Wealthy banker father of Muslim bomber gave info to Obama diplomat

The US Embassy in Nigeria was informed about 6 months ago of the danger of the Northwest attempted bomber, but took no steps to prevent what happened. The man's intentions were told to US officials in Nigeria by his father, a wealthy banker.

• from NY Post account, "Bomber was on US Watch List," by Angela Montefinese, 12/27/09, via MichaelSavage.com

China snub of Obama-news US media kept to themselves

• UPDATE: Unfortunately, it's worse than this. At Copenhagen everyone knew Obama was being snubbed and quite publicly so. (Hillary was there and will remember every detail).
  
• I doubt Obama has ever been treated this way in his entire life. The US media in criminal silence will keep this crucial news away from Obama's employer, the American people. via "Obama the Party Crasher," 12/23/09, WT
  
• 
  
• "Why did Chinese premier Wen Jiabao choose to publicly humiliate Barack Obama at Copenhagen?

In their eyes, and those of much of the world, he has lost face, and with it, power and influence.

• While getting widespread play overseas, this story has been kept very quiet by our disinterested, nonpartisan media " (Joke) continuing. "(I haven't seen it mentioned in any major U.S. outlet).

After promising to meet the Messiah at 7:00 p.m., Premier Wen stiffed him in favor of a meeting with the leaders of India, South Africa, and Brazil.

• Rather than wait, a no-doubt infuriated Obama stalked into the room in question and demanded, "Are you ready to see me, Premier Wen?" No word on Wen's reaction, though he did submit to a discussion on the spot that evidently sealed the release of the immortal and glorious Copenhagen Quasi-Agreement on Climate Change.

So with Barack Obama, we've reached the point where the leader of record of the most powerful state in history has become a man you can casually stand up....

• Then there's the deep aura of unseriousness that Obama has generated around himself. Though essentially incalculable, this factor is undeniable and will grow in importance and impact as time passes.

But there's one event in particular that very likely played a part -- the fact that, only a few weeks before, Obama publicly and notoriously bowed to the emperor of Japan.

• Japan and China have a lengthy history, very little of which can be termed benign. They have always been rivals, often acting at cross purposes and usually at sword's point. But the past century of Sino-Japanese relations has been little short of horrendous....

Which only goes to underline the reason why diplomatic protocol exists in the first place -- to exclude through ritual actions all possibilities that error, misunderstanding, or personal pique might interfere with matters of state. Obama has yet to learn this. His insistence on winging it, on reinventing established practice on his own terms, is potentially

• far more than simply embarrassing."...

from American thinker article, "Obama's Lost Face," by J.R. Dunn, 12/27/09

• via Lucianne.com; photo getty, last day Cop15.
  

Obama now despised by more Americans than George Bush at his worst

Rasmussen daily tracking poll, 12/22/09, via Gateway Pundit.

• 46% now strongly disapprove.

This is also a poll on the mass media in my view--their 24/7
propaganda is failing. ed.

Why Copenhagen failed, BBC is learning

• Well. yes. The Obama campaign said their goal was always to prevent
  
• analysis of his words and force people to focus
  
• just on what he was saying.
  
• 
  
• BBC, 12/22: "Reason #6: 24-hour news culture:

"The way this deal was concocted and announced was perhaps the logical conclusion of a news culture wherein it is

• more important to beam a speaking president live into peoples' homes from the other side of the world
  
• than it is

• to evaluate what has happened and give a balanced account.

The Obama White House mounted a surgical strike of astounding effectiveness (and astounding cynicism) that saw the president announcing a deal live on TV before anyone - even most of the governments involved in the talks - knew a deal had been done.

• The news went first to the White House lobby journalists travelling with the president.
  

• With due respect, they are not as well equipped to ask critical questions as the environment specialists who had spent the previous two weeks at the Bella Center.

After the event, of course, journalists pored over the details. But the agenda had already been set;

• by the time those articles emerged,
• anyone who was not particularly interested in the issue would have come to believe that a deal on climate change had been done,

• with the US providing leadership to the global community.

The 24-hour live news culture did not make the Copenhagen Accord. But its existence

• offered the White House a way to keep the accord's chief architect
  

• away from all meaningful scrutiny
  

• while telling the world of his triumph."...

Hey Obama, TRY CALLING NAT HENTOFF A RACIST.

"The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things."...

• "Nat Hentoff has earned the well-deserved reputation of being one of our nation's most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers. He began his career
  
• at the Village Voice

because he wanted a place to write freely on anything he cared about. And his departure from the publication has neither dampened his zeal nor tempered his voice....

• John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something

• very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition,
  

• they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises....

• So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that
  
• this guy is a phony.
  

Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.

• JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However,

• I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama.
  

Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor" (or instructor) "at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it.

• He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this.
  

So all in all, Obama is a disaster.

• JW: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama.
  
• Why is that?

NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because

• the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore.
• They just react.
  
• When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for
  
• their silence on these issues.
  

They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."

• JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?

NH: That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel. It was done to get the Medicare doctors to not spend too much money on them.

• The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar.
  

• Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care,
  
• which influenced President Obama.

In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia.

• Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and
  
• you gradually or suddenly die.
  

The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England.

• The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan.
  

A woman in the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation.

• He said I would advise her to take a pain killer.
  
• That is the essence of the President of the United States.

• JW: Do you think Obama is shallow?

NH: It's much worse than that. Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important. You see that in his foreign policy.

• Obama lacks a backbone—both a constitutional backbone
  
• and a personal backbone.
  

This is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally. I say personally because I am 84 years old, and this is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.

• JW: But he is praised for his charisma and
  
• great smile. He can make people believe things just by his personality.

NH: That was a positive factor in his election. A good many people voted for Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country. They felt good even though they didn't really know much about him and may have had some doubts....

• If the country is injured,
  
• they will be injured. That may be sinking in.

• JW: One of the highest unemployment rates in the country is among African-Americans.

NH: Not only that, the general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum. As usual, the people who are poorest—the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people—are going to suffer more than anyone else under the Obama administration. This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the Obama administration are not believable.

• I can't think of a single area where Obama is not destructive.

• JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?

NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country.

• A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans,
  

why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.

• JW: Less than 3% of high school students can pass the immigration test while over 90% of people from foreign countries can pass it. The questions are simple—such as, "What is the supreme law of the land?" or "Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" Civic education in the United States is basically dead.

NH: I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?"

• Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories. When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.

• Young people get very excited when they hear
  
• why they are Americans. It is not hard to do.
  

We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.

• JW: Adults are constitutionally illiterate as well.

NH: A few years ago, I was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment. I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe these are bright students.

• JW: I ask law students who attend our Summer Internship Program to name the five freedoms in the First Amendment. I have yet to find one who can.

NH: That is a stunner....

• JW: You don't sound very optimistic.

NH: If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life and they looked at television and read the papers, they would not recognize the country.

• The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on
  
• surface things.
  

They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government. The media ignores what is really going on.... There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved."

• 12/11/09, "America under Barack Obama: An Interview with Nat Hentoff," The Rutherford Institute, oldspeak, via Lucianne.com
  

The United Nations must be relocated outside the United States

A Sudanese climate negotiator says:

• (BBC): "Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the (Copenhagen) accord spelled "incineration" for Africa and compared it to the

• Nazis sending "6 million people into furnaces" in the Holocaust."...12/19/09

The UN has stoked hysteria and hatred against the US using 'climate' as a fake weapon. This man (quoted above) had reason to believe he was entitled to enslave American taxpayers and their children. Since American people have no leadership to defend us, no UN of our own, we must protect ourselves by having the UN move its quarters elsewhere.

His face always gives him away. getty photo, last day of snowy Copenhagen. (12/27, Now knowing how humiliated he was, this face makes even more sense).

The Nobel Prize didn't work

• Last day Copenhagen, Guardian live blog: 10.32pm: Kate Horner, Friends of the Earth:

"This is the United Nations and the nations here are not united on this secret backroom declaration....This toothless declaration, being spun by the US as an historic success, reflects contempt for the multilateral process

• and we expect more from
• our Nobel prize winning President."

above via TomNelson

• If they had looked at this multimillionaire's behavior toward his own relatives living in squalor in the slums of Boston and huts in Africa, they would have known he'd leave anybody in the lurch in 2 seconds flat.
  
• On the other hand, who or what lead these unelected elitists to believe they could harness and enslave US citizens and their children indefinitely?
• Did they think this man risked his young life in World War II to allow this country to be enslaved by psychopath billionaire back room crooks like Maurice Strong and George Soros?
• My father, US Air Force pilot, World War II,
• surviving. Standing next to his Stearman biplane.
  

Famous Lord Monckton video

The now famous Lord Monckton video:

• Wherein he explains how Obama will cede US sovereignty in Copenhagen. It's about an hour and a half. via Watt's Up with That. video from 10/14/09
  

Russians: UK climate unit manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

"Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

• The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the
  
• Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

• The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process,
  
• rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

• IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

• Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.

• As Richard North says: This is serial.

UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil

And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent

And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:

• The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else.
  
• They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available.
  
• They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated,
  
• ignored length of data set.

One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done.

• The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860,
  
• the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.""...

from UK Telegraph, James Delingpole, 12/16/09

Memo to Maurice Strong: "Our" economy is not "your" economy. Butt out.

• 10/13/09: "What is the crux of the climate change challenge?

Maurice Strong: "The unsustainable nature of our current economic system was dramatically revealed by both the climate change and the economic crises. They are inextricably linked on a systemic, integrated basis and

• cannot be managed as separate and competing issues. "...

So you'll help us out by taking the whole thing over including the US. Look, take all your dirty money made from scams like stealing food from Iraqi children via the UN Oil for Food scandal and butt out.

• Maurice Strong, advocating as he did in the 1990's, the fall of the US:
• Strong: "Only through fundamental change can we transcend these crises and
  
• rebuild the economic and social foundations of our civilization
  
• to ensure its survival and sustainability."...

One has nothing to do with the other, climate v the sub prime scam, except that the same crooks are behind both crimes.

Man incapable of changing outcome of ever-shifting landmasses

1/2004: "No one knows what will happen in the future; but it is clear that Britain within the Eurasian plate is still moving northwards, at about 0.8 cm per year.

• Palaeographers are sure that this movement will continue for at least the next
  
• 50 million years, moving north and east towards the North Pole.

• Prof. Christopher Scotese has gone further, and predicts that in 250 million years Britain will lie where Siberia is now....

We now have indications to suggest that at least three supercontinents like Pangea have existed at different times in the Earth's distant past,

• each of which broke up and rejoined.
  
• Whatever we do to our atmosphere and climate,

even Man is unable to affect this 'dance of the continents', and can only to speculate - although we will not be around long enough to witness the accuracy of any of the predictions."

• Paleogeography, The Geography of the Prehistoric World

Desperate times--Goldman Sachs Carbon Desk grabs the Digitalis

• graph carbon prices, Chicago Climate Exchange, 12/14/09

• Tony Blair says, even if science doesn't prove it, world still must act on climate change.via Climate Depot.
  

Please note: Conservation, care of our environment and its scarce resources are common sense. These matters are in no way related to islands in the Pacific whose geography is changing over time. Land movements have always existed,

• man has migrated.

ClimateGate emails did come from Siberian server; Global Warming media strongarm tactics

Also from this article:

• The United States changed its method of reporting old temperature data sometime between 1999 and 2007. New method agreed with that used by CRU (the ClimateGate unit) and IPCC. They all changed the warmest year on record from 1934 to 1998.
  

• World mainstream media was a heavier figure in global warming unanimity than scientists were. Examples include pressured reporters at BBC and NY Times.

• (above items appear near end of article).

12/13/09: "The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

• As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

• In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD
  

• that could have been just as warm’.

Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution,

• warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the ‘same old evidence’ that had been around for years.
  

• ‘Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,’ he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006.

‘True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data - but the efficacy of these is still far from established.’

• But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report,
  
• the doubters kept silent.
  

It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and

• instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act
  
• to check the unit’s data and conclusions.

Last week, as an official inquiry by the former civil servant Sir Muir Russell began, I tried to assess Warmergate’s wider significance.

The CRU’s supporters insisted it was limited. ‘In the long term, it will make very little difference to the scientific consensus, and to the way politicians respond to it,’ Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor and a former CRU director, told me.

• ‘I am certain that the science is rock solid.’

He admitted that his CRU colleagues had sometimes used ‘injudicious phrases’, but that was because they kept on being ‘diverted’ from their work by those who wished to scrutinise it. ‘It’s understandable that sometimes people get frustrated,’ he said.

The only lesson the affair had for him was that ‘we have got to get better in terms of explanation. Some scientists still find it quite it difficult to communicate with the public.’

• Others, however, were less optimistic
  

• Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, could in no sense be described as a climate change sceptic, let alone a ‘denier’.
  

• ‘Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action,’ he said. ‘But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.’

Pielke’s verdict on the scandal is damning.

• ‘These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look.
  

'They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators

• but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics.

‘They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance,

• there is no going back.’

Climate science is complicated, and often the only way to make sense of raw data is through sophisticated statistical computer programs.

• The consequence is that most lay individuals - politicians and members of the public alike - have little choice but to take the assurances of scientists such as Davies on trust.

He and other ‘global warmists’ often insist that when it comes to the IPCC’s main conclusions - that the Earth is in a period of potentially catastrophic warming and that the main culprit is man-made greenhouse gas emission - no serious scientist dissents from the conventional view.

• Hence, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s recent comment that those who disagree are
  

• ‘behind-the-times, antiscience, flat-Earth climate sceptics’.

In fact, there is a large body of highly-respected academic experts who fiercely contest this thesis: people such as Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a disillusioned former IPCC member, and Dr Tom Segalstad, head of geology at Oslo University, who has stated that ‘most leading geologists throughout the world know that

• the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible’.

These dissenters focus their criticisms on the IPCC’s analysis of the way the atmosphere works and the models it uses to predict the future.

• However, Warmergate strikes at something more fundamental - the science that justifies the basic assumption that the present warming really is unprecedented, at least in the past few thousand years.

Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had

• ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline’.
  

The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified,

• because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’.

Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’

• However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the
  
• Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling.

Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.

• There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time.
  

• In fact, its subject was more technical - and much more significant.

It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram.

• But it wasn’t just any old diagram.
  

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report -

• the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

• Drawing a diagram such as this
  
• is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use

• ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings
  

• and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

• For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.
  

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were

• no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it.

• In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long

• tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

• Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward,

• because it suggested the past was too warm.
  

• This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

***Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram,

• ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] -
  

I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’***

• Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version.
  

This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly.

• But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious,
  
• problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed -

• but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven

• weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point

• where the decline started, in 1961,
  

• and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated -

• but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.

But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists,

• the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

• On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.

By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

• McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC
  
• not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph.

• ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’
  

Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate.

• Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to
  

• avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database - its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world,
  

• the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.

In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’.

• Critics such as McIntyre had 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’.

Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs.

• The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation.

The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas,

• so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time.

The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ - anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’.

• But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made?

Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.

• This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount:
  

• without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.

In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007,

• ***the US equivalent of the Met Office
  
• had changed the way it adjusted old data.***

The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934.

• Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy,
  
• it was 1998.

At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared.

• But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and
  

• the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.

Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’

• The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big.

‘If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there.

• ‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’

Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Noughties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said,

• that statement may not be true.

Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the

• ***near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media -
  

• a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.***

In part, this is the result of strongarm tactics.

For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that

• asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 -
  

• caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess.
  

‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.

• After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and
  
• tell me you are happier.
  
• We have changed headline and more.’

Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today.

• The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’

Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder

• threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times,
  

accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists ... 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.’

But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats - and the readiness to bow to them - may become rarer.

• ‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.

‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.

‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’

Yes, emails came from here - but we didn't do it, say Russians

Russian secret service agents admitted yesterday that the hacked ‘Warmergate’ emails were uploaded on a Siberian internet server, but strenuously denied a clandestine state-sponsored operation to wreck the Copenhagen summit.

• The FSB - formerly the KGB - confirmed that thousands of messages to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were distributed to the world
  
• from the city of Tomsk, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday last week.
  

Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities

• following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link.
  

They have gathered evidence about how and where the operation was carried out, although they are not prepared to say at this stage who they think was responsible.

• A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.
  

‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’

• The Kremlin’s top climate change official, Alexander Bedritsky, denied the Russian government was involved in breaking into the CRU’s computer system.
  

• ‘You can post information on a computer from any other country. It is nonsense to blame Russia,’ he said."

"Special Investigation: Climate E-mails Row Deepens as Russians Admit they DID come from their Siberian Server," UKMailonline, 12/13/09, by David Rose,

via Lucianne.com

Soros/Obama approval at all time low-12/13/09

The Rasmussen Poll most accurately predicted the results
of the 2008 election.

• For those who don't like Rasmussen's results: He asks more questions. He....works.....harder...sorry. Have a nice day.
  

via Gateway Pundit

'Fight.'

• "“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed,

if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when

• you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival.

There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory,

• because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”"...

-Winston Churchill

• from Erick Erickson, RedState.com, 'Fight.'
  

The Climate/Media Mafia is serious. Obama invokes the military against CO2.

Obama from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

• "“It is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action –
• it’s military leaders in my own country
  

• and others who understand that our common security
  
• hangs in the balance.”"...

In "his own country," "military leaders"...yes. Victory is within sight for Soros and Goldman Sachs, and thanks again to the GOP and John McCain.

• Quote from transcript at Fox Nation via Gateway Pundit

Soros, why don't you back the loans yourself?

"The guy has tons of money and has no doubt whatsoever that global warming is cooking the planet and that it's

• all the fault of human industry and innovation.

But, as usual, he wants you and me paying for this boondoggle.

• Not surprising from a guy like Soros,
  
• who has never created
  
• anything.

...Only now, when all the rules of nature are suspended to accommodate quack science, can all the losers finally sink their loser teeth into all the great inventors and imaginers who built the car engine, fed the world, saved millions of lives and made the world better for just about everyone alive.

• George Soros has always been a vulture sitting on the sidelines of all this great creation.

Now, it's important not to belittle the value of vultures. There is good reason federal law protects the scavengers of road kill. They are willing to dine on the carrion the rest of us would rather not touch.

• Likewise, Soros bets on the collapse of currencies and makes out huge.

But nowhere in nature do vultures step forward and

• demand to be treated like sweet-voiced canaries
  

• to be kept in your living room only to void their vile diet all over civilized people.

Soros is the Larry Flynt of finance. Yet, somehow, he manages to get invited to all the big parties, whether he's lobbying to tax into oblivion small business owners and family farmers in America or to punish industrious countries everywhere for all their mighty advancements.

• Yesterday's con was all about the money -- it's always about the money -- rich countries paying poor countries to cope with all this global warming that
  
• UN scientists have so much trouble proving actually exists.

Soros' idea is that the International Monetary Fund would "loan" huge amounts of money -- $100 billion -- to impoverished countries at highly advantageous rates.

In the unlikely event of a default, the loan would be backed by IMF gold reserves.

• But no need to talk about that because, really, does anybody think Bangladesh might possibly fail to meet its obligations or do anything dishonorable,
  
• like skip out on the bill?

Here's an idea, George: Why don't you back the loans yourself and

• let Americans and hard, imaginative workers everywhere get back to work improving the planet?"

NY Post column, "Eco-Vulture has a bone to Pick," by Charles Hurt, 12/11/09; photo of Soros via Wall st. folly via ny post, Paul Allen's yacht before Bon Jovi's yacht.

Quel surprise....America-hater George Soros in Copenhagen telling them how to get our money!

Starving children in Kenya due to crop displacement for plantings better suited for carbon offsets. Children photo from Time.

• Hedge Fund and currency manipulator George Soros has made money by causing massive human suffering.

Twice convicted of stock fraud, on the pain of millions, he has extracted billions of dollars. His stated goal is to see the breakup of the US-he said the currect financial crisis is a culmination of his life's work. Now he rescues international America Haters, Inc. in Copenhagan, telling them they can get America's money without dimwit Americans realizing it. Use the IMF.

• Look for the World Bank and IMF to displace the UN in taking in and disbursing monies in one world government (disguised as CO2 management).
  

• Note: Under Obama, we are to be subservient to the IMF, WSJ Online, end of article, 4/27/09
  

"Billionaire George Soros has just instructed how to obtain $100 billion dollars to the global fight against climate change." (Don't these people read the papers? First, there is no man-made climate change. Second, the UN has collected and spent billions on so-called climate change projects which are demonstrably corrupt and worthless).

• This scam has come this far because United States citizens have no one representing them. No one. Job one is for someone to speak out every time the media refers to us as a "rich" country. We are bankrupt, "poor" by any definition, with no hope whatsoever for a turnaround.
  

12/10, BERLINGSKE: "The world's rich countries can without tormenting their taxpayers mobilize 500 billion dollars to rescue the world's climate.

• It considers the Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros, who Thursday morning presented his proposal for financing climate at UN climate conference COP15 in Bella Center.

World'll need much more money than the 10 billion dollars (50 billion dollars, ed.) Annually from 2010, which has been proposed. 10 billion dollars is not nothing.

• But it is not much, says Soros.
  

He suggests instead that the world's rich countries can provide the 500 billion dollars to fund a green environment by

• activating the reserves they have available in the International Monetary Fund, IMF.

The rich countries can borrow these so-called SDRs out into the world's poorest countries, and as you can, according to George Soros to use gold reserves in the IMF, which also has a

• value of 100 billion U.S. dollars to pay interest on the loans from the world's rich countries to poor.

On This avoids burdening the national budget in the world's rich countries at a time when you are hit by the crisis, said Soros, who stresses that the IMF countries have already decided that gold reserves will be used for the benefit of the world's poorest.

• Soros also said that he believes that China will be a net contributor to and receives from this global arrangement to fund climate projects in poor countries.

Soros has personally decided to invest a billion dollars - or almost 5 billion dollars in clean energy technologies."

• article in Berlingske by Claus Kragh, "How will it 500 billion dollars," google translation from Danish.photo reuters

The UN has suspended China from climate money due to corrupt practices, UK Telegraph, 12/8/09, very end of article, of course.