Demanding the truth

Questions of Honesty? 

Has the time now come for brave members of the Australian Labor Party and members of Her Majesty’s opposition, to start asking some really serious questions about the science and theory surrounding the notion of human-induced global climate-change? 

Very few heads have been seen above the parapets. Very few voices have been heard from our parliamentary representatives — asking, questioning, challenging, analysing, probing or enquiring into the claims of the promoters of the theory of human-induced global warming. The two decade-long media circus that has been the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the IPCC has seen to that. 

The tactics of the IPCC have been brilliant. Exceptional! What with 3000 scientists all agreeing with each other, and statements like “the science is settled”, it would be a brave politician, bureaucrat or journalist who would question the IPCC. But we employ our politicians and bureaucrats and journalists to be brave — don’t we? And we expect them to ask questions — don’t we? 

The first and really big question our politicians, government scientists and media types should be asking is this: 

Has the collection of scientific-evidence to support the theory of Human induced climate-change been gathered, collated and assessed in a scrupulously honest, impartial and non-partisan manner? 

If the answer to this is NO, then the IPCC science is worthless. 

Our politicians should also be taking a long hard look at exactly who the people are that stand behind the IPCC’s global climate-alarmist industry. And this begs the second big question: 

Have any members of the IPCC and their collaborators ever acted in an improper or unlawful manner in regards to their scientific IPCC work? 

If the answer to this is YES, then their science is worthless. 

In his 1990 Royal Commission into corruption and attempted bribery in the Tasmanian Parliament, Commissioner William J. Carter QC made some very interesting comments about the interpretation of the words impropriety, improper and unlawful. 

It [impropriety] refers to an attribute, a quality of conduct which in the particular circumstances is dishonourable, wrong, unseemly, not fitting or unbecoming. 

What is unacceptable behaviour should be discernable when one examines the context where it is found. Conduct to be so described need not be illegal, but may nevertheless be just as reprehensible as if it were a breach of the law. 

Royal Commissioner Carter also quoted U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren: 

Law floats on a sea of ethics… Not everything which is wrong can be outlawed, although everything which is outlawed, is, in our Western conception, wrong. For many years, legislatures and courts have endeavoured to define for corporate and Government officials what constitutes a conflict between their public responsibilities and their private interests. 

The conflict between the IPCC’s clear public responsibilities and the panel’s private interests may well be the silver bullet that leads to its downfall. While the enormous web of financial connections and business dealings of the IPCC’s chairman, Dr. Pachauri, is slowly being revealed to the world, as also are those of Al Gore — perhaps the more important question is: what are the private interests of the IPCC scientists? 

These may vary from a genuine belief in their scientific work, to the scramble to obtain the billions of dollars in research monies that are floating, confetti like, out of world treasuries. But the really big, over-riding private interest question is, without doubt, their reputations. And their reputations are at stake. Remember the Johnny Cash song "The Gambler": 

You got to know when to hold’em; know when to fold ‘em.
Know when to walk away; know when to run. 

Unfortunately the scientists, and the politicians and media types, who have totally embraced the dogma of human-induced climate change, have gambled heavily with their reputations. They have nowhere to run. They have played their hand. They have played their hand and bet their reputations on a theory. That theory is that CO2, created by humans, will change the Earth’s climate. There is now no turning back. There is no might be, may be or could be. They must remain true believers — their reputations depend on it. 

The consequences for them, of being wrong, is truly cataclysmic. Which explains the almost religious fervour that climate-changeism has undergone. It explains the fanatical way that the IPCC and climate-changers ruthlessly attack any doubters or sceptics. So to return to the first big question: 

… has the scientific evidence been gathered collated and assessed  in a scrupulously honest, impartial and non-partisan manner? 

Consider just a few examples: 

Professor Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick graph was the highlight of the 2001 IPCC Report. It was this single document that convinced most world leaders to embrace the impending doom of world-climate-change. Unfortunately for Mann and his IPCC team two Canadian non-scientists looked at Mann’s work and found it flawed. They looked at his computer modelling. “The flawed computer program (Mann’s) can even pull out spurious hockey shapes from lists of trend-less random numbers” they discovered. 

Apparently Mann’s computer modelling could even create hockey stick shapes from anything, anything submitted to it. Then the US Congress stepped in. When Mann refused to show the House Energy and Commerce Committee his computer codes the Committee decided to look further into Mann’s work. Another Congress committee, the House Committee on Science, became so incensed by Mann’s attitude that they requested the President of the National Academy of Science to arrange an investigation. 

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigation , chaired by the most respected statistician in the US, Dr Edward Wegman, found that Mann’s computer science was deeply flawed. Mann and his team had, “made incorrect use of principal component analysis.” Their “decentered methodology” was “simply incorrect mathematics”. Dr Wegman and his investigating committee stated: 

Mann’s assessment that the decade of the 1990’s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis. 

Nothing like this scrutiny has been undertaken by any Australian government body, so it has been mostly left to courageous Australian scientists, and just a few journalists, to start asking the awkward questions. If it were not for scientists and academics like Bob Carter, Ian Plimer, William Kininmonth and many, many other scientists, writers and internet warriors, Australia would be in the major league of the thunderstruck. 

Virtually hundreds of examples of dodgy science have surfaced, from false claims of rising sea-levels of 60 feet to the total disappearance of the Artic ice cap. Then there has been the great melt of Antarctica, to the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers — to the claims that The Great Barrier Reef will be “done for” if “we don’t act”. 

When it comes to the question of whether the IPCC has been, well, scrupulously honest, impartial and acted in a non-partisan manner— the issue is not that they are spreading these fantasies, so much, but that the IPCC fails, in nearly every instance, to correct any absurd claim of impending doom. When the IPCC scientists hear and see these claims they can’t possibly believe them. The disgusting video the UN’s IPCC presented at Copenhagen, the Gracie clip, was pure ideological inspired propaganda. And this was the work of the UN’s IPCC. When the Prime Minister of this nation comes out with things like “Don’t let little Gracie down” in front of a world audience in Copenhagen, is there any hope for rationality? 

It doesn’t take much digging to discover examples of falsification of world temperature data; The British Met. Office is now undertaking a 3 year review; the collection of China’s temperature-gathering sites is under question; Antarctic sea and ice temperature measurements have been found to be flawed; Russia is claiming foul on the way their data is being processed by the IPCC and the world’s climate isn’t doing what was predicted it would do. And the Arctic is still blanketed in ice! 

If interested politicians care to wander down the tarmac at Canberra airport they will find the Bureau of Meteorology’s air temperature measuring site. It gets the hot air from both the tarmac and blasts from aircraft jet engines, as well as from a nearby road. It is an example of how dodgy air temperature data can get into the system. The graph of the increase of Canberra temperature almost matches the graph of increased air traffic?

As to the second question floated at the beginning of this article; 

Have any members of the IPCC and their collaborators ever acted in an improper or unlawful manner in regards to their scientific IPCC work? 

Well! 

The lead scientist for the IPCC at The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones has been suspended in relation to the “1000 leaked emails scandal”. This involves, apart from the veracity of his scientific research, claims of destruction of government data, suggestions of breaking the British Freedom of Information laws as well as dubious advice about deleting embarrassing IPCC related email. Criminal charges may yet be laid from this exercise, now referred to as Climategate. 

The Commonwealth Foundation of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a leading ethics think-tank, in the United States has announced that it doesn’t trust the Pennsylvania State University to investigate Dr Michael Mann’s involvement in the hockey stick scandal and his involvement in the Climategate emails. The Foundation has released a 12 page policy brief. The brief says; 

Were scientific misconduct a criminal matter, the aforementioned facts [in the briefing paper] might be said to constitute “probable cause” for a search warrant. 

The Foundation continues saying the issue of Dr Mann’s conduct needs to be thoroughly investigated by the state legislature’s General Assembly. Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffery Piccola has promised that if the Pennsylvania State University’s investigation is a “whitewash”, he will do one that isn’t. The Commonwealth Foundation claims that the university gathers millions of dollars of funding through Mann’s IPCC work. Money, science, reputation! 

There is now an investigation into donations made to Dr Pauchari’s TERI, The Energy Research Unit, based in India. This unaccountable research facility was originally set up by the Tata Group, India’s largest company and is chaired by Dr Pauchauri. The Rudd government recently gave TERI $1,000,000 in a venture between TER1 and the CSIRO. 

And then there is the founder and chief UN man-of-shadows, the IPCC’s, Maurice Strong. 

But that’s another story! Stay tuned.