Scattered conservatives want former Vice President Dick Cheney to do more than beat Obama in the press — they want him to beat him in the 2012 election.
Obama Ignores Climate-Gate
Data scandal prompts calls for Obama to skip climate summit, but White House doubles down on commitment
Schoolies Week overrun with drugs
NSW Schoolies brazenly bought ecstasy, ice and speed in Gold Coast clubs while police turned a blind eye, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found.
Party Planner or Crasher Enabler?
White House aide under fire for security flap at state dinner once quipped she often let uninvited guests into events
Have a Happy, Merry... Winter
Connecticut school official defends ban on religious symbols, including Christmas and Hanukkah decorations
Banks feasting on borrowers' pain
BANKS are using the downturn to strip an average $3000 a year from homeowners, analysis shows.
'Nothing will fill the hole in our lives'
FAMILY of murdered British student tell of their sorrow as American Amanda Knox is jailed.
Man sits on whale, pats feeding sharks
MAN hopes actions will dispel the "myth" that tiger sharks are blood-thirsty, man-eating monsters.
Nathan Rees vows to fight on
DUMPED premier Nathan Rees has vowed to stay in politics and has thrown down a challenge to Kristina Keneally: continue the reform agenda he set up.
Parents face higher childcare fees
RISES in childcare costs of up to $22 a day are expected with new national standards in quality likely to be adopted tomorrow.
Man suspected of strangling newlywed
DETECTIVES investigating the murder of a woman whose husband has vanished say she was strangled to death.
=== Comments ===
The O'Reilly Factor
Is America losing power in the world?
===
Circuit-breaker for a struggling Coalition
Piers Akerman
YOU have to love Australian politics, fair dinkum; in what other nation would a party leader’s choice of swimwear become a topic for national debate? - Well spotted, Piers. I am reluctant to enter the abortion part of the debate because I am male and unmarried. I have been smeared by the gay lobby online for things I never said because of my conservative message. My take on abortion is that it isn’t a government decision to make, although I oppose it in general and accept it under some circumstances. My message of personal conscience is despite my knowledge of how those are affected who abort for lifestyle reasons when they are young and regret it later.
I was appalled at the press assault on Peter Debnam in the last election campaign in NSW. I note the press were largely behind the NSW ALP then and now. - ed.
===
HISTORY OF WARMING
Tim Blair
The Associated Press lists key dates in the story of a warming planet. Not a single warming-caused death is included, because there hasn’t been one, but this is apparently important:
2007 — IPCC and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore win Nobel Prize for their climate work.
Readers are invited to submit their own key dates in warming history. Here’s mine:
1988 — Tim Blair fills radiator of overheating 20-year-old Toyota with red wine. Makes it home.
===
HIGGINS
Tim Blair
From the man who brought us President John Kerry, a prediction:
Veteran analyst Malcolm Mackerras has warned that Greens candidate Clive Hamilton will win Higgins, in Melbourne’s well-heeled inner east, in a backlash against Mr Abbott’s election.We’ll find out soon enough. Polls close at 6pm. As Peter Costello points out, the Greens vote will inevitably increase due to Labor not fielding a candidate.
UPDATE. Greens are confident:
Just finished 10 hours of How To Vote carding in Higgins for the Greens. Pretty sure the Greens won my booth that went to the Libs in 07UPDATE II. Clive Hamilton:
‘‘The events of the last week or two weeks have conspired to turn this into a real contest,’’ he told reporters in Malvern East.UPDATE III:
‘‘There has been a shift in the mood of the electorate.
“The in-fighting over the ETS has been closely associated with the collapse in the leadership of the Liberal Party and we now see a party which is dominated by climate sceptics, those who don’t believe there is any climate change and want no action.’’
The Liberal Party has declared victory in the Higgins by-election.UPDATE IV. No protest vote in Bradfield, either:
Claiming victory about 8.40pm, Kelly O’Dwyer took a swipe at the Labor Party who ``didn’t have the guts to stand’’ …
Ms O’Dwyer has suffered a 0.6 per cent swing against her, but has polled 51.7 per cent of the primary vote.
Greens contender Dr Clive Hamilton has 35.3 per cent of the primary vote, a swing of about 24.6 per cent, owing mostly to the absence of a Labor candidate.
While few thought the Liberals would lose either seat, some expected the more moderate element of the party’s supporters - the so-called doctors’ wives - might give it a kick up the backside.UPDATE V. Eight paragraphs into this ABC report:
How wrong they were.
Less than three hours after the polls closed, the Liberal Party was claiming emphatic victories in both seats.
Certainly, the results reject the theory that Abbott will alienate the more moderate arm of the party.
There was a smaller-than-expected swing away from the Liberal PartyYou don’t say.
UPDATE VI. More pre-election magic from our man Malcolm:
Malcolm Mackerras yesterday predicted the Liberals would lose Peter Costello’s former seat to the Greens and that Bradfield on Sydney’s north shore would go to preferences …
Describing the elevation of Mr Abbott as “a complete disaster”, Mr Mackerras said Bradfield and Higgins in Melbourne were electorates where people wanted action on climate change …
“The swing in these seats will be much bigger than normal because of the Tony Abbott debacle … Higgins and Bradfield would be the electorates in which people most strongly feel resentment at climate change denialists.
“That is why electing Abbott was a complete disaster. They will get a terrible shock on Saturday night, they really will.”
===
DASH PLAN DASHED
Tim Blair
Earlier today:
Kevin Rudd is considering an unscheduled dash to Denmark next week in the opening days of the Copenhagen climate change conference … [it] could be Mr Rudd’s second trip to the Danish capital within two weeks if he proceeds with plans to visit next Wednesday to coincide with US President Barack Obama’s attendance.But now:
The White House said Friday that President Obama had shifted the date he would appear at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen to Dec. 18, the last scheduled day … rather than next Wednesday as originally planned.Your move, Kev.
(Via Sammi, who comments: “Hubby suggested Obama changed his plans to get away from Rudd! Probably right! It’s better than a chess game.")
UPDATE. Prior to the above antics:
At this stage, Australia will be represented by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, but the prime minister may join US President Barack Obama on the sidelines as a new global pact is signed off.End of summit? Start of summit? Stop torturing the man, Barack!
===
REVKINGATE
Tim Blair
NYT warmy advocate Andrew “Andy” Revkin’s Climategate cameo is reviewed by Mark Steyn:
The e-mails of “Andy” (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose “Climate Audit” website exposed the fraud of Dr Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph), “Andy” writes to Dr Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle:One of that paper’s less impressionable readers now asks Revkin:
“I’m going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks. peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process?of knowledge building happens, would you agree?”
And, amazingly, Dr Mann does!
“Re, your point at the end--you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”
And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of The New York Times …
Will the Times ombudsman investigate your role in this? They should.Apparently they are. Revkin’s reply:
Results coming this weekend.Should be interesting. Meanwhile, during all this Climategate conflict, the ABC reveals its love for Google – no huge surprise, given certain shared priorities.
===
Climategate: it’s international
Andrew Bolt
Scientists are under pressure everywhere but in Australia - so far:
The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.Climategate has reached New Zealand, too.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.
===
Not safe on our shores
Andrew Bolt
Ali Bazzi of Arncliffe has been charged with bashing a US marine on leave in Sydney into a coma.
===
The public voted: scepticism is endorsed
Andrew Bolt
What an astonishing triumph for new Liberal leader and warming sceptic Tony Abbott. There was actually a swing to the Liberals - from last election’s 57.04 per cent of the two-party preferred vote to 57.57 per cent this time - despite:
- A campaign dominated by the media coverage of the bitter rifts and leadership turmoil in the Liberal Party.OK, let’s hold people to account. Much of the media claimed - unfairly - this was a referendum on Tony Abbott and specificially on his global warming scepticism. I thought that far too simplistic, but let the media now be consistent. If they were right, then Abbott has already had a stunning endorsement, even before he’s really had the chance to put his case.
- The retirment of a very popular local member in Peter Costello
- Furious media promotion of the by-election as a referendum on the leadership of Tony Abbott, widely portrayed as a “Mad Monk” and warming denialist.
- The imposition on voters of an unnecessary by-election, which in Jeff Kennett’s case in nearby Burwood saw the state Liberals actually lose a safe seat.
- The selection by the Liberals of a low-profile candidate in Kelly O’Dwyer, against the high-profile Green in Clive Hamilton.
- Blanket coverage for the Greens by the ABC in particular.
- A media soundtrack of increasingly hysterical warnings about warming doom, including dying penguins at Phillip Island, cannibalising polar bears and record heat waves in Australia.
- An accidental win of the leadership by Abbott by just one vote.
- Immediate public criticism of his new policies by his defeated rival, Malcolm Turnbull.
- Universal predictions by commentators and psephologists that the Liberals would take a hit, or even lose.
Kevin Rudd would be very nervous now. Scepticism has now been legitimised as a political stand for the first time in a decade of Australian politics.
UPDATE
The Sydney Morning Herald agrees:
LIBERAL voters in two key byelections yesterday gave Tony Abbott’s leadership a resounding endorsement after a feared voter backlash did not eventuate.And that was when the SMH thought the Liberals had a swing against it in Higgins. ("Feared" is an interesting word, too. “Gloatingly predicted” might be closer.)
The Age:
THE Liberal Party has comfortably retained its blue-ribbon seats of Higgins and Bradfield in what is a significant boost for new leader Tony Abbott and an early sign that his opposition to Labor’s emissions trading scheme has support in the conservative heartland… The results suggest Tony Abbott has easily passed his first big test as Liberal leader.The Courier Mail:
TONY Abbott has passed his first test as Liberal leader with flying colours as the party easily retained two seats in mid-term polls.
The Liberals comfortably retained the two stronghold seats of Bradfield in Sydney and Higgins in Melbourne, and Kevin Rudd might be starting to feel just a little bit nervous.
===
Chasing Obama
Andrew Bolt
First Kevin Rudd wasn’t going to go unless it was at the end, to be with Barack Obama::
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has offered to attend the United Nation’s climate summit in Copenhagen in December, but a final decision will be influenced by his Danish counterpart.Then Obama announced he would be at the summit at the start, instead::
At this stage, Australia will be represented by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, but the prime minister may join US President Barack Obama on the sidelines as a new global pact is signed off.
US President Barack Obama has confirmed he will attend a major climate summit next month … An official in his administration confirmed today that he would attend the summit on December 9.So the world’s greatest autograph-hunter scrambles to change his flights to coincide with Obama’s:
Kevin Rudd is considering an unscheduled dash to Denmark next week in the opening days of the Copenhagen climate change conference …But, oops, Obama promptly wrong-foots him:
US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has delivered a boost to UN climate talks in Copenhagen, agreeing to delay his visit until the end of the meeting, when the drive for a global warming pact will climax.There’s no way a man like Rudd could bear to have left the Copenhagen meeting before Obama arrives. Stand by for the third version of Rudd’s flight arrangements.
===
Grim evidence that global warming eats at scientists’ brains
Andrew Bolt
Once again, I have to ask: if the evidence of man-made warming is so clear, why all the lies and exaggerations? Take the latest example, from the ABC yesterday:
Grim evidence of the effects of climate change are emerging in Canada, with scientists reporting more cases of cannibalism among polar bears.Wow. Eight cases of bears eating cubs? Must be global warming, since nothing like this has been seen before.
Tourists often take excursions to northern Manitoba for a first hand look at polar bears. But one group recently experienced a horrifying sight as a male bear separated a cub from its mother, then killed and ate it.
Scientists say there have been at least eight cases of polar bears eating cubs this year and that the cubs are being killed for food.
Oops. Turns out, it’s not new at all.From the Arctic Institute of North America, 1999:
Infanticide and cannibalism of juvenile polar bears (ursus maritimus) in Svalbard.So cannibalism in polar bears has been observed and noted in studies going back more than 30 years. And it’s not an isolated and extraodinary phenomenon, as researchers 24 years ago observed::
Arctic| September 01, 1999 | Derocher, A.E.; Wiig, O…
(Received 29 January 1999; accepted in revised form 9 June 1999)
ABSTRACT. Two instances of infanticide and cannibalism in polar bears (Ursus maritimus) were observed in SE Svalbard, at Hopen Island. In the first, an adult male killed three young cubs at a den site and consumed one of them. In the second, an adult male actively pursued, killed, and consumed a dependent yearling. Infanticide of dependent polar bear offspring by adult males may be more common in Svalbard than in other populations because the population is close to carrying capacity or because geographic features reduce spatial segregation of age and sex ...
Intraspecific predation, infanticide, and cannibalism have been reported in polar bears (Belikov et al., 1977; Hansson and Thomassen, 1983; Larsen, 1985; Lunn and Stenhouse, 1985; Taylor et al., 1985). However, some of the instances have followed human activities such as harvest or immobilization (Taylor et al., 1985). Regardless, intraspecific predation has been suggested as a regulating feature of ursid populations (e.g., McCullough, 1981; Young and Ruff, 1982; Larsen and Kjos-Hanssen, 1983; Stringham, 1983; Taylor et al., 1985).
Observations of intraspecific aggression and cannibalism in polar bears (Ursus maritimus)Why did these warmist scientists in the ABC’s report portray an old and relatively common phenomenon as a startling new one, and hail something perfectly natural as evidence instead of extraordinary man-made warming?
Taylor, M. Larsen, T. Schweinsburg, R.E.
Arctic, v. 38, no. 4, Dec. 1985, p. 303-309
ASTIS record 18266
Cannibalism in polar bears appears to occur as carrion feeding and as attacks by males on small cubs or incapacitated individuals. Direct observations indicate that intraspecific killing and cannibalism occur among polar bears throughout the Arctic. The high incidence of Trichinella infection and circumpolar observations of cannibalism suggest that polar bears will readily eat other polar bears when they can do so without excessive risk of injury. Speculations that intraspecific aggression and cannibalism may be an important social and ecological force are consistent with existing information on polar bear biology.
Ignorance? Deception?
And what’s the journalist’s excuse?
===
Abbott wins
Andrew Bolt
On its television news yesterday and on radio today, the ABC made explicit that the Higgins byelection, in its reporters’ opinion, was a referendum on Tony Abbott/global warming. Its coverage was blatantly pro-Green..
How delicious then:
The Liberal Party has declared victory in the Higgins by-election. Liberal candidate Kelly O’Dwyer declared the Melbourne seat won at about 8.45pm (AEDT).Yes, the swing against O’Dwyer sounds a rebuff. But bear in mind she replaced a very popular and high-profile local member, and saw her party tear itself to bits during her entire campaign, with the media particularly scathing of it - and particular to hype the green agenda in the run-up to Copenhagen.
At 9.25pm (AEDT), Ms O’Dwyer, 32, won almost 52 per cent of the primary vote, with 61 per cent of votes counted, but suffered a swing of almost one per cent swing.
So the result for O’Dwyer and Abbott will be deeply satisfying. For the ABC and the Greens less so.
UPDATE
A Liberal victory in Bradfield, too - but one much more expected:
Liberal Party candidate Paul Fletcher has claimed victory in the blue-ribbon Sydney seat of Bradfield.UPDATE 2
The 44-year-old father of two said the Liberal Party had had “a very good result tonight” after a count of 58 per cent of the votes showed he had an unassailable lead against his nearest opponent, the Greens’ Susie Gemmel.
At 9.20pm (AEDT), Mr Fletcher, a former Optus executive, had more than 55 per cent of the primary votes, while Ms Gemmel had just over 26 per cent.
Veteran Mackerras watchers knew the result well in advance, of course:
Veteran analyst Malcolm Mackerras has warned that Greens candidate Clive Hamilton will win Higgins, in Melbourne’s well-heeled inner east, in a backlash against Mr Abbott’s election.The Australian should concede it’s a great result fot Tony Abbott, given this prediction in its report on the morning of the election:
Peter Costello’s seat seems set to go to preferences for the first time in its 60-year history...These people, too, should conclude that Abbott is a far more popular leader than they assumed:
Newspoll chief executive Martin O’Shannessy said he believed the Liberals would hold both seats, neither of which Labor is contesting, but Ms O’Dwyer would be forced to preferences.(Thanks to readers Mark, Pira and others.)
ABC election analyst Antony Green agreed.
UPDATE 3
Abbott on the attack, emboldened:
Mr Abbott believes the results prove the public is uneasy about Labor’s ETS.That change I sniffed in the wind is now a stiff breeze.
“These results reflect what we have been hearing - people are deeply concerned about the cost of an emissions trading scheme on their family budget and (Kevin) Rudd needs to explain to them how this great big new tax would impact on them, he said in a statement on Saturday night.
===
Where’s Father Wally?
Andrew Bolt
The Age celebrates the Parliament of the World’s Religions by leaving out the traditional examplars of the most popular faith in not just this country but the world.
===
PLANT REVEALED
Tim Blair
Christopher Booker on the warming tree:
Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed “the most influential tree in the world”.It is a solitary larch. The larch. In other climategate developments:
The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.Three whole years! Can our Climate Justice Fasters survive that long? Starvin’ Marvin is already so out of it that he’s talking about the Richmond football club:
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
The boy’s delirious. Next he’ll be calling for the return of “Hungry" Bartlett.
UPDATE. Doug Saunders visits crisis central:
A short drive from the windswept North Sea coast of England, the Climatic Research Unit occupies a squat, weather-beaten grey concrete building on the campus of the University of East Anglia …While they’re back there, maybe they can look for all that raw data.
Said one scientist working at the institute: “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this has set the climate-change debate back 20 years.”
===
GATED COMMUNITY
Tim Blair
A Google Australia experiment, prompted by TATW:
• Types: “c”
Top suggestion: “commonwealth bank” (4,030,000 results)
• Types: “cl”
Top result: “club penguin” (10,100,000 results)
===
Peasants must slash what green gurus emit
Andrew Bolt
News from the great flying gravy train:
AUSTRALIA will emit more than 400 tonnes of greenhouse gases in sending one of the world’s largest parties to this month’s Copenhagen climate talks.UPDATE
The Australian delegation is tipped to number up to 90 state, federal and local government politicians and officials, surpassing more populous nations such as Britain.
Britain is only sending 38 delegates and support staff.
But the carpetbaggers won’t get such a free ride for much longer:
Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, told the Financial Times that whatever agreements were reached at Copenhagen over the next two weeks, when world leaders try to hammer out an accord on a global cut in carbon emissions, France would push for tighter regulation in the emerging market for carbon trading…
Already abuse of the system had resulted in tax frauds in the UK, Denmark and France. There was a risk that as the market became more complex, abuses could emerge, Ms Lagarde said, particularly given the exponential growth of trade in carbon certificates over the past four years.
===
Climategate: why wouldn’t we listen to the sceptics?
Andrew Bolt
Professor Christopher Essex, the Canadian mathematician, asks why we wouldn’t listen to sceptics such as him:
Many of we scientists have been ringing the alarm bells from the beginning on this… Climategate is no surprise at all to us.UPDATE
Evidence for this is in my book with Ross McKitrick from 2002, .. Damn it all, my friends Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre had to have a hearing before US congress to get that ridiculous hockey stick broken! It should have been a simple matter. The thing could hardly hold together under its own weight… That science needed to get settled in Congress should have got people’s attention right there that there was something seriously wrong…
Even before Climategate, I have been saying that we have set ourselves back a generation by taking the money from governments with so many strings attached.
Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions. They would have to read science stuff otherwise. They ordered up a kind of unnatural scientist that would tell them precisely what they wanted to hear.
But they gave the puppeteers clubs to deal with those of us who remained true. And the perps of Climategate are what they got. All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.
Now even Sky News is running a news report explaining Climategate. Sure, it’s two weeks after the news broke, but the drum beats grow louder.
UPDATE 2
Now even the BBC - the BBC - is treating Climategate as very serious, respectfully interviewing a scientist warning that the whole warmist edifice could now collapse.
UPDATE 3
Climategate scientist Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia feels the heat - and lashes out with all the civility for which the Climategate cabal are famous:
What an a...ehole.
===
The political climate has just changed - for Oakes, too
Andrew Bolt
Fighting words from new Opposition Leader Tony Abbott:
This morning Mr Abbott has gone on the offensive over climate change, challenging Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to publicly debate the contentious issue.And a fighting appointment of Parliament’s noisiest and most effective sceptic:
Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce says he has accepted a job on the frontbench of the Federal Opposition.It’s astonishing how fast “climate sceptics” has gone from a slur to a boast.
UPDATE
Here’s another example of Abbott willing to fight as Malcolm Turnbull rarely did. Today he took on Rudd-barracker Laurie Oakes for over this transparent and disgraceful attempt to portray him as a religious nut:
LO: I don’t want to turn this into a religious inquisition so to speak, but I’d like to ask you one question. Do you believe in evolution?Maybe Oakes could ask Rudd that question at one of the Prime Minister’s church-step press conferences - like this one, or the one he help this very morning:
TA: Yes, but I don’t want to turn into a religious inquisition either.
Lo: That’s my only question, my only religious question.
TA: But Laurie, look you’re asking me religious questions, you’ve never asked Kevin Rudd that question, have you?
LO: No, but it’s an idea.
TA: But why not? Because I mean, Kevin Rudd’s religious views are not so different from mine. You wouldn’t ask Kristina Kinneally that question.
LO: No, but those people haven’t been nicknamed by their critics things like captain Catholics, it is something people wonder about you, and I think it’s important to clarify it.
TA: But the point I’m making Laurie is my religious views, are A, they’re personal, they’re not out there in the political market place, and they’re very similar…
LO: Except to the extent you’ve put them out there.
TA: Well I don’t do doorsteps in front of church Laurie. I mean, if there’s one person who’s put religion front and centre in the public square, to use his phrase, is Kevin Rudd, so please, next time Kevin’s here, grill him on evolution and all these other subjects.
LO: I’ll certainly ask him the question.
But let’s monitor Oakes’ promise. Rudd has been leader of the Labor for three years already. Let’s see how much longer it takes Oakes to ask Rudd the nudge-nudge evolution question that he asked Abbott after less than a week.
===
Climategate: how the conspirators gagged on their deceptions
Andrew Bolt
I’ve wondered whether Climategate scientist Tom Wigley, an Australian, finally choked on all the fraud, fiddling and coverups he was witnessing from fellow members of his Climategate cabal.
Steven Hayward points out that many other Climategate scientists privately had trouble swallowing the practices of their colleagues:
In 1998 three scientists from American universities--Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes--unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology--the now notorious “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction (picture a flat “handle” extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping “blade” from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin--far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period and the little ice age both disappeared. The hockey stick chart was used prominently in the 2001 IPCC report as “smoking gun” proof of human-caused global warming. Mann and his coauthors concluded that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”Why did so few of these scientists speak publiicly of what they were observing - the fudging, the falsehoods, the bias, the exaggerations, the refusal to admit error and the tribal mindset, so fatal to dispassionate science?
Case closed? Hardly. The CRU emails reveal internal doubts about this entire enterprise both before and after the hockey stick made its debut. In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product.” Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren’t comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.
CRU scientist Keith Briffa ... emailed Edward Cook of Columbia University: “I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series,” adding that he was tired of “the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage [Mann] has produced over the last few years .??.??. and (better say no more).”
Cook replied: “I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike’s recon[struction], particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. ...”
In yet another revealing email, Cook told Briffa: “Of course [Bradley] and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective...”
Even as the IPCC was picking up Mann’s hockey stick with enthusiasm, Briffa sent Mann a note of caution about “the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist. I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent consensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence.” Briffa had previously dissented from the hockey stick reconstruction in a 1999 email to Mann and Phil Jones: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
Even Malcolm Hughes, one of the original hockey stick coauthors, privately expressed reservations about overreliance on their invention, writing to Cook, Mann and others in 2002:All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data....Mann didn’t react well to these hesitations from his colleagues. Even Ray Bradley, a coauthor of the hockey stick article, felt compelled to send a message to Briffa after one of Mann’s self-serving emails with the single line: “Excuse me while I puke.”
Why did they allow the world to spend countless billions on warming policies built on such “science” and such deep uncertainties?
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