Live from Copenhagen

I'm sitting here at the Texas State Capitol with Americans for Prosperity watching the AFP News conference live from Copenhagen, Denmark where the elite of the elite are discussing how to strap the West with a tax and trade system based on a myth, a system that would bring us to our knees and deprive us of freedom and prosperity.

I got lost in the Capitol looking for E2.102 when the event was being held in E2.012. When I came in the room Lord Monckton was up and Cindy Mallette told me I had just missed the protestors. Shucks!

Lord Monckton warned of Obama's potential signing away of US sovereignty though such an executive action, even if confirmed by Congress, could be reversed by a subsequent Administration, thank God, but we can't let it get confirmed in the first place.

Next up was a German, Wolfgang Muller, who talked about the cost of going sustainable/green as experienced in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The cost of living will at least double. The implication of that, though not stated, is the expansion of poverty.

Then Phil Kerpen, policy director took the podium. Sorry, I didn't catch that.

Now Rick Perry is up via video talking about the issue form a Texas perspective. Cost to Texans will be at least $1100 per year. Texas will loose 400,000 jobs. Any limits the EPA impose won't make a dent in CO2 levels, according to the EPA itself. He encouraged us to speak out against the EPA and those in Congress who support cap and trade.

Steve Lonegan, from Philadelphia, is up decrying the Little Red Book that the left is using to promote the climate change agenda. They unabashedly use such a communist symbol to indoctrinate the world.

Steve Moore of the WSJ just joined Lonegan on the stage. It's 10 degrees below zero today in North Dakota. It snowed in Houston last week. Not sure where the evidence for global warming is. Just a couple of decades ago the consensus was that the planet was cooling. Over the last ten years the earth has cooled, not warmed.

Only FOX News is following the climategate story. Steve took an informal poll of the audience and found that about half thought Obamacare was the biggest threat to freedom, about half thought that Cap&Trade was the biggest threat to freedom and a minority thought Card Check was the greatest threat to freedom. The climate alarmists say that hurricanes will increase because of global warming effects but this year we had few hurricanes and none that reached category 4.

Tim Philips from Copenhagen is talking about the events going on around the US.

Phil is now talking about the economic impact of C&T. The average family will loose 1000s of dollars of disposable income. It seems that the leftist want Americans to dispose of their money into the hands of leftists like themselves to spend as the left pleases. He said that what will come out of Copenhagen will be an executive agreement and in the Spring they will try to bring it up in Congress. Of more immediate concern are regulatory changes at the EPA, such as the recent "finding" that CO2 is a pollutant.

Now we have a speaker here at the Capitol, Kathleen Harnett White. She said that either the protesters or the counter-protesters (I'm not sure which she was referring to since I missed the protest but I expect it was the counter-protesters defending the status quo at the conference there in Copenhagen) were representative of those "scientists" who say that we are ignorant climate change deniers, just as some people are Holocaust deniers. The C&T bill is so complex and would produce 1000s of regulations and corresponding bureaucracies. Those "scientists" who say that global warming is unequivocally proven are spouting dogma rather than science. The EPA in it's endangerment finding last week regarding CO2 is regurgitated the "findings" of the IPCC. Texas needs to litigate this finding. We need to reverse it. The scientists that testified before the Texas Legislature last session were uniformly believers in climate change. The members of the Legislators were afraid to ask these "scientists" questions for fear of being tagged a denier. Texas leads the nation in CO2 emissions producing 670 million metric tons of CO2 per year. This is a sign of our vibrant economy, size, and the fact that we prove the country with a large part of its energy needs.

The best that could come out of this focus on CO2 would be if scientists arise that tried to measure in the troposphere the man caused CO2 and how it interacts with the other molecules and compounds up there. In other words doe real science.

Now Ms. White is taking questions. A couple of lively ones, including one from the blogger (me) about the implications of the reports of doctored data and why people don't realize that the entire man-causes-climate-change "science" is a fraud. If the proponents have to stoop to such measures (as faked hockey stick graphs) is it any doubt what is going on. Such "scientist" can make the data support whatever they want it to support.

Another lady commented that we need to not skip over explaining what CO2 is. It is not soot. It is an invisible and odorless gas at normal atmospheric conditions. It is not the bellowing black smoke that used to come out of smokestacks before we decided to cleaned up the air from real pollutants.

Ms. White ended with the costs of fuel (below) and with the statement that if you care about people you will care about and promoting freedom and prosperity, and you will fight the EPA and Cap & Trade.

Cost of alternative sources of fuel for electric generation (cost per kwh):

Wind

$24

Natural Gas

$0.23

Coal

$0.08

End Report.

RealClimate Blog: Part of the ClimateGate "Front"

I posted the following comment to the RealClimate website on This thread. It was a challenge for the website to 'come clean'. They moderate comments and did not deign to allow this comment to get published:

Prof Mann had a letter to the editor in the Washington Post this Sunday, and directed people to RealClimate website - here.

This is what Prof Mann said of RealClimate website in one of the CRU emails to colleagues writing a 'helpful' paper: " We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd like us to include. You're also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put

forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We'll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont' get to use the RC comments as a megaphone..."

#18 says "I was under the impression that this is supposed to be a neutral website discussing climate." Well, #18 - I was too - once. We and a lot of other folks who decided to take it all on trust were apparently 'played'. The question the above quote raises is - Is RealClimate about science, where-ever it leads, or is it stage-managed PR on behalf of the Jones/Mann/IPCC viewpoint?

If RealClimate wants to extricate itself from the widening scandal that has now has seen Jones step down and Mann be put under investigation, it can take steps to rehabilitation:

1. Offer an apology to the McIntyre's of the world. Acknowledge that McIntyre and ANYONE who wants the data backing up ANY peer-reviewed paper or ANYTHING that appears in IPCC has the right to get it. No complaints about the burden of such request is legitimate, replicating results is vital to science. We now know that several of the items and issues he has raised have been legitimate, valid and have ADVANCED the science. Whether McIntyre and ClimateAudit is right or wrong on a particular item, we now have seen - shockingly - how groupthink and attempts to hide information leads to bad science.

2. End the policy of moderating comments at RealClimate. It's a poor way of way of stifling the knowledgeable skeptics, since I would guess their sites are now more visited. Attempts to stifle the skeptic voices has been the Mann & Jones way, as shown in the CRU emails - trying to get journal editors canned, refusing to allow certain peer-reviewed publication into the IPCC chapters, steering people into illegally obstructing FOI requests - and it has destroyed their credibility as professional scientists. It has done NO GOOD.

It's time for a New Era of Openness. Engage and accept the alternative views, not as correct per se, but as worthy of respect instead of revulsion and shunning. As of now, there has been enough of a breach of trust that at minimum the IPCC will need a whole new set of Lead Authors and a whole new level of transparency and open-ness to the next round, or the entire enterprise will be treated as a farce.

We will see if RealClimate / Gavin realizes how seriously this has damaged the credibility of ALL involved in these emails and work, and works diligently to repair it. Your actions will tell all. As Jesus put it, 'know them by their fruits'.

Postscript - we have our answer: RealClimate didn't post this comment. The blog, which was founded by Prof Mann among others, is part of the 'front' to deny the legitimacy of questions about the theory of man-made global warming, calling the skeptics of AGW theory 'deniers'. They have no interest in admitting the errors of their sponsors or changing their ways.

Climategate Aftershocks

I knew it would be a bombshell, but it's gotten bigger and more fundamental than many thought possible: Dr Phil Jones - who in emails wrote about deleting data and emails rather than submit to FOI requests, who spoke of using the 'trick' to 'hide the decline', and who conspired to can journal editors - stepped down ('temporarily'). Penn State is putting Prof Mann of hockey stick infamy under investigation. As usual, the Lamestream Media is in "denial" mode, underplaying how serious this is, and the real story is on the internet, where you can find the real emails and judge for yourself.

Climate Depot is having a field day with this story - links galore. Here is a good summary by Lord Monkton (PDF): http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught%20Green-Handed%20Climategate%20Scandal.pdf

What it all means is the skeptics have been proved right in several areas:
1. Skeptics were suspicious of 'data massaging' and the error of torturing data to fit conclusions - and the emails and data released shows things even WORSE than we might have thought: outright fudging of temperature series, skewing of data, using 'tricks' to make misleading presentations of data, mistakes in how proxies are used are admitted in emails but not shared with others, so bad data is reused, and now CRU claims the underlying raw data doesnt even exist! They have a 'dog ate my homework' excuse.
2. Skeptics claimed the IPCC was shutting out dissenters - the emails prove it now; attempts to get Journal editors who didnt toe the line canned, attempts to keep dissent out of IPCC reports, refusal to public review notes, and a complete paranoid approach to any questioning of their 'science'
3. Skeptics were claiming that the 'Hockey Stick Team' scientists were denying access to data to replicate results - we now have emails where Jones and Mann talking about how to subvert FOI requests and how to stop the skeptics from figuring out their 'tricks'.

What is left of the 'science'?
#1 - The temperature trends for the last century were skewed - Lord Monckton explains more in above summary, using the example of New Zealand, where "official" temperature took raw temp data and 'adjusted' it to create a warming trend that in the raw data doesnt even exist!
#2 - The IPCC's credibility is now complete shot. The 'system' was gamed to create a phony 'consensus'; we skeptics knew that, but this email release proved it.
#3 - The credibility of ANYONE who claims "the science is settled" is now shot.
There IS no science left to trust, we have to hit the 'reset' button on every brick of evidence
in the whole chain, because the behavior of these men so skewed the 'science' it is all tainted.
#4 - The hockey stick is busted - unproven if not a myth.
#5 - The IPCC models were based on suppositions, and the 'skeptic' theories that pointed out the data that undermined the models was shunned. These too need to be reviewed from the ground up, and until this is done the models have no value.

Without models, a hockey stick ramp up and temperature records worthy of trust, there is not much to go on.

What to do now?
- Removal of any global warming theory nonsense from schools. This stuff has the credibility of Piltdown Man and Lysenko-ism as of now.
- They need to FIRE Prof Mann and Dr Jones and possibly charge them with FOIA violations.
- The IPCC needs to fire all lead authors, and start from scratch with a whole other team
and a process based on 100% transparency. Or failing that, the IPCC needs to disband.
- Congress needs to have an investigation and needs to put a rule into Govt-funded research requiring the full and complete sharing of data produced to support published articles; less than that is not acceptable.

UPDATE 12/2: House and Senate GOP Leaders Call for Withdrawal of EPA Endangerment Finding, Other Rules Based on Dubious Science Exposed by E-mails .