In the health care debate, we're at that point in any good monster movie when we think the creature has been safely dispatched—but it suddenly springs back to life and makes one more lunge at our protagonist. So we'll have to invoke one of the basic laws of monster movies: never turn your back until the head is severed from the body. Or in this case, never turn your back until the bill is voted down in the House.
In the background of that urgent conflict, however, I want to provide an update on the Climategate scandal, which is still being vigorously pursued in the British press, just as it is being studiously ignored in the American press.
The latest is a series of judgments from British scientific societies condemning the Climatic Research Unit—the organization at the center of the Climategate scandal—for failing to make its data and methods available to be duplicated and verified by others.
Climate change researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) are accused of withholding raw data and the computer code they used to generate results despite repeated requests for the information to be released publicly.
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) have both issued statements declaring that it is essential that scientific data and evidence compiled by researchers be made publicly available for scrutiny.
Their comments come after the Institute of Physics said that emails sent by Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, had broken "honourable scientific traditions" about disclosing raw data and methods….
The RSS also said it was crucial that data on global warming, the analysis methods and the models used to make predictions about climate change should be placed in the public domain to allow experiments and calculations to be repeated and verified.
In other words, they have found it necessary to re-assert what I learned in my 8th-grade science class: that you never get to simply assert a result—you must always be prepared to show all of your data and all of your calculations. Yet CRU head Phil Jones told a parliamentary inquiry that he thought it was perfectly acceptable to withhold his data.
The Daily Telegraph report on this notes that the computer programs used by the warmists are even more dubious than the data.
Professor Darrel Ince, from the department of computer science at the Open University, added: "A number of climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs; what I want to suggest is that this is both unscientific behavior and, equally importantly ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error."
In a long but worthwhile interview on Pajamas TV, Christopher Monckton notes the electrifying effect of the admission by Jones that he thinks it is acceptable to keep his data secret. Lord Monckton then predicts that the British parliament will next appoint a royal commission that will investigate Climategate and the evidence about global warming, using the standards of proof required in a court of law. That could get very interesting.
(See also the segment toward the end about how the American tea party movement is beginning to make its way to Britain. Talk about a historical irony!)
Meanwhile, the biggest offshoot of Climategate, Glaciergate, is now breaking open wider. One group of scientists in India is now arguing, very sensibly, that the UN's climate panel didn't just exaggerate the melting of Himalayan glaciers; they invented the connection between these glaciers and global warming. The English in this excerpt from the Hindustan Times is not very smooth, but the information is revealing:
Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has no role in controlling the conditions.
In an exclusive chat with HT, Director WIHG Dr. AK Dubey has said that the conditions of Himalayas are controlled by the winter snowfall rather than external factors like much hyped Global Warming….
"According to a data for over 140 years available with a British weather observatory situated in Mukteswar (2311m) in Almora has actually revealed that temperature in that region witnessed a dip of 0.4 degrees," he said….
"Our glaciers are giant high altitude glaciers above 4000m altitude with a permanent temperature below 20 degrees Celsius. And has no comparison with the Alps Glaciers or Alaskan Glacier which are at sea level," he said.
This is very similar to the story behind the "snows of Kilimanjaro"—another high-altitude glacier fed by permanent sub-freezing temperatures which are utterly unaffected by any recent warming trend. Yet Kilimanjaro was also claimed by Al Gore—in defiance of the best scientific evidence—as proof of global warming.
I still think that the biggest Climategate scandal has yet to really break open. This is the scandal about the brazen manipulation of global surface temperature records by the main data clearinghouse that collects those measurements. Over the past decade or so, thousands of surface temperature stations have been dropped from the record, and research by some intrepid climate skeptic bloggers has revealed that the stations most likely to be retained were built-up sites—many of them at airports—that would be most likely to show an "urban heat island" effect.
A summary of the latest findings recently appeared at the skeptic site ICECAP. Because of their crazy, non-permalinked layout, you have to go here and scroll down until you see the March 7 item by Joseph D'Aleo with the exciting title, "Klotzbach et al. Paper—Further Explored." The most interesting passage: "it appears half or more of the reported global warming from ground observations is arising from this change in station coverage. It is possible that as much as 0.2 C of the 0.25 C warming for 1979-1999 can be explained by this change in stations."
Finally, as the global warming hysteria collapses, it will take with it the big lie of "alternative energy." EPA chief Lisa Jackson has been going around claiming that an artificially induced shortage of fossil fuels will actually cause a boom in "green jobs."
Jackson said industry needs clear signals from the US government on greenhouse gas regulations. Otherwise investors would have "little incentive" to put money into clean energy jobs. The country would fall further behind other countries in the race for clean energy, which would hurt the economy, she added.
It turns out, however, that these "green jobs" are a lot like the jobs "created" by the bailouts and the stimulus. They are unproductive make-work jobs that last only so long as the government is able and willing to sustain them with massive subsidies.
Hence, in Spain, a giant experiment with solar energy has resulted in a total bust. The New York Times describes what happened.
Puertollano, home to the Museum of the Mining Industry, had two enormous solar power plants, factories making solar panels and silicon wafers, and clean energy research institutes. Half the solar power installed globally in 2008 was installed in Spain.
Farmers sold land for solar plants. Boutiques opened. And people from all over the world, seeing business opportunities, moved to the city, which had suffered from 20 percent unemployment and a population exodus.
But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain's plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.
In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano's brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated.
Jack Wakeland—as a firm believer in the importance of using numbers to understand the world—sent me a note giving some of the engineering and economic calculations behind this story.
"With 2,500 MW of solar power capacity, Spain's $580 per MWhr "feed-in tariff" was costing the nation $1.3 million per hour of direct sunshine, or $2.2 billion per year.
"Five years of paying subsidies at that rate and Spain could have paid off the cost of building a brand new 2,420 MW, two-unit AP1000 nuclear power plant—a plant that would operate at a capacity factor of 90% and make more than four times as much electricity as all of Spain's installed solar capacity.
"It's not that I'm advocating subsidized nuclear power. But, at least the Spanish people would have had something to show for it after their government spent billions of their tax payers' dollars."
In the face of all of this comes the news that a group of government-funded pseudo-scientists are "plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be 'an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach' to gut the credibility of skeptics."
In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind…. "Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails….
"This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, 'God, can't we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,'" said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion.
This is a real laugh coming from lifelong political shills like Ehrlich and Schneider. And skeptic blogger Anthony Watts also has a terrific rejoinder to the claim that global warming skeptics are in the pocket of industry. Watts provides some useful facts, contrasting the "low five-figure" support offered to sites like his by their readers against the multimillion-dollar largesse showered on the warmists by private corporations—and the many billions piled on by governments.
But still, I had to laugh at this latest tactic. The Climategate conspirators got into trouble by acting like political hacks who are more interested in propaganda than science. So the answer suggested by these scientists is to act even more like political hacks who are more interested in propaganda than science. Which will cause the global warming dogma to lose even more credibility in the eyes of the public.—RWT
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."
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