A Place to Stand

No opportunity has been lost to attack & now strike off Dr Wakefield whose findings of a link between the MMR vaccine & autism have led to a number of middle class people, probably including Tony Blair, stopping their children getting the government vaccination.

I don't know personally whether there is any case but Professor Brignal of Numberwatch seriously doubts it.

The author of the scare, one Dr Wakefield, blew his credibility at the outset in publishing by press conference a result based on just twelve cases. The subsequent contributions seem to combine the post hoc fallacy with ad hoc theorising. Unfortunately for the population at large, his opponents, the UK government, have also blown their credibility with their inept handling of such disasters as BSE, CJD and Foot and Mouth. The chattering classes are the ones who are opting out of the vaccination programme and, as a result, the first outbreaks of measles have occurred in widespread locations. What these people tend to forget is that it is not only their own families’ health they are playing with. An infected child is a danger to the likes of unborn children and vulnerable adults.

The General Medical Council, under all this pressure, decided to strike hiim off because

The doctor at the centre of the MMR controversy Andrew Wakefield was 'dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain' of children, the General Medical Council has decided.

Dr Wakefield abused his position of trust as a medical practitioner, failed in his duties and brought the profession into disrepute, the panel said.

In researching links between autism, bowel disorders and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine he ordered unnecessary invasive tests on children without proper ethical approval.

He also failed to disclose conflicts of interest to The Lancet medical journal which published his findings that sparked the collapse in public confidence of the vaccine.

Dr Wakefield and two colleagues, Prof John Walker-Smith and Prof Simon Murch, are charged with serious professional misconduct over their research methods and face being struck off the medical register.

Politicians said the findings were damning and raised questions about research regulations.

However this is hardly the only dubious research ever produced. Indeed there seems to be a new one, or retread of an old one in the papers at least daily.

The statistical or other evidence against passive smoking, salt, cholesterol, catastrophic global warming*, the LNT radioactivity scare**, mobile phone**, breast enlargement***, dioxins, Iraq not having WMDs***, global ice age***, Y2K***, nuclear winter**, acid rain**, various cannabis threats, CJD***, alleged rising sea levels***, terrorism, AIDS*, overhead power lines**, nuclear reactors, GM foods**, oil running out in 5 years (repeatedly since the 1960s)*** etc. etc. is at least equally dubious yet we see nobody struck off for them. Indeed many careers have been built on pushing these scare stories with the enthusiastic support of politicians, media et al.

So what is the difference?

Well all the other examples have been used, by those in power to a greater or lesser degree. As Mencken said "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."

MMR on the other hand has been a scare which inconvenienced those in power.

Also looking at what he is specifically charged with - doing thorough tests without permission from "peers" & not disclosing links - the first is one which would give the scientific establishment power to veto any inconvenient research & is certainly inconsistent with any claim that he was not considerably more thorough in his research than in most of the above listed scares. The second is one that almost all researchers could be accused of, particularly where government has supported a theory. Both look like somebody searching for an excuse because no fraud can be shown.

How many such researchers have never received any government money (for example it has only been possible to find one scientist, worldwide, who supports catastrophic warming & isn't clearly government funded). Are we to see all scientists who have pushed warming or any of the other scares, supported by government & have not said at the top of their reports that they are writing this as government propagandists expelled by their professional bodies. Much though it appeals in cases like Paul Ehrlich who has made a lucrative career out of such scares, all proven wrong, I would not like to see this, at least not unless some actual fraud has been proven*.

But if so to strike off Dr Wakefield is not remotely proportionate. He is not being struck off for being proven wrong but for opposing the state decision on what officially "The Science" is. That is Lysenkoism - this lynching is incompatible with the scientific process. His may be bad research but it is certainly not worse than the sort the sort routinely demanded of government science "advisors". It sends a signal that nobody should ever risk even looking at any accepted theory sceptically in case they they think they find some contrary evidence & without scepticism science does not exist.


* instances where fraud has been found, eg "hide the decline" in the climategate emails.
** scares for which there is no evidence whatsoever eg that low level radiation is harmful
*** scares which have now been proven false eg the breast enlargement scare which George Moonbat dishonestly berated Michael Durkin for not supporting.

Labels: British politics, Fear, Science/technology

This in the Scotsman today. I have highlighted the edited bit which lists many other points on which the big parties act as one. This went only to the Scotsman, because it was a reply to a particular letter. but I think I will sent a variant out to the rest of the press.

Anthony Garrett (letter Thurs) decries the refusal of so many to vote, claiming our politicians are as honest as any in the world. Has he noted that Labour & the Lib Dems cynically broke their manifesto promises that we would be allowed a referendum on the EU, the Tories broke the same "cast iron promise" & the SNP, who were in a position to hold a Scottish referendum did too? If their most binding promises are so easily broken, how can we trust to their "honesty" in any lesser or more difficult matter? Has he noted that all 4 enthusiastically push the "catastrophic warming" lie which so increases their power & our taxes? That all but the SNP support criminal, indeed genocidal wars & not one of them has a word to say against the way our "police" in Kosovo were allowed to dissect over 1,000 people, while still alive, to provide our hospitals with organs? That all are committed to destroying at least 50% of our electricity & therefore of our economy by 2010? That none of them object to Labour's policy of "electing a new people" by promoting mass immigration? That they have all connived at doubling the average household's electricity prices to £1200 annually with the lie that "the era of cheap power is over" when they all know that it could have been halved to £300 with new nuclear. That none of them aspire to match, or are even willing to discuss, the world's AVERAGE growth rate of 10%? That on almost all the major questions they function as 1 party, a party which has a virtual monopoly of the media, particularly the state funded BBC? All we are left to do is to ratify which branch of the ruling party gets to apply the whip this time.

I think the excision of the highlighted bit, even here, rather supports my contention about the virtual media monopoly held by our one & a little bit party state. Interesting to see the barriers between permissable & impermissable subjects. It is permissable to discuss the EU referendum - it is not to mention our government's dissection of living people, or even that we are so far behind world average growth.

Though I think the Conservatives winning would be less economically catastrophic than other vehicles of our clinically insane ruling class I am coming to the belief that voting for almost anybody outside that class, preferably UKIP (but also the BNP who, unlike the One Party, have condemned war crimes & dissecting people in the Nazi cause) would be better than giving the appearance of support (probably amounting to about 20% of voters) to the genocidal war criminal idiots.

Labels: British politics, letters, Scottish politics

Last night on TV I saw Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General who first said going to war would only be legal if "we would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-cooperation" & then reversed himself after being flown to America. Frightening the effects of rendition, even when direct torture isn't involved. He justified it on the basis of "past precedent" which struck a chord.

Indeed looking at his testimony online we see the word "precedent" used 16 times, half directly in connection with Kosovo & then the final time as a joke so it has obviously been a point of issue. The questioners are keen to say Kosovo is not a precedent, indeed far to keen, but Goldsmith isn't. They have been generally considered suspiciously unwilling to ask the difficult questions.

I don't think there was any precedent for this, because I think that if there had been, I think it would have been drawn to my attention before, when people were saying, "You can say there is a reasonable case". I think there are sort of two elements. I think first of all, the International Criminal Court certainly focused the attention of the armed services on their personal responsibility. I think there is also another feature, which is a sort of growing interest, belief, in legality, and the individual responsibilities of people who are involved in action...

The other was the Kosovo precedent. If I may just explain. When action was taken in relation to Kosovo, there was essentially a new legal theory that was developed, which was that there could be military force used to avert a serious humanitarian crisis(1). In that -- on that occasion, there had been a veto by Russia I believe, in the Security Council. So United Nations authority was not present. Still the view was taken, by this country and by others, that military action was justified on this new basis and I think there was a sort of view in some places: well, we managed to, as it were, avoid the fact that there was a veto on that occasion. Does that mean that if there is an unreasonable veto by another country that that can be ignored? ...

On, I think, 27 February, I met in Downing Street with, again, the Prime Minister's advisers and I told them then that, in the light of the further enquiries I had made, following my visit to the United States, following discussions with Jeremy Greenstock, following my investigation of the negotiating history, I was of the view that a reasonable case could be made -- I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case (2)that a second resolution was not necessary, and that that was, on past precedent, sufficient to constitute a green light...

First of all, it is very clear that the precedent in the United Kingdom was that a reasonable case was a sufficient lawful basis for taking military action. That was the basis, as I said -- say in my note of 7 March -- and I checked this at the time, because this is what I had been told by my officials -- it was the basis for the action in Kosovo,(3) it was also the basis for the action in 1998...

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: We said earlier, the Kosovo precedent was irrelevant. RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: I think -- forgive me, I'm saying on the basis of what is the right test to use, I'm saying that as a matter of precedent it was standard practice to use the reasonable case basis for deciding on the lawfulness of military action...

I don't need to, because the precedent is simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case and this is what had been, and so I said, "Well, there is a reasonable case"...

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Were the precedents that helpful? You have already indicated that Kosovo was a completely different basis of law. Desert Fox is obviously relevant, but, again, you have indicated a difference there. How strong were these precedents, and isn't it a bit unnerving at this sort of stage to say that we are going into this with no more than a reasonable argument?
RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: I don't think "reasonable case" quite means that, but, of course, I see, Sir Lawrence, the point that you are making. That is why, when the armed forces and the Civil Service said, "We need to know that you think it is right to do it", I saw that point of view. I had been doubtful originally. I had originally been not that instinctively in favour of this reasonable case, but these precedents were helpful, because, although Kosovo was a different legal basis, the point was that the British Government had committed itself to military action on the basis of legal advice (4)that there was a reasonable case. That was the precedent. It had been pressed upon me that that was the precedent in the past. I can see, and in a sense this is right, that, with hindsight, I was being overly cautious in expressing it in this way, but that was the precedent that had been used and I went along with it. Not, "I went along with it", I followed the same practice...

FREEDMAN You are giving the armed forces more but not on the basis of any more legal arguments.
RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: Well, not on the basis of more legal argument, but on the basis of asking a different question. This is, in a sense, why I'm saying "with hindsight". I would have liked to have known before the following week that what the armed services and the Civil Service expect was not what had been by precedent given in the past, that they wanted more(5)...

I was following precedent in giving the green light again(6)...

So going through them:

1- "New legal theory" is an interesting phrase. It means a theory for which there is no legal precedent. Without some newly passed law it is a contradiction in terms - if its new it isn't legal & if it is legal it can't be new. I could claim to have a new legal theory that i was allowed to rob & kill people but it would be no more legal than it would if Tony Blair had such a theory - which is exactly what he did.

The other, even more important part of this is that the "new legal theory" depends on the action being taken to "avert a serious humanitarian crisis" - now on this we absolutely know , it is not like Iraq where we say Blair cannot have believed the WMD story was true because of the lack of evidence. Over Kosovo we know for an absolute fact that all of Parliament & the government knew that the claims of genocide by Yugoslavia was a deliberate lie because the Foreign Secretary told Parliament, on the record, that it was not the Yugoslavs committing genocide ("humanitarian crisis") but the NATO trained & armed KLA who were engaged in genocide |& whom we went to war to assist. If the genocide accusation against Milosevic was false & known to be the war was criminal.

2 - I think he meant it the first time - that a "reasonable" or at least apparently reasonable case could be made to appear not that it existed. Slips of the tongue tend to show the thought processes better than considered statements.

3 - "was the basis of action in Kosovo" strong evidence that Kosovo was. legally, the important change in what we may laughingly call the governments respect for the rule of law & that Iraq is merely the culmination.

4 - Confirmation that the government did actually seek legal advice on the Kosovo war, something which I was told was an official secret when I made my FoI inquiry into the legal advice on that war. Since it was based on the "new legal theory" that all previous legal theories about illegal war were wrong I can understand why what the justification actually said is still an official secret.

5 - Clear proof that it was only the outcry by the public & some politicians which changed the situation - the military & civil service wanted their asses covered by a piece of paper from some compliant government judicial officer to protect them - something they had not been significantly worried when the "new legal theory" was used to justify genocide in Kosovo. In fact, as the "I was only following orders" defence showed, such an opinion, if it is worthless is worthless as a defence.

6 - If the previous Attorney general had no problem lying why should he.

Since, provably, everybody in Parliament & government knew the Yugoslav war was being fought to assist in genocide not for the public reason there can be no question that, even under "new legal theories" it was a war crime & those involved [personally complicit in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual enslavement of children & dissecting living people to steal their body organs. Moreover under the doctrine of "joint criminal conspiracy" adopted, with our government's approval (& funding) by the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, every member of the Labour, Liberal Democrats & Conservative parties & indeed BBC, ITN & other lying journalists who have all been made aware of this are also personally part of such a Nazi supporting joint criminal conspiracy.

Labels: British politics, International politics, Yugoslavia

I have previously written about Vitamin D deficiency in Scotland. This is well known as being the cause of rickets (brittle & bent bones) but this is merely the most extreme symptom.

The vitamin D hormone system controls the expression of more than 200 genes and the proteins they produce. In addition to its well-known role in calcium metabolism, vitamin D activates genes that control cell growth and programmed cell death (apoptosis), express mediators that regulate the immune system, and release neurotransmitters (e.g., serotonin) that influence one’s mental state.

Now Britain's BMJ says even rickets is returning because of our sedentary & indoor lifestyle.

But doctors reported this month that cases of the debilitating disease have once again become "disconcertingly common" in Britain.

"Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air," said Simon Pearce, a professor at Newcastle University in northeast England and lead author of a new study on Vitamin D deficiency.

"This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years," he said in a press release.

Half of all adults in Britain -- especially in the north -- have Vitamin D deficiency in winter and spring, with one-in-six having severe deficiency.

The reason for it being inherently more in the North is because we get less sunlight. Scotland, in particular, is as far north as Hudson's Bay, Petersburg & Siberia. Because of the Gulf Stream we can maintain a much better climate & thus higher population than any of them, however it still leaves us nationally with a deficiency in vitamin D. This is probably why Scotland has more multiple sclerosis than anywhere else in the world & we are top of the league in so many illnesses intensified by an overall immunological weakness.

This is the sort of thing a Scottish government, with presumed particular competence in Scottish problems could fix. For a relatively small cost & infinitely less interference than all the fuss about passive smoking, they could require extra Vitamin D to be added to certain staple foods sold here (milk & bread would be most likely). This would be likely to do more for Scotland's health than all the ministerial posturing in the world. Or alternately

"Fifty years ago, many children would have been given regular doses of cod liver oil, but this practice has all but died out," noted co-author Tim Cheetham, also a professor at Newcastle.

Labels: Science/technology, Scottish politics, Social

Well we are officially back in growth by 0,1%. 0.1% is a suspicious figure, even moreso since there is exactly the same 0,1% increase in both manufacturing & services.

In the last 2 1/4 years our economy has declined about 3%. China's has risen 20%

And what we have achieved has been done by borrowing 12.5% of GNP. Take that away, as must in time happen & ...

However worst of all is to compare this with the 10.7% growth China is now achieving.

I hope that for once the Conservatives will make that comparison. We could have 10.7% growth too if it were not for Luddist regulations destroying 50% of our economic potential & government spending eating 50% of what remains.

The Wall St Journal says

The pound fell across the board on the news, dropping to $1.6150 against the dollar from around $1.6210, while gilts firmed.

"This is crawling out of recession," said Brian Hilliard, U.K. economist at Société Générale. "We seem to have ended the quarter in pretty weak shape. I think it will reopen the debate about whether the Bank of England will consider expanding quantitative easing at its February meeting."

The economy's expansion will come as a relief to the U.K. government, which forecast a return to growth at the turn of the year. However, the tameness of the growth will raise concerns that the economy could yet fall back into contraction...

total services and total production were both up 0.1% in the fourth quarter. In services, the biggest lift came from distribution, hotels and restaurants, which were up 0.4%. Government and other services output rose 0.2%. In production, manufacturing gained 0.4%, but utilities output fell 3.3%.

Economists surveyed by the U.K. Treasury in January expect the economy to grow 1.4% this year. The Treasury forecast at the time of December's prebudget report that the economy is likely to grow 1% to 1.5% this year.

However, some economists feared that, with the value-added tax rising to 17.5% from 15%, on Jan. 1 and the political uncertainty of the election this year, the economy could weaken in the early months of 2010.

0.1% growth is well within the limits of measurement error & it seems unlikely that had the initial calculations shown zero increase, when the Chancellor's latest forecast had been for growth in this quarter, he would not have asked for a recount. Nor if this had been the first calculation, that he would have asked for a recount.

We are now in the 3rd year of a lost decade of growth similar to Japan's lost decade (actually nearly 2) also caused by the bursting of a property bubble & government borrowing & printing money to "stimulate" the economy by putting more of it into unproductive government spending & to bail out the banks. This article from the Mises Institute shows the comparison.

"The Japanese asset bubbles were identical to other asset bubbles in the sense that they were essentially inflated by credit," writes Asian bank regulator Andrew Sheng in his book From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.

Banks lent to highly leveraged developers to buy real estate against inflated collateral values, which then fueled the bubble further. Asset prices bore no realistic relationship to their return on capital, particularly since cost of funding was exceptionally low. The minute the credit stopped, the bubble began to deflate, and the main victims were the banks themselves.

After the bubble popped in Japan, that government pursued a relentless Keynesian course of fiscal pump priming and loose fiscal policy with the result being a Japan that went from having the healthiest fiscal position of any OECD country in 1990 to annual deficits of 6 to 7 percent of GDP and a gross public debt that is now 227 percent of GDP. "The Japanese tried to cure an alcoholic with heroin," writes Bonner. "Now, they're addicted to it."

Japan's monetary policy was to aggressively lower rates to .5 percent between 1991 and 1995 and has operated a zero-interest policy virtually ever since.

Between 1992 and 1995, the Japanese government tried six stimulus plans totaling 65.5 trillion yen and they even cut tax rates in 1994. They tried cutting taxes again in 1998, but government spending was never cut. Also in 1998, another stimulus package of 16.7 trillion yen was rolled out nearly half of which was for public-works projects. Later in the same year, another stimulus package was announced, totaling 23.9 trillion yen. The very next year an ¥18 trillion stimulus was tried, and, in October of 2000, another stimulus for 11 trillion was announced. As economist Ben Powell points out, "Overall during the 1990s, Japan tried 10 fiscal stimulus packages totaling more than 100 trillion yen, and each failed to cure the recession," with Japan's nominal GDP growth rate below zero for most of the five years after 1997.

After five years in an economic wilderness, the Bank of Japan switched, during the spring of 2001, to a policy of quantitative easing — targeting the growth of the money supply instead of nominal interest rates — in order to engineer a rebound in demand growth.

The move by the Bank of Japan to quantitative easing and the large increase in liquidity that followed stopped the fall in land prices by 2003. The Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero until early 2007, when it boosted its discount rate back to 0.5 percent in two steps by midyear. But the BoJ quickly reverted back to its zero interest rate policy.

In August of 2008, the Japanese government unveiled an ¥11.5 trillion stimulus. The package, which included ¥1.8 trillion in new spending and nearly ¥10 trillion in government loans and credit guarantees, was in response to news that the Japanese economy in July suffered its biggest contraction in seven years and inflation had topped 2 percent for the first time in a decade.

Sound familiar.

To get real growth we need policies which improve real competitiveness not smoke & mirrors shuffling paper. I detailed how in November 2008 & it is still correct.

Scotland, whose growthn is lower, despite SNP promises, & recessions deeper is "not expected to come out of receiion until April" which is no guarante it will then.

Labels: British politics, economics, Fixing the economy

From But Now You Know some time ago, where it is linked to what was said, but worth repeating as the current warming scam unravels & we must expect the usual "practical politicians" & journalists to shortly start pushing some new, presumably cooling, hobgoblin. As Vaclav Klaus has said the problem is not the climate, it is fine, it is freedom that is endangered every time government uses a false, or largely false, scare to control us:

For at least 114 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
1902 - “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
1923 - “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
1923 - “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
1929 - “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
1932 - “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
1939 - “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
1952 - “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
1954 - “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
1954 - Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
1969 - “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
1970 - “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
1974 - “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times Cassandras are becomingincreasingly apprehensive,for the weatheraberrations they arestudying may be theharbinger of anotherice age1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
1981 - Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
1993 - “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
1998 - No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
2001 - “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for two years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?

Labels: Fear, global warming, Media

Once again from the Sunday Mail's David Rose who clearly has more integrity & inded journalistic skills than the entire broadcast media put together*:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’
###################################

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (Lord Lawson, Benny Peiser et al) has also produced a resounnding demolition of the IPCC's alleged scientific standards & it boss Dr Pachauri's clear & unambiguous lying about their "peer review" proces regarding the Himalyan glaciers & by implication everything else:

"As a result of a Freedom of Information request, David Holland, a GWPF researcher, gained access to the responses by the IPCC’s lead authors. The documents show that most doubts and questions that were raised about the 2035 date were ignored and that the Review Editors failed to take any note of it...

“Clearly questions were raised about the 2035 predictions, but they were not properly dealt with. Had the IPCC been open and transparent and published online to the world the drafts, Expert Reviewers' comments, Lead Authors' responses and Review Editors' reports, this and the many other flaws would not have made it into to the finally published IPCC text,” said David Holland who wrote the GWPF report.

During the drafting process, doubts were raised by Government and Expert Reviewers who submitted comments to the Lead Authors. Until now, however, neither the IPCC nor the working groups have put these internal documents into the public domain. Up till now, Lead Authors could be confident that neither the Expert Reviewers nor anyone else would find out if their views had been accepted, rejected or ignored.

"Not just in this case, but on other contentious climate issues, the IPCC has consistently promoted alarmist predictions. Research and data that questions the IPCC’s assertion of looming catastrophe are routinely ignored, uncertainties are disregarded and highly unlikely disaster scenarios exaggerated. The time has come to completely overhaul the structure and workings of the IPCC," said Dr Benny Peiser, the director of the GWPF.

2035 and all that
By David Holland

In the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report this short section of text has become very controversial:
“Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (s and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.”

On 20 January 2010 the World Wildlife Fund fakecharity issued a correction to their 2005 paper in which they claimed the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by the year 2035 is very high. They now state:

“This statement was used in good faith but it is now clear that this was erroneous and should be disregarded.”

On the same day the IPCC issued a statement. Dr Pachauri, his Vice Chairs and the two TSU Co-Chairs – wrote:

“In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”

“This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report”. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.”

Readers might recall Dr Pachauri telling an Australian TV audience:

“Every stage of the drafting of our report is peer reviewed, and whatever comments we get from the peer review process are posted on the website of the IPCC, and the reasons why we accept or reject those comments are clearly specified. Where we accept a comment we say, "Yes. Accepted." Where we don't, we have to adduce very clear reasons why the authors don't agree with the comment. So it's a very transparent process.”

... one of the four Coordinating Lead Authors for the Chapter was Indian scientist Dr Murari Lal, who wrote on 22 January:

“This is more about a systematic failure of the (IPCC) review process. The... conclusions were sent to hundreds of scientists and governments... and no one raised any doubts... then.”

As will be shown he is right to say that it is a systematic failure of the IPCC review process, but entirely wrong to say no one raised any doubts at the time. Doubts were raised, as I will detail, by Government, Expert Reviewers and the Deputy Head of WGII TSU (Science), Clair Hanson, who all submitted comments to the Lead Authors, but were ignored.

That such a basic error could be ignored, is because the IPCC review process is not as Dr Pachauri suggested in Australia and nothing like the “strong interactive peer review process”, which the American delegation stressed the need for at the first meeting of the IPCC in 1988. Despite being promoted as the guarantor of the quality of IPCC Reports, the current review process is its Achilles’ heel...

This is how the IPCC planned to archive the drafts, comments and responses of the last assessment until freedom of information requests forced their online disclosure. The archives are now available for the public despite the IPCC and not because of them. They are not at, and have never been at, the “the website of the IPCC” as Dr Pachauri claims.

Accordingly up till now Lead Authors could be confident that the Expert Reviewers would not find out if their views had been accepted until they read the revised text months later when they could do nothing about it. The Lead Authors could also be fairly certain that no one would look to see if there had been an appropriate response to Reviewers’ comments.

In 1990 to overcome what was thought by many to be a poor balance between Lead Authors and Expert Reviewers, ‘Review Editors’ were introduced into the IPCC assessment process. Although, in 2008, Dr Pachauri “co-authorised” a complaint to Ofcom, which stated that these Review Editors have the “final say” on the IPCC text, this is not what is stated in the “the IPCC standards” as he calls them.

The procedures in Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work make it clear that the Lead Authors have sole responsibility for the text. They are free to accept or reject comments as they wish. Review Editors are only required to:

“ensure that all substantive expert and government review comments are afforded appropriate consideration, advise lead authors on how to handle contentious/controversial issues and ensure genuine controversies are reflected adequately in the text of the Report.”

Review Editors must also ensure that non-peer-reviewed sources such as the WWF papers are “selected and used in a consistent manner across the Report”. They are given no powers to ensure compliance but they must submit a written report to the Working Group Sessions or the Panel”. Review Editors, so far, have mostly if not entirely been drawn from the cadre of earlier author teams and cannot be thought of as independent auditors...

Now I will show what Reviewers said and Lead Authors responded. While the Reviewers are named we are not told who actually wrote the responses.

The contentious 2035 date appears in the paragraph from lines 13 to 17 on page 46 of the second order draft of Working Group II. The only changes to the draft text in the finally published text are the removal of a short redundant sentence and the addition the reference to (WWF, 2005)...

IPCC claim “The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.”

Hayley Fowler from Newcastle University commented with citations:

“I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding - and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in preciptiation and temperature trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and Fowler, 2004) You need to quote Barnett et al.'s 2005 Nature paper here - this seems very similar to what they said.”

The Lead Authors responded:

“Was unable to get hold of the suggested references will consider in the final version”...

Clearly questions were raised and were not properly dealt with, so it is true that the “IPCC standards” are either inadequate or were not followed or, as I believe, both. The ultimate fault lies with the Panel of Government representatives that jet off every year to exotic locations supposedly to oversee the work they have commissioned, and on our behalf paid for...

The fundamental breach of the “IPCC standards” is far more basic. The assessment and review process is required by the Principles Governing IPCC Work to be undertaken on a comprehensive, objective open and transparent basis. Eight unindexed boxes of paper never met the requirement to be open and transparent.

Murari Lal tells us “the conclusions were sent to hundreds of scientists and governments”. If the drafts – all in electronic form – can be sent to so many people why can they not be put up on public Internet servers at the same time? And why not have the Reviewers and Lead Authors engage on line with the strong interactive peer-review that was originally called for? This way the public can see for themselves that the process not only works but is also open and transparent.

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Meanwhile WattsUpWithThat points to Hansen's NASA/GISS having, without fanfare, removed their claim from their site. However, just for a little variety & extra scaremonegering their claim had been that the glaciers will disappear in 2030 (the IPCC having said 20350r earlier ( the WWF having said 2035). I commented

Note that the original GISS page showed them all melting by 2030.

The original “speculative” remark to a journalist may have said 2035, or it may be another report which said 2350 with the digits accidentally transposed. This metamorphosised in the IPCC report to “2035 or even earlier” which in turn GISS took down to the nearest round number of 2030.

This game of Chinese whispers is common across the alarmosphere where everybody quotes everybody else as a prime source & regularly misquotes them – always in the same direction.

In that regard it is worth noting that the scientist that New Scientist journalist Pearse talked to on the phone to get him to "speculate" about the glaciers disappearing, whose report was picked up & embellished by the WWF before the IPCC picked it up from them, ultimately ended up lucratively employed by the IPCC researching for the glacier alarm he had thus started. Chinese whispers indeed. Actually a comment in reply says that the 2030 figure was from NASA/Climate rather than MASA/GISS, a different department - this rather supports my view about Chinese whispers.

This also reflects on Ofgem's decision to criticise Martin Durkin's TV programme The Great Global Warming Swindle for not mentioning that the IPCC's work is all fully peer reviewd & unquestionable. Clearly they owe him an apology & if Ofgem is not wholly corrupt will retract at least that part of their "judgement". Equally clearly Ofgem is wholly corrupt making not the slightest attempt to achieve impartial judgements.

So both the IPCC & Hansen have now, yet again, proven that the highest standard of honesty to which they aspire is that the IPCC deliberately lie & that Hansen's group then lie to deliberately expand the lie.


*I am told Susan Watts who was & probably still is the best journalist in the BBC said on air that the Met Office's prediction of a "mild winter" hadn't been disproven by the record breaking bad weather we have just experience.

Labels: Fear, global warming, Media