What Is In The Copenhagen Agreement?

From the Wall Street Journal, here is an overview of the draft Copenhagen Agreement on global warming and the redistribution of global wealth.

If world leaders actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises.

Such as: a trans-national "government"; international taxation on industrialized countries, which include among others the U.S., Australia, Britain and Canada; massive economic damage, loss of constitutional sovereignty, and on it goes.

The aim is to give a new as yet unnamed U.N. body the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

Hack Or Leak?

If you are on the side of the believers in AGW you will also likely believe that the Climategate emails (and the far more important computer data files) were "stolen" or "hacked" by criminals, possibly professional Russian hackers, possibly hired by some combination of Big Oil conspirators.

But over at Watts Up With That there is a likely much simpler explanation:

First, few people know that there was already a previous leak last July. It turned out the "leaked" data was actually left on an open FTP server by none other than CRU Head Phil Jones himself.

Second, CRU had pending Freedom of Information requests for the very data that was leaked. It makes sense that the data for this request would be placed in one file pending the FOI approval process. It would take far too long, far too much insider knowledge and way too much access for hackers to assemble over 3,000 emails and 20,000 lines of computer code. Far more likely is that these data were assembled "in-house" at CRU and were awaiting a decision on the FOI request.

A few people inside CRU possessed the archive of documents being held in reserve in case the FOI appeal decision was made in favor of Steve McIntyre. They shared it with others by putting it in an FTP directory which was on the same CPU as the external webserver, or even worse, was an on a shared drive somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available. Then, along comes our “hackers” who happened to find it, download it, and the rest is history unfolding before our eyes. So much for the cries of sophisticated hacking and victimization noted above.

There’s an old adage: never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity or incompetence.

If You Read Nothing Else About Global Warming, Read This

Scientists, politicians and the media are jetting into Copenhagen for tomorrow's opening of the UN Climate Change Conference. Those who believe in anthropogenic global warming are hoping for a major international treaty that will transfer literally trillions of dollars out of developed western economies via the UN.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph that the AGW faithful will tell you that thousands of climate scientists have reached a consensus that the planet is warming dangerously, carbon must be controlled, humans are to blame and we must pay a heavy price for our sins against the planet.

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

The truth is that the grand theory of AGW, the "consensus" of thousands of climatologists, all comes down to British scientist Keith Briffa and his data from one tree in Yamal, Siberia. Yes, one scientist, one tree.

Be sure to read the whole thing, and the comments are worth your while too.

How Blue Box Recycling Hurts The Environment

The National Post takes a break from the enviropolitical fiasco that is Climategate to remind us of another green boondoggle - the myth that curbside recycling has any benefit. They must just love hearing hippies howl.

While a blue bin out front makes us feel we're helping the planet, recycling most household materials has either minimal environmental impact, or even a negative one.

Nopenhagen

Barack Obama has postponed his speech at Copenhagen to the very last day of the conference. He believes his presence will convince everyone to come on board at the last minute.

By switching his visit from Dec. 9 to Dec. 18 [he picks up the Nobel on Dec. 10], Obama appears to be betting that his presence can - as he has expressed hope for several times in the past - push the negotiations "over the top" toward an agreement.

Hmm. Bogus Nobel, no Chicago Olympics and now the Copenhagen house of cards... it's really just about him, eh?

Exploding cigars anyone?

WSJ: Science Is Dying

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, writes that Climategate is killing science.

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

Rex Murphy On Climategate

This is Rex's take on Climategate on CBC's The National last night.



UPDATE: Extensive commentary and heartfelt praise for my fellow Newfoundlander Rex Murphy at Andrew Watts' climate news emporium Watts Up With That.

21st Century Propaganda

If you have not seen the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, you need to see it now.

All the more so if you have already seen An Inconvenient Truth. Watch both and make your own decision. But know that what you are seeing in both of these films is state-of-the-art 21st century propaganda.

If you've spent any time here at all you probably know which movie I'd stand with.

UPDATE: The CBC is going to re-run An Inconvenient Truth again this Sunday night. If you feel, as I do, that Canada's state-run broadcaster has no business broadcasting Al Gore's discredited propaganda, write to them here. I did.

Gore's "Great Annoyance"

Al Gore has canceled a speaking engagement at the coming Copenhagen global warming convention. From the Washington Times:

Berlingkse Media, a Danish group coordinating ticket sales and publicity for the event, said that "great annoyance" was a factor in the cancellation, along with unforeseen changes in Gore's program for the climate summit. The decision affected 3,000 ticket holders.

Ticket holders who paid $1200 a pop for a speech, a lunch and a photo op with the Goracle himself.

The Copenhagen anthropogenic global warming festival is - how shall we say it - hosed. Sinking ship anyone?

This Is Me On Google Street View

This is one of the snaps the Google Street View car took of me driving eastbound on Portugal Cove Road out by Windsor Lake, St. John's, on August 31 this year. The Nissan seems to be split between two of the camera lenses.

Google Street View Newfoundland Update

Google Street View went online as of last night in the northeast Avalon Newfoundland communities of St. John's, Mount Pearl and Conception Bay South.

You can now view almost every street in the rectangle bounded by Torbay to Portugal Cove to Upper Gullies to Petty Harbour.

Lots of new 3D Buildings have been added to the St. John's images in the latest update too.

Google has more info:

Google launched Street View imagery for nine additional cities in Canada, bringing the number of Canadian cities available in the service to more than 20. The new cities are: Victoria, Nanaimo, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Sudbury, London, Sherbrooke, and St. John's.

Street View imagery has also launched today for Singapore, more cities in France and Japan, and special sites including Stonehenge, Pompei, the Palace of Versailles, and SeaWorld San Diego and Orlando.

Canada's Hockey Team

Canadiens? Nope. Canucks even? Nuh uh. Flames? Wrong again. Senators? You're kidding, right?

Canada's hockey team is the Toronto Maple Leafs, of course. Duh! How foolish of me not to know. They even have a song out.



From the National Post comments:

To be considered "Canada's Team", wouldn't the aforementioned team have had to actually won something in the past...oh...um, say, HALF CENTURY? Just sayin'.......

Who Peer-Reviewed The Climate Models? Nobody.

There have been plenty of attempts to explain away Climategate by calling for the arrest of those who "hacked" the CRU emails, or by excusing the intemperate language in the emails as a kind of collegiality, but always concentrating on the emails.

Almost no one on the warmist side is talking about the software and data files that also leaked. But as Shannon Love writes at Chicago Boyz, that is changing.

Now, Programmers all over the world have begun wading through the code and they have been stunned by how bad it is. It’s quite clearly amateurish and nothing but an accumulation of seat-of-the-pants hacks and patches. 

And it is this amateur code that the UN IPCC is basing it's call for trillions of dollars in taxes on western economies.

Shannon Love:

As far as I can tell, none of the software on which the entire concept of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) is based has been examined, reviewed or tested by anyone save the people who wrote the code in the first place. This is a staggering omission of scientific oversight and correction. Nothing like it has happened in the history of science.

For now, we can safely say all the data produced by this CRU code is highly suspect. By the ancient and proven rule in computing of “Garbage in, Garbage Out” this means that all the climate simulations by other teams that make predictions using this dubious data are likewise corrupted.

Given that literally hundreds of millions of lives over the next century will depend on getting the climate models correct, we have to start all our climate modeling over from scratch.

Democracy Wins In Honduras

Following yesterday's successful elections in Honduras, Latin American specialist Mary O'Grady writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday's elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle.

Ahem. Ha ha ha! Point point point!

Jim Treacher has a friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head:

Hello, hyperventilating zealot.

Greetings, denialist scum.

Now that we've dispensed with the formalities, please allow me to point and laugh at you. Ahem. Ha ha ha! Point point point!

Shut up.

The, er, conversation continues here.

Another Climategate Bombshell

In the Times Online this morning the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in Norwich admits it has destroyed all the original data upon which its scientists had based their theories of global warming.

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. 

Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

In one of the published emails, Phil Jones, the Director of the CRU states

[They] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

UPDATE: Drudge is quoting a Telegraph report that CRU will release all of its data. This is old news that came out before the Telegraph's subsequent story quoted above that all the original data has been destroyed. Note the time stamps on each Telegraph article.

The Worst Scientific Scandal Of Our Generation

Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster writes in today's Telegraph:

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age. 

The hacked (or leaked) emails that point to collusion, suppression of contrary evidence and subversion of scientific peer review are the more obvious issues of Climategate.

The deeper scandal shows up in the computer data files that were also released. This is where we see that the data has been fraudulently manipulated to reflect the warming trends these scientists wanted to see.

And why is any of this important? Because it is this bogus computer data that has been fed into the global warming reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the data that will be presented in Copenhagen as the rationale for punitive carbon taxes and penalties on the western economies and for restrictions on carbon emissions that will ruin western economies while contributing next to nothing in terms of temperature reduction.

So these scientists, greedy for their tenure and millions in grant money, cooked up this latest global warming scheme. Venal politicians like Al Gore conflated it for their own purposes and a lazy and unquestioning media fed it wholesale to a gullible public.

We can't know whether these scientists ever realized that their phony work would be co-opted this way, but they should be reminded that scientific, political and journalistic corruption need to be exposed. And punished.  

More likely what we can expect in the days to come leading up to Copenhagen are tediously endless lists of red herrings and straw men trotted out by the warmist faithful and their media enablers in defiance of real science. That's because this whole fiasco is not really about science at all. It's about co-opting science to promote a far-left anti-humanity political agenda.

Climategate? Quel Climategate?

The CBC is steadfastly ignoring the Climategate science scandal. A search of CBC.CA on the word Climategate reveals two links - not to CBC news stories, but to literally hundreds of comments on the CBC website put there by individuals that refer to Climategate.

A Google search just now shows 10,800,000 references to Climategate.

UPDATE: The CBC's wilfull ignorance of this scandal is disgraceful. They appear to have taken their cue from the equally guilty BBC, "cranking up their AGW reporting to fever pitch."

Meanwhile, Reuters has uncritically reprinted an editorial by the global warming activist website SolveClimate as a news story, calling the revelations a "smear campaign."

And here is more on the shameful complicity of the media from Mark Steyn.

A Female Hockey Announcer?

With all the attention on hockey sticks this week how on earth did I miss this?

On Wednesday night, New Jersey Devils broadcaster Sherry Ross made history when she became the first female broadcaster to provide play-by-play in English for an entire NHL game.

WW II Aerial Photographs Released

Long before Google Earth, pilots risked their lives and died in unarmed photo reconnaissance aircraft to bring back astonishingly detailed images of enemy facilities and bomb damage. Now a new collection of vintage recon photos has been launched on the Web in England. From the Daily Mail via Instapundit.

Alan Williams, manager of the National Collection of Aerial Photography which houses the photos, said: 'The archive literally shows the world at war.'