New Pournelle interview

Glenn Reynolds interviews Jerry Pournelle, at PJTV.

Compare and contrast: Tom Snyder interviewed Jerry Pournelle and Durk Pearson, back in 1979.

Save the data!

Maurizio Morabito:

The prestigious collection of hundreds of years of weather observations, historical books and meteorological instruments from the Collegio Romano in Rome is at risk of being dispersed for good. Please sign the appeal to prevent such a disaster: http://www.petizionionline.it/petizione/salviamo-losservatorio-meteorologico-di-roma/2200 (in the signature section: “Nome”=First name; “Cognome”=Family name; “richiesto”=Mandatory field)

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A few days ago I have received the following letter via e-mail (translated and adapted in English from the original in Italian):

Dear friends,

It is with great sadness that I am forwarding the attached letter – press release by the staff at the Research Unit for Applied Meteorology and Climatology in Agriculture (in Italian: CRA-CMA), the direct descendant of the first Italian National Weather Station inaugurated in 1876 and headquartered at the Collegio Romano from 1879 (in an area previously occupied by the Meteorological Observatory built in 1782 by Abbot Giuseppe Calandrelli (the first to apply gravitational theory to cometary atmospheres)). I hope that those who have taken this decision will go back on it, at least reconsider this meteorological site, by declaring its historical importance for Italian meteorology. That would mean leaving untouched its Library, Historical Archives and the Museum of Ancient Meteorological and Seismographic Instruments, as well as the historic Calandrelli Observatory. The Library is at present unique in Italy, after the closure, in the 1990s, of the Air Force Weather Service Library.

Joanne Nova says,

How valuable is empirical evidence and long term data? The Collegio Romano is one of the few places in the world with multi-centennial meteorological and climate data series (228 years!) … Not many people in the world appreciate how important and rare those long temperature series and historic collections are.

If the warmingists were really interested in science, this would be a big deal. Al Gore has made enough on climate alarmism to buy the place, single-handed. It's just as well, though, since the alarmists have shown what they think of data. Data are to be extrapolated, adjusted, inferred, or deleted. The actual records can be so, uh, inconvenient. Look at New Zealand for a current case, if you're tired of Phil Jones.

From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Kyoto Protocol by any other name is Wirtschaftskampf

That's "economic struggle," or trade warfare.

Back in 2002, there was still a lot of talk about how the US should hurry up and ratify the Kyoto Protocol before New York sank beneath the waves, or something. I asked Megan McArdle* if it might have been "designed to be harmless to EU economies while handcuffing ours? So that the ratification really requires no changes on their parts?" She looked at the numbers, and agreed that

The European politicians who pushed it care less about absolute prosperity than relative prosperity. They're okay with hurting their economies if ours is hurt more.

But she was too kind to those European politicians.

Recently in the Weekly Standard, John Rosenthal has taken a look at "The Secret History of Climate Alarmism: A very German story of power politics disguised as environmentalism." He goes back to 1986:

The original impulse to take action had come from the German Physics Society, which in January 1986 published a “Warning of an Impending Climate Catastrophe.” Just over six months later, in August, the newsweekly Der Spiegel popularized the German physicists’ “warning” in a spectacular cover story headlined “The Climate Catastrophe.” The image on the cover of the magazine depicted Cologne’s historic cathedral surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean: a consequence of the melting of the polar ice caps, as was explained on the inside of the issue. Thus was the “global warming” scare born. In Germany, in 1986.

The whole protocol, or "framework convention," was carefully tailored to fit events in Europe. It's no coincidence that the base year for most countries in Kyoto was the year after the Berlin Wall fell.

Rosenthal raises a concern about the wisdom, and priorities, of our diplomats:

The real questions that Americans need to ask concern their own negotiators. How could they have permitted the United States to be boxed into such an obviously prejudicial corner, and why did neither they nor the Clinton administration as such do anything to expose the ruse?

The Senate at least saw through it, and refused to ratify, 95-0. Here's the actual Senate resolution (pdf). So the 95 "Yea" votes are votes against adopting the treaty.

The science has always been secondary to the politics.

The Kyoto Protocol is still out there, not dead yet. A few more Al Frankens in the Senate and it still might pass. Here's Franken in 2009:

We can start by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. One of the dumbest things that President Bush said -- and that's a high bar -- is that Kyoto would cripple the U.S. economy. I think the opposite is true.

Funny, Al.
_________________________________
* I was using my real name on the Internet in those days. The Anglosphere Challenge was published in 2004, and it was shortly after that I grew tired of having to explain over and over again that I was not the author of that fine book, but someone else entirely.

James Cameron thinks I'm a swine

Good to know, I guess.

Apparently Cameron invited a couple of AGW skeptics (and Andrew Breitbart) to debate with him on the topic of AGW, at an event called the American Renewable Energy Summit. At the last moment he rescinded the invitations.

Meanwhile, Cameron attended the event on Sunday and used the platform to say of those who question man-made global warming: “I think they are swine."

Insulting empty chairs is always a good debating strategy. Sharon Waxman has the story. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Eyjafjallajökull

That's the volcano in Iceland that's causing so much havoc. Looks like this:



They are saying it may erupt again. This, you see, is geoengineering, as done on the large scale, by Gaia herself. Piddling plans of self-styled climatologists to launch particles into the atmosphere to raise the Earth's albedo, to block those deadly warming rays from the Sun, are shown up as the silliness they always were. If we get another Tambora event ("eighteen hundred and froze to death") out of this volcano, will the cap 'n' traders and greenies finally realize that warmer is better? I expect not. There's too much money already invested in the contrary view.

Monckton's proposed personal briefing for Rudd

James Delingpole says, "If any of your idiot friends still believe in AGW, make them read this letter." Then he quotes some high points. The whole thing is at Watts Up With That.

Good luck with the part about making them read it.

Neuroscience meets global warming

See this at Wizbang:

ClimateGate (Inadvertently) Explained

Via a link from InstaPundit, here is an eye-opening article from the current issue of Wired: "Accept Defeat - The Neuroscience of Screwing Up":

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University.

... Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. "I'm not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into," Dunbar says. "I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so much to keep track of."

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."

You really need to read the rest, because it provides a fascinating insight into the frustrations encountered by research scientists on a regular basis. I spent the better part of a decade working in a testing and analysis laboratory. We never did "pure research" -- all of our work was based on well-known analysis methods and verified by standard quality control procedures. Still, we occasionally had to re-do entire sets of tests if our quality controls indicated errors. Researchers can sometimes trace unexplained results back to commonly encountered problems with laboratory equipment, reagents, or calibration standards, but many times there is no clear understanding of why the results of carefully planned experiments end up being "wrong."

The Instapundit reader who emailed this story to Glenn Reynolds wryly noted, "Wired Magazine unknowingly explains Climategate." How true. As I have previously noted, the ClimateGate scientists, most notably Michael Mann and Phil Jones, seem to have fallen prey to the temptations of celebrity recognition and unlimited research funding that are promised by those in power when scientific research seems to be producing the "right" answers. Mann, Jones, et. al. undoubtedly believed that they were on to something significant, but chose to disregard objectivity when confronted with the fact that much of their research data apparently resided in that damnable 50% - 75% category of errant or unexpected results.

There is more.

Hockey sticks in the ice (cores)

Some sharp comments at this post by Neo-neocon, The WaPo goes rogue …, mentioning Sarah Palin's op-ed on Climategate. Commenter rickl suggests mailing this around: Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data. One of several striking graphs:

Those are years B.C. to A.D. across the bottom. Mann's hockey stick is visible on the far right. Or,

over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

Nice interglacial we have going here. Let's not mess it up.

Can we save ourselves?

Pull back from the brink? Not jump off the bridge?

Joel Kotkin discusses Copenhagen, what's happening, who benefits. Capping Emissions, Trading On The Future: The West's goals in Copenhagen are tantamount to suicide. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Eric S. Raymond on Climategate

ESR has been looking at the emails and at the code, in a series of posts:

• Hiding the Decline: Prologue
• Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate
• Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins
• Facts to fit the theory
• AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace
• Facts to fit the theory? Actually, no facts at all!
• "The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room"
  

I dare say there will be more. And he points out that Ken Burnside has started a blog, Data Against Demagogues, which will deal with, among other things, an effort by himself and collaborators to get the datasets and run the models, to see if any of the AGW work can be replicated in an open source way. Along the way, Burnside links to the "complete list of things caused by global warming" at Number Watch. A small sample:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks,

Each item is a link. It goes on.

Conflict of interests for WaPo climate reporter

Recent stories about Climategate in the WaPo (and not-so-recent stories about global warming) written by Juliet Eilperin are written from the slant that AGW is incontrovertibly proven, and that "The e-mails don't say that: They don't provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle."

Oh, OK then. That statement begs the question in a couple of ways, by assuming that "climate change" is happening and that it is human-caused. Shoddy logic.

The conflict of interest appears when we note that Juliet Eilperin is married to Andrew Light. Andrew Light is, among other things, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, specializing in climate, energy, and science policy. A look around the CAP website shows that it is committed to all the worst ideas of the "progressive" left, including, of course, the notion that AGW is real and that therefore the world must be turned upside down to fight it. Oh, and overpopulation is a menace. They are right there with Holdren and Ehrlich.

Climategate, still growing

Lots of Real Life^TM to deal with, lately, so I am just trying to follow developments, not doing much blogging. As you might have noticed.

Watts Up With That is staying on top of it, with a big accumulator page, and plenty of regular posting.

Such as: Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues: "The Whistle Blows for Truth." Most recently: Now it’s serious, Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocks Gore and Global Warming. As I said quite a while ago, more jokes, please!

Climategate goes on

I have not mentioned the Minnesotans for Global Warming for a while. They have not been hibernating, however. Here's a new song to go with the new scandal.

Don Surber has this, with the original, and some other items.

At Hillbuzz, The Global Warming fraud is an excellent chance to drive a wedge between the MSM and American public. "We tend to view everything that happens in terms of how it could impact the 2010 and 2012 races, in which we want to see as many Liberals driven from office as possible. So, today we’re thinking less about the Cap & Tax measures (which were going to fail before these emails were released) and more about what needs to be done to convince regular, non-political Americans that they were victims of an enormous scam the MSM helped facilitate."

Lorrie Goldstein at the Toronto Sun: Why 'climategate' won't stop greens. "This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power." (via Reynolds.)

Aj Strata has been on a roll with this, lots of posts, starting on Nov 20.

At the WSJ, How to Forge a Consensus. "The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start." Nice pun in the title. (via Reynolds.)

Climategate, continued

Still looking for mainstream media to notice that there is a scandal revealed here. In the NYT:

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, says he believes the release of the CRU data will ultimately do little to influence public opinion.

"Based on what we have here, I don't believe it's going to affect public opinion at all," he said. "Most people will never hear about this. Within a month, probably within a couple of weeks, this story will have basically died as a mainstream media story, unless it turns out to be the beginning of some grander, bigger scandal."

Under the rug, or the bus, is where the Powers That Be would like this to go.

WSJ is better, in Global Warming With the Lid Off:

we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

Meanwhile, at PJ Media, Iain Murray offers Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate. "First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results.… Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication.… Finally, the scientists worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom."

Also at PJ Media, Charlie Martin says that the Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story. This one is not just infuriating, but close to funny, as Charlie looks through a read_me file describing the frustration of a programmer trying to make sense of chaotic stuff that does not deserve to be called "data," and code that works just as well upside down — or was it the other way round?

Declan McCullagh says that Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails. Sen. Inhofe appears to see the problem.

Glenn Reynolds and a reader discuss the False Claims Act. Discovery would be interesting.

Climategate: AGW conspiracy exposed, or so it would appear

Updated and bumped.

This could be

Huge!

if it gets coverage.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been keeping up with this. I'll post some links here, for reference.

ClimateDepot has a roundup post that's being updated.

Bishop Hill's concise list of summaries of emails is also available at Watts Up With That.

Slashdot: Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked.

Searchable database of the emails. Does not appear to include code or data.

Another searchable database that does include documents other than mail.

James Delingpole at the Telegraph: Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Andrew Bolt: Warmist conspiracy exposed? And: The warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones.

Andrew C. Revkin at NYT: Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics. (Revkin has changed the title since I posted this; I do not know if he has also changed the text.) No comments on this one. But Revkin has blogged it, and comments are there: Private Climate Conversations on Display. He seems more offended by the hacking than by the conspiracy. Whistleblowing is a great thing when one agrees with the whistleblower. If not, then not so much.

Watts Up With That: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

Follow-up at Watts Up With That (mirrored from ClimateAudit.org): Mike's Nature Trick

Luboš Motl: Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files

John Hinderaker: a lawyer examines some evidence. The Alarmists Do "Science": A Case Study. Revkin is mentioned.

Richard Fernandez at PJ Media: The CRU Hack.

Big roundup and a nifty graphic (ad for "Al Gore's Corn Ethanol Based Global Warming Vodka: Preferred drink of progressive elites") at American Power: Global Warming Hoax Breaks Wide Open as Hackers Target East Anglia Climate Research Unit!

Gotta link Althouse, just because: Climategate. And: "Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as 'prats' and 'utter prats.'"

Charlie Martin, at PJ Media, lines out the big picture of three different scandals at the same time: Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?

Another piece at PJ Media, by Rand Simberg: Global WarmingGate: When Scientists Become Politicians, has a comment linking to someone looking at the code, who says, "This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets."

Monckton weighs in: Viscount Monckton on Global WarmingGate: ‘They Are Criminals’

From way back in August, but related, Frank J. Tipler at PJ Media: Climate Data: Top Secret!

Here earlier: Climate Money.

More to come, no doubt.

Monckton speaks with Michael Coren

How did I miss this? Canadian TV, OK.

From a month ago, before the big leak.

Part 1:



Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Worrying about (A)GW wrecks real environmental concern

"Environmentalism" used to be called "conservationism." I wonder what happened to that? "Conservationist" sounds a little too much like "conservative." Liberals live and die by the labels in their heads, so the name had to be changed.

Warren Meyer says that global warming hysteria is "sucking the oxygen out of the environmental movement." Well, yeah. For instance, cyanide, used in gold mining, is definitely a poisonous pollutant. But carbon dioxide is an essential component of life. It's plant food. Yet we now have the EPA, the Supreme Court, and the President referring to carbon, meaning carbon dioxide, as a pollutant!

Washington (April 17, 2009) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Lisa Jackson made an historic announcement today to move forward with the ruling that the carbon pollution that causes global warming is a danger to public health and welfare. This action will finally enable the EPA to begin implementing the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that carbon pollution can be curbed under the Clean Air Act.

We are carbon-based life forms, here on Earth. Honest, we are! There's a reason why "organic" chemistry is all about the carbon compounds.

Meyer's post links to some pictures from China that show what real pollution is about. For those who have forgotten.

(A)GW and the response to it considered as a game matrix

One of the comments on the Slashdot item linked in the Climategate post is an elegant description of what I just said in the title, there: (A)GW and the response to it considered as a game matrix. It's the one that begins,

You can have billions of data points over several millenia and the only thing you can hope to prove is a strong correlation between A=CO2 levels and B=global temperature.

Go read it, it's not very long.

Al Gore: pretty good with some numbers

Numbers with dollar signs attached.

With other numbers, not so good.



Millions of degrees at the Earth's core, indeed. John Derbyshire checks the numbers. He's a climate con artist, that's all. It would make sense to follow his lead on investments … just as it would to invest along with George Soros, they are the same, after all … provided that you took the Louis XV attitude towards the future: "Après moi, le déluge." Does he imagine that the millions that he is amassing from his climate con game will protect his grandchildren from the apocalypse that he predicts?

It's a good thing to be rich. It's not a good thing to get rich by scaring people about the ManBearPig that's coming to get you!

Klaus speaks on climate and Communism

Peter Robinson's five-part interview with Václav Klaus is now complete.

Part 1: on the events of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.
Part 2: "Are there parallels to be drawn between a united Europe and the late, unlamented Warsaw Pact? Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus makes a case."
Part 3: "Al Gore is wrong about global warming."
Part 4: "Klaus describes how he became an advocate of free-market principles."
Part 5: "Have we drifted from the decisive victories for freedom achieved in 1989?"