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House of Commons Finds No Evidence of Tampering In Climate E-mails
dwguenther writes "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."
According to the article, the head of committee which produced the report "said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time"; two further inquiries are to examine the issue more closely. The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
The appalling quality of the software used to model the situation (not flagging errors, but carrying on regardless) makes any conclusion pretty much worth less than the paper on which it is written
Lies Lies Lies! We're going to hellll!
Does this mean ManBearPig is real?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
But, fact remains that the Earth has been warmer and the Earth has been cooler. It WILL change. We may not like that but it is a fact. I would MUCH more prefer global warming than global cooling. You want a disaster? Try an ice age! Even a mini-ice age like happened in the 1800's and other centuries causing mass starvation and migration.
Well if the House of Commons can't find it, it doesn't exist!
Well, that's enough for me. I'm convinced!
That is strange.
Phil Jones admitted it.
The Deniers never really cared about silly things like evidence, or the opinions of pretty much every expert in the field. The whole "Climategate" was just a warm fuzzy excuse to be proud of their intellectual bankruptcy. Now that this red harring is off the table I hardly expect these enlightened thinkers to change course and face reality. Thank god I have some karma to burn, because I'm certain there will be a denier with modpoints.
Exxon-Mobil finds no evidence of danger in fossil fuel use.
that the bullshit noise that fox news and deniers spread around got quashed by some actual investigation.
I think that the crap that the right wing manages to pass off as 'facts' has done a lot to hurt any attempt to debate issues openly with any chance of keeping the discussion rational and factual
Wherever You Go, There You Are
So I guess I can look forward to public apologies from all of those Phil Jones bashers...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Look at me, expecting people to do the right thing.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
The problem with the whole Global Warming panic was not that these scientists were distorting the data. The real issue was that they didn't allow public scrutiny of the information. If another group of scientists can't reproduce these results, that the results are not science. Let other climate scientists have the raw data, and we'll see what they say. If you can get a whole bunch of people reproduce the same conclusion, then the study can be taken as credible. Until then, I reserve judgement.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
I heard about this yesterday and it seems like a deal was struck. Phil Jones steps down, and the house of commons declines to charge him. We'll never know, of course.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The sinister World League of Scheming Climatologists have corrupted the House of Commons!
What evil will they not resort to to keep their grant money coming?
Why can't people simply accept what the fossil fuel companies, their lobbyists and assorted astroturf operations tell us is true? They certainly don't have a financial stake in this, unlike those greedy scientists.
for you darn kids and your "science" no one would have ever known that global warning deniers are totally FOS.
Global warming is used as a justification to tax (carbon taxes) and control (cap and trade, various environmental regulations.).
There's nothing a government body wants more than money and control. Ergo, it's in the interests of the House of Commons to say 'yep, everything's legit here, and because it is, we're taking more of your money and restricting your lives & business even more. Gotta save the earth, ya know. It's for your own good.'
(The astute reader can guess my position on the matter of anthropogenic global warming, but the above statement is independent of the scientific truth of the matter.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I hope some of them got Al Gore's autograph as least...
What's rational and factual about the end of the graph of the WMO report on Global Climate in 1999?
It's not about the naysayers, it's about a lack of academic integrity. It doesn't matter what the issue is, cooking data is wrong!
No 'vindication' at all.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/cru-inquiry-seeks-changes-in-uk-law-citing-failure-of-crus-foia-officer/
"The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information. Mr Holland’s FOI requests were submitted in 2007/8, but it has only recently come to light that they were not dealt with in accordance with the Act.
The legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place, so by the time the action taken came to light the opportunity to consider a prosecution was long gone. The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. It is important to note that the ICO enforces the law as it stands – we do not make it."
All the world's a stage. When a messenger comes in and you shout, "HE CARRIES A VINDICATION, HE CARRIES A VINDICATION", you are creating reality as much as you are describing it.
for a while by hand. Not to mention they are not the only climate scientists. You fucking deniers are morons, thanks for fucking us all over asshole.
"...had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process". Butthead: "Huh-huh, you said perverted."
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Remember, they are the conspiracy.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If only scientists and skeptics had some sort of common ground, maybe these kinds of conflicts could be avoided.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
NASA's reproduction of these same results doesn't seem to count for anything anymore.
News flash: a den of snakes says it is safe to enter and no harm will come to you little mouse.
These people are serial liars and clueless, their credibility is LOWER than the charlatans at East Anglia.
You find some correlation with Climate Change, you get more funding to investigate. If you disprove something, you're done.
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
When did the fucking denialists hijack slashdot? I thought most here were smarter than that, but even the moderators seem to have bought the Fox News bullshit hook, line and sinker. Anyone not on board with your insane moon landing-level conspiracy nonsense has been modded into oblivion.
James Lovelock is right. As a species, we're too fucking stupid to do anything about a severe problem that is staring us in the face.
Enough of the cargo cult science already, pick up a fucking science textbook and stop making idiotic arguments. Science is not decided on the basis of your fucking political football teams.
Its been joked about but they actually did it!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Oh, no problem, folks. Let's just wait. We survived so far. What can go wrong? I mean, if it turns out climate change is a thread, we will deal with it at face value. Right?
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
Let's look at this in context.
In order to write this comment, I looked at the Telegraph's list of implicated MPs. I gave up counting after I hit 120 MPs and I wasn't even halfway down the page (and yes, I did exclude names where it said "... did not claim"). Frankly, I think it would have been easier to get a list of MPs who weren't implicated and deduct that from the total number of MPs.
Many have repaid money voluntarily. Of those that haven't, how many have been asked to repay money? A dozen? Two dozen? A fraction of the number involved, of that I'm sure.
How many are being investigated by the police? 5, last time I checked.
Now, if you or I were to be caught red-handed in a high-profile tax swindle publicised in a national newspaper, do you honestly believe there's less than a 5% chance we'd be prosecuted if we "agreed to repay the money"?
Decide for yourself!
http://www.heartland.org/books/PDFs/SurfaceStations.pdf
Major report by Anthony Watts on junk surface stations
"Executive Summary: Global warming is one of the most serious issues of our times. Some experts claim the rise in temperature during the past century was "unprecedented" and proof that immediate action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions must begin. Other experts say the warming was very modest and the case for action has yet to be made.
The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can't know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the data.
The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations - nearly 9 of every 10 - fail to meet the National Weather Service's own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.
It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.
The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7 C (about 1.2 F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be "the best in the world," it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.
This report presents actual photos of more than 100 temperature stations in the U.S., many of them demonstrating vividly the siting issues we found to be rampant in the network. Photographs of all 865 stations that have been surveyed so far can be found at www.surfacestations.org, where station photos can be browsed by state or searched for by name." "Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?" h/t Roger Pielke Sr.
Obviously if you run the same code on the same data you will get the same result But what happens when you run it on the other data?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You want disaster? Try a 2 fluctuation C warming or cooling across all our most important foodbelts! Even a minor, persistent decline or increase in ecological carrying capacity will cause serious production issues.
You want disaster? Try halving or doubling the amount of precipitation (rain and snow) available to a few dozen major watersheds across the globe. Even a minor, persistent decline or increase will lead to all kinds of resource conflicts, quite possibly even the shooting kind like is happening now.
Bottom line? When you build a complex, resource-intensive society of ~7 billion people, and run that society really close to the margins of earth's natural carrying capacity (as we are today), then arbitrarily messing around with a bunch of climate parameters is a stupid idea. It might work out okay, or it might not.
I am so bold as to to say, the conclusions of this type of research is stretched beyond what can safely be predicted of a chaotic system.
The more bold claims are used by power mongers to take more control of peoples lives.
People ought to be able to look for themselves how far the data is being stretched.
Yes, except driving is 100% purely voluntary.
C'mon...you can do better than that. That's pretty weak.
What they did was not illegal though, which is the point. The police investigated for illegal activities that the bulk of them were not involved in.
Those that did break the law are being prosecuted.
The expenses system as it existed was pretty scandalous (claiming for moat cleaning, duck islands, family members as employees etc), but it was not illegal.
I was amazed when a CNN reporter asked Al Gore about the CRU emails. Gore said they were "old news" because they are "10 years old". When I checked my copy of the emails I found the most recent was just 5 days before they were released:
From: "Thorne, Peter (Climate Research)"
To: "Phil Jones"
Subject: Letter draft
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:17:44
So much for Gore's "analysis" of the emails.
I have been struggling to reduce Climategate to something easier for folks to comprehend, and to help them realize the media's duplicity in the whole Climategate affair.
A few weeks ago I was watching a PBS show recounting the Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme. The parallels are amazing. Then it hit me...
CRU is to science as Madoff is to investing.
What catalyzed that thought was an interview on CNN where an AGW scientist proffered the reason why, despite the revelations in the FOIA files, the science was still good: "Who could keep a conspiracy like that going for so long among so many scientists?", she replied.
Madoff worked his scheme for over 40 years. That's how long. The CRU scheme has been running for almost 20 years. Madoff's 19th floor office in the Lipstick building, where he conducted his marketing campaign and gave tours for the curious, could be compared to the IPCC. He bogus trading statements were created on the 17th floor, which would be the CRU. We learned in the "HARRY_README.TXT" file that since 1990 the temperature proxies had been "synthetic", "homogenized" so much that they bore little resemblance to the raw data, which the emails say had actually been thrown away so they couldn't be used later to discredit their work, and Harry documented many examples of how that was done. Only a fool or a conspirator would accept the the "trick" and "hide the decline" as anything less than what it was, scientific fraud. Why would so many conspire in the AGW fraud? Madoff PAID influential investment firms to funnel investors into his scheme. The UN and various government agencies around the world PAID scientists to generate what the emails called "deliverables", which were published in climate journals which didn't require data archiving. So, what were other scientists "peer reviewing" when they didn't have access to the data on which the published research was based? To avoid that question peer review committees were stuffed with other scientists also paid to generate "deliverables".
The IPCC wanted these "deliverables" to "prove" that CO2 generated by the First World was THE cause of claimed temperature rises. With that "fact" the UN could then call for justice and demand redistributing the "right to burn Carbon", in the form of "Carbon Credits" to the poorer nations so their standards of living could rise, while the First World's dropped, and everyone would become equal Carbon consumers somewhere in a happy middle. Classic Marxist dialectical materialism, which may explain why the left wing of the media was only too happy to play their part in publishing the "alarming news".
In 2002 a talented statistician reverse engineered the market performance of Madoff's hedge funds. After four hours of analysis he uncovered eight facts which proved that Madoff's hedge fund was a pyramid scheme. He wrote up his finding and sent it to the SEC, which would the equivalent to climate journals. The SEC sat on the information for years and did nothing. Similarly, the climate journals refused to publish McIntyre's and McKitrick's analysis of Briffa's hockey stick report. Then, five years later, another person reverse engineered the Madoff hedge fund performance history and established twenty one points demonstrating that Madoff's market performance was bogus, and sent it to the SEC. It took the SEC a couple years and a visit to the 19th floor for the SEC to issue a report clearing Madoff of any misconduct.
Then the market crashed. In hearings before Congress the SEC refused to comment because "the matter is under investigation". Cong
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Wow, the government supports something that means more revenue for itself and more derivative trading schemes for their banker buddies? I would have expected the investigation to go the other way.
I feel sorry for true AGW believers. If they're right, western governments and the IPCC sure seem to be doing their best to fuck it up lately. AGW may in fact be true, but it just looks like such a con job at this point that I can never be for upturning the economy over it. And of course, I'll take global warming over an (overdue) ice age any day, so I wouldn't recognize the urgency, even if it were true.
Why not go back to fighting good old fashioned pollution? That's something everyone can get on board with. What about the disappearing honey bee and genetically modified foods? There are all sorts of environmental problems out there that have been ignored in favor of this (seemingly) manufactured issue.
All of science has lost credibility due to the global warming hoax. Now, when you liberal fucktards tell me that evolution is a "fact", why the FUCK should I believe you?
As CogDissident said, the data's freely available to the public for download. You don't have to submit a request to CRU for the data.
Interestingly enough, global warming deniers were inundating CRU with requests for information that could have easily downloaded instead. This kept the CRU researchers busy fulfilling information requests, instead of actually doing climate research -- essentially a DDOS. This is why the CRU researchers started turning down information requests, and I don't blame them.
said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish
No kidding. A political body doing an "investigation" like this? The phrase "the fix is in" seems to apply here - if you are honest, you have to admit the conclusion was pretty much decided before any "investigation" by the body was done, regardless of whether you trust current climate science or not.
Thanks for the info.
The whole global warming bugaboo has been one of the holes in my awareness. It became so utterly huge and confusing that I just stepped back and tuned it out figuring that when the dust settled, I'd wade back in and try to make sense of things. -That independent researchers who were smarter and more dedicated than me would be able to put the larger pieces together.
I find it no surprise that greed and a war of social control are driving the Carbon Trading scheme, but I think there is something more also hidden beneath it all.
Climate change is still with us; the weather is really peculiar. One theory which makes a lot of sense given numerous other big and weird things going on is that the whole bundle of confusion and corruption which is Climategate might be there simply to stop people from focusing on and asking what is really going on. What's up with the planet?
-FL
The blacksmiths were not put out of work by feel-good legislation, which is what is happening now.
Does this mean we need to nuke... our imagination?
Why is it that global warming denialists use the same fraudulent debate tactics as creationists? Come to think of it, the same tactics are used by people who believe that vaccines cause autism and that homosexuality is a choice.
Hard to believe that people have become so ignorant regarding science that they fall for such hokum. Especially on /.
Doctor call people who complain about perfectly normal things the "worried well". Modern society complaining about the climate is also perhaps the "worried well". It's like worry needs a home.
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
So your refutation is to assert that his question can never be asked? Basically you are saying that there is no such thing as increased efficiency and that there is no such thing as pollution. Finally you don't even address the question of how this effects the economy except to make another assertion that anything attempted will down us 'in a sea of harm.' How is that a reasonable or useful response?
I think we can all agree that people will come up with amazingly stupid ideas to solve nonexistent/pointless problems that being said people can come up with even more amazing solutions to real world problems given the resources to try. As far as I have seen the current attempts to reduce pollution have had a dramatic effect: there are far fewer instances of acid rain throughout the world than 20 years ago, building maintenance has been eased by not having to routinely clean coal dust from every nook and cranny, and rivers and streams throughout the world are providing humanity with cleaner safer drinking water and food. Do you have any instances where 'the approach taken is so stupid and expensive that any benefits are drowned in a sea of harm?' or are you just preaching to some choir that I don't hear.
Of course, this post will instantly get you labelled "denier", but I think you have made your case simply and well.
Written by a serious environmentalist. It presents results of 20 or so very eminent people in the fields related to climatology. None of them 'deny' global warming, but each has fundamental results that are in conflict with the global warming narrative.
The science is NOT solid, to say the least.
The raw data is suspect. The climate models have many free variables. So many, in fact, that it is a lot of work to make them fit new data.
We do know about evidence. We do know about computer models. We do know about how to judge science vs bogus concensus.
And while we're in science-land, we probably can explain how heavier-than-air molecules are supposedly floating in the upper levels of the atmosphere for extended amounts of time while preventing the oh-so-precious heat loss of our planet.
Exactly, everyone except global warming conspiracists know that heavy objects and gasses sink! Unfortunately I'm at sea level, and nitrogen is lighter than oxygen. I would help you debunk their theories except I'm obviously breathing 100% nitrogen and am about to
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
Believers have not followed the scientific route. They've outright contradicted it. Their models said "toads" and then there were no toads. They cannot claim "Well, climate change has made weather so unpredictable that can't even predict whether or not there will even be toadstorms!" Their models are false and they continue to extrapolate them because they are liars. They need to change their models, predict weather accurately, and start telling people what they've learned.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
> Stop f*cking ranting and cheering for your political party, open your f*cking eyes and vote
> for the right person for the job, not because they are wearing red or blue this week.
Clueless twits can always be counted upon to spout this fallacy, that you should vote for the man and not the party. It is right up there with 'there is no real difference between the two parties' in being quick ways to spot someone who knows nothing of politics but has convinced themselves they not only know more but are morally superior to the people who actually invest the effort to get a clue.
In saner times there is a measure of wisdom in your advice but most times, especially since the start of the Progressive Era, there are stark differences between the two (or more) camps. In modern times there are two great philosophies contending in the public arena.
1. The name shifts every couple of years since the majority of Americans HATE the ideas so every time a critical mass realize the new name is just the same old dogfood the name changes again. And to be fair there are policy differences and some shades of grey. But essentially this camp is the Progressives, Fascists, Liberals, Social Democrats, Labor, Socialists, Communists, etc. They are all bound together by the common belief that the State, personified in a "Great Leader", should lead a dictatorship of the enlightened few over the clueless masses. Believes in the Rule of Men.
2. Conservatives and Libertarians in a grand alliance against the forces of Statism. Believes in classical liberal ideas like natural law, individual rights and the Rule of Law. More bluntly, American ideas.
These two philosophical systems are so divergent that little common ground exists for compromise. We basically have a Cold War going on with two hostile camps kept from violence only by both sides seeing the better chance at the ballot box. But this situation isn't stable, our government is growing ever more unstable and people are losing faith in it. Eventually one side must defeat the other, driving their foe from the field and (re)implementing their system of government. And since neither side is likely to simply retire from the field without a final appeal to the sword the future doesn't look good.
So no, I won't vote for the man instead of the party. To paraphrase RAH (since I don't have the book handy) it is better to vote for a dunderhead of your own party, so long as he is subject to party displine and lacks such moral flaws as to render him a menace to society, than a genius of the party opposing. For while the dunderhead won't accomplish much even a dunderhead can represent his voters wishes. Meanwhile the genius of the party opposing is likely to accomplish much, almost none of which I will like.
Democrat delenda est
WTF???
The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
Hiding data and trying to keep skeptics work OUT of the peer review process is NOT part of a conspiracy??? B&S. Freaking newspeak.
I am ALL for development of alternative and much cleaner and more decentralized energy sources, and I have put my money where my mouth is there, but this stuff is just slap wrong on a lot of levels. It's tainted. Throw it out, start from scratch, wide open this time, NO AGENDA one way or the other, ya know, real science this time, and take that &&(*($@#?6%ing wall street trillion buck bailout #4 "carbon tax and cap and trade" complete conjob out of the picture right now, off the table. NO, that's way too much money to avoid corruption, and it is completely unneeded and just a huge skim that would take away cash that could be put into REAL research and development and *deployment*. We don't need any more freaking derivatives. We need deployed cleaner energy production units. Deployment as in get that stuff out there installed and working, stop waiting for the perfect mr. fusion device to show up before this happens, we can use all the various better alternative energy sources we have now,. and then just start making it better from that point. Stop pharting around. Mass scale manufacturing to get the dang prices down.
And no, we DON'T need a world government because of "climate change", take that horse hockey watermelon wet dream off the table right now as well.
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
But the real question is, did our MPs manage to expense the costs of this investigation? Wouldn't want them to miss out on an opportunity to line their pockets while whitewashing the damning evidence against their pet researchers and rubber stamping their highly questionable results. And I say this as one who believes global warming is happening, and is very likely a direct result of human activity and CO2 emissions. That doesn't change the fact that their behaviour was reprehensible, their models flawed, their data still missing and no longer verifiable (it's hard to verify data that has been deleted wholesale), and that as such it should not be the basis for any public policy.
But why let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of a juicy new (carbon) tax?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
http://climateaudit.org/2010/03/31/tricking-the-committee/
McIntyre is the only voice of reason as per usual
I say bullshit! There's evidence that Mars is also warming. No man made CO2 there-- so what does that say? It says Heightened-Solar-Activity. All beyond our control, Climate always changes one way or another. In the 70s the scientists all said we were going to be freezing our asses off at this point in time. Now that several fat cats, ie Al Gore,(the Grand Poopah) are positioned to make BILLIONS on carbon credit trading. Go figure. Cap and trade will cost us dearly. No evidence in the 70s and none now.
What they did was not illegal though, which is the point. The police investigated for illegal activities that the bulk of them were not involved in.
They signed a statement that the money they were claiming was required for expenses incurred carrying out their duties as an MP.
Things like eating, drinking, and cleaning their houses.
Things they seem to have been claiming that they wouldn't have done otherwise.
Those claims should have presented to a jury to see if they thought them a reasonable expense.
The politics of the matter are irrevocably intertwined. If I was an advocate for global warming, I wouldn't want to point out any conflict of interest on the part of the folks who fund most of the AGW research.
If you can find an AGW proponent that has acknowledged the potential of ulterior motives of politicians promoting AGW, then perhaps I misspoke.
However, given that:
1) You correctly identified my political alignment as right wing though I made no direct statement of the science.
and
2) You used the political, purposely inflammatory, non-scientific term 'denialism'
Perhaps the science and politics are no longer separable, eh? Maybe you'd be best off coming to terms with that.
In the single sentence
you've revealed a number of unflattering things about the emotional and intellectual level you operate on.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
You are missing the point - they are of course not legitimate expenses, but the way the system was set up, it did not matter.
There is nothing to be done - it was all legal (slimy and dishonest, but legal). The rules have been changed to prevent this, but you can't prosecute someone for something they did before the laws and the rules had changed.
Any time an industrial process produces waste, there is something being paid for as a raw material, whose processing is also being paid for, whose storage is again paid for, but which then produces nothing that returns anything for that investment. There is always going to be some waste, but some of that waste will actually be stuff intended for the primary product of that process, lost through (inevitable) inefficiencies. Since nobody is going to claim any industrial process is at peak efficiency, it is safe to conclude a better yield (and therefore less waste at LESS expense) is going to be possible. Other elements of that waste may be usable by other industries - the proverbial turning muck into brass. Again, this reduces pollution AND reduces expense.
The specific example - carbon emissions - is tougher, but I think it reasonable to say that power stations (a big source of carbon dioxide) and car engines (another big source of carbon dioxide) are highly inefficient at converting fuel into energy. Fuel is expensive (and will get ever more so, as no new uranium deposits are being found for nuke power and we're within 5 years of peak oil by some estimates). Titanium is theoretically as extractable from ore as aluminium (although nobody has developed a process that good yet). Titanium cars would need far less energy to reach or maintain a given speed than a car built out of a lump of iron. This is probably true for trucks and mass transit vehicles too. Blended-wing aircraft should also need less fuel than a traditional wing-and-cylinder body, so civilian aircraft (another big fuel consumer) could also be improved.
As for carbon being pollution, high CO2 levels reduce how efficient vegetation can photosynthesize (above a certain level which is really not that high). Since vegetation is a major part of the part of the carbon cycle that removes CO2, breaking that part of the carbon cycle is probably a Bad Idea. Carbon dioxide doesn't contribute nearly as much as sulpher dioxide to global warming, but it unquestionably contributes a fair bit. (I remember having this debate with my father, one of the pioneers in inorganic biochemistry - now called environmental chemistry - back in the 1970s, when he first introduced me to the science of Global Warming. Yes, the subject has been around for a while.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oddly enough there is exactly that in South Australia - it's called Goyder's Line.
We've burnt a lot of coal and oil, and those combustion products did not just vanish by magic but hang around like smoking inside a car with the windows up. In the 1970s this was shown to have an effect on climate.
All the doubts raised by paid PR and various crackpots cannot change that.
just ate the hens, chickens and good lord...the FOX is moving on to the Goose!!
-gc
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
We can prove because of the evidence, they believe despite the evidence.
Probably just a poor choice of words, not bashing you for it. But belief by definition does not require evidence, in fact belief is expected to be maintained in the fact of contradictory evidence.
Nitpic aside, I agree with your post.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This is what we call a Scot's Verdict. It's not that the Commons absolved them of wrong doing. It's just "Not proven."
"The result is the modern perception that the 'not proven' verdict is an acquittal used when the judge or jury does not have enough evidence to convict but is not sufficiently convinced of the defendant's innocence to bring in a "not guilty" verdict. Essentially, the judge or jury is unconvinced that the suspect is innocent, but has insufficient evidence to the contrary."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
A House committee has found that excessive Federal spending is NOT the cause of the huge national debt.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Extremely well said!
My girlfriend (yes, I have one, I'm in my forties, it's allowed :) ) just pointed out to me that much of the debate regarding release of data about global warming is similar to a lot of the arguments regarding release of data from nations that are suffering potential pandemic diseases; those nations (Indonesia, for one) believe that other nations can use that data to their advantage and to the detriment of the nations undergoing the problems. Those people saying that have a point. But!
While the analogy isn't perfect, it does point out one thing; that any data about any phenomenon that can have a global impact should ALWAYS be completely open to all; otherwise it's self-defeating for the ones withholding the data. Eventually any problem that can affect everyone on the planet, affects everyone on this planet. Nobody can know if there might not be a critical piece of data somewhere that will help in providing a solution.
It's unfortunate that in the global climate debate, it's the western nations who seem to be leading the charge; and the western nations who are also just as well known for hoarding data in other fields - and particularly in the medical field - that gives their corporations an advantage.
Perhaps - and this is a long thought - perhaps it's not governments, nor religions, who should be feared in that respect; but international corporations, who hold no allegiances except that of profit. It's hardly a new thought, but I bring it forth here again...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Apparently I was wrong. There were 3 deniers with modpoints. Glad they blew them on me with karma to spare! Now they won't be able to influence the real discussion. Cheers!
Phoenix321 just gave me the answer: to have no fucking clue whatsoever about stats and how scientists use them.
Well said, thanks. I have more to add.
"There is only one race, and that's the human race."
Edward James Olmos, aka Commander Adama of the Battlestar Galactica
Exactly. This is not a game. It's not a race to see who gets first place. It's a struggle for survival. Right now, it's OUR struggle to survive, the whole human species, against a universe that doesn't have an opinion, doesn't have a bias, that will just kill you if frak up, and will eventually kill you anyway. (you think the universe has a bias? ask it not to kill you the next time you do something stupid. Try it. Won't see you later. )
The universe doesn't have an "opinion" or a bias or any of that superstitious quackery. Quit thinking that it does. That sort of thinking gets you killed. (with apologies to Larry Niven wrt Louis Wu, hardly new but certainly deserves to be said again. Again. Again. )
You think we're special? Next time you are outdoors, on a clear night, look up at the multitude of stars, and the distances between them. Think then on how those stars are only a tiny part of many more much larger communitities of stars. Then tell me just how special we are.
What we have here might not be the only intelligence in the universe - if we can call ourselves that (hubris, indeed) but what we have is uniquely ours. Let's not fuck it up.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Yes, just keep repeating and repeating and repeating these lies until they become true. That's how propaganda works.
Clever signature text goes here.
Yet more electionering clap trap thats all .
He knows darn well he is going to get his butt kicked the hell outta No10 so he is now issuing orders to fight dirty and try to garner votes back again , We all know the data is as rigged as it ever could be we all also know Gordon (the Gofer) Brown © is desperate to hang on to power for another term so he can finish lining his pocket and finally finish the UK off we all know he is in bed with Europe BUT most of us also know it must end here this goes for both instances Global warming and Gordon (the gofer) Brown © the truth will out all this global warming stuff is in the mind of a few who have big ideas on their wallets
What the F*** is Kharma i do got teeth i don't got no kharma
You mean "didn't lose". They had some data for a purpose and when that purpose was done, they deleted it. The data was still with the owners.
Or is the fact that you haven't got EVERY SINGLE TAX RETURN proof that you're gypping the IRS, despite the law that says you don't have to keep them for more than 3 years?
Tax fraud.
You're right, every bureaucracy in the world wants to grow larger and control more of our lives.
That doesn't mean AGW is a crock, though. Just the "emissions trading" schemes that will make a lot of governments & permit traders a *lot* of money while actually doing nothing at all to reduce emissions.
What a load of crap. A committee of politicians whitewashes the climate fanatics at East Anglia? My ass! You'd have to believe that anything a bunch of politicians say is reliable, true and believable. Given the odiousness of politicians across the world, and especially the idiots in Britain who are quickly turning the island into a Totalitarian Politically Correct prison, how could any democrat and intelligent thinker accept their views and opinions. Give me a break!