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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sdgla who wrote (54603)	8/23/2012 9:44:19 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Climate-Gate Zealot Continues Three-Ring Circus Climate Fraud: In an attempt to defend his role in the greatest scam of modern times, Climate-gate's poster child threatens to defend his tarnished reputation in court. First, hide the decline, then hide the deceit. 'Get lost" was National Review editor Rich Lowry's appropriate response to a threatened lawsuit by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. NR printed a post by the great Mark Steyn, who graces these pages as well, calling Mann's famous hockey-stick graph "fraudulent." That it is indeed a fraud has been documented by many, including us. Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline: "I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline (in global temperatures)," the email read. It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards. The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts — in a pattern resembling a hockey stick — in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear. The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here too the data were carefully selected. Data from just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages. They were not included. Based on this documented record of scientific fraud, Steyn posted a stinging critique that included this quote from the blog of Rand Simberg: "Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet." An apt comparison, as Steven Hayward points out in a PowerLine blog post, since "Penn State's exoneration of Mann over the 'Climate-gate' scandal was as self-serving as their investigation of Jerry Sandusky." With hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at stake and the climate-change industry dependent on such "research," the incentives for a cover-up were huge. Lowry says he welcomes such a suit, which may include Steyn himself, saying he's willing to go to the mat and use the discovery process to unearth every last jot and tittle of climate deception by Mann and his partners in fraud. "He's going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world," Lowry writes. "In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn't stopped him before." A Congressional Research Service report shows that from fiscal 2008 through 2012 the federal government spent $68.4 billion to fight the phantom known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or man-induced climate change. In its name, the war on fossil fuels has decimated our economy, stunting growth and increasing joblessness. It's been the greatest fraud of all time, and Michael Mann has been at the heart of it.

To: Sdgla who wrote (54603)	9/10/2012 11:00:39 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The True History of Simpson-Bowles Paul Ryan didn't kill the deficit commission, which dodged the biggest issues.. September 9, 2012, 7:00 p.m. ET One of the many ways Paul Ryan scandalized the media-political class in his Tampa convention speech was to criticize President Obama for walking away from the report of his own 2010 deficit commission co-chaired by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. How dare the upstart Republican blister Mr. Obama when Mr. Ryan himself refused to endorse the final product! Mr. Ryan even had the impudence to say that Mr. Obama "did exactly nothing" as a result of Simpson-Bowles or Mr. Ryan's own budget proposals or any others, "nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue." Media elites are now using this to absolve Mr. Obama and suggest that Simpson-Bowles would have succeeded if not for the all-powerful House Budget Chairman. This rewrites history, so allow us to remind readers what really happened to the Obama deficit commission. * Mr. Obama created the panel in February 2010, without a trace of irony, after he had raised federal spending to post-World War II highs. His political goal was to blunt attacks on his overspending, while also trying to lure Republicans into becoming tax collectors for his agenda in the name of a balanced budget. Mr. Simpson is the kind of Republican who had fallen for this in the past. So it was a pleasant surprise when Messrs. Simpson and Bowles instead endorsed a more efficient and competitive tax code. Their draft swapped fewer brackets and lower rates for fewer loopholes and "tax expenditures." The appeal for Democrats is that tax revenue would grow with a faster-growing economy, and Republicans would have to accept a net tax increase reaching 21% of GDP. That's far higher than the historic average between 18% and 19% and above the modern high of 20.9% in 1944. The political myth is that Mr. Ryan was the spoiler because he's an anti-tax purist. His real objection at the time was that the Simpson-Bowles Democrats refused to offer an equal trade on spending. Their non-negotiable demand was that ObamaCare was off the table and there could be no structural reforms in Medicare and Medicaid. How is that a real compromise? Everyone agrees that Medicare and Medicaid are growing too fast for revenues to keep up. Mr. Obama himself told the 2010 House GOP retreat that "The major driver of our long-term liabilities, everybody here knows, is Medicare and Medicaid and our health-care spending. Nothing comes close." The fiscal reality is that if health care is off the table, then the only possible not-so-grand bargain is permanent tax increases that chase an explosion of federal spending. The commission nonetheless divided into topical working groups, with Mr. Ryan joining Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution to propose a modified version of the premium-support Medicare reform he would later include in the House budget. For political reasons, Messrs. Simpson and Bowles decided not to add this proposal to their final document. In December 2010, they were trying to get support from at least 14 of 18 members that Mr. Obama's executive order required for a formal consensus. Ultimately three Republicans including Mr. Ryan voted no, and four Democrats voted no, with 11 members in favor. So in fact Democrats quashed the necessary supermajority even after they first vetoed any serious reform of Medicare. And Mr. Ryan is the "rigid" one? The beads-for-Manhattan logic seems to be that Mr. Ryan should still have gone along with this entitlement status quo and also tacitly endorse the Affordable Care Act to show he's a statesman. So he should have done Democrats a favor, become politically irrelevant and not solved the real fiscal problem in return for some nice mentions from NPR commentators. Thanks for the career counsel. By the way, the same pattern played out on the 2011 "super committee" that followed the debt-limit deal. Texas conservative Jeb Hensarling was willing to trade Medicare premium support for as much as half-trillion dollars in higher taxes. Democrats rebuffed this offer too. In any case, even if the deficit commission had reached a consensus, all that would have happened is a fast-track vote in Congress. The bipartisan duo of Jim Cooper and Steve LaTourette later codified Simpson-Bowles, and it bombed on the House floor this April, 382 to 38. The real reason the deficit is still so high is that Mr. Obama lacks Mr. Ryan's good-faith flexibility. It's hard to remember now, but Washington was optimistic about Simpson-Bowles early in 2011 as a blueprint for compromise. A White House aide even called Mr. Ryan to invite him to a Presidential speech at George Washington University in 2011, telling him he'd like what Mr. Obama had to say. With Mr. Ryan in the front row, Mr. Obama instead trashed Mr. Ryan's House budget, claiming it would pit "children with autism or Down's syndrome" against "every millionaire and billionaire in our society," and that was one of the more restrained passages. Mr. Ryan's Tampa reference to Mr. Obama's dodging and demagoguery is accurate. * Simpson-Bowles did offer some useful ideas, especially on tax reform, helping to make that politically possible in 2013 if Mitt Romney wins in November. But the deficit report hardly deserves its stone-tablet, Ten Commandments image since it also abdicated on the hardest spending issues. The real budget choices won't be made by some blue-ribbon commission, but will depend on what voters do this election. online.wsj.com

To: Sdgla who wrote (54603)	12/9/2012 11:34:38 PM
From: greatplains_guy	2 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

Bad boy smashes U.N. wall of silence Source: SPPI Christopher Monckton OPINION From Christopher Monckton of Arabia in Doha, Qatar I have been a bad boy. At the U.N. climate conference in Doha, I addressed a plenary session of national negotiating delegates though only accredited as an observer. Tsk, tsk. See me after class. Five demerits. Get down and give me 20! One just couldn’t resist. There they all were, earnestly outbidding each other to demand that the West should keep them in pampered luxury for the rest of their indolent lives, and all on the pretext of preventing global warming that has now become embarrassingly notorious for its long absence. No one was allowed to give the alternative – and scientifically correct – viewpoint. The U.N.’s wall of silence was rigidly in place. The microphone was just in front of me. All I had to do was press the button. I pressed it. The Chair recognized Myanmar (Burmese for Burma). I was on. On behalf of the Asian Coastal Co-operation Initiative, an outfit I had thought up on the spur of the moment (it sounded just like one of the many dubious taxpayer-funded propaganda groups at the conference), I spoke for less than a minute. Quietly, politely, authoritatively, I told the delegates three inconvenient truths they would not hear from anyone else: •There has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of these wearisome, self-congratulatory yadayadathons. •It is at least ten times more cost-effective to see how much global warming happens and then adapt in a focused way to what little harm it may cause than to spend a single red cent futilely attempting to mitigate it today. •An independent scientific enquiry should establish whether the U.N.’s climate conferences are still heading in the right direction. As I delivered the last of my three points, there were keening shrieks of rage from the delegates. They had not heard any of this before. They could not believe it. Outrage! Silence him! Free speech? No! This is the U.N.! Gerrimoff! Eeeeeeeeeagh! One of the hundreds of beefy, truncheon-toting U.N. police at the conference approached me as I left the hall and I was soon surrounded by him and a colleague. They took my conference pass, peered at it and murmured into cellphones. Trouble was, they were having great difficulty keeping a straight face. Put yourself in their sensible shoes. They have to stand around listening to the tedious, flatulent mendacities of pompous, overpaid, under-educated diplomats day after week after year. Suddenly, at last, someone says “Boo!” and tells the truth. Frankly, they loved it. They didn’t say so, of course, or they’d have burst out laughing and their stony-faced U.N. superiors would not have been pleased. I was amiably accompanied out into the balmy night, where an impressive indaba of stony-faced U.N. officials were alternately murmuring into cellphones and murmuring into cellphones. Murmuring into cellphones is what they do best. After a few minutes the head of security – upper lip trembling and chest pulsating as he did his best to keep his laughter to himself – briefly stopped murmuring into his cellphone and bade me a cheerful and courteous goodnight. The national delegation from Burma, whose microphone I had borrowed while they were out partying somewhere in the souk, snorted an official protest into its cellphone. An eco-freako journalist, quivering with unrighteous indignation, wrote that I had been “evicted”. Well, not really. All they did was to say a cheery toodle-pip at the end of that day’s session. They couldn’t have been nicer about it. The journalist mentioned my statement to my fellow-delegates that there had been no global warming for 16 years. What she was careful not to mention was that she had interviewed me at some length earlier in the day. She had sneered that 97% of climate scientists thought I was wrong. I had explained to her that 100% of climate scientists would agree with me that there had been no global warming for 16 years if they were to check the facts, which is how science (as opposed to U.N. politics) is done. I had also told her how to check the facts (but she had not checked them): Step 1. Get the monthly mean global surface temperature anomalies since January 1997 from the Hadley Centre/CRU. The data, freely available online, are the U.N.’s preferred way to measure how much global warming has happened. Or you could use the more reliable satellite data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville or from Remote Sensing Systems Inc. Step 2. Put the data into Microsoft Excel and use its routine that calculates the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data. Linear regression determines the underlying trend in a dataset over a given period as the slope of the unique straight line through the data that minimizes the sum of the squares of the absolute differences or “residuals” between the points corresponding to each time interval in the data and on the trend-line. Phew! If that is too much like doing real work (though Excel will do it for you at the touch of a button), find a friendly, honest statistician. Step 3. Look up the measurement uncertainty in the dataset. Since measuring global temperature reliably is quite difficult, properly-collated temperature data are presented as central estimates flanked by upper and lower estimates known as the “error bars”. Step 4. Check whether the warming (which is the difference between the first and last value on the trend-line) is greater or smaller than the measurement uncertainty. If it is smaller, falling within the error-bars, the trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero. There has been no warming – or, to be mathematically nerdy, there has been no statistically-significant warming. The main point that the shrieking delegates here in Doha don’t get is this. It doesn’t matter how many profiteering mad scientists say global warming is dangerously accelerating. It isn’t. Period. Get over it. The fact that there has been no global warming for 16 years is just that – a fact. It does not mean there is no such thing as global warming, or there has not been any global warming in the past, or there will be none in future. In the global instrumental temperature record, which began in 1860, there have been several periods of ten years or more without global warming. However, precisely because these periods occur frequently, they tend to constrain the overall rate of warming. Ideally, one should study periods of warming that are either multiples of 60 years or centered on a transition year between the warming and cooling (or cooling and warming) phases of the great ocean oscillations. That way, the distortions caused by the naturally-occurring 30-year cooling and 30-year warming phases are minimized. Let’s do it. I have had the pleasure of being on the planet for 60 years. I arrived when it first became theoretically possible for our CO2 emissions to have a detectable effect on global temperature. From 1952 to the present, the planet has warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.2 Celsius degrees per century. Or we could go back to 1990, the year of the first of the four quinquennial Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC). It predicted that from 1990-2025 the world would warm at 0.3 Cº/century, giving 1 Cº warming by 2025. Late in 2001 there was a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the most influential of the ocean oscillations. From 1990-2001 is 11 years; from 2001-2012 is 11 years. So 1990-2012 is a period centered on a phase-transition: with minimal natural distortion, it will indicate the recent temperature trend. Since 1990 the world has warmed at 1.4 Cº, century, or a little under 0.3 Cº in all. Note that 1.4 Cº/century is a little greater than the 0.12 Cº/century observed since 1952. However, the period since 1990 is little more than a third of the period since 1952, and shorter periods are liable to exhibit somewhat steeper trends than longer periods. So the slightly higher warming rate of the more recent period does not necessarily indicate that the warming rate is rising, and it is certainly not rising dangerously. For the 21st century as a whole, IPeCaC is predicting not 1.2 or 1.4 Cº warming but close to 3 Cº, more than doubling the observed post-1990 warming rate. Or, if you believe the latest scare paper from our old fiends the University of East Anglia, up to 6 Cº, quadrupling it. That is not at all likely. The maximum warming rate that persisted for at least ten years in the global instrumental record since 1850 has been 0.17 Cº. This rate occurred from 1860-1880; 1910-1940; and 1976-2001. It is only in the last of these three periods that we could have had any warming influence: yet the rate of warming over that period is the same as in the two previous periods. All three of these periods of rapidish warming coincided with warming phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The climate scare got underway about halfway through the 1976-2001 warming phase. In 1976 there had been an unusually sharp phase-transition from the cooling to the warming phase. By 1988 James Hansen was making his lurid (and now disproven) temperature predictions before the U.S. Congress, after Al Gore and Sen. Tim Wirth had chosen a very hot June day for the hearing and had deliberately turned off the air-con. Here is a summary of the measured and predicted warming rates: Measured warming rate, 1997-2012 0.0 Cº/century Measured warming rate, 1952-2012 1.2 Cº/century Measured warming rate, 1990-2012 1.4 Cº/century Measured warming rate, 1860-1880 1.7 Cº/century Measured warming rate, 1910-1940 1.7 Cº/century Measured warming rate, 1976-2001 1.7 Cº/century Predicted warming rate in IPeCaC (1990), 1990-2025 3.0 Cº/century Predicted warming rate in IPeCaC (2007), 2000-2100 3.0 Cº/century Predicted warming rate by UEA (2012), 2000-2100 4.0-6.0 Cº/century But it is virtually impossible to tell the negotiating delegates any of what I have set out here. They would simply not understand it. Even if they did understand it, they would not care. Objective scientific truth no longer has anything to do with these negotiations. Emotion is all. A particularly sad example of the mawkish emotionalism that may yet destroy the economies of the West was the impassioned statement by the negotiating delegate from the Philippines to the effect that, after the typhoon that has just killed hundreds of his countrymen, the climate negotiations have taken on a new, life-or-death urgency. As he left the plenary session, the delegates stood either side of the central aisle and showed their sympathy by applauding him. Sympathy for his country was appropriate; sympathy for his argument was not. After 16 years with no global warming – and, if he reads this posting, he will know how to check that for himself rather than believing the soi-disant “consensus” – global warming that has not happened cannot have caused Typhoon Bhopa, any more than it could have caused extra-tropical storm Sandy. It is possible that illegal mining and logging played no small part in triggering the landslide that killed many of those who lost their lives. Perhaps the Philippines should join the Asian Coastal Co-Operation Initiative. Our policy is that the international community should assist all nations to increase their resilience in the face of the natural disasters that have been and will probably always be part of life on Earth. That is an objective worthier, more realistic, more affordable, and more achievable than attempting, Canute-like, to halt the allegedly rising seas with a vote to establish a second “commitment period” under the Kyoto Protocol. Will someone please tell the delegates? Just press the button and talk. You may not be heard, though. Those who are not partying somewhere in the souk will be murmuring into their cellphones. sppiblog.org