Muller Keeps Spinning

Self-designated climate expert Richard Muller appeared on the Diane Rehm show on NPR this morning, along with Juliet Eilperin, a shark book author and occasional environment reporter, and Michael MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute. Although apparently now convinced of 1980s-level climate science, Muller kept spinning the story as a political issue, almost immediately casting it as a Republican vs. Democrat story (i.e., Republicans were "more aware" of the "terrible quality" of the temperature record).

Among the voluminous Muller whoppers:
- Katrina is irrelevant because it was only a Category 3 at New Orleans
- Precipitation extremes are not significant
- Emissions are China's fault
- Decades of previous inaction are not a problem

Audio at the link, if you can stand it:
New Consensus On Climate Change

Congress Addresses Drought Crisis Through Action on Farm Bill; Wait, What?

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Conversation: Confronting the Climate Change Challenge

Prof. Michael Mann on "Conversations From Penn State":



Full video here.

The Sky's The Limit

Tom Toles 'toon today:

PBS Uses Slow News Day to Cover Keystone XL Pipeline

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

The PBS NewsHour used the slow news cycle of the Columbus Day holiday today to cover the Keystone XL pipeline issue:

A Canadian company wants to build a $13 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline to carry crude oil from the so-called tar sands region in Alberta through six states and a major aquifer to Texas for refining. Correspondent Tom Bearden reports from Nebraska on the high-stakes environmental and economic battle over the Keystone XL project.

PBS, which seems to be increasingly outsourcing its news gathering operations, presented a comment by one "JASON BERRINGER, Laborers International Union Local 1140", who said:

I worked with TransCanada before on another pipeline. And I have never had a company like them that took care of environmental issues like they have. They really care about the environment.

This would be the same Jason Berringer who was spotted in a paid pro-pipeline ad on a commercial cable news network within an hour or so of the PBS broadcast.

Speaking of outsourcing, there was no mention of the glaring conflict of interest represented by the State Dept. outsourcing the environmental review to a company with close ties to Keystone:

A few days into the demonstrations, the State Department released the final environmental impact statement on the project, a study three years in the making. It says the pipeline would carry a blend of synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen and poses no significant impact to the environment.

In a classic example of false equivalence, the feckless reporter concludes, "Both sides accuse each other of playing fast and loose with the truth."

Idiot America Report: Bashing "Haboobs"; Next Up, Banning Algebra

The NY Times reports today that some residents of Arizona are offended at the use of the term "haboob" to refer to dust storms because of its Middle Eastern origin. Presumably, they will now be mounting a campaign to ban the teaching of algebra.

"I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob," Don Yonts, a resident of Gilbert, Ariz., wrote to The Arizona Republic after a particularly fierce, mile-high dust storm swept through the state on July 5. "How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?"

Former NOAA Administrator: "Bleak Assessment"

Former NOAA Administrator D. James Baker wrote the following letter published in the March 7 issue of The New Yorker:

Hendrik Hertzberg’s bleak assessment of American climate policy is on the mark, and should be viewed in the context of an even bleaker global scene, in which China and India will continue their rapid economic growth and accompanying emissions (Comment, February 7th). History shows that changes in energy-capital infrastructure take decades; barring a technical miracle, the concentration of greenhouse gases will likely double or triple by the end of the century, bringing a new and inhospitable planet Earth, rife with extreme weather and other climate disruptions. We should do everything we can to produce green and carbon-free economies while at the same time recognizing that there must be a major effort to adapt to this new Earth. It can be done, but it won’t be easy. The ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina shows that even the most developed countries are unable to respond well to extremes of weather. If that is the best we can do, we have much to learn about how to be prepared for the new climate.

Baker was NOAA Administrator from May 1993 to January 2001. According to his biography (scroll down):

Dr. Baker received his B.S. from Stanford University, and holds a PhD in experimental physics from Cornell University. He has held faculty positions at numerous prestigious research universities, and is the founding President of the Oceanography Society. Author of Planet Earth: The View from Space, Dr. Baker has written more than 100 articles on climate, oceanography, space technology, natural resource management and sustainable development.

State Senate Curtails Cuccinelli's Capers; Limits Subpoena of Academic Research

In response to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's fishing expedition in U. Va. email servers, the State Senate has voted to limit the powers to subpoena academic research. The Attorney General's investigation has been directed against former professor and climate researcher Michael Mann.

The sponsor of the legislation, Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, was quoted saying:

We have numerous legal issues in the commonwealth which requires the attention of the people’s lawyer, the Attorney General. We don’t need him sorting through the trash cans of our university professors in order to foment litigation.

Who's the Biggest Terrorist? Yo' Mama!

Dec. 21 PM Update: Meteorologist Jeff Masters yesterday posted a review of a presentation at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The presentation by Shimon Wdowinsky of the University of Miami proposed a plausible mechanism by which the severity of the Haiti earthquake could have been influenced by deforestation and several major hurricanes which affected the country in 2008:

At last week's American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting last week in San Francisco, Shimon Wdowinsky of the University of Miami proposed a different method whereby unusual strains on the crust might trigger an earthquake. In a talk titled, Triggering of the 2010 Haiti earthquake by hurricanes and possibly deforestation , Wdowinsky studied the stresses on Earth's crust over the epicenter of the mighty January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people. This quake was centered in a mountainous area of southwest Haiti that has undergone severe deforestation—over 98% of the trees have been felled on the mountain in recent decades, allowing extreme erosion to occur during Haiti's frequent heavy rainfall events. Since 1975, the erosion rate in these mountains has been 6 mm/year, compared to the typical erosion rate of less than 1 mm/yr in forested tropical mountains. Satellite imagery (Figure 2) reveals that the eroded material has built up significantly in the Leogane Delta to the north of the earthquake's epicenter. In the 2008 hurricane season, four storms--Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike--dumped heavy rains on the impoverished nation. The bare, rugged hillsides let flood waters rampage into large areas of the country, killing over 1,000, destroying 22,702 homes, and damaging another 84,625. About 800,000 people were affected--8% of Haiti's total population. The flood wiped out 70% of Haiti's crops, resulting in dozens of deaths of children due to malnutrition in the months following the storms. Damage was estimated at over $1 billion, the costliest natural disaster in Haitian history. The damage amounted to over 5% of the country's $17 billion GDP, a staggering blow for a nation so poor. Tragically, the hurricanes of 2008 may have set up Haiti for an ever larger disaster. Wdowinsky computed that the amount of mass eroded away from the mountains over the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake was sufficient to cause crustal strains capable of causing a vertically-oriented slippage along a previously unknown fault. This type of motion is quite unusual in this region, as most quakes in Haiti tend to be of the strike-slip variety, where the tectonic plates slide horizontally past each other. The fact that the 2010 Haiti quake occurred along a vertically moving fault lends support to the idea that the slippage was triggered due to mass stripped off the mountains by erosion over the epicenter, combined with the extra weight of the extra sediment deposited in the Leogane Delta clamping down on the northern portion of the fault. Wdowinsky gave two other examples in Taiwan where earthquakes followed several months after the passage of tropical cyclones that dumped heavy rains over mountainous regions. His theory of tropical cyclone-triggered quakes deserves consideration, and provides another excellent reason to curb excessive deforestation!

Original post:
Interesting point of view in today's commentary from Dave Ross on CBS Radio:

. . . I happened to see the AP's annual catalog of disaster and realized that the greatest terrorist of all...isn't some radical bomb-thrower. It's The Planet.

In the year 2010, earthquakes, heat waves, floods, mega-typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed a quarter of a million people - most of them in January's earthquake in Haiti.

By the AP's calculations, that's more than TWICE the number of people who died in terrorist attacks in the last 25 years, COMBINED. . .

More audio at MyNorthwest.com

This is particularly relevant given the 4 solid pages of prime A-section real estate in today's high-fiber WaPo devoted entirely to analyzing the hundreds of billions being spent annually on "public safety." Apparently we can't afford to spend even a small fraction of that on the much deadlier threat from Momma Nature's attempts to kill us.

Colbert Contemplates Congressional Commerce Committee Chair Choices

Stephen Colbert recently surveyed the candidates for chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the new Congress beginning in January. The analysis focused on Rep. Barton of Texas and Rep. Shimkus of Illinois: "Joe Barton is an expert on the wind industry, and John Shimkus knows that God will not destroy the Earth." Shimkus is awarded the famous "Colbert bump."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Chair Apparent
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Wegman's: A Supermarket of Denialism

Nov. 24 Update: The commenters at Rabett Run point out that even the Daily Mail has got a clue:
Influential climate change report 'was copied from Wikipedia'

The WaPo, in whose backyard this business all transpired, is of course literally out to lunch, still focused on 80-pound cheese wheels.

Nov. 23 Update: USA Today's Vergano discusses the latest Wegmania this PM at his Science Fair blog: Wegman report round-up.
(h/t to John Mashey's comment at Herr Hare's)

Original Post:
To the WaPo, Wegman is just the name of a supermarket (Alec Baldwin: Paid to like Wegmans), while the Real Climategate continues to evolve in its own backyard at the suburban campus of George Mason University. USA Today follows up yesterday's report of an investigation into documented allegations of rampant plagiarism in the so-called Wegman Report to Congress (Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized) with a non-denial denial by the denialist:

Offered the chance to further respond to plagiarism allegations, reported Monday in USA TODAY, George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman said in an e-mail that "these attacks are unprecedented in my 42 years as an academic and scholar."

See Climate science critic responds to allegations for the full story.

Other coverage:

• Salon: Joe Barton's climate report was plagiarized
• Gawker: Report Questioning Climate Change Turns Out to Be Plagiarized
• UPI: Plagiarism charged in Congress report
• Climate Progress: Wegman exposed: Experts find “shocking” plagiarism in 2006 climate report requested by Joe Barton (R-TX)

If It Limps Like a Duck . . . Congressional Committee's Climate Change Confab

Nov. 17 Update: Santer smacks down misleading Michaels
Here are the archived CSPAN videos of the hearing:
Panel 1 (begins at end of Cicerone testimony)
Panel 2
Panel 3

Ben Santer smacks down Pat Michaels starting at 35:15 in Panel 2: "Dr. Michaels' analysis is wrong; sorry, it's just completely incorrect."

Original Post:
The lame-duck Congress will take testimony on the climate change issue on Wednesday, November 17. The hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Energy & Environment is titled "A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response". The current witness list includes:

Panel I

• Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences
• Dr. Heidi M. Cullen, CEO and Director of Communications, Climate Central
• Dr. Gerald A. Meehl, Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Panel II

• Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, Atmospheric Scientist, Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Dr. Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor, Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, The Pennsylvania State University
• Dr. Richard A. Feely, Senior Scientist, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA
• Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies, Cato Institute

Panel III

• Rear Admiral David W. Titley, Oceanographer and Navigator of the Navy, United States Department of the Navy
• Mr. James Lopez, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Mr. William Geer, Director of the Center for Western Lands, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
• Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Lindzen, Michaels, and Curry were all added today to the list originally distributed last week.

The hearing is scheduled to be webcast at the committee's website from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The CSPAN schedule has not yet been posted.

Political Climate: Elections Have Consequences; Cap and Trade, RIP

See here for other Political Science posts.

November 5 Update: Think Progress today reviews the four fossils competing to run the House Energy Committee: Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Rep. Joe "BP" Barton (R-TX), and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL).

November 4 Update: Only half of the Republican freshmen in Congress are overt science deniers. Climate Progress has the scorecard.

ThingsBreak has the rundown on Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), who has "staked his claim to the chairmanship of the House Science and Technology Committee."

Original post:
One of the consequences of the election of 2010 is that the average scientific IQ of Congress will be lower by several points. Courtesy of the Union of Concerned Scientists, here are some of the anti-scientific views coming soon to a Congress near you:

"With the possible exception of Tiger Woods, nothing has had a worse year than global warming. We have discovered that a good portion of the science used to justify "climate change" was a hoax perpetrated by leftist ideologues with an agenda."
—Todd Young, new congressperson from Indiana

"I absolutely do not believe that the science of man-caused climate change is proven. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I think it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate." —Ron Johnson, new senator from Wisconsin

"I think we ought to take a look at whatever the group is that measures all this, the IPCC, they don't even believe the crap." —Steve Pearce, new congressperson from New Mexico

"It's a bigger issue, we need to watch 'em. Not only because it may or may not be true, but they're making up their facts to fit their conclusions. They've already caught 'em doing this." —Rand Paul, new senator from Kentucky

"There isn't any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth." —Roy Blunt, new senator from Missouri

And, of course, there's that classic from the Speaker-to-be of the House: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical."

On the other hand, California defeated Proposition 23.

Some other commentary:

GOP plans attacks on the EPA and climate scientists (h/t ThingsBreak)

The Gold Guy finds some silver linings.

WaPo, WaPo, Wherefore Art Thou? Press Sleeps While Climate Report Fraud Festers

4 PM Update: The WaPo has finally reacted to the story online in a post at 3:32 PM ET:
GMU investigating climate change skeptic cited by Cuccinelli
They still seem to think it's only a local story.

Original post:
Apparently the motto at the new, fashionably slim WaPo is, "Pulitzers, Pulitzers, we don't need no mo' stinkin' Pulitzers." Here's a little exercise in Googleology: Search "wegman washington post" and you get "Eighty-pound parmigiana cheese wheels from Italy . . . and 500 varieties of produce". Replace WaPo with "USA Today" and you get "University investigating prominent climate science critic".

Yes, Virginia, while your 17th-century AG was hunting witches in the UVa email archives from 2003, his alma mater George Mason University was sitting on a case of plagiarism and academic misconduct involving the author of the so-called "Wegman Report", upon which much of his witch hunt was based. From the USA Today online posting:

GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. Last month, a 250-page report on the Deep Climate website written by computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif., raised some of these concerns. Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report are plagiarized (with some of the text taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.

According to a letter to Prof. Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts dated July 28, the GMU committee to investigate the charges was evidently formed in April, and the work was expected to be completed by the end of last month.

Where is the fraud investigation, Mr. Cuccinelli, and where is the WaPo in reporting this?

Get the Politics Out of Science

5 PM Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an editorial also:
Ken Cuccinelli, Enemy of Freedom

Original post:
Climate scientist Michael E. Mann has an op-ed piece in Friday's WaPo:
Get the anti-science bent out of politics

Challenges to policy proposals for how to deal with this problem should be welcome -- indeed, a good-faith debate is essential for wise public policymaking.

But the attacks against the science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science.

(Tip of the rabbit ears to the Herr Hare.)

Virginia's Climate Follies 2.0: Cooch's Climate Crusade

The WaPo, which has been subjected to well-earned criticism for its coverage of climate science and policy, demonstrates in an editorial today that it does have at least some clue regarding the witch hunt currently being perpetrated by the Virginia Attorney General. Under the headline, "Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass Virginia", the editorial points out:

The attorney general's logic is so tenuous as to leave only one plausible explanation: that he is on a fishing expedition designed to intimidate and suppress honest research and the free exchange of ideas upon which science and academia both depend -- all because he does not like what science says about climate change.

This sums up the situation quite well as far as it goes, but the WaPo crew are missing a golden opportunity to expose the real fraud behind this abortion of a legal case. (BTW, isn't the Cooch vehemently opposed to abortion?) Leaving aside the issue of whether the "real journalists" should have done the heavy lifting, a meticulous dossier has already been assembled in the blogosphere regarding the fraudulent underpinnings of the Cooch's crusade. In a guest post at the Deep Climate blog, John Mashey summarizes his exhaustive 200+ page analysis of the questionable scholarship, including multiple instances of apparent outright plagiarism, behind the GMU-based Wegman Report, upon which much of the Virginia AG's case is based:

The report itself contains numerous cases of obvious bias, as do process, testimony and follow-on actions. Of 91 pages, 35 are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. Its Bibliography is mostly padding, 50% of the references uncited in the text. Many references are irrelevant or dubious. The team relied heavily on a long-obsolete sketch and very likely on various uncredited sources.

In addition to evidence of the apparent fraud being perpetrated on the campus of George Mason, it might also be useful to investigate the finances of a "non-profit" organization evidently operating out of an apartment at:

1600 South Eads Street, Suite #712-S
Arlington, VA 22202-2907
Tel/Fax 703-920-2744

Image (click to enlarge): Tom Toles cartoon, Oct. 6, 2010, from Washington Post

War on Science Update: UVa 1, AG 0

As promised 10 days ago, a Virginia judge this morning ruled on the state Attorney General's request for University of Virginia documents and emails pertaining to Michael Mann's climate research. The demands by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli were rejected "in their entirety, without prejudice to the Commonwealth to proceed according to the law."

More from:

• Charlottesville Daily Progress: Updated: Judge sides with UVa in climate case, dismissing Cuccinelli demands
• VaFreedom: Academic freedom wins (for now)!
• Blue Virginia: Cuccinelli Loses Another Battle in War on Science
• ClimateProgress:Breaking: Judge rules against Cuccinelli’s witch-hunt aimed at Michael Mann and climate science

FOIA Follies: Yes, Virginia, There is a Disclosure Clause

Here's a letter to the editor in today's WaPo relating to the Virginia Attorney General's fishing expedition at UVA:

After reading about the estimated $30 million that the U.S. attorney's office spent on the Rod Blagojevich trial ["A Blagojevich defense, funded by taxpayers like you?," front page, Aug. 21], I'd like an investigation into how many taxpayer dollars Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II is spending on "a team of lawyers" to investigate a University of Virginia professor's climate change research paper ["Judge to rule on Cuccinelli probe of climate study," Metro, Aug. 21].

It's absurd that in a time of enormous budget challenges, Mr. Cuccinelli has nothing better to do than spend millions of taxpayer dollars investigating the scientific findings of our state's premier academic institution. Not to mention the millions of tax dollars the University of Virginia will probably spend defending itself in this monkey trial.

If Mr. Cuccinelli has run out of actual criminals to prosecute, it's time to look at his office for spending cuts.

Umang Varma, Falls Church

How about it, WaPo? Isn't it time for a FOIA request? The Climate Capitalist is proud to disclose that, except for 60 days of NOAA Commissioned Corps training at Norfolk, he is not now, never has been, and never intends to be, a citizen of the Capital of the Confederacy and is therefore ineligible to file, but "representatives of the media" are certainly permitted to do so.

Go, Terps!

Judgment Delayed In Cuccinelli's UVA Climate Witch-Hunt

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a ruling has been delayed in a case regarding Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's demand for all documents and emails from the University of Virginia involving climate researcher Michael Mann, who worked at the university from 1999 to 2005. Albemarle County Circuit Court judge Paul Peatross announced this afternoon that he would make a decision on the case within 10 days.

UVA administrators have strongly opposed the Attorney General's subpoena on the basis that it puts a "severe chill on academic freedom and scientific debate." Four organizations have also filed briefs in support of the UVA position. They are: ACLU of Virginia, the American Association of University Professors, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Albemarle County-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. Students, faculty, and alumni held a small rally on campus this afternoon to protest the case.

Competitive Enterprise Institute Makes More [Stuff] Up

July 9 Update: This morning, Mark Haines pointed out that even the one example cited yesterday by the CEI guest was phony (video not available).

Original post:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is one of the leading stink tanks purveying faux facts on climate change. Here's a perfect example of their credibility. Watch CNBC anchor Mark Haines, a trained lawyer and member of the New Jersey Bar, this morning demolishing a CEI Senior Attorney's bo-o-o-gus claims regarding the effect of the Jones Act on the BP oil disaster cleanup: