MUST READ: Nigel Lawson: An Honourable Man [yeah, right] (1st installment in a series on the Climate Denial Machine in the UK)

by Brendan Montague, DeSmog UK, September 1, 2014

The once chancellor to Thatcher and father of Nigella Lawson stages a remarkable political resurrection by making climate denial his personal crusade. The first of three parts in our inaugural series, "An Honourable Man." 

Nigel Lawson is an honourable man. The one-time British chancellor interrupted his idyllic retirement in the South of France to take part in what he described as a “distinctly surreal” debate on global warming held by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London on the evening of Monday, November 23, 2009. It would turn out to be portentous day in the history of British and American climate denial.

The 82-year-old was sporting dyed-black hair and a crooked salmon-pink tie. He spoke off-the-cuff. “There are huge benefits from a warming planet,” he assured his audience. “What is important is that you will be able to pocket all the benefits.”  

The shrewd rhetorician admitted that he was “not competent to pronounce on the science” and that he simply did not know whether climate change was taking place: “Within these four walls,” he said, “I have to confess to this ignorance.”

But he was certain climate science “lacked integrity” and thought that even if climate change was indeed happening, the assumption that we should try to prevent it was a “great delusion.”

He accused the government of producing “mendacious” propaganda to “frighten the public,” before presenting a harrowing picture of how any limits to economic growth from reducing our dependence on fossil fuels would impact the world's poor.  

Possibly Immoral 

“If you slow down the rate at which these countries can develop, what you are doing is condemning tens of millions of people in the developing world to unnecessary poverty, unnecessary malnutrition, unnecessary premature death and unnecessary diseases,” he concluded. “I think that's possibly immoral.” 

Dr. S. Fred Singer spoke alongside the seasoned politician that night. The silver-haired US-based scientist was among the first to question the emerging science of global warming. Singer sang from the same hymn-sheet. “I'm not worried about climate change. Not at all. We know how to adapt to climate change better than our ancestors: we don't have to live in caves any more,” he smiled.

“What worries me -- the only thing I'm scared of -- are politicians: when the zeal to control the climate, to save the climate, will introduce policies that will ruin the economy.” 

The politician and the scientist were warmly applauded by the assembly of blazer-wearing pensioners that filled the small room.

This presentation took place at the Institute of Directors' imposing classical building on London's prestigious Pall Mall during a perfect storm that would severely damage the public's trust in climate science. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, Barack Obama, the American President, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, and the rest of the world's most powerful leaders were preparing for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15), taking place that December in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The gathering was being hyped by environmentalists as the last real chance to prevent runaway catastrophic global warming and therefore save humanity from itself. 

The climate deniers in Britain and America, on the other hand, were at this time marginalised from the debate after their leading proponents had become tainted with the lingering, acrid smell of oil and tobacco money. 

A Miracle Just Happened

But shortly before Lawson’s talk a comment was posted on a popular sceptic blog: “A miracle just happened,” it said.

The cryptic message linked to a file on a Russian server which contained hundreds of thousands of private emails between professors Michael Mann, Phil Jones and dozens of the world's leading climate scientists which had been hacked and stolen from the servers of a British university. 

The hack was quickly dubbed “Climategate” by James Delingpole, an eccentric denier then blogging for The Telegraph, and newspapers and broadcasters from London to New York published the sensational claim that these emails contained “smoking gun” proof that global warming was in fact an elaborate hoax. 

The farce threatened to undermine the public's trust in climate science just when the world's governments were about to introduce legally binding restrictions on carbon emissions. Lawson appeared in The Times demanding a “high-level, independent inquiry” into Jones and his work.

“The integrity of the scientific evidence” on which “far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions” are based “has been called into question,” he wrote, “and the reputation of British science seriously tarnished.” The article hit the streets as he travelled to Committee Room G of the House of Commons to launch his charity, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), before an invited audience of Conservative MPs, lobbyists and well-wishers.

Currency Speculation

Lawson's remarkable luck would continue late into the evening. After the formal proceedings at Pall Mall drew to a close, Mark Littlewood, the chain-smoking director general of the IEA, invited the speakers to dinner. They were joined by a third man, who had made millions in currency speculation, and had given the IEA a generous £36,000 to host the discussion -- Lawson commands a speaking fee of up to £12,000. 

During the meal, the third man discussed Lawson’s recent book An Appeal to Reason, A Cool Look at Global Warming with the author himself and accepted an invitation to pay a visit to his small charity. Some time after, he turned up at the GWPF offices just off Trafalgar Square where he met Dr Benny Peiser, the social anthropologist who somehow has become Lawson's indispensable side-kick. The multi-millionaire was seemingly impressed and agreed to donate a large sum to Lawson's foundation.

This was the beginning of a new offensive against climate science, and the end of a political consensus in Britain supporting policies to reduce emissions to prevent the worst horrors of runaway global warming.

Tomorrow: part two of our three-part prologue and introduction to the first definitive, unauthorised history of climate denial in Britain and the United States. Share on Twitter and Facebook so your friends are not forced to play catch-up!

http://desmog.uk/2014/09/01/nigel-lawson-honourable-man

Climategate Revisited: New Theory Explains The Tree Ring Controversy

The tree-ring divergence problem, at the center of 2009’s “Climategate,” can be explained by normal changes in light intensity Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
 




by Elijah Wolfson, Newsweek, May 7, 2014

In November 2009, climate skeptics had their day in the sun when an anonymous hacker posted years' worth of emails sent back and forth between some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, working with the Climate Research Unit (CRU). Buried within these thousands of emails were a handful of fragments that skeptic seized on as proof positive that climate scientists had fabricated the idea of man-made global warming. After the emails were made public, a media frenzy ensued; “Climategate” culminated in deep investigations into the legitimacy of the science that backed of the theory of a man-made global warming. Ultimately, the CRU scientists were acquitted of any malfeasance, and their science was verified to be clean, but the events had a significant impact on public perception.

Five years later, a new study published in Nature Communications may help cool the lingering fallout from Climategate. The study, led by Alexander Stine of San Francisco State University and Peter Huybers at Harvard University provides a compelling scientific explanation for the issue at the center of the 2009 controversy: the tree-ring divergence problem.

Scientists are nearly 100% sure of the world’s daily temperatures for the last 150 years or so—which is when we started to keep daily weather records. But before that, it’s a little less clear. So many climate scientists, on both sides of the debate, have come to use tree rings, in conjunction with other proxy measurement tools like coral growth, isotope variation in ice cores, ocean and lake sediment records, and more, in order to reconstruct temperatures changes over years.

“The tree-ring records are in many ways the best record we have,” says Stine. “There are trees all over the Earth, and they have this annual resolution, which very few of our proxies do.” Trees reflect a more human time scale; ice core records show temperature changes across time periods on the order of millions and millions of years, while trees rings track changes year by year. In temperate climates (like much of the U.S.), trees only grow during the part of the year referred to simply as the growing season. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is the spring and summer. In a good growing season—where there’s plenty of precipitation and warm temperatures for months on end—the resulting growth ring will be relatively wide. In poor growing seasons, the rings will be narrow.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty decent proxy for those years before thermometers and recordkeeping.

The problem, though, is that since the 1960s, Arctic tree-ring growth seems to not match the actual temperature records we have. Thermometer measurements show a sharp jump in temperature in the late 20th century. This is one of the primary arguments for man-made climate change: as the global population increased, and we began to build bigger and more industrial cities, and rely more on fossil-fuel based travel in cars and planes, humans greatly sped up the warming of the planet. But Arctic tree-ring records don’t back this up. In fact, they seem to indicate a decline in temperatures during those years. This is called the tree-ring divergence problem, and has been recognized, accounted for, and written on extensively—not the least notably by Keith Briffa, one of the CRU scientists singled out as supposedly burying data after the emails were leaked, in a paper published almost a decade before Climategate.

Briffa had put forth—and the scientific community had long-since accepted—the notion that this “divergence issue” was actually a strong decline in tree sensitivity to temperatures after 1960—and not the temperature themselves. In fact, Stine says, if you look more closely at the numbers you can see that year to year, the rings on an individual tree in the Arctic Circle still do change size with year to year temperature changes—there is just a “systematic underprediction by the tree rings” that began in the mid-20th century. “And when you average all the trees, everything goes away except for that systematic underprediction.”

In 2009, critics from latched on to one email in which Phil Jones, at the time the head of the CRU, wrote that in a recent graph (prepared for a World Meteorological Organization Report) he used “Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.”

It was unfortunate phrasing. Jones was referring to the famous “hockey stick” graph used by Michael Mann, the director the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, in an article published in the journal Nature, in which he combined a number of different data sources to show overall global temperature increase over the years. According to Mann, the criticism was simply a “cynical misrepresentation” of Jones’s email, which he tells Newsweek “spoke of something that was already well known to the scientific community—that tree-ring density data should not be used to depict temperatures after 1960.” Following the release of these emails, Mann was extensively investigated for any scientific misconduct—and completely acquitted.

Today, Mann says that the whole Climategate fiasco was based around the misconception that the only evidence there is for climate change from the paleoclimate record (i.e., the record of the climate change throughout the entire history of earth) was from tree rings. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. “[There are] multiple independent lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. And the most important evidence for modern warming comes from instrumental measurements—thermometers—not paleoclimate data.”

Stine points out that in most of the scientific papers at the time, researchers would typically plot tree-ring records and thermometer records next to each other—then make an argument about the gaps between the two. “I don’t think you need to argue too hard to convince me that thermometers are better than tree-ring records,” says Stine. “What got turned into a big hoopla was the putting together of a summary graph, to say ‘this is our best interpretation of what the numbers have been.’ ”

Nevertheless, Stine and Huybers set out to explain the tree-ring divergence data—mostly, Stine says, because he wanted to get a better sense of what the Earth’s most ancient trees are actually able to tell us. Their solution is simple, elegant, and intuitive: global dimming. Since the 1960s—exactly when tree-ring data started to go awry—“there’s been large scale decreases in the amount of light that’s reaching the earth,” says Stine. It’s fairly easy to see why, too. In rapidly industrializing parts of the world with fewer emissions laws—like Southeast Asia—the light decline is particularly steep, and continues into the 21st century. On the other hand, in areas like the U.S. and Europe, you see a rapid decline in the middle of the 20th century, but then light levels steady themselves later on—right around the time most air pollution laws were put into place.

Trees of course, need light to grow—they use photosynthesis to turn light energy into chemical energy to fuel all their activities, including their growth. “My hypothesis,” says Stine, “is that the light is directly affecting tree growth: You turn down the lights, you turn down tree growth.

In the scientific community, skeptics of human-induced climate change have mostly been silenced; the 2014 National Climate Assessment published Tuesday unequivocally laid global warming and its resulting environmental impacts at the feet of human civilization, stating ominously that “climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”

 

http://www.newsweek.com/climategate-revisited-new-theory-explains-tree-ring-controversy-250208

Climate scientists, facing skeptics' demands for personal emails, learn how to cope

by Stephanie Paige Ogburn, E&E reporter, January 21, 2014

esday, January 21, 2014

In the spring of 2012, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, received a somewhat unusual request: The American Tradition Institute, a conservative group, wanted to search through his emails.

The group was seeking emails with specific phrases, although many of the words in question were not relevant to his research.

"They had terms like 'Michael Mann.' I know Mike; I don't collaborate with him. 'Hockey stick'; I don't work on that. 'Tobacco'; I don't smoke," Dessler told a room full of scientists last month, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Three climate scientists -- from left, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler -- talked about how to deal with harassment last month at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Photo by Scott Mandia, courtesy of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.

Dessler, who works for a state-funded university, had become the subject of a public records request, filed under his state's Public Information Act.

He recounted this tale at a workshop where researchers presented on some of the legal issues they had faced. The roomful of attendees, mostly scientists, paid close attention, some taking notes, others nodding in agreement.

"The goal was, they were trying to find something embarrassing," Dessler continued.

The ATI is known for its attempts to discredit climate science, and this made Dessler, who had never received such a request before, nervous.

He knew he might be required to turn over hundreds, maybe thousands of emails that he had once considered private. "If I took 10 years of your emails, I could probably find some emails that weren't phrased the best way," Dessler explained.

The researcher experienced a brief, panicked moment when he considered deleting all of the emails -- an illegal act. "That would have been a terrible idea," he told the scientists.

Instead, he went seeking for advice. "I sent out some emails and said, 'This has happened to me,' and I got a bunch of emails back. I think Gavin Schmidt [a NASA climate scientist] emailed me back and said don't panic," Dessler recalled.

Schmidt and a number of others had already been on the receiving end of such requests and could offer lessons from their experiences. The advice helped Dessler calm down, and the scientist soon began the tedious process of searching, reviewing and turning over the requested correspondence.

Dessler's experience, while hardly the norm for a scientist, is becoming increasingly common. In recent years, the American Tradition Institute has filed various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests against climate scientists working at public institutions.

Starting a legal defense fund

In response, the climate science community is organizing to support scientists who find themselves the subjects of such requests and training others to be aware that they could become targets.

In late 2011, Suffolk Community College professor Scott Mandia started the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, which has raised money to support scientists challenging the legality of certain FOIA requests. The fund is now looking to hire an executive director and expand its work on behalf of scientists.

Along with other groups, like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, it is also offering support to scientists who have either experienced such requests or feel they might.

The logo for the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Courtesy of the fund.

As scientists increasingly work to share their research findings with the public, it has also increased their visibility and made them targets, said Mandia.

"We're asking them to get out there, and when they get out there, boom, they're just shot," said Mandia. "So we want them to know that they have protection."

Public records requests, also often referred to as Freedom of Information Act requests, typically apply to researchers working at taxpayer-funded institutions, either at the state or federal level.

Chris Horner, who has filed many of the requests on behalf of ATI (ATI was recently renamed the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, or E&E Legal), is a senior fellow at both E&E Legal and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

In filing such requests, said Horner, he is seeking to find evidence of scientists at publicly funded institutions using taxpayer resources inappropriately.

"[FOIA requests] always involved their use of a taxpayer-funded, FOIA-covered position and resources for advocacy, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Union of Concerned Scientists work [or work] with certain ideologically aligned reporters," Horner wrote in an email.

Echoes of 'Climategate'?

Others have suggested that the FOIAs amount to fishing expeditions, as climate skeptic groups seek to replicate the experience of "Climategate," an episode in late 2009 when emails from researchers were stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia.

Excerpts from those emails were published in an attempt to discredit the scientists. Skeptics said the emails showed that scientists were conspiring to hide data showing that the Earth was not in fact warming, although later inquiries exonerated scientists from charges of data manipulation.

Jeff Ruch, director of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), has seen an uptick in such requests since then. "Climategate sort of created a template that others are following," Ruch said.

Over the past few years, skeptic groups have filed requests against scientists at NASA, the University of Virginia; Texas A&M; Texas Tech University; the University of Alabama, Huntsville; the University of Delaware; and the University of Arizona.

If a request is filed with a state institution, state law varies on what scientists have to make available.

Dessler's home state of Texas, for example, has a very open public records law. So in most cases, scientists working at state-funded universities there are required to turn over all of what is sought in freedom of information requests with a few exemptions.

The openness of Virginia's public records law and whether it requires researchers to turn over certain email communications are the subjects of an ongoing lawsuit between the University of Virginia and ATI.

The lawsuit, which has reached the state's Supreme Court, hinges on whether climate scientist Michael Mann and other researchers at the university are required to turn over parts of their email correspondence in response to ATI's records request.

In September 2013, the ATI also sued the University of Arizona over its response to a public records request filed in 2011 against climate researchers at that university.

Defense and education efforts

Last month's meeting was fertile ground for Mandia's Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. First organized to support Mann's fight against the ATI's FOIA against him, it has since branched out to education efforts and, at the meeting, also offered one-on-one legal consultations with worried scientists.

Along with PEER, under which the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund obtained nonprofit status, the group has put on workshops about Mann's experience and helped scientists understand the laws on which documents they must keep to meet legal requirements of FOIA and which they can throw away.

The workshop Dessler spoke at was one such offering. It also included Ruch, of PEER, and researchers Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Ben Santer and Naomi Oreskes, who have all experienced attacks because of their work.

Mann praised the fund's efforts. "They have provided critical support for legal representation of scientists who would otherwise have to dig into their own personal finances to defend themselves against the onslaught of attacks by industry front groups," he wrote in an email.

In Dessler's case, Mandia said he was able to provide the researcher with access to legal counsel and contacts at PEER and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"I can't tell you how helpful Scott was. He put me in touch with a few other people to talk to, and they basically talk you off the ledge," said Dessler. He ended up turning over a large number of emails to Horner. Afterward, he waited to see what would happen. But nothing did.

"It just disappeared into Chris Horner's hard disk," Dessler said.

Dessler also ended up on one of his favorite television shows, the PBS program "Frontline," which had decided to do a story on such requests. The researcher also used the opportunity to study Texas' public records law.

What he learned was that he can legally delete as many emails as he wants, and after that, they are no longer subject to public records requests. Now, he said, he deletes most of his emails after reading them.

When ATI's Horner realized "Frontline" had picked up Dessler's story, he submitted another records request. This one sought emails from "Frontline" and other journalists Dessler had communicated with, including reporters at The New York Times, the Associated Press and The Guardian.

But this time, Dessler was ready. "When they asked for my emails from 'Frontline,' there were none. Those were all gone," he said.

http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1059993161/print

Michael Mann responds to factually incorrect letter to the editor of the Times-Dispatch

Climate change letter was personal attack

To the Editor, Times-Dispatch, August 5, 2013

Charlie Battig did a grave disservice to your readers by spreading falsehoods about me personally and about climate science in general in his recent letter, “McAuliffe sways left and right on coal.” Battig parroted discredited denialist talking points, e.g., “the globe hasn’t warmed over the past 16 years” (the past decade, in fact, was the warmest recorded).

Much of the letter, however, revolved around Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s 2009 attempt to subpoena my personal U.Va. emails with dozens of other climate scientists. Cuccinelli is a climate-change denier, and his efforts were widely viewed as a fishing expedition intended to find something embarrassing that he could use to discredit my scientific research on climate change. His actions were blasted as a “witch hunt” by The Washington Post, while this paper editorialized on them as a “search warrant without probable cause (that) might be kosher in totalitarian states.” The state Supreme Court rejected Cuccinelli’s subpoena with prejudice last year.

Battig attempts to defend Cuccinelli’s attacks based on discredited allegations and innuendo arising from the industry-funded “climategate” smear campaign, where thousands of scientists’ emails were stolen and then misrepresented by climate-change deniers in an effort to call into question the evidence for human-caused climate change. Battig conveniently fails to acknowledge that nine investigations in the U.S. and Europe found there was no evidence of impropriety in any of these emails and that the National Science Foundation’s inspector general investigated and thoroughly dismissed all allegations of misconduct made against me personally.

It is precisely these sorts of attacks by climate-change deniers that led me to write my recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, where I discuss my experiences as a reluctant figure in the climate-change debate.

Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor, Department of Meterology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor-for-august/article_833393bb-0d7e-5389-b90d-9edb451c2ddd.html

New Study Shows Once Again How "Climategate" Emails Were Distorted

by Max Greenberg, Media Matters for America, April 12, 2013

At the height of the manufactured "Climategate" controversy, distortions of an email from a top climate scientist made it all the way to one of the leading Sunday shows. But a recent study re-confirms what that scientist was actually saying -- that much of recent heat has been trapped deep in the ocean.

In 2009, a batch of emails was stolen from the University of East Anglia. In one of the emails, which skeptics quickly took out of context, Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, lamented the "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment." Trenberth was actually referring to gaps in our "observing system" that make it difficult to say where short-term energy -- or heat -- is going, not copping to a lack of long-term climate change, as some claimed. In the email, Trenberth alluded to research suggesting that the "missing" heat might be sequestered deep in the ocean. 

For some media, none of this mattered. In a November 2009 appearance on ABC's This Week, conservative columnist George Will suggested Trenberth's email showed that "global warming has stopped," and that since climate science is "a complicated business," we "shouldn't wager these trillions" on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. 

But a recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the ocean has in fact played a "key role" in absorbing recent heat, which "strengthens our confidence in the robustness of our climate models." The findings echo the conclusions of a paper co-authored by Trenberth himself as well as findings published in the journal Physics Letters A in late 2012, all indicating that climate change continues apace. 

Recent analyses by Media Matters show that the "Climategate" episode was typical of the way the influential Sunday shows favor political spin over scientific fact. On the rare occasion Sunday shows covered climate change between 2009 and 2012, not a single scientist or climate expert was part of the discussion. In addition, every politician who discussed climate change on the Sunday shows in 2012 was a Republican:

Examining trends more broadly, the Sunday shows have hosted more Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and progressives. In this environment, honest appraisals of science are rare, and commentators like George Will fit right in.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/04/12/new-study-shows-once-again-how-climategate-emai/193611

Legitimate rape and climate change denial -- are we floating for the Todd Akin's, Paul Ryan's and Mitt Romney's?

The Danger of Laughing at Todd Akin

by Ilyse Hogue, The Nation, August 20, 2012

US Representative Todd Akin, R-MO (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

The Twittersphere went nuts yesterday after a video was posted of Missouri senate candidate, Todd Akin, expressing some jaw-dropping views on rape and abortion in an interview with local news:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The short-term consequences of such an incendiary remark are predictable: Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill will trumpet the remark to her own political advantage, donations will spike to her campaign and the party committees will offer the remark as one more proof point of the GOP’s war on women. But the impact of Akin’s effort to redefine the terms of this debate reaches beyond this one race. In the multidimensional chess that shapes public opinion, the game is less about individual elections and more about a sustained effort to mainstream radical ideas. In the case of denying women control over their lives, there’s evidence that the bad guys may be winning the long-game.

Akin was Paul Ryan’s co-sponsor on a House bill just last year banning the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of “forcible rape.” This term seemed laughably redundant since all rape, by definition, is forced. But this redefinition of rape was deceptively sinister. Statutory rapists often use coercion but not physical force. If the measure had passed, a 13-year-old emotionally manipulated into having sex with an older friend or relative would no longer be able to use Medicaid to terminate a resulting pregnancy. Nor would her parents be able to use their tax-exempt health savings fund.

While the measure was defeated, conversation around it introduced skepticism about whether all rape is created equal and what distinctions should be recognized by law. Instead of making him politically toxic, Ryan’s support of the pioneering forcible rape measure likely made him a more attractive vice presidential candidate to a Romney campaign needing to energize the right-wing base.

And whether or not Akin loses this cycle, his comments have already escalated the stakes. In his world view, the rape victim’s body will be the ultimate judge of whether a crime has taken place. If she gets pregnant, by Akin’s standard, her reproductive organs consented to the pregnancy, so she must have consented to the sex. This bizarre standard of innocence is reminiscent of medieval Europe, where the men in authority held the similarly scientific view that women guilty of witchcraft floated in water while innocent women would drown. Being cleared of witchcraft was of course not much consolation to the drowned women, though they at least got to skip being burned at the stake.

Akin’s comments appear an awful lot like step one in the GOP’s favorite two-step tactic to redefine the world around us: first, more extreme figures voice opinions that would never fly from more politically palatable ones. The right-wing echo chamber picks up those opinions in the guise of news coverage. Then, the more politically acceptable candidates shift their rhetoric to acknowledge the newly accepted opinion as reality.

Consider our seemingly uncontrollable slide towards climate catastrophe: in 2006 and 2007, the link between human activity and climate change was almost incontestable. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth was a breakout hit; and the former VP was rewarded for his leadership on the global issue with a Nobel Prize in 2007. In 2008, both McCain and Obama openly acknowledged the existence of the threat and the need for action. Scientists breathed a collective sigh of relief that the US might finally exert some leadership on this existential issue.

But when the Obama victory made the idea of a clean-energy economy a potential reality, the climate deniers kicked into high gear. Cash from the Koch brothers poured into bogus organizations to promote climate skepticism and cast doubt on the scientific consensus. Senator Inhofe called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” A 2009 Chamber of Commerce ad buy brutalized House Democrats who voted for the climate legislation. In the lead up to the climate summit of 2009, someone even hacked into a University server and published highly edited e-mails from climate scientists to make them appear to be fabricating their results. While the scientists were exonerated, the damage was done.

The resulting shift in public opinion was almost immediate. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of Americans who believed media accounts of climate change were exaggerated jumped from 35 percent to 48 percent. Among self-identified Republicans, it went to 66 percent. By last year’s Republican presidential primary, right-wing contenders made seemingly inane statements that flew in the face of scientific consensus, and even the ones like Romney who had previously acknowledged the threat were forced to recant to maintain their viability.

While the political dynamics around these two issues are different, there are striking similarities in the right-wing strategy of capitalizing on extreme statements to shift the spectrum of what’s possible. And the wary will take heed: in the span of four short years, we went from having two presidential candidates who openly advocated action to stop climate change to having no GOP candidates in 2012 who could or would affirm its existence and a Democratic president who seems to wish the issue would magically disappear. The consequences of inaction are already being felt.

The same process is underway to undermine women’s voices in our own destiny. Mitt Romney has already flip-flopped from a pro-choice Senate candidate and a governor who promised to be “a good voice” among Republicans on reproductive health to his new incarnation as Paul Ryan’s running mate and an anti-choice leader. While Ryan allows lesser candidates like Akin to carry the water on extreme views held by the right-wing patriarchy, his equally radical views become mainstreamed as his anti-woman credentials are embraced by the party leadership. If we don’t stop laughing and start drawing hard lines around scientific reality, how many Akin’s will it take before we see a President Romney ordering rape victims thrown into the water to see if they float?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169451/danger-laughing-todd-akin#

Letter from Dr. Michael Mann's lawyer to Scott Bud, Publisher of the National Review, demanding retraction of false allegation of academic fraud

Kerry Emanuel: Science Self-Corrects Even When Scientists Don't

Science Self-Corrects Even When Scientists Don't

by Kerry Emanuel, National Association of Scholars, December 19, 2011

The National Association of Scholars was formed largely to counter an erosion of scholarship originating in the political left and driven by an ideological commitment to advancing certain agendas at the expense of the free and open inquiry we once took for granted. It is therefore both ironic and distressing to find some of its members in sympathy with an equally disturbing and just as ideologically driven campaign against scholarship that can only be characterized as a war on science. The latest example is the egregious piece published recently by H. Sterling Burnett. It closely follows what has become a template for the conservative campaign against climate science:

1.      Tar an entire scholarly endeavor with the alleged crimes of a few

2.      Endlessly repeat allegations long after they have been proven false

3.      Falsely attribute to scientists extremist statements originating outside science

4.      Claim that the existence of minority opinions obviates the need to take risk seriously

5.      Attribute ulterior motives to scientists while ignoring the rather obvious motives of their critics

6.      Claim that the lack of existence of easy solutions justifies ignoring or discrediting science

As Dr. Burnett notes, the latest release of hacked emails, sometimes known as “Climategate II,” involves largely the same “cabal” as the first round; indeed, they were harvested at the same time but deliberately withheld so as to have an optimum negative impact on the recently concluded climate talks in Durban. As they contain little new information, however, they have had minimal influence. 

To be sure, some of the hacked messages are decidedly unflattering to their authors. I agree with Dr. Burnett that the requests to destroy emails or to hide data are completely out of line with the ideals of free and open inquiry that constitute a key cornerstone of scholarship. (Fortunately, various inquiries into the matter ascertained that no emails were destroyed in response to this request; nor is it possible to hide publicly funded data.) These are not defensible statements and no scientist I know would subscribe to them. But it is at this point that massive leveraging begins. We know something is amiss when Burnett claims that “the e-mails show the scientists involved to be violating their professional ethics with the result that climate science in particular and science as an institution more generally is brought into question” (emphasis mine). This represents a fundamental lack of understanding of how science actually works. It is simply naïve to imagine that science can only work if all its practitioners are models of virtue; it works because the enterprise as a whole is self-correcting, not because individuals are. Error, whatever its source, is a constant feature of research and advances are made only because results are constantly being tested by others. The land-temperature data that Phil Jones is best known for working on have been pored over by many groups, including most recently that of the Berkeley physicist Richard Muller – a strong critic of Jones’s efforts – and found to be robust. It is also consistent with records of sea surface temperature, which are based on entirely independent measurements.

From here, Burnett descends into repetition of false allegations. His claims that scientists destroyed raw data, that peer-review was undermined or that scientists employed “tricks” intended to deceive have been shown over and over again to be false, but those intent on undermining climate science hope that they will nonetheless gain currency by endless repetition. Burnett also falsely claims that researchers argue that “the science is settled”; no scientist in his right mind would ever claim that about any scientific finding. It is a claim made frequently by politicians and environmentalists, not climate scientists.

Imagine for a moment that some hacker gained access to thousands of emails exchanged among members of your profession. Can you honestly and confidently assert that none of these would reveal unprofessional behavior? Would the existence of such invalidate all the work you yourself and your profession as a whole is devoted to?  The holier-than-thou moral preening so abundantly evident in recent attacks on climate science has a singular purpose: to discredit a scientific endeavor whose findings are seen as lending support to policies advocated by Al Gore, environmentalists, the far left, and others that conservatives find distasteful. Perhaps because scientists are such easy targets, it’s easier to discredit them than engage policies that deal with climate change. At root, this is simple cowardice.

I am a scientist, a member of this organization, and someone who regards himself as conservative. I believe that our grandchildren will remember our generation not for its grand and overhyped exposés of a handful of climate scientists but for our failure to honestly and openly confront the risks that threaten their wellbeing, of which our attempts to discredit climate science are but one symptom.

Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, (2005, OxfordUniversity Press). In May 2006 he was named one of Time Magazine's "Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World."

http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=2325

Don Shelby: Probe into climate scientists' stolen emails gets serious

Probe into climate scientists' stolen emails gets serious

by Don Shelby, MinnPost.com, December 20, 2011

The investigation into the stolen emails from climate scientists in 2009 has suddenly gotten quite serious. It shuffled along under the guidance of a small UK police force for two years. Now Scotland Yard and the U.S. Department of Justice have joined the hunt for cyber criminals.

In 2009 thousands of email from one of the most prestigious universities conducting global-warming science was hacked by criminals. I say criminals because stealing emails is a crime — a cybercrime. The Hadley Climate Research Unit (HadCRU) [small note: this is not exactly correct. HadCRU is a data set; there is no HCR Unit] and East Anglia University server’s firewalls were breached. [this is correct] The target was apparently a scientist named Dr. Phillip Jones.  Because he communicated by email with scientists all over the world, dozens of other scientists’ emails were stolen in the heist. Then, the hackers released most of the emails to the public.

uea.ac.ukDr. Phillip Jones

No one is exactly clear why it was done. There are theories. One suggests that opponents of the science, unable to disprove the findings, set out to embarrass the scientists themselves. Another theory suggests that fossil-fuel interests orchestrated the hack and timed the release of the emails to injure the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit.

They are just theories. There are no facts to support them. Until last week, the investigation limped along conducted by the Norwich Constabulary, a small department. It is about to get exciting.

The press called it "climategate." Led by pro-fossil fuel and denialist bloggers as well as public-relations types working for industry supported think-tanks and foundations, the hungry scoop-crazy media reported the emails showed the climate scientists involved in criminal fraud, knowingly manipulating data and joining forces to keep contrarian science out of the major peer-reviewed journals. 

Probes launched
A half-dozen investigations were launched into the claims. All of them exonerated the scientists, all of them found no manipulation of the science. When the comments were put back into their proper context, the media did little to correct the impression it had created. So doubt about the science and the scientists lingers. The criminals won the battle. But the war is yet to be decided.  Fresh troops have just taken the field. I expect the criminals have broken a sweat.

This year another batch of emails (likely from the same theft, but held back) were dropped.  Much of the mainstream media had learned lessons from their rush to judgment in 2009.  Coverage was much more circumspect. They had learned apparently that reporting out-of-context chatter from stolen emails leaves scoop journalists with ice cream on their faces.

Agents in Great Britain have executed search warrants and seized equipment from anti-science bloggers who helped spread the stolen emails. The U.S. Department of Justice has sent letters to internet service providers and websites in the United States also involved in spreading the stolen emails. They are all being asked to maintain all evidence of any emails received from a shadowy source known as "FOIA."  "FOIA" was the chief distributor of the stolen emails. Norwich has called in the big dogs.

One of the world’s most famous climate scientists, Dr. Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania, communicated often with Dr. Jones at East Anglia. In the original reporting, Mann was often quoted, misquoted and taken out of context. Though the investigations have found he did nothing wrong, climategate has nevertheless hurt him.

Mann told me that the people who can’t abide the idea of global warming being true "have no legitimate scientific leg to stand on.  So, they have turned to criminal acts in an attempt to distract the public and policymakers." Dr. Mann is convinced that the criminal act shows the work of "industry-funded front groups and the individuals who do their bidding."

Cyber-terrorism?
The question is whether this can be characterized as a simple cybercrime -- or are there elements of cyber-terrorism involved? Bombing a building is an act of terrorism, but it is not the goal.  The goal, according to experts, is to terrorize, immobilize and destroy one’s sense of security.

schneier.comBruce Schneier

So I turned to one of the most respected cyber-terrorism experts in the country, Bruce Schneier.  Schneier has been called to testify before Congress. He is the author of eight books on the subjects of cryptography, warfare, crime and terrorism committed by cyber-criminals.

Schneier told me: "What I’ve been thinking about is whether the hack was intended to intimidate, threaten or bully. Then the crime becomes an effort to stop people from doing legitimate research. So, it is not just a data theft, but has a goal of creating a chilling effect, a threat, an intimidation."

Schneier understands the cyber world, but also the law of unintended consequences. "We are moving into a world in which everything we do is persistent," said Schneier.  By persistent, Schneier means it just doesn’t go away. "A phone conversation is actually archaic," he said.  "Today the conversation is by email or social media and those conversations are persistent."

If everything we say never goes away, it can be brought back and used to harm us. "Gotcha politics is a good example," Schneier says. "Record everything a politician says and find the two sentences he or she uttered to destroy them."

He quotes Cardinal Richelieu, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

I asked Schneier if "persistence" makes us less willing to communicate. "As we move in a world of persistent conversations, the ephemera disappears," he said.

Ephemeral conversations
The ephemera he is talking about is the way we used to communicate — talking with one another.  The conversation is gone — it is ephemeral. "A lot of our privacy was incidental to the ephemeral nature of our conversations," he told me. "Two million emails were subpoenaed in the Microsoft trial. Not long ago those conversations would have been ephemeral. They would have been a chat in someone’s office."

Dr. Mann has long believed that intimidation was one goal of the cyber criminals. "They want to intimidate, stymie, harass scientists who are out in front on the risks of climate change, and they want to serve notice to other scientists of what will be in store for them if they speak out."

Schneier said: "How open would you be in conversation if you thought your words would be on the front page of the newspaper the next day?" It is a trend. We have moved, he said, into a new world where we are losing the natural privacy we once enjoyed.

Not only are our communications on the internet persistent, but so is memory. Dr. John Abraham, thermal scientist at the University of St. Thomas, told me: "Those crimes were used to fabricate lies about world-class scientists — lies that are still being repeated today."  

Mark Twain said, "A lie can travel half-way around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes on."

I’m hoping the shoes Scotland Yard and the FBI are lacing up are track shoes.

http://www.minnpost.com/donshelby/2011/12/20/33938/probe_into_climate_scientists_stolen_emails_gets_serious

Hacked climate emails: police seize computers at West Yorkshire home of Roger Tattersall, also known as TallBloke

Hacked climate emails: police seize computers at West Yorkshire home

Police seize equipment as part of investigation into the theft of thousands of private emails from the University of East Anglia

• by Leo Hickman, guardian.co.uk, December 15, 2011

In November 2009, thousands of private emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were stolen from a server and released online. Photograph: Graham Turner

Police officers investigating the theft of thousands of private emails between climate scientists from a University of East Anglia server in 2009 have seized computer equipment belonging to a web content editor based at the University of Leeds.

On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had "executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers." She added: "No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009."

Tattersall posted his own account of the police search on his blog: "An Englishman's home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan police, the Norfolk constabulary and the computer crimedivision arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though … They ended up settling for two laptops and an ADSL broadband router … I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress [the internet host for his blog] forwarded a notice from the US Department of Justice."

Speaking to the Guardian, Tattersall said: "I am happy to assist the police with their inquiries because I haven't been hiding anything important like some people have. I assisted them with their inquiries, which involved voluntarily answering some questions regarding computer use, etc."

Last month, Tattersall's blog, as well as at least four other blogs popular with climate sceptics, received a comment from a user called "FOIA" providing a link to a Russian server hosting a compressed folder containing more than 5,000 emails exchanged between climate scientists, along with a short message setting out the perpetrator's motives. The folder also contained an encrypted subfolder containing a further 220,000 emails. It was the second time such a release had occurred.

In November 2009, thousands of emails were released in a similar manner on the eve the Copenhagen climate summit. The episode prompted a series of inquiries into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness, they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Both Tattersall and a US-based climate sceptic blogger known as Jeff Id said they had received a "formal request" via the blogging platform WordPress from the US Department of Justice's criminal division, dated 9 December, to preserve "all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession" related to their own blogs, as well as Climate Audit, a climate sceptic blog run by a Canadian mining consultant called Steve McIntyre. All three blogs had received messages from "FOIA" last month pointing to the link hosting a second tranche of emails first taken from the UEA in 2009.

During an interview with the Guardian last week before the seizing of his computers, Tattersall said that he had been questioned by Norfolk police "some two months" after the initial breach in 2009, but had heard nothing since. A number of climate scientists and bloggers are known to have been questioned by the police.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said today: "We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/15/hacked-climate-emails-police-west-yorkshire