Headlines Wednesday 25th November 2009

If you can haul it, NASA will sell it. The space agency's ready to hold its own version of a yard sale — complete with such intergalactic artifacts as a shuttle simulator (seen above) — or even the real thing.

Afghan Decision on Dec. 1
White House official tells Fox News that Obama will announce strategy decision in address to nation

Economy Rebound Slow in 3rd Quarter
Commerce Department reading of gross domestic product shows economy not as energetic as expected

Guess Who Isn't Coming to Dinner
While the White House is mum about invitees to Obama's first state dinner, top Republicans apparently left off A-list

Jewish High Jumper, 95, Finally Beats Nazis and Gets Record Restored

A former high jumper now living in Queens, N.Y., finally saw her German national record restored Monday — 73 years after the Nazis disallowed it because she's Jewish.


Julia Gillard shows off her tarted up image in magazine shoot while Joe Hockey explains why he's no longer on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Christmas card list / Australian Women's Weekly

Turnbull: Back deal or I will quit
LIBERAL leader laid down a "my way or the highway" ultimatum to dissenting MPs on ETS deal. - bye bye - ed.

What the ETS will really cost Australians
KEVIN Rudd's Emissions Trading Scheme will increase average family bills by $1100 a year. - added to which Global Warming is a fabrication - ed.

Dole held by Government to stop waste
THOSE in the dole queue could have half their payments kept for spending on essentials.

World's oldest sheep runs out of luck
SHE lived to be a record 23 years of age, but recent hot weather contributed to Lucky's death.


=== Comments ===
'Factor' Debut, Part 3: Does Sarah Palin Want to Lead a Populist Movement in America?

This is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," November 23, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET!

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

Now for the top story tonight, the final part of my interview with Governor Palin. We begin this evening with the hateful attacks she has endured.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: You, I think, have been hammered by the media more than any other politician, except Richard Nixon, in my lifetime. What is it about Sarah Palin that makes some Americans, primarily on the left, but you've been hammered on the right, too. I'm sure have you heard David Brooks of The New York Times say:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: She's a joke. I mean, I just can't take her seriously. We've got serious problems in the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: What is it about you that brings out these strong negative emotions?
===
MOONBAT MISSED
Tim Blair
Poor Graham Readfearn. Yesterday morning – after dismissing the CRU email scandal as “a load of bunkum” and those pursuing it as “moronic” – Readfearn linked to a months-old George Monbiot column he imagined might aid his cause.

Sadly, Readfearn was unaware of Monbiot’s most recent column, in which the British ultra-green admitted to being “dismayed and deeply shaken” by the CRU emails (which revealed “attempts to prevent scientific data from being released") and called for CRU director Phil Jones to resign. Monbiot subsequently described Jones as “unscientific” and offered an apology to his readers:

I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.

Changes are needed, Graham. The public deserves better. Over to you.
===
BOILEY BEARS
Tim Blair
Superhot Totterdown, Bristol, is the latest region to witness poley bear death. In Totterdown’s case, the bears are melting – despite monthly average Totterdown temperatures over 30 years of just 10.9 Celsius.
===
MIGHT I ADD, COLLINGWOOD FOR PREMIERS IN 2010
Tim Blair
Prominent Adelaidist David Penberthy takes issue with we correctivists:

Right now the climate change deniers are set to overtake the anti-vaccination crowd with their conceited disregard for the overwhelming mainstream of scientific opinion. There are a number of parallels – a determination to distort the valid scientific work of anyone who does not subscribe to their theories …

Distorting science? Ask the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit about distortion. They’re experts.

… to suggest sinister motives (when logic suggests that none could be there) …

Well, apart from millions of dollars in grants and carbon scams and book profits. Logic suggests: Follow the money.

… and to amplify the work of scientists on the fringes as the marginalised but heroic voices who alone have the courage to put arguments to the test.

When majority voices are so often wrong – giving us computer models that can’t even predict the past and “settled science” that is anything but – it might just be time to hear out the marginalised. As it happens, they are prepared to put arguments to the test.

Dave’s comparison of anti-warmers with anti-vaccination goons isn’t up to much, either. With vaccination, we can draw upon past events; with catastrophic global warming, we’re looking at a prediction. Much as previous scientific opinion predicted global cooling.
===
TRAGIC BUS
Tim Blair
Australia’s lamest mobile protest is almost at an end:

In November the seven-day Just Transition Tour will take a busload of people through coal-affected communities around NSW. The tour will promote the potential for a just transition away from coal mining and coal-fired power, towards a renewable energy future that guarantees jobs and protects communities.

It’s handy that protester numbers are now so tiny that one bus is sufficient to carry them all. Helps save on diesel bills. And “coal-affected communities” is apparently the new way to describe places where coal delivers employment; these areas are “affected” by jobs.
===
Their “science”, your cash
Andrew Bolt
Think the science behind global warming is so great that your family should back it with $1100 a year (actually more, when you realise who’s estimating the price tag)?

KEVIN Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme will increase the average family’s bills by about $1100 a year. Based on the Federal Government’s own modelling...
===
Feel it getting hotter now, David?
Andrew Bolt
The walloping that Melbourne University warmist David Karoly is getting over at the ABC - yes, the ABC - sure shows the sceptics are growing in number and confidence.
===
The warming conspiracy’s most damning emails
Andrew Bolt
THREE weeks ago Prime Minister Kevin Rudd named me as part of an international conspiracy to spread lies about global warming.

How I laughed.

But I’m not laughing now. Emails leaked at the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world - and Rudd has fallen for it.

This conspiracy comprises a group of warming scientists who have been central in spreading the false claim that the world has never been hotter and man’s gases are to blame.

It’s come to light after nearly 4000 emails and documents were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and dumped on the internet by what is almost certainly a whistleblower.

What they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time - a conspiracy by warmist scientists to fudge statistics, sack sceptical scientists, block the release of data to prevent checking, illegally destroy data, deceive reporters, censor sceptical papers, and hide errors in their work.

Most extraordinary are the emails in which these scientists admit to each other what they’ve never confessed to the world - that the world is not warming as their theories predicted.

In fact, it’s been cooling since 2001.

Cried one, IPCC co-author Kevin Trenberth, in an email to other members of this conspiracy: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.”

These are not some obscure scientists. Rather, they include co-authors of the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which Rudd cites as his proof that warming is “happening and it’s caused by human activity”.

They include Phil Jones, head of the CRU unit from which the emails were taken - a unit that Britain’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said “set the agenda for the major research effort” in climate science.

They include Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann and CRU deputy director Keith Briffa, both IPCC co-authors, who also produced the two studies that most convinced journalists of the false claim that it’s now hotter than the Medieval Warm Period just 800 years ago.

They also include scientists responsible for the HadCRU data - one of the four main measurements of the world’s temperature today.

All this may sound too James Bond-like to be true. Yet only three years ago we were warned that many of these same people had indeed created a network that was distorting science.

In 2006 the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee commissioned eminent statisticians to check Mann’s famous “hockey stick” - a graph used by the IPCC to claim today’s temperatures were the highest for thousands of years.

Their report not only found that Mann’s work was too flawed to be relied upon, just as a retired petroleum engineer, Steve McIntyre, had first said, but that there was now a “clique” of 43 climate scientists stifling true debate, with Mann, Jones and Briffa all named.

Few heeded the warning. And so that clique morphed into a conspiracy that has helped to panic the world - including Rudd - into spending billions on a scare that may not in fact exist.

That’s the background. Now here are just some of the emails.

FIDDLING DATA: “Hide the decline”

Phil Jones tells Michael Mann and others how he made his data show warming:

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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Mick Kelly, Professor of Climate Change at Jones’ university, on hiding recent cooling:

Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

A CRU programming code for dealing with tree-ring data:
===
The global warming conspiracy - damage control
Andrew Bolt
Now for the explanations… The University of East Anglia has released statements from Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit, and from the CRU, from which the leaked emails of the warming conspiracy were stolen. And they are a disgrace.

The money quotes.

Davies:

The publication of a selection of stolen data is the latest example of a sustained and, in some instances, a vexatious campaign which may have been designed to distract from reasoned debate about the nature of the urgent action which world governments must consider to mitigate, and adapt to, climate change.

No admission of the fact that this “vexatious campaign” has so far resulted in the debunking, for instance, of two infamous “hockey sticks” and the correction of the entire climate record for the United States.

And this denial of allegations of possibly criminal destruction of material under FOI request:

No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure of all, or any part, of the requested information.

That’s a denial which seems strongly at odds with the suggestions in the emails themselves, and it’s made before the University has actually done the full check it now promises:

an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests

Nor is there mention of the repeated emails discussing ways to thwart the disclosure of data, scensor sceptical scientists, pay grants into private bank accounts to avoid tax, hide flaws in the work of CRU deputy director Keith Briffa and cheat on deadlines to sneak pro-warmist material into the IPCC. Not a word.

This seems another case of what the emails so clearly exposed - mutual self-protection league of scientists determined to reject even well-founded criticism or scrutiny. Call in an independent investigator.

As for Jones:

First the messianic hype:

we face enormous challenges ahead if we are to continue to live on this planet

Then this blithe assurance - from a man who sees no debate and acknowledges no sceptic, and seems not to have read all the emails, either:

The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

If so, why do it?

We have responded to these Freedom of Information requests appropriately and with the knowledge and guidance of the Information Commissioner.

But where’s the explanation for the emails from Jones himself urging colleagues to delete material, and saying he’d rather delete data than hand it over to an FOI request? Where’s the defence against the other revelations - of bullying, censoring sceptics, driving sceptics from science magazines, keeping data from the IPCC, refusing to publicly admit to private doubts and the rest? Again, not a word.

The CRU:

A selection of these emails have been taken out of context and misinterpreted as evidence that CRU has manipulated climate data to present an unrealistic picture of global warming. This conclusion is entirely unfounded and the evidence from CRU research is entirely consistent with independent evidence assembled by various research groups around the world.

The CRU cites in particular its HadCRU data measuring world temperatures, which was not actually the primary focus of interest in the leaked documents. The Briffa tree-sample “hockey stick” and the cover-up of its flaws was far more damning - but that is not even discussed by CRU.

My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well.

But those emails are precisely the ones we need answers for. Why is none given?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 concluded that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal.

Yes, we’ve heard that before. But please explain the emails in which IPCC authors privately confess they are frustrated by - and cannot explain - the fact that the world has actually cooled this decade?

This, believe it or not, is the only reference to what was extensively discussed in the emails - the dodgy use of data by CRU deputy director Keith Briffa to compile his now discredit Yamal tree-ring graph:

CRU has also been involved in reconstructions of temperature (primarily for the Northern Hemisphere) from proxy data (non-instrumental sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals and documentary records). Similar temperature reconstructions have been developed by numerous other groups around the world. The level of uncertainty in this indirect evidence for temperature change is much greater than for the picture of temperature change shown by the instrumental data.

Yes, that’s it. No mention of Briffa. No mention that he used an astonishingly small sample to produce “proof” of warming, ignoring a much bigger sample which indicated cooling. No mention of the attempt by Michael Mann to deceive a journalist about the flaws. No mention of the conspiring to produce public solidarity by the scientists in response to the flaws exposed by the Climate Audit blog. No mention of the email expressing surprise that Science even published the work. No mention of the emails in which private admissions of its sloppiness were expressed at the same time that the work was defended publicly.

The only explanation of any substance is of the email in which Jones said he’d “hide the decline” in temperatures indicated by tree rings:

The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline...

Steve McIntyre shows why he doubts that explanation. And where is the defence of the many other references in the emails to hiding evidence of recent cooling, changing data to match our records and the rest?

This is a scandal that needs full and public examination, involving independent experts - by people completely outside the Jones clique. This whitewash will not do.

But here are the full statements:
===
Time to audit NASA’s warmists, too
Andrew Bolt
Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit isn’t the only centre of the warming faith to refuse to share its data for checking:

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Chris Horner details the three sets of documents he’s trying to wrest from another climate centre that’s into political activism as much as it’s into science:
===
Charity’s fine, donate to mine
Andrew Bolt
The Australian financial director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been accused of using up to £560,000 ($1 million) in public funds to pay for clothing, antiques and renovations to his family home.

Cameron Poole, an expert in charity finances...
===
Obama bowed
Andrew Bolt
What on earth is this extraordinary deference - this time to the leader of a police state?

Or to the leader of the Saudi autocracy:

Or to the Japanese emperor:

Whatever the reason, it stops him from bowing to the Queen of his country’s greatest ally:

===
The global warming conspiracy - the trashy Australian data
Andrew Bolt
A question: what does this say about the data used by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology about their own predictions of warming catastrophe?

From CBS News:

In addition to (the leaked CRU) e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named “Harry”—possibly the CRU’s Ian “Harry” Harris—was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. 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. Why this wasn’t coded up in Fortran I don’t know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn’t enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it’s too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight… So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

Some background, from a National Technical University of Athens study of how regional models - including the CSIRO’s - fared in “predicting” the past 18 years of temperature and rainfall:

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

That’s confirmed by ecological niche modeller Dr David Stockwell, who checked the modelling behind a technical report put together by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology that predicted worse droughts thanks to global warming. Stockwell also found the climate models couldn’t even predict the past climate, let alone the future:

In a statistical re-analysis of the data from the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report, all climate models failed standard internal validation tests for regional droughted area in Australia over the last century. The most worrying failure was that simulations showed increases in droughted area over the last century in all regions, while the observed trends in drought decreased in five of the seven regions identified in the CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology report. Therefore there is no credible basis for the claims of increasing frequency of Exceptional Circumstances declarations made in the report. These results are consistent with other studies finding lack of adequate validation in global warming effects modeling, and lack of skill of climate models at the regional scale.

And on further checking, Stockwell found the CSIRO’s models could not even predict the past (wetter) weather:

It looks to me that in the last 50 years of observations (1950-2007) in almost all regions, observations of drought are decreasing (red), while the models of drought are increasing (black).
===
Adjust your predictions
Andrew Bolt
Take your pick.

The Arctic could be ice free by:

2008

2012

2013

2014

2019

2060

Er, would you now believe 2030?

Now, 26 international scientists have collated the most recent data and observations, and they have found that climate change is accelerating beyond expectations.

Most of the 26 scientists are authors of reports published by the IPCC… According to their research, the Arctic may be ice-free by the summer of 2030 and sea levels could reach the upper limit of 2 metres by the turn of the century.

Hmm: Is that the truth, or were you peer-reviewed? And can 2030 really be “beyond predictions”, when those predictions have already included 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2019?

Meanwhile, back at the Arctic, the ice is where it’s been for the past several years. And the world’s temperature still hasn’t risen this century.
===
FAT LIP SINKS SEALS
Tim Blair
A terrorist is captured:

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004

. Good. But wait:

Instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Apparently the fellow had a bloody lip. These SEALs should be in the clear if they present a post-traumatic stress defence, but in future such cases the Surber option is advised.
===
Sing along! “Hide the decline”
Andrew Bolt

Marvellous. Proud to have contributed the polar bear graphic, too. Sing along with Minnesotans for Global Warming.

UPDATE

An ”inconvenient Aussie”? Double proud. Great links for those wanting to research the whole scam, too.