Posts Tagged: Evidence


18
Dec 10

UK’s Charity Commission finds links of Islamic charities to jihad terror groups “unsubstantiated” — by ignoring mountains of evidence

Yes, but the picture is so much more pleasant when they don’t allow all that pesky evidence to get in the way. “Muslim Aid: Hopeless Charity Commission whitewashes yet another Islamist group,” by Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph, December 17 (thanks to David): The Charity Commission, Britain’s most ineffective regulator,…
Jihad Watch


3
Dec 10

Report: Ethics Committee Probing If Financial Committee Withheld Evidence

The House ethics committee is probing why the House Financial Services Committee failed to fully comply with its promise to turn over all documents related to an investigation of subcommittee chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Washington Post reports.

After wrapping up their ethics investigation of Waters this summer and preparing for trial in October, the investigators learned about an e-mail that they considered important to their examination of Waters’s efforts to help a troubled bank tied to her husband.

Four officials, congressional staff members, and others familiar with the probe confirmed on Thursday that her trial was postponed two weeks ago in part to explore the delay in not turning over that e-mail and to examine whether other evidence was withheld.

The newspaper also reported that committee members are “concerned that the Waters investigative team did not have access to all the records, in part because they did not press for them diligently enough. Others on the staff have expressed concern that evidence may have been inappropriately withheld.”

Barney Frank, chairman of the committee, said on Tuesday that he wasn’t aware of the concerns about the documents.

“When I received the Ethics Committee’s 2009 request, I instructed my staff to turn over every document in personal office and committee files. I have every reason to believe they did that,” Frank told the newspaper.

The House ethics committee is under intense scrutiny itself following the dismissal of two lawyers who worked on the case against Waters. The California Republican has questioned the integrity of the committee and its investigation.

Documents related to the investigation of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who was censured on the floor of the House last night, did not appear to indicate that the two suspended lawyers — Morgan Kim and Stacy Sovereign — worked on the Rangel case.

[Ed. note: this post was edited after publication.]







TPMMuckraker


3
Dec 10

More evidence at least some of the Carmel fires are arson

From JPost:

Coastal District Police Commander Roni Attia said Friday that two arson suspects were apprehended in the North, near Kiryat Bialik.

The suspects were allegedly attempting to rekindle a fire in the forest with the use of Molotov cocktails. Police are not connecting the arsonists at this stage to the massive fires in the Carmel and Atlit but rather to the fire which broke out earlier at the Tzur Shalom area of Kiryat Bialik.

Attia added that arson is suspected in a number of separate fires, including Kiryat Bialik and Kiryat Tivon.

Earlier on Friday, police found a bike, a bag, and a wig inside near a fire center in Tzur Shalom, leading them to believe that the fire was caused by an arsonist or arsonists.

Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told the Post that there are 3 fire centers – Tzur Shalom, the Atlit – Tirat Hacarmel area, and the Carmel hillsides. In one, Tzur Shalom, north of Haifa, “we located suspicious items pointing to arson. As for the other two major fires, it is too early and the incidents are to large in scale to know their causes at this stage.” The death toll in the fires rose to 42 on Friday, according to Army Radio.

Now, who would want to do something like that?

Could it be the types of people who celebrate it?

(h/t Israel Matzav)

UPDATE: Commenter Jed says

Update from Israeli TV:
Fire investigator says fire source was from burning garbage.
Suspicion that more fires set up by gang, 2 suspects from Daliat el Carmel arrested by police.



Elder of Ziyon


3
Dec 10

Video: McCain Wants More Evidence; Colbert Bets On Thune For President in 2012

Stephen Colbert thinks Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has the right look to be Republican nominee in 2012. Jon Stewart goes after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for opposing the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because military leaders didn’t solicit the views of their subordinates: “I don’t know how you can get more specific about their views, then: What would you do if you were showing with a gay guy? Without maybe giving the name of the actual gay guy they’d be showering with. Oh how about this, would you be okay with Roy? What about Jim?”

Today’s Must See Moment – Fast forward to 0:18 to find out what happens when you criticize former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (R).

Hotline On Call


27
Nov 10

More Blood Boiling Evidence That The TSA Terrorizes Citizens And Does Nothing For Safety

See the woman nursing her child? Yeah, that’s what a terrorist looks like if you’re the TSA.

Go watch this video and then tell me the TSA does anything besides humiliate and degrade average citizens.

Before you get all righteous and tell me why I’m being excessively cavalier with security, a few thoughts:

1. The perimeter of an airport is not secure. Any determined terrorist could bring a vehicle into the airport with a bomb and kill hundreds, if not thousands of people.

2. The airport itself is not secure. At some security points inside the airport there are hundreds of people. A determined terrorist could bring a suitcase bomb and detonate it in the actual security area.

3. The screeners are randomly picking people. There is no rhyme or reason to the searches.

4. Drug mules know how to get through security and use orifices creatively to do so.

5. Airport workers aren’t screened.

This security nonsense must stop. It’s an atrocious violation of our civil liberties and rights.

If the government were serious about security, they wouldn’t be doing this to law-abiding (and quoting) citizens. This is a pure power play. Nothing more.

Since TSA workers are government workers, they cannot be sued. We have no recourse. We are helpless to their power. Remember this, you short-sighted idiots who want the government controlling your health care. Nothing like having someone who has absolutely nothing to lose in control of your most personal life.

It is clear from this video that the TSA workers were singling out this woman for knowing her rights. This is harassment, pure and simple. This is harassment by uneducated, untrained government robots with no common sense and no sense of right and wrong.

It’s time to revisit the amount of freedom we’re willing to trade for the false notion of being secure.

Liberty Pundits Blog


22
Nov 10

The Evidence That Shows Hezbollah’s Involvement In The Murder Of Rafik Hariri

Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) features an entensive report on Who killed Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri?, noting in particular how one man laid the groundwork for uncovering Hezbollah’s involvement in the murder, after the UN’s own failure to investigate properly:

It wasn’t until late 2007 that the awkwardly titled UN International Independent Investigation Commission actually got around to some serious investigating.

By then, nearly three years had passed since the spectacular public murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

According to the report, after the UN was unable to get any solid leads, it was Capt. Wissam Eid who alone assembled the evidence that showed Hezbollah’s involvement
. He got the phone records of all of the cellphones registered with the cell towers in the area of the explosion, deleting those of those who were killed, in Hariri’s entourage and those with alibis-resulting in a list of the ‘red’ phones used by the actual hit team. He then traced which cellphone towers the red phones had used prior to the assassination and was able to determine that the people using them had been tracking Hariri.

Eid also discovered that each person with a red phone had a secondary phone, used to contact network of phones that had existed for at least a year-this was called the ‘blue’ network

The big break came when an electronics specialist working for Hezbollah-Abd al Majid al Ghamloush-used one of the blue phones. That slip led Eid to 2 brothers, Hussein and Mouin Khreis. Not only were both of them Hezbollah operatives-one of them had been at the site of the explosion.

Capt. Eid was able to continue identifying phones associated with the hit team and uncovered a third network-the ‘yellows’-which constituted a longer-term surveillance team.

All this led to the discovery that everything he uncovered connected to land lines inside Hezbollah’s Great Prophet Hospital in South Beirut, where Hezbollah is believed to have a command center. Furthermore, it was possible to identify a network of ‘pink phones’ that communicated with both the hospital and the other networks.

The pink phones themselves were issued by the Lebanese government-and when the record for these phones was obtained from the ministry of communications, it was found that in a long column of 6 digit numbers there were 4 which were highlighted, and beside them in Arabic was the word “Hezbollah”.

It was at this point that Eid was contacted by Hezbollah, which claimed that some of the phones he was investigating were being used by Hezbollah as part of a counter-espionage operation against Mossad spy agency-and that he needed to back off.

That veiled warning was followed by a failed attempt to kill Lt.-Col Shehadeh, Eid’s boss.
On January 25, 2008, Eid himself was murdered in an explosion.

The Washington Post notes that the CBC has been warned by a U.N. attorney that he would inform the Canadian authorities that the news agency had obtained privileged U.N. documents. Considering the fact that the UN at one point lost track of Eid’s findings and that they failed to anticipate the danger he was in, it is understandable why the UN would not want details to leak out.

The other question of course is to what degree Syria and Iran are involved in the murder of Hariri-Hezbollah does not blow its nose, let alone its enemies, without the approval of its backers. But at this point, considering how the UN has allowed the trail to grow cold, it is unlikely that any linkage will be made.

More at Memeorandum

Technorati Tag: and and .


Daled Amos


22
Nov 10

The New Waters Evidence: Emails From Her Chief Of Staff

As TPM reported Friday, the House ethics committee has delayed the hearing of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and is sending the case back to investigation, citing new evidence in the case.

Waters, in response, released a scathing statement saying the decision all but proves that she is innocent and that the committee’s case against her is weak. She also claimed that the new evidence in question is neither new nor damning.

According to the New York Times, the new evidence is comprised of emails between Waters’ chief of staff (and grandson) and the House Financial Services Committee, which was working on language for a bank bailout bill in 2008. From the Times:

The e-mails show that Mr. Moore was actively engaged in discussing with committee members details of a bank bailout bill apparently after Ms. Waters agreed to refrain from advocating on the bank’s behalf.

Waters is accused of committing three ethics violations by helping secure TARP money for a bank, OneUnited, in which her husband owned stock. The ethics subcommittee that made the charges said she got language into the bailout bill that would specifically benefit OneUnited.

Waters has maintained her innocence, contending that she was trying to help all small minority- and women-owned banks. Complicating the case is the fact that a OneUnited executive was, at the time, the head of the National Banking Association, a trade group for minority banks.

“The Committee has had this ‘new’ document since October 29th, and it does not provide any new significant information,” she said in a statement. “In fact, the document shows that my office was working to ensure that Emergency Economic Stabilization Act assisted small and minority institutions. The document does not reflect any action on behalf of any specific company.”

According to the statement of alleged violation — the list of charges released by an ethics subcommittee earlier this year — Waters agreed to stop advocating on behalf of OneUnited after Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the Financial Services Committee, warned her it could look bad.

The matter will now go back to the investigative subcommittee, and a new statement of alleged violation will be released if they still find evidence of wrongdoing.

For more on the case, see TPM’s past coverage here.







TPMMuckraker


22
Nov 10

Maxine Water’s Corruption Trial Delayed Because of Evidence She Was Lying

The ethics trial of Maxine Waters was supposed to to start today, but in a surprise announcement the house committee announced last week that the trial was being delayed.  While Ms Waters claimed this was a victory, the NY Times has reported that the reason for the delay is new evidence which casts doubt on the truthfulness of the Congresswoman’s testimony.

At issue is deal that Waters is accused of arraigning between  regulators and OneUnited of Massachusetts, a bank in which her husband held shares. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who did not own shares in the company, subsequently inserted language into the bailout bill that effectively directed the Treasury to give special consideration to that bank which had been cited for unsound business practices and excessive compensation.

The new evidence comes from a series of emails from Waters’ Chief of Staff, Mikael Moore and members of the House Financial Services Committee:

The e-mails show that Mr. Moore was actively engaged in discussing with committee members details of a bank bailout bill apparently after Ms. Waters agreed to refrain from advocating on the bank’s behalf. The bailout bill had provisions that ultimately benefited OneUnited, a minority-owned bank in which her husband, Sidney Williams, owned about $ 350,000 in shares.

On the other hand the Congresswoman is happy about the delay of her trial, she is telling people that the committee delayed the hearing because they didn’t have enough evidence:

“The committee’s decision to cancel the hearing and put it off indefinitely demonstrates that the committee does not have a strong case and would not be able to prove any violation has occurred,” Ms. Waters said in a written statement.

Not so fast Rep. Waters

A person directly involved in the investigation said the new e-mails could show that members of her staff continued to work on the bank’s behalf.

“It may directly contradict a bit of Maxine’s story, if not the actual facts, the way she has told it,” said the person, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the trial.

Among other key documents pointing toward  wrongdoing by Ms Waters is an October 17, 2008, email from former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Banking and Finance King Mueller to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari and other Treasury officials referencing the contact between Frank and Paulson:

Just spoke w/ Jim [Segel] in BF’s [Barney Frank’s] office. This is about One United Bank (a minority owned bank in BF’s district). Maxine Waters is interested in the bank as well, Treas[ury] and others met w/ them (minority bankers assoc) last month per the Water’s request. They were a big holder in f/f preferred. BF is interested and may call HMP [Henry Paulson] again about this. FDIC is their primary federal regulator. [Emphasis added.]

And there is also this October 16, 2008, email from Kashkari to former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Appropriations and Management Peter Dugas:

“Peter, Jim Siegel [sic] from Frank’s office called a few times-can one of you follow-up with him?” (Segel serves as Frank’s Chief Counsel.) Paulson’s October 2008 calendar, which has been released separately, details calls from Frank on October 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, and 17.

With respect to Rep. Waters, the documents include a January 13, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, expressing surprise at Waters’ apparent conflict of interest: “Further to email below, WSJ [Wall Street Journal] tells me: …Apparently this bank is the only one that has gotten money through section 103-6 of the EESA law. And Maxine Waters’ husband is on the board of the bank. ??????”

The fact that Frank and Waters improperly intervened to score some TARP cash for One United is not shocking. This is exactly the kind of corrupt deal-making expected when the federal government decided to throw massive amounts of taxpayer dollars at private institutions.

According to the NY Times, these e-mails will be studied by the ethics committee’s investigative subcommittee, said a statement released by Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the committee chairwoman, and Representative Jo Bonner, Republican of Alabama.

New E-Mails Delay Ethics Trial of Lawmaker
By ASHLEY PARKER




YID With LID


22
Nov 10

Bombshell evidence may make Waters an ethics nightmare for Dems

The reason it got postponed.


Apparently, the Charlie Rangel ethics trial was just the warm-up act.  The New York Times reported over the weekend that the House Ethics Committee suddenly postponed the trial of Maxine Waters on ethics violation because it found more evidence of direct intervention by her office to benefit the bank in which her husband owned a […]

Read this post »

Hot Air » Top Picks


22
Nov 10

U.S. District Court Judge found “ample evidence to establish the association” between CAIR, ISNA, NAIT and Hamas

Recently an erroneous story circulated to the effect that ISNA and CAIR had been removed from the unindicted co-conspirator list — see here. The story turns out to be even worse for Hamas-linked CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT, three of the most important Islamic supremacist organizations in the U.S. today: the judge’s actual ruling has just been unsealed, and as it turns out, the judge reaffirmed the three organizations’ links with Hamas. He was only taking issue with the publication of the unindicted co-conspirator list. “Judge’s ruling on Islamic groups as ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ made public,” by Josh Gerstein at Politico (of all places), November 19 (thanks to D. C. Watson):

A federal judge’s long-secret ruling that federal prosecutors violated the rights of three major American Islamic organizations and others named as unindicted co-conspirators in a Texas terrorism support case finally became public on Friday.

However, publication of the ruling is a mixed blessing for the groups: the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust. That’s because U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented “ample evidence to establish the association” of the three organizations with Hamas, a Palestinian group that the U.S. has labeled as a terrorist organization and with a defunct charity convicted in the terrorism support case, the Holy Land Foundation.

NAIT appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn Solis’s ruling and have it unsealed. The federal appeals court recently agreed that the ruling should be unsealed and suggested that parts of it went too far, but the appeals panel refused to change it….

Jihad Watch


21
Nov 10

Wegman exposed: Experts find “shocking” plagiarism in 2006 climate report requested by Joe Barton (R-TX) – Meanwhile, evidence grows that recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.

The evidence has become overwhelming that recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (see “Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick and below).  Indeed, as WAG notes, within a few decades, nobody is going to be talking about hockey sticks, they will be talking about right angles or hockey skates (see chart above).

The disinformers (and the confusionists who Curry favor with them), however, are not merely oblivious to the multiple, independent lines of scientific investigation that lead to that conclusion.  They have for over a decade tried to discredit one small piece of that underlying analysis, the Hockey Stick graph developed by Michael Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes — continuing their obsession even after that analysis was largely reaffirmed by a 2006 report from the National Academy of Sciences, the “Supreme Court of science.”

A cornerstone of the disinformer’s ultimately self-destructive attack on climate science is a 2006 report, commissioned by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), and led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, who is now himself under investigation by GMU.  You can find all the details you could want about the shoddy analysis of the report at Deep Climate — including his “methodical demolishing of any hint of statistics” in the report, as John Mashey puts it in the comments.

Here’s more from the stunning USA Today piece:

It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others’ integrity when you don’t conform to the basic rules of scholarship,” Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

Led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, the 2006 report criticized the statistics and scholarship of scientists who found the last century the warmest in 1,000 years.

“The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists,” says Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists.”

But in March, climate scientist Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts asked GMU, based in Fairfax, Va., to investigate “clear plagiarism” of one of his textbooks.

Bradley says he learned of the copying from a year-long analysis of the Wegman report made by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif. Mashey’s analysis concludes that 35 of the report’s 91 pages “are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.” Copying others’ text or ideas without crediting them violates universities’ standards, according to Liz Wager of the London-based Committee on Publication Ethics.

“The matter is under investigation,” says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university’s request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges “wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality.”

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

“Actually fairly shocking,” says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. “My own preliminary appraisal would be ‘guilty as charged.’ “

•”If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them,” says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. “There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate.”

•”The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side,” says Ohio State’s Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU’s misconduct committee.

The report was requested in 2005 by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, then the head of the House energy committee. Barton cited the report in an October letter to The Washington Post when he wrote that Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann’s work was “rooted in fundamental errors of methodology that had been cemented in place as ‘consensus’ by a closed network of friends.”

The Wegman report criticized 1998 and 1999 reports led by Mann (Bradley was a co-author) that calculated global temperatures over the last dozen centuries. It also contained an analysis of Mann’s co-authors that appears partly cribbed from Wikipedia, Garner says….

A 2006 report by the National Research Council (NRC), which examines scientific disputes under a congressional charter, largely validated Mann, Bradley and the other climate scientists, according to Texas A&M’s Gerald North, the panel’s head. The NRC report found the Wegman report’s criticism of the type of statistics used in 1998 and 1999 papers reasonable but beside the point, as many subsequent studies had reproduced their finding that the 20th century was likely the warmest one in centuries.

Indeed, the Nature article on the report was headlined, “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph.”

The Wegman report called for improved “sharing of research materials, data and results” from scientists. But in response to a request for materials related to the report, GMU said it “does not have access to the information.” Separately in that response, Wegman said his “email was downloaded to my notebook computer and was erased from the GMU mail server,” and he would not disclose any report communications or materials because the “work was done offsite,” aside from one meeting with Spencer….

Here is an example of passages Bradley believes were plagiarized with “substantially close” wording from his textbook, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary. Sentences in bold italic represents sections he believes were paraphrased:

Bradley text: “A cross section of most temperate forest trees will show an alternation of lighter and darker bands, each of which is usually continuous around the tree circumference. These are seasonal growth increments produced by meristematic tissues in the tree’s cambium. When view in detail (Fig. 10.1), it is clear that they are made up of sequences of large, thin-walled cells (earlywood) and more densely packed, thick-walled cells (latewood). Collectively, each couplet of earlywood and latewood comprises an annual growth increment, more commonly called a tree ring. The mean width of a ring in any one tree is a function of many variables, including the tree species, tree age, availability of stored food within the tree and of important nutrients in the soil, and a whole complex of climatic factors (sunshine, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and their distribution throughout the year). The problem facing dendroclimatologists is to extract whatever climatic signal is available in the tree ring data and to distinguish from the background noise.”

Wegman report: “A cross section of a temperate forest tree shows variation of lighter and darker bands that are usually continuous around the circumference of the tree. These bands are the so-called tree rings and are due to seasonal effects. Each tree ring is composed of large thin-walled cells called early wood and smaller more densely packed thick walled cells called late wood. The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors so the problem is to extract the temperature signal and to distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors.”

Bradly tells USA Today: “They should just retract or withdraw the report as you would any scientific publication that has these sort of problems.”

Michael Mann, in an email to ClimateProgress, says

I thank John Mashey and “DeepClimate” for their hard-nosed investigative work that ultimately led to this news piece. I also thank veteran USA Today science reporter Dan Vergano for making sure that this deeply troubling story is heard by a wide, mainstream audience. The photo that appears with the article shows an iceberg. I wonder if it’s a metaphor-for, indeed, I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far with this story. I expect there will be more developments to come.

While it’s good to see attacks on climate science discredited in the media, the most important job is communicating climate science.  In this regard, the real story is how many independent analyses have supported (and expanded) the original Hockey Stick analysis.

Regular CP readers can skip the rest of this post, but I want to end with a focus on the science, not the discrediting of the disinformers.

There are now more studies that show recent warming is unprecedented –  in magnitude and speed and cause — than you can shake a stick at!

As with a pride of lions, and a delusion of disinformers, perhaps the grouping should get its own name, like “a team of hockey sticks” (see “The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn’t Disappear“).

  1. GRL:  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.
  2. JGR:  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.” [figure below]

Hockey SA small

Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961–1990AD average) for the last ∼1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39‐year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2s uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.

Yes, the 39‐year Gaussian filter appears to wipe out over half of the warming since 1950 as this NASA chart makes clear:

The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.  And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.  We are punching the climate beast — and she ain’t happy about it!

The evidence mounts every year that unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions threaten multiple catastrophes (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice“).

For the record, even a moderate MWP (even if it were global, which remains unproven) does nothing whatsoever to undermine our understanding of human-caused global warming.  The temperature trend in the past millennium prior to about 1850 is well explained in the scientific literature as primarily due to changes in the solar forcing along with the effect of volcanoes, whereas the recent rise in temperature has been driven primarily — if not almost entirely — by human activity (see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Inhofe, CO2 — but not the sun — “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850 and a post to be named later).

The Geophysical Research Letters paper, “Twentieth century warming in deep waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence: A unique feature of the last millennium” concludes:

… irrespective of the precise mechanisms responsible for the temperature variations reconstructed from core MD99‐2220, it is unquestionable that the last century has been marked there by a warming trend having no equivalent over the last millennium.

For those keeping score at home, here are a few more members of the team of hockey sticks (although the last two aren’t actually independent, as discussed here).

From Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (2009):

figure

From Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity (2010):

Lake Tanganyika lake surface temperature

From Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years (2008)

mann1.jpg

And from McShane and Wyner (2010):

mcshanewynerhockey.png

And yes, McShane and Wyner has been debunked in the blogosphere — see I went to a statistician fight and a hockey stick broke out — and is currently being eviscerated in the original journal itself.

For more on Wegman, see Wegman-gate by Scott A. Mandia, Professor of Physical Sciences.  He notes:

John Mashey answers that question in his 250 page dissection of the Wegman Report.  Please view the six page Executive Summary and the full report.  Arthur Smith has an excellent summary of Mashey’s Report on his blog:

Among Mashey’s findings:

  • Of 91 pages, 35 are largely plagiarized text, often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning. 3 pages are a mathematical appendix that seems to be the only contribution of the report’s 2nd author (David Scott). 7 pages are a padded bibliography (see below). That leaves barely half the report as actual original material from Wegman and Said.
  • A sketch of central England temperatures for the past 1000 years from the first (1990) IPCC report was highlighted in the Wegman report, but the report’s version was altered, at least by shifting the time axis and truncating the recent temperature rise (already truncated at 1975 in the original). An unaltered version of the same sketch can be found in the NAS report; until now nobody seems to have noticed that Wegman (or a source or associate) had distorted the graph.
  • Of 80 references in the bibliography, 40 are never cited in the report.
  • Many of the science papers in the remaining 40 are, while cited and sometimes summarized, otherwise ignored in the analysis
  • Wegman sent the report to a few statisticians; all known to him. Some were given only a few days to comment. Some gave strong advice that was simply ignored. This was claimed as peer review by Representative Whitfield
  • Some commenters were surprised to be listed as reviewers
  • Wegman and Said promised to publish their analysis in the peer-reviewed literature, but other than one paper in a journal where Said was associate editor (accepted 6 days after receipt), none have appeared
  • Incriminating documents associated with Said have disappeared from websites in recent weeks

Climate Progress


19
Nov 10

Rep. Waters Ethics Hearing Postponed Due To New Evidence

On the heels of a censure recommendation for Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), the House ethics committee today announced that the upcoming ethics hearing for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) is postponed indefinitely.

Unspecified new evidence has cropped up in the case, according to the committee, and the matter will go back to an investigative panel. The hearing had been set for Nov. 29.

A spokesman for Waters did not immediately have comment.

Waters was accused in July of committing three ethics violations. According to the committee, Waters improperly helped secure TARP funding for a bank, OneUnited, which her husband had stock in at the time.

She has maintained her innocence, saying she was legitimately helping an association of minority- and women-owned businesses get in touch with Treasury officials during the financial crisis.

Waters has been demanding a hearing since the allegations were announced in July.

The announcement takes the process back several steps. It is unclear what would happen to the investigation if it is pushed into the new Congress, which begins in January.









TPMMuckraker


19
Nov 10

More evidence that the Stuxnet worm specifically targeted Iran’s nuke program

Centrifuges zapped.
American Thinker Blog


19
Nov 10

More evidence that the Stuxnet worm specifically targeted Iran’s nuke program

Centrifuges zapped.
American Thinker Blog


15
Nov 10

Prosecutors (Finally) Intro Evidence Tying DeLay To Money Swap

As former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s corruption trial continues, prosecutors have finally introduced evidence tying DeLay to a money swap orchestrated by his Texas PAC which the prosecutors say was illegal.

DeLay is accused of money laundering during the 2002 Texas state house campaign. His state PAC allegedly collected $ 190,000 in corporate donations, then funneled that money through the RNC and into the campaigns of seven Republican candidates. Corporate donations are illegal in Texas.

After six days of testimony, prosecutors last week introduced the tape of an interview DeLay had with investigators in 2005, before he was indicted. In the tape, DeLay says he knew about the deal before it happened, telling investigators that the executive director of his PAC asked him to OK the deal.

DeLay said he knew the PAC “was going to take $ 190,000 and take it to the RNC and exchange it for hard money.” According to the Austin-American Statesman, DeLay said he only responded, “Fine.”

“I think because it was — it’s such a large amount of money, he wanted to make sure that — that I knew it was — that it was happening,” DeLay said on the tape, according to the AP.

After the tape was played, DeLay claimed he had misspoken, saying he was “inarticulate and clumsy.”

“Even if I knew about the deal, the deal is legal. So what’s the conspiracy?” he said.

DeLay’s defense has repeatedly argued that the money swap was legal, and that the $ 190,000 that went into the RNC was different from the $ 190,000 that came out.

Prosecutors expect to wrap their case Tuesday.









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