Robert Gibbs – 1991 North Carolina State BA in poli sci (that’s it for the education indicated on his Wikipedia entry) – is the latest political operative to be seriously questioned on the metastasizing Climategate scandal. Of course, the man happens to be White House Press Secretary, so his response should be of some moment. But Gibbs’ first instinct was to hide behind Director of White House Environment and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner – herself an English major – who has insisted AGW is settled science because thousands of scientists said so – an inane argument in itself. When a reporter noted that thousands of scientists disagreed, Gibbs basically stamped his foot and insisted “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this,” – as if this man would know in a million years.

At least during the Middle Ages the public discourse on scientific/religious disputes was held by intelligent people (or mostly). This was ridiculous, as you can see for yourself in the video below. In a way I pity poor Gibbs, because if ever a man was over his head, he is here. He probably believes AGW settled science, but who knows? Who knows what anyone believes these days? So much money and time has been invested. And we all know how unwilling most people are to back down anyway, except for, evidently, Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren who warned in 1971 that a new “Ice Age” was coming. “Ice Age” then, “Hot Spell” now. As John Belushi used to say, “Do the Locomotion.” Meanwhile, on this video, Gibbs seems more like a deer in the proverbial headlights explaining what the administration hopes to achieve in Copenhagen. Maybe he should have spent the time “Doing the Locomotion.” Now there’s a thought. (Hey, he could be the next Belushi.)

UPDATE: The Washington Times has the startling news that Gore has decided not to attend the Copenhagen conference. (Sother surprises in second half of article>)

And speaking of the Locomotion, just for the memories….

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Rajendra K. Pachauri – chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – sounded as if he was auditioning for Saturday Night Live when he said Sunday:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

Say what? Okay, Rajendra, it is so, if you think so, as the great Pirandello once said. Or “Right You Are, If You Think You Are,” as the play is alternatively translated. No matter that we know that the original climate data has all been deep-sixed. Keep thinking what you’re thinking. Or saying what you’re saying. Or something.

Actually, I’m beginning to have some sympathy for these UN scientists, creepy as they may be. They are certainly having the rug pulled out from them at the worst possible moment. Now anything could happen. Little did poor Rajendra know that his quote would end up on the top of Drudge and make him look, without parody or comment, like a self-serving bureaucratic hustler. At least that’s not as bad as the UN’s previous scandal – Oil-for-Food Programme – when several indictments were forthcoming.

Here’s a thought. From now on, when there’s something to research of true scientific importance, let’s keep it as far away from the UN as possible. We might also want to put all findings on the Internet, so the real United Nations of Human Beings can evaluate them. Oh, I forgot. Pachauri tells us their process was “very transparent.” Note the “very” – the true sign of a liar. When something is transparent, it doesn’t need qualification. It is – or it isn’t.

For more, go here.

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In a supposedly surprising development, the Swiss just voted to ban minarets on mosques in their country:

Over 57% of Swiss voters chose to approve a blanket ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, according to official results posted by Swiss news agency ATS.

Just days before the election only 37% of people polled by state-owned television station DRS said they would support the ban.

Swiss feminists were apparently in the lead in the “Stop the Minarets” campaign. No surprise there really. Salman Rushdie is not the only one to read Islamic texts (and behavior) as an assault on women. Anyone with eyes open, certainly an intelligent female, would. If only our own feminists could get off their reactionary multi-culturalist behinds in this regard.

But what may be more interesting is what this vote may reveal about what is truly inside the heart of the average European after decades of Islamization. The elites, of course, are alarmed. From the Sky report:

The Swiss government had urged people to vote against the ban, arguing it will cause “incomprehension overseas and harm Switzerland’s image”.

Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz made a video broadcast to the nation, which said: “Muslims should be able to practise their religion and have access to minarets in Switzerland too. But the call of the muezzin will not sound here.”

The right-wing proposal has stirred fears of violent reactions in Muslim countries and an economically disastrous boycott by wealthy Muslims who bank, shop and spend holidays in Switzerland.

Of course this is called a “right-wing proposal.” That must be news to those feminists. And, of course, there is no mention that throughout much of the Islamic world – forget minarets or spires – churches and synagogues are banned altogether (not to mention apostates have their throats slit).

On a personal note I remember Hans-Rudolf Merz well from my recent trip to Geneva for the Durban II Conference where I watched as the Swiss President welcomed the Holocaust-denying-nuclear-bomb-buliding-mega-misogynistic-homosexual-denying-and-now-demonstrator-murdering-religious-psychopath President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Call it ultra-bourgoies multi-culturalism or simply protecting banking interests, the whole thing was despicable. It’s great to see the Swiss people turn their backs on all that.

And speaking of multi-culturalism, before the MC Bourgeoisie deluges us with their fuddy-duddy complaints that Judaism and Christianity have also had their bouts of misogyny and homophobia, let me answer with a “yeah, well, we all know that.” But those two religions long ago began to reform themselves in those areas in many of their branches and we all know that too. Don’t believe me (or still want to lie about it for multi-culti purposes), next time you want to have a gay pride parade, want to hold it in Tel Aviv or Cairo? Or how about Riyadh?

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Things are “starting to unravel at the AGW seams,” because, apparently, the “dog ate the homework” – more specifically the temperature data on which the whole global warming “can of worms” depends. Yes, three clichés in one sentence, yet somehow apropos for this unraveling fiasco that every day becomes more eye-rolling. Today’s unraveling – intentionally saved, I am assuming, for the weekend – comes from the Timesonline:

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.

Not to worry. Carol Browner – Obama’s climate czar – assures us that global warming science is “settled.” And Carol should know. She has a B. A. in English from the University of Florida, not to mention a law degree from the same institution. (Pop quiz, Carol. What’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics? How about Einstein’s Unified Field Theory? Oh, never mind.)

Of course, there are people with somewhat more scientific background than Carol who – to be fair to her she was a legislative assistant to Al Gore when he was a Senator and helped prepare amendments to the Clean Air Act (something I support) – are considerably more concerned about the explosion of the East Anglia CRU documents on the Internet. One of those is Judith Curry at Georgia Tech who is worried about the ramifications of “Climategate” for her profession. But perhaps more apposite at this moment is Professor Mike Hulme of the very U. of East Anglia who has gone so far as to say this means the IPCC itself may have outworn its usefulness:

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 (fifth report) but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

It was that UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as most of us recall, that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. And they are the ones with the “structural tendency to politicize climate change”. From a scientist to his colleagues, that’s a powerful indictment. So it should be no surprise that Hulme also has some rather cynical things to say about the coming Copenhagen climate conference:

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

Indeed they will. And indeed it isn’t. No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation

But in an era when we no longer think the world is flat, it’s time to have open, transparent science. It’s an absolute necessity if we are to have any confidence at all in the results – and in how we are spending the gigantic sums our leaders seem to demand of us.

Toward that end, I have a simple recommendation. Postpone the UN Climate Change Conference, scheduled to begin in Copenhagen on December 7. Give it another year or two for people to examine the science in the open. Otherwise, this will be seen as one of history’s great boondoggles.

I realize this is a difficult request, to put it mildly, with 192 countries set to descend on the Danish capital. But Copenhagen has many attractions other than pompous talk. The time would be better spent drinking aquavit in Tivoli Gardens than it would spending a fair portion of the world’s wealth on anthropogenic global warming that could be either an illusion or a very minor contributing factor to a far more complex problem. Let’s postpone.

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Jerry Brown is supposedly a smart guy (for a politician) but… maybe it’s the dope we all used to smoke at his Laurel Canyon pad back in the day… but he seems to have forgotten that hoariest of warnings about killing the messenger who brings the bad news. In an eye-rolling KABC radio interview quoted (and played) on Big Government today (via Glenn), the California attorney general spent far more time speculating on who hired the private detective that found 20,000 ACORN documents in a dumpster than why ACORN would be trashing those documents in the dark of night.

This all does not augur well for Jerry’s attempt to reclaim the Cal governorship. You don’t have to read anything as august as Sophocles’ Antigone (the source of that warning), just good old Raymond Chandler, to know that in California a private dick brings the truth more often than the constabulary. But since Jerry seems to have forgotten his Antigone, I will replay the powerful lines. Woe to you who understandeth not:

Antigone
It is no weakness for the wisest man to learn when he is wrong.

Messenger
For God hates utterly
The bray of bragging tongues.

Magnificent, isn’t it?

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Look, this is not an open invitation – although “Happy Thanksgiving to All!” – but the amusing/frightening thought that some of (all?) my Facebook friends could show up for Thanksgiving occurred to me while reading the report of crashers at the White House state dinner. Talk about pouring more water in the soup – I currently have 2,257 FB friends. That’s not to brag. The likes of Sean Hannity has 15,520. (Lou Dobbs, by comparison, has 932 – not too strong if he really is planning on running for President.)

Still if I did put up a tent and invite all my FB friends (not that I have room for such a tent) how many of them would I recognize and, more importantly, how many of them would actually come? Well, I guess that would depend on what we were serving. I hear the price of Screaming Eagle cabernet has come down in the recession.

But kidding aside, I think we all know 2009 is an uneasy Thanksgiving. Even so, most of us have our family and friends to be thankful for. And the amazing bounty of nature, who or whatever we think is responsible for it. And speaking of that bounty, recent events – a download from some university servers – have reminded us that that bounty is not in as much danger as some would have us believe. That’s good news for Thanksgiving 2009.

Good news for me personally is, yes, all those Facebook friends. I am thankful to all of you. It’s rather amazing to me, because such recognition never came from my novels or screenplays. It is thanks entirely to a group effort – to Pajamas Media and PJTV. I know all of us who work on those closely tied endeavors would like to wish every one of our readers and viewers a Happy Thanksgiving. Let’s have fun in the holiday season and work our heads off for our ideals in the coming year.

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We all know the “t”-word. Our President has used it many times, as did former UN Secretary General Annan. It’s – all together now – transparency. Now the “t”-word is promised us in almost every campaign by politicians (and mega-bureaucrats like Kofi) and never delivered, so we’re used to looking at it with a jaundiced eye from them. But scientists, scientists, they are the big brains, the honest ones, the ones who, unlike cheap pols, work for eternity, like Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein.

Anyway, they were, until Climategate came along. Here from the Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog is a breathtakingly short and simple illustration of the values of Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, from whence all these emails and documents concerning global warming have been lifted.

Phil Jones, Dec 3, 2008:

About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

Phil Jones, Nov 24, 2009 Guardian

We’ve not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.

Oops. Forget the “T”-word. How about the “P”-word (prevarication)? Or the “BFL” word (big fat liar)?

Now look – I want to be clear. I don’t necessarily disagree that anthropogenic global warming is a danger. I’m beginning to doubt it, but I certainly don’t know. What’s clear, however, is these scientists at CRU don’t know (or aren’t so sure) either. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been so guarded, so deceptive, with their data (what remains of it) for so long. They would have been transparent and shared the data with the skeptics if they were so sure they were right. It’s the scientific thing to do, as we all learned in grammar school, if you’re serious about the truth.

But thus far our President and his crew, not to mention our friends at European Union and the UN, are going along as if this download never happened. It’s full steam ahead to Copenhagen:

The United States, under pressure from other nations as one of the world’s largest greenhouse-gas polluters, will present a target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions at next month’s climate conference in Copenhagen, Obama administration officials said Monday.

The development came as the European Union urged the United States and China to deliver greenhouse gas emissions targets at the long-anticipated summit, saying their delays were hindering global efforts to curb climate change.

What’s confusing here is that we all agree – or most of us- that pollution is bad. What we don’t agree on, now more than ever, is the role of AWG, which is increasingly mysterious the more you read these documents. As Charlie Martin shows us, it’s not just the emails, it’s the data itself that is corrupt. We don’t know what we know. But the world is poised to spend untold billions or trillions on that basis.

I happen to favor energy independence, was once a Sierra Club member (okay, I got sick of them) and currently drive a Prius – and still I think this stinks.

(btw, check out the Guardian interview with Jones: “Some of the emails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated. I do regret sending some of them. We’ve not deleted any emails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit – I would categorically deny that.” Hint to Jones: Never use the word “categorically.” It’s a dead giveaway.)

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I wonder what Al Gore – allegedly the world’s first carbon billionaire, not to mention Nobel and Oscar laureate – is thinking during the brouhaha over the release of the East Anglia CRU emails and documents. Probably, not much. No doubt the former veep has dismissed this as a minor distraction led by right-wing lunatics or some such. Fortunately for Gore, he has very little, if any, scientific training himself (unless you count divinity school, from which he nearly flunked out), so he can rely on his minions to reassure him without having to do much investigating himself. Several have already jumped into the fray to explain that “hide the decline” does not mean, well, “hide the decline” (of Gore’s beloved “hockey stick.”)

That’s possible, of course, just as it’s possible that all this shifty by-play between the scientists is completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things and we are on the brink of climate Armageddon. More likely, however, is that we are witnessing the vindication of Stephen McIntyre, the Toronto global warming skeptic who was among the first to question the sainted “hockey stick” and was refused the justifying data. We now see why. The suppression of peer review is perhaps the most repellent aspect of this amazing and still-unfolding story.

As James Delingpole writes in the Telegraph, the public is already skeptical of AGW (or of its supposedly giant impact). But perhaps too much water (or gold) is already under the proverbial bridge:

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

Sad but true. Sadder still is the tarnishing of science’s reputation.

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Years ago there used to be a farce on London’s West End that ran literally for decades – “No Sex, Please. We’re British!” (I think that’s the title – it’s been a while.) Anyway, those days are long gone, as we know, and the latest Oscar-worthy import from Blighty is “An Education,” a fascinating film that is the subject of the latest POLIWOOD. Although Lionel and I both liked the film, we disagreed about what the movie was trying to say. Have a look at our discussion, then see the film. It’s worth the money and time, in this rare instance. Anyway, it’s London, 1961, just before Carnaby Street, the Beatles and Swinging England are about to emerge, when a shifty thirty-two year old man picks up a cute, bound-for-Oxford sixteen-year old….

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I guess many Members of Congress secretly realize the Dean of Harvard Med was correct when he attacked the proposed healthcare legislation as a virtual anti-health boondoggle in the WSJ last week, because those members aren’t signing onto the legislation for themselves. They are only signing on for you.

Yes, the healthcare legislation still does not require Members of Congress to be part of the public plan, option, call it what you will, only poor sucker citizens. Those Congressmen are no fools. They know government-run medicine hasn’t worked in Canada and the UK. You think they want their wives lining up for a mammograms?

Here are some interesting tidbits that have been pointed out to me on my current brief visit to DC:

Ways and Means Committee – Rep. Heller (R-NV) offered an amendment to require all (“exchange eligible”) Members of Congress and their families to get insurance through the government-run plan. It failed, by a vote of 18-21, with three Democrats supporting the amendment: Berkley, Davis (AL), and Yarmuth. You can read all about it on p. 518 of this interminable document. (Who says PJM isn’t a full-service media company?) When a similar amendment was offered at the Energy and Commerce markup, it was dismissed by chairman Henry Waxman as “nongermane.” That’s my Congressman, of course. No comment necessary.

Over at the Rules Committee several amendments were filed on this subject, but ultimately not permitted under their rules. Rep. Sessions moved to make an order and provide the necessary waivers for amendment #1 offered by Reps. Fleming (R-LA), Wilson (R-SC), Gingrey (R-GA), and Herger (R-CA), which would automatically enroll all Members of Congress and all Senators in the public option. His motion was defeated on a party line vote of 4-6, with the following Members absent: Slaughter, Matsui, Pingree.

There’s more passed on to me by PJM’s “undercover correspondent,” but you get the point. It’s pretty depressing. You won’t read about this nonsense in the MSM, of course, but we’re going to try to deliver more on PJTV and the pages of Pajamas Media. That’s why I’ve been in Washington the past few days, helping to set up a team to do some investigating. The results won’t be immediately evident, but as we move into the new year, I hope you’ll see more of it.

Speaking of depressed, I don’t think I’ve even seen the nation’s capital in such a genuinely depressed mood. In my job, I have made multiple visits in recent years, but the atmosphere now is almost unnerving. No one seems to really like this healthcare legislation (how can you like what you couldn’t possibly read?). People just care about enacting or defeating it. The level of discussion is nihil; there is no discussion. Cap-and-trade, Afghanistan, everything is in a weird stasis. Some Republicans gloat that the administration seems to be imploding – and perhaps they are right – but there should be a cautionary note in all this. Imploding seems to be the natural state of this city. A party arrives in victory and months later they are in shambles. What’s astonishing about the Obama crew, however, is that they arrived on the wings of untold optimism supported by almost the entire media and still they have plummeted to near nothing in less than a year. Scary.

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