Reasoned Debate and Climate Change

For all those ardent Warministas out there (and by-now avowed sceptics - like me), this is what any future debate about the human impact on our climate should resemble. "Only connect" said Forster. At least these four are willing to try. Unfortunately, for many, mainly of the 'settled science', AGW brigade, (whatever their reasons), even that small step towards a necessary synthesis is a step far too far.

Brook + Readfearn / Monckton + Plimer from Manda Chuva on Vimeo.

Climate Ripper

I'm quite proud that my (sadly curtailed) rip of this performance by the great man, Lord Monckton, in Australia a month or so ago has now been watched by nearly 6000 people and commented on by just shy of 100 (including me).



This particular thought disease, 'Man Made Climate Change' or whatever the dangerous zealots are peddling it as now, is an especially vicious example of something we humans experience from time to time, thanks to our insatiable small-mindedness and eternal stupidity. But thanks to the apparent re-emergence, if not resurgence, of collective rational thought since Climategate, this latest example of the scale of the capacity of humans for superstitious folly is definitely on its last legs.

I think we're finally beginning to move on, socially and scientifically. And that's a very good thing, because when this ugly lunacy has been defeated, we can once again begin to focus on genuine environmental issues (the things I was brought up to care about), like saving the rainforests, saving endangered species and, ultimately, saving ourselves from watermelon, AGW, misanthropic lunatics who seem to prefer mass landscape vandalism over genuine environmentalism. They're basically Marxists masquerading as concerned citizens. We stopped that before; we'll stop it again.

But given how deep they've managed to penetrate our society, however, we're going to need not just better science, but a hell of a lot of luck if we are ever even to hope to cure our society of their corrosive, possibly deadly, disease.

I think we'll get that luck. We did in the past, and we will in the future. Maybe luck has something to do with being right - and determined!

Monckton: IPCC Chief Is Going To Jail

Not "should be going" you will note (when you look at the video below), but "is going". The modal and tense choices are very telling and, I can guarantee, deliberate. Railway engineer and non-climate scientist, but very dodgy chief of the IPCC scam-mongers, Rajendra Pachauri "is going" to jail, says Lord Monckton. A philosopher and logician as precise and vigilant when it comes to language as Christopher Monckton would never have said, publicly or privately, that in this way unless he already knew there was strong enough evidence to permit him to say it without inviting some type of legal challenge.

It's fair to say, therefore, that things are about to get a lot better for us, the long-abused, stolen-from taxpayer - and much worse for Pachauri and his crew. That would, of course, also implicate this Labour government. What a surprise.

If in doubt, vote them out!



Hat tip: Climategate

Astonishing

James Delingpole, citing Bishop Hill, is as gobsmacked as the latter by a professional analysis of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report (you know, the one with all the "Gates" in it) by a scientist named Andrew Lacis, a colleague of arch warmist James Hansen at GISS, and someone who in no way whatsoever could be branded a "sceptic." Here's an astonishing bit:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

The entire thing, naturally, was buried by the IPCC thus:

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

It is quite difficult to frame in one's mind the kind of mentalities and egos at work here. Suffice to say, their levels of by now well-documented obscene corruption, which has already led to the starvation of millions (thanks mainly to the cultivation of subsidised biofuel crops on good agricultural land instead of food), means that we can safely conclude that they will stoop to anything to keep their hideous misanthropic ideology alive - and their own pathetic 'careers' - for as long as they possibly can. This is going to be one hell of a battle - but it is one that common sense, reason and good science cannot afford to lose.

Remember, also, that this Labour government has been, and remains, one of the major villains of this piece. We can start to correct the world's current rational imbalance by ejecting it when we are finally given the opportunity. But once the Tories are in power, if they don't immediately reassess their ridiculous commitment to this unhinged - and now unravelling - politically-motivated (it's mainly inspired by anti-capitalist people-haters) dogma, then they should be next. Better they correct their policies now, then, in a timely and honest fashion.

But first things first. First, we must deal with Labour. I'm utterly confident that the British people will do just that, and good on them for it.

Andrew Neil Turns Up Heat On Hirst

Andrew Neil, who has recently come out on his blog on the side of reason, gave John Hirst an absolute grilling on the Daily Politics this morning. More please! Hat tip to Climategate.com, which provided the clip and comments:

Oh this is good, really good. We did a story two days ago, UK Met Office’s enormously wrong weather predictions earn department big pay increases, and it turns out now even the BBC is questioning The Met Office’s weather forecasting record, and record salaries. And questioning surprisingly hard.

In this clip, Andrew Neal grills Met Office chief John Hirst.

The best line (4:08) of the video and perhaps of the year: “Since you can’t the summer or the winter right in your forecasts, why should we give any credence to your forecast to what the temperature will be in the 2050 or 2020, which is what you do.”

This is the BBC? Sound more like Fox News, and we love it!

It's good that finally - finally - these guys are starting to be held to account for their lies. No sign of Hirst's bonus being taken away from him, though. And how long, I wonder, before Neil is silenced by the warmists at the BBC? It's possible.

Incidentally, Climategate.com is an American blog, in case you were wondering (no reason why you should be, of course).

Anyway, here's the vid.:



Marvellous.

[By the way, you'll have noticed Hirst's slip at 3.56-9. He says the science of meteorology (and therefore, presumably, climatology) is still a 'developmental science'. Oh really? Then we can take it that the science is far from 'settled' then. Curious.]

Ice Nation

A beautiful NASA satellite photo of the British Isles (courtesy of Prodicus)...


...and it's still getting colder. But it is certainly beautiful - beautiful and deadly, unfortunately.

I'll tell you the truth. The climate has certainly changed over the past few years - it's got significantly colder. Why? No one knows.

But while our governments continue to follow the corrupt scientists still stubbornly pushing the debunked theory that was anthropogenic global warming, people will just have to fend for themselves. The entire Northern Hemisphere is frozen and idiot governments around the world still refuse to halt the suicidal policy of emissions capping.

Meanwhile, just to meet ridiculous, arbitrary targets derived from junk science and pushed by misanthropic delusionals, we have been growing less food, replacing crops with subsidised biofuel for instance, just when that food was needed most. Result: scarcity, record grain prices and, inevitably, starvation among the world's poorest. We are discouraged from burning coal - which is still plentiful, especially where I am (and the 'cleanest' in the world). Result: energy dependency, massively high fuel and energy prices and, inevitably, death among the nation's poorest and most vulnerable. We waste vast amounts of resources on alternative energy systems that don't work. Result: well, look around you. If this cold snap goes on much longer, we'll run out of energy altogether, having failed to fix the roof while the sun was, quite literally, shining. Again, the nation's poorest and most vulnerable (especially the old) will simply die off.

So you see, the ecofascists of this nation and this world already have a hell of a lot of blood on their hands and nothing they say or do from now until doomsday (itself a concept with which they are tellingly obsessed) will ever compensate for their crimes against humanity.

The sooner these criminals are brought to book, the sooner the world can be fed, warm - and sane - again.

PS: If you're a fan of the ice, you could always join these guys' protest against global warming...
Hat tip: Steve Green

Climategate.com

Hat tip to James Delingpole for flagging up in his latest blog post (about how the warmists and alarmists have just taken one step closer to prosecution for their deceptions and frauds, at least in the USA) an excellent new AGW debunking blog called, with refreshing bluntness, simply "Climategate." It does exactly what it says on the tin. If you are a fan of the truth, then check it out - you'll find the links in the sidebar. If you prefer the lies, however, then you are already well catered for (try 'realclimate' or the BBC, for instance).

"Climategate's" subtitle, by the way,"Anthropogenic global warming, history's biggest scam," fits in very nicely with Christopher Booker's latest superb remarks on the subject of the Met Office's role in "history's biggest scam." You can find it in today's Sunday Telegraph, here.

As for me, I'm sitting in front of my computer right now trying desperately to warm up after having walked my dog in sub zero temperatures down by the seaside. It's bloody freezing where I am - on the south coast of Wales. (What, in January? Never!)

"Science Is Not A Belief System"

This, the core message of Monckton's typically impressive - and devastating - recent Berlin lecture, resonates more now than ever before, especially in the shadow of the Copenhagen travesty and the light of the Climategate scandal.

Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference from CFACT on Vimeo.

Hat tip: The Red Rag

A Real Scientist...

Many thanks to Plato Says for flagging this clip a few days ago. What a breath of fresh air. Almost makes you want to become a Kiwi (ed: or an Aussie, even). (I'm still tempted, actually.)

Anyway, over to the sane Professor:

Delingpole For PM

No, not Prime Minister (yet), but "Proven Massive" (in the Ali G vernacular, naturally). In case you can't be arsed to click through to the original post, (and why should you?), here it is in Gloriously Ripped Technicolor (GRT).

Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.

A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).

Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.

And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!

There's a film, too:

It's official, folks: only "assholes" care about reality and humanity.

I, for one, am therefore a proud asshole.

Are you?

Rex Murphy: A Clear Assessment of Climategate

A big tip of the hat to the increasingly dangerous Barking Spider (a superior species of Independent Blogger) for putting me in the way of this wonderful commentary on the real implications of Climategate by someone who can hardly be described as a 'flat earther' (see Brown's front page slurs in tomorrow's Graun), namely, highly respected Canadian political commentator, Rex Murphy.



Who, in their right mind, can argue with that?

The MSB

One thing that has struck me over the past few weeks is that an as-yet little recognised media phenomenon has been thrown into stark relief by the Climategate scandal, and it's not the MSM, of course. We always knew that they would follow on in the jet stream of this ever-growing story, pressured by the veritable torrent of people lending their support to the 'new realism' over so-called man made climate change (a sexist term in itself, if you want to be picky - ie: politically correct). The legacy media has once more been shown up for what it is: hopelessly old hat and out of touch with public opinion, preferring instead to peddle the alarmist lies, for the sake of ratings in ITV's case (you should have seen that channel's coverage on their 10 o'clock bulletin last night) or for the sake of politics in the case of the BBC. The newspapers have been fairly predictable, as one might imagine. Left wing rags have followed the left-green ideological armageddon scenario to the letter (naturally), while the rest of them have hedged themselves even deeper into a kind of editorial schitzophrenia.

So that's them, then. But what about the blogs? Well, something has now emerged that seems to me quite interesting, what you might call the "Main Stream Blogosphere." These would include established, high-traffic ones like Dale, Guido, Spectator, the Telegraph (especially Hannan and Delingpole, increasingly) and others I can't think of off the top of my head. What they have done, Guido included (but less so, to his credit), is played a similar game to the non-left media, they've set themselves up as some kind of adjudicators of the debate, thus providing themselves with protection for what they clearly view is their "credibility" among their high-powered political sources and buddies. By pretending to be outside the debate looking in (or down), they don't need to get off the fence. Thus they can avoid rocking the political boat and risk losing access to their MSM and lobby sources - and maintain what they regard as a principled editorial position which enables them to pass judgment on the great mass of genuinely independent, and genuinely (justifiably, given the nature of the revelations) critical, rational anti-MMCC blogs that make up the vast majority of the IB (the Independent Blogosphere). A political predilection has no bearing on these terms, only a willingness to speak one's mind when one feels moved to, and not to stand on the fence for any other reason than genuine agnosticism.

Take this recent Spectator post by David Blackburn, coming as it does hot on the heels of Fraser Nelson's editorial policy statement on Climategate for the paper edition:

Lord Lawson is Andrew Neil’s guest on this week’s BBC Straight Talk and, among other topics, the former chancellor rebuffs Ed Miliband’s accusation of climate change heresy. Lawson said:

“I hope that all parties…take a good hard look at this, we don’t want a sort of Stalinist monolithic line in everything. But I do think, because of the damage that will be done to the economy, that is why, and for very little good, if any, that is why we have got to take a good hard look at the fact that we can’t get a global agreement on this anyway, as will be seen in Copenhagen…So, I think you have got to go back to the drawing board and have a fresh approach. And that is why my think tank is the Global Warming Policy Foundation, it’s not the Global Warming Foundation, it’s the Global Warming Policy Foundation, because it is policy which is so damaging at the present time and threatening so much, and it doesn’t work and it can’t work, and that’s why we’ve got to think of another approach.”

Lawson’s comments are aimed at Cameron as much as anyone else, but he is not ‘denying’ the science, though I am sure he’s sceptical, and rightly so. Like David Davis, Lawson challenges the political approach inspired by the Prophet Stern, which will endanger global growth and condemn billions in the developing world to a slow and grinding death in poverty. Ed Miliband’s “saboteur” jibe proves what Fraser says in this week’s magazine: climate change has morphed from debate to catechism. It is now an issue bereft of rationality. A debate on policy, not science, is an immediate necessity - I fear all Copenhagen will amount to is a joyless shindig.

Rod Liddle was doing the same thing last week, as I wrote at the time, namely, calling for some sort of reasoned debate without actually saying which side of that debate he would feel moved to support. And here we have it again. Ordinarily, you might think that that's all fine and dandy: people are right to keep an open mind, you might think, and that would be true - if that was what was really going on here. Only, it's not. What you are seeing is confusion as the MSB has to face up to something it had hitherto taken for granted. The people who run these uber-news sites (they're not really blogs) had swallowed the whole AGW thing hook, line and sinker, at least publicly. It was the way the wind was blowing, after all. However, they've been left in something of a quandary by the fact that almost their entire readership is taking a much, much harder line on the issue: the traffic is moving!

People who read the MSB avidly, like me, never really thought of it that way before - up until now, that is. They previously regarded it as some form of blessed, independent news source free from the traditional forms of bias and/or strong-arm editorialism. Not any more. I'm afraid that one thing Climategate has done, in polarising the debate so completely, whether MSB hacks such as Nelson or Blackburn or Liddle - (the list goes on and on - you know who you are) - like it or not, and encouraging people to stand up and be counted on this great fraud, is smoke out the MSB from its comfort zone. And what a nuisance that must be for them. It's certainly a source of irritation if Liddle is anything to go by. That's a good thing because they need to get off the damn fence, show some backbone and call it as they really see it, because I strongly suspect that is exactly what they are not doing, for the reasons I've noted. (I actually - kind of - respect Will Heaven of the DT blogs for doing just that, though much good it did him! Mainly because he's wrong.)

My point is that the last thing we need is another "Main Stream" anything, much less an MSB, especially when mainstream thinking on this (and many other issues, lest we forget - NHS anyone?) is so compromised and ideological. But it looks like that's just what we have got. Ah well, maybe it was inevitable. It's just another emergent phenomenon in the cultural continuum - and could be just another sign that New Media really has come of age and truly eclipsed the old. So it's not all bad and besides, all of us little people can always vote with our blogrolls - and our mouses - if we're really that unhappy.

Loony Left Equals Loony Greens - And Vice Versa...

(As if we didn't know.)

Iain Dale spotted this extraordinarily vicious rant by left wing blogger and Labour stooge, Sunny Hundal, earlier this evening:

Look at the people who push global warming denialism: Fox News (enough said), The Telegraph (enough said), The Spectator (recently promoting AIDS denialism), Melanie Phillips (enough said), Christopher Booker (has anyone read his Wikipedia entry recently?), James Delingpole (enough said).

These are the kind of fuckwits (Delingpole, Richard North) who think there’s a conspiracy when their article doesn’t appear on Google News or use Google search hits as example of how big the story is.

Calling them ‘denialists’ is being too kind: they should be abused at every instance for the stupidity they churn out. They should be ridiculed, parodied, cussed, and constantly called out for the idiots they are because they deserve it.

Let the scientists do the science. But outside that world is a media full of bullshit artists who have vested interests in promoting ’scepticism’. The Spectator magazine’s hosting of the AIDS denialism film is just one small example. If we retreat on this war between ideologies by trying to be nice, while all they do is throw vitriol and propaganda, then we’ve already lost... There is no reason to take these people seriously or even off them an ounce of respect. If that means the political debate is charged – so be it.

Desperate.

It seems that this moron is calling on loony greens everywhere to be as "vitriolic" (to use his term), violently offensive and libelous/slanderous as possible wherever and whenever they detect any sign of criticism (or "scepticism" and "denialism" as they prefer to call it in their world of anti-debate) of the whole MMCC scam. But is he saying this in the name of the "Green" movement? Of course not, he's saying in the name of the socialist, labour movement to which he subscribes, which hijacked the Green agenda long ago and turned it into what it is today: a misanthropic, anti-capitalist, post-Soviet redux masquerading as an environmental crusade. It's therefore hardly surprising that the sickening slur "denier" is used so frequently. It deliberately associates critics of the warmist agenda with neo-nazis. (Marxists, socialists and communists always were very good at propaganda, after all. And nothing else.)

My point is that the next time anyone is smeared with the term "denier" in public, by dishonest socialists like Hundal, the answer is to sue for defamation. Immediately. It's that serious. Oh, and there I was wondering why the left has suddenly become so obsessed with the libel laws of Great Britain. Now I know: they want to make it impossible for people to protect themselves against mad watermelons like Hundal, who, once the libel laws of this country have been suitably twisted in their favour, would be able to call anyone anything he liked for any reason he chooses. For that reason, and many others, idiots like Hundal and his ilk, deaf as they are to criticism (mindless doctrinaire socialists always are) and blind as they are to the realities of climate change (it's got bugger all to do with people), can be considered a menace to democracy and a threat to freedom of speech and other inalienable human rights. And they should be treated as such; as loonies.

Unfortunately, they also happen to be calling the shots at the moment. So the peril is real. At least until a cure is found for the thought disease that is causing it.

Incidentally, if any doubt remains in your mind about the connection between post-soviet communists and the modern Green, AGW-pushing bandwagon, read this bizarre, pretty troubling article by "former" committed communist, Bea Campbell, from the Guardian (where else?) a few weeks ago. It's titled, rather unsurprisingly, "Why I turned from red to green."

Here's an extract if you can't face the whole thing:

The Green critique of modernity's Faustian recklessness helps to make sense not only of capitalism but also the tragedies of state socialisms. For progressives, whose politics hover between the centre and the far left, this is decisive.

The communist states of the 20th century did for socialism. I was a dynastic communist – my parents were British Bolsheviks, they were good citizens, and became better when Khrushchev gave permission to criticise Stalinism. All that crashed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They could not relinquish the Soviet Union, and thereafter our family rows were on the terrain of Russia. The worst insult my father could hurl was: "You're just a social democrat!"

I remained a communist until 1989, when it was all over. I was part of the anti-Stalinist, Euro-communist wing. We were clever, caused trouble, caught the imagination, but we lost. Or maybe we failed.

Green ideology represents the reconciliation of production and reproduction – that is what yields sustainability.

See? Once a red loony, now a green loony - but still really a red loony, just daubed with lashings of green propaganda. There's no epiphany, just extreme vanity and extremism. In fact, this person and so many like her are just about as egomaniacal as it's possible for a human being to be without actually regressing fully into some form of narcissistic solipsism; a complete but ecstatic break from reality. But they cling on with their fingernails and the support of like-minded, wrongheaded individuals, who serve merely to service and reinforce their delusions.

And people wonder why I'm doubtful that man made climate change is a real, measurable phenomenon, especially after the Climategate scandal (and the emerging, similar NASA story). Well, not people like the loony Hundal, actually. He just thinks I'm a nazi. Nice - and QED: the man is not sane.

One thing is certain, though, David Cameron might have gone green in the name of saving human beings from their tendency to like to keep warm, but he had better wake up to the fact pretty pronto that he's playing with political fire.

We're All Gonna Drown!

Boy, that didn't take long, did it? The warmist propaganda machine is now going into overdrive to try somehow to repair the damage of Climategate on the eve of the Copenhagen summit waste of everyone's time and our money.

This article will be splashed (ho ho) all over tomorrow's Times newspaper with its IPCC lala land "warning" that sea levels are going to rise by a thousand feet in six months unless we all commit suicide tomorrow (actually, it's only 60m according to arch AGW loon, James Hansen but let's not split hairs here, right?). All over the world, search engines have been doctored and large sections of the MSM has done all it can to bury the biggest scientific scandal of the modern era. Now they're moving into the next phase - Operation: Scare the Shit Out of Everyone. Lo and behold, here's their first offering, complete with tame German professor and a peer reviewed analysis (peer reviewed using the CRU, "have you hidden the decline?" approach, naturally) revealing new, devastating results of - well what, exactly? Something that might happen if a whole bunch of other stuff happens, based on models that tell them what should be happening - but isn't. Top research. Stop press. Cue banner headline. It's a scoop!

Read it and weep, folks. (Oh, and then, of course, "think of the children!")

Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of global warming, an important international study has concluded.

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4 metres — twice that predicted two years ago.

Such a rise in sea levels would engulf island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific, devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka and force London, New York and Shanghai to spend billions on flood defences.

Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C — the target set for next week’s Copenhagen summit — sea levels could still rise by 50cm, double previous forecasts, according to the report.

SCAR, a partnership of 35 of the world’s leading climate research institutions, made the prediction in the report Antarctic Climate Change and Climate. It far exceeds the 0.59 metre rise by the end of the century quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. This was based on a “business as usual” approach by governments that allowed temperatures to rise by 4 degrees. It will underpin the negotiations in Copenhagen.

SCAR scientists said that the IPCC underestimated grossly how much the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets would contribute to total sea-level rises.

Well at least the authors of this report had the sense to use the suitably hedging conditional "would" instead of the usual, hysterical 'will' of AGW fanatics. (And if the sun exploded, we'd all get pretty warm very quickly, right?) Mind you, they had little choice on that one, as this comment on a Telegraph blog (well known climate change activist's, Will Heaven...erm) points out:

The satellite measurement of the arctic ice coverage for yesterday (28th Nov) was 10,362,813 sq kms. On the same day in 2006 it was 9,597,969 sq kms. That represents a growth of 8%.

Source: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

Quite aside from that is the fact that all those millions of square miles of frozen Arctic water is floating on - um - more water, which, as everyone knows (don't they?), kindergarten physics tells us would not cause sea levels to rise millimeter-one if it was all boiled into the sea by a really quite humongous blowtorch tomorrow. But, you know what? Little things like demonstrable, reproducable scientific knowledge really doesn't matter any more. Climategate has demonstrated that we're not really dealing with science here at all, be it kindergarten or otherwise. We're dealing with a ruthless and ongoing deception.

This Times article, with its now all-too familiar end-of-days, alarmist propaganda mixed in with suspiciously timed, dodgy science reports and interviews with the usual suspects from the IPCC (Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, is a former railway engineer for God's sake) merely serves further to demonstrate that while the blogosphere remains free (for now), the increasingly schitzoid MSM is basically in thrall to the prophets (yes, I agree, that should read "profits") of doom. In point of fact, the manner in which the report ends seems to prove my point (about the schitzoid nature of the legacy press).

Sceptics seized upon his figures as further evidence of the unreliability of climate change predictions.

“It’s 50cm, 60cm, 100cm — 60m if you ask James Hansen from Nasa,” said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation . “The predictions come in thick and fast, but we take them all with a pinch of salt. We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming. We’re very concerned that 100-year policies are being made on the basis of these predictions”

I suppose they would call that balance, but the use of the warmist term of abuse "sceptics," (euphemistic codespeak for the vicious slur "denier" and/or the debate-killing "crank"), instead of the usual (and balanced) "critics" suggests to me that at the very least - and this is a generous conclusion - post-Climategate they simply don't know how to frame this issue any more.

They don't know, I don't (really) know - and neither does the IPCC or SCAR or the rest of the AGW industry.

But the difference is, one of us isn't being honest, and Climategate has shown us all who that is.

==Update==
Past my bedtime, but I've just seen this hilarious comment by somebody calling herself (I presume) "Auntie Mavis" under the Times scare story in question:

jim king wrote:
"1. Put a large ice cube in a glass.
2.fill it to the brim with water.
3.The ice cube will protrude above the surface.
4.Wait till the ice cube melts
5. In the doomsday theory the scare mongers would have you believe the protruding ice that has now melted will over flow.
6.It never will because ice displaces it's own volume.
7. When water freezes it expands.
8. So the reverse happen's when it melts
9. Simple school boy facts."

Now do it with the ice on top of a column of concrete with the water level up to the top. Watch the water flow over the top when the ice melts.

You what? This uber-hoon really seems to believe that someone - or something, perhaps - dropped a trillion trillion tons of ice on top of the sea at the polar ice caps. Mind you, she's probably an A-level Physics teacher (though fairly new to the profession - and the subject - it would seem) given that she appears to know more about all powerful space aliens that like to drop huge lumps of ice on unsuspecting, mostly harmless, planets, than Archimedes' principle.

Very, very stupid. That's what we're up against folks.

The Swarm Intelligence

Just scanned this very interesting article about Climategate in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute's "Enterprise" blog by someone very bright called Jay Richards. The specific points he makes (extremely well) about the ongoing, forensic analysis and reconstruction of the leaked data, revealing some of the worst abuses of the scientific process imaginable, are by now quite familiar and can be found in the usual places, several of which are linked to on this blog. It's not these legitimate observations so much, explosive as they are, as his conclusions about the significance and cultural impact of the blogosphere that really intrigued me. Here's an extract:

Of course, most of the big broadcast media are still in full blackout mode on this story, choosing instead to report on breaking news about Pete the orphaned moose. They’re following the pattern of the Dan Rather Memogate controversy in 2004. With that history-making story, the legacy media mostly tried to ignore the story, and then, when it got too big, began to spin it. Rather and CBS issued increasingly bizarre denials. Even though the gig was up within a couple of days, they continued to defend the document in question, and the stories based on it, for two excruciating weeks. (Compare CRU’s Phil Jones offering similarly risible explanations.) Meanwhile, in the parallel universe called reality, unknown and often apolitical bloggers with specialized expertise in font styles, IBM Executive Series and Selectric typewriters, military protocol, and word-processing software dismantled the details for any curious person with an Internet connection. Other, politically oriented blogs consolidated, analyzed, and broadcast the findings.

MemoGate gave many of us our first taste of the swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere, and showed that it cab beat the legacy media for getting to the bottom of a story via a networked, open-source form of peer review, with a highly refined division of labor.

We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we’re dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it’s becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up.

I hadn't really grasped what Guido Fawkes meant when he talked about similar things regarding, if memory serves, the expenses scandal* . I do now. The blogosphere, with its "swarm intelligence," is no longer potentially the most powerful communication medium in the world, Climategate has proved (at least to me) that it now is the most powerful communication medium in the world.

It therefore seems that it was no accident the Climategate documents weren't first leaked to a newspaper, as with the expenses scandal (the last real scoop of the dead tree press?) but to a blog instead, albeit what turned out to be the virtual dead end of a BBC weatherman's blog. I think it likely that given the technical complexity of the material, the whistleblower eventually appreciated that no MSM (what Jay Richards calls the "legacy media") provider would even want to touch it, all compromised as they more or less all are, much less spend a lot of time and money unpacking its secrets. It needed some serious processing power to do that, and, as Mr Richards asserts, the only place that that could be found was in the blogosphere.

So, complete paradigm shifts all round, then - not just in terms of the AGW belief system, but in terms of how we produce, analyse and trust our news-information supply, too.

I for one am pretty proud to contribute my modest (some would say infinitesimal) intellectual resources to The Swarm Intelligence.

(*It could have been something else, though, I'd need to check. But he does bang on about that and the fall of the dead tree press fairly regularly, it seems to me.)

Climategate: Bearing Fruit?

Two fairly devastating Sunday Telegraph Climategate stories have just popped up on their website, one of which will appear in print in today's newspaper. Both of them reveal in their different ways that the captured, self-censoring, dinosaur MSM in the UK is finally beginning to wake up to the scale of this scandal and that the pressure of the sheer fury being vented all over the world - at least on the internet - at the CRU and their cabal of intellectually incestuous, mutually peer-reviewing, manipulating, unethical, activist-scientists, is starting to bear fruit - already.

The first one:

Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.

The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.

A grandfather with a training in electrical engineering dating back more than 40 years emerged from the leaked emails as a leading climate sceptic trying to bring down the scientific establishment on global warming.

David Holland, who describes himself as a David taking on the Goliath that is the prevailing scientific consensus, is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain's most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws.

Mr Holland, of Northampton, complained to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last week after the leaked emails included several Freedom of Information requests he had submitted to the CRU, and scientists' private responses to them.

Within hours, a senior complaints officer in the ICO wrote back by email: "I have started to examine the issues that you have raised in your letter and I am currently liaising with colleagues in our Enforcement and Data Protection teams as to what steps to take next."

The official also promised to investigate other universities linked to the CRU, which is one of the world's leading authorities on temperature levels and has helped to prove that man-made global warming not only exists but will have catastrophic consequences if not tackled urgently. Mr Holland is convinced the threat has been greatly exaggerated.

In one email dated May 28, 2008, one academic writes to a colleague having received Mr Holland's request: "Oh MAN! Will this crap ever end??"

Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph: "It's like David versus Goliath. Thanks to these leaked emails a lot of little people can begin to make some impact on this monolithic entity that is the climate change lobby."

He added: "These guys called climate scientists have not done any more physics or chemistry than I did. A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don't believe they can ever be wrong."

Professor Trevor Davies, the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement, said yesterday: "CRU's full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data."

Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were an alleged note from Professor Phil Jones, 57, the director of the CRU and a leading target of climate change sceptics, to an American colleague describing the death of a sceptic as "cheering news"; and a suggestion from Prof Jones that a "trick" is used to "hide the decline" in temperature.

They even include threats of violence. One American academic wrote to Prof Jones: "Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

Dr Michaels, tracked down by this newspaper to the Cato Institute in Washington DC where he is a senior fellow in environmental studies, said last night: "There were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating when I kept insisting terrible things are going on here.

"This is business as usual for them. The world might be surprised but I am not. These guys have an attitude."

Prof Jones, who has refused to quit despite calls even from within the green movement, said last week in a statement issued through University of East Anglia, "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues."

He suggested the theft of emails and publication first on a Russian server was "a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks".

He added: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them."

Message ends. But despite the typical hedging and the dogwhistle ad hominem against the 'sceptic', brave David Holland who's been taking on these bozos ("Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses..." - and is therefore an amateur crank with an axe to grind, we are meant to infer, presumably), this report if nothing else serves to demonstrate that the CRU's 'Hockey Team' of AGW fundamentalist, anti-science manipulators has finally been disciplined by their hitherto blind-eye-turning bosses. Well, it's a start, I suppose - and I fully expect that sacreficial resignations will soon follow. Don't be fooled by a stunt like that, though. The true scale, gravity and penetration of this scandal is still only emerging, and the second article serves to reinforce this view. Penned by Damian Thompson, the DT's blogs editor who, some might say appropriately, is usually associated with religious matters, the implications for the (current management and future of the) BBC are simply enormous:

I think we need to take a closer look at this intriguing story in the Mail:

One of [the BBC's] reporters has revealed he was sent some of the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia more than a month ago – but did nothing about them.

Despite the explosive nature of some of the messages – which revealed apparent attempts by the CRU’s head, Professor Phil Jones, to destroy global temperature data rather than give it to scientists with opposing views – Paul Hudson failed to report the story.

This has led to suspicions that the scandal was ignored because it ran counter to what critics say is the BBC’s unquestioning acceptance in many of its programmes that man-made climate change is destroying the planet.

But hang on – wasn’t Paul Hudson the “climate change correspondent” who, as I reported on October 11, filed a story reporting that global warming stopped in 1998? I wrote at the time:

Hudson’s piece must have been a nightmare to write: talk about an inconvenient truth. All the caveats are in place, distancing him from hardline sceptics and giving plenty of space to the climate change orthodoxy. But, in fact, his scrupulous approach only makes matters worse for BBC executives who have swung the might of the corporation behind that orthodoxy, often producing what amounts to propaganda.

Back to the Mail story:

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: ‘We need to know more about the BBC’s role in this affair. Was Mr Hudson told by the BBC not to use the story?’

It was only after the same emails were published on a blog called Air Vent that Look North climate correspondent Mr Hudson owned up in his own blog to the fact he had also had the material.

In a bizarre twist, he claimed the leak had been triggered by an article he had written that questioned global warming.

Mr Hudson, 38, last night declined to comment. A BBC spokesman said: ‘Paul has nothing to add to what he has already said in his blog.’

OK, so let’s have a look at that blog entry by Paul Hudson. I’ve marked a couple of sections in bold:

Like many of you I’ve been watching the story at the University of East Anglia develop with interest. I first became aware of the news late last week, but because of my weather and filming commitments couldn’t deal with it myself and so passed the news on to some of my colleagues in the BBC’s environment and science team, including our environment analyst Roger Harrabin who wrote about it on saturday morning, and Newsnight, who covered the story last night.

As you may know, some of the e-mails that were released last week directly involved me and one of my previous blogs, ‘Whatever happened to global warming ?’

These took the form of complaints about its content, and I was copied in to them at the time. Complaints and criticisms of output are an every day part of life, and as such were nothing out of the ordinary. However I felt that seeing there was an ongoing debate as to the authenticity of the hacked e-mails, I was duty bound to point out that as I had read the original e-mails, then at least these were authentic, although of course I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the others.

There are clearly some very serious issues that arise from the information that has been released. Some people are suggesting that spin has infiltrated science. Others worry that there are suggestions that the peer review process has been compromised and those with contrary views are being frozen out. There are issues regarding data; how has it been used? But those scientists that are convinced that man is responsible for global warming are troubled that all this takes attention away from the real issue here: that action is needed to be taken from the world’s biggest polluters to cut carbon dioxide emissions. This was certainly the message that came across this morning, in this story on our science website.

How will this all be resolved? Momentum does seem to be growing, from people on both sides of the argument, behind calls for a full independent enquiry that can once and for all get to the bottom of the many issues that have been raised. A recent survey showed that climate scepticism in this country is growing, and this episode may increase it further. Some would say that an enquiry is the only way to bring clarity to the science of global warming and climate change that has enormous implications for all of us.

Reading Hudson’s blog entry, I can’t help wondering whether he was instructed to “pass the news on” to the likes of Roger Harrabin, upholder of the AGW orthodoxy, who conspiciously failed to examine the content of the emails properly. Then notice the clever language in which Hudson’s blog entry is phrased: he hasn’t retreated from his position that there’s a question mark over global warming, and he wants an independent inquiry “to bring clarity to the science of global warming and climate change”.

No wonder he was encouraged to “pass on” his story to BBC experts who believe that the science of global warming is quite clear enough already, thank you, and don’t want to see the public confused by those pesky emails.

It seems that Christopher Booker might finally be exerting some long-overdue influence on the Telegraph's hitherto schizoid editorial policy which allowed him to write seriously damning articles, week after week, about the climate change fraud, and then placed them in a comments section often right next to some dumb, ovine, AGW, goodthink editorial about the end of the world.

It also seems pretty clear that Climategate has just graduated to the "major story" division, at least in one part of the MSM. One thing is certain, the heat - and the pressure - is building. And the biggest scientific myth of all time has just come one step closer to being exploded. How big a threat the warmists regard this will be measurable by the viciousness of their propaganda backlash, something which has already begun.

Climategate: Booker's Verdict

With characteristic clarity of style, Christopher Booker has summarised the Climategate scandal and its implications in an article for the Sunday Telegraph that I've been looking forward to since the story first broke. I wasn't disappointed. It's powerful, thought-provoking and simply cannot be ignored, (can it?).

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Source Code for the Goose

A succinct deconstruction of the CRU modelling tricks that underpin what increasingly appears to be the fallacy - possibly even the fraud - that is AGW. Scary stuff.

Hat tip: Subrosa

Liddle the Umpire: Love-All

I was quite mean to Rod Liddle in a comment on his blog a while ago, though some might say justifiably so given that his remarks about Climategate appeared to be painfully unresearched and his conclusions, consequently and predictably, feeble. I wasn't the only one to think so.

To his eternal credit, however, he does not censor any of these comments, however scathing. Thus open, healthy, even robust, debate with him is enabled and encouraged. It's in this spirit that he hit back this morning, in quite a thought-provoking piece, not only at, I presume, people like me (at least indirectly) who he deems to have been pushed by AGW arrogance, certitude and flawed thinking "towards an ever more antithetical position" and that that is "a flawed, human, response – very similar to the flaws exhibited by those climate change monkeys sending dodgy emails to one another," (oh, my bad then, Rod) but directly at the AGW lobby itself. I'm afraid that if I and people like me, who, thanks to our own, (according to Rod) understandable weaknesses have been "pushed" to some sort of extreme anti-AGW position by, in particular, the Climategate scandal, have attracted merely his sympathy and counsel, the warmists have attracted nothing less than his scorn - albeit a reasonably equable scorn, in true Liddle-the-peacemaker style. But his post also contains an interesting warning for the AGW lobby at large, though delivered at a warmist commenter who left some pretty scathing remarks of his own, but from the other direction, that's worth quoting.

I find it genuinely difficult to debate with people who deny my right to debate; this is the case with the climate change lobby. The danger, if you don’t watch out, is that the arrogance and certitude of the AGW lobby pushes one towards an ever more antithetical position. This is a flawed, human, response – very similar to the flaws exhibited by those climate change monkeys sending dodgy emails to one another. If you work for, and are paid by, an institution which accepts climate change as a fact, then you will be disinclined to accept scientific evidence to the contrary. You hold climate change as an article of faith, and also a conduit for remuneration. This is how science becomes poisoned; but it happens in almost every scientific endeavour, and always has done. Scientists become trapped by their own paradigms; they are reluctant to let go of ideas. This is why it usually takes a generation before paradigms change. But change they always do. Remember that a generation ago we were worried by global cooling and the coming of the next ice age.

I have no expertise whatsoever in meteorology, but I do have a bit of knowledge about stats, and randomness and chance – and it is this that leads me to a broadly sceptical point of view regarding AGW. Jim Ryan kindly responded to my blog about the UEA debacle with a lengthy and pretty rational argument, to which he appended a list of many organisations which sign up to AGW. What he didn’t say, however, was that these organisations often heavily qualify their belief in man-made climate change, suggesting that it is “probable” or “heavily probable” or “likely”. Fine. And there are many more which will not go even this far.

But it is another part of Jim’s response that interested me, because it involves statistics and displayed the almost universal misunderstanding of statistics and chance. He wrote:

“Rod, you visit a 100 tumour specialists and 97 tell you you require an operation to treat the condition. The other 3 say it is benign and does not require any treatment “

The implication being that of course the 97 are right, and that any rational person would not question this supposed fact. A 97% certainty is pretty much a certainty, full stop, isn’t it?

Well, no. Suppose the tumour which the doctors believe afflicts me is a fairly rare type of tumour, one which affects only, say, one in 5000 people. If that is the case then the likelihood that I do not have that tumour, and that those 97% of surgeons have made a wrong diagnosis, and that I therefore do not need an operation, is far, far higher than the likelihood that I do have a tumour and do need it operated upon. Jim’s analogy utilizes that difficult thing to supposedly prove his point, the false positive.

Well, OK. I think that is a fair point about false positives - and it should actually count as a serious warning to all sides of this debate: check your facts and don't be too certain about your stats. However, he still fails, like all the other UK MSM professional journos, bar one or two, to give us the benefit of his wisdom about what have emerged as nothing more or less than faked statistics. But he simply chooses to ignore the reprehensible actions (the manipulation of data to produce misleading results, the dirty tricks, the stifling of opposition and the endless, alarmist propaganda campaign and so on), some of which constitute actual fraud given that vast sums of taxpayer funding is involved, and yet he satisfies his own prejudices by dismissing the perpetrators of these deceptions as "climate change monkeys".

So, the upshot of this is that we are none the wiser as to where, precisely, Liddle stands on any part of these issues. Is he saying that the monkeys are basically correct but they've been naughty monkeys for being so certain in their belief that they seemed to imagine all established scientific norms and moral/social (even legal) codes could be suspended, such was the size of the crisis they'd revealed? Is he arguing that this was wrong (bad monkeys) and that all it has served to do is create more monkeys (who are probably right wing monkeys, to boot)? Is he merely pretending that he is the only sane, high-brow human (therefore not a monkey) left on this crazy old planet of ours, blowing hot and cold as she endlessly does?

With the first two, from this particular post we are, indeed, left none the wiser. But I do think that my last question might have an answer - and it's most definitely a "yes". Liddle's contribution, more or less, has been to massage his own ego by placing himself firmly in the middle but raised above the scrap, sort of in the position of Umpire of the Great Global Warming Tennis Slanging Match. I can just imagine him sitting on that high chair, complete with booming tannoy, calling out the scores and overruling the line judges. "False positive: Let"; "Sceptic Monkeys' Fault: Game, Warmists." He must be loving every minute of it!

But he cannot be serious.

"Hide the Decline": Deleted Data Revealed

Steve McIntyre, the climate scientist behind climateaudit.org has pieced together the code that reveals the data deleted by the CRU to "hide the decline" (as Prof Phil Jones now famously said in a leaked email) in post-1960 global temperatures. It provides further damning evidence of a cover-up the likes and scale of which the scientific world really has never seen before. It is devastating.

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

A retrieval script follows.

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.
Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.

The reason, as explained on Sep 22, 1999 by Michael Mann to coauthors in 938018124.txt, was to avoid giving “fodder to the skeptics”. Reasonable people might well disagree with Gavin Schmidt as to whether this is a “a good way to deal with a problem” or simply a trick.

Meanwhile, as the UK MSM and government go on pretending that nothing has happened, merrily misinterpreting a Chinese promise notionally to cut pollution and confusing bad weather in Cumbria (in late November, no less) with "climate change," the rest of the world is beginning to wake up to the implications of this scandal. Australia's main opposition Liberal party, for instance, has gone bananas with five of its front bench members resigning over their leader's plans to support a carbon cap. Climategate really could be starting to make a difference, but not, sadly, in the UK where journalists and comedians continue to deny the scandal is anything more than a diversion.

But Barack Obama is going to Copenhagen, so that's alright then. I wonder if he's seen Steve McIntyre's report. I wonder if he cares.

==Update==
The Wrinkled Weasel has a bit of a blogscoop (for me, at least - I didn't see the Mail article that carried the story) that gives you some idea about just why the UK is not yet experiencing much fallout from climategate. The BBC knew about the emails over a month ago and even had a copy of the file. But, predictably, it spiked the story. Impartiality? Not on your life. But don't worry, you and I just pay for it all: CRU, BBC, government AGW propaganda - the lot. Tidy.