually push that the science is settled and to save the planet we need resembling the actions of Audi’s “Green Police” commercial.

For those who haven’t seen the ad, (available here), green cops arrest average citizens for small environmental infractions. The ad even includes a super-sniffing anteater and Cheap Trick rerecording “Dream Police” into “Green Police” as the theme song. Some of the infractions are quite over the top but many are either punishable by fine today or are currently being proposed. Some cities, including Washington D.C., have implemented a plastic bag tax. The phase-out of incandescent light bulb will commence in 2012. There are some who want to ban bottled water because it creates too much waste and uses too much energy. San Francisco passed a law that says if residents or businesses do not recycle properly, they would be hit with fines and could have their garbage collection stopped. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said, “We don’t want to find people. We want to change their behavior.” And that’s the legitimate problem with overreaching environmental policies that limit personal freedoms.

Jonah Goldberg said of the green police ad: “The commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety and surging popular skepticism.” Let’s hope NOAA’s new climate service isn’t another avenue to reignite the doomsday scenarios to protect the government’s iron grip on the scientific consensus.

SOURCE. See also comment by Sen. Inhofe






Drivers of "green" cars let down by yet another British government policy change

Drivers who took the Government’s advice and chose a low-emission car could be left with a white elephant after a U-turn by ministers. Britain’s biggest supplier of biofuels will announce today that it is closing its pumps because the Government is ending financial support from April.

It is the second time in five years that the Government has changed its mind and cancelled subsidies after encouraging motorists to invest in a particular type of green car. In 2005 it withdrew grants for drivers to convert their cars to LPG. Now motoring groups are advising drivers to think very carefully before accepting Government grants for electric cars because ministers’ current enthusiasm for them may not last.

Morrisons will withdraw pumps at 144 filling stations that dispense B30, a blend of 30 per cent biodiesel and 70 per cent ordinary diesel, which is used in 5,000 vehicles.

The supermarket group is also considering withdrawing E85, a blend of 15 per cent normal petrol and 85 per cent ethanol. Businesses and individuals which have adapted their vehicles to use the high blends of biofuels will find that their investment has been wasted. They will have to revert to using ordinary petrol and diesel and will no longer be able to claim any environmental advantage.

Avon & Somerset Police, Somerset County Council, Wessex Water, Wessex Grain and the Environment Agency all bought fleets of flexible-fuel vehicles on the assumption that the Government would continue its 20p a litre duty discount on ethanol. This will be withdrawn on April 1.

Edmund King, the president of the AA, said: “People who invested in these vehicles capable of taking these high blends of biofuel are being left high and dry.”

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

*****************************************