The Dog Ate My Homework

Uncategorized 33 Comments

Christopher Horner asks the obvious question:

Oh Snap! Mouse trap – available at many fine stores – click
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it.
First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.
But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?
Among all that has been revealed, there does not appear to be one. Let alone a chain discussing the importance of not at long last actually having the raw, how this loss might relate to the scores of emails they wrote about whether to release the data and how to avoid releasing the data and how they’d rather destroy it (I don’t know, “pretend to have lost it”) than give it to the folks who seem to be on to them.
This seems like a big email, and a chain of discussions that would pervade that which has been revealed. It doesn’t.
To the contrary, we have numerous emails from Jones explaining how turning over the raw data is one option, but he’d much rather destroy it than let the intrepid start pawing over it which could only lead, as he admits in one email, to figuring out what CRU et al did to said raw data in order to come up with their alarming claims.
So there is a reasonable conclusion, and it is not that the data was lost or destroyed twenty years ago.

crossposted @ Cjunk

Blog Notes

Blogging 20 Comments

Last road trip of the year. I’ll be checking in once in a while over the weekend, but will resist surfing or posting too much. It’s time for a mental break, and the insulated otherworld of a dog show is the perfect place for it. Cjunk and Lance will be keeping an eye on the place, and our other guest bloggers are invited to post of course.
To everyone who has supported the site over the past two weeks with your background information, reader tips, guest posts, emails, encouragement, donations and plain old “getting the word out” – thank you! I don’t say it often enough.
I’ll be back sometime late Monday, barring a sudden dump of Minnesota warming. With luck the cold front will stay down in Houston.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 75 Comments

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. John Williams performing Asturias ¤ (6:00), the fifth movement of Isaac Albéniz i Pascual‘s 1886 collection: Suite Española, Op. 47. Those who like this style of music may also wish to revisit Maria del Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza Rasten’s performance of Francisco de Asís Tárrega y Eixea’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, on our 2008-10-24 SDA LNR Show.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

The Bottle Genie

climategate2 343 Comments

Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today. There really wasn’t much choice but to report it, now that Environment Minister Jim Prentice had officially described the allegations as “serious”, coupled with the day-old news that CRU head Phil Jones was “stepping aside” in preparation for his encounter with a double-decker.
As of this evening, there are 23,100,000 Google results for “climategate” – and exactly one on-air report from the CBC.
It’s been 14 days since the cork was pulled from FOIA 2009.zip
And as it turns out, the concerted efforts of a protective mainstream media to ignore the scandal turned out to be worst possible course of events for the University of Anglia’s motley CRU and their supporters in the wealth distribution industry.
They gave us something very powerful – 14 days of time. Time, while scores of bloggers and thousands of readers put in uncountable man hours of dissection and analysis.
Time for those who’d been discussed and copied in the leaked emails to confirm that there was no evidence of tampering.
Time for programmers to sift through Harry’s now famous code line by line, to test it for themselves.
Time for members of the academic community to get their outrage and condemnation on the record, and on their own terms. Time for those who’d been targeted to retell their stories.
Time for opinion columnists and talk radio to break ranks and take on the job their news editors refused to do, to disseminate the facts gathered, checked and analyzed by bloggers to a wider audience.
Time for the comments sections of every online newspaper in the western world to fill with angry demands from their readers to cover the damned story. Not because they were needed anymore, but because we wanted the stupid charade to end.
So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn’t watch to find out what’s contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we’d read it for ourselves.
We only watched to see if he had.
For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.
It’s a spin doctor’s worst nightmare.
As I’ve been saying from the beginning, they’re hearing the sound of all hell breaking loose. And as much as it’s being directed at the research institutions and the policy makers following along like so many imprinted penguins, the bulk of public rage has focused on the media.
I don’t think my friends in traditional news gathering truly appreciate what it is they’ve done. I don’t believe they fully comprehend how gravely they have injured themselves, and how they’re driving home the razor into an industry already struggling for survival with abbreviated, dismissive, misleading reports and “denier” and “conspiracy nut” slurs.
The bloggers tried to warn them. The opinion columnists tried to warn them, the talk hosts tried to warn them. Their readers, viewers and listeners tried to warn them.
The news media perfected the business of bombshells. They wind them up, drop them, film the explosion, and move on.
They’re just learning now that we’re in the business of bottle genies.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 60 Comments

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
Peter Lilley, one of several senior members of Britain’s ruling Tory party who are questioning whether the science of AGW is settled, and whether a political consensus on AGW actually exists, is quoted in today’s Independent as saying that the “effects (of global warming) tend to be exaggerated.”
In the ongoing debate over AGW, this important question of whether we actually know that a one or two degree increase would lead to environmental Armageddon has been pushed off the proverbial radar screen. Well, never mind a degree or two, let’s up the ante: in tonight’s musical selection, flamboyant Australian songwriter/entertainer Peter Allen is practically on fire as he commences to perform his signature song I Go To Rio, and when he does burst into flames at around the 2:25 mark, he simply grabs a hand fan and uses it to fan the flames! What panache!
Feel free to grab your own maracas and bunny hop your Reader Tips into the comments.

The Sound Of Hell Breaking Loose: Your Context, Sir.

Little Known Facts 51 Comments

This FP column by Ross McKitrick leaves only one question unanswered…

The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the Mann Hockey Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent. They are written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy series over and over.

Why wasn’t it on the front page?

“It’s all unravelling now.”

Y2Kyoto: Just In Time For Hopenchangen

Roadkill 52 Comments

“Carbon trading” and “fraud” – not just synonyms anymore!

Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.
Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.
Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.

Critics often compare today’s carbon trade to the tulip bubble of the 1600’s. I disagree, for the two differ in a fundamental way. When a trader placed a tulip on the auction block, he actually had a tulip to sell.

Look Left, Look Right

Military 51 Comments

Obama’s speech on Afghanistan reminded me of Churchill in one sense – it was dead.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.
An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

Of course, nothing cheers a US military audience more than invoking Vietnam. “This won’t be like the last time your elected leaders forced defeat down the throat of victory.”
After so many prime time speeches, it’s hard to watch Obama without tuning out to play the “left-right game”. It’s pretty simple, just predict what direction the Presidential metronome will look next. “Look left … look right … look left… look right.” Try it – you’ll be right 95% of the time.
Last night, he was playing it, too.
(second link fixed)
Update – Donald Rumsfeld comes out swinging;

In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that ‘Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.’ Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response.”
“I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, ‘repeated’ or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President’s assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.”
“In the interest of better understanding the President’s announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President’s assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied.”

“Let’s go to the pub.”

What He Said 49 Comments

An excellent presentation, with an excellent addendum;

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you’re going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact “at it” and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 12

climategate2 81 Comments

SDA gets results!
CBC;

The U.K.’s University of East Anglia says the director of its Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations stemming from the publication of hacked emails.
Phil Jones, the director of the global research centre on climate change, announced that he will stand aside until an independent review determines whether he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university said Peter Liss will become acting director of the climate research unit.

As I noted yesterday, this comes on the heels of an announced Penn State investigation into Michael “hockey stick” Mann.
Via John, who found it accidentally buried in the CBC Technology & Science headlines, where few will find it to comment. But we’ll help them out with that.
Over a week ago I wrote;

“But this event is less bombshell than it is bottle genie. No matter what efforts are undertaken by a protective media to bury this scandal, no matter how badly the warmist industry tries to spin it away, the CRU data release is now part of the permanent climate debate, and it ain’t ever going away.”

The number of those voicing doubts is growing exponentially – a graduate student at MIIT Tech, this lengthy article in Reason.
More here from a “working scientist” – “I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended:”
(In related news….)

Y2Kyoto: Trouble In Hopenchangen

Baiting The Left 61 Comments

Times of India;

In an unprecedented move, India on Saturday joined China and two other developing countries to prepare for a major offensive on rich nations at the Copenhagen conference on climate change next month.
The four countries, which include Brazil and South Africa, agreed to a strategy that involves jointly walking out of the conference if the developed nations try to force their own terms on the developing world, Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister for environment and forests (independent charge), said.
[…]
The developing nations will also not accept any pressure from developed countries to establish legally binding emission targets at Copenhagen. Developing countries want to be allowed to reduce emissions voluntarily and take what they consider to be “nationally appropriate actions” he said.

h/t james

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