45 years later, global alarmist still alarming

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If you've been following this blog for a while, you know there is a special place in our heart for one Paul Ehrlich (pictured). Ehrlich has been making fantastically wrong predictions regarding what will befall the human race since his book The Population Bomb arrived on the scene back in the late 60s.

Seriously, what other emotions but warmth and affection can you have towards someone who was freaking you out as a 2nd-grader reading his predictions of Book of Revelations-sized calamities in our Weekly Reader.

Well, neither time nor a crappy track record has dissuaded Ehrlich from his thinly-disguised call for population reduction and wealth redistribution. Wait, what? Did we say thinly-veiled? There's nothing veiled about his calls for population reduction and wealth distribution.

From The Guardian:

Cut world population and redistribute resources, expert urges

Nuclear disaster or plague likely unless population shrinks and natural resources are reassigned to poor, says Prof Paul Ehrlich .

The world's most renowned population analyst has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor.

Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, goes much further than the Royal Society in London which this morning said that physical numbers were as important as the amount of natural resources consumed.

"The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."

"Most of the predictions [in Population Bomb] have proved correct. At that time I wrote about climate change. We did not know then if it was warming or cooling. We thought it was going to be a problem for the end of this century. Now we know it's warming and a problem for the beginning of the century; we didn't know about the loss of biodiversity. Things have been coming up worse than was predicted. We have the threats now of vast epidemics".

(italics, ours)

What Ehrlich predicted is that we would all pretty much be dead by now.



The warmists' world is in shambles. In the midst of discredting themselves through burying data and outright misleading the public on the issue, the climate change conference at Copenhagen back in 2010 was an epic failure to where now no one pays any effective attention to these global climate conferences.

What this has resulted in, fortunately, is for the warmists to speak freely and admit that needed change for the planet's citizens really isn't about global climate change but power... power over the productive societies of this planet.

Rather than wealth redistribution or population reduction (the actual mechanics of which, Ehrlich never gets into), the planet and specifically the "huddled masses" of this planet would be better served were they not enslaved by the various forms of corrupt and amoral governance be they autocracies, warlord-ships, dictatorships or kleptocracies.

Wealth redistribution will merely consolidate more power into the hands of those already in power in the aforementioned governing styles and unless pro-free market, constitutional forms of government are embraced where the rule of law rather than the rule of power is embraced, Ehrlich's predictions may very well be self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sustainability is not about wealth redistribution rather rule of law, freedom of speech and property rights. Any other approach is doomed to failure.

Quickies

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A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






Glenn Reynolds presents his own Occupy cirriculum:

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties.

This unit would note that social-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution.

Which accomplished more lasting good? Is Max Weber's Protestant work ethic applicable to social movements?

Southern talk:

We have utilize a few, uhh, coloquialisms of our own but being native Southern Californians, we don't know if the following accounts for regional-speak:

Busy? "Busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest."

See you tomorrow? "Lord willing and the river don't rise."

Someone forget or srew-up your name upon a subsequent meeting? "Call us what you want, just don't call us late for dinner."






Spinsters.com on capitalism and charity:

Capitalism, aka the free market, is the best assurance of individual and societal prosperity. Turns out, capitalism is also the best spur towards charity and generosity to the less fortunate. People are most generous to others when their own needs are secure. Capitalism provides the economic security necessary to inspire charity. The cold-hearted businessman is a tired Marxist myth.

B-Daddy has a round-up of news events himself and which includes this take-down of the faith-based global warming climate change community from the Wall Street Journal:

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world's economy would "drive decades of economic growth." This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

B-Daddy has long claimed that the warmers rejection of a carbon tax in return for dropping the income tax is proof of their purely statist intentions and we believe him.






Terrific: We're No. 1!...

... in per capita debt.

It's come to this: Asian American Journalists Association releases guidelines on Jeremy Lin media coverage.






Headline: Exclusive: State Department quietly warning region on Syrian WMDs

The State Department has begun coordinating with Syria's neighbors to prepare for the handling of President Bashar al-Assad's extensive weapons of mass destruction if and when his regime collapses, The Cable has learned.

This week, the State Department sent a diplomatic demarche to Syria's neighbors Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, warning them about the possibility of Syria's WMDs crossing their borders and offering U.S. government help in dealing with the problem, three Obama administration officials confirmed to The Cable. For concerned parties both inside and outside the U.S. government, the demarche signifies that the United States is increasingly developing plans to deal with the dangers of a post-Assad Syria -- while simultaneously highlighting the lack of planning for how to directly bring about Assad's downfall.

Who wants to bet that we will find quite a bit of Hussein-era Iraqi WMDs should this come to pass? However, we're glad we are thinking this issue through ahead of time vs. supporting a completely haphazard and unauthorized kinetic military action in Libya to protect civilians take out military targets take out a foreign leader and which resulted in thousands of RPGs going unaccounted for. There has been pretty much zero media coverage of this circumstance in the past 4-6 months.




Gotta run... may be back with more fun later today.

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Smack of the day

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Has it really been two years? Two years since the much-hyped international global warming conference in Copenhagen which was rightfully named Hopenchangen for its aspirations and for which predictably (and thankfully) nothing of substance was achieved.

After all, for the faith-based global warming zealots, it's not really about global warming. This from last year's conference in Cancun:

Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: "The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War." After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization."

Reducing the planet to a ring of 3rd world socialism seems more the goal of the AGW zealots but that wasn't the smack. After the complete debacle that was Hopenchangen that signified the apparent demise of the global left's attempts to shackle the industrial West, it's no small surprise that no one wants to talk about this year's confab in Durban, South Africa... except Senator Jim Imhofe (R-OK).

Hello, I am Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican Senator from Oklahoma. Today, I’m happy to bring you the good news about the complete collapse of the global warming movement and the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, as world leaders meet for the United Nations global warming conference in Durban, South Africa. For the past decade, I have been the leader in the United States Senate standing up against global warming alarmism and cap-and-trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in American history. This victory is especially important today, as families in America and around the world continue to face tough economic times. Tossing out any remote possibility of a UN global warming treaty is one of the most important things we can do for the economy.

I am making this announcement from Washington DC – where I am confident that the only person left talking about global warming is me. The message from Washington to the UN delegates in South Africa this week could not be any clearer: you are being ignored. And you are being ignored by your biggest allies in the United States: President Obama and the Democratic leadership in the Senate.

There is good reason for this – just two years ago, President Obama, along with members of his administration, several members of the Congressional Democratic leadership, and Al Gore, travelled to Copenhagen to tell the world that the United States was ready to join the United Nations efforts and implement costly global warming regulations through cap-and-trade legislation. Knowing this was nothing but a lie, I made the trip to Copenhagen as a one-man truth squad to inform the 191 countries in attendance that there was no way the United States Senate would ever pass global warming cap-and-trade. They didn’t like it, but I was right and they were wrong. Now, two years later, my colleagues are nowhere to be found at the latest conference.

Nice.




We'll have more on Fast and Furious later today or tomorrow... info that is a smoking gun and pretty much confirms our suspicions that Fast and Furious was merely a crudely cynical plan to lay the groundwork for stricter gun control laws.

Video clip of the day

Four different tornadoes in eastern Mississippi and Alabama from this past week including the birth of the Tuscaloosa tornado.




Now, apart from the fact that it is spring and Mother Nature is a bitch there has to be some sort of rational explanation for this freakish weather, right? But, of course...

From Think Progress:

“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

The congressional delegations of these states — Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky — overwhelmingly voted to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous. They are deliberately ignoring the warnings from scientists.

(italics, ours)


Rest easy, San Diegans. The wild fires of '03 and '07 can now be rationalized as a sort of pre-punishment by Gaia for going Republican in the following years' elections. Elections do have consequences, indeed.

We love intellect - it's the intellectuals we can't stand

"In the world we live in, you can't really separate science from politics.

The money that researchers need to do their research comes from agencies that have to generate that money on the basis of exploiting public fears."

- Professor Robert Fallon (co-director of the Air Pollution Health Effects Lab at UCI)

If you have been following along with things here in California, you may know we have our own little Climategate brewing in the Golden State.

Yesterday, we directed your attention to Leslie's post on Dr. James Enstrom of UCLA who is fighting to get his job back after he blew the whistle on what he believed was a fraudulent CARB (California Air Resources Board) study that has been used as justication for jobs-killing CARB regulations and which was authored by a CARB board member with diploma mill doctoral credentials.


Check out the Reason.tv video here for the details on this travesty and the accompanying academic thuggery.




We swiped this from the always entertaining and insightful Secular Apostate who had this to say regarding this whole sorry affair:

Thankfully, the epidemic of irrationality has not infected all scientists. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad: the scientific process has been corrupted, possibly beyond repair. The attempt to stifle debate on anthropogenic global warming by hijacking scientific boards and character assassination is a perfect example of that. And now we’re seeing it in spades in California and air quality regulation.

Do yourself a favor and check out the entire post.


The poltical class in this country has been working itself into a lather the past 2-3 years over what they perceive as an anti-intellectualism that has seized the conservative movement and the country class as a whole.

They've got it all wrong. It's not an anti-intellectualism per se but rather anti-intellecuals as in we're done listening to intellectuals spew what they perceive as intellect and science because they have become hopelessly compromised and corrupted beyond redemption.

And unlike their favorite bogeyman, the collective religious right, the fact that they sit at the levers of power means their moral scolding actually gets codified into law by vote or regulatory fiat giving them much more control over our lives than Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson could ever dream of having in their worst fever swamp nightmares.

Much like our open-border adversaries, the "intellectuals" have poisoned the well with their bad faith negotiating and junk science and finding any common ground upon which to move forward is gone until they all exit the stage.

Anti-intellectualism? Quite the opposite, really.



P.S. The video suggests that Dr. Enstrom's hearing was on April 4th. We'll keep our eyes peeled to see how it went down and will post accordingly.

Erin Brockovich...?

... eh, probably not.


You would think this was being pitched to Paramount or Miramax executives as we speak.

It's all there: whistle-blowing, speaking truth to power, pointing out fraudulent science generated by people with fraudulent credentials and fighting to keep one's job.

Unfortunately, Dr. James Enstrom is on the wrong side of the narrative. Leslie at Temple of Mut has the details, here.

SLOB Update

The SLOBs (San Diego Local Order of Bloggers) got together this past Sunday evening to convene our regular (quarterly-ish) beer summit this time at the Yard House in downtown San Diego.

Leslie of Temple of Mut took an open primary straw poll of the summit's attendees to see who was their front-runner for the Presidency in '12 and Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels, took 3 of the 12 votes cast for the win... this time around.

For more on the poll results and an outstanding round-up of what's happening on the ground in Wisconsin, check out Leslie's post here.



Also:

"My question is a basic science question," I started. "In science, Falsifiability is key to any theory. So, is Climate Change Falsifiable?" The young man asked for more detail to be sure that I was not just reading some script. "For example, if I had a theory that all cars are green and then observed a red car it would prove my theory false." The call screener proclaimed his approval of the question and I shortly layed the question out to the two global warming advocates.

Read more about Charles Caesar's totally excellent adventure on local KPBS, here.

Warning: despite their benign appearance, don't sleep on these guys

The U.N. climate change conference (ne'e global warming conference) wrapped up yesterday and which "began with modest aims and ended early Saturday with modest achievements."

Perhaps we've been looking at these climate change conferences in the wrong manner. While we see a global attempt towards a massive wealth redistribution scheme, these folks that are attending the conference are a bit more realistic and are just viewing it as some down time at a popular tourist destination before the hectic holiday season.

It has become a little dance, if you will: We get our hackles up, perspiring over economy-killing policies that have not one chance of ever being implemented and the faith-based AGW zealots convene their annual circular cocktail firing squad and prove us right by not accomplishing a single agenda item of real substance.

But just so we don't lose that fire in the belly, there always seems to be one or two utterances from the faith-based AGW zealots that reminds us of why we're all here.

“This is not the end, but it is a new beginning,” said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who serves as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It is not what is ultimately required, but it is the essential foundation on which to build greater, collective ambition.”

Because last century was nothing except a study of the somewhat ill effects of "collective ambition".

So, 2011.... Durban, South Africa. See you then?


H/T: Secular Apostate

Quickies

A round-up of news items, columns, and blog posts that caught our eye this week.



The Democrats' diversity problem: The Voting Rights Act rules that govern redistricting is hurting congressional blacks' state and nation-wide appeal.

Recall the Justice Department's meddling down in Kinston, North Carolina, where they ruled that black voters needed to know who the Democratic candidates were... for city office.

Time to take another look at this well-intended but very possibly out-dated law?





From Cafe' Hayek and explaining the behavior of economists particularly in recessionary times:

There is truth in both of those arguments but I think it is useful to add some public choice as well with economists as rent seekers–if you want to be a player, you have to be willing to play. So those economists who argue for the virtues of intervention get a chance to play. Those who oppose intervention remove themselves from any chance of riding the government gravy train.

It’s a bootlegger and baptist argument–economists favored discretion and ad hoc intervention to save the economy knowing it is good for their own income and power. There’s also some groupthink involved. When everyone is touting the virtues of job creation via fiscal policy, you feel a little lonely suggesting it’s a sham. Finally, there is some risk aversion. Once you have some input into the policy process, better to do something than do nothing. Did Ben Bernanke really want to preside over the next real Great Depression while doing nothing? Better to do something, even if it’s flawed. The fact that you gain enormous power along the way would help any mortal man come to the view that doing something is better than doing nothing.

So, economists are becoming the new faith-based global-warming zealots? Terrific.





You may have heard the city of Cleveland threw itself a pity party on Thursday evening as LeBron James and his Miami Heat came to town to endure taunts, boos and signage that will not make anyone take pity upon Cleveland.




Oh, in case you were curious, the Heat thumped the Cavs 118-90.





Got gas? You may. Fracking goes global as Scrappy American companies are exporting their controversial drilling techniques to Asia and Europe, where "fracking" could face less regulation.





Michael Gerson on shellackings, messaging problems and assigning blame to conspiracies:

It is very bad political advice. It also indicates a movement losing contact with political reality. When an ideology stumbles, its adherents can always turn to alcohol - or to conspiracy theories. It is easier to recover from alcohol. Conspiracy thinking is not only addictive, it is tiresome. It precludes the possibility of interesting policy debate or genuine disagreement - how can you argue with a plot?

You know where we stand on this matter. Coping mechanisms in both '06 and '08 where also we knew exactly why the Republicans got trounced and it had zero to do with messaging or conspiracies.




Seriously. Given the alternative, conspiracy theories are so lame.





Suckers... Mickey Kaus breaks down the General Motors IPO and the ten warning signs GM ignored.





When you lose Paul Krugman:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

Perhaps, Krugman could share what he believes are those "values" that President Obama believes in because after 3+ years of being on the national/global stage, we sure as hell don't know what his values are.

And we were told it was Sarah Palin who was not properly vetted. Suckers.





At a season-ending banquet in Ann Arbor:

Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez fought back tears, talking about the toll his job has taken on his family, and used passages from the Bible and a Josh Groban song during an emotional address that closed the team's banquet.

"I truly want to be a Michigan man," he said Thursday.

Rodriguez might not get that chance next season.

He didn't have to deal with the awkwardness of having Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh in the same ballroom, getting honored with the Wolverines who were honored 25 years after finishing the season ranked second, but the tension he feels about his job security was apparent.

A couple of things here. Michigan football officially recognizes 2nd place finishes?

Also, the conventional wisdom was that RichRod needed to win one of his last two games (Wisconsin and Ohio State) to save his job. They got drubbed in both finishing a bowl-eligible 7-5. We bought into this logic until early this past week. We think RichRod stays and here is what we wrote about his hire 3 years ago:

Let’s face it… Michigan is the CBS of college football. They are the embodiment of the stodgy, gray-flannel suit establishment of college ball. And like CBS, Michigan’s presumed dominance has been taking some hits of late – the program was showing its age and subsequently the ratings… and rankings were beginning to slip.

They took a huge gamble on Rodriguez and his very un-Michigan-like spread-option offense. If the Tiffany Network of college football whacks Rodriquez now, after only 3 years, it will appear that they are flailing and directionless... and perhaps as worse, admitting that they completely screwed up in the hiring decision. Rodriguez, who does have that offense dialed-in, gets another year to go at least 9-3. The now-rare occurrence of beating Ohio State would greatly help matters as well.

As for that song that got the head ball coach all misty...








Upon hearing this news, Groban tweeted:

"Coach Rodriguez, I'm very flattered but crying to You Raise Me Up is SO five years ago."

Getting punked by Josh Groban? Maybe RichRod is getting whacked, after all.




Folks, that's all for now. Will check back in later in the day, perhaps.

The most wonderful time of the year

With the weather turning cooler and tomorrow kicking off the beginning of the holiday season there is an unmistakable feeling of good will towards mankind in the air. Why, just this past Monday, we reported out on the fact that Al Gore finally admitted that corn ethanol was a horrible idea (no doubt before moving on to the next subsidized green get-rich-quick scheme).

And, also just the other day, we've figured it all along but one of the leading acolytes of the faith-based AGW movement came out and admitted that international efforts to combat global warming/climate change have nothing to do with global warming/climate change.

Just in time for the movement's big confab down in Cancun next week, here's Ottmar Edenhofer:

Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: "The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War." After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization."

The spectacular failure that was the climate change conference in Copenhagen last year (remember Hopenchangen?) gets another go around but this time the AGW zealots are dropping any pretense of wanting to do anything towards thwarting climate change and instead will attempt to implement a global wealth redistribution plan.

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

It's as if these Marxist AGW zealots figured out they junked up the science so much the public no longer believes them so they look around and say, "Well, we don't have much credibility anymore with the "AGW" thing but we still have our "Marxist" and "zealot" chops intact - let's roll with that.

Again, we are appreciative of the honesty and good will that is bursting out all over the place, of late.

And may Cancun '10 be every bit the laughable spectacle that Copenhagen '09 was.

Winning friends and er, influencing people

As you will find out at the end of the clip, this video was made by the faith-based AGW set in support of their carbon-reduction initiative.




Charmed, we're sure, because nothing garners support for your cause like absolute intolerance of dissent of your cause especially in such a grotesquely violent nature.

If you're asking yourself, "what were they thinking?", don't bother because thought had nothing to do with it as this represented, rather, the logical if extreme conclusion to Al Gore's shrill "The time for debate is over".

When they told us that indifference or inaction to faith-based AGW would bring dire consequences, they weren't lying.

And as much as moderate greenies out there will denounce this ad, we sense that much like moderate Muslims with respect to speaking out against terrorism, there will be the "yes, but..." rationalizations that follow.

When lying about and fudging the facts won't do, simply fast forward to totalitarian threats and intimidation to impose your agenda.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” –C.S. Lewis

H/T: Hot Air

Stuff you just can't regulate

Boston.com has got some great pictures of the volcano, here.

(please... please click image to enlarge)



And Temple of Mut has some good science stuff on the very un-Earth Day-like behavior of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull, here.

Revealed

The climate data models that Phil Jones and his scientists at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit that have been the subject of an intense Freedom of Information fight have finally been made public.

Secular Apostate has the goods, here.

Where are they now?

Paul Ehrlich is famous in these parts for two things. First, for his work back in the 70s that scared the beejeezus out us as his doom and gloom end-of-days predictions from his books like The Population Bomb showed up in our elementary school-issued Weekly Readers.

Class, after your coloring assignment please turn to page 5 where we will read about how the planet will experience mass starvation killing hundreds of millions of people by 1995 because of overcrowding.

The second element of his fame is far less noteworthy everywhere else except in BwD Nation. Paul Ehrlich deserves special recognition because of how wrong he was in every single one of his predictions. Not just wrong but spectacularly wrong… fantastically and stupendously wrong. ALL CAPS and bold-faced wrong. A-person-could-write-a-book-about-how-wrong-Ehrlich-was wrong.

In fact, Paul Ehrlich was wrong to the magnitude and degree that what resulted was not being discredited but rather achieving a tenured position in the biology department at the University of Stanford.

That’s how wrong Ehrlich was.

So, of course, it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots and discover that Ehrlich is currently one of the high priests of the faith-based AGW cult which is once again back in the news but in this instance, not for data dumping, data fudging, decline-hiding or any outright lying on the subject of global warming but for going on the offensive and attacking those people that would have the temerity to question the rather un-scientific methods executed to date by the faith-based AGW crowd.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

"Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.

The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body on the matter, has suffered defections of members after it had to retract claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt over the next 25 years.

It’s a crazy thought, we know, but perhaps instead of wasting time, energy and resources in discrediting their skeptics, they should stick to being scientists and practice their craft in a straight-up non-partisan manner. Then again, that really hasn’t been their strong suit as the last few months have revealed so this response is entirely predictable.

And speaking of resources, a good chunk of the money that will be going towards this partisan attack is your tax dollars

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and a chief skeptic of global-warming claims, is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants falsified data. He lists 17 people he said have been key players in the controversy.

Cue the outrage from our slopping-at-the-public-trough and put-upon scientists:

That news has enraged scientists. Mr. Schneider said Mr. Inhofe is showing "McCarthyesque" behavior in the mold of the Cold War-era senator who was accused of stifling political debate through accusations of communism.

Cry us a river. The time for debate really is over. Any credibility once possessed by the Paul Ehrlichs and Phil Jones and the rest of the miserable grant-seeking and tax-payer soaking AGW cultists is gone and gone forever. There is no going back – nothing these hacks will ever say again can be trusted.

The climate change scientific community needs to start completely from scratch and the first step is to clean house of every single last one of these alarmists. Get some new blood into these acadamies and universities that don’t have the taint of these scandals and then maybe we can start having a discussion again about man-made global warming. ‘Til that happens, though, please don’t bother us.

H/T: Hot Air

Man missing dog

Doggone, it’s been a rough few months for the faith-based AGW crowd. Here’s one of the high priests of the cult, the disgraced Phil Jones of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, employing the-dog-ate-my-homework defense.

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Unfortunately, for Jones, the problem has not been his stated bout with being just a wacky absent-minded professor but rather the fact that they dumpstered the raw data.

The image of Jones as merely this benign tweed jacket-wearing, pipe-smoking academian would be more believable were not for the fact that he admitted earlier that he simply eliminated the data that would prove to be inconvenient to his cause and that of his fellow cultists the world over.

Damn those interwebs and their long memories

Honor among thieves?

So, how's that whole carbon trading scheme working for ya?

KT has the details, here.

But do you know what would look better here, instead? Fir. Douglas Fir.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.

The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.

According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.

Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department's forecasts "have caused considerable concern" among farmers and ranchers.

(italics... all of them, ours)

This is just insanity.

And haven’t we been down this road of “altering” data to “hide the decline” to fit snugly into a political agenda just recently?

The article goes on to say that Vilsack wants his chief economist to work with the EPA to "undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation."

Well, we certainly know what some of the intended consequences of agriculture are: abundant and cheap food that will feed this country’s and the world’s growing population. Unfortunately, we are not really concerned with that. Radically altering the business model of our agrigulture sector based upon junk science is apparently trumping starving ourselves.

The dairy industry is already heavily subsidized in order to prop up prices, so we guess this is just the Obama administration’s way of extending a cash for conifers program to the rest of the agriculture industry.

We’re beginning to wonder: are they really that incompetent or do they sit around and make-up the most blatantly retarded crap just to make blogging easy?

P.S. Looking forward to more green on green violence as the ethanol industry clashes with the Cash for Conifers lobby.

Quote of the day

"It’s a catastrophe," said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation, of the five-nation agreement. "We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with."

(italics, ours)

Well, the President was able to save some face by getting India and China to buy into a vague and totally meaningless non-binding carbon emissions reduction agreement that was not endorsed by the balance of the 193 nations voting on the official accord so I guess we can classify this as a win-win situation.

Copenhagen 101

Confused about global-warming, are ya? Not sure whether or not you are to blame? Can’t quite get your brain wrapped around the climate conference at Copenhagen? Is that what’s troublin’ ya, bunky?

Maybe this will help you make sense of it:

President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

That puts a nice neat bow on things, now doesn’t it?

That we would even think about throwing our hat in with the freedom-loathing, capitalism-destroying, faith-based AGW zealot-wing of the Star Wars cantina scene is a disgrace.

Making adjustments for one's faith

We’ve been advised by the faith-based AGW zealots to ignore Climategate as it doesn’t definitively disprove global warming and that all the huffing and puffing over it is a distraction. They’re exactly right as there is plenty of other stuff they will need to start answering for beyond beating Climategate to death.
Willis Eschenbach takes a look at the raw temperature data from NOAA/GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network) (one of the 3 main global temperature datasets), throws out the “homogenization” adjustments and finds some very interesting results.



Story here.

H/T: The Scratching Post