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Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray. Cheers And from the November 21, 2009 article: Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc ! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it ! ... From: Phil Jones To: santer1@XXXX Subject: Re: A quick question Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008 Ben, Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email. Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here! ... From: Phil Jones Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!! Cheers Phil: ... Options appear to be: Send them the data Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them. #1047388489 #1047390562 It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice ! #1051156418 This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that ‘anti-greenhouse’ science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on)…. Example three is the driving out of Professor James Saiers as editor of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, which under him had published a sceptical paper by sceptics Sallie Baliunas and Wille Soon. Here’s Tom Wigley to Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann: 1106322460 txt Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. Mann writes: [snip] I’m not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap. There appears to be a more fundamental problem w/ GRL now, unfortunately… Mike Mann again: Thanks Tom, Yeah, basically this is just a heads up to people that something might be up here. What a shame that would be. It’s one thing to lose “Climate Research”. We can’t afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don’t know him–he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here). If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don’t that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised! [snip] mike Labels: global warming LONDON — Seaborne raiders in a high-speed skiff tried again on Wednesday to commandeer the Maersk Alabama, the American-flagged ship seized by pirates in April, the United States Navy said. In a separate episode, the captain of a hijacked chemical tanker was reported to have died of gunshot wounds inflicted when pirates seized the MV Theresa with 28 North Korean crew members northwest of the Seychelles on Monday. The spate of attacks reflected the increasing boldness of pirates roaming far from their bases in Somalia to seize vessels and sailors to hold for ransom. The United States Navy Central Command said four suspected pirates in a skiff came within 300 yards of the Maersk Alabama at 6.30 a.m. Wednesday about 600 miles off the northeast coast of Somalia as it headed for the Kenyan port of Mombasa. But a security team on board the Maersk Alabama responded with small-arms fire, long-range acoustical devices painful to the human ear and evasive maneuvers to thwart the attack, the Navy said in a statement. “Due to Maersk Alabama following maritime industry’s best practices such as embarking security teams, the ship was able to prevent being successfully attacked by pirates,” said Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, the commander of the Central Command. “This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take pro-active action to prevent being attacked.” Labels: gun self-defense Labels: gun rights Labels: telescopes Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, 'Germanic' cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown. The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler's Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition. Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments. She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration. Selected objects from the family's enormous collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne. 'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.' The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals. The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin. Labels: history With current Fed policy, gold is headed rapidly toward $2,000 per ounce, probably within six months. The forecasters who see such a price, but suggest it would take four to five years to get there, are ignoring history. Since gold was able to get from $185 to $850 in 18 months in 1978-80, there is no reason why it cannot get from $1,100 to $2,000 in six months now. What's more, although 1980's peak seemed madness at the time, and was equivalent to nearly $2,400 today, there is no reason why gold cannot go much higher if it is given another year or so to get there. The supply of gold from new mining is around 1 million ounces per year LESS than in 1980 and the supply of speculative capital that could flow into gold is many times greater. Hence, a $5,000 gold price is possible though not certain, if present monetary policy is continued or only modestly modified – and that price could be reached by the end of 2010. As was demonstrated by the housing bubble of 2004-06, modest rises in interest rates are not sufficient to stop a bubble once it is well under way. Given the Fed's recent track record, it is most unlikely that we will get any more than modest and very reluctant interest-rate rises. Even if inflation is moving at a brisk pace by the latter part of next year, the price rises will be explained away, or possibly massaged out of the figures as happened in the early part of 2008. Hence the bubble will inexorably move to its denouement, at which point gold will probably be north of $3,000 an ounce and oil well north of $150 per barrel. Even though there will be no supply/demand reason why oil should get to those levels, and gold has almost no genuine demand at all, the weight of money behind those commodities in a speculative situation will push their prices inexorably upwards, beyond all reason until something intervenes to stop it. At some point, probably before the end of 2010, the bubble will burst. The deflationary effect on the U.S. economy of $150 plus oil will overwhelm the modest forces of genuine economic expansion. The Treasury bond market will collapse, overwhelmed by the weight of deficit financing. Once again, the banking system will be in deep trouble. The industrial sector, beyond the largest and most liquid companies and the extractive industries, will in any case have remained in recession – it is notable that, in spite of the Fed's frenzy of activity, bank lending has fallen $600 billion in the last year. Unemployment, which will probably enter the second downturn at around current levels, will spike further upwards. The dollar will probably not collapse, but only because it will have been declining inexorably in the intervening year, to give a euro value of $2 and a yen value of 60 to 65 yen to the dollar. Labels: economics
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The Global Warming Fraud
An interesting set of articles from the November 21, 2009 and November 22, 2009 Australian Herald Sun. It includes a number of emails from Professor Phil Jones who heads Britain's Climate Research Unit that demonstrate that he was intentionally fiddling with data to get the "right" results:From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Phil
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
These are not the actions of someone who believes that the data demonstrates global warming. These are the actions of someone who is engaged in a criminal enterprise.
Fraud is widespread in the academic community. Michael Bellesiles and Ward Churchill are the tip of the iceberg.
UPDATE: This November 22, 2009 article pretty conclusively demonstrates the type of intellectual fraud going on in the global warming community, with this set of emails:
And:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor…
GRL is Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union--and not a trivial journal in any way. Yes, it was very important to get people fired there.
Hi Malcolm,
Maersk Alabama Attacked By Pirates Again
It didn't go so well this time for the pirates; the victims returned fire. From the November 18, 2009 New York Times:
Yes, it is rather amazing how turning a low-risk activity (piracy) into a high-risk activity seems to help, doesn't it? Into the 19th century, American merchant ships were generally armed--and not just with small arms--to deal with the problem of piracy. But the prevailing sentiment elsewhere seems to be to pay ransom instead.
Finishing Final Edits on the Academics for the Second Amendment Amicus Brief
It is, of course, complementary to the briefs filed by other parties, so it's a bit of a struggle to make sure that it stands on its own--but doesn't unnecessarily duplicate what the other parties in McDonald v. Chicago are doing.
In any case, Academics for the Second Amendment has exhausted its treasure chest (in the loosest, smallest definition of "treasure") so if you want to assist with this effort--even just a couple of bucks--go to their blog, and hit the PayPal button on the right side of the screen. Or send a check to:
Academics for the Second Amendment
Post Office Box 131254
St. Paul, MN 55113
Things To Stop Forwarding
The claim about the nature of the states that voted for Obama in 2008 ascribed to Professor Joe Olson: he didn't write it after the 2000 election, after the 2004 election, or the 2008 election. The data contained therein might be true, but the fact that it keeps coming around with a new election year, new Democratic candidate for president, and attributed to someone who didn't write it, should make you very skeptical.
The claim that Dr. David E. Cole of the Center for Automotive Research met with Obama appointees to the car task force, and when he told them that certain automobile designs would require repeal of the laws of physics, they said that they would have Congress repeal those laws? Nope. Cole does say that some years ago, he did talk with members of Congress that thought they could repeal laws of physics ("2 + 2 = whatever the Party says it does," to paraphrase Orwell). But Cole hasn't meant with the Obama car task force.
Clear Skies
Last night was something of a rarity: a crisp clear night. And let me emphasize how crisp it was.
I rolled Big Bertha 2.0 out a bit late--around 8:30 PM--and by then, the target that I had originally planned to go after, M101 had dipped too low in the sky for a decent view. After spending some time collimating the mirror, I decided, "It is just too cold out here!" and went back inside.
I am pleased to report that the diagonal mirror holder and mirror cell that I made for Big Bertha 2.0 are very easy to adjust for perfect collimation.
Taking Christ Out of Christmas
A friend pointed me to this interesting article in the November 17, 2009 Daily Mail about a new exhibit in Germany:
This doesn't surprise me particularly. I recently finished reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. He makes the claim that the Nazis removed prayer from German public schools in 1935, for a similar reason. I have not had a chance to spot check Goldberg's claims, but I this does generally fit. National Socialism was derived from progressivism, and shared many of its most obnoxious traits: hostility towards religion, and especially Judeo-Christian beliefs; support for eugenics; government control over the economy; hostility towards free market capitalism.
UPDATE: It does appear that Goldberg was largely right, although perhaps a little oversimplified. Richard Grunberger's The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 pp. 289-290 indicates that in 1935, religion was removed from the school leaving exams, and religion classes were made optional. The time when religion classes were offered was moved to encourage students to miss classes, religious instruction was reduced to one day a week in the over-12 age group, and completely stopped for the over-14 age group once the war started. In Bavaria, parents were strongly encouraged to take their kids out of Catholic schools. What remained of what we might call chapel was replaced with entirely patriotic activities.
(While not relevant to religion, not surprisingly, the Nazis also encouraged students to think of themselves as smarter than their teachers and other educated people, since most of these in many villages were clergy.)
How Much More Gloomy Can A Prediction Get?
A friend pointed me to this depressing prediction, based on how the price of gold has burst through the $1,100 per ounce ceiling:For 18 months, the gold price had been in a trading range topping out around $1,000. It has now broken out decisively from that range. The opportunity for the world's central banks to change policy and affect the economic outcome has been lost. The world economy is now locked on to an undeviating track towards another train wreck.
And then it gets really bad. I have held off on buying bonds. Some friends are buying commodities--which really aren't an investment, but they can be a good hedge against inflation--and especially hyperinflation.
...
If the Democrats had an opposition party, there could be a very good opportunity for that opposition party to win decisive control of Congress next year. But there is no opposition party anymore. And even getting in control of Congress, isn't going to be able to clean up this mess as long as the Democrats control the White House. And that's assuming that this mythical opposition political party actually had the courage to do something.
Maybe it's time to stockpile canned food and ammunition.
UPDATE: A reader tells me that the $850 peak around 1980 didn't last very long--a day or two, before falling back. My recollection is that when my wife and I went out to buy wedding rings in early 1980, gold was at about $1000 an ounce, and our wedding rings are proportionately skinny as a direct result. I also notice that the "buy gold now!" advertising seems to be getting more intense--almost like someone wants to dump their inventory while the price is high. This is not at all what you would expect if there was a realistic chance of gold going a lot higher. On the other hand, the deficit is going to definitely cause inflation at some point.
Sure Enough, Idaho Just Gained A Bunch New Congressional Districts!
Idaho Freedom Foundation reports that along with all the other states that have acquired a bunch of new House districts because of the stimulus, so has Idaho! When I asked Recovery.org for a list of Idaho Congressional districts that were benefiting from the creation of new jobs, it showed details about jobs created in Idaho Congresional districts (in order of number of jobs created or saved): 2, 1, 5, 4, 8, 9, 35, 3, 0, 16, 19, and 28! And all this time I thought there were only two Idaho Congressional Districts! (And who represents the 0th district?)
What is this? Did Chicago voting "vote early, vote often" suddenly get applied to stimulus spending? No wonder it was so expensive--they had to spend money in Congressional districts we didn't even know existed!
Real Snow
This was more than just a dusting of snow. I fear it is time to wash and cover the Corvette for the winter, and turn off collision insurance until spring. It is also very cold--21 degrees when my wife and I returned home this evening from watching our granddaughter. It is probably below 20 degrees by now.
