Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

A: She is so irrelevant that the Washington Post gave her op/ed space today on Climategate and Copenhagen:

The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

It’s actually even worse than that if you look at the Volokh Conspiracy (one of the best blogs that I don’t regularly read or link to. I have no explanation for that) it links to another damning post on the subject:

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

It is a crime against science that stuff like this is going on and data continues to be held back. Volokh reminds us we have seen this before:

Turning declines in raw data into rises in one’s tables is one of the things that led to Michael Bellesiles’s resignation from Emory in the Arming America scandal.

You might remember that Bellesiles and his book Arming America was was hailed and lionized when it was released but when the facts came out he lost his Bancroft prize and his university position over his phony data. This was under a decade ago yet people forget.

Back to the Palin Op-ed she brings up a second oft ignored point:

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to “restore science to its rightful place.” But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a “deal.” Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats’ cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs — particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Why is this being done? Powerline has some answers:

That’s right: the Godfather of the Democratic Party, who exerts his enormous political influence to prevent American oil companies from developing our own petroleum resources in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, has placed his biggest bet–not on the United States, but on Brazil. If Exxon Mobil can’t compete in the Caribbean with Petrobras, the value of Soros’s Petrobras investment will skyrocket. That’s the sort of thievery that lies behind the Democratic Party’s deliberate hobbling of the American economy.

He links to this Washington Post article on the subject:

“It’s going to change the role of Brazil in the geopolitics of oil,” Petrobras’s president, José Sergio Gabrielli, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. “We are going to become a much bigger producer.”

Petrobras estimates that production in Brazil could reach 3.9 million barrels by 2020, up from more than 2 million a day now. Proven oil reserves would rise from 14.4 billion barrels to more than 30 billion barrels, according to government estimates, putting Brazil in the same league as such major oil exporters as Qatar, Canada, Kazakhstan and Nigeria.

4000 high paying jobs and more production. Our democratic party ties our hands while their patron gets rich from it. How nice would it be if those jobs were here?

Yup good thing we didn’t vote for that irreverent Palin

Never forget elections have consequences, we did this to ourselves.

Update: Apparently left has gone nuts over the idea of the Wa post running this oped. the funniest line is this one:

Fred Hiatt Wants The Washington Post to Go Out of Business

What other explanation could there be for deciding that he wants to run an op-ed by Sarah Palin about how Obama should “boycott” the Copenhagen conference?

After all who wants to hear what Sarah Palin has to say. It’s not like she sold a million books over a couple of weeks or is being greeted by crowds and lines wherever she goes. Why would a business that makes it’s profit based on issue sales or eyeballs have any interest in someone like her.

If I thought he actually believed it then this would be a jump the shark moment for Matt Yglesias

God are they afraid of her.

Update 2: Fred Sargent doesn’t like Sarah Palin but he gets full marks for not denying reality.

To be clear, I’m not defending the decision to run the piece. I wouldn’t have run it. I’m just pointing out the undeniable fact that the woman’s name gets people clicking. Until people stop clicking, Palin and her views will continue to get attention.

It’s a start.