Here it is Monday, and the administration is keeping quiet about the climate-change fraud conundrum. The only word I’ve heard comes from climate czar Carol Browner, who stated,
I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real (…) [people calling for action] are a very small group of people who continue to say this isn’t a real problem, that we don’t need to do anything.
At least she stops short of calling us “deniers” or “flat earthers.”
Which is better than I can say for Al Gore. His new book is called, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, and it opens with this happy quote from Deuteronomy: “I’m offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses.”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gore thinks very highly of himself. He’s on a crusade to save us from our own worst instincts, much like his wife was in the 1980’s. He loves to see himself on television, and it’s even better that he gets to lecture us from a position of moral authority.
Another person who takes himself very seriously is Ed Begley Jr., best known for his brief career as a drummer for Spinal Tap. He really doesn’t like seeing his beliefs called into question, and he had a bit of a meltdown when Stuart Varney put him on the spot the other day:
Those are the key words: ‘peer reviewed’ studies. Get it from people with the word ‘Ph.D’ in their name. Get it from Nature or National Geographic (…) those people are scientists.
The only problem is that the Ph.D’s were lying. One of them is Dr. Michael Mann (not to be confused with the director by the same name). To quote Dr. Mann directly:
Yes, we’ve learned out lesson about FTP. We’re going to be very careful in the future what gets put there. Scott really screwed up big time when he established that directory so that Tim could access the data. Yeah, there is a freedom of information act in the U.S., and the contrarians are going to try to use it for all its worth. But there are also intellectual property rights issues, so it isn’t clear how these sorts of things will play out ultimately in the U.S. [CRU email #1107454306]
Mann has been published by both Nature and National Geographic. Hence the problem with Mr. Begley’s line of reasoning.
Global warming is bad science, put to the purpose of serving bad public policy. Remember the brilliant idea of converting corn subsidies to biofuel production? The results included food shortages and riots in Central America.
The only word on this from the Oval Office is that the President is definitely going to Copenhagen next week. I hope it turns into a shouting match. It’s about time.
A few incidentals. The full archive of emails and source code is available at WikiLeaks. It’s about 160Mb. The “hide the decline” email is #0942777075.
I mentioned before the parallels between this situation and gun-control research, and I thought I’d offer another example. As I’d written last week, the Brady Campaign brief in the McDonald case is up, and I spent a bit of time checking their citations.
Without going into detail, these are my margin notes:
- Funded by VPC
- Funded by Brady Campaign
- Discredited and withdrawn when raw data could not be produced
- Slanted CDC search criteria
- Kellerman
- Kellerman again
- Joyce Foundation trustee
- Johns Hopkins grant through Joyce
- Pulled when Donahue was accused of falsifying stats
- Rec’d $400K from Joyce Foundation for study
- Director for Brennan Center, funded by Joyce, Carnegie, OSI
This stuff is quoted as “research” before the highest court in the United States, and the only peer review is among a fixed pool of sympathetic colleagues. Dishonesty is endemic in academics, and we need to consider a more stringent, unified alternative to peer review.