Written by Alex Newman

After admitting that the United States’ own climate data was worse than the Climategate-tainted University of East Anglia’s, two U.S. Senators are demanding answers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“In light of recent revelations and scientific reports, we are contacting you regarding our continued concerns with the apparent declining credibility of United States climate data,” wrote Senators John Barraso of Wyoming and Louisiana’s David Vitter in a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden. “With almost ten percent unemployment, America cannot afford to base its energy policy on flawed data.”

After a series of scandals and blatant errors largely discredited the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that warned of disastrous global warming, the letter explains that policymakers turned to American data as a sort of back up. “Unfortunately, it appears that U.S. data is equally flawed and corrupted by questionable scientific practices,” the Senators stated.

The letter refers to information obtained from NASA by the Competitive Enterprise Institute under a Freedom of Information Act request. In the documents, a senior scientist from the space agency advised a reporter that NASA’s climate data is inferior to the Climategate-spoiled records from the UEA’s disgraced Climatic Research Unit - and that NASA’s information is partially derived from the CRU’s flawed data.

Also casting doubt on U.S. climate data is an investigation by meteorologists Alan Watts and Joseph D’Aleo. “The study highlighted that among many other data integrity issues, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA have not only reduced the total number of weather stations that they gather climate data from, but have ‘cherry picked’ the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places,” explained the Senators’ letter.

Canada GHCN stations (VJones) in 1975 (diamonds) enlarged here).

Canada GHCN stations (VJones) in 2009 (diamonds) enlarged here).

The results of the investigation - which also concluded that some 90 percent of weather stations do not even meet the government’s own standards on the appropriate distance of stations from biasing influences like roads or airports - are available at surfacestations.org. 

A former NASA physicist’s study is also cited in the letter, fueling even more questions about the agency’s “science.” Dr. Edward Long, who released the results of an investigation in late February, concluded that “GISS, over a 10-year period has modified their data by progressively lowering temperature values for far-back dates and raising those in the more recent past.” And after reviewing the study, the Senators concluded in their letter that the result of NASA’s methodology had been to “dramatically change the true temperature record of the United States” (below enlarged here)

The lawmakers noted that they had “serious concerns” about the recent reports. They also invited NASA chief Bolden to testify before the Senate on the credibility of the agency’s data. “The American people deserve to know the facts about the science behind our policies,” they explained. 

Another prominent U.S. Senator, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, called for investigations of some climate scientists after a report prepared for his Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee concluded that there were potentially criminal activities involved. Even the former head of the UN’s climate-change panel has called for an inquiry into an apparent “warming bias” by government climate researchers. 

In an interview with Fox News about the letter and NASA’s climate data, Senator Barraso also criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide - a gas exhaled by humans and essential to plant life. “When the administration is trying to make an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide, I think it’s reckless to make such huge decisions affecting American jobs and the American economy based on data that may not be reliable, and seems to be contaminated,” he said. “I don’t think the facts bear out, at this point. You wonder if it’s more about politics than it is about science.”

But amidst all of the scandals, NASA’s climate research programs are set to increase their funding by a whooping $2.4 billion, or 62 percent through 2015, according to the Washington Post. “The budget increase reflects both a campaign promise by President Obama to focus far more on the threat of climate change and what NASA officials called a ‘philosophical shift’ on the issue,” the paper reported. 

Without an even greater outcry from citizens, the governments of the world will continue pouring the people’s resources into this scam. There is too much at stake for them to go down quietly. But as illustrated by the seemingly never-ending stream of scandals, errors, and lies, the climate crusade is imploding, and fast.

The IPCC report has already been all but debunked after a long series of scandals and obvious errors were uncovered. Many American politicians and officials distanced themselves from the flawed report after the revelations, claiming they were relying instead on U.S. government data. But now, it has become obvious that NASA and other American agencies in charge of U.S. “climate science” have been providing less-than-accurate information as well.

As reported recently by The New American magazine, global-warming alarmism is dying a slow death. The recent NASA scandals are just a new chapter in the rapid unraveling of the campaign to convince people around the world to pay carbon taxes to global authorities. And as documented in an earlier article for The New American magazine from the UN Copenhagen global-warming summit, the anti-science climate alarmist agenda is clear: more taxes, more regulation, more government, and less freedom. 

With a poll from October of last year showing that barely a third of Americans believed in human-caused global warming, the alarmists were clearly already losing the battle for public opinion. And that was before the recent exposure of all the mistakes and scandals, which also made it clear that alarmists are losing in the scientific arena as well. But governments have vast sums of money at their disposal, and Obama made it abundantly clear when he rammed through healthcare “reform” despite massive opposition that public opinion will not alter his agenda.

Stopping governments from saddling the people of the world with economy-destroying taxes and regulations is a crucial fight. But it will be long and hard. To win, a groundswell of Americans even larger than the opposition to health “reform” must demand an end to unconstitutional EPA carbon regulations and put a stop to the billions in funding for bogus climate “science.” If legislators refuse to listen, they must be removed from office as soon as the next elections permit. See more here.

By Jonah Goldberg

Too little, too late, too clever, and for the wrong reasons. That’s a good way to describe President Obama’s decision to allow a little offshore drilling.

Of course, most of the environmentalist base of the Democratic party sees it the other way around: too much, too soon (since “never” is their preferred timeline), too dumb, but for the right reasons.

Obama justified his decision to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the southern Atlantic, and some coastal regions of northern Alaska on the grounds that it would create jobs and serve as a “bridge” to the carbon-free Brigadoon we’ve long been promised. The reality is that his decision was entirely political. Aiming to win vital Republican support in the Senate for some kind of bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation, he lifted the ban where the polling was in favor of doing so. Sound science, energy policy, and economics were the last things on his mind. On that, there is widespread consensus.

Back when oil cost $140 per barrel, Pres. George W. Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling. Once elected, Obama quietly reinstated it. Since then, Obama’s Interior Department has been doing just about everything it can to slow, hamper, and prevent oil and gas exploration in the U.S. and offshore. There’s no reason to believe the administration won’t keep doing that. Besides, Obama’s announcement actually bans more oil and gas reserves from exploration than it opens up: nothing in the Pacific, nothing in the western Gulf of Mexico, nothing in southern Alaska - all promising areas.

But there’s an unintended irony to Obama’s decision, one that he probably has not considered, since the passage of health-care reform has only reinforced his ideological hubris. The welfare state that Obama is trying to create needs money, desperately. The federal debt is currently around $12 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office expects it to hit $20 trillion by 2020. Throw in the unfunded liabilities - i.e., promises to citizens - in our existing entitlements system and the debt creeps over $100 trillion.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Steven Hayward thinks this is something of a ticking time bomb for the Left’s overlapping coalition of environmentalists and welfare-state liberals. For years, environmentalists have been selling snake oil about energy policy, claiming that we can give up on nasty but affordable carbon-based energy such as coal, oil, and gas and embrace wind, solar, and geothermal (but not nuclear!) at little to no cost. In fact, if you listen to people such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, switching to solar panels and wind farms will make us richer and more competitive, if not cause unicorns to poop “green jobs” and rainbows for as far as the eye can see.

Obama’s arguments for health-care reform were similarly otherworldly. We can give 32 million more people coverage, without preconditions, and save money. It’s already clear that this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pitch was bogus; big corporations are announcing that Obamacare will either cost them millions (if not billions) or force them to drop coverage.

It turns out that there’s no free lunch, not on health care and not on energy policy.

And that’s the irony. Obama and his Democratic successors will keep trying to squeeze the rich to pay for their schemes. But that won’t raise anything close to the revenue they need. They’ll try for a value-added tax, which will raise lots of money but also stifle growth. Eventually, if they want to avoid bankruptcy and keep the welfare state afloat, never mind pay for all of these environmental white elephants, they’ll need more revenue, and that’s where oil comes in.

Environmentalists who estimate that we only have six months’ worth of oil in the Arctic or offshore don’t know what they’re talking about, because nobody knows how much untapped oil we have.

Many of the estimates are 30 years old, and they were made before radical leaps in seismic exploration and drilling technology. We could have tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas under our soil or off our coasts. (One American Petroleum Institute study suggests that government revenues alone from untapped resources could be $1.7 trillion over 20 years.) Oil-industry jobs already pay twice the national average and are pretty much impossible to send overseas.

Fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere for at least a few decades. Even if we don’t drill, other countries certainly will. No country in the world with significant oil or gas resources is abstaining from exploiting them - except for America. Environmentalists say that makes us a leader; the rest of the world says that makes us a sucker.

See post here.

By Joanne Nova

The UK Parliamentary Committee was always going to be a whitewash. They put no skeptics on the committee; they interviewed no skeptics; they didn’t ask Steven McIntyre to speak. They tried to put people on the committee like Phillip Campbell, who had already pronounced it was a done deal and ClimateGate a non-event, but were forced to settle for people who were more covertly sympathetic: “impartial” people like committee chairman Phil Willis, who had already made up his mind in January and announced it in the Telegraph: “There are a significant number of climate change deniers, who are basically using the UEA emails to support the case this is poor science that has been changed or at worst manipulated. We do not believe this is healthy and therefore we want to call in the UEA so the public can see what they are saying”.

It’s no wonder the committee made a spin-like press release with wishy-washy weasel words. What’s amazing is that under the spin, they can’t help but bust all of modern climate science. The UK report: [press release]

“The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.

The translation: We were looking in the wrong spot. We don’t think Phil ought to get busted for just doing what all the other sloppy, biased scientists do. He did hide data, but so does everyone else. The whole of climate science has bogus practices that need to change. It’s official: common practices across all climate science are so poor they need to change.

The UK Report: Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available - which they mostly are - or the methods not published - which they have been -its published results would still be credible:...[para 51]

Translation: We here in the once-Great British Isles are now happy to accept getting most of the data instead of the full complete set. From now on, we will also accept most of the receipts for your tax returns instead of the original copies, and we will accept most of the receipts of government ministers on working trips to Barbados. Near enough is good enough. With trillions of dollars at stake, it’s no time to get fussy.

The UK Report:  [T]he results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

Translation: The results of the EAU agree with data sets around the world that are also sloppy, incomplete, unverifiable, and by NASA’s own email disclosures, even worse than the EAU’s. This meets the standards of the British Government.

Memo to the people of birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the home of Newton: As all your trusted traditions and standards of excellence fade into mediocrity, and you give your disposable income to Goldman Sachs, the UK government hopes you will bear it with a stiff upper lip and no backbone at all.

Let’s be clear people. We don’t need a committee to tell us that a scientist who makes statements like these is deceitful:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick...to hide the decline.

Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith regarding the latest IPCC report? Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

There were thousands of e-mails, but we don’t need thousands. They are old news to skeptics, but we need to repeat the ones that matter in letters to editors, phone calls to friends, messages to ministers, and blog comments. Imagine if the words above came from a politician about the national budget how they would not be front page news. Imagine how the public would react. Count the days it would take before he was sacked. Thanks to carbon trading, this is is the national budget. Worse, it’s an international trading scheme. We are supposed to trust these scientists. They have lost the global data sets. We don’t need to say any more. There is no recovering from that one simple point.

We don’t need a committee to tell us that this is bogus, and nor do the public. The citizens of the free world just need to hear the quotes. They understand that when someone hides a decline, there is no other interpretation. The researcher is concealing something he doesn’t want you to see.

Here’s how it works in government-run climate science “results”: If the results don’t work the way you want, you can adjust them. If people want to check those results, you can lose them. If you get caught losing and adjusting them, you can always count on the committee results to whitewash it.

ADDENDUM
Wait until you hear this.

There is a second inquiry into ClimateGate and Andrew Orlowski has discovered that the man in charge, Lord Oxburgh, is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.

The peer leading the second Climategate enquiry at the University of East Anglia serves as a director of one of the most powerful environmental networks in the world, according to Companies House documents - and has failed to declare it. James Delingpole and Bishop Hill have the wrap on the conflicts of interest and power plays in the second committee, and how the GLOBE company was set up to avoid FOI’s. It’s more brazen than you can imagine...It’s an organisation of legislators run as a private company, and funded by...wait for it..."International Organisations, Governments, Parliamentary Bodies and Industry, both financially and politically, with particular acknowledgement to United Nations, The Global Environment Facility, The World Bank, European Commission, the Governments of Canada and Great Britain, the Senate of Brazil and Globe Japan.”

In 2007, it had a budget of 850,000 pounds and the 2007 accounts also refer to creating “a forum for legislators and business leaders to discuss the 2012 climate agreement, illegal logging and related issues”. What 2012 climate agreement?