Scientific understanding and faith simultaneously on display:
‘For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable “sign” of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.’ – Fred Pearce, New Scientist, October 1996
This being near Climategate time, it is worth reflecting upon that heady time in late November 2009 when the world of climate science saw its edifice of assumed scientific integrity broadsided by its own hidden reality. Much like what goes on with the SkS kidz and their private forum, what was said by climate prima donnas (to borrow words from Dr. John Christy) when they thought nobody was looking, was far different from the presentation made to the public.
I recall that about this time of publication December 9th 2009, I was in the middle of trying to get Climate Audit back online after being crashed by the traffic generated by news on November 19th from WUWT: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released
So, given that distraction, I must have missed this article from Michael Kelly then, the whole period was a furious whirlwind of commentary as the inner sanctum of climate science was revealed. I’ll start with a significant excerpt, much more and a link to the full article follows. There are gems that I’ve never read, like this one from Keith Briffa in 1996, before team climate science and funding glut became the norm:
As always I seem to have been away bullshiting and politiking in various meetings for weeks! I try to convince myself that this is of use to us as a dendrochronological community but I am not so sure how much that is really true these days.
It is well worth your time. h/t to reader Ian W
From the writings of Michael H. Kelly, Dec 9, 2009:
==============================================================
Tom [1255550975] tries to soothe Kevin further with a nice bit of Jesuitry: ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. But what you said was “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”. Now you say “we are no where close to knowing where energy is going”. In my eyes these are two different things — the second relates to our level of understanding’ and the first, presumably, to our degree of faith.
(I can’t make Tom out at all as a character, however. He is an enigma to me, as changeable as, well, the climate. At times he can be the scourge of the heathens, and in very unpleasant ways; at others a stern voice of reason, moderation, and scientific standards, compared to some of the others. Next, for example, in 1255553034, he rebukes Mann ‘The Figure you sent is very deceptive … In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC’ and Schmidt ‘I just think that you need to be up front with uncertainties and the possibility of compensating errors’, referring to a graph which Mann says will reassure Kevin and doubters in the outside world. An unquestioning true believer who won’t see his beloved cause brought into disrepute? This is fun. This must be what it was like to be a Kremlinologist or someone who studies the inner machinations of the Vatican. We need scientists, number-crunchers and other experts on this story to annotate the mails and other files fully, but we will only fully understand what happened and the people involved when someone writes a novel about it.)
In 1256765544 Gentleman Phil Jones complains about scientist Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen to someone at her university. She has forwarded articles about the Yamal scandal and the disappearing CRU data [they are also in the mail and are worth reading if you are coming newish to this] to someone at UKCIP [UK Climate Impacts Programme] she thinks ought to know about it: ‘I expect that a great deal of UKCIP work is based on the data provided by CRU (as does the work of the IPCC and of course UK climate policy). Some of this, very fundamentally, would now seem to be open to scientific challenge, and may even face future legal enquiries. It may be in the interest of UKCIP to inform itself in good time and become a little more ‘uncertain’ about its policy advice.’
Gentleman Phil disparages these articles with the standard line about peer-reviewed lit and in the next breath disparages Boehmer-Christiansen’s peer-reviewed literature: ‘You are probably aware of this, but the journal Sonja edits is at the very bottom of almost all climate scientists lists of journals to read.’
Boehmer-Christiansen’s colleague commiserates with Phil, and says ‘I’ll try and have a quiet word with her’ about using her ‘Reader Emeritus’ title in communications of this sort, ‘but at the moment in fairness she is entitled to use it in the way she does.’ Also ‘I’d want to protect another academic’s freedom to be contrary and critical, even if I personally believe she is probably wrong.’ But reassures Phil he’s personally onside: ‘Since Sonja retired I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness – I’ve signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it.’
1256760240. Phil cautions Keith not to respond to mails he has forwarded, from an academic at another university, who has written expressing concern over various matters pertaining to Keith’s Yamal work and the other studies that have drawn on it, including:
1) The appropriateness of the statistical analyses employed
2) The reliance on the same small datasets in these multiple studies
3) The concept of “teleconnection” by which certain trees respond to the
“Global Temperature Field”, rather than local climate
4) The assumption that tree ring width and density are related to temperature in a linear manner.
Whilst I would not describe myself as an expert statistician, I do use inferential statistics routinely for both research and teaching and find difficulty in understanding the statistical rationale in these papers. As a plant physiologist I can say without hesitation that points 3 and 4 do not agree with the accepted science.
There is a saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”. Given the scientific, political and economic importance of these papers, further detailed explanation is urgently required.
He has sent further questions after Keith posted an explanation on the CRU site, saying, ‘I find your explanations lacking in scientific rigour and I am more inclined to believe the analysis of McIntyre.’
1256735067. Mann to Phil: ‘be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy [Revkin? Of the NYT? Of ‘the prestige press doesn’t fall for this sort of stuff, right’?] and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like.’
In 1257888920, November 10th this year, someone from UKCIP is writing about problems with the CRU database. See the ‘Harry_read_me’ file for more.
The mails end shortly after with references to a new IPCC working group. There is mention of a ‘Good Practice Guidance Paper’.
Rather than end with a whimper I will now go back a bit.
1254751382, October 5th, 2009. This is perhaps the climax, where it really all falls apart. The mails at the top of the file are just the gang damage-limiting. But scroll down below, where there are newsgroup mails they’ve forwarded to each other. Scientists talking about the Yamal revelations: I could well be wrong but when I first read it it looked to me like a generation of younger scientists, fighting free of the dead hand of the established old blokes at CRU and elsewhere. This may be the happy ending, if you like, at least unless and until this new blood become as crusty and stuck on their pet theories as the old guard.
…Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.
2) The IPCC 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.”
the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.”
…’This is terrible but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis. I dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics.
That is not to say that global warming is not occurring to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may be going slower than the powers that be would like.
Hence, (I postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal to their equally dishonest club members. Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.
Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall … in the good old days. Humans are hardly perfect creations. I am never surprised at what they can do. I am perpetually grateful for those who are honest and fair and thankfully there is a goodly share of those.’
But I will give the last word to scientist John Christy, from a mail to one of the team members at the end of July 2009 [1248993704].
We disagree on the use of available climate information regarding the many things related to climate/climate change as I see by your responses below – that is not unexpected as climate is an ugly, ambiguous, and complex system studied by a bunch of prima donnas (me included) and which defies authoritative declarations. I base my views on hard-core, published literature (some of it mine, but most of it not), so saying otherwise is not helpful or true. The simple fact is that the opinions expressed in the CCSP report do not represent the real range of scientific literature (the IPCC fell into the same trap – so running to the IPCC’s corner doesn’t move things forward). …The “consensus” reports now are just the consensus of those who agree with the consensus. The government-selected authors have become gatekeepers rather than honest brokers of information. That is a real tragedy, because when someone becomes a gatekeeper, they don’t know they’ve become a gatekeeper – and begin to (sincerely) think the non-consensus scientists are just nuts.
*
The real ending is up to us.
At this point we are already guaranteed to be the laughing stock of the future, for having entertained this nonsense for even a single year. A cautionary tale of mass hysteria, comparable to the witch-burners or the millenarian doom-cults, all the more so because we were more technologically advanced and fancied ourselves so superior to them.
If you’re a fairly youngish person reading this, you can expect one day to have bratty grandkids dancing around you taunting you about it. ‘Ha ha ha! In Granddad’s day they were afraid of carbon dioxide! Ha ha ha!’ They will breathe on you. ‘Look, look, I’m poisoning Granddad! Look, I’m destroying the planet with my poison breath! Oh no, Granddad – I think I’m going to fart – shall I put a cork in? Granddad, there’s a cow in the field going to fart – shall we kill it? Granddad, do you think Mummy will burn in hell for driving a car? Do you call them the Devil’s Chariot, Granddad? Do you think light-bulbs are sinful, Granddad? Do you flog yourself when you turn one on? Do you think Mummy was sinful for having children, Granddad? Should I not have been born, Granddad? Granddad … you’re choking me…’
At least, I hope you do. That’s what’s up to us now. If we sit back and allow them to enact radical changes at Copenhagen in spite of what’s been revealed, more likely your grandchild will be a pious little snot in a sackcloth habit who every time he visits will point and yell, ‘OIL-BURNING PLANET-KILLER!’ and spit on you.
Or they will not have been born, because you couldn’t afford to buy the indulgences to have kids.
I sincerely hope I’m being alarmist and shrill saying that. But if something gets pushed through at Copenhagen it will be only the beginning. The history of the past few years has shown that even good, worthwhile movements for social change keep going through inertia and simply don’t know when to stop even when they’ve become destructive. This will be destructive from the start and will simply never end of its own accord because they will go on calling for more and more sacrifices to an unappeasable god, because none of what we do will make a blind bit of difference because they are barking up the wrong tree.
I’m not expert at what cap and trade schemes will lead to but it seems to me that, rather than being ‘socialism’ as some opponents claim, it will enable big companies (and economies) to get bigger at the expense of smaller ones. People are already making huge amounts from carbon-trading, and companies like Shell are preparing to cash in on carbon-capture. It’s what will come after that worries me. Discouraging all but the rich from flying or driving would only be a first step. After that, eating meat will be punitively taxed, everything else you buy or do will be rationed on some carbon measure rated by a massive new bureaucracy, and I suspect that after a while you won’t be able to have children without purchasing a license for all the CO2 they’ll put out over the course of a lifetime.
Already there is a new scheme, endorsed by the great and good, whereby you can assuage the guilt of taking a plane trip by preventing an African from being born.
When I visited that article almost none of the commenters seemed to find that tasteless, let alone disturbing or deeply wrong; pretty much the only objections were from people who said it would be much better to stop people in the Western world being born.
I’m having to bite my fingers to keep from triggering Godwin’s Law. And I suppose it would be wildly inappropriate, after several thousand words mocking people for betraying science and reason, to make any reference to the devil.
===============================================================
Read it in full here
Related articles
- Lives of the Climate Bloggers (2): Michael H. Kelly (geoffchambers.wordpress.com)
- Behind the SKS Curtain (climateaudit.org)
- The Economist: problems with peer-review undermine self-correction of science (winteryknight.wordpress.com)
- Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry message to Climategate’s Michael Mann: ‘You continue to damage the credibility of climate science in ways that you apparently can’t imagine’ (climatedepot.com)
- Public Relations (Spin Doctors) Deliberately Deceived Public About Global Warming and Climate Change (wattsupwiththat.com)
Happy Climategate Anniversary, Anthony! I forgot the date myself, I’ll bake a turkey in its honor!
Those were certainly heady, earth-shaking days, and there is still much work to do.
Happy Thanksgiving, Charles the DrPH
This Michael Kelly is funny & darkly entertaining. Maybe he forgot his history w/this:
I’m not expert at what cap and trade schemes will lead to but it seems to me that, rather than being ‘socialism’ as some opponents claim, it will enable big companies (and economies) to get bigger at the expense of smaller ones.
Fascism. Same thing as socialism/marxism just in a different wrapping.
Re: Optimum Population Trust ==> Well, if nothing else, at least they are honest about what they are up to and why. They even state that “only unwanted births will be prevented” so that we know they don’t intend to actually force black and brown women to be sterilized or have their unborn children aborted. See how very kind and understanding they are?
Of course, preventing one birth in the developed world would offset a couple of orders of magnitude greater amounts of future CO2 emissions..—- “oh, but you see, we need more of these kinds of good people and less of those bad kinds….so it is perfectly logical.” (not an actual quote….)
Incredibly heartbreaking that a major news outlet could print this story in anything other than horror and indignation.
..
Geoff Chambers’ recent post reminded readers of Kelly’s remarkable essay, which, as Chambers observes, had been cited in a CA article on Yamal. I too appreciated the reminder and enjoyed the re-read.
The history of the past few years has shown that even good, worthwhile movements for social change keep going through inertia and simply don’t know when to stop even when they’ve become destructive.
This is a classic line. I”m spreading this all over the place, as it is so true.
Trade a plane ride for an African’s life. What next – take a train, prevent a Dane? Shoes for Nigerians? Polynesians for clunkers? Buy our finger lickin’ chicken with double-size fries and three Nairobi families will go childless!
That is pretty freaking crass even for liberals.
” I was in the middle of trying to get Climate Audit back online”
?
REPLY: I operated the server for Climate Audit at the time – Anthony
Thank you.
This is where I came into the game. 4 years, and I have learned much, made reasonable and also foolish statements, determined for myself that the certainty spoken of is not based on any more than a comfort that one should go forward for a variety of reasons, one of which is to keep an otherwise good job and make the mortgage payments – the reasoning that most of us use at sometime or other to justify working for the firms we work for.
If it hadn’t been for the revelations of Climategate, I would have gone with the social and political drift. If it hadn’t been for the revelations I would not have become sensitive to the difference between what was said and what, by the words used, I thought was said. If it hadn’t been for the revelations I’d be worried for our future. One day I’d like to know who to thank for all these better things.
It’s very nice (and extremely helpful) to find another on-line source and compendium of those naughty emails.
I never want to hear anyone ever again criticise these decent honourable climate scientists, no more stories of data manipulation, no more questioning of their motives or methodology, /Sarc off
A long read, but well worth it! While others have put together bits and snippets of the emails and the dishonesty of the “team”, he pulls it all together. Disturbing most of all.
We are being railroaded to a destructive ending by a bunch of egotistical jackasses.
Wow, 4 years. And I guess these guys are still getting funding. Amazing.
Whilst I have to keep reminding myself that we can’t expect rapid progress from government, looking back an awful lot has changed. Even in Scotland which I’ve referred to as “the banana republic of wind”, major politicians are now willing to sit on a platform next to climate sceptics.
There are four classic steps for a purchase:
Awareness (it exists)
Interest (in the product)
Desire (a wish to own it)
Action (converting the desire into a purchase).
Cimategate made people aware of the sceptic argument
Over the next few years, all of us have managed to make the subject interesting enough that politicians have wanted to find out more.
Now as fuel prices really begin to bite in the UK politicians have a real desire to accept the sceptic arguments because they are fed up with the non-sense on global warming
Now the next stage is to give politicians the confidence that they can be sceptics. Or even as in Australia, that it is electoral suicide not to be a sceptic.
In contrast there is a stage called “post purchase dissonance”. We all go through it … it involves intensive reading about the thing we’ve bought … which has no value at all but seeks to reassure us that the product we bought was what we intended.
Well the politicians have been through that stage on the global warming argument, and they’ve discovered that the product description the salesmen of the IPCC sold them, doesn’t match up at all to the evidence of the shoddy science they’ve bought.
It is only a matter of time before it goes back as “unfit for intended use”.
Beautifully put.
Yes it is up to us, who dare to question the mob.
Going with the crowd is so much easier, but the historic results of acquiescing to the madness of crowd, are starkly writ on our past.
Letting the authors of this CAGW obscenity slip away unpunished will encourage even more extreme lunacy in the future.
Modern democratic government appears to be the culprit here.
Our bureaucracies created this falsehood, deliberately to serve their global agenda, the UN seems to be a paradise of the unaccountable,unelectable, “expert”.
The Canadian connection, I find intriguing, Mr Strong,The Federal Liberal Party and our overtly socialist civil service, there is many indications that CAGW, strip the wealth, was orchestrated,promoted and is being protected from investigation, by these people.
Note also their intermarriages with the Democrats of the USA.
These activities are their normal behaviour, steal from the masses to enrich the well connected.
As a canadian I hate to think this, but blame Canada might be true.
Perhaps we Canadians can atone for releasing this obscenity upon the world, by being the first to hold criminal investigations into this crime of perpetuating a fraud with taxpayers dollars?
Huh. Mann accused McIntyre of “scientific fraud.” He didn’t call McIntyre’s hockey stick a fraud. He accused the man himself of scientific fraud. Has Canada ever been awarded the Nobel Prize?
Atlas Shrugged…
It was Climategate that turned me from an unconcerned and ambivalent spectator of the circus to a fire-spitting sceptic. Finding out about how ‘fellow scientists’ were misbehaving really stuck in my craw. And watching the likes of Mann and Hansen with their faces all screwed up by cognitive dissonance, just drove the point home: These shysters are a bunch of self-agrandizing has-beens determined to hold onto the meme, even while knowing that they are full of shytte.
Still very very disappointed by FOIAs last ureleased release…must have been meat in there. ?!
It’s utterly incredible to me that Jones, Mann, et. al., are still pushing on and continuing as if Climategate never occurred; maybe it’s time to remove the gloves and hit these tools where it hurts.
Think about the amounts that have been wasted in enriching these mendicants. They should be made to repay every bloody cent.
Climategate was the turning point in the battle against climate alarmist Eco-fascism. Someday the person or persons responsible for leaking the Climategate emails will be awarded the Medal of Honor. I welcome the day.
I just want to take a moment to offer my #ClimateThanks to Bjorn Lomborg, Dr. Salby, Dr. Curry, Dr. Spenser, Dr. Shaviv, Dr.’s Pielke for action tackling the threat of climate change policy.
http://www.barackobama.com/news/climate-thanks/
“For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable “sign” of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.’ – Fred Pearce, New Scientist, October 1996.
Amen to that!
And apparently they’re still searching. TheGreenGrok (Bill Chameides) had aSeptember 10th blog post entitled “Starting to Suss Out Connections Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change”. The general message was “Scientists start to meet a ‘grand challenge’… to determine the effect of human activities on climate… It cited 19 papers filled with the usual alarmist pap: “modeling results indicate, may have influenced, potential increased risk, can be explained mainly by, likely…, yada, yada, yada”. Despite the claim, nothing conclusively connected human activities to climate change.
To which I commented:
“Without a doubt, determining the effect of human activities on climate is the ‘grandest’ challenge faced by climate research. To my knowledge, no one has yet been able to separate the effect(s) of human activities on climate from natural variation. Please provide references to the paper or papers that have successfully done so. These of course would be peer reviewed papers with data available for replication. Please refrain from listing papers based on models, as the projections of every climate model drifts further from reality with each passing day.”
Bill Chameides reply:
There are so many papers I would not know where to start. Suggest you start with the latest IPCC report and/or the science part of the National Research Council’s America’s Climate Choices report.
FAIL!
And thanks FOIA for publishing the climategate e-mails! #ClimateThanks
If the 99 per cent are quacks, supporting a cult from which they are lining their own pockets, I’d
much rather believe the 1 per cent.
The analogy is simply wrong and silly, and has been used rather stupidly recently and on other occasions by David Cameron, in defence of his own AGW stance.
If 99 per cent of doctors told me I was ill, I would believe them. If 99 per cent of AGW fanatics say that global warming is happening, contrary to the evidence of the last 17 years, I would say show me the proof, your diagnosis is false; you are making it up for your own personal profit.
It’s wonderful how these people try to strengthen their case by using this mythical 99 per cent figure. I’m quite certain that if it were possible to poll all the thousands of climate scientists around the world, then there wouldn’t be anything like the 99 per cent figure they try to hang on to. The figure would fall dramatically, probably to far less than 50 per cent. Can someone tell the Camerons and the Obamas of this world to wake up and look at the facts; If they do, then they wouldn’t allow themselves to look so stupid when trying to support the unsupportable.
From Dr. Christy’s comment….”The “consensus” reports now are just the consensus of those who agree with the consensus.”
Anthony, you may want to fix “I operated the sever…” in your reply to Martin A. A typo with quite the opposite intent!
[Fixed, thanks. — mod.]
Some people mistakenly call this ‘crony capitalism’ but there is no capitalism involved. Please google Mussolini and corporatism. You’ll find this is a form of socialism known as ‘fascism.’ While fascism may appear at first glance to be a form of capitalism, it’s not.
more solyent green!: “You’ll find this is a form of socialism known as ‘fascism.’”
Hmm… Specifically, when the industry leaders tell the government how to regulate their industry, and on the condition that the government gets partial to full temporary vetoes or nationalization, then it’s fascism. In the US, this arrangement can be found with… just about all the contentious entities. Labor Unions, anything medical related, all non-credit financials, etc. And yes, it is a go-to haven for existing stake-holders to exercise rent seeking behaviour.
To my knowledge cap and trade fails some of the definitional necessities to be considered a fascistic model. More specifically its akin to patent grants or other guild related scarcity schemes. Still rent-seeking, of course. Just throwing this out there for clarity before the misplaced Godwin’s start rolling in.
Good post Anthony. I might add to your account of reducing births. We also burn our corn in our cars rather than finding a way to feed it to the malnourished.
establishments to call them out for by this failure , which can only mean that when ‘the cause ‘ falls its will do much damage to all science , particularly in regards to public trust , on its way down.
And for that we may all end paying the price ,ironical especially in the environmental area.
The wife and I popped Kelly’s write up in the text-to-speech app and sat back for the last two hours laughing and remembering the various episodes. No, I do not wonder how Mann, Jones et. al. are still business as usual. If you watch the various committee meetings on C-SPAN and listen to the unchallenged outright fraudulent statements made by witnesses in committee it is soon realized that it does not matter if it is right or wrong all that matters is that the agreed upon conclusion has been reached. Although Andrew at Bishop Hill recently pointed to a recent hearing of a Scottish Parliament Committee on fracking with two different sessions that was informative, honest, refreshing and devoid of all non-sense.
Yeah, what happened to the third tranche? I keep thinking I missed something. Did I?
/Mr Lynn
Isn’t it fascinating how the inexorable tendency of all cap-and-trade systems is to drive the price of CO2 to zero? The market resists paying for goods and benefits not received.
It seems we may be flogging a dead horse here. Nearly all the comments on climate issues even in mainstream media are anti-AGW. Just take a look at the articles through Google News. One exception may be the Guardian which is notoriously pro AGW. ie AGW will definitely disappear as an issue.
Yet when I call it a con job Warmists hyperventilate. They have asked me why should climate scientists behave so badly? What have they got to gain? The IPCC authors are not paid. And I have repeatedly given them the above examples as the motivation – I just used different, harsher words. These con artists do get paid, by keeping the gravy train on tracks. An don’t forget the tropical jaunts. Cancun wildness.
On honesty. My bold.
You can search the emails below.
http://di2.nu/foia/foia.pl
When will Climategate III be searchable?
But why not pay Shell to do something it has been doing for over 30 years to get MORE oil out!!!?
[my bold]
Thanks Anthony for linking to my article. All I did was highlight Mike Kelly’s comic masterpiece, which distils the often rather boring exchanges between scientific functionaries in order to extract the pure juice of their underlying thinking.
I also made two points which I’ll repeat here for those (like me) who are allergic to following up every link:
While most of the readers here (like me) had a quick look at the Climategate Files and then went on to our favourite blogs to find out what everyone else thought about it, Michael H. Kelly stayed with the files – for several days and nights it seems, right to the end. And he wrote down his thoughts as they came to him – the James Joyce of the History of Science.
Mike Kelly’s short story-format work should be read by all the politico-scientific experts who think that the seven official reports into Climategate tell the true story.
“When the history of climate warmism comes to be written, the comments of one Michael H. Kelly will be a key testament to the fact that the lies of the politico/scientific establishment were obvious to any independent critical mind. This simple fact is important.”
When I wrote my post, Mike Kelly’s blog was down and I wrote about him in the past as of a dear departed. He’s just shown up in a comment at my blog, and I urge all readers of WUWT to get over to his blog at
http://michaelkelly.artofeurope.com/
It’s a very English humo(u)r – dare I say it – (despite his Irish name).
Here in UK David Cameron is getting stick for suggesting the Government rows back on taxes designed to penalise fossil fuel use, fund non-ff investment and promote energy efficiency projects, all after claiming that his would be the greenest government ever.
He needs to understand that there is nothing remotely “green” about anti-carbon policies (because despite the best efforts of the vested interests exposed in the Climategate e-mails, CO2 isn’t the bogey-man that the flawed models try to scare us with) and that the Government’s money would be better spent, yes, on energy efficiency programmes to help disadvantaged households and neighbourhoods, but primarily, and urgently, on a MIX of state-of-the-art generating capacity, including super-critical coal-fired plant as well as new gas and nuclear stations.
The UK is getting perilously close to a massive generating gap, so he needs to act now,
(a) to tell the European Commission that existing coal plant will be kept open in order to maintain security of supply until replacement units are available, and
(b) to direct DECC, HMT and other ministers and officials to work with UK generators both to keep enough existing plant on line and to approve new builds with the minimum of further delay and with no non-commercial price guarantees – such subsidies need to be junked with the windmills, solar panels, etc. that would never have been built without them.
But the sad truth is that Cameron has put UK energy policy into the hands of Zygons – as red beneath their skin as watermelons but infinitely more dangerous.
“This may be the happy ending, if you like, at least unless and until this new blood become as crusty and stuck on their pet theories as the old guard.”
And if there was any doubt about the power of the “pet theory” – or what Francis Bacon quaintly but it turns out accurately called “idols” – we now have Youtube to remind us.
So what the heck happened to climategate 3.0? In March we had an announcement that the password had been released to Anthony and a raft of other skeptics and then. .. nothing. ..
I first read about Michael Kelly on Geoff chambers blog a few days ago and after reading this thread decided to buy his book on Amazon UK. It’s not for the easily offended and, as Geoff points out, is very british in humour. IMO, for less than five pounds, it’s worth every Penny.
NB- it’s written under the pen name of Sunny McCreary and NOT Michael Kelly.
Oops, just noticed he’s written a number of books under his name Michael H Kelly. It’s his latest title ‘my godawful life’ I referred to under the Sunny McCreaRy pseudonym. Apologies.
I’m not expert at what cap and trade schemes will lead to but it seems to me that, rather than being ‘socialism’ as some opponents claim, it will enable big companies (and economies) to get bigger at the expense of smaller ones.
I believe fascism is the word opponents were looking for.
“People are already making huge amounts from carbon-trading, and companies like Shell are preparing to cash in on carbon-capture.”
Yes, Shell should be well positioned to cash in, as far back as 2000 they were considering accepting an invitation to “act as a strategic partner” with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, i.e.:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0962818260.txt&search=shell
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0968691929.txt&search=shell
And the “Notes from the meeting with Shell International attached”?:
http://junksciencearchive.com/FOIA/documents/uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc
I wonder if Shell ever accepted the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit.’s “invitation to act as a strategic partner”, which is “broadly equivalent to a ‘flagship alliance’ in the TC proposal.” If the “strategic partnership” was accepted I’d also be interested to know, not only about “the provision of funding”, but also the “(limited but genuine) role in setting the research agenda etc.” that Shell had at UEA CRU, especially as “Shell’s interest is not in basic science” rather “they are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.”
Also, the UAE’s relationship with Shell, Exxon-Mobil, Enron and BP Amoco;
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/uea-sleeping-with-the-enemy/
makes it laughable that Micheal Mann’s book offers:
Careful if you read the source of this quote, i.e. today’s Huffington Post article “Amazing Grace: A Survivor’s Story”, as you might throw up in your mouth…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/d-r-tucker/amazing-grace-a-survivors_b_4340632.html
Eliza says: Nov 26, 2013 at 12:28 pm
“It seems we may be flogging a dead horse here. Nearly all the comments on climate issues even in mainstream media are anti-AGW.”
Eliza I wish you were right, but until the politicians start to listen to sceptics there is still a mountain to climb (on both sides of the Atlantic, and of the Channel). They employ ‘advisors’ who will tell them what they want to hear. The papers they read most often here in the UK (the Guardian and the Independent) are both still devoted to the AGW religion, as is the BBC; these are also the chosen media sources beloved of teachers. Most young people have had this stuff rammed into their brains since birth.
I agree that there has been a remarkable turnaround in the tone of newspaper comment threads, in the last couple of years, but this has yet to be turned into votes or action – viz, the words of Obama, Milliband, Merkel et al.
And the HadCRUT team’s positive relationship with the fossil fuel industry is longstanding:
The following email from Geoff Jenkins Head, Climate Prediction Programme at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which is part of the Met. Office. For reference, the Hadley Center partners with the University of East Anglia (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRUto generate the HadCRUT temperature data set:
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/0277.txt
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/about-cru/history
In fact, the University Of East Anglia’s “Unit of Climatic Research” was
http://books.google.com/books?id=50HjSi5o8J0C&q=page+285#v=onepage&q=page%20285&f=false
So when the Hadley Center and UEA CRU get funding directly from the fossil fuel industry they claim that “at no time did we come under any even slight pressure to get us to say or omit anything in papers we wrote”. However, when Willie Soon gets funding from a foundation that has a fossil fuel company among its contributors, his credibility is impugned and Greenpeace challenges “the Marshall Insitute on its sources of funding (which include ExxonMobil).”
The hypocrisy is mindboggling…
I think its fair to say that those that claims some grand pro-AGW conspiracy are no more accurate than those claiming some grand oil funded one against it. In practice, it needs no conspiracy just perfectly normal self-severing interest. Take climate ‘science ‘ as an area , before AGW a little cared about and less understood poor relation to the physical sciences. After AGW it become big league. With funding coming out of its ears with lots of jobs , tenure etc and for some high public profiles , even political influence .
Therefore it not a real surprise to find those that have enjoyed the ride on the way up are working hard to stop the roller-coaster from going down the other side of the hill. While for organisations like the IPCC the equation is even simpler, no AGW no existence. No conspiracy is required, it is just human nature at work complete with arrogance and self-interest.
It well-worth reading Bacon on the reasons why he felt he had to invent the ‘scientific method’, just to remind ourselves of what it was really like to live under an unquestionable and pervasive AGW-style mindset.
I also think that Climatology is just the tip of the emerging post-modern/.anti-enlightenment world of ideological politics
Hans H says:
November 26, 2013 at 9:39 am
Still very very disappointed by FOIAs last ureleased release…must have been meat in there. ?!
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Estimates for time required to redact email addresses in N zillion emails?
@tony nordberg says: November 27, 2013 at 2:18 am
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Welcome to the world of post-normal science…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science
Kinda all reminds me of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSGWoXDFM64
Just wanted to mention keep up the great work!
John Smith http://dumm1.co.uk