FSM and SDS alumnus and Tikkun Magazine founder Rabbi Michael Lerner has some advice for certain of the President’s 2008 voters:

Many are suffering from post-traumatic Obama abandonment syndrome — an ailment that came from being severely traumatized by Obama’s political moves in the past thirteen months. A palpable sadness, depression, anger and even despair carried by many who had worked for Obama and now felt betrayed by his choices in his first year in office was mixed with compassion and a strong determination to not allow the political Right to use our despair as their ticket to a political revival…

“What do we in the liberal and progressive world do now, if we face three, or hopefully seven, years of an Obama presidency?” The first step toward answering that question was to grieve what we had lost, honestly acknowledging the painful, for many quite humiliating, fact that after having built so many walls of self-protection against allowing ourselves to get sucked into some new moment of idealism, we had allowed those walls to come down as we became energized about Obama, only to find that once again our hopes had been dashed…

What happened in Obama’s first year is that most of those who had allowed themselves to hope began to appear to themselves and others as naïve fools, and the humiliation that they experienced will take some years and psychologically or spiritually sophisticated interventions…

the most important first step for liberals and progressives is to explain to themselves and each other that history is not over, that the Obama years still retain some possibilities, and even though we need to give up our (often unconscious) fantasy that Obama was our messiah who would save us and the world, we can and must still retain our understanding that the suffering in this world through poverty and oppression, the destruction of the environment and the possibility of ending all human and animal life on the planet Earth, and the survival of our own souls and mental health requires that we revive a movement based on love, kindness, generosity, ecological sanity, and caring for each other, including everyone on the planet.

Fortunately the objectives of Rabbi Lerner and his like-minded group have gotten much more limited and practical, as he has discussed at several conferences: “The SF Conference and its follow up in D.C. focused on two first steps in this direction: 1. An Environmental and Ethical Responsibility Amendment to the U.S Constitution and 2. A Global Marshall Plan.” Whew! Thank goodness. No more silly talk of a messiah, just the more prosaic and commonplace tasks of a Constitutional Amendment and a Global Marshall Plan. (HT: BOTW)

By the time of the Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern, the New Left had acquired an important foothold in the governing apparatus of the Democratic Party; this influence has only grown over time. The consequences of this are much in evidence today in Congress and the administration. In a way, the Tea Party Movement is a reaction to this (though it is also a reaction to the business-as-usual Republicans as well). On the one hand there is, in the Democratic Party, considerable support for a tops-down, command and control model of governance and the economy, and on the other hand there is, seemingly all of a sudden, this bottoms-up group that came from nowhere and just took off like some YouTube video that gets tens of millions of hits.

Like the education establishment, the Old Media have mostly been allied with and supportive of the leftward leaning trend. This has made it seem like the majority of the country is deep blue, when in fact the bluest areas of the nation are highly concentrated — and several are notably major media centers. Conservatives outnumber liberals 45-19 in America, though you’d never guess that from watching TV or reading the paper. When the history of this era is written, one of the fascinating aspects may be how the internet and the other New Media helped ordinary people to see for themselves that the worldview of those running the Old Media wasn’t so dominant after all.

This is a little painful to watch, as if neither Stephen Colbert nor his audience quite likes making a fool of Attorney General Eric Holder. Still, the point is well made. HT: Polipundit

Democrats as well as Republicans are openly critical of the President these days:

“The President needs to lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat. “Las Vegas is suffering through one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and we cannot afford for the President to bring us down any further,” added Republican Senator John Ensign. “Nevada has one of the most distressed economies in the country, and the President has done little to focus on job creation over the past year. Discouraging people from coming to our state to make a political point adds insult to injury,” said Republican Congressman Dean Heller.

The mayor of Las Vegas, a former Democrat not affiliated with a political party, was even nastier: ““He didn’t learn his lesson the first time, but when he hurt our economy by his ill conceived rhetoric, we didn’t think it would happen again, but now that it has I want to assure you, when he comes I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot back to Washington…”

Meanwhile, the President said: “If anybody’s searching for a lesson from Massachusetts, I promise you, the answer is not to do nothing.” Clearly we are not objective in this matter, but we get the feeling that the subtext of the Democratic critics’ comments on Las Vegas is: “wake up before it’s too late.”

Bloomberg presents a list of politicians and others who perhaps should be retired, since their dreary and inaccurate beliefs are so out-of-date, not to mention expensive:

Senators trying to salvage climate-change legislation this year are circulating a scaled-back plan to reduce emissions in a bid to win over more lawmakers. Among proposals being discussed to achieve President Barack Obama’s goal of capping carbon-dioxide pollution is a “hybrid” approach combining a tax on carbon emissions from refineries and emissions limits for other industries, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. “We’re looking at everything,” Senator John Kerry told reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Massachusetts Democrat is working with Graham and Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, to craft bipartisan energy and climate legislation. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a so-called cap-and-trade bill last year with support from Obama and companies such as General Electric Co.

Opponents, including billionaire Warren Buffett, said the emissions-trading program aimed at curbing greenhouse gases would amount to a burdensome tax on consumers. Comparable legislation stalled in the Senate.

Global warming was dead last among 2010 Americans’ priorities, according to a Pew poll, and no wonder, since it is undoubtedly the greatest scientific scam and scandal of at least the last century. Why look to Washington for leadership when these fellows are so far behind the times and really haven’t caught up with the Open Source world we increasingly inhabit?

Obama voter Mort Zuckerman:

He’s done everything wrong…Obama’s ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he’s been in office. He’s had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences?

And now people stop listening to him. The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He’s lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other political figure since we’ve been using polls. He’s done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things.

I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster. One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.” I’m very disappointed. We endorsed him. I voted for him. I supported him publicly and privately…

The political leadership of the world is very, very dismayed. He better turn it around. The Democrats are going to get killed in this election. Jesus, looks what’s happening in Massachusetts.

Obama voter Professor David Michael Green:

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year…

A successful president is one who articulates a strong and compelling narrative for the nation. So, in your quest to avoid rising even to mediocrity, be sure to leave a great big gaping canyon where that whole narrative thing is supposed to go. No New Deal, no Great Society, no New Frontier or War on Terror for you. Nope! Just a thousand little projects with little non-solutions to big problems. Hey, why not inject yourself into Cambridge, Massachusetts community police politics while you’re at it!…

you’ll also want to take the most important power the president has — the bully pulpit — and totally piss it away. Appear everywhere at once, all the time, saying lots of nice words, about a thousand different issues. But never with passion, never with compelling simplicity, never with repetition, and never with urgency. Pretty soon you’ll turn being everywhere into being nowhere. Everyone one will tune out your ubiquitous self. Give up the high moral ground which is the most important asset of the office you hold, and you’ll make sure that no one ever listens to you anymore. You will persuade the public of nothing. Except that you are irrelevant.

Bob Herbert weighs in with this. NYT: “Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it…Who is Barack Obama? Americans are still looking for the answer.”

These rather harsh assessments from former Obama supporters are not good news for him or, frankly, for the country. Our assessment of the man is also downbeat, but then again, we didn’t vote for him or his strange promises, and we oppose most of his policy initiatives. It is bad news for the country to have, for the next three years, a President many of whose foes and former fans regard as this inept.

The AGW scam was all good fun while it lasted, and profitable too. The Indian head of the UN climate change panel, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has been living it up on the dime of the taxpayers of the US and the West, and his IPCC didn’t even bother to cover up its ineptitude. Times:

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated”…

Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction…and other leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas. A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate. An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Who cares? The people are so gullible that they don’t care if you defraud them and steal their money with utterly bogus “scientific” claims — but apparently they start caring when money gets too short to fund such nutty extravagances. In other news, there is apparently no reliably accurate statistical data supporting meaningful warming in the US over the past century. But party on if you like.

(Extra bonus good fun: Hasnain works for a Pachauri company, and the now-disowned claim about the glaciers helped that company land a big contract and grant. Suckers! HT: Roger Simon)

The WSJ covers some of the same ground as this piece.

We have no idea if this fellow Scott Brown will win, but it is easy to understand his stump speech, which hits a lot of right notes as it aims for independents as well as the Faithful. The professionals who sculpted the scene did a nice job of creating an image of “the people versus the elites,” an image that Brown capitalizes on well:

Thank you very much. What a privilege it is to share the stage with John Ratzenberger, Lenny Clarke, Doug Flutie, Curt Schilling, Fred Smerlas, Steve DeOssie, and many, many others – and my favorite singer, Ayla Brown.

As you know, Curt Schilling made the news just a couple of days ago when my opponent didn’t recognize his name. Of all the many false accusations she’s made in this campaign, one of the strangest was to call Curt Schilling a Yankee fan. Let me properly identify the guy she’s been smearing on the radio: His name is Curt Schilling, formerly of the World Champion Red Sox – you know, a baseball team that plays at Fenway Park.

Doug Flutie, what can I say, great guy, great career, and I am proud you are here. John Ratzenberger, a wonderful actor, you brought a lot of laughs to us during your many years with Cheers. Fred and Steve, you are legends and good friends. Ayla, thank you for again sharing your beautiful voice. Millions have seen her on national TV, and going through this campaign I’ve got an idea of what Ayla went through on “American Idol.” She had to deal with Simon Cowell, and I had to deal with David Gergen.

Our campaign is going strong, and the finish line is in sight. The day of decision is almost here. The whole nation is watching, but the choice on Election Day belongs to you and no one else. Friends and fellow citizens, I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck and I’m asking for your vote.

When we started this campaign just a few months ago, the political machine wrote us off. A Senate seat in Massachusetts, we were told, was already spoken for – and this special election was just a minor detail that wouldn’t get in the way. The political machine already had a short-term placeholder in the Senate. Now all they needed was a long-term placeholder, and everything had been arranged.

Well, there was just one little problem with that plan – the independent-thinking people of Massachusetts wanted a real choice, and they – and you — have made this a real contest.

The voters are doing their own thinking, and the machine politicians don’t quite know how to react. So they put in a distress call to Washington, and the next thing you know, Air Force One is landing at Logan.

My first response is very simple: Democrat or Republican, the president of the United States is always welcome in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Now, it wasn’t exactly a scheduled visit. Sort of a last-minute thing. The political machine controlled that Senate, he was told, and it was going to stay that way.

Well, the party bosses gave the president some bad information. This Senate seat belongs to no one person and no one political party – it belongs to the people of Massachusetts.

Maybe they also told President Obama that I had no chance at all. After all, who ever heard of guy from Wrentham getting elected to the U.S. Senate? But as the president might remember, upsets like that have been known to happen.

The president may recall as well how much he used to talk about a new kind of politics – about campaigns based on conviction, instead of just false and small-minded negative ads. Well, as long as he’s paying a visit, he might want to talk to Martha about that. Not only are her ads negative, they are malicious. How quickly the politics of hope have become replaced by the politics of desperation. Shame on Martha.

Before the president rushed to the scene, we saw my opponent standing with a former president, the governor, the senior senator, the appointed senator – the whole party establishment, right on down the line.

At the beginning, it felt like me against the machine. But guess what? I was wrong. It’s us against the machine.

I don’t need an establishment to prop me up. I stand before you as the proud candidate of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents across Massachusetts, north and south, east and west.

The party machine is in high gear for my opponent. The establishment is afraid of losing their Senate seat. You can all remind them that this is not their seat, it is yours.

Should I have the honor of representing our state in Washington, D.C., I will serve no faction but Massachusetts. I will pursue no agenda but what is right. I will be nobody’s senator but yours.

One of the great advantages of being independent is that you meet voters of every kind. And you learn what people are really thinking about the big issues facing our state and our country. The political experts are still wondering how this little campaign of ours grew so fast and gathered so much strength and momentum. The reason is simple.

We do not want a senator whose only question on health care is to ask Harry Reid, “How do you want me to vote?” Massachusetts wants real reform, and not this trillion-dollar Obama health care bill being forced on the American people.

This bill would raise taxes. It would cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars. It would be unfair to our veterans. It would destroy jobs, and run our nation deeper into debt. It is not in the interest of our state or country – and as your senator, I will insist we start over.

I will work in the Senate to reform health care in the right way, the honest way. No more closed-door meetings behind the scenes. No more arrogant party leadership. We can do better, and as the 41st senator I’ll make sure of it.

In health care, we need to start fresh, work together, and do the job right.

On the question of taxes, my opponent this week endorsed yet another tax increase. She summed up her whole approach by saying, quote, “We need to get taxes up.”

She has it exactly wrong: We need to get job creation up, and taxes down. I will work in the Senate to put government back on the side of people who create jobs – and as John F. Kennedy taught us, that starts with a tax cut for the American people.

As a lieutenant colonel and 30-year member of the Army National Guard, I will keep faith with all who serve, and with our veterans, too. I will work in the Senate to defend our nation’s interests and to keep our military second to none.

In our debate, my opponent insisted that there are no longer any terrorists in Afghanistan. Maybe the president can pull her aside today and explain the basics: There are still many terrorists in Afghanistan, Martha! They are at war with the United States, and for the safety of this nation we must defeat them

As an attorney, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation – they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the agenda of a new establishment in Washington. And they think you’re on board with all of it. They think they own your vote. They’re sure they can’t lose. But on Election Day, the Bay State will set them straight.

If Brown wins the election there will be a lot of over-analysis from both parties. Our two cents: people are tired of the grandees in Washington not listening to them and trying to impose, big, expensive, complicated things on them, come hell or high water. That is an unAmerican as you can get — its opposition began in Boston, after all, more than two centuries ago. Obama the professor seems the personification of this narcissistic and inflexible “I know better than you do” approach, and a substantial portion of the American people have had it up to here with his act.

Yet a protest is not a policy. This is not 1994. The harder part for Republicans is to fashion an approach that does not look like power brokers like Tom DeLay will replace the Reids and Pelosis. One approach to the issue might focus on three things: (a) restoring American pride, not bowing and scraping before other nations; (b) focusing on removing the greatest dangers to American independence — you know, those things that when they go wrong, everyone asks “why didn’t they do something about that, with all the time on their hands? and, most difficult, (c) repairing an American economy beset with structural problems that have generated 20% unemployment among men.

Copenhagen, cap and trade, American cowboyism, “green jobs” and Rube Goldberg healthcare are the big problems and priorities in faculty lounges and the dreamworld of the elites. To one extent or another these are all fantasies. Hence, things have spun out of control under Obama and the people are saying “no” to all that. A majority of Americans would prefer freedom and betterment of their lives to the fantasies of the utopians among us. The question at hand is how to turn a massive protest into a positive program.

Obama was above all the candidate of poetry, but America’s problems are mostly prose. Yet to make the sentiment underlying the Brown protest something sustainable, Republicans need to reach for grander themes than “no.” We’ll just have to see who among them, if any, is capable of rising to the occasion.

TNR suggests an electoral strategy for Democrats and a certain species of Republican:

it’s hardly a shock to hear that some Dems would prefer to set aside tackling climate change–especially so soon after a grueling health care fight. “We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh recently groused, “but I think it’s very difficult in the economic circumstances we have right now.”

Difficult, but maybe less so than Bayh thinks. The House has already passed its own climate bill, complete with a cap on heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and, in the Senate, Democrats have begun to get some welcome support from the other side of the aisle. Susan Collins is co-sponsoring a cap-and-dividend bill, which would essentially tax carbon dioxide at the source and refund most of the proceeds to households, while a few Republicans (like Lisa Murkowski) had positive things to say about last month’s Copenhagen accord, which put key developing countries on a path to curtailing their own emissions.

\Interestingly, one of the most forceful advocates for a Senate climate bill in recent weeks has been Republican Lindsey Graham. “All the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day-in and day-out, you’ll never convince me that’s a good thing for your children and the future of the planet,” he told a crowd in South Carolina, the day after being censured by Charleston County’s GOP for working with Democrats on the issue. “Whatever political pushback I get,” he added, “I’m willing to accept, because I know what I’m trying to do makes sense to me.” Lately, he’s been huddling with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman on a “tripartisan” bill to reduce emissions.

Some have argued that Congress would be crazy to take on an issue as divisive as climate change in an election year, but the Senate, with only one-third of its members up for reelection, is less susceptible to that calculus than the House. And election-year timidity may be more an invention of pundits than historical fact.

To us these people seem out of their minds. We’re in a crisis and these bozos are in cloud-cuckoo-land. (a) When 20$ of American men do are not employed, the number 1, number 2, and number 3 issue is jobs, jobs, jobs — good, private sector jobs. Which means government needs to help and get out of the way at the same time. Furthermore, even if we weren’t in a time of pronounced global cooling, why fiddle around with nonsense like this when it is perfectly clear that countries like China and India aren’t going to play along (except to go to conferecnes where they laugh at us behind our backs). Washington: fools and damned fools.

Howard Dean does not like the Senate healthcare bill:

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform…the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company…

Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

From the very beginning of this debate, progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided…Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to…

I have worked for health-care reform all my political life. In my home state of Vermont, we have accomplished universal health care…I know health reform when I see it, and there isn’t much left in the Senate bill. I reluctantly conclude that, as it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America.

Various voices do not like what happened in Copenhagen:

Obama may become known as “the man who killed Copenhagen,” said Greenpeace US head Phil Radford, one of many activists to rap the president for the flimsy agreement with India, South Africa, Brazil and China, which thwarted the president throughout the conference…

“The president has wrecked the UN and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming,” said Bill McKibbon of the progressive group 350.org…Friends of the Earth tore into the pact as well. “Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries,” the group said in a statement. “This is not a strong deal or a just one — it isn’t even a real one.”

Apparently it’s tough to be a man of the Left these days.

Here’s what wowed ‘em in Copenhagen:

President Chavez brought the house down. When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause. When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening…

then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ — “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Meanwhile, following the historical pattern of developing capitalist economies, China is currently home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities on the planet, and has pretty bad water quality as it industrializes to lift its people out of grinding poverty. The government says “don’t hate the rich, be one of them.” In some ways China’s economic development mirrors that of the US a hundred years ago.

As a result of these priorities, China apparently has a different take on Copenhagen: “China has told participants in the UN climate change talks that it sees no possibility of achieving an operational accord this week…China is instead suggesting issuing ‘a short political declaration of some sort’, but it is not clear what that will say.” One part of the world waxes, while another part wanes.

Journalist Diane Francis in the Financial Post:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world. A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate…

The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah…None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed.

From the bio of Diane Francis: “We started a graphic design and typesetting business, Francis Graphics, which became very successful. I left the business to stay at home with our two babies, Eric and Julie, for six years.” So which of her kids doesn’t she like? Or maybe it’s only your kids she doesn’t approve of.

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

Telegraph:

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.

The AP reports that the sponsors of Copenhagen are hoping to pick your pocket. Meanwhile, the head of the IPCC provides some comic relief:

At stake is a deal that aims to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, and to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor countries every year over decades to help them adapt to climate change.

Scientists say without such an agreement, the Earth will face the consequences of ever-rising temperatures, leading to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal cities, more extreme weather events, drought and the spread of diseases.

“The evidence is now overwhelming” that the world needs early action to combat global warming, said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an U.N. expert panel.

He defended climate research in the face of a controversy over e-mails pilfered from a British university, which global warming skeptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn’t fit their theories.

“The recent incident of stealing the e-mails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC,” he told the conference.

Meanwhile: “the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier…”We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.” And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five”…The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets.

Rajendra K. Pachauri -– the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –- veered into self-parody in the Guardian about the East Anglia scandal and the IPCC (HT: Roger Simon):

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report…Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

He also said that people fly on airplanes far too frequently, and he “denounced” the practice of serving ice water to some patrons in restaurants in a different piece in the Guardian:

“Today we have reached the point where consumption and people’s desire to consume has grown out of proportion…The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable.”…”We should make sure there is a huge difference between the cost of flying and taking the train,” he said. Despite the fact that there is often little benefit in time and convenience in short-haul flights, he said people were still making the “irrational” choice to fly…Pachauri also denounced the practice in some restaurants of providing iced water to customers who had not ordered it. “It is just an enormous amount of waste that we don’t even think about”…

BTW, Pachauri also wants to regulate how much meat you can consume.

The Punchline, via Mark Steyn: “Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles…So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.” God save us from these creatures!

The East Anglia epicenter of AGW alarmism is even worse than you might have thought. Times:

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.

So they threw away the actual data and kept the cooked books. Does that sound like science or does it sound like Enron? Would you want to spend a trillion dollars based on this? HT: Roger Simon

(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.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

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.

We originally posted this back in June, but it seems relevant again, given the recent events in East Anglia. As we said at that time, cap and trade is a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist. Yet worthies like Paul Krugman are vehemently for cap and trade and find “treason” among the global warming “deniers”:

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?

An awfully big deal is being made about some academics who apparently made up some rather dramatic global warming data (here, here and here for example). We hope the fraudsters take it in the shorts. It’s pretty obvious that there’s good money (and high praise) to be had in being a global warming alarmist, and so fraud will surely follow — and it has.

Whether the exposure of the fraudsters changes this faith-based debate remains to be seen, however. When the earth heats or cools a bit, the reason is probably solar activity, though it’s always possible there are some other factors at work as well. What is assuredly not the cause is an absolutely trivial — from 280 to 380 ppm — increase over the course of a century in a gas essential to life on earth. Indeed, it seems to us plausible that the slight rise in CO2 is an effect, not a cause.

In any event, the hysteria generated by the Tipping Point crowd about potential consequences decades in the future ought itself to be clear evidence that common sense has vanished and that in all likelihood your pocket is being picked by these seemingly earnest preachers. That particular Great Awakening still lies in our future, however.