Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks wrote perceptively about the burgeoning populist revolt against the “educated classes”. Brooks was promptly slapped around by various blogosphere essayists such as Will Collier, who noted that Brooks’s column reads like a weaselly apologia for the dismal failures of the “educated classes” in the last couple of decades.… Continue reading Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority

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Copenhagen Conference Crashes

Well, it’s happened. The Copenhagen climate conference has concluded with a three-page fig-leaf over its naked failure that even the New York Times can’t spin as good news for the AGW alarmists. It’s kind of entertaining to watch them try, actually, but the glum tone of the report is palpable. The best laugh line from… Continue reading Copenhagen Conference Crashes

From Russia, with love

Oh, it just keeps getting better. As the Copenhagen conference collapses, word comes from Russia that the Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis has found evidence of skulduggery and fraud in the CRU’s treatment of Russian climate data.

Crazy in Copenhagen

Two days before the deadline for an agreement at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, Mother Nature is demonstrating the same sly sense of humor that Al Gore, el jefe of the global-warming bloviators, often seems to elicit from the old gal. That is to say, it’s snowing like a a sonovabitch and there’s… Continue reading Crazy in Copenhagen

Hiding the facts in plain sight

OK, this is lovely. Remember Phil Jones of the CRU saying they had retained only “homogenized, value-added” data rather than raw measurements? It seems that well before the CRU leak there was strong circumstantial evidence that much (perhaps all) of the supposed global-warming signal is accounted for by “adjustments” made to the data.

“The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room”

The unravelling of the AGW fraud continues to provide an entertaining mix of high drama and low comedy. My favorite recent entry on the CRU mob is a screed from a professor of mathematics in Canada: “All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.” Then there’s… Continue reading “The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room”

AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace

AGW alarmists, led by the “hockey team”, have dismissed criticisms that urban heat-island effects have been distorting surface temperature measurements upwards. Now Vincent Gray, a reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report, says this: not only is the single paper on which this dismissal is based fraudulent, the hockey team knows it’s fraudulent and keeps citing… Continue reading AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace

Facts to fit the theory

On 12 Oct 2009, climatologist and “hockey-team” member Kevin Trenberth wrote: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the… Continue reading Facts to fit the theory

Will the AGW fraud discredit science?

In response to the mounting evidence of fraud, data falsification, and criminal conspiracy by the “hockey team” clique of climatologists pushing anthropogenic-global-warming (AGW) theory, there has been serious and concerned speculation that the collapse of this scam may damage the credibility of science in general. This is a reasonable thing to be concerned about, given… Continue reading Will the AGW fraud discredit science?

Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions. ; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$ 2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’ ; yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey) This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise.… Continue reading Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins

Data Against Demagogues

Ken Burnside, a regular commenter here, has launched his own blog. Data Against Demagogues is about methodological integrity, the use and abuses of data visualization, and how to tell junk science by its smell. Ken hopes the CRU flap will become a teachable moment on these issues. So do I. More power to him!

Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate

The email and documents recently netjacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia raise serious questions about the quality of the research being used to underpin major public-policy decisions. In the open-source software community, we understand about human error and sloppiness and the tendency to get too caught up in a… Continue reading Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate

Hiding the Decline: Prologue

According to the summaries I’ve seen, the 61 megabytes of email and documents net-jacked from the Climate Research Unit a few days ago do not — quite — reify conservatives’ darkest fantasies about “the team” (as the network of professional anthropogenic-global-warming alarmists communicating through CRU likes to style itself). To do that, they’d have to… Continue reading Hiding the Decline: Prologue

Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common?

Heh. State representative Fred Maslack of Vermont has proposed a bill under which non-gun-owners would have to register and pay a fee. Entertainingly enough, there is actual justification for this in a careful reading of the Vermont state constitution. The Hon. Rep. Maslack is joking. I think. And I’m against requiring people who don’t want… Continue reading Maybe if moral cowardice cost money, it would be less common?

Uncivil society and the collapse of the nomenklatura

A few moments ago, I read a review of a new book, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, and the following sentences jumped out at me: This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed… Continue reading Uncivil society and the collapse of the nomenklatura

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