Have a look at the opening film of Copenhagen Climate Summit:

All the elements for a good old fashioned scare mongerin’:

• Poverty. Check.
• Scared Children. Check.
• Polar bears threatened. Check.
• Floods. Check.
• Drought. Check.
• Earthquake. Check.
• Storms. Check.
• Tornadoes. Check.
• “Expert” Testimony*. Check.

These people have no shame.

* Includes the renowned scientists, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and UN Chief Ban Ki Moon.

For those that have an interest in the code of the recently hacked emails and documents from the Hadley Centre, I have written a little program to automatically extract comments from the source code and text from “readme” text files*. This makes it a little easier to search through code comments.

You can download this file here.

What I discovered is this (documents\harris-tree\briffa_sep98_e.pro):

; PLOTS ‘ALL’ REGION MXD timeseries from age banded and from huge
; standardised datasets.
; Reads Harry’s regional timeseries and outputs the 1600-1992 por
; with missing values set appropriately.  Uses mxd, and just the
; “all band” timeseries
;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********

yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75        ; fudge factor

Later in the code:

;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The fudge factor above does not seem to have a basis in any physical reality. I have done many computer models previously and I recognise that this is a classic example of the programmer trying to massage the data to their needs. What this code does is apply a rudimentary filter to the data. What effect this code actually has is unknown at the present. I am still analysing the code to try to get some sort of filter coefficients so that we can plot the frequency response of these filters to get a better understanding of what is actually going on here.

Watts Up With That has a list of source code comments describing the need to “avoid the decline”.

*Postnote about the program:

• program comments that start with ; or ! (these are FORTRAN comments tags)
• any text document with readme, read.me, read me or read_me in the filename is included
• .pdf’s and .docs are not included.

Great post from science writer Joanne Nova:

The world is considering a new financial market larger than any commodity, it’s “based on science”, but if you ask for evidence, you’re called names—“Denier”, and by our Prime Minister, no less.  This is supposed to pass for reasoned debate?

In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions—that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.

It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible.

Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutche Bank, and HSBC.

The banks… want us to trade carbon.

Read on.