November 29, 2009
Jonathan Leake
The storm began with just four cryptic words. “A miracle has happened,” announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change.
“RC” said nothing more — but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate.
There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
Jones is a key player in the science of climate change. His department’s databases on global temperature changes and its measurements have been crucial in building the case for global warming.
What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning.
In one, Jones boasted of using statistical “tricks” to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature. In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.
November 29, 2009
Jonathan Leake
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
.timesonline.co.uk
November 29, 2009
Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden was within the grasp of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001, but U.S. military leaders decided not to grab him, resulting in the long-term terror war that continues today, a new Senate report says.
The report comes as President Obama prepares to announce his decision on sending more troops to the region, including reportedly 9,000 Marines who will be deployed in short order after the announcement.
A review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Usama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora,” reads the 49-page report authored by Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff for Chairman John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate.
MORE…...foxnews.com/
November 29, 2009
By Byron York
Jacob Weisberg, of Slate and Newsweek. Weisberg argues that if Barack Obama manages to pass a national health care bill by January 20, 2010, the first anniversary of his inauguration, he will have “accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency.”
While Weisberg — who last made a splash by amplifying White House attacks on Fox News — gives Obama credit for other accomplishments, like the stimulus and putting America “on a new footing with the rest of the world,” he suggests that the success of Obama’s first year depends greatly on the passage of health care legislation. And while some advocates of the Democratic bills currently under consideration have tried to downplay the enormity of the changes the legislation would bring, Weisberg is entirely open about Obama’s goal of nationalizing health care, expanding government, and undermining the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
“We are so submerged in the details of this debate…that it’s easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the impending change,” Weisberg writes. “For the federal government to take responsibility for health coverage will be a transformation of the American social contract and the single biggest change in government’s role since the New Deal. If Obama governs for four or eight years and accomplishes nothing else, he may be judged the most consequential domestic president since LBJ. He will also undermine the view that Ronald Reagan permanently reversed a 50-year tide of American liberalism.”
READ MORE…..http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
November 28, 2009
By HUMAN EVENTS
1. It’s Not Getting Hotter: Five major international climate centers report that average global temperatures have not risen over the past 11 years.
2. It’s Bad Science: A British judge ruled that teachers in Great Britain’s school system will be required to issue a warning before they show students An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s controversial film on global warming.
3. It’s Just a Tax: Energy costs will soar under the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill, and those costs will be passed on to consumers. Obama Administration Budget Director Peter Orszag has estimated that a 15% decrease in emissions would cause the average American family to pay $1,300 in additional utility costs a year.
4. It Will Spread Your Wealth Around: The Obama Administration’s goal is to raise $650 billion through the energy tax. But only $150 billion of that will be devoted to alternative energy production, while $500 billion gets redistributed to people who don’t pay income taxes.
READ MORE…...humanevents.com/
November 27, 2009
The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress enacted a law banning the government from providing funds to the group.
The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it.
Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about $53 million in federal aid, much of it grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for providing various services related to affordable housing.
But the group has become a prime target for conservative critics, and on Oct. 1, President Obama signed into law a spending bill that included a provision that said no taxpayer funds — including funds authorized by previous legislation — could be “provided to” the group or its affiliates.
CONTINUED…...nytimes.com/
November 27, 2009
Global Warming game has been rigged from the start.
This is part of an Opinion article from the Wall Stree Journal.
We don’t doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.’s Fourth Assessment Report: “Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?” does not “read well,” it’s true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn’t delete any such emails.)
But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the “peer-review” process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.
FULL ARTICLE…...wsj.com/
November 26, 2009
By Thelma Guitierrez and Wayne Dash
The high school honor student and the NFL’s highest-paid defensive back stroll down the destitute streets of Skid Row.
“I can sell you something right quick,” a drug dealer hisses.
Another shouts, “Gonna whoop your ass!” More expletives are hurled.
Seventeen-year-old Kenneth Chancey is giving a tour to Nnamdi Asomugha, showing the NFL star the streets that he and his sister used to walk to get to school while living in a Skid Row homeless shelter. Prostitutes, addicts and drug dealers scatter. “Camera! Camera!” they shout.
The two make it safely past the park, one of the roughest areas of Los Angeles. An orange soda whizzes through the air, nearly hitting the teen and the Oakland Raiders‘ All-Pro cornerback worth $45 million.
“Wow,” the teen says. “I’m sure they watch you every Sunday, and they don’t even recognize who you are.”
It is Kenneth’s inner strength and his love for education that have brought together this high school class president and NFL star.
“The thing I took away is how fearless he is,” Asomugha said later. “The things he’s been through are so big and so severe — they were threatening our lives and throwing things at us on Skid Row. But it doesn’t bother him.
“His potential meter is at 1,000 right now.”
Escaping through education
Even while Kenneth lived on Skid Row, he dreamed of attending Harvard to become a neurosurgeon. When Asomugha saw Kenneth’s story on CNN, he wanted to help. He runs a foundation, the Asomugha College Tour for Scholars, that takes talented inner-city kids on tours of college campuses they otherwise would never be able to see. He’s helped get 25 teens into college over the last four years.
CONTINUED…...cnn.com
