By John O’Sullivan
The controversy surrounding Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation of alleged climate science fraudster, Michael Mann, will just not go away. The amount of hot air generated presents more risk of global warming than any greenhouse gas.
But if we take the heat out of the argument for a moment and just ponder the essential legal issues, we may see some plain blue sky rather than the fog of opprobrium currently emanating from some quarters.
What is Fraud?
I would urge readers to be clear in their mind on this, as it is crucial to understanding the significance of Mann’s conduct. Fraud may legally be defined as “A false representation of a matter of fact - concealment of what should have been disclosed - that deceives and is intended to deceive another so that the individual will act upon it to her or his legal injury”
What are the Five Key Elements?
Whether you are warmist or sceptic and whichever legal authorities you refer to on this, you will find that the basic common law requirements in proving fraud must fulfill five separate elements, as follows:
(1)There must be a false statement of a material fact:
(2) Knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue;
(3) Intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim;
(4) Justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and;
(5) Injury to the alleged victim as a result.
How Do The Elements Apply to Michael Mann?
Ok, let’s play prosecutor and apply the above to Mann’s case:
(1.) Michael Mann presented his hockey stick graph-a consolidation of various paleoclimatic data-without clarifying that he had not applied such proxy data throughout. Mann had, in fact, secretly grafted onto his graph the actual temperature records from the 1960’s and dispensed with the tree ring proxies. He never admitted to such deceit. This was to ‘hide the decline’ in the reliability of his proxies. Moreover, he claimed to have used a large data sample - he didn’t. Analyst, Steve McIntyre uncovered that the whole scam spins around one tree!
(2.) The leaked Climategate computer folders marked “CENSORED” and “FIXED,” affirm that a 14 bristlecone pine series had been consciously and deliberately excluded by Mann in his calculations and thereafter kept from scrutiny. Thanks to a whistleblower, we now have at least some of the data despite Mann’s best efforts to keep it from independent auditors’ eyes. Despite having seen his methodologies exposed as both unsound and unethical Mann refused to correct his findings. Thus we may infer conscious and deliberate persistence in his deceit (mens rea).
(3.) In numerous interviews and publications Mann may be shown to have made repeated statements that his graph is a robust attempt at a proxy of past GLOBAL temperatures. This is a lie. At best, because he cherry-picked data so vigorously, his graph merely represents a localized proxy of North America.
(4.) Mann’s work is heavily cited by the IPCC. World governments acted on such ‘evidence’ and continue to invest heavily in remedial and unnecessary climate measures because they were persuaded that modern temps were potentially ‘catastrophic’ based on the spurious greenhouse gas thesis of Mann and his colleagues.
(5.) The total cost already paid globally by taxpayers is estimated to be in the tens of billions. Food aid projects have been impacted and hunger and starvation was precipitated by needless enterprises like biofuel farming. Mann may be held accountable for a proportion of that financial and human loss.
‘A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush’
Thus we have sketched out the basics of a case; while a more thorough analysis would no doubt fill a large filing cabinet-similar to that empty one in the corner of Mann’s office marked ‘Proof of My Integrity.’
Dr. Judith Curry has made the point that others may also have been engaged in such egregious conduct. Of course, Mann wasn’t acting alone and this is not a ‘witch-hunt.’ But rather than exonerating Mann, such an apologist argument merely mires him deeper in a conspiracy to defraud. And busting the wider conspiracy is any prosecutor’s goal.
Anti-corruption investigators proceed by pinpointing one fraudster at a time so that others may be more readily fitted into the conspiratorial puzzle; and taxpayers will be glad to see an end to that junk science gravy train.
No More Scientific Dystopia
It’s heartening to find that Dr. Curry shares in the desire of skeptics for improvements in climate science ethics generally. Hopefully, we can find common cause to more quickly rid ourselves of the bogus greenhouse gas theory.
Until that pseudo-science is buried I fear we still risk plunging downward into the spiral of scientific dystopia now more generally referred to as ‘post-normal science.’
Newton and Einstein would be spinning in their graves!
Read more here.
John O’Sullivan is a legal advocate and writer who for several years has litigated in government corruption and conspiracy cases in both the US and Britain.
By Chris Horner, The Daily Caller
The number 13 is proving quite fortuitous for me, if not so much for the global warming industry.
Thirteen months after I published the subtle “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed,” the ClimateGate e-mails leaked out of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, affirming the very same specifics of the alarmists’ whole sordid tale.
No longer could they deny what many had suspected about the shady “climate science,” and after ClimateGate the energy-rationing agenda offered in the name of “global warming” was thrown off track, helping to doom the ill-timed Copenhagen “Kyoto II” conference.
Last week, precisely 13 days after publishing “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America,” word leaked from Spain that the socialist government has finally acknowledged longstanding allegations which, again as luck would have it, I specifically laid out in the book.
In short, we learned of reports that the socialist Zapatero government has laid the groundwork for abandoning its vaunted “green jobs” schemes, admitting in an official if not yet released document the damning criticisms levied by an academic team. Their research had received great attention - and prompted vicious smear campaigns - both here and in Spain.
That is very bad news for the Obama administration whose leader on eight separate occasions instructed us to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain” if we wanted to see his model and vision for a “green economy.” He would launch America into a new era of prosperity premised in “new technologies” like windmills - yes, he actually said that.
This line was promoted at the expense of other Obama claims, like his vow in San Francisco to use such schemes to cause “electricity prices [to] necessarily skyrocket.” Which, it turns out, Spain’s “green economy” also managed to do.
At least, it caused electricity prices to rise leading the Spanish government - in order to avoid paying the political price - to set the rates far below the actual costs of producing inefficient energy from intermittent sources requiring massive physical redundancy (the wind blows when it feels like it). So they ran up a massive “rate deficit.”
In testimony to the U.S. House the lead Spanish researcher, Madrid economics professor Dr. Gabriel Calzada, revealed how paying this debt down would require raising Spanish electricity rates another 31 percent. Here we see the beginnings of “skyrocketing” rates.
For having dared to take Obama up on the serial invitation to eyeball Spain’s wondrous scheme, Dr. Gabriel Calzada was not only treated with typically shabby behavior by the House Democrats that day, but his own countrymen accused him of being “unpatriotic.” Not for what he said, but for the fact that he said it.
Imagine what these same people will surely call the Spanish socialists for admitting to Calzada’s claims. Among the caterwaulers were the communist party-affiliated trade union and the country’s “renewable” energy association “rent-seekers.” Both were furious because, as the head of the latter wrote, Spain needed the U.S. to fall for the scheme, too, and thus bail them out before their bubble burst.
Well, last week it did. Yet, to date, only David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner has picked up on the relevance of the story to Obama’s policies. The unfolding debacle is otherwise cast as a sidebar to Spain teetering on Greek-style collapse. The Spanish media are openly flogging the scandal. Even this Spanish article slavishly enthusiastic about the necessary, and massive, subsidy schemes notes that Spain’s green energy and employment rhetoric is “collid[ing] with the harsh economic reality...Today this energy is only possible if you have production support, and finally all the money spent will end up impacting all consumers through a rise in electricity bill.”
It makes clear how Spain’s green rent-seeking businesses are in panic mode over the prospect of retroactive cuts to their subsidies, with the boondoggle now fully exposed. Tens of thousands of jobs are described as being directly at risk, telling us that these jobs were indeed “bubble” jobs created solely as a result of a governmental policy favor, and therefore not, ahem, “sustainable.” Industry Minister Miguel “Sebastian explained that they were in ‘dialogue with industry to find a solution to continue betting on renewable energy, which is our strategic bet (...), but without adversely affecting the competitiveness of the Spanish economy.’”
That is, they’ve need an exit strategy from the mess, but have created constituencies demanding they still be fed. Soon, no doubt, the Obama administration and other cheerleaders for cramming down the “green""lifestyle agenda on you will insist that Spain isn’t really an appropriate analogy, at all. Why, Obama’s plans really are quite different and, anyway, we’ll just avoid Spain’s problems.
This is a guess but an educated one given what lawmakers began chanting after Europe’s “carbon cap-and-trade scheme was similarly revealed to be an economic debacle, chasing manufacturing jobs to exotic locations such as Carroll County, Ky. Ours is different.
It would also be of a part with Sen. John Kerry stating two weeks ago, in the face of crumbling public willingness to accept the monstrosity of cap-and-trade here, that cap-and-trade “isn’t an environment bill.” It’s really about jobs, and national security, and anything else that might appeal to you. It’s just, apparently, that they felt they had to go the route of a “global warming” scheme to make the agenda politically palatable but, now, well, they think you deserve the truth.
That truth really is that the issue isn’t the issue for our friends. And the claims of economic benefits to flow are as false as the notion that the cap-and-trade or “green jobs” schemes would change the temperature - something implied but which no one actually claims, for the obvious reason that the claim cannot be supported.
It’s time to call a halt to this, before Obama imposes yet another of Europe’s statist mistakes as part of his “fundamental transformation.” You must instead re-take the political class’s power, before they steal yours. See post here. See Chris’s Power Grab here.
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Are we listening yet?.
By Chris Horner, Spectator on 5.7.10 @ 8:57AM
So about two weeks ago Sen. John Kerry, a lead author of the looming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman global warming/cap-and-trade legislation said about his bill, to disassociate from Earth Day loopiness: This is not an environment bill. No kidding. No one on the planet claims it would change the climate in any way our most sophisticated instrumentation could discern. It’s about power. Hence the title of books like “Power Grab”.
Today we read in E&E Daily, from another co-sponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham: “It’s not a global warming bill to me. Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore. “
Oddly, both remarkable statements have been ignored by the establishment press, slavish as they are to also seeing this agenda through to the end because, as Sen. Tim Wirth said in 1988 and Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address, even if you don’t buy the excuse their agenda is still “the right thing to do.”
As I have been saying for some time and just published a book making the case: the issue is not the issue. The global warming then climate change then, uh, it’s jobs, that’s it, jobs, or maybe national security or...I dunno, what appeals to you? ... agenda for promoting the energy-scarcity list of mandates, wealth transfers and lifestyle restrictions were just excuses for doing what these people have long insisted they, as your betters, be able to do to you.
Get this reality now, or wake up one day and wonder why you didn’t before it was too late. See more here. See Congress’s Sad Embarrassment here.
UPDATE: Lieberman on FOX Sunday 5/9/10 with Chris Wallace: [will] “...create millions of new jobs in our country and make us energy independent”, “I think it’s about the best thing we can do to create jobs and make America energy independent","we are going to have the broadest group of supporters Wednesday when we launch this bill that has ever come together for an energy independence program.”
Comments on the United States Department of State’s U.S. Climate Action Report 2010. 5th ed., May 4, 2010 submitted by:
J. Scott Armstrong (Ph.D., MIT, 1968), a Professor at the Wharton School of Management, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Long-range Forecasting, the creator of forecastingprinciples.com, and editor of Principles of Forecasting (Kluwer 2001), an evidence-based summary of knowledge on forecasting methods. He is a founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting, and he has spent 50 years doing research and consulting on forecasting. (Armstrong@wharton.upenn.edu)
Kesten C. Green of the International Graduate School of Business at the University of South Australia is a Director of the International Institute of Forecasters and is co-director with Scott Armstrong of the Forecasting Principles public service Internet site (ForPrin.com). He has been responsible for the development of two forecasting methods that provide forecasts that are substantially more accurate than commonly used methods. (Kesten.Green@unisa.edu.au)
Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist at the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also the receiving editor in the area of solar and stellar physics for the journal New Astronomy. He has 20 years of active researching and publishing in the area of climate change and all views expressed are strictly his own. (vanlien@earthlink.net)
Statement
Our research findings challenge the basic assumptions of the State Department’s Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report (CAR 2010). The alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming are not the product of proper scientific evidence-based forecasting methods. Furthermore, there have been no validation studies to support a belief that the forecasting procedures used were nevertheless appropriate for the situation. As a consequence, alarming forecasts of global warming are merely the opinions of some scientists and, for a situation as complicated and poorly understood as global climate, such opinions are unlikely to be as accurate as forecasts that global temperatures will remain much the same as they have been over recent years. Using proper forecasting procedures we predict that the global warming alarm will prove false and that government actions in response to the alarm will be shown to have been harmful.
Whether climate will change over the 21st Century, by how much, in what direction, to what effect, and what if anything people could and should do about any changes are all forecasting problems. Given that policy makers currently do not have access to scientific forecasts for any of these, the policies that have been proposed with the avowed purpose of reducing dangerous manmade global warming - such as are described in CAR 2010 Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7- are likely to cause serious and unnecessary harm.
In this comment on CAR 2010, we summarize findings from our research on forecasting climate. Most of our findings have been published in the peer-reviewed literature and all have been presented at scientific meetings. They are easily accessible on the Internet and we provide links to them.
1. There are no scientific forecasts to support claims that there will be dangerous global warming over the 21st Century.
a) Faulty selection of forecasting methods
Based on scientific research on forecasting, the most appropriate method for forecasting climate over the 21st Century would be a naïve no-trend extrapolation. Due to the substantial uncertainty about climate, it is not possible to forecast even the direction of change and one should not, therefore, forecast changes. As with many conclusions from scientific research on forecasting, this conclusion derives from a finding that is not intuitive: in complex situations with high uncertainty, one should use methods that are conservative and simple (Armstrong 1985; Armstrong 2001).
While much has been made of the climate models used to support forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming, these were used in effect only as tools to present forecasts. The actual forecasts were made by unaided judgment; that is, by judgment unaided by forecasting principles. A substantial body of research has shown that unaided judgment cannot provide useful forecasts in complex situations with high uncertainty (Armstrong 1980; Tetlock 2005), such as is the case with climate.
In other words, if one were to recruit the cleverest climate scientists in the world and give them access to all of the available facts about climate, and ensured that all facts were true and all data were valid and accurate, the experts could do no better at forecasting climate than people with only minimal expertise. And their forecasts would even be less accurate than those from a simple heuristic. This finding is astonishing to those who are not familiar with the eight decades of evidence in the peer-reviewed research literature, and nearly all who learn of it believe that while the finding might apply to others, it does not apply to them.
b) Errors in implementation of forecasting methods
The forecasting procedures described in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report violated 81% of the 89 principles relevant to climate forecasting. For example, the methods and data were neither fully disclosed nor were they easy for independent researcher to access, no reasonable alternative forecasting methods were assessed, and prediction intervals were not assessed objectively (see “Global warming: Forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts").
Those who were responsible for making the forecasts had no training or experience in the proper use of scientific forecasting methods. Furthermore, we were unable to find any indication that they made an effort to look for evidence from scientific research on forecasting. It is perhaps not surprising then that their implementation of their forecasting method was inappropriate.
c) Failure in validation testing
The forecasting procedures used by global warming alarmists were not validated for the situation. To address this oversight, we conducted an ex ante forecasting simulation of the IPCC forecasts (from the organization’s 1992 report) of a .03C per year increase in global average temperature.
We used the period from 1850 through 2007, a period of industrialization and exponential growth in human emissions of carbon dioxide. In a head-to-head competition involving 10,750 forecasts, the forecast errors from the IPCC model were more than 7 times larger than the errors from a model more appropriate to the situation, the aforementioned naïve extrapolation. More importantly, the errors were 12.6 times larger for the long-term (91 to 100-year forecast horizons). (See “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making.")
2. There are no scientific forecasts to support the actions advocated by global warming alarmists.
a) Our findings apply not only to the alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming, but also to the unsupported claims that various actions (e.g., “buying local,” carbon taxes, subsidies for alternative sources of energy) would be beneficial
To assess actions properly, one would need to forecast all the costs and benefits. For example, we examined the procedures used to support the claim that polar bears are in danger of extinction and should therefore be listed as an endangered, The claim was made in the face of evidence that the polar bear population has been growing in recent decades. (See “Polar bear population forecasts: A public-policy forecasting audit") As with the IPCC’s climate forecasts, we found faulty forecasting procedures. Indeed, only 15% of relevant forecasting principles were properly applied. An example of a faulty procedure is the construction of 45-, 75-, and 100-year forecasts based on an analysis that used only 5 years (2001-2005) of calibration data on polar bears and ice.
We judged that the polar bear population forecasting process to have been affected by political biases. See also Dr. Armstrong’s testimony on this issue to a U.S. Senate Committee in January 2008.
b) A failure to consider the costs and benefits of reasonable alternatives
For responsible and rational policy making, it is necessary to obtain forecasts for a set of alternative decisions. One alternative would be to take no action, and another would be to monitor the situation until there is scientific evidence on actions that would lead to beneficial outcomes. On this matter, basic economic rationality in the form of cost/benefit analysis aligns with basic science: reasonable alternative hypotheses must be tested in order to have a good chance of identifying the truth.
3. A political argument, the “precautionary principle,” has been used to block a scientific approach to forecasting climate and making decisions.
The purpose of scientific forecasting is to reduce uncertainty in order to facilitate wise decisions. The so-called “precautionary principle” claims that uncertainty is a reason to make dramatic changes. It has the effect of marginalizing rational scientific study. Rejection of the rational scientific approach to decision making was mocked in George Orwell’s 1984, in one of the three slogans displayed on the Ministry of Truth building, “Ignorance is strength.” (Our essay “Uncertainty, the precautionary principle, and climate change” describes the anti-scientific nature of the “precautionary principle.")
In the case of global climate change over policy-relevant time scales, there is little uncertainty. Proper scientific forecasts provide extremely accurate forecasts. Climate varies, but our validation study showed that simply extrapolating last year’s global mean temperature resulted in a mean absolute error of only 0.24C for fifty-year ahead forecasts. It is difficult to imagine how policy makers would benefit if this error were reduced further, even to 0.0C.
4. Using a new, but validated forecasting procedure known as structured analogies, we forecast that the global warming movement will be shown to have raised a false alarm and to have been responsible for precipitating decisions that caused long-term harm to most people.
We are conducting an on-going study to examine earlier forecasts of manmade disasters such as the global cooling movement in the 1970s, and the environmental movement’s campaign to ban DDT. We have been actively seeking such analogous situations, especially from the people responsible for promulgating alarming forecasts of manmade global warming, to see if there have been any widely accepted forecasts of manmade disasters that proved to be accurate or where the forecasted disaster was successfully prevented by government actions.
In all, we have identified 72 analogous situations, and we judge 26 of them to be relevant. Based on an analysis of these 26 similar alarms with known outcomes, we found that none were based on forecasts derived from scientific forecasting procedures, and all were false alarms. Government actions were sought in 96% of the cases and, in the 92% of cases where government action was taken, the actions caused harm in 87%. ("Effects and outcomes of the global warming alarm: A forecasting project using the structured analogies method").
We are providing full disclosure and inviting inputs at publicpolicyforecasting.com. A page of the site devoted to our Global Warming Analogies Project provides a list of the 26 analogies and links to descriptions of some of them. We also seek evidence that might lead us to revise our analyses. We will provide an update of the project at the 4th International Conference on Climate Change on May 18, 2010.
Based on our structured analogies study, we forecast that the global warming movement will be found to have been raising false alarms, and that the negative effects of the movement will continue to be felt for many years.
Conclusions
Those who make alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming have appealed to the “precautionary principle” in order to justify their calls for drastic actions. The latter appeal is made in response to uncertainty about how and why climate changes. We have shown that the alarming climate forecasts are not based on scientific procedures. Calls for drastic action are neither logical nor responsible.
Policy-makers should halt and reverse actions to try to change the climate. There is no scientific justification for making energy more expensive and reducing economic efficiency. If policymakers fail to reverse their anti-energy policies, we forecast that people will suffer further harm from unnecessarily expensive energy as well as from unintended consequences of climate change policies.
References
Armstrong, J. S. (1978; 1985), Long-Range Forecasting: From Crystal Ball to Computer. New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1978; 2nd Edition, 1985.
Armstrong, J. S. (1980), “The Seer-Sucker Theory: The Value of Experts in Forecasting,” Technology Review, 83 (June/July), 18-24.
Armstrong, J. S., Green, K.C., & Soon, W. (2008), “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit,” Interfaces, 38, No. 5, 382–405. [Includes commentary and response]
Green, K. C. & Armstrong, J. S. (2007), “Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts,” Energy and Environment, 18, No. 7+8, 995-1019.
Green, K. C. & Armstrong J. S. (2010), “Effects of the global warming alarm: A forecasting project using the structured analogies method,” Working Paper.
Green, K. C., Armstrong, J. S. & Soon W. (2009), “Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making,” International Journal of Forecasting, 25, 826-832.
Tetlock, P. E. (2005), Expert Political Judgment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.