At the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research there’s a recap of Kenneth P. Greens’ Nov. 10, 2009 testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance about global warming issues. Specifically they cover Green’s response to Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) assertion that “not one peer-reviewed paper contradicts the “consensus” view that greenhouse gas emissions will cause devastating consequences[.]”

Readers of this blog know better, but this is the accepted talking point pushed by the Holy Order of Global Warming Hysteria and its minions — hundreds of which are FREEZING their tookuses (tooki?) off in Copenhagen where all that anthropogenic Global Warming is making standing in line for hours in near-freezing temps interesting. Heh!

But, back to Green. Along with citing numerous peer-reviewed papers calling AGW into question and or calling into question the research leading to the pro AGW positions, he gave Senator Kerry and whoever else bothered to show up for that hearing a little lesson on the potential economic effects of Cap & Trade legislation.

Key Points from Kenneth P. Green On Cap & Trade:

1. Cap-and-trade is an inappropriate mechanism for the control of greenhouse gases. I observed that this was not only my opinion, but also that of the economists who first developed the concept, as well as people like James Hansen, and the organization Earth First!, neither of which are known to dismiss climate change as a problem. I have subsequently learned that Greenpeace also opposes cap-and-trade as a mechanism for controlling greenhouse gases.
2. Cap-and-trade will fail to control carbon emissions because of inevitable corruptions of the scheme in the political process and afterward in trading markets.
3. Cap-and-trade will, however, cap economic growth, as every time the economy grows, we use more energy, which will increase permit prices, eventually stifling growth.
4. Higher energy prices will increase the costs of goods and services, suppressing demand and killing jobs.
5. Higher energy prices will make American industry less competitive, leading to industry flight and more lost jobs, unless we wish to return to the days of tariff-wars and unfree trade.
6. Current cap-and-trade legislation will cause economic winners and losers both regionally and sectorally across the United States, often unjustly transferring money from poorer communities to more wealthy communities.
7. Cap-and-trade will create a new class of poorly understood financial instruments (PUFIs) that risk creating a bubble far larger than the one that recently knocked the economy into a deep recession.
8. By favoring biofuels, cap-and-trade will put a bounty on ecosystems and lead to massive conversion of forests and prairies into biofuel plantations.
9. The idea that current legislation can be described as a “jobs bill” is ludicrous. One hundred and fifty years of economics tells us that governments do not create jobs, they just move them around, invariably killing more than they create.

From the revealed secret deals that were leaked last week in Copenhagen, to the stated goals of the radical environmentalists all over the globe, to our own Progressive Senators and Representatives it is absolutely crystal clear — Man-Caused Climate Change is nothing but a dangerous bit of political theater designed to scare the masses into giving their governments ever more control of their lives and to accelerate the ever ongoing redistribution of wealth, not just from OUR richer to OUR poorer, but all around the globe.

Except, of course, for those save-the-planet elites that think nothing of jet-setting to far-off places, like Copenhagen, along the way emitting tons and tons of that nasty ol’ carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the very Global Warming they so decry, if it was actually happening — but hey, they’re doing it to SAVE Mother Gaia, don’t ya know?

Oh, ya betcha! Gaia, and their own filthy little bank balances . . . or big ones.

Now, that’s Progressive!

Not much of a yellow brick road in Denmark these days, and maybe, just maybe, the house has fallen smack on top o’ them assembled Global-Warming-Hysteria Witches. One can dream . . .

In a DailyMail.co.uk Special Investigation Report there is a nice set of graphs that illustrate just how much the famed Hockey Stick Graph — that visual representation of Global-Warming-Doom-&-Gloom used throughout the world to scare the beejeezus out of all of us — was altered by manipulation of the tree-ring data used to extrapolate (guess?) the temperatures before the invention of the thermometer. Yeah, if something was never measured then they gotta guess, I guess.

Of course, when you’re makin’ those educated guesses and they’re bolsterin’ your own conclusions and drivin’ your own agenda like a Nascar ace on crank, it must have been a super downer to have those same data sources turn on ya, show something 180 degrees opposite o’ what you believe — would make ya look like a blitherin’ idiot if you let that one show up on the chart. So — what to do, what to do?

Hmmmm. Just stop that naughty little errant data line where it deviates from expectations and hide the end of it behind some of the others — yeah, that’s the ticket! ‘Hey — gotta save Mother Gaia, don’t ya know?” Yeah, and those million-pound research grants, too.

It’s a long article so you should go and read it all. Here’s some of the red meat to make you hungry for more — besides, you should go if only just to see the graphs!

It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report – the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ – measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven

weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.

But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.

By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’

Of course, the Climate Change Scientists are still up to their old tricks of subterfuge and bullying:

Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists … I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’

But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats – and the readiness to bow to them – may become rarer.

‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.

‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.

‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’

One can only hope. Speakin’ o’ Hope — the Obama circus will be in Copenhagen at the end of the week, where the Chosen One will declare that Global Warming will stop — right now dammit! — because, HE says so . . . or something to that effect. Afterwards we all get shafted with zillions of dollars in new carbon taxes and ever more legislation that enables the Federal government to regulate take over the rest of American industry and American energy production.

He did promise to double our energy bills during the campaign — might be the only campaign promise he keeps!

You can’t make this stuff up folks. According to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence [sic] Council, our love of soft toilet tissue is going to wreck our planet. In other words, being kind to your po-po is givin’ Gaia fits.

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

Mercy! Maybe we should all grow a patch of switchgrass in the back yard and weave our own, butt-abrading toilet wipes. Of course, those would not be flushable so they would have to go into landfills — how unsanitary! Gaia would belch forth the methane of decomposing human wipes and that would cause more Globaloney Warming that would sink all the islands on the planet into Atlantis-type oblivion — sorry, I do digress.

Actually, some cagey entrepreneurial folk in Australia have a solution — Wallypop Family Wipes.

Lately, with all the media attention, there’ve been a lot of naysayers talking about the stench. I can honestly say, our wipes don’t stink.

Well, what they are really sayin’ is that they are such good little ‘natural living’ environmentalists that their, well, you know, doesn’t stink either. As Australian blogger Andrew Bold remarks:

Surely it’s time global warming believers marked their houses with some sign, a green pentangle or something, as a warning to visitors to enter at their own risk.

Seriously, we gotta know where these nutters live . . . ’cause they are among us — Yipes!

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