On the same day that Nature published yet another editorial repudiating public examination of the conduct of academic institutions, Penn State President Graham Spanier was fired from his $813,000/year job for failing to ensure that a proper investigation was carried out in respect to pedophilia allegations in Penn State’s hugely profitable football program. The story is receiving massive coverage in North America because the iconic Penn State football coach, Joe Paterno, was also fired today.

CA readers are aware of Spanier’s failure to ensure proper investigation of Climategate emails and his untrue puffs about the ineffective Penn State Inquiry Committee, reported at CA here and by the the Penn State Collegian as follows:

Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. Penn State President Spanier is quoted as saying:

“I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,"Spanier said.

Spanier’s claims were totally untrue. Not only did the Inquiry Committee fail to “look at issues from all sides”, they didn’t even interview or take evidence from critics - as they were required to do under the applicable Penn State policy. As I reported at CA at the time:

The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that “North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release."]

They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s’claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.

Although State Senator Piccola had written to Penn State President Spanier asking him to ensure that “the university must deploy its fullest resources to conduct an investigation of this case”, the Inquiry Committee decided that the investigation committee should not investigate three of the four charges “synthesized” by the inquiry committee and, as a result, despite the request of Piccola and others, no investigation was ever carried out Penn State on any of the key issues e.g the “trick...to hide the decline”, Mann’s role in the email deletion enterprise organised by Phil Jones or the failure to report adverse data which the House Energy and Commerce Committee had asked about (but not investigated by the NAS panel, whose terms of reference were sabotaged by Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS).

When told by the subsequent Investigation Committee that they weren’t investigating the substantive charges, Richard Lindzen told the committee,

“It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I’m wondering what’s going on?”

Clive Crook of the Atlantic Monthly mercilessly criticized Penn State for their fatuous findings that success in bringing revenue to the university and accolades from peers necessarily meant that misconduct was precluded:

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....

You think I exaggerate?

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…

Had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions…

Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

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. In the case of Climategate, President Spanier apparently saw nothing wrong with reasoning that equated revenue generation with virtue and accepted the report.

In such a febrile environment, the likelihood of wilful blindness in respect to the far more profitable football program was that much greater and that appears to have been what happened. Even though a Penn State staff member witnessed a rape of a 10-year old by a more senior Penn State official, the junior Penn State staff member did not intervene at the time and investigation by more senior Penn State officials appears to have been cursory until a recent grand jury. (For example, they don’t appear to have bothered even identifying or interviewing the victims.)

It’s hard not to transpose the conclusions of the Penn State Climategate “investigation” into Penn State’s attitude towards misconduct charges in their profitable football program:

This level of success on the football field and revenue generated from it, clearly places Coaches Paterno and Sandusky among the most respected professionals in their field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of their profession in operating a football program…

Had Coach Paterno or Coach Sandusky’s conduct of their program been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for them to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from peers who may or may not agree with his program…

Spanier planned to introduce Michael Mann at an invited lecture next February. I guess that someone else will make the introduction.

Spanier was fired not because of any personal role in the Sandusky football scandal, but because of negligence on his part in ensuring that the allegations were properly investigated. This was not the only case in which Spanier failed to ensure proper investigation of misconduct allegations. As noted above, Spanier had falsely reported to the Penn State trustees and the public that the Penn State Inquiry Committee had properly interviewed critics and had examined the Climategate documents and issues “from all sides”.

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An astute observer noted that Spanier’s then-idiocy:

The fact that the football team was drawing big crowds shows Sandusky couldn’t have been doing anything wrong.

I guess they felt since Mann was bringing in millions of grant dollars, he too must be innocent. No need to look.

We must congratulate NRDC for having done what no scientist can, definitively link weather events to the physically meaningless statistical global mean temperature

Health cost of 6 U.S. climate disasters: $14 billion - Deaths and health problems from floods, drought and other U.S. disasters related to climate change cost an estimated $14 billion over the last decade, researchers said on Monday.

“When extreme weather hits, we hear about the property damage and insurance costs,” said Kim Knowlton, a senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council and a co-author of the study. “The healthcare costs never end up on the tab.”

The study in the journal Health Affairs looked at the cost of human suffering and loss of life due to six disasters from 2000-2009.

“This in no way is going to capture all of the climate-related events that happened in the U.S. over that time period,” Knowlton said. “At $14 billion, these numbers are big already.” (Reuters)

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Penn State sex scandal not the only outrage - it’s just the one media reported
US Report

Heads are spinning now over allegations of a sexual abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University. Fox News said former football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, 67, “was arrested Saturday on charges that he preyed on boys he met through The Second Mile, a charity he founded for at-risk youths.”

Pennsylvania State Attorney General Linda Kelly alleged a coverup of Sandusky’s behavior. The Penn State athletic director and a senior vice-president have “stepped down” said Fox.

People aren’t so outraged about another coverup involving a professor at Penn State. That coverup doesn’t involve a sex scandal.

Penn State is also home to Michael Mann, professor of meteorology and well-funded pusher of manmade global warming. Mann has received millions (perhaps billions; I haven’t tallied the totals) of taxpayer dollars for research.

Thing is Mann, the public employee, likes secrecy.

In September, I reported on Mann’s refusal to make all his emails public. Those emails were generated at the University of Virginia.

The American Tradition Institute said:

“UVA, with approximately $500,000 in support from private donors, has resisted an earlier records request under a Civil Investigative Demand by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, which he initiated pursuant to the Commonwealth’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act (FATA). That case is now before the state Supreme Court. Press reports indicate the University decided not to cooperate after a similar pressure campaign was launched, also seeking to bar the taxpayer (or law enforcement) from seeing records the taxpayer underwrote.”

ATI noted that researchers “built a wall of protection around an invented ‘consensus’ view of global warming alarmism.” That wall was erected after the Climategate email scandal.

Mann’s research projects are currently listed on his curriculum vitae at Penn State. Will he keep his Penn State emails secret too?

Media have reported Mann has been repeatedly cleared of “any scientific misconduct.” Media neglected to mention Mann was “cleared” by his fellow academics.

As for global warming and carbon emissions, the politicization of physical science hasn’t worked out well for Main Street either. China is currently holding some serious gases hostage. The website Watts Up With That? cited a MarketWatch news release:

“In a shocking attempt to blackmail the international community, Xie Fei, revenue management director at the China Clean Development Mechanism Fund, threatened: ‘If there’s no trading of [HFC-23] credits, they’ll stop incinerating the gases’ and vent them directly into the atmosphere. Speaking at the Carbon Forum Asia in Singapore last week, Xie Fei claimed he spoke for ‘almost all the big Chinese producers of HFCs who ‘can’t bear the cost’ and maintain that ‘they’ll lose competitiveness.’”

Secrecy among public employees does not work out well for people, whether it involves sex or carbon.

Climate Depot, a site that monitors global warming and climate change research, says more than 1,000 scientists disagree with manmade global warming claims.

For years, the public and Congress heard only one side of the global warming issue. Climategate changed all that.

(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Nov. 8, 2011)

The massive snow storm that buried the parts of the Northeastern United States on the last weekend of October was not an unprecedented event. Claims have been made that this storm was something new and strange and that it was caused by global warming. The people that made these claims have not done their homework. In order to understand the present we must know and understand the past. One can’t put current events in proper prospective if we are ignorant of past events. That is why we teach children history in school. Apparently many adults do not appreciate the need to know history. Rabid claims that all so called “extreme” weather events are caused by climate change come from ideologically and politically driven people who are ignorant of past weather events.

A look back at historical weather events in New England and surrounding areas reveals that October snowstorms have always occurred. On October 26th 1859, 4 inches of wet snow covered New York City. This amount is similar to the 6 inches reported at Fieldston in Bronx county New York from this past October’s storm. Much earlier in history, on October 27th 1765 more than a foot of snow fell at Boston, Massachusetts. There is little information available about this event being it was nearly 250 years ago. However from a meteorological point of view it is reasonable to assume than many areas around Boston and perhaps Southern New England were also buried under large amounts of snow. Water temperatures off Boston would have been relatively mild in late October keeping snowfall amounts lower near the coast. It is possible that amounts of snow higher than fell in Boston occurred west of the city that day being that they were farther from the modifying influence of the still mild water temperatures. Large amounts of snow in Boston do not come from anything else but coastal storms this early in the season. These coastal storms, more often than not, affect large sections of Southern New England. If it snowed that much in Boston from this storm it is quite possible many other areas had large amounts of snow as well. However this storm played out, it is very significant that a major snowstorm hit Eastern New England on October 27th 1765 and that the snowfall was greater than what happened in Boston on October 29th and 30th of this year.

Another heavy snow event in late October occurred in Salem, Massachusetts on October 29th 1746. A foot of snow covered the ground by storms end. Again there is little additional information available to make reasonable assumptions about how widespread the storm was. Meteorological experience tells me that such a great fall of snow would not have been limited to one location, especially being that the water was still mild offshore. Additionally, amounts of snow this large do not occur in isolated areas this early in the season in Eastern New England but instead are associated with large coastal storms know as Nor’easters that frequently cover all of southern and Central New England. It is reasonable to assume that this was a large coastal storm that produced heavy snow across much of Southern and perhaps Central New England and is likely another example of the reality that the storm of late October 2011 is not unique.

Over 200 years ago an October snowstorm hit New Southern and Central New England that appears to be very similar to the event of this past October. On October the 9th 1804, three weeks earlier in the month than this year’s storm, a massive fall of snow buried parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Historical accounts indicate that a tropical storm moved up the Atlantic Coast, possibly merging with a pre-existing coastal storm and generated very heavy rains, strong damaging winds and large amounts of heavy, wet snow. New Haven, Connecticut, right along the coast, reported a small accumulation of snow (just as they did in this October’s storm). Low elevation cities in the Connecticut River valley reported 4 to 6 inches of wet snow. One foot of snow was recorded at Goshen, in northwestern Connecticut and amounts as high as 20 inches were reported in northern Connecticut. Farther north in the Berkshires of Massachusetts massive amounts of wet snow fell with up to 30 inches reported (exactly the same amounts as fell in this October’s storm). In Vermont and Central New Hampshire amounts of 2 to 3 feet of heavy, wet snow buried everything in sight (same as this past storm). Amazingly all of this took place three weeks earlier in the month than this year’s snowstorm. Given this fact there, it is likely there would have been massive and catastrophic tree damage but in those days there was no power to knock out so the impact was severe in a different way.

There were far fewer people and far, far fewer snowfall reports as well back in 1804. Today our network of snowfall measuring sites is vastly denser than in the past. This results in snowfall measurements picking up isolated large totals that would have been missed in the distant past making storms seem large today than in the past. The snowstorm of October 9th, 1804 has remarkable similarities to the storm of this past October. This should serve as a remind to us that nature repeats itself over and over again but on time scales that humans have difficulty comprehending due to our relatively short life spans.

Those who claim that this October’s snowstorm was caused by global warming or climate change are either too lazy, too politically motivated or too afraid to look into the past see what they might find, the truth. This October’s snowstorm was not unique and not caused by climate change. It is simply part of the sumptuous variety of weather here in New England and for that matter, around the world. If you don’t know history, everything that unfolds is new.

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The global reinsurer Munich Re has received a lot of attention for its press releases on climate change, such as this statement issued one year ago:

A month before the start of the world climate summit, Munich Re is drawing attention to the strong probability that there is a connection between the large number of weather extremes and climate change. The reinsurer has built up the world’s most comprehensive natural catastrophe database, which shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming.

Munich Re also said via press release:

[I]t would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.

A new paper is forthcoming in the journal Climatic Change in 2012 helps to shed some additional light on such claims. The new paper—titled “A Trend Analysis of Normalized Insured Damage from Natural Disasters” by Fabian Barthel and Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics—is a follow on to their earlier work which was published last November (and if you read that one, the new study won’t be surprising).

Here is what the new paper concludes based on its examination of weather-related losses from the Munich Re global dataset from 1980 to 2008 (emphasis added):

[At a global scale] no significant trend is discernible. Similarly, we do not find a significant trend if we constrain our analysis to non-geophysical disasters in developed countries…

Convective events, i.e. flash floods, hail storms, tempest storms, tornados, and lightning, deserve closer attention since these are likely to be particularly affected by future global warming (Trapp et al. 2007, 2009; Botzen et al. 2009) and there is some evidence that past climatic changes already affected severe thunderstorm activity in some regions (Dessens 1995; Kunz et al. 2009). Figure 7a shows that there is no significant trend in global insured losses for these peril types. Similarly, there is no significant trend in insured losses for storm events (Figure 7b), tropical cyclones (Figure 7c) or precipitation-related events (Figure 7d).

They do find a positive trend in insured losses in the US since 1973, and for specific phenomena such as hurricanes and floods, for which longer-term data sets show no upwards trends for either phenomena (and which Barthel and Neumayer acknowledge). Interestingly, they also claim to find a positive trend in insured losses from convective events in the US (including tornadoes), which is in sharp disagreement with our recent work on normalized tornado losses, which finds a dramatic reduction in both economic losses and strong tornadoes since 1950 (in fact, even the non-normalized economic losses show a downward trend). They also find upward trends in storm losses in the western part of Germany. The acknowledge that both regional trends might be associated with simple variability or how they adjust for insurance penetration—it will be interesting to reconcile our tornado work with theirs (ours focuses on total damage).

Based on their analysis they conclude (emphasis added):

Climate change neither is nor should be the main concern for the insurance industry. The accumulation of wealth in disaster-prone areas is and will always remain by far the most important driver of future economic disaster damage…

What the results tell us is that, based on the very limited time-series data we have for most countries, there is no evidence so far for a statistically significant upward trend in normalized insured loss from extreme events outside the US and West Germany…

[W]e warn against taking the findings for the US and Germany as conclusive evidence that climate change has already caused more frequent and/or more intensive natural disasters affecting this country. To start with, one needs to be careful in attributing such a trend to anthropogenic climate change, i.e. climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Our findings reported in this article could be down to natural climate variability that has nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change. Such natural climate variability may well explain our finding of a significant upward trend in insured loss from hurricanes in the US, for example…

They offer several other methodological cautions about the interpretation of the few trends that they found, and quite appropriately.

But the most interesting part of their study is not their conclusions, which are both a valuable contribution to this area of research and perfectly consistent with the growing literature on this topic, but rather, what is found in the acknowledgments (double emphasis added):

The authors acknowledge support from the Munich Re Programme “Evaluating the Economics of Climate Risks & Opportunities in the Insurance Sector” at LSE.
My favorite press spokesman at LSE, Bob Ward, also gets an acknowledgment.

So the next time that Munich Re wants to attribute the growing toll of disaster losses to climate change, or you see someone citing Munich Re saying as much, they might be reminded of the Munich Re funded (and peer-reviewed) research which tells quite a different story than that found in press releases. 

ABSTRACT

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report Four (AR-4) of 2007, concerning the influence of rising levels of CO2 on global increases of tropical cyclone (TC) activity is inaccurate and a disgrace to the scientific community. The public expected there would be rigor and objectivity coming out of such an important document which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore. The summary of TC activity of this report was based on discredited peer-reviewed papers whose lack of authenticity was known before the report was released. A select cadre of global warming advocates (with little TC knowledge or experience) bent their objectivity to drive this report toward a desired (but faulty) conclusion that global TC activity was increasing in frequency and intensity. They further implied that a large portion of this alleged TC increase could likely be attributed to rising levels of CO2.

This paper brings forth observational and theoretical evidence to show that rising levels of CO2 have not had any observable association with increases in global tropical cyclone frequency and intensity. In fact, levels have been trending downward over the last 20 years.

This paper discusses why we should not be able to measure any potential future CO2-TC association for many decades, and if any such potential future relationship should ever be able to be isolated, it would be quite small. It also dissects the many observational and theoretical errors of the IPCC-AR4 concerning its reported past and likely future increases of global TC activity.

This paper extends the list of IPCC-AR4’s many questionable conclusions and misrepresentation beyond those that have already been earlier pointed out such as the Himalayas becoming snow-free by 2035, the Arctic Ocean possibly becoming ice-free in coming decades, and the possible coming Amazon rainforest destruction. The issuance of these erroneous IPCC reports does much damage. They should be terminated.

See full detailed analysis here.