Vital Remnants

Willis Eschenbach at Watt's Wrong with That? on the beating science itself has taken from the Global Warming crowd:

People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency.

Science works by one person making a claim (hypothesis), and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists attack the work by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry.

Read the rest here.

And while your there, check out the e-mail correspondence detailing the history of unsuccessful attempts Eschenbach has made to get the actual data upon which global warming alarmism is based.

Labels: global warming, science

Labels: jake

Lord Monckton on the scandal that has now enveloped the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where scientists doctored, misrepresented, and destroyed data in order to fabricate a Global Warming crisis:

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

Read the rest here.

Labels: global warming, science

It's now official. Not only is passing on Western civilization declasse among the Educrats, advocating the American Dream may end up costing you your teaching license in some places. We go now to Katherine Kersten at the Wonderland desk of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune:

Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools -- at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching.

...The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

Further proof that the foxes are in charge of the educational henhouse. More here.

HT: Karnick on Culture

Labels: education, political correctness

Gavin Atkins has provided an enjoyable way to while away the hours as the End of the World slowly recedes into the future with a Climate Science quiz. See how much you know about how Global Warming research is really done.

Labels: global warming, science

The chief reason schools are failing is that people don't know what the problem is. And the reason they don't know what the problem is is because the educational establishment is telling us that it is something other than what it is. We need more technology; we need more tests; we need to pay teachers more; we need to spend more money on schools; etc., etc., etc.

But the chief problem with our schools is that, thanks to the wonderful people who are in charge of educational policy, they have fundamentally changed their purpose--and parents haven't caught on. Schools are now so preoccupied with things like technology and multiculturalism and various fads and gimmicks that they have almost literally rendered themselves incapable of doing what schools are meant to do.

So what are schools meant to do?

The chief thing they're meant to do is to pass on Western civilization. But if you said this in a meeting of modern professional educators you would be hooted out of the room--or perhaps rather patted on the head and thanked for your input. And definitely don't bring it up in the education department of you local state university (or, for that matter, any teacher training program).

This is attempted in various places and from time to time. E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s "Core Knowledge" program is implemented at this or that public school--if the school is fortunate enough to have someone there to defend it against its detractors, of which, in the educational establishment, there are many. It is, in fact, a measure of the plight of education in our country that a program such as Hirsch's--in which the simple transmission of cultural knowledge is seen as important--should be so controversial.

Instead of passing on our culture, schools now see themselves as in the business of either adapting children to the current culture through vocationalism or trying to change culture through Political Correctness. These goals are justified on the grounds that our current society and the modern economy demands something fundamentally different from what was demanded in previous times. This, of course, is complete nonsense.

The needs now are the same as they have always been: people who are functionally literate in reading, writing and mathematics, who know history and literature, and who know how to think. Period. But our educational policy is dictated by people who are largely opposed to proven methods of reading instruction, who think that serious instruction in grammar is counterproductive to writing, who promote touchy-feely approaches to math instruction, and who are members of university departments (by which I mean education departments) talk a good game on "critical thinking skills", but know a good specimen of logic if it had a sign on it.

Frank Furedi, author of Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, seems to understand at least part of the problem:

In virtually every Western society, education is in trouble. Unfortunately, however, policymakers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem – unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline – and not the cause.

Yet the main reason education often is not educating is because it finds it difficult to give meaning to human experience. Time and again, curriculum specialists inform us that because we live in a world of rapid change, the conventions and practices of the past have become outmoded, outdated or irrelevant. Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.

The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents...

Read the rest here.

Labels: education

My piece on Gov. Grinch stealing the state Christmas tree ran in today's Lexington Herald-Leader.

Labels: War on Christmas

Retired climatologist Tim Ball on what e-mails between Global Warming advocates traded between each other show about how the science of Global Warming really works:

Labels: global warming, science

It is amazing how liberal journalists all of sudden discover scruples when faced with decisions about printing information that goes against there editorial positions. Here is the Worldwide Standard on the New York Times blog refusing to print e-mails from someone who hacked a server that are causing not a little embarrassment for Global Warming alarmists:

With the release of hundreds of emails by scientists advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors -- including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments -- even the New York Times is forced to concede that "the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists." But apparently the paper's environmental blog, Dot Earth, is taking a pass on publishing any of the documents and emails that are now circulating. Andrew Revkin, the author of that blog, writes,

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Ahem. Has anyone noticed that this is the same paper of record that published the Pentagon Papers?

Labels: global warming, media bias

If you ever wanted to see spinning at its finest, get a load of the response from Real Climate on the embarrassing revelations now coming out on the web from private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the School of Environmental Sciences of the University of East Anglia, an allegedly reputable center for climate research and one of the bastions of Global Warming alarmism. The e-mails were made public after the files were allegedly hacked from a Russian web server, although it is apparently not clear whether they were hacked or released from someone within the community. In any case, the authenticity of the e-mails has apparently been acknowledged.

Here is one assessment from Investigate Magazine:

As the fallout from CRUHACK grows, the biggest story is not actually whether data was manipulated in individual cases, although in my view that's bad. And it's not that global warming scientists were so arrogant in 2004 as to mock the death of an opponent, although that too is bad.

It's not that some of these scientists were sitting on taxpayer-sourced slush funds worth tens of millions of dollars each, for an industry total of somewhere close to US$100 billion, whilst their supporters raised merry-hell about Exxon sponsoring skeptic research to the tune of a few million, although this too is massively hypocritical.

It's not that the scientists show signs of being political activists, and even helping promote a global governance agenda.

No, in my view the biggest scandal to erupt from CRUHACK is the death of peer-reviewed climate science.

We now all know – the entire industrialized world – that while global warming scientists and their supporters were publicly ridiculing skeptic's arguments as "not peer reviewed" because – by implication – the arguments were not good enough, that in fact some of the top scientific advisors to the UN IPCC were conspiring (and that is the right word) to sabotage any attempt by other scientists to publish peer reviewed papers challenging global warming.

And what these e-mails reveal? Well, according the Real Climate, some of whose participants apparently wrote some of the revealing e-mails, nothing important. That is, unless you consider comments that seem to indicate intentions to mislead the public on Global Warming, doctoring data to help their cause, and support for suppressing article submissions to peer-reviewed journals that disagree with politically correct positions on the issue.

Here is a comment from one of the e-mails, referring to several papers from people who have the nerve to disagree with the Approved Opinions:

K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

So, how do we explain that? Here is "Gavin" at Real Climate giving it the ol' college try:

Bad papers clutter up assessment reports and if they don't stand up as science, they shouldn't be included. No-one can 'redefine' what the peer-reviewed literature is.

If the papers are really "bad" (likely translation: "disagree with us"), then why would a "redefinition" of the peer-review process be necessary? And even if they can't actually do it, are we supposed to be comfortable with the fact that Global Warming scientists would like to?

As Investigate Magazine further points out:

The next global warming believer who raises "peer review" as a defence of global warming deserves to be metaphorically tarred and feathered and laughed at for the rest of his or her natural life.

The Wegman report to the US Congress found unhealthy links between the IPCC's scientific advisors. The CRUHACK emails now prove that festering scientific corruption beyond reasonable doubt.

The integrity of climate science died this weekend. It will never be the same.

Looks like some people have some splainin' to do.

Labels: global warming, the End is Near

Labels: Diversity, political correctness

What, you are asking yourself, is all that clatter arising at the State Capitol? There you were, all snug in your bed, with your kerchief and cap, visions of sugar plums dancing in your head, and you have to spring up to see what's the matter.

It's a press release from the Governor's office. So you tear open the shutter and pull up the sash, and what to your wondering eyes should appear but the state Christmas tree that has just arrived.

And there's the little old driver so lively and quick that you know in a moment it must be Gov. Beshear, all dressed in fur, from his head to his foot (and his clothes all tarnished with ashes and soot), cameras flashing, smiling and making sure everyone sees him next to the tree that his administration was going to change to a "Holiday tree"--before, that is, there was a veritable citizens' revolt demanding that the Christmas tree be brought back.

But like all politicians, when they meet with an obstacle, they mount to the sky and make it look like they were on the right side of the issue in the first place. So there he was, his eyes twinkling, his dimples merry, his cheeks like roses and his nose like a cherry, declaring:

“During the first Christmas holidays in 2008 after I became governor, Jane and I had the honor of lighting the Commonwealth’s Christmas tree, and we are looking forward to doing so again this year, and every year while I am governor.”

As one observer pointed out, the word "Christmas" is used in the press release about 56 times, which is why we laughed when we saw it, in spite of ourselves.

Labels: Kentucky, political correctness, War on Christmas