Domestic Terrorists

May I suggest a visit to the YouTube page this video came from to watch more videos? Also the Forclosure Diaries home page.

The video was suggested in the comments to You Have Got to be KIDDING - Nancy Jacobini's Home was Broken Into AGAIN.

The question is: why would the banks be doing this? I have a theory (gleaned from the comments at "Nancy Jacobini..."). Suppose through Credit Default Swaps (CDS)and other financial instruments the banks get paid several times the value of the property when they foreclose? What is the incentive to accept home owner payments? The incentive is to reject mortgage payments because the property is worth more in default than with an "owner" actually living in it.

With ordinary insurance once one company pays the others are off the hook. You can't collect several times the value insured. But CDSes are more opaque than real insurance. Thus the banks can get away with this sort of fraud.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

You Learn Something New Quite Frequently

A couple of days ago I learned about Benford's law.

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on the logarithmic scale.

This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.

I looked it up when I was trying to find out how some types of fraud (making up numbers) are detected.

An Inconvenient Question

I missed this video when it first came out. It is reporter Phelim McAleer asking Stephen Schneider some questions. Check out the totalitarian response to an inconvenient question.

And just who is Stephen Schneider? He is the academic who said:

“To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Ah. So honesty is no longer the best policy. Nice to know where he stands. If he is talking he is lying. Unless conclusively beyond a reasonable doubt proved otherwise.

And Mr. SS has written a book:

Science as a Contact Sport

Evidently the contact has been a bit too much for him.

Schneider is also a member of the Club Of Rome. Here is a bit on The Club of Rome along with a cast of characters.

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller

Well on to the video.



And these folks wonder why there is a Tea Party movement? It seems like a rational response to their plan for world domination.



Click on the above image and learn how to spread it around.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Breitbart At The Tea Party Convention

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I also like the following interview of Breitbart done by Instapundit. You can see several of the themes he presented in his speech previewed here.



Part 2

And just to add to the mix, here is Bill Whittle on how Breitbart splashed on to the scene.



H/T Andrew Marcus at Big Government

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Listen My Friends

The above is a little Moby Grape ditty called Omaha. Which brings to mind a report on how Omaha voters view the Obama administration.

OMAHA, Neb.—As President Barack Obama began his first State of the Union address Wednesday night, Kevin Fischer glanced at television above him and compared his 2008 vote for the president to ordering from an infomercial.

"You listen to the sales pitch and you're so excited and then it arrives and you open the box and it just crumbles," Mr. Fischer said. "It turns out you didn't get what you thought you were going to."

Politicians and used car salesmen. Voters should know better.

Regret for supporting a Democratic presidential candidate is an unusual sensation in this quiet, snow-covered prairie city. That's because heading into the 2008 election, no Democratic presidential candidate had won here since 1964. Nebraska was second only to Utah in its red-state reliability.

My mom is an Omaha Democrat. When I was growing up I was an Omaha Democrat too.

The Obama campaign succeeded by drawing from the district's substantial pool of independent voters and by coaxing a critical mass of registered Republicans in middle-class neighborhoods to cross party lines, according to Douglas County election records. Here, where the urban core gives way to 20- and 30-year-old subdivisions with names like Ridgefield and Eagle Run, Mr. Obama turned Omaha blue.

Some of those voters eat breakfast at Billy's Cafe, a small restaurant in a busy strip mall where a short stack of pancakes and an egg costs $2.85 and photos of dirt-track racing cars adorn mustard-colored walls. Jennifer Wood, a waitress at Billy's for seven years, said a lot of her customers own their own homes and pay cash for new cars.

"All of a sudden, a lot of them lost a lot of money and instead of retiring in a year, they're hoping to retire in five years, minimum," she said. A Republican who voted for Sen. John McCain, Ms. Wood said that Mr. Obama, "had a chance to be a great president. But he focused on the wrong thing, he focused on health care instead of jobs, and people are angry about that."

I can confidently tell Jennifer it is not just Omaha.

Chris Pflaum, a liquor salesman who also abandoned his party to support Mr. Obama, said in retrospect, he voted with his heart instead of his head.

"I think I got caught up in the fact that he was the first African-American president," Mr. Pflaum said. "With the economy the way it is, that doesn't seem as important anymore."

Well at least he has the liquor to fall back on.

What is the most common sentiment in America about Mr. Obama's election and subsequent performance according to totally anecdotal evidence I have collected?

Mr. Fischer said when he voted he believed Mr. Obama would draw down U.S. troops abroad, close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and help get the economy back on track.

"None of that has happened," he said. "I feel duped."

These folks from Omaha are not the only rubes.

There is evidence that there are a lot of rubes in Europe. And there is no evidence that any of the European people quoted ever lived in Omaha.

And for the record: I voted for Palin. I could see the Three Card Monty dealer now ensconced in the White House from half a continent away. Actually I didn't have to look that far. Chicago is less than 90 miles away from where I reside.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Chinese Puzzle

The guardian.co.uk, a paper not noted for its scepticism about Man Made Global Warming, has uncovered what appears to be fraud in the Phil Jones account of Chinese weather stations.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

. What amuses me about this is that Climate Audit had made similar claims in 2007 and they had left no mark on the good science of the climate researchers.

Did Jones et al 1990 “fabricate” its quality control claims? This hard-hitting question is asked by Doug Keenan here. He cites the following claims from Jones et al 1990 and Wang et al:

The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times. [Jones et al.]

They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times…. [Wang et al.]

Keenan observed that those statements are vital for the papers. For many years, no one knew what stations were used in Jones et al 1990. Only after recent FOI actions in the UK publicized here at CA did a list of the stations used in Jones et al 1990 become available in March 2007, after years of obstruction. Since then, Keenan has corresponded recently with both Jones and Wang, seeking a valid explanation of the above claims. His conclusion:

The essential point here is that the quoted statements from Jones et al. and Wang et al. cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated.

So far the discrepancies uncovered by McIntyre have proved to be true and the cover ups and obfuscations of the Team have appeared to be false. And it is early days yet. Not even three months into ClimateGate and the IPCC report is falling apart.

Evidently There Was A Lack of Evidence

The Stern Review on the effects of climate change (things will be different?) had to retract a point or two after publication.

The Stern Review on the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the Treasury, was greeted with headlines worldwide when it was published in October 2006

It contained dire predictions about the impact of climate change in different parts of the world.

But it can be revealed that when the report was printed by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.

Among the claims that were removed in the later version of the report, which is now also available in its altered form online, were claims that North West Australia has been hit by stronger tropical typhoons in the past 30 years.

Another claim that southern regions in Australia have lost rainfall due to rising ocean temperatures and air currents pushing rain further south was also removed.

Claims that eucalyptus and savannah habitats in Australia would also become more common were also deleted.

The claims were highlighted in several Australian newspapers when the report was initially published, but the changes were never publicly announced.

A figure on the cost of US Hurricanes was also changed after a typographical error was spotted in the original report. The original stated in a table the cost of hurricanes in the US would rise from 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 1.3%.

The later report corrected the error so the increase was from 0.06% to 0.13%. A statement about the correction appeared in a postscript of the report and on the Treasury website.

We are so fortunate that it was not a Harsh Review. Or a Severe Review.

What it looks like to me is that things are not as bad as we thought. Except maybe for Climate Scientists.

A mighty outpouring of rage today from Philip Stott, foaming with righteous indignation, on the life and imminent death of the AGW scam.

Part of him is naturally enthralled:

… as an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face – political, economic, and scientific.

He recognises that this an era of massive geopolitical power shifts:

The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen débâcle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska.

So how about those scientists who ran the scam? Off with their heads.

Now suddenly it has all changed utterly. And you know what? I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians like Brown and disgusting Milibands booted out and I want Conservative fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick – that’ll be you, David Cameron, you Greg Clark, you Tim Yeo, you John Gummer, to name but four – to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.

For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Chris Booker has had the same experience, as has Richard North, Benny Peiser, Lord Lawson, Philip Stott and those few others of us who recognised early on that the AGW thing stank. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

Yeah, maybe it isn’t the Christian way. But screw ‘em. It’s not as though they haven’t all been screwing us for long enough.

As you can see it is the view from the Brit side of the pond. Over here we have Al Gore as our bete noire. And Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre as our relentless surveyors of the scientific scene.

And as long as Anthony Watts is on my mind, how about a look at coral bleaching in Florida?

Never mind predictions of catastrophic bleaching from global warming, cold is the culprit of this story. With ocean heat content now shown to be dropping slightly since 2005, there is even greater concern.

Excerpts from Physorg.com: Coral in Florida Keys suffers lethal hit from cold:

January 30, 2010 By Curtis Morgan

Bitter cold this month may have wiped out many of the shallow water corals in the Keys.

Scientists have only begun assessments, with dive teams looking for “bleaching” that is a telltale indicator of temperature stress in sensitive corals, but initial reports are bleak. The impact could extend from Key Largo through the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, a vast expanse that covers some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.

Given the depth and duration of frigid weather, Meaghan Johnson, marine science coordinator for The Nature Conservancy, expected to see losses. But she was stunned by what she saw when diving a patch reef 2.5 miles off Harry Harris Park in Key Largo.

Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death. There were also dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish littering the bottom.

“Corals didn’t even have a chance to bleach. They just went straight to dead,” said Johnson, who joined teams of divers last week surveying reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “It’s really ecosystem-wide mortality.”

The record chill that gripped South Florida for two weeks has taken a heavy toll on wildlife — particularly marine life.

Jeeze. The Global Warming folks have been preparing for hot and now they have nothing in their bag for cold. I warned them. But they wouldn't listen. Oh well.

BTW the last I heard CO2 was still going up:



This falling temperature thing was totally unexpected. According to Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. the IPCC models don't do natural variability.

What can we learn from the IPCC climate models based upon their ability to reconstruct the global average surface temperature variations during the 20th Century?

While the title of this article suggests I’ve found evidence of natural climate cycles in the IPCC models, it’s actually the temperature variability the models CANNOT explain that ends up being related to known climate cycles. After an empirical adjustment for that unexplained temperature variability, it is shown that the models are producing too much global warming since 1970, the period of most rapid growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This suggests that the models are too sensitive, in which case they are forecasting too much future warming, too.

There are things the models can't explain? Like where they learned the trick to hide the decline? Well I can tell you I am shocked. I don't mind a girl straying. We are all human. But Heidi D. Kline has gone too far by hiding her extra curricular activities. I consider that cheating. Admitted error I can handle. Cheating is beyond the pale.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Dear God Please Not Another One

James Delingpole appears to have found another hole in the IPCC "science". You can check out his view of the holes in the science of the Amazon rain forest. I'd rather look at personalities.

It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:

My background and experience around the world has required and developed high-level policy and analytical skills. I have a strong understanding of government administration, legislative review, analysis and inquiries generated through involvement in or management of the Australian Regional Forest Agreement process, Parliamentary and Government inquiries, Coronial inquiries and public submissions on water pricing, access and use rights and native vegetation legislation in Australia and fire and natural resources laws, regulations and policies in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia.

And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist:

Andy Rowell is a freelance writer and Investigative journalist with over 12 years’ experience on environmental, food, health and globalization issues. Rowell has undertaken cutting-edge investigations for, amongst others, Action on Smoking and Health, The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, IFAW, the Pan American Health Organization, Project Underground, the World Health Organization, World in Action and WWF.

But the IPCC’s shamelessness did not end there. Dr North has searched the WWF’s reports high and low but can find no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change.

Oh. Dear God No. They are just making shit up.

Here is what I think IPCC now stands for:

I Pretend (you) Cough (up the) Coin.

A Disaster Of Biblical Proportions

The UN's IPCC has just taken a few more torpedoes below the water line.

Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

Here’s an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report:

I'm not going to reprise the long list. You can find it at the links provided.

I would like to touch on a few things. First off WWF stands for the World Wildlife Fund. Second I'd like to look at the connection between the WWF and the UK Meteorological Office.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

Scientific method has gone out of the window, to support a theory that looks more questionable than ever.

And what is the WWF telling its Internet readers?

The U.K. Met Office says "it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998."

The Met Office said the record temperatures likely will be driven by "a combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño." It noted that this year is the fifth warmest year, based on records extending back to 1850.

"Looking further ahead, our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010–2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far — 1998," the Met Office said.

Ah yes the experimental models. What he means is computer programs. Unverified computer programs with dodgy codes and corrupted data.

And about the floods and hurricanes that are supposed to descend on mankind if he doesn't mend his ways? Made up.

THE UN climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to a rise in natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. The report's author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.

The link was central to demands at last month's Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $US100 billion from the rich nations.

However, the IPCC knew in 2008 that the link could not be proved but did not alert world leaders, who have used weather extremes to bolster the case for action on climate change.

And they knew it was bad and did nothing. You know, that is not the only fraud uncovered. We may now be in possession of tens of them. So far. In fact it is looking like the whole IPCC enterprise is a fraud. And that doesn't even get to the bottom of the CO₂ emissions trading fraud.

I'd like to go back to Watts Up With That and look at a few comments on the subject.

Evidently the WWF is removing articles they had formerly posted. That is pretty good evidence on its face that they were fraudulent.

Jer (18:34:30) :

I find that most of the links are now inactive. Wondering if this is happening because of the attention. It seems like IPCC referenced material ought to be available.

Jer

This one is amusing:

PaulH (18:34:53) :

@Patrick Davis: It might be easier to list what the IPCC got right.

Frankly, if the IPCC were to declare that water is wet I would insist on independent verification from a non-UN/non-WWF affiliated organization before believing it.

Another joker.

Halfwise (18:49:58) :

It is easy to get confused between the World Wildlife Fund and World Wrestling Entertainment. Here is how to tell them apart: One gets crowds wildly excited with staged antics, bizarre plot lines and unbelievable hype. The other stages wrestling exhibitions.

Here is one about the fraud connections. It refers to a rather long comment with links up thread.

Andrew30 (19:04:30) :

pat (18:37:29) : ;

Yes, pat I put that there.

This list of documents goes beyond just one carbon trader.

So was the money and influence from more then one carbon trader being channeled through the WWF to both the CRU and the IPCC?

Has the WWF become no more than and money and influence launderer for Big Carbon?

Here is an excerpt from a comment from A Jones.

a jones (19:30:42) :

Yes

As I observed elsewhere this is a great scientific, financial and political fraud. And as with all frauds once the dominoes start to topple the collapse accelerates with terrifying speed.

So fast that I at least can hardly keep up.

And although there is immense inertia in those who have invested so heavily in the fraud, from the political activists to the Meeja to the politicians themselves once there is sufficient impetus in the avalanche they have to give way. The politicians will say they were deceived but acted in good faith, the Meeja never apologises for anything, and the activists will say they were only trying to get a point across, see WWF announcement over glaciers.

Yet possibly for the first time we are seeing what t’internet and the WWW can really do.

The Indian press is hot on the story, something we would have never known even a few years ago.

Isn’t modern technology a wonderful thing?

Yes it is.

Here is a rather long one about conjecture in science.

yonason (19:34:37) :

Shrinking Glaciers, Shrinking Arctic; Science so simple that even Mark Twain could do it.

http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/life_mississippi/18

“Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
……….
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

I think Mark Twain ia as good a place as any to put a halt to this amusement. It is hard to get more amusing than that. The good news is that the whole fraud is unraveling. It will be interesting to see what the Watermelons try next.

Green is the new Red!


Cross Posted at Classical Values

Scientist - I Lied

A lead IPCC scientist lied to get political action.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

And there is some evidence he lied for money.

How can people like that sleep at night?

On a pillow full of twenties I recon.

H/T Watts Up With That

Prostitution Services

Andrew Cockburn, who is not a conservative politically, has a few words about what is really behind the global warming scam. You will note that the piece appears on Counter Punch which is not in any way shape or form associated with American Conservative thought.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic – human-caused - global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web over a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.

Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception – particularly the executive summaries -- carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters Shell and BP, also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.

You will also note that James Hansen, one of the cheer leaders for global warming, was at one time funded by Enron. He also has a peculiar stance on fossil fuels. Coal bad, natural gas good. I don't see why one form of CO2 (from coal) is worse than the CO2 from another source (natural gas).

Mr Cockburn continues with:

After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, “Climategate” the reaction amid progressive circles – 99 per cent inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming - has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause.

Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers – always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail – that they commanded the moral high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There’s now a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It’s where the money is. Scepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

The camp followers and prostitutes are sure to be pissed if the global cooling predicted by Russian scientists in 2006 comes to pass.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov expects a repeat of the period known as the Little Ice Age. During the 16th century, the Baltic Sea froze so hard that hotels were built on the ice for people crossing the sea in coaches.

The Little Ice Age is believed to have contributed to the end of the Norse colony in Greenland, which was founded during an interval of much warmer weather.

Abdusamatov and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences astronomical observatory said the prediction is based on measurement of solar emissions, Novosti reported. They expect the cooling to begin within a few years and to reach its peak between 2055 and 2060.

"The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times," he said. "The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth's global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol."

There are signs:

Rare blizzard strikes West Texas.

DALLAS — In much of the rolling plains of West Texas, a blizzard has never been recorded.

There has been one now.

The region west and northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area saw blizzard-like conditions throughout the day Christmas Eve as up to 8 inches of snow fell in the region, according to the National Weather Service. Winds gusting at up to 65 mph drifted the snow as deep as 5 feet in some areas.

No blizzard warning had ever been issued for an area of Texas as far south as Interstate 20, said Jim Wingenroth, senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office in San Angelo.

Blizzards in China.

There is a lot more bad weather going around. Compare the predictions of Britain's Meteorological Office to current reality.

And a look at how China is profiting from the AGW scare is instructive.

So you think giving developing countries all those free "carbon credits" is going to cut greenhouse gas emissions and save the planet? Think again.

Through a bizarre but wholly foreseen loophole in the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) system, payments are actually incentivising manufacturers in China and other developing countries to continue producing one of the most potent of all greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting substances (ODS) known collectively as CFCs, used for refrigeration and other industrial purposes - at a cost to British and other developed world consumers of over $18 billion.

And how is China doing? Pretty damn good.

The level of China's involvement, as a major beneficiary of the scheme, makes a nonsense of the commentators at Copenhagen who were predicting that China might sabotage a deal. With so much money at stake, there was no way China was not going to fall into line, showing up the much-reported spat between Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao for exactly what it was – pure theatre.

Thus does Booker conclude that the part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.

As with all prostitutes the haggling is not about the act it is about the price.

The tree-huggers have been well and truly "had" – but then so have we. It is us that are going to pay, through our electricity bills, our taxes and living expenses, in increasing amounts for this hidden bonanza which the negotiators so diligently protected last week.

Trading in what amounts to thin air, on the farcical premise that life-giving carbon dioxide is a "pollutant", they have perpetrated the biggest heist in the history of mankind, all to protect "Big Carbon”.

It is becoming more obvious every day that the prostitutes did have sex but it is the customers who got fucked. If people are paying for Global Warming and they are actually are getting Global Cooling I predict that in time even true believers will begin to howl at being duped. At least the honest ones.

There is also another synonym for "Big Carbon". I like to call them The Climate Cartel.

You might find this book of interest: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. Lubos Motl of the Reference Frame did.

During my years in the U.S. Academia, I experienced a couple of events related to the global warming propaganda that I found stunning. Scientists around me (including myself) were subjects of intimidation and disciplinary proceedings - or they were instantly fired - because of their skeptical views about the climate change (or even for skeptical results of their work).

Chris Horner shows us that those events were not coincidences. Environmentalism has become a new ideology that has replaced Stalinism and that is beginning to take over the Western world - a world that has enjoyed freedom and democracy for centuries. You will learn that Greenpeace is reading from Horner's trash, in order to obtain materials that they could find helpful in their propaganda war.

Do you know what's happening to the children at schools? They are being indoctrinated. In fact, they are expected to revolt against their parents who "cause global warming". Because the children have to watch scientifically unrealistic horror movies related to the climate, such as An Inconvenient Truth, many of them don't sleep well at night.

Many politicians are scared of the "momentum" that they demand "action" against the climate change, too. Scientists who don't join this irrational hysteria are being threatened, likened to criminals or even Islamic terrorists. Journalists produce piles of lies and distort scientific findings that are already damaged by biased peer review or full-fledged censorship.

This whole scary machine is moving in the direction chosen by the environmental activists who are always "ahead" of their followers. Right now, they want the "dissidents" to be censored or even arrested. Are their today's dreams going to become reality on the day after tomorrow? Meanwhile, there is no climate crisis. In fact, there hasn't been any statistically significant global warming at least for 13 years. But the society seems to be choosing a direction that is disconnected from any observations or science.

The similarity of the environmentalists' techniques with those of the Nazis and communists are far too obvious. If you live outside the Academia or other sectors of the society influenced by this movement, and you are not certain whether there is a reason to worry, read this insightful and shocking book because it can tell you what you might expect tomorrow unless we manage to defeat this new ideological cancer bubbling in the society.

Thank you Lubos.

If we don't defeat these profiteers we are well and truly screwed. There is hope.

Via the Examiner we see a report in the Christian Science Monitor. It tells us that a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50 percent of likely (US) voters now believe that global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends.

One slightly false note - the Examiner says: "... the climate alarmists now have a long way to go to re-establish their credibility with the public at large." Nah! They've blown it. If after 20 years of propaganda, this is the best they can achieve, then they are going nowhere.

Interesting though how many of the media stories on the current vile weather fail to mention global warming (lack of) in their copy. You can bet that if there was anything that could be remotely attributed to their religion, it would be right up-front.

Religion? Isn't Global Warming, fraudulent though it may be, science? Not according to a British Court. With a blanket of Global Warming spreading across North America I predict a rush of believers to the Church exits. I hope no one gets trampled. But I'm not in the main sympathetic to the believers, considering how many of them have yelled "fire" on a crowded planet.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Winning A War With A Warmer

Always open up in the attack mode:

There is no way to know for sure but is it possible that the proponents of Climate Catastrophe are being paid by Al "I'm going to make billions off of carbon trading" Gore to push his agenda? He and his friends stand to make a LOT of money if they can get Congress to act in the fashion they desire.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to read a book:

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Inspired by Tall Dave's dust up with some warmistas. (in the comments)

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The Hockey Stick Is Broken Permanently

This is a tale of forensics and what appears to be scientific fraud. And wouldn't you know it: climate hysteria. Let me start with the famous hockey stick. It is a graph showing unprecedented global warming at the end of the 20th century. It was the icon of global warming hysteria. The wiki has the graph and a picture of Michael Mann (the discoverer).

You will note that Mr. Mann is holding a section of a tree. Why? Well the hockey stick was developed by analyzing tree rings which are supposed to be a proxy for temperature. This may or may not be true but I'm not going to deal with that question. You can look into that at The Problem With Tree Ring Thermometers.

Steve McIntyre showed that by using the Mann methodology and feeding noise into the computer program that analyzed the tree ring data you get the hockey stick. So the tree rings are irrelevant to the hockey stick.

But that is not too important to the current controversy. What is important is that it has now been shown (since Steve was finally - after years of asking - able to get the data) that Michael Mann cherry picked the data. And in fact with the full data set the hockey stick goes down (Steve prefers to say the results are flat) and not up. Which is rather a surprise given the bias of the analysis.

It started with this post (which references Climate audit):

Mann Cherry Picked The Data

Here is a mirror posting of the Climate Audit post (it is kinda technical):

How Michael Mann Was Found Out

A more detailed look at the revised graph.

UK Climate scientists have some 'splainin to do.

In layman's terms what does it mean? The hockey stick is dead and its development in the first place may have been a scientific fraud for at least two reasons. Bad analysis and data cherry picking.


Books on some other things wrong with climate science:

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know

The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them

Happy reading!

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Bring It On

In the above video the ACORN outers, Hanna Giles and James O'Keefe, say about potential suits from ACORN, "Bring It On". Well ACORN has brought it on.

Community activist group ACORN is suing the makers of a hidden-camera video that showed employees of its Baltimore office giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute.

The liberal group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

This has got to be the dumbest political move since Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman."

So what does Althouse think? She says:

Glenn Reynolds is pretty sure ACORN is falling into a trap.

Yes, it's almost as if the real point of the videos was to provoke a lawsuit that would open ACORN to the legal intrusions of discovery. And of course, Giles and O'Keefe will get even more publicity, and it shouldn't be hard for them to attract aggressive legal counsel and a hefty litigation fund.

I have heard lots of folks in comments to this story offering to donate to a legal defense fund. It is almost as if ACORN wanted to keep this story alive.

As to keeping the story alive? I was already getting tired of it and hadn't planned to write anything further since the story had served its purpose. It got the Census Bureau to sever ties with ACORN.

H/T Instapundit who thinks as Althouse pointed out, "I’M PRETTY SURE THEY’RE FALLING INTO A TRAP". Yes they are. Click on the Instapundit link for more.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Carbon Market Frauds

It looks like the European Carbon Trading Scheme is being hit by massive fraud.

Carousel fraud has found its way to the carbon market. The particularly European type of fraud entails setting up complicated import and export schemes between EU member countries, charging buyers for value-added tax in the country of destination, and then absconding with the tax rather than handing it over to the governments.

In 2006 the UK and German governments embarked on a series of raids in 2006, and the UK introduced ‘reverse charging’ for VAT on certain items prone to carousel fraud. At the time carousel fraud was mainly seen as confined to small electronic goods such as mobile phones and computer chips.

A year later it was it was observed that fraudsters were simply moving away from those goods towards others that hadn’t yet been targeted by authorities. But it wasn’t until high volumes of trade were observed on France’s BlueNext carbon exchange this year that carousel fraud became an issue in the carbon markets.

So you have this imaginary quantity - one carbon credit - and people are surprised such a "commodity" is open to fraud? It shouldn't be a surprise. It should be a given.

Here are a few words from some one who saw it coming.

The [carbon offset] market requires validators and verifiers all over the world. The system is already short personnel with these skills. Then there is the question of who pays these people? Regulators need to keep in mind the failure of the credit rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, etc.) in the recent credit crisis. Markets require trust. Respondents said the only reason certain investors purchased some MBS assets was the Triple-A rating. These same respondents say that a significant flaw in the system exists because the credit rating agencies are paid by the bond issuers. A disincentive exists for doing a thorough job. Currently, validators and verifiers are paid by project developers. If we are to learn from the failings of the financial markets, this is an aspect of the carbon offset markets ripe for misconduct.

Well, well, well. Another government program that encourages massive amounts of waste fraud and abuse.

It was never about carbon emission reduction. It was always about government/elite Power and Control. In the sixties when I was on the left the slogan was "Power to the People" a traditional American value - perverted to be sure - but the slogan resonated with the American ideal of self governance. And what has the left got now? "Take Power From The People", both economic power and literally electrical power. Eventually people catch on to this sort of thing and in America they vote the rascals out. Faster please.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tax Breaks For The Rich

It seems as if we have a new kind of economic privilege in America.

The Senate voted Tuesday to give a tax break to new car buyers, setting aside bipartisan concerns over the size of an economic stimulus bill with a price tag approaching $900 billion.

The 71-26 vote came as President Barack Obama said he lies awake nights worrying about the economy, and signaled opposition to congressional attempts to insert "buy American" provisions into the legislation for fear it would spark a trade war.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski led the successful effort to allow many car buyers to claim an income tax deduction for sales taxes paid on new autos and interest payments on car loans.

She said the plan would aid the beleaguered automobile industry as well as create jobs at a time the economy is losing them at a rapid rate. "I believe we can help by getting the consumer into the showroom," she said.

So government is now the marketing arm of the auto companies offering discounts to entice buyers? Do these critters have any idea of how foolish they look?

And what is this "if you buy a new car you get a tax break". If you buy a used car - nada. Don't people selling used cars deserve to have their market propped up? What makes them unworthy? Probably not enough union labor in the used car business to make it worth a politician's time.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Default Interpretation

I was reading the comments at Coyote Blog since I just finished a bit about a climate article they had put up and I came across this little gem by dearieme posted Aug 9, 2007 12:15:51 PM:

"Government scientists ..refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software": the default interpretation of that is that they are crooks.

It seems like a lot of people are coming to that conclusion.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

A Shill For Al Gore?

Coyote Blog has a bit up on the latest Climate Change scandal. The error in the data making 1998 the hottest year on record. James Hansen is head of GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) the source of the error. Michael Mann (inventor of the guaranteed hockey stick method - feed any data in, random numbers are good - get a hockey stick out) stated he was 99% certain that 1998 was the warmest year on record for the last 1,000 years. Actually it is the second warmest year on record in the last 73 years. That means he was only off by 927 years. Not bad for a professional. The error has been corrected in remarkably short time. However, it has brought to light something rather interesting.

James Hansen gets money from a foundation run by John Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Newsweek portrays James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as untainted by corporate bribery.

Hansen was once profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the "world's leading researcher on global warming." Not mentioned by Newsweek was that Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

You don't suppose the money has biased Hansen do you? Me either. I put such talk down to idle speculation, innuendo, and ugly rumor. Like all true scientist who understand that CO2 is causing global warming, the man is beyond reproach. I think those inquiring into the underlying data and adjustment methods of NASA/Goddard's GISS temperature record are just a bunch of climate hooligans and should be ignored. Mr. Hansen is in charge of GISS. He works for the government. His honesty and integrity are beyond reproach. No need to audit the books.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Problems in Asia

It has come to my attention that there are problems with the the temperature record in Asia.

At virtually the same time NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies was correcting historical climate data with the assistance of Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, a British mathematician discovered serious flaws in papers used and cited by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent Assessment Report.

Douglas J. Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley arbitrageur and current independent mathematical researcher, identified "fabrications" in such studies that suggest a "marked lack of integrity in some important work on global warming that is relied upon by the IPCC" and that "the insignificance of urbanization effects on temperature measurements has not been established as reliably as the IPCC assessment report assumes."

The errors are so glaring that one might conclude fraud was involved. Such a conclusion would be premature.

There are links to the studies involved and other links at the above url.

H/T Reliapundit

Update: 11 Aug 007 1711z

Questions about the Russian data.

Anthony Watts has some thoughts on the China problem.

Cross Posted at Classical Values