In the #5 spot is a story that may not seem like it is from this year: the continuing effects of "Climategate," the scandal which broke just before Thanksgiving 2009, exposing the scientific corruption behind the global warming "consensus."
This may seem like an old story, partly because most of the entries below are from the first half of the year, while the scandal was still breaking wide open, and partly because its significance is in what did not happen. The exposure of Climategate stopped cap-and-trade legislation in Congress long enough for the people to elect a new Congress that will kill it permanently.
Meanwhile, the weather is not cooperating with the climate. While this sort of thing is happening across the Northern Hemisphere, Britain's main meteorological center is under fire for consistently predicting warm, mild winters—in keeping with global warming dogma—while Mother Nature delivers harsh, snowy winters.
And as Britain is buried under another blanket of snow, everyone is dragging out an old prediction from a warmist:
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event.""Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
Below are the highlights of the Climategate story as it unfolded this year, including admissions by top Climategate conspirators that the science is not as certain as they belligerently claimed.
But the other half of this story is the fact that the exposure of the global warming fraud is not stopping the warmists—whose goal was really just political power all along. And so the Obama administration is proceeding to use its vast, unchecked regulatory power—the same power it is using at the FDA to ration the cancer drug Avastin, and the same power it is using at the FCC to grab control of the Internet without congressional authorization—to impose energy rationing by executive fiat at the EPA. The latest step of this EPA power grab is expected this week.
That sets up one of the top stories for next year. The new Congress will need to hold hearings to more thoroughly investigate Climategate and hopefully break the scandal open wider. And then they will need to reclaim their power from the executive branch, passing legislation that explicitly blocks the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide.—RWT
TIA Daily makes an excellent last-minute Christmas gift. If you get your order in by 2:00 pm on December 24, the recipient will be sure to get a gift message and his first issue of TIA Daily by 5:00 pm on Christmas Eve. And get a special bonus while you do it.
Renew your subscription today, or buy a gift subscription for someone you value, and receive a special bonus. Buy a six-month subscription and get one month added to your subscription; buy a one-year subscription, and we'll add two months; buy a two-year subscription and we'll add four months.
$38 -- TIA Daily Six-Month Subscription
$74 -- TIA Daily One-Year Subscription
$144 -- TIA Daily Two-Year Subscription
Go to www.TIADaily.com/subscribe. For gift subscriptions, look for the "gift subscriptions" category.
Also check out these other products:
$48 -- TIA Monthly One-Year Subscription
$122 -- TIA Daily and TIA Monthly Combined Subscription
All available at: www.TIADaily.com/subscribe
Top Stories of the Year
- The Gates Break Open
- Environmentalism's Berlin Wall
- Climategate Conspirator Cracks
- Intellectual Climate Change
- Never Mind
- "Agency Rule-Making"
Top News Stories
Commentary by Robert Tracinski
1. The Gates Break Open, January 31
Another key breaking point in the defeat of the left is the moment in President Obama's state of the union address when he referred to the "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change"—only to be greeted by laughter from the Republican side of the chamber.
This is the impact of Climategate. It has now become laughable to say that there is no legitimate scientific dissent on global warming. And Climategate is a scandal so big that we are only now beginning to get a feel for its vast outlines. As I predicted last year, "The code of silence which says that you cannot doubt global warming is being broken down, and the floodgates of skepticism are about to open."
Indeed, the "gates" are opening in the sense that there is a whole series of "gates" that form subsidiaries within the Climategate scandal. There is Glaciergate, in which a claim about melting glaciers rmade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was shown to have no scientific basis, and the originator of the claim admitted that it was "included purely to put political pressure on world leaders."
Another IPCC claim, about thinning ice on mountaintops, was shown to be based only on anecdotal reports in a magazine for mountain climbers and in a Swiss graduate student's dissertation. What will they call this one, Matterhorngate?
There is Amazongate, which reveals another false IPCC claim about how global warming will affect the Amazon jungle, and the Daily Telegraph's report reveals there are many more such cases on the way.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages—when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Where was the IPCC's chief, Rajendra Pachauri, while all of these bogus claims were being sneaked into his agency's reports? He was penning a novel, which seems to be a fictionalized version of his own sexual exploits, and tending to his vast business interests in companies that would profit from global warming regulations.
But the biggest scandal within Climategate ought to be called Datagate—the ongoing revelation that the chief sources of global temperature records have systematically tampered with the data, dropping out records from rural weather stations, which record cooler temperatures, in favor of stations whose results are biased toward warming by the urban heat island effect. See the summary below.
And a British court has just ruled that the Climate Research Unit implicated in the original Climategate scandal violated Britain's Freedom of Information Act when it withheld its raw data on global temperatures.
As for the political consequences, Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts has been described as "the Scott heard 'round the world," but I didn't quite believe that until a reader sent me a link to an article from The Hindu—I guess that's India's version of The Scotsman—which describes how the UN has sent out a letter giving countries like India and China more time to sign on to the global warming agreement from last year's Copenhagen summit. The article then adds:
"That letter, and the defeat of the Democrats in the Massachusetts by poll, has forced the UN to postpone the deadline indefinitely," an [Indian] official said. "With the Democrats losing in one of their strongholds, the chances of the climate bill going through the US senate have receded dramatically. "So if the US is not going to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, which was a very weak target anyway, why should we make any commitment even if it does not have any legal teeth?" the official said.
When good things happen, they reinforce one another. The combination of Climategate and the Massachusetts Miracle may kill any possibility for a broad global agreement to choke off the world's supply of energy.
"A US Climategate?" Investor's Business Daily, January 22
We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.
As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."
Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude, and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35....
Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
2. Environmentalism's Berlin Wall, February 3
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.
3. Climategate Conspirator Cracks, February 14
Last Sunday, the London Times carried a profile of Phil Jones—the head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the man at the center of the Climategate scandal. The professor admitted to having contemplated suicide "several times" since the scandal broke, and the article continued: "The incident has taken a severe toll on his health. He has lost more than a stone [14 pounds] in weight and disclosed he is on beta-blockers and using sleeping pills." Is this the reaction of a man with a clear conscience?
The article says that Jones is 57 years old—but in the accompanying photo, he looks about 20 years older. He looks 40 years older than he does in every other picture I've seen of him before now. The stress of Climategate is literally killing him.
I have to admit, though, that if I were Phil Jones, I would be contemplating suicide, too, because the rest of his life is going to be rather unpleasant. What he hasn't figured out yet is that he does have a way out, a way to salvage himself financially and as a human being, a way to be allowed to disappear into a quiet retirement. His only way out is to turn state's evidence and rat out his co-conspirators.
I've been speculating to some friends that if Jones doesn't figure this out, it is just a matter of time before one of the other conspirators does. One of them will eventually crack.
Well, it looks like Phil Jones is the guy who just cracked. But he didn't do it deliberately in order to cut a deal. This is more like one of those old episodes of "Perry Mason" where the real killer, badgered by Mason's relentless questioning, confesses on the witness stand. Except that in this case the cross-examination was conducted by a previously friendly source, the BBC.
In an interview that came out over the weekend, Jones spilled the beans. Asked whether "the rates of global warming from 1860–1880, 1910–1940, and 1975–1998 were identical," he agreed that "the warming rates for all 4 periods"—he also threw in, for no apparent reason, the period 1975–2009—"are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other." Remember that a key claim of the global warming hysteria—a claim that the Climategate conspiracy was meant to protect from criticism—was that the recent rate of warming was "unprecedented" and therefore outside the range of natural variability. Jones is now admitting that this isn't true.
Moreover, asked whether "from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming," Jones replied that this was also true—but with the excuse that the tiny upward trend for that period is almost statistically significant, which is a bit like being almost pregnant. Asked about the temperature trend from 2002 to present, he admits that "the trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant." So he has been forced to admit that global warming hasn't occurred for the past 15 years.
But the blockbuster in the interview is a question about the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—a period of several centuries, about a thousand years ago, in which global temperatures are believed to have been several degrees warmer than today. Again, a central goal of the Climategate conspiracy was to deny the existence of the MWP by propping up Penn State professor Michael Mann's infamous "hockey stick" graph, which showed global temperatures remaining flat for the past two thousand years, then suddenly shooting up in the last 50 years. Asked about the Medieval Warm Period, however, Jones replied:
"There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not.... Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the [Northern Hemisphere] and [Southern Hemisphere]) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented."
Jones doesn't say that the MWP actually happened—but he admits that it is a legitimate theory and a subject for debate.
It is important to grasp what an enormous concession this is. If global temperatures were warmer a thousand years ago, that implies two things. First, a Medieval Warm Period was obviously not caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide, since there were no automobiles or industrial smokestacks. So it must have been a naturally occurring fluctuation in climate—which means that current temperatures are also well within the range of natural variation. Second, the Medieval Warm Period was a period of relatively hospitable weather that helped Western civilization claw its way out of the Dark Age. Sea levels didn't rise, storms and droughts didn't lay waste to the countryside—in short, none of the disasters predicted for current warming. And there was no runaway global warming. Within a few centuries, temperatures fell down again and slid into a "Little Ice Age" that lasted until 1850, when the recent warming trend began again.
So if the existence of the Medieval Warm Period is still up for debate, then the whole theory of man-made global warming is still up for debate.
How many times have we been told that "the debate is over"? Jones is admitting that the debate is still very much on. In fact, asked what scientists mean when they say "the debate is over" on global warming, he told the BBC: "I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well."
Well, then. About that whole "restructure your society now to avert the disastrous effects of global warming" thing? Never mind.
The British papers, which have recently taken up the Climategate scandal as a straight news story, pounced on the BBC interview. The Mail on Sunday—also known as the Daily Mail; British papers maintain the quaint custom of giving their Sunday editions a different name—published a good editorial which concluded that "in the light of the 'Climategate' revelations, it is time for governments, academics, and their media cheerleaders to be more modest in their claims and to treat skeptics with far more courtesy."
In fact, that's already happening. The big news about the BBC interview is not just Jones's admissions. It is the fact that the BBC is finally beginning to ask the tough questions that journalists should have been asking years ago—and in their introduction to the interview, the BBC reveals that some of the questions were "gathered from climate skeptics."
That's the real story here: the first time a top member of the global warming establishment is subjected to tough questioning that takes climate skepticism seriously, the whole charade falls apart.
The effects of this cannot be overestimated. Take a look at the latest coverage in The Times, which offers us yet another report presenting the views of the skeptics: "World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists."
"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years. These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanization, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama. "The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development."
This story is not news to anyone who has been closely following the global warming debate. What is news is that these arguments are being discovered, taken seriously, and presented as straight news stories in the mainstream British press.
This trend has not yet made its way across the Atlantic, but the English-speaking world is too interconnected for the US papers to hold out. What began in Australia last Spring and spread to Britain this Winter will inevitably make its way to America, sooner rather than later.
And when it does, get ready for some big political repercussions. Already, as the Washington Examiner points out, Senator James Inhofe is acting like a man who has been vindicated. Inhofe is a longtime climate skeptic who was the head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works back when Republicans controlled Congress. In a way, he is the man who made Climategate possible, because it was his effort that staved off global warming legislation for a full decade, buying just enough time for the bogus science to be unmasked. (Credit also goes to Inhofe's counterpart in the House, Representative Richard Pombo, who was defeated in 2006 by a Democrat who was backed by the big environmentalist groups.)
The Examiner links to a Fox News Channel interview in which Senator Inhofe describes Climategate as "taking every argument [the global-warming alarmists] had and defusing them." And prompted by the Fox host, he announced that he would try against to introduce legislation blocking US government funding for the UN's climate establishment.
This, by the way, is just a small foretaste of what we can expect if Republicans re-take control of Congress. It is why I can already recommend that in November we should do whatever we can to get Republicans elected to the Senate—even if that means voting for squishy semi-statist "moderates" like Mark Kirk in Illinois. If the Republicans can get a Senate majority, then James Inhofe will once again control the Committee on Environment and Public Works—and we can expect a very interesting, very thorough Senate investigation of Climategate.
On the global warming front, it has been a good year. And next year will probably be better.
4. Intellectual Climate Change, June 3
First it came to Australia. Now it is taking over Britain. How long before the mainstream media containment wall collapses, and skepticism about global warming finally takes over here, too?
The American people are already highly skeptical, mind you, but the American media has so far maintained its monolithic dogma on global warming. But not if we follow the pattern of Britain, where the global warming dogma has collapsed since the Climategate scandal broke late last year.
How far have things gone? Well, revered environmentalist guru James Lovelock is now telling The Guardian, "Who knows? Everybody might be wrong. I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out."
The Royal Society—Britain's prestigious scientific society—has been forced to back off its endorsement of the global warming hysteria.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution's official position on global warming. It will publish a new "guide to the science of climate change" this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.And best of all is the story below, about a debate at the venerable old Oxford Union, in which prominent skeptics defeated alarmists in a vote by the students—and by a good margin. Intellectual climate change is possible, and it is only a matter of time before it comes, in full force, to the US.The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: "Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect—there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements." This contradicts a comment by the society's previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: "The debate on climate change is over."
"Oxford Union Debate on Climate Catastrophe," SPPI Blog, May 27
For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that "global warming" is or could become a global crisis....Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world's premier debating society, carried the motion "That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change" by 135 votes to 110....
Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that–politically speaking–the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun....
Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: "And your reference is?" Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering "Your reference? Your reference?" Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.
Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much "global warming" over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective....
Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as "Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society". At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, "If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and"—glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box—"measure it!"
5. Never Mind, July 8
The press and the scientific establishment—especially in America—is busy whitewashing the ClimateGate scandal. But they cannot escape its impact, and here's proof.
What was the whole point of the ClimateGate conspiracy? Well, mostly it was to promote and protect Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, which used "tricks" to "hide the decline" and make recent decades look like an unprecedented warm period. The conspirators were so successful, they managed to put the graph on the cover of a UN report on global warming, making it a symbol of global warming claims.
But now, after ClimateGate, Mann is running for cover, telling the BBC that there are too many uncertainties about past global temperatures and that "I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate."
So never mind, then.
"Michael Mann Says Hockey Stick Should Not Have Become 'Climate Change Icon'," Louise Gray, Daily Telegraph, June 28
The scientist behind the controversial "hockey stick" graph has said it was "somewhat misplaced' to make his work an 'icon of the climate change debate." Professor Michael Mann plotted a graph in the late 1990s that showed global temperatures for the last 1,000 years. It showed a sharp rise in temperature over the last 100 years as man-made carbon emissions also increased, creating the shape of a hockey stick.The graph was used by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth and was cited by the United Nations body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as evidence of the link between fossil fuel use and global warming. ...
The issue became a central argument in the climate change debate and was dragged into the "Climategate" scandal, as the skeptics accused Prof Mann and his supporters of exaggerating the extent of global warming.
However, speaking to the BBC recently, Prof Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, said he had always made clear there were "uncertainties" in his work. "I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate," he said.
6. "Agency Rule-Making," February 16
The New York Times officially notes what I've been expecting. If 2009 was the year of Obama's legislative onslaught against liberty, 2010 will see a renewed regulatory onslaught, in which the president compensates for the neutralization of the Democratic Congress by relying on the vast unilateral powers of the modern presidency.
The story here is not really about Obama. It is about the sheer scope of the power that the legislature has unconstitutionally abdicated to the executive branch, so that the president can now threaten to impose sweeping regulations on every aspect of the economy—which is what EPA carbon dioxide controls would amount to—through "agency rule-making" and "administrative fiat."
That phrase, "agency rule-making," really captures the way in which the modern regulatory state overthrows the basic structure of American government. There is a technical term for "rule-making"; it's called "legislation," and Article I of the Constitution gives that power to Congress, not the executive branch.
If the Republicans are looking for long-term reforms that will reign in the power of government, they ought to consider taking back the "rule-making" authority that Congress has given up.
"Obama Making Plans to Use Executive Power," Peter Baker, New York Times, February 12
[I]n the aftermath of a special election in Massachusetts that cost Democrats unilateral control of the Senate, the White House is getting ready to act on its own in the face of partisan gridlock heading into the midterm campaign.Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat....
His administration has signaled that it plans to use its discretion to soften enforcement of the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military, even as Congress considers repealing the law. And the Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with possible regulations on heat-trapping gases blamed for climate change, while a bill to cap such emissions languishes in the Senate.
In an effort to demonstrate forward momentum, the White House is also drawing more attention to the sorts of actions taken regularly by cabinet departments without much fanfare. The White House heavily promoted an export initiative announced by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke last week and nearly $1 billion in health care technology grants announced on Friday by Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, and Hilda L. Solis, the labor secretary.
One-Year Subscription — $74
Six-Month Subscription — $38
0 comments:
Post a Comment