Posts Tagged ‘peer review’

Climategate Redux: A Look at the State of Play

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Between finishing my taxes and the House District 52 race, I’ve had precious little time to post updates on other issues, but despite my personal lacunae interesting developments in Climategate have been bubbling right along.

This piece in the Telegraph does a good job of covering some of the further revelations. One of the more interesting points:

“The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was ‘peer-reviewed’, having been confirmed by independent experts.

“But a new study put this claim to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups.”

And who would you get to provide an objective, disinterested analysis of IPCC claims? Why, obviously “chair of Falck Renewables, a firm that has wind farms across Europe, and chair of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, ‘a lobby group which argues that carbon capture could become a $1 trillion industry by 2050.'” Who else? That’s like asking G. Gordon Liddy to perform a dispassionate, objective analysis of Watergate.

You would think that Climategate, the failure of the last “cap and trade” bill, the deep unpopularity of ObamaCare, and the continued poor jobs situation would conspire to prevent Democrats from pushing a huge, job-killing, tax-and-spend global warming bill. You would be wrong. Under the bipartisan fig-leaf of the ever more RINO-ish Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid and company are getting ready to unveil Cap-and-Trade Junior. And they plan to do it in secret, without all those messy public committee meetings. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how low congressional Democrats are willing to drive their poll numbers in order to get the government’s fingers into as many economic pies as possible before the reckoning comes in November.

The battle over cap-and-trade, and Climategate, is far from over. If you know anyone in South Carolina, they should be ringing Graham’s phone off the hook to oppose this. Speaking of which, here’s the contact information for Graham’s offices off his official website:

Washington Office
290 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Main: (202) 224-5972

Upstate Regional Office
130 South Main St.
7th Floor
Greenville, SC 29601
Main: (864) 250-1417

Midlands Regional Office
508 Hampton Street
Suite 202
Columbia, SC 29201
Main: (803) 933-0112

Pee Dee Regional Office
McMillan Federal Building
401 West Evans Street, Suite 226B
Florence, SC 29501
Main: (843) 669-1505

Lowcountry Regional Office
530 Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, Suite 202
Mt. Pleasant, SC 29464
Main: (843) 849-3887

Piedmont Regional Office
140 East Main Street, Suite 110
Rock Hill, SC 29730
Main: (803) 366-2828

Golden Corner Regional Office
124 Exchange Street
Pendleton, SC 29678
Main: (864) 646-4090

Here’s the email form: http://lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.EmailSenatorGraham.