Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. By Christopher Booker
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.
The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".
What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.
Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".
None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.
What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.
Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.
Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.
Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.
Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant").
Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.
Posted by: Omoter Speaking for Boskone7794 ||
03/15/2009 13:43 ||
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#1
NPR did report on the opening day of the second conference, and a more scathingly mocking performance cannot be imagined. Even for NPR it was appalling.
Hat tip Instapundit
It's not just soldiers who win wars. Governments also have a crucial role to play and to judge by the response of most Western governments to the threat we face from radical Islamism, we are simply not competing on equal terms with the enemy.
No one can claim that we in Britain don't understand the nature of the threat we face. In recent months, there has been a succession of reports highlighting the increasingly pernicious influence British Islamists are having on the Nato-led campaign to bring stability to Afghanistan.
#1
I've always said, the way to get the non-voting American [What difference will it make?] out to the polls is to make him/her mad. Someone is working really hard on that one.
My political theory is that Bush got the incomptetent tag because he was incompetent, just as Obama gets the tag.
The problem is that the federal governmnt is so large and growing that the most competent people on the planet will have their competence tested under such a large, ponderous system.
In other words, the federal government is far, far too large in terms of employment, power and sheer size to run effectively.
As I wrote, Bush was incompetent, just as so as Obama, only Obama is much, much worse.
Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"
The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts.
Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House.
#1
Your comment on the size and inefficiency of the bureaucracy is accurate. Given that it is not run on business principles and therefore has the additional overlay of rules, regulations, policies and is run from a myriads of perspectives and influences sews the seeds for its inevitable ossification and eventual irrelevance. Such organizations ultimately devolve to a point where they exist for their own purposes and survival. At least in private enterprise companies are run, theoretically for the benefit of the owners, employees and directors. So long as those interests are moderately aligned and the raison d'etre for the company's existence i.e. satisfying a market persists it will continue. But once a company fails to even moderately maintain that link it either has to get an artificial support [e.g GM, Chrysler are good examples]. At that point it becomes part of the bureaucratic infrastructure of the society unless it is cut loose [e.g some of the railways].
There is only one answer. Cut off funding. Of course that doesn't happen as simply as that. But once tax revenues can't cover it [which they haven't for years] and the bank funding the debt [the bond market] gets leery it demands a compensation for the higher risk [higher interest rates]. The only other alternative is to print money [higher inflation and in Zimbabwe's case hyperinflation]. The US$ is currently viewed as a safe haven, hence the artificially lower rates because of the demand for treasuries. But that will end at some time.
So back to your comment. If government gets so large [as in my view it currently is] as to be impossible to control competently and the money runs out, what will it take for such a broad sweeping change in the political class to get in and take the scythe to the structures? Will the change come from individual state governments which just refuse to participate to the extent that they can and set an example? Will populations just move from one state to another sufficiently to force change [Californians going to Texas? - God forbid]? If the national political level won't throw up leaders, it will have to occur at a state and local level.
#2
There is only one answer. Cut off funding. Of course that doesn't happen as simply as that.
It does if you have the line item veto. The power of the executive, judiciary, and legislature were well balanced until the introduction of the fourth, unaccountable, unchecked branch of government, the bureaucracy under civil service protection. A means to bring it under control must be found.
Yes, of course "they" do. Barry is a very competent socialist. Many eggs will have to be broken to make the giant, communal welfare omelette. Do "they" care how, many whom the eggs may belong to? Certainly NOT! Are "they" concerned at all that the country and possibly the entire world is in the throws of an economic callapse or global depression? Certainly NOT! The state of the economy is entirely incidental to the primary goals and redistribution intent of the administration. A single political party system or machine, and total government dependency of the population is the desired outcome.
#4
No, he's trying to wreck the US economy in the name of equality and social justice. In the bright new future we will all be equally poverty stricken, miserable, and totally dependent on government 'generosity'.
#10
The Peter Principle in action. That's why for very very important positions you want the individual to have successfully gone through some really tough and challenging experiences.
Is Obama incompetent? I thought that was a rhetorical question if we're referencing him as a leader. Methinx the guy couldn't lead a fire team in silent prayer and has less legit tangible leadership experience then a corporal. He has never owned or ran a business or even started one. He ran a good campaign & was fortunate enough to have an econ crisis & one of the worst GOP nominees in modern history - that was it. He's a decent speaker (w/teleprompter in hand), is somewhat handsome and seems like a nice guy. He was a shoe in when you looked at the idiocy and intellect of our american idol/idiot generation.
I am not surprised one bit at how bad he will f* things up. What did he have, like 4 nominees in row that didn't pay their taxes and no one vetted it? Incompetence personified.
I thought this was a decent article until the last 4 paragraphs. For some reason I thought the barbarity that these mutts were responsible for would be listed along with the current numbers of survivors they have affected. Which is a more heinous act: Torturing thousands of Americans on a daily basis - families of 9/11 victims, families of those killed at the embassy and on the Cole, families of soldiers killed because of our response to 9/11 and having to clean up the world's messes ourselves - that or - Being made uncomfortable but still alive and well and hating America to the core and able to organize thousands upon thousands to fight us at every turn. It makes me want to puke. Maybe some of my liberal friends (whom I will be directing here) can put this into perspective. This stupidity is really getting to me.
#2
Written by a full professor of journalism, UC - Berkeley. If that's how he's teaching them to write, no wonder the papers are going broke. Five pages of propaganda, excerpted from a much longer article? Why on earth would the reader pay a premium for that?
The Intel Czar's Picks: Not Too Intelligent? By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK
Two of the dumber journalists at Newsweak go after the Obama administration for being stupid. Worth the price of admission just for that ...
Add president Obama's national intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, to the list of embattled top-level appointees. Blair, a retired four-star Navy admiral who attended Oxford with Bill Clinton, courted controversy among pro-Israel and anti-China activists this month when he named Charles (Chas) Freeman, an outspoken former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to chair the National Intelligence Council, a committee of the government's top intel analysts. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other pols complained to the White House, Freeman abruptly withdrew. Now both Republican and Democratic intel experts are raising questions about another Blair pick: John Deutch, a former CIA director once accused of major security lapses, who's been appointed to a temporary panel reviewing troubled, top-secret spy-satellite programs.
Is he working from home?
After Deutch resigned as CIA director in 1996, agency officials discovered he had stored hundreds of pages of classified files on his home computers, despite repeated warnings that they could be intercepted via the Internet. Because of the incident, Deutch was stripped of his high-level security clearances, and a criminal probe into the matter culminated in January 2001, when the ex-spy chief agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of mishandling classified material. (The next day, Clinton, in one of his final acts as president, pardoned him.) Given Deutch's history, congressional officials want to know why Blair placed him on a panel so sensitive that its work should require an ultra-top-secret security clearance known as SI/TK (Special Intelligence/Talent-Keyhole). "The decision to grant [Deutch] a security clearance again is an affront," GOP Sen. Kit Bond, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NEWSWEEK, adding that it "should be reversed immediately." An agency spokesman acknowledged that former CIA director Michael Hayden restored Deutch's security clearance a couple of years ago so Hayden could consult with him and other ex-spy chiefs on "classified CIA matters." But Blair also has broad power to grant security clearances. (Deutch did not respond to requests for comment.)
I'll bet he didn't. The man shouldn't be allowed in Washington as a visitor during cherry blossom season and yet is being treated as an insider. It says something about the thinness of Bambi's rolodex ...
Congressional critics, including some Democrats, say the two appointments illustrate Blair's tin ear.
And lack of, er, intelligence ...
As he vigorously defended Freeman, Blair also underplayed evidence of substantial financial ties between the Middle East Policy Council, a think tank Freeman used to run, and Saudi interests. Blair had told Congress that "no more than one 12th" of the council's $600,000 budget came from the Saudi government. But Freeman told NEWSWEEK that the council had also received a $1 million endowment from Saudi King Abdullah in 2005, plus another $1 million pledge for operating support from Saudi Prince Alwaleed.
One could have said similar things about James Baker, but you'll notice George Bush at least kept his distance from his father's favorite advisor.
"Director Blair was asked by the president to ... seek the best expertise, and to provide the best intelligence," says Wendy Morigi, a spokesperson for the intel czar. "That's exactly what he's doing." This is all so ludicrous as to excite explanations of conspiracy with intent to undermine.
Posted by: Omoter Speaking for Boskone7794 ||
03/15/2009 10:46 ||
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(Special Intelligence/Talent-Keyhole)
"Special" as in "Olympics"
and "Key" is not the right three-letter word
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/15/2009 11:15 Comments ||
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Charged and convicted of improper handling and storage classified, clearance and access revoked and he's being read-on to SI/TK again?
Sets a lovely legal precedent. Very lovely. They have substantially elevated the risk level and made every security manager's task more difficult. Of course after former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger's escapades, why should anyone be surprised.
#5
Last time I was read-off from SI-something access
I remember that even writing or saying certain specific words was a felony. Where might one go to report any possible violations by the NYT.....The Obama Administration? Sadly, not encouraging ....
After authoritatively and wrongly claiming the United States would go to war to halt Iran's nuclear program six times during the Bush administration, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh is back at peddling conspiracy theories. His latest: Former Vice President Dick Cheney personally ran an "executive assassination ring."
"After 9/11, I havent written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They havent been called on it yet."
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. "It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."
"Its an executive assassination ring essentially, and its been going on and on and on," Hersh stated. "Under President Bushs authority, theyve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. Thats been going on, in the name of all of us."
Like every good tale, there is some truth to it. The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, does participate in the black operations hunt for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups' leaders. This is done in conjunction with the CIA's Special Activities Division. There is little secrecy about this, just read Jawbreaker or this article by Bob Woodward from back in November of 2001.
But to claim that JSOC does not "report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office," or that "Congress has no oversight of it" is just false. JSOC was established in 1980 after the failed mission to rescue the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran. JSOC is a component command of the U.S. Special Operations Command, which reports to the Secretary of Defense. JSOC, like the CIA, certainly falls under congressional oversight.
Hersh has made a living of making fantastic claims that don't quite live up to the hype. Chalk this one up as another Hersh fantasy.
Along with none other than veteran lib journalist Bob Simon of CBS, I am a long time advocate of clandestine wet work as a remedy for global terrorism: A terrorist banker falls down the stairs in Rome and breaks his neck, a pro-terror propaganda shill dies a gruesome death when his Bentley unaccountably runs off a British road at 200 KPH; a safe-house burns down in Caracas, taking a nest of Al-Quds operatives with it; a Saudi-registered Gulfstream vanishes over the Indian Ocean, with a prince of the realm at the controls; a prominent academic disappears from his yacht during a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico.
There are many possibilities here if we just use our imaginations. I think, in fact, that 100 well-aimed pistol shots would have done more good than all the bombs and missiles we have so far used in this war; and I am not averse to bombs and missiles at all.
As Mr. Simon pointed out, this approach has one great but unappreciated advantage: Nobody even claims that it is legal and it therefore requires no changes to the law or administrative rules that could later be turned against freedom-loving people.
#2
Actually, I rather think he is talking out of his ass, as usual - our very own journalistic Grima Wormtongue.
What I would like to see is have him subpoenaed and under oath to testify about his grotesque series of fantasies about American military atrocities in the Iraq War.... "Yes, yes, Mr. Hersh, you have claimed detailed knowledge of these atrocities you claim have been committed by American troops, and all sorts of "evidence" - don't you wish to have the perpetrators charged and convicted of those ghastly crimes? Dates, locations, names, units, circumstances, please Mr. Hersh... and take your time..."
He's been going around peddling that kind of 'winter soldier' atrocity stories at his speaking engagements since the Iraq War began.
He would s**t a brick the size of a Conex box if that ever happened, and it might just get him to shut up for a while. But it would be amusing to watch him being forced to put his money where his mouth is, for once.
#6
When the Republicans regain control of Congress, it would be interesting to have a Congressional committee drag this fellow in and investigate his various claims over the years. It would be fun to watch.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
03/15/2009 12:20 Comments ||
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I am in agreement with AC, with one minor change. Pistol shots are way too quick to even the score with the carnage and evil wrought on innocents by many of these folks. I always thought it would be most fitting that if every time their car was started, it exploded. Ditto for every time they flushed the toilet. And so on, until the final end is reached. There just has to be a general understanding that some behaviors will not be tolerated by society.
#8
I agree w/AC 100%. How seriously awesome would it of been if Darth Cheney ran a wet worx/star chamber?! It would of been efficient and utterly ruthless. Asshole jihadis and CAIR traitors disappearing w/out a trace. Chicoms having their servers die w/out explanation. 3 Gorges' Dam mysteriously showing cracks. Earthquakes hitting Iran every month. The weather dominator coming on-line!
If they did have such a thing I am deeply offended...that I wasn't asked to apply for a job. :)
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