President Obama announced Tuesday that he would speed 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in coming months, but he vowed to start bringing American forces home in the middle of 2011, saying the United States could not afford and should not have to shoulder an open-ended commitment.

Senior administration officials suggested, however, that any initial withdrawal starting in mid-2011 could be very limited, depending on the military situation at that point.

“The pace, the nature and the duration of that transition are to be determined down the road by the president based on the conditions on the ground,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, under secretary of defense for policy.

Addressing critics who have likened Afghanistan to Vietnam, Mr. Obama called the comparison “a false reading of history.”

Republicans applauded the buildup of troops but questioned the commitment to a timetable for bringing them home.  ...  But among many Democrats, the response ranged from noncommittal to outright opposition.

Mr. Obama is calculating, administration officials said, that the explicit promise of a drawdown will impress upon the Afghan government that his commitment is not open-ended.

The new Afghanistan strategy draws heavily on lessons learned from Mr. Bush’s “surge” and strategy shift in Iraq in 2007, which Mr. Obama opposed.

NATO’s secretary general said Wednesday he believed other members of the alliance would increase in their commitments by at least 5,000 extra troops.

The E.U. made global climate control a key plank of its geopolitical strategy in 2001 when President George W. Bush said he would let the Kyoto Protocol languish rather than seek, against impossible odds, to win ratification in the U.S. Senate.

So far, New Zealand is the only country outside Europe to have passed into law a national plan to trade emissions, leaving the bloc looking increasingly isolated. Jürgen R. Thumann, the president of BusinessEurope, a powerful confederation of industry and employer groups, has criticized the system as the most “costly climate policy program in the world.”

“That’s of course the unfortunate situation for Copenhagen,” said Jo Leinen, a German member of the European Parliament who is leading the chamber’s delegation to the conference that is intended to follow up on the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol. “It’s turning into a bit of a ping-pong match between China and the United States, with each just looking at the other,” he said.

The E.U. remains internally divided on key issues, among them how much to pay developing countries to limit emissions and how deeply to cut their own output.

Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, said that he would leave his post while the university conducted a review of the release of the e-mail messages. The university has called the release and publication of the messages a “criminal breach” of the school’s computer systems.

The e-mail exchanges among several prominent American and British climate-change scientists appear to reveal efforts to keep the work of skeptical scientists out of major journals and the possible hoarding and manipulation of data to overstate the case for human-caused climate change.

In a related announcement, Pennsylvania State University said it would review the work of a faculty member who is cited prominently in the e-mail messages, Michael Mann, to assure that it meets proper academic standards.

The British university has contended that the messages were illegally obtained by a hacker, who posted them on Web sites of groups critical of the current scientific consensus that human activity has caused dangerous changes to the global climate.

Let me start with the bottom line and then tell you how I got there: I can’t agree with President Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan. I’d prefer a minimalist approach, working with tribal leaders the way we did to overthrow the Taliban regime in the first place. Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security...

People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never W.M.D. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Iraq has proved staggeringly expensive and hugely painful. The mistakes we made should humble anyone about nation-building in Afghanistan. It does me.

Still, the Iraq war may give birth to something important — if Iraqis can find that self-sustaining formula to live together. Alas, that is still in doubt. If they can, the model would have a huge impact on the Arab world. Baghdad is a great Arab capital. If Iraqis fail, it’s religious strife, economic decline and authoritarianism as far as the eye can see — the witch’s brew that spawns terrorists.

Iraq was about “the war on terrorism.”

IT’S a token of spirits faith that older is better. Older is certainly different. It’s always more expensive. But does aging a spirit necessarily improve it?

I pondered this question after the spirits panel recently tasted 20 bottles of rum that had been aged for at least seven years. The results were unexpectedly disorienting — at first disappointing but ultimately thought-provoking.

The Bacardi was our best value at $24. It, along with the Ron Abuelo, No. 8 on our list, were the least expensive of the rums, which reached as high as $90.

Fundamentally, rum must be distilled from sugar cane, or more accurately, the byproducts of the process of making sugar out of sugar cane. Most rums are made from molasses, though many use sugar cane juice instead, especially in French-speaking areas. These are often labeled rhum agricole, or agricultural rum.

Beyond that, however, rum can be made just about anywhere, in almost any fashion, and aged for as long as the producer desires.

With so much room for improvisation, rum can mean many things to many different people. No category of rum is more popular these days than flavored rums, although as near as I can tell, flavored rums have not yet hit the root beer depths of flavored vodkas.

In the past week, speculation has swirled about the actions of his wife, Elin, who says she used a golf club to free Woods from the SUV. Celebrity gossip Web site TMZ reported that Woods' facial wounds may have stemmed from a domestic altercation, not the crash.

Last week, the National Enquirer reported that Woods was having an affair with a night club hostess in New York, which the woman has denied. US Weekly on Tuesday reported that Woods had a 31-month affair with a cocktail waitress, with further details - and a possibly incriminating voice mail recording - slated to be released Wednesday.

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

Charlie Martin over at PJM highlights a perfect illustration of this tendency. Apparently the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, recently blew a gasket over a study that was equivocal on whether or not the Himalayan glaciers were melting due to global warming. Pachauri said: Of course they're melting! In fact, the 2007 IPCC report asserted that they are melting faster there than any place else. They'll all be gone — gone I tell you! — by 2035 if not sooner. The panel reported that: "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

Now, anyone who has seen a glacier up close who is not drunk on Kool Aid would have looked at a prediction that all of the roughly 10,000 Himalayan glaciers would be gone in less than 25 years with skepticism (particularly when many of them are, in fact, growing). It turns out that the 2035 prediction was a typo. The original paper on which the prediction was based had said the glaciers could be gone by 2350, but the IPCC guys read it as 2035 and Pachauri not only believed it, but when confronted with scientific evidence that even the 350 year prediction might be overblown, angrily defended the 25-year prediction as authoritative.

I've been doing Modeling and Simulation for the DoD for about 15 years.  In our case, we have empirical test data we can use validate the models — you know real flight-test data, etc.  Whenever we get empirical data that breaks the model we first do a sanity check to verify that the data isn't some random out-lier, and if not then we determine the underlying cause and adjust the model.  If I were caught bending the data to fit the model as the CRU was doing, I'm quite confident that I'd be unemployed and quite possibly facing time as a guest of the Feds.

...greater transparency should not be limited to just temperature data, but to all aspects of climate science. In an email response to me, climatologist Pielke Sr. argues, "I completely support the view that the computer software [of climate models] must be available for scrutiny by independent scientists. Otherwise these models should not be used in climate assessment reports." Only through such transparency can other researchers determine whether or not climate models are adequate forecasters of future climate change or are merely prejudices made plausible.

"In the end, I would hypothesize that the result of the freeing of data and code will necessarily lead to a more robust understanding of scientific uncertainties, [and] that may have the perverse effect of making the future less clear," emails Pielke Jr.

"The inability to tolerate dissent has unfortunately destroyed the credibility of climate change science and I don’t know how it’s going to come back," laments climatologist and free-market Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels, who was frequently reviled in the CRU emails. "I don’t know how the public and policymakers will ever trust what climate scientists say in the future."

In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers. That’s the true tragedy of Climategate.

Why the UN GHG Hypothesis Should Be Rejected on Scientific Grounds

Alan Carlin | August 9, 2009

In a previous post I explained why I believe that the United Nations GHG hypothesis that significant global warming will occur as a result of increasing greenhouse gas (such as CO2) levels is implausible.  In this post I will explain why I believe that the best available evidence indicates that the hypothesis is not just implausible but rather should and can be rejected on scientific grounds.  ...

According to the scientific method, a scientific hypothesis must be tested by comparing real world data with the implications of the hypothesis.  This is how Albert Einstein was able to persuade the world that his ideas on relativity had merit.  Scientists kept proposing real world tests of his hypothesis but each test confirmed its validity. After a number of these tests, the opposition conceded that his hypothesis was valid. (For a description of this extended process see, for example, Jeffrey Crelinsten’s Einstein’s Jury: The Race to Test Relativity). A similar process resulted in the acceptance of Newtonian mechanics and other hypotheses which gradually assumed the status of theories.

If the comparison with real world data does not confirm the hypothesis, the hypothesis should be rejected. There are only two alternatives from a scientific viewpoint when this happens: Discard or at least modify the hypothesis or discover an error in the data used to reject it.  From a scientific viewpoint, it is totally irrelevant how many public officials or scientific organizations–or how prominent they may be–support a particular hypothesis.  A hypothesis has scientific validity only by comparison with real world data.  ...

Acceptance of the hypothesis requires that each of the following four observations are present:

1.  There is a hot spot in the upper troposphere in the tropics as predicted by the UN. If greenhouse gases are significantly warming the Earth the first signs of it are supposed to appear about 10 kilometers above the tropics. The lack of such a hotspot is discussed in my Comments in Section 2.9 as well as by Joanne Nova downloaded here. She discusses the major objections that have been raised to this comparison and why she believes they are not credible. For more detailed information see here.

2.  There is heating of the oceans.  The added heat generated by increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere must be stored somewhere. It has not been showing up in the atmosphere in the last decade, so if the hypothesis is valid it must be going into the oceans. But in the last few years this has not been the case. An extensive discussion of the evidence can be found here. The bottom line is that the AGW hypothesis fails this test as well.

3.  The observed outgoing radiation fluxes from the Earth decrease with increases in sea surface temperatures. Satellite data, however, shows an increase, which is inconsistent with the high climate sensitivities to increases in CO2 and positive feedback so crucial to the UN’s case. A new peer reviewed paper accepted for publication on this subject can be found here. For a video of Christopher Monckton’s presentation on this study on the Glenn Beck program see here.

4.  The atmospheric response times for volcanic sequences would be longer than they would be without the UN hypothesis. If climate sensitivity is as high as the UN claims, it should show up in the atmosphere’s response time from volcanic eruptions. The reason for this is that climate sensitivity is also a measure of how tightly air and sea temperatures are coupled. High sensitivity is associated with weak coupling, allowing the establishment of significant disequilibration of the sea surface temperature. A discussion of this can be found in a 1997 report from the National Academy of Sciences here.  The discussion may be a little technical, but the conclusion that the data “is consistent with low [climate] sensitivity,” which is inconsistent with one of the UN’s crucial conclusions, is clear.

The conclusions are the same in each of these four cases: The UN hypothesis is not supported or even partially supported by these comparisons with real world data. 

As Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has recently observed with regard to his findings on comparison 3 above, “In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming/climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own – quite removed from science.”

Accordingly, using this hypothesis has no scientific basis based on current knowledge concerning these four comparisons.  Attempts to argue that it is anything more than a religious or superstitious belief must show that the data used in each and every one of these tests (as well as others that may be proposed in the future) is wrong.

Accordingly, using the UN hypothesis as a basis for formulating policy is not useful or relevant from a scientific viewpoint.  Attempts to do so are likely to lead to scientifically unsound policy. Given that the current proposed “solution”–radically reducing CO2 emissions–would cost many tens of trillions of dollars, it is particularly incumbent on those advocating this very large expenditure (for which there are many other uses if it should actually become available) to show that their solution should not also be rejected since it is based on a hypothesis that should be rejected.

...one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael  Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word.

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: ray bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.

Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.