Climategate: This Time It’s NASA Posted on March 6th, 2010
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by Iain Murray and Roger Abbott, American Spectator
The “Climategate” scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics’ hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations.
Now a new “Climategate” scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data provided by NASA.
The emails reveal that GISS, like CRU, has done a poor job of preserving and managing its data. Although there is no evidence that GISS has destroyed its data, as CRU did in the late 1980s, Dr. Reto Ruedy of GISS admits in an email that “[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date.” In another email, he reveals that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. “[NASA's] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data… may not have been correct,” he says. “Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.”
Hat Tip: MilitantLibertarian
USDA to Dump National Animal Identification System.. Sort of Posted on March 5th, 2010
A flurry of news surrounded the announcement by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack that the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS) would be scrapped. The measure met stiff resistance from homesteaders, small farmers, organic growers, and raw milk and whole foods advocates. The problem is, the news is wrong. The NAIS isn’t being scrapped, it’s just being shelved “pending more review.”
There is a mixture of good and bad news in the USDA’s decision. The decision was likely not made to benefit the small producer or the homesteader. Rather, it was probably made in order to take them out of the debate so that the tracking system could go through.
The original NAIS plan would have required onerous costs on small agricultural producers – whether they were selling product or not – and distinctly favored the large agricultural conglomerates, who could easily afford the new rules. Rules which applied differently to them.
In the NAIS, each animal on a farm would require a tracking number and 48-hour reporting of its whereabouts and condition. This applied to everything from backyard poultry to cattle herds in the hundreds of thousands. The big difference was that large (industrial) livestock herds could be tracked as a single unit, whereas small homestead or farm herds had to be tracked as individual animals.
Besides the economic reasoning, however, whole foods advocates like Judith McGeary of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance say that the system itself is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Tracking the animals does nothing but allow for finding the source after the fact, but nothing to prevent anything up front. The whole excuse for the NAIS was to be able to prevent diseases like mad cow from spreading.
“USDA’s claim that we need 48-hour traceback of all animal movements is not supported by scientific studies or logic. The agency should focus on high risk situations, namely the factory farms. The agency should also look at the specific diseases of concern and how they are spread. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work.”5
Now, any animal that does not cross state lines upon its sale is not required to be tracked. This eliminates most small farms, local sellers, and homesteaders out of the equation, which would, in turn, give them no reason to combat the USDA’s plans for a future NAIS.
However, it will still effect many of us in the whole foods and organic lifestyle movements. Anyone who has homesteaded realizes that you cannot produce everything you need all on your own. You need neighbors with whom you can barter and do business. A small farmer on the eastern edge of Wyoming, for instance, may need chicks to replenish his hen house after an unfortunate fox attack. He is as likely to go into Nebraska, next door, as anywhere else. Except now he`s crossed state lines, so those chicks must be registered with NAIS.
That is only one example and assumes that the USDA will not expand the reach of its program once it’s in place. Further, it’s obvious that the USDA’s plan to track animals will do nothing to prevent disease and only allow them to point the finger to lay blame when an outbreak occurs.
The real problem here are the huge, commercial meat producers who handle their cattle as if they were merely cogs in the wheel at a factory. This industrial agriculture means huge stockyards with thousands of pens holding hundreds upon hundreds of animals packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, wallowing in their own filth. This is a disease bomb just waiting to explode onto the market.
The USDA’s plan for NAIS is not to scuttle the project, but only to change it and re-introduce the same idea in a couple of years. This does nothing to prevent disease and everything to cater to the huge agricultural conglomerates and industrial meat producers.
All while making life more difficult, even impossible, for the small farmer and homesteader.
Resources:
1 – USDA Plans to Drop Program to Trace Livestock, William Neuman, New York Times, Feb. 5, 2010
2 – USDA Announces New Framework for Animal Disease Traceability, USDA, Feb. 5, 2010
3 – Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance Weighs in on NAIAS, Hartke Is Online, June8, 2009
4 – Q&A: New Animal Disease Traceability Framework, USDA APHIS, February 2010
5 – Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance Weighs in on NAIAS, Hartke Is Online, June 8, 2009
The Jedi mind trick falters… Posted on February 22nd, 2010
Wyoming’s energy is Wyoming’s energy – a rebuttal Posted on January 30th, 2010
by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner
Recently, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s Outdoors Editor Shauna Stephenson published an article about recent changes to energy rules and regulations from the nation’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and how they would affect both Wyoming’s energy producers and the conservation groups that fight them. (Yes, we need energy, but not at any cost) Stephenson failed to ask the one fundamental question that should be driving this debate and instead focused on the partisan issue at hand.
The driving question should be: why is it Washington’s decision what Wyoming does with our energy?
Being something of a tree hugger, I understand the issue of sustainability and conservation, but I am practical enough to understand that the forces at work here are not what they pretend to be. A generally free market, Constitutional understanding of the issue immediately tells me that government, especially centralized control in Washington, will do little to “conserve” anything and a lot to bring new hazards to our great state’s future.
Wyoming is the nations number one net producer of surplus energy and is responsible for about 34% of the nation’s total clean coal supply. We are also one of the greatest producers of natural gas and have some of the highest potential for renewable wind energy production. No wonder the feds in Washington want to control our energy sources. Even Texas, often seen as the nation’s oil capital, doesn’t produce a surplus like we do and remote Alaska is unable to export well enough to beat our ability either.
In this regard, Wyoming is at a real negotiation advantage. All we have to do is realize one thing: the District of Columbia doesn’t control us, the People of Wyoming control us and our energy.
Earlier this week, I listened in on Senator Barrasso’s telephone town hall meeting where as much was said by one caller, who questioned why Washington was so interested in telling the People of Wyoming what to do. That was in regards to health care, but it applies here as well.
Of course, environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy and other big-money psuedo-environmental groups hope to gain more control over policies affecting Wyoming’s energy. None of those groups are based in Wyoming and I’d be willing to bet that few even include citizens of this state. I don’t belong to any of them. Do you?
The citizens and their elected officials here in Wyoming need to begin weighing everything Washington does to control our everyday lives and our economic future and begin to consider the idea that maybe Washington is more trouble than it’s worth. As an independent State in the Union, Wyoming has the Constitutional authority to tell Washington to shove off.
Perhaps it’s time to do so. Other states, such as our friends up north in Montana, have already done so on other issues – they decided gun control from the BATFE in Washington was not for them. Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and others have all proposed 10th Amendment legislation to assert their rights as independent States.
I think it’s high time Wyoming did the same.
The people who live here and enjoy our beautiful state’s natural wildness, great resources, rural living, and unobtrusive politics are the ones who should decide what is done with resources that surround us.
After all, it’s our mountains, our prairie, our oil, our gas, our water, and our wildlife that are at stake here. Not America’s, but Wyoming’s. Yours and mine. Washington is 1,400 miles away. What can they possibly know about Wyoming?
The Four ‘Gates’ of the IPCC Posted on January 27th, 2010
First there was Climate Gate, showing that the peer review process has descended into a criminal farce of scientific malpractice where adjusting and hiding data was de-rigueur. Hello Fraud. ClimateGate also spread to the US, where 75% of worldwide data is systematically ignored or “adjusted” until it tells the right story.
Then there was PachauriGate, showing that the man in charge of the IPCC was chairman of boards of companies that profit handsomely as the scare-factor is ramped up.
Along comes GlacierGate: about the IPCC “accidentally” using a WWF report instead of peer reviewed science papers. After calling a 60 page Indian Govt report on glaciers “voodoo science” they were forced to apologize for that “one paragraph that was wrong”. Then Donna LeFramboise in just one day of hunting, found 16 other references in the IPCC 4th report to the “scientific journal” called “WWF”. Proving that really, the big safety-mechanism of the IPCC reputation was not in its exhaustive reviews but was in the way it made its documents so big, so dull and so unreadable, that hardly anyone actually … reads them. Call it the thousand-page-cloak-of-invisibility.
Camouflage for poor science, poor standards, bad logic, and too many vested interests to name.
Now there is AmazonGate. The IPCC fabricates disastrous claims about the Amazon forest, and references a document written by activists that doesn’t even support the claim.
Will 40% of the Amazonian forests react drastically to even a slight change in rainfall? Is there a tipping point for the Amazon? The reference turns out to be an Australian forest specialist, who works for not just the WWF, but also for the World Conservation Union, and who according to his CV mostly works in Australia and Asia, and not the Amazon. His co-author is a journalist who’s worked on Greenpeace campaigns and for the WWF. Then, to top it off, the assertions that the IPCC attributes to them can’t even be found in the report that they wrote.
All Gates lead to humiliation and embarrassment for the followers of the great cult of the carbonistas.
And we haven’t yet got even close to the scandal of the faulty assumptions that led to the faulty models and alarmist predictions in the first place, or the even bigger scandal of how the observational evidence that proves the assumptions false is and was ignored by the IPCC.
