If ignorance is truly bliss, then green-blogger Brendan DeMelle has got to be one the happiest people on the face of the earth. Attempting to ridicule the Heartland Institutes’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, set to kick off in Chicago this Sunday, DeMelle relied on tired arguments that might otherwise be persuasive if they were either: a) relevant, or b) accurate. The following pretty much sums up DeMelle’s take:

…this denial-a-palooza fest is dripping with oil money and represents a blatant industry effort to greenwash oil and coal while simultaneously attacking the credibility of climate scientists.

The entire conference can therefore be dismissed out of hand. Nothing to see here except a bunch of posers on the take, right? Had he been blogging during the Renaissance, no doubt DeMelle would have advanced the same kind of argument to defend the accepted version of “settled science” back then:

Pay no attention of that fraud Galileo. You know he’s part of the Accademia dei Lincei, right? And you know that group is funded by that rich aristocrat Federico Cesi, right? How can you believe a guy with those connections? How can the Pope and all those Cardinals possibly be wrong?

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It has been fascinating to observe how a multinational corporation that is so popular and trusted can be so flatfooted and incapable of responding to a crisis.

Like many of these crises it started small. The corporation seemed invincible and underwent major growth. Some worried the growth was too fast and retained doubts about the science and the technology. However, these warnings were on the fringe and were easily ignored…

… until three months ago, when the corporation suddenly found itself at the center of crisis after crisis, its science and technology revealed to be hopelessly flawed, shoddy even.

Inside the corporation denial took over, but eventually it became clear the problem was structural.  In a rush for profits and market dominance, executives had ignored procedures, falsified data, and then covered up or tried to minimize their falsifications.

Compounding the problem — the head of the corporation remained silent until he was forced to respond to the concerns of the American people: (more…)

As a trial lawyer, I am jealous of Tom Friedman, that prophet of painfully conventional “wisdom” whose insights grace the ever dustier New York Times op-ed pages.  His latest column, “Global Weirding Is Here”, has managed to achieve what I only dream about as an attorney -– a self-proving argument.

Tom is, of course, an anthropological global-warming disciple and a lay Grand Inquisitor.

So, naturally, the uncooperative weather – you know, those giant snowstorms folks back east might have noticed – provide him with a quandary.  How does one reconcile his faith that the world is becoming one gigantic orchid hothouse with the fact that it seems to be colder all the time?

Well, you start by mocking the heretics – excuse me, the “deniers”: (more…)

Please click for Part I and Part III.

PART II – The “hockey stick” graph inadvertently incites a new camp of “lukewarmer” skeptics. Climategate files make first appearance on the internet, but were in the hands of one person days before they were made public.

If history tells us anything, it shows us that inciting an audience is an extremely precarious undertaking. Inspiring one group of followers with a call-to-action can just as easily unleash the furor of another. Arousing a community to attack an indisputable villain can surprisingly lead to a circling of the wagons by the scoundrel’s close associates. Inciting is an unpredictable endeavor, best left for those with an innate ability to read a situation or an army on-the-ready to quickly take advantage of an opening.

So is the story of the hockey stick – just as quickly as it was used as a rallying call for warmists, it also inadvertently gave birth to a camp of skeptics.

Enter Steve McIntyre, stage right. A retired mineral explorer and math scholar from Toronto, McIntyre became interested in climate science and the hockey stick due to its seeming inconsistencies. A Medieval Warming Period (seen above) had been a well-documented event in which the earth’s temperature increased considerably sometime between 1000 and 1300 AD, followed by a cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age. A graph of this cycle was even included in the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990. These events were, however, absent from the Mann et al hockey stick graph. McIntyre was curious about how the graph was made and as chance would have it, the discipline of temperature reconstructions, largely an exercise in statistics, fit right within his mathematics wheelhouse.

Steve McIntyre

On investigating the hockey stick, McIntyre happened upon what he viewed as some errors in the application of his field of expertise along with some misuses of data. He contacted Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist with a PhD in economics, and the two worked on a paper that would highlight the errors in the original hockey stick article. (more…)

Please click for Part II and Part III.

How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.

It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.

The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.

Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review. (more…)

Trillions of dollars are at stake in the man-made global warming debate.  The Climategate scandal – where leaked emails and computer programs involve dozens of prominent scientists worldwide – has almost everything one would want in a good scandal: conspiracies, fraud, possible destruction of documents, and lots of heated exchanges.  But the media has been reluctant to look into the problems and even when the controversy has been acknowledged it has been quickly dismissed as unimportant.

Newsweek poo-poohed Climategate as just showing “a few scientists in a bad light” and that “there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.”  The New York Times editorialized that “no one should be misled by all the noise” and that global warming was just too important “to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action.”  Former Vice President Al Gore has been in full swing doing interviews the last few weeks, and the media has rarely challenged any of his claims.  Gore told Slate: “What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.”  He made the same comment unchallenged on MSNBC.  Yet, the thousand emails were written over thirteen years, and went right up through this year. (more…)