Potholer54 just made a

">video on the hacked emails.

">here's another one

This decade 'warmest on record' (8 December 2009)

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The first decade of this century is "by far" the warmest since instrumental records began, say the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Organization.

Their analyses also show that 2009 will almost certainly be the fifth warmest in the 160-year record.
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The WMO said global temperatures were 0.44C (0.79F) above the long-term average.

"We've seen above average temperatures in most continents, and only in North America were there conditions that were cooler than average," said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.
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The WMO uses three temperature sets - one from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and two from the US, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and the space agency Nasa.

Asked whether the controversy surrounding e-mails hacked from CRU could have any bearing on the results, Mr Jarraud replied that all three datasets showed the same result.
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Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?

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The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.

The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide "unhelpful" research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.

The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them "an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect". The Kremlin has also been accused of running co-ordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighbouring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.

"It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services," Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, said in Copenhagen at the weekend. "It's a carefully made selection of emails and documents that's not random. This is 13 years of data, and it's not a job of amateurs."
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I had wondered if the hack was the work of the Russian Mafia, but this makes more sense given the newly formed bridges between the American far right and the Russian far right (Tea Partiers' New Hero: Ex-KGB Agent Who Thinks U.S. Will Collapse Next Year).

Quote: I had wondered if the hack was the work of the Russian Mafia, but this makes more sense given the newly formed bridges between the American far right and the Russian far right (Tea Partiers' New Hero: Ex-KGB Agent Who Thinks U.S. Will Collapse Next Year [www.alternet.org]).

Three things:

1. I see Russia has it's own version of Rush Limbaugh.

2. I wonder if people still think Obama being black has nothing to do with this.

3. Glad to see the Tea Partyists would rather merge with Mexico than live under a foreign Socialist.

I don't see that guy as the equivalent to Limbaugh. He's more like the kinds of people that Limbaugh has on as guests. Limbaugh is the US equivalent of Lord Haw Haw. I point to that story as evidence of channels by which these emails might have made it into the hands of the climate change denial industry here in the USA.

Proving that CO2 causes global warming is like proving that cigarettes cause cancer. I know people who believe smoking is beneficial to their bodies. There are people in their 90's who smoked their whole lives and have NO cancer. Just like there are people who are immune to AIDS.

Quoting from this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#Surveys_of_scientists_and_scientific_literature

"...debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes."

In other words it's people who know little about the science of climate are the ones who want to believe in alternative explanations.

^^ Blame it on the fascinating Dunning-Kruger effect [smile]



That theory alone explains a lot about the seemingly-irrational impudence from various anti-intellectual groups in the US.

Those folks have help, a lot of help.

The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy

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In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, [1] to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous.
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The CFC industry hired Hill and Knowlton to fight back. As is essential in any Manufactured Doubt campaign, Hill and Knowlton found a respected scientist to lead the effort--noted British scientist Richard Scorer, a former editor of the International Journal of Air Pollution and author of several books on pollution. In 1975, Scorer went on a month-long PR tour, blasting Molina and Rowland, calling them "doomsayers", and remarking, "The only thing that has been accumulated so far is a number of theories." To complement Scorer's efforts, Hill and Knowlton unleashed their standard package of tricks [4] learned from decades of serving the tobacco industry:

* Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence.
* Predict dire economic consequences, and ignore the cost benefits.
* Use non-peer reviewed scientific publications or industry-funded scientists who don't publish original peer-reviewed scientific work to support your point of view.
* Trumpet discredited scientific studies and myths supporting your point of view as scientific fact.
* Point to the substantial scientific uncertainty, and the certainty of economic loss if immediate action is taken.
* Use data from a local area to support your views, and ignore the global evidence.
* Disparage scientists, saying they are playing up uncertain predictions of doom in order to get research funding.
* Disparage environmentalists, claiming they are hyping environmental problems in order to further their ideological goals.
* Complain that it is unfair to require regulatory action in the U.S., as it would put the nation at an economic disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
* Claim that more research is needed before action should be taken.
* Argue that it is less expensive to live with the effects.

The campaign worked, and CFC regulations were delayed many years, as Hill and Knowlton boasted [5] in internal documents. The PR firm also took credit for keeping public opinion against buying CFC aerosols to a minimum, and helping change the editorial positions of many newspapers.
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n 1988, the fossil fuel industry realized it had a serious problem. The summer of 1988 had shattered century-old records for heat and drought in the U.S., and NASA's Dr. James Hansen, one of the foremost climate scientists in the world, testified before Congress that human-caused global warming was partially to blame. A swelling number of scientific studies were warning of the threat posed by human-cause climate change, and that consumption of fossil fuels needed to slow down. Naturally, the fossil fuel industry fought back. They launched a massive PR campaign that continues to this day, led by the same think tanks that worked to discredit the ozone depletion theory. The George C. Marshall Institute, [6] the Competitive Enterprise Institute, [7] Heartland Institute, [8] and Dr. Fred Singer's [9] SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been key players in both fights, and there are numerous other think tanks involved. Many of the same experts who had worked hard to discredit the science of the well-established link between cigarette smoke and cancer, the danger the CFCs posed to the ozone layer, and the dangers to health posed by a whole host of toxic chemicals, were now hard at work to discredit the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused climate change.
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Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity [18], there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):
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If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.
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Quote: Original post by LessBread
Those folks have help, a lot of help.

The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy

I'd agree that having figureheads such as Limbaugh and other who can satisfy the denialists' confirmation bias has been a key to perpetuating the anti-intellectual behavior.

Here's more speculation on the idea that climate change deniers are associating with the underworld... ClimateGate Is Watergate Redux

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The real scandal is not the email archive, or even how it was acquired, sorted, and uploaded to a Russian server, but rather the emerging evidence of a coordinated international campaign to target and harass climate scientists, break and enter into government climate labs, and misrepresent climate science through a sophisticated media infrastructure on the eve of the international climate talks.

One leaked archive could have been the result of an aggrieved staff member or rogue hacker, out to grind a political axe or wreak revenge upon a colleague. However, the University of Victoria was targeted in a similar attack, when two people disguised as network computer technicians attempted to penetrate the security of the facility and access the data servers of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. When challenged by an employee, the two individuals fled the scene. The network penetration effort was confirmed by University spokespeople in the National Post [1] and was reported by Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog [2].
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The actual dollar amount spent is unknown, as disclosure laws require few details and have huge loopholes, but the Center calculated that an extremely conservative estimate would give you a minimum figure of more than $27 million dollars spent in direct lobbying from April to June of this year. In a major and still unfolding scandal [7], Bonner and Associates, an astroturf lobbying organization contracted to the coal industry's trade association, falsified letters to lawmakers from local civil rights, veterans, and other groups opposing federal climate legislation. This comes on top of the documented campaign of industrial espionage against environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, that was exposed last year by Mother Jones magazine [8].

The picture painted by these facts lead to the open question to if, as huge amounts of corporate money started being spent in unregulated funds, including to ethically compromised contractors and security firms, to defeat federal and international climate regulations, some of that money was diverted to fund a criminal conspiracy?

Could there be a criminal campaign to break into the climate research centers of foreign governments, review their archives for damaging snippets of text, and then elevate a fringe conspiracy theory that climate change is a hoax by the world's scientists, civil society organizations, and governments to impose socialism upon the people of the world? If so, this story would be an eerie and ironic echo of Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" that was embraced by many of the same groups currently promoting the ClimateGate talking points.
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