By Christopher C. Horner Times-Dispatch Guest Columnist
The University of Virginia indicates it will challenge Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s request for records produced, using taxpayer resources, by former Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences Michael Mann. This is regrettable. Cuccinelli is following smoke to see if there is fire, prompted by troubling revelations in leaked documents that raise serious questions about Mann’s activities while at the university.
UVa’s Faculty Senate has condemned Cuccinelli’s request, calling it a serious infringement upon academic freedom and assault on the freedom of scientific inquiry. It joins a chorus of voices enjoying massive financial support from the taxpayer but who, it seems, believe that this should come without conditions, established by law, which follow the money.
On its face, their problem is with a 2002 statute that passed both state legislative chambers unanimously, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. It bears no hint of exempting academics, scientists, or others from its prohibitions or inquiries that attach to the use of appropriated funds. It empowers the attorney general to compel documents, and testimony about them.
No one claims the law doesn’t apply here. With a straight face, scientists and academics instead merely argue against applying it to them. Academic freedom apparently means taking taxpayer money free from accountability under standards applying to the rest of us. Since when?
This inquiry derives from the late 2009 leak of e-mails, computer code, and code annotations produced by Mann and colleagues throughout the “climate” establishment. This is known colloquially as “Climategate.”
Despite intense efforts to wave the revelations away, the admissions and code annotations establish, among other things, efforts to “hide the decline” in temperatures, and patch thermometer data on the end of tree ring reconstructions despite admonition by colleagues not to do so for it was improper.
Without implausibly recasting the evidence as a series of misinterpretations, how does the attorney general justify ignoring this mountain of evidence in the public domain?
Upon intimidation, it seems. Ritual “McCarthyism!” rhetoric and straw-man arguments abound, including keening about non-existent criminal fraud allegations. Cuccinelli has made none, and is not challenging scientific conclusions. He simply is following the letter of a statute authorizing investigation of possible fraud.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth from scientific, academic, and other establishment salons is of course designed to pressure him to back off. Let’s hope they fail, for the signal such a move would send would be a costly one, in several respects.
In the face of Climategate’s revelations, it seems critical to remind all of those living off of taxpayer monies, but pondering inappropriate activism, of these conditions. There is no other external incentive to be honest. Climate science, living high on public money, has proven it cannot or will not self-police. But it is our money they are playing with.
The “climate” industry writ large is now spectacularly funded by the taxpayer, to the tune of about $9 billion just at the U.S. federal level in 2009. It now far outpaces even our public expenditures on, for example, AIDS (should AIDS researchers be exempted from responsibility?). It appears burdened by those problems associated with other boom industries springing up almost overnight. Granting passes because certain quarters blanche at the prospect of scrutiny is the inappropriate response.
Adherence to conditions that come with public funding is subject to civil enforcement. This request for documents, indeed the statute authorizing it, put academics on notice that they must do their work openly, honestly, and using the traditional approach of the observer who is indifferent to the outcome of the experiment. That is in grave doubt in the instant case. It is troubling how saying so is considered unacceptable, amid escalating name-calling against an attorney general who is operating under a unanimously enacted law, which plainly applies, about which no one previously complained.
There is one other disturbing aspect of the university’s telegraphed challenge. That is the double-standard and seemingly malicious treatment to which it subjects academics less politically correct than Dr. Mann.
Consider former Mann colleague Dr. Pat Michaels, who as a research professor of environmental sciences drew great political and academic wrath by challenging the same political and policy agenda that Mann champions.
In stark contrast to Mann’s case, UVa has told Michaels it is preparing to provide his records and e-mails to Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act. The establishment reaction? Silence.
Oddly, UVa informed Del. Bob Marshall that he could not similarly have Mann’s records, claiming they were destroyed by virtue of Mann having departed the university.
Of course, so had Michaels. Both were in the same department. Yet Michaels’ records remain, and are on their way to Greenpeace. A university FOIA official explained to Michaels that some peoples’ records are treated differently.
Indeed. The university needs to self-correct, and faithfully and evenly follow all laws. See post here.
ICECAP NOTE: Time for phone calls and letters. The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson conceived by 1800 and established in 1819. It is currently rated by U.S. News & World Report as the #2 best public university in the United States. They need to know by this duplicitous action, they will lose the respect that they earned over the last two centuries. University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III, who became president in 1990, will step down at the conclusion of his 20th year on Aug. 1, 2010. He will become President Emeritus at that time. The address is P.O. Box 400224, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4224 and phone 434-924-3337.
The Foundry, Energy and Environment
Another one of the standout presentations at the Heartland Institute’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change was the one by Nils-Axel Morner, former emeritus head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. His talk focused on sea level increases and the difference between observed data and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model’s predictions.
Morner was a former reviewer on the IPCC report and when he was first made a reviewer he said he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one.” Morner discussed the realities of a number of countries and islands claimed to be doomed from climate change. He started with the Maldives, which some reports claim will be submerged in the next fifty years. Morner pointed out that the sea level around the Maldives has been much higher before and actually fell 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) during the 1970s. He also asserted that sea levels have been stable for the past three decades.
The same could be said for Bangladesh, another country threatened by sea level rises. Last year US News reported that “brackish water from the Bay of Bengal is encroaching, surging up Bangladesh’s fresh-water rivers, percolating deep into the soil, fouling ponds and the underground water supply that millions depend on to drink and cultivate their farms.” Morner’s analysis of the data, however, shows that the sea level has been stable for the past 40 to 50 years and may have even decreased. Coastal erosion is unquestionably a problem but it’s not from sea level rise, Morner says. He also reports that there has not been an increase recorded in Tuvalu, Qatar, Vanuatu, Venice and northwest Europe.
Of course, rising sea levels could present problems in the future but so far the hysteria has been unsupported by fact. Furthermore, the policies aimed at reducing sea levels (cap and trade, international carbon dioxide reduction treaties) will have little if any impact. Despite the futility of CO2 cuts, there are many cost-effective, adaptive solutions that efficiently target specific problems and do not require globally adopted treaties. Many of these adaptations are driven by markets. Seed companies develop drought and heat resistant strains that have increased agricultural productivity in the face of global warming. Low tech, but efficient, dams create reservoirs in the Himalayas to provide water supplies and irrigation during dry months. Capping CO2 only hinders the overall economic development of poorer countries and thus puts them in a worse position to adapt to climate change and rising sea levels, if it ever becomes necessary. See more here.
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Ocean Acidification and Biodiversity - Replacing Climate Change as Environmental Issues
By Bob Ferguson
Could it be that the “case for catastrophic climate change” is proving to be as weak as long suspected? As the UN and the environmental NOGs have failed to convince the public about a climate crisis, the shift appears on to species endangerment, in part derived from “ocean acidification”. Here is my PPT on this issue from the Heartland ICCC IV. See here. As always, the culprit is humanity itself [which needs transnational regulation, reduced living standards and population reduction] and its hydrocarbon-based industrial society [which requires dismantling].
Bob
UN says case for saving species ‘more powerful than climate change’
Goods and services from the natural world should be factored into the global economic system, says UN biodiversity report
• Economic report into biodiversity crisis reveals price of consuming the planet
The Brasilian Nut Tree “Castanheira” is protected in Brasil, but plenty had been logged. Photograph: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace
The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.
The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.
The UN’s biodiversity report - dubbed the Stern for Nature - is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher - between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.
To mark the UN’s International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum’s director Michael Dixon warning that “the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded”.
The UN report’s authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.
“We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within,” said the report’s author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.
The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as “a landscape of market failures”.
The report will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run so that it factors in the value of the natural world. In future, it says, communities should be paid for conserving nature rather than using it; companies given stricter limits on what they can take from the environment and fined or taxed more to limit over-exploitation; subsidies worth more than US$1tn (696.5bn pounds) a year for industries like agriculture, fisheries, energy and transport reformed; and businesses and national governments asked to publish accounts for their use of natural and human capital alongside their financial results.
And the potential economic benefits are huge. Setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas would cost $45bn a year globally, according to one estimate, but the benefits of preserving the species richness within these zones would be worth $4-5tn a year.
The report follows a series of recent studies showing that the world is in the grip of a mass extinction event as pollution, climate change, development and hunting destroys habitats of all types, from rainforests and wetlands to coastal mangroves and open heathland. However, only two of the world’s 100 biggest companies believe reducing biodiversity is a strategic threat to their business, according to another report released tomorrow by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is advising the team compiling the UN report.
“Sometimes people describe Earth’s economy as a spaceship economy because we are basically isolated, we do have limits to how much we can extract, and why and where,” said Sukhdev, who visited the UK WHEN as a guest of science research and education charity, the Earthwatch Institute..
The TEEB report shows that on average one third of Earth’s habitats have been damaged by humans - but the problem ranges from zero percent of ice, rock and polar lands to 85% of seas and oceans and more than 70% of Mediterranean shrubland. It also warns that in spite of growing awareness of the dangers, destruction of nature will “still continue on a large scale”. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has previously estimated that species are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than it would naturally be without humans.
Dr. Will Happer’s Testimony Before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming - May 20, 2010
My name is William Happer, and I am the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University. I have spent my professional life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases - one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect. I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. I am a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. I have done extensive consulting work for the US Government and Industry. I also served as the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (DOE) from 1990 to 1993, where I supervised all of DOE’s work on climate change.
Key Excerpts: The CO2 absorption band is nearly “saturated” at current CO2 levels. Adding more CO2 is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but you are only wearing a windbreaker. The extra hat makes you a little bit warmer but to really get warm, you need to add a jacket. The IPCC thinks that this jacket is water vapor and clouds. [...]
The climate-change establishment has tried to eliminate any who dare question the science establishment climate scientists and by like-thinking policy-makers - you are either with us or you are a traitor.
Orwellian: I keep hearing about the “pollutant CO2,” or about “poisoning the atmosphere” with CO2, or about minimizing our “carbon footprint.” This brings to mind a comment by George Orwell: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration. CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth. Commercial greenhouse operators often use CO2 as a fertilizer to improve the health and growth rate of their plants. Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were at least 1000 ppm, a level that we will probably not reach by burning fossil fuels, and far above our current level of about 380 ppm. We try to keep CO2 levels in our US Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels. [...]
That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be an article of faith for the climate-change establishment. Enormous effort and imagination have gone into showing that increasing concentrations of CO2 will be catastrophic: cities will be flooded by sea-level rises that are ten or more times bigger than even IPCC predicts, there will be mass extinctions of species, billions of people will die, tipping points will render the planet a desert. Any flimsy claim of harm from global warming brings instant fame and many rewards.
Sea Level: The sea level is indeed rising, just as it has for the past 20,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Fairly accurate measurements of sea level have been available since about 1800. These measurements show no sign of any acceleration. The rising sea level can be a serious local problem for heavily-populated, low-lying areas like New Orleans, where land subsidence compounds the problem. But to think that limiting CO2 emissions will stop sea level rise is a dangerous illusion. It is also possible that the warming seas around Antarctica will cause more snowfall over the continent and will counteract the sea-level rise.
Hockey Stick: I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated “hockey stick curve,” in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. Both the little ice age and the medieval warm period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick. This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis. There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval warm period that was as warm or warmer than today. I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of the facts of climate change.
Conclusion: I regret that the climate-change issue has become confused with serious problems like secure energy supplies, protecting our environment, and figuring out where future generations will get energy supplies after we have burned all the fossil fuel we can find. We should not confuse these laudable goals with hysterics about carbon footprints. For example, when weighing pluses and minuses of the continued or increased use of coal, the negative issue should not be increased atmospheric CO2, which is probably good for mankind. We should focus on real issues like damage to the land and waterways by strip mining, inadequate remediation, hazards to miners, the release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals, organic carcinogens, etc.
Life is about making decisions and decisions are about trade-offs. The Congress can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently.
Or they can act on unreasonable fears and suppress energy use, economic growth and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.
Climate Depot’s Selected Highlights of Dr. Happer’s May 20, 2010 Congressional Testimony: (Dr. Happer’s Full Testimony here: (To read the warmists’ testimony of Ralph Cicerone, Stephen Schneider, and Ben Santer, see here. )