A court-appointed investigator has found that the high-profile prosecution of the late Senator Ted Stevens was “permeated” by the prosecutors’ “serious, widespread and at times intentional” illegal concealment of evidence that would have helped Mr. Stevens defend himself at his 2008 trial, a federal judge disclosed on Monday. But the 500-page report by the investigator, Henry F. Schuelke, recommends that none of the Justice Department officials involved in the case be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court because the judge who presided over the trial, Emmet G. Sullivan, of Federal District Court in Washington, did not issue an order specifically instructing prosecutors to obey the law
Everything worked out well from a certain political perspective, however. Stevens was convicted 8 days before the 2008 election and was defeated. We shall see worse than this in 2012. Street theater at the highest levels, bogus charges, and God knows what else.
Eugene Robinson seemed awfully sure of himself in the WaPo:
The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate…For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.
The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.
“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention…
Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future…
The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise
There’s only one little problem with all this. Here’s the actual data from Best’s archives, without the ten-year “smoothing” and other features created to produce the graph above. As you can see, it shows cooling over the last decade:
However, Mr. Muller was already on the record: “Richard Muller, leader of the initiative, said that the global temperature standstill of the past decade was not present in their data.” Oops!
James Delingpole of the Telegraph is in high dudgeon: “I had my doubts about Muller’s findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a ‘sceptic’ when there is little evidence of him ever having been one….I really didn’t want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?”
Of course, much of this is becoming irrelevant, since the US and the West can’t afford the expensive fantasies like cap-and-trade and so forth. But it’s nice for candidates for cutting government spending to stand up and draw attention to themselves as Muller has done.
international human rights law dictates that police must use the greatest possible effort to capture suspects alive…The U.N.’s independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, said this week that there was “considerable dispute in legal circles as to whether we are dealing with an armed conflict in respect of al-Qaida in Pakistan.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross was holding a meeting on the issue Thursday and declined to comment beforehand. Louise Doswald-Beck, a former legal chief for the Red Cross said, however, that bin Laden was clearly not an enemy combatant. “He was basically head of a terrorist criminal network, which means that you’re not really looking at the law of armed conflict but at lethal action against a dangerous criminal,” she said…
Doswald-Beck, who teaches law at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, said only an independent investigation of bin Laden’s body would be able to prove exactly how he died, and that had been rendered virtually impossible by the destruction of forensic evidence
Not only the “destruction of forensic evidence.” There’s much more. It’s curious that there’s more than Watergate’s 18 minute gap in the recording of the SEALS’ attack (this gap runs 25 minutes), another piece of evidence destroyed. Curious that there was apparently no firefight at all in the house where OBL was killed. Curious that three people who did not fire a shot, but “lunged” at this or that, got taken out.
It seems clear enough that the administration ordered a hit on bin Laden — an extremely dangerous hit from the standpoint of the SEALS — but a hit nonetheless. We have no problem with that as a policy matter. But there appears to be a big CYA at work in the administration, as might be expected from university types, to avoid the opprobrium from faculty lounges and the international busybody community.
A politician said this last year about pending health care legislation: “Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you…First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.” Back on planet earth, here’s what’s happening. WSJ:
McDonald’s Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul…McDonald’s provides mini-med plans for workers at 10,500 U.S. locations, most of them franchised. A single worker can pay $14 a week for a plan that caps annual benefits at $2,000, or about $32 a week to get coverage up to $10,000 a year.
Last week, a senior McDonald’s official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain’s insurer won’t meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80% to 85% of its premium revenue on medical care.
McDonald’s and trade groups say the percentage, called a medical loss ratio, is unrealistic for mini-med plans because of high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims. Democrats who drafted the health law wanted the requirement to prevent insurers from spending too much on executive salaries
Scott Johnson wonders “whether President Obama made a single truthful argument in favor of Obamacare.” Good question. The Tea Party is about curbing many things, out of control spending, loss of freedoms, and the like. But right up there on the list is that people really don’t like being lied to, brazenly and repeatedly, by someone who looks at them condescendingly, with a sneer that says “what are you going to do about it?” We wonder what Mary McCarthy would say about this fellow.
Janet Daley diagnoses the current American condition in the Telegraph:
America has learned, thanks to Barack Obama’s crash course in European-style government, about the titanic force of class differences. The president’s determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America’s history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state…
What is…startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) “enlightened” class with the poor and deprived…
Liberal politics is now –- over there as much as here –- a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for “not the right sort”.
The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance –- which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam -– have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed “ambition” as a form of gaucherie…
the Democrats, who once represented the interests of ferociously self-respecting blue-collar America, are now seen -– under their highly educated president, who wholeheartedly embraces the orthodoxy of the liberal salon -– as having abandoned their traditional following. Which is precisely what Labour did here when it turned its back on what used to be called “the respectable working class” because of its embarrassing resentments and “prejudices” against welfare claimants, immigrants, and anti-social youths.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons the media continue to believe stories that are false but confirm their exquisite consciences and their superiority to the hoi polloi. (HT: Wretchard)
Matt Bai, whom we often like, wrote this in the NYT about the Tea Party movement:
There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.
It’s been a long time since that original report in March. Long enough for the Times to figure out what Powerline and its readers and so many have known for quite a while: the story isn’t true. But it just won’t die.
Why Doesn’t the Media Interrogate Tea Partiers’ Beliefs? — The media’s enduring, and understandable, fascination with the Tea Party movement continues unabated, as this weekend’s coverage demonstrates. Unfortunately, what appear to be false notions of objectivity—or perhaps a lack of interest in policy—is preventing that coverage from illuminating what the movement actually represents and what it would do if empowered…
There are only two ways to balance a budget in the red: raising taxes, which Tea Partiers vehemently oppose, and cutting spending. But what spending should be cut? Defense and veterans spending, which accounts for 54 percent of the federal budget? It would be pretty hard to merge that with the Republicans’ foreign-policy-hawk wing. Entitlement spending such as Social Security and Medicare? Good luck winning elections with that platform.
What’s amusing about this is not that the figures are off by a mile — the US budget is about $3.55 trillion and defense spending is $663 billion or so, or about 19% of the budget. The amusing part is that if you click the link to the 54% figure, you will see that Newsweek used some data cooked up by the War Resisters League as the source of its information. Evidently an unbiased source in Newsweek’s view. HT: Jim Hoft
As with the history of the Berlin Airlift, the history of the East-meets-West, and that of D-Day, so we have the history of the recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United. Time after time President Obama or his team get their history wrong. What is the reason? (a) laziness; (b) incompetence; (c) thinking the facts don’t matter; (d) thinking Americans are too stupid to notice; (e) all of the above; (f) none of the above?
In politics, as in sports and life, it is easier to see and be outraged by the lies and dirty tricks of the other team, rather than those of your own. That’s natural. But there are sometimes moments when it becomes painfully obvious that your own team has committed an outrageous wrong. Often these moments occur when the nature of the lie threatens to undermine the reason that you put faith and trust in the guy leading your team, and you suddenly have the sense that you’ve been played for a sucker all along.
President Bush had several such moments. His nomination of the clearly underqualified Harriet Miers (she can’t write!) was one. It (a) smacked of cronyism, and (b) seemed to validate a key contention of the other team, that George Bush was not too bright The nomination of Miers tended to undermine the defenses of Bush that he might be tongue-tied, but he was smart enough and a straight shooter. Another such moment was Bush’s endorsement of a very unpopular and unenforceable-by-design immigration bill, in language that was deeply offensive to conservatives.
President Obama has had episodes that approached these Bush experiences, at least in our opinion. They included his inanimate response to the brutality in Iran and his unemotional responses in the matters of Hasan and the undiebomber. Obama’s defenders took the position that his cool responses showed a man of deep strategy, instead of a guy who didn’t get it. Those debates remain undecided in political terms to this day. But his repudiation of a campaign pledge of openness and transparency is another matter. Liberals wanted an end to what they saw as the obfuscation, secrecy and outright lies of the Bush administration, and Obama offered himself as the cure, promising unparalleled openness and transparency on numerous occasions. Then he betrayed his supporters. This was one reaction:
It remains to be seen what will be the fallout to the Obama administration of repudiating his pledge of transparency and accountability to his supporters. Maybe very little. Or maybe it will soon be his press secretary’s turn to get thrown under the bus — an Obama trademark in such uncomfortable moments.
CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated that the PPACA, incorporating the manager’s amendment, would reduce Part A outlays by $245 billion and increase HI revenues by $113 billion during the 2010-2019 period. Those changes would increase the trust fund’s balances sufficiently to postpone exhaustion for several years.
However, the improvement in Medicare’s finances would not be matched by a corresponding improvement in the federal government’s overall finances. CBO and JCT estimated that the PPACA as amended would add more than $400 billion ($245 billion + $113 billion + interest) to the balance of the HI trust fund by 2019, while reducing federal budget deficits by a total of $132 billion by 2019.
The reductions in projected Part A outlays and increases in projected HI revenues would significantly raise balances in the HI trust fund and create the appearance that significant additional resources had been set aside to pay for future Medicare benefits. However, the additional savings by the government as a whole — which represent the true increase in the ability to pay for future Medicare benefits or other programs — would be a good deal smaller.
The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs.
At the end of the day, who cares? It’s less than a trillion dollars so it’s pretty much rounding error. And it’s small beer compared to some of the antics that have gone on over this past year. So Merry Christmas and let’s hope 2010 is an improvement.
ABC reports that a mystery Senator apparently is going to get a payoff for voting for the healthcare bill to the tune of $100 million for a hospital facility (later to be named for the Senator of course).
APPROPRIATION. — There are authorized to be appropriated, and there are appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services, $100,000,000 for fiscal year 2010, to remain available for obligation until September 30, 2011, to be used for debt service on, or direct construction or renovation of, a health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services. Such facility shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.” (Manager’s Amendment To H.R. 3590, Pg. 328)
Here’s the funny part. For some reason the Senator in question apparently doesn’t want it known that he is taking a payoff, or at least that’s the way it looks to us from the elaborate excuse coming from Democratic staffers: “Democratic staffers say there are 11 states with medical schools that could qualify for the funding (we’re still waiting for the list). The Secretary of HHS would decide who gets a piece of the $100,000,000 pie.” Yeah, right. HT: Powerline
Willis Eschenbach has been digging into the temperature data from Darwin Airport that indicate radical, accelerating AGW. He believes the books have been cooked and the hockey stick is specious:
Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century…when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C…
People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.
One thing seems pretty clear in the ClimateGate debate — the credibility of one side or the other will be seriously impaired at the end of all this. HT’s: Ace, Volokh
the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.
But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining…
these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week’s Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.
You’d think that such egregious behavior would have been exposed long before this. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period by these fraudsters was in its way a cry for help, one that went mostly unheeded until now.
It dawned with the warmest winter on record in the United States. And when the sun sets this New Year’s Eve, the decade of the 2000s will end as the warmest ever on global temperature charts. Warmer still, scientists say, lies ahead…all people everywhere under that warming sun faced one threat together: the buildup of greenhouse gases, the rise in temperatures, the danger of a shifting climate, of drought, weather extremes and encroaching seas, of untold damage to the world humanity has created for itself over millennia…
Nasheed’s tiny homeland, a sprinkling of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, will be one of the earliest victims of seas rising from heat expansion and melting glaciers. On remote islets of Papua New Guinea, on Pacific atolls, on bleak Arctic shores, other coastal peoples in the 2000s were already making plans, packing up, seeking shelter.
The warming seas were growing more acid, too, from absorbing carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas in an overloaded atmosphere. Together, warmer waters and acidity will kill coral reefs and imperil other marine life — from plankton at the bottom of the food chain, to starfish and crabs, mussels and sea urchins.
Over the decade’s first nine years, global temperatures averaged 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, NASA reported. And temperatures rose faster in the far north than anyplace else on Earth.
The decade’s final three summers melted Arctic sea ice more than ever before in modern times. Greenland’s gargantuan ice cap was pouring 3 percent more meltwater into the sea each year. Every summer’s thaw reached deeper into the Arctic permafrost, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a global-warming gas…More methane escaping the tundra meant more warming, more thawing, more methane released.
At the bottom of the world, late in the decade, International Polar Year research found that Antarctica, too, was warming. Floating ice shelves fringing its coast weakened, some breaking away, allowing the glaciers behind them to push ice faster into the rising oceans.
On six continents the glaciers retreated through the 2000s, shrinking future water sources for countless millions of Indians, Chinese, South Americans. The great lakes of Africa were shrinking, too, from higher temperatures, evaporation and drought. Across the temperate zones, flowers bloomed earlier, lakes froze later, bark beetles bored their destructive way northward through warmer forests. In the Arctic, surprised Eskimos spotted the red breasts of southern robins. In the 2000s, all this was happening faster than anticipated
We agree that if the chart above is accurate, some anomalous warming has been taking place on earth recently. Certainly the hockey stick is alarming. But perhaps what should have been more alarming is the disappearance of the Medieval Warm Period from roughly 900-1300, when temperatures were several dregrees warmer than they are today. For example, it was warm enough and the seas were sufficiently ice-free in about 1000 AD that Leif Eriksson was able to sail to Newfoundland, which later became impossible again. Marc Sheppard has much more on this and related topics in the American Thinker.
MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen has a few well-chosen words on global warming. The article should be read in its entirety. WSJ:
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%…Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.” There is general agreement on the above findings…
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false. Of course, none of the articles stressed this…
even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about. Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback…
The notion that the earth’s climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth’s climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today’s. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the “Early Faint Sun Paradox.”
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
It is interesting to remember that science has always had witch doctors, political hacks, and outright frauds. Clarice Feldman has a piece on the left-wing harmonic convergence in the fraud that is anthropogenic global warming. (The firm Fenton Communications, which we’ve noted in passing previously, is part of the nexus.) Bruce Walker discusses the egregious Trofim Lysenko. The main difference between the fraudsters of yesterday and those of today would seem to be that the paychecks now are much larger, and the intended power-grab more dangerous than in ages past.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
(BTW, based on the sequence of data requests and data purges and the large amounts of money involved in perpetuating the AGW scam, we won’t be surprised if charges of criminal or civil fraud are ultimately filed in this case.)
The East Anglia CRU was apparently the epicenter of AGW alarmism. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph recounts the scandal that has almost resulted in the world’s kleptocracies picking the pockets of American taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars:
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
This is an incredible scandal, and not one red cent of the taxpayers’ money should be spent in furtherance of this hoax. However, since America is currently governed by a clueless college professor (who is apparently entirely untroubled that his enablers are thugs), keep a close eye on your wallet.
the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…
researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…
Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.
Oh, what the heck, we give up. Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — and perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?
A thick file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker from a British university climate research center and has since spread widely across the Internet starting Thursday afternoon.
Before they propagated, the purloined documents, nearly 200 megabytes in all, were uploaded surreptitiously on Tuesday to a server supporting the global warming Web site realclimate.org, along with a draft mock post, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist managing that blog. He pulled the plug before the fake post was published.
I have a story in The Times on the incident and its repercussions, which continue to unfold. But there’s much more to explore, of course (including several references to me). The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
The UK Telegraph has a different approach to the matter. For what it’s worth, we think it is more likely that there was a whistleblower involved in this episode than not. Finally, the Times not publishing information “never intended for the public eye” in this case makes us think of the Pentagon Papers and the NSA pseudo-scandal, among other stories. Interesting editorial choices.
