As most of you know, Mark Steyn is a defendant in a lawsuit by the possibly Canuckaphobic (judging by the disproportional number of Canadians among the victims of his lawfare) and reflexively litigious Dr. Michael Mann.
If you’ve been following this (among all the other ‘defamation’ cases), you might be interested in this filing opposing the dismissal of counterclaims.
And, to get you into the mood, here is ‘Hide the Decline – Part 2’ for your listening (and viewing) pleasure:
Donna Laframboise is an investigative journalist who has investigated the IPCC’s claim that their findings are based solely on peer-reviewed scientific literature. She has found that far from basing their findings on solid scientific studies, the IPCC heavily relied on so called ‘gray literature’, composed mainly from activist propaganda with a dash of government policy papers thrown in for good measure.
Disclosure: I was one of the citizen reviewers who volunteered to go through the IPCC’s references as part of the citizen’s audit Donna Laframboise organized and then reported in her book, ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World’s Top Climate expert, and am acknowledged as such in the book.
What Donna Laframboise did was unique: rather than challenge the science behind the IPCC’s report or its conclusion, something which is difficult and open to dispute, she took the testable statement made by the IPCC regarding the sources on which they drew their conclusions. And, she proved that the IPCC lied about the sources on which they based their very report.
Since then, she has been speaking out about IPCC and the untrue statements she could prove they had made, in addition to publishing her book and blogging about the issue. It is therefore not surprising that a whistle-blower from within IPCC itself had sought her out to leak some information to her regarding the next IPCC report.
Donna Laframboise has gone public with this material yesterday, January 8th, 2013, by publishing a long post on her blog ‘No Frakking Consensus’ as well as a guest post on WUWT (Watts Up With That, world’s leading ACC-skeptic site) with links to the data from the three memory sticks with information from the so-termed ‘Secret Santa leak’.
Today, she had been served with legal notice by IPCC to take the data down or else…
So, if you’d like to get a hold of the data (I know I’ve been busy reading over it – fascinating stuff), better download it fast…or look for some of the many torrent sites distributing the information. Like Donna’s post concludes:
‘But really, the cat is out-of-the-bag. The damage is done. Thousands of copies of these documents are now out there. They can’t be recalled.’
You go, Donna!
Exposing corruption in unaccountable bureaucracies which increasingly try to regulate our freedom out of existence is the duty of each and every one of us!!!
UPDATE: The good IT fairy has made the leaked documents into a searchable database.
Since Dr. Mann’s new hobby of suing people has brought up the subject of the ‘hockey-stick graph’ – specifically, whether its creation was honest incompetence or straightforward fraud valid ‘climate science’, I wend digging through the interwebitudes for some more background material.
Note: Dr. Mann is not suing National Review and Mark Steyn for comparing Penn State’s whitewashing of both the pedophile and himself. Not at all. He is suing them for having called him a fraud. And the reason he is suing Dr. Ball is because he said that Michael Mann belongs in State Penn, not Penn State… Therefore, I am not suggesting either of these things, in any way, shape or form.
There is so much material out there, it is difficult to pick the best few – the ones that best document the events. However, here are a few front runners:
This post opens with:
‘There wasn’t any hockey stick prior to the year 2000.
The 1990 IPCC report showed that temperatures were much cooler than 800 years ago.’
It then supplies graphs – of what was the historical record prior to 2000, and how that all changed as the ‘hockey-stick graph’ took shape.
It even points out which bits were done by Phil Jones’s team, which by Michael Mann’s team.
Chock full of graphs, showing the ‘before’ and ‘after’ figures.
So, how did this become ‘accepted science’? What ‘studies’ confirmed it? How did it make it into the IPCC reports?
That is an interesting story in its own right – and has been meticulously pieced together in this post:
From the intro:
‘The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I’m going to try to tell it in layman’s language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it’s the first time the whole story has been set out in a single posting. It’s a long tale – and the longest posting I think I’ve ever written and piecing it together from the individual CA postings has been a long, hard but fascinating struggle. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.’
Here, meticulously documented, is the story of how the ‘hockey-stick graph’ went from being just one paper, submitted by one scientist, to ‘scientific consensus’ and unquestionable holy writ.
It documents questionable behaviour by the scientists involved, the editors of the journals and the IPCC folks, none of whom appear to be following their own guidelines of professional conduct.
While we are on the topic of IPCC itself, it is important to note that while they loudly touted the unfortunate hockey-stick graph for quite some time – before quietly removing it without an explanation – it is important to understand that this is not a body of leading scientists: it is primarily a political body, formed by a political organization, through a politically correct process, to promote its own political agenda – with a few scientists tossed in for window dressing.
One person who has documented IPCC’s sloppiness (if not downright corruption) and lack of adherence to its own rules is the Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise. Here she is, from a tour in Australia:
Much of the IPCC process was dominated by ‘climate modelling’ – computer programs that try to predict what will happen based on what has happened. On the surface of it, this seems valid: the problem is in how these models were constructed. It seems they are, to put it mildly, highly flawed.
Another fundamental problem for the IPCC reviewers was that they were only permitted to comment on the studies which were pre-selected and presented to them for comment. This selection process was highly sensitive – but handled by the behind-the-scenes bureaucrats. There were many instances where scientists spoke up, saying the material they were presented with was not representative of the current work in the field and asked to be permitted to include a broader spectrum of studies. These requests were summarily dismissed by the apartchicks running the show.
But even as hamstrung as they were, when scientists actually commented on errors/omissions/inaccuracies in the drafts of the reports, their comments were dismissed, the drafts were not corrected and the objectionable conclusions or downright errors made it into the final reports. Cough, Himalayan glacier, cough…
That is not a sound scientific process….
While I was scouring the interwebitudes looking for supporting links, I came across an interesting site:
Bookmark this site – it catalogues peer-reviewed, scientific papers (by category) which refute the warm-mongering narrative. Over a thousand of them.
It would b easy to just sit here are read them all – but then, this post would never get fin…
Yes – I have just finished reading this book (Kindle version) and would like to say a few words about it.
First, in the name of transparency, I disclose that I am named in the acknowledgments as one of the over 40 citizen auditors whom the book’s author, Donna Laframboise, had recruited to audit the references in various IPCC AR4 chapters in order to verify whether the sources were peer-reviewed scientific journals or other materials. (More on this later.)
Let me start with the conclusion: well worth a read!
It is worth reading regardless of your opinions about global warming and the role humanity does or does not play in it because, contrary to some book reviews, the book does not actually address the science itself. Let me say it again: this book is NOT an examination of the science, nor does it draw any scientific conclusions. Not one!
Rather, this book takes the claims the IPCC (and its members) make about the organization and how it functions and tests them for consistency and validity. As the sub-title of the book says, it is ‘An Expose of the IPCC’. It is a journalistic expose of the process (and its corruption) behind the IPCC repots: exactly the sort of thing that investigative journalist are trained to do.
This is a serious matter: regardless of where your opinions may fall on the science itself, the process through which the IPCC reports – the reports with perhaps the furthest and deepest financial and political implications of our generation – are generated must be transparent and worthy of our trust. It is perhaps even more the interest of the ACC believers that this process is ‘beyond reproach’ – that their Kool-Aid is not tainted, if you will.
What Donna Laframboise has revealed in ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC’ is an eye-opener to people who have trusted the IPCC simply because they were told to trust world’s leading scientists.
No, the book is not perfect. There is a number of things that I would have either eliminated or re-phrased or even things I think are important that were not included in the book. For example, she does go on about the Y2K bug in an attempt to parallel the hysteria and I get her aim – yet I think this and similar bits detract, not add to the book. At times, her wording is more colloquial than what appeals to my taste, but that is a minor pick – and what she says, regardless of the style she says it in, is valid.
As for omissions – perhaps the most important one is that while I was checking the references for several of the chapters in AR4 for the Citizen Audit, I noted that a number of the references were not to peer-reviewed journals, but to actual official government policy papers.
To me, this is a big deal.
Yes, she correctly pans the IPCC for using a WWF and Greenpeace pamphlets and ads and press releases as source material – these are clearl not peer-reviewed science, despite the often repeated mantra that the IPCC uses exclusively sources from peer-reviewed scientific publications. Citing these as peer-reviewed science is very problematic and Donna does a great job exposing this.
But that a number of actual government policy papers (from several different national governments as well as from the EU) are the source material on which the IPCC draws its conclusions is, in my never-humble-opinion, just as big (if not even bigger) deal. Precisely because, as she documents in her book, it is governments who nominate people for IPCC participation, inclusion of policy papers by those very same governments demonstrates very clearly the conflicts of interest of many of the people behind the IPCC.
OK – that was my pet peeve. I have to admit, in light of what the book does reveal and how meticulously it documents all of its assertions, it is just a minor niggle.
Perhaps the most praise-worthy aspect of ‘The Delinquent Teenager’ is how meticulously it is researched and documented. I have not seen a hard copy, but the Kindle version (and, I understand, the pdf version) are filled with links to relevant material and almost a quarter of the book is ‘footnotes’. Really. Everything written in this book has been researched and documented beyond anything I have seen – ever. For a fact junkie such as I am, this really makes the case – and proves it.
Different people liked different aspects: here are a few other reviews of the book (this one has copious quotes).
What did I learn from the book that I did not know before?
Two things jump to mind right away:
1. There were no conflict of interest guidelines or rules for the IPCC as late as 2010 – they were deemed unnecessary. This is problematic on its own. However, following a scathing review by IAC, such conflict of interest rules have been done up. Alas, they will not apply to any of the people currently working on the next IPCC report, because, as Rajendra Pachauri who heads the IPCC says, that would not be fair…
It would not ‘be fair’ to expect the IPCC ‘experts’ to adhere to conflict of interest rules?!?!?
2. Donna Laframboise strings together a sequence of events that we should be aware of and supports it with quotes from Rajendra Pachauri and others: the role of the IPCC never was to present an impartial report.
Here is the sequence:
Let me emphasize this: the IPCC was created specifically to lend ‘scientific’ backing to the claim there is a problem only AFTER the UN had created the solution!
There is more in the book that I learned, but these two things are of such importance, it is difficult to believe any investigative
This is an important book – if you have not done so, please, read it!
Donna Laframboise is the corageous Canadian journalist who has taken on the ACC/Global Warmmongers.
She is the one who conducted the IPCC audit (in which your never-humble correspondant participated) which clearly demonstrated that the IPCC did not use ‘peer-reviewed scientific publications’ as the sources of information on which it drew to created its reports.
(Check out the free preview – it is 7 chapters long!)
Fit reading on ‘Earth Day’ – the watermelon subversion of ecology, originally launched to mark the 100th birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (aka Vlad, the Lenin):
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–(Marketwire – April 21, 2010) – University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, launched a lawsuit today in BC Supreme Court against three writers at The National Post (and the newspaper as a whole), over a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.
…
Dr. Weaver’s statement of claim not only asks for a Court injunction requiring The National Post to remove all of the false allegations from its Internet websites, but also seeks an unprecedented Court order requiring the newspaper to assist Dr. Weaver in removing the defamatory National Post articles from the many other Internet sites where they have been re-posted. [emphasis added]
This, after Dr. Mann (I think it’s still ‘Dr.’ – can one be stripped of a doctorate for committing scientific fraud?) has threatened to sue ‘MinnesotansForGlobalWarming’ for their wildly successful ‘Hide the Decline’ video about Dr. Mann’s role in the biggest scientific fraud of our generation…
And now, not just kooks like David Suzuki are calling for jailing anyone who speaks up against the ACC fraud – now, legislators are lobbying the UN (which has never ceased to seize an opportunity to silence ‘pesky critics’) to pass international laws that would force national governments to jail those who speak up against their ‘carbon-trading-gravy-train….
Is it getting chilly here?
I did it!
I signed up to be a part of the group of ordinary citizens which does some due diligence on the IPCC 4th report’s references!
We’ve been bombarded with assertions that the IPCC review is based on ‘solid, scientific studies which were published in reputable scientific journals after undergoing a thorough peer-review which ensured only ‘sound’ science gets published.
Right.
Yet, it is exactly this claim that the IPCC review is using peer-reviewed (peer-review is ‘quality control’ in scientific studies) – and therefore high-quality and somehow ‘unassailable’ scientific studies – it is this claim that is being widely used as a shield to any criticism of the report and the political policies it is attempting to mandate. In short, the IPCC ‘crowd’ is deriving the authoritativeness of their report from the claim they used peer-reviewed science!
And – even after their earlier predictions have clearly not come true (their own top scientists have testified that there has been NO statistically significant WARMING in the last 14 years – and the total warmingfrom 150 years ago to-date just over 1/2 degree Celsius: well within the ‘noise’ one would expect due to natural variation) and every respectable scientist would admit their hypothesis is faulty, these people are still claiming that the IPCC report is accurate ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and that we should all approve shady schemes which will make them rich!
So, we are checking nothing but the veracity of this claim – just how much of the report is based on solid science and how much is based on ‘gray literature’ !
Volunteers who sign up each take a chapter and see which references are actually peer-reviewed scientific studies. Each chapter’s references will be reviewed by at least 3 different volunteers, to minimize errors….and if there is any doubt as to the count of ‘peer-reviewed’ versus ‘other’ references, the number most favourable to the IPCC will be used.
And, we’re not even digging into the whole ‘pal-review’ instead of ‘peer review’ – all we are ‘tagging’ are references to government policy reports, WWF publications (yes, I HAVE come across one of these in the first 100 references I checked), random websites (yes, I saw one of them, too), self-references, EU or UN press releases, various government policy statements (yes, I saw many of these, too), and so on.
This project is not ‘examining the validity of the science’ – that is complex and people who are imminently qualified are already doing a great job doing that.
Nor are we taking a look at ‘what studies were included’ versus ‘what studies were available’. That is, we are not checking if the report is based on ‘cherry-picked’ studies – ones that only show one side of the issue – also a very important factor which could be a source of a bias.
No – not going there.
In other words, we are not auditing the science in the IPCC report.
Instead, we are testing the assertion – nay, claim! – that the IPCC report is based on peer-reviewed, scientific studies published in reputable scientific journals!
That is all!
Still, it is a big task: the chapter I am checking has over 600 references…. it takes time to check them!
But, it is a little ‘walk-on-part’ in this war of scientific skepticism against politicized subversion of science….and that is important.
Once the good folks (Donna and her helpers) from NOconsensus.org get all the well documented results and meld them together, they will let us know just how much the IPCC report is based on scientific studies vs. ‘gray literature’!
Stay tuned….
Donna Lafromboise of ‘There is No Frakking “Scientific Concensus” on Global Warming’ is seeking volunteers who are willing to spend 3-10 hours in reviewing the IPCC’s references – simply to check (and count) the number of ‘peer-reviewed’ references versus ‘other’ sources (like, say, an ad by WWF, a press release, a guess in an obscure non-scientific magazine, and so on).
The reason?
Most of our policymakers (worldwide) are pretending (acting as if) the 2007 IPCC report were the absolute truth, represented a 100% scientific consensus (you know – anyone who disagrees is automatically defined as a non-scientist, or worse – a denialist!).
One of the reasons most often cited for considering this to be THE authoritative last word that we, pesky humans are boiling poor Mother Earth do death is that the IPCC report is based on solid scientific evidence. All the IPCC evidence, the warm-mongers claim, is based on scientific studies which were peer-reviewed and published in reputable scientific journals.
‘Peer-review’ is what makes a scientific study ‘respectable’. It is a process in which other respected scientists (ones who are not connected with the people who did the original work and who wrote it up for publication) read the original study, examine how the data was collected, how it was manipulated, how the study analyzed the data and whether the data supported the conclusions which the authors of the study made. In other words, it’s like having a teacher mark your homework….. If it is ‘good’ – it passes the ‘peer-review’ and the scientific journal can publish the study with the knowledge that their reputation will not be tarnished by doing so.
This, of course, puts great pressure on the scientists reviewing the study. No, they are not expected to re-create the experiment, but, they are responsible for making sure that good scientific methodology was followed, that the data collected actually measured what the original scientists thought it measured (THIS is where MORE mistakes in scientific studies happen than most people – including scientists – are aware of), that the statistical analysis used was appropriate for the data, and so on. It is a big responsibility – with the greatest asset a scientist has on the line: their reputation!
That is why ‘peer-review’ is considered to be an assurance of ‘good, sound science’.
And THAT is why the IPCC and its supporters argue that since the IPCC is based on ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific studies, it is above reproach!
OK….
For the sake of the argument, let us set aside any claims that the IPCC-associated scientists turned ‘peer-review’ into ‘pal-review’ and actually check to see just how accurate the claim that the IPCC used only scientific studies which were ‘peer-reviewed’ and published in reputable scientific journals.
‘How much of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is based on peer-reviewed literature? Recent examinations of two random chapters found only 24 percent and 58 percent of the sources cited were peer-reviewed journal articles.’ ‘
So, she has decided to put the whole thing to the test!
But, that is a lot of checking…. Therefore, she is looking for volunteers who would be willing to share the load:
‘The goal of this project is for each chapter to be counted thrice, by three volunteers working independently of one another. In the event that tallies differ dramatically, further examination will occur. Should they differ only marginally, the count that is most favourable to the IPCC will be used.’
So, if you have a bit of time and are willing, head on to her site and get counting!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 