Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility
February 7, 2010 by Jonathan Leake

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.

This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself.

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New errors in IPCC climate change report

New errors in IPCC climate change report
February 6, 2010 by Richard Gray and Ben Leach

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.

But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:

The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.

Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.

More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.

Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.

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Obama Reads Word “Corpsman” as “Corpse Man” Twice

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If Obama fails, the country succeeds

The Electorate vs. Obama’s Agenda
February 5, 2010 by Charles Krauthammer

“I am not an ideologue,” protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

…

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

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Bailout cop: TARP’s not working

Bailout cop: TARP’s not working
January 31, 2010 by David Ellis

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The watchdog charged with monitoring the government’s $700 billion bailout unleashed one of his harshest criticisms of the program to date, questioning its overall effectiveness.

In his latest quarterly report to Congress, special inspector general Neil Barofsky said that the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, has failed to boost bank lending as well as halt the spread of foreclosures — two key aims of the sprawling program.

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Wheels fall off global-warming hysteria

Wheels fall off global-warming hysteria
January 31, 2010 by Lorne Gunter

I can’t recall the wheels coming off the bus of any expert-driven hysteria as fast or as completely as they are now coming off the global-warming scare.

I suppose they must have came off faster from Y2K. At 12:00:01 AM on Jan. 1, 2000, when airliners didn’t fall from the sky and power plants didn’t shut down spontaneously or computers didn’t freeze up all over the world, the air came out of the Y2K scare instantly. Billions had been spent on preventing that disaster-that-never-was up until midnight on the final day of 1999, then almost not a penny afterwards.

That is faster than the wheels are coming off the climate-change bus. But AGW — anthropogenic global warming — is a very close second.

News of the manipulations, distortions and frauds perpetrated to advance and preserve the environmentalists’ cause celebre are so numerous and coming so fast, it’s hard to keep up.

First, of course, there were the e-mails and computer files leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) -one of a handful of climate-research centres around the world that are the pillars of the United Nations’ claims about impending climate doom. The CRU leaks showed many of the world’s leading climate scientists discussing how they could torque their research to show more recent warming than there has been, conceal their “tricks” from other scientists and government investigators, and pressure scientific journals not to publish reports by dissenting scientists.

Then a couple of weeks ago came the news that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate-change arm, had based its most recent findings on Himalayan glacier melt on an old study that had never been peer-reviewed or even published and which was based entirely on the speculation (not research) of a single Indian scientist who now works at the environmental think-tank run by the head of the IPCC, economist Rajendra Pachauri.

This by itself wouldn’t be devastating, except that the scientist in charge of the glacier chapter of the IPCC’s latest assessment report (AR4) admitted he had known the melt estimate was wrong but had included it anyway because “we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

That’s not climate science, it’s environmental activism, pure and simple — using misleading figures to whip up alarm and bring about political action.

Another revelation of malfeasance this week was the discovery that the chapter on Amazon rainforests in the IPCC’s AR4, the one that included the often-repeated claim that 40 per cent of the forest is under imminent threat from climate change, was written not by climate scientists but by an policy analyst who works for environmental groups and a freelance environmental author. Like the glacier chapter, it was written not to present the latest dispassionate scientific data, but to present a propaganda case that would produce the policy outcome the UN and the IPCC want. It confirmed that the UN is a player for one side in the climate debate, not the source for object facts.

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Now we demand the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism policies!?

What exactly did Bush and Cheney do wrong?
February 2, 2010 by Glenn Greenwald

As I noted several days ago, it is not only Republicans — but Democratic and media establishment figures as well — who clearly crave the preservation of the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and civil liberties.  When Bush’s popularity collapsed to historic lows, political and media elites pretended for awhile to object to his administration’s fear-based and radical policies as extremist and an assault on “our values.”  But that was all just such a transparent pretense.  In those few instances where Obama has rejected the Bush/Cheney template, the outrage and hysteria from Democratic and media voices is pervasive, and is growing louder.

Just look at these illustrative incidents.  Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell went on Fred Thompson’s radio show yesterday to demand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be put before a military commission — at Guantanamo.  Over the weekend, Time’s Joe Klein lambasted the Obama DOJ, and embraced Bush’s former CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden, by objecting to the criminal charges and Constitutional rights afforded the accused Christmas Day bomber, with Klein decreeing:  “the bomber is an enemy combatant.  He doesn’t have Miranda rights.”  MSNBC personalities Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie chatted yesterday with their boss, MSNBC Washington Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker, all agreeing that the decision to grant civilian trials for ”Terrorists” is “a pure, self-inflicted wound.”  When Najibullah Zazi was arrested for allegedly plotting a serious Terrorist attack, The New Republic’s Michael Crowley said he was so frightened by this that he was open to torturing Zazi.  Democratic Senators are threatening to join the GOP in cutting off funds for civilian trials.  Democratic members of Congress joined with the GOP to prevent even modest reforms of the Patriot Act and other surveillance abuses.  City officials compete with one another over who can be the most frightened and terrorized by Terrorists.

And The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen — who was so frightened by Terrorism that he wrote multiple screeds screeching that we must have vengeance on Saddam — devotes his entire column today to criticizing Obama for putting us In Grave Danger by rejecting a handful of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies

…

look at what Cohen is saying: Bush “soiled America’s image,” but what he did was right, just and necessary, and Obama should follow that — which is essentially what many Democratic Party and media elites are saying as well. Seriously: if you were a Bush follower, wouldn’t you feel as though you were owed a major apology for all the accusations and the fuss that came from Democrats and media figures, accusing you of supporting radical and Constitution-shredding policies when, it turns out, they actually crave those policies in order to feel safe? Doesn’t all of this bolster the Republican claim that those attacks on the Bush administration for civil liberties abuses were not due to genuine conviction, but rather for partisan gain (in the case of Democratic officials) and cheap, preening, wet-finger-in-the-air moralizing (in the case of media stars)?

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Study shows abstinence education does work

Abstinence-only programs might work, study says
February 2, 2010 by Rob Stein

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

“I think we’ve written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence,” said John B. Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who led the federally funded study. “Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used.”

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, comes amid intense debate over how to reduce sexual activity, pregnancies, births and sexually transmitted diseases among children and teenagers. After falling for more than a decade, the numbers of births, pregnancies and STDs among U.S. teens have begun increasing.

The Obama administration eliminated more than $170 million in annual federal funding targeted at abstinence programs after a series of reports concluded that the approach was ineffective. Instead, the White House is launching a $114 million pregnancy prevention initiative that will fund only programs that have been shown scientifically to work — a program the administration on Monday proposed expanding to $183 million.

“This new study is game-changing,” said Sarah Brown, who leads the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “For the first time, there is strong evidence that an abstinence-only intervention can help very young teens delay sex.”

The study is the first to evaluate an abstinence program using a carefully designed approach comparing it with several alternative strategies and following subjects for an extended period of time, considered the kind of study that produces the highest level of scientific evidence.

“This takes away the main pillar of opposition to abstinence education,” said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the criteria for federal funding of abstinence programs. “I’ve always known that abstinence programs have gotten a bad rap.”

Longtime critics of the approach praised the study, saying it provides strong evidence that such programs can work and might merit taxpayer support.

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Former President of Poland, enemy of Soviet Communism, campaigns for Republican in Chicago

Lech Walesa stumps for conservative IL candidate for governor
February 1, 2010 by Ann Kane

From the Gdansk Lenin Shipyards to the city of the Back of the Yards, Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, and preeminent community organizer, attended a fundraiser on Friday, January 29, to endorse Adam Andrzejewski (an gee eff skie) who is one of six Republicans seeking the nomination of his party for Governor of Illinois.

Walesa , who led trade union strikes in Poland in the early 1980s, managed to bring about needed economic and political change for laborers without resorting to violence.

He led the Solidarność or Solidarity, a broad anti-Soviet social movement. Its activities included workers taking to the streets to demand the right to self-govern in a communist country. Eventually, Solidarity claimed victory, and the Polish people elected Walesa as president in 1990.

In a video-taped interview by a group known as foundingbloggers.com, Walesa indicated that the U.S. was heading toward socialism because of two factors:

The issue with the banks; and the government wastes all the money; they build a bureaucracy; just for itself.

He went on to reassure:

But we will not let you devolve to communism here.

While at the fundraising luncheon, Walesa spoke about the U.S. in relationship to the world.

The U.S. is a superpower. Nobody doubts that. Today they lead the world-militarily. They also lead economically, but they are weak.

They don’t lead morally and politically any more. The world has no leadership. The U.S. was the last resort and hope for all the nations. Today we have lost the hope.

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UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim

UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim
January 31, 2010 by Jonathan Leake

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

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