Blogito

“Based on his conversations with other leaders and the progress that has already been made to give momentum to negotiations, the president believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference on Dec. 18 rather than on Dec. 9,” the White House statement said.

The political winds, that is. Obama is smart to wait until the last minute, I think.

“The United States will pay its fair share of that amount and other countries will make substantial commitments as well,” the White House said. “In Copenhagen, we also need to address the need for financing in the longer term to support adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.

“Providing this assistance is not only a humanitarian imperative — it’s an investment in our common security, as no climate change accord can succeed if it does not help all countries reduce their emissions,” the statement said.

I have examined the record of the previous century carefully, Obama might have added. During those years when emissions were much lower than they are today, those target year to which we wish to return, all nations lived together in peace and prosperity, and there were no wars or health problems or instances of economic hardship. We need to return to those times, he may have muttered.

The cap-and-trade program reminds me of the story of the prolonged fighting at Tobruk or Anzio or wherever it was that had Italian troops pinned down in their foxholes under heavy five for weeks, unable to move. A brief cease-fire was negotiated and the Italian general appeared before his troops to announce the good news. Men, he said, today you will finally have a chance to change your underwear! They cheered lustily. Mario, he continued, you change with Pasquale; Pasquale, you change with Giuseppe; Giuseppe, you change with...

The Washington Post has moved climate change to their front page but still seem to be adopting the party line:

These are the facts: After an increase in 1998, the world has been historically warm, but its average temperatures have not climbed steadily. Does that mean climate change has stopped?

Many mainstream scientists say no: This is just a tic of nature, as cycles of currents in the Pacific Ocean and a decrease in heat coming off the sun have temporarily dampened warming. Some researchers, though, have said the models -- and, by extension, the human researchers that built them -- could be missing something about how the climate works. That point was made in one stolen e-mail, in which climate researcher Kevin Trenberth wrote it was a "travesty" that models could not explain why the Earth hadn't warmed more.

They tell you what the facts are, they say, but not all of them...especially not including some “facts” in dispute. And they show a chart of the warmest years on record but only cover 1995 to 2008, with an “estimate” for 2009 which finally shows an up-tick after three years of decline.

No mention of previous warm years, like 1934, or what temperatures were like during the Medieval Warm Period.

And note the throw-away line about a decrease in heat coming off the sun having had a temporary effect, along with ocean currents, both of which apparently are strong enough to overwhelm the increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide, which has increased greatly year-on-year.

And despite the brief graph displayed, which clearly displays 1998 to be the warmest year of the bunch as well as the whole prior century, with possibly a statistical tie in 2005, but all others on the graph clearly below them, the author still concludes with these final words:

The diversity of opinion on this topic, however, wasn't evident late last month, when a group of 26 climate researchers issued a report called "The Copenhagen Diagnosis," summarizing scientific advances since the last major U.N. climate report in 2007.

"Has global warming recently slowed down or paused?" the report said. "No."

On Thursday, two Republican senators asked NASA to look into why it has not yet answered a researcher who filed a Freedom of Information Act request two years ago seeking temperature data and e-mails similar to the ones from the British university.

In 2007, NASA made corrections to its data that showed 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year on record for the contiguous 48 U.S. states. Researcher Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Washington Times he has filed three FOIA requests and will sue at the end of this year if the requests aren't answered.

A NASA spokesman told The Times this week that it is still processing the request and that he couldn't say why it's taken so long.

U.S. law gives the agency 20 days to respond to the request, and Mr. Horner said he suspects NASA is delaying because it is afraid of what the data would show.

I went back to check the label on their graph about 1998 and realized I had not copied the link like I usually do so wanted to add that, too. What do you know...the item has completely disappeared from the page. In fact, it disappeared almost entirely, despite quite a bit of searching.

For 1998 it says: “Only year in top 10 before 2001” which NASA has already acknowledged is not the case even if they don’t really want to respond to the three FOIA requests.

So now I wonder...is it the WaPo author who doesn’t know he’s passing on misinformation? And the reason NASA and NOAA don’t correct the newspaper is...?

Dana Milbank acknowledges some hard truths after first producing some rationalizations:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet. ...

In other cases, Obama truly has gone back on campaign vows. Even some of his advisers are disappointed that he has moved so slowly to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. Civil libertarians are justifiably disappointed with his decision to continue much of the Bush administration secrecy. Clean-government types are understandably frustrated that Obama vowed that lobbyists "will not get a job in my White House" but now grants waivers so that lobbyists can work in key administration jobs.

What his limited record showed, unmentioned by Dana, is that it was also a far-left liberal record, not anywhere close to being that of a middle-of-the-road bipartisan politician.

In fact, the only Obama supporters Milbank describes as being critical of Obama, MoveOn, Code Pink and Huffington, are complaining only about Afghanistan, not the rest of his agenda. So is Afghanistan actually the cape in which he hides the sword from the bull until the last moment?

The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" released today reveals that by any objective measure—melting ice sheets, greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise—the climate is warming faster than anticipated. And when the natural variability induced by massive climate systems such as oscillations over decades in ocean temperatures, currents and even sunspots reverts to the mean, the roughly three warming watts per square meter added by greenhouse gases will still be there to drive climate change.

While they finally actually refer to a number, three warming watts per square meter, they get coy about what the various “greenhouse gases” actually are, the contribution played by carbon dioxide in that mix, and further the degree to which man is adding carbon dioxide...and yet that is the only political solution which has been proposed!

How much of that 3 watts/m2 is anthropogenic carbon dioxide? Whether virtually all of it or virtually none of it they don’t say, curiously enough.

Melting ice sheets? Well, some edges have melted, some haven’t, and some inner portions have thickened, so what’s the net difference? Sea levels have risen? Okay, how much since, let’s say, 1940? Since 1998, a year they used to like a lot?

An earlier SA article quoted Dr Mann as saying how much raw data was available out there for the asking from multiple sources, blah blah blah, but this article says:

While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents.

Note the adjective there. Political, not scientific, opponents.

But, like the tango, it takes two to make a political argument out of a FOIA request and we’ve just learned that NASA, ostensibly a scientific organization rather than a political one, has managed to stall providing data for going on three years now. Surely these aren’t all frustrated scientists working under a deadline of that significance?

I wonder...will the editors of Scientific American write to the Washington Post tonight to correct the graph printed therein which calls 1998 the only year in the top 10 before 2001? If not, why not?

The most charitable answer would be that they either didn’t know or didn’t notice...but how comfortable does that make you in electing them the top scientists to decide how many trillion tax dollars you should spend on capping-and-trading carbon dioxide credits?

Can you help but wonder tonight how many people read that Washington Post item and looked at the graph and the label identifying 1998 as the warmest year of the previous century and believed that to be the truth?

How many, do you think, know that NASA quietly amended those numbers, after being caught in an error by an outsider, so that 1934 was the warmest, which means it’s still cooler today than it was even at that time?

How many of you think that NASA, NOAA and the Scientific American are going to rush corrections to the Washington Post?

How many of you think that even if they do, the Washington Post will make a Page One item out of those corrections like they originally did with this graph?

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

“I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.

But the point, of course, is that there has been ONE HELL OF A LOT of anthropogenic carbon dioxide created since 1934, for all I know maybe the huge majority of it, and for 72 years of that to make things only “slightly” warmer, plus 2007 and 2008 registering a decline from 2006, means clearly the AGW theory has to be terminally weak.