By Anita Kumar, Washington Post
CHARLOTTESVILLE—A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth’s temperature.
Lawyers from the attorney general’s office said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely designing his well-known “hockey-stick” graph to show global warming or including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he submitted for grants.
Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli’s behalf, said there was a possibility of a “consistent pattern of manipulation of data.”
But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday’s hearing.
Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli’s authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.
Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross took the matter under advisement, saying he would rule within 10 days.
“It’s frankly offensive to be attacked by a sitting attorney general in a state I know and love,’’ Mann said in a phone interview after the hearing. “These charges continue to be made by climate-change deniers. There is no grounds whatsoever for the claims they are making.”
The long-awaited courtroom showdown between Cuccinelli and Virginia’s flagship university drew a packed house. Cuccinelli, who is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over global warming, has denied that he is seeking the documents because of Mann’s scientific findings. He did not appear in Charlottesville on Friday but issued a brief statement.
“The attorney general is the sole official charged with enforcing Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act,’’ he said. “Our office is investigating whether a false claim was presented to the university to secure payment under government-funded grants—nothing more, nothing less.”
Russell argued that the attorney general’s office is allowed to have the documents because they are on state e-mail servers and because the grant money is in a state bank account. But Chuck Rosenberg, an attorney for the university, argued that four of the grants were from the federal government and are not subject to state law.
Rosenberg also argued that Cuccinelli failed to specifically identify in the civil investigative demand what Mann allegedly did wrong, which is required by law. Peatross repeatedly pressed Russell for that information.
“There is reason to believe that in information he submitted for grants, there is manipulated data,” Russell responded.
Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand under a 2002 state statute designed to catch government employees defrauding the public of tax dollars.
Mann’s work has long been under attack by global warming skeptics, particularly after references to a statistical “trick” Mann used in his research surfaced in a series of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Mann has said the e-mail was taken out of context. Some of his methodologies have been criticized by other scientists, but an inquiry by Pennsylvania State University concluded that there was no evidence that Mann engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data. Mann worked at U-Va. from 1999 to 2005 and now works at Penn State.
“Calling scientific findings ‘fraudulent’ because you don’t agree with them is dangerous,’’ said Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
See post here.
Icecap Note: Cuccinelli is a true American hero. Mann is a disgrace to the science, to UVA and PSU. The AMS, AGU, the union for college professors and UCAR are hypocites in their attack on Cuccinellui while they look the other way at the Greenpeace shotgun attack via FoIA on all skeptical scientists in the universities. Oh and one last thing “Scientific Integrity” and “Union of Concerned Scientsists” is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
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Obama Sides Against States & Greens Over Global Warming Enforcement
By Gabriel Nelson, The New York Times, 25 August 2010
The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.
In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation’s largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The defendants—American Electric Power Co. Inc., Duke Energy Corp., Southern Co. and Xcel Energy Inc.—filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court earlier this month, asking the court to reject the argument that greenhouse gas emissions can be addressed through “public nuisance” lawsuits (Greenwire, Aug. 4).
In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA’s newly finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of common-law claim.
Katyal urged the court to vacate the decision and remand the case to the 2nd Circuit for further proceedings, this time taking into account the administration’s push to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The 2nd Circuit’s decision rested on the assertion that “EPA does not currently regulate carbon dioxide,” but that has since changed. The Obama administration has finalized several regulations in response to the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which told the agency to decide whether greenhouse gases were pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
“Since this court held in 2007 that carbon dioxide falls within that regulatory authority, EPA has taken several significant steps toward addressing the very question presented here,” Katyal wrote. “That regulatory approach is preferable to what would result if multiple district courts—acting without the benefit of even the most basic statutory guidance—could use common-law nuisance claims to sit as arbiters of scientific and technology-related disputes and de factoregulators of power plants and other sources of pollution both within their districts and nationwide.”
Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general’s office on June 24, it seemed they had “a lot of friends in the room,” he said.
“We feel stabbed in the back,” Pawa said. “This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?”
Top attorneys at environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say. Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.
“This reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration’s briefing in Massachusetts,” said David Bookbinder, who served as the Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.
Full story
By Kirk Myers
The Church of Global Warming (a.k.a. the Church of CO2 Emissions), which has converted many a true believer over the past few decades, is facing a Reformation of sorts. Its pews are beginning to empty as snow-bound and shivering skeptics increasingly question its once-unchallenged doctrines. Still, many millions of worshipers remain faithful to the religion’s man-is-warming-the-earth theology - a belief system based on demonstrably fraudulent science and false prophecy. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that the earth is now cooling - not warming - why do so many cling to their Greenhouse God while denouncing CO2 as the planetary Satan? Why do they continue to recite chapter and verse from necromancer Al Gore’s Bible of Inconvenient Truth?
Have the good disciples not read or seen the mountain of real-world evidence that belies the pronouncements of the High Priests of Mother Earth? Are they so in thrall to their environmental gospel that they have abandon reason? The answer, regrettably, is yes. As Caroline May of BigGovernment.com notes, Warmist worship is rooted not in facts, but in “blind adherence to an unproven principle”:
“This unquestioned adherence to the theory of Global Warming bears all the markings of what traditionally would be recognized as a religion. Complete with sin (the emitting of carbon dioxide), scriptures (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports), commandments (drive a Prius, use Compact Florescent Light bulbs, do not eat meat etc.), indulgences (carbon offsets), proselytism, prophets (Al Gore), priests (scientists), prophecy and apocalypse (floods, hurricanes, dead polar bears), infidels (Warming skeptics), and salvation (the halting of carbon emitting industrial progress) . . . .”
Those who argue that the sun is largely responsible for climate change are branded as heretics, just as Galileo was condemned by church authorities for claiming the earth revolves around the sun. The sun’s impact on earth’s climate is huge compared to that of human beings - a fact well understood by most climate scientists and solar physicists. But green theologians and their flock of well-meaning, but misguided, believers ignore or downplay the sun’s dominant role. Instead, they blame humans in the most apocalyptic language.
As columnist Don Feder notes, the new Church of Mother Earth, is rooted in the secular doctrines of Marxism. It is a quasi-religion that promises to take adherents to the Promised Land of “rigid control, central planning, rationing, pre-industrial living standards and flagellation to purge us of our sins.”
The late Michael Crichton, a celebrated author who penned Jurassic Park and several other best-selling novels, condemned the religious-like aspects of environmentalism as far back as 2003 in a speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism,” Crichton observed. “Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists . . . a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.”
Some of the biggest critics of the church of eco-theology are scientific experts, many of whom are ostracized and treated by fellow researchers as apostates - “unbelievers” and “deniers.”
According to Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “We are shifting away from science and into the realm of religious fanaticism, where the followers of the creed, brimming with self-righteous fury, believe that they are in possession of a higher truth.
Like a religion, environmentalism is suffused with hatred for the material world and again, like religion, it requires devotion rather than intellectual rigor from its adherents. It is intolerant of dissent; those who question the message of doom are regarded as heretics, or ‘climate change deniers’, to use green parlance.
And, just as in many religions, the route to personal salvation lies in the performance of superstitious rituals, such as changing a light bulb or arranging for a tree to be planted after every plane journey. Even Czech President Vaclav Klaus has taken a verbal swipe at the new eco-creed, calling the global warming movement a “new religion.”
“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature . . . This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished,” Klaus said. “They [global warmists] will try to dictate to us how to live, what to do, how to behave.”
The rigid strictures of eco-worship don’t leave much room for fun. Virtually everything one does is sinful - traveling during holidays (especially if it involves plane travel), driving your car, having a comfortable temperature in your home, using incandescent light bulbs, leaving the phone charger plugged in, idling in the school parking lot, driving instead of walking or bicycling to the corner store, using the fireplace, and on and on. The new eco-doctrine demands that everyone - believers and unbelievers - must endure a living Purgatory on earth so Polar Bears can procreate in greater numbers and Greenlanders can remain comfortably frozen.
As John Brignell writes, “The eleventh commandment for the killjoys is ‘Thou shalt not have fun,’ and global warming provides a delightful playground for them."`But don’t dare complain about or challenge the anti-carbon creed. Those who defy the religious order are branded apostates and eternally damned - or worse.
Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada received five death threats after publicly challenging the man-causes-global-warming doctrine."I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”
In recent years, the green religion has filtered into the ecclesiastical realm where it has found a sympathetic ear. Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury is one of several godly potentates to cloak himself in the vestments of green and preach eco-sermons to his flock. According to a story in London’s Daily Mail, the archbishop “urged people to recycle their rubbish and cut down on air travel . . . He also called for people to ‘go out of doors in the wet from time to time’ and take chances to watch the changing of the seasons in order to ‘restore a sense of association with the material place and time and climate we inhabit and are part of.’”
And in a Twilight Zone moment, a British judge recently ruled in favor of a worker who claimed he was unfairly dismissed from his job at a property management firm for expressing his concerns about man-made global warming to his fellow employees. As Chuck Colson of Breakpoint.org reported, “The judge’s ruling opens the door to the possibility of employees suing their employers ‘for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.’”
Tragically, the environmental movement has become the gathering place for a growing assemblage of Gaia worshipers, neo-pagans, animists, wiccans and eco-magic believers - most of them neither interested in nor possessing an understanding of the complex scientific principles that drive climate change. The true mystics among them have turned from saving the polar bears to embracing a belief in fairies, pixies, gnomes, elves and other spirits of nature.
The groups pushing the global warming religion the hardest are those who stand to profit most from the evolving carbon-trading market. They are religious only in their worship of Almighty Wealth, and they plan to make a killing from the global warming scare through carbon trading. Carbon-trading offsets are similar to the medieval indulgences of old - pardons granted by the church for sinful behavior. As Alexander Cockburn writes: “The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary, and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in ‘carbon credits’ is in formation. Those whose ‘carbon footprint’ is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.”
This carbon-trading scheme - and lots of investment money - is the driving force behind the global warming hysteria. Dirty, polluting humans must be convinced that global-government control of CO2 emissions is their salvation - even if destroys industry and reduces the world to peasantry. A great effort is underway to avoid blaming climate change on the sun - and for good reason: It is impossible to enact an international treaty to control the sun’s magnetic activity. If the sun, not human-generated atmospheric CO2, is responsible for global warming (and cooling), carbon taxes and a world carbon-trading exchange are pointless. Ergo, there would be no carbon fortunes to made by the CO2 warriors at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.
As Cockburn explains, the relentless demonizing of CO2 by the high priests of global warming is a sham - a deliberate deception. “There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend,” he says.
“The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism, and greed, just like the old indulgences . . . .”
“The truth is there is no man-made global warming,” says Capitalism Magazine’s Tom DeWeese. “There’s only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery.”
See post here. To show you how unreceptive the believeers are to even hearing facts that question their faith, see how Marc Morano was handled in a planned debate in Aspen, CO Sunday originally arranged by James Cameron, who backed out at the suggestion of Climate Progress’s Joe Romm here. Crowd called for Morano to kill himself.
By John McLean
PREFACE
This document has been written in response to the independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently being undertaken by the InterAcademy Council (IAC).
Others may have a different opinion but I have no faith whatsoever in this review because the IAC has far too many close links with the International Science Union (ICSU), an organization that spent almost 30 years pressuring for the creation of the IPCC (see chapter 1).
According to the IAC website, the 18-member board of the IAC has at least three people - Ralph Cicerone, Martin Rees and Kurt Lambeck - who head national science bodies, all of which are members of the ICSU. Howard Alper, also an IAC board member, is the co-chair of IAP, the global network of science academies, and most of those academies are ICSU members. Membership of the ICSU has the documented obligation of supporting its objectives, which means that already the IAC’s independence is compromised.
The relationship is not merely via overlapping roles of individuals and the bodies they represent because the president of the ICSU is an official observer on the IAC board, and among the IAC’s web links to “partner organizations” we find the ICSU listed prominently.
The IAC and ICSU have a very similar role. Both seek to fit the square peg of science into the round hole of politics, to take a field where truth is not determined by consensus and twist it to fit a field where consensus is everything. Both have grandiose statements of intent - the IAC’s is “Mobilizing the world’s best science to advise decision-makers on issues of global concern” - and both work very closely with UN bodies such as the UNEP, a co-sponsor of the IPCC.
The ICSU’s modus operandi is to involve government and intergovernmental organizations in research projects where those organizations provide funding and ICSU members do the observations and research. The ICSU writes a report about that work and presents it to the client organization although rarely with any external peer-review.
The IAC makes similar statements about its work; in fact the IAC seems almost a twin of the ICSU in that it seeks to provide scientific input to governments and intergovernmental organizations and does so via reports.
The close links between the IAC, the ICSU and United Nations bodies like the UNEP make me think it very unlikely that the IAC review of the IPCC will propose radical changes because to do so would be to alienate a number of organizations and put its future work prospects at risk. So carefully does it need to tread that I expect only recommendations for minor changes rather than the radical changes that I believe are necessary.
Rather than make a submission to review that is at risk, in my eyes, of being perhaps not a whitewash but nonetheless weak, I have elected to release my own views on the matter via a different forum.
The first chapter of this review will deal at length with the scientific justification for the establishment of the IPCC, which is not as solid as some might believe, by exploring the events, reports, individuals and organizations that played key roles.
Chapter two will show that the writing of IPCC Assessment Reports is a process open to bias by the authors, consensus about the text is far less than the IPCC implies and how IPCC authors have rallied together to produce papers for citing by the reports.
Chapter three will deal with the peer-review process and explain its fundamental flaw and show how it is nothing more than a means of soliciting further information to support the IPCC’s arguments.
The fourth chapter will discuss the IPCC’s distortions and serious omissions, the kinds of things that if published in unbiased fashion would have undermined its strident claims.
Chapter five will present the case that the IPCC’s temperature data is unreliable and that the method of temperature measurement, the environment in which that monitoring takes place, the coverage of the Earth’s surface and even the sources of the data are so dynamic as to cast doubt on the accuracy of the entire temperature record.
Chapter six will show that the climate models on which the IPCC relies for attribution and projection are seriously flawed because, as the IPCC indirectly states, they are incomplete.
Chapter seven will provide a short summary of the key problems with the IPCC’s analysis of climate issues and show that the IPCC’s claim of significant man made warming cannot be sustained.
The final chapter contains some brief recommendations for a climate monitoring and investigation system with far greater integrity than the IPCC has shown.
Because this is a review, examples will be provided where applicable. It should not be assumed that the examples are the only instances of problems related to the subject matter under discussion, nor that the authors and reviewers mentioned were the only people to act in a similar fashion.
When examining the IPCC reports my focus has been the contribution by Working Group I because the contributions by the other working groups are based on the assumption that WGI correctly describes the situation. For this reason I don’t address matters such as plagiarism on the matter of Himalayan glaciers nor the citing of very suspect material in discussion of the Amazon rainforest and changes in the Antarctic.
Finally, let me state for the record that none of the work for this review was funded by anyone other than myself.
CHAPTER 1 – THE DUBIOUS SCIENTIFIC JUSTIFICATION FOR ESTABLISHING THE IPCC
INTRODUCTION
To properly understand how the IPCC grew to hold so much influence it is necessary to examine the relevant events and actions that led to its establishment and to then focus on the key players, the individuals and organizations who firstly drove its creation and then its power.
The casual observer might believe that the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) decided in the late nineteen-eighties to form a joint-venture to consider climate matters but in reality the pressure for the IPCC or some similar organization started building almost 20 years earlier and was driven by the beliefs of individuals, by politics and, very likely, opportunism. Exaggeration of claims, various deceitful omissions and a glossed-over desperate shortage of scientific understanding played their part, but so too did the environmental “blame human beings for everything” zeitgeist of the time.
See full analysis here.