Month: December 2011

Guardian:

On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had “executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers”. She added: “No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009.”

Tattersall posted his own account of the police search on his blog: “An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan police, the Norfolk constabulary and the computer crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though … They ended up settling for two laptops and an ADSL broadband router … I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress [the internet host for his blog] forwarded a notice from the US Department of Justice.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Tattersall said: “I am happy to assist the police with their inquiries because I haven’t been hiding anything important like some people have. I assisted them with their inquiries, which involved voluntarily answering some questions regarding computer use etc.”

Last month, Tattersall’s blog, as well as at least four other blogs popular with climate sceptics, received a comment from a user called “FOIA” providing a link to a Russian server hosting a compressed folder containing more than 5,000 emails exchanged between climate scientists, along with a short message setting out the perpetrator’s motives. The folder also contained an encrypted subfolder containing a further 220,000 emails. It was the second time such a release had occurred.

BigCityLib:

Tallbloke is one of the denialist bloggers who was gifted the latest batch of “Climategate” emails.  I don’t think he was near the center of the first release.  In any case, the U.K. police want a closer look at his computers.

Anthony Watts says he isn’t a suspect. But if they do a cavity search, who knows what it will turn up.

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Ok, I just lost my lunch.

Continue reading “Get Popcorn. Stolen Emails Recipients Under Scrutiny.”

Karma’s a Bitch.

At least it has been in my life. Generally, what goes around comes around – well, not if your last name is Bush and you live in the rarified strata of those who only fail up  – but generally for us little people, this is the case.

Many climate deniers obviously believe they are above the laws of cause and effect, that the normal laws of physics and man do not hold for them. Hence we have the obvious arrogance of the individual or individuals stealing emails from climate scientists.

Tonight, there’s disquiet among those who might  have thought themselves untouchable. Tonight, there’s a quiver on the dark side. I don’t frequent any of these blogs – their inside baseball venom and self dramatization bore me. But a few of them have just gotten a little mail from the Department of Justice.

The Air Vent: 

Tallbloke a fellow recipient blog of the climategate emails, and linked on the right, was raided today in what seems to be a coordinated effort by Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division.  His home was raided and computers were taken for ‘examination’.

Updates are coming shortly which will explain further.  The same is coming to a blogger near you.

Perhaps this post should be titled  –  “The Empire Strikes Back”

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Right – the persecution complex ever at the ready.

Save the drama for your mama.

 

One of the unexpected pleasures I had last week at the American Geophysical Union conference was meeting Dr. Jeff Masters of WeatherUnderground, one of the web’s premier weather and climate resources.

Jeff has a new post reviewing this past year’s wild weather.  When we envision hurricanes, we don’t usually think of Binghampton, NY…..

Wunderground.com:

With one of the wildest weather years in U.S. history drawing to a close, it’s time to look back at some of this year’s unprecedented onslaught of billion-dollar weather disasters–and the lessons we should have learned.

One of these disasters was the approximately $1 billion in damage due to flooding from Tropical Storm Lee, which brought torrential rains along a swath from Louisiana to New York in early September. Among the hardest hit cities was Binghamton, New York (population 47,000), where record rains due to the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee on September 8 brought a 1-in-200 to 1-in-500 year flood to the city’s Susquehanna River. A flood 8.5 inches higher than the city’s flood walls spilled over into the city that day, damaging or destroying over 7,300 buildings in Greater Binghamton, and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Damage to Binghamton’s sewage treatment plant and city infrastructure alone are estimated at $26 million. Damage to one elementary school is estimated at $11 – 19 million. There is as yet no damage estimate for private property losses, but they will undoubtedly be in the tens of millions. Damage to private property in the county immediately downstream from Binghamton, Tioga County, is estimated at over $100 million.

I argue that there is strong evidence that the extra moisture that global warming has added to the atmosphere over the past 40 years could have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back” which allowed Binghamton’s flood walls to be overtopped, causing tens of millions in damages. Had this event occurred 40 years ago, before global warming added an extra 4% moisture to the atmosphere, the Susquehanna flood would have likely stayed within the city’s flood walls.

More Pics below…

Continue reading “Dr Jeff Masters on this year’s Wild Weather”

Fairewinds’ chief engineer Arnie Gundersen discusses whether the accidents at Fukushima were a meltdown, a melt-through, or a China Syndrome. Whatever the accidents are named, thousands of tons of water contaminated with plutonium, uranium, and other very toxic radioactive isotopes are flooding the site, the surrounding water table, and the ocean.

There’s been a lot of hyperbole about what is happening at Fukushima. Gunderson provides some perspective.

Mitt Romney tripled down on his move to the fantasy based community with a new ad demonizing Newt Gingrich’s supposed alliance with “Al Gore’s liberal Global Warming agenda”.

Romney has apparently completely given up even the pretense of belonging to what republicans now scornfully call “the reality based community”. The fossil-funded GOP noise machine is going all out to, as former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently observed –  “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

Science has no politics. The atmosphere does not know left or right, only the laws of physics.

The depths of pandering to the very worst anti intellectual elements of the political spectrum were already astounding   — You have now entered the Twilight Zone….

The images we use to tell ourselves stories tell their own story.  This is the story of who we are – in our imaginations – in 2011 – on planet earth.

Wackjob right wing media manufactures imaginary story – check.

Story designed to activate reptilian fight-or-flight response in reality-challenged Fox News audience – check.

Add Religious Bigotry. Flavor with racism. Serve cold.

Raw Story: 

Conservative columnist David Frum, who was speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, blasted Fox News on Sunday for creating an “alternative knowledge system.”

In an article published by New York Magazine in late November, Frum had argued that conservative media like Fox News and talk radio “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

In an appearance on CNN Sunday, Frum cited claims made on Fox News that President Barack Obama was proposing a “new Christmas tree tax,” something that was found by both The Florida Times-Union and PolitiFact Oregon to be not true.

“It fed into a story about this Muslim-y kind of president trying to destroy a Christian holiday,” Frum explained to CNN’s Howard Kurtz. “To make this a ground for a cultural conflict, to create a sense in large numbers of people they are being persecuted and attacked at a time when the country is in so much trouble, that’s how this thing is fed.”

“The question is what is the impact on the viewer?” he continued. “And we know, for example, that people that watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events. That’s a correlation that we know.”

Crain’s Detroit Business: 

With real Christmas trees slowly losing sales ground to the artificial kind, many tree farmers were counting on a new federal program to boost business in Michigan — the third-largest producer of real trees in the nation.

They’ll have to wait at least another year.

In early November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a “checkoff” program to promote sales of fresh Christmas trees. Two days later, under attack by conservative bloggers and talk show hosts, the federal agency changed its mind.

The program — similar to those promoting sales of beef, milk and other farm products — would have been funded by a 15 cent-per-tree fee collected from farms that sell 500 or more trees a year. The USDA had planned to appoint a board of industry representatives to oversee a “program of promotion, research, evaluation and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace,” the agency announced in the Federal Register.

Shortly after the USDA announced the checkoff program Nov. 8, the conservative blogosphere reacted. David Addington, vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, called the program “the Christmas tree tax.”

“The economy is barely growing, and 9 percent of the American people have no jobs,” Addington wrote in his blog. “Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do?”

Rush Limbaugh called it “Obama’s Christmas tree tax” and part of the “war on Christmas.” After the USDA put the program on hold, Limbaugh claimed credit.

The Agriculture Department isn’t killing the program, said Gwen Sparks, the department’s public affairs manager.

“USDA will delay implementation of this industry-funded program to provide consumers and other stakeholders an opportunity to better understand its nature and purpose,” she said.

Sound familiar? I thought so, too.

LA Times:

…it’s hard to believe that even a tyrant as petty and murderous as Nero would be foolish enough to watch the burning of his city-state and do nothing about it. But we Americans are.

Climate change is no longer a theoretical concept to be debated at symposiums by science nerds. It is happening right here, right now. Thirteen of the warmest years on record worldwide have happened in the past 15 years. In the U.S., 12 weather-related disasters this year have caused in excess of $1 billion in damage each, a record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Although many expected the global economic downturn to slow the output of greenhouse gases, emissions actually have been accelerating at an alarming rate, growing 5.9% in 2010 — the biggest jump since 2003. The American response? Fiddling around.

Susan Lewis in the Winchester Star: 

Today, with China’s ascendancy on the horizon, our political leaders are calling for more students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. They understand that America’s ability to compete in the global economy depends heavily on our technical expertise.

How disappointing, then, that many Republican leaders disparage science and the work of scientists when it clashes with their ideology or merely suits their political goals. This attack on science has dangerous consequences, threatening to undermine science education, critical government funding for basic science research, and public sentiment toward science.

In 2009, a group of 18 prominent scientific groups headed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science sent Congress a letter stressing the clear evidence for climate change. Yet 94 of the 100 GOP members of Congress elected in 2010 either deny that global warming is real or have pledged opposition to any effort to mitigate it. When George Stephanopoulos asked House Speaker John Boehner what the Republican plan was to deal with carbon emissions, he replied, “George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it’s harmful to our environment, is almost comical.” Boehner’s apparent confusion would be comical if scientific illiteracy didn’t carry potentially dire consequences.

The anti-science streak is so strong among Republican presidential contenders that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently called it “mind-boggling.” The majority of the candidates, including Ron Paul, Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry, don’t accept evolution, the bedrock of modern biology. “Can you imagine a company of any size in the world where the CEO said ‘oh, I don’t believe in science’?” Bloomberg asked the audience at a Columbia University economics forum.

Another one of those deeply strange animated news spots from Taiwan. Appropriate since we live in deeply strange times.

NMATV: 

Canada is withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday, abandoning its 1997 commitment to cut emissions 6% below 1990 levels by 2102 and cementing the transformation of the country’s image as a global leader in the fight against climate change into what critics are calling a “climate renegade.”

By 2009 Canada’s emissions were 17 percent above 1990 levels. Canada faced nearly $14 billion in penalties for failing to reduce greenhouse emissions if it had remained a signatory to the Kyoto accord.

The Kyoto Protocol was signed by the Liberal Party, and Canada’s currentConservative government has made it clear since 2006 that it had no intention of honoring the Kyoto pact, in part because it does not cover major emitters of greenhouse gases such as the US and China.

Adopted on Dec. 11, 1997, the Kyoto Protocol set binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the EU to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Major polluters Brazil, India and China were signatories but as developing economies were not required to reduce emissions.

US President Bill Clinton signed the agreement but it was not ratified by Congress. Then Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee chairman Frank H. Murkowski said the Kyoto accord was “dead on arrival.”

Eugene Robinson – Washington Post: 

I’m inclined to believe that the apparent result of the climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, might turn out to be a very big deal. Someday. Maybe.

After the meeting ended Sunday, initial reaction ranged from “Historic Breakthrough: The Planet Is Saved” to “Tragic Failure: The Planet Is Doomed.”

My conclusion is that for now, at least, the conceptual advance made in Durban is as good as it gets.

This advance is, potentially, huge: For the first time, officials of the nations that are the biggest carbon emitters — China, the United States and India — have agreed to negotiate legally binding restrictions.

Under the old Kyoto Protocol framework, which for now remains largely in effect, rapidly industrializing nations refused to be constricted by limits that would stunt their development. The United States declined to sign on to the Kyoto agreement as long as China, India, Brazil and other rising economic giants got a pass.

This meant that while European nations worked to meet emissions targets — or, in some cases, pretended to do so — the most important sources of carbon were unconstrained. When Kyoto was adopted, China was well behind the United States as an emitter; now it’s far ahead. India recently passed Russia to move into third place.

The Durban talks seemed likely to go nowhere until the Chinese delegate, Xie Zhenhua, announced that Beijing was willing to consider a legally binding framework. With China now responsible for fully 23 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, this was an enormous step forward.

Bloomberg: 

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) — The U.S., long accused of blocking progress in international climate talks, is winning a two-decade old debate about how to curtail global warming.

The decision yesterday by China and India to move toward an agreement with the “legal force” to limit their fossil fuel emissions marked the first step toward treating developing nations the same as industrial ones when it comes to reducing pollution.

President Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before him, had pushed for that parity after the Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which limits greenhouse gases for industrial nations. Developing nations such as China and India had no commitments under Kyoto.

“The Durban climate talks have brought us to an important moment where all nations will be covered in the same roadmap toward a long-term solution for the climate crisis — the greatest challenge facing our planet,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

The Bloomberg article is worth reading at length here.