Category: Climate & Energy

By Steve Milloy
July 14, 2010, The Daily Caller

Penn State University just exonerated Professor Michael Mann for wrongdoing related to Climategate. While that good news for Mann is no surprise, it came at a dear cost to Penn State – its integrity.

Soon after Climategate broke last November, Penn State convened an internal committee to investigate Mann, the primary author of the now-infamous and discredited “hockey stick” global warming graph.

Hopes for a bona fide investigation were dashed when the preliminary results were released in February. To the joy of climate alarmists, Penn State announced via press release that Mann was cleared of three of the four allegations against him (regarding falsification/suppression of data, deletion of e-mails/data and misuse of confidential information). But if one looks past the release and reads the committee’s report, it becomes obvious the fix was in.

The preliminary review included the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, and documents submitted by Mann. While one committee member did informally endeavor to get external views on Mann, they only came from Texas A&M’s Gerald North and Stanford University’s Donald Kennedy.

North had earlier dismissed Climategate in a Washington Post interview only a few days after the scandal broke. He also assisted with a futile 2006 effort to rehabilitate Mann’s debunked hockey stick. As editor of Science magazine, Kennedy was an outspoken advocate of climate alarmism.

The committee went to great lengths to defuse the money line from the Climategate e-mails – i.e., “Mike’s Nature trick… to hide the decline.” While explaining how “trick” could merely refer to a “clever device,” the committee failed to even mention “hide the decline,” a phrase referring to Mann’s still-unexplained deletion of temperature data contradicting the climate alarmism hypothesis.

Based on Mann’s denial, the preliminary report concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that Mann intended to delete e-mails – even though that conclusion is contradicted by the plain language and circumstances of the relevant e-mail exchange. No inquiry beyond Mann’s denial was made.

Finally, the preliminary report dismissed the accusation that Mann conspired to silence skeptics by stating, “one finds enormous confusion has been caused by interpretations of the e-mails and their content” – but shouldn’t the committee have attempted to eliminate that confusion?

It’s unclear why the committee didn’t immediately exonerate Mann of the fourth allegation — seriously deviating from accepted practices within the academic community — except that by leaving it open, the committee apparently hoped to rebuild “public trust in science in general and climate science specifically.”

Four months later, the committee’s investigation charade has concluded. Most shocking, however, is that Penn State remains openly unabashed by the investigation’s shoddiness.

As before, a media release clearing Mann of “any wrongdoing” is making alarmists giddy. But once again, the investigation’s disturbing reality is revealed in the report.

The committee again excluded from consideration any document or point of view that might incriminate Mann’s conduct.

Other than the Climategate e-mails, the committee only examined:

(1) undescribed “documents collected by the [committee];” (2) “documents provided by Dr. Mann…”; (3) the committee’s preliminary report; (4) a May British House of Commons whitewash of Climategate; (5) a recent letter published in Science magazine deploring climate skepticism from 255 climate alarmists; (6) a document about the National Science Foundation peer review process; (7) the Department of Energy Guide to Financial Assistance; (8) information on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s peer review process; (9) information regarding the percentage of NSF proposals funded; and (10) Mann’s curriculum vitae.

The committee apparently made no effort to obtain, much less consider, the volumes of available news reports, analyses (including from Congress) and commentary about Mann, the hockey stick and/or Climategate.

More than see no evil, the committee maintained its policy of hear no evil. Of the five additional interviews conducted, four were of Mann’s fellow alarmists. The lone climate skeptic interviewed was MIT professor Richard Lindzen. But the report makes clear that the committee conducted Lindzen’s interview in the finest traditions of a kangaroo court.

Here’s how the report describes the interview:

… When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage… Dr. Lindzen’s response was: ‘It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues that he explicitly stated in the e-mails. I’m wondering what’s going on?’ The Investigatory Committee members did not respond to Dr. Lindzen’s statement. Instead, Dr. Lindzen’s attention was directed to the fourth allegation, and it was explained to him that this is the allegation which the Investigatory Committee is charged to address…

Amazed that the committee would treat a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and an IPCC lead author with such disrespect and disregard, I contacted Dr. Lindzen. He told me, “They also basically ignored what I said. I suppose they interviewed me in order to say that they had interviewed someone who was skeptical of warming alarm.”

The committee asked Mann about e-mails that mention Dr. Stephen McIntyre, one of the scientists credited with debunking Mann’s hockey stick. While Mann told the committee that there was “no merit whatsoever to Mr. [sic] McIntyre’s claims here…,” the committee didn’t interview McIntyre.

The committee also pointed to several awards given to Mann for his research including Scientific American’s naming Mann as one of the “50 leading visionaries in science and technology” and its selection of a web site co-founded by Mann as one of the top 25 “science and technology” web sites in 2005. The committee then wrote, “had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the respected practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions…”

The Committee also credited Mann with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. “This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside accepted practices in his field,” the committee observed. MIT’s Lindzen was also a co-Nobelist, but apparently the award didn’t help his credibility.

Global warming and Mann have been worth millions of grant dollars and lots of publicity for Penn State. But one would think the institution’s integrity is worth more.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

By Steve Milloy
The Daily Caller, May 13, 2010

There are only three things you need to know about the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill that was released Wednesday—it will accomplish nothing for the environment; it will cost a lot of money and it will financially enrich and politically empower a host of scoundrels.

Regardless of what you think about manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, it is undeniable that the emissions reductions contemplated by Kerry-Lieberman don’t amount to a hill of beans. The goal of Kerry-Lieberman, like the goal of the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill, is to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.

But rather than such paltry emissions cuts, let’s say that starting next year, we just shut down America—zero emissions—and kept it shut down for the next 100 years. What difference would that make atmosphere-wise?

Roughly speaking, U.S. energy use (at 2005 levels) adds to atmospheric CO2 at a rate of about 1 part per million every three years. So after 100 years, U.S. energy use would add about 33 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere. Is that a lot?

Well, atmospheric CO2 has increased by over 35 ppm since 1995 without producing any global warming at all—that’s according to IPCC contributor and Captain Climategate himself, the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones. Moreover, physicists agree that every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere has less global warming potential than the molecule that preceded it. So the next 35 ppm of atmospheric CO2 will have less impact than the preceding 35ppm, which had no discernible effect.

None of this is a secret, the EPA did this analysis for itself in 2007.

Back to Kerry-Lieberman, it carbon emissions reduction provisions would obviously be nowhere near as severe as the shuting-down-America-for-100-years-scenario.

So what will Kerry-Lieberman cost us to accomplish nothing?

Based on the Waxman-Markey bill, which Kerry-Lieberman is modeled after, the Brookings Institution (hardly a hotbed of climate skeptics or Chicago-school economic thought) estimated that between 2012 and 2050, mandatory CO2 emission reductions would make energy cost $9 trillion more—this works out to a cost of about $3,100 per year for a family of four.

This of course doesn’t take into account the inflationary aspects of making energy cost more—after all, all goods and services are produced with energy and energy that costs more will necessary inflate the cost of everything. Americans will have a hard time paying these costs given all the jobs that will flee overseas to places like China, India and Mexico where carbon caps won’t exist, and energy and labor prices will be lower.

But surely someone will benefit from Kerry-Lieberman, right? That $9 trillion, after all, must go somewhere.

Sales of permits to emit CO2 will fill federal coffers with more money for politicians to hand out to special interest groups. Many CO2 emission permits will be handed out for free to special interests who will be able to turn around and sell them in the market for guaranteed profits. Wall Street will get to profit from the trading—just assume that every time you switch on a light a bell will ring at Goldman Sachs notifying it of yet more profits from nonproductive financial shenanigans. Al Gore’s venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins has invested more than a billion dollars in dozens of companies that are Kerry-Lieberman dependent. Talk about Gore-porate greed.

Kerry Lieberman contains a host of mandates and programs for energy efficiency, so-called green technologies and other corporate welfare programs. Companies like GE would profit from electric utilities being forced to buy expensive “renewable” technologies and from consumers being forced to buy more expensive appliances.

Worse than the transfer of wealth from the hard-working to the hardly-working, is the transfer of power from Americans over their own lives and businesses to governmental goons and busy-bodies. The Environmental Protection Agency—the most rogue federal agency of all —would be responsible for administering Kerry-Lieberman. While EPA control over the economy and the power to enforce that control would be immensely expanded, American business and individuals would have essentially the same ability as now to defend themselves against the EPA—pretty much none.

Although Kerry-Lieberman is a loser of a bill for the vast majority of America, we will have our hands full fighting its financial and political beneficiaries. Even if the bill fails to pass before the election, there is talk on Capitol Hill of procedural shenanigans by which a lameduck Congress could pass it regardless of what Americans have to say in November.

Rise up America, while you still can.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them (Regnery 2009).

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/13/kerry-liebermans-great-american-rip-off/#ixzz0np4oHpUh

Here’s the Kerry-Lieberman bill… almost 1,000 pages.

By Steve Milloy
May 12, 2010, Washington Times

Are academic scientists some special sub-species of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That is the question now being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Cucinelli is under assault by global warming alarmist brigades and the American Civil Liberties Union for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Cuccinelli recently sent UVA a civil investigative demand (CID) requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mann.

Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mann’s claim-to-fame — the infamous “hockey stick” graph — is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late-1990s while Mann was at the University of Massachusetts, his hockey stick graph purports to show that average global temperature was fairly stable over the past millennium and up until the 20 the century, when it spiked up impliedly because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey stick graph began to be revealed for what it was — pure bunk.

Critics of the hockey stick graph first became suspicious because it failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature — the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with critics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, it was discovered that the computer model that produced the hockey stick would produce a hockey stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Past the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, as it turns out, Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous Climate-gate phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Mann’s defenders characterize this deletion of data as an elegant statistical technique. There is, however, nothing sophisticated, much less innocent about it. Contrary to Mann’s defenders, the hockey stick has never been vindicated by anyone. If nothing else, proof of its discredit lies in the fact that no one, not even the ethically challenged United Nations, relies on it anymore as evidence of manmade global warming.

Mann’s name-making hockey stick work occurred while he was at the University of Massachusetts, after which he was hired by the taxpayer-funded UVA. Did UVA hire Mann under the illusion that his hockey stick was a legitimate scientific achievement? Did Mann receive taxpayer-funded grants based on what amounts to scientific misconduct? These are legitimate inquiries — but not to everyone.

Left-wing academics, global warming alarmists, and the ACLU object to Cucinelli’s probe. They cast aspersions such as “witch hunt,” McCarthyism,” and “abuse of office.” In their less hysteric moments, they claim Cuccinelli threatens academic freedom. This is all so much rot.

Some scientists have actually been known to commit scientific misconduct tantamount to fraud. A Tulane researcher was found guilty of misconduct by the federal Office of Scientific Integrity in the late 1990s for fabricating data about pesticides being dangerous hormonal system disrupters. Don’t forget the South Korean researcher that was indicted for claiming false advances in stem cell research. Only political correctness saved a University of Pittsburgh researcher from conviction during the 1990s of manipulating data allegedly linking lead-based paint with lower IQs.

Believe it or not, scientists are just like the rest of the population — a mixture of good and bad. Mann’s hockey stick is such bad science that it compels the question, “Why?” Would UVA have hired Mann and would government grants have been awarded to him had the truth about the hockey stick been known by university and state decision-makers at the time? Were they intentionally deceived?

As the Climategate scandal has revealed, the climate alarmist mob is, at the very least, devious and unethical. It has conspired to silence its critics and to dispense with the normal give-and-take of the scientific process — all the while trumpeting the junkiest of science in trying to frighten the public and politicians into keeping the grant money flowing.

Have some of the climate mob’s members acted criminally as well? No one knows at this point. But through his hockey stick shenanigans, Mann has certainly provided Cuccinelli with “probable cause” to consider the possibility. A thorough investigation by someone not in cahoots with the climate mob is the only way to answer legitimate questions related to the expenditure of taxpayer money.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them (Regnery 2009).

By Steve Milloy
February 11, 2010, PajamasMedia.com

There’s good news for those who like to watch paint dry and grass grow. Now you can log on to www.climate.gov and watch the climate change. Continue reading Obama's National Climate Disservice

From KSTP-TV:

“Wind turbines placed in cities across Minnesota to generate power aren’t working because of the cold temperatures.

The Minnesota Municipal Power Association bought 11 turbines for $300,000 each from a company in Palm Springs, Calif.

Special hydraulic fluid designed for colder temperatures was used in the turbines, but it’s not working, so neither are the turbines.

There is a plan to heat the fluid, but officials must find a contractor to do the work.”

Click here for the video.

…as predicted in Green Hell and as reported in today’s New York Times:

Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.

So much for “clean energy”…