By Tom Fuller, San Francisco Environmental Policy Examiner
Well, Steve Mosher and I have written a book and it’s now for sale at the Amazon affiliate, CreateSpace.com. Click here to go get your copy.
Here’s an excerpt talking about Michael Mann’s work on the famed Hockey Stick paper, MBH 98:
Many scientists they worked with had doubts about the material to be presented. One of the key figures in Climategate, Keith Briffa, goes so far as to say he believes something different than what their figures show: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
Malcolm Hughes writes, “I tried to imply in my e-mail, but will now say it directly, that although a direct carbon dioxide effect is still the best candidate to explain this effect, it is far from proven. In any case, the relevant point is that there is no meaningful correlation with local temperature.”
Ed Cook: “I have growing doubts about the validity and use of error estimates that are being applied to reconstructions.”
Tom Wigley: “I have just read the M&M stuff critcizing MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work—an opinion I have held for some time.”
Tom Wigley again: “A word of warning. I would be careful about using other, independent paleoclimatology...work as supporting your work. I am attaching my version of a comparison of the bulk of these other results. Although these all show the “hockey stick” shape, the differences between them prior to 1850 make me very nervous. If I were on the greenhouse deniers’ side, I would be inclined to focus on the wide range of paleoclimatology results and the differences between them as an argument for dismissing them all.”
I’d like to express thanks to two regular commenters here, Marty and Steve Douglas. Marty edited this book in two days and helped us a lot. Steve did the cover and a lot of the graphics inside. We couldn’t have done this without you.
I may just possibly write one or two more articles in hopes of convincing you to buy this book--and on that note, if you do intend to buy it, early is better than later. If early sales are robust enough, that becomes a story I can use to stimulate further sales. For now, we can make the comments section here a Q&A about the book. Several of you have already posed questions about it--here’s a chance to learn more than you ever wanted to know about writing a book, working with Amazon, etc. Thanks to all of you for your support. It’s been a hectic month, and I hope it didn’t show in my columns here.
By E.M.Smith
This “Anomaly Map” was produced for the most recent month at the NASA / GISS web site here.
You can create many maps, and many of them will not show The Bolivia Effect as well as this one (while some may be better). This map was not “cherry picked”, it is just the most recent month with data available. It does, however, have a very nice example of The Bolivia Effect in it. (At least 2, in fact).
Alright Already, what is this Bolivia Effect?
Notice that nice rosy red over the top of Bolivia? Bolivia is that country near, but not on, the coast just about half way up the Pacific Ocean side. It is almost entirely high cold Andes Mountains. It’s the patch of whitish mountains in this picture:
White, Green, or Brown? Decisions Decisions
South American Andes
We originally saw this picture, and this problem, in this posting.
One Small Problem. There has not been any thermometer data in GHCN since 1990. None. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Empty Set. So just how can it be so Hot Hot Hot! in Bolivia if there is NO data?
Easy. GHCN /GIStemp “makes it up” from “nearby” thermometers up to 1200 km away. So what is within 1200 km of Bolivia? The beaches of Peru and the Amazon Jungle.
Not exactly the same as snow capped peaks, but hey, you gotta make do with what you have, you know? (The official excuse given is that the data acceptance window closes on one day of the month and Bolivia does not report until after that date. Oh, and they never ever would want to go back and add date into the past after a close date. Yet they are happy to fiddle with, adjust, modify, and wholesale change and delete old data as they change their adjustment methods)
What about that other red spot in the middle of Canada? Yup, you guessed it. No thermometers survive in GIStemp in Yukon and The Northwest Territories, and only one survives in Nunavut (at the northern edge of Canada, but in a location called The Garden Spot of the Arctic due to the unusual warmth of the area allowing a variety of plants and animals to survive there that do not survive elsewhere.
We took an in depth look at those thermometer deletions in this posting. Which included this description (from the wiki page) of the only surviving thermometer in Northern Canada, at the weather station in Eureka:
“Eureka has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic.” Further down, under “Climate” it says: “Winters are frigid, but summers are slightly warmer than at other places in the Canadian Arctic.”
The station is on the coast near water. Water, as we know, serves to moderate extremes of temperature. There is a nice picture of it, showing the ocean in the background, on the above link, if you wish to see it.
Arctic Red is What Again?
How about all that Red in the Arctic? Well, no surprise, there are no thermometers up there. Yes, all that red across the top is fiction. It is called “estimation” based on ice estimates and “interpolation” and even “the reference station method” but in the end it all comes down to “just made up”.
So when you look at one of these Anomaly Maps, the “highest and best use” that I have found for those rosy red patches is to find those places where there have been abuses of the thermometers (such as in Morocco where they move from the coast, near cool ocean currents, to the Atlas Mountains, on the edge of the Sahara Desert) or where they have been deleted from High Cold Places (such as Bolivia), or where there are simply none at all (such as the Arctic).
Bolivian Data
This is a listing of the “By Altitude” report for Bolivia, so you can see for yourself that there are data in the “baseline” period used by GIStemp, but there is no data since 1990.
The GHCN “By Altitude” report for Bolivia, Country Code 302:
For COUNTRY CODE: 302 (enlarged table here)
Notice that while one thermometer level manages to straggle into 1990, it gets shot that year (or the “decade ending” would have had a later year - by default I end the decade counts in years ending in “9” so 0-9 end up in one decade average together; unless you run out of records)
It is very hard to have “warming” with no data, but somehow GIStemp, with GHCN, manages to do just that. I guess Bolivia is somehow magical, so I just call it “The Bolivia Effect” and it is warming the planet. Read more here. Icecap Note: Look for a major report on this data fraud next week. It is on such a large scale, it makes Bernie Madoff look like he robbed a few convenience stores.
Fairbanks, AK- In an ongoing effort to attract Former Vice President Al Gore to come to Fairbanks and debate his man-made global warming theories, a unique interactive ice sculpture will be unveiled Tuesday, January 5th in downtown Fairbanks.
The new sculpture, a 6’ tall, 4,000 lb, likeness of Mr. Gore will be uncovered at the corner of Airport Road and Cushman Street next to Thrifty Liquor. This year the carving features an audio dub of Mr. Gore’s Dec. 2009 Copenhagen speech suggesting the entire Polar Ice cap will likely disappear in the next 5 to 7 years, and urging us to upgrade our light bulbs.
As the audio is played, hot air will be emitted from the mouth of the statue, signifying the dangers to the environment of all types of man-made emissions. The source of the hot air will be the Ford F-350 flatbed truck on which the sculpture sits, with a 2” hose from the tailpipe of the vehicle, through a hole bored in the back of the head of the carving, and pumped out through the mouth of the statue. Local businessmen Craig Compeau and Rudy Gavora commissioned the frozen artwork, by world class sculptor Steve Dean.
“We’re not giving up easy”, Compeau told onlookers as the statue was receiving its final touches Sunday evening. “We invited Mr. Gore to Fairbanks last January (one of the coldest in decades) to debate his planet-melting theories. His people responded via email, that although Mr. Gore would love to attend, there was a scheduling conflict.” Compeau was confused by the response since he had not suggested any specific date or time.
Locals are welcome to stop by and get their photos taken with the artwork at any time of day, although the frigid temperature may keep them away, or cause cameras to freeze up. Temperatures in Interior Alaska have recently fallen to the -30 to -40F range.
In conjunction with the release of the new statue, Compeau has incorporated a “Local Warming” contest that will raise money to provide warm winter clothing for homeless Fairbanks residents. The contest asks participants to estimate how many hours the Ford F-350 would have to run (at idle) to equal the carbon output of a round-trip visit from Tennessee to Copenhagen aboard a Lear jet. The winner will receive a warm Ski-doo winter jacket, long underwear, thermal socks, and an Al Gore Bobblehead doll. To enter, or to see the interactive statue in action go here.
By Alex Newman
The Associated Press (AP) was caught misleading readers with biased and inaccurate coverage of the Climategate scandal in an article entitled “Science not faked, but not pretty” that was carried by hundreds of publications.
The AP gave copies of the leaked e-mails to three scientists for the story. It then attempted to portray their views on the scandal in a dishonest manner. The international wire service selectively quoted the experts it interviewed to make it seem as though they did not think the leaked e-mails and data from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were a very big deal. But the leaked e-mails were a big deal, and the scientists interviewed knew it.
Now, the truth has come out. In an explosive Washington Times editorial entitled ”Biased reporting on Climategate - Associated Press coverage raises eyebrows,” the newspaper, which spoke to all three of the scientists cited by the AP, exposed the AP’s shoddy “journalism.”
“There’s a big difference between saying that there isn’t sufficient evidence to determine if falsification of data occurred - and that there should be an investigation - and saying, as AP did: ‘Science not faked,’” noted the Times. The Times concluded that the “Fourth Estate watchdog” was acting more like a “third-rate pocket pet” in relation to its coverage of climate change and, more specifically, Climategate. All three of the scientists gave a very different impression to the Times than that portrayed by the AP article.
For instance, the director of scientific freedom, responsibility, and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Mark Frankel, was quoted by AP as saying that there is “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.’” However when he spoke to the Times, Frankel explained what he really meant: The e-mails alone are not enough to determine whether the science was fake, and a proper, independent investigation must decide that. He also said that outsiders with “impeccable” credentials should be brought in to help the ongoing investigations.
The next scientist, Professor Dan Sarewitz at Arizona State University, was quoted by the AP saying: “This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds.” But he was not talking about the “validity of the climate science,”, according to the Times. “While AP used the quote to suggest that there was nothing terribly wrong that had been revealed in Climategate,” wrote the Times, “Mr. Sarewitz was trying to issue a warning that politics infects too much science and that reporters, politicians and the public are naive about that reality.” Sarewitz also supports a proper investigation and is skeptical of the ones currently being conducted by the universities involved.
The third scientist interviewed by the AP also told the Times a similar story: The data should be shared and the investigations should continue. The Washington Times editorial summed it up nicely: “The wire service portrayed the trio of scientists as dismissing or minimizing allegations of scientific fraud when, in fact, the scientists believe no such thing.”
The AP refused to let any of the “reporters” or editors involved with the “not faked” story speak to the Times, claiming that they did not have time. Ironically, one of the lead reporters who worked on the story is himself caught up in the Climategate scandal. The AP did note at the very end of its article that one of the Climategate e-mails was from one of the reporters working on the story - Seth Borenstein. But, the AP dismissed the e-mail as nothing more than a request “for reaction to a study, a standard step.” In reality, the e-mail is very damning of the AP science writer’s mentality.
“Mr. Borenstein’s e-mail was hardly standard and far from neutral,” notes the Times’ editorial. “In it, the reporter disparages Marc Morano, a critic of man-made global-warming claims, as “hyping wildly” the study that Mr. Borenstein asked scientists to comment on. The e-mail almost makes it appear as if Mr. Borenstein were asking those involved in Climategate to help him discredit critics of man-made global warming.”
Finally, the Times notes that “East Anglia and Penn State are not the only two institutions that need to answer questions about what is going on behind the scenes.” Indeed, the AP has some serious explaining to do. This distortion of reality was run in publications around the globe, often on the front page of Sunday newspapers. How many people were left with a false impression about Climategate? And more importantly, what does the AP plan to do to regain the trust of readers? What about the newspapers that innocently ran the story, assuming it was accurate?
That a respected, international journalism organization has been exposed essentially lying to readers demands some sort of response. If the people cannot even trust the Climategate-connected scientists or the press to fairly debate the global-warming issue, how can they trust the government to re-engineer society, ration and tax carbon dioxide, and ultimately remake the entire global economy?
By Chris Horner
Poll after poll have recently affirmed that the ClimateGate revelations (I actually say “affirmations") dealt a mortal blow to the public’s belief in the environmentalist brass ring of “catastrophic Man-made global warming.” The dishonesty exposed therein iced the cake for a public attentive to the increasingly shrill and absurd alarmist campaign, demonstrably cooler temperatures cool and the sky remaining precisely where we left it.
Troubled by such results, several green groups to rush out polls of their own, riddled with gauzy questions generally distilling to “wouldn’t you want to save the planet from destruction if you could get rich doing so?” I oversimplify, but not grossly. This week the National Wildlife Federation claimed two-thirds of Americans want federal limits on greenhouse gases! Surely a Congress desperate to do something popular will hop on board this train? Not likely.
The shocker from these forays is that a substantial number have so little regard for the alarmist claptrap that they’re willing to dismiss even loaded questions designed to elicit a positive response.
You may recall a Washington Post poll conducted a few years ago, even before the cooling trend became pronounced, and severe winters of the sort that green activists assured us were now a thing of the past serially returned. That poll prompted a WaPo headline trumpeting that the public wanted to address climate change “at whatever the cost”.
This is the sort of tool employed for years to support the talking point that it was that mean George W. Bush that stood between the United States, nay, the world, in agreeing to climate harmony in the form of a treaty and domestic cap-and-trade language (Copenhagen just now put the lie to that, for any who actually believed the argument).
Of course, the Post pollsters didn’t actually pressure test that result, laden with cheap virtue as are all such ventures where the only cost is a reply. All they dared learn was that “at any cost” meant to the majority something less than a dollar more per gallon. If only cap-and-trade would merely inflict that harm, why, the greens might be onto something. But our president has admitted the axiom that cap-and-trade is designed to cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”, “bankrupt[ing]” industries.
So despite the flurry of greenie claims that the public is, too, with them, another poll came out this week commissioned by the National Federation of Independent Business. Its results track far better with the only poll that matters, more on which in a moment.
NFIB found that two-thirds of small business owners and managers - the people whose sentiments drive three-fourths of new-job creation - oppose a cap-and-trade scheme. 52 percent of voters oppose it, making it about as popular as Obama’s health care takeover. 54 percent of small business owners and managers, and 42 percent of voters, believe that such a system would result in job loss.
The reason the results were different is that NFIB’s pollsters added context to what they were asking, if possibly more soberly than is warranted but, hey, they erred on that side for credibility giving them a leg up on the greens. So respondents were at least challenged to consider that the policies are not free-ice cream - even if still just in answering a poll question, which hurts slightly less than actually paying the additional amounts or losing your job. Polls claiming to show public support for cap-and-trade seem to prefer a don’t ask, don’t tell approach.
Elected lawmakers, who appear to jealously guard only one job - their own - are unlikely to try and ram through cap-and-trade next year as the greens’ polls indicate would be the popular thing to do. In fact, numerous self-styled “centrist” Democrat senators and even the occasional liberal like Sen. Jay Rockefeller have indicated that, no, this appears to be a good issue to think about for 2011. That’s an odd-numbered year, you see, with no elections, and the public, as reflected in the NFIB poll, want nothing to do with this scheme and want their lawmakers to have even less to do with it.
So let the greens wave about polls whose questions smack more than a little like scripts from late-night real estate get-rich-quick infomercials. Senators know that this stove is hot, and they aren’t about to lay their own hands on it. That’s not to say there won’t be feints and even a few death throes this Congress to try and convince a dispirited left-wing base that they should be excited about voting in 2010.
But cap-and-trade is a dead parrot. In a way, that’s a shame. Actually trying to pass it would allow for salting the political earth from which the sneaky, cynical idea sprang. But that, too, shall come. See post here.
By Richard J. Grant, PhD
Truth is not determined by majority vote. Any talk of a “consensus” in science is best not taken as the final word. As Somerset Maugham once put it, “If 40 million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.”
Climatology is a science, not to be confused with environmentalism. The heart of environmentalism is not to be found in the natural sciences. It is ideology and nothing more. That is why it ends in “-ism.”
Environmentalism is itself not a monolith, but its dominant strand is distinctly statist in character. As such, its main nemesis is the science of economics, not climatology or any of the other natural sciences.
A sound understanding of economics is all that is needed to discredit the emerging interventionist social agenda of the environmental movement. The methods that they recommend cannot deliver the results that they promise.
It is common to hear accusations of “junk science” hurled against environmentalists, particularly those touting the dangers of climate change.
These accusations might be well taken and, if so, would be sufficient to derail the CO2 “Cap and Trade” juggernaut. But the real objective of the environmental movement appears to be in the social realm. That means the control of people, with environmental controls serving merely as the instrument.
We have had considerable domestic and international experience with governments that micromanage the lives of their residents. The more governments interfere in our lives, the more things go wrong. The people are poorer, less healthy and less able to adapt to the vagaries of nature and of other men. If ever a science were settled, this would be it.
It should be obvious that each individual’s actions affect the rest of us to some greater or lesser extent. The same is true with respect to the environment around us. Complex interactions present us with great regularities, as well as many unexpected events. It has always been so; and we can expect it to remain so.
The environmental activists now meeting in Copenhagen need to mature a bit and come to understand that we have less to fear from CO2 than from bad ideas.
Instead of sucking the oxygen out of the debate, they should admit that they know far less than their claims would suggest. They need to learn humility, an essential ingredient in anyone who would speak of science.
We need not con ourselves that we know enough to predict the Earth’s temperature 100, or even 20 years from now. Even less certain should we be that we have the power to control it.
What we can control is our readiness to face whatever comes. But to follow the advice of the Copenhagen activists, or those who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill, is the path of fools.
It is the path of weakness and dissipation.
We know better, and we have done better. It is free societies that have done the best in meeting economic and environmental challenges. It is free societies that have led the way in developing new energy sources and making them incrementally more efficient.
If we, as consumers, really feel that burning coal for energy is too dirty, we don’t even need to put a tax on it. All we need to do is stop wasting money on subsidies to low-yield, low-reliability sources, such as wind and solar and remove the irrational and crushing regulatory burdens from more promising energy sources, such as nuclear. We don’t need to subsidize any energy source.
The technology has already advanced sufficiently that private competition to serve customers would result in a systematic replacement of old energy sources by cheaper and cleaner sources.
If governments would stick to their job of protecting us from aggression, rather than blocking us from progress, we would now be wealthier, healthier, safer and cleaner. See post in full here.
Richard J. Grant is a professor of finance and economics at Lipscomb University and a scholar at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, snowed in at his country seat on the shore of Loch Rannoch
It is a glorious day outside the window of the Library at Carie. A foot or two of snow is on the fields and forests and on the distant Grampian Mountains. It is so cold that Loch Rannoch, the watery remnant of a mighty glacier that once swept majestically down from Rannoch Moor to distant Dundee 110 miles to the east and now placidly laps at the foot of our graceful lawns, is giving off a pearly mist, through which occasional darts of sunlight strike diamond fire from the fresh snow on Beinn Mhorlach, the little mountain on the far shore.
We cannot go anywhere, and no one can come to us. The roads for 30 miles around are impassable, and there is nothing the gallant roadmen of Perth and Kinross Council can do to keep them clear. So there is time to think a little, after the pandemonium of the collapsed Copenhagen climate conference.
The glaciers were here as recently as 9000 years ago. Then, by little and little, they went. Did they go because of manmade “global warming”? No, of course not. There were too few humans. There had been no Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors’ few, puny fires did not emit enough CO2 to make any measurable alteration to the composition of the atmosphere. Yet the glaciers went. There are greater forces acting upon our planet than we yet understand, and a little humility from the climatological/political community would be in order.
How is it that anyone, even for an instant, can seriously imagine that the doubling of today’s CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for this century will have a major and potentially catastrophic influence over the climate? Humankind is too insignificant to make any real difference to global temperature, as anyone with a sense of due proportion can see at once.
The ancient Greeks had a nifty aphorism - panta metrios. This means, “All things in due proportion”. Every great civilization has a sense of due proportion: every failing civilization loses it. Our classe politique, worldwide, has lost it big-time. The rhetoric at Copenhagen - even by the generally lacklustre standards of the TV age - was deplorable. The bombast, braggadocio, and rodomontade of politician after peculating politician was out of all proportion to the non-problem that the conference was supposedly addressing. The dictator of Venezuela received a standing ovation for a 20-minute rant against the imagined evils of capitalism - the system of economic liberty that has given prosperity to all those nations that have embraced it. The world’s bureaucrats and politicians hate capitalism, for it gives independence to the people, and diminishes the power of central government. So they leapt to their feet and thunderously acclaimed the posturing ninny from Venezuela.
For the first time, half of the world’s heads of government met in one place. And what did they talk about? Ending poverty? Nah. Making free trade freer? Nopenhagen. After 15 straight years with no statistically-significant “global warming” on any measure, they talked about the need to Save The Planet from - er - “global warming”. After nine straight years of statistically-significant, rapid global cooling, culminating in a snowstorm of unprecedented severity and extent that swept right across Europe and North America, they tried to tell each other, and us, how urgent the “global warming” problem was, and how necessary it was to reach a legally-binding deal to shut down the economies of the capitalist West wholesale.
We did not, and do not, believe them. In those countries which still have the right to make and unmake their own governments by secret ballot, public opinion still matters. And, in those countries, the opinion polls - for years - have shown a galloping decline in the number of voters who trust politicians, scientists, corporations, academics, teachers, or the media to tell them the truth about “global warming”. In what is left of the free world, people are no longer buying the Great Lie.
In Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, in the United States, and even in once-free Britain, now ruled by the dismal, alien, unelected Kommissars of the hated European bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship, the opinion pollsters are telling the same story. “Global warming’, as a problem, isn’t. It ranks at the very bottom of everyone’s list of things that politicians ought to be doing something about. Even the Washington Pest, which has relentlessly inflicted the crudest and most childish of propaganda upon its readers in the hope of getting them to believe the New Superstition, has published - albeit through gritted teeth - an opinion poll showing a sharp and dramatic drop in the number of voters who think that President Obama is exercising wise leadership in tackling “global warming”.
The unspeakable BBC, which was one of the first news media to gobble up and gabble out the New Superstition hook, line and sinker, is wringing its collective, collectivist hands and threatening us with more and better and bigger propaganda to explain to people how dire the non-threat of non-warming is. The Times, echoed by our hapless soon-to-be-ex Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, says the same, and snipes at those of us who have refused to be taken in by the nonsense, quoting with approval the Marxist president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, who says that in a global village there are always global village idiots, and we “climate skeptics” are the village idiots.
What the mainstream instruments of propaganda have entirely failed to grasp is that, even if politicians and bureaucrats and environmental correspondents are fatally stupid, the people possess an innate common sense, known to Catholic theologians as the sensus fidelium, which prevents propaganda from influencing them except in the very short term. In the long run, the people can always be relied upon to hold fast to that sense of due proportion that the ancient Greeks at once admired and exemplified. That is why the pusillanimous propaganda of our ruling elite - far too shrill of late to be in the least convincing - has not convinced.
So let us, the people, demonstrate the due sense of proportion that statesmen ought to exhibit. Let us tell the political elite how to make serious policy on the “global warming” question.
First, we need just a few facts. These have been depressingly absent in this debate. Instead, various fictions and inventions have held sway. Lies, whatever propaganda value the lesser sort of politician may conceive them to possess, have no place whatsoever in public policy-making, which cannot work unless it be rooted firmly in the truth. Let us take one fact that the unspeakable BBC and most other Leftist news media have done their damnedest to conceal. There is not a scientific consensus on everything.
There. I’ve said it. I’ll say it again. There. Is. Not. A. Consensus. On. Everything.
And all we’re looking at, after an entire decade of business as usual, with no emissions cuts at all, is around half a Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”. So here’s the thing. To prevent that half a Fahrenheit degree of warming imagined by the UN, we’d have to shut down - and shut down completely - the entire world economy for a decade. Right back to the Stone Age, and without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in our caves. And, at the end of that period of misery, disease, disaster, and death - for that is what would follow from total economic shutdown - all we should have to show for the sacrifice was a measly half a Fahrenheit degree of warming forestalled.
Now, imagine yourself as a statesman, rather than as a mere jabbering politician looking to win the youth vote, or mere crafty bureaucrat plotting world domination by stealth. Would you - for a single instant - propose, as the first draft of the now-dead Copenhagen Treaty proposed, that we should indeed shut down 95% of our carbon-emitting economies - i.e., practically close down the whole show? No, of course not: you would realize that adaptation to “global warming”, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective than attempting to limit our emissions of CO2, which is demonstrably pointless, even if the UN’s science is right.
One final thought. Though it is possible to argue that replacing a small amount of our CO2 output by alternative sources of energy would have a negligible adverse impact on the economy, as our calculation has shown, replacing only a small amount of our CO2 emissions would have an even more infinitesimal effect on global temperatures than shutting down the entire carbon economy.
Furthermore, and it is important to grasp this, a widespread and too-rapid shutdown of CO2-emitting plants, or a failure to build new ones as needed, will have a disproportionately large adverse effect on the economy, and for an insignificant climatic benefit. For instance, if we were rapidly to shut down half of all CO2-emitting activities, it is reasonable to estimate that - so central is burning fossil fuels to every aspect of manufacture and vecture worldwide - that half of all economic activity worldwide - and possibly more - would disappear.
The bottom line is this. Any statesman with a sense of due proportion would not dream of placing any restriction whatsoever on the emission of CO2 by our industries and enterprises. The economic cost of trying to mitigate imagined “global warming” by reducing our CO2 emissions must in all circumstances extravagantly, monstrously, absurdly outweigh any conceivable climatic benefit. It is this central economic truth, which we have here demonstrated by simple, robust, irrefutable calculation, that the media and the politicians can no longer ignore. For it is this central economic truth, above all, that is the reason why the attempted bureaucratic coup d’etat in Copenhagen has ended in ignominous and fortunate failure, and why it shall not succeed in future.
Have a good Christmas, and eat, drink and be merry in due proportion. Panta metrios! Read full post here.
By Andrew Bolt
Update two: A responder to WUWT reports this reply from Wikipedia. “In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming. This has now been added to his article. Nobody has replaced him specifically, but there are more than a thousand other administrators with very varied backgrounds.” Your letters and calls and posts on the web can and do make a difference. This should energize you to write to PSU to push ouster of Michael Mann and other universites to oust their alarmist professors and to NCAR, Scripps, Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the AGU. AMS, APS and other professional societies to get their agenda driven hierarchy removed.
See this post on William Connelley, Thoughtcop here.
Update: See in this American Thinker piece using the whistleblower emails how the team conspired to suppress/delay publication that challenged the consensus position.
Climategate: how the cabal controlled Wikipedia
By Andrew Bolt
As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band [of Climategate scientists] saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined.
With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement - the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable - no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.
Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team - U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley - would take on particularly crucial duties.
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known -Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, ... Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it - more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred - over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
This scandal grows more astonishing by the day - in its extent, its effect, its shamelessness, its savage intolerance and its betrayal of science. But this aspect of Climategate also sounds a deep warning of how easily the new technology of information dissemination can be hijacked by only a few well-placed extremists. Add that to Google’s promotion of Al Gore last week on its home page, and you can see and fear the potential. Read post and comments here.
Contact and demand removal of William Connelly here:
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