AP's Seth Borenstein is just too damn cozy with the people he covers – time for AP to do something about it

Would not be surprised if Google is delaying or simply not showing up any news stories anti-AGW re recent daily mail on CA not on google news for example change to bing or other?

The story that AP SHOULD have written…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html

AP = Busted!!!

Well done! Hit them hard where it hurts the most, their professional integrity in the eyes of their readers.

“Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?”
I think I wanna puke!!
Thank you for getting this out. I saw a Seth Borenstein AP story this morning I knew it was blatant propaganda. Great job for getting on top of this. There’s so much disinformation out there. The alarmists are in a nutty rage pointing to how their faith in global doom is totally justified because Factcheck.org or AP or some other trashy piece of propaganda says so. I even saw some GW alarmist radio show host loon on TV today say, “All the scientists in the world know climate change is man made, except for, like, ten deniers.”
Arrrrrggghhh!
How do people remain this ignorant? Propaganda from little pukes like Seth Borenstein, for one. What a slimy tool this guy is. Journalism is so tainted in my eyes these days. They’re little foot soldiers of disinformation, these writers. Yick! Orwell couldn’t have written creepier characters than these scum.
Yesterday, I saw Factcheck.org’s “fact” check of climategate and, basically, they said: There’s no problem with CRU emails. It was just misunderstanding…
Argghhhh!!
Then I looked at their source list. My Gawd, they are idiotic enough to include sources like a CRU press release, IPCC, East Anglia, etc. I wrote to FC.org’s editor in a rage and asked “Are you serious!?”
And some numbskull reviewed the FC post (in Stumbleupon.org) as “thumbs up”: Good unbiased assessment of climate scandal.
By the way, a week or so after the climategate scandal had already broke, I read a GW alarmist story so hysterical and creepy I bookmarked it for a laugh. Of course, there’s no balanced mention at all of the email scandal raging on.
Oh, who wrote it?
That little slimy bastard who has taken journalism and made it something no more respectable than the feces of worms who live in sewage. In my eyes, mainstream media journalism’s dead. Thanks to putrid little creatures like Seth Borenstein.
Anyway, I wrote a post about how sources like Factcheck, MSNBC are doing blatant propganda here, if you’re interested:
http://aprilbaby.typepad.com/a_california_life/2009/12/propaganda-101-climate-science-scandal.html
PS Any male who types “Watcha think”, sounds like a thirteen year old cheerleader. I think he needs to spend some time doing hard core manual labor to get the peppy teen girl living inside him to man up.
Sorry, I’ve just had it with the demise of truth anywhere.
Signed,
Sickened by Seth

In a sane world, another media outlet would be all over this.
If they were actually interested in the truth. Or even competing instead of colluding.
And Mary, that has to be the misleading headline of the month. Well, maybe week.

The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.
In the referenced e-mail, it was fairly obvious Borenstein wasn’t looking for a reaction for quotes, he was asking which direction the Crew wanted it spun.

Well, I’ll tell you Mary
I’d much rather be
(fill in your own last line)

The part about Tamino was particularly interesting.

Big brother is watching
George Orwell Lives!!
Even his name was an alias for George Arthur Blair !!

Here is another example of Mann et al bullying of other scientists, in order to discredit the 2003 Soon / Baliunas paper on the frequency of the appearance of the MWP in published literature. Borenstein missed that one too.

Bulldust (00:51:04) :
I moved to Bing when I heard al gore had connections with Google

Sorry but I don’t know where to post this link but I think it is worth a read. From the mainstream press in UK’s Mail on Sunday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html

So apart from visiting the most exotic places in the world and a limitless expence account. What made you want to be an environmental journalist?

Well here’s one from the BBC, the exception prooves the rule I guess. Interesting comment about pressure from another journalist though.
Clive James: “Point of View” on BBC Radio 4 Fri, 11 Dec 2009.
Skip the first 45 seconds. May not be accessible outside of UK.

From that daily mail link(thanks Mary)
Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.
This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.
In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data.
The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934.
end
The reporter has done a good job,I’m going to thank him.

” And why on Earth do you think 192 governments are represented in Copenhagen right now? A scam?”
A goodly percentage of these governments are scams: Sudan, Libya, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, Bolivia….

“And why on Earth do you think 192 governments are represented in Copenhagen right now? A scam?”
Of those 192 governments, a goodly number are scams or worse.
The UNO is itself a scam.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.
‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’

As well as the amazingly well written piece on the Daily Mail site which a number of readers have posted on (e.g. A Robertson (02:55:22) ), the UK Sunday press also has Christopher Booker’s excellent piece:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6798052/What-links-the-Copenhagen-conference-with-the-steelworks-closing-in-Redcar.html
A nice piece showing how British Government / EU policy is exporting jobs and wealth to India and how we are paying for this through our electricity bills (up over 80% in four years and set to double (at least) in the next four).
And don’t forget the interesting story of how our own beloved Gordon ‘Flat Earth’ Brown, at a time when the UK economy is in power dive, found £1.5 Billion to launch a ridiculous EU wheeze to ‘help poorer countries cut their carbon emissions’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6790396/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Gordon-Brown-pledges-1.5bn-to-European-fund.html
So why are we the biggest contributors to this project? (£1.5 Billion out of £6.5 Billion from 27 nations + the EU themselves).
What is it for? How is the money to be distributed? How many tin pot dictators will salt their share into Swiss bank accounts? What reduction in global temperatures will be achieved?
Do tell!

Luc Hansen (02:09:54) :
Money. Sharks circling over the smell of green in the water.

Perhaps the MSM will take notice when the Russians start taking the steps they proposed in the early 70’s to combat cooling: Damming rivers headed to the Arctic and staunching the flow out of the Bering Straits, spreading soot on the Arctic ice.

Upthread a poster noted that Roger Harribin appears in the emails.
It may be perfectly innocuous, but it made me wonder how many people are getting sucked into this mess either by association by appearing on the Cc list or by active involvement such as Mr Borenstein/Richard Black.
I imagine that a lot of people are trawling the database for their names – perhaps a more detailed look for lesser well known people would be worth it.

The same thing that happened to Dan Rather will probably happen here. The AGW scientists will go to their grave claiming doom but will fade from the scene because of the embarrassment of the obvious fraud. People just have a need to hate somebody and this time around it’s capitalism and the free market. Well hate it all you want but C and FM will survive and grow even stronger.
The have nots that for a large part don’t want to help themselves but only want someone else to help them have learned that they can vote themselves money. This transfer of wealth from the developed countries to the undeveloped is the goal here not saving the planet. The problem is the elites that are so self absorbed that they can’t see the obvious conflict of interest like flying to a save the world from air concert in a private jet spewing jet exhaust out the back while sipping wine and reading about Tiger Woods’ latest fling.
Sweet and priceless are words that come to my mind at this point. AP looks like a fool and they don’t even know it. Bagdad Bob- “We have them surrounded in their tanks.”
Thanks Anthony for keeping a level head through all of this. We need to stay on top of this for the press will try and bury it.

@Deadman
Clive James, on the BBC, has a very articulatePoint of View on the whole CRUx of the matter.
Can anyone provide a transcript; it would be essential reading.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p6vln/A_Point_of_View_11_12_2009/
This is a great post and it is worth listening too. He deals with future prediction in an hilarious way and also warns against realists getting carried away and falling into the trap of the alarmists.

Luc Hansen:
The money that would be transferred by the Copenhagen Treaty to the “poor” countries will never reach the people in those countries. Like almost all preceding international “aid” money, it will be pocketed by the unscrupulous rulers of those countries.
Meanwhile, if you want your daughter to have a future worth living, you should be alarmed about the so-called “climate scientists” who are corrupting the very basis of science itself, upon which all our futures depend.

I think it’s time to add a fourth BIG LIE to the list.
1 Of course I’ll respect you in the morning.
2 Your cheque’s in the post.
3 I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.
4 These emails have been taken out of context.
By the way, MichaelL, (3:56:21) I also had a look at Luc Hansen’s website. A strange man indeed. No relation to Jim I take it!

@plato
Roger Harribin wasn’t copied into an email, it was addressed to him amongst others. The contents of the email are not controversial, but it does make you wonder what access these people had to BBC journalists, especially when you see BBC reports, which are essentially press releases by The Team

Does anyone actually put any stock in this AP announcement?
Are these guys kidding me? The AP makes this ridiculous statement, and we are all supposed to figure the issue is settled? One of the main suspects said he didn’t do it. That’s OK then. It seems, their conclusions are reached by the fact that nowhere in the emails did anyone say “we faked it”.
These guys are a bunch of journalists, for goodness sake. Seth Borenstein, for one, has been a hysterical eco-maniacial pro-AGW writer for years and years.
The University of East Anglia investigation is supposed to take months and months. The Penn State investigation is also going to take months and months. Yet when the Associated Press, a bunch of newspapermen, take a few days and decide that everything is hunky-dory – investigation closed – we are supposed to be impressed. How are we supposed to figure these journalists came to their decision? Did they take a poll of other journalists? Did they poll themselves?
Conclusions
1.) Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with so much uncertainty, they have no value whatsoever.
It is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. A single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.
2.) The IPCC’s so-called “peer review process” is fundamentally flawed if a lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of his own work, where that work is the critical core of the chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger work – in this case, the IPCC summary report and all the underlying technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship of carbon dioxide to temperature that are based on Britta’s work, which is, of course, the majority of such analysis.

I hope this is effective. I have written to them many times but it needs to come from you guys in order to have any real impact at all.
So many of us appreciate your efforts.

“The story that AP SHOULD have written…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html”
—————————-
That daily mail headline is very misleading as most of the article refers to the holes in the defence of the “trick” and is broadly sceptical of AGW science. The end of the article refers to the Russians admitting that the zip file of leaked info was posted on a Russian server, but ends with saying that anyone from anywhere in the world could have posted it there and it is ridiculous to blame the Russians.
But then what else would you expect from the religious climate alarmists, but wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

If it’s your intention to destroy the free world, start with the press and the media.
That’s what going on here. Conspiracy anyone!

Here’s Clive James’ article for those having problems accessing it.
A POINT OF VIEW
Having one-sided discussions about climate change helps no-one, says Clive James in his weekly column.
About 40 years ago now, the world used to hear a lot from a futurologist called Herman Kahn. Of ample girth and unquenchable volubility, Herman Kahn, who died in 1983, was always making confident pronouncements about what would happen in the future.
So and so, he would say, would happen 10, 20, 25 years years from now. It wouldn’t happen tomorrow, so that you could check up on it straightaway, but it would happen 10, 20, 25 years from now.
Some of us realised that he had invented a new unit of time, and we gave it a name. In tribute to Fermi, who could measure electrons, we called his new unit of time the Hermie. The merit of the Hermie, as a unit of measurement, was that, while being vague, it sounded impressive.
The prediction itself might or might not have been right. Herman Kahn predicted that within one Hermie everyone in the West would fly his own helicopter and have access to free-fall sex.
That didn’t happen within one Hermie, but it still might happen in the next Hermie.
All we can be sure of is that Herman Kahn’s language exemplified an impressive way of talking about the future, a way of sounding impressive that sounded less impressive only when you realised that sounding impressive was its main motive. Big things would happen. It was big talk. And it paid the penalty of all big talk. As you got used to it, you got tired of it.
Language of alarm
Over the last 10 years we have heard a lot about how civilisation would be in trouble if it didn’t soon do something drastic about global warming. But this impressive message tended to sound less impressive as time went on. It wasn’t just that the globe uncooperatively declined to get warmer during the last 10 years.
It was that the language of alarm wore out its welcome as it became ever more assertive about what had not yet happened.
The brief, unarguably still hot period, when the world had somehow refused to grow any hotter was soon explained, although it seemed strange that it had not been predicted.
The world, when it resumed warming again would heat up by so many degrees, or so many more degrees than that, and within 10, 20, 25 years – within a single Hermie – there would be the corpses of fried polar bears floating past your penthouse window.
According to the media, scientists were agreed, the science was settled, science said, that all this would happen. The media promoted this settled science, and the politicians went along with the media. The whole deal had the UN seal of approval.
The coming catastrophe that had to be averted wasn’t exactly like knowing when the asteroid would arrive so you could send Bruce Willis, but unless we did something, irreversible damage, if not certain doom, was only a Hermie or two away.
Today, after recent events at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, that supposedly settled science is still the story, but the story is in question. Suddenly there are voices to pronounce that the reputation of science will lie in ruins for the next 50 years.
For two Hermies at least, nobody will trust a single thing that a scientist says. Well, even to a non-scientist like myself, that last prediction sounds suspiciously like the others.
Layman’s reading
My own view is that true science, the spirit of critical inquiry that unites all scientists, or is supposed to, is reasserting itself after being out-shouted by at least half a Hermie of uninterrupted public relations. But I hasten to admit that my view is not only not the view of a scientist, it is the view of somebody who can still remember the first day he was exposed to calculus and froze as if in a new Ice Age.
As I said in one of these columns earlier in the season – In praise of scepticism – before the events at the Climate Research Unit, my only position on the matter of man-made global warming was that from my own layman’s background reading I thought the reported scientific unanimity that global warming is man-made, and likely to be catastrophic, was always a more active area of scientific debate than you would have guessed from the way the media told the story.
Just saying that much was enough to get me condemned by one of the broadsheet environmentalist gurus. He said I was an old man resistant to the facts because I didn’t care what happened to the world after I was gone.
As I bounced my grand-daughter on my knee, rather hoping that in the course of the next Hermie she would not be obliged to star in a remake of Waterworld as the sea rose 30 feet above her house, I bit back a rude word.
But the guru still had a point when he said my scepticism about the settled science was a wilful defiance of established fact. Unfortunately the fact had been established largely by the media, who had been telling only one story. If you said the story might have two sides, that sounded like scepticism.
People in my position had to get used to being called sceptics, as if scepticism were a bad thing. We even had to get used to being called denialists, although clearly it was an unscrupulous word.
We were also called, are still called, flat-earthers by people like Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, but that kind of abuse is comparatively easy to take, because everybody knows that neither man would be capable of proving mathematically that the earth is not a cube.
Mainstream media
So what happened at the Climate Research Unit? Well, basically nothing new. A bunch of e-mails got hacked, or perhaps leaked. Some of the phrases that supposedly reveal skulduggery reveal a lot less when you put them in the context of what, we are told, was only locker-room enthusiasm.
In the correspondence columns of the scientific websites – where the level of discussion has consistently been miles above anything the mainstream media has provided for the last decade – there are already wise voices to warn that the sceptics should not make the same mistake as the believers by treating any slip they can find in the arguments of their opponents as evidence of the biggest fraud since Bernie Madoff made off with the money.
That would be Hermie talk, and self-defeating, because the more absolutist man-made global warming case has always looked sufficiently vulnerable just by the way it has been reluctant to listen to opposing voices no matter how well qualified.
There has never been any point, and there is no point now, in calling the warmists a bunch of devious conspirators against the truth. All you ever had to do was notice how their more strident representatives didn’t want to hear any other opinions, even when the opinions came from within their own ranks.
Far from there having been unanimity among scientists on the subject of catastrophic man-made global warming, there has scarcely been unanimity among climate scientists. It only takes one dissenting voice to punch a hole in the idea of unanimity, if that voice has a chance of being right.
There was a time when almost every scientist except Einstein thought that Newton had buttoned up the subject of celestial mechanics. And this time, on the subject of global warming, there was always, right from the beginning, a number of climate scientists who didn’t endorse the alarmist picture.
You could say that the number was small, and a few of them were vengeful because they had been sidelined for not being sufficiently doom-laden in their claims. But a few of them were older men who just wouldn’t go along with the prevailing emphasis.
Orthodox view
One of these few was Prof Lindzen of MIT. I never could convince myself that the professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology knew less about the earth’s climate than I did, so I started to watch him. Hopeless on the media, Prof Lindzen is the sort of pundit with a four figure IQ who can somehow never figure out that you are supposed to talk into the
microphone.
His fellow anti-alarmist Prof Fred Singer not only formed a thought too slowly for radio, he was too slow for smoke signals. But gradually, as I watched the side roads, it seemed to me that these few dissenting scientists with zero PR skills increased in number.
The number of scientists who endorsed the orthodox view increased also, but the number of those who didn’t went up instead of down. I couldn’t do the calculus, but I could count heads.
There were scores of eminent scientists who signed the 2007 open letter to the secretary general of the UN, and then later on there were hundreds quoted in the US senate minority reports.
It could be said that few of them had expertise in climate science, but that argument looked less decisive when you considered that climate science itself was exactly what they were bringing into question.
So science was not speaking with one voice on the matter. It only seemed to be, because the media, on the whole, was giving no other story. Then this Climate Research Unit thing happened, and it was the end of the monologue. The dialogue has begun again.
The scientists are arguing on the matter, which is the proper thing for science to do, because in science the science is never settled. Some say that the argument about how all this happened will go on for another two Hermies at least.
We can hear, from deep underground, the contented purr of Herman Kahn. It’s all turning out exactly as he predicted.

Glab 02:57:11,
yes you are right. That quote appears to be from a letter and not an article.
However questioning the other research on here as a result of that minor faux pas is a bit rich.
Please also apply your obviously rigid standards to the leaked e-mails scandal.

I bought the Mail on Sunday this afternoon and can confirm that the article
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
was printed in full, a double page spread on pages 12 & 13. (Paper has 88 pages)

Bornestein et al, say:
“McIntyre, 62, of Toronto was trained in math and economics and says he “substantially retired” from the mineral-exploration industry, which produces greenhouse gases”
Uh, Seth breathes, so I guess he too produces greenhouse gases.
Is this AP’s best’s attempt at an ad hominem attack on the integrity of Mr. McIntyre? Pathetic!

My email to AP:
Please forward to:
Paul Colford, Director of Media Relations
Jack Stokes, Manager of Media Relations
(as listed on AP’s ‘Contact Us’ page)
I am a science teacher who is reading through the facts and opinions of the CRU ‘Climategate’ email and files in order to present my students with both sides of the debate. I have turned to the Associated Press coverage of many issues in the past, depending on your collective work for accurate quotes, balanced coverage, and unbiased reporting.
Today, I read a review entitled “E-mails show pettiness, not fraud”, linked here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment//
The review was authored in part by AP employee Seth Borenstein, and the authors’ ultimate conclusion is that the emails do not show any problems with the science or the data but merely reveal the scientists being petty and human.
This is a fair opinion from an outsider, and one worth taking into account. However, I was troubled to find that Mr. Borenstein is not an outsider; in fact, he is one of the correspondents in the emails. On July 23, 2009, Mr. Borenstein wrote an email to ‘Kevin, Gavin, and Mike’, three of the principle climate scientists involved in the emails. The email is archived here, in a nested reply: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=988&filename=1248790545.txt
Mr. Borenstein wrote:
Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that
Marc Morano
is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
Seth Borenstein
Associated Press Science Writer
sborenstein@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700,
Washington, DC
20005-4076
202-641-9454
In my mind, this reads as the correspondence of an insider and a person who has a specific viewpoint. I have no problem with Mr. Borenstein having these views, but I am suspicious that there is a conflict of interest when he is supposed to be reporting in an unbiased and objective matter on the same material. His opinion of the emails’ contents has clearly been stretched into the review of referenced above. Because he is part of the email set that he is reviewing, I believe he should recuse himself of this story as a party with a conflict of interest.
The media, and especially the gold standard of the AP, has a responsibility to separate themselves from the stories they cover. Mr. Borenstein cannot separate himself from this issue because he is in the emails, so he should not be reporting on it, in my opinion.
According to the The Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles (linked here: http://www.ap.org/newsvalues/index.html ):
…ultimately, it means it is the responsibility of every one of us to ensure that these standards are upheld. Any time a question is raised about any aspect of our work, it should be taken seriously.
I am questioning an aspect of Mr. Borenstein’s work, and I believe it should be taken seriously by him and by your organization.
The following two sections from the Statement of News Values and Principles also apply:
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The AP respects and encourages the rights of its employees to participate actively in civic, charitable, religious, public, social or residential organizations.
However, AP employees must avoid behavior or activities – political, social or financial – that create a conflict of interest or compromise our ability to report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action. Nothing in this policy is intended to abridge any rights provided by the National Labor Relations Act.
EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION:
Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.
I request that these concerns be forwarded to Mr. Borenstein’s editors and supervisors. I would appreciate an acknowledgement of receipt of this request and a response from Mr. Borenstein and other members of your staff that address conflict of interest issues. Thank you.
Joshua Lake

Seth Borenstein admitted in his 2/2/07 AP article “Scientists Pull Few Punches in Climate Report” that IPP science was filtered by politics–“Scientists wrote the report and government officials edited it with an eye toward the required unanimous approval by world governments” Why did this not throw up warning flares? Certainly some questions as to why supposed scientific fact required government approval was warranted. And later in the same article he wrote “Scientists wrote the report and government officials edited it with an eye toward the required unanimous approval by world governments” Seth Borenstein actually broke the story of the collusion between government and scientists long before the leaked CRU Emails. Perhaps other writers will review Mr. Borenstein’s to see just how deep the collusion runs between scientists, government and the press. Obviously rhetorical.

“The Booker article is indeed excellent. It is also a taste of things to come. Multinationals relocating manufacturing from West to East subsidized by carbon credits paid for by us!”
Britain has been reeling in recent years from the brutal competition of “globalisation”, so lauded by the taxpayer funded parasites like Blair and Gore. Now we have the next nail in the coffin of Britains economy, a gaming of the system, terrifying in its efficiency and savage in its consequences.
Beseiged not only by the “invisible hand of the market”, but now the visible hand of bureaucracy, which is itself driving heavy industry to leave these shores for India by giving them billions in carbon offsets which we then have to buy back to earn the right to consume our energy.
People are starting to wake up. The truth is out of the bottle. And just as the loosening of the grip of the State lead to the downfall of the Soviet Union, so will these revelations do likewise to this new global tyranny. But we must keep up the pressure. Give them no quarter, nor expect any in return. Let the battle be joined.

Marc Morano great debate in Copenhagen

One big problem. That’s a LETTER.
Yes, I noted the same thing, by reading the URL. I am a reporter who thinks Climategate is extremely serious, because of the fraud uncovered. But you’ve got to be careful not to let obvious errors like this get through. Even though the substance of your argument isn’t hurt, any error impairs your credibility.
REPLY: Yes, it was a dumb error on my part. It has been corrected. Note my response above to the commenter that first noticed it. Thank you also for pointing it out. -A

I have a nomination for quote of the week. From commenter TJA at Climateaudit, Posted Dec 13, 2009 at 6:55 AM on thread Daily Mail: Special Investigation-
“My opinion is that the Hockey Stick is sawdust now, and the emails make it pretty clear that “The Team” knew this at the time. In fact, one of the funniest things about the emails is that they show there was a “Hockey Team” except it was a little unbalanced, being composed of left wingers and slow defensemen and a goalie who counted on the goal judge not to switch on the red light when the puck crossed the line.”

the AP is just being itself.
We are making it easy for the political left to sweep ClimateGate under the carpet.
I haven’t seen one ‘skeptic’ on tv, not one, talk about the enormity of ClimateGate. As a matter of fact I saw one minimize it. And that was, of all people, Steve McIntyre.
If the real story of ClimateGate is going to be told in the media then skeptics are going to have to stop waiting for someone else to do it.

We should take what Seth Borenstein says on faith. He is a “peer reviewed” reporter.

J.Hansford (23:42:11) :
The bias is so blatant, it’s breathtaking.
AP is no longer a news outlet, it’s become a propaganda mouth piece for Ecofascism… Pravda for all things AGW.
————————————-
The mainstream media has been controlled by the political left since probably the days of Walter Cronkite. This is nothing new. Global warming is from the political left. What the AP is doing is no surprise.
—————————————–
That the ‘skeptics’ are letting ClimateGate slip through their fingers because they thought the left wing media would make it a big story but the opposite is now happening—THAT IS A REAL TRAVESTY!

_Jim (08:30:50) :
[snip]
Control; Teachers do it . Bosses do it. Girlfriends do it. Wives do it. City Councils do it. Professional societies do it. ‘Standards’ bodies do it. Law enforcement types of many persuasions (including code enforcement etc.) do it.
But of course, Jim. The HUGE difference is when folks use government guns, tassers, prisons or fines to control others. I will never get over that.
a rule of thumb:
1. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others.
2. Bad ideas should not be forced on others.

Here is the latest ARGO data… it took less then 10 seconds to find.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/argo/latest_data.html#compressed
The original hand written “raw” land records for the US are available in PDF, as has been commented about already a few times.
The minute by minute data for the airports is available for most of this decade.
The reality is that the data is “still” out there. Until lately, no one cared enough to look at the status or quality of the data. It is my personal opinion, that the data needs to downloaded, staged and made available on an open source server making it easily available for *anyone* to look at or graph the data.
A terabyte or two is nothing in todays computer hardware world.

Michael (08:26:11) :
Now Mark Maslin is saying it’s 5000 scientists.

Vincent (09:27:15) :
Marc Morano hardly got a word in with that “professor” interrupting him constantly.
The more they interrupt the more I like it. They broadcast their insecurities to the world by it!
Finally, debate!

Just sent this off to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. They’ve been fairly good lately about printing minority views.
______________________________________________________________________________
“Your readers might be interested to learn that reporter Seth Borenstein (“Report: Hacked e-mails….”, p. A18 in Sunday’s paper) is himself a contributor to and recipient of the CRU correspondence. So he is investigating and reporting on his own behavior, in apparent violation of Associated Press professional standards.
“Readers who believe the data hasn’t been compromised should get on line and read for themselves, not only the e-mails, but especially the computer coding comments, which Borenstein, Satter, and Ritter have simply ignored. A fairly forceful discussion of the journalistic standards can be found at http://wattsupwiththat.com/”
John Slayton
260 Sundance Ct
Azusa CA 91702
626 969-9061

E.M.Smith (04:25:53) :
…
It would be needed to repeat this test with something like “Tiger Affair” or “911 Attack” or even “Iraq War” to see if the same percentages hold for non-AGW topics. If they have a persistent relationship, it is probably not a bias. But if Google does a lot better on other topics, with only Climategate in the rear… then it’s likely a bias thing. I’ll leave that bit for others to work out. Right now I need to go change my default search engine to AltaVista… and tell myself it’s OK that Bing beat up Google… really it is…

I decided to try a relative skill test between Altavista, Bing and Google on a search term that had no likelihood of being politically charged, by searching on a last name that I know to be a very rare spelling.
The relative results are:
Google 41,700
Altavista 21,400
Bing 5110
I then did a search on a neutral technical term that includes two words separated by a space —- heat pipe
The relative results are:
Altavista = 60,400,000
Bing = 13,000,000
Google = 11,000,000
It appears that on terms that have no political impact and only depend on the search engine indexing very obscure references like cemetery listings, birth and death listings in news papers etc. Google far out performs Bing.
On a technical term like Heat pipe google is the clear loser of the three. With out following a few million links I can’t say anything about the relevance of the hits on Altavista, but it is clear from these tests that it is bad technique to rely on only a single search engine if you are looking for best possible coverage on any topic.
The conclusion I draw from that is:
Bing is actively crawling the web and looking for links to climate gate, as it appears to not have the same index depth for obscure search terms. That Altavista is a competent search engine, but still falls short of Googles reach in some areas, but is superior in others. Google has the reach and raw data capacity to find much larger numbers of obscure references and on climate gate is limiting output for one of several reasons. It could be excluding duplicates, although that appears unlikely, since if you go to the end of listings the number of hits does not increase significantly if you select the option to not exclude duplicates “If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”.
Google search for climate gate with no restrictions = 29,200,000
Search for climate gate do not exclude duplicates = 29,300,000
For some reason Google is not indexing as many hits as Bing on a highly controversial topic. It would be interesting to see if there was some entire class of “hits” that Google is excluding that Bing is picking up. Unfortunately that would take sophisticated analysis of the actual nature of the hits indexed by each search engine and a statistical analysis of the fractions that appear from news organizations, high traffic blogs, minor news outlets etc. to see if some sub set or hits are systematically being excluded.
I am beginning to doubt that there is some “intentional” skewing of results by Google, but there are clearly differences between various search engines on their competence to find certain terms due to differences in how they index “hits”, and crawl the web.
Perhaps the only lesson here is that sole source supply on any subject or news item whether you are talking about the IPCC as a data source or a search engine can lead to biased results.
Larry

Jack in Oregon (09:29:39) : Here is the latest ARGO data… it took less then 10 seconds to find.
Thanks. Is it possible to view a curve with the global sea temperature average from ARGO online? Something like this:
http://climate4you.com/SeaTemperatures.htm
If not, why not setup a server that can automatically download, process and display the global temperature sea average according to ARGO?

1:16pm, 20091213
CNN, Byorn Lomborg just nailed Paul Krugman.

google climategate is down to 24 million today.
A couple of days ago it was 28 million. Shouldnt the number increase ???? Is it the Gorgle effect?

I dunno guys. I think we should give Mr. Borenstein a break. It is my experience that if not all, then the vast majority of “science” reporters do not have sufficient cranial capacity to grasp even the slightest technical concept. And that’s not just limited to climate science. Medical, mathematical, computational, any branch of physics or chemistry, etc, etc. They’re all pretty hopeless. Borenstein was simply another of that gang in way over his head.

Yahoo
climate gate 40.300.000
climategate 73.900.000
altavista
climate gate 40.300.000
climategate 73.900.000
bing
climate gate 7.000.000
climategate 11.300.000
Google
Climate gate 6.950.000
climategate 2.910.000

google shot themselfs in the foot.
When a bias became aparent or even percieved, people started avoiding google.
I purged google from my computer, how many others did likewise I can only guess.
The lower numbers for google could be a reflection of market share lost.

I posted a comment over at Dot Earth concerning NASA’s water cycle discussion on how weather dramatically cools the Earth from an otherwise intolerable 67 C for a weather-free, atmosphere-laden, greenhouse-rich Earth.
http://nasascience.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-water-cycle
the relevant section- “If the earth were in radiative equilibrium, with an atmosphere, the surface temperature would be 67°C. This does not happen because water evaporates from the surface, mostly from tropical seas, cooling the surface. The hydrological cycle keeps the greenhouse effect from heading to an overly hot planet.”
Interestingly, Dr. Roy Spencer makes the same argument in his excellent 2008 book Climate Confusion on page 54-
“Because, while many people have heard that ‘the greenhouse effect makes the Earth habitably warm,’ virtually no one has heard that ‘weather makes the Earth habitably cool.’ Quantitatively, the cooling effects of weather are actually stronger than the greenhouse warming effect. So, why is it that we never hear about that in discussions of global warming? HMMM?”
So far, we have the climate realist Roy Spencer and Gaia-hugging NASA oceans in complete agreement.
Along comes Andy Lacis from NASA GISS, who throws NASA oceans under the bus today at Dot Earth-
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/skeptics-hold-fast-in-copenhagen/?sort=oldest&offset=5
“Chris Y, in comment #83, has pointed out what appears to be an embarrassing bit of erroneous PR information on the part of NASA that has clearly fallen far short of its intended objective.”
“It is painfully clear that whoever wrote this, really had no clue of how the Earth’s greenhouse effect works,…”
“I hope that NASA will fix this bit of embarrassment soon, and have their next PR piece checked for basic accuracy by someone knowledgeable in the field.”
Now that NASA GISS has been alerted to this PR ‘leak’, I expect the NASA site linked above to be ‘adjusted’ in the next few days or weeks to conform…

2 pm, EST Today, (16 minutes into the show, 2nd segment); Sunday on Fox News Channel:
Sen. James Inhofe vs. Rep. Ed Markey on Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday (replay from 9AM); Replayed, again at 6PM.
A fair overview of US and global governmental status. Not enough time to clearly get much out of the issues. These are vet politicians. Some interesting details. Clarification? TV debates are obviously a very, very difficult venue.
Markey showed his superior ability through clever bites and diverting focus to his agenda. Some flashy “specifics” (“tree ringed circus” unfounded as they may be).
Inhofe good at providing background, but he required additional efforts by interested viewers – not good for reactionary/emotional convincing.
Fox summary “Markey: Climate-Gate Has Become ‘Tree Ring Circus'” at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/13/markey-climategate-tree-ring-circus/
Additional:
‘Stossel’ Premiere to Take on Global Warming; http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,579963,00.html?test=economy

In spite of -30 to -50 F cold, the citizens of Edmonton still found time to protest last evening as they demanded a cooler climate. See this article entitled “Frigid Climate Protest” :
http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/edmonton/2009/12/13/12138496-sun.html
Is this funny or what?
For those who don’t know, the minimum temperature last night at Edmonton Int AP was -50 F and the headlines read “Prairies Hit with Extreme Cold Snap”.

photon without a Higgs (09:38:05) :
Michael (08:26:11) :
Now Mark Maslin is saying it’s 5000 scientists.
They’re breeding faster than rats. Oh wait, that statement is self contradictory.

In a sane world, another media outlet would be all over this.
We do live in a sane world. And not just a Media Outlet is on them. tens of thousands of media outlets:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/12/ap-investigates-climategate.html
Also keep an eye on my buddy Eric at Classical Values. He is really smart and a most interesting writer. Disclaimer: he is also a personal friend.
Which means you can add points to his rating.

Mr. Borenstein is conflicted, but out here in the So Cal boonies, I inform you the Los Angeles Times must be the most deranged alarmist newspaper in North America. Today’s “opinion” page is one half photos of world spots supposedly showing glacier retreats, but not providing local temperture info. The times is the last outpost of the Kilimanjaro theory, which I thought all alarmists had dropped, but they keep at it. Just the other day they had a UCLA “institute” (read-grant macro-farm) apparatchik reasserted the Kilimanjaro claim within one of the times’ opinion pieces why good thinking people should not think about Climategate. The paper is literally a joke, but unlike NY or Chicago, there is no big competitor. The San Francisco papers, ironically, have a modicum of objectivity. I think the times reporters are all on the “consultant” side-employment, or are just robotic dolts.

What if an Internet tool could be created to break the barrier between divided Internet blogs talking about the same subject such as that of climate? That day has arrived.
Details here;
Tool to Break the Divide of the Left Right Paradigm.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/118836
I sent this to Alex Jones to see what he thinks.

“Back2Bat (11:24:08) : wrote
_Jim (10:00:34) :
{snip}
“Conspiracy theories are the tool of the weak-minded.”
Perhaps, I would not know.
Gee Jimmy, you are great at casting me as a straw man. As far as conspiracies go, I have no problem with them else we are dealing with thought and speech “crimes”.
Let folks conspire. I conspire to bring down central banking.”
I really like this Back2Bat guy. Where do I know you from, Mish, Calculated Risk?
A also love learning about good actual proven conspiracies such as Watergate and Climategate.

Smokey (11:27:24) :
“Now Mark Maslin is saying it’s 5000 scientists.”
Mark has made a big mistake. It’s one thing to distract with talk about melting glaciers and icebergs, but he has actually made a simple factual error – by 2 orders of magnitude. The number of contributors to the important chapter 9 are about 50. When I get some time, I’m going to go through the AR4 and see where these other 4,950 are – or even if they exist.

‘Climategate’ Furor Continues
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1798635/climategate_furor_continues/index.html

Svensmark has just collapsed on national Danish television in a live debate with Lomborg and politicians.
very scary … 🙁

CNN, 3:39 pm EST, Steve Moore on “Climate Change”

…apparently Svensmark has a pacemaker that jump started during the debate. He should be well, but on his way to hospital.

Archbishop of Canterbury says fear hinders success of climate change
Rowan Williams tells Copenhagen service corporations and governments are afraid to make choices to bring real change

It is almost official now, Climate Scientology is a religion !

sorry, looks like a malicious info war at wiki over Svensmark, maybe

Climategate.TV
http://climategate.tv/

_Jim (10:00:34) :
…At this rate the ‘NWO’ will find you (us?) an easy mark.
… This means no third parties, no appeal to lauP noR as a ’savior’;
– and turn off Alex Jones (‘Jack Blood’ et al), Joyce Riley and ‘The Power Hour’. They do nothing but cause you to burn energy and resources uselessly and will figuratively ’suck your brains out’.
“Conspiracy theories are the tool of the weak-minded.”
…Moderators, an appeal to leniency in snipping this post, pls….
Jim, who let you out over at LGF, trolling here and bashing trolls there, your ‘Ron Paul ‘ gave it away NodroG. Whats your nick bud. Now it all makes sense.
That appeal to moderator leniency just cracks me up!! Let the big boys take the lead here, listen and learn.

(Posted a variant of this on Climate Audit for about 30 seconds, and then Steve disappeared it. Not even a snip.)
[glad to oblige – snip]

I made this more readable in case you missed it.
What if an Internet tool could be created to break the barrier between divided Internet blogs talking about the same subject such as that of climate? That day has arrived.
Details here;
Tool to Break the Divide of the Left Right Paradigm.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/118836
I sent this to Alex Jones to see what he thinks.

M White (03:50:21) :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.
‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’
———————————————
I wonder if they would release them to Anthony or Steve M

Follow up:
“Copendenier Henrik Svensmark collapses on Danish TV” (jerks)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/copendenier-henrik-svensm_b_390413.html

Michael (12:41:11) :
“According to the Mail, the Russian government has made a veiled threat to disclose certain details, that they claim could be embarrassing to some person or persons unknown outside of Russia, if allegations of direct Russian involvement in stealing the archive do not cease.”
———————————————————-
oh baby let it happen!!!!!!

Re: AP dishonesty: I’ve stopped reading CNN’s website. At this point, everything from the MSM seems like soviet-style propaganda. The idea that the AP would ditch an associate because he did what they asked (better than anyone else) is kind of funny. You’re asking the people who are an integral part of the propaganda machine to throw one of their own under a bus so they can keep doing it. If they’re going to be a propaganda machine, shouldn’t they be our propaganda machine? Who owns them?

We have been here before…
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/corruption-of-media.html

Re: Seth & AP. He and they are not worth it.

The AP has just published an investigation into the Climategate emails: “AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty” (Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter, and Malcolm Ritter).
My critical response can be found on ICECAP: “AP Analysis Overlooks Scientific Implications of Climategate”
The article was slanted by significant omissions.

I have dropped several AP notes in the “Tips & Notes to WUWT” thread. My paper, “The Florida Today” prints an AP Climate article almost every day and has for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I just get tired of it. Florida Today, and Al Neuharth (and some other history I’m not familiar with) had something to do with starting Gannett and USA Today. I don’t get USA Today but it would be interesting whether they to have been sticking these AP articles in every day?

The Irish are starting to question the veracity of the doomsdayers.
Recently David Bellamy was interviewed on Irish TV Late Show :

and now this:
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/tide-is-turning-on-climate-change-1973273.html

Biased.
Seth Borenstein is yet another example of a BIASED Liberal Extremist Press.
They don’t “search” for the truth. They “pick and choose” their sources and then they spew it as…fact.
If God wants the Earth to warm…then it will.
This “chatter” is nothing but “intelectual distractions” between those who like to hear themselves talk. PATHETIC!
Oh, yes I did say the word GOD for in this day and age (sadly) far too many of those “in power” never bring up God or give thanks to God in print or on TV or on the Radio. Everything comes from God and if we, as a Country, had the “press” put 1/2 of their efforts into adhereing and respecting God then this World would be a better place.
During the interim we are left with Seth Borenstein and his “close knit group of fellow Liberal Extremists” all crying “the sky is falling”. Pathetic.
Jefff Schrembs, American Citizen

You sir are the true reporter. What you have done is what reporters used to do. Excellent article.