Because Nothing Ever Happens In November…

Guest post by Thomas Fuller

The past month has been by turns eventful, maddening and hilarious. What it has not been, for 2010, is unusual. This year has been packed with news, opinion and stories regarding climate science, climate politics, climate news, and now thanks to Josh, even climate cartoons. There’s a reason why…

This week we have Steve McIntyre firing back at John Mashey and Raymond Bradley’s attack on Edward Wegman’s report on Mann’s Hockey Stick. Their attack happened last week, and pushed the 10:10 campaign to blow up children out of the climate news. It also pushed aside Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s decision to press ahead with subpoenas for Michael Mann’s emails.

You do realise that the whole year has been like this, right?

Hal Lewis, a prestigious physicist, resigned from the APS, citing their position on climate change as basically fraudulent as his reason.  William Connelly, a long-standing editor at Wikipedia, was banned from his pet section on climate change after years of sanitizing climate entries to reflect the alarmist position. Rajendra Pachauri will stay on as head of the IPCC, falsifying my prediction some months back that he was for the high jump. Skeptics rejoiced. Pachauri still has not been able to explain why his UK charity suddenly found large amounts of undeclared income when faced with an audit. (Maybe it was hidden under a seat cushion.)

It appears that temperatures in New Zealand do not show a temperature rise until they are adjusted by scientists who trained with Phil Jones. It also appears that California’s restrictive laws on diesel fuel is based on science that got key metrics badly, badly wrong.

And The Royal Society issued a new statement on climate change, acknowledging that ‘the science is not settled.’

That’s just October, and the month is not even finished. People in the mainstream media who wonder why support for action to reverse or halt climate change has disappeared do not seem to understand that an almost daily diet of embarrassment does eventually have an effect. Because the mainstream media chooses not to cover these stories in any detail–often not at all–they forget that more people read this weblog than most newspapers, and they come from all around the world. They forget that every day, Roger Pielke Sr. presents news of scientific publications that challenge the alarmist consensus, and that his son daily tries to put boundaries around what is possible in terms of change. They certainly forget Steve McIntyre’s auditing of lax performance by climate scientists, and I doubt if they ever get past Lucia Liljegren’s haiku.

Every month this year has been like this. Much of the news has been of the climate ‘consensus’ shooting themselves in the foot–remember the Greenpeace blogger boasting that they know where skeptics live? Much of it has been measured responses to wild claims on their part.

There has been no news agenda, no concerted campaign, no oil money going after the climate icons. This year’s news has been largely driven by people with time and energy examining the claims that many used to accept, because they have lost confidence in the establishment and their pronouncements. Trust, once lost, is seldom re-bestowed, and there are now too many people scratching their heads when the CAGW crowd comes out with a new one, saying–‘Waitaminnit–let me see that. Where are the numbers and where did you get them from?’

But hey–it’ll quiet down, now. Right? Nothing ever happens in November…