Email 4141, a glimpse into the climate science Mad Hatter Tea Party: "I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us"

For all your Leftist ideological corruption of science needs.

250 Climategate emails.

For example:

 

 

Ed Cook: "It certainly looks pretty spooky to me with strong "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" signals in it"

ClimateGate email 3759

date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:07:38 -0400
from: Ed Cook
subject: Oroko Swamp
to: Keith Briffa
Hi Keith,
Here is the Oroko Swamp RCS chronology plot in an attached Word 98 file and actual data values below. It certainly looks pretty spooky to me with strong "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" signals in it. It's based on substantially more replication than the series in the paper you have to review (hint, hint!)...[Ed Cook]

And:

Email 4141, a glimpse into the climate science Mad Hatter Tea Party: "I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us"

ClimateGate email 4141

date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004...
I think this is a real problem, and I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming...Therefore a central message probably has to be that humans are now interfering with extremely large and heavy global systems, of which we know relatively little: we are in a totally new situation for the human species, and our impact added to all the natural variations that exist risks to unsettle subtle balances and create tensions within the systems which might also lead to "flip-over" effects with short-term consequences that might be very dangerous.
And then, the good old precautionary principle must be guiding our effort. During the cold war, enormous resources were put into missiles, airplanes, and other military equipment to check Soviet expansion and make containment policy credible - in the firm hope that all this equipment would never have to be used. And it wasn't, and nobody complained about the costs. Now, in the face of a different, but clearly distinguishable global threat "more dangerous than terrorism" the cost issue surfaces all the time. Somehow we all need to help in creating an understanding that the threat of global change is real and that we need to develop a new paradigm of looking at the world and the future: this is not just a scientific or technological issue. It involves important philosophical and ethical considerations where some fundamental value systems have to be challenged.
Bo
-----Original Message----- From: Asher Minns...
FWD: Abrupt Climate Change
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media, which can become public perception.---
---
I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us....The message regarding the lesson of the THC should NOT be "global warming will cause an ice age." The message should be one about year to year or
decadal variability, and the way alternation of cold years/decades/centurys with very hot ones will exacerbate the problem of adaptation. Imagine a decade of torrid heat, thirty years of pretty good climate, fifty years of early frosts, a century of drought, twenty years of flood -- that's the kind of thing we need to worry about, not the simple "icebergs in the Thames" scenario. [Ray Pierrehumbert?] 

The Great White North withdraws from ...

...the Big Green Scam.

Canada declares that it is exercising its right to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

Truth is an important value in science, but funding...

...is all important.

November 2011 Climategate e-mail release shows that critics wild claims that Warmists were spiking data was not so wild after all:

Especially since that consensus has just been rocked by a Galileo-sized blow: The November release of yet another batch of emails (the first wave were leaked in 2009) from some of the world's leading proponents of AGW, including climate scientists Michael Mann and Phil Jones, which show researchers admitting to one another privately that the case for AGW is not nearly a solid as they claim publicly.

The emails also show AGW scientists conspiring to smear those who disagree with their apocalyptic diagnosis of the planetary temperature, and discussing with one another how to hide or minimize contrary evidence and evade lawful requests for their data.

Take this email from Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia: "Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data."

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, thinks this email alone should lead to a criminal investigation of Jones, the CRU and the Department of Energy.

Another nugget from Jones shows him attempting to evade Freedom of Information requests about his data: "I've been told that IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process."

Why would Jones want to avoid releasing his data? A clue comes from another message in which Jones admits to choosing only the data which supports his theory: "I, too, don't see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we're choosing the periods to show warming."

Let's be clear - this is not science. It's fraud. Fraud that has real consequences for real people: Recently a teacher turned off the heat in an entire school in England - on the coldest day of the year - to cut carbon emissions and fight global warming.

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?”

Climategate 2 - another release of Climate Researchers' emails contains more embarrassing revelations and admissions:

Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. “We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale "signature" of greenhouse gas warming was absent. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources, Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresses his discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were the demands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.

This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came as little surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but they rocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Al Gore and Bill Nye "the Science Guy" teach high school students how to be real scientists...

...fabricate your global warming test results and get lots and lots of government funding!

Watts Up With That attempts to replicate an experiment that Al Gore and Bill Nye tout as being "so easy a high school kid can do it" to prove the truth of global warming.  The result is a rigorous analysis of how important it is to modern climate science to force the data to fit the theory:

Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified, and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.


The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL.

But, hey, they've got funding!

By the way, Watts Up With That was also responsible for destroying a bit of pseudo-knowledge that I've always cherished, namely that Venus' intense heat is caused by a "runaway Greenhouse Effect."  Apparently, notwithstanding that kinda-cool explanation, it's not; it's caused by Venus' extreme atmospheric density.

Also, one of the commenters at Watts Up With That notes a similar problem with various "high school science experiments" designed to prove global warming/the greenhouse effect, i.e., they don't work.  You can just imagine the teachers and students either figuring that they didn't do the experiment right, and moving along, or fudging the data in order to get the right result, i.e., replicating the scientific method used by scientists in getting grants since time immemorial.

The commenter observes:

Looks like maybe it is not just Al Gore that is misrepresenting the actual results of these high school experiments, but a whole raft of supposed educators. If so, it implicates our entire educational system. How many thousands of times have students tried and failed to replicate the stated experimental results without these failures ever managing to emerge as a challenge challenge to those results? The scandal here could really be huge.

It probably is because, notwithstanding the lip service paid to replication of results and the willingness to invalidate a theory based on an experiment, humans are humans and human nature respects a "magisterium," particularly in this day and age the magisterium of science.

Becoming the "Other."

BREAKING: An IPCC backchannel ‘cloud’ was apparently established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA.


If it's "settled" and it's "science," why so much effort to hide from the public.

Wiki leaks shows how United States manipulated Climate Change Treaty.

Some of the requests for intelligence on other diplomats was designed to arm twist foreign countries into signing stupid deal that is inimical to American interests.

Article here.

Hal Lewis - Professor Emeritus and 67 year member of the American Physical Society - resigns from APS because of corrupt Global Warming Scam.

Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara described the reasons for his resignation:

Corrupt Science.

An AGW proponent castigates the corruption he finds in the post-Climategate inquiries.

The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann -- the paleoclimatologist who came up with "the hockey stick" -- would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for "lack of credible evidence", it will not even investigate them. (At this, MIT's Richard Lindzen tells the committee, "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?" The report continues: "The Investigatory Committee did not respond to Dr Lindzen's statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.") Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers -- so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.


You think I exaggerate?

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research...

Had Dr. Mann's conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions...

Clearly, Dr. Mann's reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

So, the measure of honest science is.....ability to generate funding.

On the actual Climategate inquiry, the author, Clive Crook, writes:

Like Pearce, The Economist rightly draws attention to the failure of the Russell inquiry to ask Phil Jones of the CRU whether he actually deleted any emails to defeat FoI requests. It calls this omission "rather remarkable". Pearce calls it "extraordinary". Myself, I would prefer to call it "astonishing and indefensible". I don't see how, having spotted this, the magazine can conclude that the report, overall, was "thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics." (Well, the critics make such unreasonable demands! Look into the charges, they say. Hear from the other side. Ask the obvious questions. It never stops: you just can't satisfy these people.)

None of this restores confidence in science, at least where science intersects with fashionable public policy.

Climategate report finds...

that the "trick" designed to "hide the decline" was misleading:

Here is the report.  The "misleading" conclusion is buried in the report.

Real Scientists Critique the Pseudo-science of Climatology

It seems that the use of the term Greenhouse Effect may have caused people to improperly "reify" an abstraction. To wit, the warming that occurs in a greenhouse is not comparable to what happens in the atmosphere as a matter of basic physics.

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and frictionmust not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

I'm curious about the argument in this paper.  It seems basic to the issues that a lot of people have spent a lot of money on for a long time. So, why have I never heard that the "greenhouse effect" is a fiction that "can never exist?"

Some more excerpts from the paper:

5 Physicist's Summary


A thorough discussion of the planetary heat transfer problem in the framework of theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics leads to the following results:

1. There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect, which explains the relevant physical phenomena. The terms "greenhouse effect" and "greenhouse gases" are deliberate misnomers.

2. There are no calculations to determinate an average surface temperature of a planet with or without an atmosphere, with or without rotation, with or without infrared light absorbing gases. The frequently mentioned difference of 33 C for the fictitious greenhouse effect of the atmosphere is therefore a meaningless number.

3. Any radiation balance for the average radiant flux is completely irrelevant for the determination of the ground level air temperatures and thus for the average value as well.

4. Average temperature values cannot be identified with the fourth root of average values of the absolute temperature's fourth power.

5. Radiation and heat flows do not determine the temperature distributions and their average values.

6. Re-emission is not reflection and can in no way heat up the ground-level air against the actual heat
flow without mechanical work.

7. The temperature rises in the climate model computations are made plausible by a perpetuum mobile of the second kind. This is possible by setting the thermal conductivity in the atmospheric models to zero, an nonphysical assumption. It would be no longer a perpetuum mobile of the second kind, if the "average" fictitious radiation balance, which has no physical justification anyway, was given up.

8. After Schack 1972 water vapor is responsible for most of the absorption of the infrared radiation in the Earth's atmosphere. The wavelength of the part of radiation, which is absorbed by carbon dioxide is only a small part of the full infrared spectrum and does not change considerably by raising its partial pressure.

And:

In other words: Already the natural greenhouse effect is a myth beyond physical reality. The CO2-greenhouse e ect, however is a \mirage" [205]. The horror visions of a risen sea level melting pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations. The emergence of hurricanes and tornados cannot be predicted by climate models, because all of these deviations are ruled out. The main strategy of modern CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to hide themselves behind more and more pseudo-explanations, which are not part of the academic education or even of the physics training. A good example are the radiation transport calculations, which are probably not known by many. Another example
are the so-called feedback mechanisms, which are introduced to amplify an effect which is not marginal but does not exist at all. Evidently, the defenders of the CO2-greenhouse thesis refuse to accept any reproducible calculation as an explanation and have resorted to unreproducible ones. A theoretical physicist must complain about a lack of transparency here, and he also has to complain about the style of the scienti c discussion, where advocators of the greenhouse thesis claim that the discussion is closed, and others are discrediting justified arguments as a discussion of "questions of yesterday and the day before yesterday"25. In exact sciences, in particular in theoretical physics, the discussion is never closed and is to be continued ad infinitum, even if there are proofs of theorems available. Regardless of the specific field of studies a minimal  basic rule should be fulfilled in natural science, though,even if the scientific fields are methodically as far apart as physics and meteorology: At least among experts, the results and conclusions should be understandable or reproducible. And it should be strictly distinguished between a theory and a model on the one hand, and between a model and a scenario on the other hand, as clari ed in the philosophy of science.

Cui Bono?

Could it be that that Climatefraud is actually a way of allowing some people to make money?  Joanne Nova says "follow the money."

Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and found $23 million paid by Exxon over 10 years (which has stopped). Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded, but it's not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect "taxed", consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits won't actually fall that much.


But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics-- even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on sceptics was even less.

And:

Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates: "I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market." "The largest commodity market in the world." He ought to know.


It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat, copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than oil.

More Cracks in the AGW Wall

According to the Times of London, increased temperature readings may be the result of urbanization and other factors that do not reflect general temperature:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.


In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.


These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.


The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Also note this in relation to the post immediately below:

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.


Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”

So, Dr. Pope warns that the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought - Panic! - but Dr. Johnson says that there has been no warming since 1995.








 

Scientist Acknowledges History, Maybe

The inventor of the infamous global warming "Hockey Stick" graph is acknowledging that his data was not "well organized" and that there is a "real issue" about whether the Middle Ages were warmer than today.

This was during the "Medieval Warm Period," when it was warm enough for Vikings to settle in Greenland.

As a history major, I learned all about the effects of the Medieval Warm Period in allowing European populations to increase and providing an environment that allowed the Vikings to erupt out of Scandinavia.  Then, all this Global Warming stuff and it was like people had just forgotten this bit of history.

Like I've always said, I will get nervous about "Global Warming" and the DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD when we can grow wheat in Greenland.

From the BBC article:

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.


He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

Fraud includes providing only a half-truth without the necessary qualifications that allow the receiver of the information to properly weigh the information.  In this case, the necessary qualification would have been that Jones data was not well organized and that he was withholding the raw data to spare himself the embarrassment of people learning that his data organization rendered his conclusions subject to criticism.

So, instead, he presented one view of the data, didn't reveal the weakness of his methodology and permitted supporters to declare that anyone who doubted his "hockey stick" graph was insane.

That's fraud.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.


But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period

Well, no one previously said "predominantly" and no said that the debate hadn't been settled.  Rather, they sent the MWP down Orwell's "information hole."

Shouldn't the debate be "settled" before we cripple the economy?  Might it not be important to learn whether the Middle Ages were warmer and why that might be the case, in light of the fact that their were no carbon emitting industries way back then?

Just asking.

Interesting Update:

The BBC article didn't mention this bit from the BBC interview, which the Daily Mail supplies:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.


And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made

So, no statistically significant warming since 1995, i.e., during the same period that we have been repeatedly told that Global Warming has been established as a fact.

Why did the BBC article not mention the "inconvenient truth" that the scientist it interviewed said that there was no statistically significant warming since 1995?

Perhaps, it has something to do with the fact that the BBC has its pension money invested in Global Warming:

STRIKING parallels between the BBC’s coverage of the global warming debate and the activities of its pension fund can be revealed today.


The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.

The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.

Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.

Veteran journalist and former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons is unhappy with the corporation’s coverage.

Scientists are People - Corrupt and Prejudiced and Greedy - like Everyone Else.

Here is a typical Left-blog hooting at the success of a skeptic obstretician who defeated a defamation claim filed by a researcher whose study the skeptic had criticized.  The hooting comes from the fact that the study involved alleged scientific proof that prayer improved the chances of a couple's succesful in-vitro fertilization.

The thrust of the blog's post is that the evil forces of religious credulity have been vanquished once again by the gleaming righteousness of SCIENCE!

With all due respect, whoop-dee-doo.

In California, in this day and age, defending against defamation suits arising from public comments is about as risky as betting on the sun rising in the morning. California has an "Anti-SLAPP" ("Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statute that puts the burden on the plaintiff to show up front that he has evidence supporting a prima facie case against the defendant.  Since an element of a case where there is the privilege of a common interest in a subject matter - as would be the case of a researcher criticizing another scientist's research - is malice, the plaintiff would have to show that the defendant personally had it out for the plaintiff as opposed to having some axe to grind with the plaintiff.

Good luck with showing that.

In fact, according to this source, Flamm prevailed under the Anti-SLAPP suit on the grounds that plaintiff could not prove that the allegedly defamatory statement could not be understood in a non-truthful way.

So, it was a short-putt to victory.

So, the results of the lawsuit show the law doing what it is supposed to do, namely, protecting people who participate in public discussions from lawsuits that are not really, really well-founded.

What is interesting, and what the blogger completely misses, is on how many different levels this episode shows the sordidness and corruption that that we are seeing in climate research and other areas.

Let's count the ways.

First, the paper that kicked off the trip to the Superior Court of the State of California was peer reviewed.  According to this interview with the defendant, Dr. Bruce Flamm, in 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a paper titled, "Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized trial." 

The Journal of Reproductive Medicine sounds like an official publication targeted to  professional in the field of reproductive medicine, the articles for which would be peer reviewed to make sure that they are consistent with the standards and the paradigmatic assumptions of the field.  Flamm confirms this:

Q: What was it about this study that got under your skin?


A: As soon as I got that issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine I was shocked. It was the lead story in the issue. And it showed a phenomenal change. It wasn't 10 percent or 4 percent of the women becoming more fertile. It was a 100 percent jump. If it were true, it would have changed the whole field of infertility. That's what got my attention. All the doctors I know of in my field were talking about this. They said, "If this is true, it is going to change everything." I have many different colleagues with different religious beliefs. Some were very hopeful that this was a big breakthrough not only in medicine but in spirituality - that prayers could make a difference. But most of my other colleagues were smiling in disbelief, saying this was very odd that this got into a peer-reviewed journal.

Flamm was suspicious, so as he says:

A: Just looking through the methodology, things jumped out. And I noticed right away that one of the authors. Daniel Wirth, wasn't a doctor or a PhD. He was a lawyer. I had never seen that before, a lawyer co-authoring a study in a major research journal. So I Google-searched his name and came up with all sorts of very bizarre things. Paranormal healing research. And therapeutic touch, which doesn't actually involve touch. It's about waving your hand above someone and altering their auras.

Hold the presses!  Flamm did what???

He google-searched and discovered that one of the contributors was a lawyer with connections to "paranormal healing research."  How difficult is that?  And these peer-reviewers are supposed to know who's who in their field and who can be trusted and who needs to really show that they have the goods.

So, why didn't the peer-review process pick this up?

That's a darn good question, and one that someone ought to be asking.

So, that's one buried point that this morality tale of science versus religion has to offer.

Second, there is the corrupt stem cell research angle.

Remember when the good people of California voted to indebt themselves to the tune of $3 Billion dollars now, and $6 billion when it was paid back, for stem cell research under Proposition 71?

Well, it appears that one of the researchers in this prayer study had his nose in that particular trough.

The plaintiff was Kwan-Yul Cha.  According to Flamm:

Q: And what about Dr. Cha? He started to have problems after he went after that stem cell grant in California, or was there something before that?


A: At the time the Cha-Lobo-Wirth paper was written, Cha was the head of the Cha Columbia Infertility Center in New York City. It catered to the Korean population and had his picture on the Columbia Web site right next to Lobo's. Soon after the NIH investigation, Lobo was no longer the chairman of the department and the Cha Columbia Infertility Center disappeared.

According to this article, Dr. Cha was in the trough for "seed grant" money under Prop. 71:

The check is not in the mail for La Jolla's Burnham Institute or the CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles.


Burnham will not be receiving a $638,000 seed grant to fund research that could have led to the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines, the state stem cell institute revealed yesterday.

And CHA will not be receiving a $2.6 million stem cell cloning grant, the institute said.

And:

The CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles has withdrawn its application for grant money, said Arlene Chiu, chief scientific officer of the state stem cell institute.


The CHA researchers in Los Angeles wanted funding to make customized nerve cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease using human embryonic stem cell lines and a cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

The initial approval of CHA's grant request was immediately questioned by taxpayer advocacy groups because of the facility's close ties with a for-profit Korean parent company, CHA Health Systems.

Proposition 71, the state law that created California's stem cell institute and the $3 billion taxpayer-funded research fund it will distribute, requires all grant recipients to be in California.

Meanwhile, CHA's CEO, Kwang Yul Cha, has come under fire as a co-author on a scientific paper that some critics say was identical to one published in a Korean journal. Cha denies any wrongdoing.

I assume that Cha was motivated to sue out of some notion that if he showed everyone that he was really peeved at Flamm's charges, then these other folks - investors, maybe - would believe him when he said they weren't true.  Given the fact that Cha apparently had already lost $2.6 million, this would seem to be a financially weighty matter for him.

Third, the wrong lesson has been learned from this experience.  Here is Flamm's press release on the California Supreme Court denying review - the possibility of the Supreme's granting review was the longest of long shots:

Today's ruling is a victory for science and evidence-based medicine. Scientists must be allowed to question bizarre claims. Cha's mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud. A criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trustworthy source of research data. Cha could have simply admitted this obvious fact but instead he hired a team of lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions. Physicians should debate their opinions in medical journals, not in courts of law. Judges have better things to do with their time and taxpayers have better things to do with their money."

I agree with Flamm's point that scientists - heck, anyone - should be allowed to question bizarre claims. I'll even go so far as to say that anyone should have the right to question any damned claim they feel like without being sued.

But Flamm's qualifications of a victory of science and the right to question "bizarre claims" misses the point that this study passed peer review and was sponsored by someone who apparently had enough scientific street cred to get a $2.6 million grant from the State of California.  What if this study hadn't been "bizarre"? Would that have made Cha any more reliable or trustworthy?  What if he hadn't gone out on a limb with a prayer study and had stayed safely within "science" by cooking research results on more mundane subjects?  Would he ever have been found out?

The major motivating reason for Flamm's interest was that Cha's results were problematic in light of Flamm's materialistic presuppositions about reality.   This is perfectly fair, albeit shouldn't a scientist be open to experimental confirmation or disconfirmation of his presuppositions?

But what if it was an area that Flamm didn't have any bias against?  What if it was a presupposition that Flamm happened to share?  Would that research now be upheld as a model of the scientific method?  Would Cha be cooking results on $2.6 million of our money?

If Cha got as far as he did with as dodgy a study as he had, how much fraud is being succesfully passed off because it confirms the prejudices and expectations held by the individuals who make up the scientific community?

Who knows?  But it does make you think of the embarrassment that is climate research.

On the Hot Seat

The former head of the IPCC - who knows that there is Global Warming but never read the IPCC report - gets roasted in this interview.

Hands off the Prize

Rajendra K. Pachauri is a name to remember.  Dr. Pachauri is the head of the supposedly neutral International Panel on Climate Change and joined Al Gore in receiving a Nobel prize for their work on global warming.  As we know, Dr. Pachauri has recently been targetted for criticism based on is manifold conflicts of interest and shoddy research.

Likewise, we know that Gore's work has been subjected to a court finding that it is inaccurate.

It seems like the Nobel Prize committee has a fairly decent track record in ferreting out psuedo-science and charlatans and giving them prizes.

File under "this word "science"....I do not think it means what you think it means."

According to Breitbart:

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.


According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

Magical non-melting glaciers.  Data gleaned from sports magazines.  Cooking data to take out coolling.  Now, putting 50% more of the Netherlands under water than is true, which could have been checked simply by checking freakin' Wiki.

Global Warming is has moved from tragedy to farce.

Hitler learns that Global Warming lies have been uncovered.

This word "science"... I do no think it means what you think it means.

It's gotten to be a really lop-sided Babe Ruth Baseball game that should be called on account of the "mercy rule."

How many things can the AGW forces pooch?  Now, it seems that many of its vaunted claims of melting glaciers and diminished rain forests were propoganda fabrication known to be such by the same authorities who were profiting from keeping the AGW story going.

Here is Christopher Booker on Amazongate:

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.


Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.

The source the IPCC cited as its "scientific" authority for this claim, however (as Dr North first reported on his EU Referendum blog), was a propagandist pamphlet published in 2005 by the WWF, the environmentalist pressure group, citing a magazine interview with Dr Husnain six years earlier.


Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

Here is more on the bogus claim that the IPCC made that the glaciers were going to melt in the Himalayas by 2035.