By Darren Samuelsohn, Politico
Eighteen months ago, Barack Obama took office pledging to deal with a “planet in peril.”
His party held big majorities in Congress, and the House answered by passing a tough cap-and-trade bill. A massive climate conference in Copenhagen, with Obama at the center of the action, focused the world on the need to address global warming.
Then came the nation’s worst-ever environmental disaster, an oil spill in the Gulf that put momentum behind environmentalists and scarred the image of big, polluting industries.
Add in a summer of record-high temperatures, and it would seem the stars had been aligned like never before for climate legislation.
But by Thursday, the White House’s biggest energy and environmental initiative sat in tatters, relegated to an unknown election-year abyss after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he didn’t yet have 60 votes and would instead move to the lowest hanging energy fruit.
The blame game has already begun.
One exasperated administration official on Thursday lambasted the environmentalists led by the Environmental Defense Fund for failing to effectively lobby GOP senators.
“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” the official told POLITICO. “They spent like $100 million and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”
But many say it was Obama who didn’t do enough to make the climate bill a big enough priority, allowing other monster big-ticket items like the economic stimulus, health care and Wall Street reform to suck up all the oxygen and leaving environmentalists grasping for straws too late in the game - well past the expiration date for other big accomplishments during the 111th Congress.
“The absence of direct, intense presidential leadership doomed this process,” said Eric Pooley, author of “Climate War,” a just-published book that chronicles the past three years of debate on global warming. “We did have a window there, and now the window is shut. It’s more about prying it back open than anything else.”
Going back to Day One, Obama never turned his campaign proposals into formal legislative text, leaving lawmakers to shoulder the load. And when Obama spoke publicly about the issue, it was only with a vague call for “comprehensive energy and climate” measures that did little to help win votes.
Obama’s hands-off approach didn’t matter as much in the House, where Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and, later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi built their winning coalition region by region to scrap out a 219-212 vote just before the July 4, 2009 recess. But it was another story with his former colleagues in the Senate, where carbon caps had never topped 48 votes on the floor.
“Without his leadership, then everything he’s done so far will lead to nothing,” Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in late June during a press conference aimed specifically at getting the White House more engaged in the process.
Administration officials counter that they did everything they could. Carol Browner, the president’s top energy and climate adviser, kept in regular touch with moderate Republicans like Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). But West Wing officials concluded the poisonous partisan atmosphere in the upper chamber made it necessary to outsource the lobbying effort to green groups.
Of course, part of the bill’s demise had nothing to do with Obama or the environmentalists.
Primary politics sent several one-time Republican climate advocates running for cover. Back in 2003, after a losing floor vote, Sen. John McCain pledged to keep on plugging away on the climate issue just like he did campaign finance reform. But he avoided the new negotiations that included his best Senate friends, Joe Lieberman and Graham. Instead, McCain attacked Obama for packaging pieces of his climate policy in a budget request and then insisted on nuclear power provisions that he knew touched a raw nerve with Reid.
Another one-time ally, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) went after Obama’s ability to tackle climate through Environmental Protection Agency regulations, a move that put environmental groups on the defensive during key months of the debate. And Lugar, who voted for climate bills in 2003 and 2005 that had caps in them, said he couldn’t support the concept anymore.
“My dilemma was that the whole process they were headed toward, the cap and trade and carbon pricing thing, I appreciate it’s become an article of faith for many, that nothing short of that really is effective or worth paying attention to,” Lugar told POLITICO on Wednesday. “I’m just taking a very different point of view, that we don’t start or end with that, but that we don’t have it at all.”
Several other swing vote Democrats never came close to playing ball. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill avoided climate bill advocates and journalists who cover the issue. And when she was cornered, she warned of the political consequences to moderates - and the Democratic majority—if they were pressed to vote for a carbon cap. West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller argued the legislation had little resonance on Capitol Hill or back home.
“Most of the members of Congress don’t know how to explain it, much less the American people,” he said.
Several other Democrats, including Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln and North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan, pleaded with Reid to instead focus on energy legislation.
“They very much don’t want to put their necks on the chopping block for something they don’t think is going anywhere anyway,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch.
Perhaps the biggest blow came this April when Graham bolted from nine months of closed-door climate negotiations with Lieberman and Sen. John Kerry. It was a dramatic weekend less about climate change than immigration politics, full of late-night phone calls and Lieberman opting to break Sabbath to host a meeting at his Georgetown home.
Graham had been an effective spokesman for the climate bill, blasting moves to pass a “half-assed” package of energy measures. But his departure left Kerry and Lieberman searching desperately for new GOP friends.
“Republicans pulled out of the talks, and it’s just that simple,” said Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who played a pivotal role in getting the House bill across the finish line. “There’s not another answer.”
Advocates also hung on for too long to the idea of an economy-wide proposal that combined emission caps from power plant, the manufacturing sector and transportation fuels. Kerry and Lieberman didn’t signal they were OK with a scaled-back approach until the summer, long after the different sides of the debate had hardened their positions.
“They went to the compromise too late to get it all sorted out,” said Pooley. “I’m not saying it would have been easy to make it happen, but it might have been possible.”
Where climate legislation goes from here is a wide-open question.
Leading Senate authors say they aren’t done with negotiations this year, and advocates say they will keep beating the drum through the summer.
“Ultimately - and sooner rather than later - these issues simply must be dealt with,” said former Vice President Al Gore. “Our national security, our economic recovery and the future of the United States of America - and indeed the future of human civilization on this Earth—depends on our country taking leadership. And that, in turn, depends on the United States Senate acting.”
But the inconvenient truth is that election-year politics are likely to keep the Senate from coming anywhere close to debating a carbon cap in 2010.
“I think it’ll be very difficult to do anything in the fall because partisan fervor will only grow and make it very, very difficult,” Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy Corp., perhaps the most outspoken of the electric utility executives when it comes to advocacy for climate legislation.
For Obama, the goal is to tackle climate through a suite of Environmental Protection Agency regulations, starting early next year with power plants. More than a dozen states have also started their own mandatory programs, though those are under assault in the wake of economic recession and political transitions, including in the California governor’s office.
On Capitol Hill, prospects for climate legislation beyond 2010 rest to some degree on Democrats holding onto their majorities. GOP lawmakers who are poised to assume leadership positions if they win the House or Senate this November include well-known skeptics on climate science, most notably Joe Barton on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Jim Inhofe in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Waxman said Thursday he was disappointed in Reid’s decision. “If they can’t do it, they can’t do it,” he said. “But that’s a real shame.”
Still, the California Democrat also said he would “refuse to accept” that there’s no chance of a climate bill getting across the finish line.
By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit
In the Guardian debate, George Monbiot’s opening question (made in good faith on his part) pertained to CRUTEM, George noting that the inquiry had been able to derive a CRUTEM-like result from GHCN data and challenging me that this had somehow rebutted my “crusade” on this point.
I tried to deal with this as quickly as I could, since I did not want to waste an already short 5 minutes to deal with disinformation. My answer - which surprised Monbiot - was that CRUTEM had been little more than a passing interest at Climate Audit on which I’d seldom commented. And that Muir Russell’s finding on the triviality of CRU’s temperature unit simply endorsed a point previously made at Climate Audit. This answer seemed to baffle George and others.
Unfortunately, Monbiot and others had uncritically accepted disinformation from the Muir Russell inquiry, which, on this point (as on some others), instead of examining (with citations) actual criticisms from sources like Climate Audit, preferred instead to construct its own allegations which, in this case, they described as “broad allegations which are prevalent in the public domain”. Lucia has often criticized such Gavinesque behavior in other contexts.
My long-standing position on CRUTEM was that CRU’s obstruction of data requests was most likely due to its desire to conceal that it did so little work on quality control; that the CRU result could be derived so trivially that, in effect, CRU no longer served any useful function in this field. Long before Climategate, I’d recommended that CRU’s responsibilities in this field be transferred to the UK Met Office and that the US Department of Energy re-allocate its funding in this area to improvements at GHCN - a point that should be considered carefully in the US DOE review of their funding of CRU (reported by Jonathan Leake here.)
At the Guardian panel, I observed that CRUTEM was an almost microscopically small issue in the Climategate emails - Climategate was about the Hockey Stick and its handling by IPCC, not CRUTEM. CRUTEM was mentioned in only 25 emails and, even then, often passim.
I’ll review some past CA posts to provide support for this.
In early 2007 here, I’d observed that the HadCRU series for gridcell 57N 77E (containing the single Siberian station, Barabinsk) could be derived from a simple anomaly calculation from a GHCN version of Barabinsk. At the time, we didn’t know what stations CRU used, but, in this case, I observed that the CRU calculation was straightforward - unlike GISS, which had all sorts of weird smoothing and adjusting, which were then a topic of interest. This post contains some interesting plots of differences between various various versions for the gridcell and station - the understanding of these differences has underpinned the desire to examine data as used by the various agencies.
In late 2008, long before my own FOI requests for CRU station data, I discussed CRU calculations in more detail here, concluding with the observation that “if, like GISS, they are doing nothing other than trivial sums on GHCN data, one feels that the money would be better spent on beefing up QC and data collection at GHCN.”
The reverse engineering of CRUTEM3 looks almost pathetically easy given that we’ve already waded through step 0 of GISS, where they collate different GHCN versions (dset0) into a single station history (dset1.) CRU doesn’t have the bewildering sequence of smoothing operations that Hansen uses at multiple stages (though Hansen, mercifully, doesn’t use Mannian butterworth smoothing).
To my knowledge, unlike GISS, CRU does not make the slightest attempt to adjust for UHI, relying instead of articles like Jones et al 1990 purporting to show that UHI doesn’t “matter”.
We can already emulate GISS step0 - not that it makes any sense, but it provides a benchmark. Here’s all that seems to be necessary to produce a gridded CRUTEM3 series given a dset1 data set. First, create an anomaly-version of the series. I have a simple function anom on hand and this could be done as follows:
dset1.anom=apply(dset1,2,anom)
Then one could make an average of dset1 series within gridcell i as follows, where info is an information dataset in my usual style containing for each station, inter alia, its lat, long and gridcell number (called “cell” here):
for (i in 1:2592) grid[,i]=apply(dset1.anom[,info$cell==i],1,mean,na.rm=T)
This would yield the CRUTEM3 series. My guess as to why they don’t want to show their work is because they probably use hundreds of line of bad Fortran code to do something that you can do in a couple of lines in a modern language. Anyway, I’ll experiment with this at some point, but this is my hypothesis on all that’s required to emulate CRUTEM3. CRU has been funded by the US DOE; if, like GISS, they are doing nothing other than trivial sums on GHCN data, one feels that the money would be better spent on beefing up QC and data collection at GHCN.
We re-visited this issue in the Mole post last summer. I observed in a comment (along the lines of my 2008 post):
Nowhere have I encouraged readers to expect any smoking guns in this data set. Quite the opposite. My own best guess as to why they are so obstructive about the data is the specific commercial interest of CRU. My guess is that they spend negligible time on quality control, but derive a lot of funding for a prestigious data set and use the funds for other purposes. They don’t want anyone to see how simplistic their analysis is and how negligible their quality control. Nothing more, nothing less. (But that’s just a guess. The real reason may be different again.)
Reader Adam observed:
The whole CRUTEM / HadCRUT gridded series can be easily reproduced for the most of the globe with the GHCN dataset. I’ve tried it for some gridcells and it worked. This is not actually true, though it holds for some gridcells (as I’d observed for the Barabinsk gridcell.) For example, HadCRU includes SST data, which is not in the GHCN land data set. In addition, Jones has his own 1961-1990 “normals” that he uses for standardization and an exact replication of CRUTEM cannot be accomplished without these “normals”, though the calculation can be approximated using freshly calculated normals. (Oddly enough, I have a copy of the CRUTEM2 normals from my 2002 correspondence with Jones - before I’d been blacklisted because of the MM2003 criticism of MBH98). In response to Adam, I observed:
I agree with your comments. Like you, I believe that 95% of CRU is obtained from GHCN, with a very few non-GHCN sources, of which Austria is one (Norway, Sweden, Denmark are others.) Like you, I believe that they do relatively trivial manipulations of GHCN data. As I’ve said elsewhere, that is my best guess as to the secret that they don’t want exposed and the only commercial interest that they are protecting.
Also see my post from earlier this year discussing the ”end of CRUTEM” and the desireability of this responsibility being taken over by the Met Office, a post in which I review earlier comments to this effect going back a few years.
A couple of other posts at the time of the Mole incident were here and Dr Phil, Confidential Agent , in which I observed that Jones was a temperature accountant:
Jones has spent much of his academic career as a sort of temperature accountant. Commencing in the early 1980s, he collected station data and compiled averages - a useful enterprise, but surely no more than accounting.
Muir Russell’s second of three “broad allegations which are prevalent in the public domain”:
That CRU adjusted the data without scientific justification or adequate explanation. Some allegations imply that this was done to fabricate evidence for recent warming.
I don’t know who they had in mind here, as they’ve followed the Gavin Schmidt practice of not providing a citation. And perhaps somebody somewhere has made an allegation in this form. But this is not an allegation that was made at Climate Audit. My own surmise was not that CRU had adjusted the data, but that they hadn’t adjusted the data for UHI - a surmise that has been verified.
The criticism from Climate Audit was that (1) CRU provided their station data as collated to “friends” but not to potential critics; and (2) that their excuses for not providing station data were what one London reporter (not Jonathan Leake) described to me as “deliberately deceptive”.
Muir Russell did not directly address either issue. Instead, they re-framed both questions.
Postscript: In their Appendix 7, Muir Russell say that they were able to make a concordance of 90% of CRU stations to GHCN stations despite the lack of such a concordance by CRU. This is a lower percentage than the concordance (95.6%) that I’d placed online in December 2007.
Muir Russell stated:
31. The Review Team was able to match 90% of stations given in the CRU list to GHCN (see Appendix 7). CRU has stated in a written submission [15] that that the remaining 10% can be obtained from other sources including the NMOs. Thus substantial work is required to take the CRU published list and assemble 100% of the primary station data from global repositories and NMOs. We make a recommendation for the future below.
When Willis Eschenbach managed to get the list of CRU stations as used, I did semi-automated matching of CRU information to GHCN information, discussing the matter here and posted up my concordance in Dec 2007 here, in which I’d matched 95.6% of CRU stations to GHCN sources.
by Marlo Lewis
Many have already written the obituary for the Kerry-Lieberman bill and other cap-and-trade legislation in the current Congress. In today’s Politico, however, columnist Darren Samuelsohn quotes Sen. John Kerr’s denial of that assessment: “No, it’s not dead because we’re going to have a lame duck session and we have weeks ahead of us.”
Re-read the first part of Kerry’s explanation. Kerry is saying that even if the Democratic leadership does not hold a vote on cap-and-trade before the November elections, fearing the wrath of the electorate, the greenhouse gang might still enact cap-and-trade after the elections, when voters could no longer hold them accountable.
How exactly would cap-and-traders pull it off? Samuelsohn summarizes the strategy as explained by an unnamed spokesman for a “major advocacy group”
But one source from a major advocacy group said Wednesday that another option is for the Senate to pass a pared back energy measure now and then go to conference during a lame-duck session with the House-passed climate bill that includes greenhouse gas limits across multiple sectors of the economy. At that point, the source said, anything is possible.
Clever, but perhaps not clever enough. As Machievelli infamously advised princes long ago, one should not say to someone whom one wants to kill, “Give me your gun, I want to kill you with it,” but merely “Give me your gun,” for once you have the gun in hand, you can satisfy your desire.
Kerry, the unnamed advocacy group spokesman, and others have let the cat out of the bag. They are saying in effect, “Give us an energy bill, any energy bill, we want to snooker you with it to get cap-and-trade. We’ll conference any energy bill passed by the Senate with Waxman-Markey in a lame duck session, and neither you nor the American people will be able to stop us. Hah!”
Except that loose-lipped schemers are half-baked Machiavellians. The Party of No can and should have the last laugh. All Senate Rs have to do is resist the temptation to “do something.” They now have a compelling and easily explained reason to postpone further consideration of energy legislation until the next Congress. It is simply that the greenhouse gang, by its own admission, does not intend to play fair or respect the wishes of the electorate.
Rs who strongly feel the impulse to “do something” need merely wait until January 2011, when they are widely expected to hold more seats in both the House and Senate, and when Waxman-Markey will no longer be in play.
By Andrew Bolt
Clive Crook may be a warmist, but is honest enough to describe whitewash when he sees it:
I am for a carbon tax. I also believe that the Climategate emails revealed, to an extent that surprised even me (and I am difficult to surprise), an ethos of suffocating groupthink and intellectual corruption.
I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.
The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann - the paleoclimatologist who came up with “the hockey stick” - would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for “lack of credible evidence”, it will not even investigate them.... Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers - so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.
Further “vindication” of the Climategate emailers was to follow, of course, in Muir Russell’s equally probing investigation. To be fair, Russell manages to issue a criticism or two. He says the scientists were sometimes “misleading” - but without meaning to be (a plea which, in the case of the “trick to hide the decline”, is an insult to one’s intelligence). On the apparent conspiracy to subvert peer review, it found that the “allegations cannot be upheld” - but, as the impressively even-handed Fred Pearce of the Guardian notes, this was partly on the grounds that “the roles of CRU scientists and others could not be distinguished from those of colleagues. There was ‘team responsibility’.” Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the university which houses CRU, calls this “exoneration”.
The Economist, which initially played down the scandal, is almost as astonished by the refusal of the Climategate inquiries to examine the science:
An earlier report on climategate from the House of Commons assumed that a subsequent probe by a panel under Lord Oxburgh, a former academic and chairman of Shell, would deal with the science. The Oxburgh report, though, sought to show only that the science was not fraudulent or systematically flawed, not that it was actually reliable. And nor did Sir Muir, with this third report, think judging the science was his job.
UPDATE
Financial Review journalist Mark Lawson has had enough of this madness. From the blurb for his new book, A Guide to Climate Change Lunacy:
Activists and even some scientists will tell you that the science behind the expected major warming of the globe is rock solid. In fact, the projections of temperature increases in coming decades are based on entirely unproven forecasting systems which depend on guesses about crucial aspects of the atmosphere behaviour and the all-important oceans. In addition, these forecasts use carbon dioxide emission scenarios that have been generated by economic calculations rather than from science, and parts of which are already hopelessly wrong less than a decade after they were made.
As Mark Lawson explains in this book, in layman’s language, this lunacy has been compounded by further forecasts based on these already deeply flawed projections and combined with active imaginations, to produce wild statements about what will happen to plant, animal, bird and marine life, as well as coral reefs, hurricanes, sea levels, agriculture and polar ice caps. The books shows that these projections are little more than fantasy.
On top of all this lunacy activists, aided and abetted by some scientists, have proposed a range of solutions to the supposed problem that are either never going to work, such as an international agreement to cut emissions, or are overly complicated and expensive for no proven return, such as carbon trading systems and wind energy. None of these proposals have been shown to be of any use in reducing carbon emissions, outside of theoretical studies. Where wind energy has been used in substantial amounts overseas the sole, known result has been very expensive electricity for no observed saving in emissions.
Read post here.
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Judge refuses to withdraw from drilling ban case
NEW ORLEANS - A federal judge who overturned the Obama administration’s initial six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling has refused to disqualify himself from the case.
Several environmental groups had asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman to withdraw from the case because of his investments in several oil and gas companies. Feldman refused in an order issued Friday and posted Monday.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court rejected the government’s bid to restore its temporary ban on issuing new permits for deepwater drilling and suspension of 33 existing drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Justice Department later issued a new moratorium that it hopes will pass muster with the courts.
Jill Colton, staff writer, the Weather Network
July 17, 2010 - Argentina is suffering from some unusually cold weather. In fact, snow fell in over half the provinces on Friday.
Snow in July? Well, that’s the case for Argentina this week. It is winter in the southern hemisphere.
An arctic air mass is hovering over the middle of the country, bringing frigid temperatures and leaving snow on the ground. In Cordoba, north and east of the capital, roads and homes were blanketed in white, making driving conditions trecherous, but exciting children with the rare snowfall.
Local newspapers reported that the temperature plunged to -1.5C in Buenos Aires, on Friday—making it the coolest day in a decade for the capital. Even the beaches saw white powder. The coastal resort city Mar del Plata was blanketed by snow for two days straight.
Woman bundles up on the streets in Buenos Aires The snow was easily the biggest story of the day, as most newspaper front pages were dedicated to pictures of the snow. One paper reported snowfall in 12 of the country’s 22 provinces.
Meteorologists say the satellite images show that the cold air mass settled firmly over central Patagonia, where temperatures plummeted to -15C. Maria de los Milagros Skance, the director of the national meteorologist service said, “A cold air mass from the pole moved into the country and affected the entire country and continues affecting it.”
Skance also notes that the air mass caused snow in places that don’t get snow and then pushed the cold all the way up into the subtropical northern areas of the country.
In Buenos Aires, temperatures are expected to climb until Monday, but there’s still a wind-chill factor and light rains that will keep conditions frosty.
See post here.
METSUL reports 30 deaths from the cold with the worst in Argentina and Chile, Chile had the worst snowstorm in 30 years (up to 5 feet). The cold has reached the equator and reached into the Northern Hemisphere.
Sarah Westcott and Mark Reynolds, Daily Express
BRITAIN faces years of blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward green power, a leading energy expert warned last night.
A growing obsession with global warming and “renewable” sources threatens the stability of our supply.
Derek Birkett, a former Grid Control Engineer who has a lifetime’s experience in electricity supply throughout Britain, warned that the cost of the crisis could match that of the recent banking collapse.
And he claimed that renewable energy expectations were now nothing more than “dangerous illusions” which would hit consumers hard in the pocket.
“We are going to pay a very heavy price for the fact there has been a catalogue of neglect by the former Government which has focused on renewable energy sources,” Mr Birkett said.
“We need a mix of sources and this takes time. Renewables have the problem of being intermittent, particularly wind, and we need more back-up capacity. By having all our sources in one basket we are risking disruption.
“There is a lot of over-enthusiasm by governments to push global warming, which makes me very suspicious.” Less than five per cent of our energy comes from renewable sources but the “disproportionate” cost of implementing green technology runs into many millions of pounds, he said.
In a new book, When Will the Lights Go Out, published this month, Mr Birkett claims things will only get worse. He said the “lavish incentives” being offered to developers of green energy are being passed on to customers as the UK struggles to meet EU directives on carbon emissions.
He also warned that a growing reliance on renewable energy is creating widespread uncertainty in the electricity supply chain.
With many nuclear power stations and coal plants ending their lives and being taken out of service we “can’t rule out” people being left without power. The real problem is the cost of making sure this does not happen, and Britain’s lights “do not go out”, he warned.
“The country is going to have to make a choice whether to go along with green ideas of renewable generation or go back to coal and nuclear power.”
Read more here.
BNP News
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.
Britons needs to rise up and speak out against this denial of freedom and assault on the scientific method
By Paul Chesser
The Wite-Out was barely dry on the Climategate investigations of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit and Penn State hockey stick creator Michael Mann last week when environoiacs (including Mann himself) trumpeted “exoneration” and demanded apologies to those who were scrutinized. But not everyone who is sympathetic to the alarmist cause believes the investigations were legitimate, including The Atlantic’s Clive Crook (Hat tip to Morano):
I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even willfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.
The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with “the hockey stick”—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for “lack of credible evidence”, it will not even investigate them. (At this, MIT’s Richard Lindzen tells the committee, “It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I’m wondering what’s going on?” The report continues: “The Investigatory Committee did not respond to Dr Lindzen’s statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.") Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers—so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false....
In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no. His record is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed, with apologies that Mann has been put to such trouble.
Warren Meyer, who is not inclined to take Mann to the woodshed, called the investigations ridiculous as well:
In a large sense, Penn State’s only test of Mann’s ability is that he is currently a member in good standing of the small in-crowd that dominates climate science. His science is good because it comes to the right conclusions.
Unlike many skeptics, I have no desire to “get” Professor Mann. I don’t need him fired or even investigated by Penn State. The way to refute him is to refute him, not haul him in front of tribunals.
That being said, Penn State did start and investigation and as such has some responsibility to do the thing right. And boy was this a joke. The most charitable thing I can say is that his work is fraught with more questionable decisions and practices and approaches than anything I have ever seen that was taken this seriously.
The formerly mainstream media has seized the opportunity of these two sham reports to also exonerate their own laziness and apathy in reporting about Climategate. As Pat Michaels wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the investigations were not independent, but protective of their own institutions. The universities and the environmentalists can pretend, but not a soul was exonerated, cleared, or acquitted. The scandal lives, and now has grown