ClimateGate: Facts Are Important Things

This week, diplomats from around the world are gathering in Copenhagen for the global climate change summit—an event that has been marked by controversy in the wake of the “climate-gate” scandal that has recently and rightly gained significant international media attention.

This scandal has provoked many questions that I believe deserve answers.  Among other things, it would seem that information relating to climate change research may have been held back from the public— and key decision-makers, too.  This could of course impact the appropriateness and effectiveness of policy that the US, and indeed world leaders, might pursue.  Before moving forward, given the potentially significant economic consequences associated with some of the steps under consideration, I personally think it is important to get a handle on all the facts, whether they be good, bad or ugly.

Unfortunately, Barbara Boxer and her colleagues in Congress who seek to pass major cap and trade legislation that analysis shows is a job killer take a different view—and have different questions they want answered.

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Tags: Barbara Boxer, cap-and-trade, carbon emissions, climate change, climate email
Posted Dec 9th 2009 at 9:32 pm in Environment, News, Politics | 43990107 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/cfiorina/2009/12/09/climategate-facts-are-important-things/ClimateGate%3A+Facts+Are+Important+Things2009-12-10+04%3A32%3A06Carly+Fiorina

ClimateGate Denial

There have been numerous ostentatiously pathetic efforts to distract from what ClimateGate has not “revealed”, but affirmed, in the principals’ own words, and this mewling is getting more pathetic by the attempt.

Sitting in the chair waiting to participate in a CNN program Monday night largely dedicated to the issue — or, rather, what proved to be an embarrassingly slanted effort at to diminishing it, in its language and approach though to the channel’s credit they at least let me and Steve McIntyre on — I listened to the program’s lead-in. It entailed childish language like that the program will have “scientists and skeptics” (good grief), but also a remarkably insistent emphasis — with nothing whatsoever to back the claim up — on the exposed material being “hacked emails” (with no mention of computer code, annotations, other documentation and the like contained in the exposed trove; now that’s some serious bias).

There also is nothing in the record to suggest a hacking. Indeed,  there is tremendous reason to suspect a whistleblower, tracing back the evolution of the demands for the information, the denials, and the information’s path into the public realm. Yet whichever it was changes nothing about the substance, all of which is found in documents subject to the UK’s freedom of information act.

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Tags: carbon emissions cap and trade, climate change, climategate, Competitive Enterprise Institute, data fraud
Posted Dec 9th 2009 at 12:59 pm in Environment, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 4367460 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/12/09/climategate-denial/ClimateGate+Denial2009-12-09+19%3A59%3A52Christopher+C.+Horner

ClimateGate: Scientists Behaving Badly

Over at the Weekly Standard, the always impressive Steven Hayward has a good summation of where we are in Climate Gate:

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

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Tags: cap-and-trade, carbon caps, carbon emissions, climate change, climate emails
Posted Dec 6th 2009 at 3:21 pm in Environment, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 41870106 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/publius/2009/12/06/climategate-scientists-behaving-badly/ClimateGate%3A+Scientists+Behaving+Badly2009-12-06+22%3A21%3A29Publius

Manipulating Climate Change: Warming to RICO?

For some time. several individuals have asked why we don’t just initiate suit against the obviously dishonest tactics and claims by the global warming industry under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO). This law commissions “private attorneys general” to pursue violations on their own, in essence as proxies for the state.

I have explained with intermittent impatience that just serially lying or exaggerating to deceive are not on their face  RICO “predicate” offenses. There must be three instances of a certain type of enumerated behavior over ten years to constitute a pattern in violation of RICO.

I have received an email from someone who has much appropriate training and experience and which causes me to revisit the issue. He writes,

“Well, now it really does look like a massive conspiracy to defraud the government.

When I was in law school, one of my profs noted dryly that once in a while the Massachusetts Attorney General would sternly announce ‘we are going to investigate this matter of ____,’ and the sky of Boston would blacken with the smoke of burning documents.

I bet there was a blip in electricity use this morning from emails being deleted by the climate change community.”

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Tags: big environment, climate change, data manipulation, global warming, global warming emails
Posted Nov 21st 2009 at 10:23 am in Environment, Justice/Legal | 35018125 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/11/21/manipulating-climate-change-warming-to-rico/Manipulating+Climate+Change%3A+Warming+to+RICO%3F2009-11-21+17%3A23%3A05Christopher+C.+Horner

Global Warming’s ‘Blue Dress’ Moment?

I am not able to fully digest all of the relevant material just this moment, but check out what Anthony Watts at “Watts Up With That” among others have posted. Anthony is a meteorologist who blew the lid on the scandalous placement of official U.S. government thermometers  – even movement to — asphalt pads, Arizona parking lots, next to hot air vents, above barbecue grills, and so on with the convenient result of a warming bias.

I will put all of this in full context as more analysis of the revelations and their meaning emerge, but just know this was described to me as “the closest thing you’re ever going to come to a ’smoking gun.’”

If you’re not a global warming geek, the point of the material is that we have apparent — and I only say apparent at this point — written admissions of cooking the books, among other nastiness, by the leading names in the global warming alarmist movement.

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Tags: anthony Watts, climate change, data manipulation, global warming
Posted Nov 20th 2009 at 10:27 am in Environment | 33986115 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/11/20/global-warmings-blue-dress-moment/Global+Warming%27s+%27Blue+Dress%27+Moment%3F2009-11-20+17%3A27%3A30Christopher+C.+Horner