An Honest IPCC Scientist Warns His Colleagues: Don’t Dismiss ‘ClimateGate’

The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot.

Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble. Taylor got off a little easier, receiving only scoffs and curious-to-annoyed glances for asking inconvenient questions.

But that’s not to say we were the only people to question the assumptions of the attendees who believe the “science is settled” on global warming. Perhaps the greatest challenge came from one of their own — renowned climate scientist William Sprigg — who urged his colleagues to stop treating the ClimateGate scandal as irrelevant noise promoted by “deniers.” In an amazingly telling moment, green energy consultant Andy Van Horn, who introduced Sprigg, admitted he’d never heard of ClimateGate until Sprigg suggested it a few weeks ago as a topic worthy of discussion. (Who are the real “deniers” again?)

Sprigg, adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, believes the planet is on a potentially dangerous warming path and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to blame. He also led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. Clealry, Sprigg is no “outlier” or “rebel,” but one of the most respected and “mainstream” scientists in the field of climatology. So it came to a bit of shock to the audience when Sprigg expressed concerns about how contrarian scientists are treated with contempt by many of his colleagues.

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Tags: Ayn Rand, cap-and-trade, climate change, climategate, EUEC
Posted Feb 5th 2010 at 10:57 am in Environment, News, Politics | 7044662 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/jlakely/2010/02/05/an-honest-ipcc-scientist-warns-his-colleagues-dont-dismiss-climategate/An+Honest+IPCC+Scientist+Warns+His+Colleagues%3A+Don%27t+Dismiss+%E2%80%98ClimateGate%E2%80%992010-02-05+18%3A57%3A31James+G.+Lakely

ClimateGate: Penn State Initial Report Signals Whitewash

I have looked over the Penn State University’s report issued yesterday, “RA-10 Inquiry Report: Concerning the Allegations of Research Misconduct Against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Department of Meteorology, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences”. Below are eight points addressing my initial impressions, in the order they appear in the report (with one bracketed exception from page 4, moved up slightly in order of appearance here].

Findings_Mann_Inquiry –

My take-away, to spoil the ending for you, is that the panel revealed most of what we need to know about the ability of this internal inquiry to credibly assess charges of misfeasance, by limiting their evidentiary pursuit outside of select blogs and media reports to speaking with Mann, aided by a supportive NAS report (to the exclusion of the Wegman Committee report, inexplicable including for a factor cited, below) and one panel member interviewing ex parte two Mann supporters.

In my opinion, by this approach they did not do, and will in hindsight not be deemed as having done, themselves or their institution any favors.

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Tags: climate email, Climate Research Unit, climategate, independent inquiry, Michael Mann
Posted Feb 4th 2010 at 5:41 am in Environment, Featured Story, News | 6951483 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2010/02/04/climategate-penn-state-initial-report-signals-whitewash/ClimateGate%3A+Penn+State+Initial+Report+Signals+Whitewash2010-02-04+13%3A41%3A41Christopher+C.+Horner

Penn State’s ‘ClimateGate’ Inquiry Determines Further Investigation Is Needed

In looking at four “possible allegations” of research misconduct against meteorology professor Michael Mann, a Penn State University panel has determined that further investigation is warranted for one of them.

The allegations — or “possible allegations” as they put it — stem from Mann’s alleged involvement in the “ClimateGate” e-mails scandal that surfaced in early December and seemed to show evidence of fraud and conspiracy among the research scientists and others whose work formed much of the basis of calls for extreme climate change regulation.

At the center of the scandal was Mann, the inventor of the famous “hockey stick” graph which claimed to show that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures had shot up to their highest level in recorded history. It was made famous in Al Gore’s Academy Award®-winning documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

While this is good news, I suspect panel members are secretly hoping someone else will shoulder responsibility for determining Mann’s guilt or innocence before they’re forced to reach any conclusion(s).

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Tags: climate change, climategate, global warming, Michael Mann, penn state
Posted Feb 3rd 2010 at 3:07 pm in Environment, News | 69402100 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2010/02/03/penn-states-climategate-inquiry-determines-further-investigation-is-needed/Penn+State%27s+%27ClimateGate%27+Inquiry+Determines+Further+Investigation+Is+Needed2010-02-03+23%3A07%3A34Bob+McCarty

Hide the Job Decline: $500k in Stimulus Funds to ClimateGate Professor

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the Stimulus Bill) has been such an epic failure, that even the mainstream media has started to notice. The White House has tacitly acknowledged this and recently announced that it would no longer ‘count’ jobs ‘created or saved’ by the Stimulus. The basic problem is that the bulk of the spending went to programs or projects that have nothing to do with economic growth.

The latest example of this is a $500,000 grant to Michael Mann, Professor at Penn State University and unintended c0-star of the ClimateGate e-mail scandal. The leaked e-mails revealed collaboration among scientists to stifle dissenting views on the extent of man-made global warming.

Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:

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Tags: cap-and-trade, climate gate, greenhouse gas effect, greenhouse gases, hide the decline
Posted Jan 14th 2010 at 3:17 pm in Environment, News, federal spending | 60034111 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2010/01/14/hide-the-job-decline-stimulus-funds-to-climategate-professor/Hide+the+Job+Decline%3A+%24500k+in+Stimulus+Funds+to+ClimateGate+Professor2010-01-14+23%3A17%3A44Mike+Flynn

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

Wednesday Open Thread: Hide the Decline Edition

From the ever-awesome Angus McColloch:

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Tags: climate change, climategate, global warming, hide the decline, hockey stick
Posted Dec 9th 2009 at 5:17 am in Obama, Open Threads | 4337847 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/publius/2009/12/09/wednesday-open-thread-hide-the-decline-edition/Wednesday+Open+Thread%3A+Hide+the+Decline+Edition2009-12-09+12%3A17%3A13Publius

ClimateGate and the UN: New Red Scare over Green Lies

Believe it or not, the UN just whined that climategate is the Russian’s fault. It appears that the United Nation’s position is that the obvious cover-up of the false doctrine that is global warming perpetrated by global warming “scientists” is not the fault of the lying scientists, but that of the assumed “paid” Russian hacker that hacked the globaloney scientist’s emails and exposed the cover-up to the world. Convoluted reasoning, no?

Remember when you were a child and your Mother discovered through hearing about it from the neighbors that you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing? Remember how instead of taking responsibility for your actions you cried that it wasn’t right that someone narced on you? Well, that is the same sort of childish, facile reasoning that the UN has employed to explain away this climaegate scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently said that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were obtained and hyped by Russia in order to “destroy public confidence” in the “science” of man-made global warming… or is it now “climate change”? It’s hard to keep up with their constant name changing as they look for more sellable rhetoric.

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Tags: Al Gore, anti-capitalism, cap-and-trade, climate emails, climate gate
Posted Dec 7th 2009 at 7:33 pm in Culture, Economics, Environment, News | 4204699 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/wthuston/2009/12/07/climategate-and-the-un-new-red-scare-over-green-lies/ClimateGate+and+the+UN%3A+New+Red+Scare+over+Green+Lies2009-12-08+02%3A33%3A56Warner+Todd++Huston

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

Sen. Boxer and ClimateGate: The Terror of Tiny Town

As the USS Obama Administration slowly starts to settle into the waves, future historians will be kept busy searching for the source of the iceberg that holed it below the waterline on its maiden voyage to the land of Hope and Change.  Was it the non-stimulating “stimulus”?  The ludicrous Nobel Peace Prize?  The decision to try the Sept. 11^th plotters in lower Manhattan?  The Afghanistan speech at West Point this week, splitting the difference between surging and surrendering as the photo-op cadets nodded off in the background?  It’s a tough call, and the first year’s not even over yet.

But this administration is more than simply its swivel-headed Fearless Leader, ping-ponging between his teleprompters as the law of diminishing returns exerts its iron grip on his poll numbers.  It’s also the executive officers, the governing party’s top senators and congressmen, the palace courtiers who enforce discipline among the spear-carriers as they split up the swag.  In this, the Obama Administration is especially blessed, featuring both the frozen rictus of Anunciata d’Alesandro Pelosi as the speaker of the house and Harry “the Horse” Reid, an innocent Mormon virgin wandering among the fleshpots and real-estate deals of Las Vegas, as the Senate majority leader.  The Right is, indeed, fortunate in its enemies.

Still, the prize for the dumbest Democrat currently extorting a salary from the taxpayer (check out what her staff costs you here) remains where it long has been, in the grip of Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, née Levy, the pride of Brooklyn and, latterly, of Marin County, Calif., and former relation-by-marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the brief marriage between her daughter, Nicole, and Hillary’s sterling brother, Tony.  Tony Rodham, you may recall, is a former prison guard and repo man who managed to get himself into hot water over a hazelnut deal in the republic of Georgia, got caught up in Pardongate, was assaulted in flagranteby a man who claimed Tony was boinking his girlfriend, got caught up in bankruptcy court and battled his ex over child-support payments.

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Tags: climate change, climate change emails, climate fraud, daniel ellsburg, Gen. Michael Walsh
Posted Dec 3rd 2009 at 4:51 pm in Congress, Environment, Featured Story, News, Politics | 40686134 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mwalsh/2009/12/03/sen-boxer-and-climategate-the-terror-of-tiny-town/Sen.+Boxer+and+ClimateGate%3A+The+Terror+of+Tiny+Town2009-12-03+23%3A51%3A09Michael+Walsh

ClimateGate’s Josh Steiner Moment?

By now you’ve likely forgotten the name of Josh Steiner, the Bill Clinton aide who feebly testified that he had lied to his own diary when recording events of the time. But you haven’t forgotten the pitifulness of the spectacle. I suggest we may have just passed that one in ClimateGate, with the following passage from John Tierney’s column in the New York Times, discussing “Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”:

“In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of ‘grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,’ immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

‘No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.’

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word.”

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Tags: climate fraud, climategate, Clinton aide, John Tierney, Josh Steiner
Posted Dec 1st 2009 at 4:13 pm in Environment | 3915066 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/12/01/climategates-josh-steiner-moment/ClimateGate%E2%80%99s+Josh+Steiner+Moment%3F2009-12-01+23%3A13%3A26Christopher+C.+Horner