Dangerous Precedents

The Lasting Legacy of John Key Is Being Written

One imagines that constitutional and legal experts will be somewhat alarmed at the Prime Minister's wheeling and dealing over the law.

The review on the how the Police and Child, Youth and Family have been applying the anti-smacking law has just been published. The full report can be read here.

The recommendations amount to a cluster of protections and "helps" for people who are being investigated for smacking their children. No doubt they will go a long way to preventing over zealous officials running amok--although the report also assures us that such things have not been happening. Nevertheless, safeguards are deemed to be necessary--and John Key has promised that he will ensure that all the recommendations are acted upon.

What a mess. We have a situation where the law says unequivocally that using smacking to discipline a child is a crime. But a bureaucratic edifice is being built to ensure that the law is not applied. The Prime Minister is now happily chirping away telling people it is perfectly acceptable to break the law. The headline in the NZ Herald says it all: "PM: It's okay to give light smacks"

This, we believe, is a far more serious failing of the Prime Minister than his stubborn refusal to change the law. His disrespect of the rule of law, his preference for bureaucratic management of the law so that it can be disregarded, his public declarations on how the law is to be understood and applied are disgraceful. He is quoted as saying:

Lightly smacking a child will be in the course of parenting for some parents and I think that's acceptable. It is up to individual parents to decide how they're going to parent their children ... Some people will continue to lightly smack their child for correction, some will not. It is up to them to decide.

Good on you, mate. Another political deal all stitched up.

Can you think of any other law, any other crime, where Key's advice might be acceptable. Take road law, for example. It is now an offence to use a hand held phone in a car. But, using the "Key doctrine" we are entitled to believe that whether you use a hand-held phone or not is a matter of personal choice. Some will continue to do it--and that's acceptable. But because some people who really want to use their phones in cars will be intimidated by the law, we also need a bureaucratic entity to help them. Free 24/7 advice lines need to be set up, explaining how the law need not really be observed, what our rights are, the processes which the police might use when they apprehend cell phone users in cars. Pamphlets setting all these things out must be printed and given out by the police when they pull someone over for using a phone. At the top of the brochure, we need to have John Key's attitude towards the law printed in large font: "It's OK to break the law." Wonderful.

Someone in caucus needs to find the mana to stand up and tell the Prime Minister to his face that his stance is simply wrong. The damage he is doing to one of the fundamental tenets of justice--the rule of law--is inappropriate and unacceptable and that it must stop. Clearly the Prime Minister has lost whatever perspective on this issue he once may have had. He appears to be blithely ignorant of the damage he is doing and of the wider dangers of his foolish position.

Turning Education on Its Head

The Educational Common Sense of E.D. Hirsch

The most recent edition of City Journal as an extensive article on educational reformer, E. D. Hirsch. This gentleman's prescriptions have been adopted over a number of years by the education system in the state of Massachusetts, resulting in a salutary rise in educational standards throughout that state.

We have posted several times on how educational theorists and government education systems have become deeply influenced by post-modern philosophical theory, coupled with a relentless drive to subvert and pervert God's established order in creation. Demand rights theories have been applied to children, resulting in a consensus amongst avant-guard educational theorists and bureaucrats to the effect that children are mini-adults, and must be treated as adults from the time they take their first breath (they are entitled to it, don't you know).

The Scriptures, however, reveal that God has created the world with hierarchical structures of superiors and inferiors.

The Fifth Commandment makes clear that children are inferiors, in the sense of being commanded to obey and honour their parents. Modern post-Enlightenment man believes he knows better, insisting that children are the sociological and legal equal of adults and are to be treated as such. This has meant an excessive emphasis has been placed on the child learning and discovering for himself, rather than being taught by a superior. As a consequence, government education systems have increasingly tended towards contentless education. The upshot: more and more illiterate graduates coming out of government schools.

E. D. Hirsch is not, to our knowledge, a Christian. He is just a common-sense academic who has managed to avoid or evade being swept up with the avant-guard establishment. Hirsch's specialist academic field was literature. Eventually he ended up as Chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s [University of Virginia] admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students.

Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

In other words, Hirsch realised that the dominant cause of poor English skills was a lack of background knowledge in related humanities. This led him to create a knowledge based curriculum for primary and intermediate schools, called the Core Knowledge Curriculum.

For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Hirsch was quickly reviled by the educational establishment. His book Cultural Literacy

came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist.

The idea that there might be an authoritative corpus of knowledge which had to be transmitted to children was an anathema to the avant-guard. By the mid 1980's, the avant-guard had become the educational establishment. Their triumph was virtually complete.

Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” In my children’s elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching.

Hirsch began systematically to skewer these stupid ideas (which still dominate the New Zealand government education system to this day).

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

In 1993 the State of Massachusetts quixotically decided that it would follow Hirsch's advice and set knowledge based standards in its curricula for each school year. The result? Rapidly rising educational achievements by students in the Massachusetts school system.

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.

It is a salutary achievement. But not unexpected. Strange things happen when you cast of the shackles of a spurious ideology and deal with the world as God has created and established it. Part of that establishment is accepting the superiority of adults (and their delegates, the teachers) over children and their consequent responsibility to teach and impart truth and knowledge to the next generation.

Doug Wilson's Letter from America

Christian Postmodernism
Oxymorons of Our Time, Part II

Douglas Wilson.

This is the second part of Pastor Wilson's interaction with John Franke's Manifold Witness, which attempts to reconstruct the Christian faith under the aegis of postmodernist philosophy.

John Franke begins by asking and answering the question, "Do you believe in truth?" He allows that the easiest thing for emergents to do is to just say yes, in order to reassure everybody. But then he gets into his explanation of why he thinks this is an odd question, and all the reasons why he has to handle such questions in the first place just float to the surface.

On the one hand, he says this:

"I thought to myself: Of course I believe in the truth. I believe in God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God . . ." (p. 1)

And this:

"In fact, we not only believe in it [truth], but we are passionately committed to seeking it" (p. 2)

But on the other hand, he says this:

"In order to do this, I suggest a simple thesis: the expression of biblical and orthodox Christian faith is inherently and irreducibly pluralist. The diversity of the Christian faith is not, as some approaches to church and theology might seem to suggest, a problem that needs to be overcome" (p. 7)

And . . .

"Christian plurality is a good thing, not something that needs to be struggled against and overturned" (p. 8)

Now if he is serious about the "plurality of truth," as the subtitle of the book has it, then shouldn't he be "passionately committed to seeking them"? This will come up again, promise.

The whole question arises for Franke because he has confounded the object of knowledge with the knowers. One event can have multiple witnesses, and they can all grasp different aspects of what they witnessed, with some of them getting details wrong, but this does not create multiple events. This is still one event, one truth, the resurrection of Christ, and four witnesses -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The fact that we all know in part and prophesy in part is hardly an earth-shaking development in theology (1 Cor. 13:9). The fact that we see through a glass darkly is not a truth that we needed Derrida to explain to us (1 Cor. 13:12). This is as old as dirt. Ever hear about the five blind men and the elephant? The deeper lesson in that parable is not that there were five elephants.

But here is Franke anyway:

"What has prompted the question time and again has been the attempt to come to terms with what I believe to be one of the most significant challenges facing Christian theology in the contemporary setting: the sheer, existential reality of Christian plurality" (p. 3)

Get that? The plurality is in our grasp of the truth, something that can be affirmed by anyone with eyes in his head. But a plurality of witnesses has nothing whatever to do with plurality in what they see. Jesus did not multiply the loaves and fishes by getting additional people to come over and look at them.

Sometimes Franke sounds like he is right on the money.

"'Do you believe in truth?' Yes, I do. I believe that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God in the flesh and that, as such, he is the way, the truth and the life" (p.9)

But that "I believe" tucked away in there is not the same "I believe" that you find in the Apostles' Creed, for example. He believes, and others believe, and the variations in all those beliefs come to be reckoned as variations within the object of their belief itself. Or objects themselves.

"I also believe that the church, as the image of God and the body of Christ, is called to bear a unique witness to Jesus in the world and that, by the will and intention of God, this witness is inherently and irreducibly plural" (p. 9).

If Franke were only saying that our witness to the truth is inescapably plural, then that claim does not even begin to approach controversy. Who didn't know that? But I take him as engaged in some sleight of hand. He says truth is plural because our witness to the truth is plural, and this means that the "truth," such as it is, is grounded in our "faith communities," and not in the unsearcheable counsels of God, established before eternal times. It is kind of like in Einstein, where time is the clocks that measure it. Truth is what our collective witness says it is, and if that witness is plural, then the truth is plural. This is relativistic, and the only alternative approach to what Franke is saying would be to say that I could start manufacturing automobiles by having some friends come over to look at my car.

"Why is it that Christians from across time and around the world, seeking guidance and understanding concerning the mysteries of life and the hope of the gospel, have come away from their study carrels and their prayer meetings with such different conclusions on nearly every aspect of the one faith?" (p. 6)

Because men are sinners? Because we do theology selfishly? Because of the noetic effects of sin? Because we are the apprentice knowers and not the known? Because of creedal advance over centuries?

But with this set-up, Franke then engages in a couple of breath-taking moves. He points out that Christians throughout history have differed on many things, including basic things.

"The fact is that on matters as central to the faith as these, Christians simply do not agree on the answer" (p. 6, emphasis mine)

These differences spread across all the denominations of Christians -- Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants of all stripes. Franke considers their differences, and wonders if he could proceed on a supposition that they all share, which is that there is a right answer, and that the task of theology is to try to honestly find out which one is right, or is the closest to being right. Nope. Franke takes the one point of agreement that they have all shared, and shared for centuries, wads it up and throws it out the window.

"I believe that none of these answers is sufficient" (p. 7).

Heh. As much as he wants plurality of truth, Franke cannot get away from this inescapable rule of doing theology, which is that everybody thinks what he thinks, and believes that others who don't think it are wrong. Why doesn't Franke apply his "plurality of truth" moonwalk to this question? Why doesn't he include himself and his thesis in this? "Some Christians say that truth is plural, like me, and others say that it is unified, like everybody else. These all resolve in the heart and mind of the triune God, blessed be He." But that would mean that ultimate truth is both one and many, and saying so means sounding like Rushdoony on Van Til, and there go the sexy book deals and forewords by McLaren the Rock Star.

The second breath-taking move is even better, a real show-stopper. Some might be worried that this approach would introduce a destructive pattern of "anything goes" into the life of the church, and the doing of theology.

"This claim does not mean that everything that goes on in the church is therefore allowable and appropriate as a manifestation of diversity -- far from it" (p. 8)

No, no, not at all. There are certain fixed principles, certain absolutes, that cannot be altered, come wind or tide.

"Some claims and assertions about Christian belief and practice are wrong, such as those that support discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender" (p. 8).

In a book like this one, I am usually braced for stuff, but even so . . . This sort of thing is like getting hit in the small of the back by a 250 pound linebacker for Florida State full of mayhem, traveling at a high rate of speed. But the experience is not painful, even though coach has to take me out of the game -- cause I am wheezing and laughing so hard. I mean, I really did not see that coming.

Some might be fearful that if we allow for pluralist truth on principle, this might open the door to an anything goes relativism. Not to fear. No, not at all. We still have the absolutes that we have received from the Ohio State Human Rights Task Force. That's something we can take to the bank of true catholicity.

Two problems for Franke, one theological and the other a matter of sheer practical blinkeredness.

The thing that creates the theological problem for Franke in the first place is the astounding existential diversity that exists among professed Christians. That is the basis of his problem. And so, does this diversity not include various views, theologically grounded and existentially experienced, that impinge on issues of race, ethnicity and gender? Is he kidding? Not that I would do this or anything, but suppose I were to characterize liberation theology as a bundle of ressentiments for theological hispanitards, and the chomskeets who cheer them on. What would Franke say about that? My postulated perspective here is all part of the existential ecclesio-diversity, is it not? And no fair googling these new terms of theological discourse and saying that they are insulting. No, they may be insulting for you, but each of us walks up the mountain by a different path. Peace out, man.

Second, the astounding thing here is that Franke doesn't see himself doing what trendy theologichoppers have been doing over and over for generations. Peter Leithart cites Albert Schweitzer's very funny observation about the quest for the historic Jesus -- this quest "repeatedly discovered, much to its surprise, a Jesus who happily confirms and conforms to its own cultural prejudices" (Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, p. 218). As Popeye would have it, what a coinkydinx. This emergent project, however furrowed the brow, is being undertaken by risible members of the risible church.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog- 9th October, 2009

Global Warmists In Denial

The Worm is Turning

It would appear that the global warming cheerleaders are in denial. They simply just do not get the significance of the leaked e-mails from the CRU. The award for the most lame apologia must go to Michael Le Page, writing in the New Scientist. Despite the fabrication of data (more on that below) Le Page assures us that we can be one hundred percent certain that the earth is getting warmer. Yes, one hundred percent. No room for doubt.

The leaking of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, has led to a media and political storm. The affair is being portrayed as a scandal that undermines the science behind climate change. It is no such thing, and here's why.

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you'll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

Well, matey if that is the kind of "one hundred percent certainty" you are proffering, you are in deep trouble. The globe is recording record cold temperatures all over the place. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story. And if they do, well the CRU and its cabal has shown the way: make up data to fit the story. But Le Page goes on: "We know greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming." Excuse me . . . how do you know?

Upon asking this question, the whole bogus case unravels faster than the Man of Steel on a good day. The entire global warming case rests upon a fallacy--the fallacy of "False cause", otherwise known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means after the event therefore caused by the event. Or, to put it another way, the fallacy is a confusion of co-incidence with causation. The mere fact that something occurs with or after an event does not establish or prove causation.

The "undeniable proof" offered by the warmists to establish that "greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming" is that CO2 emissions have increased under industrialisation and economic growth during the past two hundred years. At the same time, temperatures have allegedly risen. Therefore, the latter must be caused by rising CO2 emissions. QED. Bollocks. The argument is completely fallacious. If a boy goes out at sunset every day and beats his drum, then minutes later the sun goes down, is he entitled to conclude that the beating of his drum makes the sun go away? Of course not. Yet this is the quality of "argument" which warmists are trying to foist upon the world.

But poor old Michael Le Page has now been made twice foolish. Not only has he been sucked in by fallacious reasoning, he also has not yet grasped that the temperature data--that is, the base, non adjusted, non fabricated temperature data shows no warming at all over a hundred years. Not only is he busy beating his drum, but the sun is staying high in the sky. So there is not a shred of credibility left.

Now, moving on to the most important tree on the planet. Christopher Booker gives the best piece yet explaining the damning significance of one tree in Siberia. (Hat Tip: Fairfact Media)

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest.

If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see. To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period). The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.

Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.

Finally, Climategate has gone uber-viral on the web, but the MSM are largely in denial. It is the biggest story of a decade or more, and it is being steadfastly and studiously ignored. Nothing to see here, move on. Old news. Insignificant. Minor in the grand scheme, etc. Consider this piece by James Delingpole (Hat Tip: Maria at NZ Conservative)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Al Gore has had to cancel a Copenhagen speaking event at which he had hoped to charge starry-eyed believers in his ManBearPig religion $1200 a piece for the privilege of shaking his hand, breathing in his CO2 and having his latest book inflicted on them.

Could those unforeseen circumstances have anything to do with Climategate?

I think so. Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

North explains:

Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

Here are the rankings:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

And lest anyone doubt how big this story is, now Sarah Palin has weighed in. On her Facebook page she urges President Obama to boycott Copenhagen. She totally gets it:

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

She concludes (and if she goes on like this, we really ought to start thinking her of a serious candidate for next president: way to go, Sarah!)

Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a “sin” against the planet. In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to “restore science to its rightful place.” Boycotting Copenhagen while this scandal is thoroughly investigated would send a strong message that the United States government will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices. Saying no to Copenhagen and cap and tax are first steps in “restoring science to its rightful place.”

Yep. From your mouth to God’s ear, let us hope

More Suffering for Chinese Christians

New Persecution Wave?

We have blogged before on how the Government of China is greatly intimidated by loss of control of its vast subject population. John Garnaut, the China correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald recently posted two articles on Chinese government oppression of its people. The second deals with a new persecution of "house churches".

Firstly, he reports on how people who complain against officials are ending up being imprisoned and persecuted.

How a complaint led to an ordeal in a secret prison

November 14, 2009 - 12:00AM

Liu Yuhong's problem began as a private land dispute with the family's landlord. But small troubles have a habit of escalating in China, a country that lacks institutions for effectively resolving disputes.

Last year Liu's parents lodged a complaint at the local government's petitions office. Since that brave and perhaps foolhardy move, the family has been drawn into a vortex of state-sanctioned kidnapping, violence and possibly worse.

''My father is 69 years old and he is in a re-education-through-labour camp,'' she told the Herald on Wednesday.

''A baby has died … and I don't know whether my mother is dead. For a rural woman, that is too much.''

In the absence of an effective legal system, citizens are officially encouraged to take their grievances - everything from high-level corruption to land disputes - to a unique Chinese institution: the petitions office.

These were established in imperial times and have since been replicated at almost every tier of government.

The design flaw of the petitions system is a fundamental one: the offices are typically run by the same officials that the petitioners are complaining about. When ''petitioners'', as they are called, don't get results at the local level they tend to aim higher, in Beijing.

Yu Jianrong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, surveyed 632 Beijing petitioners and found only one case that had been satisfactorily resolved.

Professor Yu has warned that officials had incentives to subvert the petitions system because complaints relating to their jurisdictions count directly against their performance appraisals. He says the petitions system is strained to breaking point because the party refuses to loosen its grip on the political and legal systems, thus choking off alternative ways for disputes to be debated or independently adjudicated.

The Communist Party ignored his advice, choosing instead to reassert its primacy over the country's media and courts.

And so China's enormous security and legal apparatus devotes ever-increasing resources to preventing complaints from being officially registered or publicly aired, rather than resolving them.

The remainder of the article documents the particular sufferings and abuse suffered by Liu as an example of the cruelty and oppression of the regime.

The second article looks at how the Chinese Government is flexing its muscles against Christians.

BEIJING: President Barack Obama, scheduled to arrive in China last night, is under pressure to press the Chinese Government to halt a new campaign of "persecution" against the country's flourishing network of unregistered churches.

The largest of these "house churches" in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Linfen have been evicted from their buildings in recent weeks and a number of their leaders have been questioned, detained or arrested.

"Obama should tell President Hu Jintao to stop the persecution of China's house churches," said Zhang Mingxuan, the president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, speaking by phone from a hotel in Nanyang where he was being detained for the duration of Mr Obama's visit to China.

Fan Yafeng, a prominent church leader, legal scholar and human rights activist, told the Herald that the growing crackdown against house churches was larger and more important than campaigns earlier this year against human rights lawyers, the media and the internet.

He said the informal Christian church network was a more formidable adversary than any other section of China's civil society because of its capacity to mobilise within China and abroad. "This is the Communist Party's battle of life and death," said Professor Fan, who was sacked from his Government think-tank job two weeks ago.

He did not think the party could win this battle because of the "contrast" between Christian and Communist Party commitment to their respective faiths.

The house church movement has been growing rapidly in China in recent decades.

China's Christian population has surged from about 3 million during the Cultural Revolution to 130 million, according to the highest Chinese Government estimate.

The majority of Chinese Christians are members of "official" Catholic and Protestant church organisations that are closely linked with government organisations. But the fastest growth has been seen in hundreds of informal "house churches" which began as Bible study groups but have swelled into large congregations.

The crackdown on China's larger house churches began in Shanxi province's Linfen city in September, with the demolition of a church and arrest of two pastors. This month it spread to Beijing and Shanghai.

Eight days ago Beijing's Shouwang congregation was forced to hold their Sunday service outdoors during a snowstorm after government officials had intervened to prevent property owners from renting or selling them any premises.

Yesterday 800 of Shouwang's mainly young and professional followers were authorised to use a university auditorium, but preachers were prevented from leaving their houses to attend.

One preacher negotiated his way past police and plain-clothes security officials to arrive 90 minutes late, into the arms of elated church leaders. The Shouwang congregation has attempted to keep a low profile and its leaders did not accept interviews yesterday.

"The Government wants unregistered churches to go back to the mode of operation where they remain small, take place in apartments, and are not very public in their practice," said Carsten Vala, of Loyola University, Maryland, who has researched China's registered and unregistered Protestant churches.

"Most important is how the rank and file react to the Government stopping their meetings," he said. "In Chengdu they have continued to meet, and that presents a real problem for the Government."

In the Roman Empire, persecution of Christians came in waves. It was sporadic and swept the Empire, or parts of it, from time to time. The simple fact was that the Gospel's spread could not be stopped. It would appear as though a similar bottom-up, grass roots conversion of the Chinese people is occurring now. It is of God's Spirit. His means are preaching and teaching, worship and service against which guns and prison have little permanent effect. All the evidence indicates that such oppression only serves to make the churches more powerful and influential in the long run.

We do not know whether the current oppression of house churches will continue and widen into a fully fledged relentless persecution, as is the case against the Bhuddist Falun Gong, or whether it will die away in this case. But succeed it will not. The Spirit of God is moving across the face of China and when He changes hearts they do not change back again.

How Copenhagen Will Play Out

"Agreementist" Charades on a Grand Scale

Peter Hartcher is the International Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald. In this piece he tells us exactly how he expects the UN global summit in Copenhagen to combat Global Warming will play out. It will go precisely nowhere, but with great fanfare of trumpets and timpanis. He explains how we have seen all this before. For our part we hope that what he says is accurate. We are comforted by his prognostications. We have believed for some weeks that Copenhagen is a dead rubber.

Disagreeable truth about the coming Copenhagen charade

Peter Hartcher
November 24, 2009 - 12:02AM

We are about to see an advanced case of ''agreementism'' between world leaders at the Copenhagen climate change meeting. It is a painful and embarrassing disorder with familiar results.

Every case begins the same way. Leaders gather in summits. They confer. They reach earnest consensus that they need to solve a common problem. They commission studies and agree to meet again. Next time, they tell reporters, they will make real decisions.

This looks terrifically statesmanlike and carries lots of photo opportunities. But then they realise it will be unpopular and difficult to implement necessary reforms. Troubled, the weaker among the leaders gaze into their quivering souls and choose self-preservation over problem-solving. At this instant, the fire of activism departs.

But their huffing and puffing self-promotion has built a peak of expectation. They can't just walk away and admit failure. The conditions are now ripe - the next time the leaders gather, agreementism sets in.

In a mild case, leaders simply draw up high-sounding communiques. In numbered paragraphs, they give a strong impression of firm agreement and resolute action, but without actually binding themselves to any.

But in an advanced case, leaders know that this simple ruse is unconvincing. The problem is too big, and the leaders have talked too much, to hope that they can get away this easily. They need more than a mere communique. In this stage of the disease, the symptoms deteriorate markedly. Leaders display a disturbing symptom known as ''concerted unilateralism''.

This is a sophisticated way of saying that countries can do whatever the hell they like, but they will write something pompous about it first. And they will all do it together. This is precisely the symptom that world leaders are now displaying ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit - the so-called COP15 - in two weeks.

This was supposed to be the meeting that sealed a legally binding treaty on all 191 nations of the world. Successor to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, it would be the pact to save the planet from the devastating effects of global warming.

But you could pick the acute onset of advanced agreementism the moment the meeting's chairman, Lars Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, uttered the following words at a breakfast meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders in Singapore on November 15: ''The Copenhagen Agreement should be global, comprehensive and substantial, yet flexible enough to accommodate countries with very different national circumstances.''

Allow me to interpret: ''To frightened leaders everywhere, do not panic! Each of you will write down on a piece of paper what you want to do about global warming. There is nothing compulsory. Make it sound impressive. We are supposed to be saving the entire planet, remember? Whatever.

''Next, we will collect your papers. We will staple them together. We will call it the Copenhagen Agreement. We will declare victory. We will all have our pictures taken. And we will tell reporters that, next time, we will make real decisions. You know the drill.''

How can we be so certain of this outcome? We have two ways to be sure. First, Rasmussen went on to spell it out in unmistakeable terms.

''Will it be binding? Yes, it will be binding. Even if we may not hammer out the last dots of a legally binding instrument, I do believe a political binding agreement with specific commitment to mitigation and finance provides a strong basis for immediate action in the years to come.''

Take special note of the all-important distinction between a ''legally binding instrument'' and a ''political binding agreement''. A politician's binding agreement? That's in the same category as a campaign promise.

And celebrate the wonderful non-sequitur of ''immediate action in the years to come''.

In a masterstroke, Rasmussen called the format ''one agreement - two purposes''. The first purpose, he says, is to state political intent, and the second is to keep talking about a legal treaty for later. The media shorthand for this has become a ''two-step'' agreement.

Second, we know how this will end because we've seen it twice before in recent history. We've seen precisely the same format of ''concerted unilateralism'' on different continents and in different fields, and each time with the same result.

One was the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum's ''Bogor Declaration'' of 1994. In that much-ballyhooed agreement, the APEC leaders at their summit in Indonesia said ''we announce our commitment to complete the achievement of our goal of free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific''.

For developed countries this would be ''no later than the year 2010 and developing economies no later than the year 2020''. But there was no binding agreement. It was a political deal which allowed each country to do what it pleased.

What happened?' ''The Bogor commitments have been all but ignored,'' summarised the Lowy Institute's Allan Gyngell and Malcolm Cook in a 2005 paper. Some APEC leaders still fantasise about a free-trade zone.

The other was the European Union's ''Lisbon Strategy'' of 2000. This was supposed to make Europe the world's most dynamic economy by 2010. But individual governments ignored the deal and continued to pander to unions and bureaucracies.

The director of the International Centre for Money and Banking Studies in Geneva, Charles Wyplosz, wrote: ''The strategy rests on peer pressure - the naming and shaming of governments that fail to make progress. In practice, however, peer pressure has become peer collusion.''

The result, in the words of the director of the European Policy Centre, Antonio Missiroli, was ''shameful''. The European economy remains sclerotic.

Bogor and Lisbon are clear precedents for Copenhagen's ''concerted unilateralism''. Nothing in any such agreement carries any real force. Only the countries that already wanted to act will act, and the rest will just sit around and watch. But there will certainly be agreement.

Peter Hartcher is the Herald's international editor.

Most Dangerous Apostate

Cooking the Books

When prevailing scientific or academic paradigms are broken the early critics of the paradigm are often laymen or non-experts. The simple reason is that it is the "outsiders" who have not been conditioned to believe the current expert consensus.

The paradigm of global warming has been politically manufactured from the beginning, when, at Margaret Thatcher's urging, the UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Therefore, its scientific foundations and credentials have always been particularly vulnerable. And it is outsiders who have done the real work in exposing some of the pseudo-science that lies at its core.

Anne Jolis of the Wall Street Journal profiles a sceptic who is hated by the climate change establishment. Welcome to the nerdy world of Stephen McIntyre.

Revenge of the Climate Laymen

Global warming's most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science.

By ANNE JOLIS

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang's Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described "auditing" a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa's much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists' posters. Like other so-called "hockey stick" temperature graphs, it's an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We're burning ourselves up!

"It was the belle of the ball," Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. "Its dance card was full."

At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia's Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.

Mr. Briffa denounces Mr. McIntyre's work as "demonstrably biased" because it uses "a narrower area and range of sample sites." He says he and his colleagues have now built a new chronology using still more data. Here, as in similar graphs by other researchers, the spike soars once again. Mr. McIntyre's "work has little implication for our published work or any other work that uses it," Mr. Briffa concludes.

He and his colleagues may well ignore Mr. McIntyre, but the rest of us shouldn't. While Mr. McIntyre's image may use data from fewer sites, it still has nearly three times as many tree cores representing the modern era as Mr. Briffa's original.

Yet Mr. McIntyre is first to admit his work is no bullet aimed at the heart of the theory of man-made climate change. Rather, his work—chronicled in papers co-written with environmental economist Ross McKitrick and more than 7,000 posts on his Climateaudit.org Weblog—does something much more important: It illustrates the uncertainty of a science presented as so infallible as to justify huge new taxes on rich countries along with bribes to poor ones in order to halt their fossil-fueled climbs to prosperity. Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.

It all started in 2002 when—as many might given the time and Mr. McIntyre's mathematics background—he decided to verify for himself the case for action on climate change.

"It was like a big crossword puzzle," he told me. "Business was a bit slow at the time, so I started reading up."

Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted "hockey stick" graph prominently featured by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. Alerts about review boards' seemingly lax standards litter his blog, highlighting in particular the IPCC, which has used both the Mann and Briffa graphs in its reports. In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.

"At the beginning I innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff. … So often my mouth would drop, when I realized no one had really looked into it."

Even more innocently, he assumed the billion-dollar climate change industry would welcome his untrained but painstaking work. Instead, Mr. McIntyre is subjected to every kind of venom—that he must be funded by Big Oil, by Big Business, by Some Texan Somewhere. For the record, the 62-year-old declares himself "past my best-by date, operating on my own nickel."

James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute, has dismissed him as a "court jester." Mr. Mann replied to an emailed query about Mr. McIntyre by decrying "every specious contrarian claim and innuendo against me, my colleagues, and the science of climate change itself."

Others are more thick-skinned: "You mention his name in my community, people just smile. It's a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists," affirms Stanford University's Stephen Schneider.

One wonders what is so funny, when it is not only the Canadian hobbyist fueling skepticism, but also figures from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center that now show thickening Arctic ice; from the U.K. Met (Meteorological) Office showing falling temperatures that contradict modeling predictions; and other studies that suggest natural factors in climate change are being dramatically underestimated.

Climatologists say they will only take Mr. McIntyre seriously if he creates his own temperature reconstructions and submits them for peer review. But the best science should stand up even to outside scrutiny. And if Mr. McIntyre has a credibility problem with climatologists, climatologists' predictions are increasingly viewed skeptically by the public.

A Pew report last month revealed that the number of Americans who believe humans are causing climate change has dropped 11 percentage points in the last 18 months to 36%; that the number who feel there is solid evidence that the earth is warming has fallen by 14 points to 57%; and that those who think the issue is "very serious" has sunk nine points to 35%.

Mr. McIntyre declares no interest in debunking The Theory in toto, nor in discouraging efficient energy use. His blog will disappoint those seeking anything more political than technical analyses.

In fairness, researchers are far from the loudest voices telling "skeptics" like Mr. McIntyre to sit down, shut up and surrender their lightbulbs without further question—that megaphone belongs to the politicians and activists pushing centrally-planned economies in the name of saving the Earth. Here, we see that contempt for laymen is not universal: Al Gore's ignorance is happily overlooked given his power to push billions in research funding. The same goes for Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, and everyone else declaring "the debate is over."

I asked 10 climatologists what they thought was the most reliable method of predicting climate, and got nearly as many answers. People in the field compare climate studies to health studies—another complex mechanism with uncontrollable factors, where best practices will always be debated.

Climate researchers know their prescriptions don't carry the certainty laymen assume from that which is labeled "science," yet most shy from a straightforward account of this uncertainty.

"Methods certainly need to be continually refined and improved. I doubt that anyone in the paleoclimate community would disagree with that," says Rob Wilson of the University of St. Andrews's School of Geography and Geosciences. "However, can the nuances of methodological developments be communicated to the laymen—and would they want to know? I do not think this would help."

Maybe not, but letting people feel duped by hyperbole is proving even more harmful to the warmers' cause.

"I never said I was proving or disproving anything…. I just don't think we should be thanking the people who make it harder to find out what's true," Mr. McIntyre says.

The climate establishment will probably never thank Mr. McIntyre, much less follow his example. The rest of us should do both.

Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

The Two Handed President

Political Theatre At Its Worst

Economists--purveyors of that dismal science--are infamously known for never offering a straight answer on anything. Winston Churchill famously yearned for a "one-handed economist" having been afflicted with economic advisers who prefaced every piece of advice with, "On the one hand . . . , but on the other . . ."

Such equivocation does not tend to go down well when it comes from national political leaders, either. Gabor Steingart in Spiegel Online provides us with scathing criticism of President Obama's announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan. Steingart loses count of the number of conflicting hands Obama tries to play in his speech.

Searching in Vain for the Obama Magic

By Gabor Steingart

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama's speech would be well-received. Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech. But it didn't help: The soldiers' reception was cool.

One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan -- and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war -- and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

Just in Time for the Campaign

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama's re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the "world's great religions." He promised that responsibility for the country's security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai -- a government which he said was "corrupt." The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But "America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars," he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Obama's Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama's magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives -- their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners -- particularly those with a talent for oration -- are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called "Hope."

In his speech on America's new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.

The American president doesn't need any opponents at the moment. He's already got himself.

The Rot Spreads

The Pollies Will Eventually Be Hung Out to Dry

So far in Climategate, the furore has been over the Climatic Research Unit ("CRU") at the University of East Anglia. Its leaked e-mails and other material show it to have been "massaging" global temperature data, or in the Unit's parlance "adding value" to temperature data. It is clear that so far politicians have not caught up with the significance of this scandal. When confronted and asked to comment, the response invariably is along the lines of, "It's unfortunate. But relatively minor in the scheme of things. The vast majority of scientists continue to believe that the world is warming."

The fact is that the arcane world of climate science has changed. For if you do not have temperature data to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the world has warmed over the past one hundred years, the "science is settled" brigade will disappear into the mist.

Now, when a global warming advocate asserts that earth's temperatures are rising, the simple question that will be put is, "How do you know?" And the fact is that the CRU imbroglio shows us that we don't know. Nobody does.
There is no evidence--at least no kosher evidence--there is only massaged data, adjusted to make it look as if the earth's temperature has risen over the past one hundred years. The raw ("non-massaged", oh, excuse me, "non value added") data for New Zealand and Australia, for example, shows that temperatures in have been flat for one hundred years, respectively. That is the fundamental significance of Climategate.

But, someone will object, there must be other temperature data sets around the world. Well, yes there are. Climate scientists around the world have relied on the CRU data; yet even that has been released under strict controls, and only to "friendly" scientists--those considered reliable and members of the cabal. The leaked e-mails demonstrate this clearly. (The e-mails actually speak of other scientists being either "reliable" or "unreliable". However, there are other independent data sets. Professor Phil Jones made this assertion when he was apologizing for his indiscretions. He claimed that these other data sets would confirm the integrity of the CRU data.

The most widely used alternative data set is held by Nasa. So, the argument runs, we can forget the CRU scandal, and work with Nasa's temperature data set. Or can we? Well . . . maybe not. There is something really smelly there as well. Consider the following piece by Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times.

Thursday, December 3, 2009
Researcher: NASA hiding climate data

Stephen Dinan

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.

Mr. Horner, a noted global warming skeptic and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he's given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he'll sue to compel the information's release.

His fight mirrors one in Europe that has sprung up over the the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the UK after thousands of e-mails from the center were obtained and appear to show researchers shaving their data to make it conform to their expectation, and show efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.

The center's chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.

The center has also had to acknowledge in response to a freedom of information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind global warming.

Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data-shaving has happened at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), another leading global warming research center.

Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center which runs the GISS laboratory, said they are working on Mr. Horner's request, though he couldn't say why they have taken so long.

"We're collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests," Mr. Hess said. "It's just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that's responsive."

He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn't say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. . . .

NASA's GISS was forced to update its data in 2007 after questions were raised by Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.com.

GISS had initially listed the warmest years as 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931. After Mr. McIntyre's questions GISS rejiggered the list and 1934 was warmest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and then 1931. But since then, the list has been rewritten again so it now runs 1998, 2006, 1934, 1921, 1999.

The institute blamed a "minor data processing error" for the changes but says it doesn't make much difference since the top three years remain in a "statistical tie" either way.

Mr. Horner said he's seeking the data itself, but he also wants to see the chain of e-mails from scientists discussing the changes.

The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Mr. Horner says he's never received an official acknowledgement of his three separate FOIA requests, but has received e-mails showing the agency is aware of them.

He said he has provided NASA with a notice of intent to sue under FOIA, but said he also hopes members of Congress get involved and demand the information be released.

NASA and CRU data are considered the backbone of much of the science that suggests the earth is warming due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. NASA argues its data suggests this decade has been the warmest on record.

On the other hand, data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville suggests temperatures have been relatively flat for most of this decade.

Smell a rat? Oh, yes. It appears to be a very big and very smelly rodent indeed.

Update on Climategate

Snakeoil is What Snakeoil Does

Things are getting worse for the great propaganda campaign. As we expected, the Australian Senate has killed Kevin Rudd's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The US Senate is burying Obama's ETS proposals into a deep, dark hole. Copenhagen will be pure political theatre and spin. Politicians will return home holding up pieces of paper, proclaiming "Global salvation in our time." It will mean nothing--as we will endeavour to reveal in the next few days. Copenhagen is dead: the only unknown now is the final shape and pallor of the corpse.

But New Zealand is still out there, punching above our weight, as Prime Minister, John Key would assure us. The hubris knows no bounds.

Meanwhile, here is a summary of what is reverberating around the world in the last twenty-four hours on Climategate.

1. Denmark is rife with ETS fraud! This is a bit embarrassing since the last time we checked, Copenhagen was in Denmark. The whole ETS concept is an attempt to create an artificial market by artificial non-market means (government fiat directives). If there were a genuine market for carbon emissions, the free market would have been trading them generations ago. Artificial markets are easily subject to rorts and frauds, where virtual reality is created by the stroke of a pen, or a keystroke.

A Danish newspaper reports that Denmark is the centre of a sophisticated scam involving ETS credits.

Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register [for carbon quotas]. One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.

This, we predict, is just the tip of the iceberg.

2. Legal actions are coming. According to James Delingpole in the Telegraph:

Viscount Monckton talked of at least two in the offing – both by scientists, one British, one Canadian, who intend to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud. Their case, quite simply, is that the scientists implicated in Climategate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process.

3. Calls for a US Senate inquiry. Senator Inhofe, the top ranked Republican on the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is calling for a Senate inquiry into

a possible conspiracy between some of the world’s most prominent climatologists to, among other things, manipulate data on so-called global warming.
Inhofe said the recent disclosure of emails between several prominent climatologists reveal “possible deceitful manipulation of important data and research used by the US Global Change Research Program” and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

He suggested “a possible conspiracy by scientists, some of whom receive or have received US taxpayer funds, to stifle open, transparent debate on the most pressing issues of climate science.” Inhofe also noted that there appeared to be “a campaign to vilify scientists who question global warming alarmism.”

4. Professor Plimer calls a spade by its name. At a recent public meeting in the UK, Australian scientist, Ian Plimer did not mince any words:

Professor Ian Plimer condemned the climate change lobby as “climate comrades” keeping the “gravy train” going. In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.

Who Will Rid Us of this Curse?

Walter Lippmann, Prophet of the Age

In 1932, Lippman wrote:

"[While] the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colours, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words . . . .

"Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come . . . . [T]he premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

"So universal is the domination of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men's lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states . . . .

"But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men. "

Cited by Paul A Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009) p.254.

We firmly believe that only the Spirit of God, applying the grace and gifts of the Lord Jesus Christ, Messiah of God to the hearts of men can rid us of this curse. For it is both an idolatry and an enslavement of heart. Men who are not made free by the truth and grace of God would in the end prefer to be enslaved to officials who promise to protect them and provide for them.

When Fools Take Charge

Condemned to Perpetual Ignorance

A recent newspaper article profiled the latest fandango in early child education. It calls for a more thoroughgoing and radical commitment to treating children as adults from the very outset.

In what way, you ask?

Parents should be treating babies and toddlers with more respect, a visiting academic says, and that means talking to infants as if they are adults, never putting them in high chairs or leaving them in car seats, and steering clear of many popular toys.

From day one, early childhood expert Polly Elam says, parents should also consult their baby before picking them up, changing their nappy or taking them on outings. That means talking the baby through what you are about to do, before you do it – and waiting for their response.

If parents skip this consultation, they should later apologise to the baby and explain why they acted hastily.

The absurdity of such extremism is easily dismissed. But things get more sinister when we are told that this new "movement", Resources for Infant Educarers, are being used as the guiding light for over twenty-four new early childhood education centres in New Zealand. The approach is radically paedo-centric, which fits right in with the philosophic cant currently dominating the Ministry of Education. Here is a sample of this radical approach in action:

If the infant learns a new skill, such as picking up a toy they have dropped by themselves, the philosophy says parents should not praise them. Elam says: "We try not to praise the child for things that they would do naturally ... a little bit of struggle is what a child enjoys doing. When they have accomplished something, we want them to have the intrinsic feeling of, `I did it!', rather than looking for the external praise." Likewise, if an infant falls and hurts themselves, parents should not just shush them and tell them they are fine. "They're not fine – they're frightened, and so we'd rather say what happened: `You fell down the steps, and that was frightening for you'... We don't deny the child the feeling. We often want the child to stop crying because it makes us feel more secure, but we've got to allow them to go through the crying and come out the other side knowing `I can get hurt, I can cry but I can also come out'. That's a life-long lesson that we want them to learn."

Teachers as glorified pseudo-life-coaches. Stand back and let the child learn for itself, at its own pace, being the wonderful self-discovering, auto-creative being that it is. But the Education Review Office, which now conducts audits on pre-schools, is a running cheerleader for paedo-centric education.

Predictably, it gives this approach top marks. Education Review Office reports on centres using RIE or Pikler strategies emphasise how happy, independent and confident the children are.

Too true. And by the time the children get to be six or seven they will be so self-confident and uber-independent that they will be uneducable. Having become wise in their own eyes, through the incessant encouragement of their parents and their pre-school teachers, they forever will be consigned to live in a state of perpetual foolishness. Such is the benighted wisdom of our apostate age.

Men Behaving Badly

Short Summary for Non-Experts

Anthony Watts has published a helpful short summary by Lon Glazner for the non-expert on what the hubbub over the leaked Climatic Research Unit's e-mails is all about.

What’s the hubbub? It all comes down to men behaving badly. Emails and files related to top scientists that support man made global warming theory were released in the hacked files. These scientists have authored/co-authored many of the studies relied on by the UN IPCC, and world governments. The studies have been used to pronounce global warming an immediate, and therefore taxable, threat.

Here are some of the highlights of the documents released.

1. The scientists colluded in efforts to thwart Freedom of Information Act requests (across continents no less). They reference deleting data, hiding source code from requests, manipulating data to make it more annoying to use, and attempting to deny requests from people recognized as contributors to specific internet sites. Big brother really is watching you. He’s just not very good at securing his web site.

2. These scientists publicly diminished opposing arguments for lack of being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In the background they discussed black-balling journals that did publish opposing views, and preventing opposing views from being published in journals they controlled. They even mention changing the rules midstream in arenas they control to ensure opposing views would not see the light of day. They discuss amongst themselves which scientists can be trusted and who should be excluded from having data because they may not be “predictable”.

3. The scientists expressed concern privately over a lack of increase in global temperatures in the last decade, and the fact that they could not explain this. Publicly they discounted it as simple natural variations. In one instance, data was [apparently] manipulated to hide a decline in temperatures when graphed. Other discussions included ways to discount historic warming trends that inconveniently did not occur during increases in atmospheric CO2.

4. The emails show examples of top scientists working to create public relations messaging with favorable news outlets. It shows them identifying and cataloging, by name and association, people with opposing views. These people are then disparaged in a coordinated fashion via favorable online communities.

What the emails/files don’t do is completely destroy the possibility that global climate change is real. They don’t preclude many studies from being accurate, on either side of the discussion. And they should not be seen as discrediting all science.

The Hollowing Out of New Zealand

Corrupt Democracy and the Devil's Bargain Remain Intact

It was always nothing more than an empty gesture. The taskforce set up to tell New Zealand how to close the living standards gap with Australia by 2025 has published its findings. It was a stillbirth. We cannot recall any Government instigated investigation being so comprehensively dismissed so quickly. If the Report were a stone it would have been found at the bottom of Grand Canyon within seconds.

The Prime Minister and his deputy rushed to assure the electorate that closing the gap with Australia was always and only an aspirational goal, which is to say it is a goal no-one should takes seriously. John Armstrong catalogues the political impossibility of following the report's recommendations. Essentially, no-one has the political will or courage to follow the advice which essentially turn around two key planks: reduce taxation, and reduce the role of elephantine government.

Most singularly, neither John Key nor Bill English disagreed with the recommendations per se. They just said that they would not be following them. Now they need to fess up and be candid with the electorate. The reality is that no successful and popular politician can follow the recommended steps--the voters could not stand the pain; they will rise up to cast out any such errant government. The devil's bargain that lies at the root of all corrupt western democracies--of which New Zealand is surely one--where politicians bribe electors with promises of goodies paid for by other people's money, and voters willingly accede to being bribed--remains firmly intact. But such corruption has its price. The problem with bargains made with the Devil is that certain damnation draws nigh.

The damnation drawing night is the hollowing out of our economy at an increasingly rapid rate. In effect our leaders have told us that lower and lower relative living standards are inevitable. New Zealand is ineluctably moving down the ranking ladder towards the status of a banana republic. And the speed of decline is increasing by the year. It is sad, but inevitable. The vicious cycle is reaching critical speed: people and capital flight will likely become unstoppable from this point onwards, until the government prohibits both, at which point, the banana republic truly will have arrived.

Maybe when the end is reached, hacks like John Armstrong will change their view and nostalgically look back to the wonderful years of courage and progress that attended the reforms of Roger Douglas, but it will all be too late. Too bad. On the other hand, maybe Mr Armstrong thinks there is something noble about New Zealand sinking to the bottom of the OECD, becoming a "pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas".

Contrary to the seductive tones of the Devil's bargain, no-one owes us anything. But prostituting ourselves to the highest political bidder--as if we were all owed something by someone else--is now so much part of national life that it cannot be reversed. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Since we have judged ourselves unworthy of God's light and law, as being beneath our dignity or, as the French would say, our amour-propre, He long ago turned to others. The light of the Gospel is now shining elsewhere. Our darkness is deepening.

Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation

They Must Not Be Allowed to Get Away With It

Christopher Booker, writing in the Telegraph says that the scientific establishment is now hopelessly compromised. New Zealand is named in the scandal.

Booker makes his case for scandalous behaviour, requiring full accountability, by making three indictments.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious . . . is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the [Climatic Research Unit] CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide?

The second indictment is:

(T)he leaked documents . . . show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the "Harry Read Me" file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the "Harry Read Me" file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

Indeed--the matter is so egregious that in the face of all the assertions and "evidences" of rising global temperatures in the previous century one now has to ask, "How do you know the data is actual data?" Moderate sceptics have adopted the position of agreeing that the evidence points to global warming in the twentieth century, but they remain unconvinced that it is due to the release of CO2. Now, however, there is grounds to doubt whether the earth's temperatures have increased at all in the twentieth century since the data recording the increases has been so manipulated, adjusted, and messed up.

Third indictment:

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

The pressure and shame to date has been considerable. The University of East Anglia has now reversed its position and agreed to publish all its data (once necessary permissions have been secured). Healthy scepticism requires that we expect yet another long string of delays and obfuscations. Phil Jones, head of CRU remains in denial. He says he has nothing to fear from the release of data because it essentially is consistent with other,

completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

Phil Jones still has not grasped the crevasse over which he is now suspended. The e-mails disclose an acceptance amongst the leading scientists in all those institutions to accept the CRU's massaging and adjusting the data, which implies that they are guilty of the same sins. Certainly in New Zealand, the head of NIWA has publicly stated their adjustments to temperature data were consistent with "international standards". That suggests a consensus acceptance of manipulation of data within the cabal. So, it is not just the data which will need to be released, but every adjustment and justification thereof. We also know that the data sets are hopelessly compromised and the base data thoroughly unreliable.

Meanwhile, according to the BBC the University of East Anglia has announced that it will commission a formal independent inquiry into the leaking of the e-mails and what they revealed. the key thing now is whether this inquiry will be a cover-up or a diligent expose.

Professor Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, told BBC News there are three key issues:

* how did the leakage occur - was there any payment in the process?
* the alleged behaviour of the scientists indicated by the e-mails
* does this have any impact on the scientific conclusion?

If an independent inquiry encompassed all three aspects, Professor Sir David said he would support it.

We hope for the best, but fear the worst.

What is it with the Left?

More UN Insanity

The Herald recently carried a piece on the Maersk Alabama which had warded off an attack by pirates. You may recall that this is the second time the Alabama has been attacked by pirates. The first time it had to be rescued by Navy Seals. This time it was carrying armed guards who showed the pirates the business end of a few assault rifles.

All well and good, and unremarkable. Except for this. Apparently the UN does not like the idea of merchant ships defending themselves against pirates.

The UN's Maritime Safety Committee says members should "strongly discourage the carrying and use of firearms by seafarers for personal protection or for the protection of a ship." The concern is that bringing guns aboard ship will encourage violence.

Why is the left so pacifist? Why do they hate the fundamental human right of self-defence? Why does a Safety Committee reject the very thing which would make sailing through dangerous waters far safer?

The UN is long passed its "use by" date. It's time New Zealand came to its senses and withdrew.