The silence of the Right - by Richard... Monday, December 07, 2009

The silence of the Right - by Richard... Monday, December 07, 2009

Tariq Ali on BBC Radio 4 at 9.15 this morning - Start the Week with Andrew Marr - rather let the cat out of the bag, saying global warming is the best chance the Left has left to get communist ideals back into practice. And he does ... start 16 minutes into the programme. It has to be deciphered: "planning" is key word. (Lifted from Delingpole's comments.)

That said, we are all aware of the left-wing agenda underpinning the global warming movement. It makes it all the more strange, therefore, that while the Right in the US, Canada and Australia is becoming ever-more voluble, the British Right is largely silent.

This is despite the fct that latest poll from Politics Home shows that the Conservative voters are not behind the Boy.

Some 74 percent believe the media exaggerate the threat of climate change from (Mann-made) global warming. 15 percent of them believe the media get it about right, and only 9 percent are of the opinion that the media don't take the threat seriously enough.

One suspects that the silence of the Right's political establishment is largely the "Cameron effect". Because he is their best chance of getting them a majority in Westminster, and the Boy is on the wrong side of the argument, expressions of dissent on this issue are taken as expressions of disloyalty to The Great Leader.

Thus, rather than invoke the spectre of "splits", which the Left will exploit (as it is already seeking to do), the Right simply doesn't talk about the subject. Thus, there has been no official political comment from the Right in the UK on "Climategate", and the Tory blogs have hardly mentioned it. They have been emasculated.

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A bad Sheik? - by Richard...

The "Climategate" row took centre stage on the opening day of the Copenhagen climate summit today, says The Times, as the world's leading oil exporter intervened to question the scientific consensus on Mann-made global warming.

"As 15,000 delegates from 192 nations began what was billed as the "last, best chance" to avert a catastrophic rise in sea and air temperatures, Saudi Arabia's chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, spoke from the floor to say that e-mails hacked from a UK research centre had shaken trust in the work of scientists," the paper reports.

He, we are told, was not the first to mention the Climategate scandal. In his opening address to the conference, railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri said the hackers had been trying to undermine the work of his organisation.

Do you remember the old days of OPEC and oil price hikes, when the Saudis were the villains? Things were so simple then – we knew who the baddies were. Now it it's Indian railways engineers. They don't seem to have the same presence though – we can't even do half-way decent baddies these days.

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Delingpole - by Richard...

The Russian distraction.

Interestingly, there is very little follow-up from the rest of the MSM. Quite a few, such as here are not impressed:

Scientists are educated in the same places as our politicians, bankers and economists. They are also human and prone to the same failings of morals and judgement. But we seem to put them on some sort of plane above the ordinary person. "The scientists" have decided that something must be done and they are far cleverer than us, so it must be done. This is the sort of deference that got us into the financial and political mess the world is in today.

That is a big part of the problem ... too many people are far too deferential. "We must listen to the scientists ... baaaaa ... ", they say. And why?

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I know ... - by Richard...

It's been done before ... many times – but it's still funny.

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Springtime for Fraudocrats - by Richard...

American Thinker - indispensible, as always.

... the decay goes far beyond the CRUddites in Britain; it's all over the world among the machine politicians of science. All of them knew what was going on with the Biggest Science Scam in History, because it should be obvious to a child of six. Undergraduates in calculus classes learn that nonlinear dynamical systems are unanalyzable. 

Introductory physics classes learn there is no solution to the three-body problem, and the atmosphere is a lot more complicated than just three asteroids cycling around each other in space. 

Metereologist Edward Lorenz rose to fame in science by dramatizing the nature of chaotical systems, physical systems that cannot be predicted from their initial conditions. The weather is one of the best examples, but the earth sciences and biology are full of them. So no sane scientist or mathematician could have believed the Global Warming scam. If any of them say they believe it today, they are either lying or incompetent. 

Global Warming is like Political Correctness; everybody knows it's a lie, but nobody is allowed to say it in public.

Picked up from Tom Nelson, who keeps a running list of useful bits.

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Memo for Copenhagen cops - by Richard...

Sent by An Englishman's Castle, adapted from the original.

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It must be global warming - by Richard...

The cold storm system dropping from the northeast out of Canada will be unusual since the coldest temperatures will bypass Northern California communities such as Red Bluff and Redding but drop Sacramento Valley temperatures Monday to a record 27 degrees.

That's the coldest for Dec. 7 since the National Weather Service began tracking temperatures in Sacramento in 1849.

From the Sacramento Bee.

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Bishop Hill - by Richard...

Quote of the day from a toiler in the vinyard, via Hans von Storch, from those dreaded e-mails: [we] " ... honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e., we know with certainty that we know fuck-all)."

Quite!

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The Real agenda - by Richard...

"The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable." So declares railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri, who advocates a focus at Copenhagen on "the larger problem of unsustainable development, of which climate change is at best a symptom."

In other words, says the Wall Street Journal, Pachauri is more focused on an ideological economic agenda in which climate change is little more than a useful tool.

I think we knew this already, but it is useful to have the reminder. At its heart, Copenhagen is simply a mass exercise in state intervention, disguised (not very well) as "saving the planet".

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Speculation - by Richard...

The newspapers are playing the "Russian hackers" story big this morning, with The Daily Scarygraph a new entrant to an already crowded field, parading the headline: "Climategate: was Russian secret service behind email hacking plot?"

Note, as with most other papers, the question-mark at the end of the headline, signifying, as it did with theMail on Sunday that the story is unsupported speculation.

That is even how the Scarygraph opens its non-story, nevertheless attempting to give the fabrication the impression of substance by telling us that: "There was growing speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the 'Climategate' scandal."

The only thing "growing" about the speculation is the number of newspapers willing to publish it, which makes it no more powerful, nor any more true than when the Sunday media brought it up yesterday.

How the non-story has been treated is, however, a fascinating case study of how the MSM – so keen to assure us of its serious credentials - can build a story out of absolutely nothing, using misleading language, innuendo, conjecture and juxtaposition, plus all the other tricks of the trade which make the media so loathsome.

Some of if, of course, looks so innocuous, such as the Scarygraph opening its narrative by telling us that: "Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in Siberia."

It is the word "published" which is so misleading, but this we have to find from the blogs and forums – not the MSM. More accurately, the folder containing the files – with the URL "ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip" - was deposited on the "incoming" data storage section of a tomcity.ru server, a section which is accessible to any internet user in the world with access to the world-wide web. It requires neither the knowledge nor the permission of the server-owner for material to be thus deposited.

The key word, therefore, is not "published" but "deposited", and there it would have remained unheeded until – as happened – the location was broadcast ... for other people then to download, and then publish the contents.

From the very start, then, the crucial issue is that this is a publicly-accessible server which can be reached from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, Russian servers are particularly attractive to people who wish to lodge material on the internet anonymously, as the Russian authorities are distinctly unhelpful when it comes to revealing the addresses of computers used to upload material onto servers in their territory.

Thus, the fact that the material was placed on a Russian server gives no clue whatsoever as to the identity of the person (or persons) who uploaded the material, or of their location. The newspapers, therefore, have to invent a connection and a "motive" in order to forge a link. TheScarygraph does this, as do many of the others, by telling us:

Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming. The CRU emails included remarks which some claim show scientists had manipulated the figures to make them fit the theory that humans are causing global warming.

We then get much other – completely extraneous detail about Russian hacking, and the involvement of Russian state services - all serving to build up a history of such activity in the country, all lending spurious authenticity to the speculation. But nothing so offered adds a shred of evidence to that speculation. It is totally irrelevant.

At least The Times is slightly more circumspect – but only very slightly. It states that the "Russian connection" to the controversy ... raises suspicions of a state-sanctioned attempt to discredit the Copenhagen summit involving secret service espionage. "But," it adds, "it could as easily have been the work of freelance hackers hired by climate-change sceptics."

This is, of course, speculation on speculation, as there is no public domain evidence (yet) that a hacker was involved in obtaining the material. Here, therefore, the papers rely on the "talking head" technique, relying on speculation from a third party. This is Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC.

He very obligingly tells the media that, "It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services," adding, "If you look at that mass of e-mails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it's a carefully made selection of e-mails and documents that's not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs."

This, of course, elides two different issues. For sure, the material is very selective. But it would have needed someone to know what they were doing to pick such a careful and relevant selection of material. And so carefully to select the material over such a time-span would have taken weeks of work (not necessarily by one person). That almost rules out a hacker - a hacker could hadly get the period of extensive, uninterrupted access needed to access and pull together all the files. 

Given the name of the folder (FOI2009), the speculation is that the files had been gathered by the University of East Anglia itself, in response to a Freedom of Information exercise, which had not been released. 

How they then came to be uplifted and ended on a Russian server, is not yet known publicly - and may never be known. Whoever sent them, though, had higher than average computer skills, as key identifying material (known as meta-tags) had been removed, and date stamps had been altered or removed.

As to the Russian server, the Mail on Sunday falsifies the picture by telling us it "understands" that "the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk." That the server is "tiny" is an invention. But we do know that it is owned by Tomcity, which just happens to be a major internet service provider in the city. Furthermore, its parent company, Tomline, is a major telecommunications company.

Another fabrication then follows from The Mail on Sunday, when it tells us that server "is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes." The company is a public internet provider. The paper has not spoken to the company – that, it admits. By its own admission, it is inventing this snippet, which is irrelevant anyway.

Much other lurid detail follows, all totally irrelevant and providing no evidence to support the speculation. But this assertion from the paper is priceless: "It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation," it says. It is not known if David Cameron has fallen under suspicion either. And the point is?

Almost parodying its own "investigation" though, the paper towards the end of its fiction informs us that a Russian hacking specialist had told it: "There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been. There has been speculation the hackers were Russian." He adds, for good measure, his own speculation: "It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen "

As to fact, what do we know? Well, the website Air Vent was contacted at 9:57 pm on 17 November on its comments site, with information of the location of the folder, and some details of the files together with a message. The entry had been posted from a proxy server in Saudi Arabia, which means it could have come from anywhere in the world.

Before that, at around 6.20am (EST) on 17 November, an unknown person hacked into the RealClimate website server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey. We are told they disabled access from the legitimate users - which is hardly a sign of an expert hacker, if it happened - and uploaded a file FOIA.zip on to the server. They then created a draft post that would have been posted announcing the data to the world that was identical in content of the comment posted on the Air Vent later that day.

The "Turkish" server was another proxy, so the originator could again have been anywhere in the world.

The same message, and .zip file, was also posted several hours before the one at the Air Vent, at Steve McIntyre's blog, Climate Audit. According to McIntyre, "The IP address of the commenter at CA was Russian 82.208.87.170." It was another proxy server.

Whoever did this – whether one person or several - could be anyone in any government, or it could simply be sophisticated techies, who also, if Real Climate is to be believed, knew how to "disable access" on that blog - people who might, for example, have gained administrative access through obtaining a password (easy enough to do) or by by-passing the security protocols. 

Nothing we know answers the question of who actually collected and released the files, or where they (or he or she) were when they did. The Russian "connection" is speculation, as is almost everything else offered by the newspapers on this subject – a torrent of idle, ill-informed gossip which typifies our modern-day media.

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A global conspiracy - by Richard... Sunday, December 06, 2009

And The Guardian is proud of it – its initiative in which 56 major newspapers in 45 countries speak with a single voice (albeit in 20 different languages) through a shared editorial on "global warming". A sentence acknowledging the controversy over Climategate was "optional".

Global warming – global government – global newspaper ... makes sense.

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