Despite the best efforts of CRU “climatologists,” the scandal ignited by the hacking of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit just keeps gaining traction.

The most recent problem facing the CRU?  They have destroyed much of the raw data they used to support their man-made global warming claims.

Most of the data in question was erased in the 1980’s, and serves, to this day, as the foundation upon which the CRU databases are built.  With the original numbers gone, there is essentially no way for other scientists to check the work the CRU has been doing for the last 30 years. 

A statement on the CRU website reads “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” 

Professor Phil Jones, the CRU director, maintains that a temperature increase of 0.8 Degrees Celsius over the last 157 years is “unequivocally” related to mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions.   However, the fact that the data on which he bases that claim is gone has sent shock waves through the scientific community.

As Roger Pielke, an environmental studies professor at Colorado University puts it: “The CRU is basically saying ‘Trust us’.  So much for settling questions and  resolving debates with science.”

We are told constantly that faith and science don’t mix.  Science is provable, demonstrable, and based in quantifiable fact.  Why then should the CRU just expect the world to have faith in their numbers, especially in the wake of emails that show that its scientists were cooking the books?

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

- Robert Laurie

A non-scientific poll, conducted by Vanity Fair Magazine and 60 Minutes, found that radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is the nation’s most influential conservative.  His 55% win  is hardly surprising since Limbaugh’s audience averages 13.5 million listeners a week.

Other important reporting by the crack 60 Minutes / Vanity Fair team?  The sky is Blue, the sun rises in the East, and Oprah has money.

The runner up in the poll was radio and TV host Glenn Beck who, considering his habit of getting Obama administration officials fired, deserves more than his paltry 15%. 

The poll also asks which President should have his face added to Mount Rushmore.  Despite an early, mysterious lead by Barack Obama, the battle for the top spot is now being waged by FDR and Ronald Reagan.

To skew the numbers, go HERE, and click on things…over and over again.

- Robert Laurie

Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend, and if any of our readers managed to sneak into a state dinner while we were away, please, drop us a line!

Regular updates will resume in a mere moments….

After a long, 90 day period of careful consideration, Obama announced that he had reached a decision, and earlier today made his plans known.

“Courage” the turkey  has been granted a presidential pardon.  Instead of an execution and a delicious post-mortem, the bird will receive a trip to Disneyland and an idyllic life on a farm.

Congratulations to courage, and here’s hoping that the president can find the time to make an announcement of similar importance regarding the future of our troops in Afghanistan.

To every one else, Happy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy your non-pardoned birds.  The Robalution will resume on Friday, assuming Harry Reid doesn’t sneak into the Senate tomorrow to pass his health care bill while we’re looking.

- Robert Laurie

Sarah Palin, often dismissed by the left as an idiot who should just go home to her snowmobiling husband and massage his feet, has again had the last laugh.

According to the AP, her book, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” sold over 700,000 copies in it’s first week on sale.  The memoir had a first printing of 1.5 million copies, but due to the strong sales an additional million will be manufactured.

Of recent political authors, only Bill Clinton has managed to do better.  His book, “My Life,” sold 900,000 copies in week one, largely due to its discussion of the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Given that they had 11 reporters fact checking Palin’s 400 page book, while only two were fact checking the 2000 page Senate health bill, we’re sure the AP is thrilled with the high sales numbers.

- Robert laurie

Your Senators, Representatives, and President don’t care what you think.  They’ve made that abundantly clear.  However, for a second, just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend they did.

Why?

Because if they gave a damn about their constituency’s opinions, they’d be quaking in their boots today.  According to Rasmussen’s latest polling, only 38% of likely voters approve of the Democrat’s health care reform plans.  They’ve polled the question nearly two dozen times since June, and that’s an all time low – down almost ten percent in just the elast two weeks..

Also at an all time low, Barack Obama.  He’s sitting at a 45% Approval rating.  Furthermore, just 27% of voters stongly approve of the job he’s doing. 

More interesting is the fact that 42% stongly disapprove.  That’s the same number George W Bush had when he left office.

Fortunately, as we said, they don’t care about these numbers.  It’s a good thing, too.  Otherwise the “how low can you go” approval limbo might start making the Dems nervous.  No one wants nervous Dems, right?

Check out all the data HERE.

- Robert Laurie

Look, I thought we settled this.  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Barack Obama does not bow before communists, thugs, dictators, or human rights violators. OK?  What Gibbs says, goes.  End of story.

Here’s a nice snapshot of our President bowing before his superior, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

I’m sure the Dalai Llama would love to talk about this with Obama, if he hadn’t been snubbed by the President.

Who says Obama’s “nice guy” act isn’t getting him anywhere.  Oh, that’s right, German newspapers.

- Robert Laurie

 

This morning a story broke, quietly at first, about the possibility that hackers had managed to infiltrate the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit email system.  The CRU is one of the worlds most powerful and influential global warming research bodies.  At some point, almost every bit of research that climate change activists cite as “evidence” passes through their hands.

Rumors of what these hackers had managed to get their hands on started to circulate immediately but no one was sure if it was genuine or not.  Now, the BBC is confirming it.  The hack was real.

A zip file containing 160 megabytes worth of stolen text was uploaded to a Russian server early this morning.  Then it started to disseminate.  Now you can get a hold of it from any torrent or file-sharing site on the net.

Inside are documents and emails, all of which point to what could be the biggest scientific scandal in history.

Keep in mind, these are still just alleged emails because, while the break in has been confirmed, the content of what was taken has not.  If they are proven to be genuine, however, the information will destroy companies, damage politicians, and likely cast a very dark shadow over the legitimacy of the movement.

For example, here’s the head of the Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones, discussing the method by which he was combing data indicating temperature declines with false data indicating increases:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@
[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]
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
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit 

Here they are, admitting they can’t figure out why the world isn’t heating up, and how it’s a “travesty” that their data isn’t keeping up with the plan.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

Other information in the emails includes the following, entitled FOIA Thoughts, which suggests ways to deal with troublesome Freedom Of Information Act requests:

Options appear to be:

1. Send them the data
2. Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

Care to hear about bogus statistics?  That’s in there too….

ith,

Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I’ll send it to you.

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though – I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions – he laughed and said that’s what he thought at first also. The data’s tempting but there’s too much variation even within stands. I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have – they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I’ll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.

Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I’d be optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.

Yeah, I doubt I’ll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I’d like to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably someday though.

Cheers, Gary

The Zip file contains a whopping 1,073 emails in one folder, and 3,485 documents in another.  It will take some time to dig through it all, particularly since most of it is quite complex.  That said, the first few hours of investigation have already turned up evidence that is extremely damaging to the CRU’s cause, and there is no reason to think there won’t be more.

If you want to look for yourself, the Zip file torrent is available at The Pirate Bay.  Alternately, you can grab it from this link at MegaUpload.

More info HERE at Hotair.com and HERE at AirVent.com where the story originally broke.

If you follow the polls, you’re aware that Rasmussen has had Obama below the 50% mark for a while now.  Those numbers were, of course, dismissed by the left as the ravings of a biased, right wing pollster, desperate to damage our beloved 44th President.  They pointed to Gallup’s relatively high numbers as proof.

Now, however, Gallup’s numbers are catching up with Rasmussen.  Today, for the first time, Gallup shows the President with a sub-50% approval rating.

This means that, according to Gallup, Obama is the fourth fastest President in the race to 49%.

Click HERE for all of Gallup’s info, including a ridiculously long, apologetic missive about how their own polling really doesn’t mean anything.  These numbers, according to the pollsters, are nothing more than symbolic.  They clearly don’t want anyone to worry, and all but promise that Barack will make a comeback.

We would be remiss if we didn’t ask the question: “If the numbers are so meaningless, why bother to take the poll in the first place, Gallup?”

- Robert Laurie