From those defenders of the faith at the Associated Press:

A prayer rug rest against the wall in the apartment of Maj. Nidal Hasan in Killeen, Texas, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens more Nov. 5 at the Fort Hood military base.

Atty: Fort Hood suspect may use insanity defense

By Angela K. Brown, Associated Press Writer

FORT WORTH, Texas – An Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people during an attack on his Texas post will likely plead not guilty to the charges against him and may use an insanity defense at his military trial, his attorney said Monday.

John Galligan, the civilian attorney for Maj. Nidal Hasan, said he is considering an insanity defense among other options, but that it’s too early to determine his defense strategy.

"Based on the evidence thus far, his mental status must be raised," Galligan told The Associated Press by phone from his office near Fort Hood, about 130 miles southwest of Dallas. "Anybody who allegedly engages in conduct that is completely contradictory to his lifestyle and military career — an insanity defense has to be considered." …

Galligan said military law requires his client to plead not guilty if prosecutors seek the death penalty, but he said that decision has not been made…

Galligan said he is frustrated because prosecutors are taking too long to respond to his questions and requests. He said he has asked why no witnesses were allowed to testify during Saturday’s hearing, and why it was closed to the news media….

This attorney is undercutting his own case.

"Anybody who allegedly engages in conduct that is completely contradictory to his lifestyle and military career — an insanity defense has to be considered."

Given that Mr. Hasan was a practicing Muslim, how did anything in his life contradicted his actions? 

Instead, we think Mr. Hasan would be far better served by claiming he was acting upon his religious beliefs.

Which would amount to the same thing.

(Thanks to Melissa for the heads up.)

From Best Buy:

(Click to enlarge)

Christmas can’t be mentioned, but Eid al-Adha can be?

Lest we forget, Eid al-Adha is that beautiful "Festival of Sacrifice" when Muslims celebrated by ritually slaughtering camels, bulls, sheep in the streets, by cutting their throats and letting the blood run out until they die.

Which of course makes it holiday much more worthy of mention than boring old Christmas.

And while we are asking questions. Why are people now saying ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘happy Thanksgiving’?

Is Thanksgiving too religious now?

From the global warming cultists at CNN:

Sea level rise could cost port cities $28 trillion

By Peter Wilkinson, CNN

November 23, 2009

London, England (CNN) — A possible rise in sea levels by 0.5 meters by 2050 could put at risk more than $28 trillion worth of assets in the world’s largest coastal cities, according to a report compiled for the insurance industry.

The value of infrastructure exposed in so-called "port mega-cities," urban conurbations with more than 10 million people, is just $3 trillion at present.

The rise in potential losses would be a result of expected greater urbanization and increased exposure of this greater population to catastrophic surge events occurring once every 100 years caused by rising sea levels and higher temperatures.

The report, released on Monday by WWF and financial services Allianz, concludes that the world’s diverse regions and ecosystems are close to temperature thresholds — or "tipping points."

Any one of these surge events could unleash devastating environmental, social and economic changes amid a higher urban population.

According to the report, carried out by the UK-based Tyndall Centre, the impacts of passing "Tipping Points" on the livelihoods of people and economic assets have been underestimated.

Global temperatures have already risen by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius [1.25 Fahrenheit] and the report says a further rise by 2-3 degrees in the second half of the century is likely unless deep cuts in emissions are put in place before 2015.

The consequent melting of the Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Shield could lead to one such tipping point scenario, possibly a sea level rise of up to 0.5 meters [19.6 inches] by 2050.

The report focuses on regions and phenomena where such events might be expected to cause significant environmental impacts within the first half of the century.

For example a hurricane in New York, which could cost $1 trillion now, would mean a $5 trillion insurance bill by the middle of the century, the report adds.

"If we don’t take immediate action against climate change, we are in grave danger of disruptive and devastating changes," said Kim Carstensen, the Head of WWF Global Climate Initiative.

"Reaching a tipping point means losing something forever. This must be a strong argument for world leaders to agree a strong and binding climate deal in Copenhagen in December."

Note how misleading this article is, right from the start:

A possible rise in sea levels by 0.5 meters by 2050 could put at risk more than $28 trillion worth of assets in the world’s largest coastal cities, according to a report compiled for the insurance industry.

That makes it sound like this is an insurance industry report. Or, at the very least, that it was done at the insurance industry’s request.

But we get the facts a little later in the article:

The report, released on Monday by WWF and financial services Allianz…

This is really all you need to know about this so-called report.

The World Wildlife Federation are rabid proponents of ‘global warming.’ This is their bread and butter.

And the insurance company, Allianz, must have found some way to make a buck off of the climate scare hoax:

"We must prepare our clients"

"As an insurer and investor, we must prepare our clients for these scenarios as long as we still have leeway for action," says Clemens von Weichs, CEO of Allianz Reinsurance. "Setting premiums risk-appropriately and sustainably is of vital interest to everyone involved, because this is the only way to ensure that coverage solutions will continue to exist."

Allianz intends to address climate change by entering into dialogue with its clients at an early date. This will allow it to point out countermeasures in a timely way, and work together to develop specific coverage concepts, whether for existing assets or for future climate-compatible projects like alternative energy and water supply concepts, dyke construction, or protection against failed harvests…

And Allianz has been working with the World Wildlife propagandists for some time now.

They have even roped unsuspecting school kids who survived Katrina into their propaganda ploys, as this undated article from the WWF’s website reports:

WWF Allianz Southeast Climate Witness Program

Climate change is among the most pervasive threats to the Earth today. We have the power to address its root causes and limit its impact on the planet. Educating young people plays a critical role in this effort.

In the Gulf Coast region, many students have already felt the trauma of devastating climate events. WWF and Allianz gave displaced youth from Hurricane Katrina an opportunity to learn more about the science of climate change, as well as tools for exploring and explaining the vulnerability of their region to climate change, a forum to tell their stories of how climate change has affected – and will continue to affect – their lives and way of life, and the opportunity to do something about it.

Southeast Climate Witness Student Research Opportunity

Through the Southeast Climate Witness Program, 25 students were chosen from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to participate in vulnerability research of their region. Participants were high school students who were interested in the environment, planning on attending college, and who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Selected students attended Climate Camp in June 2008 as well as a Youth Summit in Washington D.C. July 7-11, 2008; and received a $1500 stipend and an HP laptop computer for college.

While in Washington, the students had the opportunity to speak at a briefing sponsored by Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. During the briefing, they presented the findings of the research project they participated in…

Of course the WWF is simply following the propaganda guidelines we reported earlier (from the CRU documents) set out in ‘The Rules Of The Game’:

20. Partnered delivery of messages will be more successful

Experience shows that partnered delivery is often a key component for projects that are large, complex and have many stakeholders.

Of course CNN is a “partner” here, as well, since they merely parroted the WWF’s press release without giving any opportunity to the other side.

And of course all of this nonsense is being rushed out in time to impact the upcoming life or death for the earth conference known as ‘Hopenhagen.’

From the Prescriptions blog of the New York Times:

A Call From Senator Kennedy’s Widow

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

November 21, 2009

Moments after the vote to begin debate on the major health care legislation, a reporter asked the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, if he had spoken with President Obama.

“I was pretty well focused on getting the votes,” Mr. Reid said with a smile. “I took all senators’ calls but no one else’s.”

But there was someone else: Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose life’s work in the Senate was largely dedicated to the issue of health care.

Mr. Reid first mentioned the call in an aside to Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate, as they stood at a news conference after the vote. While Mr. Kennedy was battling cancer, Mr. Dodd stepped in as acting chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and helped shepherd the health care bill through a committee vote in July.

“She believes that Ted was watching,” Mr. Reid told Mr. Dodd.

Asked about the call, Mr. Reid said that Mrs. Kennedy had telephoned him in the Democratic cloakroom just after the 60 to 39 vote, which allows debate to begin on the Senate’s health care legislation.

“She called right after the vote,” Mr. Reid said. “I’ll remember the call always. She of course was crying pretty hard. We both felt that he’s watching us tonight.”

This is from the New York Times blog, Prescription, which uses the sub-title: “Making Sense Of The Health Care Debate.”

Which would imply some kind of rational thinking.

But, no, the Senate is supposed to pass this terrible legislation because “Ted Kennedy is watching.”

(Note that they didn’t say whether he was looking down or up.)

Somehow we almost missed this from the Washington Post:

A budget-buster in the making

By David S. Broder
Sunday, November 22, 2009

It’s simply not true that America is ambivalent about everything when it comes to the Obama health plan.

The day after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave its qualified blessing to the version of health reform produced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Quinnipiac University poll of a national cross section of voters reported its latest results.

This poll may not be as famous as some others, but I know the care and professionalism of the people who run it, and one question was particularly interesting to me.

It read: "President Obama has pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our federal budget deficit over the next decade. Do you think that President Obama will be able to keep his promise or do you think that any health care plan that Congress passes and President Obama signs will add to the federal budget deficit?"

The answer: Less than one-fifth of the voters — 19 percent of the sample — think he will keep his word. Nine of 10 Republicans and eight of 10 independents said that whatever passes will add to the torrent of red ink. By a margin of four to three, even Democrats agreed this is likely.

That fear contributed directly to the fact that, by a 16-point margin, the majority in this poll said they oppose the legislation moving through Congress.

I have been writing for months that the acid test for this effort lies less in the publicized fight over the public option or the issue of abortion coverage than in the plausibility of its claim to be fiscally responsible.

This is obviously turning out to be the case. While the CBO said that both the House-passed bill and the one Reid has drafted meet Obama’s test by being budget-neutral, every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters.

Here, for example, is what Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group of budget watchdogs, told me: "The Senate bill is better than the House version, but there’s not much reform in this bill. As of now, it’s basically a big entitlement expansion, plus tax increases."

Here’s another expert, Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: "While this bill does a better job than the House version at reducing the deficit and controlling costs, it still doesn’t do enough. Given the political system’s aversion to tax increases and spending cuts, I worry about what the final bill will look like."

These are nonpartisan sources, but Republican budget experts such as former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin amplify the point with specific examples and biting language. Holtz-Eakin cites a long list of Democratic-sponsored "budget gimmicks" that made it possible for the CBO to estimate that Reid’s bill would reduce federal deficits by $130 billion by 2019.

Perhaps the biggest of those maneuvers was Reid’s decision to postpone the start of subsidies to help the uninsured buy policies from mid-2013 to January 2014 — long after taxes and fees levied by the bill would have begun.

Even with that change, there is plenty in the CBO report to suggest that the promised budget savings may not materialize. If you read deep enough, you will find that under the Senate bill, "federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period" — not decline. The gross increase would be almost $1 trillion — $848 billion, to be exact, mainly to subsidize the uninsured. The net increase would be $160 billion.

But this depends on two big gambles. Will future Congresses actually impose the assumed $420 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health programs? They never have.

And will this Congress enact the excise tax on high-premium insurance policies (the so-called Cadillac plans) in Reid’s bill? Obama has never endorsed them, and House Democrats — reacting to union pressure — turned them down in favor of a surtax on millionaires’ income.

The challenge to Congress — and to Obama — remains the same: Make the promised savings real, and don’t pass along unfunded programs to our children and grandchildren.

You read that right. This is by that David Broder.

The ‘dean’ of the ‘inside the beltway’ pundits.

Still, even Mr. Broder misses the biggest lie of all in the current ‘healthcare reform.’

Under either of the healthcare bills, the cost of healthcare is going to sky rocket.

But we were told at the start of all of this that reform would make healthcare cheaper. And in fact, Mr. Obama claimed it would save trillions of dollars.

Nobody even bothers to pretend about that now.

From one of the foremost ‘Anthropomorphic Global Warming’ cranks, George Marshall, from the website Climate Change Denial:

SWIFTBOATING THE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS

George Marshall

November 22, 2009

The theft of 1,000 private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that deniers have learned lessons from dirty politics and are running a new campaign to undermine public trust in climate scientists. The feeble response from the UEA and the climate science community shows that scientists are still totally underestimating the fragility of that trust and the crucial role it plays in building public belief.

The Importance and fragility of Trust
The lay public, when presented with confusing data and competing arguments  about climate change deploy the heuristic (a fancy word for a mentalof short cut) of believing the people they most trust. Trust in the communicator  is therefore a crucial precondition for belief in climate change.

Unfortunately the three main climate change communicators: politicians, journalists and environmental campaigners, are among the least trusted people in society- fighting it out for bottom place in the ranking with lawyers and car salesmen. No one would pay any attention to them at all if they were not drawing on the aquifer of public trust in scientists.

Climate scientists have always misunderstood the dynamic of public belief and trust. They assume that belief will be built on their data and that public trust is merited by their authority.  With the exception of a few outstanding communicators, they often make no attempt to speak to deeper values or make an emotional connection with the public – indeed they see that as contrary to their professional independence.

However, whilst it is true that there is an underlying respect for scientific expertise, there are many other more emotional and contextual components to real trust. We tend to trust people we know, who seem to be like us, who speak to our values and life experience, who appear to have integrity or- that most intangible quality- people whom we seem to like.

The Deniers have always understood this. They use language that is designed to appeal to deeper values (such as freedom, independence, progress). The narrative they tell of being determined (and even persecuted) free thinkers standing against the tide of oppressive and self-interested conformity is designed to create an aura of integrity and trustworthiness…

And they [the skeptics] seek to demonise real science by picking out individuals to abuse. None more so that Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a paleoclimatologist who prepared the famous hockey-stick graph.  Dr. Mann has had the bravery to stand publicly by his findings and has been subjected to an extraordinary campaign of vilification and accusations of distortion and falsification (there are 20,000 responses to a search for “’Michael Mann’ climate fraud”). Mann seeks to keep above the fray but he has plentiful grounds for a string of libel actions.

Hacking into UEA

… The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these e-mails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self interested and politicized ends. Even better for them, some of these quotations come from Michael Mann.

But you could find anything in here. I looked and found lots of references to lunch and fun, 94 to hate, 31 to love. Generally, though, the e-mails are extremely focused, technical, and, dare I say it, really dull. As noted on Realclimate.org, the website that Mann helped found, the e-mails contain “no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords”.

But this is hardly the point. This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context. The speed with which the emails have been cut apart and fed into existing storylines is remarkable. The story has been led from the beginning by the denial site climatedepot.com (I absolutely refuse to provide a  hyperlink)  where you find the entire page given to ‘Climategate’, ‘smoking guns’,  ‘blood in the water’ – lines that have all been fed to and doltishly repeated in the mainstream media.

Swift Boating the Climate Scientists

The coordinator of climatedepot.com is Marc Morano, a libertarian right self publicist and former aid to the outspoken denier Senator Inhofe, who has been seeking to become a kingpin in the climate denial industry. Marc Morano is not new to this kind of dirty fighting. According to the investigative site Source Watch,  Morano, whilst working as a journalist for the right wing Cybercast News Service,  was the first source in May 2004 of the smear campaign against John Kerry that later became known the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Although different in context and content, there are marked similarities between the Swift Boat campaign and the hacking of the UEA e-mails. Both were sophisticated strategies to undermine trust. Both identified trust and integrity as a major strength of the opponent and then played carefully chosen story lines to undermine them. At the very least the UEA e-mail campaign is an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning.

Personally I suspect it goes further than that. The storyline is too clever, the timing on the brink of Copenhagen and the US climate bill too convenient. Obtaining compromising internal documents is the holy grail of presidential campaigns, so why would not campaigners who cut their teeth in US politics not seek to apply the same tactics against the poorly defended servers of a provincial university. I wait with interest to find out how these e-mails were obtained.

Call me a bastard and I’ll show you my birth certificate

And, the most disturbing similarity between the UEA hacking and the Swiftboat campaign, is that both rely for their success on the unwillingness of the opponent to rise to the debate and defend themselves. It is a generally accepted analysis that Kerry’s slow response was a huge strategic mistake which strengthened the smear. A weak response to an attack on your integrity, however ill founded, is read as guilt.

The UEA response has been frankly pathetic. It was informed by Real Climate of the hack on Tuesday 17th  but only responded reactively two days later when journalists caught onto the story. It refused to confirm whether the e-mails were accurate or not and, for a long time, refused to comment at all.

Now, in typical scientist fashion, it seeks to argue the data rationally. The UEA website states that “the selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way”. Mischievous? Irresponsible? What naughty pixies…

So might I suggest this would have been the appropriate response for Professor Jones:  speak to every journalist who calls, go on the offensive and defend your science. Clearly state that you are not prepared to have your hard working and committed colleagues  around the world defamed or slandered by the kinds of people who illegally hack into computers.  State that this is a desperate last ditch tactic by fanatics who have lost the rational debate.

And how about taking action against the criminals who hacked in? The stolen emails are currently on a website called www.anelegantchaos.org that has been set up for the purpose and is linked from all the denial websites. The owner of the site has written a self important introduction about the public interest of the site and the “disappointing insights” it provides. He has also put in a function to search the stolen property.

He is probably an egotist who enjoys the attention, so I am not going to name him. However his name, address and telephone number are all on the site registration.  If he had my private emails splattered all over his site he would be hearing from my lawyers – if he was lucky. The fact that there appears to have been no attempt to prevent this site is yet further evidence of the half hearted response of UEA.

Sadly, due in part to the lackluster response, I am sure that these wretched e-mails have now entered permanently into the mythology of climate denial. Scientists are going to have to be a lot more savvy and on the ball in future.

Surely this is the absolute proof that the CRU emails are authentic, and that everything the ’skeptics’ are saying about the is true.

For we now know that ‘to Swiftboat’ anybody means to tell the truth about them.

From the global warming cultists at the New York Times Dot Earth Blog:

Private Climate Conversations on Display

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

November 20, 2009

A thick file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker from a British university climate research center and has since spread widely across the Internet starting Thursday afternoon. Before they propagated, the purloined documents, nearly 200 megabytes in all, were uploaded surreptitiously on Tuesday to a server supporting the global warming Web site realclimate.org, along with a draft mock post, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist managing that blog. He pulled the plug before the fake post was published.

I have a story in The Times on the incident and its repercussions, which continue to unfold. But there’s much more to explore, of course (including several references to me). The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here. But a quick sift of skeptics’ Web sites will point anyone to plenty of sources.

Here’s the news story:

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents…

[UPDATE, 11/22: Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post explores some email exchanges criticizing certain peer-reviewed papers and journals and focused on excluding the papers from inclusion in the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report. I'm running down tips and assertions related to the theft and hackings. It remains interesting that before they were placed on an ftp site and dispersed across the Internet, someone tried to plant them on Realclimate.org and publish a mock post linking to them. Needless to say, if anyone has information or ideas, feel free to email dotearth AT nytimes.com.]

We almost passed on this article when we first saw it last Friday. After all, what is to be expected from a writer whose job depends upon promulgating a lie. (A situation so many journalists at The Times and elsewhere find themselves in, day after day.)

But then we remembered all the vital national security secrets that the New York Times felt obligated to publish, claiming that the public’s ‘right to know’ superseded any danger to the nation – and, indeed, that same public. (The ‘Pentagon Papers,’ come to mind, just for starters.)

But then when we saw the article’s ‘update,’ we could no longer resist.

The New York Times and the Washington Post are more interested in tracking down and punishing the whistleblower, than they are in publishing the (now confirmed as authentic) emails and documents.

This is what passes for journalism from our two foremost newspapers.

By the way, lest we forget, both The Times and the Washington Post cheerfully directed their readers to Sarah Palin’s hacked emails.

Granted, they didn’t post any emails verbatim themselves. But they both were careful to link to a site that had images of Mrs. Palin’s emails.

From an unfazed by the facts Associated Press:

Warming’s impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto

By Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer Sun Nov 22

WASHINGTON – Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

- The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

- Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

- Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

- Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

And here’s why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect … an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."

The last effort didn’t quite get the anticipated results.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters — the U.S., China and India — were not part of the pact’s emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.

And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

"By far the most serious differences that we’ve had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.

"We’ve come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone’s face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It’s all happening far faster than predicted.

Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What’s been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves — adding up to the size of Delaware — came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn’t raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn’t anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland’s ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."

Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn’t even merit a name until the past few years.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don’t die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it’s all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

Weren’t we regularly told around the time of the Kyoto Accords that the earth only had about ten more years to exist?

It seems to us like things turned out far better than what was predicted then.

Moreover, isn’t there now a gruding consensus that there has not been any discernible warming for the last ten years? Doesn’t that take us back to 1999?

1998 must have been a hell of a hot year to have done so much damage in one short year.

And here’s why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent.

Then obviously the Kyoto Accords are to blame.

After all, isn’t that the kind of ’cause and effect’ reasoning the ‘Warmers’ ascribe to?

"Things are much worse than the models predicted."

Since none of these same models predicted that the earth’s temperature would remain the same for the last ten years, maybe the models are useless.

In any case, whatever is worse, if anything, can’t be the fault of global warming, since there hasn’t been any for the last ten years.

Still, in some weird way it’s almost inspiring to see the AP out there fighting for their deeply held religious beliefs.

And any facts (or leaked emails) to the contrary be damned.

(Thanks to Franco for the heads up.)

From the DNC’s CNN:

Freshman Dem: Passing health care reform worth losing my seat

Posted: November 22nd, 2009

From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart

Washington (CNN) – A freshman Democratic senator said Sunday that he will support his party’s efforts to pass health care reform legislation even if that means losing his seat in next year’s midterm elections.

“If you get to the final point and you are a critical vote for health care reform and every piece of evidence tells you if you support the bill you will lose your job, would you cast the vote and lose your job?” CNN’s John King asked Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado on Sunday’s State of the Union.

“Yes,” Bennet bluntly and simply replied.

Bennet was appointed by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter to replace Sen. Ken Salazar, who stepped down from the Senate to serve as President Obama’s Interior Secretary. Bennet, who was superintendent of the Denver public school system prior to his appointment, will have to seek election to the seat for the first time in 2010.

They are just as Mr. Limbaugh described them. Suicide bombers.

Still, you have to wonder, what will paradise look for these Democrats?

For a Muslim devotee, paradise is where they can finally enjoy pork and whores.

But don’t Democrat Congressmen already have ready access to both of those attactions?

As we have previously mentioned, some enterprising people at ‘An Elegant Chaos’ have put together a search engine for the Climate Research Unit (CRU) files. You can also just browse the emails at that site:

(Click on image to go to search engine)

You can also download a .zip compacted file of the entire CRU stash of emails and documents from S&L’s server by clicking here. (However, be aware that it is quite a large 63.29 MB file, so it may take some time to download.)

Should you come across any items of interest, please feel free post them as a comment to this thread.

Please include the email or document name. And please keep your posts brief and try to make them as clear as possible.

From Australia’s Herald Sun:

Chart that appears at the top of the University Of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit website.

The warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones

Andrew Bolt

Saturday, November 21, 2009

These are the emails that should have Professor Phil Jones most worried about his future.

Jones, head of the CRU unit whose emails were leaked, has been under most fire so far over one email in particular in which he boasted of using a ‘“trick" to “hide the decline” that would have otherwise spoiled his graph showing temperatures soaring ever-upward.

But far more serious – at least in a legal sense – may be his apparent boasting of destroying data to stop sceptics from checking this alarmist work. If, as some emails suggest, he destroyed it to thwart FOI requests from Professor Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, who’d already exposed as fake the Michael Mann “hockey stick”, Jones, one of the most active of the IPCC lead authors, could even face criminal charges.

(Note: in saying that, I should add that these emails may simply be poorly worded, out of context or even altered by the whistleblower who leaked them.  Jones may also not knowingly have done anything wrong, and there is no proof that he did anything against the law. UPDATE: Several updates on Jones below, including his “selfish” wish to see global warming “regardless of the consequences” just to be proved right.)

Whether laws were broken or not, the emails prove beyond doubt how resistant Jones and his colleagues were to having their work properly scrutinised by anyone not of their “team”. No wonder, perhaps, when the documents reveal Jones has so far attracted $25 million in grants.)

The most damning emails on this point are the following, starting with 1107454306.txt, in which Jones refers to MM – McIntyre and McKitrick (bold added):

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike, I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

Jones admits he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre – or anyone:

From: Phil Jones

To: santer1@XXXX

Subject: Re: A quick question

Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008

Ben,

Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.

Anyway requests have been of three types – observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter – and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these – all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business – and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here!

Makes you wonder very strongly what Jones is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Also makes you laugh all over again at his claim once that the data being sought had, sadly, been … um, lost.

In1212063122.txtm, Jones urges another colleague, Michael “Hockey Stick”, Mann, to join in the deleting – at least of emails about the IPCC’s controversial ARA report on man-made warming which Jones co-authored, and which claimed warming was “unequivocal” and “most likely” caused by humans:

From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008 </MANN@XXX.EDU></P.JONES@XXXX.UK>

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil:

For years Jones has made clear his determination to keep crucial data from the eyes of sceptics:

From: Phil Jones To: mann@xxx.edu
Subject: Fwd: CCNet: PRESSURE GROWING ON CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER TO DISCLOSE SECRET DATA
Date: Mon Feb 21 16:28:32 2005
Cc: “raymond s. bradley” , “Malcolm Hughes” </MHUGHES@XXX.EDU></RBRADLEY@XXX.EDU></P.JONES@XXXX.UK>

Mike, Ray and Malcolm,

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here ! Maybe we can use this to our advantage to get the series updated !

Odd idea to update the proxies with satellite estimates of the lower troposphere rather than surface data !. Odder still that they don’t realise that Moberg et al used the Jones and Moberg updated series !

Francis Zwiers is till onside. He said that PC1s produce hockey sticks. He stressed that the late 20th century is the warmest of the millennium, but Regaldo didn’t bother
with that. Also ignored Francis’ comment about all the other series looking similar to MBH.

The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !

Cheers

Phil

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.

Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

And when Jones is really forced to the point of handing over his data, he considers ways to may checking it more difficult or annoying:

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

But Jones figures a way out:

At 04:53 AM 5/9/2008, you wrote:

Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things – don’t pass on either…

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this…

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

UPDATE

More from Don’t-Disclose Phil, who seems to have a like-minded acolyte in Melbourne’s own Bureau of Meterology warmist David Jones:

Email 1182255717.txt

Wei-Chyung and Tom,

The Climate Audit web site has a new thread on the Jones et al. (1990) paper, with lots of quotes from Keenan. So they may not be going to submit something to Albany. Well may be?!?

Just agreed to review a paper by Ren et al. for JGR. This refers to a paper on urbanization effects in China, which may be in press in J. Climate. I say ‘may be’ as Ren isn’t that clear about this in the text, references and responses to earlier reviews. Have requested JGR get a copy a copy of this in order to do the review.In the meantime attaching this paper by Ren et al. on urbanization at two sites in China.Nothing much else to say except:

1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit

.2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. He said they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are threads on it about Australian sites.

3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning) about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on paleo.

Cheers

Phil

Wow. Which sites may they be? And what does it say of David Jones that the reading of a single website renders you a non-person, whose inquiries must invariably be disregarded?

UPDATE 2

How impartial a scientist is Phil Jones? How open to evidence that he may be wrong? Gather from this confession to John Christy:

…If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.

Cheers, Phil

How typical for Jones to confuse “science” with “hypothesis”.

UPDATE 3

The attempts to stop the publication of papers by sceptics such as Chris de Freitas and Roger Pielke (sr?) are astonishing. This is how the image of consensus was forged – in both senses of the word: From Phil Jones to Michael Mann, dated July 8, 2004:

The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

The trouble is the so many climate scientists and institutions are implicated in these emails, or are connected to those involved, that who is left in the scientific community to hold Jones and his mates to account? Who has even the will to strike against a high priest of the warming faith?

Yet from the reaction even at RealClimate, it seems even the faithful must now hold their nose.

UPDATE 4

It seems that Phil Jones’ request to his colleagues to delete emails followed an FOI request not from Steve McIntyre but from engineer David Holland. The following time-line (from Bishop Hill) of Holland’s FOI requests to Keith Briffa, a lead author of the IPCC’s key chapter 6 of ARA4, is especially damning:

May 5 – FOI request
May 6 – CRU Acknowledgement
June 3 – CRU Refusal Notice
June 4 – Holland Appeal
June 20 – CRU Rejection of Appeal

Fom the May 5 FOI request to the CRU, which employs Briffa:

Dear Mr Palmer,

Request for Information concerning the IPCC, 2007 WGI Chapter 6 Assessment Process

Drs Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn of your Climatic Research Unit served as lead authors on the IPCC Fourth Assessment, which by international agreement was required to be undertaken on an comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis.1 On 31 March 2008, I asked Dr Briffa for important specific information, not so far released, on his work as a lead author to which I have had no reply or acknowledgement, but have, through other FoI enquiries, been given a copy of his email dated 1 April 2008, to several other IPCC participants including Dr Philip Jones, and to which my letter was attached. He told his colleagues his response to me would be brief when he got round to it. Also included in the documents released to me is an email dated 14 March 2008 to Dr Briffa, among others, from Susan Solomon, Co-Chair of WGI, advising the addressees not to disclose information beyond that (which I consider inadequate) already in the public domain.

Accordingly, I hereby request the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and/or the Environmental Information Regulations 2004:

But here, again, is CRU boss Phil Jones, just three weeks after David Holland’s FOI request:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

UPDATE 5

No to disclosure to non-friends!:

From: Phil Jones
To: santer, Tom Wigley
Subject: Re: Schles suggestion
Date: Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008
Cc: mann, Gavin Schmidt, Karl Taylor, peter gleckler

Ben,

When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also aware of what is going on –

Ain’t peer review grand? You only get to be checked by the people you know will agree.

Incidentally, where in FOI legislation does it say man-made warming sceptics are banned from using it?

There really is a lot of irony here.

The gentleman who runs the UK website Bishop Hill has done a great job summarizing some of the Climate Research Unit emails:

Climate Cuttings 33

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I’ll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".(1075403821)
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"…to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr "I’m not entirely there in the head" will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

It’s almost unfortunate that there is so much to choose from. The information almost buries itself.

As we have previously noted, some enterprising people at ‘An Elegant Chaos’ have put together a search engine for the CRU files. You can also just browse the emails at that site.

You can also download a .zip compacted file of the entire CRU stash of emails and documents from S&L’s server by clicking here.

However, be aware that it is quite a large 63.29 MB file, so it may take some time to download.

From their unabashed fans at the New York Times:

Sept. 11 Defendant Seeks a Trial, and a Platform

By SCOTT SHANE

November 21, 2009

The five men the Justice Department has said will be charged in the attacks of Sept. 11 intend to plead not guilty so they can express their political and religious views during a trial, the lawyer for one of the men said on Saturday.

The lawyer, Scott L. Fenstermaker, said that during a meeting at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison on Tuesday, his client, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, expressed the desire for a trial despite his intention to admit his role in the attacks and seek “martyrdom” through execution.

“He acknowledges that he helped plan the 9/11 attacks, and he says he’s looking forward to dying,” Mr. Fenstermaker said of Mr. Ali. But he said he expected Mr. Ali and his co-defendants to plead not guilty “so they can have a trial and try to get their message out.”

Mr. Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, is a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief organizer of the 2001 plot. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Nov. 13 that Mr. Mohammed, Mr. Ali and three other alleged 9/11 plotters would be tried in federal criminal court. Mr. Fenstermaker said Mr. Ali told him all five men would seek a trial…

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Fenstermaker, who represents Mr. Ali in a civil case challenging his detention and visited him for three days last week, gave The New York Times a translation from Arabic of a two-page letter written by Mr. Mohammed, Mr. Ali, and a third 9/11 defendant, Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash to the military court at Guantánamo in September.

The letter was written to say that the men had no objection to a 60-day continuance in military commission proceedings. But the three men used it to condemn the United States’ military presence in Muslim countries and its support for Israel, a preview of the kind of thing they might be expected to say in court.

“We were arrested in 2003 and we spent three years moving around between the black sites in the ‘Dark Ages’ of Bush, then we were transferred to the island of oppression, torture and terror, Guantánamo, in 2006,” the letter said. The phrase ‘Dark Ages’ was in English in the original, the translator noted.

The letter goes on to excoriate President Obama, describing the current era as “the black ages of Barack” and calling him “a liar.” The three men offer greetings to Osama bin Laden; his deputy in Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and the head of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Since their first appearances in military court at Guantánamo, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants have indicated that they would admit their role in the terrorist plot and seek to be executed. But when they are indicted and brought to New York City for arraignment, as expected sometime in the next two months, they will have the option afforded any criminal defendant of pleading not guilty and standing trial.

Mr. Fenstermaker, a criminal defense lawyer practicing in Manhattan and Brooklyn who represents Mr. Ali pro bono, is an outspoken critic of the campaign against terrorism and has had a contentious relationship with the government. His 2005 lawsuit challenging the military commissions was dismissed, but it prompted several Guantánamo prisoners to seek his representation, he said. In June a federal judge rejected his request to represent a prisoner held in the 1998 Tanzania embassy bombing.

Gee, no kidding.

So does the ACLU, and all of the other groups who pushed for civilian trials. (After all, they have hated our country longer than the terrorists. And more vehemently.)

And speaking of people who hate this country, it is mildly surprising that the New York Times would even publish this article.

But they probably think it is safe to publish such material on the weekend.

(Thanks to Melissa for the heads up.)

From a disappointed Associated Press:

Postal Service to resume North Pole Santa letters

By Rachel D’oro, Associated Press Writer

November 21, 2009

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Wide-eyed children around the world will be hearing from Santa’s "elves" at the North Pole after all.

During Christmas seasons for decades, these dedicated elves responded to thousands of letters addressed to "Santa Claus, North Pole."

All that was ending with a U.S. Postal Service decision to discontinue the program based in the small Alaskan town amid privacy concerns…

A reversal of the Postal Service move was announced Friday.

"We never wanted to spoil people’s Christmas," said agency spokesman Ernie Swanson. "It was just a decision we had to make based on privacy concerns, and it is labor-intensive. But it’s still nice that we’re able to resume this and still make people’s holiday."

The letters will now be answered under tightened privacy rules implemented nationwide by the Postal Service in response to security concerns that arose in a similar program in Maryland last year…

The group also has been assigned a specific address that will allow its volunteers to run their own alternative program, bypassing the stringent new rules and perhaps lessening the Santa letter load for the Postal Service. The restrictions don’t affect privately run letter efforts. Children can write to Santa through that program at: 1 Santa Claus Lane, North Pole, AK 99705…

Postal Service officials, who consider the North Pole effort part of the agency’s giant Operation Santa program, originally said the Alaska district had too few resources to deal with the time-consuming new rules and was therefore opting out.

And just the other day the authorities said it wasn’t “feasible.”

Funny how quickly things can change, when the public hears what’s happening.

Some actual journalism from the Washington Post:

Hasan had intensified contact with cleric

FBI MONITORED E-MAIL EXCHANGES
Fort Hood suspect raised prospect of financial transfers

By Carrie Johnson, Spencer S. Hsu and Ellen Nakashima
Saturday, November 21, 2009

In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two.

The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI’s Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said.

Hasan’s contacts with extremist imam Anwar al-Aulaqi began as religious queries but took on a more specific and concrete tone before he moved to Texas, where he allegedly unleashed the Nov. 5 attack that killed 13 people and wounded nearly three dozen, said the sources who were briefed on the e-mails, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is sensitive and unfolding. One of those sources said the two discussed in "cryptic and coded exchanges" the transfer of money overseas in ways that would not attract law enforcement attention.

"He [Hasan] clearly became more radicalized toward the end, and was having discussions related to the transfer of money and finances . . .," said the source, who spoke at length in part because he was concerned the public accounting of the events has been incomplete. "It became very clear toward the end of those e-mails he was interested in taking action."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said Friday that he would investigate the handling of the e-mails — 18 or 19 in all — and why military officials were not aware of them before the deadly attack. Levin told reporters after a briefing from Pentagon staff members that "there are some who are reluctant to call it terrorism, but there is significant evidence that it is." …

In the months before the shootings, the two discussed how Hasan could make several transactions of less than $10,000, a threshold for reporting to U.S. authorities, according to the source who spoke extensively. Hasan did not explicitly vow to fund terrorist activities or evade tax and reporting laws for contributions, the source said.

"I believe they were interested in the money for operational-type aspects, and knowing that he had funds and wouldn’t be around to use them, they were very eager to get those funds," he said.

To date, investigators have not unearthed evidence that Hasan sent money to charities with strong or suspected ties to Islamist militant groups, but they are continuing to probe his financial dealings as one aspect of a many-pronged case, other sources cautioned.

The FBI obtained the e-mails pursuant to court-ordered wiretaps, according to a former intelligence official. After receiving a wiretap order, Internet providers generally set up accounts that allow cloned copies of e-mails to go to the government agency in real time. Stored e-mails also may be provided with a search warrant.

In this case, a first batch of Hasan’s e-mails was sent by agents in San Diego to the bureau’s Washington field office, where a terrorism task force began to assess them in December. But months later, additional messages emerged, according to government and congressional sources. Those e-mails were reviewed only in San Diego, where authorities determined they did not pose a national security risk. The FBI said last week, without going into details about the process, that "all of the e-mails were known." …

In several of their applications for search warrants, authorities are approaching the matter as a regular criminal investigation rather than invoking special legal authority available in terrorism cases, the sources said…

Given the modest way he lived, one really has to wonder where the bulk of Mr. Hasan’s $90,000 a year salary went. We suspect it went to Pakistan.

But how on earth did these emails not raise flags?