Monbiot in the Guardian::

“When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get……….

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific……

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”.

My Comment

George Monbiot seems to be the only global warming advocate with the integrity to state the obvious. What the emails reveal is reprehensible in the extreme, given the position of the scientists involved. They have to go, no matter where you stand on the issue.

And by the way, I´m no hard-core skeptic about climate change or human influence on the environment at all.  I think the “preventive principle”

(correction: I mean precautionary principle)

is a pretty good rule to go by when considering economic and other options, am a strong advocate of organic and sustainable farming, and think that many forms of development do indeed create havoc with the environment – destroying shorelines and exacerbating natural disasters, if not actually provoking them.

However, hijacking the entire world into an international regime in which scam artists like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, allied hedge funds, speculators, and governments play roulette with “carbon credits” has nothing to do with being a steward of the environment.

Want to help the planet?

Plant a garden. Plant trees. Use meat as a condiment not as a staple. Walk or ride a bike as often as you can. 

Don´t think of yourself solely as a consumer but also as a citizen.

And fight the militarized state.

The single biggest problem (I mean man-made problem) for the climate is war. Nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, fighter jets, weapons testing, bunker-busters – this is where the damage is done, most of all in misdirecting energy and resources into destruction, when they could as easily be directed toward productive uses.

Dr. Tim Ball, from Canada Free Press (via Lew Rockwell):

“Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”

You can download the climate change fraud documents from the link below:

http://www.filedropper.com/foi2009 or http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94

(Lila: I am linking the hacked emails after all, because no private emails (correction: I meant ´personal´) are included and because I´m convinced the material was gathered for an FOIA request that was being obstructed).

The Guardian, UK:

“To complicate matters further, the debts were taken out as Islamic bonds, known as sukuks, and the rules about what happens if the borrower fails to pay them back are hazy.”

My Comment

Add to this the earlier announcement that Abu Dhabi would treat the debts selectively, and you begin to wonder. If the selectivity is based on the degree of interconnection with the government, that would be one thing. But if the selectivity is based on discriminating between domestic and foreign creditors, Islamic and non Islamic, I suspect this would cause problems.

Now a bit of information on the sukuk.

Islamic banking has five pillars, as noted in this Times piece :

1. a ban on interest

2. a ban on speculation

3. a ban on haram (forbidden) investments, such as pork or gambling

4. the requirement of partnership or sharing of profit and loss

5. the requirement of asset backing.

What´s interesting is that while several Islamic funds have defaulted, the sukuk itself has never been tested in court, giving rise to uncertainty about how creditors would be treated in an insolvency….how they would be ranked in preference…and  whether they would be competing against each other rather than for the underlying assets…..

“The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?

Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.”

— Henry Hazlitt. Economic In One Lesson

From Lew Rockwell:

“Survival Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘This report highlights ‘the most inconvenient truth of all’ – that the world’s tribal people, who have done the least to cause climate change and are most affected by it, are now having their rights violated and land devastated in the name of attempts to stop it. Hiding behind the global push to prevent climate change, governments and companies are mounting a massive land grab. As usual, where money and vast profits are at stake, the world’s indigenous people are being shamefully swept aside.’

Lysander Spooner (“Poverty: Its illegal Causes and Legal Cures”):

“The principle, that a debt is obligatory only to the extent of the debtor’s means when the debt becomes due, would nearly, if not wholly, put an end to a class of contracts, that are immoral and fraudulent, in intent, if not in law, on the part of the creditors, and which ought never to be enforced against debtors. These contracts are of this kind. An old and experienced man takes advantage of the inexperience and the sanguine anticipations of a young man, to sell him property at enormous prices, giving him credit for the whole, or a part, but well knowing, from his own superior judgment and experience, that the young man will not at all realize his anticipations, or even realize enough from the property to cancel his liability. But he sells the property to him on the calculation that the latter will be able to pay at least the real value of the property; and that, as for the balance, he is a young man, he will be able to work it out; or his friends will pay it for him; or the possession of this property will enable him to get credit of others, and thus he will be enabled to pay this debt by throwing an equivalent amount of loss upon somebody else. Such contracts are plainly immoral and fraudulent, on the part of the creditor, both towards the debtor, and towards others*2-although their immorality and fraud are of a character not susceptible of being legally proved and defeated in particular cases. The only way of defeating them seems to be, to adopt the principle that no contract is binding beyond the limits of the debtor’s means.”

Accounting for missing gold at the Royal Canadian Mint:

“Mint officials double-counted some gold bullion they sold, and also underestimated the shrinkage of the gold during processing.

The federal government had withheld bonuses for mint executives until the mystery was solved. It’s unclear whether those bonuses will still be paid out.

Junior Transport Minister Rob Merrifield, who’s responsible for the mint, called in the RCMP on June 9 after he learned that an audit would not “rectify the problem” of the missing gold. That’s about 10 weeks after the government first learned of the missiing gold.”

CTV.

Rick Ackerman:

“The giant retailer’s shot-across-the-bow – offering the top ten best-sellers for $10 — came just in time to devastate book stores during the holiday shopping season. Stores of every size will be vulnerable — from independents who have been savvy enough to survive competition from Amazon, to the largest vendors, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target, and even Amazon itself. No seller will make money at that price, not even publishers, but that is of little concern to Wal-Mart, which seeks only to demonstrate in as brutal a manner as possible that it will not be undersold. Nor can independent booksellers simply buy copies from Wal-Mart to resell, since $10 best sellers are being limited to just a few copies per buyer. The predictable result six to twelve months down the road is that many book stores both big and small will be closing, adding hugely to a retail vacancy rate that is already approaching depressionary levels.

Wal-Mart is all good cheer in promoting its everyday values, but there is no longer any denying that its primary goal is to drive all of its competitors into the ground. This strategy will no doubt be abetted by Chinese manufacturers eager to unload goods into a weak U.S. market at any cost. When Wal-Mart eventually succeeds at it, we can be certain that “everyday low prices” will be superseded in practice by prices reflecting whatever the traffic will bear. Wal-Mart has the reach, the naked ambition and the pricing power to bankrupt nearly any competitor in any business, from consumer electronics, to Halloween costumes, to funeral services, to pharmaceuticals, to lawn furniture. A decade ago, a grassroots movement to hold the line against Wal-Mart’s relentless expansion died after the retailer won some local skirmishes. Now the company is too big to oppose, a vital appendage of nearly every town in which it operates. America has paid a huge price for those everyday values.”

From George Monbiot, the real global warming conspiracy revealed:

“The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?

Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.”

My Comment:

That´s from prominent environmentalist George Monbiot. I hope the emails were the work of a whistle-blower, as I think that will make the evidence that much harder to dismiss. But, even if they were, it´s quite easy for the global warming advocates to spin this whole business.