Looks like Penn State's Mann inquiry will be without the tough questions

Phil. (12:15:15) :

So you think that Mann should be judged on financial and political grounds not scientific/academic conduct.

That may very well be the only thing that saves him. He’s gotten oodles of “stimulus” money and the gov is still a mover and shaker in the donkey party.

Christopher Booker’s revealing article not only points out that the UK Commission has misread its own Act – but that now it is obligated to go forward with legal prosecution. Unless it doesn’t. Which speaks volumes to the depth of corruption that prosecution would disclose.
“The real mystery therefore is how the Commission came to misread the very Act which brought it into being. Undoubtedly a successful prosecution involving such world-ranking scientists would be extraordinarily embarrassing, not just to the Government but to the entire global warming cause. So what has persuaded the Commission not to do its duty”
FOI is the peoples’ vehicle for redress of government – which the public pays taxes to. If FOI can willy nilly be brushed aside, it might as well be stricken from use. Which is a reason for people on this site and in the UK to hound their representatives to not let this transgression go un-prosecuted.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7113552/Climategate-confusion-over-the-law-in-email-case.html

This whole affair is becoming more profoundly disturbing as it moves outward from ground zero.
I was never an AGW believer and I have a fair degree of cynicism about existing power structures everywhere. However, it is shocking that this obvious corruption in ‘Climate Science’ (it ain’t science) is being systematically covered up by just about every group that guards the gates.
Note that although it is entirely possible that AGW is happening to a tiny extent (maybe even measurable), it is well beyond any reasonable expectation that it will have a catastrophic effect. For this to be worth altering the world economy it must be imminent and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) about which we can effectively do something. Frankly, I don’t believe the evidence comes even close to supporting the notion that anything out of the ordinary is happening with Climate at all.
This is remeniscent of the U.S. Presidential election where a near trillion dollar boondoggle was on the horizon and even though people like me *knew* they were heading for a financial meltdown (I am a Canadian), apparently it was a complete unknown for all the major Candidates until just after the election. Please. Who can believe that a Trillion dollar gap existed anywhere and was completely off the radar? Only the purely innumerate (addmitedly a frightening large percentage of the population) could think that a million times a million dollars was able to hide itself like that. It was, BTW, mentioned in the election, just not by the people to whom the news establishment was pointing your attention.
I only have a B.Sc., but the ‘science’ as practised by the ‘hockey team’ is well below my pay grade. I would have known it was nonsense from the science I learned in High School. In fact, I expect it would take only a week or two to ‘skill up’ someone of slightly above average intelligence so that they could see for themselves that CAGW is nonsense.
The noise over Climategate has been characterized by the ‘climateers’ as an ‘attack on Science’. Although the argument is spurious, it does well to take a long look at the scientific establishment. The CAGW nonsense has been beneath contempt all along. What reasonable person, scientist or not, believes this silly notion? How on earth could the scientific establishment sweep this under the carpet for so long and then participate in the cover-up? It is just shameful and more than a little scary.
The burden of proof for the truly extraordinary claim that we must alter the world economy to stave off the end of the world lies squarely with the camp arguing that claim. It is not up to me to prove that Russell’s teapot is not hiding out there somewhere. It sure is not up to me to ‘prove’ it will not end the world. They keep tossing the ball back saying that skeptics have to somehow prove that it is *not* CO2. In fact, the preponderence of evidence actually does falsify the CO2 theory. However, it is not our argument to break. It is their argument to make.
They must *PROVE* (to the point that we would bet trillions of dollars) that:
1) A catastrophe is coming.
2) We can do something about it at a cost that is lower than living with the catastrophe.
3) That CO2 is the culprit and reducing it is the answer.
If Cap and Trade legislation goes into effect we will have essentially allocated a Trillion dollars or more to reducing CO2. To the extent that we have any evidence, we would be better off spending that money on *producing* CO2. There are surely better ways to spend that money. Even though I am a socialist, though, I would say that it is not their money to spend. I do not want to pay a tax designed to starve plant life. I want to spend it on my kids.
I have looked and looked and looked for the allegedly overwhelming evidence of CAGW. It is not out there. That is not surprising, because AGW of the catastrophic flavor is not in evidence. What evidence seems trustworthy falsifies nearly every falsifiable fact upon which CAGW either depends or predicts (hence depends upon to be a good model).
I should not have to look for the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for this ‘settled science’. It should be easy to find. It is not easy. What evidence you can pry out of the system or exists in older publications either flatly contradicts CAGW or is tainted in some way. I invite anyone who has a little math and science to do their own digging. I, for instance, got the temperature values for my local area in Ontario going back a hundred years or so and plotted the graph and did the stats. A meaningless ‘R^2’ value and a nearly plumb horizontal line. If there is a trend toward warming in my locality it is not evidenced by the data we have.
The climateers keep using ‘ad hominem’ attacks and chant about ‘peer review’ within the narrow confines that they actually control. They keep referring to ‘overwhelming evidence’ as if only a moron could dispute their claims, but when pressed, they keep pointing to the same tired spurious arguments and what we now have some proof is data that is actually rather limited, tainted or categorically false (like, just made up or something).
If you throw out the hockey team, the IPCC report saying that glaciers are going to disappear magically in a couple of decades and the most grotesquely compromised data sets, what do you have left? If the evidence is ‘overwhelming’ they should be easily able to point to *TONS* of underlying data, uninvolved experts who have actually looked at this matter and agree with them and papers that are not the subject of some dispute right now. If they could do that, they would. They have not because they cannot. When you remove their compromised stuff, all you have left is stuff that either says nothing at all or falsifies their claims.
I do not believe there is an informed scientific consensus that we should alter the world economy to protect us from CAGW. I would bet against it. It is clear that the people who ostensibly speak for most major scientific bodies have bought into this for one reason or another, but I don’t think they speak for their members. They can’t possibly speak for their members who are informed. However, even if there were a consensus, it would not be scientific proof.
Although this is not an attack on ‘small s’ science it is becoming an attack on ‘large S’ Science by virtue of the fact that the incumbent establishment is participating in the cover-up either by action or inaction. The gatekeepers of science are interfering with its pursuit.
Honestly. On Wikipedia they are still discussing what title will replace ‘Climatic Research Unit hacking incident’. Climategate (which redirects there) is not on the table as far as the WP gatekeepers are concerned. It makes me think of Orwell. ‘Climategate’ or any other probable title that a normal person would use for this item, essentially redirects you to ‘Crimethink’.
It offends me that slightly nutty factions both sides of this debate have decided that this is polarized along ‘right’/’left’ ‘liberal’/’conservative’ lines. Putting aside the fact that it is a false dichotomy anyway, I happen to identify with the ‘left’ end of the spectrum. I come from a labor union background originally. I am decidely left of center. They say that ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ and it is true in this case. It bugs me that I have to throw in with people with whom I have rather sharp social and political differences. However, I think it behooves anyone who truly cares about the world they are leaving their chilrden to join forces when they stand together on an issue this important.
Finally, apropos of the original topic of this article, the fact that they have not asked serious principals from the (essentially) injured side of this matter is shocking, but quite in keeping with the rest of this increasingly disturbing matter. I would like to think that ‘the truth will out’, but as I said on WP before I gave up, I am expecting this will take months or years to finally be put right.
I apologize for the long entry re-iterating things said elsewhere. I had to get it off my chest! Those of you fighting the good fight here have my sincerest thanks.

@ur momisugly DeepN – Your summary is not overlong, nor is it redundant in this or any other context. In fact, it is quite cogently written, and in my opinion deserving of broader readership. Would you consider submitting such content to the quite informal weekly online “magazine” The Libertarian Enterprise (at http://www.ncc-1776.org/ )?
The editor is Ken Holder, and his e-mail address is available on the publication’s Web site.
Thank you.

Tucci — Thanks for the kind words. That comment was (uncharacteristically for me) typed in extemporaneously. On re-reading the comment, I notice that as a result it has a surprising number of errors. I will attempt to clean up and send along as you have suggested. The more the word gets out there, the better, it seems to me.

Climategate Forecast…
“What is the current scientific consensus on the conclusions reached by Drs. Mann, Bradley and Hughes? [Referring to the hockey stick propagated in UN IPCC 2001 by Michael Mann and debunked by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2003.]
Ans: Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on MBH98/99. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”
AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION, also known as The Wegman report was authored by Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University, David W. Scott, Rice University, and Yasmin H. Said, The Johns Hopkins University with the contributions of John T. Rigsby, III, Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Denise M. Reeves, MITRE Corporation.

I guess Joe Pa’s football revenue will have to support the meteorology program too.