Archive for the ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Category
Slain Iranian scientist was working on a nuclear bomb detonator
Daryush Rezaee-Nejad
Straight from the Debka File: “Daryush Rezaee-Nejad, 35, who died Saturday, July 23, when two motorcyclists shot him in the head and throat in front of his home in Tehran, was a rising star of the new generation of Iranian nuclear scientists. debkafile’s Iranian sources disclose he was attached to one of the most secret teams of Iran’s nuclear program, employed by the defense ministry to construct detonators for the nuclear bombs and warhead already in advanced stages of development.
This was another in the series in the past year of mysterious attacks of top-flight scientists attached to the Iranian nuclear program.
Our sources disclose that while he may have fit the Iranian media’s description of “a university student studying for a master’s degree in electricity at the Khajeh-Nasser University, one of the defense ministry’s Institutes of Hydraulic Engineering and Structural Engineering,” that description applied only to one part of his work.
He was also to be found daily at the top secret Parchine nuclear and military laboratories in northeast Tehran, where most of the work on nuclear bomb components and operational warheads is conducted.
His employment in this dual capacity helped Tehran keeping these activities under deep cover.
It also accounts for the Iranian media’s conflicting accounts of Razaee-Nejad’s role.
Initially, he was described as “a nuclear scientist working for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.” That was Saturday shortly after his death. Sunday, they changed the story and called him “an electronics master’s student.” However, the Iranian Fars news agency alone suggested. “…the media had made a mistake in reporting Rezaee-Nejad’s specialty” and went on to insist that he had links with the defense ministry.
Further belying the claim that he was only a student, Iran’s parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani Sunday delivered a furious diatribe against “the American-Zionist terrorist act “against one of the country’s scientists as yet another sign of the degree of American animosity.” He said: “America should think carefully about the consequences of such actions,” and urged Iranian security sources “to deliver a strong response to these evil moves.”
debkafile’s intelligence sources report that Tehran appears to have got in a muddle over the dead scientist’s job description after realizing that disclosing his connection with the nuclear program betrayed how deeply the scientific teams employed in uranium enrichment – and even the scientific manpower directly engaged in building a nuclear bomb – had been penetrated.
Iranian media experts tried hard to undo the damage by retooling that description for an additional reason: They needed to reassure the scientists employed on nuclear work and their families that they were not in danger lest they take fright and run for their lives.
Furthermore, neither the experts nor the public has forgotten that only nine months ago, on November 27, 2010, two leading lights of Iran’s nuclear program were targeted for assassination by the same method in the middle of Tehran: Prof. Fereydoon Abbassi, whom debkafile identified at the time as director of the uranium enrichment centrifuge facility at Natanz, and Dr. Majid Shariari, whom our sources revealed as in charge of the cyber war against the Stuxnet virus attacking the same facility.
Dr. Shariari died on the spot. Prof. Abbasi survived the attack and was appointed Vice President for nuclear affairs and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Organization.
Since Saturday, security has been tightened for Iranian nuclear experts and their families, using special units established for the purpose, according to debkafile’s sources. But this last assassination indicates that the security belt designed to protect them may too have been penetrated.”
US Army Used Psy-Ops Tactics Against Powerful Americans to Push War
Straight from Gizmodo: “Psychological operations are important to the US military. Two highly unpopular wars are being fought among highly unfriendly populaces. But, under federal law, it’s illegal to use American psy-ops influence against other Americans. That hasn’t stopped us, Rolling Stone reports.
According to statements made by members of the Army with psy-ops training—the strategy of both propagandizing, influencing, and extracting information from others—a military team in Afghanistan used their powers against visiting politicians, including several prominent senators. On the list? John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Al Franken, Rep. Steve Israel from the enormously important House Appropriations Committee, and Admiral Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Top brass. To what end? Money.
These are politicians who’ve got the cash in their hands, and you can’t have a war without plenty of it. So the Army decided to play dirty (and illegally), claims Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes. When bigwigs arrived in Kabul, Holmes—whose self-described job is to “play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave—was directed by General William Caldwell to do just that. Get inside their heads:
According to Holmes, the general wanted the [Information Operations] team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?”
Which is illegal. When Holmes balked, he found himself the target of both an internal investigation and a formal reprimand, and a found the backs of his superiors turned against him.
Whether effective or not, the mere existence of psy-ops warriors is serious business. Even if mind control methods are bunk, the fact that the government would be determined to wield this weapon against itself is ominous—and on your tax dollar dime. [Rolling Stone]“
White House fumbles getting its Osama bin Laden story straight
Straight from the Debka File: “Two days after the US President Barack Obama’s triumphal announcement that Osama bin Laden was dead, the White House was grappling with a serious credibility problem: Questions and contradictions are mounting about the how and why US elite SEALs killed the most wanted man in the world at his mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2. New information proving the first stories wrong comes not just from a defensive Pakistan government but also from US officials.
Dismissing the conflicting disclosures as “artificial stories” and “conspiracy theories” won’t wash – not just in the US but in Arab and Muslim countries after Washington was forced to retract data the president’s adviser on terrorism John Brennan put before the media on Tuesday. It was admitted tardily that bin Laden was not armed when he was killed, there was no firefight in the Abbottabad villa and his wife was not used as a human shield.
Pakistani sources challenged other parts of the original narrative and Wednesday, May 4, the dead terrorist’s daughter told Al Arabiya TV most damagingly that her father was captured alive and then shot by US forces.
Even before that, amid rising demands for evidence that Osama bin Laden was dead, White House spokesman Jay Carney confessed Tuesday night: “Even I’m getting confused.”
And no wonder. Monday, in his first statement on the operation, Obama stated: “And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.” Was he talking about a targeted assassination?
Brennan later said that in the firefight in the terrorist’s bedroom he had been asked to surrender and was shot dead when he did not answer. Another US spokesman said the SEALs were ready to take him alive.
Other US sources described the shooting as happening quickly – “in the blink of an eye,” said one. The Republican leader Mitt Romney remarked: “Osama bin Laden took one in the eye.”
His daughter’s evidence contradicted this jumble of American versions. Even though she must have had a Pakistani green light for the Al Arabiya interview, her testimony cannot be lightly dismissed because she was present and shot in the leg before being taken into Pakistani custody. Her version makes it look as though US troops executed her father in cold blood.
The backlash from her testimony will not do much good to the delicate relations between the Obama administration and Muslim rulers like Saudi King Abdullah which are already tested to the limit over US involvement in the Egyptian uprising and Libyan war.
Pakistani leaders are caught awkwardly between an effort to clear their intelligence service ISI of American accusations of collusion in concealing the al Qaeda leader’s presence in its midst, and domestic opinion, which is outraged by their government’s suspected connivance with Washington to betray a Muslim figure and permit American forces to violate sovereign territory.
Reporters in Islamabad heard from the Pakistani foreign secretary Salman Bashir Wednesday, May 4: “We had indicated this complex (in Abbottabad) as far back as 2009 as a possible place,” after sighting suspected terrorist movements on the property. It was not known at the time that bin Laden was hiding there and there were millions of other suspect locations, he said.
Bashir also hit out at former CIA Director Leon Panetta’s comments that informing Islamabad in advance about the raid had been ruled out as “worrying.”
These comments are just the start of the war of words building up between the Zardari-Ghilani government and the Obama administration. Islamabad has one major advantage: The inmates of the Abbottabad villa and the injured persons present when bin Laden was killed are in Pakistani custody, some in military hospitals. They can be produced whenever necessary to rebut Arab and Muslim criticism of Pakistan’s conduct and fend off any attempts to undermine its ties with the Taliban, which has already vowed to avenge Osama bin Laden’s death in Pakistan and Afghanistan and outside those countries.
This verbal war will make further inroads on the Obama White House’s credibility.
Riots in Pakistan after double murder-accused Davis ‘buys’ freedom
Raymond Davis
Straight from the Hindustan Times: “Riots broke out on the streets of Pakistan following the revelation that double murder-accused CIA contractor Raymond Davis was released over a ‘blood-money’ deal, and hundreds of protesters attempted to attack the US Consulate building in Lahore on Wednesday evening. Police wielded to batons, fired warning shots and resorted to tear-gas shelling to control the mob trying to attack the consulate, The Nation reports.
The police also badly tortured a reporting crew of a news channel while they were covering the protests live from the site.
Davis’ release sparked countrywide angry protests, and a large number of protesters – mostly belonging to religious and opposition political parties – converged outside the Lahore Press Club soon after the local media flashed the news.
Tehrik-e-Insaaf and Jamaat-i-Islami activists were leading the protests as they blocked the busy road by setting tyres on fire, creating a traffic mess in the highly sensitive and busy location of the city.
As the angry protesters tried to attack the US consulate, dozens of them sustained injuries as the police resorted to baton-charge to disperse the mob.
The surrounding of the press club turned into battlefield as the protesters – who were chanting full-throat slogans against the Pakistan government and US authorities, terming the release as an attack on the country’s sovereignty – pelted stones and water bottles at the policemen.
The mob also set the effigies of top politicians and US President Barack Obama on fire.
In the wake of similar massive protests in several other parts of Lahore, heavy police contingents have been deployed across the City, while armed patrolling has been intensified to keep the situation under control, police sources said.”
Vaccine — Autism Link Research Was Deliberate Fraud
Straight from the LA Times: “Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 report in the journal Lancet purporting to show a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella “was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud,” says Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, in an editorial published Tuesday. The editorial accompanies the first of three reports by British investigative journalist Brian Deer that document how Wakefield manipulated data in his attempts to prove something that he “knew” before he started his research. Most of the information in the reports has been published previously, but the recent publication of the General Medical Council’s 6-million-word transcript of the hearing in which Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in Britain was revoked allowed the editors of BMJ to peer-review Deer’s reports and confirm the extensive falsifications in the original Lancet paper.
The episode, Godlee said, reminded her of the announcement of the Piltdown man, the paleontological hoax of 1912 that led people to believe for 40 years that a missing link between man and ape had been found.
The original paper authored by Wakefield and 12 others involved 12 children with autism, nine of them with a regressive form in which the children begin to develop normally, then lose speech or other faculties. The average delay between vaccination and onset of autism in eight of the children was 6.3 days, the authors reported, and the parents were said to blame the vaccine.
But, Deer finds:
–Only one of the nine children who supposedly had regressive autism actually did. Three did not have autism at all.
–Five of the children had preexisting developmental problems, despite the paper’s claims that all were normal prior to vaccination.
–Although the paper claimed an average of 6.3 days between vaccination and the onset of symptoms, some children did not show symptoms until months later.
Moreover, none of the details of the medical histories of any of the patients could be matched to those cited in the Lancet article. All had been altered to make Wakefield’s claims more convincing. Ten of the authors subsequently asked that the paper be retracted. The Lancet withdrew the paper last year.
Wakefield had been doing research at the Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, but he resigned the position earlier this year, and it is not clear where he is now.
“The sad thing is, his work has influenced a lot of people,” said Dr. Peter Hotez of the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington, D.C. [Updated Jan. 6, 1:20 p.m.: An earlier version of this article said the Sabin Vaccine Institute is in New York City.] “If you do a Google search of vaccines, so much of what you see are anti-vaccine sentiments using Wakefield’s work as a basis for it, and as a result, children are having vaccines withheld. It’s tragic.”
According to David G. Amaral of the UC Davis MIND Institute, “What is most destructive in an episode such as this is the undermining of the public’s confidence in the integrity of science. I believe that most autism researchers have understood for some time that the weight of scientific evidence does not support the role of vaccines as a major cause of autism. The public should know that science is self-correcting.”
Wakefield “is not the first scientist to be spectacularly wrong,” noted Dr. Paul A. Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who cited such others as Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of cold fusion fame. “But nobody did harm like this guy. Let there be no doubt. Hundreds were hospitalized [because they weren't vaccinated], and four children were killed…. He had a tremendous negative impact.”
But Offit is not sure he is fraudulent. “That implies intent. He’s a believer. That’s why he is so convincing. He is convincing because he is convinced.”
Says Rick Rollens of Sacramento, the parent of an autistic child and one of the founders of the MIND Institute: “This is just another sad installment of the continued public lynching of Dr. Wakefield by the vaccine establishment and their lackeys in the public health community. The relentless personal and professional assaults on Dr. Wakefield will do nothing now or in the future to alter what we as parents of vaccine-induced autistic children already know: that is, vaccines can and do cause autism. No amount of orchestrated attacks by those who have a vested interest in defending the status quo on the historic and courageous work of Dr. Wakefield will change the truth.” “
Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers
"Have you seen my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?"
Straight from Fox News: “Captain Robert Salas was on duty in Montana in 1967 when a UFO shut down the nuclear missiles on his base. And he’s hardly the only one to make such a claim.
On Monday, six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about similar events at the National Press Club, all centering around unidentified flying objects and nuclear missiles. They plan to urge the government to publicly confirm the incidents, stating that they were ordered never to discuss the events.
“We’re talking about unidentified flying objects, as simple as that,” Salas told FoxNews.com. “They’re often known as UFOs, you could call them that,” he added. Salas, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch officer, will host the event along with researcher Robert Hastings, author of “UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites.
According to the pair, witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby.
“I was on duty when an object came over and hovered directly over the site,” Salas said, regarding the March 16, 1967, event at Malmstrom AFB in Montana. “The missiles shut down, 10 Minuteman missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later,” he said.
Are they evidence of unknown military action from a foreign country, or are these extraterrestrial
visitors? Salas thinks the answer is clear — and finds it curious that they’re so interested in our nuclear arsenal.
“There’s a strong interest [in our missiles] by these objects, wherever they come from. I personally think they’re not from planet Earth.”
Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men claim the Air Force warned them never to disclose details of the events.
“The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it,” Salas said. Col. Halt adds, “I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted — both then and now — to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation.”
The group plans to distribute declassified U.S. government documents at the event that they claim will substantiate the reality of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites extending back to 1948. The press conference will also address present-day concerns about the abuse of government secrecy as well as the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg, these stories,” Salas told FoxNews.com.”
If the Legislation Passes, Your New Car WILL Have a Black Box — For Your Own Good
This is a black box
Straight from Dvorak Uncensored: “Insurance companies will love this. The Authorities will love this. Wives and husbands being cheated on will love this. In short anyone can, legally or with a little bribe money, find out where your car has been.
Congress is now eyeing new legislation that would force the automotive industry to make safety updates to vehicles in the wake of the massive recalls by Toyota. If the legislation were made into law, all automakers would be required to install black boxes into their automobiles and to pay fees to the government to fund safety agencies.
The black boxes would record vehicle parameters leading up to an accident to help investigators determine if the accident was an issue with the vehicle or driver error. The draft of the legislation was released by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman of California. The legislation would also remove any caps on civil penalties a carmaker was subject to.
The legislation would also give the NHTSA the power to order an immediate recall of vehicles if it finds that there is an “imminent hazard of death or serious injury.” Other sections of the draft legislation would impose new safety standards that relate to brake override systems and preventing pedals from being trapped on the floor.”
Remember that ash cloud? It didn’t exist, says new evidence.
Eruption: The Eyjafjallajokull volcano saw flights across Europe grind to a halt and passengers stranded.
Straight from the Daily Mail: “Britain’s airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country.
Skies fell quiet for six days, leaving as many as 500,000 Britons stranded overseas and costing airlines hundreds of millions of pounds.
Estimates put the number of Britons still stuck abroad at 35,000.
However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk.
The satellite images demonstrate that the skies were largely clear, which will not surprise the millions who enjoyed the fine, hot weather during the flight ban.
Jim McKenna, the Civil Aviation Authority’s head of airworthiness, strategy and policy, admitted: ‘It’s obvious that at the start of this crisis there was a lack of definitive data.
‘It’s also true that for some of the time, the density of ash above the UK was close to undetectable.’
The satellite images will be used by airlines in their battle to win tens of millions of pounds in compensation from governments for their losses.
The National Air Traffic Control Service decision to ban flights was based on Met Office computer models which painted a picture of a cloud of ash being blown south from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.
These models should have been tested by the Met Office’s main research plane, a BAE 146 jet, but it was in a hangar to be repainted and could not be sent up until last Tuesday - the last day of the ban.
Evidence has emerged that the maximum density of the ash was only about one 20th of the limit that scientists, the Government, and aircraft and engine manufacturers have now decided is safe.
British Airways chief Willie Walsh always insisted the total shutdown went too far.
‘My personal belief is that we could have safely continued operating for a period,’ he said.
Mark Tanzer, chief executive of Britain’s ABTA, which represents British travel agents and tour operators, said about 100,000 stranded British travellers should have been returned home by Monday morning.
About 35,000 more will remain marooned until Friday, the group said.
‘While most flights are back to normal, and most stranded British passengers will be back by the end of this weekend, there is still quite a high level of disruption in some destinations.
‘In some areas of the world, there is a significant lack of air capacity to enable British people to be returned quickly,’ Tanzer said.
Many Icelandic airports are closed and though authorities say Eyjafjallajokull is now producing much less ash, they confirmed no signs of the eruption ending.”
Global Warming Roundup
Global Warming Deniers
Newsweek, April 28, 1975
Copenhagen Conference Carbon Footprint
Head of IPCC Poised to Make $Billions$
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri
Straight from Dvorak Uncensored: “Head of IPCC Poised to Make a Fortune for Himself — Wow, this guy is really something. Exactly how all the facts in this article were ignored by the media until now is astonishing. He will be the first Carbon billionaire, not Gore. Gore is small potatoes compared to this genius.
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
related story:
Carbon traders already making millions. And they are not who you think they are.
The oil companies, given huge amounts of permits, found it easy to trim their emissions a little and so make huge profits. Expanding businesses and public services, on the other hand, were forced to buy more permits. In its first year of operation Shell made a profit from carbon-trading of £49.9million and BP a profit of £43.1million.
How much detail will the public and “warmists” need to read and hear about before it dawns on them that this is one huge scam and the money is coming out of their pockets in the form of increased prices and taxation? Dumbing down the educational system and subverting the media has indeed paid off.”
Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming
Al Gore is our Saviour!
Straight from the Telegraph: “Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.
As Richard North says: This is serial.
UPDATE: As Steve McIntyre reports at ClimateAudit, it has long been suspected that the CRU had been playing especially fast and loose with Russian – more particularly Siberian – temperature records. Here from March 2004, is an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann.
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil
And here at Watts Up With That is a guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent
And here is what one of the commenters has to say about the way the data has been cherry-picked and skewed for political ends:
The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.
One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.
Not, of course, dear readers that I’m in any way tempted to crow about these latest revelations. After all, so many of my colleagues, junior and senior, have been backing me on this one to the hilt….
Oh, if anyone speaks Russian, here’s the full report.”
Climategate Scandal Spreads to New Zealand as MSM Continues Ostrich Act
Straight from NewsBusters: “Oops! If the mainstream media was hoping that the Climategate scandal would be limited to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Reasearch Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, they are out of luck. This scandal has now reared its ugly head on the other side of the globe at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA) which is that nation’s chief climate advisory unit.
Watts Up With That? reposting from New Zealand’s TBR.cc Investigate magazine’s breaking news forum explains this latest development in the widening Climategate scandal:
The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.
In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.
Here is the caption under that NIWA graph:
Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).
Mama, save me! I’m scared! But wait. Watts Up With That? provides us with a very important caveat in the form of another graph:
But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:
Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.
The revelations are published today in a news alert from The Climate Science Coalition of NZ:
Straight away you can see there’s no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.
Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?
Yeah? What is going on? Why did NIWA frighten your humble correspondent?
Why does NIWA’s graph show strong warming, but graphing their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!
Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?
It is relatively easy to find out. We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.
Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.
What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.
About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.
One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.
We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.
NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.
Pardon the interruption here but does anybody else notice how it is the much maligned blogosphere that is doing the detailed footwork that the mainstream media should, but won’t, do? Okay, I return you now to the unfolding Climategate scandal:
NIWA’s David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.
“Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?”
“No, no,” replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science Coalition and accusing them of “misleading” people about the temperature adjustments.
Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were “destroyed” or “lost”, meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.
So far this New Zealand scandal remains unreported in the American MSM but, to its credit, there is a report on this latest Climategate outbreak across the pond by James Delingpole the UK Telegraph. Meanwhile, if the U.S. media ever pull their ostrich heads out of the sand, they will have a huge amount of catching up to do in this scandal.”
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up
"The concensus is in! There is no debate! Why won't you listen?"
Straight from the Times Online: “There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.
Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.
World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.
Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.
Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling. British officials said they were no longer confident that it would contain specific commitments from individual countries on payments to a global fund to help poor nations to adapt to climate change while the draft text on protecting rainforests has also been weakened.
Even the long-term target of ending net deforestation by 2030 has been placed in square brackets, meaning that the date could be deferred. An international monitoring system to identify illegal logging is now described in the text as optional, where before it was compulsory. Negotiators are also unable to agree on a date for a global peak in greenhouse emissions.
Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”
Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.
“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.
He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”
Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.””
Iranian Nuclear Monitor Pushed er… Falls from 12 story Building
Vienna International Center
Straight from Dvorak Uncensored: “Police in Austria are investigating the mysterious death of a British nuclear monitoring expert. Early news reports said that Timothy Hampton, who worked for an international monitoring unit called the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), died after falling 12 stories in a building in the Vienna International Center, one of the United Nations’ main office complexes in Europe. Reports said Austrian authorities would order an autopsy. “Everything points towards a suicide, and there are no signs of any third party being involved,” a police spokesman, Alexander Haslinger, told the French news agency AFP. Authorities in Vienna have privately indicated to other governments that while suicide is the principal cause of death under investigation, they haven’t ruled out the possibility that it could have been an accident or even murder, according to an official source in Washington. Official reports and a former U.N. official indicate that Hampton fell 12 stories down an internal emergency stairwell—from the 17th to the fifth floor—in the high-rise Vienna building.
Some news reports said that Hampton had been involved in the current round of negotiations between Iran, the U.S., and several other Western countries regarding Tehran’s controversial nuclear program.”
Farrakhan suspicious of H1N1 vaccine
Farrakhan and Castro
Straight from UPI: “Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan told an audience in Memphis he believes the H1N1 flu vaccine was developed to kill people, a witness said.
Farrakhan, 76, spoke for nearly three hours Sunday at a gathering to observe the religious group’s Holy Day of Atonement, which also marked the 14th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal reported, citing a source who attended the speech.
“The Earth can’t take 6.5 billion people. We just can’t feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as you can. We have to develop a science that kills them and makes it look as though they died from some disease,” Farrakhan said, adding that many wise people won’t take the vaccine.
“The black community has become toxic and must cleanse and restore peace from within,” Farrakhan said.
Farrakhan told listeners not to become complacent as a result of Barack Obama’s election as the United States’ first black president, the newspaper said.
“You have to understand that he was voted in to take on the affairs of a nation, not yours and mine. He is the American president, not the black president,” he said.”
Hersh: ‘Executive assassination ring’ reported directly to Cheney
"This is what I think of you Moonbats!"
Straight from The Raw Story: “Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of “America’s Constitutional Crisis” whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.
Hersh replied, “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
Hersh told MinnPost.com blogger Eric Black in an email exchange after the event that the subject was “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.” He is looking into it for a book, but he believes it may be a year or two before he has enough evidence “for even the most skeptical.”
Stories have been coming out about covert Pentagon assassination squads for the last several years. In 2003, Hersh himself reported on Task Force 121, which operated chiefly out of the Joint Special Operations Command. Others stories spoke of a proposed Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group.
As Hersh noted in Minnesota, the New York Times on Monday described the Joint Special Operations Command as overseeing the secret commando units in Afghanistan whose missions were temporarily ordered halted last month because of growing concerns over excessive civilian deaths.
However, it appears that Hersh is now on the trail of some fresh revelation about these squads and their connection to Vice-President Cheney that goes well beyond anything that has previously been reported.
Eric Black’s blog posting, which includes an hour-long audio recording of the full University of Minnesota colloquy, is available here.”
