And to leave you until the New Year, a modern day parable of God and Santa Claus...

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.” P.J.O'Rourke "Parliament of Whores".

Ayrdale wishes friends and foes alike a happy trucetime until the ref. blows his New Year whistle.

What really drives the green left ?

...well international socialism of course, which makes their environmental "save the world" pose such an obvious and hypocritical sham. After the chaos and farce at Copenhagen can anyone really be in any doubt now that the only point of the whole climatastrophe scenario is to inspire fear and guilt and grease the wheels of the money train ? And can anyone now really believe deep in their hearts that "the science is settled" and that increasing CO2 levels will devastate our world ?...Although the war against the green left is by no means won, we have achieved a significant victory, a DDay of sorts that will proceed under its own accelerating momentum...this from the UK Telegraph...

...When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly. After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers...This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen...more here...

The tipping point has been reached...

...and the burden of proof is now with the alarmists. A subtle change in MSM coverage of the issue has been apparent since Climategate. This excellent post from Samizdata...

...I've just been watching this video, of Lord Monkton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monkton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about "climate change" is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else? Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monkton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited. But that is the subtext. Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this. I agree with Johnathan Pearce...that the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives...though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It's all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time...

...this too (H/T PKH) excerpted from a letter to the UK Economist...Nikolay Semyonov, a Soviet scientist and Nobel prize winner in chemistry, wrote that:

“There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. This is a direct path to unjustified self-confidence, to loss of self-criticalness, to scientific fanaticism, to false science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science and, since science is now a matter of state importance, to inflicting great injury on the country.”

...the writer adds...Semyonov was referring to the ruthless manipulation of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko and other opportunists. In a similar vein, it is time we recognise that we are becoming prey to a new fanaticism, a religious fervour that runs contrary to rational society...more here...

...AND breaking news from WuWT, a Russian report that the Hadley CRU used selective data only when analysing Russian weather stations so as to reinforce their warming prejudices...This is a very powerful accusation, which if true could change much about the climate science debate. Many papers are based on this dataset which has the highest trend of the major ground datasets...the complete report here...

Another (global warming) myth bites the dust...

...the Himalyan glaciers are shrinking, it's our fault ! According to CNN and the IPCC, they'll be all gone by 2035...it's global warming !
Well no, not exactly... Glacier loss is apparently mainly caused by soot from Nepal, India and China. Hope the news gets to Copenhagen quickly, before they go off on a crazy, expensive and pointless CO2 tangent...

...the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people...more from WuWT here...

...and quote for the day, in a letter from Pennsylvania State Senator Jeff Piccola, to Pennsylvania State University re Climategate conspirator Michael Mann...from WuWT again...While Dr. Mann has made statements in the press during the last week to the effect of “I welcome this investigation” I wonder if he’s seen some of the correspondence being sent to PSU regarding him. Here’ s one from Pennsylvania State Senator Jeff Piccola that has some very pointed language...

“…anything short of the absolute pursuit of science cannot be accepted or tolerated.”

...suggesting that funding and careers could be at threat. Now there's a thought...

...and for your interest, and because it's the silly season, here's an old school photo of Alfred E. Neumann. See if you can spot the little chap...
...and a long overdue acknowledgment to Denis Dutton and his colleagues at Arts and Letters Daily. If ever a website captures (and holds on to) the promise of the internet it's this one. Refreshed daily with links to media sources, reviews, articles, essays, blogs and comment of interest, it's the first port of call for my morning's reading, and leads me straight to its twin site Climate Debate Daily. And by the way, although it's a bit late, Denis is the author of the very well reviewed The Art Instinct, a copy of which is on my Christmas wish list. Thanks and best wishes Denis !

...and I can't hang up my mouse, without including this blast at the British MSM from Gerald Warner writing in the online Telegraph...So, instead of proving its worth, serving truth and debate, arresting the attention of the public by exposing our rulers’ lies, the MSM are rolling over to become a mouthpiece of the consensus, repelling readers and viewers as they go online, just as citizens in Iron Curtain countries once tuned in covertly to Western media. The internet is the new samizdat. All of this may still be a relatively gradual process while all citizens are being deprived of is information and debate. But when the bill is presented to sustain the phoney religion consecrated at Copenhagen, when taxes rocket, when we can barely see by the light of mercury bulbs, when every amenity of life is threatened – will people still be willing to pay money for newspapers and television channels that tell them to submit to this tyranny, when they could be exploding the myth and freeing society?
It seems less than likely. The Mainstream Media are hanging themselves – it is doubtful that they can any longer be described as mainstream. These are turkeys voting for Christmas...more here...

Why the long face Al ?

...true to the green left principles of overstatement, fear, disinformation and lies, Al Gore blundered badly in Copenhagen. This from the UK Times online...

...There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore. The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming. Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal. World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal...more here...

...and BTW, here's a 1959 picture of the USS Skate, the first submarine to surface at the obviously ice free North Pole...remember that Al ? More, here...

What progressive really means to red greens...

...is progress towards socialism. Never mind that any move towards green left utopia is to turn the clock backwards. It's worth noting again that the green anti-capitalist left, who claim a copyright on the words progressive and caring are the group most prepared to resist real progress and work hard to condemn our most vulnerable and poor global citzens to ongoing poverty. This from Tim Wilson, director of the climate and trade unit at the institute of public affairs, (hardly a rabid right winger) who observes with weary resignation; It's the poor who will pay for the Copenhagen circus...blogging from Copenhagen...

...MORE people attend UN conferences than make a meaningful contribution, but even by UN standards delegates are describing the Copenhagen climate conference as a circus. Twenty-odd thousand green activists predominantly from developed countries are overwhelming the 8000 government officials and demanding meetings with delegations so they can push their proposals into any final agreement.
A handful of green, anti-capitalist activists has even infiltrated official negotiations and are representing countries in some negotiating stream...A motley crew of negotiators representing Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana and India have put into technology transfer negotiating texts the scrapping of intellectual property rights necessary to attract private investment in the development of climate-friendly technologies that are needed to cut emissions...The irony is that if there were as many people who cared about cutting poverty, the world's poor would be better able to adapt to the consequences of climate change and there'd also be the economic resources to cut emissions and deliver a binding agreement at Copenhagen...more here...

How to explain this persistent and transparent hypocrisy ? Only by appreciating that for the green left this is their last roll of the dice. As I have commented before, this argument defines their cause, and loss of the argument condemns them to total and permanent political irrelevancy.

Cometh the hour, cometh Tony Abbott...

...Australia will "almost certainly" vote next year on the issue of AGW and the huge tax increases that will go with it. Readers of this blog know that AGW is a grand plan to redistribute Western wealth to developing nations, and is a direct reaction to the success and strength of capitalism, and the fruit of capitalism, globalisation. The reactionary green/left anti-capitalist revolt is attempting to cement in place world government via the UN. The clash between the two forces will come to a head next year when Australians will vote in 2010 in a general election that will scrutinise every aspect of the science fraud and international conspiracy behind AGW. The eyes and ears of the world will focus on the debate, and in particular on Tony Abbott who made it happen... From the man himself, writing in The Australian...

...As things stand, there will almost certainly be a climate change election. It won't just be about climate change, but that will be the totemic issue. The government will say that lifting the price of carbon is necessary to help the environment. That might be the case one day, but certainly not now. The challenge is to find ways to improve the environment without a great big new tax.

When Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace in the dark days of 1940 to accept the king's commission, he felt that his whole life had been but a preparation for this moment, or so he recounts in his memoirs. This is not wartime Britain. And I am certainly not Churchill. Still, I feel well equipped to take on the leadership of the party in what are testing times for the conservative side of politics...more here.. and here... and here...

...AND on the eleventh and twelth days of Christmas, my true love sent to me, twelve thousand warmists meeting, eleven guns a smoking,ten computer programmes, nine researchers dancing, eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming, six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs, three hockey sticks,two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

Something is very, very rotten in the state of Denmark...

...so says our brave but endangered columnist Jim Hopkins (aka Jam Hipkins) in his fortnightly offering (see also my posting 27.11.09) in this morning's NZ Herald...

...the heart's not singing 'cos there's sod all to sing about, sunshine! We can't even sing about that anymore without some sobbing celeb sanctimoaniously banging on about our bloody carbon footprint. It's hard to get a tingle in our Jingle Bells when there's a colossally wasteful, doom-on-steroids loath-in happening in Denmark. And tough to get the goodwill going with 30,000 and four hoarse men of the apocalypse screaming "Repent! Repent! The End is Nigh! Last chance to save the planet" at their taxpayer-funded religious rally in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. That's why we're not shopping,...because we're numb with despair. Because we feel hopeless, bludgeoned by shonky science and dodgy data into a state of abject grovelment - ashamed of our sinful selves and terrified our delicate little planet is going to hell in a (very hot) handcart.
It isn't and it won't. She's a tough old Mother, Earth...more here...

...and on the 10th day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...ten computer programmes, nine researchers dancing,eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming,six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs,three hockey sticks, two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

...I didn't intend to enlarge today's posting, but MUST ADD THIS remarkable and incredible exchange of emails between Tom Wigley of Climategate fame, and (the temporarily stood down) Phil Jones of the CRU. Read this, and judge the truth and integrity of these men for yourself...from Andrew Bolt...

...the person he was rebuking in this email, Michael Mann, was an
author of this same IPCC who had his now discredited “hockey stick” included
prominently in the third IPCC report to “prove” what now seems almost certainly
false - the today’s temperatures are the hottest for more than a 1000 years. The
Keith Briffa he attacked in the first email is also an IPCC author, whose
similar attempt to “prove” there was no medieval warming is now also regarded as
completely discredited. The Phil Jones that Wigley sent the first email to is
another IPCC author, who vowed to keep out sceptical papers from the IPCC, urged
the destruction of evidence and boasted he had used a “trick” to “hide the
decline” in temperatures in another graph used by the IPCC...more here...

Summer warming and whimsy...

...are on this Kiwi's agenda today. And why not ? Copenhagen is making the green left unhappy, (although the news hasn't yet reached my favourite green busker "progressive causes only" Morris ) ...and plenty of cold beer and BBQ's are a feature of our glorious summer, and... Tunku Varadarajan of the online Daily Beast offers a sceptic's A-Z guide to the laughable farce at Copenhagen called Taming AGW...cop this...
...Very nearly a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce compiled A Devil's Dictionary, in which he sought to puncture the cultural cant of his time. Here is an attempt—at much shorter length—to prick a very contemporary kind of cant, that which has swollen the debate on climate change to ungovernable proportions.

A is for anthropogenic: as in anthropogenic global warming, or “AGW”), a $10 word for "man-made" which global-warmists wield as proof of expertise—no one more so than Al Gore, who, after having invented the Internet, turned his prodigious mind to the conundrum of AGW.

B is for Björn Lomborg: the Danish professor whose book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, should have put Al Gore out of business forever; for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that aren’t ready to abandon the good, carbon-burning life just yet; and for boondoggle (see "ethanol," infra).

C is for the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit: the now-discredited source of much of the data used to fuel climate hysteria. In November, in an episode that was oh-so-predictably dubbed Climategate, a cache of leaked emails showed that researchers systematically hid or manipulated data that was inconsistent with the accepted narrative of man-made climate change..H/T Denis Dutton of Arts and Letters daily...more here...

...and Minnesotans for Global Warming, the Nobel prize winning creators of "Hide the Decline" have just issued a great sequel "It's a Climategate Christmas", here...

...and on the seventh, eighth and ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me; nine researchers dancing, eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming, six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs, three hockey sticks,two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

Tim Flannery, is a white hot warmist turned sceptic...

...and who would of course hate the term denier. (Although he now admits the science of AGW is by no means settled, and therefore must have some doubts re AGW. ) Shock ! horror ! But never mind...we now appear to have a new sceptical chum. Professor Flannery is Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and has had to swallow a dead rat and admit "We can't admit we have perfect knowledge, we don't." Flannery is the very highly respected author of the wonderful "The Future Eaters" (an un PC look at species extinction in Australasia) and "Throwim Away Leg", (pidgin for "go on a long walk" ) re his scientific observations and travels in Papua New Guinea, and also the IPCC orthodox "The Weather Makers" which may need major revision after the CRU leaks. More on Tim Flannery and his record here...and, a summary below of the first day's activity and chaos in Copenhagen as seen by Michael Asten, professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne, and titled Climate claims fail science test, published in The Australian...

...THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate. We had the "grandfather of climate change", James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions. It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue...

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't"...meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself...more here...

AND what did it take to turn Tim Flannery into a sceptic ? Maybe something like this...

...sent by paleoclimatologist Ed Cook to the CRU's Keith Briffa, outlining his opinions on the current (2003) state of knowledge of past temperatures: "The results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about (less than)100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the (greater than) 100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).. H/T Bishop Hill...

...and on the fourth, fifth and sixth days of Christmas, my true love sent to me...six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs,three hockey sticks, two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

Karen Fish, a liberal babe with big clues...

The loopy but "progressive, tough and liberal" warmist Karen Fish has worked out why so many people disrespect Al Gore and refuse to accept climatastrophe, and don't all rush off to join greensleaze. It's all in the names, says the appropriately named Ms Fish.
Homer Simpson and James Hansen would no doubt agree. The names are so like so ...wrong says Ms (Red Snapper) Fish...Al Gore and all environmentalists are now being called stupid data changing ignorant frauds, and global warming and climate change a hoax.
How could this be happening? The root problem (is) with the names Climate Change, Global Warming and Environmental... these words are too narrow for the problems they describe and more importantly, people do not understand these words. “Environmental” sounds like a mental enviro. This is why the climategate people are so ready to pillory us over the climategate scandal. They think that we are mentally ill... H/T Tim Blair here...

The Emperor's new clothes...

...are on display. They're dirty threadbare rags, full of patches and holes. Even the pro-green NZ Herald has noticed, with climategate on the front page, and this amazing and very brave cartoon on the op-ed page...and now this in depth analysis and comment on what passes for modern day scientific ideals from the online Weekly Standard...

..Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming...The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment...
...One of the things the CRU emails prove is that the oft-cited figure of 2,000 top scientists is misleading; the circle of genuinely active scientists in the work of CRU and related institutions in this country is very small. Nonetheless, Al Gore and other climate campaigners have leaned heavily on the IPCC process as proof for their assertions that human-caused global warming is a matter of "settled" science. This, even though, in the last IPCC report on the science of climate change in 2007, the terms "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appear over 1,300 times in 900 pages, and the report describes our level of scientific understanding of key aspects of climate as "low" or "very low." The IPCC chapter on the climate models that are the principal tool predicting our future doom refers to "significant uncertainties" in all the models, and admits that "models still show significant errors..." more here...

...and on the first, second and third days of Christmas...my true love sent to me three hockey sticks , two tricks to play, and a cross section of a pine tree...

The inconvenient truth...

...will not go away, and it's thanks only to a broad media power base that the pretence of scientific impartiality still clings to so many of the so called scientists of climate science. This, from Real Clear Politics...Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed...What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences-physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering-came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences....more here...

...and who was responsible for the CRU leaks ? A discontented insider or an outside hacker ? A Samizdata writer feels it may be the work of the Russians...what if it does turn out to have been the former KGB? Would it not be an irony of historic proportions that an organisation formerly devoted to establishing a global tyrrany has thrown a big hammer-and-sickle into the works of their would-be successors? And, not just ironic, but also just. Because if the warm-mongers get their way, then it is not the powerful and the well-connected that need fear their zealotry. The Al Gores and Zac Goldsmiths of the world can afford to bask in the green glow of personal glory, safe in the knowledge that their opulent lifestyles will not be compromised by so much a sterling silver napkin ring. They will soar (both literally and metaphorically) above it all. No, it is the Average Joe/Jane who will be forced to endure the austerity that their new overlords will demand. It is those who struggle to make ends meet who will be told that the planet can no longer afford their humble family saloon or their two weeks a year in the Algarve. It is the little people who will be stepped upon because they can be stepped upon. Maybe, one day, we will know the true identity of the e-mail hackers. Or maybe we will never know. But I do sort of hope that it does turn out to be some guy called Yvgeny, acting on orders from the Kremlin, tapping away in a windowless room in a drab building on a military base in Krasnoyarsk because then, we will be able to say: congratulations, tovarisch! You have, at long last, established yourself as a Hero of the Proletariat.

Vested interests are an enemy of sound science...

As our politicians and green left celebrities jet away to Copenhagen the international climategate fiasco rumbles on. The weary electorate have long since dismissed Al Gore's eco-porn scenarios, and have lost confidence in so called climate science and its practitioners. How did we ever get into this farcical situation ? ...Follow the money trail... from todays WSJ ...

...the question is...why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them. Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"...

Please note, the image to the right is the property of Maggie Terlicki and can be found at her wonderful website, here...

Harry, the anguished computer programmer summarised the sad shonky mess that climatastrophe rests on..."I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!" This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble...more here...

Dr Roy Spencer weighs in...

...and comment from this man is received with a degree of respect...Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming...


My Top 10 Annoyances in the Climate Change Debate
1. The term “climate change” itself.
2. “Climate change denier”.
3. The appeal to peer-reviewed and published research.
4. Appeal to authority.
5. Unwillingness to debate.
6. A lack of common sense.
7. Use of climate models as truth.
8. Claims that climate models have been tested.
9. The claim that the IPCC is unbiased.
10. The claim that reducing CO2 emissions is the right thing to do anyway...read the full article, here...and quote of the day, from the UK Telegraph...

"...At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed..."

"Their shoulders held the sky suspended...

...they stood and earth's foundations stay..." A.E.Houseman wrote about an army of forgotten mercenaries. Although his sentiments are a little melodramatic, they are applicable and could also apply to 2 individuals who are changing our world as we watch. One is the anonymous northern hemisphere whistleblower who leaked the CRU information and data to us, the second is Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose ascendancy to political leadership over the climate change issue is being watched and debated worldwide. As Andrew Bolt observes in the Melbourne Herald Sun, Tony Abbott has...

... bought the Liberals time - the only thing left that could heal their bloody division over global warming.The Liberals can be healed if they see global warming not as a moral question, but a scientific and economic problem. And events will prove decisive in settling a difference of opinion on those. FIRST, if the world keeps failing to warm, the warming theory itself will crumble. Indeed, it's crumbling already. Rudd's belief that man is heating the world is based almost entirely on the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But thousands of emails uncovered in this month's Climategate scandal show that the scientists most responsible for those reports did not just doctor data, destroy awkward evidence, and censor sceptical scientists. They also show some of them privately admitting that the world seems not to be heating as they (and Rudd) predicted.
"Where the heck is global warming?" raged Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, to another Climategate scientist: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
But time won't just settle this argument about whether the world is actually warming.
By next year the UN's Copenhagen summit will be well over and we'll also know then how serious other countries really are about cutting their emissions, too.
If the world's biggest emitters - such as China, the United States and India - keep refusing to agree to their own legally enforceable cuts in emissions, then tiny Australia going it alone will seem even more suicidally mad.
Of course, it cuts both ways. If the world resumes warming with a vengeance, and if the world's big emitters do indeed set real targets, then many sceptics will be forced to shut up.
So time will tell, and time will heal. Time is thus what the Liberals need most, along with a leader who would meanwhile rather die fighting than live crawling. With Abbott, the Liberals finally have both a cause to fight, and time to heal...more here...

...I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Mick Jagger was right. Time really is on our side...meanwhile Phil Jones has his collar felt...

...and, H/T Theo... Anyone need a new watch ? Buy a Rolex...

Nurse Myra and Tony Abbott...

...Mr Abbott (right) the new Australian opposition leader and next Prime Minister is, according to this morning's NZ Herald...an outspoken, two fisted conservative. M.A. (Oxon.) Rhodes scholar, ex boxer...

...obviously then a man to be reckoned with...“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously...when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”...and "As opposition leader I am not frightened of an election, and I am not frightened of an election on this (climate change) issue...as far as many, many millions of Australians are concerned, what the Rudd government's ETS looks like is a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicised handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy..."

Abbott's ascendancy is another major blow for the left, (what a week !) particularly the extreme statists. The 2010 election will be a de facto referendum on climate change, this from the Australian...

...Tony Abbott will steer the Liberal Party back to its conservative roots with a 2010 election campaign portraying Kevin Rudd as a Whitlamesque big spender whose climate change policies will smash Australian jobs...more here...

...and while in public Abbott hedges his bets over AGW, (as does John Key ), the Australian electorate is generally as cynical over Al Gore's climatastrophe as their Kiwi cousins...Abbott said he believed climate change was real and humans did make a contribution, but that the extent of that contribution and the measures needed were in dispute, as were the merits of an ETS. "We will have a strong and effective climate change policy, but one thing we are not going to do is damage Australia's export industries, put ourselves at a competitive disadvantage against the world, and we are not going to have the conceit of thinking we can save the world on our own."

And Nurse Myra ? Well, she reminds me of someone I knew well many years ago at St. Vincent's Hospital in Darlinghust. Our paths crossed recently in cyberspace when I stumbled upon her enthralling and edgy blog; Gimcrack Hospital. Nurse also knows a fair bit more than I do about Mr Abbott's past. (An ex paramour maybe ?) as her comment to yesterday's posting showed. Pay her a visit and say hello...

...and quote of the day..."Leute wie Sie standen auf den Mauer-Wachtürmen der roten Sozialisten, Sie überwachten die Wachtürme der braunen Sozialisten. Und, ..., Leute Ihres Schlages werden auf den Wachtürmen der grünen Sozialisten stehen und deren Umerziehungslagern zu klimatologisch korrekten Staatsbürgern."("People like you stood in the guard towers of the red socialists' wall, they stood in the brown[shirt] socialists' guard towers. And people of your stripe will stand in the guard towers of the green socialists and their re-education camps for climatologically correct citizens.")
- Commenter Frank39, who appears to have lived in East Germany, responding on a post on Climategate from the German "Science Skeptical" blog...H/T Samizdata...

Emissions Trading Stinks, (ask Aussies)...Something's in the air...

...sang Thunderclap Newman (a cousin of Alfred E.) back in the 70's. That something was insurrection and rebellion, and it's back. The findings of Climategate; data manipulation, data concealement, climate scaremongering and anti-scientific fraud (in fact all the usual hallmarks of green political chicanery) have led to widespread public anger and an abashed guilty silence from climate alarmists, aware that the whiff of a huge scientific scandal will not be dispelled easily. Christopher Booker, writing in The UK Telegraph says...

... these men (the so called hockey team) have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even...George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

...it's now generally thought that the leak from the CRU was via a whistleblower rather than an outside hacker. It's likely then that there are more revelations to come. One day perhaps we'll know the true motivation behind AGW, and put names and faces to its backers. One day too, we'll understand why so many reputable scientists, politicians, science journals and media personnel have been and still are colluding in such an immense fraud. And the charge of collusion and fraud has been made directly and repeatedly without any mention of legal counter charge. Note this taunt from a letter writer in today's NZ Herald...(Dr) Jim Salinger says he is considering becoming a columnist so he can write what he likes without worrying about the facts. Jim can continue to be a climate catastrophist and ignore the truth without any need for a career change...

One day the gaps in our knowledge re this scandal and the pseudoscience behind it will be filled, and our debt to the courageous whistleblower/hacker will be evident. But while we're waiting for more revelations it's very apparent that this is not a scandal involving a cabal of right wing conservative politicians. If it was it would dominate the headlines and the PC media establishment would leave Tiger Woods relatively undisturbed. But... whatever future revelations may disclose...

...our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age...More here...

...AND STOP PRESS...in Australia, Tony Abbott wins the Liberal leadership stoush, putting Rudd's ETS in doubt...The scene is now set for further ructions within the Liberal party or revolts in the Senate and a Liberal-Nationals Coalition attacking the Rudd Government’s ETS as a new tax. ..more here...

STOP PRESS...

...turmoil within the Australian opposition. Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull's support for Kevin Rudd's ETS is costing him dearly. A ballot for leadership is expected to take place tomorrow. Its outcome may determine a "double dissolution" general elction...

...Expectations that Mr Hockey would agree to challenge came as a Newspoll conducted for The Australian on the weekend revealed a stunning eight-percentage-point collapse in the Opposition Leader's rating among voters. After a week of attempting to force his reluctant party to vote in favour of the Prime Minister's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, Mr Turnbull was rated preferred prime minister by only 14 per cent of voters, down from 22 per cent a fortnight ago... Mr Hockey is likely to contest tomorrow's Liberal leadership ballot under a deal allowing the Liberals to crush Kevin Rudd's hope of a pre-Copenhagen deal on climate change.

...meanwhile an emotional Mr Turnbull (pictured left with possible leadership contender Joe Hockey) pleads with the Australian media to "leave me alone."
More from the Australian here...

A contempt for scientific objectivity...

...whatever the outcome of Copenhagen, whatever stitched up shonky deal is made, the verdict of history and of science will remain the same; climate alarmists are frauds, and their stooges within the science establishments and in the media are guilty of collusion, lies and deceit. The information is now released, and the stink and shame of corruption will follow those who wilfully choose to ignore it...

...In the last few days, the cause of climate alarmism took a big hit when more than a thousand e-mails exchanged by scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) suddenly surfaced online...But notwithstanding the e-mails’ route to publication, their actual content is extraordinary. These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity. There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity, and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement. Especially in anticipation of the major climate summit taking place in Copenhagen next month, the significance of this explosive disclosure is hard to underestimate. According to climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”...more here...

...and from Ian Plimer in the Daily Mail...They put forward an ideology that is blind fundamentalism, unrelated to scientific facts. Politicians build new bureaucracies and pose as environmental saviours without having to face the consequences of their actions. Heads must roll. Meanwhile, the planet will do what it has always done: change...more here...

...remembering the warning message from George Orwell.. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984.

...and here's Rodney Hide's "please explain" letter to Nick Smith...

Our extinguished Poet Laureate...

...writes often in the NZ Herald as Jam Hipkins. His witty and self deprecating columns pierce the PC pretence that abounds here in NZ. Hopkins is an iconoclastic rebel with a fortnightly column and produces politically incorrect satire with bite. Today he's at his very best, brightening our Friday mornings with a column headed Dodgy science gets us all off the hook...

...The other (example of monetary muckiness) concerns a gaggle of Newton's heirs, scientific geezers beavering away, recording data, analysing statistics and reporting only what is provable and true. Except these crooks haven't. They've cooked the books. They've lied. They've falsified the facts to induce needless panic and alarum in the bosoms of the groundlings. Along the way, they've blackened the reputations of others who challenged their conclusions, whilst earning for themselves great renown and large amounts of dosh.There's supposed to be an absolute rule in science: if the facts don't fit the theory, the theory must be wrong. But these beneficiaries of massive research grants have adopted a more creative approach. In their world, the First Law of Prestige and Avarice applies; when the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts...But these egregious boffins have done more than remind us that the purest of research is prone to the corruptions of ambition and income. What they've done is wilfully attempt to influence public opinion - and political outcomes - around the world. For these data-bodgers weren't investigating the mating habits of the Lesser Crested Gobsnot. No, they were climate scientists. Or, more precisely, pseudo-scientists, twisting the truth to produce results which they and their employers desired...more here...

As with other MSM, the NZ Herald has reported the scandal around the CRU as a breach of security rather than a gross and grotesque scientific fraud. Jim Hopkins, God bless him and reward him, has shone the spotlight on the elephant in the room. We wait now for further news and comment re NIWA, CRU and Jim Salinger as posted yesterday. The s*** has now hit the fan..

...AND, because it's Thanksgiving...

...and from the usually very unexcitable Bishop Hill...On the code thread, James Smith has just posted this comment:
From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It's reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic.
Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.

The house of cards has collapsed...

...and a easy way to rate the clanging of the alarm bells is to check out the level of debate at the green left site Hot Topic. A stab to their sensitive green collective hearts has been the admission from their UK Guardian spokesman and ally George Monbiot, that the head of the CRU, Phil Jones should resign. Further revelations from the leaked material will strengthen future actions and investigations. From CBS news ...the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change...

This issue will not go away, and has the potential to rival Watergate as a political scandal. It may become the defining issue of the Obama presidency. And talking of scandals, closer to home the NZ Climate Science Coalition has been doing some simple spadework, and what they've found appears to link NIWA, CRU and their ex-employee Dr Jim Salinger, to some more dodgy statistics...

There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years. But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on? New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is responsible for New Zealand's National Climate Database. This database, available online, holds all New Zealand's climate data, including temperature readings, since the 1850s. Anybody can go and get the data for free. That’s what we did, and we made our own graph...

...and what the Coalition have found is that the official graph used by NIWA, and largely collated by Dr Jim Salinger, and started by him in the 1980's when he was at the CRU, differs markedly from the data. They therefore conclude...

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this...We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace...more here... and here... and now featuring on WuWT here...

It remains to be seen what Dr Salinger will say about all this, but the suspicion is now raised that NIWA understood Salinger's apparent distortion of the data, and may have sacked him as a result...Now Rodney Hide has asked Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, to "please explain." However, the ball remains firmly in Dr Salinger's court...watch this space.

Some more light relief. What do you think Homer Simpson thinks about climate change ? Check it out...with thanks to PKH here...

...and... We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to suspend the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia from preparation of any Government Climate Statistics until the various allegations have been fully investigated by an independent body...here...

...and for a great overview, with links to blogs, media sources around the world, see The Week, here...