budbromley

A BBC article (link below) summarizes new research appearing in the journal Nature about methane (natural gas) in the Antarctic.  The Antarctic could be developed as a methane energy resource.

It is not surprising that there are immense reserves of methane beneath the ice and oceans on and around Antarctica.  More than 170 million years ago, it was part of the super continent Gondwona.  At several points in its history, Antarctica has been covered with forests and inhabited by life forms.  It was much warmer then than now and the continents have moved.  But, it is the continuous degradation of life forms that continuously forms methane and petroleum almost everywhere on the planet.  Today, this planet is creating gas and oil as it always has done and in quantities that dwarf human use of it.  After water, oil is the second most common liquid on this planet.  Only human contrivance keeps oil, gas and energy prices high.

Temperatures in Antarctica have been as low as -89 degrees C in our lifetime.  Most of that continent is 3 kilometers above sea level, which makes it very different and much colder than the Arctic North Pole where there is no continental land mass.  The Arctic north is essentially at sea level.  Temperature decreases rapidly with altitude.  This means there is almost zero chance of Antarctica warming enough to produce a methane-caused climate catastrophes there… except for the unlikely event of a major asteroid strike on earth or a major tectonic event.  BBC fails to point out that Antarctica is gaining sea ice and ice depth on most of its land mass.

Southern Hemisphere sea ice is slowly increasing:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png

When a long spell of significant global warming occurs again, long before Antarctic ice sheets would melt, the methane hydrates on the continental shelf and Gulf of Mexico offshore the U.S. would warm first and methane would bubble to the surface.  That methane would immediately turn to CO2 when it contacts O2 in the air and we would see a steeper increase in the CO2 trend.  But, during the last ten years of so, satellite measurements are showing no increase in global temperatures, and satellites produce the most reliable measurement.  Some reports show a rising trend in temperatures on land surfaces, but land comprises only about 30% of the planet’s surface and many scientists fault these land-based measurements for location problems and cherry picking of data.

It is very unfortunate BBC chose to use this scientific article to continue the hysterical misinformation that global warming could release this Antarctic methane to cause a climate catastrophe.  The scientists only mention the climate warming aspect in the very last phrase of the very last sentence of the abstract in the journal Nature, “with the potential to act as a positive feedback on climate warming during ice-sheet wastage.”  Climate was not the focus of their scientific article, but no doubt the mention of the potential climate connection still helps get them published in the UK in the very pro-global warming Nature publications.

It is very unfortunate that BBC chose to publish a negative story instead of a positive story.  These sorts of things depress markets and readers.  The positive story is that the earth has naturally sustaining reserves of gas and oil which could be developed to stimulate a new renaissance in the macro economics on this planet.  Instead, BBC chose to promote the self-fulfilling continuing negative narrative built on global warming.  That neo-Malthusian narrative has been proven false, but so-called progressives and liberals continue to repeat that lie because it maintains their status quo and their control of governments and economies, by keeping gas and oil prices high, which in turn inflates the prices of everything else.  There is nothing progressive or liberal about sustaining a lie.

It is dishonest that BBC seems to seek out claims that humans are the cause of global warming and that humans could reverse global warming.  A limited amount of global warming has not been determined to be a negative for either humanity or the planet.  The contrary is true.  Even if all of the Arctic sea ice disappeared each summer, that would have many benefits, and that in fact has happened in the past.

The hypothesis that humans cause global warming has been de-bunked by the work of thousands of scientists around the globe.  Many of the scientists who still support this failed hypothesis have been caught distorting data,  hiding data, and blackballing scientists who speak out against the scientific fraud.  One of those nefarious scientists is Dr. Michael Mann, the inventor of the so-called hockey stick sudden rise in temperatures which Al Gore made infamous in his movie and speaking tours.  Dr. Mann’s invention has been debunked.  Mann is part of the sad episode known as “ClimateGate.”

Dr. Mann works at Penn State which has become notorious for its neglect of its responsibilities in its sports programs.  Penn State investigated Mann’s work for 4 months in 2010 and “cleared him of any wrongdoing” in a whitewash report.  Most scientists have blasted Mann.  Yet Mann’s invention lives on in Gore’s movie, Obama’s speeches, UN-sponsored conferences at posh resorts for thousands of people from hundreds of countries … most on government paychecks and expense accounts…and CNN, PBS, BBC and Nature literature.  The elitist, pro-global warming UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included Mann’s hockey stick graph in its Third Assessment Report in 2001 but then removed it from their 2007 Report.  Two Canadian statisticians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, discovered serious statistical errors in Mann’s hockey stick analysis; they even showed that random data fed into Mann’s algorithm would produce hockey sticks graphs.

Canadian climatologist Tim Ball jokingly wrote that “Mann should not be at Penn State but in a State Pen[itentiary].”  Mann sued Ball for libel, which leaves Mann open for pre-trial discovery of his hidden data and deposition under oath by Ball and his attorneys.  Mann has been hiding his data for years from many legal “Freedom of Information Requests.”  Of course, open access to original data is required for another scientists to reproduce the data,   but Mann has never allowed full access and Penn State has protected Mann even though Mann’s work was funded by government grants.  According to the rules of science, Mann is not doing science.  It would be fitting if Mann’s data are used to destroy the EPA’s and UN IPCC’s case for human-caused global warming and Mann went to jail for fraud for taking grant money from the public under false pretenses.

The article in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/nature11374.html

Read more on the Mann’s scam:  http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html

The BBC story:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19410444

I know this is not what the mass media and Democrat politicians tell you.  But this is the history of Social Security (FICA) according to the Social Security Administration.

President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) was the first to use the Social Security Trust Fund surpluses to finance increased spending on Great Society programs and the Vietnam War. Technically speaking, Johnson moved the SS Trust Funds from “Off Budget” to “On Budget.” He sent legislation labeled Unified Budget Act to Congress.

LBJ’s spending was so large that even the Social Security trust funds didn’t cover his deficit. Johnson began to use SS trust funds for general budget items.

“This change took effect for the first time in the President’s budget proposal for fiscal year 1969, which President Johnson presented to Congress in January 1968. This change in accounting practices did not initially put the President’s budget proposal into surplus–it was still projecting an $8 billion deficit. However, it is clear that the budget deficit would have been somewhat larger without this change (it is difficult to say how much larger because this change was mixed-in with the other legislative, budgetary and fiscal policies the President was urging Congress to adopt).”

…” In the 1983 Social Security Amendments a provision was included mandating that Social Security be taken “off-budget” starting in FY 1993. This was a recommendation from the National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka the Greenspan Commission). The Commission’s report argued: “The National Commission believes that changes in the Social Security program should be made only for programmatic reasons, and not for purposes of balancing the budget. Those who support the removal of the operations of the trust funds from the budget believe that this policy of making changes only for programmatic reasons would be more likely to be carried out if the Social Security program were not in the unified budget.” (Note that this was a majority recommendation of the Commission, not the unanimous view of all members.) This change was in fact enacted into statute in the Social Security Amendments of 1983, signed into law by President Reagan on April 20, 1983.”

“Actuaries say that thanks to the Reagan reforms of 1983, Social Security is fully funded for 75 years.  Medicare is much harder to gauge, because no one knows the future rate of growth of medical costs, which have been quite high in recent decades.”

You might find this interesting.  http://www.ssa.gov/history/BudgetTreatment.html

President Clinton reversed Reagan’s reform and put your Social Security and Medicare payroll contributions (as well as your employer’s contributions on your behalf) back into the general budget, i.e. back “on budget.”  Since Clinton administration the federal government has been spending your money on anything.  The government takes your money, replaces it with a non-marketable, interest bearing U.S. government IOU.  But you the taxpayer are paying the interest on that IOU.  You are paying interest on your contributed money which the government borrowed from the trust funds.

“In 1999 President Clinton proposed investing the Social Security Trust Fund in what some might consider “risky” assets in the stock market and bonds.  The stock market then was in the late stages of a bull market cycle with stock prices and indexes overvalued. Clinton told a joint meeting of  the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate:

In 1993 President Clinton sought to increase taxes on Social Security benefits of the elderly and disabled. The final version of the bill passed by the Democrat controlled Congress increased taxes on beneficiaries from the first 50% to 85% of benefits (or “annuity payments” as they were originally called). Vice President Al Gore cast the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate to make the tax increase law. The Clinton-Gore tax increase on Social Security benefits imposed a 70% income tax rate on a retired couple making as little as $22,000 per year.

“Meyerson of the Democratic Socialists of America, writing in the Washington Post  proposed eliminating the payroll tax altogether, for both employers and employees, claiming it would increase by $2,100 the take-home pay, and buying power, of workers making $50,000 annually.”

http://www.conservapedia.com/Social_security

Obama is not a nice guy and he is not a moderate. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature and to the Senate by smearing his opponents through proxy newspaper stories.  He was supported by felons, ex-terrorists, socialists and other questionable characters.  His policies are not helping but hurting the lower income constituencies that elected him. Nice guys don’t have kill lists for assassination by unmanned drones. Nice guys don’t let hundreds of guns walk into Mexico and kill 300+ people and then cover it up. Does Obama’s statement about Americans clinging to their guns and Bibles sound nice or moderate?  Does taking the legal contract rights of GM’s bondholders sound nice to you? How about shutting out Chrysler’s creditors and dealers in Obama’s deal with United Auto Workers?  In 2008, Obama openly bragged that his campaign strategy is: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Nice? He called critics of his amnesty policies “enemies” who needed to be “punished” by Latino voters because they were not “the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.” Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa introduced Obama at a Detroit Labor Day rally by urging union members to work against Republicans and “take these son of a bitches out.” Obama was silent. Obama told entrepreneurs, “You didn’t build that business…” Translated into Chicagoese: Nice little company you got there. Too bad if something happened to it.

“Chicago, Obama’s chosen political venue, helps to explain this behavior. The mayor of Chicago — the job he once aspired to before greater opportunity beckoned — is an utterly dominant figure.

Chicago pols assume they can endlessly plunder the local private sector without penalty. And business leaders quickly catch on that it’s a good thing to be known as a personal friend of the mayor. Campaign money flows accordingly.

The local rule is “don’t back no losers.” Those who do are well advised to do business somewhere else. You never know when the assessor is going to raise your assessment. And don’t appeal in court unless you hire the lawyer with the right connections.

The mayor is also the one who gets all the credit for all good things that happen on his watch, as Obama is attempting to do on the killing of Osama bin Laden. Even though he opposed the interrogation methods that produced the information that led our special forces to Abbottabad.” ~ Michael Barone

Reference and thanks to: Michelle Malkin

Also be sure to see this:  http://www.audacityofhypocrisy.com/obamacrimescom/

Ron Paul is the best man to be the next President. However, though I don’t like it, he was not able to persuade enough Americans to win even the GOP majority. Paul got my money and my vote in the primary and I tried to persuade many of his truths.

But, we have to be realistic.

Second, Romney has demonstrated business skills and experience far beyond Obama’s (which are non-existent), and also beyond Paul’s for handling an economic crisis.  Romney was demonstrating moral while Obama was sucking a bong and looking at porn or worse with his mentor.  Romney’s conservative principles with regard to government are not nearly as strong as Ron’s based on their records, but then Romney’s principles are far better than Obama’s.  Romney was building American enterprises while Obama was organizing against them, filing discrimination suits to coerce banks into subprime mortgages, training ACORN community organizers in the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.

Third, Obama has already demonstrated where he is taking this country… off a cliff into a chaos, tyranny and a de-developed and diminished America.  Fourth, Romney SAYS he is not going there.

Without further analysis, this decision boils down to going in the same (negative) direction Obama is going today and where he will probably accelerate OR voting for Romney’s promise of a change in direction toward more conservative principles. Already at the point in the analysis, I would vote for Romney.

But there’s more.  Romney and Obama’s foreign policy positions are clearly NOT the same. For example, Obama clearly does not support Israel and Romney does…according to the current Israeli Prime Minister who is looking down Iran’s gun barrel.  What more proof do you need?  Obama stated he will stand with Muslims, while Romney slaps Obama and Clinton with the simple but obviously true statement that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Romney supports Poland, Obama didn’t.  It could not be more clear.  Obama and Clinton, by their appeasement, are leading this country into war, perhaps unwittingly, by essentially waving a wave flag in front of an enraged bull (Iran and radical Islam). Make no mistake, Islamists intend to dominate the earth. We can’t hide our heads in the sand and expect they will leave use alone.  Libertarian President Thomas Jefferson had to send the first U.S. Navy ships and Marines to stop Muslim pirates.  Appeasement starts wars.  Wars stopped by appeasement are known as surrender.

Obama will try to institute gun control, Romney will not…and did not in Massachusetts (I live there and have a license). Instead, Romney brought the NRA and gun-control advocates to the negotiation table to draft proposals for MA’s existing gun law.

Obama clearly supports and is supported by big banks. Romney at least has the financial and economic clout and background to understand what is at stake in the economy, while Obama clearly is lost without a clue, led around by the nose. Romney is also supported in this election by big banks, but he does not really need that money and could be (yet to be proven) less beholden to crony politics than Obama.  Obama proven over and over that he is beholden.

Romney gives a huge portion of his income to charity (~19%) and Romney’s income is self-made, while Obama gives a pittance (less than 1%) to charity and Obama is a made man paying millions to hide something in his past while hiring thugs like Rahm Emanuel, Van Jones, SEIU, and ACORN.

Ron and Rand, Bill McClintoch, Marc Rubio, Jim deMint and several others have a chance of influencing Romney, but they have no chance of influencing Obama. Romney says he will reduce the size of government, while Obama has been steadily increasing the size of government.

Obama is the rotten bird in the hand, Romney is the live bird in the bush.

The whole tax system is upside down in terms of incentives.

There should be no tax on income or savings.  Tax should be on consumption, not on income.  The tax rate on consumption could be progressive, but that is a matter for a separate discussion.   Consumption that was purchased with food stamps or welfare checks should be taxed.  If one wishes to avoid or reduce the tax, then one delays or reduces consumption, or learns better shopping habits, resulting in increased savings and investments.  The entire economy would improve.

One might argue that taxing welfare checks is not productive. But that is easily proved to be false. We would be teaching behaviors which are desired and productive for the individual and society. Teach people to fish, don’t give them fish. Our current system is indeed teaching people, but teaching the wrong behaviors.

Healthcare and other such services should also be taxed as consumption, even if the funds used to pay for the healthcare came from an insurance policy. That would result in a competitive healthcare market. People would shop around for the best doctor/drug/hospital for the money.

Rio+20 failed (and Copenhagen, Kyoto before them) because it did not address the real cause of the problem.  For example, if your purpose or goal is to stop the melting of glaciers in the Rockies, you are doomed to fail at that goal if your actions are directed at the wrong cause of the melting.

Documenting the EFFECTS which would  occur if and when the glaciers melt with myriad studies does not provide information about nor confirm the CAUSE.  If a scientist is sincerely trying to save corral but does not understand the cause of the problem, most likely they will have sampling problems in their studies.  Coral adapts by moving to a different location if the water is too warm; the reef moves deeper or further north.  If you sampled the same location over time, which would make sense if the cause was ocean acidification, then you would miss the new coral heads forming 100 miles north.

This is precisely was is occurring in the climate change issue and other UN-proposed treaties like UNCLOS.  The UN IPCC, EPA, Al Gore, EDF, WWF, etc are reciting a litany of effects which might or might not occur, replete with multimillion dollar grants and movies.  But even after 30 years and spending billions they do not have reproducible evidence validating the CAUSE of global warming or cooling, and they will not discuss or debate CAUSE, and demonize you if you ask.  The UN IPCC just released a new 500+ page report detailing impacts, risks and futures, but no evidence as to cause.  Beautiful graphics, expensively prepared, but nothing that speaks to cause.

Their behavior indicates that their real goal is different from what they are saying.  Their real goal as judged by their behavior is to raise money.  A corollary: judge a policy, project or program by its outcome with regard to a validated cause, instead of the stated intent.

Thus, the earth has been slowing and intermittently warming since the last ice age, but so far no one knows the cause.  Various hypotheses are being and have been tested.  CO2 has been thoroughly tested and it failed.  But, the “warmists” continue with the CO2 story built over 3 decades at the cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent because their real goal was not to stop warming.  Their real goal was to tax carbon, and to make us all feel guilty enough to not object to the taxes and inevitable price increases.

In fact, the economist who built the computer models for trading carbon credits was funded by The Joyce Foundation when Obama sat on its board of directors and another board director at that time is president of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).  https://www.theice.com/ccx.jhtml  Al Gore and the UN’s Maurice Strong were directly tied to CCX until early 2009 when it was sold to ICE (International Commodity Exchange)  in Atlanta.  Goldman Sachs was the largest CCX shareholder.  CCX was expecting $25 trillion per year in trades on carbon credits, on which CCX would be paid commission and fees.

Obviously, if there is no tax on carbon, then there is no need to trade carbon credits to offset carbon taxes.  Obama’s EPA is ignoring the science and the economics and taxing carbon anyway.  The House has already voted to defund the EPA’s activities regarding climate change and separately also to defund the UN IPCC.  Canada, eco-conscious and one of the early adopters of the global warming story, has defunded its climate change activities and renounced the UN IPCC program, as have Russia, China, Czechoslovakia.

By the way, Al Gore’s mentor Maurice Strong (a Canadian) is the same guy who was former Assistant Secretary General of the UN running the Iraq “Oil for Food” program until he ran from the U.S. and his UN job -having been caught red handed with a million dollar bribe check from Saddam Hussein.

You and I share interest in coral reefs and the environment, but climate change is a giant fraud.  Lawyers will make a LOT of money in the near future litigating cases against the fraudsters.

Obama is a useful ideologue idiot. Pravda is advancing the same causes as The Council of Foreign Relations in the US, JP Morgan Chase, and similar organizations and governments in 8 other countries. Here are excerpts from “The Anglo-American Establishment” by Carroll Quigley, historian for the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) during the 1960’s. Quigley was professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was an instructor at Princeton and Harvard; a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the House Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; and the U.S. Navy. He was also one of Bill Clinton’s teachers. Watch to end of this 10 minute video summary… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxfGSIHvOgc

Here is the full length 80 minute interview with G. Edward Griffin explaining the left-right DEM-GOP paradigm and collectivism, regardless of which party is in power, and the work of Carroll Quigley.  Quigley historian for the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) during the 1960’s. Quigley was professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was an instructor at Princeton and Harvard; a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the House Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; and the U.S. Navy. He was also one of Bill Clinton’s teachers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAdu0N1-tvU&feature=related

Here’s excellent reading if you want to know what is really happening with global warming/climate change/sustainability. Covers recent science on sea level change, arctic ice cover, storms and weather events, etc. It’s a thorough rebuttal of the EPA, IPCC, and alarmists. Lots of references and links. http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Peabody_Science-of-Climate-Change.pdf

Obamacare, if enacted as proposed, eventually will result in a healthcare industrial complex crippled by the same problem as the UN IPCC and the EPA: the failure of the scientific peer review process. There will be one big difference: the climate crisis is not real, but the failure of the peer review process is guaranteed to cause a real crisis in health care, and inevitably a crisis with your personal health care or the health care of someone in your family.

Obamacare, requires multiple concatenated, multi-disciplinary task forces and committees to report recommendations up to the head of HHS; healthcare by consensus. Over time, these will become bureaucracies and fiefdoms like the IPCC committees, NASA GISS, Hadley CRU, and the EPA, all of which are now accused of fraud. How will this community-organized healthcare industrial complex work if the scientific peer review process has failed? How will it work if the credibility of a scientist or a medical research institute or a diagnostic instrument company on the task force is established by political connections and willingness to “tow the party line,” instead of credibility validated by empirically replicated science and engineering? The healthcare industrial complex will be unable to evaluate or debate the underlying science, having been institutionally hindered by conflicting interests. Healthcare will fail just as the Copenhagen and Rio+20 climate conferences failed.

Are you ready to trust your health care to a railroad engineer? Is a social worker’s opinion part of the consensus that sets the ‘standard of care’ for the cleaning procedures for a kidney dialysis machine between patients? Do a career politician and the community have a vote in the consensus decision which defines the ‘standard of care’ for your next medical procedure?  This are part of Obamacare.

If the peer review process is not repaired by the professional scientific societies, then your health is in danger, with or without Obamacare.  Arguably, we are already in danger.  The managers within each professional society have fiduciary responsibility to diligently manage the peer review process and professional ethics within that profession, but that is not happening today.  For that reason, many scientists and physicians are resigning from their professional societies.

Managers of professional societies cannot delegate their diligence responsibilities to other  organizations, such as one of the hundreds of new Obamacare agencies.  To do so would contradict the definition of peer review process. A meta-organization such as the National Academies of Science or National Research Council (or a multi-disciplinary committee as defined in Obamacare) does not have the skills or experience to replicate experiments and evaluate the data; attempting such a process would look like the UN IPCC and their gray literature instead of peer reviewed science.  The UN IPCC is a political organization, and  Obamacare mandates hundreds of similar political agencies, and these agencies will be making your health care decisions.

A properly functioning scientific peer review process keeps an organization or an individual honest and focused on goal … typically the means justify the end result. In contrast, in political ideologies typically the ends justify the means; a certain community organizer comes to mind. Politics and science are opposite in many respects.

The problem of junk science in the human-caused global warming fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. The problems will spread unless the peer review process within professional societies is fixed.

Management and editors at professional scientific societies are negligent in their failure to vigorously condemn scientific organizations and individual scientists who have not made their data and methods available to other investigators. These societies should be removing the publications by these scientists or clearly marking them as unvalidated work.  The societies and editors should not have published the work in the first place. The societies and the managers of these societies have not fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility to their members and sponsors and the result is now many examples of failure of the scientific peer review process.

Recently there have been many more revelations about fraud among global warming proponents. Phil Jones, manager and scientist at the UK Hadley Climate Research Unit has resigned.  Serious problems with distorted climate data from NOAA and NASA have been described by D’Aleo, Watts and others.  The EPA is faced with several lawsuits and a Congress determined by good reason to stop EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.  If a similar scandal were to happen in the healthcare industrial complex, there would be a real healthcare crisis and people would be dying.  The global warming alarmists are spending billions of dollars measuring sea level by the millimeters, CO2 by parts per million, and temperature changes in tenths of degrees over decades.

A couple of years ago, the TV show “60 Minutes” calculated that fraudulent healthcare claims total $60 billion a year.  Does anyone believe that the amount of fraud will now decline since Obamacare creates hundreds of new agencies in more than 900 pages of law?   If so, then yes, I have that proverbial bridge to sell you.

Where is the vigorous condemnation of this non-scientific behavior among the professional scientific societies? Where are the internal investigations of failures in the peer review processes within the scientific societies?  Where is the rejection of these unethical scientists from their peer review groups?  The editorial corrections for un-substantiated reporting are extremely rare.

Posted below is the commendable statement to the UK Parliament by The British Institute of Physics which describes problems with peer review process in the global warming fraud. The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have taken the opposite position, having decided to endorse work by some of their members and defer to the UN IPCC; APS and ACS managers have inappropriately delegated their responsibility, when instead they should be demanding to review the underlying science and investigating their internal peer review problems.  Members and sponsors (including Congress) of U.S. professional societies should be actively condemning negligent management and taking legal action against management if they do not respond appropriately.  Where is the vigorous repudiation by Congress of the UN IPCC and its negligence, malfeasance and fraudulent peer review process?  American taxpayers are paying for a big part of UN fraud.

It is the negligence of management at these societies which is destroying the professional credibility of scientific societies. These managers are defending their bureaucracy and budget.  As a result, the world is accelerating backwards down a slippery slope into chaos and dependency on government by consensus.

Consensus and crony capitalism are life threatening when used in sciences, engineering and healthcare, but that is exactly what is defined in Obamacare. Citizens and Congress can act to stop it or else watch as our standard of living slides into the third world and beyond.

March, 2010 ———Updated July 13, 2012
Letterhead

Parliamentary Business

Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry, ‘The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia’.

The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute’s Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and

· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of ‘proxies’, for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ‘self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much ‘raw’ data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.

9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

11. The first of the review’s terms of reference is limited to: “…manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice…” The term ‘acceptable’ is not defined and might better be replaced with ‘objective’.

12. The second of the review’s terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU’s policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.

How independent are the other two international data sets?

13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.

The Institute of Physics
February 2010