Homogenized, sterilized and pasteurized
The University of East Anglia’s CRU has told the public it no longer stores the raw data upon which it bases its famous global warming theory. The UK Times reports it as saying, “we do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The Times added that the data was dumped before Phil Jones took over the CRU at a time when “climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.” The implication is that Jones must have operated on the databases which contained the “clean” data innocently and discovered the patterns he found or says he found without malicious premeditation.
That may well be the case. The main objective criticism of the carbon-based warming model is that it is not proved. That’s different from saying it’s not true. It may or may not be true. However, until it is conclusively shown to be true and the results can be reproduced, it would be unwise public policy to embark on a trillion dollar amelioration program, with far-reaching economic, social and environmental effects. Government normally intervenes when there is a compelling public interest to do so. It should never intervene on the basis of an uncertain bet. Government is not the racetrack where bureaucrats can bet taxpayer money on the horses they fancy.
Nor can the “precautionary principle” be rationally invoked without recognizing the possibility that the climatologists, deprived of a real fact base, may in fact be getting their prescription wrong wrong. The precautionary principle would assign danger to both the chance you may get a cough and the possibility that the brown liquid in the unmarked bottle may not be what you think it is, because the label has peeled off long ago. Is it Nyquil or is it Drano? And do you feel lucky today? Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken illustrated the principle of dangerous living in the Deer Hunter. “Climate change. Click.” Then spin the cylinders again. But the question must be asked, is the world allowed to peek in to the chamber? Isn’t it allowed that much? Can we have the data please?
Not that it always matters.
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But the “Science is Settled”! Don’t need no stinking data.
How conveeeenient!
clearly a lie.
betcha they have the data on paper, thumb drives, CDs, workstations, old reports, and probably tattooed on their asses so they can literally sit on it.
Fake, but accurate.
The socialists will not be denied, facts and ‘the will of the people’ be damned.
How convenient for Michael “Madoff” Mann and Phil “Ponzi” Jones.
They knew no-one could challenge their “results” — and they knew and intended that their version of climate history would be relied upon by useful idiots (and their funder/masters in the political and corporate world).
The whole purpose of the CRU Unit was to develop the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models
From the CRU site itself:
History of the Climatic Research Unit
The Climatic Research Unit is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models.
The aim of the Climatic Research Unit is to improve scientific understanding in three areas:
past climate history and its impact on humanity;
the course and causes of climate change during the present century;
prospects for the future.
The Unit undertakes both pure and applied research, sponsored almost entirely by external contracts and grant from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry.
Alongside its research activities, the Unit has an educational role through its contribution to formal teaching with the School of Environmental Sciences (most notably, the MSc in Climate Change) and various forms of in-service training including postgraduate education. It is regarded as an authoritative source of information on both the science and policy aspects of climate change by the media and maintains a high public profile.
The staff of the Unit have an enviable publication record, contributing to both peer-review and popular journals as well as editing various newsletters and bulletins.
The Climatic Research Unit is part of the School of Environmental Sciences with close links to other research groups within the department such as the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment. The Unit undertakes collaborative research with institutes throughout the world on a diverse range of topics and is coordinating or contributing to a number of networking activities.
This sort of crap would get a failing grade for a student in a high-school science class.
The b.s. just piles higher and higher.
These people are perfect candidates for our devastatin’ly brilliant leader to appoint as czars in some critically important position. Doesn’t really matter which, just so long as they’re in the compound under the syndicate’s protection.
It’s like finding a bunch of chess pieces floating in a cesspool that just exactly match the set you have in your mansion’s parlor. Snap’em up, I say. Great hedge against losing some of the originals.
…and the solution to the possibility that we may or may not be contributing as CO2 emiting mammals to an increase in global temperatures by how much,we know not, and whether that is bad, we know not, because of an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, which is still a miniscule percentage of the atmosphere, and we know not why it is increasing, is to TAX THE WEALTHY AND RE-DISTRIBUTE TO THE POOR, even though there is zero evidence that reduced CO2 in the atmosphere will result. Oh and by the way, lets do everything in our power to disable man from producing energy. More energy being, of course, the only thing that can improve mankind.
Makes sense to me.
The real issue, as I see it, is that the data is really unimportant. Cursory analysis of the Fortran code indicates that the basic algorithms are BS, to use a technical programmer phrase.
Use this Google link
There is much discussion in the comments of the blogs, etc about the valadj vector. The significance of this vector is a s follows:
If you apply the vector, valadj (value adjustment???), to any corresponding set of relatively close values (for example 1,1,1,1,1,1,…etc, or even 32.0, 31.0, 30.0,…etc) you will get a sharp upward trend in the resulting value plot. Interesting reading.
By the way, the above comments on my part are not rigoursly vetted, so if any one wants to “peer review them”, be my guest.
Dunno.
Maybe the raw data is not the thing either. What would need to be disclosed is the raw data along with all of the footnotes such as “1. Black asphalt parking lot went in next to station in March 2002 and “2. Air conditioner cooling tower installed next to thermometer shack in April 1988.”
I suppose those corrections could have all manner of problems with confirmation bias. The Urban Heat Island effect has been discussed for a long time, and maybe the bias would be to underestimate the corrections whenever there are corrections to be made.
I really think this -gate thing is worn out; Hell, Nixon’s been dead 15 years.
We should change (in an era of change) the term for this pile of kaka to a more expressive and descriptive term evocative of the memory of one of the greatest scam artists of our time:
the late Edward M. “Im Just Here to Help the Poor and the Children” Kennedy.
We should call it “Climaquiddick“
In terms of damage done to the world and its economy and personal freedom, this needs its own moniker.
It is worse than Chapaquiddick, Madoff, and Watergate combined. In Europe they cannot use incandescent light bulbs, carbon taxes are being imposed, the moron politicians are trying to hand over the wealth of their constituents to the third world . .inefficient alternative job killing energy is being mandated, kids are being terrorized..travel is being rationed..airline tickets are being surcharged need I go on?
Two words: Yeah, sure.
Nothing some pitchforks and torches wouldn’t cure. Riding these clowns out of town on rail covered in tar and feathers is in order.
Of course when you start finding out that data has been “lost” at other climate research centers people do get suspicious.
I noticed that the University of Pennsylvania has started to “review” and “investigate” its relationship with Professor Mann. Looks like they are getting ready to through a blanket over the donkey there.
If this whole AGW thing turns out to be a crock it suggests that, contrary to the suppositions of the press, the religious impulse is alive and well. Why did the cultural flagships of Western Civilization follow a bunch of second-rate prophets and scam artists? Was it because they needed a reason to believe in socialism, so that when they were told a pseudo-scientific fable they simply jumped at the chance, closing their eyes and hurling themselves into the arms of their beloved, who coldly considered had halitosis and a bad hairpiece?
Maybe civilizations are periodically seized with this madness. In 1914 Europe killed each other over, what exactly? For most of the 20th century vast populations followed Hitler and Stalin? Why? What did those monsters have that was remotely attractive. And yet it happened. Today, we’ve come with an ace of throwing out our shoes, stumbling around in the dark and returning to a primitive age and under the leadership of a collection of mountebanks, con artists and fraudsters.
So let’s get to the bottom of this. And if we’ve dodged the bullet yet again, it will be nothing to do with the cleverness of the public intellectuals, but from the questioning of the untutored, who like the little boy in the story yelled, “the emperor has no clothes!”.
But he does have a model.
Amateur hour has become the order of the day in certain halls of academia and most halls of Western government.
What high profile figure will finally use this to knockout Algore in a very public way? The stage is set; someone just needs to run with this.
There is one important obstacle to this monumental debacle’s being generally not understood nor accepted by the non-technical populace at large as a monumental debacle: Global warming provided a “perfect storm” of universal disaster, and thereby provided a “perfect savior” from said disaster. People who have great fear of the “great unknown” need a “great known to fear” so that they can then imagine a “perfect solution.” What global warming provided was a small host of disciplinary political protocols to enforce on the populace of the world at large, which once imposed would then enable all to breathe a collective global sigh of relief that now, at last, the great cataclysm will have been averted. Like making human sacrifices to a vicious “god of destruction,” only when you’ve imposed sufficient suffering on all the populace (in the guise of “green environmental discipline”) can you be sure that this great god of destruction will interdict his (here, “globally destructive”) wrath.
Believe me: the rest of the world is not going to want to believe that the global warming hoax is a hoax–having it always with us conveyed to great a universal comfort.
He PLAYED upon our FEARS!
But I’ve never been close enough to know if he has halitosis or not.
w, maybe it’s just that there is a need for action in a population, the downside of conservatism seems to be the desire to leave things alone – and people like to see action! Pow! Zap! Wham!
We need leadership.
One commenter at the Times site linked above wrote:
And this goes to the heart of the problem. Policymakers were making decisions with huge economic consequences, not in the least for the Third World. People actually starve in the Third World and many would have actually and physically died if all these regulations had been imposed because their industries would have gone under.
The deaths of those industries might have been justified if the science called for it. Like in the movie “When Worlds Collide”. The few must die for the survival of the race, etc. But suppose the predicted asteroid on a collision course with earth were just a flyspeck on the primary mirror of Palomar? Or maybe someone’s snot on the photographic plate? Or worse, somebody had just penciled it in? I agree with the commenter. Just do the science and throw out the politics.
The raw data is still gettable, unless we are to believe that each nation destroyed their raw data as well.
Were the “precautionary principle” to be strictly followed, most women should amputate their breasts when they are around 35, and most men should extract their prostates at the same age. Thus, breast and prostate cancer would be almost erradicated.
W @ 14:
The Fourth Turning folks suggest that the new generation is one that is likely to get carried away on a mission.
Perhaps AGW is it.
Or perhaps they just wanted to Serve someone (it will be hard but you need to view it to the end to get the punch line):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRrdmZwdW-c
Why did the West’s wandering religious impulse transfer itself to “Science”? After everything we’d been through in the 20th Century, when Science proved itself to be completely amoral – as ready to do experiments for Dr. Mengele as to save lives at the Mayo Clinic? Why did people convince themselves that Science was too pure and honourable to let us down again? As if it somehow existed separately from the human beings who use and apply it? I think that deep down, people felt that Science could not be capricious and willful, like the old gods – it would be logical and predictable, and thus, controllable by people who really don’t want to be controlled by anyone else. They give lip service to “following the data” and submitting to the conclusions of Science, when they secretly regard Science as a tool to be wielded by the powerful and the enlightened (i.e., themselves). Wherever the religious impulse is detached from God, you’ll find people who imagine that they’re quite capable of godhead themselves.
“My dog ate my homework.”
Some lame excuses never go out of date.
/////
WRT Perc ( dry cleaning solvent ): Scare mongers effectively banned its use on the premiss that it might be passing Chlorine free radicals up into the upper Ozonosphere.
When all the facts were in ‘perc’ was exonerated. However the production of perc collapsed anyway and every dry cleaning establishment in America has either purchased new equipment at five times the expense to do an inferior job or gone out of business.
BTW all of the old regulations eliminating perc from trade use have expired, IIRC.
////
What goes for this minor chemical is now slated for carbon dioxide.
AGW is a rent-seeking, pandemic, lobbyist-mania.
The opportunity of the hustler class to trough-up:
a thundering herd of snouts I fear!
////
Some have made dark aspersions WRT Russian ‘black hats’ exposing CRU.
Lack of motivation is suspected.
What if Putin’s economic-warfare model projected a collapse in crude exports and prices upon the enactment of insane anti-carbon taxes.
After all, any such sur-taxation would eclipse Smoot-Hawley extractions. Canada and Australia would be pounded down. Across every manner of industry the 1st world would shut down and re-erect in the 3rd world — since carbon taxes don’t apply.
Perhaps Putin is concerned that the death of the West is too much of a good thing?
programmer @ 8: looks pretty bad, don’t it?
But of course we’d have to see the whole program to understand it for sure.
But the last few values are all 2.6, that’s flat. Aren’t there published papers explaining this all? If not, poop on it all.
The New Age Hitler youth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRrdmZwdW-c
Herb (@10)
I was just thinking the same thing.
It’s like the alarmist-media would rather exploit a chaotic, antagonistic “-gate” than mediate the fact-based review that AGW’s detractors are conducting.
It’s laughable.
I’m laughing, too, at Nemesis’ power these days. Two churchs’ iconographies have suffered mighty, debilitating blows this week. AGW’s “Hockey-Stick” and “Peer-Review” idols are now Troy’s Apollo before Achilles’ sword, and Europe’s coeur republic, Switzerland, has decapitated Islam’s iconic thrust into Europe: her citizens just voted to ban the construction of new minarets. The Progressive’s hallowed Church of Multiculturalism has taken a direct hit, and the fight for Europe is (finally) on. November’s been a watershed month.
And the fall-out could be delicious. Where does a well-heeled, head-scarfed, climate-alarmist like Nancy Pelosi find shelter in the coming political maelstrom? And is a floundering Barbara Boxer, or a has-been John Kerry, or a ‘hymie-town’ Al Sharpton, or a “plausible deniability” Al Gore, or an outta-town Hillary Clinton (or any of Maureen Dowd’s vaunted “moral authorities” for that matter) in any position to throw her a life-saver? Et tu Obama? What’s your next move gonna be?
Lots of fun is in the works, observing the scurry will please. And the longer-term effects of all this are looking pretty good, too. If the current iconoclasm continues, it could nudge the world towards republican government, administrable Westphalian frameworks, a corporate ethos of honor, responsibility and accountability, and an abiding, global disdain for “junk” media products.
Here’s hopin’.
-Steve
“Losing data” doesn’t pass the laugh test. That data had to have been transferred to hard disk in order to be analyzed and processed. All of it can almost certainly be contained on a single drive given today’s storage densities, and a drive takes no significant space. Even if they did throw away the original paper and magnetic tapes (who the heck uses tapes these days?), a claim yet to be verified, I guarantee they have it on disk somewhere.
Of all the words with CRU
What comes to mind is crud
And from the first the skeptics knew
That squeezing stones for blood
Was easier than getting those
Who manufactured lies
To say which data sets they chose
That proved the world wide rise
In temperatures on this fair Earth
Would lead to fatal cause
Like rising seas and earthquake birth
And shark attacks from Jaws
And meteors and melting ice
Volcanoes and the like
And much too much of things not nice
And breaches in the dike
While monsoon rains would flood the land
And drown both kith and kin
And rising tides drove all to stand
On high ground ‘mid the din
Of hurricanes of fiercest blows
Destroying homes and shrubs
While polar bears faced thinning snows
To raise their cute white cubs
But fear thee not the gurus said
We have a plan that works
Without us you would all be dead
Not knowing danger lurks
We’ll put a tax on CO2
In every breath you take
We’ll charge you for the carbon too
In everything you make
But here’s the thing, you can evade
The punishment du jour
By simply sending checks that paid
To us and to Al Gore
A simple sum that will allow
You carbon credits for
Just anything that me and Al
Have stocked up in our store
What’s that you say, we’ve cooked the books
Whatever can you mean
Just ‘cause the data’s gone and looks
Suspicious and obscene
You must not think that we would lie
For that would be uncouth
We swear to you, both Al and I
That warming is the truth
Just a thought. Anyone else here feel the same way they did during the Bellesiles case?
It’s always easier when you just stick to the truth and let events lead to their natural conclusion. The forces of truth are getting better at this. Let’s watch this play out and give our thoughts, our support, and our cash to those digging the truth out. These guys do look guilty as hell though, don’t they?
It makes me consider the things people will do to impose their will on the world. Amazing, in retrospect.
Science, indeed.
Scientific reports and news have always been immensely interesting to me. I always want to know what they think or believe about everything from astrology to zoology and everything in between. The problem I have with these reports is that they are infused with words like if, could be, should be, might have, etc., etc. Which leads me to believe that that science is mostly speculation based on what they know for fact with an educated SWAG at the rest based on the best scenario they can come up with.
For example, in this month’s issue of National Geographic they ask the question: Are We Alone? Searching the heavens for another Earth. It’s an interesting and informative read. However, they failed to answer the question. Why bother to ask if they never answer it. Are we alone is the same question we have been asking ourselves for eons. After reading it my conclusion is – Yes we are alone as far as we know. That’s the same answer as fifty years ago.
Another example is the recent announcement about the discovery of water on the moon. Okay. That’s fine. Now what? How long will it take the next astronaut who lands on the moon to pump up the first gallon of moon water? Will the astronaut take a sip?
The problem with weather and climate change is that mankind has been trying to predict the weather for thousands of years. Basically what it comes down to is your guess is as good as mine. Which farmer or general hasn’t wished they could control the weather? What the hell makes us think we can modify and control weather and climate now?
And so it goes . . .
13 toad
Small correction: Michael Mann is presently employed by Pennsylvania State University, not the University of Pennsylvania. The latter is one of the Ivies, not a state university.
Full disclosure: I have one cousin who went to Penn (School of Dental Hygiene) and another who graduated from Penn State and flies for USAirways. Neither likes having their respective schools confused with each other.
Mann’s home page, for any BCers who are interested:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/
Most of the political, corporate and academic elites have never given a flying crap about either the earth or people, so AGW isn’t about redistributing wealth to the third world. These oligarchs have a plan in place to soak up the transferred wealth generated by carbon taxes and traded credits to fill their bank accounts. Meanwhile, those oligarchs who crave power will have ever more control over mankind.
Environmentalists and socialists hope there will be a new world order but most of these useful idiots will face the same fate as Lenin’s followers: betrayal.
The fix is in and no revelation will change the course. We can blog and complain and demand justice but nothing will stop this train short of purging the oligarchs with extreme prejudice.That ain’t gonna happen, so enjoy a slightly kinder version of the short, brutish and nasty Dark Age feudal life that’s coming our way.
Wretchard #14: “So let’s get to the bottom of this.”
I can tell you what the bottom of this is. I was in DC the summer of 1988 and it was hot. Not the hottest year ever there but in the top 5 or so, but at the time everyone was sure it was the hottest summer ever.
And as the Congressmen went to their offices they said “It’s hot.” And one of them replied “I have a guy who is willing to testify on why it is hot.”
“Inside the Beltway” is a mindset, the most important single one in the Federal Government. There is an internal logic for that place, combined with canned subroutines on how to accomplish actions to give the most political effect.
“… a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue.”
This makes no sense coming from an agency whose ONLY mission, embodied in its name, is climate research.
They must either:
a) think the rest of the world is fools–they would not be crazy to think this, given how long they’ve gotten away with this scam and how many people they have fooled–, or,
b) their lawyers told them to say this, given their non-response to FOIAs and other legal and ethical risks they are now at; or,
c) Both. I vote for “c”
Obvious response but probably won’t be done is for UK internal security to show up, lock the whole place down, and take EVERYTHING; ditto any off-site storage, and slap subpoenas on everyone who has EVER worked there to produce any data they may have or disclose whereabouts of same, to make any destruction or hiding henceforth a matter of contempt of court or interfering with an investigation.
Never happen, of course, but that’s what is needed.
Does this episode in the age of Reason and Science remind anyone of Rachael Carson and DDT? How many millions of African children have died because of the worldwide panic that she created which stopped the use of a wonder chemical that was saving lives?
I think that deep down, people felt that Science could not be capricious and willful, like the old gods – it would be logical and predictable, and thus, controllable by people who really don’t want to be controlled by anyone else.
Maybe people wanted to be free without paying the price for it. Humanity wanted to take its hands off the wheel and yet have the grand vehicle of history continue to propel itself into broad and sunlit plateaus. Could we leave it to HAL to do the right the thing always?
Perhaps there is no vacation from freedom; no prospect of leaving it to the process without being part of the process. We can’t appoint a bunch of philosopher kings and sit back. Life is unfortunately about building up and tearing down; of choosing and failing or choosing and succeeding. About living and dying. We thought we could trust “them”. In the end, we can only trust ourselves, and that only partially.
Why did the West’s wandering religious impulse transfer itself to “Science”?
Why not?
At least, it already has many times before, most famously during the French Revolution, in the aftermath of which the scientistic (yes, -tistic) impulse gave rise to what we now know as socialism.
The impulse to reject theological explanations for everything from disease to the divine right of kings, is even older, certainly present in pre-Socratic Greece. Of course, rejecting superstition does not require you to transfer the religious awe to somewhere else … yet, too often, that’s just what happens.
Whoops I lied. It wasn’t Penn U it was Penn State.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/28/mann-to-investigated-by-penn-state-university-review/
The questions:
How do we prevent another debacle like AGW from happening?
How do we prevent another debacle like Obama from happening?
Some in the mainstream press don’t seem to understand the significance of dumping the original data. I can think of a good financial equivalent: Suppose a tax auditor is coming to check a company’s books, based on a report that there may have been problems going back 20 years. The auditor says…
auditor: “can I see your records?”
company rep: “here’s some reports I just generated.”
auditor: “what about the originals?”
rep: “there are no originals.”
auditor: where’d they go?”
rep: “we lost them. They were a pain to keep around.”
auditor: “Can I see your old bank statements?”
rep: “I can generate what I think they were.”
auditor: “How about originals?”
rep: “Nope, we threw away all the originals.”
auditor: “Invoices?”
rep: “I got nothin’.”
auditor: “Accounts receivable?”
company rep: “Same thing. I got a program that will make up some new ones for you if you want.”
auditor: “Don’t bother.”
next stop: a Federal grand jury.
Consider this:
“Some scientists like to play with the notion that global disaster may result if environmental pollution continues unchecked. According to one scenario, the planet is already well advanced toward a phenomenon call ‘the greenhouse effect’.Concentrations of carbon dioxide are building up in the atmosphere, it is said, as the world’s vegetation which feeds on C02 is progressively chopped down. Hanging in the atmosphere, it forms a barrier trapping the planet’s heat. As a result, the greenhouse theorists contend, the world is threatened with a rise in average temperature which, if it reache 4 or 5 degress, could melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level by as much as 300 feet and cause a worldwide flood…. ”
This is what bears the name of “science” today. It is on the basis of this kind of stuff that your are being pushed into a new Dark Age.
–
from “The New Left:The Anti – Industrial Revolution”, a collection of essays by Ayn Rand, published first in 1971.
1971.
So yeah, this scam has been going on for a long time. It is unfortunate that the science is not better reviewed. The loss of data seems to be like the Library of Congress throwing out the Presidential Papers from the 19th Century because they “ran out of room, and they probably aren’t relevant anymore”.
I’ve been a so-called scientist for almost 30 years, albeit not in the same league as the gentlemen at the CRU. In the drug industry, you have to keep all kinds of records for YEARS, in case the FDA wants to review what you have done. I have notes and records from my undergraduate days in the ’70′s, still stashed in boxes in the basement. I have no doubt that my last employer (who was bought out by another company) has destroyed or discarded a lot of the records created back in the ’90′s, but I was hardly doing world class research, either.
If the science and data were THAT convincing, I would have been demanding a thorough peer review, were I running the CRU or other AGW research institutes. It would be compelling and persuasive to the doubters.
It IS part of the Anti-Industrial Revolution. Is is meant to substitute reason and thought for a quasi-religious belief in the purity of the world and sins of industrial man. It has been part of the long march of the Gramscians through the Academy. So-called business men have been and will continue to tout “being green” (the large company I am a part of does this routinely), and “environmental consciousness” to avoid getting bad publicity from Earth First! or the Sierra Club.
This leak or hack or whatever it was will be paved over and forgotten in the next few news ‘cycles’, unless those in the alternative media keep the story alive and keep asking questions.
Sooner or later, the truth will out. I hope. And things will get ugly before they get better. There is too much ego involved among the AGW believers.
And the biggest casualty will be the lost belief and trust in science as a whole.
In the last 3 or 4 decades a number of phantoms have walked through the walls of history. The population bomb, nuclear winter, the Y2K bug, subprime mortgages, various ghostly financial instruments and maybe now, global warming. In each case the pattern is the same. There is a kind of complacent certainty in something which you can’t see, touch or feel, but are convinced exists anyway. We all light these magic candles or pour our money into instruments set about with strange signs. Then the things dries up and blows away to accompaniment of some weeping and regret, but not too much, because yet another portent takes its place. And we go in pursuit of yet another phantom.
I thought this was the age of science and or reason. And probably it is; in comparative terms. But there is still a large element of mumbo-jumbo in public life. This one wasn’t too bad as phantasms go. It’s the next one that worries me.
Willis Eschenbach has a guest post up on Watts Up With That that is VERY significant.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/29/when-results-go-bad/
He found e-mail correspondence between Phil Jones and Professor Wibjorn Karlen.
Professor Karlen plotted historical temperature data from the Nordic region, available from a source other than CRU, and compared that to the temperature plots for the same region produced by the IPCC, based on CRU data.
Karlen could not find the same extent of late 20th century warming as the IPCC, and asked Jones about it. Jones just blew him off.
Karlen extended his investigations to other parts of the world, and found the same thing in each case – that the temperatures reported by the IPCC were exaggerated when compared to temperature reported by other sources – national and regional organizations. Jones blew him off again.
It seems inescapable that CRU’s depradations include faking the temperature record to show warming higher than it really is.
On further investigation, Eschenbach also found that the CRU datasets include stations in major cities around the world, which builds in the Urban Heat Island effect to bias the temperatures upward.
This another hammer blow, and is likely to be replicated as other similar discoveries are made.
For example, in the GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network) temperature record, the number of reporting stations has been reduced from approximately 6,000 to approximately 1,000. http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/ The effect of dropping the stations is that the remaining stations show dramatic warming in the Northern Hemisphere. If the missing NH stations are included, there is no warming. http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/the-northern-hemisphere-what-warming/
Was it only me who clearly saw the connection between the medieval Catholic Church’s indulgences and Al Gore’s carbon tax credit
Both of them had the same idea: get the rubes to pay good money for an intangible purporting to solve a nonexistent problem.
P.T. Barnum was right about suckers. We live in a world full of them.
The CRU at East Anglia University appears to be a hotbed of “post-normal science” in which facts and truth are socially constructed. It is deconstructionism for the hard sciences.
Wretchard had a very good post on post-normal science back in 2007.
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-post-normal-science.html
Wretchard quoted Mike Hulme at length – he is an advocate of post-normal “science,” particularly when it comes to AGW.
In this link, http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/ the author says the following – which in light of Climategate, is quite amazing:
“Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters.”
AGW is Nuclear Winter 2.0.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
Josh: Define “West”. It ain’t in or near the District of Columbia.
Most folks I know are and have been very skeptical of the whole AGW scam, engineers particularly. Regular folk (non-politicians) dont believe it on instinct. This has little to do with theology and a lot to do with an understanding of Nature, which is where Science meets theology. Most of Nature is a wild and woolly place that is, at its base, subject to mathematics which is the tool God gave us to understand Nature. Now within mathematics (which can get really really obscure if you want it to) is a certain logic which is clear to the untrained observer. The claims of the AGW crowd violated the the certain logic of proportionality (pissing in the Ocean changes nothing); violated the logic of cause and effect (heat comes from the Sun and not a window unit); supported the absolute law of the stupidity and inefficiency of government (no example necessary).
It comes down to this: When God is through with this Earth, it’ll be done and over.
We are not to know when that is.
Pavement ends.
That’s all, folks.
Full stop.
BT
End of line.
If this whole AGW thing turns out to be a crock it suggests that, contrary to the suppositions of the press, the religious impulse is alive and well. Why did the cultural flagships of Western Civilization follow a bunch of second-rate prophets and scam artists? Was it because they needed a reason to believe in socialism, so that when they were told a pseudo-scientific fable they simply jumped at the chance, closing their eyes and hurling themselves into the arms of their beloved, who coldly considered had halitosis and a bad hairpiece?
Back on the thread where we ended up talking about Viktor Frankl, more than one person made the observation that man cannot live (sanely) without a sense of purpose. I think I would add that (non-sociopathic) man cannot live without a sense of his own sinfulness, either. To be human is to feel not just inadequate, but, somehow, bent. There’s a “wrongness” to much of life, and any decent person is going to feel that a portion of that wrongness lies within.
AGW appropriates so many religious memes that it’s difficult to believe that more people did not pick up sooner on its cultish qualities. (1) “We have offended an Entity Far Greater than ourselves.” (2) “Our offense was born of selfishness.” (3) “The Great Entity will punish us for our selfishness UNLESS (4) We make drastic and immediate sacrifice.” (5) “Don’t ask for the raw data or the code. It was given to us by a burning bush. If you doubt this story, you are a DENIER who hates the Great Entity and must be shunned and destroyed.”
To be human is to feel the wrongness of this world & much of this life … indeed, to seek out feeling the wrongness, i.e., “the moral thing is to feel bad about the wrongness, and the worse you feel, the more morally superior you are.”
AGW filled this need to feel bad, and on a global (literally) scale, no less. It also promised expiation through transnational unified effort. So in those two aspects it was really quite an irresistible piece of cheese baiting the trap for today’s pomo secular mice … massive guilt, huge penance due.
That it spoke in the voice of the 20th-century god, Science, was no accident.
“West” is the Judeo-Christian culture based on a system of laws and faith in a diety, with the Greek tradition of logic, and the later accretion of the scientific method. More or less.
Wretchard, the sub-prime loan is the thing that is not like the others in your list above. It came, it saw, and it beggared us.
Basic data is important. A paleontologist’s field journal may contain information that another scientist looks at decades later and gets a “Eureka” moment from.
If it is true that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit threw away basic data, this is a bigger scandal than dirty tricks used against heterodox researchers to keep their papers out of key journals.
We need the raw data!
Raw! Raw! Raw!
That’s the spirits we have here, at More Science High!
/sorry, couldn’t help myself
So we now know with unblemished certitude that another pillar upon which civil societies stand, science, has been corrupted in what some describe as a once in a century con. That the common man pays heavily for this is a given. Recently on this site in an unscientific poll the movie ZULU scored frequently as one of the best. I recall one of the great lines, delivered by the color sergeant when asked by a ranker why they were the ones being picked on. His response was absolutely elegant in its accuracy and simplicity…”Because we are here and nobody else lad”
Well, here we are all again, we rankers, being “taken” for our life’s’ work, again within a year of the greatest con in financial history…… and we “rankers are the ones who will pay. Goldman Sachs’ bonus pool at the end of 2009 was $20 billion. But it apparently is just the beginning of what is coming. Reputable financial houses, as they are described online, are telling their clients how to prepare for potential “global collapse” over the next two years. France’s Societe Generale, according to the London Daily Telegraph’s chief investigative reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is such a house that is now “mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.” I would say that avoiding wealth destruction will become the least of their worries as hoi polloi become sans-culottes and we move into Robespierres’ “Terror” and Committees of Public Safety.
“Governments have already shot their fiscal bolts,” Mr. Evans-Pritchard writes. “Even without fresh spending, public debt would explode within two years to 105 percent of GDP in the United Kingdom, 125 percent in the United States and the European Union, and 270 percent in Japan. Worldwide state debt would reach $45 trillion, up 2 1/2 times in a decade. Learn flexibility because you’re going to be kissing it all good bye.
Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Business School and a prominent citizen of the Internet, says in his latest contribution, “Bigger than the budget deficit, America has a leadership gap. Despite last February’s $787 billion stimulus package, the economic recovery is not creating jobs; unemployment is rising (34 million, including those whose benefits have expired, out of a work force of 153.9 million); and the president and Congress offer little more than nostrums and platitudes.”
The conservative Financial Intelligence Report says dollar devaluation is a done deal. “Since taking office almost a year ago,” FIR thunders, “the Obama administration has increased the monetary base by a staggering $10 trillion … and doubled the expected annual budget deficit to almost $2 trillion.” The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf, highly respected the world over, says shady trading activities destroyed the financial system.
All of this, the styrofoam pillars of obamas circus maximus deomocratic communist convention are an inducement for social upheaval, and social upheaval is what we are going to be facing shortly. No government can continue to do what this government has done to the American people and expect those people to remain civil and subservient. Some will, they are hard wired for pusillanimity. Some of us are not so inclined.
“Define… disappeared.” (lost).
“As sure as I know anything, I know this — they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I am to misbehave.”
It is not over yet. I would love to share the optimism, steveaz. The fallout may be delicious, but in the context of … them pushing one egg or another, because as sure as I know anything, I know this — they don’t have one egg in the basket. The AGW may be put on hold. Some concillatory noises generated. Mann will likely lose his tenure at Penn State. To appease the sheep so the wolf would remain whole.
But they will try again. It may not be AGW, though some people would not like the idea of losing their investment and the earning potential–there has never been a scam quite like this. They have believers. They brainwashed the wee ones now for almost two decades. They have the “health care” bill. That is one way to maker people better. They also have Codex Alimentarius. No fuss. It is being done quietly, bit by bit in Europe and to a degree in North America. Regulation by regulation, one at a time, slipped through different bills so no one would notice how the landscape is being shifted under their feet. Maybe something that is being trumpeted so loudly is not the right way, someone may notice that the spiel is out of tune. Or maybe it is good to direct the focus. Any crisis can be exploited in numerous ways.
Perhaps they can’t fully control the air you breathe. But they can control your health and your food supply. They are trying. And the will try to find a way how to control water.
Credit Suisse has a graph of financial markets that shows predictions for 10 years ahead. In 2 years from now–2011– it shows a dip, or better say an abyss that nears the bottom. An absolute wipeout. I wonder what do they know. Another crisis in making to be fully not left behind?
Don’t fall soundly asleep. It ain’t the time. Pour wine or scotch or the bubbly to celebrate our small victory if you must, but stay awake. It is a certainty, not that they will try again, but that they are trying, always.
So we now know with unblemished certitude that another pillar upon which civil societies stand, science, has been corrupted in what some describe as a once in a century con.
Habu, I disagree with this entirely. Science is widespread and heterogenous, and frequently turns up a bunch of crap, that’s the whole reason for the peer-review system. One could argue (with only a little stretching) that it is working as it is designed.
But even if this time around we have a little more corruption in the mainstream, the grand body of science does not stop dead. The cars still run, and we still know why. The computers still work, and your blood pressure medicine still works as it did, none of theory or scientists in any of those areas has changed because of a few blockheads at East Anglia.
Was it only me who clearly saw the connection between the medieval Catholic Church’s indulgences and Al Gore’s carbon tax credit
Two years ago I noticed another creepy example of religious imitation: http://kraalspace.blogspot.com/2007/02/church-of-blue-marble.html And THAT was triggered by something even earlier: in 2001, Al Gore wanted to set up a program where a satellite would constantly beam an image of the Earth, for people to contemplate for their spiritual health. It was a pagan high-tech version of Perpetual Adoration, and even had a religious-sounding name: Triana.
Josh, you have a constitutional guarantee to your religious beliefs. The Church of Scientism was happily corrupting the peer-review system for decades.
It is still working, in fields that do not get attention of mongers of some kind. But to trust it without a reservation is an article of faith. A parallel system may need to be put in place.
It really doesn’t matter a whole lot if AGW is totally discredited or not. It was just a tool to an end, an end that had to do with control, not with the environment.
The people who want to control every aspect of our lives will come up with a new justification if AGW is discredited. Its not the demon’s name that is legion, its the lies it will tell to get its way.
“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”
An AP article says that unless the “rich nations” put in up front money — nothing less than 10 billion — then there will be trouble in Copenhagen. Yvo de Boer says it’s gotta be done. Cash on the barrel. Upfront money will win back the trust of the nations after decades of inaction by the US. Read the thing.
Josh@53,
Spot on. Science and math are just tools. A way of looking at the world and beyond, if you will. A way of focusing this tremendous gift given to humans called intellect.
Used correctly, we have built things ranging from space ships to pace makers.
The only thing that AGW produced is fear. I want to know the names of all the peers who reviewed this mess. They, in addition, to the perpetrators, have no place teaching others, or for that matter, having any position of trust. They are too gullible or stupid to be trusted.
Once again Yes Minister has proven to be way ahead of all of us. Clearly Sir Humphrey would be very disappointed in the leadership at the CRU. He would probably pack them all off to the War Graves Commission or Vehicle Licensing Centre Swansea.
From the episode “The Skeleton in the Closet,” which aired November 25th, 1982.
publication could give grounds for an
#58 Programmer–
The only thing that AGW produced is fear. I want to know the names of all the peers who reviewed this mess. They, in addition, to the perpetrators, have no place teaching others, or for that matter, having any position of trust. They are too gullible or stupid to be trusted.
You are being far too kind. There is the notion of “useful fools,” but these people more properly can be described as “useful whores,” and maybe I’m being too kind as well.
Mark Steyn on on pier-review.
I peer-review you,
You peer-review me,
We’re one happy family,
With a neatly rolled bundle,
–Who needs watchers of watchers–
Won’t you say you “peer-review” me too?
Why in the Blue Blazes does it say that I do not have permission to edit my own document and clean up the formatting, when I have 12 minutes on the clock?
Josh,
Then you disagree that the prostitution of data that involves the biggest scientic debate of our time, global warming, is just business as usual in the scientific community. You buttress your belief this is true because “the grand body of science” has not stopped dead.
I don’t believe that is a claim made by anyone I have read,nor stated by me. My indictment is that this is one (1) of the greatest cons played on the world in a century. I didn’t even make the asssertion that it was THE biggest one, but that it was indeed a huge con. So I don’t believe we are that far apart. Heart medications still work but in the overall picture the largest debate of the past decade hasn’t been about aspirin or heart meds but about global warming . Ancillary to that argument is the fact that trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this challenge bogus as it is, ostensibly predicated on made up data.
I will say you have taken a unique position on one huge con however.
Why in the Blue Blazes does it say that I do not have permission to edit my own document and clean up the formatting, when I have 12 minutes on the clock? The thing is a wordpress comment edit add in. I’m not sure it is wholly stable.
wretchard/57
Richard, maybe it is that “if you put up, it is not all lost, for 60 billion we can buy a lotsa … well, you know … those who would be already established who they are, we’ll just haggle over the price” moment.
For most of the 20th century vast populations followed Hitler and Stalin? Why? What did those monsters have that was remotely attractive.
Have you actually watched Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) by Leni Riefenstahl? She made Adolf Hitler look good! (Aspects of the Star Wars saga were ripoffs of this film, by the way.) I think future generations ought to watch the occasional totalitarian film in order to comprehend just how creepy such propaganda can be.
I am reminded of some of the lyrics of a song (supposedly) composed by PDQ Bach called “Farmer on the Dole”.
The moral of the story please attend to very well,
Exactly who the devil is is often hard to tell.
He may be short and ugly or he may be fair and tall,
He may just be the man for whom you voted in the fall.
Maybe for $60 billion, they can make another, entirely new ecopalypse.
I think most totalitarianism is fueled by a basic human desire for idolatry. Large numbers of people want idols, desire idols, and demand idols. They want certainty in their lives, and they want to know what to think and how to think. They don’t want to be bothered with thinking for themselves. It seems easier that way. When a political system does not deliver enough idolatry to satisfy their desire for a fix, they seek the system’s overthrow so they can worship their idols again. Hitler and Stalin appealed to hero worshippers.
Let’s not assume that everybody in the world wants freedom. Plenty of people would gladly give up their freedom to live vicariously through a superhero. Hence, I am deeply suspicious of any politician who presents himself as a superhero for this very reason.
Bob Smith @ 27 and E. Nigma @ 40: Any time data “disappears” it makes all conclusion suspect. There is no excuse today for data to disappear. There is virtually unlimited storage to keep all data without interfering with the capture of new data. And I’m sure the NSA or the FBI could retrieve data from any storage device. Unless, of course, they destroyed all the tapes and hard drives.
Josh @ 48: Your definition of “The West” is great. Judeo-Christian inalienable ethics and a loving deity, plus Greek logic, plus Bacon and the scientific method. Succinct and spot on. That tradition has produced the likes of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, Lister, Pasteur, Newton, Einstein, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Moses, Jesus, and so much more.
George Gilder’s new book “The Israel Test” describes the envy of those outside Western Civilization as a reason they want to destroy us. But who can explain why the beneficiaries of Western Civilization, who are a part of it, would want to destroy it?
I again remind BC readers of Arthur Koestler’s neglected masterpiece, “The Call Girls.” Describes the Al Gore syndrome and the Davos crowd.
i’m glad folks are commenting on how environmentalism/GW is a secular religion and also how Michael Crichton said so. see this Crichton video on youtube .
Lie tellers eventually get caught in their own web of deceit. It’s almost embarrassing how badly the fabrications are becoming though.
Money + Politics are two combined ingredients that when included in any serious scientific recipe must be monitored with utmost caution.
These ‘scientists’ should shtick to selling mood-rings, penis enlargement pills and magic 8-balls.
Then you disagree that the prostitution of data that involves the biggest scientic debate of our time, global warming, is just business as usual in the scientific community.
Cold fusion.
Have a nice day.
–
There was some researcher in, I think it was solid state physics, about five years ago, published a whole bunch of papers in different refereed journals before someone noticed he used exactly the same chart for all kinds of different data in the different papers.
Endless examples.
For some reason I’ve been thinking of the “Children’s Crusade” of 1212.
http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/children.html
“Little is known of the return journey. Many of the children, especially the girls, could not face again the ardours of the road and stayed behind in some Italian town or village. Only a few stragglers found their way back next spring to the Rhineland. Nicholas was probably not amongst them. But the angry parents whose children had perished insisted on the arrest of his father, who had, it seems, encouraged the boy out of vainglory. He was taken and hanged.
The second company of German pilgrims was no more fortunate. It had travelled to Italy through central Switzerland and over the Saint Gotthard and after great hardships reached the sea at Ancona. When the sea failed to divide for them they moved slowly down the east coast as far as Brindisi. There a few of them found ships sailing to Palestine and were given passages; but the others returned and began to wander slowly back again. Only a tiny number returned at last to their homes.
Despite their miseries, they were perhaps luckier than the French. In the year 1230 a priest arrived in France from the East with a curious tale to tell. He had been, he said, one of the young priests who had accompanied Stephen to Marseilles and had embarked with them on the ships provided by the merchants. A few days out they had run into bad weather, and two of the ships were wrecked on the island of San Pietro, off the south-west corner of Sardinia, and all the passengers were drowned. The five ships that survived the storm found themselves soon afterwards surrounded by a Saracen squadron from Africa; and the passengers learned that they had been brought there by arrangement, to be sold into captivity. They were all taken to Bougie, on the Algerian coast. many of them were bought on their arrival and spent the rest of their lives in captivity there. Others, the young priest among them, were shipped on to Egypt, where Frankish slaves fetched a better price. When they arrived at Alexandria the greater part of the consignment was bought by the governor, to work on his estates. According to the priest there were still about seven hundred of them living. A small company was taken to the slave-markets of Baghdad; and there eighteen of them were martyred for refusing to accept Islam. More fortunate were the young priests and the few others that were literate. The governor of Egypt, al-Adil’s son al-Kamil, was interested in Western languages and letters. He bought them and kept them with him as interpreters, teachers and secretaries, and made no attempt to convert them to his faith. They stayed on in Cairo in a comfortable captivity; and eventually this one priest was released and allowed to return to France. He told the questioning parents of his comrades all that he knew, then disappeared into obscurity. A later story identified the two wicked merchants of Marseilles with two merchants who were hanged a few years afterwards for attempting to kidnap the Emperor Frederick on behalf of the Saracens, thus making them in the end pay the penalty for their crimes.”
“Perhaps there is no vacation from freedom; no prospect of leaving it to the process without being part of the process. We can’t appoint a bunch of philosopher kings and sit back. Life is unfortunately about building up and tearing down; of choosing and failing or choosing and succeeding. About living and dying. We thought we could trust “them”. In the end, we can only trust ourselves, and that only partially.”
This is being lived out in the Australian Parliament at this moment, and tomorrow morning in the Liberal Party Room. The ETS Kevin Rudd “has to have” and the leadership the Liberals can’t decide whether to have or not. The pity is that it is all happening without reference to the real world, although “Science!” is the invocation de jour even in the midst of this religious fervour.
wretchard wrote:
The first part is the crux. So far no one has been able to nor allowed to reproduce the findings. Therefore there is NO, I repeat NO, science here just speculation. Wool-gathering. Wishful thinking, as it were.
For the 2nd part, the US gov’t does it all the time. TARP, Porkulus, Cap’N Tax, etc. And that my friends is why so many of us are so disgusted with all and sundry in DC. Demonrats or Elephakes, it does not matter. They all need to be sent packing and the US recaptured from the looters.
2×4 @ 52:
Proper attribution is critical. [/snark off] Truly that movie tells it correctly. A group trying to improve mankind.
wretchard @ 57:
Ransom! Ahoy, Cap’n, pirates off the port bow! Really, we should give this bunch the SEAL treatment for pirates as that is what they are. Unreal.
That there is a storm brewing has been obvious for some time. The form it will take is still up for debate. Will the Statists lower the hammer first? Or will the Liberty Lovers rebel? Those are the interesting questions.
This latest affront to the sense of the common man is just grist for the mill.
W.#57- That article… If I needed one little gnat’s breath of persuasion to convince me that we are witnessing history’s first world-wide fraud against humanity, then that crummy AP story was it. Wow. No time to waste, New data tells us that we’re going to hell even faster than we thought! the Maldives are disappearing. Brown and Sarkozy are gonna fork over now, where’s everybody else? Mere billions can make a difference, so let’s go!
In the face of all that we’re learning about this, they continue with even more urgency than before. This of course goes way beyond any scientifically based concern about the status of the environment vs. the Citizen. Some strange stuff is brewing at the UN, and I don’t like the smell of it.
In other news, there have been major rallies in at least ten cities throughout Brazil to protest against Ahmadinejad’s visit there. It was a real cross section of people waving Brazilian, Israeli, and Rainbow flags.
I think these protests are good news.
steeple
Actually, I beg to differ. Academia and Government are beset by Professionals, people who want to make a career, and a business, out of the thing. Amateurs would (and have) done far, far better. As someone pointed out, Einstein wasn’t a tenured professor when he developed General Relativity, he was a patent examiner. The damn professionals get too caught up in the money process, and since neither Government nor Science are subject to typical market forces, they’re rife for exactly the sort of cabalistic capture that’s happened with AGW.
And as far as the original data being thrown out “before anyone knew it was important because it took up too much space…” Well, let’s just say I think that’s a crock. CD-ROM burners existed back then. You can hold a lot of temperature reports on a 640MB CD-ROM. I think what really happened is the cabal running this scam realized the data didn’t support their theory, so they created doctored versions and deleted the originals to hide the evidence. Nothing these people produce can be trusted. Even if they miraculously discovered a forgotten cache of the “original” data, I would not accept it as genuine. They are fakes, frauds, and con men. Everything they’ve touched has to be thrown out. If we’re worried about the climate, we need to start a new effort, staffed with real scientist rather than partisan hacks, to gather new data. Back to Square One, and do it right this time.
Unless of course it’s not about science at all.
Which it isn’t.
Wretchard
So, should we start calling it the Algore plug in?
…to the great rolling hoaxing eye, in all its many heads awry, now as we cast our fate and fly, can’t remember if we said goodbye….
***
I remember holdin’ on to you
All them long and lonely nights i put you through
Somewhere in there i’m sure i made you cry
But i can’t remember if we said goodbye
But i recall all of them nights down in Mexico
One place i may never go in my life again
Was i just off somewhere or just too high
But i can’t remember if we said goodbye
I only miss you every now and then
Like the soft breeze blown’ up from Caribbean
Most November i break down and cry
Cause i can’t remember, can’t remember, if we said goodbye
72 Josh
You’re thinking of the Jan Hendrik Schön scandal–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Schoen
This reminds me of the Enron scandal. Bogus information submitted, and anyone who questioned it was derided as “too stupid to get it”.
When it came crashing down it did so in a very short period – that’ll be different as many have a vested interest in this scam, and they will attempt to keep it inflated until it’s obvious that it can no longer be done.
When Enron was finally scrutinized, the first (and still foremost in the public mind) cause of the collapse was the unethical and illegal activities by Fastow, Skilling, and others.
In fact, Enron was a total mess. The CFO didn’t have knowledge of many basic things that were needed to run the business, the books were impossible, etc. I’ve read speculation that Enron could have weathered the corruption and survived, but they couldn’t stand corruption and total incompetance.
The emails in this case are damaging, but the code and methods they used will prove fatal to AGW, or at least set it back several years. So I expect that eventually there will be an attempt to sacrifice Jones, Mann, et. al. as unethical for trying to quash dissent and destroy data rather than respond to FOIA requests, while trying to divert attention from the shoddy methods that were employed. They’ll try, but won’t be able to salvage this. I’m gonna have a good time watching their efforts.
Climate Change and the Death of Science
Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government (including the UKCIP98 and UKCIP02 scenarios, and reviewer for UKCP09), the European Commission, UNEP, UNDP, WWF-International and the IPCC, and was co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science
“The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.
…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.
Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…
The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.
There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.
More here and here on post-normal science.
As a Climatologist, I can tell you raw data is useless. It must be properly interpreted by experts in the field of Climatology – like me. What’s more important is the grant money.
I am still waiting for my $289,000 payment for last month’s data tuning, travel and lodging expenses. The Al Gore Institute of Climatology and Grant Preparation does not solely exist on speaking engagement fees – how lucrative they maybe. It exists on Grant money from the ignorant American Taxpayer.
Give me money now!
Or, polar bears will be raining down on your streets.
http://tinyurl.com/yglehu9
When data are noisy, inhomogenous and pooled from sources of a very different quality, the methods used for their smoothering, averaging, adjusting and so on are crucial for statistical conclusions inferred from these dats. Different methods often lead to qualitatively different conclusions. So lack of collaboration with world statistical community, which is hundred times bigger than climatologists community, is a blunder. It undermines any trust to integrity of the whole effort.
Sorry to be so obtuse, but I didn’t see the Michael Crichton videos at the end of W’s post. At least my thoughts followed those of a mind much greater than mine.
When it comes to keeping financial records, the law says seven years and that’s exactly how long I keep ‘em, and it aggravates the heck out of me to have to do that…my money, my business. After seven years they are destroyed. I, however, am not storing the original data upon which the entire planet is being asked to react in a way that will change the living conditions of the human race. Those records should have been vaulted somewhere near the Declaration of Independence. The seriousness of this “science” of AGW has become a self-mocking joke by their own standards in failing to preserve this original data.
Sergey, the way they were doing it was not by omission, but by commission. The links in Burrah’s post remove any doubts if there were any.
72. Josh
So now your claim is cold fusion, as a matter of public and scientific debate, as well as numbers of dollars spent trumps, the debate over global warming?
Hmmm.
You also have a nice day.
OT:
Minaret ban approved by 57 per cent of voters
To the great surprise of pollsters and the regret of the government, the Swiss on Sunday said yes to a ban on the construction of minarets.
Government seeks to limit impact of minaret ban
The government says voters’ approval of a ban on new minarets reflects fears among the Swiss population of Islamic fundamentalism.
Minaret result seen as “turning point”
Swiss voters’ clear decision on Sunday to ban the construction of minarets has generated a wide range of emotions, from stunned joy to rueful concern.
Doug,
Dime will get you a donut that a lawyer invents the “Swiss Minaret.” It looks just like a regular Minaret only it has a watch attached to the outside. Presto!, it becomes an Islamic Clock Tower.
If you are a private supplier of goods to the US government and you supply an item that doesn’t comply exactly to material spec., you can go to jail in a heart beat. If you are working for some kind of non-profit connected to the left however you can rape babies in the IRS parking lot, record it, and charge the government for the use of the camera.
Josh..
Well you sure know your stuff. I didn’t do any research into dollars spent etc but you are indeed correct (provided we accept simple Goggle search, one under ‘cold fusion” and another under “global warming”)
Cold fusion by several lengths at the finish line…good call.
Well now my “styrofoam pillar” comment just doesn’t have the same ring to it . It now sounds rather off note and frumpy.
I’d still be curious as to the dollars spent and the damage to the credibility to the scientific community this latesest kerfuffle has had but you’ll have to lead me out of the woods cause I was headed in the wrong direction.
Best,
Habu
90. Lifeofthemind:
LOL !
Wasn’t it Will Rogers who once said that politicians are the only people who can create a crisis and campaign against it? Can we modify that to add scientist?
If so, should that now read: Politicians and scientist are the only people who can create a crisis and campaign against it.
Trouble is, that somehow nowadays, politicians and scientist seem to be campaigning for the crisis.
NASA had a perfectly good reason for losing all of the scientific records and original videos of the glorious voyages to the moon. Yes, they did.
RR/94; don’t say that around Buzz Aldrin!
I must disagree with Josh – the way to measure the significance of a scandal is to evaluate how much time and how many resources it wasted. In the case of cold fusion, a few physics departments spent a semester or so trying to replicate results, and when they couldn’t the story was over. No great government programs or worldwide tax schemes were predicated on it. With this – every government worldwide got involved, and it has had at least a 20 year lifespan. (beginning with James Hanson’s infamous 1988 congressional testimony)
And bear in mind that the average person hasn’t even heard of this scandal yet – it will be years before we can gauge the true impact. What I fear greatly is a general rejection of rationality in general and science in particular. If it becomes commonly believed that “science” is just another word for an elite guided scam, why should anyone buy into it? The world could easily fall into another age of superstition and irrationality – we are on the brink of that today. When accepted authorities are exposed as having been liars, the most shameless liars will find it quite easy to become the new authorities.
I imagine the AGW fraudsters are heading to gymnasiums in droves to improve their arguments.
To paraphrase Voltaire:
“If global warming did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.”
It didn’t, and it was.
RR/97; LOL –good one –but in BA’s defense, that guy he unloaded on has been following him around foryears, showing up at speaking engagements and heckling from the audience. He just heckled him in the wrong venue, finally, and Aldrin finally had a clean shot at him. I think he probably had for a fact gotten tired of arguing with the guy about the moon shot being a fraud. Meself, i can believe that claiming an equivalence between the AGW scam and the Apollo program, that is, that one must accept that either both are real or both are fake, is, all due respect, not sensible in any way other than as a parallel construction of words –words, which we need keep in mind are symbols of reality and not reality itself. As Lincoln used to say, you can call a tail a leg, but that won’t make a five-legged dog.
“At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann :
Mike,
…
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”
“Lost.” Yeah, right.
One of many, many smoking guns:
———-
; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’ ; yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
——————–
The purpose of these fudge factors was naked dry-labbing: added to the 20th-century temp data to lower the 1930s and increase recent years: voila! instsnt ‘warming.’
Dr. Phil Jones
Climatologist
Global Cooling Skeptic
November 30 2009
I believe Dr. Phil- He is a genius.
All of you should be ashamed making lurid comments about this great doctor.
Now, just one more question Dr. Phil.
I need some help with a personal problem.
How do I stop beating my wife?
I noticed this revelation of lies has not stopped abrams and bettes of the weather channel from pushing the global warming/climate change idea, This motning there was even a nod to Ted Kennedy who “lived in boston by jimminee!”
Stephanie needs to get a life.
The monstrous egotism involved is stunning. Just because you can more or less understand something does not mean that you can control something anymore than knowing God is the same as being God.
These are the same people that figured they could sprinkle some fairy dust and terra-form Mars. The AGW theory requires a bit of science-fiction creativity as it does conceit to arrive at its conclusions. Once the dark principles of mega-alchemy are assumed the tinkering with the recipe will follow.
It is a small step from follow me and I will save us all to step aside, I will save us all in spite ourselves; Indignant caprice is Al Gore’s calling card.
The AGW “corrected” temperature data is probably neither more nor less reliable than the data compiled by the US government about “jobs created or saved”. AGW probably does exist, but only in those non-existent congressional districts where real “stimulus funds” disappeared to.
Science as a world view, and as distinct from the scientific method, has been repudiated repeatedly over at least the last century, but it does not seem to want to go away. Take a survey of how many people think Darwinian evolutionary theory explains the origins of life — of which it has nothing to say — and you may be surprised by the ignorance of otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people.
All of this abuse of science is the product of a materialist theology, a kind of pantheism that has seen a gradual resurgence since the modern world lost its moorings at the end of the 19th century.
Psychology is doing the same thing as the climatologists have been, twisting itself into pretzels to satisfy misguided political agendas. In defense of same-sex marriage the American Psychological Association has essentially offered “proof” that males and females are the same, arguing that homosexuals can do as good a job of raising children as a heterosexual couples. It’s also striving to normalize Gender Identity Disorder, the delusional belief that one is of the opposite sex, by defending the “human rights” of the so-called transgendered.
The problem is hubris. The loss of understanding of a divine hierarchy and of a natural order has spawned inside-out and upside-down perspectives. We are spinning in space and getting more and more frantic because of the delusion that we are in control of that which we are not.
The thing that offers hope, of a kind, is that “they” cannot possibly control as much as they think. The tower started to come crashing down as soon as The One’s feet of clay became obvious. And now this blow to AGW at long last.
The debt owed by secular-humanism to its Judeo-Christian heritage looks like it’s coming due, and no bail-outs are in sight.
Predictably, the real global climate change is turning out to be more in the realms of philosophy and theology than the material, and it’s promising to be a real mess.
Rather than sit back and enjoy the show, it feels like time to head for the hills and hunker down, in the company of like-minded souls if possible.
Let the Africans suffer and die. We can cleanse our souls by feeling sorry for them.
Have you watched vid #1 above? Check that out with the story of Dr. Stephen Mowangi, who has been forced by the do-goodies to get along with solar energy in his Kenyan clinic: he can either turn on the lights OR turn on the fridge in which he keeps medicines and tissue samples.
This type of connected, organic, clean, harmonious, natural suffering is left to noble savages and little brown brothers in distant, romantic lands — while Al Gore, Bono, and Richard Branson gather the lucre of the AGW fraud to themselves so they can be treated in technological oases that will become rarer and less accessible to the rabble as their agenda proceeds. My summation of this is my first paragraph.
Dr. Mabuse (@22),
RE Western research institutions’ predilection for pontification:
Paul Rahe answers your question succinctly at ’round 3:30 – 4:00 in this first-of-five “Uncommon Knowledge” interviews at National Review Online.
Linky
Burrah,
Thank you for the links to the the-normal science articles. They explain a lot.
The alliance of post-normal science and rhetoric is of particular interest. I hope Starling will comment on this.
In the lead-up to Copenhagen, you will see (e.g. full page ads in the New Yorker) advertisements for “Copenhagen,” sponsored by the International Advertising Association. Check out the web site of Hopenhagen for some remarkable web composition. Who pays for the ads? Who coordinates the pre-Copenhagen stage-craft? The stage-craft is frighteningly impressive. The only problem for the show is the leaking front tire of the juggernaut, i.e. the CRU leak.
PA Cat @ 80: thanx.
Everyone – sure, of course AGW is unprecedented in the size of its impact, I am talking strictly about its scientific merits and demerits.
Even my cold fusion example was really a different type than AGW – just bad science, not outright fraud. There is a lot of such bad science around. Just wanted to point out a pretty famous one.
But again, I say, why not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law
Or, well, Stalin’s little bad-science experiment with agriculture had a pretty devestating impact on the Soviets.
I can cite a *lot* of Silicon Valley startups based on very thin scientific ideas (more like hopes or wishes), that blew a lot of money and got nowhere. Heck, worked for one. My brother worked for another. Well funded by big names, and bogus as a three dollar bill. Were any of these frauds? Well, there’s a spectrum from stupidity on one side to honest mistakes on the other. And in the end, does it matter?
Science is hard, don’t ever think otherwise.
Don’t believe *anything* new until it is proven six ways from Sunday.
That’s why the AGW thing is unnerving to competent scientists, who must demand such proofs before acting on them in the name of science. Anything else is acting on them in the name of hope, change, hysteria, politics, greed, personal glory, etc. Common as dirt, but just not science.
OK not “hard science”, there are social sciences that talk about just these kinds of phenomena, say financial bubbles, … I’d put the CDO/CDS stories into the “bad science” category and very nearly the size of AGW, and those stories are ongoing, now that you mention it!
end of ramble
John McLachlan @ 105: The AGW “corrected” temperature data is probably neither more nor less reliable than the data compiled by the US government about “jobs created or saved”.
Too true.
But then the overall jobs data, also the CPI data, has been overcooked for twenty years or more.
The more time passes, the less I think of Alan Greenspan – and I’m talking increasingly negative, he went below the zero axis for me a long time ago. He broke a lot of stuff. I wonder if it won’t turn out that he broke the Fed and let Ron Paul sweep away the pieces. I think Paul is a loon of the first water, but after the last year, about the Federal Reserve, I just don’t know.
(OK I’m not sure which parts of this stuff are the fed, which parts treasury, which parts labor department, etc – but Greenspan and the fed were certainly involved in the action side of the macroeconomics, and increasingly with the microeconomics of the banks, and Greenspan was involved in the H-1B program and advised on stuff regarding the CPI, etc)
arhoo/107; there you are, right down in the nitty gritty of the hellishness of the whole thing –the progressives, and all their vilifying of everything First World and caucasion, are themselves really actually doing what they’ve spent the last century trading on accusing everyone else of.
when they preach on the Double Standard, listen closely for they are the experts.
Bloody ironic that just when free markets finally for the first time in human history began to control the spectre of famine always just a bit of bad weather removed from the doorway of third world families, along comes the self-appointed champions of the little folk to jerk away their rice bowls snarling “well you’ve had your taste, that’s enough now!”
That they do this using lies can hardly make it worse, but of course it does, and does, and does.
8. programmer:
I took a quick (couple hours) gander at the Harry readme text and came to the same conclusion, although my programming days were long ago, It was FTN.
It had to be dumped. It was electronic and couldn’t be shredded. Besides, Nixon gave shredding a bad name. Now when Joe or Jill 6-pack hears “shredded” they assume there is a cover-up. The AGW crowd wouldn’t want that. Even the most ignorant Journalist picks up their ears at ‘shredded’.
Eventually sombody will trip over the fact that in AGW circles, ‘peer group review’ is jargon for ‘criminal conspiracy’.
Then the fecal matter is really in the rotary air circulation device.
wws @ 39 and others
I used to run the grants dept for a large transportation agency, received lots of Federal dollars in grants (about $3B in the time I was there)… we had to retain all original records to justify every expenditure, until each grant was “final-audited” and then 3 more years. Since (a) the Feds never had the money to do the audits, and (b) we had a cost allocation plan that used the entire expense base of the agency to allocate overhead costs to and among the grants, we had to keep EVERYTHING, FOREVER. Literally, a good portion of a warehouse, with at least a dozen boxes of payroll sheets and contractor invoices and payments added each month. Eventually, the Feds let us microfiche some of it, but that was so laborious and expensive we mostly just kept adding boxes of paper.
And we weren’t even trying to change the world’s economy.
Throwing out the data is analagous to the murderer throwing away the gun he used.
This stuff is really simple.
I have three points to make.
First, this issue is being driven by a political need. In inflation adjusted dollars, federal spending in the first year of the Obama Administration is running slightly more than 50% higher than it had during the first year of the GWBush Administration. In order to make Obama’s “change we can believe in” sustainable, huge new taxes of some type or another will have to be raised to pay for the envisioned level of federal government services. A carbon tax is apparently the preferred vehicle, but if the carbon tax fails in Congress, we will surely see other proposals. Given how much new money is needed I suspect the next candidate in line will be a VAT.
Second, the CRU datasets only add to an already very large body of evidence that there is obvious fraud at the very core of the so-called “science” of global warming. The obvious questions are (a) how did this state of affairs come about?, and (b) is it indicative of a broader problem in science today?
Climatology did not develop as other disciplines in modern science have developed. Basically, the current field of climate research is a product of government funding in the 60s and 70s, following Sputnik. In an environment where federal funding of science was increased across the board, geophysics got its cut.
It wasn’t until WW2 that aviation requirements led to wide spread training in meteorology. Before that a high school education without any additional special training had been fully adequate for employment in the weather business. Collecting and reporting weather data had not generally been seen as a scientific endeavor. Fully aware that finding that the climate was not changing could lead to a return to the stagnant past, the leadership of the new discipline was prone to an unusual level of activism.
Climatology is multidisciplinary, without a single core discipline. Hence, it lacks the ability to police itself (how does an individual expert in ocean currents, for example, judge the work of those who collect pollen or try to make statistical sense of highly flawed historical temperature data?).
These two factors, its birth as an artifact of cold war science funding policy and its multidisciplinary nature, made the field of climatology ripe for Lysenko-like manipulation.
The closely related field of oceanography, in contrast, is a model of responsibility in science policy. Oceanography policy is led from Woods Hole on the east coast and Scripps at La Jolla on the west coast rather than from Washington. Oceanography had been established as a separate discipline in the 1930s and the two dominant actors can police each other even as they cooperate in driving policy in their field.
This and other examples indicate the problem with climatology is unique to climatology.
Third, regardless of the politics and the fraud, the question abut the potential for AGW remains unanswered. We know that every molecule with 3 or more atoms will absorb energy in the IR spectrum and, for that reason, is a potential contributor to global warming. We also know that particulates in the atmosphere play a large role. My sense is that if AGW is real, it is being driven by products of combustion, refrigerants, etc, and not by CO2. Blame those individuals across the globe who cook their daily meals over open fires that release soot and partially oxidized products of combustion. The ultimate joke in this entire affair may be that, even if AGW is real, the charges against CO2 may be as baseless as those brought against Captain Dreyfus a little more than a century ago.
I’m sorry for my absence over the last few days, esteemed BCers (apologies to the late Johnny Hart).
Where is your humility? It is possible that any one of us could have stumbled into a quagmire in its building — particularly in our younger, more naive years — and found ourselves awaking today to a nightmare similar that which these climatologists are finding themselves in.
In all seriousness, our salvation may be found in forgiving a few of the techies and, instead, hounding the pols and moneyed interests who exploited them and forcing them to heel. Note from this story that the pols and moneyed interests are looking to hound he or they who braved the dangers in order to uncover — FOR OUR BENEFIT — the Warmistas’ cleverity.
We, as the new media, the true heirs to the Fourth Estate, must not let up. We owe at least that much to that insider who the “UN Honcho” is promising to persexecute.
M@116: This stuff is really simple.
But really (really) common. The person on the periphery would be surprised. Some fields are strictly kosher – oceanography as noted above – but basic information management is routinely compromised.
It’s the human element as far as I can tell. In an age of computerized data management, there’s no other explanation. (Aside from the intent angle and that’s a witch’s brew of tangled webs.)
96. wws
The point you made is is the point I attempted to make and was unsuccessful. It was more than likely due to who I am rather than what I said for you are correct , as was I , that more has been made out of global warming than cold fusion in terms of impact on society.
Good job…I threw Josh a bone because he needed one and because Google would have backed him on the most superficial level and that is simply a measurement or raw hits and had nothing to do with the remainder of what I pointed out. As I said, it wasn’t what was said but who said it.
41. wretchard:
In the last 3 or 4 decades a number of phantoms have walked through the walls of history. The population bomb, nuclear winter, the Y2K bug, subprime mortgages, various ghostly financial instruments and maybe now, global warming. In each case the pattern is the same. There is a kind of complacent certainty in something which you can’t see, touch or feel, but are convinced exists anyway. We all light these magic candles or pour our money into instruments set about with strange signs. Then the things dries up and blows away to accompaniment of some weeping and regret, but not too much, because yet another portent takes its place. And we go in pursuit of yet another phantom.
Yes, thank you sir. I’ve been posting the same thoughts less elegantly for some time now, and it is this scenario, this history, that forms the foundation of my skepticism about AGW. The world is still suffering from the huge overhead costs imposed on us by past scares and panics. Also, sometimes the consequences take bizarre and tragic twists:
The buildings of University of East Anglia are “ziggurat” copies. The Ur (Ur the First City, the “cradle of civilization”) ziggurat meant “house whose foundation creates terror”. That same strange Oz blog details the coming event and cautions vividly be aware the Copenhagen Plot.
***
Meanwhile, back at the bank robbery, esteemed WSJ economics editor Stephen Moore has a new book out, timidly titled How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting The U.S. Economy.
wws@96: The world could easily fall into another age of superstition and irrationality – we are on the brink of that today.
Ain’t gonna happen. The Middle Class (the mushy middle as some here say) is still out there washing the dishes, mowing the grass, and keeping a healthy distance from the fringe elements dancing with delight on the edges of real life. Science will go on. Discoveries will be made. And life will get better.
But probably worse sooner than later.
Gotta think Big Picture.
Michael Chrichton’s spoke truthfully about the banning of DDT and millions dying from malaria as a result.
My late father kept the bags of DDT in a special locked shed, where he mixed the solution for spraying apple trees after each rainfall. Miss one spraying, and the apples would become infested with insects, almost uneatable. I sat on the tractor with a spray nozzle he had rigged up for me, and probably got as much on him as I managed to get on the trees. My dad didn’t ‘eat the stuff’, but he sure ingested a lot. I remember once getting in and making tracks through the fine white powder with a favorite toy. Daddy wasn’t amused, though.
As an American growing up in New England, I never worried much about mosquitoes. Slap ‘em and forget. Here in Japan, it’s a totally different mind-set. I’m always amazed at how my wife runs about in a near-panic until she finds and kills any mosquito that is spotted inside. It’s a very serious thing.
Chrichton cites an estimation that millions have died from NOT employing DDT, and the students around him don’t seem to register any noticeable reaction. I’m astounded by both, actually. Bad politics kills, and we should take seriously the thought that we might be responsible for some of the carnage. I feel terrible remorse just letting my anger show in a classroom of children- this is life and death stuff being played with. Doctors pledge to ‘do no harm’, certainly teachers and scientists should adopt a similar attitude. Isn’t this the idea behind professional ethics? What about just plain ‘human’ ethics? This AGW and do-good advocacy is killing people, darn it.
This is ethical monotheism:
There is a God.
God’s primary demand is ethics.
God without ethics leads to religious evil.
Ethics without God produces secular evil.
Dennis Prager- Ultimate issues 1991
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Why did the West’s wandering religious impulse transfer itself to “Science”? After everything we’d been through in the 20th Century, when Science proved itself to be completely amoral – as ready to do experiments for Dr. Mengele as to save lives at the Mayo Clinic?
I think this occurred in Universities, when a critical mass of ‘socially conscious’ students and professors realized that those bozos who rigorously grasped the hard sciences of math, chemistry, physics, geology, botany etc etc could always best them in arguments on those subjects, and owned in effect some real trumps when it came to debates.
But it was the ‘socially conscious’ gang which felt that that, due to their cultivated human sensitivities and respect for feelings, they were the ones who should prevail when it came to directing the behavior of other, lesser beings – like those hardheaded scientists.
We saw this in the early 70s, when the University of Washington actually instituted a program called the Social Management of Technology. An crusade for imposition, as it were, of the rule of the wise humanists over those socially unconscious dweebs with the slide rules, who at the time merely provided better-upholstered caves and vulgar automobiles to willing but unconscious buyers.
From there, it was just a short step for those SMT students to employ what sciences they were able to grasp as their own trumps, and use them as weapons in the creeping socialization of democratic governments – all by co-opting and transforming the previous Devil of Science into a new God, of whom they would now claim the priesthood.
@117 The obvious questions are (a) how did this state of affairs come about?, and (b) is it indicative of a broader problem in science today?
I think the problem is also driven by the general Leftist bent of Universities. “Hard science” researchers are no less prone to the endemic social pressures then Lit professors are. They live in a world where George Bush is Satan and etc. (we all know the laundry list). To that crowd, “Bush lied people died” is as much a proven “fact” as AGW. It is simply the belief you must have to be one of the cool kids.
Academics are also often ego maniacs (big fish in little puddles), and the soft fuzzy glow of Hollywood was all over AGW. Al Goreleoni getting an Oscar? And a big standing O from the assembled glitterati? Who doesn’t want to hitch onto that bandwagon.
It’s like that vile little guttersnipe James Hansen becoming a Leftie hero by forever screaming how the Evil Bush was censoring him. Yet we find out this same “censored” fellow had hundreds and hundreds of media appearances notched in his belt.
It’s about ego. It’s about hanging with the Cool Kids. It’s about a glowing profile in the Washington Post or Newsweek. It’s about money, money and yet more money. It’s about fitting in at the right cocktail parties and hob-nobbing with the right sort of people (this alone drives more bad thinking and policy than most people can imagine).
And this is why the greatest punishment for these scum is abject public humiliation. But without the MSM and Hollywood behind it (e.g. being lambasted by tone setter Jon Stewart), nothing will come of it. Simply put, they’re going to get away with it in all the ways that matter most to them because the Right simply doesn’t have an effective publicity machine in place (note to Sarah Palin — get a TV show already).
At last, a practicle solution to the AGW fraudsters problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0D78JtxmqI&feature=player_embedded
GL/123; –says “Gotta think Big Picture”
***
In the first link @ #122, Oz blogger Seeker 401 carries on his masthead:
“ Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws. ” – Confucious
***
The new Nyquist –just up –opens:
“I happened, once again, upon an old quote from Jean-Francois Revel: “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.” Sadly, Revel is stating the obvious. But then, it really isn’t obvious to most people. Even when you point out what is happening, they are so unfamiliar with history, and so unschooled in ideas, they have lost the thread of modernity’s narrative. Possessing clarity, Revel did not lose this thread.”
“In the post-9/11 introduction to his book, Anti-Americanism, Revel criticized de Gaulle for justifying France’s withdrawal from NATO in 1966 on account of American tardiness to help France in two World Wars. “And yet that was precisely the purpose,” wrote Revel, “in the light of past experiences, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: to guarantee the automatic and immediate military intervention on the part of the United States (and the other signatories) in case of aggression against one or another member state.” Thus Revel concluded, “Emotional prejudice can blind even a great man to the inherent absurdity of some of his positions.” (my bolding)
(and closes:)
“Those who see clearly have fallen silent, either because they are dead or because they no longer fit our “culture.” We prefer our illusions, just as we prefer sugar mixed with everything we eat. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.”
Does the academy need to be bound by a SOX-like protocol?
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/11/29/11967916-sun.html
If my former client was bound by SOX because it affected dollars and cents why not the academy? They get dollars & cents via grants and the results of this research (THIS research in particular) will affect the fortunes of millions of people (billions?).
The Toronto Sun produces a summary of one of the CRU Hack files and it is clear that if my last client handled their data and code like these researchers do the SEC (or whoever enforces SOX) would be all over them.
My guess is a lot of that work was done by amateur programmers (budding climatologists) and therefore sloppily handled — but that does not let them off the hook.
Again with my previous client, even for work not under strict SOX guidelines we proceeded as if it was. We had to have code reviewed and signed off on. A simple data update had to go through a slightly streamlined path.
I am not so disappointed by those at and working with the CRU but much more so with the media and governance.
…as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end, amen.
On 128. Robert Reis:
I’m shocked, I tell you shocked that you would even (giggle) indirectly, sanction (snort!) such a violent and illegal, (Bwahahahhahhah) act against a respected (scumbag) in the AGW conspiracy. After all, that was a sinful waste of ammunition. Though I do admire the characters ability to place a shot under stress (What stress, he was having fun).
123 Peter Warner,
Our thoughts coincide quite a bit. See Synopsis of Pascal Fervor and maybe we can aid one another.
———-
Doug:
All those reports of Swiss success that my email says you are attempting to post (good luck with all those links, LOL) may be temporary.
The EU (and others I care not to mention cuz they is close to US) has been putting tremendous pressure upon the Swiss to join the EU. (The EU has not pulled out all the stops yet either.)
There are 4 official languages in Switzerland. I bet you’re right on your first fill-in-the-blank as to which Swiss (the blanka-phones) are most hankering to cave to EU pressure.
One ethical scientist apparently proved the invalidity of the whole scheme a few years back but was bounced from NASA because of it. You can review his paper or summaries of it and get as deep into his thinking as you want, but he has a lot of support out there.
From the 3/9/08 UK Telegraph:
“Hungarian scientist Ferenc Miskolczi has discovered the greenhouse gas equation Arthur Milne developed in 1922 contains a serious flaw. Milne mistakenly solved the differential equation involved by assuming an infinitely thick atmosphere. Miskolczi was working for NASA at the time and NASA suppressed his report which contradicted NASA’s claims.
Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”
Miskolczi rewrote the equations and the modified equations don’t indicate a runaway greenhouse effect. His equations indicate a limit to any greenhouse effect. Thus even if there is a greenhouse effect it cannot do what the Rev. Al Gore claims it will do. . . .”
Marty 117:
“Throwing out the data is analagous to the murderer throwing away the gun he used. This stuff is really simple.”
First thing they teach you in freshman chemistry, is to write down everything in your lab book and NEVER erase anything. The lab book is supposed to show your entire discovery process including blind alleys. I’ve been involved in experimental projects related to the Space Program and we documented everything (including screw ups) and deleted nothing (lots and lots of documents cluttering up shelf space). To deliberately destroy raw data, particularly after it was published in a peer review journal violates one of the first principles of science (repeatability). Also, to modify or fabricate data to match a preconceived result (dry-labing) is the worst sin in science. If someone was awarded a Ph.D. based on dry-labed data and got caught, his Ph.D. would normally be revoked. The guys at CRU knew all of this and rejected basic scientific ethics to pursue a political agenda. They’ve destroyed their credibility as scientists (their doctor’s degrees should be revoked).
Off topic but interesting:
The following link to a peer reviewed journal paper indicates that the H1N1 virus might be artificial:
http://www.virologyj.com/content/6/1/207
The author’s imply that there was some sort of screw up and a lab created virus got loose. I’m not a virologist but I’m sceptical. The people who work with these viruses know the consequences and I can’t believe they’d make that sort of error.
There is the very nasty possibility that this was a bungled attempt at bio-terrorism. The Spanish Flu was the one of the worst diseases ever to curse the human race and H1N1 is essentially a variation of the Spanish Flu. Also H1N1 first appeared in Mexico City which is arguably the best place on Earth to launch a bio-warfare bug. However again, I’m sceptical. If this was bio-terrorism then the disease should have much worse. My family and I have already been exposed to what I thought was the Swine Flu and it was no biggy. If this was bio-terrorism then they screwed it up badly.
Eggplant:
I agree. But we should still make an offer so they can reclaim some respectability.
Not necessarily. (see buddy’s suggestion below, but there are more reasons too.)
E/134; read up on John Holdren’s writings, then figure in the sources and precursors to a few other crises i could name, and THEN speculate about a lab virus that screwed up badly. What if it was only meant to keep folks jumpy about their health during the Obamacare debate? Oh, i know, that’s crazy –but i’m not the one that exposed the moral idiocy in the White House czar corps –the czars in question (Sunstein, Holdren, Browner, Chu [actually a cabinet sec, a 'legit'], several others) did that to their own selves, in their writings and speeches and careers on how to achieve their own preferred characteristics of the unitary block of protoplasm AKA ‘the population’.
This all started at the very beginning, with the October Revolution of 1917. Kerensky replaced the czar, the senior (he moved into the Winter Palace, first non-royal ever) in an alliance with Lenin –then Lenin went to work on him with a whole new bag of ttricks called “by any means necessary” (and got himself exiled, from where he could safely overthrow Kerensky). And Reds ever since have proudly upheld the Bolshevik tradition of being absolutely ruthless in advancing the Party. I see no reason that Kremlin-on-the-Potomoc would be any more fastidious than politics at the minimum requires.
Doug, as your list of links, and your whole post about the Swiss voters refusing to allow any more minarets, still have not appeared, maybe you ought try Buddy’s webcrawler approach (e.g. in 136) to listing such links in the future. [/sometimes quick learner
]
I’ve made a note to remember that myself Mr. Larsen.
Women and homosexuals need to be loved so they can expose themselves to the will of men. This need to be loved is pushed by both parties and imposed upon men as a passive aggressive attack on the male gender. I think gender studies and climate studies are rightfully taken together. Energy is power and men have always sought it. The AGW crowd wants you filthy men to put a condom on and stop breathing. They want us to bend-over to their will. Regardless of their motivations their tactics would not work at all if we were not worried what a bunch of euro-fhags thought. Caring is a social disease that one gets from fine young cannibals. Why should they try to compete when they can turn their advisories compassion against them.
The Russians and the Chinese are secretly laughing at us and will promise to get on their all-fours and arch their backs waiting to be mounted by the girly men of the effete western elite, but only after WE humiliate ourselves. I would like to live in a country where euro’s are not allowed visas, perhaps in the post-apocalyptic Texas, until then, you’re all owed a very bloody nose.
“Can’t we all get along? “ No sir, we can’t.
#11; “In terms of damage done to the world and its economy and personal freedom, this needs its own moniker.”
Piltdown science?
Pascal (the derivative) 135 said about the CRU liars:
“… we should still make an offer so they can reclaim some respectability.”
It appears that the folks at CRU are “digging-in” and sticking with their story, refer to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/ipcc-climate-change-leaked-emails
When caught telling a bald face lie, a good tactic is to become wildly indignant and then change the subject.
The MSM tried to suppress this story but it’s leaking out anyway (inept buffoons). The timing was good to foul up the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. This raises the unasked question about who really were the “Russian hackers” who spilled the beans on this scientific fraud. Who ever did it knew what they were doing. There are some very powerful interests that stand to lose lots of money if AGW becomes established canon. One suspects the “Russian hackers” were not just script kiddies having some fun on the public library’s computer.
bob/139; “climate seance’ -?
Pascal/137; Bing is great for that –has its weaknesses, but to throw out several related articles on a clean weed-free page, it’s the berries.
Anyone who has run a small business for any length of time has learned, possibly with some reluctance, but out of necessity, the ABC of accounting. I have gone through that myself a while back, and came out of it with deep respect for the wisdom of accounting practices, regardless of how strange they may seem the first time one looks into them. Actually, learning the ABC of accounting may not by itself be a sufficient reason to launch a business, but it’s definitely one of its benefits.
One of the shocking revelations in this learning-by-necessity is the discovery of the “closing of the books” procedure, in which the systematic time-stamped record of every transaction for a given period of time, is sent to possible oblivion, for the benefit of the “bottom line”, which actually falls at the bottom of the balance sheet.
This is called “closing the books”. It does not imply, nor necessitates, throwing the books away, only closing them, that is producing an updated summary, the so-called end-of-period balance sheet. One possible excuse for throwing the books away after having summarized them is saving space on one’s hard disk. Another one is that if you have purchased inexpensive accounting software, as a small start-up might well have, it will not be sophisticated enough to let you go back in time to any pre-closure date and correct an old mistake within an already closed book, and recalculate everything since the date of the correction, thus producing a more accurate, revised balance sheets since the correction.
A less common excuse would be that some contents of the books might be better left irretrievable, but such excuse may not become voiced, with the burden of silence following you all the way to the grave… But this is accounting, not science, although rigor benefits accounting as much as it benefits science. Illegitimate precedence afforded to the summary over whatever was originally thrown into the hopper is potentially criminal. The excuse of throwing the data away to make room on the storage system does not really hold water in our times, when storage goes for less than one dollar-per-gigabyte.
In accounting, having thrown the original data away is permitted by law after some period of time, but in science, this is either plain sloppiness or outright crime. For instance, Isaac Newton based his work on the gigantic data set compiled by Tycho Brahe and his students in the late 16th century. These books contained a systematic compilation of all the know planets rise and fall times, weather permitting, over a great many years.
In this case, Newton’s summary required more effort and more intellectual boldness than a mere closing of the books procedure in accounting, but he had the fortitude to it carry out, and produce a brilliant summary known as the laws of gravity, but Tycho Brahe’s original observation books were not thrown away. They are still accessible today (originals kept in Copenhagen, and copy in Vienna). There was no need to destroy them, and you could still use them to re-create Newton’s laws if you can muster the time and the brain power, particularly if you limit yourself to paper and pencil in your tool box.
Destruction of original scientific data in our times better have a really good justification. Gentlemen, start your rationalization engines! In the mean time, keep your cool about planet fever, and summits thereabout, in Copenhagen, of all places!
ledger/84; just come up with a catchy name like Silver Spoon Nutworks and a K Street lawyer –and you got ‘er made!
140. Eggplant:
I agree again. I linked to a similar story as you up at no. 119.
I’m all for ridiculing these VIPs. It is core to the reason why I latched onto Pascal as the model maker from the start (hence my site moniker.) Pascal started the mockery that left the racketeers of his time no place they could show themselves. After he died, the rest of the world finished the job he started.
Here’s my candidate for the those like Obama et al. UN = United Nimrods.
That link at Nimrods has two posts which fill in the larger meaning we can glean from the Biblical account for application to today’s events and UN members.
The reason I suggested making an offer to the disgraced climatologists was included up at no. 119, in the last two paragraphs.
We are doing here what the Sinister media has no intention of doing. I think members of this club are proof positive that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
These frauds need to be put in jail.
In many ways this whole inept thing is a sign-of-the-times.
First off, we have the socialists who over the decades have done their best to sell their ideology but failed repeatedly. So realizing they can’t sell their ideology on its own merits, they cook up a Trojan Horse, i.e. AGW. Unfortunately these hapless bozos select the wrong Trojan Horse (the science isn’t there). Of course that doesn’t stop them from trying anyway by cooking up fraudulent data. In the meantime, why aren’t honest/rational people jumping up and down trying to unmask this fraud. Obviously, they’re trying but they can’t get past the MSM which wants to maintain the socialist/AGW narrative because it’s entertaining. In the end, the fraud is revealed by the illegal actions of “Russian hackers”. Odds are these “Russian hackers” are actually mercenaries hired by Exxon.
So the farce is complete: Criminal deceit trumps left wing ideology while honest/rational people sit on the sidelines looking hopeless and confused.
Buddy 136. I ask my Dr about the H1N1 flu and to my great surprise,( my dr is very mild and gentle person) he went into a rage about the H1N1 flu saying it was developed in a major Pharm in this country as a possible bio weapon when other labs around the world requested a sample of the H1N1 for their testing to develop a vaccine this big Pharm sent out a live virus unknown to these companies and that is how the virus got out of the lab and spread around the world. To stress his outrage, he stated that it would be over his dead body before he would give the vaccine to anyone.
Peterike 127, the esteemed Mr. Hansen will be speaking in Houston next Monday. It would be nice to have some fellow Belmont Clubbers there to join me to make our presence known. Tickets available at the Progressive Forum; no worries, it’s not sold out.
Richard/148; if i were an operative with orders and working inside the system (for a big pharma with a gov’t contract would be ideal for the purposes) and wanted to deliberately “have an outbreak accident” then my cover would involve a story a lot like that story your doc i’m sure believes.
A secretive, private, for-profit company, blinded by the profit motive, uses sloppy procedures (because the need for profit causes short-staffing and poor training, and personnel worried about paying their bills and putting food on the table are ‘distracted’ and make errors) that a not-for-profit (such as the gov’t) would not “irresponsibly” fall prey to.
A quad benefit ensues, the scare, and the bug gets out, and anger and doubt toward ‘the big drug companies’ continues preparing the people for ever greater gov’t takeover, and re ”bio weapon” the military receives a nice perfectly-targeted smear.
Just sayin’ –not dissing yore doc in any way. just mentioning –
http://www.bing.com/search?q=obama's+radical+czars&first=11&FORM=PORE
richard, just scroll thru the first two pages of lede-in blurbs –no need to even open the URLs to get a feel for the fantastical potential such a crew such as this has. “danger” is too mild a word for the sh*t we’re in.
I’m inclined to accept the belief that H1N1 came about naturally and was not an artificial virus (Occam’s Razor supports this view). Call me naive, but I don’t think a person intelligent and educated enough to create such a virus would deliberately release it. However I do believe in Peak Oil and that many of our current economic problems stem from a diminishing world energy supply. I can imagine a world resource depletion fanatic (a “doomer”) convincing himself that the human race was destroying itself and the only hope for mankind’s long term survival would be through radical population reduction. Such a radical doomer might justify to himself releasing some variant of the Spanish Flu in a high population area like Mexico City.
If the raw temperature data got dumped, it got dumped a week ago by terrified CRU staffers who understand that if got out, it would prove how much they cooked the books to show more warming than really occurred.
The dog ate my tree-rings, indeed. What kind of fools do they take us for?
We cycle from one environmental crisis to the next like an old-time Hollywood star running through husbands — only instead of the triumph of hope over experience, it’s the triumph of despair over experience. Who now remembers when Acid Rain was going to kill all the trees and poison all the lakes? Who remembers how in the 1970s we were all supposed to die from industrially-induced cancers? As a former teacher of environmental courses, I’ve seen half a dozen major crazes come and go, each taken up with the same enthusiasm and credulity, dissent from each ferociously proscribed while the fashion held sway. In 1984, when Edith Efron published “The Apocalyptics” debunking the cancer scare, the very dust-jacket blurbs had to be anonymous because the scientists who wrote them feared professional reprisals; signed copies of their reviews went to the publisher and academic referees under the seal of secrecy. As with AGW, the regulators wanted “settled science” and didn’t care how they got it.
buddy,
I followed your link, got to following a rhinoceros and found this wonderful quote from our President.
[The] issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.
BARACK OBAMA, MSNBC interview, Sep 25, 2006
Somehow, that says it all.
I just googled John P. Holdren. I’m impressed! This guy is no dummy. He started out as an aeronautical engineer. After the bottom dropped out of aerospace around 1969, Holdren got out of aerospace and went into nuclear fusion research. As an aeronautical engineer, he was doing shock layers around heat shields. The physics of shock layers is not all that different from the physics of a plasma inside a fusion reactor. Holdren got a Ph.D. from Stanford in only four years (bright boy). He then did nuclear fusion research until the bottom dropped out of that field in the mid-1980s. After that he got fed up with being a straight technical guy and became an academic. From there he got sucked into politics (it often happens).
Holdren is no brainless moonbat. I wonder why such a bright guy allowed himself to be associated with Obama?
Richard @ 148, I take it your doctor is an older gentleman, at least 50yo and more likely 60+? My take on your story is that he is outraged at the very terms like H1N1. Molecular biology was basically born in the early 1970s, probably made it into premed by the early 1980s and med school curriculum by the late 1980s, so I’m guessing he escaped sometime before then.
But then I’m very very skeptical about the quality of most medical doctor education, standards, and practices, so much of it is traditional and basically pre-scientific. You have to realize, up through about the 1950s, the average GP – had almost nothing in his bag but aspirin and morphine – and chicken soup, I guess. Imagine the training it took to practice in those days. Your average witch doctor was better trained and stood a better chance of helping patients. And now the situation has turned around 180 degrees – there is a ton of science, tons of drugs, and the average practitioner isn’t going to understand 5% of them, even within a specialty.
Lots of good comments here by many people, some of whom are actually in the field of climate research.
None of this is a suprise to me. From the start one could see that this is a highly complex and newly developing field of science with significant limitations.
It does not lend itself to laboratory experimentation or the double blinded ‘gold standard’ type of studies which medicine (my field) uses to bypass unknown or unquantifiable variables including researcher bias, which is unavoidable. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow despite far greater latitude in experimental design in other fields.
This is much worse. The challenges are so large that I cannot imagine how they can be overcome to derive anything meaningful from historical data given the precision required in estimating the small changes we are talking about.
So this is less precise than anthroplogy in my estimation.
We all know that global climate is dynamic and has been long before our ancestors walked on two legs.
This bothered me from the start. Then the issue is compounded by trying to implicate a causative factor, human CO2, an admitted minor factor in the big picture of greenhouse gasses. Then the headache of politics kicked in over an esoteric science just beginning to see the dawn.
Too me, cancer is just beginning to see the dawn and we have lots of controlled experiments to study that. Every patient is essentially a controlled experiment.
So why is politics so interested? Why have these scientists and their celebrity spokesmen become so invested? Why is this a left-right issue at all? It should not be if it is science. There is no left-right issue over cancer treatment, automotive safety, or relativity theory for example.
I dunno. My sense is that there is a crack in the vase and we will see some return to sanity. Maybe not.
When I see this I think about basics. This is a human endeavor and many formerly forgotten folks in the basement of the physical science departments are now hot celebrities. They cannot avoid the surge of applications for graduate students and the money pouring in. Simple human nature.
Spindok
#35Cdor… Just can’t help yourself when whacking Rachel Carson, ehhh?
The fact is that DDT is a lipid soluble, UV-resistant, extremely long half-lived synthetic pesticide which was bio-accumulated all the way up the food chain (nobody even understood that process until decades after DDT was in widespread usage); was detectable at high levels even in the fat tissue of antarctic penguins; and was shown to be the reason that eggshells of high-end fish predator birds (eagles, pelicans, etc) became so thin that the eggs couldn’t support the weight of the incubating adults, and the raptor populations crashed radically. Because of its cheapness and its persistence, once applied to aglands, DDT was used globally in vast quantities as a broad-spectrum pesticide. Banning such use was absolutely warranted and completely valid scientifically. It was just not foreseen –as with many complex social and ecological phenomena– that the downside would be a rise in malaria in the depths of the Third World. Alternative mosquitocides proved to be both expensive and comparatively toxic to humans, as well as desirably non-persistent, so they were never practicably adopted as the replacement for DDT targeted to antimalarial, rather than to widest agricultural applications.
That it now seems advisable to use DDT again for extremely limited household interior and for saturating bed-netting doesn’t make Rachel Carson wrong, doesn’t invalidate the science behind the ban, and doesn’t undo the welcome restoration of bald eagle and osprey populations that have seen both species removed from the endangered lists.
There are plenty of good reasons to critique one-dimensional environmentalist overreach, but the vast reduction in the amount of DDT dumped into the biosphere wouldn’t be among them!
–it’s just so strange that now here we are, with humankind in technological flood –innovating and inventing, and tho there’s more of us than ever, we also have more of everything –longer lives, better food, cleaner cities, less disease –why would a doomer want to kill off a share of the human race (in order to save it from dying off, note!) on the grounds that the history of mankind developing greater efficiency and process with ever smaller shares of resources devoted to the basic necessities of life –is going to suddenly slam on the brakes?
What on earth gives them the idea? yes peak oil is scary but natgas is gonna save us for a few hundred years and by then we’ll have better answers for the next cycle. I mean, that’s the way to bet, bades on history –and the alt is to draw in now, and force the population down –that’s not going to fundamentally alter us spiritually? –before we are even sure that people won’t ALWAYS innovate and drive prosperity? Considering the ”cure” many would MUCH prefer the illness! Nobody gets out alive anyway, and maybe while we’re here we don’t want to participate in breeding and farming –and culling –other human beings.
Holdren and partner Ehrlich wanted sterilants surreptitiously added to water sources, forced abortions, and all sorts of ghoulish totalitarian catastrophes, implemented IMMEDIATELY or it would be TOO LATE to save us from overpopulation-induced extinction. They made these demands in 1969.
HPH @ 159: Thanks for the post. The ranting about DDT on the right wing totally mystifies me. I guess it makes sense to use it for indoor applications … but I find myself nervous even about that. Here in Los Angeles, hundred pound chunks of the stuff are still found near where the plants used to produce it, and some immense amounts of it were apparently dumped into the bay up through the 1960s, hopefully burried in muck on the ocean floor, since apparently the bird life has pretty much recovered. But I know even (!) Rush Limbaugh rants about how wrong Rachel Carson was, and she wasn’t wrong at all.
So with all of our progress in chemistry, we can’t come up with a biodegradable but still effective version of DDT?
Shannon Love is apparently a software professional like me. But he expressed the same recognition I did in a much more expressive and clear write up. Must reading.
He also wrote a further document that explains the rest.
buddy larsen 160 said:
“Holdren and partner Ehrlich wanted sterilants surreptitiously added to water sources, forced abortions, and all sorts of ghoulish totalitarian catastrophes, implemented IMMEDIATELY or it would be TOO LATE to save us from overpopulation-induced extinction. They made these demands in 1969.”
Aerospace can be a very optimistic profession. Aeronautical engineers are supposed to solve all mankind’s ills with technology, e.g. colonies on Mars, resources from space, flying cars, you name it. In 1969, the aerospace industry imploded after the Apollo Program was terminated. Tens of thousands of aeronautical engineers lost their jobs and were forced to change careers (a few bright guys couldn’t handle it and committed suicide). I suspect that Holdren originally believed in the aerospace dream and then became a jaded cynic after the dream was crushed. I still buy into the dream but then again, I’m not as smart as John Holdren.
Or as corrupt, i daresay.
#156 Eggplant
The problem works both ways. people who major in the “hard sciences” usually don’t take anything in college regarding the “social sciences” except for the minimum required, which is usually at the undergraduate level. And at that level you get what? Neo-marxist junk. And people who major in things like journalism or sociology don’t usually take any courses in the “hard sciences” like physics except for the rinky-dink “psychics for dummies majoring in humanities” that are required.
But the plain fact is that those who are at the helm of society need to have a knowledge of both, and very few people do. The notion that we can obtain all the energy we need by putting solar cells on our roofs is one dimension of the ignorance; the idea that all the ills of society are merely engineering problems that can be solved by passing laws is the other.
Ignorance may be bliss–but if you are a ruler your ignorance is probably hell for the poor bastards you rule.
ledger @ 84
That clip remindes me of the clip that can’t be shown on TV anymore – 9/11
Fred3 @ 162: But of course, “open source science” is the only science there has ever been. That’s why this AGW stuff is crap from top to bottom. Really, all these CRU emails have done is brought an awful situation, already known in the climate field, to the general attention of other scientists who up to now have ignored the issue and/or trusted that the science being done was at least average. Well, turns out it was not.
I’m afraid I don’t really buy this chasm between science and engineering. For the most part, a good practitioner of either should be at least a tolerable practitioner of the other, where the domain in question is a scientific project that depends on even moderately complex software.
What I *can* buy is a long-standing practice in academia to get by with minimal engineering experience – pay a grad student or postdoc peanuts, to hack around stuff. I’ve been in a couple of situations where someone in a commercial company gets an idea to go mine academia for product ideas. Huge gobs of semi-working code are acquired, with the idea of doing just a little cleanup, “productization”, and putting it up for sale. Never works. Always calls for total rewrite. Generations of students pass through these projects, duplicating code, generally poor design combined with bits of genius, insufficient testing, little or no version control, you name it. I suppose I turned out some of that stuff in my own school daze, so long ago.
So, no doubt the conclusion stands, the code is full of hacks and ugly, too, probably inconsistent, unjustifiable, and downright embarassing once revealed. But more by academic tradition than because of some essential lack of engineering skills by scientists.
Eggplant @ 156: Holdren is no brainless moonbat. I wonder why such a bright guy allowed himself to be associated with Obama?
Because Obama does delegate – a lot. Perhaps the only good habit I’ve seen him exhibit, he’s the opposite of a Carter micro-manager. But I suppose if you delegate like mad and nothing gets done, there’s something wrong with your management.
Whether or not Holdren is a brainless moonbat is another matter. If he puts the results before the science, I don’t care if he can do hydrodynamic solutions in his head, he’s a fool. The brilliant ivory tower academic with no appreciation of the results of his brainpower is a cliche because it is so common.
#159,161, Hanoi and Josh,
Much concern over the Falcon, narry an emotion expressed over the loss of millions of humans. If it were your brother or sister, child or wife that had to die to save the birds what would be your response? Are not humans a part of nature? Is it not our right to survive, like all other species, to the best of our ability? In a perfect world we don’t have to make a choice, but that’s not the world in which we live. If I had to sacrifice a bird or a Polar Bear for you, I would do so. Would I be wrong?
Rachael Carson, like the Warmists of today, considered Man a lesser species to be sacrificed to the mosquitos or to the very CO2 which we exhale. I have no qualms about this wonderful planet Earth which I love, but it is here to be the home of humans and without humans, it is useless for me. The enviros are self-hating. They would drive Man from existance. Don’t use energy, don’t use water, don’t eat meat, don’t even breath. Our very existance destroys the planet. Well, so be it. Rather than create hysteria true science should be rational and level. If DDT use was found to cause a certain harm, while we knew it was doing much good, why not find a way to reduce or eliminate the harm without abandoning the good? Why not, as we have done with automobiles, reduce the emissions while preserving our energy sources until finding better alternatives? I want clean air and clean water and a warm house in the winter and a cool house in the summer as well. Must we always throw the baby out with the bathwater?
way OT, bt have a look at this:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KL01Ad01.html
Obama is just breaking his back selling out American power.
back on topic:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense
read this and read the comments. Complete isanity. SA is now not really about science t all.
The article itself, engages in the slandering of ppnents, not science.
Amazing.
162 Fred3,
Shannon writes well what I am suggesting when I say in comment #130:
My guess is a lot of that work was done by amateur programmers (budding climatologists) and therefore sloppily handled — but that does not let them off the hook.
If one reads the CRU Hack document entitled HARRY_READ_ME.txt there is a number of things that strike. First, is the the title of that file — when I am at a client’s site the title of my modules, variables, etc is professional and per their standards. HARRY_READ_ME.txt is not anywhere near that. Yeah, it is just a name but names are important.
Reading the Toronto Sun article & the file I note above makes it appear that the code is poorly documented, that the provenance of the data is questionable, that data integrity constraints are are ignored & run over, and the code in a lot of ways is very brittle.
Shannon’s article is good and maybe the various professional scientific organizations should develop and publish data-processing guidelines. Such as a “scientific SOX”.
Josh: Obama does not delegate. He is a front man–a lot.
Delegation does not mean anarchy, a power vacuum or and abdication of power or responsibility. In politics, governmental or corporate, it means leaving the working out implementation details of “policy” or strategic goals, then reviewing them and then executing. This is not really what Obama is engaged in at all.
If Holdern sidse with someone like OBAMA because he feels he can have more power due to what you term “delegation”, then he indulges in profound moral turpitude, which is a form of moral idiocy.
Then the question becomes not, “why is he there”, but “why is such a smart guy so immoral”.
I, for one, would say that the answer to that one is that he is not really all that smart, he is merely clever, and with a certain facility in a technical specialty.
well, i guess we ought to be jumping for joy that the Obatanic is hitting all these icebergs. But somehow i feel like we keep winning the duck. Like that duck hunter who shoots and drops a duck into a farmer’s field, and the farmer claims it. They both want the duck, and start having words. Farmer suggests they settle it with an old local tradition: “I kick you as hard as I can in the crotch, then you do the same to me,” he says, “…and whoever screams the least gets the bird.”
The city guy can’t back down so he agrees, and the farmer backs up a few yards, comes in at a run, and lets loose a terrific kick to the duck hunter’s crotch. The guy collapses to the ground and rolls around in gasping in agony for about twenty minutes. Then he staggers to his feet and whispers, “okay, now it’s MY turn.”
“Nah,” says the farmer, turning away. “You can keep the duck.”
cdor @ 169: The problem posed by DDT was the collapse of the entire ecosystem, including us.
And it did not seem an insurmountable problem to do without as it was only one of dozens of insecticides – a good and cheap one, to be sure.
Maybe a complete ban was unnecessary, but – and here comes another of my favorite cliches – public policy tends to be a blunt instrument.
DDT is probably not the real solution to malaria, much wider and compound efforts, more biotech, will probably be needed. Have to say, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing some good work on these kinds of diseases. Maybe reintroducing DDT for limited indoor use will be part of a larger project.
Gimme a break, Cdor #169! First off, I don’t think Rachel Carson was into seriously culling humanity, like Holdren et. al have been so accused, and if recollect her books, they described the mindless ecological losses as –in-part– a crime against humanity, as in future children who would never again hear birdsongs (that’s what she meant by “Silent Spring”).
Second, if you re-read my posting, the issue never was weighing a few pretty birds against the millions of dead Africans that nobody imagined would be the downside forty years later. By the mid-1960s, DDT was showing up in human breast milk at alarmingly high levels, and globally so; yet while DDT and similar halocarbons tended not to be acutely toxic to mammals in the near term, the long term physiological and epidemiological risks were already manifesting in avian population crashes, and the risk of continuing such profligate application of so persistent a chemical was unsupportable. That is to say, the ban was utterly rational.
FWIW, I’m an enviro sciences Ph. D., and I’m not self-hating. Far as I can tell.
HPH/176; –but the thing is, there weren’t suddenly millions of preventable malarial child deaths –the numbers just accumulate year by years. the frustration –and some of it falls on the polemic and authoress –is that nobody on the ‘ban’ side seems to notice or much give a damn. Just like with Ehrlich’s book and the Club of Rome’s dire, panic-inducing predictions. When they don’t come true, the jeremaids just go down the mem hole and the perps do barney frank “I didn’t do ANYTHING wrong, you HEAR me?”
i think Prince Charles has a hot one out, doom by December or something –we’ll get to see another long spiral launched downfield and straight down the memory hole –after which, the catastrophe prediction, and the expert predictor, and the immediate climate doom (that BTW for all Charles –or any other soothsayer in this travesty –knows, might be causing thousands of panic suicides), all just go back to normal just as if they’d never tried to cudgel us loose from our goods at all, just as if they hadn’t even dreamed of coming together to make yet another quick smash & grab.
Maybe I am missing something. Has DDT been re-introduced as a life saving destroyer of malaria? Have millions died in the interrum? FWIW (whatever that means), I am just a dumb small business dude…so we can get our credentials straight.
Perhaps we can agree that controlled usage might have been a more humane response, not an hysterical ban.
cdor @ 178: yes to both. millions have died of malaria in the interim, and likely enough many would have been saved by DDT use – if it didn’t at the same time kill so many birds, that bugs went wild anyway, ate all the plants, and starved humankind to death. and yes, it is now suggested and likely to be tried shortly that use of DDT only inside huts and homes in Africa would kill enough mosquitos and leak back into the environment slowly enough that many lives will be saved and the ecology will not be harmed.
For credentials in hard science I have none, and did not realize until recently that my layman’s knowledge of science was vanishingly rare in the larger electorate. OTOH if you need some database work done, or other software development projects, or if you want to talk philosophy of mind along the lines of Fodor and Dennett, and associated philosophy of science, give me call!
—millions of dead Africans that nobody imagined would be the downside forty years later.—
Sorry, you are mistaken. The same kind of megalomaniacs and leftists did think out the “downside”, but for them it was an upside.
Around the time of the DDT ban, Dr. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, may have revealed how some environmentalists really feel about human beings when he was asked if people might die as a result of the DDT ban: “Probably…so what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2RkZGYwNTc0ZGU5NTkxOTdlNmM3Nzc3MzMyMTE1NjA=
AND THEY STILL IGNORE THE DEATHS…
DDT has come under fire from large corporations and environmentalists. But it is saving lives in Southern Africa.
Uganda’s High Court recently ordered the health ministry to stop spraying the insecticide DDT in the northern part of the country. …… Given more than 300 Ugandan children die each day from malaria, delaying the indoor spraying of DDT will surely cost lives.
http://american.com/archive/2008/june-06-08/an-invaluable-insecticide
I’m an enviro sciences Ph. D., and I’m not self-hating. Far as I can tell.
Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up.
“…future children who would never again hear birdsongs…” – Hanoi (!) Paris Hilton
Yeah, like that beautiful osprey warbling. And, BTW, for an “enviro sciences Ph.D.”, you sure don’t know much about DDT:
http://junkscience.com/ddtfaq.html
Yo, Cdor… For what it’s worth (“FWIW”), I’m also a small business dude, probably about the same level of “dumb as you. I’m not trying to diss you with credentials, I’m just reacting to your bit about self-hating enviros. Some are, some aren’t.
Again, if you slow down and read my posts, banning DDT wasn’t “hysterical” in the slightest: the science was solid, the physiological mechanisms in bird reproduction were becoming understood, the bio-accumulation and pervasiveness of DDT residues were by then undeniable, and the downside of existing unchecked pesticide usage was crystal clear. What you’re bitching about is that the downside of the recommended banning wasn’t so obvious, since it didn’t manifest for another generation or more.
The legitimate hesitation that non-self-hating, non-racist enviro scientists have with DDT going back into production as an antimalarial agent is that because it’s so easy and cheap to manufacture –and so long-lasting when applied to agricultural crops– there may be a large risk of it coming out from under control and its re-emergence as an intolerable global pollutant.
Honestly, you cannot make this stuff up.
Mongoose–you can make anything up. If you don’t know this then nothing is known. Gullibility accounts for most of the dynamics of human history.
c@169: considered Man a lesser species to be sacrificed
Exactly. The radical endgame of Deep Ecologists – or whatever name they are using today. Again, I am surprised at the lack of traction, but am guessing that Islamic issues moved to the front of the line. (I will also go so far as to say that cooler heads – maybe a few are still out there – decided that the AGW farce had run its course and money/focus were immediately required elsewhere; hence some conveniently timed cracks in the “Book”.)
Socialism diminishes the individual just as Deep Ecology reduces humanity to a player within a flattened existential pyramid. Self flagellation, in ‘sacrifice’ to some greater good, or Bible, is a striking commonality – talking One’s Book, as they say.
And yet, at some point, a greater good is exactly what will be required – eventually. 2008 was a tribute to unfettered self-interest. Talking one’s Book.
I recall about 10 years ago reading a remarkable rebuttal to the (then) very popular search for existential eco-based models to replace the human-centric industrial-resource model. Unfortunately, several computers later, I can no longer locate the article. But I remember the subtly of argument and the lyrical prose used by the author (Univ of CO Math Prof) to gently chide the ecologists for their (apparent) embarrassment at possessing the intellectual riches to enable mastery over their environment. Sometimes the Book is Good.
The only reason to destroy the data is because, (in the immortal words of Evan Thomas):
“the narrative was right but the facts were wrong”.
When these guys start turning on each other, in a bid for self preservation, is when the fur will really fly.
Now, now tcobb, you perfectly well what that expression means. stop putting words in my mouth and lay off this business of telling me how the world works, thank you very much.
BTW< t is human probity, courage, faith, intelligence and creativity that accounts for most of the "dynamics" of human history, at least all those worth noting.
For those interested in the swine flu, a series of videos from a Benedictine nun who is also a doctor of public health.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ySNSQTR-Q&feature=related
In Spanish with subtitles.
HT to The Anchoress.
D’oh! @ 182: an interesting compilation but one-sided. are you going to pretend there was no science at all supporting the alleged problems with DDT? the junkscience lists alleges mistaken DDT readings, but doesn’t list any actual occurrences of these mistaken readings. my recollection circa 1970 was reduced pelican populations in Los Angeles. were these chance, caused by other factors that vanished just as DDT was banned?
Interesting, but without presenting both sides, I cannot find it convincing. It would be nice for the future, if it were correct.
We should all be aware of who wants to pick the winners and losers.
Civilization as we know it is confronted with serious issues. It just so happens some think they can determine the outcome. These are not ignorant people, and carbon is a vehicle to the solution in their eyes. The problem is that they equate survival as a species with a socialist (we all know where that ends) state.
relentless growth is unsustainable.
Climate change propanganda is the vehicle to get there, since stating the obvious issues would generate even more populist resistance.
The myth that technology can solve everything is patently false.
this will end badly.
Bear, I’ve been battling with this concept a very long time. Few are willing to state it as you have.
There is redundancy in your assertion “The myth that technology can solve everything is patently false.” It sounds like you want to believe your line so much that you had to call technological solutions both a myth and patently false.
Dare you battle with me over it? I may agree with the idea you are attempting to formulate somewhat, but I will always battle with those who aim to play god and with those who are willing to let them (though most are too cowardly to admit it). Cedarford (C4 he was dubbed (by who?)) was one who partially admitted letting them, but he also was one of BC’s original trolls.
In case anyone has missed this one, Iowahawk on The Secret Life of Climate Researchers:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/
191. good point. I think that there is a (not necessarily) 100% Malthusian solution, but I don’t trust those that think they have it. I’ve always been a champion of the little folk
Drink and football has slurred my wording somewhat
Pascal, I do believe in technological solutions, I just don’t think we can absorb (socially) the rapid rate of change of technology.
I know the game and how it’s advanced, hence some of my disillusionment.
190. Bear:
The myth that technology can solve everything is patently false.
…….
This could double as a double negative.
But even taken as presumably intended — it is both misleading and misleading. ie it is more correct to say that all technological solutions (in the grand scheme of things) at best are temporary.
Charles. point well taken. My intention was to say that we seem to me overly enamored with technology. Having implicit faith in technology is misguided since it’s really about application of same.
To 193:
First of all, even Malthus backed away from the concept of what is called a Malthusian solution such as associated with czar Holdren and others like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe. The Sinister Wing (radical left) has proven to be and remains ruthless.
As I haven’t seen you before, I don’t know where you are coming from well. Maybe others here will recount their previous impression of your prior inclinations.
Anyway, you are trying to convey the impression that it is the Sinister Wing whom you do not trust. That would be wise given their history of 100 million murders. (I believe the Neo-Malthusians refer to it as “the pilot program.”) Thus “a champion of the little folk” would be wise to keep your distrust.
194: As an engineer, even I don’t fully back technology alone. Human ingenuity and desire to survive at the individual level is even more important. Ingenuity is clearly the source of technology, but also it knows when it is not wise to go too far. I have personally held back advances because I didn’t trust my clients. Why? Obligation to a Higher authority.
The people who perverted science and co-opted scientists (some all too willingly) to back their goals are the anti-progressive “Progressives” with the end of history “Postmodernist” thrust that is embodied in this AGW scam and inventing the idea of carbon-footprinting as the decisive factor of who may live and who must die.
In Genesis 22, God asked Abe to bring Isaac up as an offering. In a world dominated by human sacrificial pagan religions like Moloch worship, this was quite common. What was uncommon was that the God of Abe said “NO — this is NOT what I want.” It was as Abe had told Isaac, “God will provide his own Lamb.”
In a world where we are constantly told to worry of shortages, the idea of a God we cannot see providing for us sounds illogical at best. Utterly mad even. But it is God-given in human nature to also have that ingenuity of which I am personally familiar. IT IS NOT JUST ABOUT TECHNOLOGY Bear.
Anyway, this fear of sustainability, THIS is the primary reason, IMHO, for the undermining of Judeo-Christianity. Hitler at least had the nerve to call it “that Jewish disease.” Today’s misanthropic megalomaniacs are getting pretty close to saying the same thing, but they don’t need to as long as they have Dawsons and Hitchenses to make the case for them, and the ACLU to threaten every Christian in the US if they so much as bow their head in silence. And courts and politicians who let them get away with it.
And even Judeo-Christian “religious leaders” who think that the world could become overpopulated if they don’t help the “clear thinkers” convince the people that it’s okay to let them “cull the herd” as it were.
Jesus said to Peter “get thee behind me Satan.” I would say a great many of today’s religious leaders do not recognize themselves as Peter in this instance, in particular, do they?
It is also in my ingenuity to fight these haters of my fellow humans. That is the way that these people rub wrong with me — and if God indeed exists, I am absolutely sure it is wrong with Him.
Bogie Wheel @ 47
Tremendous post. A Classic. Thanks
Hoi polloi won’t pay any attention to this. This debate is too rarefied for the great unwashed (the ones Jay Leno featured on his walkabouts, who can’t count past ten with their shoes on).
I predict, with regret and anger, that the Juggernaut will continue to roll, crushing even its devotees.
This is what the Left have learned. If they IGNORE everything, they can “disappear” it. At least as far as public knowledge is concerned. The Leftists count on “journalists’” complicity, which is nearly unanimous, and the bird-witted John Q. Public’s miserably short attention span. And the silo effect: almost no one of a leftist bent will ever look into the Belmont Club et cie.
Think of the Communists’ numerous, brazen erasures of history, photos, names; this is nothing to them. Nothing.
Copenhagen will end up loading more chains around our necks. Why? far too many vested interests will, I’m afraid, insist.
#50, Josh: Thanks for finally explaining that joke to me — I never got it!
(too stoned, probably….;-))
Bear
As this thread may close shortly, I’ve posted our interchange at Ingenuity by Common Humans: Discounted by Our Demigods.
I know it doesn’t help anything to say… “cause the Bible says so”… but still I can’t help but think about passages such as Genesis 8:22 -
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
- and reflect on how, if the vast masses of Westerners still possessed any reverence for their own religious heritage, we’d not be facing anything like this stupendous AGW hoax with its punishing prescriptions, and people like Holdren and Mann et al wouldn’t be let anywhere near positions of influence over global policy.
My guess is that Beverly @200 is right; the juggernaut will continue to roll on. We’ve long since traded the truth for a lie. A really really really bad trade. But I guess in the days ahead we’ll see. We’ll see just how much of a difference the email hacking makes.
I wonder if a time line of the technological applications of DDT would bear out the idea that notion of that violent data dance so aptly described by Iowa Hawk. Methinks the social scientific ramifications of the behavior may be a source of much grant guano, on eagle dung day (iirc this was the description) in and of it self.
agw is descriptive. copenhagen-like climate control summits are prescriptive. Was that not the difference described, between Marxism and other variants of Stalin-ism, Mao-ism, Trotski-ism, and Corporat-ism, described inside this very club’s walls not a year ago?
Seems so.
Wadeusaf
Karen Yvonne,
They may try, the Hopenhageners, to disregard the revelation and continue on the course. But the main pillar may be too wobbly and the law of unintended consequences applies in a large dose, and they see that.
AGW was an ideal vehicle. Something so nebulous, unfalsifiable and specialized that it could be guarded by a handful of chosen priests. Just because priests got cocky does not mean all the 20 years of relentless work came to naught.
It is too dangerous to keep on the message with the damaged core of it. India and China want to be present, just to make sure no one is trying to impose something on them that would disadvantage them. Or, to put it bluntly, they would not like to be left on the recipient side of the con job.
The meme has to be reforged. The AGW would be recasted as ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change). A new timeline will be set. The current priests would be released with a golden parachute for appreciation of their services and a new priesthood would take their place. A new, deemed unfalsifiable, aspect of the ACC would be discovered shortly and presented to faithful in an encapsulated form to spread far and wide. It has to be spread fast, so the skeptics don’t have a chance to address it in a meaningful form. All the original fears would be reconfirmed and a modified carbon tax rescue package would be presented to the confused public. $60 billion asked by the Hopenhagen hosts — that the participants as well may shell out — may buy a lot of indulgency (indulgent currency).
OK, I know, I am a bit cynical. But my life experience taught me to expect the worst and prepare for it and hope for the best.
Maybe the AGW is doomed. Maybe it would be painfully apparent to the AGW pushers that the damage is too great to be able to rescue the whole concept. But with billions at stake (that would be lining their pockets in a short order if this unfortunate f#ckup did not take place), they will not go into the cold without a fight.
PS-Yea, Iowahawk rulez!
Wadeusaf,
Descriptive/prescriptive…
Sort of, but in a highly transformational form. If Them hit the population with an idea of socialism in more or less a direct form, there would be only a small segment of populace making purring noises. Therefore both descriptive and prescriptive elements of the stratagem must be as disguisive and metamorphed as possible, to anesthetize a majority that may otherwise see through it.
The AGW is, from They POV, so perfect. Not only it does provide a vehicle for a redistribution of resources into hands of the Carbonari elite, to establish that perfect state that would make people better, but also covers a potentially plausible failure scenario (“we were too late to implement our solution because of deniers sabotage and 5.5 billion people died”).
The stakes are higher than most of people would even remotely consider.
re survival via ‘patently false technology’ — please regard two entities of like size and geography, California and Japan.
Japan, 70% sparsely populated mountainous volcanic, has a population of almost 130 million people whose socioculti stats (longevity, fecundity, education, crime, divorce, drugs, et cetera and so forth) as well as anecdotal evidence and wide long firsthand observation of the world eyes, and leaving off the noise of the transitory, temporary, and secondary (Yen policy, gov’t debt/equity, “low” economic growth, Elvis haircuts, et cetera), whatcha got could be called, in comparative and relative terms, a “successful human experiment”. Just concede the implications of cities clean & safe and streets open 24 hrs/day –for young & hold, halt, lame, no matter. Also, i know from experience, Japanese are cheerful and happy folk, by and large.
California has not 128 million people, but 36 million people. i think i’ll just stop right there and let readers fill in the blanks (pls remember, we are talking about economic sustainability, not whether or not the ‘melting pot’ idea has been ”progressed” to ‘melting the pot’).
***
Twoby, might add too that no matter what the weather is, if you the Hopenhager can point to anything at all you have coerced the great unwashed into, then you have a Triumphal March to play on the Mighty Wurlitzer.
Conversely, if the great unwashed refuse to budge, and then the weather doesn’t fall apart, then you have some ‘splainin’ to do –see “algore flop sweat”.
Copenhagen offered (before the CRU meltdown) the potential for imposing international legal constraints that would encroach upon nation-state sovereignty. (I believe it was Habu that posted the Lord Monckton video link describing the wording of the treaty.) An international legal foundation for the green platform is what the participants hoped to achieve.
Second best would be money, which needs perspective – one years bonus for Goldman Sachs. The 2008 “bank robbery” on the other hand scales up to $14 trillion and counting. (What does Credit Suisse know that we don’t for 2011?) Without the desired legal mandates, Copenhagen is peanuts. A blip on the radar screen. A suspense-less denouement. Gloria Swanson without a sunset. A diversionary game of post-modern rollerball to keep the audience aroused and kicking while the adults make book in the back room.
Geeze Louise/207
What does Credit Suisse know that we don’t for 2011?
You’ve noticed, eh? Maybe it is not a prediction. Rather a notice, a reminder to very special people to mark their calendars.
I don’t see AGW as a diversion vis-a-vis book making. They are an aspect of one whole. What good it would do to one to sit on bags of money? That is a caricature of evil capitalist I remember from my child years seeing rather often. But even then it struck me as preposterous. The bags of money is nothing but a tool.
The power is what is so exciting. You eventually don’t need a lot of money to exercise the power, you just have to make sure that no one else but you has money and you can then distribute pitances to your subjects to do your biding.
Whether it is AGW or something else if that fails, it is only a smokescreen in the sense that its purpose is to create a world without sin. The architects of that world know what the sin is–the preposterous idea of individual liberty for anyone but them, the enlightened ones.
“Sustainability” is about the least progressive (or most reactionary) idol i can imagine –the future can’t be known, only guessed at, so to create in the present a future sustainability –can only be to attempt to sustain the present into the future. And of course that means –taken to its own logical end — to stop growth in all forms everywhere, including the growth of the body (maybe even the volume) of history.
Naturally, of the two states of being, that is the quick and the dead, the one is a terrible threat to those who worship themselves as they are now and wish to ever be, while the other, the dead (unborn or no) not only offer no threat but in their stability of needlessness actually objectively metaphorically transform the idolatry into a competing Mosaic Law of immutable stone-chisled verity beyond question, and oblivious to any call for ‘peer-review’ as –what peer can there be? Are the Ten Commandments peer-reviewed? No? So, why not –”what made them proof against question?”
And you answer, “This –that they move mankind ever into the future clean enough, strong enough, free enough to survive.”
And they answer, “precisely –they accept the rigor and pain of time and change. But you don’t have to be burdened with all that –just die now –you’re going to anyway, and why be so inefficient and wasteful as to dawdle?”
And you have nothing to answer with except that old ancient belief that we are here to worship, witness, learn, improve, and to speak for ourselves.
Which (since the dead are agreed by all to be for better or worse inarguably very quiet) means that those who speak for them and against the living, since they cannot know the dead, are really speaking for themselves.
–which raises the question, without a god they will call by name, what IS energizing and motivating them?
“Sustainability”
Buddy, the word always gave me uncontrollable goosebumps.
“But is it -ity, not -ism!”, I hear the objection.
Maybe They decided -ity sells better than -ism. In any case, this -ity, if no one is to misbehave and stop They, would make seem -isms like heavens on earth.
without a god they will call by name
Oh, but They do have a god that They call by name. They are Gods to Themselves, swapping conscience for their vanity.
twoby, well, “conscience” is, you know, a very complicated thing (translation: “I’m not sure anybody but myself can really understand it”).
***
“”We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole… This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”
Prof. Ernst Lehmann, 1934
***
“progressive thought” is the search for the ‘third way’ (to use the phrase made famous by President “Triangulatin’ Bill” Clinton). so, when you kill someone to keep them from dying (see Prof Lehmann’s party) you become the ‘third way’, the god of your making –and thus to
escape from the dawn-of-time dichotomy of being either a humble pilgrim of a fallen angel or the eater/eatee around the cannibal cookpot.
Step right up, folks, and see Lumos the Czech Physicist tell the little-known but fascinating story, “How Green Was Our Nazi?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Holdren, but did you see ‘Instapundit” this morning?”
>>”No, I’ve been busy updating my suggestions in Ehrlich’s Population Bomb book –why? What does it say?”
“well it’s write here, just look down.”
/
SOMETHING IN THE WATER is feminizing male fish. Pee from birth-control-pill takers? Or something else?
Posted at 9:31 am by Glenn Reynolds
160. buddy larsen:
–it’s just so strange that now here we are [...] longer lives, better food, cleaner cities, less disease –why would a doomer want to kill off a share of the human race [...] on the grounds that the history of mankind developing [...] the basic necessities of life is going to suddenly slam on the brakes?
I’ve been smirking lately, as I’ve had the sneaking suspicion all along that the Obama/Biden ticket is the Left’s last-ditch, desperate attempt to forge their post-democratic “controlling authority” on the global scale, before the global demos pulls them back.
The con is often the first to know that his jig is up.
The writing has been on the wall since the first OPEC oil embargo. And the cobwebs have only thickened in the ensuing 3-decades:
1. Environmental regulations, scarcity of fuels and coercive labor unions continue to strangle the Northern city-states like Chicago and Detroit that rely on manufacturing and transportation for their revenues.
2. The race-grievance industry’s fractious tactics have been gradually losing their edge. The US’ generosity to Africa since Reagan and the rise of the Black American middle class were gradually pinching the racket’s options…and the left’s framing of Islamic terrorism in the American racialist lexicon after 9/11 didn’t help much either. From Tawana Brawley to A.A., from “hate” speech to America’s “first black President” (a.k.a. Bill Clinton), from the UN’s latest “Conference on Racism” to Barack Obama’s pastor’s “God Damn America” – I think that as early as John Kerry’s electoral rebuke (remember Kerry’s ad that implied George Bush dragged a black man behind his pick-up truck) it has been clear that the nation was tiring of the Left’s cheap race-baiting.
3. The American Democrat(ic) Party has long suffered from an identity crisis. At least three competing personalities pull this “party” in three different directions: its urban cronies force it to subsidize a corrupt, urban, “bike-path” polity; its populists moor the party’s elites to a ‘crude’ working class nationalism that finds its only expression as local unionism; it’s internationalists lead the party inexorably to the UN’s courts where they effectively evade republican checks on their salaries, projects and tenures. It’s always been just a matter of time – the wheels are gonna come off this gypsy’s rickety caravan.
4. The Left has failed to convince the world that its way is best. In 2009, capitalism, treaties forged between partnering nation-states (“Unilateralism” instead of “global,” top-down, UN-ism) and competing constitutional democracies are still the operable models to follow. China’s been watching.
I could list a couple more, but I’ve got to go to work.
(snip from link in #213)
FLATOW: And there has not been any evidence to date that we know of that shows that it’s affecting people who drink the water in the Potomac?
Dr. BLAZER: Not that I’m aware of.
FLATOW: Yeah. And does it mean that these fish then – if they become feminized, does that mean they can’t mate with the other fish and then reproduce anymore?
Dr. BLAZER: Well, no. Actually, many of the male fish that we looked at in the spring did have sperm in the testes as well. What they found in Europe with a similar fish that they’ve been looking at for a number of years is that the intersex fish produce less sperm and that sperm is less motile. And so, you know, less successful at reproduction, but they still can reproduce.
Dr. BLAZER: Let me take a phone call or two. Our number 1-800-989-8255. Let’s go to Joy in Perry, Florida. Hi, Joy, where is Perry?
(end snip)
***
http://www.bing.com/search?q=worldwide+fall+in+sperm+count&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
***
hmmm… random walk, let’s see chart @
recommendation: drink only Bourbon until we can evict the people’s temple from DC.
ugh –okay, that last one did it –i’m gonna run into town & get my head examined
Bear, thanks for responding at the above link. I’ll continue there shortly.
Buddy thanks for the additional thoughts — proving yet again the value of BC.
2×4, why had I no idea we were on the same page?
Yes. Although we had everything we NEEDED in Paradise, the serpent knew then and knows now it may ever appeal to our ego with the words “Who says YOU can’t go there?”
(The suspected mechanics in Tiger Woods’ predicament could serve as a reminder to us all.)
The excitement for the forbidden fruit will eject us Americans from our Paradise should we either fail to keep our Nimrods from the Fruit forbidden by our Constitution or fail to eject our Nimrods first.
LIARS! LIARS! PANTS ON FIRES!
2×4@208: The power is what is so exciting.
Oh I understand that. What angers me is the hypocrisy and the chickensh^t scale relative to the Great Bank Robbery. On the one hand we have the end-of-the-worlder’s in Copenhagen fishing for their legal writs of justification while being bought off for a measly – what’s the current number – $60B?. (But I will say those valadj vectors discovered in the code are a piece of work – just breath-taking, if confirmed.)
On the other hand we have Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs allocating a few hundred million for a fund to help small businesses weather the recession, doing “god’s work” dontcha know while air brushing Goldman’s image after salvaging the bonus pool for those awesome ‘performers’ in the front office.
One side does it “for the children”. The other side does it “for the performers.”
They really do think we are that stupid.
I don’t have an informed opinion on whether the Fed should be forced to open it’s books or not, but just for the pure hubris of recent behavior, I’d open their ledgers and go at it with calipers and magnifying glass.
They really really do think we’re that stupid.
Pascal @ 119
My humility is just fine, thank you, but I really hate it when someone tries to con me and beggar my family and my country.
No argument from me about the pols, but there is no excuse for these academic guys, either… a bunch of PhD’s in various scientific disciplines, they were and are hardly facing starvation a la Jean Valjean.
They should spend the rest of their natural lives defending themselves before investigators, judges, auditors and academic discipline panels, and bankrupt themselves with lawyer fees trying beat all the raps.
And when their natural lives are over they can spend eternity explaining to Lucifer why they don’t belong there.
Humble enuf fer ya?
Hey, any of you climatadweebs out there monitoring this thread:
The offer for coming clean and helping out those who’ve already spilled the beans has a limited duration.
Once you let these Nimrods sign on to Copenhagen, I doubt very much you’ll find anyone who will not back Marty.
PtD@119: our salvation may be found in forgiving a few of the techies and, instead, hounding the pols and moneyed interests who exploited them and forcing them to heel.
I missed that post, but even in the twilight of day – and my years – I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or serious.
If sarcastic, then GoTo the End of This Post.
If serious, I actually have one more comment about this whole sorry mess. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I was originally skeptical (the time frame for doomsday kept shrinking), but with the publication of Lomborg’s book, I thought the community of climatologists would clean up their work and begin the development of more credible science. That may or may not happened – to a degree which we will never know until much later. But what DID happen was (1) the continued pursuit of punitively expensive international legal controls designed to encroach on state sovereignty and (2) CRU, which clearly demonstrated the persistence of the bad work dating subsequent to Lomborg’s slap on the knuckles.
And that’s just dealing with the global warming/cooling/change part – not even addressing causation. The former is a definite maybe (just have to decide on the direction of the trend line). The latter is totally specious. If they have a convincing case to make for causation, they need to make it.
So nope, the climatological community has some serious mea culpas to deliver. But they won’t because they’re little stinkers, like most academia-based researchers.
Buddy, Of The quick, and the dead,
The quick being the living tissue of the nail bed. The dead being the nail.
Thus, putting a nail in this coffin is redundant exercise. And, while pulling a nail just plain painful, would growing a nail be a cure or just a malicious use of dead matter? If you can still grow a nail is the matter really dead?
Quick Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa!
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,
beatæ Mariæ semper Virgini,
beato Michæli Archangelo,
beato Ioanni Baptistæ,
sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo,
omnibus Sanctis, et vobis, fratres (et tibi pater),
quia peccavi
nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere:
mea culpa,
mea culpa,
mea maxima culpa.
Ideo precor beatam Mariam
semper Virginem,
beatum Michælem Archangelum,
beatum Ioannem Baptistam,
sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,
omnes Sanctos, et vos, fratres (et te, pater),
orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum.
Amen.
and all is forgiven right?
No harm, no foul weather friendship?
Which Story is Sinister Media Pursuing? relentlessly.