You know a scandal may have legs when even the mainstream media, which has generally hewed to alarmist line regarding global warming, reports on the evidence of scientific fraud:
Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.
While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.
In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!“
(Emphasis added)
The highlighted segment of the Post article reiterates the point I made yesterday: results had become more important to significant players in the “climate alarmist community” than truth, leading to a willingness to corrupt the scientific process by excluding contrary articles from scientific literature. Again, this revelation and the others contained in the leaked emails should call all pro-alarmist research into question. As the article points out, most politicians in the US have been unquestioning sheep about anthropogenic climate change. Maybe this time they’ll develop a healthy skepticism.
These are dark times indeed for true believers in the religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming: not only is the empirical evidence going more and more against their Inconvenient Truths, but now there have come revelations of scandal within the walls of one of the Holy Places of the Faith. A hacker broke into the computer systems of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit and stole over 60 megabytes of emails and other documents and released them to the public.
The significance of of these files is that they strongly indicate deliberate fraud and the illegal destruction of data by researchers seeking to bolster the case for AGW. They also speak of plans (at least) to corrupt the peer-review process by smearing skeptical scientists in order to blackball them, thus creating a review process slanted favorably toward research that supports the anthropogenic thesis of global warming and ignores any problems with that research.
James Delingpole of The Telegraph has a good overview of the ethical roaches uncovered by this (let’s be blunt) theft. Let me quote from one of the emails dealing with the corruption of the peer-review process:
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Talk like this should mortify anyone concerned for the integrity of science. The peer-review process is crucial to maintaining this integrity. For any scientist to try to game and shape this system in their favor should lead to calling into question the whole body of their research, especially when global-warming alarmists, such as the scientists at the CRU, are demanding governments take extreme measures to fix a problem the scientists claim is incontrovertible fact.
If half of what was revealed is true, then any credibility possessed by the pro-AGW faction in the scientific community, national governments, and the UN is crippled or outright destroyed. The Senate should call an immediate halt to any further consideration its version of the Waxman-Markey bill, passage of which would be disastrous for the US economy, until the truth about these revelations from CRU can be determined.
Besides Delingpole’s article, here are a few other links you’ll want to read to get an idea of the scope of this scandal:
The mind boggles at the possible scope of the fraud revealed today. For the sheer magnitude of its potential effect on the world’s economy, it dwarfs other scandals, such as fake fetal stem cell research. If true, it could be fatal to the Anthropogenic Global Warming movement.
Congratulations, Mr. President, you now have the first open scandal of your administration! It’s a good one, too. There’s the corrupt use of public funds, trumped up charges and a smear campaign to get rid of a troublesome priest an Inspector General who asked too many questions, and even charges of sexual harassment and a cover-up thereof. Well done. You’re a rookie president no more.
Congressional Report: Rhee did ‘damage control’ after sex charges against fiance Kevin Johnson
A congressional investigation of the volunteer organization AmeriCorps contains charges that D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee handled “damage control” after allegations of sexual misconduct against her now fiance, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA star and a prominent ally of President Obama, The Washington Examiner has learned.
The charges are contained in a report prepared by Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and Rep. Darrell Issa, ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The investigation began after the AmeriCorps inspector general, Gerald Walpin, received reports that Johnson had misused some of the $800,000 in federal AmeriCorps money provided to St. Hope, a non-profit school that Johnson headed for several years.
Walpin was looking into charges that AmeriCorps-paid volunteers ran personal errands for him, washed his car, and took part in political activities. In the course of investigating those allegations, the congressional report says, Walpin’s investigators were told that Johnson had made inappropriate advances toward three young women involved in the St. Hope program — and that Johnson offered at least one of those young women money to keep quiet.
Read the whole thing; it goes straight back to the White House and its Chicago Way politics.
RELATED: The scandal regarding the the administration’s attempts to suborn the Inspector-General system has been brewing for several months now. Maybe this will be the incident that blows it wide open. I wrote earlier about the connection to pork and rats and their use in recreating Cook County on the Potomac. Stacy McCain has written extensively on the war on the watchdogs. More from Ed Morrissey.
UPDATE: Iowa’s Senator Grassley, a “patron saint” of the Inspector-General program, thinks there is clear evidence of a political motive in Walpin’s firing.
Bunk. The man who screamed “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down soldiers was committing an act of jihad as a devout Muslim. But, aside from the sheer horror of the atrocity itself, a lack of understanding of Islamic doctrine makes it difficult to comprehend how someone who had been given the best of everything by his colleagues in the Army could then turn on them. How could someone practicing what we’ve been told again and again is a “Religion of Peace” shoot down a pregnant woman in cold blood?
Raymond Ibrahim supplies some answers. In a two-part article at Pajamas Media, he explores the Islamic doctrines that provided the intellectual and spiritual framework for Hasan’s assault. In the series, he looks at
Wala’ wa Bara’, the doctrine of loyalty and enmity, which requires of the Muslim absolute loyalty to his Islamic brethren and hatred of all things un-Islamic, including people. This is crucial to understand.
Taqiyya, the doctrine of permissible lying and deception, pretending to be a friend and ally of unbelievers while hiding the enmity in your heart.
Jihad. War for the sake of Allah.
Sakina. The peace that comes over the mujaheddin as he enters battle with the infidel. By all accounts, Major Hasan displayed it.
Da’wa. Islamic preaching and proselytization in order to bring people to Islam. One of the few reasons under sharia law it is permissible for a Muslim to live in non-Muslim lands.
I can’t emphasize enough that these articles are excellent introductions to what is an all-too obscure topic. We can’t hope to defeat the jihadist enemy unless we know how he thinks. Otherwise we’ll again be left fishing for lame excuses when the next attack occurs.
RECOMMENDED READING: Mr. Ibrahim is the editor of The al-Qaeda Reader, a collection of translated documents written by Osama bin Laden and his deputy psychotic mass-murderer in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The first part collects essays aimed at other Muslims, marshaling arguments based on the Qur’an, the hadiths, and sharia rulings to justify their actions. The second collects propaganda aimed at Westerner, often very different from what they say when “speaking among themselves.” It’s dry, but I recommend it highly.
Apparently, new research (you know, that empirical evidence thing, not just computer models) shows that Antarctica has been far warmer in the recent geologic past – all without Man’s intervention:
A new study of Antarctica’s past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day.
The findings, reported this week by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.
Previous analysis of ice cores has shown that the climate consists of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods roughly every 100,000 years. This new investigation shows temperature ’spikes’ within some of the interglacial periods over the last 340,000 years. This suggests Antarctic temperature shows a high level of sensitivity to greenhouse gases at levels similar to those found today.
Lead author Louise Sime of British Antarctic Survey said,
“We didn’t expect to see such warm temperatures, and we don’t yet know in detail what caused them. But they indicate that Antarctica’s climate may have undergone rapid shifts during past periods of high CO2.”
During the last warm period, about 125,000 years ago, sea level was around 5 metres higher than today.
Of course, nothing yet establishes that CO2 is a cause of warming, not an effect of it. That the temperature was much higher then at CO2 levels “similar to today” hints at an independent factor. Obviously, more research is needed, hopefully without the a priori assumption that CO2 causes global warming.
Regardless, the key fact to note here is that this happened in the past with no human input.
Why does anyone take Al Gore seriously on global warming, or any matter involving science? The guy’s ignorant. Check out this howler. Thirty seconds of searching on the Internet found the correct information.
Again, I ask: Why does anyone lend this bombastic fool any credence whatsoever?
Because anthropogenic global warming is a religion, not a science, and the Goracle is its chief priest.
Egyptian cleric Mahmoud al-Masri tells the story of a nice Muslim man who did his Jewish neighbor a favor: he tricked him into converting to Islam and then told him “if you leave the faith, we’ll kill you.”
My dear brothers, we want to repent, and we want to take by the hand those people who have not yet repented. We should feel pity for them. By Allah, we should not be tough with them. These people are sick. They are sinners. We should feel pity for them, we should care for them. We should act like doctors who care for the sick. You should care for them and feel great pity for them, and seek any ingenious way to make a person repent.
I’d like to tell you a very nice story. Once there was a Muslim who lived next to a Jew. The Muslim saw in the Jew a measure of goodheartedness – however small – and he wanted to find any way to make him convert to Islam. So he went to him and asked: “Don’t you feel the need for Islam? Why don’t you become a Muslim?” The Jew said: “The only thing preventing me from becoming a Muslim is that I love drinking alcohol. I would have become a Muslim ages ago, but the only thing stopping me is that I am an alcoholic.”
The Muslim devised a plan. He said: “No problem – become a Muslim, and continue to drink.” The Muslim didn’t meant this, of course, but he said to him: “Become a Muslim, and continue to drink.” The Jews said: “Fine.” He said: “I proclaim that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” The Muslim said to him: “Now you have become a Muslim. If you drink alcohol, we will carry out the punishment for drinking alcohol on you, and if you renounce Islam, we will kill you.” So the man remained a Muslim and never drank alcohol again. This was a nice trick by this good Muslim.
For video of Smiling Mahmoud explaining the Islamic version of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, visit MEMRI.
Is Sarah Palin’s tour to promote her new book part of a canny strategy for 2012, a plan of which Sam Walton would have approved? J. Robert Smith at American Thinker believes it may be so, as her tour takes her to those places the elites ignore:
What’s notable about Sarah Palin’s book tour, which starts midweek, is where she’s not going. She’s not going to L.A. or New York, Boston or San Francisco. She’s going smack dab to the middle of the country. Fly-over country, liberals call it. And it’s a shrewd move, not only in selling books, but positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012, if she chooses.
It’s a strategy right out of the late Sam Walton’s playbook: go where there’s demand and the competition ain’t. Walton, who could have run and won political campaigns, built Walmart into the behemoth it is today by opening his discount stores in small towns in the heartland, towns that the eight-hundred pound gorilla K-Mart ignored.
Walton conquered the discount retail category from the heartland out. He didn’t so much as clobber K-Mart as steal a march on it. Palin may just prove that a heartland strategy does more than sell blenders and books. It’s the foundation for winning a national election.
And it isn’t just a political version of the Sam Walton Way: Smith points out the places she will visit are home to large numbers of Jacksonians, traditional Democrats who tend to be culturally conservative and aggressive about national security. This same group, also known as “Reagan Democrats,” formed a large part of the winning coalition in 1980 and the subsequent Republican dominance. Palin resonates with this group, and her tour and media appearances give her a chance also to repair her reputation (savaged by the major media, which acted as a propaganda arm for the DNC) with politically independent affluent suburbanites who, polls show, are deserting the Democrats and Obama in droves – witness the recent election results in New Jersey and Virginia.
Can a “from the heartland out” strategy win in 2012? Perhaps. Politics is the art of coalition-building, and right now there are large segments of the nation who do not feel their needs are being served or are actively being harmed by the political elites. Sarah Palin already has shown she can run an effective “anti-insiders” campaign, though it remains to be seen if can work on a national level as it did for Reagan – or if she’ll even decide to run in the first place.
Regardless, ignoring the big cities and staking your claim in “flyover country” is a strategy that would have made Sam Walton smile.
With the release 2012, Islamist Watch wonders why the film shows holy places being destroyed around the globe – except Mecca.
“Who will survive 2012?” asks a website promoting Roland Emmerich’s new end-of-the-world film set three years from now. The answer: Muslims — or at least their cherished holy places:
For his latest disaster movie, 2012, the 53-year-old director had wanted to demolish the Kaaba, the iconic cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. …
But after some consideration, he decided it might not be such a smart idea, after all.
“I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich told SciFiWire.com. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right.”
Have a look to see how else Hollywood has gone out of its way to avoid offending Muslims, but shows no such concern for other religions, and learn why David Rusin rates Hollywood a D for Dhimmitude.
Maybe its because, if we do, we’ll find the real truth: that anthropogenic global warming is a gigantic fraud.
Controversial new climate change results
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.
The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.
I emphasized that last part because it’s important: the results from Bristol are based on empirical observation and the geologic record, not computer models that are by nature limited to the assumptions humans program into them, assumptions that have been shown to be fundamentally flawed.
The central argument of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is that Man is pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere that the the Earth’s ecosystem cannot absorb it all, and thus the excess is leading to dangerous temperature increases that will have catastrophic effects. The findings of Dr. Knorr, if they hold up to testing and replication, destroy the foundation of the AGW argument. If indeed there is no measurable excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, then there is no basis for the feared greenhouse effect. Thus the frantic effort to get the United States and other countries to hobble their economies in the name of “fighting climate change” is at best a Chicken Little moment of hysteria among true believers or, at worst, a mask behind which to hide the real statist agenda of extending government control over every aspect of our lives.
And they have to do it before the inconvenient facts wreck their Holy Truth.
LINKS: Watt’s Up with That calls the Bristol findings a bombshell. Heliogenic Climate Change discusses how the Arctic was much warmer in the recent geologic past than it is now. Fausta informs us that the Green Statist crowd is giving up on their latest attempt to impose a global Waxman-Markey fiasco on the world. Sister Toldjah relates how the US Environmental Protection Agency has threatened two of it lawyers who have dared to challenge AGW orthodoxy.
The big news yesterday was the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the confessed, proud mastermind of the 9-11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 of our people and foreign guests, would be tried in a civilian court in New York City, just blocks from Ground Zero:
The Obama administration said Friday that it would prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a decision that ignited a sharp political debate but took a step toward resolving one of the most pressing terrorism detention issues.
The decision, announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., could mean one of the highest-profile and highest-security terrorism trials in history would be set just blocks from where hijackers for Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Mr. Holder said he would instruct prosecutors to seek death sentences for Mr. Mohammed and four accused Sept. 11 co-conspirators who would be tried alongside him.
I can’t decide if this is some sort of continuation of Holder and his boss’s war against the Bush Administration and the CIA, monumental stupidity and incompetence on their part, or both. Do these two geniuses realize that trying KSM and his buddies in Manhattan invites every jihadi in the world to strike the city again, either to rescue them or avenge them? Do they comprehend what a circus and a farce this will become? This is the ultimate act of reverting to a pre-9/11 mentality, which for the length of the 90s assured us that law enforcement was the proper venue for handling terrorists.
This is depressing and disturbing on so many levels, I can’t even work up a good rant. Others however, had plenty to say. Let’s start with my hero of that terrible day and first choice for President in 2008, Rudy Giuliani:
Part 1
Part 2
Let me repeat Hizzoner’s trenchant observation: the decision to try KSM in New York is “frighteningly incompetent.”
Michael Mukasey was George W. Bush’s last Attorney General and had been the presiding judge at the trial of the Islamic terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. If anyone should know why the civilian court system is not competent to handle cases of jihadist terrorism, it is he:
The difficulty of trying terror suspects through civilian courts, he said, is that the discovery process, the public presentation of evidence, and other elements of a trial “could turn a criminal proceeding into a cornucopia of information for those still at large and a circus for those in custody.”
He pointed out that when capturing the enemy combatants, pieces of information “were not gathered, nor was evidence gathered, on the assumption that they would be presented in a federal court.”
There would also be tremendous security issues involved with making sure that courthouses, jails, the judge and jury, were all safe.
“It would take a whole lot more credulousness than I have available to be optimistic about the outcome of this latest experiment,” Mukasey said at the conclusion of his formal remarks.
Somehow, I think Judge Mukasey was understating his misgivings. (via Hot Air)
Finally, former Governor Sarah Palin weighed in on her Facebook page, calling it an “atrocious decision:”
It is crucially important that Americans be made aware that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks may walk away from this trial without receiving just punishment because of a “hung jury” or from any variety of court room technicalities. If we are stuck with this terrible Obama Administration decision, I, like most Americans, hope that Mohammed and his co-conspirators are convicted. Hang ‘em high.
Charles Krauthammer looks at the latest attempt to explain Major Hasan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood as “anything but Islam” -this time, as a psychiatric problem- and isn’t impressed:
Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?
And what about civilian psychiatrists — not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics — who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?
It’s been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.
But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.
The “obvious,” of course, is that Nidal Malik Hasan was a devout Muslim who had chosen to obey the call to holy war against the infidel, the call to jihad fi sabil allah, and acted on it by gunning down 51 people, killing 14 – including the unborn child of the pregnant woman he murdered.
But we can’t say that. In our post-modern world besotted with multiculturalism, it is out-of-bounds to take a hard look and talk frankly about another culture or religion (unless it’s Western), such as Islam with its imperatives toward supremacism and war against the unbeliever. No, instead we have to repeat politically correct pabulum and invent psychological disorders that don’t exist, all so we can continue to ignore the jihadist elephant in the living room.
Whatever else you may think of former President George W. Bush, I think even his most hardened foes, if they’re honest, have to admit he’s a good man:
George W. Bush Secretly Visits Fort Hood Victims
The Bushes entered and departed the sprawling military facility in secret, having told the base commander they did not want press coverage of their visit, a source told Fox News.
Former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura secretly visited Fort Hood last night and spent “considerable time” consoling those who were wounded in Thursday’s shooting spree, Fox News has learned.
The Bushes entered and departed the sprawling military facility in secret, having told the base commander they did not want press coverage of their visit, a source told Fox News.
The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them.
If there are any of you out there with any connection at all to the Bushes, we implore you to give them our thanks…you tell them that a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown, Chicago were wrong about the Bushes…and are deeply, deeply sorry for any jokes we told about them in the past, any bad thoughts we had about these good, good people.
You may be as surprised by this as we are ourselves, but from this day forward George W. and Laura Bush are now on the same list for us as the Clintons, Geraldine Ferraro, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and the other political figures we keep in our hearts and never allow anyone to badmouth.
Criticize their policies academically and intelligently and discuss the Bush presidency in historical and political terms…but you mess with the Bushes personally and, from this day forward, you’ll answer to us.
Whoever thought die-hard liberals would be missing George W. Bush? The guys at Hillbuzz are class acts, too.
A new video from Dan Mitchell and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, explaining why both the House and Senate health-care reform bills would be a red-ink train wreck:
Posted by Phineas Fahrquar 
Posted by Phineas Fahrquar 
Posted by Phineas Fahrquar 
Phineas Fahrquar
Sister Toldjah
