Drug War and Empire
Lew Rockwell interviews Dr. Mark Thornton
Great interview: http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/?p=episode&name=2008-11-27_075_drug_war_and_empire.mp3
Friday, November 28, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Obese People ("Functionally Disabled") Win; Private Property Loses
Obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one on flights within Canada, the country's Supreme Court ruled yesterday.
The court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are "functionally disabled by obesity" deserve to have two seats for one fare.
The airlines had lost an appeal at the Federal Court of Appeal in May and had sought to launch a fresh appeal at the Supreme Court.
The court's decision not to hear a new appeal means the one-person-one-fare policy stands.The appeal had been launched by Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz and WestJet.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,455834,00.html
The court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are "functionally disabled by obesity" deserve to have two seats for one fare.
The airlines had lost an appeal at the Federal Court of Appeal in May and had sought to launch a fresh appeal at the Supreme Court.
The court's decision not to hear a new appeal means the one-person-one-fare policy stands.The appeal had been launched by Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz and WestJet.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,455834,00.html
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
A defender of liberty to lead European Union?
In the 1980s, a Communist secret police agent infiltrated clandestine economics seminars hosted by Vaclav Klaus, a fiery future leader of the Czech Republic, who had come under suspicion for extolling free market virtues. Rather than reporting on Marxist heresy, the agent was most struck by Mr. Klaus’s now famous arrogance.
“His behavior and attitudes reveal that he feels like a rejected genius,” the agent noted in his report, which has since been made public. “He shows that whoever does not agree with his views is stupid and incompetent.”
Decades later, Mr. Klaus, the 67-year-old president of the Czech Republic — an iconoclast with a perfectly clipped mustache — continues to provoke strong reactions. He has blamed what he calls the misguided fight against global warming for contributing to the international financial crisis, branded Al Gore an “apostle of arrogance” for his role in that fight, and accused the European Union of acting like a Communist state.
Now the Czech Republic is about to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union and there is palpable fear that Mr. Klaus will embarrass the world’s biggest trading bloc and complicate its efforts to address the economic crisis and expand its powers. His role in the Czech Republic is largely ceremonial, but he remains a powerful force here, has devotees throughout Europe and delights in basking in the spotlight.
“Oh God, Vaclav Klaus will come next,” read a recent headline in the Austrian daily Die Presse, in an article anticipating the havoc he could wreak in a union of 470 million people already divided over its future direction.
An economist by training and a free marketeer by ideology, Mr. Klaus has criticized the course set by the union’s departing leader, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The ambitious Mr. Sarkozy has used France’s European Union presidency to push an agenda that includes broader and more coordinated regulation by the largest economies to tame the worst of the market’s excesses.
Even those who worry about Mr. Klaus’s potential role as a spoiler concede that his influence over policy in the European Union will be circumscribed, given his largely symbolic functions as president in the Czech Republic.
But Mr. Klaus’s sheer will and inflammatory talk — the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash once called him “one of the rudest men I have ever met” — are likely to have some impact.
“Klaus is a provocateur who will twist his arguments to get attention,” said Jiri Pehe, a former adviser to Vaclav Havel, Mr. Klaus’s rival and predecessor as president.
To supporters, Mr. Klaus is a brave, lone crusader, a defender of liberty, the only European leader in the mold of the formidable Margaret Thatcher. (Aides say Mr. Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)
To his many critics, he is a cynical populist, a hardheaded pragmatist long known as a foil to Mr. Havel, the philosopher-dreamer, and a troublemaker.
Mr. Klaus declined to be interviewed for this article. His office called a list of proposed questions “peculiar.”
As a former finance minister and prime minister, he is credited with presiding over the peaceful 1993 split of Czechoslovakia into two states and helping to transform the Czech Republic into one of the former Soviet bloc’s most successful economies.
But his ideas about governance are out of step with many of the European Union nations that his country will lead starting Jan. 1.
While even many of the world’s most ardent free marketeers acknowledged the need for the recent coordinated bailout of European banks, Mr. Klaus lambasted it as irresponsible protectionism. He blamed too much — rather than too little — regulation for the crisis.
A fervent critic of the environmental movement, he has called global warming a dangerous “myth,” arguing that the fight against climate change threatens economic growth.
Perhaps his greatest ire has been reserved for the European Union. In 2005, he called for it to be “scrapped.” Now, he is a vocal opponent of the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to help Europe become more of an international player, but which he argues will strip countries of sovereignty.
On a state visit to Ireland this month, Mr. Klaus incensed the government and annoyed many in his own country by publicly praising Declan Ganley, a businessman and political activist who was influential in persuading a majority of Irish voters in June to reject the treaty.
And while other European leaders have criticized a newly assertive Russia, Mr. Klaus has forged close ties with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin and recently distanced himself from the Czech government’s criticism of Russia over the war with Georgia in August.
Those who know Mr. Klaus say his economic liberalism is an outgrowth of his upbringing. Born in 1941, he obtained an economics degree in 1963 and was deeply influenced by free market economists like Milton Friedman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world/europe/25klaus.html?_r=2&hp
“His behavior and attitudes reveal that he feels like a rejected genius,” the agent noted in his report, which has since been made public. “He shows that whoever does not agree with his views is stupid and incompetent.”
Decades later, Mr. Klaus, the 67-year-old president of the Czech Republic — an iconoclast with a perfectly clipped mustache — continues to provoke strong reactions. He has blamed what he calls the misguided fight against global warming for contributing to the international financial crisis, branded Al Gore an “apostle of arrogance” for his role in that fight, and accused the European Union of acting like a Communist state.
Now the Czech Republic is about to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union and there is palpable fear that Mr. Klaus will embarrass the world’s biggest trading bloc and complicate its efforts to address the economic crisis and expand its powers. His role in the Czech Republic is largely ceremonial, but he remains a powerful force here, has devotees throughout Europe and delights in basking in the spotlight.
“Oh God, Vaclav Klaus will come next,” read a recent headline in the Austrian daily Die Presse, in an article anticipating the havoc he could wreak in a union of 470 million people already divided over its future direction.
An economist by training and a free marketeer by ideology, Mr. Klaus has criticized the course set by the union’s departing leader, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The ambitious Mr. Sarkozy has used France’s European Union presidency to push an agenda that includes broader and more coordinated regulation by the largest economies to tame the worst of the market’s excesses.
Even those who worry about Mr. Klaus’s potential role as a spoiler concede that his influence over policy in the European Union will be circumscribed, given his largely symbolic functions as president in the Czech Republic.
But Mr. Klaus’s sheer will and inflammatory talk — the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash once called him “one of the rudest men I have ever met” — are likely to have some impact.
“Klaus is a provocateur who will twist his arguments to get attention,” said Jiri Pehe, a former adviser to Vaclav Havel, Mr. Klaus’s rival and predecessor as president.
To supporters, Mr. Klaus is a brave, lone crusader, a defender of liberty, the only European leader in the mold of the formidable Margaret Thatcher. (Aides say Mr. Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)
To his many critics, he is a cynical populist, a hardheaded pragmatist long known as a foil to Mr. Havel, the philosopher-dreamer, and a troublemaker.
Mr. Klaus declined to be interviewed for this article. His office called a list of proposed questions “peculiar.”
As a former finance minister and prime minister, he is credited with presiding over the peaceful 1993 split of Czechoslovakia into two states and helping to transform the Czech Republic into one of the former Soviet bloc’s most successful economies.
But his ideas about governance are out of step with many of the European Union nations that his country will lead starting Jan. 1.
While even many of the world’s most ardent free marketeers acknowledged the need for the recent coordinated bailout of European banks, Mr. Klaus lambasted it as irresponsible protectionism. He blamed too much — rather than too little — regulation for the crisis.
A fervent critic of the environmental movement, he has called global warming a dangerous “myth,” arguing that the fight against climate change threatens economic growth.
Perhaps his greatest ire has been reserved for the European Union. In 2005, he called for it to be “scrapped.” Now, he is a vocal opponent of the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to help Europe become more of an international player, but which he argues will strip countries of sovereignty.
On a state visit to Ireland this month, Mr. Klaus incensed the government and annoyed many in his own country by publicly praising Declan Ganley, a businessman and political activist who was influential in persuading a majority of Irish voters in June to reject the treaty.
And while other European leaders have criticized a newly assertive Russia, Mr. Klaus has forged close ties with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin and recently distanced himself from the Czech government’s criticism of Russia over the war with Georgia in August.
Those who know Mr. Klaus say his economic liberalism is an outgrowth of his upbringing. Born in 1941, he obtained an economics degree in 1963 and was deeply influenced by free market economists like Milton Friedman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/world/europe/25klaus.html?_r=2&hp
FDA crimes - as reported by its scientists
A group of scientists working in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health division has revolted against the corrupt managers of its own department, accusing them of committing crimes by claiming, "There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices."Read the letter yourself here (PDF):http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_1...The letter from the FDA's own scientists goes on to say, "It is evident that managers at CDRH have deviated from FDA's mission to identify and address underlying problems with medical devices before they cause irreparable harm, and this deviation has placed the American people at risk."Congressman John, Dingell, chair of the committee which received the letter, went on to charge that these FDA bureaucrats "approved or cleared medical device applications in gross violation of laws and regulations..." (http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_1...)
Note, too, that the mainstream media has virtually ignored this story? You might think that a revolt of FDA scientists against their criminal bosses would be a huge story worthy of front-page treatment at USA Today or the Washington Post, right? Only the NY Times bothered to report this story, as far as I can tell. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/healt...)
The FDA: A gang of unindicted criminalsThe FDA, you see, is a criminal organization engaged in tactics of intimidation, censorship and oppression that can only be properly called "terrorism." Don't take my word for it, though: The FDA's own top scientists are now on the record saying much the same thing! Their complaint to Congress alleges top FDA managers "ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law.”Keep in mind this is from the FDA's own scientists! This isn't some outsider (like me) ranting about the FDA being a criminal organization; these are the words of the very people who work there!Even the FDA director is like an evil character out of a Marvel comic. His name is actually Dr. von Doom... er, I mean Dr. von Eschenbach, and he has routinely ignored the multiple letters sent to him by these scientists complaining of the same criminal behavior taking place at the agency.The FDA, of course, believes it is above the law and subject to no rules whatsoever. It is a political organization, and a criminal one at that.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024910.html
Note, too, that the mainstream media has virtually ignored this story? You might think that a revolt of FDA scientists against their criminal bosses would be a huge story worthy of front-page treatment at USA Today or the Washington Post, right? Only the NY Times bothered to report this story, as far as I can tell. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/healt...)
The FDA: A gang of unindicted criminalsThe FDA, you see, is a criminal organization engaged in tactics of intimidation, censorship and oppression that can only be properly called "terrorism." Don't take my word for it, though: The FDA's own top scientists are now on the record saying much the same thing! Their complaint to Congress alleges top FDA managers "ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law.”Keep in mind this is from the FDA's own scientists! This isn't some outsider (like me) ranting about the FDA being a criminal organization; these are the words of the very people who work there!Even the FDA director is like an evil character out of a Marvel comic. His name is actually Dr. von Doom... er, I mean Dr. von Eschenbach, and he has routinely ignored the multiple letters sent to him by these scientists complaining of the same criminal behavior taking place at the agency.The FDA, of course, believes it is above the law and subject to no rules whatsoever. It is a political organization, and a criminal one at that.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024910.html
Monday, November 24, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Dick Cheney indicted by Texas grand jury
Yesterday a grand jury in Texas indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Watch the news video: http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=2825
Global Banking Revolution
There is a quiet revolution going on. It's not a political revolution or a social revolution. It is being carried out without guns, bullets or physical violence, but this aspect makes it none the less real. The world is in the midst of a financial revolution led by the banking system whose representative in the U.S. is the Federal Reserve, a private bank that is not part of our current government system and does not hold reserves. The goal is the complete dominance, ownership and control of all assets by the government. What Americans are now witnessing may be the finest coup d'etat ever perpetrated.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024863.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/024863.html
Private Prisons? A product of large incarceration rates and no money
Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.
Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.
Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country's 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. "There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future," said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.'s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.
California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705334657739263.html
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.
Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.
Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country's 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. "There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future," said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.'s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.
California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705334657739263.html
More Cameras
To make good on his offer to help Chicago combat violence, Gov. Blagojevich envisions putting speed cameras on interstates across Illinois -- and using the revenue to form an "elite tactical team" that would operate in Chicago and other cities.
The idea is in its infancy, with no budget and no timetable.
But the governor also is providing Chicago with immediate assistance, said Lucio Guerrero, a spokesman for the governor.
The help comes a month after the governor offered to lend state troopers to fight what he labeled "out-of-control" crime. Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis welcomed the help, but insisted crime in the city remains at decades-low levels.
According to Trent, new State Police teams will stop motorists for traffic violations on Chicago expressways near high-crime areas. The troopers will also look for gun and drug violations. They can communicate with Chicago Police officers on radios and come to their aid when needed.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/blagojevich/1095739,CST-NWS-blago07.article
The idea is in its infancy, with no budget and no timetable.
But the governor also is providing Chicago with immediate assistance, said Lucio Guerrero, a spokesman for the governor.
The help comes a month after the governor offered to lend state troopers to fight what he labeled "out-of-control" crime. Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis welcomed the help, but insisted crime in the city remains at decades-low levels.
According to Trent, new State Police teams will stop motorists for traffic violations on Chicago expressways near high-crime areas. The troopers will also look for gun and drug violations. They can communicate with Chicago Police officers on radios and come to their aid when needed.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/blagojevich/1095739,CST-NWS-blago07.article
Monday, November 17, 2008
Unsolved Crime. Having the wrong focus.
The detection rate for offences of violence stood at 49 per cent last year, according to official figures issued in a parliamentary answer.
When Labour came to power, almost three quarters of violent crimes were solved.
The figures, which mean that every year hundreds of thousands of victims do not see justice done, caused a fresh dispute last night over policing priorities.
Rank-and-file police leaders and opposition politicians said too much time was taken with red tape or chasing lesser crimes to attain government targets.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: "It is bad enough that so much violent crime is being committed. It is a real insult to victims that over half of perpetrators are getting away with it.
"This is a direct result of Labour's target culture, which has incentivised the police to pursue minor crimes over serious violent ones, and the reams of red tape that tie officers to their desks when the public wants them out on the street."
It emerged last month that levels of some of the most serious forms of violent crime were higher than previously claimed because of the way police now recorded offences. In a leaked document at the weekend, the Home Office's leading civil servant admitted that the Government had failed to reduce serious violence because of a focus on targets.
The latest figures for England and Wales will renew the pressure on police chiefs to send officers to visit the victim of every crime after Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, backed such an approach in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday.
Lyn Costello, of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, said: "It is frightening. Police are tied up in so much paperwork. We have to put more officers on the streets."
The detection rate, where a perpetrator is identified and dealt with, for all violent offences was 49 per cent in 2007-08. That means that of 961,188 recorded offences, 490,000 went unsolved.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3474582/Million-violent-crimes-a-year-but-fewer-than-half-are-solved.html
When Labour came to power, almost three quarters of violent crimes were solved.
The figures, which mean that every year hundreds of thousands of victims do not see justice done, caused a fresh dispute last night over policing priorities.
Rank-and-file police leaders and opposition politicians said too much time was taken with red tape or chasing lesser crimes to attain government targets.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: "It is bad enough that so much violent crime is being committed. It is a real insult to victims that over half of perpetrators are getting away with it.
"This is a direct result of Labour's target culture, which has incentivised the police to pursue minor crimes over serious violent ones, and the reams of red tape that tie officers to their desks when the public wants them out on the street."
It emerged last month that levels of some of the most serious forms of violent crime were higher than previously claimed because of the way police now recorded offences. In a leaked document at the weekend, the Home Office's leading civil servant admitted that the Government had failed to reduce serious violence because of a focus on targets.
The latest figures for England and Wales will renew the pressure on police chiefs to send officers to visit the victim of every crime after Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, backed such an approach in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday.
Lyn Costello, of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, said: "It is frightening. Police are tied up in so much paperwork. We have to put more officers on the streets."
The detection rate, where a perpetrator is identified and dealt with, for all violent offences was 49 per cent in 2007-08. That means that of 961,188 recorded offences, 490,000 went unsolved.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3474582/Million-violent-crimes-a-year-but-fewer-than-half-are-solved.html
Global Cooling
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.
Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.
Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml
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