Brutally Honest

"Textbook cases of gross lapses in professional ethics and scientific malfeasance"

H. Sterling Burnett is a member of the National Association of Scholars and he's describing the global warming movers and shakers:

Climategate, both 1 and 2, are textbook cases of gross lapses in professional ethics and scientific malfeasance.  To understand why, one must first understand what science is and how it is supposed to operate. Science is the noble pursuit of knowledge through observation, testing and experimentation.  Scientists attempt to explain, describe and/or predict the implications of phenomena through the use of the scientific method.  

The scientific method consists in gaining knowledge or explanatory power through a process.  Progress is made in science by proposing a hypothesis, and developing a theory to explain or understand certain phenomena, and then testing the hypothesis against reality.  A particular hypothesis is considered superior to others when, through testing, it is shown to have more explanatory power than competing theories or hypotheses and when other scientists running the same testing regime can reproduce the results of the original test.  Every theory or hypothesis must be disconfirmable in principle, which means that, if the theory predicts that "A" will occur under certain conditions, but instead, "B" and sometimes "C" result, then the theory has problems.  The more a hypothesis's predictions prove inconsistent with or are diametrically opposed to the results that occur during testing, the less likely the hypothesis is to be correct.

Which brings us to Climategate.  Climategate parts one and two are a series of leaked e-mails from arguably the most prominent researchers promoting the idea that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. The e-mails show the scientists involved to be violating their professional ethics with the result that climate science in particular and science as an institution more generally is brought into question. 

...

The pursuit of knowledge through science can’t proceed if scientists refuse to share data and methods.  In defense of their refusal to share data, suppress its release or even destroy it, climate scientists have claimed that because those asking for the data are skeptics, they will only use the data to try and undermine their results.  So what?  Either the data and methods stand up to scrutiny and the results are robust or they are not. Either way, the skeptics have done the world a service. 

The National Association of Scholars now casting doubt on the Church of Chicken Little.

More of this please.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

NASA's Hansen, vicar of the Church of Chicken Little, doubles down

James Hansen's cash flow must be running a bit low:

A new investigation of the ancient climate record shows that time to stop climate change is running out — maybe sooner than scientists had thought.

That’s the message from an international team of scientists reporting today at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco (#AGU11 on Twitter).

James Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and was one of the scientists on the study. He says that even the accepted benchmark of a 2-degree Celsius rise (3.6 F) in temperature that might result from doubling of current carbon dioxide levels would have a much greater impact than was previously thought.

“Once the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, then you’ve got an unstable shoreline, which is going to be continuing to change over time,” said Hansen in a presentation to fellow scientists. “It would be a mess for those people living at that time to deal with. And it looks like that time will be this century.”

The team’s new examination of the paleo-climate record now shows that  ”a global warming of a couple degrees Celsius would basically create a different planet,” Hansen warned. It’s different than the one that humanity, that civilization knows about. If we look at the paleo record, the target of two degrees Celsius is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”

The two-degree mark gets a lot of focus in both scientific and policy circles, as it’s emerged as the one clear benchmark for controlling warming that industrialized nations have been able to rally around.

Hansen says another measure of climate change deserves a second look in light of this new investigation: The atmospheric carbon reduction target of 350 parts per million (ppm) may not be enough. “It really should be somewhat less than that,” he told the gathering. “It’s necessary if we want to maintain stable ice sheets and shorelines.”

Hansen’s warning is based on his team’s finding that long-ago changes of less than two degrees in the Earth’s temperature resulted in oceans rising by about 25 meters (about 82 feet). Current science on global ice sheets concludes that they’re shedding ice, and the rate of that is increasing.

“We’ve got to slow down this experiment that we’re doing with the planet,” says Hansen, “because otherwise we’re leaving for young people a situation that’s going to be out of their control.”

The only way to avoid this disaster is to send more money Hansen's way.  And stroke a check to Al Gore while you're at it.  

Pay now or your children will die.  And their puppies.

You've been warned.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Since when has science had something to do with helping the cause?

There's been a new release of Climategate emails that, should they prove to be genuine, shed additional light on the darkness and deceit that is global warming 'science'.

Watts Up With That brings us details:

Early this morning, history repeated itself. FOIA.org has produced an enormous zip file of 5,000 additional emails similar to those released two years ago in November 2009 and coined Climategate. There are almost 1/4 million additional emails locked behind a password, which the organization does not plan on releasing at this time.

The original link was dropped off in the Hurricane Kenneth thread at about 4 AM Eastern. It is still there.

Some initial snippets floating around the blogosphere:

<3373> Bradley: I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.

<3115> Mann:  By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

<3940> Mann:  They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.

<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause

<2440> Jones: I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process

<2094> Briffa: UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC
task.

There's tons more at the link.

Science today is less about testing a particular theory and looking to get consistent results that are explainable and repeatable... it's now about helping a cause.  

A cause that is lining the pockets of many a charlatan.

Fraudulent science pays

And pays well.

John Hinderaker at Powerline has details:

Beyond that handful of leading alarmists, if you are involved in any way in climate science, you have a financial interest in alarmism. Even minor climate scientists get consulting contracts and are invited to present papers in exotic locales. And if you are not an alarmist, you have little or no chance of cashing in on the billions of dollars in government grants for climate research. Essentially, the closed world of climate “science” has been bought and paid for, largely with our tax dollars. Under these circumstances, it is remarkable that so many real scientists have been willing to forgo financial advantage and blow the whistle on the alarmists’ frauds.

Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, comments:

NASA’s James Hansen is back in the news for two reasons. He has a new paper claiming that the Moscow heat wave during 2010 and the Texas heat wave during 2011 provide a form of statistical proof of global warming. The pause in warming must be justified somehow! The study was quickly refuted by several commentators, most devastatingly by Lubos Motl.

The second reason Hansen is in the news is that he failed to report some $1,600,000 of outside income over several years as required by his contract for government employment. Normally, TWTW would not bother with such, but this is an exception for a number of reasons. One, in 1988 with great publicity, Hansen announced with great certainty that global warming threatens humanity. Two, with great publicity, Hansen declared that President Bush was trying to muzzle him. And, three, he was cited as the scientific advisor of Al Gore’s scientifically disgraceful film. Apparently, Hansen believes that his celebrity status exempts him from the regulations that govern other government scientists.

Occupy the fraud that is global warming science and start with Hansen, its lead grifter.

When will the Occupy crowd target NASA's James Hansen?

Because clearly, Mr. Hansen is making money hand over fist and aren't the Occupy loons haters of the rich?

As it waits for the resolution of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which seeks the outside employment permission records of global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center has received the belatedly filed 2010 public financial disclosure of the renowned director of the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

ATI obtained Dr. Hansen’s Form SF 278, which is required to be filed annually, also under the Freedom of Information Act. The disclosure revealed that Dr. Hansen received between $236,000 and $1,232,500 in outside income in 2010 relating to his taxpayer-funded employment, which included:

• Between $26,008 and $72,500 in honoraria for speeches;

• Between $150,001 and $1.1 million in prizes;

• Just under $60,000 in the form of in-kind income for travel to his many outside-income generating activities

The travel reporting marked the first time Hansen detailed such “in-kind” benefits, which included apparent first-class travel for him and his wife on trips to Australia, Japan, and Norway. The new detail raises the question of whether Dr. Hansen wrongly submitted forms in previous years, which he left blank and attested “none” in the space where he is required to report travel expenses taken as part of his outside employment, all in years in which he was busy with numerous paid outside activities of the same sort as he was in 2010.

“Now that Dr. Hansen’s outside income has come under scrutiny, we see a newfound attention to detail on forms where he reports about these sources,” said Christopher Horner, ATI’s director of litigation. “It also shows that Dr. Hansen continues to enjoy a healthy level of earnings that supplement – and for his curious exploitation of – the taxpayer-funded position he holds.”

I'm sure the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are making their way from Rupert Murdoch's Upper East Side apartment to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in nearby Morningside Heights... and I'm as sure the mainstream media will be there to cover their protests.

Aren't you?

H/T to Don Surber who asks poignantly of this NASA civil servant:

Just when does he get around to doing his job?

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Scientific consensus: Ice loss is exaggerated

Anyone who denies what follows must be anti-science:

The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said on Monday.

The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and significant shrinking could lead to a global rise in sea levels.

"While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available," HarperCollins said on its website on Monday.

However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.

"We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading," said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge.

"We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered."

Other scientists agreed.

"These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland," said Jeffrey S. Kargel, senior research scientist at the University of Arizona.

The Times Atlas suggested the Greenland ice sheet has lost 300,000 square kilometers in the past 12 years, at a rate of 1.5 percent per year.

However, measurements suggest this rate is at least 10 times faster than in reality, added J. Graham Cogley, Professor of Geography at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.

"It could easily be 20 times too fast and might well be 50 times too fast," he added.

I'm assuming that Al Gore and his minions will soon be comparing those who disagree with racists and holocaust deniers.  Those comparisons will quickly be followed by claims that the scientists are in the pockets of big oil.

Scientific consensus isn't if the consensus doesn't fit the meme.

"There will be a full-on assault on climate skeptics"

And Al Gore's going to be the apparent weapon of choice:

Former Vice President Al Gore will renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multi-media event.

"24 Hours of Reality" will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.

The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore's message.

"There will be 200 new slides arguing the connection between more extreme weather and climate change," Trewin Restorick, chief executive of the event's UK partner Global Action Plan, told Reuters on Monday.

"There will be a full-on assault on climate skeptics, exploring where they get their funding from."

Isn't it interesting that very few will explore where it is that the Church of Chicken Little gets their funding? And more interesting that those funding sources are never seen to be a reason to cast doubt on the movement?

It's a line of questioning I'd like to see taken up with Mr. Restorick and those of his ilk.

I won't hold my breath.

Crossposted at Wizbang.

Presidential alarming of children

By Chuck aka XtnYoda

Now ... the President of the United States of America ... has joined the ranks of those pushing the propaganda of "man made climate change" (anthropogenic global warming) ... down the throats of children.

Climate Depot

President Barack Obama told Scholastic News Kid Reporters during a TV interview that one of the "greatest challenges facing" their generation is “climate change.”

"Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama stated, after citing the economy as another big issue. The interview was conducted by Scholastic News kid reporters as part of the new program on the “Challenges Facing America's Youth.”

Obama explained: “There are some big challenges around climate change. The temperature of the planet is getting warmer because of the pollution that we are sending up in the air, the carbon that we are releasing.” He added: “That is something we are going to have to really focus on.”...

Obama also claimed that man-made global warming was “causing changing weather patterns.” "In places like Florida you may be more vulnerable to hurricanes, in other areas we have seen more drought,” he explained.

“We have got to get started dealing with this issue. and we have to make sure your generation finds better ways to use energy more efficiently so that we are not sending out as much pollution into the air and that is something we are going to have to really focus on," Obama added....

This is a sad day in American history.

Government's propaganda of children and climate

By Chuck aka XtnYoda

The government's "Energy Star" agency has started a major campaign targeting children with their "global warming" mantra.

Brazen evil and child abuse coming from this government agency.

Shame on you "Energy Star."

You are no star ... you are a black hole ... attempting to suck the life out of every child and their futures.

'It provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change'

I'm guessing Al Gore thinks this piece is racist:

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

CERN's director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer warned his scientists "to present the results clearly but not interpret them". Readers can judge whether CLOUD's lead physicist Jasper Kirkby has followed his boss's warning.

"Ion-induced nucleation will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere."

Kirkby is quoted in the accompanying CERN press release:

"We've found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we've found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays."

...

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature (pdf):

"[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.

The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.

Summarizing, the sun appears to be more responsible for global warming than humans.  And the scientists at CERN join the racist throngs throwing cold water on Al Gore's agenda.  

Hey Al... you're losing the conversation. 

H/T to Lex Communis.

Crossposted at Wizbang.