Penn State report on Mann: new investigation to convene

Watts Up With That
Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The report is out, and further investigation is forthcoming.

Excerpts from the report are below, where they considered 4 allegations. They say only one had merit. That will be the subject of the upcoming investigation.

Excerpts:

“It is clear to those who have followed the media and blogs over the last two months that there are two distinct and deeply polarized points of view that have emerged on this matter. One side views the emails as evidence of a clear cut violation of the public trust and seeks severe penalties for Dr. Mann and his colleagues. The other side sees these as nothing more than the private discussions of scientists engaged in a hotly debated topic of enormous social impact.

We are aware that some may seek to use the debate over Dr. Mann’s research conduct and that of his colleagues as a proxy for the larger and more substantive debate over the science of anthropogenic global warming and its societal (political and economic) ramifications. We have kept the two debates separate by only considering Dr. Mann’s conduct.”

“Decision 4. Given that information emerged in the form of the emails purloined from CRU in November 2009, which have raised questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research activity, given that this may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist, and given that it may be undermining public trust in science in general and climate science specifically, the inquiry committee believes an investigatory committee of faculty peers from diverse fields should be constituted under RA-10 to further consider this allegation.

In sum, the overriding sentiment of this committee, which is composed of University administrators, is that allegation #4 revolves around the question of accepted faculty conduct surrounding scientific discourse and thus merits a review by a committee of faculty scientists. Only with such a review will the academic community and other interested parties likely feel that Penn State has discharged it responsibility on this matter.“

An investigatory committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials will consider this matter and present its findings and recommendations to Dr. Henry C. Foley within 120 days of being charged. The committee will consist of the following five faculty members:

1. Dr. Mary Jane Irwin, Evan Pugh Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering;
2. Dr. Alan Walker, Evan Pugh Professor, Department of Anthropology and Department of Biology;
3. Dr. A. Welford Castleman, Evan Pugh Professor, Department of Chemistry and Department of Physic;
4. Dr. Nina G. Jablonski, Head, Department of Anthropology; and
5. Dr. Sarah M. Assmann, Waller Professor, Department of Biology.

Ms. Candice Yekel, as Director of the Office for Research Protections and as the University’s Research Integrity Officer, will provide administrative support and assistance to the committee.

The investigatory committee’s charge will be to consider what are the bounds of accepted practice in this instance and whether or not Dr. Mann did indeed engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.

Read the report here (PDF)

International Bureaucrats Lie About Global Warming

By Doug Bandow

If what global warming scaremongers said was true, the planet would be in peril.  But if what they said was true was, in fact, true, they wouldn’t have to lie about the process.

Walter Russell Mead points out in American Interest:

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.  It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

With this in mind, ‘climategate’ – the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists – looks sinister rather than just unsavory.  The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods.  Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ‘science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue.  A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal.

The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere.  The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had – which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources – was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.

The political war over climate change is ending.  The alarmists have lost.  The campaign won’t disappear any time soon.  But unless the movement sheds its discredited leaders and brings its policy prescriptions into line with the evidence, the center and even the moderate left will begin running in the opposite direction.  After all, in today’s political climate, what politician wants to tell the American people that he or she intends to wreck the U.S. economy for a lie?

Doug Bandow, American Conservative Defense Alliance

View the original article at Campaign for Liberty

Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws

Fred Pearce
London Guardian
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

Full article here

Marc Morano on Alex Jones TV: NASA Scientist Demands End to Industrial Society

The Alex Jones Channel

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Alex welcomes back to the show Marc Morano, the man behind the climate website ClimateDepot.com for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Morano is a former journalist with Cybercast News Service. He has written articles critical of NASA global warming scientist James E. Hansen. Morano was also a producer and correspondent for the nationally syndicated television newsmagazine American Investigator.

View the original video at The Alex Jones Channel

Controversial climate change boss uses car AND driver to travel one mile to office… (but he says YOU should use public transport)

Simon Parry
UK Daily Mail
Sunday, January 31st, 2010

He is the climate change chief whose research body produced a report warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas might melt by 2035 and earned a Nobel Prize for his work – so you might expect Dr Rajendra Pachauri to be doing everything he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.

But as controversy continued to simmer last week over the bogus ‘Glaciergate’ claims in a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which he heads – Dr Pachauri showed no apparent inclination to cut global warming in his own back yard.

On Friday, for the one-mile journey from home to his Delhi office, Dr Pachauri could have walked, or cycled, or used the eco-friendly electric car provided for him, known in the UK as G-Wiz.

But instead, he had his personal chauffeur collect him from his £4.5million home – in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla.

Hours later, the chauffeur picked up Dr Pachauri from the office of the environmental charity where he is director-general – The Energy and Resources Institute – blatantly ignoring the institute’s own literature, which gives visitors tips on how to reduce pollution by using buses.

Full article here

Mad Scientists Want To Simulate Volcanoes To Block Sun

Global warming alarmists target the very source of all life on earth as a deadly enemy to the environment

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Even as the very foundation of the global warming fraud collapses as a result of scandal after scandal, and the manufactured link between CO2 emissions and temperature increases is vehemently debunked, mad scientists with sympathetic allies in the White House are proposing to simulate volcanoes in order to block out the sun.

Despite the fact that Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, and a host of other mammoth, caught red-handed examples of global warming alarmists engaging in outright fraud to manufacture a link between CO2 emissions and climate change have been exposed over the last two months, geoengineering nuts are still insisting on the necessity of carrying out their own man-made climate change by loading the atmosphere with sulphuric particles in an effort to block the very source of all life on earth – the sun.

“A geoengineering project to block the sun by simulating volcanic eruptions would be 100 times cheaper than cutting greenhouse gas emissions, climate change scientists said,” reports the Telegraph.

“The environmental scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada, Edward Parson of the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University, were writing an editorial in the journal, Nature.”

“They called for governments to establish a multimillion-pound fund for research into the simulated volcanoes and other solar-radiation management techniques for shielding the Earth against sunlight.”

No, this isn’t a script from V or some tacky alien invasion B movie – esteemed scientists are really proposing to treat the sun – without which all life on earth would perish – as a mortal enemy to the environment.

With no justification whatsoever, and with scant regard for the health consequences, these lunatics actually want to create artificial volcanoes in an attempt to produce global dimming.

No doubt the following benefits that are associated with exposure to sulphur will be enjoyed as an added bonus by the same kind of people who advocate genocidal measures of population reduction.

– Neurological effects and behavioral changes
– Disturbance of blood circulation
– Heart damage
– Effects on eyes and eyesight
– Reproductive failure
– Damage to immune systems
– Stomach and gastrointestinal disorder
– Damage to liver and kidney functions
– Hearing defects
– Disturbance of the hormonal metabolism
– Dermatological effects
– Suffocation and lung embolism

As we have previously highlighted, a prominent supporter of geoengineering proposals is none other than White House science czar John P. Holdren, a key Obama advisor who infamously co-authored a book in which he called for a “planetary regime” to enforce draconian population control measures such as forced abortion, infanticide and mandatory sterilization, as well as poisoning the water supply.

In April last year, Holdren revealed that high-level talks had already taken place to explore the possibility of “geoengineering” the environment by “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays”.

“It’s got to be looked at,” Holdren was quoted as saying, “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” The AP also reported that Holdren said he had raised the concept in administration discussions.

But for some, simply launching gargantuan atmospheric experiments to block out the sun doesn’t go far enough. A new book staunchly advocated by none other than NASA’s James Hansen calls for cities to be razed to the ground, industrial civilization to be destroyed, and acts of sabotage and eco-terrorism in the name of halting whatever invented environmental catastrophe alarmists are threatening this week.

“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,” writes author Keith Farnish, adding that “people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses”.

As we have repeatedly stressed, the innumerable scandals currently rocking the global warming establishment are eating away at whatever credibility the climate change authodoxy had left, but unless we follow through and weed out the systemized detritus that already infests every level of our society in the name of climate change, these sophisticated crackpots are just going to keep pushing ahead with their lunacy.

This starts with a wholesale rejection and noncompliance with any policy, regulation, or mandate instituted in the name of stopping the manufactured fraud that is man-made global warming.

‘Climategate’ scandal scientists broke the law by hiding data from global warming sceptics

Kate Loveys
UK Daily Mail
Thursday, January 28th, 2010

The scientific unit at the heart of the climate change emails scandal broke the law by hiding data from sceptics.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for the data.

The decision by the Information Commissioner’s Office comes months after controversial emails from the university’s Climatic Research Unit, a global leader in its field, were released on to the internet.

In one email the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, asked a colleague to delete emails relating to a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In another message, Professor Jones told how he had persuaded the university to ignore Freedom of Information requests from sceptics.

Full article here

Global Warming Fraud Collapses Amidst Deception And Scandal

Even vehemently pro-AGW news outlets admit its game over for the IPCC

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The multi-billion dollar global warming fraud is truly beginning to crumble, with even vehement man-made climate change advocates like the BBC acknowledging that the credibility of the IPCC is shot.

“The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures — and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas,” writes the BBC’s Andrew Neil in an article entitled ‘The dam is cracking‘.

Climategate was merely the opening salvo in a series of seemingly never-ending scandals that have engulfed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the last few weeks.

The first major blow came when the IPCC had to admit that their 2007 forecast that the Himalayan Glaciers would disappear by 2035 was completely wrong. The absurd claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, invoked by the World Wildlife Fund, and then copied into the 2007 IPCC report with no investigation as to its accuracy.

In reality, even if IPCC estimates of global warming are proven correct, which is severely doubtful in light of their recent track record, the glaciers will be around for at least centuries longer.

“In fact, the IPCC’s 2007 report cites WWF documents as “evidence” at least another 15 times,” writes Andrew Bolt.

“Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture.”

It then emerged that the scientist who first made the claim, Syed Hasnain, is now employed by The Energy Research Institute – headed by IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri. Just two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study Hasnain’s bogus claim.

Pachauri, portrayed as an authoritative scientists by some when in fact he is a railway engineer, only made himself look worse by initially attacking climate skeptics as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science” when the glaciers issue was highlighted. Pachauri later had to retract his words but still refuses to apologize. Pachauri’s reputation is in tatters and he is under intense pressure to resign.

The credibility of the IPCC was further devastated when it was revealed that their predictions on the Amazon rainforest were also lifted wholesale from WWF propaganda with no independent verification whatsoever.

Amidst all this scandal, new peer-reviewed studies have emerged to confirm the obvious – the world had ice age activity even when levels of greenhouse gases were four times higher than the level of our pre-industrial times.

Global warming is heading to the same dustbin of history as Y2K, SARS and swine flu – another manufactured scare peddled primarily to make vast profits for corrupt elitists at the expense of the general public. The entire fraud is collapsing under the weight of its own lies as new revelations of IPCC deception and bias emerge on an almost daily basis thanks to the sterling work of climate skeptics who have had their convictions vindicated.

Investigate Pachauri now

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
Monday, January 25th, 2010

The IPCC and its deeply conflicted chairman are starting to smell very badly, and not just because of Climategate:

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers…

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

Humbled – but not humble. In fact, Pachauri was at first suspiciously determined to defend this preposterous error, based on a wild and unsubstantiated claim by a single scientist in a telephone interview, and to smear the scientists and critics who pointed it out. Remember his initial responses:

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, has hit back, denouncing the Indian government report as “voodoo science” lacking peer review.

And again:

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”

Even more suspiciously, Pachauri’s TERI employed the very scientist whose airy claim in 1999 had started the whole Himalayan scare:

The Carnegie money was … acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt… The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. He now heads Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

In fact, and making this scandal even worse, is the admission that the IPCC deliberately included the Himalayan claim in its 2007 report for political purposes, despite knowing it was suspect at best:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action..”.

And let’s not forget which warmist dupe – and wannabe UN secretary general – has also tipped Pachauri’s TERI another $1 million of taxpayers’ funds:

Australian Prime Minister Mr. Kevin Michael Rudd announced $1 million contribution to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) …

When wild and baseless scares are pushed by a man who makes serious money from them, it’s time to call in the auditors. Pachauri may be innocent of any wrong doing, but only a fool would be blind to the danger of corruption when so many millions are being thrown at pushers of the warming faith.

Question: could the Nobel Prize be withdrawn from the IPCC if more such revelations come to light?

Full article here

Pachauri must resign at once as head of official climate science panel

Geoffrey Lean
London Telegraph
Monday, January 25th, 2010

It is time for the embattled Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). He is steadfastly refusing to go, but his position is becoming more and more untenable by the day, and the official climate science body will continue to leach credibility while he remains in charge.

When on Friday I wrote for my Daily Telegraph column (published yesterday) that he was “at best one more blunder away from having to resign”, I did not expect other errors to come to light quite so fast. But, as I blogged yesterday, four more have now been reported from the part of the latest IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers that contained the notorious – and now withdrawn – claim that they would disappear by 2035. And there are now reports that it erred in relying on an unpublished report in linking natural disasters like flood and hurricanes to global warming. All appear much less serious than the original Himalayan howler, but they add to the impression of sloppiness at the IPCC.

Pachauri’s reaction to the original revelation was widely reported to be that he claimed to have “absolutely no responsibility” for the mistake. But – leaving aside the obvious fact that, as Chairman, he is ultimately responsible for the content and standards of the report – he is himself rapidly emerging as much more of an issue than even a few errors in the 3000 word document. Much of his trouble, rightly, stems from his outrageous reaction to an Indian paper late last year which suggested that the glaciers were not vanishing quickly – dismissing it as “voodoo science” and adding, hubristically: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening in the Himalayas.”

He has reacted equally robustly to calls for his resignation, saying he has “no intention” of quitting and adding: “I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them”. But it is not just the sceptics who are unhappy, and he has long been a controversial figure. Environmentalists were outraged when he became chairman of the IPCC in 2002, ousting the enormously respected Dr Robert Watson (now Defra’s chief scientist), after lobbying by the George W.Bush administration: Exxon had sent the White House a memo asking for Watson to be “replaced at the request of the US” as being “too aggressive” on climate change. Al Gore called him the “let’s drag out feet candidate”.

Full article here