Man-Made Global Warming Theory Is Sinking Fast

Palin Blasts Global Warming Studies as 'Snake Oil'

(Newser) – Speaking at a logging conference in northern California tonight, Sarah Palin ripped studies supporting global-warming theories as a “bunch of snake oil science.” The former Alaska governor touted her climate-change-doubter credentials at the event—from which media were barred, though the AP procured a $74 ticket for its reporter—noting her attempts to declaw federal action to characterize the polar bear as an endangered species.

Editor's Note: No editions of TIA Daily have gone out since Wednesday due to a massive snowstorm that left me snowbound and without an Internet connection for the past few days. I wouldn't exactly call it "Snowmageddon"—but then again I'm from the North, and south of the Mason-Dixon Line the snow removal system is not really adequate to deal with anything heavier than four inches, so I guess this qualifies as a disaster.

At any rate, now that the sun has returned and melted the ice off of our satellite dish, here are the editions I had prepared but was unable to send. Rather than send them all separately, I have combined two editions together. In a poetic coincidence, both of the articles delayed due to unusually cold and snowy weather are about the collapse of the hysteria over global warming.—RWT

TIA Daily • February 3 & 4, 2010

The Informants

The British press are testifying against their co-conspirators in order to protect themselves from prosecution in the court of public opinion.

Feature Articles

Environmentalism's Berlin Wall, by Robert Tracinski and Jack Wakeland
Man-Made Global Warming Theory Is Sinking Fast

The Informants, by Jack Wakeland
Climategate Stampedes the Herd

TIA Daily Feature Articles

1. Environmentalism's Berlin Wall

Man-Made Global Warming Theory Is Sinking Fast

by Robert Tracinski and Jack Wakeland

The last few weeks have seen a dramatic change in the coverage of Climategate in the British press—a trend that has not yet made it over to this side of the Atlantic, but which should (and will).

In London, The Times and the Daily Telegraph have launched an old-fashioned newspaperman's crusade against "Glaciergate." Both papers are reporting extensively in numerous stories about mistaken, false, and biased findings about glaciers in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report.

It started on January 17, with the Telegraph reporting that "UN Report on Glaciers Melting Is Based on 'Speculation'" and The Times reporting: "World Misled over Himalayan Glacier Meltdown." The Times followed up with an admission by the source of this error that there are many other errors in the section on melting glaciers in the UN's report ("UN Climate Change Expert: There Could Be More Errors in Report) and with the revelation that IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri was told of the glacier error and failed to correct it (Climate Chief Was Told of False Glacier Claims Before Copenhagen." Then the newspapers discovered that claims in other sections of the UN report about the allegedly dire effects of global warming were also based on dubious sources. Examining a claim about disappearing ice on mountaintops, the Telegraph reported that "UN Climate Change Panel Based Claims on Student Dissertation and Magazine Article"—rather than the carefully reviewed scientific studies it is supposed to use—and also revealed (in "Amazongate: New Evidence of the IPCC's Failures") that claims about the Amazon jungle and as many as 20 other claims in the UN report were based on nothing more than press releases from environmentalist advocacy groups.

Just this Sunday, February 7, the Telegraph piled on with an overview of the many errors in the UN's IPCC report, and The Times offered a report on the IPCC's fatal loss of credibility as an authoritative source on climate science.

These newspaper stories are being printed as straight news—not just analysis, commentary, or opinion. This is a sea change. Gone are the days when environmentalist scare stories and pseudo-scientific proofs of "global warming" would be printed as straight news in the major British press—not without the other side, the side of rational and objective science, getting the straight news coverage first.

Both The Times and the Telegraph are beating the drums for the removal of IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, and they're doing it by covering Glaciergate as a straight news story about political corruption. The Times has even gone so far as to report claims that Dr. Pachauri deliberately let stand statements that he knew were false about rapidly disappearing Himalayan glaciers, in order "to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds."

Climate criminals are now being called out by name by the establishment British press and being convicted of their frauds in straight news stories by the normal techniques of good journalism.

This is the impact of Climategate: the presumption of legitimacy has been stripped from the promoters of man-made global warming theory. From now on, the British press will question their claims and pursue those questions all of the way down until they find either legitimate scientific controversy—or ideological posturing and grant application fraud.

The trend had even spread to the main leftist British newspaper, The Guardian. Environmentalist Fred Pearce starts out with article making the usual dismissive claim that "the 'climategate' scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics' lies." Having offered the usual disclaimer, presumably to protect himself from the ire of his fellow environmentalists, he then goes on to offer a mostly honest review (two months late) of the damning evidence from the Climategate e-mails. An article on the "Strange Case of Moving Weather Posts and a Scientist Under Siege" recounts an important climate study that was based on documents about Chinese weather stations, documents that the Chinese-American author of the study now says he cannot find. ("The dog at my homework" excuses are becoming a standard response from climate fraudsters.) "Leaked Climate Change E-mails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws" describes CRU chief Phil Jones's efforts to cover up the Chinese weather station scandal. "Controversy Behind Climate Science's 'Hockey Stick' Graph" reveals the climate elites' internal doubts about a graph claiming that recent warm temperatures are unprecedented—doubts which were not mentioned when the IPCC used that graph as the "logo of global warming." Most damning is "Climate Change E-mails Between Scientists Reveal Flaws in Peer Review," Pearce's overview of how "a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers."

The British press are fighting for the truth about global warming in the mistaken belief that it is being discredited by a handful of corrupt and criminal hacks at the CRU and the IPCC. The article summary of a Daily Telegraph report says it all: "Faulty science published by the United Nations' climate change body is in danger of obscuring a 'much larger truth,' a senior government official warned yesterday, amid fears of growing public skepticism about the reality of global warming."

They think that they're fighting to right the listing ship of legitimate man-made global warming science. Instead, they're sinking it. And they're sinking it fast.

When they are done trying to separate the legitimate science from the fraud, intimidation, and political posturing—they will find that there is nothing left. One more month of this assault, and the whole environmentalist school will be in cultural shambles. Four more months and environmentalists won't be able to show their faces in public

Those of us who spotted this fraud early on have waited 25 long years for good and rational scientists and commentators to hack away at the political defenses of the ruling man-made-global-warming clique. Now the waiting is over. Man-made global warming is dead as a scientific, cultural, moral, and political cause.

This will have a political and cultural impact bigger than anything else that is happening today. When the collapse of the Soviet Empire discredited socialism as a moral, economic, and political ideal, the Western left looked for a new ideology around which they could reconstitute their quest for political power. They settled on environmentalism—and they staked all of the credibility of this new environmentalist creed on the scientific claims about man-made global warming. When that falls, the whole ideological foundation of the left will be dealt a shattering blow—the second such blow in two decades.

The whole leftist quest for political power will be exposed as having no basis in economics and no basis in climate science. It will be exposed as a quest for power and control for their own sake—a conclusion that will permanently discredit the left.

2. The Informants

Climategate Stampedes the Herd

by Jack Wakeland

Whistleblowing is a highly motivated act—a personal emergency—and that's how we got the CRU e-mails and the tidal wave of stories about climate fraud in the British press.

The whistleblower is an inside man who feels he has no choice but to turn in his close associates, people with whom has had an extensive personal association; so extensive as to be considered a personal friend and ally; so extensive that dishonest actors within the whistleblower's circle of associates have trusted him with evidence of their moral turpitude.

Giving up all these personal associations—betraying them—is a highly motivated act.

For the whistleblower, the personal emergency may be the honest crisis of suddenly discovering that he has been living in a den of thieves, but, more commonly, it is a crisis of dishonesty. The whistleblower, like a mob informant, is one of a group of evil men, and the crisis is that he realizes that he's going to be caught and punished. In order to avoid punishment, he turns to the federal prosecutor—or Steve McIntyre and the general public—and asks for their protection in exchange for delivering evidence against the big fish.

Traces on the e-mail addresses, the file servers used, and the breadth of the content of the Climategate e-mails indicate that the whistleblower was either a major actor within the research group or had privileged user access to the group's e-mails. Outside hackers—ideologically motivated amateurs or government intelligence agencies—are not responsible. These speculations—that the Russians did it in order to sink the Copenhagen talks and preserve markets for Russian oil—are leftist conspiracy theories that are every bit as well founded as the theory that an American Communist didn't shoot John F. Kennedy.

An additional speculation is that the individual who made the leak may have been the CRU's information officer, a man who was under a legal obligation to preserve e-mails in order to deliver them to scientific intervener, Steve McIntyre, who had requested them in a legal filing under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

This speculation has a whole story line within it: that CRU chief Phil Jones was systematically hunting down and deleting the very e-mails that the CRU information officer was being charged with releasing to McIntyre, and to preserve the illusion of openness within the CRU, Jones was informing the information officer that he was deleting them. Under this speculation within a speculation, the information officer released the e-mails directly to the public because he feared that they would be deleted if he waited until the official FOIA disclosure package was assembled.

At this stage, it is way too early to tell who the CRU insider was and whether or not his motives were honest. Remember, for the whistleblower to have evidence of a crime, he has to have had a close association with the criminals. We may hope that the whistleblower at the CRU was a computer network administrator who was charged with fulfilling a Freedom of Information Act request and suddenly discovered that his university housed a den of thieves.

Unfortunately, the most likely type of whistleblower at the CRU is an informant, an insider who was a party to decades of the academic fraud and political posturing of the man-made-global-warming clique. In turning to the blogosphere and the general public, the CRU whistleblower may have been attempting to expunge his own crimes in applying for and spending research grants backed by fraudulent science.

Now that the British press—left, right, and center—have taken up the cause of questioning all of the lies made by the man-made-global-warming clique, they are acting as professional whistleblowers. As investigative reporters, however, we can see that these pressmen don't have to dig very deep. All of their dozens (soon to be hundreds) of reports on dishonesty in climate science are low-hanging fruit—very low-hanging.

Like the insider at the CRU, the British press are suddenly asking a lot of questions with a great deal of energy all at the same time. Like the insider at the CRU, they are highly motivated. Some—a small minority—have the satisfaction of being able to print as straight, unbiased news stories facts about the climate fraud that their editors had told them for decades were merely their opinions, facts that would not be printed unless they got a promotion to the respectable journalistic positions from which one may be permitted the luxury of printing mere opinions: editor or columnist.

For the rest of the British press, the widening field of heavily reported climate lies is feeding on itself. They were a part of the man-made-global-warming clique; one of the most important parts. They—the dishonest left-wing and second-handed press—were the transmission belt that willingly and knowingly conveyed to the public whatever the man-made-global-warming clique in the scientific community said. They have spent the past two decades transforming arbitrary and baseless claims from pseudo-scientists into the use of government force against the combustion of fossil fuels and, therefore, against all aspects of industrial civilization.

To the dishonest leftist and second-handed pressmen of England, the current crusade against global warming lies is a highly motivated act, a personal emergency. They are all rushing to be the first to inform the public about the lies in order to create the illusion that they were the discoverers of the lies—and not the people who sold them to the public in a steady stream for more than 20 years. In their attempt to avoid a general cultural prosecution for their long-standing acts of moral turpitude, the mass of the British press are trampling each other to be the first to get out the truth about the lies.

Climategate has stampeded the herd, and the rumble can be heard clear across the Atlantic.



Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal