Best couple of lines from Bradley Fikes in the NC Times (h/t WUWT):

A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.

Boy, was I naive.

Read the rest.

. . . I can take stock of the latest from the global warming alarmists.

We have some evidence of groupthink, courtesy of Andrew Bolt . . .

. . . evidence that the IPCC head is in it for a lot more than the goodness of his heart, from the London Telegraph . . .

. . . and a very dangerous idea from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown – also in the Telegraph (via Planet Gore, emphasis added):

Gordon Brown is drawing up plans for the European Union to become a global warming “policeman”, monitoring individual countries’ compliance with carbon-cutting targets.

The plan emerged from the chaotic Copenhagen conference on climate change, which ended in acrimony and mistrust between world leaders.

The summit was unable to reach a substantive deal on cutting greenhouse gases because of a row over how countries would prove that they are honouring promises to cut their carbon emissions. China in particular objected to any external monitoring of its actions.

Mr Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy now are working proposals for a “European monitoring organisation” that will oversee every country’s actions on emissions.

I mention this because I know many people who are convinced the United Nations will, someday, shake off its incompetence and impose global government on all of us.  I repeat what I have always told them: don’t waste your time with those clowns; keep your eye on the EU – when it comes to eroding sovereignty and self-government, they actually know what their doing.

Cross-posted to RWL

The end of the Copenhagen nonsense will bring more attention to Washington, in particular the EPA finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  Many Democrats are hoping the EPA finding will pressure Congress into passing cap-and-tax, while others see the potential for the EPA running the show and seeing that as the best outcome.

However, as Stephen F. Hayward notes in the Weekly Standard, the EPA ruling is a political minefield for the alarmists, one that could block actual regulation for years – and give skeptics plenty of time to ensure it never happens - while the “science” behind it continues its collapse.

After all, Copenhagen was supposed to be the moment global warming succumbed to “global governance” – and we know how that turned out.

Cross-posted to RWL

The good news is the alarmists are furious (Washington Post).  The bad news is the president has a pretense of an “agreement” (WaPo) to browbeat Congress or justify EPA regulation.

The politics of this have shifted slightly in the alarmists favor here, but not nearly enough to be of any significance once the impact of Climategate is fully felt.  Outside the US, the “deal” means nothing (Andrew Bolt).

All in all, the conference was about as good as it could get for AGW skeptics.

Cross-posted to RWL

Andrei Illiaranov, founder of Moscow’s Institute for Economic Analysis, senior fellow at the CATO Institute (h/t Planet Gore), and former economic adviser to Vladimir Putin, comments on the IEA climate data study (emphasis added):

The IEA report shows that Russian meteorological-station data in the last 130 years did not substantiate the rate of warming on Russian territory suggested by the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature (HadCRUT) database, which has now been partially released.

IEA analysts point out that Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, while the HadCRUT used data from only 25% of such stations in their calculations. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in their global temperature calculations even though there was no lack of meteorological stations and observations. The data of stations located in areas not listed in the HadCRUT survey often shows slight cooling or no substantial warming in the second part of the 20th century and the early 21st century.

. . .

On the whole, HadCRUT specialists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations. IEA analysts found that the climatologists used the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the “urban heat effect” more frequently than the unbiased data from the stations located in less populated places.

The IEA authors calculated that the scale of actual warming for the Russian territory in 1877-1998 was probably exaggerated by 0.64°C. Since Russia accounts for 12.5% of the world’s land mass, such an exaggeration for Russia alone should have an impact on the IPCC claim that the global temperature in the last century has risen by 0.76°C.

. . .

The IEA report concludes that it is necessary to recalculate all global temperature data in order to assess the real rate of temperature change during the last century. Global temperature data will have to be modified because the calculations used by Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change analysts are based on HadCRUT research.

In other words, the entire global warming apparatus has been built upon sand.  All of the delegates in Copenhagen are relying on a model that is at best deeply flawed and, given the evidence above, more likely an outright fraud.

This is so big that, of course, MSM must ignore it at all costs, except for NPR – of all places!

Cross-posted to RWL

Acccording to this translation website, the above is Russian for “hide the decline” (UPDATE: the parenthetical piece is “updated and bumped”), and according to Kommersant (cited by RiaNovosti and then SDA and WUWT), that’s exactly what was done to Russian temperature data (emphasis added):

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.

Russia was one of the very few places that seemed to still be warming as the rest of the world levelled off this decade – and now we know why: the data was “probably tampered with.”

This also marks Asia as the fourth continent where data has been fudged (the others are North America, Australia, and Antarctica).

UPDATE: As James Delingpole notes in the London Telegraph, this is about a lot more than just Russia:

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.

Back to the Kommersant account to explain why (emphasis added):

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.

For the mathematically challenged, 12.5% is one-eighth.  That’s enough to tilt the entire model.  We now have evidence that the global warming alarmism is, indeed, fraudulent.

This is huge – which, of course, means no one in MSM will cover it.  It’s up to us, in the blogosphere – again – to inform the American people, which is why I’m bumping this (to the consternation of Redskin fans and Mrs. Riley - Congrats on the little guy!) to ensure more readers are aware of just how dramatic this is.

Cross-posted (with slight modification) to RWL

Gerald Warner (Telegraph, UK) seems to think so (although it should be noted that, like here, MSM does not include the papers willing to acknowledge their viewpoints – such as the Telegraph and most of the British tabloid press such as the Daily Express - h/t Andrew Bolt), and the reaction from the once-lefty now MSM-approved Guardian is Exhibit A in Warner’s favor (Damian Thompson, Telegraph).

Cross-posted to RWL

This time, his source on the “melting ice caps” cuts his legs out from under him (Times of London via WUWT):

Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

Again, this will come as a shock to those living outside the United States, but for us Americans, Gore’s issues with the truth come as no surprise.

Cross-posted to RWL

Deceptive headline aside – David Rose (Sunday Mail, UK) provides the details on the decline that was hidden, how it was done, and why it was done.

In effect, the climate alarmists thought they had a tree-ring dataset that would disprove the medieval warm period (MWP).  The only trouble was that the dataset depicted temperatures falling since 1960, which pretty much exploded its value as a descriptor of the past, let alone a projector of the future.

So, as Iain Dale reveals in his post on the subject, the alarmists simply stopped showing the tree-ring dataset data after 1960, letting the actual temperature data rise by its lonesome – and giving the anti-MWP tree-ring data far more credibility that it deserved.

This was “Mike’s Nature Trick” used to “hide the decline.”  Of course, we now know plenty of other examples of this regarding actual temperature data, but this was the first one revealed to the world by the unnamed whistleblower.

That this was allowed by the entire alarmist community – including the IPCC – reveals how thoroughly corrupted it became.

Cross-posted to RWL

All courtesy of Watts Up With That: the Tennessee edition (I can’t wait for the country song that this inspires), the California edition, and the Antarctica edition.

Cross-posted to RWL

Jonah Goldberg has the best analysis of this at NRO. Read the whole thing, but here are the crticial points:

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation.  The finding comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO₂ falls under the EPA’s jurisdiction.

A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox’s Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: “If you don’t pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation . . . the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. . . . And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

And such “uncertainty” is a huge “deterrent to investment,” which will hurt the economy even more.

Translation: We don’t want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn’t act, well, a-groin-kickin’ we shall go.

This is grotesquely dishonest.

The White House and Congress could, quite easily, do something about the EPA’s threat. President Obama could instruct Jackson to interpret the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision granting the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gases more loosely. He could ask Congress to simply rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to exclude carbon dioxide from its list of official pollutants — the policy the EPA followed for years until the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Clean Air Act.

But no.

As part of the enduring statist desire to penetrate ever deeper into every nook and cranny of our lives, greens have wanted to find a way for the government to regulate CO₂, a natural byproduct of fire and breathing, for decades. Now they can.

That is why the White House will use Jackson as a Medusa’s head, to petrify cap-and-trade opponents with the prospect of something even worse: the effective seizing of the means of production.

I know most of the blogosphere’s focus has been on health care – and more power to the folks fighting that good fight – but I have always believed this was the more dangerous issue, and the above is why.  The left has repeatedly used this issue as its excuse for permanent and massive economic regulation (and, in some cases, doing away with human rights and democracy – see Tom Friedman and Diane Francis, via LifeNews, for those).

Again, Goldberg sums it up perfectly in his column:

Indeed, some of loudest voices have a weird habit of telegraphing their priorities. Tim Wirth, a former senator and now chairman of the United Nations Foundation, once said: “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” New York Times columnist and prominent warm-monger Thomas Friedman has repeatedly said (most recently this week) that he doesn’t care if global warming is a “hoax” because, even if it is, the fear of it will force us to do what we need to do.

And it just so happens that with the exception of nuclear power — which most greens still won’t support — global warming fuels nearly every progressive ambition. Wealth transfers from rich to poor nations: Check. The rise of “global governance” and the decline of American sovereignty: Check. A secular fatwa not only to erode capitalism but to intrude on every aspect of our lives (Greenpeace offers a guide to carbon-neutral sex): Check. Weaning us off of oil (which, don’t let the Goregonauts fool you, was a priority back when we were still worried about global cooling): Check. The checks go on for as far as the eye can see, and we will be writing them for years to come.

There is some hope here.  Any regulation proposed by the EPA (assuming Congressional opponents of this nonsense remain unmoved) can be challenged in court (and it’s a sure bet it will be).  Unless I miss my guess, Congress can refuse to authorize any funds to enforce the regulation – and given Climategate, that could happen even before the November elections.  It can certainly happen after the elections (it’s almost certain the regs will still be tied up in lawsuits then).  Finally, there’s always 2012, and the chance to replace this Administration with one determined to let us live our lives again.

However, we have to make sure this regulation becomes Outrage No. 1 the moment it is announced (before then, I’ll be content with Outrage No. 2 – for now), so that no politician can claim ignorance of this.

Cross-posted to RWL

Now the global warming alarmists are trying to claim that the infamous “hockey stick” graph that brought them to fame and then infamy was never part of their argument.  Roger Pielke, Jr. makes quick work of that nonsense (via NRO Planet Gore).

Cross-posted to RWL

Just in case you think the data manipulation was relegated to the Australian Outback, Dr Richard Keen of the University of Colorada has some illuminating analysis on temperature data in Alaska (Air Vent via Andrew Bolt, emphasis added by Bolt):

My averages show that the past three decades have shown no warming (since the PDO shift in 1977), and are in fact no warmer than the 1935-1944 decade.  This is very different from the IPCC which shows a substantial warming over the past three decades….

One can only guess what “corrections” were applied to the GHCN and IPCC data sets, but I can easily guess their magnitude – about 1 degree.  Curiously, the magnitude of the adjustments is about the same as the “global warming” signal of the past century.

The alarmists, meanwhile, have responded to all of this by browbeating scientists, apprently not realizing what got them in this mess in the first place (Times of London via NRO – Planet Gore, emphasis added):

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails.

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research . . . The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

. . .

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

Given that, they may not even be aware that they’re data-fudging is being exposed.

Cross-posted to RWL

Willis Eschenbach details how the climate data in and around Darwin, Australia was transformed from white noise into a hockey stick (Watts Up With That).  It’s a long post, but well worth the read.  Here’s the kicker:

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style . . . they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

It is now at the point where even the editors of the Free Lance-Star – who went through about half a barrel of ink to prevent my election to the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors – are calling for a reset on climate science and climate politics.  When you start to lose MSM . . .

Cross-posted to RWL

Al Gore has spent the last nine years trying to rebuild his reputation as an international environmental activist – and in the process he has swallowed and advanced the nonsense that has now been exposed as Climategate.

In the rest of the world, this is how he is known – an advocate who, like nearly everyone else involved with this, put faith over facts and damaged his own causes with blatant hypocrisy.

However, those of us who remember Al as a politician (i.e., Americans) remember the other Al Gore, the one who never met a truth he couldn’t fold, spindle, or mutilate.

That Al Gore has come back with a vengeance in reaction to the Climategate fiasco (Andrew Bolt):

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 – just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.

How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?

Apologies to Andrew for scraping the link, but it was the last paragraph that struck me.  To the rest of the world, Al Gore repeating something that is categorically untrue – and unlike “climate change” in the pre-Climategate era, easily refutable – is a shocking event.

For Americans, by contrast, it’s just typical.

It makes me wonder how many Australians (or anyone else outside the U.S.) heard of the time Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

Cross-posted to RWL

I have a group of “right wing” friends.  They are more like acquaintances that I’ve grown up with and I’m kind of like a distant cousin to them.  I grew up Catholic in a republican/democrat house and considered myself a Republican (went out to wave at Reagan when he drove by our house) until I picked up some book learnin’ in college.  These friends of mine are mostly catholic, always speaking about family values, anti-abortion and putting down liberals and talking about the coming apocalypse.  Mostly they are guys in the 20-33 yr old range.   They post on their Facebook pages their arsenal of weaponry and what guns they are going to purchase next.  They regularly post pictures of them with their AK-47s or other guns out in the desert shooting and drinking.  They are also constantly posting anti-Obama and pro-Sarah Palin stuff (seriously) and anti-this-that-and-whatever on Facebook.   Every now and then I answer a quiz they send me and usually pick the opposite of what they choose.

What irks me the most is they have the worst manners.  They are the most uncivilized group of people I’ve ever known.  No social skills whatsoever, mostly “home schooled” or special charter schools or never even got past the 9th grade.  If they are pro-family anti-abortion one minute they are talking about girls they banged the next minute.  A lot of them are musicians and they used to get their kicks going to coffee shops and singing pro-war songs and laughing at the people who booed them.  They are thoroughly rude and stupid and clueless.

So over the course of the last 2-3 years that I was in this circle (but on the outer rings), I asked one of them to a concert because I knew he liked that music (Sting and Elvis Costello).  He was around my age, cute, and I had an extra ticket, so I thought it wold work out great to get to know him better.  I messaged him on myspace, the only way I knew how to get ahold of him (even though he was passed out on my couch, drunk, the night before but left before I had the chance to ask him).  I never ever heard from him about it.  I saw him a few times recently after that concert and he never even said a word to me about anything.  ANYTHING.  Never said “hi” or “I got your message” or “I got your message too late, sorry.”  NOTHING.  Even stopped saying hello, even when he was in MY HOUSE and eating MY FOOD.

Recently, I moved to California to get away from the gangster-redneck mindset, the leeches, the sad memories, and the weather and to pursue my career.  So another of these ‘friends’ that I had some things in common with was in California in my city for his job and it seemed like he was going to be in town for a few weeks and over xmas.  So I messaged him on facebook because his status updates seemed a little lonely and we have some things in common, so I asked him if he wanted to hang out sometime.  NO RESPONSE.  Nothing.  Not even a “no thank you” or “I”m really busy”.  Just NO ACKNOWLEDGMENT whatsoever.

So these are the typical right-wing young people.  They are the pro-Sarah Palin, pro-Limbaugh, Pro-Bush kool-aid drinkers.  I’m done with them.  I am deleting every last one of them (not like they would know, but I won’t have to see their dim-witted posts) and I’m done with them.  If they can’t get over a person’s views (I’m never as in-your-face about them as they are) and have no manners or respect for another person, even a woman, they are lost causes in my book.  Typical right-wing, socially retarded assholes who have no respect for other people.  If this is the future we are pandering to, the Idiocracy trunk of the American family tree, WE ARE ALL DOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nice.  Keep drinking that Kool Aid, guys…

“The one thing they can’t change are the demographics of this state,” Armstrong said. “This state continues to turn blue.”

With many party members convinced November’s losses came because Democratic office seekers did not clearly enough set out policy positions that distinguished them from Republicans, the party took the unusual step of adopting a resolution on a policy issue: With little discussion the central committee voted to encourage all of Virginia’s Democratic members of Congress to support a health care reform bill that includes a public option.

Um, yeah.  The problem with Creigh Deeds was that he didn’t go hard enough to the left during his campaign…  Right.  Try that strategy in 2013, why don’t you?

From Maurizio Morabito at Omniclimate (via Robert Costa of Planet Gore):

An eye-opening “global cooling consensus” CIA document dated 1974 has just been re-discovered in the British Library by Yours Truly and is extensively mentioned today in the (printed) pages of The Spectator (UK) and Il Foglio (Italy).

. . .

“A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems” will make quite an embarrassing reading, especially for:

• the most obdurate catastro-warmists (when they will notice that almost all AGW scares are a search-and-replace job from “cooling” to “warming”), and
• the history deniers fixated on ‘demonstrating’ that a scientific consensus about Global Cooling in the 1970’s were a ‘myth’(*)

And there is more (much more), from ever-improving climate models promising to become good in a few years’ time to the unsettling apparent ease with which Government agencies then (as now) could get scientists to agree on whatever they needed them to agree on.

Nobody aware of the CIA document’s contents should be able to avoid a good chuckle after reading any of the current AGW reports on famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena; on climate-related major economic problems around the world; on Africans getting in climate troubles first; and so on and so forth.

Why? Because it is all too clear that those scares cannot be real, since they have already been mentioned verbatim in all their dramatic effect, but about Global Cooling.

Of course, the cooling stopped, reversed itself for about a quarter-century, and the Global Cooling scare became a Global Warming scare.

Plus ça change, plus ça mème chose.

Cross-posted to RWL

From the Times of London, via Andrew Bolt:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

Of course, we couldn’t have a story like this without a government trying to get in the way of real science (same link):

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

Putting politics before science?  I thought only Texans did that.

Cross-posted to RWL

Robert Grenier (Cube Antics) takes aim at the computer code used as “correction for decline” (via WUWT).  It is a genuine eye-opener.

In effect, the “value added” to the data was a wave designed to make current temperatures look something like this.

 Or, as Edward John Craig from NRO – Planet Gore put it:

CRU would adjust series of actual temperature readings so that they would be skewed toward these values. Add a little fudge, and it’s eternally hockey season.

Cross-posted to RWL

Climategate busted through Canada’s MSM wall, thanks to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of  all places (take the worst of MSM and PBS, and you have the CBC).

The above quote is the best of several gems from Rex Murphy:

First up: Gore’s claim of ManBearPig melting the Kilimanjaro ice is debunked (Pajamas Media):

Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.

The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of  “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”

Whoops!  Maybe Gore was talking about the other Kilimanjaro peak (Flying Circus via Youtube).

Meanwhile, the professors at the heart of Climategate are beginning to resemble, shall we say, rattlesnakes committing suicide (Daily Telegraph):

One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”

This may start to get ugly.

Cross-posted to RWL

Because I’m 5…

Police in Plymouth, England say to be on the lookout for a balding, middle-aged, white male who is definitely a virgin.

And he has man boobs…for those of you taking this seriously.

Officers warn this weirdo wants a whiff of your backside.  The suspect is seen in this surveillance video sniffing a supermarket employee’s behind as he stacks store shelves.

GROSS!!!!!  Do you see the moves this guy has??  I think my favorite is the squat, reach, lean, and sniff  while pretending to be interested in stuff on the bottom (snicker) shelf opposite the store clerk.

The guy totally needs a comic book villain name.  Arse Bandit?  Ass Assaulter?  Bootie Breather?

Sniffy, here, has been caught on camera, not once, but twice.

Cops are treating the incidents as criminal, sexual assault even.

How enraged would you be if you caught this guy behind you???

The store clerk in the video didn’t realize what was happening, but did find it strange that the shopper was lingering so close in the aisle for so long.   The victim had suspicions and told management who pulled the tape.

Police have released the footage hoping someone can identify the suspect.

No scandal has proven so powerful as to heal a politician, but as this letter for Speaker Howell implies, Jim Webb (of all people) might very well have been able to put his infamous foot-and-mouth disease behind him.

Webb’s letter is not seen here, but Howell refers to it thusly:

I am writing in reference to your letter to President Obama, dated November 27, 2009, seeking clarification from the President about his understanding of Executive Branch authority to bind the United States in connection with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. To date, I am unaware of any response you have received from the President regarding this important matter . . . I was pleased it was a U.S. Senator from our Commonwealth who took the time to clarify to our President this important principle of our republic spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. As you note in your letter, our Constitution provides that only legislation agreed upon in the United States Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create a commitment on behalf of our country to an international emissions reduction program.

Howell goes on to describe the danger inherent in the Administration’s end-run around the elected Congress:

Since your November letter, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has claimed the administrative power to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, an unprecedented action that has wide-reaching and potentially negative economic implications for our Commonwealth and Nation. In the wake of the EPA’s action, it has been reported that U.S. diplomats in Copenhagen apparently are assuring the diplomats of other nations that an emissions reduction agreement signed by the U.S. President can be implemented by the EPA regardless of the fact that the U.S. Congress has not passed a cap and trade emissions program.

As the elected leader of the oldest legislative body in the United States, I find it deeply troubling that our
federal government would entertain the idea of undertaking international commitments whose implementation depends on the dictate by an executive branch bureaucracy of potentially draconian and costly rules that the Congress is thus far itself unwilling to impose. If this were to happen, it would be an incredibly troubling erosion of our democratic values.

Now, I’ve been harsh on Howell and Webb (the former less so over the last seventeen months), but both are to be commended for sounding the alarm.  Here’s hoping they keep it up.

Cross-posted to RWL