Cooking the decline [update 5]

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”  -  Leo Tolstoy

In Wagner’s opera ‘Twilight of the Gods,’ Hagen is the character who turns fact into fantasy, poisons everything with lies and finally, inevitably, stabs the hero in the back – all in an attempt to grab the gold and gain power over the whole world.

Appropriate then that Hagen’s name appears in name of the city that will almost certainly represent the twilight of either the climate scam or the industry of the free-ish world.

The stakes are that big. Even Al Gore and the scientists exposed by ClimateGate say so – albeit in different words. This could either be the last big push for the warmist con job, or its last hurrah.

The stakes are being upped at the very time that the “science is settled” mob are being shown up as the scamsters many of us have always suspected them of being – because with the release of the “ClimateGate” emails and data, it’s now apparent that “the science” has been “settled” largely by unscientific means.

In simple words, by hiding the decline, cooking the figures, and then deleting the raw data – or in NIWA’s case by massaging it –deleting it rather than releasing it, and finally by barring those who do disagree with the warmist consensus from publishing their work.

Talk about manufacturing consensus out of botched cloth. As even guests on the pro-warmist BBC are now allowed to say, “CRU's programming is 'below commercial standards'.” And not just the programming.

The very peer-review process on which science is supposedly based is corrupted.

The models on which all the climate projections are based are bosh.

The programming itself is botched.

The raw temperature data is either lost, or deleted.

The collection of the raw temperature data itself is seriously flawed.

The collectors for the word’s CO2 data, used to make the link between temperature and AGW, are discovered to be sited near either volcanoes or exhaust stacks.

And the stories of catastrophic sea level rise and ocean acidification are now revealed as just so much nonsense.

It is an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, people. When all that is not gold is washed away from the alleged science, what is left is not truth but only the cyanide used to remove gold from its ore: Not truth, only poison.

Just imagine if climate “researchers” became doctors!

Effectively conceding that his colleagues have been hurt by the recent revelations, Engineer Pachauri --that non-scientist who heads up the alleged scientists of the IPPC -- told BBC Radio just before the Copenhagen that there must be a full investigation of the revelations contained in e-mails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). And the UK’s Met Office announced it would fully reexamine its temperature records to ensure the records are accurate and reliable, even though the re-examination could take three years, is opposed by the British government, and is now being used by the word’s governments to bring down genuine calamity on the world’s producers and taxpayers..

Fact is, their data are so diseased they're all but useless for anything but government work.

If this wasn’t just politics, the gathering at Copenhagen and the Climategate revelation would between them be the Emperor’s New Clothes moment for warmists we all knew was coming.

Nonetheless, even as the basis of their religio-mongering is challenged on the conference floor at Copenhagen, the Climate Change circus cruises along midst the snow and ice of a Scandinavian winter – propelled by 1200 limousines, 140 private jets, free sex, faked figures, massaged projections and phony assumptions used to justify the biggest worldwide tax grab in history on industry, progress and human development.

UPDATE 1: Kevin Green at AEI reckons that when it comes to reacting to a changing climate, adaptation beats strangulation in any case:

  The Earth's climate is prone to sharp changes over fairly short periods of time. Plans that focus simply on stopping climate change are unlikely to succeed; fluctuations in the Earth's climate predate humanity. Rather than try to make the climate static, policymakers should focus on implementing resilience strategies to enable adaptation to a dynamic, changing climate. Resilience strategies can be successful if we eliminate current risk subsidies and privatize infrastructure.

In other words, whatever the failing science says, the best approach is to leave people free to adapt, not so smothered in red tape and taxes that any adaptation is impossible.  As my colleague Bernard Darnton says,

We know that socialism and central planning are unworkable at seventeen degrees.  What makes anyone think it’ll be different at nineteen degrees?”

UPDATE 2: I can’t resist taking a couple of excerpts out of Mark Steyn’s column, to which I made only a passing link above:

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of—to pluck at random—enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths,” are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach ‘consensus’ at Copenhagen. . .
    “How did we reach this point? Ah, well. Like the proverbial sausage factory, you never want to look too closely at how the science gets settled. The other day, a whole bunch of electronic documents most probably leaked by a disaffected insider from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were posted online . . .
    “[P]erhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest ‘climate research’ at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless.
    “Let Ian ‘Harry’ Harris, who works in ‘climate scenario development and data manipulation’ at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science?     After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:

    “ ‘ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
    “ ‘OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.’

“Thus spake the Settled Scientist: ‘OH F–K THIS.’ And on the basis of ‘OH F–K THIS’ the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world. . .
    “Some in the political class go along because it’s too much effort to resist. A few are presumably true believers. But what a lot of the rest like about ‘global warming’ is the ‘global’ bit: you can’t do anything about it at town or county or even national level. No, sir, we need a ‘global’ response. Fortunately, as Herman Van Rompuy, ‘president’ of ‘Europe,’ puts it: 2009 is the first year of global governance.’
    “That’s great news, isn’t it? I would urge the delegates at Copenhagen to listen to the experts and issue a comprehensive statement fully reflecting the rigorous scientific evidence. Here’s my draft:

             “' ‘OH F–K THIS.’ ”

UPDATE 3: ClimateGate makes the NZ mainstream media--well, the Otago Daily Times—in a thorough and very readable piece outlining some of the more notable warmist scams used in recent years to “hide the decline.”

Read The case for global warming is in serious doubt – OTAGO DAILY TIMES.

UPDATE 4: Owen McShane:

First the CRU. Then the NIWA ‘adjustments’.
Now the Darwin Smoking Gun.
    “Suggest you wait an hour or so and then go to Watts Up With That, and read ‘The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero.‘
These guys are great adjusters.
There is an incredibly cheap way to address global warming.
Just go back to the original data and get rid of all these ‘adjustments.’
    “There can be little doubt that the IPCC global warming is man made – just man made with an Excel spreadsheet.
    “Throw the sheets into the bin, and all will be cool.”

UPDATE 5: On the first day of CopenHagen, TVNZ’s Close Up chose to air a debate between Ian Wishart and Gareth Morgan on the science of global warming.  Sure, it wasn’t the scientists themselves – it wasn’t Chris de Freitas versus Jim Salinger, which would have been something to see – but seeing ten minutes of AGW debate in prime time was really something to watch.

Watch it here.

And by the way, just in case you’re wondering . . . the public vote which viewers were requested to make came down 70-30 in favour of climate skepticism.