Archive for July 7th, 2010
Johann Hari: How Goldman gambled on starvation
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”
Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. “My children stopped growing,” a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. “I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died.”
Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn’t happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn’t because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren’t enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.
To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache – but not half as much as they made the poor world’s stomachs ache.
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he’ll lose some cash, but if there’s a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he’ll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch – and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles’s crop at all.
If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: “Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn’t be explained in workaday English.” Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote “The Wasteland”. Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn’t fully understand.
So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba’s plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
Here’s how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world’s frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.
When I asked Merrill Lynch’s spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: “Huh. I didn’t know about that.” He later emailed to say: “I am going to decline comment.” Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that “serious analyses … have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices”, offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.
How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was “the main cause” of the rise.
So it has come to this. The world’s wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
If we don’t re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate – drenched in speculator-donations – may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this “trade” takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron’s government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.
Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.
The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: “We can’t go through that another time. Please – make sure they never, never do that to us again.”
07
07 2010
We Need Constitutional Sheriffs Now!
By Carl Bruning
“It is time for the sworn protectors of Liberty, the County Sheriffs, to walk tall and defend their citizens from all enemies of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.”
Americans are facing the stark reality that their Constitutional rights are being shredded. Nearly every action taken by the Federal government today violates the Constitution that sheriffs and the military have taken an oath to defend. The Sheriff may truly be the last hope for saving our constitutional Republic and our liberties.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in “The value of Constitutions”, that “there is no honorable law enforcement authority in Anglo-American law so ancient as that of the county sheriff whose role as a peace officer goes back at least to the time of Alfred the Great.”
The Office of the Sheriff has existed for over one thousand years and is the oldest law enforcement position in the United States. The word Sheriff is derived from the “Shire-Reeve” (who was the most powerful English law authority figure). Throughout history, the sheriff was recognized as the chief law enforcement officer in his shire or county, and was responsible for maintaining law and order and being an officer of the peace.
The County Sheriff is elected by, for, and of the People, and is our last line of defense against an oppressive and over-reaching government and tyranny. The Sheriffs are powerful executors of the law, and the Supreme law of the land is the Constitution.
In 1775, Edmund Burke declared, “Bad laws are the worst form of tyranny.” By that definition, we have tyranny today. Thousands of new laws are being shoved down our throats, and most bear little resemblance to the Constitution. Indeed, the very essence of tyranny is defined by the blind enforcement of bad laws. A Sheriff has the power, the authority, and the responsibility to resist tyranny and unconstitutional laws and actions.
Our founders understood that Liberty was our most important asset to defend. Samuel Adams said,“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”
The New American magazine article, “Sheriffs Oppose Encroachment of Federal Agents Into Their Jurisdictions”, stated: “There are dozens of candidates for sheriff nationwide who share [the] view on the supremacy of state government and the constitutional locus of police power. These lawmen read the Constitution and nowhere in it do they find authorization for the federalization of law enforcement. In fact, they argue, the Constitution’s federal system endows local police with greater authority than any federal agent when it comes to enforcing the laws in their counties.”
The article continued with, “… the sheriffs and sheriff candidates … firmly assert their preeminence in the field of law enforcement. Their principle premise is that as sheriffs are the highest elected law-enforcement agent in the land and they are directly answerable to the voters and chosen by them, then they stand on the top rung of the police ladder. Federal officials, they argue, are not on the ladder at all, as the Constitution does not endow the federal government with police power and therefore the Tenth Amendment reserves that right to the states and to the people.
In 1994, Sheriff Richard Mack stood up to the Federal government and filed a lawsuit to stop the “Brady bill” that was signed into law by President Clinton. Six other sheriffs from around the country joined the lawsuit. On June 27, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the Brady bill was in fact unconstitutional and that the Federal Government could not commandeer state or county officers for federal bidding [Mack/Printz v. USA]. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority, stating, “The Federal Government may not compel the states to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
In 2005, a bill (HB 284) was introduced in the Montana State Legislature which required the County Sheriff be notified before any federal agents are allowed to enter the state with the intention of carrying out law enforcement actions. The bill provided not only for pre-notification, but that the Sheriff must also give consent before federal agents may proceed. Every state legislature should draft a similar bill for their next session.
In his book titled, “The County Sheriff — America’s Last Hope”, Sheriff Richard Mack wrote: “If we are to get America back, if we are indeed to return to the constitutional Republic we were meant to be, then it will be up to us, the sheriffs of America… who have the guts and dedication to tell the feds that we will no longer tolerate their intervention, control, meddling, mandates, or criminal behavior.”
The Sheriff is the chief law enforcement authority in our county, and he is elected by the ultimate power source, We The People. It is time for us to elect County Sheriffs who will walk tall and defend their citizens from all enemies of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. The future of our constitutional Republic may depend on it.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=997
07
07 2010
Gun Liberty and McDonald
By Laurence M. Vance
It has been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. This is especially true when it comes to gun liberty, since there are many organizations and government officials in “the land of the free” that would like nothing better than to disarm or severely limit the gun rights of law-abiding American citizens. The recent pro-gun decision in the Supreme Court case of McDonald v. City of Chicago doesn’t change our need for due diligence when it comes to gun liberty.
The McDonald Case
In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that upheld a District Court ruling against a challenge to the city of Chicago’s draconian gun laws that have effectively banned handgun possession by almost all residents of the city since 1982. Naturally, Chicago’s murder rate has increased since the gun ban was enacted, and the city now has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Yet, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, a strong gun-control proponent, said the city “will publicly propose a new ordinance very soon” that will attempt to restrict gun ownership in a manner that doesn’t violate the Supreme Court decision. The District Court is expected to take up the case again later this summer.
Alito was joined in full by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and for the most part by Justice Thomas. At fifty-six pages, Thomas’s concurring opinion is longer than the majority opinion. Scalia also had a concurring opinion, but mainly to respond to the dissent of Justice Stevens. Another dissenting opinion was written by Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor.
The plaintiffs in the case argued that the Chicago gun laws violated the “privileges or immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Amendment’s “due process” clause incorporates the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In reversing the decision of the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court rejected the former argument and accepted the latter one, thus ruling that the Second Amendment, which protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, as the Court ruled in Heller (2008), applies to the states.
The Incorporation Doctrine
The issue of incorporation is a complicated and sometimes controversial one. I have written at length on this subject in “The Kelo Decision and the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The Second Amendment was adopted because, as Justice Alito quoted from the Heller decision: “During the 1788 ratification debates, the fear that the federal government would disarm the people in order to impose rule through a standing army or select militia was pervasive in Antifederalist rhetoric.” Before 1820, thirteen states had also adopted state constitutional provisions that protected an individual right to keep and bear arms. Several States did have laws that restricted firearm ownership to those who were free men and did not pose a “danger of public injury”
The Bill of Rights was originally designed to apply only to the federal government. Writing in Barron v. City of Baltimore(1833), Chief Justice Marshall pointed out that the first eight amendments were added to the Constitution because of concerns about the extent of federal power. Marshall held that if “the framers of these amendments intended them to be limitations on the powers of the state governments, they would have imitated the framers of the original constitution, and have expressed that intention.” Often forgotten is that the Bill of Rights had a preface:
The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.
In three nineteenth-century cases before the Court—U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), and Miller v. Texas(1894)—it was affirmed that the Second Amendment only applied to the federal government. And it should be pointed out that the right to keep and bear arms was widely protected by state constitutions at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Beginning with the case of Gitlow v. New York (1925), where the Supreme Court ruled that a New York law violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment because that part of the First Amendment was incorporated into the Fourteenth, the Supreme Court began to selectively incorporate certain elements of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment via the “due process” clause. With the incorporation of the Second Amendment in the McDonald case, this only leaves four things that have not been incorporated: the Third Amendment’s protection against quartering of soldiers, the Fifth Amendment’s grand jury requirement, the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial in civil cases, and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines.
The inclusion above of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, which each contain more than one subject, shows that the Supreme Court’s incorporation doctrine can encompass just part of an Amendment. And not only that, the Court applies two things from the Sixth Amendment differently against the states than against the federal government. First, the appointment of counsel is required in all federal criminal cases in which the defendant is unable to afford an attorney, but is only required in state criminal cases where lack of counsel results in a conviction lacking in “fundamental fairness.” And second, a unanimous jury verdict is required in federal criminal trials, but not in state criminal trials. Although the whimsical nature in which selective incorporation of amendments and parts of amendments was carried out during the twentieth century has led some—including this writer—to question the whole concept of incorporation, it is a firmly established doctrine that, like judicial review, has become a permanent fixture of the Supreme Court.
That the respondents in the McDonald case, as well as the four dissenting justices, oppose the incorporation of the Second Amendment shows, as Jacob Hornberger recently pointed out, the hypocrisy of liberals. No liberal—on or off the Supreme Court—ever had a problem with the incorporation doctrine when it came to First Amendment rights or the rights of the accused. Liberals are all of a sudden arguing against incorporation because they are anti-gun.
Although agreeing with the Court that the Second Amendment applies to the states, Justice Thomas makes a good argument that the right to “keep and bear arms” applies to the states through the “privileges or immunities” clause.
The Second Amendment
The Second Amendment to the Constitution has engendered more controversy than any other Amendment except perhaps the Fourteenth. It’s twenty-seven words read: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The dissenting opinion by Justice Breyer in McDonald seeks to revisit the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Breyer has evidently never gotten over it. He still tries to maintain that the Second Amendment relates primarily to the states’ ability to maintain a militia. First of all, he is just plain wrong. Among other things, “the people” are also mentioned in the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. Are we to believe that “the people” means something different in the Second Amendment? The militia referred to citizens who owned guns. There were no police forces, National Guards, or standing armies. Secondly, the Second Amendment is about a right that is already assumed to exist. The amendment recognizes a right; it does not grant a right. The Bill of Rights was never intended to give Americans rights; it was designed to protect their rights from infringement by the new and powerful central government under the Constitution. And third, even if the Second Amendment was not in the Constitution or did refer only to the states’ ability to maintain a militia, it would not affect Americans’ right to keep and bear arms one iota. All men have a natural and moral right to arm themselves for hunting, sport, or self-defense against aggression by other men or governments.
Justice Breyer even has the audacity to invoke the principal of federalism as a reason why the Fourteenth Amendment shouldn’t incorporate the Second. Incorporation would “amount to a significant incursion on a traditional and important area of state concern,” says Breyer. The federal relationship that exists between the states and the central government is an important one. Federalism and decentralization are bulwarks of liberty against the tyranny of the central government. But since when was Justice Breyer, or the other justices who joined him in dissent, or the respondents in McDonald, or Mayor Daley, or any liberal in favor of gun control concerned about limiting the power of the federal government? These people are just flat out against gun liberty.
The libertarian and decentralist perspective on the Second Amendment is a simple one: The Federal government may not infringe upon anyone’s right to keep and bear arms, period. There should be no federal restrictions, federal registration, federal background checks, federal banning of certain weapons, or other federal infringements of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This means that it is on the state level—per the Tenth Amendment—that we should be arguing the pros and cons of restricting the gun ownership of certain convicted felons, non-citizens, the mentally ill, etc., lawful gun types, usage, ammunition, etc., and any other type of regulations. To what extent the federal government should intervene in state gun laws is entirely another matter.
McDonald and the Prospects for Gun Liberty
Because the Tenth Amendment is a dead letter—and the Constitution too it seems most of the time—the McDonald decision, at least in the short run, is good for gun liberty. However, like the Heller case, I have mixed feelings about the Supreme Court’s decision in McDonald.
Writing for the majority, Justice Alito makes it perfectly clear that although Chicago’s gun ban may not be constitutional, most of the existing gun regulations that do infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms will continue:
It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibits the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperial every law regulating firearms.
Noted in the decision was a brief (Amici Curiae 23) filed by thirty-eight states on behalf of the petitioners that “state and local experimentation with reasonable firearms regulations will continue under the Second Amendment.”
It is because of the Supreme Court permitting infringements on the right to keep and bear arms that some gun-control advocates reacted favorably to the McDonald decision. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City optimistically remarked that the Court’s decision shows “we can work to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists while at the same time respecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.” Jackie Hilly, the Executive Director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, is pleased with the decision. Says Hilly:
All the other amendments have reasonable restrictions on them. So I actually really like the Heller decision and the McDonald decision because they put the Second Amendment in the context of all the other amendments… people from the gun lobby like to promote the idea that you have an absolute or god-given right to possess a gun. That’s clearly not true; your right can be restricted.
Mayor Daley is already expected to demand registration of all handguns, mandatory training for gun owners and a limit of one handgun per person. There is nothing in Heller or McDonald that necessarily prohibits broad anti-gun measures requiring training courses, gun and/or ammunition registration, liability insurance, fingerprinting, guns to be kept unloaded, trigger locks, gun registries, waiting periods, background checks, the banning of “assault” weapons, high-capacity magazines, automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns, and limitations on the type and amount of ammunition.
But an even greater danger is the potential for the future federalization of all gun laws due to the further erosion of federalism because of the incorporation doctrine. Congress and the federal agencies it has created have already federalized a host of ordinary street crimes already covered by state criminal codes.
Conclusion
As much as the McDonald decision is a victory for residents who want to defend themselves in Chicago and other municipalities with draconian gun laws, this decision also makes it clear that our rights are not natural and absolute. They are subject to the whims of the current members of the Supreme Court.
In view of the McDonald and Heller decisions and the myriad of federal, state, and local gun restrictions and regulations, we might rephrase the Second Amendment this way:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by the federal government, except by federal laws that infringe upon that right which are approved by the Supreme Court. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed by the state governments, except by state laws that infringe upon that right which are approved by the Supreme Court.
On page 23 of the McDonald decision, Justice Alito mentions how after the Civil War “the laws of some States formally prohibited Blacks from possessing firearms.” He gives an example of a law in Mississippi that forbade a Negro not in the military and not licensed by his county to “keep or carry fire-arms of any kind.” Does not the same thing exist today for all races in some parts of the United States?
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” This is especially the case with gun liberty. The price of absolute gun liberty is indeed eternal vigilance.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=996
07
07 2010
Climategate Whitewash Complete: Third Inquiry Clears Everyone Involved
University vice chancellor hopes “conspiracy theories” will now end
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, Jul 7th, 2010
A third and final inquiry into the climategate scandal has exonerated everyone involved and declared that there is no question over the science behind manmade global warming – even though, like its predecessors, it has not investigated the science.
The so called “independent” inquiry into scientists at The University of East Anglia’s Climate research Unit found that “Their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.
It further noted “We did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC.”
The full report can be downloaded here.
The university’s vice chancellor, Edward Acton, said the report had exonerated his staff and he hoped it would end the “conspiracy theories and untruths” that have dogged the unit, reports Reuters.
Of course this conclusion is hardly surprising given that, as we have previously reported, the so called “independent” investigation was led by Sir Muir Russell – a vehement supporter of the notion of anthropogenic global warming.
While absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science, Russell is intimately involved with The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.
This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.
For the climategate inquiry, Russell constructed a panel of “experts” that share exactly the same views, clearly contradicting the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.
Russell has called for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the CRU scientists.
Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the scandal, will now be reinstated in his role at the CRU, despite the fact that the investigation concluded that some of Jones’ data was misleading and that he failed to act openly in response to questions about climate data lodged under Britain’s freedom of information laws.
“We found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer,” the report said.
Indeed, among the thousands of emails that were leaked from the CRU were communications from Jones specifically asking his colleagues to delete information from their computers that may have called the science behind their findings into question.
Yet, as reported in the London Guardian today, “extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”
The report also parroted the findings of The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF), released last March after just a single day of oral testimony. Like the government’s report, the “independent” inquiry found nothing sinister in Jones’ use of the words “hide the decline” and “trick” with regards to data on temperature changes obtained from tree ring research.
The independent inquiry even used the exact same wording as the government report to dismiss the notion, claiming that the use of the word “trick” may have been shorthand for a “neat mathematical approach” to ejecting erroneous data.
The STC pulled this explanation from testimony by the CRU itself, which stated:
…as for the (now notorious) word ‘trick’, so deeply appealing to the media, this has been richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context. It was used in an informal email, discussing the difficulties of statistical presentation. It does not mean a ‘ruse’ or method of deception. In context it is obvious that it is used in the informal sense of ‘the best way of doing something’. In this case it was ‘the trick or knack’ of constructing a statistical illustration which would combine the most reliable proxy and instrumental evidence of temperature trends.
Scientist Steve McIntyre, who is mentioned over 100 times in the leaked emails has consistently explained how this explanation is insufficient and falls flat on its face.
On his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre notes:
“Contrary to [the University of East Anglia's] claims, there is no valid statistical procedure supporting the substitution of tree ring proxy,”
“This is absurd.” McIntyre added, “The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.”
McIntyre points out that at no time did even the CRU itself contend that any of its data was erroneous, so to conclude that it had to dispose of such data is ludicrous:
In addition, their suggestion that Jones and others were doing nothing more than “discarding data known to be erroneous” is simply absurd. There was no testimony to the Committee (nor has it ever been suggested) that the tree ring data was measured incorrectly or that the data was “erroneous” – the data is what it is. The tree ring data goes down instead of up – but that doesn’t make it “erroneous”. It only means that the data is a bad proxy – something that was concealed from IPCC readers.
McIntyre submitted notes to the Science and Technology Committee on this very detail of the matter, however, his detailed description was either completely ignored or disregarded.
The idea that the “trick” was not to conceal data that was out of step with the scientists warming thesis also falls down when you consider that the code within the CRU’s climate models prove that temperature numbers were “artificially adjusted” to hide the decline in global warming since the 1960’s.
This information was leaked along with the inflammatory emails referring to it and provides the real smoking gun. However, predictably, there has been no mention of the coding in the any of the inquiries.
The Russell review said it was not misleading to omit part of the tree ring temperature series but the process should have been made plain in the graph which showed global temperature rises, and which was used in an influential report published in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
Again, like the parliamentary report before it, the Russell review also dismissed further allegations leveled at the CRU, including the suggestion the emails proved the scientists were actively subverting the peer review process and operating within a culture of stonewalling dissenting evidence, theories, data and viewpoints.
Those charges arose following disclosure of Phil Jones’ comment to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University: We “will keep them out (of journals) somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” in reference to scientific papers they disagreed with.
The leaked emails highlighted CRU scientists routinely referring to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation“,”misinformation” or “crap” that needed to be kept out of the public domain.
As the London Guardian notes, The Russell report described such actions and descriptions by Jones and the CRU as “robust” and “typical of the debate that can go on in peer review”.
“In the event, the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review.” Fred Pearce writes. “And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism.”
Once again it will be left to the alternative media and blogs to expose another whitewash report, given that the vast majority of the corporate mainstream media is running with headlines along the lines of “Investigation Clears Climate Scientists” and “Warming Science Vindicated”, headlines that will be repeated ad infinitum by warmists, carbon trading scam artists and eco-fascists everywhere.
Another separate “independent” inquiry, led by Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the science and technology select committee, also cleared the CRU scientists of any wrong doing in April. However, its findings have since been questioned given that Oxburgh admitted that it also “didn’t investigate the science.”
Related Reading: Climategate Archive
http://www.infowars.com/climategate-whitewash-complete-third-inquiry-clears-everyone-involved/
