Martin Hutchinson (Dec 16, 2009)

Excerpt:

The shakiness of the mathematics underlying the global warming “consensus” was highlighted by the recent “climategate” e-mails and computer tapes involving researchers at the University of East Anglia. Like Wall Street risk managers, climate scientists pooh-poohed the obvious flaws in the assumptions underlying their mathematical models. Like Wall Street bankers, they asserted a consensus behind those models - in Wall Street’s case, to win from regulators a profitable loosening of their leverage limits; in climate scientists’ case, to persuade politicians to provide them with hugely profitable research opportunities and capital for their “new energy” start-ups.

Like Wall Street traders, the scientists rejected any modifications of the models that had served them well and pushed those models to their outer limits; the Wall Street gang to trade ever more exotic derivatives, the scientists to justify ever more alarmist predictions of climate change.

The denouement in both cases may also turn out to be similar. In Wall Street’s case, the faulty models have led to losses in the financial system totaling in excess of US$1 trillion. In the climate scientists’ case, the precise degree of error in their assumptions is not yet apparent. It is only clear that dubious methods were used to cover up the flaws in their models and observations, and that the more extreme predictions (”6 degrees Celsius by 2100″) were made up out of whole cloth to justify gargantuan economy-destroying projects of government control.

Should the conference on climate change at present underway in Copenhagen produce anything beyond alarmist blather, the net cost to the global economy is likely to exceed by far that of the subprime mortgage fiasco. The difference between the two cases is that in Wall Street, the first decent-sized downturn showed the models to be rubbish, although admittedly that took 21 years to happen after the first demonstration. On the other hand, with climate models we will have to wait even longer, until 2100, to find out whether they were completely spurious or merely exaggerated.

Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference from CFACT EUROPE on Vimeo.

‘A political and cultish lovefest’

James Delingpole, December 8th, 2009

Despite the Al-Gore-Kool-Aid-drinkers’ best efforts to suppress it, the Climategate scandal continues to blossom and flourish. (Or should that be putresce and pullulate?)

I think my favourite comic detail this week just has to be the one about the amazing not-so-fast-shrinking glaciers. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading reports like this scare stories about glaciers retreating “faster than predicted” are a central plank of the IPCC’s case that we should carbon-tax ourselves back to the Dark Ages NOW. According to the IPCC, the Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035.

Or should that be 2350? Yep it seems those scientific experts who make the IPCC’s reports so famously reliable and trustworthy have a bad case of numerical dyslexia.

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Cliff Kincaid - December 8, 2009

You don’t need to attend the United Nations climate change conference to know what’s really going on.

Ignoring the fallacies behind the “science” of man-made global warming, a new U.N. report on “climate justice” says the U.S. and other countries owe $24 trillion in “climate debt” to the rest of the world. The report, “Climate Justice for a Changing Planet,” argues that the United States is “historically the largest global emitter” of greenhouse gas emissions and therefore has the biggest “debt” to pay.

But another U.N. report puts the figure at $45 trillion.

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John Carroll - December 5, 2009

John Carroll wonders whether we are being whipped into obedience by the fervour of pseudo-religious fundamentalism.

Almost everyone who contributes to the deluge of comment on climate change speaks as an amateur. From politicians to journalists, from academics to scientists, many outside their specialisations, they are not trained in a discipline congruent with their argument. Nor am I.

I leave alone those elements of the debate unclear to me. The rest of my contribution here is built on experience of theories and arguments across a broad range of human problems, on some capacity to judge their plausibility and professional work in social, historical and psychological theories, as well as training in mathematics and economics.

APOCALYPTIC THEORIES

The global warming debate has been captured by prophets of doom and the language of Apocalypse. This is reminiscent of a pseudo-religious mindset that has been recurring on the left since Karl Marx postulated the destruction of capitalism would miraculously lead to utopia. All the usual trappings are present. Anyone who thinks differently is an agent of the devil; the tones of righteous outrage with which climate sceptics are denounced as deniers are reminiscent of fundamentalist religious crusades.

This is particularly off-putting in a discussion that depends on high-quality science, cool logic and careful argument. It raises old suspicions. The West already has experienced theories of impending environmental disaster - with the Club of Rome launching a very successful scare campaign in the 1970s about the world running out of food. Its book, Limits to Growth, sold 30 million copies. Hardly a decade passed before its predictions were proved wrong.

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Transcript:

Everyone agrees that climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity.

That’s the constant claim of the polital elite - and it’s a lie. Everyone does not agree. Thousands of scientists dispute the very existence of man-made global warming, citing natural cyclical changes that saw vineyards in Roman northern England and a Swedish army march over the frozen Baltic in 1658 to Copenhagen.

As an army of global Warming zealots marches to Copenhagen, the truth is that their Orwellian consensus is based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship, and fraudulent statistics. In the words of leading climatologist Professor Richard Lindzen: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll back of the industrial age.”

In fact, there will be no bemused amazement, for the reason for this hysteria is clear: it is designed to provide the excuse for a political project of the globalists to replace national democracy with new world order global governance. It has nothing to do with science and everything to do the globalists’ common purpose to tax and control us while making billions for corporations in the Green industrial complex.

The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology: a secular religious hysteria, complete with Pope Al Gore, carbon credit indulgencies and the pursecution of heretics. But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen and the truth will [come] out. Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao.

JoNova - December 3rd, 2009

It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.

What follows is a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.

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Terry Melanson (4/12/2009)

According to Mr. Henderson, the great psycho-wave of the past 35 years is “global salvationism.” This quasi-religious belief has two ill-fitting articles of faith: environmental alarmism, and the assertion that Third World poverty is in some way due to the West taking more than its fair share of global resources. Both problems are alleged to require top-down global political solutions, including giant corporations accepting more “social responsibility.”

The focus of this global master-plan is the bland but subversive notion of “sustainable development,” that without extensive UN-administered government controls the world is going to Hades in a handbasket …

- Peter Foster, “The Prince of Power [Maurice Strong],” Financial Post (May 19, 2005)

I can’t think of a better way to put Climategate into proper perspective than to revisit a 1998 Financial Post editorial titled “Global Warming: The Real Agenda.” Its author, Terence Corcoran, quoted from statements given to the Calgary Herald by the former Environment Minister, Christine Stewart.

As “minister of the environment, I am very worried about global warming,” Stewart said, “no matter if the science is phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.”

(more…)

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER - 02nd December 2009

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday’s Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

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The scandal we see and the scandal we don’t

Andrew Orlowski - 30th November 2009

Analysis Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really?

The archive - a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions.

Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics’ work - an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn’t absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.

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Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

BRET STEPHENS - DECEMBER 1, 2009

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.

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James Delingpole - November 20th, 2009

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka  CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip:Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

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