Climategate’s ‘Josh Steiner’ Moment, Featuring John Tierney and Michael Mann
By now you’ve likely forgotten the name of that Bill Clinton aide who feebly testified that he had lied to his own diary when recording events of the time. But you haven’t forgotten the pitifulness of the spectacle.
I suggest we may have just passed that one in Climategate.
The following passage is from John Tierney’s column in the New York Times, discussing “Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline”:
In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word.
But isn’t it “Mike’s trick” that is being described here? Grasped and described as such by CRU’s Phil Jones as having been performed on Mike’s graph?
By Mike?
So — Mike’s defense is that no one had told him what he, himself, was up to?
These guys need to call for a RealInvestigation to get to the bottom of their actions. The more they stumble around, the worse they make it for themselves.
It doesn’t matter!
Everyone expects them to lie, and they do. No major media outlet is going to call them on it and they’re not going to cover the story anyway.
Those who already believe will still believe. If they become exposed to the new information, they will rationalize it away as they’ve done all evidence counter to their beliefs for 40 years.
Regrettably, those of us who know the truth, care about the truth and speak the truth are too few, too marginalized and have too small a voice to effect the outcome of events pending.
I look around the western world and see socialism gaining steam in every corner and on every front.
Folks, we’re losing!
Check out a biologist’s explanation in this documentary transcript:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com
“industry-funded climate disinformation”
Christ, they never get tired of the Big Lie, do they?
Ow.
In Denmark, a small country in northern Europe, we are just now preparing for the climate swindle summit.
Thousands of politicians, many of them evil dictators and murderers, are about to arrive in our capitol Copenhagen, alongside with their bureaucrats, to confirm their belief in this enormous swindle and negotiate how to share the proceeds.
Tens of thousands of ultra-left-wing idiots will gather in the squares and on the streets of Copenhagen to scream and shout. Plundering, raw violence and destruction has been announced and will take place.
When the great masters of the swindle have flown away, and the dirty, violent street hooligans are gone, too, the Danish taxpayer will have paid some 200 or 250 million dollars for nothing but stupid swindle, violence and misery.
Yes, we’re losing.
3, that’s just boilerplate alarmist tribalism. Over at ClimateAudit, Judy Curry (alarmist-Georgia Tech) wrote what was generally a rational piece on the need for more transparency in climate research. But she couldn’t resist the itch to throw something in there about the ExxonMobil disinformation machine. It made her come off sounding like a 9/11 truther, after what was generally a rational and even good piece.
I don’t quite understand what drives this kind of quirky behavior, whether it’s an irresistible itch, or a need to telegraph back to her own tribe that she’s still one of them. Very odd either way, though.
Chris –
One of the commenters on Climategate had it right early on: AGW is Mann-made, we just got the spelling wrong.
Bohemond @ #3: Look at today’s WSJ site (12/1/2009). Brett Stephens has a column titled, “Follow the Money.” From what he write, it appears these oh-so “disinterested” scientists have been raking it in from various governments to conduct “science” on AGW. So, I would say, what they have done has been, “government-funded climate disinformation.”
Climategate, Part One
In normal times, i.e., pre-politically correct, pre-Obama times, the slowly evolving truth about global warming/cooling/climate change would be blockbuster news and the whole sleazy story would already be in development as a movie.
Granted, Oliver Stone wouldn’t be falling all over himself trying to get the tale of Climategate onto the silver screen and into a theater near you but more reputable writers, directors, and producers–whoever they are–would just love to film an expose’ of the global warming charade to acquaint the American people with the fact they have been had for decades.
That wishful-thinking scenario of reputable Hollywoodians exposing the truth about the baloney-science climate farce is as probable as Adam Lambert going hetero or Patrick Kennedy going Catholic.
Regardless of Hollywood and related charlatans, thanks to computer hackers, the truth is finally slithering out about climate change and, God willing, Americans may soon be free of the meticulously-designed guilt for our reprehensible and willful destruction of Planet Earth.
If and when that happens, we hapless human Americans may finally rest easy content in the knowledge that we didn’t cause it and whether it even exists outside the venal minds of greedy publicity hounds in academia and self-serving politicos is very suspect.
The MSM, not unexpectedly, has chosen to either downplay or totally ignore the story out of Britain that has been tagged “Climategate” thereby linking it with the Nixonian political scandal of Watergate.
Such linkage does a disservice to the scope of this scandal which far surpasses in gravity Watergate and even surpasses the papal rebuke of Nicolaus Copernicus and his cockamamie cosmological theory of a heliocentric universe.
In the sixteenth century, only maniacs believed the Earth was not the center of the universe. In the twenty first century, only muckraking, semi-retarded conservatives rejected anthropomorphic/anthropogenic climate change.
Those sixteenth century maniacs were proven less maniacal than seers. The twenty first century idiots are now in the slow progress of being proven prophets.
Thank you very much! . . .
(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1350)
Looks like Meltdown Mann.
Mannmade global warming is getting goose bumps.
what bubblehead said
As an astute commenter on another site noted, there’s an easy way to tell politics from science.
Quantum Physics is a theory.
Relativity is a theory.
Evolution is a theory.
But “AGW is settled science” and “the debate between capitalism and socialism is over.”
well, seems German goverment (now in right wing) will not fall into the Copenhague trap
@ 1 Bubbehead.- left wing ideas can’t win because they are against reality and reality can’t be defeated. Their victory is only popularity, they can destroy an empire or a great country like USA but they can’t survive against Nature laws. When they find no producer to loot they will kill each other. They take your banks and industry now, they will take your cars and guns tomorrow; when there are no more cars, guns, tv etc they will confiscate your bread (provided you are still around and not fled away).
Or you take back your country, dismantling the heavy leftist machine; or you flee (but it happens that USA was the last place to flee from socialist/collectivist systems) or you go on strike a la Atlas Shrugged and make the system collapse by itself.
Christopher writes:
“So — Mike’s defense is that no one had told him what he, himself, was up to?”
Yep, they are caught red-handed and multiply so. As academics, their only attempt at defense amounts to blubbering; arrogance always believes that it will win the day regardless.
Oh, by the way, for the last 20 years, at least, Mann has been known as the “Pit Bull” of the AGW movement.
There’s a key point to this data grafting that needs attention. It’s the elephant in the room.
Everything Michael Mann & Co have done is based on their 1,000 year temperature data bank. If this data is bad, their science is bad. It’s that simple. This data is mostly based on tree rings.
By 1998, many of these guys had invested years and even decades of work based on tree ring data. It’s in 1998 that the “divergence problem” was first recognized: Starting in 1960, tree ring data “diverted” from actual instrument readings. That means thermometers gave one reading, tree rings a different reading.
This is actual scientific proof that tree ring data is suspect. If tree rings don’t work for the last 40 years, why do we think they work for the last 1,000 years. If tree ring-based data is suspect, everything that Mann & Co have done is suspect. QED There are other issues with their methodologies, but this is fundamental. This is the elephant in the room.
They say that the “trick” to “hide the decline” was over how they spliced the old tree ring data with the new data from instruments. So they’re not denying the elephant in the room. They just hope we don’t see it.
Where are the suggestions on policy to correct this type of abuse? Scientists can certainly analyze the poor scientific method but I believe that the government’s wasting of our money is what is causing the rest of us the most heartburn. POLICY: You take government money, you post any request for information, FOI, to the internet within 3 months or all future funding slides out 4 years past the posting.
I would think it might be in the fundamental interest of scientists generally to make an example of and drum these guys out of their respective fields, before their monumental and self-evidently fraudulent “science”–which would have deliberately had profound effects on virtually everyone on Earth–discredits scientists and science generally, and makes people highly suspicious of and unwilling to believe any scientist or his findings for quite a long time into the future.
We’ll have to do it ourselves, the captive media certainly won’t, but has any one begun to research the money that these guys have already received. A “pit bull,” falsifying over 20 years has to have made a bundle.
The methodology aught to start by searching US government records to identify grants to Penn State, Mann, CRU and other specifically identified entities. Then a review of each published article of the top 5 or 10 bandwagon perps to extract from the brief footnote at the beginning of most academic articles, the names of the financial sponsors. THE UN records are probably hidden to cover the UN’s cut of most funds, but there may be some information that helps identify where the money went.
“Established science” was very costly and very likely, many academic beakwetters and their hangers-on made A LOT of money in the process.
Then, I’d like to see a tie in between the criminal academics and the cap-and-trade bandits, the carbon credit schemers and others, like politicians, who have or might have profited from Gore’s scam.
What with her lying temperature records, sneaky warming periods in the past and other tricks that embarrass the global warming alarmists, Gaia looks like a Denier. Maybe she will smile sweetly and proceed to a general freeze up. Turning the climategate gang into ice cubes would be worth the cost of a new pair of longjohns.
These things take on a life of their own. The only other huge government funded boondoggle that comes to mind right now is MRGO. That is the Army COE project that killed New Orleans. If you read that history, posted by the Army, you learn that after Katrina, Congress decided to close down the channel. Why ?
After spending billions of dollars and years of work, nobody was using the new channel and it made the city far more susceptible to the hurricane. The whole thing was designed ignoring what is known about storm surge. There are books explaining what happened and lawsuits galore.
There were warnings about storm surge and MRGO before the storm; years before the storm.
I think it is a comparable example, even if on a smaller scale (Billions, not trillions).
You can tell a lot about a person from what he accuses others of. If someone is always accusing others of taking bribes- he probably is, if someone is accusing others of lying be careful what you believe. It works most times because most people assume others are like themselves.
We’re losing? No: to lift words from another context, climategate (what a horrible term) is certainly not the end, it isn’t even the beginning of the end- but it may well be the end of the beginning.
The politicos will have a grand party in Copenhagen, make all sorts of benign and important sounding words (sounding benign and important to themselves of course) and commit to nothing- except another party in a few years. After all if you got invited to a great party you’d want there to be another one wouldn’t you. During those years further wheels will come off the theory- and as this happens opposition will grow. Unless temperatures start behaving as predicted by the IPCC AGW theory will go down- and bring it’s supporters with it.
@16:
Exactly. Public policy made on the basis of scientific research must require that research be replicable with all the data available to anyone.
Does Piltdown Mann mean the tens of billions of dollars thrown around by various state, federal and national governments when he says “industry-funded climate disinformation”?
posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists.
It reads like a line written by Carl Sagan out of “Contact”
I suppose they “speak the language of science” on “RealClimate” as well.
“… tens of billions of dollars thrown around by various state, federal and national governments when he says “industry-funded climate disinformation”?
No, that’s “government-funded climate disinformation”?
But, who goes around talking about “industry-funded climate disinformation” ? The guy is paranoid.
Climategate, Part Two
“You gonna believe Obama or you just wanna believe yer lyin’ eyes, yer dumb brains an’ all that phony evidence out there? We sez it’s so, so it’s so, dammit. Case closed!
Using more diplomatic rhetoric and somewhat better English, thus spaketh chief White House flack-hack Robert Gibbs in response to queries concerning the furor over Climategate.
And, furthermore, he asserted covolutedly, “climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore:” http://bit.ly/6fga41
Mr. Gibbs, sorry to burst your bubble but your office and the presidency don’t confer upon you or Barack Obama the gift of infallibility or wisdom: The global warming game is up. The deceivers lost, truth won.
The long-running Climategate fiasco, the revelation that much of the scientific community has been distorting, exaggerating, out and out lying, and covering up the facts about climate change for their own vain and venal purposes, is over.
(See “Climategate Part One,” http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1350.)
Look, the warmists had their day, celebs, politicians and money grubbers like Al Gore milked it for all it was worth, pseudo-scientists and academics amassed their grants, and the dark, guiding force behind it all–the United Nations–managed to terrify the planet. . .
(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1353)
They also argue that the use of the term “trick” was taken out of context and didn’y imply “THAT kind of trick”. Well pretty funny then, that this very thing that Mann IN FACT DID, then feigned offense to, managed to survive the Holy Sacred Peer Review process.
So not surprisingly, as they attempt to absolve themselves from their unabsolvable actions, they are really just wiggling in quicksand and sinking deeper. The whole of these revelations tells us the following:
1. Mann cheated
2. Mann LIED about cheating, and blamed it on oil industry propaganda instead
3. Mann’s cheating was NOT UNCOVERED IN THE PEER REVIEW PROCESS that they portray as an infallible determination of scientific validity
4. Mike’s “trick” was absolutely positively “THAT kind of trick” and well respected journals, world leaders and billions of people were TRICKED. In fact Obama still has one hand on our checkbooks, ready to throw another borrowed trillion down this hole.
The only surprise is that people are surprised. You want to see some REAL statistical trickery, read through an FDA drug trial sometime. Climate scientists are amateurs compared to big pharma. Statistics are bullcrap garbage, and their overuse in science and society has done nothing but dumb us down and steal our freedom…all while we bleed rectally and have erections lasting more than 4 hours.
Ruchard,
Your answer is absolutely YES. Where do you think all of their funding comes from? The government doesn’t have money of its own. Government money is just money squeezed from industry in the form of income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, pollution taxes, tarriffs, etc etc, and it is being used to impose more costs on them and/or put them out of business.
So all climate information is industry funded. Industry is the only thing that actually, factually, and tangibly GENERATES REVENUE AND PROGRESS IN THIS WORLD. Socialist governments, junk scientists, and media diarrhea are not only morally bankrupt, they are FISCALLY ACTUALLY bankrupt. These folks and their idiotic idealogies cannot produce a dime on their own. Their money is stolen from those actually making a positive contribution to the real world. This is what makes all of this so dispicible to the average joe.
Now even in the face of extensice and damning evidence this same Idiot-Trinity chooses cognitive dissonance to reality and closes themselves off in a world of denial. But reality will not be denied and these scientists will yet feel the shame they deserve. That is the true and brutal beauty of reality. Just as global cooling has happened in the face of dire warming predictions, no amount of number fudging and book cooking will prevent them from suffering the shame they have brought upon themselves in the real world. Because the shame is REAL, much more real than their junkscience or sloganeering. Mann is under investigation, Jones’s whole family is under police protection, Copenhagen is sunk, and Obama’s approval ratings are sinking faster than Nancy Pelosi’s face. Its so great I can’t stop watching..