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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (335168)	11/21/2009 2:23:13 PM
From: KLP	6 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793974

Manipulating Climate Change: Warming to RICO? by Christopher C. Horner biggovernment.com biggovernment.com For some time. several individuals have asked why we don’t just initiate suit against the obviously dishonest tactics and claims by the global warming industry under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO). This law commissions “private attorneys general” to pursue violations on their own, in essence as proxies for the state. I have explained with intermittent impatience that just serially lying or exaggerating to deceive are not on their face RICO “predicate” offenses. There must be three instances of a certain type of enumerated behavior over ten years to constitute a pattern in violation of RICO. I have received an email from someone who has much appropriate training and experience and which causes me to revisit the issue. He writes, “Well, now it really does look like a massive conspiracy to defraud the government. When I was in law school, one of my profs noted dryly that once in a while the Massachusetts Attorney General would sternly announce ‘we are going to investigate this matter of ____,’ and the sky of Boston would blacken with the smoke of burning documents. I bet there was a blip in electricity use this morning from emails being deleted by the climate change community.” Well, it is certainly true that, on its face this prospect has to be taken seriously barring revelation that words do not actually mean what they appear, in full context of the issue and the email, to mean (which so far has been the principal substantive defense). Fraud is a RICO predicate offense. If what we are seeing unfold is evidence of fraud, a RICO complaint is a possibility, along with what the “discovery” process would reveal. The email and data authors (and massagers, playing “tricks” with the data to “hide the decline” in temperatures) do appear to be true believers in their cause, and often in their data, neither of which is dispositive. They also are candid in ways triggering tortuous arguments explaining how those words don’t really mean what they say. The defenders say the literal readings – that’s plural, not a one-off remark – represent “sinister interpretations” (New York Times), and the implausible is actually the appropriate reading. For example, we’re now, for the first time, told that calling something the researchers did with data a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures is actually very typical application of common lingo about scientific methods purporting to represent findings. This is the first I have encountered in this context a benign meaning for that. This defense might have currency had not the actions in question already been exposed by private investigations and being, in fact, a “trick” “hiding the decline” in temperatures. The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing, on the data CRU have been denying access to and recently claiming simply, if again implausibly, to have lost. As well as on the taxpayer-funded IPCC process, and the peer-review process addressed in these emails as having been corrupted with a particular outcome in mind. Also, there are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves. The plain reading of what has been revealed so far, if the documents are indeed authentic as a blanket admission yesterday seemed to make clear, does give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides. In fact, their centers and careers and reputations ride on there being a “global warming” crisis, or at least there being some semblance of acceptance thereof. I am not yet drawing conclusions on this, but all of the above is food for thought. I will look into this further when I’m back from travel and able to give it some attention, as will some colleagues. We also must confront the truth hinted at by the jibe about the massive email deleting that has surely taken place in the past 72 hours. The ability to permanently delete such material, and codes and other files, is not something I am at all expert in, but an issue on which the viability of pursuing any such actions would hinge. So, hopefully more later.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (335168)	11/21/2009 10:48:59 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	4 Recommendations Respond to of 793974

Fascinating. I can't wait to hear Lord Monckton's views. I'm sure he is busy reading these emails right now. Or perhaps he is uncovering a buried smoking gun of scientific fraud.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (335168)	11/22/2009 12:36:17 AM
From: Neeka	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793974

My hubby says..... As a scientist, but not a practicing scientist, because I'm not earning money to falsify anything, I can tell you there is no such thing as a "trick" in science. Unless you're unable to discern what is going on, and you might be talking to a fellow scientist, and say: "by what trick did that happen, I don't know but would like to understand." That's the only circumstance where you could refer to a trick in science. So to change data by way of a trick is totally outside the realm of serious science. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Professor Phil Jones Professor Phil Jones E-mail: p.jones@uea.ac.uk I am the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. I was born in Surrey in 1952 and completed a B.A. in Environmental Sciences at the University of Lancaster in 1973 and an M.Sc. (1974) and Ph.D. (1977) at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My Ph.D. was titled "A spatially distributed catchment model for flood forecasting and river regulation with particular reference to the River Tyne." My research interests are in instrumental climate change, palæoclimatology, detection of climate change and the extension of riverflow records in the UK using long rainfall records. I am principally known for the time series of hemispheric and global surface temperatures, which I update on a monthly basis. I have numerous research papers over the last 20 years and these are available in the CRU Publications List. I have coedited four books: "Climate Since A.D. 1500" (with Ray Bradley) published by Routledge in 1992 and in paperback in 1995; "Climatic Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 Years" (with Ray Bradley and Jean Jouzel) published by Springer-Verlag in 1996; "History and Climate: Memories of the Future" (with Astrid Ogilvie, Trevor Davies and Keith Briffa) published by Kluwer in 2001 and "Improved Understanding of Past Climatic Variability from Early European Instrumental Sources (with Dario Camuffo) published by Kluwer in 2002. I have been a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1992 and was on the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Climatology until 1995. I am currently on the editorial board of Climatic Change. I am an elected member of Academia Europaea since 1998 and a member of the American Meteorological Society since 2001. I was jointly awarded the Hugh Robert Mill Medal in 1995 by the Royal Meteorological Society for work on UK Rainfall Variability, and in 1997 the Outstanding Scientific Paper Award by the Environmental Research Laboratories / NOAA for being a coauthor on the paper "A search for Human Influences on the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere," by Ben Santer et al. in Nature, 382, 39-46 (1996). More recently I was awarded the first Hans Oesschger Medal from the European Geophysical Society (now the European Geosciences Union) in 2002 and the International Journal of Climatology prize of the Royal Meteoological Society for papers published in the last five years, also in 2002.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (335168)	11/24/2009 8:05:25 AM
From: Brumar89	4 Recommendations Respond to of 793974

Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean? Just one of the scandals is the willingness to manipulate data to make a political case. November 22, 2009 - by Charlie Martin <- Prev Page 2 of 2 See for example emails 1047388489, 1256765544, 1255352257, 1051190249, 1210367056, 1249503274, 1054756929, 1106322460, and 1132094873. Also see email 1139521913, in which the author discusses how the comments at RealClimate.org are moderated to prevent skeptical or critical comments from being published. RealClimate advertises itself as a scientific blog that attempts to present the “real case” for AGW. The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question. See for example emails 0938018124, 0843161829, 0939154709 (and the graphic here), and 0942777075 (and the discussion here). The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK. See for example emails 1106338806, 1228330629, 1212063122, 1210367056, and 1107454306 (again!). Email 1107454306 is particularly interesting. In it, Dr Jones writes: The two MMs [McKittrick and McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. What makes this interesting is that the CRU, in later years, announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” their raw data when they responded to an FOIA request from … McIntyre. Now, I’ve purposefully not included much of the text from these emails, both for reasons of space and because I want people to read them for themselves. But, at least on this first look, it appears that the three scandals are: First, a real attempt by a small group of scientists to subvert the peer-review process and suppress dissenting voices. (For another look at this, by a respected climate scientist who was one of the targets, see these posts on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog.) This is at best massively unethical. Second, a willingness to manipulate the data to make a political case. This is certainly misconduct and possibly scientific fraud. This, if it proves true, should make these scientists subject to strong disciplinary action, even termination of their tenured positions. Third, what gives every appearance of an actual conspiracy to prevent data from being released as required by the Freedom of Information Acts in the US and UK. If this is proven true, that is a federal crime. These emails and the data associated, taken together, raise really important questions about the whole scientific structure of AGW. Is the data really valid? Has the data been effectively peer reviewed and have attempts to falsify been fairly treated? Is CO2-forced AGW really the best hypothesis? Until these questions are answered, the various attempts to “deal with the climate change crisis” have no acceptable scientific basis. pajamasmedia.com