Voters have really had it with the dysfunction in DC coming from both parties. As the left and right establishment attempt to control who is their standard bearer (versus attracting voter support) the electorate is leaving both parties to go independent:

A report released Wednesday by the centrist think-tank Third Way showed that more than 825,000 voters in eight key battleground states have fled the Democratic Party since Obama won election in 2008.

…

Amid frustrating partisan gridlock and unprecedentedly low party-approval ratings, the number of voters registering under a major party is falling fast, but it is also falling disproportionately.

In eight states that will be must-wins in 2012 — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — Democrats lost 5.4 percent of their registered voters while Republicans lost 3.1 percent.  The number of independent voters in those states jumped 3.4 percent.

Democrats started ahead in numbers, so while the percentage of GOP defections has been less percentage wise, the fact is both parties are hemorrhaging support.

There will likely be more independent voters in the upcoming election than there has been in nearly 50 years, according to the report.

I think the character assassination of Herman Cain was the last straw with many voters who want a say in who is nominated. They are fed up with the power brokers in the parties and those inane talking heads (whose only expertise is in the sewer of politics) deciding who is worthy. That decision must be in the hands of the voters or our democracy has been lost.

What is really irritating about the Cain fiasco (besides his buckling before voters could weigh in) was how the GOP bower brokers piled on based on rumor. A lot of conservative commentators now look like fools:

The former NRA [National Restaurant Association] Chairman, Biff Naylor, who hired Herman Cain says that Sharon Bialek was terminated before Herman Cain was even hired and thus he never met her. On top of that she propositioned him (Naylor) for dinner once because she thought he was handsome, which he promptly turned down as he was happily married.

Naylor also says he knew the other two that said Cain harassed them, and that whatever they took exception to was so minor that it wasn’t even reported to the executive committee or the board.

As we suspected, Allred and her floozies made up their claims of harassment. But did the GOP establishment stand by their comrade – hell no! They raised their elitist noses and left Cain to fend for himself.

I was not sure if Cain would make it, but I do know he deserved and earned the right to have some votes held to let the people decide whether his flaws or the false claims of the DC power brokers were going to impact their support.

The anti-government fervor has not abated. And instead of being focused on the Dems and Obama (a rightful target of such anger), the GOP has successfully placed themselves into the box called ‘source of the problem’ instead of ‘possible solution’.

Be prepared. Because this election will be like no other, and polls will be hopelessly out of sync with an electorate’s mood which will be completely different from all past elections – making their turnout models crap.

Addendum: And like the lemmings they are, the left and right are in the news with dumb politician tricks. First from the petty and dumb wing of the GOP:

More than two dozen House Republicans introduced legislation on Thursday that would prevent the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) from calling airport screeners “officer” unless they have gone through federal law enforcement training or are otherwise eligible for federal law enforcement benefits.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the lead sponsor of the Stop TSA’s Reach in Policy (STRIP) Act, said that TSA has essentially allowed its airport screeners to play dress-up by giving them metal badges and police-like uniforms in recent years. But she said many airport screeners have no “officer” qualifications, and should have this title removed.

What an egotistical moron. My son, a US Marine Corporal, was a TSA screening agent before he joined the Marines. These screeners have a thankless job, but they have protected the flying public for over a decade since 9-11. They are doing what they are told to do, and they do it while arrogant travelers like Alec Baldwin fail to understand why they are not above the rules for the riff-raff. My son had to be stern with some famous people (including Mike Tyson) and I travel a lot and KNOW it is not the fault of screeners for what their management directs them to do.

So these elitist GOP no-nothings are going to go after and insult TSA workers trying to keep us safe. How is this different from a liberal demeaning someone in the military?

But to be balanced, I will also note how clueless are Democrat President is to his current predicament:

STEVE KROFT: Did you overpromise? Did you underestimate how difficult this was going to be?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I didn’t overpromise. And I didn’t– underestimate how tough this was going to be.

Like having the waters recede was not an over promise, or the idea of shovel ready jobs was not a massive underestimation of the government nimbleness.

BTW, don’t kid yourselves about why Cain’s alibi was so late in coming. People were orchestrated to let Cain take hits without help, and then he was bought/pressured to drop out. The fact he folded indicates he did not have what it takes. The fact he was the only outsider means this election cycle is lost, unless Cain or Palin or someone from WAY outside the DC Political Complex shows up.

Climategates I and II have done enormous damage to the ‘science’ underpinning the alarmist view of man-made CO2 driven global warming. From the exposure of the ‘hide the decline’ trick which destroys the hockey stick graph, to the realization that the unaltered, clearly represented data and results from the CRU actually cannot prove today’s climate is any warmer or cooler than previous period, to the shoddy code exposed in Climategate I, the mathematical confidence underlying the alarmists claims has been rotting away. See here for many, many posts over two years on where the math does not meet the claims.

I am here to attempt to uncover the final straw that should (in any other scientific field) provide the final nail in the coffin of alarmists claims. As I have said many times, if the claim that today’s climate cannot be accurately compared to the well documented Medieval, Roman and Bronze age warming periods, then there is no way to claim the Earth is experiencing runaway warming due to anything (let alone human generated CO2).

The entire proxy and tree ring paleoclimate effort (historic climate derived indirectly from geological, chemical or biological indicators) is founded on the assumption that the Uniformitarian Principle used in geology can be applied to biological and global climate systems. This is patently absurd!

Here is what the Uniformitarian Principle requires in order for the paleoclimate results to have a shred of confidence:

The theory that all geologic phenomena may be explained as the result of existing forces having operated uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time.

In terms of plate tectonics, mountain building, erosion, etc this is a valid assumption. It means the complete set of physical interactions that drive a geological system today are EXACTLY the same in past periods, so we can compare today and infer the past. This is why we can measure erosion in rivers or in ancient mountain ranges and infer how Niagara Falls was created and migrated to its current location, or how The Great Lakes formed from the last glacial retreat, etc.

But it makes NO SENSE when talking about biological systems and how they respond annually to the local environment (which is NOT local climate). When searching the Climategate II emails I discovered this statement (email #2836) from Keith Briffa in July of 2009 referring to a NERC project that was/is addressing the ‘decline’ seen in tree rings so sinisterly hidden by Mann and Jones circa 2000:

Palaeoclimate reconstructions extend our knowledge of how climate varied in times before expansive networks of measuring instruments became available. …

Inferences about variations in past climate, based on this understanding, necessarily assume that the associations we observe now hold true throughout the period for which reconstructions are made. This is the essence of the uniformitarian principle. …

The existence of divergence casts doubt on the uniformitarian assumption that underpins a number of important tree-ring based (dendroclimatic) reconstructions.

The divergence of modern tree rings in the cherry picked proxies of some areas of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) with present day temperatures (1960-2010, the most accurate portion of the record) used to compare past and present tenps really shook the alarmist camp. It is no surprise why this disconnect between proxy and local temperature had to be hidden in the Hockey Stick graphs. This would undercut the entire alarmist case.

And we know from work by Jeff Condon at Air Vent that Briffa, Mann, et al cherry picked tree rings for proxies since there is no real clear temperature signal in the rings anyway. It must have been a shock to have the divergence show up after filtering for any signal they could pretend existed. This cherry picking in itself is a violation of the Uniformitarian Principle, because if the forces or indicators are IDENTICAL in all cases, then all tree rings should have a clear and unambiguous temperature signal of the same order. Since they had to cherry pick to find rings with a signal, then it is obvious rings do not respond to temp in an identical fashion (over time, space, altitude or whatever).

An October 1999 email (#1731) from Jones in response to some comments makes it clear how foundational this assumption is to IPCC:

His two points are basically wrong !

1) ‘Patterns during the 20th century are applicable to earlier epochs’. This assumption applies to all paleo reconstruction papers ever written. OK, it is an assumption called the ‘Principal of Uniformitarianism’ and we could have stated it clearer, but it is one that has been made by countless thousands before us. If it is not valid we might as well give up.

So, is the long held assumption that identical processes are in place over 1000 years for a stand of trees in a large region valid? Of course not. As many have pointed out tree rings are influenced by numerous factors that would overpower any temperature impact. These include amount of water available, amount of nutrients (which in turn can be influenced by fire, wind damage, migration paths of animals that deposit fertilizer, pestilence, etc), sunny days, canopy, early warm or late warm starts for spring, etc.

Each year over the centuries that these dynamic ‘eco systems’ existed around  trees measured for temperatures, the Uniformitarian Principle was violated in so many ways it is absurd to make the argument it could ever apply. As Phil Jones said: they should just give up and start over.

Even worse, the biological proxy itself is not unchanged over this time. Genetically each species has evolved since the Medieval Warm Period. Therefore its response to the widely fluctuating local climate has also changed. It’s response to pestilence is different. Its efficiencies in nutrient or solar processing has evolved. Everything has changed as a species to some degree.

In email #4454 there is a great debate on when one cannot apply the Uniformitarian Principle to paleoclimate factors. Here is a snippet:

>David M. Lawrence wrote:
> > Uniformitarianism is perfectly appropriate here.  Just because there are individual variations in a process,
> > whether in stomatal response to water stress or in erosion and deposition rates of sandbars, doesn’t mean
> > that one cannot make generalizations of how the process works for all from observations of how the
> > process works in some.

…

>Nope, I don’t think so.  You have found yourself forced to resort to generalisations: stomata respond.
>Uniformatarianism is exact.  Not “nearly the same” but “the same”.  If you could guarantee that the
>biochemistry and the genetics of the plant species were exactly the same, then I would agree.  But you can’t
>assert that.  Quartz sand IS exactly the same over time – no genetic variation.
>
>Hil

…

Water availability is not the only regulatory factor and is  not directly responsible for the turgor of guard cells.  The turgor pressure of the guard cells is regulated by alteration of the osmotic potential of the cytoplasm (H and Ca ion transport across the plasma membrane) in response to stimuli including ABA in terms of drought stress or the internal CO2 concentration, resulting in the changes in Water Use Efficiency, which is increased in elevated CO2 environments.  Even mechanical stress, such as that induced by wind sway, can result in a short term closure of stomata.  Mutants in the production of ABA or sensitivity to ABA have very altered stomatal responses.  This implies a genetic component to stomatal function, so I’d be hard pressed to generalize that “all guard cells work in the same way” with out really investigating each tree one samples to verify that ‘hypothesis’.

Frank

What this exposes is the foundational fault in ALL Alarmist AGW claims. Without unambiguous proof today is significantly warmer than prior periods, there is no fire for the alarm bells. There is no runaway global warming.

And if this logical, scientific argument is not enough, then let me allow one Keith Briffa to communicate his until now hidden views (email #2999; July 2007):

Subsequentlty other researchers have reported “divergence” phenomena , but again associated with high latitudes only. There is as yet, no definitive answer or even concensus that these studies represent the same phenomenon. Most suggested “solutions” (see Rob’s comments)to the cause are problematic and it is important to study the nature and possible causes further. At present such studies are hampered by a lack of recent tree-ring and tree-density data (especially post 1980). The answer may lie in a mixture of methodological and biological factors.

…

Tree-ring based and virtually all proxy reconstructions (including of the NH) are subject to large statistical uncertainty, arising out of diminishing quality and coverage of predictors back in time. The methods used to translate these data into quantitative estimates of past temperatures also assume uniformitarianism in the relationships between predictors and predictand. This is hard if not impossible to prove.

Briffa goes on to point out humankind has changed the environment, so the principle will not hold for that reason as well. But even if humankind did not have an impact, the forces of evolution and the dynmnics of annual diversity for any ecosystem nullifies the use of this foundational assumption.

Therefore, the house of cards that is the AGW theory of human produced CO2 in the atmosphere has NO scientific or mathematical basis. None.

Tags: CRU, Global Warming, Hockey Stick, IPCC, Keith Briffa, Phil Jones, Uniformitarian Principle

Update: Reader Blog Lurker at CA discovered my dyslexia – and the fact I have the wrong email number. Fixed below, but the number is #3468 – end update

Update: Jeff Id at Air Vent wanted something pithy to summarize this post.. So since I am watching endless Harry Potters today I have decided to preview this post with a summary of the problem and trick covered at the end. Here was the challenge facing the IPCC team in 2006:

It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time.

Without doing something, the IPCC claims of historic warming would sink into the noise of the measurements and be forever determined a fraud. So Briffa comes up with a plan:

the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates.

Mischief Managed! – end update

I have been reading the Climategate  2 emails, repeatedly stunned at how bad it really is in the climate ‘science’ backwater. Talk about your amateur scientific method!

Just this morning though I tripped over an email from Keith Briffa at CRU that likely is another smoking gun that will completely up-end the Hockey Stick and all similar claims of unprecedented warming in the last half century.

Before we get to the email (and I request assistance from people more skilled in the use of time series), I want to reiterate my primary case against the IPCC claims of historic warming. The actual temperature measurements from 1850-1960 are sparse and uneven (to be kind). Apparently for the entire southern hemisphere there are only a handful of continuous records to cover this HALF of the world. From 1960 to 1990 the sample size fills in globally and the consistency increases, but it really is only in the satellite era (1990 onward for good temps)  that we get consistent global measurements of decent precision. 20 years is a very short time to make claims  covering centuries of time – even if we were using this data.

The IPCC is not using this data it turns out. The modern (and most accurate) global temperature record (1960 to present) diverges from the primary temperature proxies used to assess current temps against historic temps (i.e., tree rings). Tree rings show “a decline” in temperature in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere in the last 50 years.. Therefore we do not see in the Hockey Stick calibrated tree ring temperature signals from the last 50 years compared to previous ages like the Medieval and Roman Warming periods.

The reason we do not see this is because if they did compare the modern era to the past using tree rings calibrated to the modern record there would be no historic warming today.

This is known as hiding the decline.

My beef all along is how no one has defined the integrated error in the IPCC global temperature value. Starting from the errors of the temperature reading itself, to the errors that combine (i.e., expand)  by averaging and smearing these local measurements to 500×500 km grids over weeks, months and seasons, which then combine at the hemispheric and global level, we are looking at what has to be an error/precision level at the global values of +/- 2-5°C. And from this we find a 0.8° C warming???

The IPCC charts don’t show this formal error analysis. And now we might know why.

In email #3468 from 2006, Keith Briffa makes an astounding admission. He explains how he combined errors from multiple time series to ensure the modern temp numbers (already fudged by covering up the tree ring numbers with thermometer numbers the tree rings don’t agree with) do not fall inside the precision of the historic numbers. First he admits why he must fudge the data:

we are having trouble to express the real message of the reconstructions – being scientifically sound in representing uncertainty , while still getting the crux of the information across clearly. It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time.

Let this settle in for a moment. If the Team has to represent uncertainty as a total range (which is not just arbitrary, but the professional and scientific norm), then the uncertainty would swamp their claims and destroy the IPCC’s alarmist message.  As I predicted, the uncertainty in the measurements combined with the uncertainty of deriving a temperature value from tree rings results in an error bar so wide we don’t know if we warmer or colder than the Medieval Period.

Briffa admits this behind the scenes in this email. But how to salvage the Hockey Stick? Briffa creates his own new math (in total violation of all professional rules of applied statistics):

By overlapping all reconstructions and giving a score of 2 to all areas within the 1 standard error range of the estimates for each reconstruction , and a score of 1 for the area between 1 and 2 standard errors, you build up a composite picture of the most likely or “concensus”  path that temperatures took over the last 1200 years (note – now with a linear time axis).

This is kludge is arbitrary and a completely nonsensical way to combine uncertainties. Basically he throws out uncertainty that is unique to a time series. The only uncertainty that is allowed to be shown is where it overlaps with another series. So if one series has huge error bars (like tree rings) that portion that is outside the others is lost. Another way it falsifies the integrated picture is if one series is showing cool temps while 2 others are showing warm. The cool side of the error is now lost, only the overlap between the cool one and warm two shows up. Basically, he is filtering data AGAIN to select only what he wishes was reality. And he freely admits it:

This still shows the outlier ranges, preserving all the information, but you see the central most likely area well, and the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates.

Good Lord, if you are not going to integrate the data that disagrees with your expectations, why even pretend to be doing statistics or science? Just pick your data and plot it and get it over with!

I leave it to those who do know statistics to describe how bad this really is, but it looks to be a complete crock.

Addendum: To be clear here, I am not sure what Briffa did (I do not have the picture) or if it made it into any report. I assume it did. Maybe not a defensible assumption – but it seems everything else in these emails has a tangible product out there so I will stick with it. And while I am not sure what Briffa did mechanically, I know why he did it since he says it himself. He could not use standard error ranges, so he concocted something else. I’ll leave it to others to determine the severity of this action – but in my mind it simply was another way to hide the mathematical truth that the hockey stick is all smoke and mirrors.

I did not think Cain would cave, but he did. Which means politics in America is now controlled by the elite of the Political Industrial Complex.

Since that is the case, this blog will be suspending its interest in  parties and politics as well. Since the system is rigged against Main Street, no need to waste my time pretending our views matter.

GOP – you will not see any support from the Strata-Sphere. Your on your own. I seriously doubt I will even vote, let alone lift  finger for any of the DC insiders now running. If someone like Palin or Cain jumps in I will reconsider. But listening or challenging the vacuous dribble that passes for political debate is just a waste of IQ points.

Instead I will focus on science, law, ethics (if we can find any) and current events. Which means I will keep covering the economic mess left by the Democrats while noting there will be no assistance coming from the meek and impotent GOP. I will keep covering Climategate, along with other failed conspiracy theories. Will keep an eye on Fast and Furious and other gross crimes against our citizenry from the powers that be. But politics reeks right now and I just tool a shower.

I have seen 30 years of changing out who is sitting in the deck chairs of the ship of state, and have realized that as long as the Political Industrial Complex decides who gets to sit in the chairs and not the voters this nation is screwed. We are still heading for the same iceberg because we cannot get someone like Cain or Palin by the rabid guard dogs covering for those who are up to their elbows in our tax dollars.

Tags: Caim Suspeds

Updates At The End!

The Climategate 2 email drop is quite a daunting body of evidence. There is so much damning information it sometimes is hard to figure out what to post on and what emails to use to build a case of malfeasance.

My constant argument against the so called science underpinning the IPCC global warming claims is that it was pretty  shoddy stuff. If someone attempted to use similar levels of mathematical techniques and data/software quality controls  on any space program it would be borderline criminal. The so called scientists don’t even know what data is run behind any results! They throw out data that does not fit their theories and then claim to have discovered historic warming. And when this per-filtering does not work, they hide the bad data (known as hiding the decline or hiding the divergence).

To me the smoke and mirrors applied by the IPCC team to hide the severe problems behind their theories and results is the reason this entire area of science should be sent back to the quasi-science, backwater niche from whence it came. And for those not steeped in math or science let me explain why.

Continue Reading »

Tags: Briffa, Climategate, CRU, Divergence, Hide the Decline, Hockey Stick, IPCC, Mann, MXD, Tree Ring, TRW

Update: Hot Air notes someone else did another calculation – 11% – end update

One thing this recession has taught a lot of us is the fact that some federal statistics simply suck. Take the unemployment rate. People honestly think this is the number of people who want a job and don’t have one. But it is not.

The unemployment rate is computed from the “civilian workforce”  – which is not the total available workforce. I used to think it was until I started plotting where the work force should be given a steady rate of population growth.  Since our population has been on a very stable trend for decades, it is obvious that the total available workforce remains a study fraction of the overall population (subtracting out kids,, retired folks, criminals in jail and those with disabilities that preclude being able to hold a job).

Realizing population trends don’t shift very much over such short periods as a decade, I gathered and plotted the civilian workforce numbers for each month of the year and something startling showed up [click to enlarge]:

The blue area is the size of the civilian workforce for the month of November running from November 2000 to November 2011. Note how this workforce grew in size with the population for most of the last decade. In fact, the ‘labor force participation rate’ fluctuated between 66-67% all the way through until the Great Recession hit in 2008. Since then it has dropped (thanks to impotent liberal stimulus policies) to 64% and has never rebounded.

The problem with the unemployment rate touted in the news is it is based on the current workforce size – not what that size should be under normal economic times given our population size.

The red line I added to the chart above shows where we as a nation would have been in terms of ‘civilian workforce’ numbers if we had not hit the 2008 economic down turn.  Instead of  the current work force in November 2011 of 153,883,000 we should have a workforce of 158,500,000. That is 461,700 viable workers not counted in the November unemployment rate. These people are out there in the population – since our population has not shrunk at all in the last 3 years.

When you recompute the unemployment rate using the number of employed (140,580,000) out of  the real workforce of 158,500,000, you get a more accurate reflection of the job situation in America.

That actual unemployment rate is 11.3%

A couple of points on why this is valid and more accurate than the federal computation.

• The available/interested workforce out of any population is pretty stable. Under low unemployment and rising incomes there is a demand for workers that is not met by the workforce. This is why wages rise, etc – supply and demand. When demand outstrips supply there is competition, and therefore the workforce is at its peak capacity. Therefore, the low unemployment period at the beginning of this century reflects the peak participation rate for our society right now – 66-67%
• The unemployment numbers from the government are from surveys. They have limited accuracy (like any poll does). It is highly doubtful they are good to within 100,000 people, so these kinds of estimates are well within the bounds of the government produced numbers. Whether it is 10.9% or 11.5% does not matter, because it definitely is NOT 8.6%!
• This shrinking of the workforce size is seen in all the months of the year to some degree or other, so it is a well documented and real phenomena.

This is why the rosy numbers mean nothing in the real world. The inability to find a good job, build a career, be upwardly mobile is not there. As long as people are not counted in the workforce size, the government’s unemployment numbers will be drastically underestimating the economic suffering in the nation.

Tags: Unemployment Rate

I have one request of you Mr. Cain as you consider your campaign – don’t let the bastards win like this.

Yes, this crap is getting old and is more painful to your family than expected. Whatever the details of the last charges it is the worst reason to leave the race.

Many of us who stand by you do so because you are not a politician but from Main Street America. A man who made good.

If you leave the race over this latest nonsense then there never will be an opportunity for a normal American to lead this nation again.

I implore you to remain in the race through the South Carolina primary at least. I think you will win or come in 2nd in Iowa and South Carolina and really shake things up.

I beg you – let the voters speak. Don’t let the smear machine and the GOP old guard chase you out. Those spineless pols and talking heads would sell their soul to beat Obama – and that means selling you down the river.

You have already taken the hits – now simple see it through a little longer. You paid the price, you may as well finish the ride with you head high. If the voters say they prefer someone else, then you will have departed with your reputation intact, and your supporters will wish you well.

Don’t let the bastards win like this.

Update: This is how the GOP will end as in a whimper:

A growing number of prominent conservatives are abandoning Herman Cain, saying a Georgia woman’s claim that she had a 13-year affairwith the Republican candidate has effectively doomed his presidential bid.

I am right no incredibly proud to NEVER have been a registered Republican or Uber Conservative. Imagine if Clarence Thomas was abandoned like this. Losers on the right unite in defeat!

We are witnessing the character lynching of Herman Cain by CNN and others in the Political Industrial Complex (Pols, Lobbyists, Special Interests, Media, etc). Cain is an American success story, a man from a lower middle class, hard working family whose ancestors were once slaves. He rose to the pinnacle of the business world and has some very bold and needed ideas on how to neuter Washington DC’s Political Industrial Complex.

So he has a target on his back. I am not sure which is more maddening. The unproven and unsubstantiated charges from the left (who defended Clinton, the womanizer in chief through his endless stream of dalliances and sexual predation), or the spineless surrender of the right who rush declare Cain’s candidacy over.

I have no clue what the truth is, I only know that in this country you are innocent until proven guilty and no one should be damaged by unfounded rumors. Those who promote and enable such damage are not true Americans.

Allahpuundit at Hot Air makes some cogent points – worthy of everyone holding their fire. First off, consider the source of the claims:

Two other interesting details. One: The Fox affiliate claims it wasn’t White who approached them with this story but a tipster who knows her and who allegedly was shopping the story to national media. That might explain the peculiar timing of White waiting to come forward until after Cain had already started to slide in the polls. If she was looking to make a buck off the story, she’d have been better off jumping in three weeks ago when he was still the frontrunner and media interest was sky high. The fact that she waited suggests that she might be telling the truth in saying she felt obliged to come forward before some news outlet picked up the tipster’s claim and ran with it. Two: Watch to the end here and you’ll see that she has money problems and has been accused before by a business partner of stalking and defamation. In fact, she lost a defamation case because, supposedly, she never showed up in court to contest the suit.

Phone logs does not an affair prove. And as Allahpundit notes in another post, an affair is not a crime nor anyone’s business:

This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace – this is not an accusation of an assault – which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate. Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults – a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public.

I think Iowa caucus voters are wondering why this man scares the DC insider crowd so much? I have said it before, the anti-government, anti-business-as-usual mood in the country is ripe for coming to Cain’s side as opposed to abandoning him at the moment. Not without more than this.

Will Iowa, New Hampshire and other primary and caucus voters determine this hit job on Cain is a sign Cain might actually be the antibody to DC’s power addiction?

We will have to wait and see, but I can tell from Cain’s initial stance he is not bowing down. Good for him. If this is a gold digger who wants to play politics, then prepare to be vetted.

These claims by CNN allies are akin to crying rape. They will have the same devastation on Cain’s career, family, reputation, etc. So while CNN will broadcast any old rumor they see fit to run, the rest of the media better get their act together and put an end to these political hit jobs. They need to bring their game up a few notches (ethics-wise).

Either this new woman has proof or the media calls her out on it. We need to disarm the rumor-mill and move away from the Dan Rather lose ethics that brought us forged documents and lies. We shall see, but if the media and libs are going this far out on a limb with such flimsy foundation, the only reason I see for this is they are taking orders from a frightened Whute House and DNC, and the GOP side keeps trying to help by determining Cain dead.

Well, this ain’t 1980 and we have seen the public lynching of people like Justice Thomas before. We have seen the left defend groping interns in the White House (among the milder charges). We have are not naive nor prude. DC is a smelly swamp.

Updates at end

Climategate 1 hit two years ago with the release of damning emails and documentation that exposed really shoddy code and unmaintained data, not to mention the efforts by alarmists to hide their own data that completely destroyed their own claims of man-made, CO2-driven, warming. The most damning of these was the ‘hide the decline’ ‘trick’ that covered up how tree rings diverged from temperatures in the modern era. This realization, that this prime temperature proxy for temperatures before 1880 (when temp records began) was no damn good against the modern record (1950 onward), means all hockey stick graphs are  pure fiction. When your measurement stick is broken (as apparently was known for tree rings, thus the need to hide that part of the data) then the results are broken.

End of the math 101 story.

It took many weeks for Climategate 1 to gain traction in the media, and it was then followed by white-wash investigations that avoided the one issues the media now claims it settled. The truth is the  science was never investigated and was never confirmed. So people with minimal math skills (just enough to get by public school) now claim the science is settled. Laughable.

This new round of emails is more damning than the first because of the white-wash by the media and pols who have no clue how to interpret the data, algorithms, graphs, nor have a clue how the scientific process works (being published in niche journals by like minded alarmists is not the scientific process). With the fiction that CRU and IPCC were vindicated having been played, the more damning second round of emails puts us in the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ state. The alarmists’ credibility is toast given the new revelations, as is their media and political cheer leaders. There is no pretending the science is sound now.

For example, on tree rings there is this great riff from email 3826:

A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.

The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.

cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.

pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis

access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.

moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.

snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!

The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.

If there is a temperature record in tree rings, it has error bars (i.e., precision) on the order of +/- 5-10° C – or worse. Which means there is now way to tell if today’s temperatures really are unique or unprecedented. Other scientific studies show that is clearly not the case ( i.e., there was a warmer period around Roman and Medieval times). Tree rings do not have the fidelity to disprove these other scientifically sound results.

The new emails expose a group of thin-skinned PhDs that are polar opposites to the careful and capable paragons of science past, such as Albert Einstein:

Thanks for the added info. If Mike said that my calibration procedure is “flawed”, I will be extremely pissed off …

In all candor now, I think that Mike is becoming a serious enemy in the way that he bends the ears of people like Tom with words like “flawed” when describing my work and probably your and Keith’s as well. This is in part a vindictive response to the Esper et al. paper. He also went crazy over my recent NZ paper describing evidence for a MWP there because he sees it as another attack on him. Maybe I am over-reacting to this, but I don’t think so.

Emphasis in original post. Mike Mann is the 800 lb buffoon in the whole tragic play. His methods have been proven wanting, he is the architect of hiding the tree ring divergence by using the modern temps to ‘hide the decline’  – or massive cooling indicated by tree rings. He is emotionally volatile and sometimes infantile. I would not hire him do a damn thing on any of our work for NASA. PhDs don’t mean capable – trust me on this.

The worst aspect of Climategate II exposes how the media and politicians literally connived with alarmists to perform  white-wash reviews of skeptic concerns. Reviews that would provide cover for all the alarmist mistakes, misinformati0n and  lack of minimal professionalism:

This is pretty ugly. In 2007 the NRC was setup to review the state of climate science. The usual players were involved …

We didn’t discuss the email evidence (as you put it) nor Pielke’s dissent. We shouldn’t and we won’t if the NRC people have their way …

The panel is solid. Gerry North should do a good job in chairing this, and the other members are all solid. Chris[t]y is the token skeptic, but there are many others to keep him in check …

More here. One of many damning new details that clearly provide evidence of collusion and misrepresentation. This article is particularly damning to the alarmists and their political allies:

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’.

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

[H/T reader Frogg1] 

What is important to remember here is that alarmists want to stop humanity’s evolution and industrial progress. The long for a Luddite-like world where humanity has no modern conveniences (conveniences which protect nature from our consumption, trash and biowaste). Alarmists want to pick the pockets of the world to fund their naive fictions.

Skeptics actually promote a balanced and sane approach to continuing the industrial evolution in a manner that support humanity but protects nature. And they do not do it for $$$. Most of us skeptics do this on our own and without compensation or promise of compensation. So if the average person wants to decide who is truly on their side, remember skeptics don’t want to stop modernizing food production, waste treatment, medicine, housing, transportation, standard of living, etc. It is the alarmists’ who want to limit, stop or undo these things.

Update: More damning of the Mann:

The new emails show that Bradley thought that this series was, to use the technical term preferred by climate scientists, “crap” and should not be used in multiproxy studies – an issue raised by Bradley in connection with Mann et al (EOS 2003) – their attack on Soon and Baliunas 2003.

Needless to say, Bradley did not publish a comment criticizing the use of this series. It has subsequently been used over and over again in IPCC multiproxy studies, commencing with Mann and Jones 2003. In my post a few years ago, I observed that it was, in fact, “the most heavily-weighted contributor to Mann and Jones [2003] … The Yang composite and the North American PC1 (bristlecones) dominate the Mann and Jones [2003] reconstruction, making other series essentially irrelevant.”

Crap in, crap out.

Update: BBC and CRU censored skeptics so the Green Message could not be discovered to be based on shoddy science, shoddy code, lost data, lousy statistics, hyped results (0.8° C warming in a century, when each day we experience 10-20 times that from morning to noon):, etc:

The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.

Like I said, after the white washes, this is even more damning because clearly all those investigations FAILED!

Update: About that crappy code and unmaintained data the purports to detect warming, we have this gem:

Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”

You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.

You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established.

The alamrists’ theory about the end of civilization as we know is based on this lost data? Really?

Tags: Briffa, Climateate, CRU, IPCC, Jones, Mann

Happy Thanksgiving America!

Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving