Ephemera

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ag5o6McbNc6o&pos=1

Obama to Propose New Rules on Banks’ Size, Trading
By Nicholas Johnston and Julianna Goldman

Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama will offer proposals to limit financial institutions’ size and trading activities as a way to reduce risk-taking, an administration official said.

Obama will announce the rules today at 11:40 a.m. in Washington after meeting with former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker at the White House. The proposals will be part of an overhaul of regulations and will specifically address firms’ proprietary trading, the official said yesterday on the condition of anonymity.

Obama is renewing his focus on economic issues, tapping into voter anger about the struggling economy, taxpayer bailouts and growing bank profits at a time of 10 percent unemployment and a federal deficit that rose to $1.4 trillion last year.

The proposals could affect trading at some of the nation’s largest banks, including New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Frederic Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Banks conduct proprietary trading for their own benefit, not for that of their clients.

“It is an obvious target,” Dickson said. “It has been a highly profitable business for those firms that have superior platforms. Whatever the details of the restrictions, it will draw Wall Street’s attention.”

Obama in June proposed an overhaul of U.S. financial regulations to fix lapses in oversight and excessive risk-taking that helped push the economy into a prolonged recession.

Fee on Companies
Last week the president announced a plan to impose a fee on as many as 50 financial companies to recover losses from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. It would be imposed starting June 30 on companies such as New York-based Citigroup Inc. and American International Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“We’ve got a financial regulatory system that is completely inadequate to control the excessive risks and irresponsible behavior of financial players all around the world,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News yesterday.

“People are angry and they’re frustrated,” Obama told ABC. “From their perspective, the only thing that happens is that we bail out the banks.”

Voter anger helped Republican Scott Brown win the late Edward Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts this week, giving Republicans the ability to block Obama’s top legislative priority, a health-care overhaul. The Massachusetts seat had been held by Democrats for more than 50 years.

U.K. Plans
The proposed U.S. rules could limit activities of banks such as Goldman, the most profitable investment bank in Wall Street history. Goldman reaped more than 90 percent of its pretax earnings last year from trading and so-called principal investments, which include market bets on securities and stakes in companies.

Goldman reported its quarterly earnings today, beating analysts’ estimates as the company slashed the percentage of revenue allocated to compensation. Morgan Stanley reported yesterday, and JPMorgan published its results last week.

In Britain, the Financial Services Authority last month published plans to make banks scale back proprietary trading, where a firm trades securities and other financial instruments with its own money rather than for customers. Under the rules, banks would have to put up as much as 29 billion pounds ($47 billion) of extra capital to cover potential trading losses.

‘Regulatory Arbitrage’
Bankers say additional regulation may threaten both their industry and a recovery in the economy. Marcus Agius, chairman of Barclays Plc, Britain’s second-biggest lender, said today he’s concerned that regulation imposed by national governments may jeopardize competition among lenders.

“In all of this, there’s the whole question of an international level playing field,” he told a London conference. “It’s something people say they believe in, but we’re seeing elements of regulatory arbitrage. We’re in the early and fragile stages of an economic recovery, and what we don’t want is to kill that with an excess of regulation.”

Volcker, chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Board, has criticized as “reform light” the financial industry’s efforts to weaken financial regulation proposals in Congress.

A year ago, Volcker issued a report from the Group of Thirty, a panel of former central bankers, finance ministers and academics, calling for separation between commercial banks and businesses that engage in speculative risk-taking such as hedge funds and proprietary trading.

‘A Bad Dream’
“Some market participants, possibly some in this room, seem to be suggesting that the events of the past couple of years were like a bad dream -- a truly unsettling bad dream, but nonetheless something that in the cold light of day need not require a really substantive change in the structure of markets or corporate lifestyle,” Volcker told an audience that included bankers Jan. 14.

Four U.S. institutions -- Bank of America, San Francisco- based Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan and Citigroup -- held 35 percent of the country’s deposits on June 30, compared with 28 percent by the four biggest two years before, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve.

‘Inappropriate’ Areas
During last week’s speech at the Economic Club of New York, Volcker warned that “some areas of finance, as well as ownership ties with commercial firms, are inappropriate for banking.” He specifically cited hedge funds, private equity funds and proprietary trading.

“The point is that they present added risk and virtually unmanageable conflicts of interest with more essential customer relationships,” Volcker said.

John S. Reed, the former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup, said he regrets helping engineer the merger that created the bank.

“I’m sorry,” Reed said in an interview last year. U.S. lawmakers were wrong in 1999 to repeal the Depression-era Glass- Steagall Act, he said. The act required the separation of institutions involved in capital markets from those engaged primarily in traditional customer services, such as taking deposits and making loans.

Reinstating Glass-Steagall
Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democrat Maria Cantwell have proposed legislation to reinstate the Glass- Steagall law as a way to stem the rise of banking conglomerates such as Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America that are active in retail banking, insurance and proprietary trading.

The Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Mary Schapiro is beginning its own review of financial markets, including an examination of so-called high frequency trading, in which professional investors execute orders in milliseconds to capture tiny price discrepancies. The strategies make up more than 60 percent of all U.S. stock transactions, according to New York-based research firm Tabb Group.

The House of Representatives passed a package of new financial rules in December while the Senate continues to work on legislation that has the support of Republicans and Democrats.

The two lawmakers leading the regulatory reform effort, Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd and House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank, as well as former SEC Chairman William Donaldson will join Obama for the announcement.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aBYdUTYojMD0


New Mexico’s Richardson Thwarts Case, Former Pension Chief Says
By Michael Haederle and Martin Z. Braun

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- A former investment officer at New Mexico’s pension fund for teachers told lawmakers yesterday that Governor Bill Richardson’s administration is fighting his efforts to recover hundreds of millions of dollars from investment firms under the state’s whistleblower act.

Frank Foy, who has filed two lawsuits on behalf of the state’s taxpayers, has alleged that Richardson’s political supporters received as much as $40 million in “kickbacks” that were disguised as third-party fees from money managers.

“The Richardson administration is fighting us every step of the way,” Foy told a special meeting of the state Senate Judiciary Committee. “Why are they fighting us? They should be helping us, but they’re not.”

Foy’s suit was filed before the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission began an investigation into whether money managers and their agents used political ties to get access to New Mexico’s State Investment Council, which oversees about $13 billion in endowment funds, and the $8 billion Educational Retirement Board. The New Mexico probe is part of a nationwide investigation into public pensions.

A call to Gilbert Gallegos, a spokesman for Richardson, a Democrat, was returned by Charles Wollman, a spokesman for the investment council. He said Foy’s allegation of stonewalling was inaccurate.

“We provided 75,000 documents just two weeks ago,” Wollman said. The council has prioritized responding to the federal investigation, he said.

Records Request
Previously, Gallegos has said Foy’s lawyer was a “partisan Republican” and called Foy’s suit without merit. Foy is a disgruntled employee who resigned after an allegation of sexual harassment, Gallegos said. Foy says he was falsely accused.

Victor Marshall, Foy’s lawyer, said that the educational retirement board and investment council have refused to respond to a public records request for documents related to investment decisions. Foy’s lawsuits, filed in the Santa Fe district court, haven’t progressed to the point of producing documents through discovery because of a shortage of judges, Marshall said.

Foy has alleged that he was pressured by a Richardson appointee to purchase $50 million in collateralized debt obligations from Chicago-based Vanderbilt Capital Advisors LLC. New Mexico’s State Investment Council bought $40 million of the securities. Marshall said the state had invested $243 million with Vanderbilt starting in 2004.

‘Worthless’ Investments
The Vanderbilt investments were made through Marc Correra, whose father Anthony is a close friend and political supporter of Richardson. The younger Correra collected $5.6 million in fees on the Vanderbilt investments, out of a total of $22 million that he received overall for acting as marketer for money managers, Marshall said.

New Mexico’s investments in the CDOs have proved “worthless,” Foy’s suit said.

State senators commended Foy and Marshall during the hearing for filing the lawsuits under the new Fraud Against Taxpayers Law, which provides for the recovery of treble damages, as well as attorney fees and percentage of recovery for the whistleblower.

Judiciary committee chair Cisco McSorley said the Legislature needs to include new funding for the courts and attorney general’s office to enable cases like Foy’s to go forward, something that may be tough in a year when the state faces a $600 million budget deficit.

“We may need a special judge to handle these cases,” he said.

Jeff Smith, a spokesman for Boston-based Pioneer Investment Management, Vanderbilt’s parent company, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment. Pioneer is a unit of Milan-based UniCredit SpA. Ronald Rubin, an attorney for Correra, declined to comment.

 

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From the man who ( quite literally ) turned hurricane forecasting from something resembling entrail reading by charlatans into science:

December 8, 2009

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO_2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be a honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO_2 's influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO_2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century's global warming of about 1 degree F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century changes in the globe's deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe's temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent 'ClimateGate' revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public.

The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO_2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO_2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate.

The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA's just announced decision to treat CO_2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world's continued economic development. We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country's sovereignty.'

Best Wishes,
William Gray, Ph.D.

 

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The dam is cracking
Andrew Neil
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2010/01/the_dam_is_cracking.html
09:42 UK time, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

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.

The dam began to crack towards the end of last year when leaked e-mails from one of the temples of global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, suggested that a few sleights of hand were being deployed to hide facts inconvenient to the global warming case. An official investigation into these e-mails is on-going.

But the flood gates really opened after the IPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole.

The truth, as seen by India's leading expert in glaciers, is that "Himalayan glaciers have not in anyway exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat."

So the 40% of the world's population that relies on the seven major river systems supplied by these glaciers can sleep a little more soundly in the knowledge that their water won't run out in 25 years after all.

Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny -- indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

The author, who didn't actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his research, has now repudiated what he sees has its misuse of his work.

His conclusion: "There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss."
Yet it was because of this -- now unproved -- link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes.
It was also central to many of the calculations in Britain's Stern Report, which might now need to be substantially revised.

Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate -- how many "gates" can one report contain? -- comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by "tropical savannas" if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

The WWF has yet to provide any scientific evidence that 40% of the Amazon is threatened by climate change -- as opposed to the relentless work of loggers and expansion of farms.

Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that "2,500 scientists can't be wrong", referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus.

But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists.

They may -- or may not -- still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from "settled" and that there are important questions still to ask. The mainstream media has been slow to do this.

The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops -- and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

The sceptics may be about to get their first scalp. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman often wrongly described in the media as the world's leading climate scientist (he's actually a railway engineer), at first attacked those who questioned the IPCC's alarming glacier prediction as "arrogant" and believers in "voodoo science".

He's since had to retract the prediction but can't quite manage an apology -- and is now under mounting pressure in his Indian homeland to resign.

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a4jmJgrha3Y4

Mice Tail Turned Into Brain Cells in Feat Possible for Humans
By Rob Waters

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Skin cells from the tails of mice were turned into neurons able to form connections crucial to brain function, a study said. The Stanford University scientists who performed the feat said it should work with human tissue.

The research, published today in the journal Nature, is the latest demonstration that cells’ basic functions can be transformed by inserting or turning on the right genes in their DNA. In this case, that was accomplished without first turning the skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells before they were changed into different kinds of body cells.

The work provides a more efficient way to make neurons from the skin of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases than a method developed four years ago by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan. Yamanaka’s breakthrough showed that skin cells from mice or humans could be made into stem cells and manipulated again to become any cell in the body.

The paper “might be a landmark,” said Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. “There’s a long history of failure in this field. Researchers tried for 30 years to convert a common cell type into neurons. People published papers, but no one ever made a real neuron.”

Two years ago, Douglas Melton, a researcher at Harvard University’s Stem Cell Institute who focuses on diabetes, showed that one cell in the pancreas could be turned into another without first reverting to a primitive, embryo-like cell. Melton said the Stanford work was a major advance because it starts with cells that can be easily obtained from a person.

Fat, Skin, Hair
“If you wanted to make more cells for yourself, the ones you’d be willing to give up are fat, skin, hair, blood -- not brain cells,” Melton said.

The process also takes a more direct route to changing the function of cells than Yamanaka’s method, Melton said.

“Instead of trying to turn them back into pluripotent stem cells and then make those into differentiated cells, he’s short- circuiting that process and saying let’s go right from one readily available cell to another cell of interest,” Melton said in a Jan. 24 telephone interview.

The research was led by Marius Wernig, an assistant professor of pathology at Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Wernig, 35, and his colleagues identified 19 genes that are active in neurons and inserted them into skin cells taken from the tails of young mice. The team used a type of virus known as a lentivirus to carry the genes into the skin cells.

Cells Transformed
After a month, a few of the skin cells showed signs of having turned into brain cells. The team then used a trial-and- error process to identify three genes from among the 19 that could do the job on their own.

Using the three, Wernig’s team found that in just two weeks, 20 percent of the skin cells had morphed into neurons.

“That means reprogramming doesn’t only go backward, but can occur in any direction,” Wernig said in a Jan. 22 telephone interview. “If you extrapolate from this, you could probably turn any cell in your body into any other cell if you just know the right factors. A year ago, I would not really have believed this was possible.”

Wernig and his colleagues are trying to do the same thing with human cells and Stanford has applied for a patent on the process. If it works in human cells, researchers could use the method to turn skin cells from a patient with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, for example, into neurons with the genetic defects that cause the condition.

Studying Disease
This would allow researchers to study the workings of the disease and to test drugs that might treat it, Wernig said. Two closely held companies, Ipierian Inc. of South San Francisco and Fate Therapeutics of San Diego are using similar approaches to develop therapies. New York-based Pfizer Inc., London-based GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Novartis AG, based in Basel, Switzerland, are among the major pharmaceutical companies with stem-cell programs.

Before the cells have practical use, they’ll have to be shown to be true neurons, Loring said in a Jan. 25 e-mail.

“The question now is how these genetically engineered neurons stack up against real neurons in a real test -- can they be used to repair the brains of mice that have experimentally induced Parkinson’s disease, for example?” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do but it’s exciting.”

 

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a9pi5NeBMkwk

Cheapest Route to Walmart From China May Skip Buffett’s Railway
By Kyunghee Park and Eric Sabo

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese toys and sneakers headed to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. on the U.S. East Coast may bypass Warren Buffett’s $33.8 billion railway as the expansion of the Panama Canal slashes the cost of shipping them by sea.

The deeper, wider canal will allow A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, China Ocean Shipping Group Co. and other lines to ship more cargo directly to New York and Boston instead of unloading it on the West Coast for trains and trucks to finish the journey east. That could save exporters 30 percent, the canal operator said.

The $5.25 billion Panama Canal project, scheduled for completion during its centennial in 2014, may take business from ports including Los Angeles and Seattle, and railroads including Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. It costs as much as $1,000 more per cargo container to use trains than ships, said Lee Sokje, a shipbuilding analyst at Mirae Asset Securities Co. in Seoul.

“It is inevitable that railways, such as Burlington Northern, will lose some of their cargo once the Panama Canal is expanded,” said Jee Heon Seok, a shipping analyst for NH Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul. “Many more containers can be moved in a single voyage on a ship than going through the West Coast ports.”

More Cargo
China, poised to overtake Japan this year as the world’s second-biggest economy, may boost exports by 20 percent during the first quarter as the global economy recovers, according to Macquarie Securities Ltd. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

China Cosco Holdings Co., Asia’s biggest shipping company by market value, and 14 other container lines said Jan. 14 they expect a “significant” increase in transpacific cargo this year on rising U.S. consumer sentiment.

That prospective growth spurred Berkshire to pay $26 billion for the remaining 77.4 percent of Fort Worth, Texas- based Burlington Northern it didn’t already own. Buffett, the Berkshire chairman, said the largest U.S. railroad will benefit from “moving around more and more goods.” The acquisition is pending and expected to be completed by March 31.

Burlington Northern customers in Gulf of Mexico ports -- including Houston and Galveston, Texas -- may benefit from more traffic going through a wider canal.

Buffett didn’t respond to a request for comment. A Burlington Northern spokeswoman, Suann Lundsberg, said trains deliver cargo from the West Coast to the East Coast as many as nine days faster than ships using the canal.

30 Percent Savings
Rail traffic is expected to continue growing, although probably at a slower rate than in the past, Lundsberg said.

“We know he doesn’t make short-term investments,” Art Wong, spokesman for the port in Long Beach, California, said of Buffett. “He must be making it because he thinks it’s a great long-term investment.”

About 43 percent of Asian cargo shipped to East Coast ports -- including Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida --goes through the Panama Canal, said Rodolfo Sabonge, director of marketing for the Panama Canal Authority. That share may increase to 49 percent by 2025.

“It will become less expensive overall to ship through the canal,” Sabonge said. “Savings could go up to 30 percent.”

The expansion project, started in 2007, is building locks on both sides of the 50-mile canal, digging a new channel linking the locks and deepening the waterway connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea.

New York Harbor
Currently, ships loading fewer than 5,000 20-foot boxes use the canal. The expansion will accommodate vessels carrying about 12,600 containers and may generate cargo growth of about 5 percent a year, Sabonge said.

“It will, of course, help reduce costs for exporters to the U.S.,” said Victor Fung, chairman of outsourcer Li & Fung Ltd., the world’s biggest supplier of toys, clothes and furniture to retailers including Walmart, Target, Macy’s Inc. and Marks & Spencer Group Plc.

The company reported HK$46.3 billion ($5.96 billion) in sales during the first half of last year, with 61 percent of that coming from the U.S.

East Coast ports are readying for the changes. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is deepening more channels to 50 feet and considering options for a 78-year-old bridge between New Jersey and New York City that may be too low.

“Increasing numbers of big ships are anticipated at our port facilities following an expansion of the Panama Canal,” the agency said in September.

Ports, Railroads Collaborate
Hanjin Shipping Co., South Korea’s largest shipping company that operates two California terminals, is building its first East Coast terminal in Jacksonville to handle an increase in cargo through the canal. The facility opens in 2013.

The ports around Charleston, South Carolina, are dredging to accommodate vessels carrying more than 8,000 20-foot containers.

Six ports on the opposite coast -- Los Angeles; Long Beach; Oakland, California; Seattle; Tacoma, Washington; and Portland, Oregon -- handle about 70 percent of containerized trade between Asia and the U.S., according to an Oct. 12 statement.

They are collaborating with Burlington Northern and Union Pacific Corp. to convince Asian exporters they are better options than the canal for reaching East Coast markets. They cite advantages including deep-water terminals, connections to inland transportation networks, and storage and distribution facilities.

Trains also use less fuel, reducing costs and carbon emissions, they said.

“We don’t think those alternative gateways will go away,” said Tay Yoshitani, chief executive officer for the Port of Seattle. “If we don’t improve our competitiveness, we could lose a lot of cargo.”

 

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By: Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.

... one of the absurdities (Dick Lindzen’s term, as I recall) in the way current climate change theory works: For a given observed temperature change, the smaller the forcing that caused it, the greater the inferred sensitivity of the climate system. This is why Jim Hansen believes in catastrophic global warming: since he thinks he knows for sure that a relatively tiny forcing caused the Ice Ages, then the greater forcing produced by our CO2 emissions will result in even more dramatic climate change!

But taken to its logical conclusion, this relationship between the strength of the forcing, and the inferred sensitivity of the climate system, leads to the absurd notion that an infinitesimally small forcing causes nearly infinite climate sensitivity(!) As I have mentioned before, this is analogous to an ancient tribe of people thinking their moral shortcomings were responsible for lightning, storms, and other whims of nature.

This absurdity is avoided if we simply admit that we do not know all of the natural forcings involved in climate change. And the greater the number of natural forcings involved, then the less we have to worry about human-caused global warming.

The IPCC, though, never points out this inherent source of bias in its reports. But the IPCC can not admit to scientific uncertainty…that would reduce the chance of getting the energy policy changes they so desire.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/1/28/some-msm-attention.html

WHAT'S THE FUSS ABOUT THE HOCKEY STICK GRAPH?

Much of the current panic began in 1998 when Dr Michael Mann and his co-authors published their now-discredited 'hockey stick' temperature plot. Named for its shape that showed a long trend of steady temperature drop over a 1,000 year period and a sudden rise since the early nineties, it became the foundation stone for the global warming brigade.

[A] New book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, by scientist [editor] Andrew Montford, tells how the figures don't stack up and how lone researcher Steve McIntyre exposed the myth. In fact the hockey stick, based on a computer generated model ignores natural climate fluctuations in the past. Christopher Booker, an author who believes the theory of man-made global warming has been disproved describes the original work as "one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history,of science' and adds: "Temperatures have always gone up and down over the years. The trend since 2001 is down. No one knows what is going to happen but almost all the computer models on which man-made climate change claims are based have been shown to be wrong.

 

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The Alaska Pipeline Project Files Open Season Plan With FERC
- First in the History of the North Slope

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/29/10 -- The Alaska Pipeline Project announced today that it filed its plan with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to obtain approval to conduct the first natural gas pipeline open season to develop Alaska's vast natural gas resources. The project is a joint effort between TransCanada Corporation (TSX: TRP) (NYSE: TRP) (TransCanada) and Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) to develop a natural gas pipeline under the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA).

"The open season plan filing is an important step in the development of Alaska natural gas resources and we have worked diligently to advance the project," said Hal Kvisle, TransCanada president and chief executive officer. "This significant milestone demonstrates that we are meeting the AGIA commitments on-schedule and in-line with the required process, effectively aligning the interests of the State of Alaska, the project, shippers and other interested parties."

The open season plan is posted and can be reviewed on the FERC and Alaska Pipeline Project websites, and members of the public can provide comment through the month of February. If FERC approves the plan, the Alaska Pipeline Project will finalize its open season offering and provide it to potential shippers at the end of April for their assessment during the 90-day period through July 2010.

"The work of the Alaska Pipeline Project in preparing a comprehensive and competitive open season package reflects the combined technical, planning, commercial and project management expertise of both ExxonMobil and TransCanada," said Neil Duffin, president of ExxonMobil Development Company.

During the open season, the Alaska Pipeline Project will provide information about its terms and conditions to potential natural gas shippers, allowing them to assess their interest in making long-term commitments to reserve capacity on the pipeline.

The open season process initiated with FERC applies to the portion of the project in the United States. A separate but coordinated open season for the Canadian portion of the project will be conducted concurrently with the U.S. open season.

Two options will be submitted for shipper assessment in the Alaska Pipeline Project open season. The first option is a pipeline from Alaska's North Slope to Alberta, Canada, a distance of approximately 1,700 miles (2,737 kilometres), where the gas can be delivered on existing pipeline systems serving major North American markets. The second option would transport natural gas from the North Slope to Valdez, Alaska, a distance of approximately 800 miles (1,287 kilometres), where it would be converted to liquefied natural gas in a facility to be built by others and then delivered by ship to North American and international markets.

Both options would provide opportunities for Alaska communities to acquire natural gas from the pipeline from a number of strategically located off-take connections.

Components of both options include a world-class gas treatment plant (GTP) and Point Thomson natural gas transmission pipeline. The GTP would be built next to the North Slope's Prudhoe Bay facilities to treat the gas so it can be shipped on the pipeline. An approximately 58 mile (93 kilometres) pipeline would connect the natural gas supplies of the Point Thomson field to the plant and pipeline.

The results of the open season will determine the preferred development option.

Updated cost estimates for the project are in the range of US$32 billion to US$41 billion for the North Slope to Alberta option, and US$20 billion to US$26 billion for the Valdez option. Both options have an expected in-service date of 2020 and would provide either 4.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day under the Alberta option or 3.0 billion cubic feet per day under the Valdez option.

The Alaska Pipeline Project provides Alaska a viable opportunity to develop its North Slope gas resources and is designed to deliver a reliable and secure source of clean energy to markets for decades to come. The project would be one of the largest private investments in the history of North America and would provide substantial benefits to the State of Alaska, the Lower-48 states, and Canada, including significant revenues, jobs, business opportunities and new long-term supplies of natural gas.

For more information on the Alaska Pipeline Project, visit the project's newly launched website at: www.thealaskapipelineproject.com.

About TransCanada
With more than 50 years' experience, TransCanada is a leader in the responsible development and reliable operation of North American energy infrastructure including natural gas pipelines, power generation, gas storage facilities, and projects related to oil pipelines. TransCanada's network of wholly owned pipelines extends more than 59,000 kilometres (36,500 miles), tapping into virtually all major gas supply basins in North America. TransCanada is one of the continent's largest providers of gas storage and related services with approximately 370 billion cubic feet of storage capacity. A growing independent power producer, TransCanada owns, or has interests in, over 11,800 megawatts of power generation in Canada and the United States. TransCanada's common shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under the symbol TRP. For more information visit: www.transcanada.com

About ExxonMobil
ExxonMobil is the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company, providing energy that helps underpin growing economies and improves living standards around the world. ExxonMobil uses innovation and technology to deliver energy to a growing world. The company operates facilities or markets products in most of the world's countries and explores for oil and natural gas on six continents. For more information visit: www.exxonmobil.com

TransCanada Forward-Looking Information
This news release may contain certain information that is forward looking and is subject to important risks and uncertainties. The words "anticipate", "expect", "believe", "may", "should", "estimate", "project", "outlook", "forecast" or other similar words are used to identify such forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements in this document are intended to provide TransCanada security holders and potential investors with information regarding TransCanada and its subsidiaries, including management's assessment of TransCanada's and its subsidiaries' future financial and operations plans and outlook. Forward-looking statements in this document may include, among others, statements regarding the anticipated business prospects and financial performance of TransCanada and its subsidiaries, expectations or projections about the future, and strategies and goals for growth and expansion. All forward-looking statements reflect TransCanada's beliefs and assumptions based on information available at the time the statements were made. Actual results or events may differ from those predicted in these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among others, the ability of TransCanada to successfully implement its strategic initiatives and whether such strategic initiatives will yield the expected benefits, the operating performance of TransCanada's pipeline and energy assets, the availability and price of energy commodities, capacity payments, regulatory processes and decisions, changes in environmental and other laws and regulations, competitive factors in the pipeline and energy sectors, construction and completion of capital projects, labour, equipment and material costs, access to capital markets, interest and currency exchange rates, technological developments and the current economic conditions in North America. By its nature, forward-looking information is subject to various risks and uncertainties, which could cause TransCanada's actual results and experience to differ materially from the anticipated results or expectations expressed. Additional information on these and other factors is available in the reports filed by TransCanada with Canadian securities regulators and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on this forward-looking information, which is given as of the date it is expressed in this news release or otherwise, and to not use future-oriented information or financial outlooks for anything other than their intended purpose. TransCanada undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

ExxonMobil Cautionary Statement
Estimates, expectations, and business plans in this release are forward-looking statements. Actual future results, including project plans, schedules, and costs and production rates, resource recoveries, and capital expenditures could differ materially due to changes in market conditions affecting the oil and gas industry or long-term oil and gas price levels: political or regulatory developments; the outcomes of negotiations; timely completion of development project; reservoir performance; technical or operating factors; and other factors discussed under the heading "Factors Affecting Future Results" under the "investor" tab on our website (www.exxonmobil.com) and in Item 1A of our most recent Form 10-K. Reference to quantities of natural gas and similar terms include volumes that are not yet classified as proved reserves under SEC definitions but that we believe will be produced in the future.

To view the Alaska Pipeline Project Fact Sheet associated with this release, please click the link below:

http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/AlaskaPipeline.pdf

To view the Open Season Fact Sheet associated with this release, please click the link below:

http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/OpenSeason.pdf

 

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Gridlock is exactly, precisely what the authors of the Constitution intended. The b'hoys had recently finished getting rid of a king at a considerable expenditure of blood, sweat and sacrifice and they wanted to be goddamned sure there'd never be another one. Their whole idea was to set up a system of checks and balances that would make it extremely difficult to get anything done. They intentionally designed a government with separation of powers and pitted "ambition against ambition." In order to secure a maximum amount of freedom, they intentionally provided for a small and limited government.


It was never their intention to create a system that permitted demagogues to purchase votes by looting government coffers.


Unfortunately, the concept of a professional politician is one that never entered their minds. This country went off the deep end the day it became possible to make a living as a politician.

 

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I propose a new National Wildlife Federation motto:
"Never let accuracy get in the way of scaring the gullible into donating."

http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/oddball.png

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/crested_butte_annual_snowfall.png

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/hurr_list.png

 

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IPCC “Consensus”—Warning: Use at Your Own Risk
By: Chip Knappenberger

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often held up as representing “the consensus of scientists”—a pretty grandiose and presumptuous claim. And one that in recent days, weeks, and months, has been unraveling. So too, therefore, must all of the secondary assessments that are based on the IPCC findings—the most notable of which is the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—that “greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be (that greenhouse gases are leading to dangerous climate change and need to be restricted). So clearly you can see why the EPA (who has a similar objective) would decide to rely on the IPCC findings rather than have to conduct an independent assessment of the science with the same predetermined outcome. Why go through the extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion?

The EPA’s official justification for its reliance on the IPCC’s findings is that it has reviewed the IPCC’s “procedures” and found them to be exemplary.

Below is a look at some things, recently revealed, that the IPCC “procedures” have produced. These recent revelations indicate that the “procedures” are not infallible and that highly publicized IPCC results are either wrong or unjustified—which has the knock-on effect of rendering the IPCC an unreliable source of information. Unreliable doesn’t mean wrong in all cases, mind you, just that it is hard to know where and when errors are present, and as such, the justification that “the IPCC says so” is no longer sufficient (or acceptable)...

*****​

...Many more examples of the IPCC “procedures” can be found courtesy of the Climategate emails.

For instance, in Chapter 6, the paleoclimate chapter of the IPCC’s most recent Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), it is the strong sentiment of one of the chapter’s coordinating lead author, Jonathan Overpeck, that he wants to dismiss the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—a period of relatively high temperatures that occurred about a thousand years ago. If the MWP were found to be as warm as recent conditions, then the possibility that natural processes may play a larger role in recent warming is harder to ignore—thus the need to dismiss it. The task of doing so fell on Keith Briffa, who developed the contents of a special box in IPCC AR4 Chapter 6 that was apart from the main text and which focused on the WMP. Here’s the advice
( http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=480&filename=1105670738.txt ) issued to Briffa by Overpeck:

I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort.​

Briffa attempted to complete his task by presenting a well-chosen ( http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/26/manns-pc1-in-esper-and-frank-2008/ ) collection of data that showed that while some proxy temperature reconstructions did show a warm period about 1,000 years ago, others did not. He concluded that a more complete picture indicated that the higher temperatures during the MWP were “heterogeneous” (regionalized), while the warming of the late 20th century has been “homogeneous” (i.e. much broader in spatial extent)—confirming that current conditions were likely unprecedented during the past 1,300 years. Briffa received congratulations ( http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=483&filename=1105978592.txt ) for a job well done by Overpeck:

[A]ttached is Keith’s MWP box w/ my edits. It reads just great – much like a big hammer. Nice job.”​

Thus, that conclusion driven by Overpeck’s desires, written by Briffa, perhaps reviewed by the chapter’s other authors (with varying degrees of knowledge about the subject), is now preserved as “the consensus of scientists.

But apparently, that consensus isn’t accepted by other leading paleoclimate researchers. In a peer-reviewed article published in 2009 in the journal Climatic Change, paleo-researchers Jan Esper and David Frank carefully re-examined the same proxy temperature reconstructions used by Briffa and came to conclude that the IPCC was unwarranted in declaring that the temperatures during the MWP were more heterogeneous than now. Here is the abstract from that paper ( http://www.wsl.ch/staff/jan.esper/publications/Esper_2009_CC_IPCC.pdf ):

In their 2007 report, IPCC working group 1 refers to an increased heterogeneity of climate during medieval times about 1000 years ago. This conclusion would be of relevance, as it implies a contrast in the spatial signature and forcing of current warmth to that during the Medieval Warm Period. Our analysis of the data displayed in the IPCC report, however, shows no indication of an increased spread between long-term proxy records. We emphasize the relevance of sample replication issues, and argue that an estimation of long-term spatial homogeneity changes is premature based on the smattering of data currently available.​

*****​

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/01/ipcc-consensus-warning-use-at-your-own-risk/#more-6981

 

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If The Sierra Club and similar loonies got their way, they'd happily order humanity back to living in caves.

That's the only possible outcome from their expressed positions. The only benefit of doubt I can give them is that they are horribly misguided, innumerate idiots.



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123274700

Green Groups Oppose Obama On Nuclear Power
by Elizabeth Shogren

February 2, 2010

Building a nuclear plant is a lot like trying to get a mortgage these days to build an expensive house. You might need someone to co-sign your loan.

“Now, they never pay any money, but they're there just in case,” says Jim Connaughton, executive vice president of Constellation Energy.

President Obama this week showed how serious he is about nuclear power by proposing to triple the money available for loan guarantees for nuclear plants for a total of $54 billion. His nuclear overture also sent the message that he is determined to woo supporters for climate change legislation, which is stuck in the Senate.

But environmental and taxpayer groups complain that the proposal would set up Americans for another expensive corporate bail out.

Nuclear plants cost more than $10 billion to build and most companies cannot get financing for them without government loan guarantees.

“We just need the federal backstop in order to attract the private sector investment that will make that possible,” says Connaughton.

Constellation is pursuing loan guarantees to build an additional unit at its nuclear plant in Calvert Cliffs, Md., and hopes to build several more after that.

Congress and President Bush created the loan guarantee program in 2005. Power companies say that the $18 billion already promised would help build a few plants but would not spark the nuclear renaissance they want.

Nuclear Power Helps Obama Meet Climate Goals
The additional $36 billion the president is proposing could do that and help Obama meet his greenhouse gas goals, industry executives say.

“Nuclear is the only generation out there that produces power 24-7 with no carbon emissions at all,” says Tom Williams, a spokesman for Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy.

Wind and solar produce electricity only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. So, nuclear power is needed to help the country cut greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050, which the president and many scientists say is necessary to help avert catastrophic climate change, industry executives say.

The president's nuclear proposal could play another crucial role in helping him address climate change, utility executives and members of Congress say. It could help persuade Republicans and moderate Democrats to support a sweeping global warming law. The House passed a bill last year, but similar legislation is stuck in the Senate.

“There's a lot of support for nuclear from the people who are currently not supporting the climate bill. By offering up this, it should help bridge the gap,” Williams says.


Environmentalists agree that the loan guarantees help the climate bill’s odds.

Environmental Groups Oppose Nuclear Loan Guarantees
“If you offer a bunch of utilities $54 billion in loan guarantees, they will probably round up a few senators to support you. That's correct,” says Carl Pope, executive director, Sierra Club, a large environmental Group. “That's how Washington is working these days. That doesn't mean that I like it.”


Pope and many other environmental activists usually support President Obama, but they oppose his loan guarantee proposal.

They stress that nuclear plants are inherently dangerous because waste from them stays hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. And the country still hasn't come up with a long-term plan to store the stuff.

Plus, they argue that nuclear plants are so expensive to build that they're a bad economic risk for taxpayers.


“They need the loan guarantees because investors are afraid that they'll never finish the plant. Or the plants will cost twice as much as they're supposed to and will never be able to sell affordable electricity,” Pope adds.

Still Pope says loan guarantees for the nuclear industry would not sour environmental groups on a climate bill.

“I don't think these kinds of loan guarantees would push us into opposition to a climate bill that would otherwise save the planet,” he says.

But even if the president's nuclear overture wins over a few Republicans and moderate Democrats, the climate bill still faces a lot of other hurdles.

 

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2 February, 2010
Groundhog Day
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/02/02

It's the birthday of James Joyce, born in Dublin (1882), who said, "The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." Joyce wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939);an autobiographical novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916); and a short-story collection, Dubliners (1914), among other works.

He was educated by Jesuits, first visited a prostitute at the age of 14, dropped out of medical school and aspired to be an opera star. He met and fell in love with a Galway hotel maid named Nora Barnacle when he was 22 years old, and he set the action of Ulysses on the day he had his first date with Nora, June 16, 1904. It's now commemorated all over the world each year as Bloomsday, after the novel's protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

Shortly after meeting Nora, he convinced her to leave Ireland with him and elope to continental Europe. He thought he'd lined up a teaching job as a language instructor, but that fell through, and he ended up working at a bank in Rome for a while. They were forever impoverished and constantly relying on Joyce's brother Stanislaus for money.

They had a son, Giorgio, and after that James and Nora slept head to foot, an attempt at birth control. It didn't seem to be an effective form, though, and Nora became pregnant with Lucia about a year after giving birth to Giorgio. Joyce was a doting father, liked to spoil his kids, never punished either one and once told an interviewer, "Children must be educated by love, not punishment."

Nora was famously apathetic toward her husband's writing. Joyce worked at night and laughed so loudly at his own words that Nora would get up and tell him to stop writing and stop laughing so that she could get a bit of sleep. Shortly after Ulysses (Joyce pronounced it "Oolissays") was published, she remarked to a fan of his: "I've always told him he should give up writing and take up singing." Ulysses took seven years of unbroken labor, which translated into 20,000 hours of work.

Joyce was afraid of thunder and lightning — during electrical storms, he would hide under bedcovers — and he was also afraid of dogs, and walked around town with rocks in his pockets in case he encountered any roaming mutts. He didn't care for the arts other than music and literature, and he especially had no patience for art like painting. Over his desk he kept a photograph of a statue of Penelope (from Greek mythology, the wife of Odysseus/Ulysses) and a photograph of a man from Trieste, whom Joyce wouldn't name but said was the model for Leopold Bloom. On his desk he had a tiny bronze statue of a woman lying back in a chair with a cat draped over her shoulders. All of his friends told him it was ugly, but he kept it on his desk anyway. One of his Parisian friends remarked, "He had not taste, only genius."

Joyce liked to drink and he liked to dance; his daughter-in-law said that "liquor went to his feet, not head. "Joyce usually sat with his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He was kind and generous to strangers, and he was known to invite waiters to join him at his table for food and drink. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Co., said that Joyce "treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore. ... If he arrived in a taxi, he wouldn't get out until the driver had finished what he was saying. Joyce himself fascinated everybody; no one could resist his charm."

James Joyce said, "The artist, like the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

 

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http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/5749853/the-global-warming-guerrillas.thtml

The Global Warming Guerrillas
By: Matt Ridley [ author of numerous science-related books including 1999's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters ]

Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

So used are greens to sycophancy in the television studios that when they occasionally encounter even slightly hard questions they are outraged. Peter Sissons of the BBC: ‘I pointed out to [Caroline Lucas of the Green party] that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions... Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC — the BBC! — should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.’

Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all — all! — its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.

Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference?

In a word, the internet. The Climate Consensus may hold the establishment — the universities, the media, big business, government — but it is losing the jungles of the web. After all, getting research grants, doing pieces to cameras and advising boards takes time. The very ostracism the sceptics suffered has left them free to do their digging untroubled by grant applications and invitations to Stockholm. The main blog used by the Consensus, realclimate.org, exemplifies this problem, because it was set up by a PR company and is run by an employee of Nasa, who ties himself in knots trying to show that he does the blog in his spare time. It is also characterised by a tone of weary condescension and censoring of dissent that you do not find on most sceptic sites.

Contrast it with wattsupwiththat.com, a site founded in November 2006 by a former Californian television weather forecaster named Anthony Watts. Dedicated at first to getting people to photograph weather stations to discover how poorly sited many of them are, the site has metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians.

Or take a book published last month called The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, a rattling good detective story and a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing. Montford has never worked in the media. He is an accountant and science publisher who works from his home in Milnathort in Kinrossshire. He runs a blog called ‘Bishop Hill’.

Montford came to the subject in 2005 when he read a blog post by another amateur non-journalist named Tim Worstall, a scandium dealer who lives in Portugal (I am not making this up), who was in turn passing on news of another blogger’s work: Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant and keen squash player in Toronto. Because he keeps catching errors in their work, McIntyre is the sceptic the climate scientists most love to hate, even though he is scrupulously polite and insists that the followers on his website, climateaudit.org, are too. ‘A certain person’, the Climategate scientists called him in their emails, or ‘Mr Mc “I’m not entirely there in the head”’, or ‘the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science’.

Notice that all of these sceptic bloggers are self-employed businessmen. Their strengths are networks and feedback: mistakes get quickly corrected; new leads are opened up; expertise is shared; links are made. Prejudice and ignorance abound too, but the good blogs get rewarded with scoops and guest essays so they tap into rich seams of knowledge. When Montford first ran his now classic post called ‘Caspar and the Jesus paper’, about the shenanigans the IPCC had to resort to in order to get a flawed paper rebutting McIntyre into the peer-reviewed literature in time to use it in their report, word of mouth caused interest in his website to explode.

Mcintyre’s forensic dissection of the Consensus papers puts cosy scientific peer review to shame. Digging deep into data and computer programs, he has found myriad mistakes in both the statistical technique and the data used to make the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show that recent temperatures were unprecedented in level and rate of change. But he has also uncovered a mistake in data that conveniently prevented 1934 being warmer than 1998 in America; the splicing together of the records of two Antarctic weather stations as if they were one; the smoothing of sea-level rise in a way that conveniently concealed its recent deceleration; the use of a Swedish lake sediment series upside down so it showed recent warming instead of cooling; and most recently the reliance of an attempt to resuscitate the hockey stick on a ludicrously small sub-sample of just 12 Siberian larch trees. That last one came about when Montford spotted that a scientist who had been refusing McIntyre access to data for ten years had published in a journal with a strict policy of archiving data. Montford tipped off McIntyre, who asked the journal to force the scientist to release the data, which he eventually did.

‘It seems inconceivable to the commentariat,’ says Andrew Orlowski of the online newspaper of the IT industry, the Register, ‘that scientists have prejudices too, and that the publication process (peer review) is not some Kitemark of quality but is vulnerable to being hijacked.’ Chip Knappenberger, who blogs at masterresource.org, believes the rise of blogs as repositories of scientific knowledge will continue if the scientific literature becomes guarded and exclusive. ‘I can only anticipate this as throwing the state of science and the quest for scientific understanding into disarray.’

When Climategate broke, the mainstream media, like knights facing archers at Crécy, mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.

For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/5749853/the-global-warming-guerrillas.thtml

 

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http://www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/events/20100206/comp_snow_20100206.png
​

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/1d/Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.pnghttp://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/1e/Holocene_Sea_Level.png

 

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February 7, 2010

Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
By Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.

This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself.

In it he wrote: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” The same claims have since been cited in speeches to world leaders by Pachauri and Ban.

Speaking at the 2008 global climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Pachauri said: “In some countries of Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50% by 2020.” In a speech last July, Ban said: “Yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by half in some African countries over the next 10 years.”

Speaking this weekend, Field said: “I was not an author on the Synthesis Report but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”

Watson said such claims should be based on hard evidence. “Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,” he said.

The claims in the Synthesis Report go back to the IPCC’s report on the global impacts of climate change. It warns that all Africa faces a long-term threat from farmland turning to desert and then says of north Africa, “additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-20 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003)”.

“Agoumi” refers to a 2003 policy paper written for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. The paper was not peer-reviewed.

Its author was Professor Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan climate expert who looked at the potential impacts of climate change on Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. His report refers to the risk of “deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000–20 period”.

These claims refer to other reports prepared by civil servants in each of the three countries as submissions to the UN. These do not appear to have been peer-reviewed either.

The IPCC is also facing criticism over its reports on how sea level rise might affect Holland. Dutch ministers have demanded that it correct a claim that more than half of the Netherlands lies below sea level when, in reality, it is about a quarter.

The errors seem likely to bring about change at the IPCC. Field said: “The IPCC needs to investigate a more sophisticated approach for dealing with emerging errors.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017907.ece

 

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http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/rosneft-reaffirmed-as-reserves-leader/399257.html

Rosneft Reaffirmed as Reserves Leader
09 February 2010
Reuters

Rosneft kept its grip firmly on the top spot among the world's publicly traded oil companies as it reported on Monday a 2.5 percent rise in hydrocarbon reserves for 2009 under PRMS rules.

The state-controlled firm has been a chief driver behind Russia's recent surge in oil output, which last month remained above 10 million barrels per day, mainly thanks to Rosneft's huge newly commissioned Vankor field in the Arctic.

In January, Rosneft also announced the discovery of a new field in east Siberia, Sevastyanovo, that analysts said could potentially add 4 percent to Rosneft's proven and probable reserves, as the field's reserves are estimated at 150 million metric tons.

On Monday, Rosneft reported a 163 percent reserves replacement ratio under the Petroleum Resources Management System criteria in 2009.

Russia's largest oil company said in a statement that its proved reserves under the PRMS methodology, formerly known as SPE, stood at 22.858 billion barrels of oil equivalent, up 2.5 percent from 22.307 billion boe in 2008.

Under the more stringent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's methodology, which takes into account reserves extractable during the life of companies' existing licenses, Rosneft's reserves rose to 15.146 billion boe from 14.448 billion boe in 2008.

The reserves audit, performed by DeGolyer and MacNaughton, confirmed that Rosneft was first among public oil companies in terms of oil reserves, under both PRMS and SEC standards.

Rosneft said its hydrocarbon reserve life was 26 years, 23 years for oil and 66 years for gas, under the PRMS rules.

 

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Jerome Ravetz, Ph.D. is a professor of the philosophy of science at Oxford best known for his books challenging the assumptions of scientific objectivity, discussing the science wars and post-normal science.

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/insis/associatefellows/Pages/jerryravetz.aspx

At the end of January 2010 two distinguished scientific institutions shared headlines with Tony Blair over accusations of the dishonest and possibly illegal manipulation of information. Our ‘Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035′ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is matched by his ‘dodgy dossier’ of Saddam’s fictitious subversions. We had the violations of the Freedom of Information Act at the University of East Anglia; he has the extraordinary 70-year gag rule on the David Kelly suicide file. There was ‘the debate is over’ on one side, and ‘WMD beyond doubt’ on the other. The parallels are significant and troubling, for on both sides they involve a betrayal of public trust.

Politics will doubtless survive, for it is not a fiduciary institution; but for science the dangers are real. Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State. This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions. In the event of a serious discrediting of the global-warming claims, public outrage would therefore be directed at the community of science itself, and (from within that community) at its leaders who were either ignorant or complicit until the scandal was blown open. If we are to understand Climategate, and move towards a restoration of trust, we should consider the structural features of the situation that fostered and nurtured the damaging practices. I believe that the ideas of Post-Normal Science (as developed by Silvio Funtowicz and myself) can help our understanding.

There are deep problems of the management of uncertainty in science in the policy domain, that will not be resolved by more elaborate quantification. In the gap between science and policy, the languages, their conventions and their implications are effectively incommensurable. It takes determination and skill for a scientist who is committed to social responsibility, to avoid becoming a ‘stealth advocate’ (in the terms of Roger Pielke Jr.). When the policy domain seems unwilling or unable to recognise plain and urgent truths about a problem, the contradictions between scientific probity and campaigning zeal become acute. It is a perennial problem for all policy-relevant science, and it seems to have happened on a significant scale in the case of climate science. The management of uncertainty and quality in such increasingly common situations is now an urgent task for the governance of science.

We can begin to see what went seriously wrong when we examine what the leading practitioners of this ‘evangelical science’ of global warming (thanks to Angela Wilkinson) took to be the plain and urgent truth in their case. This was not merely that there are signs of exceptional disturbance in the ecosphere due to human influence, nor even that the climate might well be changing more rapidly now than for a very long time. Rather, they propounded, as a proven fact, Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming. There is little room for uncertainty in this thesis; it effectively needs hockey-stick behaviour in all indicators of global temperature, so that it is all due to industrialisation. Its iconic image is the steadily rising graph of CO2 concentrations over the past fifty years at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii (with the implicit assumption that CO2 had always previously been at or below that starting level). Since CO2 has long been known to be a greenhouse gas, with scientific theories quantifying its effects, the scientific case for this dangerous trend could seem to be overwhelmingly simple, direct, and conclusive.

In retrospect, we can ask why this particular, really rather extreme view of the prospect, became the official one. It seems that several causes conspired. First, the early opposition to any claim of climate change was only partly scientific; the tactics of the opposing special interests were such as to induce the proponents to adopt a simple, forcefully argued position. Then, once the position was adopted, its proponents became invested in it, and attached to it, in all sorts of ways, institutional and personal. And I suspect that a simplified, even simplistic claim, was more comfortable for these scientists than one where complexity and uncertainty were acknowledged. It is not merely a case of the politicians and public needing a simple, unequivocal message. As Thomas Kuhn described ‘normal science’, which (as he said) nearly all scientists do all the time, it is puzzle-solving within an unquestioned framework or ‘paradigm’. Issues of uncertainty and quality are not prominent in ‘normal’ scientific training, and so they are less easily conceived and managed by its practitioners.

Now, as Kuhn saw, this ‘normal’ science has been enormously successful in enabling our unprecedented understanding and control of the world around us. But his analysis related to the sciences of the laboratory, and by extension the technologies that could reproduce stable and controllable external conditions for their working. Where the systems under study are complicated, complex or poorly understood, that ‘textbook’ style of investigation becomes less, sometimes much less, effective. The near-meltdown of the world’s financial system can be blamed partly on naïvely reductionist economics and misapplied simplistic statistics. The temptation among ‘normal’ scientists is to work as if their material is as simple as in the lab. If nothing else, that is the path to a steady stream of publications, on which a scientific career now so critically depends. The most obvious effect of this style is the proliferation of computer simulations, which give the appearance of solved puzzles even when neither data nor theory provide much support for the precision of their numerical outputs. Under such circumstances, a refined appreciation of uncertainty in results is inhibited, and even awareness of quality of workmanship can be atrophied.

In the course of the development of climate-change science, all sorts of loose ends were left unresolved and sometimes unattended. Even the most fundamental quantitative parameter of all, the forcing factor relating the increase in mean temperature to a doubling of CO2, lies somewhere between 1 and 3 degrees, and is thus uncertain to within a factor of 3. The precision (at about 2%) in the statements of the ‘safe limits’ of CO2 concentration, depending on calculations with this factor, is not easily justified. Also, the predictive power of the global temperature models has been shown to depend more on the ’story line’ than anything else, the end-of century increase in temperature ranging variously from a modest one degree to a catastrophic six. And the ‘hockey stick’ picture of the past, so crucial for the strict version of the climate change story, has run into increasingly severe problems. As an example, it relied totally on a small set of deeply uncertain tree-ring data for the Medieval period, to refute the historical evidence of a warming then; but it needed to discard that sort of data for recent decades, as they showed a sudden cooling from the 1960’s onwards! In the publication, the recent data from other sources were skilfully blended in so that the change was not obvious; that was the notorious ‘Nature trick’ of the CRU e-mails.

Even worse, for the warming case to have political effect, a mere global average rise in temperature was not compelling enough. So that people could appreciate the dangers, there needed to be predictions of future climate – or even weather – in the various regions of the world. Given the gross uncertainties in even the aggregated models, regional forecasts are really beyond the limits of science. And yet they have been provided, with various degrees of precision. Those announced by the IPCC have become the most explosive.

As all these anomalies and unsolved puzzles emerged, the neat, compelling picture became troubled and even confused. In Kuhn’s analysis, this would be the start of a ‘pre-revolutionary’ phase of normal science. But the political cause had been taken up by powerful advocates, like Al Gore. We found ourselves in another crusading ‘War’, like those on (non-alcoholic) Drugs and ‘Terror’. This new War, on Carbon, was equally simplistic, and equally prone to corruption and failure. Global warming science became the core element of this major worldwide campaign to save the planet. Any weakening of the scientific case would have amounted to a betrayal of the good cause, as well as a disruption of the growing research effort. All critics, even those who were full members of the scientific peer community, had to be derided and dismissed. As we learned from the CRU e-mails, they were not considered to be entitled to the normal courtesies of scientific sharing and debate. Requests for information were stalled, and as one witty blogger has put it, ‘peer review’ was replaced by ‘pal review’.

Even now, the catalogue of unscientific practices revealed in the mainstream media is very small in comparison to what is available on the blogosphere. Details of shoddy science and dirty tricks abound. By the end, the committed inner core were confessing to each other that global temperatures were falling, but it was far too late to change course. The final stage of corruption, cover-up, had taken hold. For the core scientists and the leaders of the scientific communities, as well as for nearly all the liberal media, ‘the debate was over’. Denying Climate Change received the same stigma as denying the Holocaust. Even the trenchant criticisms of the most egregious errors in the IPCC reports were kept ‘confidential’. And then came the e-mails.

We can understand the root cause of Climategate as a case of scientists constrained to attempt to do normal science in a post-normal situation. But climate change had never been a really ‘normal’ science, because the policy implications were always present and strong, even overwhelming. Indeed, if we look at the definition of ‘post-normal science’, we see how well it fits: facts uncertain,values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. In needing to treat Planet Earth like a textbook exercise, the climate scientists were forced to break the rules of scientific etiquette and ethics, and to play scientific power-politics in a way that inevitably became corrupt. The combination of non-critical ‘normal science’ with anti-critical ‘evangelical science’ was lethal. As in other ‘gate’ scandals, one incident served to pull a thread on a tissue of protective plausibilities and concealments, and eventually led to an unravelling. What was in the e-mails could be largely explained in terms of embattled scientists fighting off malicious interference; but the materials ready and waiting on the blogosphere provided a background, and that is what converted a very minor scandal to a catastrophe.

Consideration of those protective plausibilities can help to explain how the illusions could persist for so long until their sudden collapse. The scientists were all reputable, they published in leading peer-reviewed journals, and their case was itself highly plausible and worthy in a general way. Individual criticisms were, for the public and perhaps even for the broader scientific community, kept isolated and hence muffled and lacking in systematic significance. And who could have imagined that at its core so much of the science was unsound? The plausibility of the whole exercise was, as it were, bootstrapped. I myself was alerted to weaknesses in the case by some caveats in Sir David King’s book The Hot Topic; and I had heard of the hockey-stick affair. But even I was carried along by the bootstrapped plausibility, until the scandal broke. (I have benefited from the joint project on plausibility in science of colleagues in Oxford and at the Arizona State University).

Part of the historic significance of Climategate is that the scandal was so effectively and quickly exposed. Within a mere two months of the first reports in the mainstream media, the key East Anglia scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were discredited. Even if only a fraction of their scientific claims were eventually refuted, their credibility as trustworthy scientists was lost. To explain how it all happened so quickly and decisively, we have the confluence of two developments, one social and the other technical. For the former, there is a lesson of Post-Normal Science, that we call the Extended Peer Community. In traditional ‘normal’ science, the peer community, performing the functions of quality-assurance and governance, is strictly confined to the researchers who share the paradigm. In the case of ‘professional consultancy’, the clients and/or sponsors also participate in governance. We have argued that in the case of Post-Normal Science, the ‘extended peer community’, including all affected by the policy being implemented, must be fully involved. Its particular contribution will depend on the nature of the core scientific problem, and also on the phase of investigation. Detailed technical work is a task for experts, but quality-control on even that work can be done by those with much broader expertise. And on issues like the definition of the problem itself, the selection of personnel, and crucially the ownership of the results, the extended peer community has full rights of participation. This principle is effectively acknowledged in many jurisdictions, and for many policy-related problems. The theory of Post-Normal Science goes beyond the official consensus in recognising ‘extended facts’, that might be local knowledge and values, as well as unoffficially obtained information.

The task of creating and involving the extended peer community (generally known as ‘participation’) has been recognised as difficult, with its own contradictions and pitfalls. It has grown haphazardly, with isolated successes and failures. Hitherto, critics of scientific matters have been relegated to a sort of samizdat world, exchanging private letters or writing books that can easily be ignored (as not being peer-reviewed) by the ruling establishment. This has generally been the fate of even the most distinguished and responsible climate-change critics, up to now. A well-known expert in uncertainty management, Jeroen van der Sluijs, explicitly condemned the ‘overselling of certainty’ and predicted the impending destruction of trust; but he received no more attention than did Nikolas Taleb in warning of the ‘fat tails’ in the probability distributions of securities that led to the Credit Crunch. A prominent climate scientist, Mike Hulme, provided a profound analysis in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, in terms of complexity and uncertainty. But since legitimate disagreement was deemed nonexistent, he too was ignored.

To have a political effect, the ‘extended peers’ of science have traditionally needed to operate largely by means of activist pressure-groups using the media to create public alarm. In this case, since the global warmers had captured the moral high ground, criticism has remained scattered and ineffective, except on the blogosphere. The position of Green activists is especially difficult, even tragic; they have been ‘extended peers’ who were co-opted into the ruling paradigm, which in retrospect can be seen as a decoy or diversion from the real, complex issues of sustainability, as shown by Mike Hulme. Now they must do some very serious re-thinking about their position and their role.

The importance of the new media of communications in mass politics, as in the various ‘rainbow revolutions’ is well attested. To understand how the power-politics of science have changed in the case of Climategate, we can take a story from the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey. There were two incidents in the Boston U.S.A. diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, involving the shuffling of paeodophile priests around parishes. The first time, there was a criminal prosecution, with full exposure in the press, and then nothing happened. The second time, the outraged parents got on their cell phones and organised; and eventually Cardinal Archbishop Bernard Francis Law (who had started as a courageous cleric in the ‘60’s) had to leave for Rome in disgrace. The Climategate affair shows the importance of the new IT for science, as an empowerment of the extended peer community.

The well-known principle, ‘knowledge is power’ has its obverse, ‘ignorance is impotence’. And ignorance is maintained, or eventually overcome, by a variety of socio-technical means. With the invention of cheap printing on paper, the Bible could be widely read, and heretics became Reformers. The social activity of science as we know it expanded and grew through the age of printing. But knowledge was never entirely free, and the power-politics of scientific legitimacy remained quite stable for centuries. The practice of science has generally been restricted to a social elite and its occasional recruits, as it requires a prior academic education and a sufficiency of leisure and of material resources. With the new information technology, all that is changing rapidly. As we see from the ‘open source’ movement, many people play an active role in enjoyable technological development in the spare time that their job allows or even encourages. Moreover, all over IT there are blogs that exercise quality control on the industry’s productions. In this new knowledge industry, the workers can be as competent as the technicians and bosses. The new technologies of information enable the diffusion of scientific competence and the sharing of unofficial information, and hence give power to peer communities that are extended far beyond the Ph.D.s in the relevant subject-specialty. The most trenchant and effective critics of the ‘hockey stick’ statistics were a University-employed economist and a computer expert.

Like any other technology, IT is many-faceted. It is easily misused and abused, and much of the content of the blogosphere is trivial or worse. The right-wing political agendas of some climate sceptics, their bloggers and their backers, are quite well known. But to use their background or motivation as an excuse for ignoring their arguments, is a betrayal of science. The blogosphere interacts with other media of communication, in the public and scientific domains. Some parts are quite mainstream, others not. The Climategate blogosphere is as varied in quality as any other. Some leading scholars, like Roger Pielke, Jr. have had personal blogs for a long time. Some blogs are carefully monitored, have a large readership and are sampled by the mainstream media (such as the one on which this is posted, Wattsupwiththat.com). Others are less rigorous; but the same variation in quality can be found in the nominally peer-reviewed scientific literature. Keeping up with the blogosphere requires different skills from keeping up with traditional literature; it is most useful to find a summarising blog that fits one’s special interests, as well as a loyal correspondent, as (in my case) Roger ‘tallbloke’ Tattersall.

Some mainstream publications are now saying nice things about the blogosphere. Had such sentiments been expressed a while ago, the critical voices might have had a public hearing and the Climategate scandal might have been exposed before it became entrenched so disastrously. And now the critical blogosphere does not need to be patronised. Like any extension of political power, whether it be the right to believe, to protest, to vote, to form trades unions, or to be educated, it can lead to instabilities and abuses. But now the extended peer community has a technological base, and the power-politics of science will be different. I cannot predict how it will work out, but we can be confident that corruptions built on bootstrapped plausibility will be less likely in the future.

There is an important philosophical dimension to Climategate, a question of the relation of personal scientific ethics to objective scientific facts. The problem is created by the traditional image of science (as transmitted in scientific education) as ‘value-free’. The personal commitments to integrity, that are necessary for the maintenance of scientific quality, receive no mention in the dominant philosophy of science. Kuhn’s disenchanted picture of science was so troubling to the idealists (as Popper) because in his ‘normal’ science criticism had hardly any role. For Kuhn, even the Mertonian principles of ethical behaviour were effectively dismissed as irrelevant. Was this situation truly ‘normal’ – meaning either average or (worse) appropriate? The examples of shoddy science exposed by the Climategate convey a troubling impression. From the record, it appears that in this case, criticism and a sense of probity needed to be injected into the system by the extended peer community from the (mainly) external blogosphere.

The total assurance of the mainstream scientists in their own correctness and in the intellectual and moral defects of their critics, is now in retrospect perceived as arrogance. For their spokespersons to continue to make light of the damage to the scientific case, and to ignore the ethical dimension of Climategate, is to risk public outrage at a perceived unreformed arrogance. If there is a continuing stream of ever more detailed revelations, originating in the blogosphere but now being brought to a broader public, then the credibility of the established scientific authorities will continue to erode. Do we face the prospect of the IPCC reports being totally dismissed as just more dodgy dossiers, and of hitherto trusted scientists being accused of negligence or worse? There will be those who with their own motives will be promoting such a picture. How can it be refuted?

And what about the issue itself? Are we really experiencing Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming? If the public loses faith in that claim, then the situation of science in our society will be altered for the worse. There is very unlikely to be a crucial experience that either confirms or refutes the claim; the post-normal situation is just too complex. The consensus is likely to depend on how much trust can still be put in science. The whole vast edifice of policy commitments for Carbon reduction, with their many policy prescriptions and quite totalitarian moral exhortations, will be at risk of public rejection. What sort of chaos would then result? The consequences for science in our civilisation would be extraordinary.

To the extent that the improved management of uncertainty and ignorance can remedy the situation, some useful tools are at hand. In the Netherlands, scholars and scientists have developed ‘Knowledge Quality Assessment’ methodologies for characterising uncertainty in ways that convey the richness of the phenomenon while still performing well as robust tools of analysis and communication. Elsewhere, scholars are exploring methods for managing disagreement among scientists, so that such post-normal issues do not need to become so disastrously polarised. A distinguished scholar, Sheila Jasanoff, has called for a culture of humility among scientists, itself a radical move towards a vision of a non-violent science. Scientists who have been forced to work on the blogosphere have had the invaluable experience of exclusion and oppression; that could make it easier for them to accept that something is seriously wrong and then to engage in the challenging moral adventures of dealing with uncertainty and ignorance. The new technologies of communications are revolutionising knowledge and power in many areas. The extended peer community of science on the blogosphere will be playing its part in that process. Let dialogue commence!

——————-

My thanks to numerous friends and colleagues for their loyal assistance through all the drafts of this essay. The final review at a seminar at the Institute of Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University was very valuable, particularly the intervention from ‘the man in the bus queue’.

 

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http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5f07875970c-pi

 

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I'm nearly through Robert G. Kaiser's So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and The Corrosion of American Government.

The book focuses on the transformation of The District of Confusion ( a/k/a Cancer On The Potomac ) from a sleepy backwater ("A city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency") where limited, necessary government functions were accomplished by collegial consensus to today's urban hellhole largely populated by sleazeballs*. It didn't take all that long. I remember when it was possible to look across to the south shore of the Potomac and see nothing but cornfields. Now, it's all concrete for miles and miles in every direction full of gridlock, manipulators and Blue Plains effluent.


Kaiser accomplishes the task by following the career of one Gerald Cassidy, a graduate of the school of hard knocks who begins life as a bleeding-heart liberal attorney for migrant workers in Florida and ends up a slimeball with a net worth of $100 million through influence peddling and manipulating the spending of taxpayer money. If you want to understand why the U.S. is well on the way to bankruptcy, this is a book which explains the process of how and why the richest nation the world has ever seen self-destructed.

http://www.cassidy.com/
http://www.cassidy.com/bios/biodetail.asp?Id=1&Office=dc


I'm old enough to have seen the transformation and live close enough to have observed it firsthand. It's been sickening to watch.

I commend the book to your attention. It is both eye-opening and disgusting. It'll leave you wretching.





__________________________
*An influence-peddlar is, by definition, a sleazeball and a social parasite because he/she produces nothing of any value to society.

 

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Gazprom Cleared to Build $10 Billion Baltic Pipeline
By Kati Pohjanpalo and Anna Shiryaevskaya

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- OAO Gazprom, the world’s largest natural-gas producer, won its last permit to build a $10 billion pipeline to Germany, its first direct link to western Europe.

A Finnish regional agency today approved Nord Stream AG’s construction of the pipeline under the Baltic Sea, with gas shipments planned to start next year. The Zug, Switzerland-based venture with Wintershall AG, E.ON Ruhrgas AG and Nederlandse Gasunie NV earlier secured other permits from Finland, Russia, Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

Baltic Sea countries voiced concern over the pipeline’s environmental impact while Poland, which transfers about a fifth of Russia’s gas to Europe, compared it to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Europe before World War II. The 7.4 billion- euro ($10 billion) link will bypass Ukraine, reducing the risk of supply cuts that hit Europe last year.

“In general, approvals and discussions were objective although excessively politicized,” Alexei Knizhnikov, an oil and gas program coordinator at WWF Russia, said in an e-mail. “The process that has just been completed doesn’t remove all potential threats and issues at the implementation stage.”

Gazprom shares advanced 0.2 percent to 168.85 rubles at 1:13 p.m. in Moscow. The shares slid 1.7 percent yesterday.

‘Some Doubts’
Baltic Sea littoral countries have said the 1,220-kilometer (758-mile) pipeline may damage the environment. Nord Stream has changed the proposed path to allay these concerns, moving the route north of the Danish island of Bornholm, and farther from nature reserves near the Swedish island of Gotland.

“We still have some doubts” over the project’s impact on the environment, Estonia’s Prime Minister Andrus Ansip said Feb. 10. “The concerns of Estonian scientists have not been adequately answered.”

More than 150,000 mines were deployed and disposed of in the Baltic Sea during and after the two World Wars, according to Nord Stream. The company plans to bypass the munitions in some locations or remove them in others.

“It’s the biggest man-made construct in the Baltic Sea,” said Tapani Veistola, an officer at the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation. “The main problems are the nutrients and heavy metals spread during construction and that there is no plan for dealing with the pipeline after it’s no longer in use.”

‘Tight Screening’
Nord Stream will build two parallel pipelines on the Baltic seabed from the Russian city of Vyborg near the Finnish border to Greifswald on the Baltic coast in Germany.

The conduit’s first line may start operating in September 2011, RIA Novosti said today, citing Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The first link will ship 27.5 billion cubic meters a year, or about a third of Germany’s consumption. The second pipe is to double capacity in 2012.

“We passed a tight screening,” Sebastian Sass, Nord Stream’s permitting manager, said in a telephone interview today. “This is an important day for European environment and the security of energy supply in Europe.”

The project is on budget and construction is set to start in April as scheduled, Sass said. Pipe-laying will begin in the middle of the Swedish sector, he said.

Today’s permit was the third and final hurdle for Nord Stream in Finland after an environment report found the project feasible and the government sanctioned the use of the country’s economic zone.

Permission Granted
Work on the pipeline may begin immediately and any complaints must be registered within 30 days, said the Southern Finland Regional State Administrative Agency in Helsinki, which granted the permit.

Gazprom aims to expand its share of the European gas market from about 25 percent now to 30 percent in 2015. The company’s export arm has contracted 22 billion cubic meters of gas deliveries via the line, Nord Stream Finance Director Paul Corcoran said in an interview in December.

The European Union has sought more reliable imports of gas after shipments through Ukraine were halted twice in the past four years. A row between Ukraine and Russia over gas prices and transit fees disrupted Gazprom supplies to 20 European countries for almost two weeks in freezing temperatures in January 2009.

Ukraine’s President-elect Viktor Yanukovych has vowed to maintain transit volumes via his country, currently the main route for Russian gas to Europe, and said Ukraine should join Nord Stream.

Molotov-Ribbentrop
“If I win the elections, I will propose that Ukraine joins the consortium that is now constructing Nord Stream,” he said on Jan. 19, before the second-round election where he claimed victory.

Gazprom holds 51 percent of Nord Stream, Wintershall and E.ON Ruhrgas each have 20 percent and Gasunie has 9 percent. GDF Suez SA, owner of Europe’s biggest gas network, has been in talks on joining the project. Nord Stream expects to borrow 3.9 billion euros from 27 banks in early 2010 to finance construction, Corcoran said.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, while serving as defense minister in an earlier government, in 2006 compared the Nord Stream project to the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty that divided eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before World War II.

The pipeline may be preferable to tankers for fuel supply, Finland’s Veistola said.

“The Gulf of Finland is already full of ship traffic,” he said. “We’re living on borrowed time as statistically speaking, there should already have been a major oil or chemical spill.”


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601095&sid=aIQeAmQH3uxI

 

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It's El Nino, Folks, NOT Global Warming.



http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/el_nino-winter-pattern.jpg


By Anthony Watts

...The Times reports: Too much snow forces Scottish resort to close.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6990487.ece

One of the low elevation Vancouver skiing venues (Cypress Mountain) is short on snow this year due to El Nino, and the Global Warming machine is soon going to saturate the news with this story. It has already started and is ramping up.

VANCOUVER, B.C. — One morning last week, environmentalist David Suzuki looked across English Bay from his Vancouver home to Cypress Mountain, usually covered in snow this time of year but now left all but bare by a warm winter.

“I’ve watched in horror as the snow has just melted away from Cypress Mountain,” Suzuki said, referring to the 2010 Olympic Games snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue. The view from Vancouver, Suzuki and others say, provides a glimpse into the future for the Winter Olympics.​

Never mind that most of the ski areas in the world are having excellent seasons, including other Olympic venues like Whistler – which has already received over 1,000 cm of snow this winter. Arizona Snowbowl has received 238 inches of snow this winter! You read that correctly – Arizona.

Squaw Valley, California (site of the 1960 Winter Olympics) is reporting at least 10 feet of snow on the ground. Ski conditions around Salt Lake City (site of the 2002 Olympics) are excellent. Wolf Creek, Colorado is reporting close to ten feet on the ground. European ski areas are reporting excellent snow. Pajarito Mountain, New Mexico is reporting one of their best ski seasons ever. North Carolina ski areas are reporting some of their best conditions ever. Scotland is reporting the best ski conditions in 50 years. Washington DC is shut down due to snow.

Most of the ski areas in British Columbia have excellent snow, but be assured that the press will highlight the one area which doesn’t – and will not provide a sensible explanation for the cause. They will blame it on global warming, and will intentionally ignore ski conditions in most of the globe...

 

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33rd America's Cup Series

BMW-Oracle has the faster boat— at least in light air. There's good reason to think The America's Cup will return to the U.S. in very short order. Anything can happen, of course, but life is a thousand times easier if you've got the faster boat ( see the report below on the first race of the series ).

This is amazing shit. The high aspect rigid wing ( it really is an airfoil ) that serves as the vessel's "mainsail" is enormous ( 223 feet high ). According to reports, the foil is more than twice the size of a Boeing 747 wing. The vessel's been clocked at 28 knots and sails so fast that the apparent wind doesn't much change.

A trimaran, the vessel sails on one hull in what appears to be a precarious balance. Massive real-time computing enables her to be sailed on the razor edge of control.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/USA-17-flying-cropped.jpg



Ellison’s BMW-Oracle Takes 1-0 Lead in America’s Cup
By Alex Duff

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. challenger BMW-Oracle took a 1-0 lead in the 33rd America’s Cup after its 68-meter (223-foot) motorized carbon fiber wing helped it outpace Alinghi.

The USA-17 trimaran was quickest over the 40-mile course off Valencia, Spain, after sailing as fast as 25 knots (28.8 miles-per-hour) on the downwind section. The challenger made up an almost 1 minute, 30 second gap behind the Swiss boat at the start to win by more than 15 minutes.

BMW-Oracle, owned by billionaire Larry Ellison, is a win away from returning sailing’s oldest and most prestigious prize to the U.S. after 15 years abroad. The winning margin today was bigger than in any of the races in the last edition, including the qualifying series.

“The wing sail looks like an absolute gem, it has less drag,” Peter Lester, a former America’s Cup tactician, said in a broadcast from the U.S. team’s base. “As long as BMW-Oracle can keep the boat in one piece they are in a completely dominant position.”

The best-of-three regatta follows 30 months of legal dispute over rules between Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, whose Swiss team won in 2003 and 2007. The opening race was also delayed four days by variable weather.

Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ellison jumped off USA-17 into a speed boat before racing began. His 138-meter “Rising Sun” boat and Bertarelli’s 46-meter “Vava” were among the spectator fleet at the start.

Penalty Turn
Alinghi, steered by Bertarelli, was penalized for blocking Oracle before the start. It had to do a penalty turn, which it did just before the finish line.

The Swiss boat jumped out to a 600-meter lead when the U.S. challenger skippered by James Spithill was caught on the wrong side of the line as the race began.

USA-17 reeled in Alinghi quickly. BMW-Oracle followed an Alinghi tack to make sure of its advantage and led by 3 minutes, 21 seconds at the halfway stage.

In a breeze of about five knots, the American boat sped further into the lead on the downwind section. Spithill was carrying a laptop computer in a backpack that feeds boat data to him via military-style goggles.

The first race was postponed Feb. 8 because of shifting off-shore winds and then again two days later when race director Harold Bennett ruled the sea was too rough. The second race is scheduled for Feb. 14.

The U.S. hasn’t held the America’s Cup since 1995, when Dennis Conner’s Young America lost to New Zealand.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601077&sid=aNt5YdmJKanY

 

[trysail]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/13/congenital-climate-abnormalities/

CONGENITAL CLIMATE ABNORMALITIES

By: Willis Eschenbach

Science is what we use to explain anomalies, to elucidate mysteries, to shed light on unexplained occurrences. For example, there is no great need for a scientific explanation of the sun rising in the morning. If one day the sun were to rise in the afternoon, however, that is an anomaly which would definitely require a scientific explanation. But there is no need to explain the normal everyday occurrences. We don’t need a new understanding if there is nothing new to understand.

Hundreds of thousands of hours of work, and billions of dollars, have been expended trying to explain the recent variations in the climate, particularly the global temperature. But in the rush to find an explanation, a very important question has been left unasked:

Just exactly what unusual, unexpected temperature anomaly are we trying to explain?

The claim is made over and over that humans are having an effect on the climate. But where is the evidence that there is anything that even needs explanation? Where is the abnormal phenomenon? What is it that we are trying to make sense of, what is the unusual occurrence that requires a novel scientific explanation?

There are not a lot of long-term temperature records that can help us in this regard. The longest one is the Central England Temperature record (CET). Although there are problems with the CET (see Sources below), including recent changes in the stations used to calculate it that have slightly inflated the modern temperatures, it is a good starting point for an investigation of whether there is anything happening that is abnormal. Here is that record:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/slow_warming_in_merrie_olde.jpg


Figure 1. The Central England Temperature Record. Blue line is the monthly temperature in Celsius. Red line is the average temperature. Jagged black line is the 25-year trailing trend, in degrees per century.

Now, where in that record is there anything which is even slightly abnormal? Where is the anomaly that the entire huge edifice of the AGW hypothesis is designed to elucidate? The longest sustained rise is from about 1680 to 1740. That time period also has the steepest rise. The modern period, on the other hand, is barely above the long-term trend despite urban warming. There is nothing unusual about the modern period in any way.

OK, so there’s nothing to explain in the CET. How about another long record?

One of the world’s best single station long-term records is that of the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. It has been maintained with only a couple minor location changes for over 200 years. Figure 2 shows the Armagh record.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/slow_warming_in_armagh.jpg


Figure 2. Temperature record for Armagh University. Various colored lines as in Figure 1.

We find the same thing in this record as in the CET. The fastest rise was a long, long time ago. The modern rise is once again insignificant. Where in all of this is anything that requires billions of dollars to explain?

Finally, what about the global record? Here, you don’t have to take my word for it. A much chastened Phil Jones (the disgraced former Director of the CRU of email fame), in an interview with the BBC on Friday, February 12, 2010, answered a BBC question as follows:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.​

So in fact, according to Phil Jones (who strongly believes in the AGW hypothesis) there is nothing unusual about the recent warming either. It is not statistically different from two earlier modern periods of warming. Since these warming periods were before the modern rise in CO2, greenhouse gases cannot have been responsible for those rises.

So my question remains unanswered … where is the anomaly? Where is the unusual occurrence that we are spending billions of dollars trying to explain?

The answer is, there is no unusual warming. There is no anomaly. There is nothing strange or out of the ordinary about the recent warming. It is in no way distinguishable from earlier periods of warming, periods that we know were not due to rising CO2. There is nothing in the record that is in any way different from the centuries-long natural fluctuations in the global climate.

In other words, we have spent billions of dollars and wasted years of work chasing a chimera, a will-of-the-wisp. This is why none of the CO2 explanations have held water … simply because there is nothing unusual to explain.

SOURCES:

CET:

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html

ARMAGH:

http://www.arm.ac.uk/preprints/445.pdf

ADJUSTMENTS TO THE CET:

http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/004482.html

JONES BBC INTERVIEW:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

Jones also makes the interesting argument in the interview that the reason he believes that recent warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) is because climate models can’t replicate it … in other words, he has absolutely no evidence at all, he just has the undeniable fact that our current crop of climate models can’t model the climate. Seems to me like that’s a problem with the models rather than a problem with the climate, but hey, what do I know, I was born yesterday …

 

[trysail]

...Days after the zoo reaffirmed its non-interference policy, mass circulation daily Bild ran a story with a headline reading "Why Won't Anyone Save the Cute Baby Knuts in Nuremberg Zoo?"

At the beginning of January, zoo keepers noticed that Vilma appeared nervous; she was seen agitatedly scratching at her feedbox, and there was no further sign of her cubs. It is believed that she devoured them. When asked for a reason, Nuremberg zoo director Dag Encke stated that they could have been ill, a circumstance under which polar bears in the wild often eat their young...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocke

Polar bear 'may have eaten cubs'

Experts at Germany's Nuremberg Zoo say a female polar bear may have eaten her cubs, as there is no sign of them.

Two polar bears, Vera and Vilma, gave birth a few weeks ago. The zookeepers had decided not to disturb the cubs, even if the mothers rejected them.

Vilma scratched her feed box on Monday, "appearing nervous, well-fed, obviously not hungry," a zookeeper was quoted as saying. No cubs could be seen or heard.

So as not to disturb the cubs, the zoo did not check how many were born.
Zoo director Dag Encke said that Vilma's cubs - believed to be a pair - may have been ill and that in such cases polar bears often eat their young.

Vera was spotted briefly with one of her cubs

"Predators are known to eat their offspring when the youngsters are handicapped or when the mother's circumstances make it unlikely that she can rear them successfully," he said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7176575.stm