Headlines Sunday 22nd November 2009

Fla. authorities find woman's body inside car at bottom of lake near her home — a lake that had been searched years ago without success.

Dems Get 60 for Health Bill
Ark. senator last of three Dem holdouts to announce she will vote to move health care bill forward

Concern 9/11 Trial Will End in Death?
Germany will send observer to trial to ensure no evidence provided by country is used to apply death penalty

The Film Gore Would Rather Ignore
'An Inconvenient Truth' facing more criticism with release of new documentary rebutting many of Gore's claims

'Our worst fire threat in a century'
HOT weather, bone-dry bushland and high winds combine to create massive bushfire threat. - only because of mismanagement of state resources. - ed.


Iran will begin five-day air defense war games drill aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from possible attack.

Diggers returning home as drug addicts
AUSTRALIAN troops are using cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs while on tours of duty.

School mistress 'had sex with students'
SEVEN boy boarders at an exclusive private school have alleged they were raped by their female house mistress.

'Irrefutable' proof student killed roommate

EVIDENCE linking Amanda Knox to the murder of Meredith Kercher is "irrefutable and well corroborated", prosecutors claim.

Customers struck with case of Costco-sis
SINCE the US retail giant opened its first Australian store shoppers have been "going berserk".

'Summer sickies' soar as temperatures do
ONE in five workers called in sick last week - ditching their jobs to enjoy a day in the sun instead.

Inside Geoffrey and Brynne's $2m wedding
SPARE-no-expense nuptials between Geoffrey Edelsten and Brynne Gordon in overdrive.
=== Comments ===
Heart of the health debacle
Piers Akerman
LAST November Commissioner Peter Garling found NSW hospitals were “in a period of crisis’’ when he produced his monumental report on their status. - I spoke, recently, at a Liberal Policy meeting in Liverpool on issues you touch on here. Ms Skinner included some of my comments in her precis of the discussion, but I will add more when I send a submission to the Liberal Party policy group soon. The ALP have created a layer of bureaucracy so as to limit free speech, not to promote better health care. They have done this in the education sector too, as I have endured, as well as in policing, law, transport and any other place they reach, as I can see.
Hamidur Rahman’s case was effectively covered up when two low level management types in the Dept. of Ed. involved the department without senior management being aware. When senior management became aware, they chose to cover it up because their managers would have had to do something. The bureaucratic layers are good at isolating troubleshooters, but not good at allowing change or change management.
The result of policy change will be difficult to manage when O’Farrel becomes Premier in a little over a year’s time. The problem is some of these overpaid bureaucrats are good workers in lousy positions. The restructuring will have to be substantial. However, substantial restructuring can allow NSW to once again progress.- ed.
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BARBIE IN A BAG
Tim Blair
She’s the doll every little girl will want to own. And there’s no need for expensive accessories like books or cars or a life, because Barbie in a Bag isn’t allowed to leave her home unless accompanied by a male relative (Mullah Ken, sold separately).
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It’s raining bears
Andrew Bolt
Plane Stupid is right. They’ve managed to make - unintentionally - the funniest scare ad around about global warming,
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The Global Warming Conspiracy: today’s best emails
Andrew Bolt
The best of the emails discovered today from the Global Warming Conspiracy will be on this thread. And, again, thank you to the many reasons who are contributing.

(An aside: have you noticed that this is astonishing scandal - with such profound implications - is being broken and covered almost exclusively by bloggers, and not the paid mainstream media? What this means is something for a column for another day.)
===
It’s spreading
Andrew Bolt
Most of the media reporting is easing into this Great Global Warming Conspiracy story sideways, but the tide is slowly turning. Here’s the latest reports:

AP:

Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online — stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change… Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.

CBS:

The debate between skeptics and supporters of global warming has heated up recently as hackers managed to get a hold of e-mail correspondences between some of the world’s leading scientists involved in researching the issue… At the center of the story is the claim that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Britain were attempting to fudge temperature data to help bolster the theory that humans are to blame for global warming.

UPI:

E-mails stolen by hackers prove some leading British climate change scientists falsified information to prove their case, skeptics of global warming say.

UPDATE

Meanwhile, the Sun-Herald’s Stephanie Peatling, ignoring this scandal, is as puzzled as she’s cross:

The reappearance of climate scepticism in Australia is one of the weirder things to have happened in politics this year.

She’s sure these silly sceptics must be wrong, and helplessly looks to the Rudd Government to tell her why:

If the Government fails to get the emissions trading scheme passed it will be partly due to its inability to counter the arguments of the sceptics.

Stephanie, here’s a thought: maybe, just maybe, the Government doesn’t actually have an answer to our arguments. Hence this “weird” reappearance of scepticsm that has you mystified.

Proof that the unexamined assumption is one of the greatest perils in journalism.
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A scandal too big for these words
Andrew Bolt
We’re all struggling. What do we call this scandal?

It’s in fact a conspiracy of many of the world’s leading global warming scientists that involves massaging data, dodging scrutiny, hounding out sceptical editors, fudging figures, the possibly criminal destruction of data under FOI request, tax avoidance, gloating over a sceptic’s death, character assassination of sceptics. admissions of using “tricks” to “hide” inconvenient trends, farming grants, private admissions of grave doubts in their own public warming warnings, close collusion with green groups, the joint concocting of the most alarmist announcements and much more.

Whew. So your nominations, please:

- Climategate

- The Weathermen Conspiracy

- The Great Global Warming Swindle

- The Global Warming Conspiracy

- The Climate Conspiracy

- The CRU Conspiracy

- The Global Warming Scandal.

Help! Your own suggestion is probably going to be better.

UPDATE

On one thing, however, all should agree. This is not a case of “hacking” or “data theft” as several news outlets of the Left insist. This is whistleblowing, almost certainly by an insider.
===
The global warming conspiracy: how it massaged its data
Andrew Bolt
Phil Jones, IPCC author and head of Brutain’s influential Climatic Research Unit, has given us the most obvious example of the massaging of evidence, but his is far from the only example from members of The Team - this conspiracy of global warming scientists.

Jones’ email you’ve already no doubt read:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

Climate Audit has explained just how that “trick” worked, and just what it so handily hid.

(updated)

But here’s two other examples - one involving an extraordinary collusion to hide clear errors in a temperature reconstruction produced by Keith Briffa which allegedly showed today’s temperature was higher than anything in the past.

But first, another example, from Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann to Jones and others, explaining the need to get rid of evidence that the Medieval Warm Period 1000 years ago was actually warmer than now:

Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

In fact, activists such as Adam Markham, head of the Clean Cool Air Planet, which sells global warming “solutions”, somehow got the impression they could trust these guys to beef up scarey predictions to order.

Here’s Markham’s email to Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (who’se actually since backed away from the catastrophists):
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The global warming conspiracy: its silencing of the sceptics
Andrew Bolt
This time we’ll focus on the sheer thuggery of the “The Team” - how this conspiracy of powerful alarmist scientists tried to drive sceptics and non-allies out of their jobs, and even succeeded.

Here’s three examples:

Example one is the email from Tom Wigley to IPCC author Timothy Carter about the Climate Research journal, then edited by sceptic Chris de Freitas:

PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter—50+ people.Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.

Further emails from the team in its successful pursuit of de Freitas’ scalp:
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AMERICA EMBIGGENED
Tim Blair
From the man who brought you 57 US states, now we have hundreds of fake Congressional Districts filled with thousands of phantom employed. One of these bogus districts even has a prospective leader.

All of Obama’s numbers keep increasing … except his own.
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How the Age drowned its readers in spin
Andrew Bolt

How utterly shameless and deceptive is the warmist scaremongering of The Age?

Above is the front-page picture it ran yesterday over this text:

Villagers on the island of Abaiang stand in the sea where their homes used to be.

And over the picture was this headline:

As the globe warms up, a way of life is washed away.

Every reader would assume that the seas have risen more than thigh-high at Kiribati, and man-made warming is to blame.

Only deep in the text is this coded admission that whatever caused the erosion - or land sinkage - it may not primarily have been rising seas, whether man-created or not:

Short-term readings of sea level rise are problematic due to large year-to-year variation, in part caused by events such as El Nino (which typically causes a large rise), and La Nina (a smaller rise or decrease). The Australian National Tidal Centre reports that sea levels in Kiribati have averaged a rise of 3.7 millimetres a year since 1992.

Which would made a total rise, if true, of 6.2cms, not the 62cms implied in the picture.

But, wait, there’s more. When you check the latest the Australian National Tidal Centre’s latest report, you actually find evidence not only that calculations of sea level rises depend in part on the year you choose as your base, but that any net sea level rises have in fact lately stopped - which The Age unaccountably forgot to mention:

===
Hope the sex was worth his job
Andrew Bolt
If true, the allegations of sex make a liar of Mike Rann. And the sex-in-the-car angle make him seem extraordinarily reckless:
After allegations of sex in his office during parliamentary sessions surfaced yesterday, Michelle Chantelois, a former barmaid at Parliament House in Adelaide, alleges the Premier directed her to pick him up in her car from the nearby casino and drive to a secluded road beside a golf course.

There, Ms Chantelois claims, “intimacy was involved”. - and again another ALP 'leader' may be replaced without going to an election on the issue. -ed.
===
Palin sells
Andrew Bolt
The haters just can’t shake off Sarah Palin:

Publisher HarperCollins said Friday that Sarah Palin’s memoir sold 300,000 copies its first day, among the best openings ever for a nonfiction book. In 2004, Bill Clinton’s “My Life” debuted with sales of 400,000 copies. The year before, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “Living History” started at 200,000.

UPDATE

Ah, the tribalism of the Left - and that proneness to Palin Derangement Sydndrome. Here’s alleged feminist Jessica Valenti, excusing sexism when used to demean a woman not from the Left:

I agree; the cover [of Newsweek] is undoubtedly sexist. It sexifies and dismisses Palin - something that was done time and time again during the campaign, whether through VPILF (Vice-President I’d Like to F---) badges or reporters commenting on her appearance. But despite the veracity of Palin’s sexism claim, I have a hard time mustering up outrage for a woman who depends on outdated ideas about women to drum up sympathy.

Now had Palin depended on fashionable ideas about women to drum up sympathy....
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SARAHPHOBIA
Tim Blair
Sarah Palin’s fact-checked best-seller frightens open-minded San Francisco:

Hardly anyone wants to touch the thing, or even get close to it.

The new autobiography by moose hunter and failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is harder to find in the Bay Area than a hockey mom. Some bookstores figure it’s one of those grit-your-teeth First Amendment deals that principled booksellers must put up with from time to time.

But many nonchain bookstores won’t handle it.

“Our customers are thinking people,” said Nathan Embretson, a bookseller at Pendragon Books in Oakland. “They’re not into reading drivel.”

They prefer non-drivel … like, for example, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies.
===
FRIENDS
Tim Blair
A line from those CRU emails that does as neat a job as you’d like of summing up the creepy relationship between alleged quality media and warming alarmists:

Fortunately, the prestige press doesn’t fall for this sort of stuff, right?

Naturally, this refers not to insane claims of looming destruction but instead to warming scepticism.

UPDATE. The prestige press falls for yet more warming hysteria:

Kidney stones, malaria, Lyme disease, depression and respiratory illness may increase with global warming, researchers at Harvard Medical School say.

Don’t forget the increase in whores! Just as well warming stopped a whole decade ago, or this could really be a problem.

UPDATE II. Jay Currie:

The leaked CRU documents, so far as I can see, do not destroy the shaky theory of AGW. The do something far more fundamental: they call into question the integrity of the core group of climate scientist whose work and views have dominated the so called “consensus”.

From that link, this comment: “My prediction is that the Scientific Establishment is going to crucify these guys; a lot of reputable scientists boarded that bus. They aren’t going to be happy to discover their driver is the Shamwow Guy.” Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull is still fighting yesterday’s war:

In the biggest test of his leadership to date, Mr Turnbull will tomorrow and on Tuesday try to convince his hopelessly divided party to vote for the climate-change legislation in Parliament on Thursday.

I wonder who Malcolm’s favourite climate expert is.

UPDATE III. Poor Stephanie Peatling is all confused:

The reappearance of climate scepticism in Australia is one of the weirder things to have happened in politics this year …

What is particularly strange is that as the science becomes more certain, the number of climate sceptics seems to be growing.

You get the feeling Stephanie doesn’t follow this issue very closely.

UPDATE IV. More of that certainty Stephanie was talking about:

None of the multiple computer simulations used by a UN climate-change agency for assessments of global warming appears good enough to predict how India’s monsoon will behave, two Indian scientists have said.

The researchers examined 10 simulations of future climate scenarios used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and found none could reproduce correctly the behaviour of even 20th-century rainfall.

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How many billions to the banana republics?
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd has promised to pay our ”fair share”. So many billions will he commit Australia to handing over to Cuba and the rest of them:

CENTRAL American nations will demand $US105 billion ($114.2 billion) from industrialised countries for damages caused by global warming, the region’s representatives say.

Central American environment ministers gathered in Guatemala overnight to discuss the so-called “ecological debt” owed to them and to set out a common position ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen next month.