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A large collection of e-mails exchanged among weather researchers at the University of East Anglia in England have gotten out and caused a scandal. The reason that University's climate research unit matters is that it has been heavily relied upon by the United Nations in reaching its alarming conclusions about the threat of global warming. The reason it's a scandal is that the e-mails vividly portray leading scientists there scheming to suppress or discredit data and analysis contrary to their dire predictions. The whole idea that the Earth is warming dangerously and that man, by burning carbon fuels, is the...

Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned. Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is...

On Today's Show... November 30, 2009   CBS/Vanity Fair Poll:  Rush is the Most Influential Conservative (And This is News?)   The Universe of Lies: Big Warmers Try to Whitewash ClimateGate Fraud The UN head says these emails are no big deal. No big deal? They expose the cabal!   » UK Telegraph: Leaked Emails "Won't Bias UN Global Warming Body" Says Chairman » Dr. Roy Spencer: UN IPCC Process "Is Dangerous for the Progress of Science" » UK Times: Climate Data Dumped » Lifson:  Emails Leaked Before Hacked » NewsBusters: ClimateGate Smoking Gun Found, American Thinker Does Media's Job » Canada...

With the Copenhagen climate talks starting next week, climate-gate keeps getting worse. There is no precedent for so many academics engaging in coordinated efforts to distort research for political ends. The problems go well beyond deleting e-mails to prevent their disclosure from a Freedom of Information Act request. The UN claims that “there is ‘virtually no possibility’ of a few scientists” biasing their reports. But it doesn’t just involve a few minor figures: implicated are the most powerful and well placed people in academia -- heads of departments and centers. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East...

How much concern should there be over the revelations about hacked emails and files from the computers of British climate scientists? In my Findings column, I mention a stolen file from a computer expert named Harry and discuss one of the issues of contention — a British scientist’s mention of a technique to “hide the decline”“>”hide the decline” in a temperature graph that appeared on the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization. You can see the relevant graphs at the bottom of this post. You can read critiques of the graphing technique at Steve McIntyre’s Climate...

I usually constrain my viewing of CNBC to Squawkbox in the 6-9 AM (eastern time) slot and can't claim to watch it all the time. But today I tried to recall hearing ANYTHING about Climategate and couldn't think of even a comment. I went back and looked at "headlines" and "segments" over the past 2 broadcast days (which would have covered the recent revelations of the raw data being dumped from the archives at East Anglia's CRU), but there appeared to be nothing. Climate change and man-made global warming have become one of the most important "stories" in world affairs...

I love beginning posts with personal anecdotes, which you can deduce from the fact that I never do it. No time like the present to start!One week in high school, my all-time second-favorite social studies teacher, Lyle Thornton Wolf, presented us with a fascinating unit:On Monday, he passed out forty-eight distinct high-school and college level American history textbooks (there being 48 students in the class). Each of us got a different textbook, though some were merely later versions of an earlier text that somebody else had. Each of us took his book home with instructions to read and “brief” (like...

So now that climate scientists have been shown to have engaged in all manner of shenanigans, will they release their data so that others can check their conclusions? Um, they'd love to, really, but, er, they lost the data. Or rather, they threw it out, as London's Sunday Times reports:Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based...The New York Times's Andrew Revkin--whom we faulted last week for parroting "peer reviewed" studies even after the revelation that the peer-review process was corrupt--has...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.

I've prepared headlines and lead paragraphs for five never-before-published "breaking news" articles about major events in history that mimic the BBC News' treatment of the climate change e-mails scandal.

I've been pondering the announcement over the weekend that the CRU at UEA "destroyed" the original temperature data, possibly decades ago. I understand that the raw observations may well have occupied an excessive amount of space and the "let's throw the junk out" attitude is somewhat understandable. However, I don't imagine that these "scientists" normalized the data using calculators. In all likelihood the raw data was digitized and then normalized. If indeed that was the case, are we to believe that they threw out a tape because it took up too much space? A little hard to believe from my...

The most obvious thing that strikes anyone wading through the CRU documents is how easy it was for a small number of "experts" to propel their data-raped conclusions first into a "peer-reviewed" "consensus" and then up through western governments into the international fait accomplis of Kyoto, the IPCC and now Copenhagen. I initially assumed stuff like this was just a bit of naked obstructionism toward a few troublemakers: I find it hard to believe that the British Antarctic Survey would permit the deletion of relevant files for two recent publications or that there aren't any backups for the deleted data...

Penn State scientist fights backMichael Mann says global warming e-mails are being taken out of context By Frank Warner Of The Morning Call November 26, 2009 Penn State scientist Michael E. Mann on Wednesday said his recently disclosed global warming e-mails show only that he's been pursuing the facts and fighting sloppy science. But Mann distanced himself from a 2008 e-mail by British scientist Phil Jones, who asked Mann and others to delete certain e-mails sought under Freedom of Information laws. ''I'm not going to defend that request,'' Mann said. ''I did not approve of what he asked for and...

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair [Rajendra Pachauri] said today. (snip) Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered. "The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report," he said.

Climategate: Why it matters The scandal we see and the scandal we don't By Andrew Orlowski Posted in Environment, 30th November 2009 13:23 GMT Analysis Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really? The archive - a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions. Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media...

Despite new evidence of manipulation of climate change data, an advocate of affordable and reliable domestic energy says there's still a lot of work to do.

Do they deserved to be punished for lying to us?

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today. Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007. The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university. Pachauri said the large number...