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Pity The Fools That Believe in Man-Caused Global Warming

What a snow job some corrupt scientists, the arrogant elite, radical environmentalists, the United Nations and their co-conspirators in the United States, have perpetrated on the people of this planet in order to convince a gullible public into believing in the Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale of man-caused global warming!  In the process they have sullied true science and corrupted the scientific method, maybe beyond repair.  Their specious arguments stretch credulity and are what we call MAI science, or Made-As-Instructed.  In other words, you manipulate the data to arrive at the desired outcome.  What has transpired in this debate is nothing less than the trashing of all of the science greats since Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

But to see anything clearly, you must have a sufficiently broad perspective, accompanied by hard data, repeatable long-term observations and verifiable facts.  If you are standing and looking at the ground, your perspective and your field of view are quite limited.  If however, you are standing on the top of a mountain, your perspective broadens exponentially.  And thus it is with the subject of global warming. Without a broader view, it is almost impossible to know whom or what to believe.  So, a short history of the Earth is in order.  The history we present here is reasonably accurate, based on the collected scientific data over the last 500 years, with not much argument within the honorable scientific community.

Human civilization is but a bare 5,000 years old.   If you took the entire life of Planet Earth, some 4.5 billion years and divided that life span into a 24-hour clock, our puny 5,000 years represents the last tenth of a second, of the last second of the 86,400 seconds that occur in one 24-hour period.  If you took the age of enlightenment, commonly known as the Renaissance (14th to the 17th Centuries) when true science was born, it represents less than the last 100th of a second of the last second in our 24-hour clock.  During the last 5,000 years the Earth has been relatively quiet, with a few burps in climate variables, but it hasn’t always been that way.

The Earth has endured the effect of massive sunspots, reversing poles, shifting magnetic fields, drifting continents, asteroid and comet collisions and ice ages, in its 4.5 billion-year history.  It has experienced the wondrous 165 million-year dinosaur experiment.  Approximately six hundred million years ago, the “Cambrian explosion” occurred, when life almost magically erupted, emerged and evolved at a pace never before seen.  Some scientists have contributed this explosion of life to a sudden increase in atmospheric oxygen.

Over its lifetime the Earth spun, tilted, heaved, shifted its orbit, drastically changed, expelled poison gases, ash and molten lava, grew hot and then cold.  Continents, floating on an underground sea of molten magma, drifted first toward each other (Pangea) and then away.  Polar ice caps and glaciers melted and sea levels rose and then lowered.  New evidence has come to light that the entire Earth was one big ball of ice at one time in its long and violent history.

A little more recently, about 12,000 years ago, one-third of the Earth’s surface was covered in a layer of ice more than one mile thick.  During that ice age, which lasted longer than civilized man has lived on Earth, there were no animals, plants or insects that could survive in this harsh, frozen environment.  But life on Earth still survived in other places less-hostile.  The ultimate thaw and the rushing torrent carved deep gouges and massive channels in the Earth’s surface.  It created riverbeds and dry falls and lakes and inland seas and other features in the Earth’s crust, not there before.  Now that was global warming on a grand scale and humans hadn’t even come out of their caves yet.

Whole forests grew and then died out.  Mountains rose out of the bowels of the Earth, pushed up by continents in collision and then flattened back into the crust.  Rivers changed direction.  Monster lakes were formed.  Giant meteors struck the Earth at galactic speeds, carving massive holes in the crust and sending continent-size clouds of sunlight-dimming dust into the atmosphere.  The atmosphere became opaque and cut off the life-giving sunlight, rendering lifeless enormous parts of the planet.  Millions of species of plants and animals evolved, survived, reproduced and then died out, to be replaced by entirely different species of plants and animals.   Had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, it has been posited that mammals would have never evolved in their current form, including humans.

However, major changes seldom occurred in cataclysmic events.  They almost always took place agonizingly slowly, over eons of time, through the tedious, grinding, random, chaotic, disorganized process of natural evolution and natural selection.  The variables were almost infinite and still are.

And today, those same agonizingly slow processes are at work.  We (humans) are an integral part of those processes but we will have little or no effect on any final outcome.  Those who tell you so are lying.  We will but only tickle the grander elements such as the sun, the moon and the Earth itself, none of which is predictable, much less measurable to the degree necessary for accurate predictions over long periods of time.  Our only avenue for survival is to get out of the way, if we can.  The whole idea that man-generated CO2 is causing run-away global warming, when atomospheric CO2 represents a small fraction of so-called greenhouse gases and man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 is a miniscule fraction of naturally occuring CO2, would be laughable, if it wasn’t that evil men were exploiting it for evil purposes.
“I pity da’ fool.”
A few spewing volcanoes or an episode of sunspots can totally invalidate any computer models.  Just look at weather predictions.  Any prediction is good for about two hours and that is why the environmentalists’ models were predicting an ice age 20 years ago and now they are predicting global warming.  Any credible scientist will tell you that the greater the number of variables in a non-linear dynamic system (such as the weather) render long-range predictions virtually meaningless the moment they are spit out of the computer.  What has been done in the name of man-caused global warming, is an insult to true science.  It is fueled by dirty, agenda-driven money, a corrupt ideology and the lust for global power.

The universe, our solar system and even our Earth are violent, dangerous places to humans and other life forms and always have been.  Just ask the dinosaurs.  So far, we have just been lucky.  A close-by (in galactic terms) supernova in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, in which our solar system resides, could flood the sun and planets with massive amounts of deadly radiation and render Earth lifeless and barren in a virtual geologic instant.  If the sun changed its energy output by a significant fraction, all life on Earth as we know it, could cease.  An errant asteroid or comet could cross the Earth’s orbit and the resulting collision could dramatically change the pattern of life, or terminate it altogether.

Environmentalists cry “wolf” on very little data and way-too-short time periods to come up with so-called accurate predictions, as they have with man-caused global warming. Unfortunately, environmentalism has become a cult of mindless followers with a distorted vision of how humans and the Earth should relate to each other.  Earth gets the highest priorities — over people — in spite of true science.  In reality, humans are but a part of the evolutionary and natural processes of Earth and those processes, not environmentalists or governments, will determine whether we, as an intelligent species, will survive or die out. This is why their man-caused, global-warming theory is an unmitigated farce and this is why that any very expensive attempts to control man-generated CO2 is an unprecedented fraud, with dire consequences for the global economy.

We must always be vigilant against the never-ending threat of governments and special-interest groups peddling crises with propaganda, hype, distortions and lies, because behind each crisis is a hidden agenda and in the end their hidden agenda has more to do with control of the masses and the transfer of wealth.  They only use pseudo science as a means to an evil end.  Shall it ever be thus.

© Copyright November 24, 2009 – All Rights Reserved

~ The Author ~
Ron Ewart is the President of The National Association of Rural Landowners and may reached for comment via email at r.ewart@comcast.net.

http://www.federalobserver.com/2009/11/24/pity-the-fools-that-believe-in-man-caused-global-warming/

December 24, 2009
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce
By Alexander Cockburn

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policymakers” – essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.”

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom Wigley: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are no where close to knowing” how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering – such as carbon mitigation – is “hopeless.”

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that “greenhouse” theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner’s “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics,” updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/24/anthropogenic_global_warming_is_a_farce.html

December 22, 2009
Other Consequences of Climategate
By Ed Timperlake

The consequences of “Climategate” are lost opportunity costs that should have been directed at real global pollution problems. The hothouse atmosphere at East Anglia from cooking the books on a huge fraud has significant consequences that will play out over time. “Global Warming” shamans have sent the world on the fool’s errand of looking for man-made carbon footprints while very real environmental problems have fallen by the wayside.

On a micro-level, some involved in this scientific fraud will have their reputations destroyed. Along the way, nasty invectives will be leveled, which will make for fun reading. I specifically found it interesting to read Nobel Laureate Al Gore lie to defend the liars. His statement was a total fabrication when he said scientific e-mails were ten years old. The latest one was sent just months ago.

One can just imagine the sense of loss felt by environmental activists who were planning on making billions protecting the world from greenhouse gases. The real threat is not pollution as defined by the simple act of breathing and emitting CO2, but the pollution of industrial waste pumped into the atmosphere at specific locations and also dumped into streams, rivers, and oceans. It is a proven scientific fact that chemical toxins directly impact groundwater.

While the East Anglia con artists were looking skyward, the real problem was symbolically right under their feet.

One of my most beloved possessions is a personal letter from President Bush ‘41 thanking me for my role as an Assistant Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs, in making “progress toward settling the complex questions about the environmental hazards of warfare.” The questions the VA had been dealing with on my watch were about Agent Orange and “Gulf War Illness.” Both are very real and very deadly.

Of the 2,709,918 Vietnam veterans that served in Southeast Asia, around 800,000 are still alive. Almost 59,000 were killed in action, and around another 100,000 were severely disabled. Claims have been made about Vietnam vets having higher suicide rates, more substance abuse problems, and higher incidences of homelessness. Regardless, the number of soldiers from the war alive today is evidence that Vietnam vets paid a high price for their service. Many soldiers were killed by Agent Orange — not climate change from a carbon footprint.

The National Academy of Science and the VA link exposure to Agent Orange to such horrible diseases as Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and prostate cancer. Another real tragedy is that the sons and daughters of Vietnam vets have a higher incidence of spina bifda. That determination was the first time the US has linked adult exposure to toxic chemicals to birth defects. A lot of Vietnam veterans were killed before their time by Agent Orange — not climate change and a carbon footprint. Also, the world should not forget that Vietnamese families are also paying a high price for ongoing exposure to Agent Orange in their groundwater.

For our next generation of veterans, one cause of the growing problem of “Gulf War Illness” is exposure to Iraq chemical munitions inside bunkers that were blown up in Desert Storm. Even today, some residual chemical munitions (yes, WMDs) have been found. However, on an ever-bigger “environmental hazards of warfare” front, there is really grim news.

Serving in the DoD, I was responsible in 2003 for visiting the Iraq Port of Umm Qasr. Before my visit, I hosted at the Pentagon a senior representative of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP). The man, a highly educated French engineer, warned me about the cancer-causing, toxic nature of the Persian Gulf.

His well-made point was that because of evaporation, for twenty-three hours of each day, water flows into the gulf — and only for one hour a day does it flush itself. Essentially, the gulf is a man-made devil’s brew of every nasty chemical in the world, from chemical munitions used in the Iran-Iraq war (and also by Saddam against his own people) to rocket motors and warheads and bunker oil in sunken ships to simple raw open sewers. Gulf water can kill you.

When I visited Umm Qasr, the locals quipped, “Turn on the water and see what we are having for dinner.” It was that disgusting.

The costs of war in that part of the world, according to my UNDP visitor, are now horrendous, including extremely high cancer rates for children. He even claimed that if they can afford it, poor fisherman burn their catch rather than feed it to their families.

We should immediately stop trying to blame mankind for the complex ebb and flow of the earth’s climate since creation. There are real life-and-death issues that are specifically geographically located. With investigation and intelligent mitigation efforts, a concentrated scientific focus could make a profoundly positive impact on humanity.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/other_consequences_of_climateg.html

By Chris Flood

Published: December 21 2009 11:40 | Last updated: December 21 2009 11:40

Carbon prices dropped sharply on Monday in response to disappointment at the outcome of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, which ended with an agreement that fell well short of its goals for significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This (accord) is a very disappointing outcome,” said Trevor Sikorski, director at Barclays Capital: “I see nothing here that should drive investment in the carbon commodity and low carbon technology.”

Mr Sikorski warned that the outcome of the Copenhagen conference was “bearish for the market and bearish for the world.”

European Union allowances for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European carbon emissions, dropped 8.7 per cent to €12.40 a tonne in early trading before recovering slightly to trade 5.7 per cent lower at €12.80 a tonne.

One dealer described the market as like “a falling knife” but said that a rise in European gas prices had helped to support the carbon market.

UN-backed certified emissions reductions for December 2010 delivery fell 6.6 per cent to €11.05 a tonne, their lowest level since June 23.

Dr Emmanuel Fages of Societe Generale/Orboe said: ”Copenhagen illustrated the failure of the UN process in dealing with climate change but drop in carbon prices is due purely to sentiment and fundamentals will reasset themselves. The pre-2012 supply and demand outlook has not changed and post 2012, the market is still pricing in a 20 per cent cut in emissions.”

The European Union said the accord (which is weaker than a legally binding treaty) was not ambitious enough to persuade it to raise its target for cutting carbon from a 20 per ent reduction to a 30 per cent cut by 2020.

Dr Fages said EUA carbon prices could drop to as low as 10 euros a tonne in the first quarter of 2010 as market participants, who have been oversupplied with quotas, would know for certain how much carbon had been emitted in 2009.

“Copenhagen showed that we cannot reply on the UN and the whole process of dealing with climate change has to be much more bottom up than top down,” said Dr Fages.

Eugen Weinberg, head of commodity research at Comerzbank said: ”Everybody is disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen meeting but it was an important step to have direct talks betweeen the largest polluters and we have to wait to see what individual countries will opt to do under the non-binding goals that will be published at the end of January.”

Mr Weinberg said the importance of the US Climate bill currently being debated in the US Senate “could not be understated” as passing the legislation would allow for the development of linkages between US and European carbon markets and would support EUA prices as a target for a 30 per cent cut by 2020 could be revived.

”But if the bill fails, it could be a real disappointment for the market and it would be difficult to see positive catalysts going forward,” warned Mr Weinberg.

Mark C. Lewis, analyst at Deutsche Bank, said the Copenhagen Accord would cast uncertainty over the future of post-2012 carbon offset trading schemes under the Kyoto Protocol called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

“The development of new CDM projects is likely to slow over the course of next year, and perhaps significantly so,” said Mr Lewis.

Meg Brown analyst at Citigroup said the settlement at Copenhagen would perpetuate uncertainty about the outlook for the carbon market post 2012.

“International offset markets were hoping for detail on how CDM would be expanded, perhaps including sector-specific benchmarks and an expansion of the market’s size,” said Ms Brown: “Heavy industry must wait longer for clarification of emission liabilities and international abatement mechanisms.”

“The lack of a political framework is seen as bearish because a lot of hedge funds and financial institutions had pinned their hopes on quite a significant and important alternative to other commodities markets,” said Jean-François Cauvet at Paris-based carbon market broker COER2.

Crude oil prices moved higher on Monday, supported by colder weather in the US and Europe.

Nymex January West Texas Intermediate rose 15 cents to $73.51 a barrel. The January contract expires at the close on Monday and February West Texas Intermediate, which becomes the benchmark from Tuesday, traded 50 cents higher at $74.91 a barrel.

Opec is meeting in Angola this week but the oil producers’ group is not thought likely to call for any changes in its current production quotas.

“We expect prices could ease somewhat after the Opec announcement as participants will be reminded that Opec will not be doing anything to tighten supplies anytime soon,” said Edward Meir, an analyst with MF Global.

ICE February Brent added 65 cents at $74.40 a barrel.

US natural gas prices also moved higher, with Nymex January Henry Hub up 12 cents, or 2.1 per cent, at $5.902 per million British thermal units.

Fri Dec 11, 7:06 PM

Fraud within Europe’s carbon credit trading system has cost taxpayers more than $7 billion in the last 18 months, European police said Friday.

Officials at Europol, the body in charge of co-ordinating police forces inside the European Union, say fraudulent activity on the EU’s Emission Trading System was first suspected in late 2008 when police noticed the volume of trades in certain countries would mysteriously spike.

“It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90 per cent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities,” Europol said.

Since late 2008, the total value of fraudulent activity is believed to be in excess of five billion euros ($7.7 billion Cdn) from bogus trades in European unit allowances, or EUAs, the credits that companies in some countries buy to offset their greenhouse gas output.

In the EU and other jurisdictions, caps are put on the total amount of carbon dioxide that is allowed to be emitted. Companies that pollute more than their fair share must then buy carbon credits from companies that don’t pollute, to keep the total output below the prescribed cap.

Market volume on the EU’s carbon trading system peaked in May 2009, with several hundred million EUAs traded in France and Denmark alone, Europol said.

At the time, one EUA was worth about 12.5 euros, or about $19.30.

In the scam, criminals set up a carbon trading account on a recognized European market. They would then buy credits tax-free on exchanges in countries outside Europe. Those credits are then transferred into the European account, and the fraudsters collect tax on that transaction, but the monies are never paid to any European tax agencies.

The bogus trading account is then shut down before tax authorities can collect.

To prevent further losses, governments in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and most recently Spain have all changed their taxation rules on the transactions. Trading activity from the aforementioned countries has declined by as much as 90 per cent as a result, Europol said.

Police agencies throughout Europe are currently collaborating to uncover specific fraudulent trades, and there are reasons to believe that fraudsters might soon migrate toward the gas and electricity branches of the energy sector, Europol said.

The EU carbon trading market is estimated to be worth nearly $140 billion a year, and 12,000 emitters have purchased more than two billion EUAs thus far. The Emission Trading System is one of six recognized European carbon trading markets.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/091211/business/business_eu_carbon_credit_trading_fraud

So what’s cooking: is it the planet, or just the evidence?
Mark Aveyard

Last Updated: December 20. 2009 8:19PM UAE / December 20. 2009 4:19PM GMT What we have just witnessed in Copenhagen was a rare spectacle in global affairs: a massive exercise in political groupthink reaching its pinnacle precisely as the rational foundation for it began to unravel in a very public way.

Even as records confirmed the authenticity of the controversial “Climategate” e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain, true believers at the UN conference were still in denial (the first stage of grief), acting as if CRU were some minor outpost in the climate research landscape. In fact, it is a world leader in global-warming research.

Stretching back over ten years, e-mail records show a culture of corruption at CRU in which researchers fabricated trends in climate data, concealed modifications to their computer models from public scrutiny, attempted to evade Freedom of Information requests and tried to isolate sceptical colleagues in the scientific community.

Among those at the UN who bothered to address the Climategate bombshell, the response generally took the following form: the scandal doesn’t matter much because thousands of scientists have signed letters supporting the theory of man-made global warming. That’s like portraying presidential elections in Iran as models of democratic behaviour; when the outcome is predetermined by those in power, counting ballots is merely an artful conceit.

I would like to trust the signed declarations of scientists supporting the global warming “consensus”. But in my experience, when it comes to political causes, professors are not the Socratic gadflies of academic lore. Scepticism isn’t a habit of academics today any more than candour is a habit of politicians.

You don’t win many elections by divulging everything you believe, and you don’t get promoted in academia by telling your senior professors what you really think of their politics. As a result, on some campuses, being openly sceptical about global warming means that you risk being labeled a “denier” – and we all know to which ghastly event in European history that term usually applies.

I am not strongly committed to any position on global warming, except the position that science ultimately must serve truth above politics. I am more sceptical about the man-made component of the theory than the question of warming by itself. The public form of this debate carries little scientific content. I have met dozens, maybe hundreds, of global-warming alarmists, inside and outside academia, and not more than a handful had any grasp of the basics of climate science. Typically, the more passionate they are, the less informed they appear (a rule with too few exceptions in politics not to be useful). In these discussions, the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age might as well be mythical eras in a lost epic by JRR Tolkien.

In defence of Copenhagen’s mission, Scientific American and other publications predicted that CRU’s sins would have no effect on the scientific “consensus”, pointing to research at other climate laboratories. But this evades the central question: if trusting CRU was a mistake, why should we trust the researchers at, say, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies ?

The long-term damage of Climategate, though, doesn’t concern the public standing of any particular laboratory. The general damage to scientific credibility is a graver issue. The scandal has undermined trust in scientists and science itself. Any open society that funds research and uses it to guide political decisions must protect the public’s trust in science.

Few of us have the time or the ability to scrutinise the raw data of any research programme. We trust that researchers will behave ethically, allowing nature, not their preconceptions, to guide their conclusions. But money and politics can ruin a lot of good things. You don’t get millions of dollars in government grants by claiming that the sky isn’t really falling. Apocalypse is good for business at universities. And you don’t get interviews with the BBC and 60 Minutes by saying “I don’t know” to all the big questions, even if you really don’t know and no one else does either.

Those who lose sleep over carbon emissions need to face the CRU scandal head-on. It is emboldening researchers who have been holding their tongues about climate change despite deep reservations. What we will see in the next few months is the exposure of a “consensus” that isn’t entirely consensual. Members of the American Physical Society (APS)are openly questioning its stance on global warming. The committee charged with crafting the group’s position is headed by Robert Socolow, described by one APS member as someone “whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming”.

This month 141 climate-science researchers signed a letter to the UN questioning the presuppositions behind Copenhagen, especially the primary evidence behind the alarmist position, the computer modelling of climate trends: “Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.”

If the issue is settled in the minds of climate scientists, who are these people? And why did the UK’s Meteorological Office (a frequent collaborator with East Anglia) announce that it would be reviewing 160 years of temperature data in the wake of the scandal?

Climate is always changing. The earth is always getting warmer or colder, and sometimes these changes are rapid. Are we now in a warming trend that justifies a radical restructuring of the global economy, including a surrender of personal and corporate liberties to politicians and bureaucrats? Are human beings the primary source of global warming?

If you’ve already made up your mind, you can find scientists and evidence on both sides to support your view. For those of us who think either scenario is possible, knowing whom to trust just got harder.

Mark Aveyard is assistant professor of international studies at the American University of Sharjah

http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091221/OPINION/712209923/1080

Mark Davis: The gift of ‘Climategate’ is a fresh start

09:06 AM CST on Saturday, December 19, 2009

Santa makes his rounds later this week, but I’ve already received one of the best gifts ever: the complete unmasking of one of the most insidious movements of recent history – the radical effort to force reckless and needless constraints onto the human race in an attempt to change the planet’s climate.

If I had been told last year that a scandal called “Climategate” would reveal in 2009 the depths of treachery that would infect the so-called science behind assertions of man-made global warming, I would have been thrilled. But I would have asked for just a little extra something.

I would have asked for this monumental and wholly deserved embarrassment to explode just before the opening gavel of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, an orgy of clergy and parishioners in the tawdry church of anthropogenic climate change.

The curtain finally fell on this 12-day global dog-and-pony show Friday, amid shattered dreams of launching a new initiative to dash the world’s economies against the rocks of a contrived menace.

My gratitude knows no bounds. Not just for political reasons; this was a genuinely dangerous cult whose success would have exacted a profound toll on the quality of life of the human race.

The Climategate e-mail release is a watershed moment in the history of hoaxes. But while it reveals just the tip of the fraudulent climate change iceberg, it is also at long last a victory for those who wish to be good stewards of the planet’s environment without crippling human productivity.

And for having endured the braying lectures of those who have preached this dishonest scripture for years, from high political priests like Al Gore to the annoying deacons filling the Hollywood wing of environmental delusion, I am going to enjoy this for a while.

This is not ordinarily how I roll on the fairly rare recent occasions when my political side prevails. Dangerous inattention to national security raises my hackles, but on virtually everything else – health care, taxes, even abortion – I recognize there are differences and debates that must play themselves out among those with varying views. I’m always ready to engage with vigor tempered by openness to opposing positions.

It is time for the global environment to be addressed in that fashion. While there is no reason to conclude that man can change the Earth’s temperature in any significant way, our existence will always have some effect on the environment. A frank conversation must take place over how to balance human needs for jobs and energy against the effects we have on our air, water and land.

But for too long that discourse has been hijacked by those who would relegate us to unproven alternative energy sources while gutting the methods that have made American productivity unmatched in human history.

The radical left’s hostility toward capitalism, leading to a poisonous bias in science funding toward those who sing from the global warming hymnal, led to decades of scientists saying man was heating the planet and that we could cool it by suffocating our economies with draconian limitations.

And for a while there, they were widely believed. Drunk on this falsely earned power, they crowed that the debate was settled and that their claims of man changing the Earth’s temperature were proven. The planet’s history of rising and falling temperature cycles dating to before factories and SUVs made no difference to these people. Even the global cooling scare of the 1970s – in many ways a more environmentally offensive decade than the current one – was conveniently forgotten.

But now their radical politicization of science has been outed and their pretense of caring about the planet stripped away. My favorite metaphor for these discredited neo-Marxist souls is watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside.

I don’t know if sanctimonious blowhards like Al Gore will ever be properly chastened by the uncovering of the scam they have perpetrated. But for those wishing to enjoy a playing field made honest, it is time for a constructive debate about how to maintain the global economy in a responsible way that honors the planet and the needs of the people who live on it.

That means embracing green technologies that actually work – which will not require a dime of taxpayer subsidy. We all want a clean and healthy world. From hybrid cars to low-emissions home products to solar panels and wind farms, plenty of planet-friendly technologies have won favor in the marketplace, and we are better for them.

And we are surely better off for the dawn of this new day allowing us to dispense with the absurd narcissism that man can change the planet’s temperature, or that we know better than God what its ideal temperature should be.

This frees us for the important human business of taking care of the Earth in a way that meets the needs of both planet and man.

Mark Davis is heard weekdays from 8:30 to 11 a.m. on WBAP-AM, News/Talk 820. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-markdavis_1220edi.State.Edition1.1d27b2e.html

SOLD: Senator Nelson’s Bribe

by Publius

We’ll be blunt. The ‘health care reform’ legislation under consideration in the Senate is the most corrupt piece of legislation in our nation’s history. Yes, we understand that is a strong statement and there have been other abominations throughout our nation’s life. But never before did corrupt legislation threaten to radically and forever change the live’s of every American.

Exhibit A is the outright bribe extracted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Corn Huckster State) from Sen. Harry Reid. As a result of Nelson’s performance in his role of Hamlet in the health care deliberations, we will have two health care systems in this country; one for Nebraska and one for the other 49 states.

In its quixotic attempt to ensure everyone has health insurance, the Reid legislation greatly expands Medicaid eligibility. Because Medicaid is a program whose costs are split between the federal and state governments, this expansion in eligibility raise costs dramatically for states. States will be forced to either raise taxes or cut other services to accommodate the forced increase in Medicaid spending.

Unless that state is Nebraska.

Below is the text for Nelson’s bribe. Under this language the federal government will forever cover the costs of Medicaid expansion in Nebraska. Taxpayers in every other state will forever be responsible for the expanded Medicaid program in Nebraska.

Outrageous doesn’t do justice to describe this situation. Sen. Nelson also secured an exemption from a new insurance tax for non-profit companies in his state. Mutual of Omaha and Nebraska’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield won’t have to pay a tax other companies will be required to pay.

There is next to nothing honest about the entire health care debate anymore. The current legislative text was released just hours ago. The first votes are expected within hours. The health care sector accounts for 1/7th of our economy. And the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” will have just hours to consider its radical transformation. However much they say the legislation will cost, don’t believe it. Rarely has a bill been so manipulated to hide its true cost.

Consider this from the most recent CBO estimate of the cost of the legislation:

These longer-term calculations assume that the provisions are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified (either through legislation or administrative action) to avoid reductions in those payments, and legislation to do so again is currently under consideration in the Congress.

And this,

The legislation would maintain and put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. Under current law and under the proposal, payment rates for physicians’ services in Medicare would be reduced by about 21 percent in 2010 and then decline further in subsequent years.

(Hey, American Medical Association, how’s that endorsement of this bill working for you?)

And, this gem:

It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.

Soon, 60 Senators will vote for this.

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/19/sen-nelsons-bribe/

World leaders reach ‘toothless’ late Copenhagen climate change deal – but officials admit it’s ‘not enough’
By Jason Groves and David Derbyshire

Climate change talks ended in farce last night after world leaders claimed they had struck a ‘meaningful deal’ – but admitted it was not enough to tackle global warming.
After hours of acrimonious talks in Copenhagen, President Barack Obama unveiled a face-saving package that failed to include any targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The fudged deal – backed by Britain, America, South Africa, India, Brazil and China – came after a day of bitter rows and divisions in which the United Nations talks came close to collapse.
President Obama said the deal was an ‘unprecedented breakthrough’ and that countries would add firm commitments next year.
But its flimsy nature was exposed when he admitted targets put forward by countries “will not be by themselves sufficient to get to where we need to get by 2050″.

The deal includes a pledge to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2C – seen as the cut-off point for averting catastrophe – and a pledge to spend £67 billion a year on helping poor countries tackle global warming by 2020.

The agreement said they had agreed to ‘listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines’.
But it has no long-term global targets for emissions cuts or a timetable to turn the agreement into a legally-binding treaty.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the agreement was ‘a vital first step’ but accepted that a lot more work was required to turn it into the legal treaty he had originally wanted to secure at the summit
He said: ‘This is the first step we are taking towards a green and low carbon future for the world, steps we are taking together. First steps are difficult, but they are also necessary.’
He said China opposed turning the proposals into a treaty ‘for the wrong reasons: clinging to their version of what they think international organisations should not do’.
Mr Brown had offered to hand over £7.5 billion in extra cash to developing countries to sweeten the deal. He also offered to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by an eye-watering 42 per cent – 10 times the level offered by the United States.

But in a further humiliation Mr Brown was not included in a list of world leaders personally thanked by Barack Obama for their contribution to the talks.

The 11th-hour deal followed two years of negotiations and a fortnight of intensive talks aimed at saving the planet.

It came after a day of rows which saw the prospects for a meaningful agreement fade amid a row between the West and the developing world about how to share the burden of tackling climate change.

Earlier the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez dubbed the marathon summit ‘Nopenhagen’.

The breakthrough followed talks between US president Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

Failure to reach a substantial deal would be a personal humiliation for Gordon Brown who put his credibility – and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money – on the line in a desperate bid to clinch an agreement that would seal his place in history.

Speaking during a break between negotiations last night Mr Brown acknowledged there was a real danger the talks would fail.

He said: ‘if we don’t succeed I will have other proposals. This is not the time to put these forward. But we are not going to abandon our climate change agenda.’

Divisions between the US and China lie at the heart of the deadlock.

There had been hopes that President Barack Obama would rescue the talks with a pledge of higher carbon dioxide cuts in the US when he flew in to the Danish capital yesterday.

But he arrived empty handed and launched a thinly veiled attack on China’s refusal to allow international monitoring of its promised future carbon cuts claiming ‘without such accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page’.

He added: ‘While the science of climate change is not in doubt, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now, and it hangs in the balance.’

It emerged that China’s Premier Wen Jiaboa had not attended any of the leaders’ meetings.

Chinese sources said he was very offended by President Obama’s speech and found it ‘humiliating’.

A successful deal would have seen rich nations pledging to cut carbon dioxide emissions and the creation of a £67 billion fund to help poor countries cope with global warming. The West also wanted the developing world to sign up for cuts in future emissions.
The deadlock left Gordon Brown fuming. Sources said he vented his frustration at the lack of progress, angrily jabbing his fingers at a succession of world leaders during a private meeting and demanding: ‘what are you going to do to make this work?’

Mr Brown had offered to hand over £7.5 billion in extra cash to developing countries to sweeten the deal. He also offered to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by an eye-watering 42 per cent – 10 times the level offered by the United States.

Late last night, environmentalists said hopes of a meaningful deal were ‘almost zero’.

Tony Juniper, environmental campaigner, said: ‘After two years of negotiations and two weeks of talks here in Copenhagen, it’s disgraceful that the so-called world leaders didn’t come up with a better offer to secure the deal that the world desperately needs.

‘The display of rhetoric that world leaders came out with was predictably familiar and it lacked the commitment needed to address this problem as the science demands.’

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was the first to publicly declare the deal dead, referring to the outcome as ‘Nopenhagen’.

Leaders met for a third session behind closed doors last night, working on draft after draft of a political declaration.

Mr Brown said leaders were still arguing over whether to commit to keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2C – the widely accepted limit needed to prevent catastrophe. The other major hurdle was the refusal of China and others to allow independent monitoring of their pledges to cut future emissions.

The United Nations was reported to have asked world leaders to plan to stay overnight in Copenhagen because of the deadlock.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1236659/Copenhagen-climate-change-conference-World-leaders-reach-Copenhagen-agreement–officials-admit-enough.html#ixzz0a7UrxFQy

Dangerous Chemical!

A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical “dihydrogen monoxide.”

BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

Dihydrogen monoxide:

* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the “greenhouse effect.”
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Contamination is reaching epidemic proportions!

Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the midwest, and recently California.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

* as an industrial solvent and coolant.
* in nuclear power plants.
* in the production of styrofoam.
* as a fire retardant.
* in many forms of cruel animal research.
* in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
* as an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products.

Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can be done to stop them because this practice is still legal. The impact on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its “importance to the economic health of this nation.” In fact, the navy and other military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.