A Place to Stand

since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants. The major amounts came from HEFCE (6.6 million pounds) and NERC (2.7 million pounds).

Britain has a truly stupendous budget deficit of £175 billion a year. Various Conservative politicians are on the lookout for parts of our overall budget of about £700 billion that can be cut. Large areas of cuts that would not hurt the famous "front line services" by the Taxpayer's Alliance among others. I have suggested how it could be done previously. Much of it boils down to finding quangos that are particularly useless or even economically negative. So lets look at these candidates:

HEFC - The Higher Education Funding Council for England is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (previously the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) in the United Kingdom, which has been responsible for the distribution of funding to Universities and Colleges of Higher and Further Education in England since 1992. It was created by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.

In 2007-08 HEFCE allocated £7.1 billion in public funds from the UK Government to universities and colleges in England to "support them in delivering high quality education, research and related activities". It only funds the institutions and does not give grants or loans to individual students.

So since this has been given to Professor Jones as boss of the CRU which is only tangentially part of the University of East Anglia & as such it is not going for eduction they seem, at the very least, to have been pushing the envelope of their remit. They are giving so much money, so easily for "research" which has been conducted unscientifically, fraudulently & so poorly as to be scientifically worthless, allegedly "losing" the data on which it is based. Professor Jones is on record as saying of that data "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it" & then, following an FoI enquiry, that it had been lost. At the very best that means his alleged findings are worthless & no sort of science.

When an organisation has enough money both to spend on things which are not its remit & which turns out to be wasted onn junk then there is something wrong. If they are doing their main job adequately then they have a lot too much money to play with & as a rough estimate I would expect an accountant with experience in restructuring companies in bankruptcy would cut it by a minimum of 1/3rd without doing significant harm to its real remit. Digby Jones would probably put it very much higher but lets move cautiously.

So that can be £2.4 billion saved.

Of course this assumes that there is not an overall government conspiracy to produce fake scares & that they are merely serving as a conduit for such fraud. But again lets be cautious.

NERC Natural Environment Research Council is a British research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences. Budget £400 million. The Natural Environment Research Council delivers independent research, survey, training and knowledge transfer in the environmental sciences, to advance knowledge of planet Earth as a complex, interacting system.

This is clearly a misuse of the word "independent" since it is dependent on NERC payment, NERC's website is long on pictures of polar bears & quotes of how "the climate change issue is every bit as serious as the press make it out to be" which if scientific would be the question not the answer. However working down through layers of information for press, policymakers, other bureaucrats etc. etc. what they have actually done for that £400 million comes down to :

Role of forests in storing carbon becomes clearer (Trees in African rainforests are getting bigger and are trapping more carbon)
Arctic sea ice is receding and thinning
Effectiveness of iron fertilisation in doubt
Bumblebees benefit from varied landscapes
Algae adopt Cheshire Cat defence
DNA study illuminates ageing in swifts
Solving the riddle of the smell of the sea
How do predators know where to look for food?
Keeping moorland carbon underground
Researching a sustainable path to bioenergy
Carbon capture and storage in China
Probing the causes of the Sichuan quake
Forecasting floods across the nation
UK rivers still too acidic for sensitive species (waterways are recovering from acid rain)
Identifying looming tipping points
Quantifying effects of man-made atmospheric nitrogen on the ocean
Taiwanese typhoons bury carbon at sea
World's biggest digital geological mapping initiative
From molten metal to blood clots
Tougher ozone controls needed
Protecting plants without pesticides

Of these the first is an expected beneficial effect of more CO2 though I bet it doesn't say that. Arctic ice is not receding. Carbon capture is not a technology in non-laboratory use anywhere & is just the next eco-hype to avoid nuclear & draw attention away from the failure of windmills. Acid rain is simply another eco fake scare. "Looming tipping points" presuppose everything about warming is already proven.

For £400 million a year this doesn't look like much particularly since this is 1 1/2 times what is needed to make Britain the world leader in the industrialisation of space. I know that most, though not all eco-fascists want us not to spend money in space until we have solved every problem on Earth but surely spending money on giving bees a better view should not take such an absolute priority over supporting one of the world's (well humanity's) fastest growing industries currently worth $6 billion a year to us but which could be doubled just as a start.

I have previously dealt with NERC when in 2006 its boss Alan Thorpe challenged climate sceptics in the Guardian & elsewhere to a public debate & then went into purdah when the challenge was taken up. The challenge indicates this grant giving body had eschewed any attempt at scientific impartiality, the vanishing indicates he wasn't expecting to have to back up the challenge & knows perfectly well it cannot be factually supported.

I very much doubt if any of the "research" NERC is supporting is adding anything significant to the sum of human knowledge & some of it is clearly subtracting. If any part was it could get funding for conventional sources. NERC appears to be a bureaucracy which exists purely to push its own eco-fascist agenda.

Abolishing it would save £400 million without coming within even hailing distance of any front line service.

And These 2 make up £9.3m of the £13.7m. I do not know where the rest came from but with £2.8 billion saved if I was the minister I would be looking at the donors of the rest. If they were proportionately equally useless that would allow savings of another £1.3 billion. That's a total of £4.1 billion. Not going to balance the budget on its own but in practice no less than the total cuts suggested by the Labour or Liberal Democrats have produced.
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Science is vital to the growth of our society, more vital in my opinion than any political debate between "socialists" & "capitalists" (who are usually neither). Government should be prepared to fund it even, indeed particularly, in a recession. Nonetheless the investment is only beneficial if it is directed to improve the science. However there is strong evidence that government funding, as presently done, has a net negative effect. Funding designed to "prove" catastrophic global warming clearly has so in spades as well as being intellectually & morally corrupt & damaging to all the basic principles without which science is replaced by what Richard Feynman called cargo cult science. Such patronage by those without understanding may be the difference between Renaissance Italy & the post Renaissance period.

I do think government should promote real research, but not by directly acting as gatekeeper to what and who gets funded. It should:

1 - Fund an X-Prize Foundation or indeed several for different branches of science
2 - provide special assistance to individuals & small businesses seeking to register international patents & copyright
3 - Abolish the employer's National Insurance contribution, or for self employed the entire amount, for researchers involved in technology research.*

1 & 2 don't workm until we have actually achieved the technology promised & so would cost nothing for several years. Then it would still be highly profitable almost no matter how large the investment. Jerry Pournelle had this to say, in testimony to Congress, on real technology investment.

Knowledge gained through the X programs helped U.S. aerospace firms to dominate the world industry. In the 1970’s US high technology, particularly aircraft, were the largest single cash export of the nation. They were very important in making up the deficits in our balance of payments.

*HT Mark Wadsworth for #3

Labels: Fixing the economy, global warming, Science/technology

The Scotsman has printed up a follow up letter of mine to my previous Turin Shroud one. This was in response to a wrong but sensible reply pointing out that the record of the Shroud goes back to southern France in 1389. Once again neither they, nor anybody else, according to Google, have published any of my now 3 letters on the climate fraud (though the aberdeen P&J has, to its credit, published a 2nd letter decrying BBC censorship of the news). Spooky.

That there was a holy shroud mentioned in 1389, as Stephen Moreton says (Letters, 27 November) is beyond dispute. Indeed, across Europe there were several of them. Those who believe what we know as the Turin Shroud was made by Leonardo for the Savoy family assume the Savoys had first purchased an old one, going cheap because it had been discredited as a fraud, and after keeping it out of sight for 50 years substituted the present creation, thereby giving the new one a spurious history.

Looking at the current one it is clear that, whatever it is, it is not an obvious fake. Moreover, the muscle definition of the body is simply far beyond any medieval art. It is either a genuine miracle, but showing serious errors on God's part, or an article created by some unrivalled Renaissance artist using a camera obscura (something da Vinci was interested in) and recently available silver sulphate (he was also interested in chemistry). If that technique is accepted, a medieval origin is also impossible.

I do not exclude the possibility that the universe has some sort of self-aware creator, but I do exclude as unreasonable that He would have spent time creating the shroud, in France in the 14th century, in a way we can now duplicate, and got it wrong in this way.

For God to impersonate da Vinci is not quite as great an achievement as for da Vinci to impersonate God.

Last line highlighted because I am pleased with its studied arrogance. The self aware creator may be the human race.

Labels: letters, Science/technology

John Redwood, on his blog, has called for a public enquiry.

It would be helpful if in the UK there was a proper enquiry into what has been happening to the evidence and its interpretation at East Anglia. Where public money is being spent on scientific research we need to be assured the standards and independence of the research are worthy of public support.

On Question Time last night the BBC did actually allow a question on the emails & fraud. Melanie Philips, who has long written that it is indeed a fraud was put in the first position, always the hardest because you can't marshal your thoughts, everybody else gets to pick you apart & at least on this occasion, you have no comeback. Nonetheless she put the case cogently |& accurately. The BBC's own guest, comedian Marcus Brigstocke said that he had helped perform scientific experiments in Greenland & seen with his own eyes that it was melting away which is simply a lie. Conservative David Davis showed movement by saying that while warming is definitely happening (it definitely isn't now) there was doubt it was catastrophic, which destroys the entire case cutting half the economy. Later on Andrew Neil's Politics show Michael Portillo said roughly the same. A silly woman on QT & another on Neil's (Diane Abbot MP) said the Cockermouth flood "proves" catastrophic warming which may fit the BBC's assertions of 2 years ago, during the floods then, that CAGW would mean more floods but not their assertion the previous year that it would mean droughts. In fact the Cockermouth flood could have been averted if the eco-fascists had not vetoed it, which does not affect whether warming is real but does show that mitigation is infinitely more practical than what they propose.

I Have written this summary of the global warming theory & its faults on Charles Crawford's blogoir but think it worth putting here too. Strangely enough LibDem Norman Fraser, in his role as the ghost of Christmas past, has taken to making his normal illiberal assertions there, as always without stooping to facts.
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That CO2 absorbs more infra-red than oxygen & nitrogen is not in dispute. The question is whether this is a catastrophic, serious, trivial or minuscule effect.

CO2 makes up about 3 parts in every 10,000 of the atmosphere which is up by about 1 part. Calculations have suggested that a doubling would increase temperature by about 0.3 C - the rest of the alleged catastrophic warming assumes positive feedback systems, primarily increasing heat putting more water vapour in the air (water vapour being orders of magnitude more important as a greenhouse gas) & also assuming no negative feedback (primarily more cloud cover which is highly reflective).

However 0.3 C is a minor effect compared to variations we have seen - the little ice age being significantly colder, the medieval warm period being about 2 C warmer & the Climate Optimum (9,000 to 5,000BC) possibly as much as 4C warmer. In none of these did we see the positive feedback system required. That we stand on the cusp of a global tipping point & have done so for millions, even billions of years without tipping into runaway warming is inherently unlikely . It is orders of magnitude more likely that negative feedback effects predominate which is why we have relative stability - we are probably much closer to a cooling tipping point where increased snow cover increases reflectivity increasing snow since we have had ice ages as recently as 10,000BC but the current eco-fascist scare is not concerned with that.

Beyond that only 3% of Earth's CO2 production is of human cause, farting cows make more & termites much more.

Beyond that there are geo-engineering things we could do now to induce cooling (putting SO2 into the stratosphere) & that we have the capability to do in a generation to induce warming (square miles of orbiting tinfoil mirrors) if the human race does not succumb to fascist Ludditry

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Meanwhile, nearly a week after it broke across the world online, our media still censor as much as they can. This from Aberdeen is the only letter I can find on it & since i have sent 2 almost everywhere I can say for a fact that it is not that the press aren't getting letters but that they are censoring.

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Media

Via WattsUpWithThat is the news of cracks in the political wall. The Australian opposition Liberal Party is fracturing on the issue of global warming.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position...

The resignations began this afternoon after Mr Abbott and Senator Minchin confronted Mr Turnbull,leader urging him to put off a vote on the scheme until February.

Mr Turnbull refused so Mr Abbott handed in his resignation.

"This is a very difficult decision for me. I've always regarded myself as a very loyal party man," he said...

Mr Abbott says he urged Mr Turnbull to reconsider his position after being inundated with calls and emails from voters.

"The phone lines have been in meltdown with people saying that the Liberal Party would not be doing its job as an Opposition simply to pass this thing without the scrutiny that people calling my office think it demands," he said.

After Mr Abbott announced his resignation, news that the other four had also quit quickly followed.

The party's emissions trading spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, is now in Mr Turnbull's office.

As the revolt unfolds in Parliament House sources say the Government has offered to gag debate on the ETS legislation, which is now underway, in order to bring on a vote.

It is understood that the offer is being considered but it is thought such a move would be unlikely to succeed.


Special meeting

The Senate is due to sit until Monday to vote on the scheme and Senators Minchin, Abetz and Parry say they will stay in their positions until then.

A special meeting of Liberal senators is now under way.

The Opposition's spokeswoman for early childhood and women, Ms Mirabella, says she also cannot support the scheme.

She says she decided to resign after the party room meeting on the ETS legislation "left a bitter taste in my mouth".

"It's not a decision that you take lightly," she told Sky News...."It's not a matter of desertion. It's a matter of not being able to vote for bills that are so bad under any measurement," she said.

And she conceded she has never witnessed such extraordinary scenes during her time in Parliament.

"Quite frankly I hope not to experience another week like this," she said.

Yesterday Senators Mitch Fifield, Mathias Cormann and Brett Mason also offered to resign from their frontbench positions.

This is actually rather creditable since resigning is what one is supposed to do when one seriously disagrees. In Britain ministers just leak that it wasn't their fault. This remark from Mr Turnball also suggests that he is acting ethically, from a different point & that this breach is indeed purely because it has only recently become obvious that warming catastrophism is a fraud.

'This has now become a question not simply of the environmental responsibility of the Liberal Party but its integrity,' Turnbull said amidst the turmoil. 'We agreed with the government on this deal. We must retain our credibility of taking action on climate change.'

He is actively not saying that he now believes in alarmism but that previous promises must be kept. If the promises were obtained through fraudulent claims, as they were, & if they will produce unjustified costs to the people they represent, I don't think they should be binding.

Would that some British politicians were willing to say the same in the Commons.

Also from WattsUp it turns out that the New Zealanders were also fixing their own warming figures even before the CRU got hold of it & refusing to make data available for verification. Exactly the same tactics & they remain completely incompatible with real science.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

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.

In a related matter I asked this question

Can anybody name 2 scientists who aren't paid directly or indirectly by government (that includes Friends of the Earth) or charities/foundations specifically committed to alarmism who have said catastrophic warming is real. That excludes statements along the lines of "most of the 20thC warming (0.6C) may be anthropogenic" but genuine catastrophism.

on 3 catastrophic warming sites & one sceptical one. The results are:

Realclimate post 137 - one answer asking me to define catastrophic which I did & then no answer.

Brave New Climate - question censored

Deltoid - question censored Deltoid comments are worth reading simply because they are an example of directed mob behaviour - that by starting with people with an agenda, many of whom are genuinely prominent "climate scientists" & censoring serious comments on alternative sides, people can work themselves into persuading themselves of the most obvious lies eg "If there were any damning info, as is being alleged, it would come out in the peer review process."

And on the other side WattsUpWithThat again where the question stood but nobody came up with any names.

So nobody anywhere is able to name 2, or apparently even 1 prominent scientist, anywhere in the world, who openly supports the catastrophic warming claims who is independent of funding by government or committed alarmists. 'Nuff said.

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Science/technology

I have this letter in today's Scotsman. It is a reworking of this blog I recently did & is in response to other letters on the subject recently. The highlighted line is excised. Saying that the images of Christ prior to the Renaissance vary widely, some bearded & some not etc., but that almost all those since have been the face depicted & thus the face of Leonardo da Vinci may have been a step too far.

If the Turin Shroud were genuinely caused by Christ's body miraculously transmigrating through it while it was wrapped round him the marks would be as wide as the circumference of the front half of a body rather than the diameter as it is. It is also taller at the front than the back because the face is larger than real faces. It is unlikely that God would have made such elementary errors.

The alternative is that it was manufactured using what amounts to a photographic process using silver sulphate, by some Renaissance artist with a unique knowledge of anatomy & attitude to heresy. That is almost certainly Leonardo da Vinci.

I do not think that seriously reduces its importance. If art is the process of evoking awe & empathy the Crucifixion is the ultimate subject & Leonardo, whose face appears to be the one used for Christ, & which since then has become how Christ is depicted, has created, unknown to the world for centuries a work of art which makes the Mona Lisa look like a painting.

I have also sent 2 letters (well 1 1/2 because the 2nd was a rewritten version of the first) to papers everywhere on the leaked global warming alarmist information. Google search doesn't show any of them published. It seems some things are nowadays just too heretical to be discussed & it is interesting to see where the divisions are.

Professor Colin McInnes also has a letter in it attempting the Sisyphean task of educating Professors of "architecture & alternative energy" (Howard Liddell) in the basics of economics, engineering & physics.

Labels: letters, Science/technology

Been a while since I did one of my mega-projects - mainly because on all the big stuff I have already shown how easy it is to change the world. However since, like war, much of progress is getting there fastest with the mostest here is the ultimate in high speed on Earth.

The advantage of a mag-lev train moving in vacuum is that it has effectively no friction restraints. It can thus move at any speed, far faster in theory even than stratospheric jets, & that since there are no energy losses in movement, though there are in accelerating to that speed, running costs are very low. Disadvantages are that getting in and out is a fairly complicated process & turning tight corners at that sort of speed not pleasant (though if cornering the train can tilt & since there are no windows all you would feel is a slight increase in gravity pressure which is kinda cool). Accelerating at 1 g (10 m/s^2 = 22mph acceleration a second would mean it takes 45 seconds to accelerate to 1,000 mph by which time one has covered 6.20 miles). Since that acceleration is horizontal while gravity is vertical the combined G would be 1.41 which is perfectly acceptable sitting down, though seats would have to turn round before deceleration at the end. However it means that this is a system which would be optimum only for long distance travel. The other disadvantage is that building hundreds or thousands of miles of tunnels & keeping them airtight is not cheap. Vacuuming is probably not as big a problem as appears because it is only a 1 atmosphere pressure differential & engineers regularly work with thousands. Where air travel is the only competitor it is an option worth looking at.

A vactrain is a proposed, as-yet-unbuilt design for future high-speed railroad transportation. This would entail building maglev lines through evacuated (air-less) or partly evacuated tunnels. Though the technology is currently being investigated for development of regional networks, advocates have suggested establishing vactrains for transcontinental routes to form a global subway network. The lack of air resistance could permit vactrains to move at extremely high speeds, up to 6000-8000 km/h (4000-5000 mph or 5-6 times the speed of sound at sea level and standard conditions), according to the Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering program "Transatlantic Tunnel".

Theoretically, vactrain tunnels could be built deep enough to pass under oceans, thus permitting very rapid intercontinental travel - wiki ctd

The optimum first development would be something 200-300 miles long connecting really large & wealthy cities separated by sea & thus currently only accessible by air. Japan, Seoul, Beijing are slightly further apart than that but not a bad fit, between some of the Japanese islands are a shorter distance. Since this is tectonically active I would need some convincing however.

My other suggestion is from London. There is already a tunnel connecting it to Paris, 2 of the world's great cities but an alternative would be connecting to Amsterdam, still a major city & one where English is almost ubiquitous. A straight line from there passes just north of Berlin & then Warsaw. It would require some bend to extend it to Moscow (1500 m) but there is a lot of room to manage it. Rail's major problem for the commuter is that it goes only to very restricted locations. Hour & a half from the centre of London to that of Moscow is pretty wonderful. Even an hour in traffic at each end making it 3 1/2 hours from Brent Cross to Krylatskoe isn't shabby.

Vac-trains have been proposed before. In the 1970s Robert Salter suggested

A route through the Northeast Megalopolis was laid out, with nine stations, one each in DC, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and two in Connecticut. Commuter rail systems were mapped for the San Francisco and New York areas, the commuter version having longer, heavier trains, to be propelled less by air and more by gravity than the intercity version. The New York system was to have three lines, terminating in Babylon, Paterson, Huntington, Elizabeth, White Plains, and St George.

The killer argument against

In Salters day "Enormous construction costs (estimated as high as US$1 trillion) were the primary reason why Salter's proposal was never built" which is hardly surprising when the entire US economy was only a couple of trillion.

Here also is a link to discussion of the idea - it gets a rough ride but that is what such discussion is for.

However times & technology change. Tunnel boring technology in particular. Between 1982 & 2000 Norway built over 750 km of tunnels at between £3.2 million & £10mill per km. London-Amsterdam is 356 km. At an average of £6.6 million X 2 tunnels come out at £4.7 billion. Double that for airtighting & double it again for track & because everything costs more & takes longer (#119) we come out at £20 billion. That is not a sum to take lightly though it is less than the proposed high speed rail link between London & Scotland which many favour, though I do not.

Even if it isn't profitable it may be financially viable in terms of how it enhances property values. That is why the cold-hearted and calculating property developers at Canary Wharf offered to pay for the entire Jubilee Line extension themselves. They did their figures and worked out that £400 million spent on the extension would have boosted the value of their office blocks by over £1,000 million.. A few years of world average economic growth would certainly expand the market. Moreover technology didn't stop in Norway in 2000. I don't know if tunneling costs have further reduced but it is certainly possible & I can imagine that it would now be possible to build a better tunnel borer, better than this tiddler
possibly even run by one of Hyperion's reactors, which would chew through ground steadily at a much reduced price. If it doesn't exist now it is the sort of technology bottleneck which could be considerably eased by an international technology prize. Also there should be economies of scale in longer tunnels. Indeed looking at the falling cost of tunneling & the ever increasing share that lawyering plays in getting permission to build on the surface, which contributes to the £26 billion price of a London-Scotland high speed train, we may well be close to the stage of crossover.

Finally an idea which is not entirely mine, I wrote of it here, but has not been applied to such trains - just as accelerating a train takes electricity, deceleration produces current. Such power can be stored with high efficiency in flywheels which can, in turn, power that train starting on the next stage or another in the opposite direction. If so energy costs are pretty much limited to the inherent inefficiency of any system. Not only the fastest transport in the world but +80% of the energy reused as well.


UPDATE Colin McInnes has sent this link to an alternative which, by boring through the centre of the Earth allows for gravity to provide the motive power. However with flywheels already saving approx 80% of the power I think the energy costs of core cooling would significantly exceed the saving. We will probabnly have to make do with taking the long way. http://www.mprize.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_learn

On such concepts it would be theoretically possible to accelerate the train to above 16,000 mph. This, at 1G acceleration would take 12 minutes & a distance of 1,600 miles. Because of the rate at which the train would drop due to the Earth's curvature beyond that speed we would perceive negative gravity. This could be obviated by the train swinging over & running on the roof. At 1 G acceleration for 6,000miles & the same deceleration we could reach Australia in 47 minutes, reaching a peak speed of 31,000mph and achieving a maximum negative gravity of 93% of normal gravity. This is only 5 minutes longer than the direct route. Heinlein's book Friday contains this method of transport though for lesser distances & speeds.

Labels: Big Engineering, Science/technology, X-Prizes

The BBC Newsnight have actually reported this fraud & I have to admit the video which is (or was earlier) available here is well balanced.

I commented on Mark Wadsworth, from which this is taken

That is a a good piece from Newsnight. It has always been apparent that Paxman didn't believe the warming scam but knew which side his bread was buttered having produced this sarcasm -

“I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.”
Jeremy Paxman, BBC "news" presenter

Clearly he has recognised change in the wind. Nonetheless the BBC use Newsnight, which has a very small audience, to put out inconvenient facts while the popular news programmes were doing a puff piece on George Osborne's commitment to alarmism. They did the same when they put their only report on the way NATO police had been allowed to dissect Serbs, while alive, to sell the body parts to our hospitals. Until it is getting EXTENSIVE coverage on the 10 o'clock news we are still seeing censorship.

Channel 4 also had a quick mention 18 mins & 18 seconds inasking an alarmist scientist about it & for balance, agreeing with him.

Much more credibly Andrew Neil had a real debate with Professor Singer V Bob Watson. Andrew Neil recently chaired questions at a lecture by Ian Plimer at which he acted professionally & presumably understands what is going on.

In the rest of the media George Moonbat, the Guardian's standard bearer on all things eco-fascist has said

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

... But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

But we should beware of warming alarmists bearing gifts & this article, headed "The leaked exchanges are disturbing, but it would take a conspiracy of a very different order to justify sceptics' claims" looks like a damage limitation exercise in which Professor Jones is to be amputated to stop the bleeding. "They damage the credibility of three or four scientists" which is less than some single emails, having more than 3 recipients, do. He then says what, to him, would be required to prove warming a scam & it is essentially the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with Jews changed to alarmists. Obviously & presumably coincidentally (?) he is setting up the same straw man that Realclimate did when they said "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords". Personally I find the protocols a bit overdone & would be suspicious of such an absolute confession but I am not Moonbat.

Elsewhere Lord Lawson, the one British politician who has an unblemished record on alarmism, has called for an enquiry on this. I have some doubts on this since government enquiries are usually ways to firstly defuse damaging stories until they have gone away & secondly a way to apply whitewash (see the Hutton enquiry on Iraq or the one on the Scottish Parliament scandal). It also seems to me that a very good enquiry is going on online without any need for "assistance" from elderly but respectable judges. A criminal investigation of what is palpably fraud in which all involved, including the politicians who were paymasters here, would be desirable but that is very different from a government enquiry.

By coincidence Lord Lawson has also announced the formation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is unique. We are an all-party and non-party think-tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated. On the eve of the UN climate change conference at Copenhagen, designed to secure agreement on such policies, this has become particularly timely.

Through our website www.thegwpf.org and in other ways, we shall be subjecting both the claims of the damage that might be caused by any future warming, and the costs and consequences of alternative policies that might be put in place, to dispassionate analysis based on hard evidence and economic rigour. We are in no sense 'anti-environmental'. There is a wide range of important environmental issues, which call for an equally wide range of policy responses. Our concern is solely with the possible effects of any future global warming and the policy responses that may evoke. But we are also aware of the curse of world poverty, and of the crucial importance of growth and economic development in the poorer countries of the world as the only serious means of alleviating it.

The Foundation is headed by its Director, Dr Benny Peiser, who founded (in 1997) and continues to edit the world's leading climate policy network

PS I have put a comment on the Guardian saying this & adding "Incidentally George says "Had I known that it was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn't have wasted years of my life". A couple of years ago a Guardian journalist fronted an hoax designed to take in the sceptical community & prove their credulity. In this it abjectly failed being rumbled within minutes. Compare & contrast the many years repeated frauds by Mann & co have been accepted by alarmists. Would it be possible for Monbiot, or indeed the Guardian as a whole, with their newfound understand of fraud, to make an educated guess as to who the people that Guardian journalists is fronting fraud for are?". In the best traditions of that fakenewspaper i expect it to be censored but will let you know if it isn't or even if the guardian acknowledge its deletion.

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Media

For the first few days the news has been about the emails because they are accessible. Now we are starting to see people having had the time to check the data. I am certainly not qualified to do this but it seems to be very much the sort of thing one would expect from pseudo scientists rather than the real sort.

Via Devil's Kitchen:

The hacked e-mails were damning, but the problems they had handling their own data at CRU are a dagger to the heart of the global warming “theory.” There is a large file of comments by a programmer at CRU called HARRY_READ_ME documenting that their data processing and modeling functions were completely out of control.

They fudged so much that NOTHING that came out of CRU can have ANY believability. If the word can be gotten out on this and understood it is the end of the global warming myth. This much bigger than the e-mails. For techie take on this see:
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There is another problem: the values are anomalies, whereas the 'public' .grim files are actual values.
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How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!!
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dtr2cld is not the world's most complicated program. Wheras cloudreg is, and I immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for completely unfathomable reasons, didn't include months! So we read 50 grids instead of 600!!!
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This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets.
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the filenames in the _mon and _ann directories are identical, but the contents are not. And the only difference is that one directory is apparently 'monthly' and the other 'annual' - yet both contain monthly files.
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As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless.

It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that.
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There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

WattsUpWithThat has

As soon as the emails became public showing Professor Jones saying had used "Nature's trick .... to hide the decline"

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?

There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:

"People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing."
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Computes regressions on full, high and low pass Esper et al. (2002) series,
; anomalies against full NH temperatures and other series.
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N

This all rather reminds me of the findings of Professor Wegman when he was called in by Congress to say whether Mann's Hockey Stick maths were correct, as he insisted, or wrong as Stephen McIntyre said. His conclusion is limited by the fact that he is a gentleman & writing for Congress & I assume has not had access to the raw data here but:

Findings

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis.

However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the
narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of
coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has
been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

We are clearly seeing persons not even competent to do statistical analysis masquerading as scientists This is snake oil of the first order & since politicians do have real scientists, like Professor Wegman, to call on the fact that they & our obedient journalists have deliberately limited themselves to these fraudsters & proclaimed them to be the scientific "consensus" & provided them with such excessive amounts of money (£13.7 million to Jones) cannot be coincidence. The only answer which remotely fits the facts is that since "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." (Mencken) they quite deliberately hired these charlatans to pump up a scare story because, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they needed another hobgoblin.

This has a long way to run yet - these people are just the hired assassins, it is the hirers who count. The BBC, naturally, are still censoring.

Richard Black of the BBC has been muzzled. It is official the BBC is involved in a massive cover up.

Update 2309: Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.
(comment 09:40:01)

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Media

The files revealed by hacking the CRU continue to gather momentum from the original Air Vent site to Devil's Kitchen, Biased BBC , Bishop Hill , Mr Eugenides etc in the UK & WattsUpWithThat, Climate Audit, Andrew Bolt The Register overseas on the net & remain censored on the MSM. Mark Wadsworth has read the papers. Michael Mann's RealClimate is, naturally censoring comments. This morning during the Andrew Marr show the BBC news censored it & in the papers round up 2 warming alarmist puff pieces were read out (on how Obama really intends to do something & another threat to polar bears) but the main story was entirely censored. What did we do before the net - well we got lied to & led by the noses by the fascists as the lies about Yugoslavia prove. The MSM cannot plug this information hole. It has the feel of an electronic Berlin Wall falling. There is no way that the BBC is ever again going to fool people into thinking it is a trustworthy news organisation.

While not having any intention of going through the lot of it I Did check up pages 33, 32 & 31 (randomly selected later ones) of these emails & found these on 31
#################################

Michael Mann on hiding some data whose origins researchers want to keep hiddenI propose, hoping that their is no loud objection, that we will include a line in our response indicating that we have confirmed that we get similar results using the GKSS Erik simulation. We'll leave it at that. We don't need to show that result necessarily, unless the editor/reviewers demand to see proof, and we certainly don't have to reveal where we got the GKSS data. As I mentioned, there are enough groups out there that now have it, that VS and Zorita would not know the source, and we would not reveal it.

We feel as if we cannot completely hide the fact that we have confirmed our result w/ GKSS, hence the "compromise" suggested above. Meanwhile, we can pursue a more thorough, official collaborative effort in the future.

At this point , it is fair to

Keith Briffa

say that this adjustment was arbitrary and the link between Bristlecone pine growth and CO2 is , at the very least, arguable

Martin Juckes
At this point , it is fair to

say that this adjustment was arbitrary and the link between Bristlecone pine

growth and CO2 is , at the very least, arguable
---------------------------
and I am surprised by the extreme weakness of the evidence. There is

one

> study of 27 strip-bark pines which shows that they clearly developed

> anomalous growth around 1850. Attributing this to CO2 is odd, to say

the

> least

Raymond S Bradley

There are other examples of how Jack Eddy's grey literature publication was misused. In

a paper in Science by Zielinski et al. (1994) [v.264, p.xxx xxxx xxxx]--attached-- they

P Jones

in addition to a poleward shift in the storm tracks and an > increase in their average intensity, there is a decrease in the number > of storms . This is probably too much for the bullet, so that a less > specific version may be required. > > I think the whole bullet could be: > > Mid-latitude westerly winds have shifted polewards and stengthened since > about the 1960s, with associated changes in storms [ie dropping any mention of the decrease in numbers indeed that the only change is that "associated" with strengthening this may not be completly lying but is dishonest & certainly not sciene - Neil]

reproduced [in Figure 1c] a similarly schematic version of Holocene temperatures giving

the following citation, "Taken from J. A. Eddy and R. S. Bradley, Earth-quest 5 (insert)

(1991), as modified from J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, J. J. Ephraums, Climate Change,

The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1990)."

But I had nothing to do with that one!

So, that's how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the definitive IPCC record on the last

millennium!

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Media