Guest Post by Steven Mosher, WUWT

Not the funniest Monty Python sketch, but for me it illustrates what the climate wars have finally come down to: blackmail. The examples range from the benign - pressuring journalists not listen to skeptics - to the professional - pressuring colleagues to avoid working with skeptics, to the petty - Ammann refusing to do a paper with McIntyre because it would be bad for his career - to the bizarre, blowing up people who refuse to sign a pledge to cut their carbon emissions.

Aptly titled, “no pressure”, this video depicts the common fantasy people have about those with whom they disagree. “Why can’t we just blow them up? “ When reasoned words don’t work, there is an ineluctable progression through the following stages - naming calling, caricature, demonizing, dehumanizing, through fantasy attacks which culminate in action. Doing something about it. Showing them you mean business.

Wegman is the perfect target. Perfect because he is not central to the skeptical position. Perfect because he’s just doing a job. Perfect because it will send a message. Shooting the messenger always does.

And the message it sends is that they will come after you with every sort of pressure if you refuse to comply. To be sure there are weak forms of pressure from the skeptic side: the recent legal action taken against Mann is a useful example. For the most part, however, the skeptics have no power, and so they are left using the meager legal tools they have: the FOIA and the subpoena.

Skeptics cannot impanel committees to whitewash and they cannot go on witchhunts. This is most clear in the case of the NCDC misappropriating the work of Anthony Watts. As Watts details here when his work was misappropriated he really had no recourse except to write a strong letter. To their credit NCDC remedied the matter by fixing the attribution, something Wegman could do by climate science corollary.

What if Watts, however, had taken legal action against NCDC and had offered to withdraw that action if the NCDC retracted its work. Blackmailing the science because of a mistake made in the preparation of a document.  What would be next, asking that papers be withdrawn because of grammatical infelicities, or typos?

And so Bradley now walks in Anthony’s shoes. How well does he fit them? Did he write to Wegman and ask for proper attribution? Or did he follow in the 10:10 path and try to blow Wegman up ?

In a comment at CA Donald Rapp tells us

“The issue is not whether Wegman committed plagiarism as a technicality, but rather, who cares? Obviously, Wegman had nothing whatever to gain from using words written by Bradley in reviewing Bradley’s work. Lost in all this is the question of whether Wegman was right - and I believe that he was. If Wegman was right, then the various hockey sticks prepared by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, Esper Cook and Schweingruber, Mann and Jones, and Mann et al. are all bogus. While dozens of people continue to file their comments on whether it was plagiarism or it was not, that is akin to fiddling while Rome burns. Meanwhile, the hockey stick continues to spread through our schools and textbooks like a plague, while Bradley desperately tries to protect his turf from the truth by discrediting Wegman personally. Proof of this is that Bradley has offered to stop his prosecution (persecution?) of Wegman if Wegman will remove his report from the Congressional Register. It is like a burning of the books. Farenheit 451 all over again.”

Steve McIntyre quotes from Bradley’s mail.

“I filed a complaint with George Mason University (where Wegman is a Professor) & they have set up a committee to investigate my complaint. I[A] recent letter from their Vice-Chancellor indicates that they expect the committee to report their findings by the end of September.

That’s the long & short of it. I have told the University that I am prepared to drop this matter if Wegman makes a request to have his report withdrawn from the Congressional Record. No response on that.

Thanks
Ray [Bradley]”

Maybe Bradley had a different game show in mind.

Jim - “I’m not a criminal lawyer” Edwards frames the issue nicely

“That would be amazing because, if so, it may be evidence of an honest-to-goodness crime [not the imagined crimes AGW-debaters are constantly crowing about].

It looks like Bradley is threatening to ruin Wegman’s career unless he alters his prior Congressional testimony.

That smacks of post-facto extortion or witness tampering. [both potential felonies]

I don’t practice criminal law, but it does not look good to me.”

Or we can be charitable and suggest that Bradley is a Burro for even contemplating bringing this pressure to bear on Wegman. Finally, Wegman’s University is in Virginia, my sense is that Cuccinelli might take notice of it, were it brought to his attention.

Read more here.

By Chris Horner

The New York Times has just published another in a series of establishment press missives seeking to marginalize - from the perspective of establishment press-types - tea party activists and politicians who embrace or are embraced by them.

This latest entry is an embarrassment, if a rather typical one as I detail on Chapter 1 of Red Hot Lies, “Media on a Mission.” Here are some problems with the article:

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” [Dem. Congressman and pro-cap-and-trade voter Baron] Hill said, echoing most climate scientists.

The author does not point to any survey of “most climate scientists,” challenge or even inquire about the source for or other evidence to support that claim. That is because there is no such survey or collective assertion by the critical masses of “climate scientists.” Period. It’s a talking point. But he’s a reporter. If he wanted to be straight about the issue he would at the very least turn to the very inconvenient statement by the Association of State Climatologists. But, again, it’s inconvenient.

When pressed, those who scribble or utter this shibboleth generally expand the universe of “climate scientist” to include anyone who is willing to go on record agreeing in return for being called one of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even if they are anthropology teaching assistants. Read on.

That is, they revert to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of (as its name indicates) representatives appointed by governments, which itself appoints anthropology TAs, instructors in “the human dimension of environmental change” (bring own incense, please) and transport policy instructors, for example, to achieve great if still exaggerated (why is that necessary?) numbers of supporters who supposedly (but didn’t) write its proclamations? The IPCC’s “chief climate scientist” and chief “climatologist,” according to outlets like the New York Times and USA Today is, just for the record, actually a...railway engineer.

The piece continued quoting the Member of Congress it sought to defend:

“That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.”

Except that it is highly disputed, so it must be disputable. Stop and ask: have I not heard great vitriol tossed at scientists who dispute, sign petitions arguing against - and even resign their lifelong membership in professional societies over - this indisputable truth? Have you heard about the Wikipedia gatekeeper now topic-banned from the site for his years of work altering the truth and smearing the many scientists and papers disputing its supposedly indisputable opposite (WSJ notes it nicely, here, subscription required)?

Why would these things be if the argument about man-made global warming isn’t disputable? Or, possibly, is that just a talking point to avoid dispute which, as the years have shown, the alarmists cannot make the case serially stated as fact throughout articles such as this one?

Also unremarked was the salient point that nothing this congressman has ever voted for or voiced support for - meaning, not Kyoto, not cap-and-trade, not ‘green jobs’...nothing - would according to anyone ‘do something’, meaning, detectably impact the climate. So, frankly, it is rather unreasonable to conclude that the prescribed ‘do something’ remedies are in fact about the climate. See “ideological groups,” below.

The piece then adopted a different sort of advocacy, biased and selective characterization:

Groups that help support Tea Party candidates include climate change skepticism in their core message. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests.

Of course, solar, wind and related industries underwrote the public affairs, lobbying and smear campaigns. In fact, they even teamed up with left-wing ideological groups who love the prescription (Team Soros over at Center for American Progress, plus the Rockefeller and other foundations). Oh, and oil and utility interests, who lead author Ed Markey (D-MA) even publicly thanked for dragging his bill over the finish line in the House. The article continued:

The oil, coal and utility industries have collectively spent $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates, like Mr. Hill, who support it, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington.

That’s as far as the reporter got into raising Team Soros, oddly. As a source for its information. But in fact, most of the money spent by such groups appears to have been spent writing and lobbying to pass their favored bill - quick, name an oil company which fought the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? You’d be wrong, and the utilities’ trade association Edison Electric Institute claimed to have helped craft the bill, which they helped pass the House. But that doesn’t fit the template of activist-journalists who channel “most climate scientists.”

Just as some do not understand that it’s the spending, stupid, largely driving public disgust with the political class, our media friends’ decline is largely attributable to such knee-jerk, unthoughtful bias, preening advocacy shrouded in the aura of objectivity.

Washington appears - appears - to be on its way to reform. Possibly the media can be fixed, too. Most Tea Partiers agree. Of course, I didn’t talk to most Tea Partiers, but I read a lot of my peers saying that. So it must be an indisputable truth. Post here.

By Roger Pielke Sr, Climate Science

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research [UCAR] has released a press statement titled

Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades [h/t to Marcel Crok]

The press release starts with the text [highlight added]

The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, according to a new study by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.

Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.

In contrast, higher-latitude regions from Alaska to Scandinavia are likely to become more moist.

Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Nino.

The new findings appear this week as part of a longer review article in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

The press release is based on the paper

Aiguo Dai, 2010: Drought under global warming: a review. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. DOI: 10.1002/wcc.81

with the abstract [highlight added]

“This article reviews recent literature on drought of the last millennium, followed by an update on global aridity changes from 1950 to 2008. Projected future aridity is presented based on recent studies and our analysis of model simulations. Dry periods lasting for years to decades have occurred many times during the last millennium over, for example, North America, West Africa, and East Asia. These droughts were likely triggered by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs), with La Niña-like SST anomalies leading to drought in North America, and El-Niño-like SSTs causing drought in East China. Over Africa, the southward shift of the warmest SSTs in the Atlantic and warming in the Indian Ocean are responsible for the recent Sahel droughts. Local feedbacks may enhance and prolong drought. Global aridity has increased substantially since the 1970s due to recent drying over Africa, southern Europe, East and South Asia, and eastern Australia. Although El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), tropical Atlantic SSTs, and Asian monsoons have played a large role in the recent drying, recent warming has increased atmospheric moisture demand and likely altered atmospheric circulation patterns, both contributing to the drying. Climate models project increased aridity in the 21st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years. Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.”

This UCAR press release and the article itself are not scientifically robust. Buried within this material are the significant cavaets:

1.  “Dai cautioned that the findings are based on the best current projections of greenhouse gas emissions. What actually happens in coming decades will depend on many factors, including actual future emissions of greenhouse gases as well as natural climate cycles such as El Nino.”

2. “Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.’

In other words, there is NO way to assess the skill of these models are predicting drought as they have not yet shown any skill in SST predictions on time scales longer than a season, nor natural climate cycles such as El Nino [or the PDO, the NAO, ect].

Funding of multi-decadal regional climate predictions by the National Science Foundation which cannot be verified in terms of accuracy is not only a poor use of tax payer funds, but is misleading policymakers and others on the actual skill that exists in predicting changes in the frequency of drought in the future. See post here. See also Roger’s post on “Very Important New Paper “A Comparison Of Local And Aggregated Climate Model Outputs With Observed Data” By Anagnostopoulos Et Al 2010” here. Roger concludes: If the Anagnostopoulos et al conclusions are robust, it raises the question on the value of spending so much money on providing regional climate predictions decades into the future

Excellent post Roger. You have expresed the exasperation of many scientists over the NSF advocacy actions in recent years.