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Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing...

Here it is: When our great grandchildren are dealing with the effects of climate change, they will look at this and hate us: http://t.co/YBv5vM8Kzu— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 27, 2015 This is Vox's piece by Brad Plumer depicting Senator James Inhofe tossing a snowball on the Senate floor.  He then segues into more pretty charts showing data from the Climate Change Institute and NOAA. When will the climate kook-aid drinking liberals get it through their heads? It's not pretty charts, it's the data behind them that's cooked.If you use cooked data to make pretty charts, they are still wrong.  Ask...

Virginia’s highest court has denied a conservative group’s effort to force the University of Virginia to turn over emails from a controversial climate scientist who worked at the school. The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday held that the public university wasn’t obligated under the state’s freedom of information law to release thousands of emails that Penn State researcher Michael Mann wrote while he was a UVA professor several years ago. Mr. Mann in 2009 came under scrutiny among global warming skeptics after hackers leaked thousands of email exchanges between the professor and other researchers that suggested that the scientists sought...

Unpublished research by university scientists is exempt from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday, rejecting an attempt by skeptics of global warming to view the work of a prominent climate researcher during his years at the University of Virginia. The ruling is the latest turn in the FOIA request filed in 2011 by Del. Robert Marshall (R-Prince William) and the American Tradition Institute to obtain research and e-mails of former U-Va. professor Michael Mann.

n 2002 Richard Warman appointed himself Canada's Hatefinder General and went around the Internet hunting down so-called haters and turning them in for lucrative tax-free sums amounting to many thousands of dollars. Hatefinder Warman and his enablers at the Commission abused the extremely narrow constitutional approval given to Section 13 by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision and instead turned it into a personal inquisition for himself and his pals. Parliament took my advice and abolished Section 13. Now it's déjà vu all over again: Michael Mann turns out to be the Richard Warman of climate science, a man...

Mann and his lawyers doctored a quote and put their own version of it in direct quotation marks. That's bad enough. But they did it for a specific reason. Because the original makes clear that Sir Muir's findings apply only to the "CRU scientists" - that's to say, employees of the University of East Anglia, who are the only people the Russell panel was charged with investigating, and were therefore the only people it was in a position to exonerate. So, as evidence of Michael Mann's "exoneration", the best his lawyers can come up with is a fake quote from...

Well, I can't speak for Dr Mann or my co-defendants, but I want to put it in front of a jury - in part because I loathe "settling" and regard it as a malign and corrupting influence on the American "justice" system. Nobody's guilty or innocent any more, are they? It's all about the settling. But the pressure to "settle" means that, for a litigious goon like Dr Mann, simply launching suits relieves him of the need to win them. Nuts to that. He wanted this case, so he can have it and take it to a jury.

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

Thank you also to all those who've made suggestions with respect to both the science and the law. The good advice I'm keeping close to my chest, the not-so-good ones we might publish here to throw Dr Mann's Big Tobacco lawyers off the scent. Speaking of the upcoming trial, Denyse O'Leary was a key part of the Internet pushback against Canada's squalid "human rights" commissions five years ago, and she has noted the banner above. Denyse has a post today about the Scopes Monkey Trial comparison, and writes: The choice of symbolism is interesting. The only thing one can be...

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

Speaking of "befuddled effete new-male eunuchs", "Climate Science Is For Sissies Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Well, okay, not quite. The actual headline is "Climate Science Is For Second-Raters Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Our old pal James Delingpole is referring to MIT prof Richard Lindzen's testimony to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster this week. This exchange with the ghastly, condescending Tim Yeo was especially choice:

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

It is an interesting legal question whether a man who fraudently claims to be a Nobel laureate in a legal filing can, in any sense, be defamed.

As readers may know, National Review and I have an impending court date in Washington with Dr Michael E Mann, creator of the global-warming “hockey stick” and self-proclaimed Nobel laureate, for the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“. (You can contribute to our legal defense fund here; also, the TV rights to my forthcoming white Bronco chase are still available – we’ll be using a hybrid, of course). Forced by circumstance to take an interest in the latest developments on the climate-change “consensus”, I was interested to see this story, in which The New York Times...

Last month, a group of scientists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott launched the latest salvo in the global warming war. They announced that they had reconstructed the last 11,000 years of Earth climate history, based on various proxies, and had found that in the 20th century there was an unprecedented uptick in temperature. The Marcott paper was hailed by liberal media outlets; to cite just a few examples: * “We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of ­climate data prove it.” The Atlantic, March 10. * “The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an...

We wrote here about a recent effort by a group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick. The Marcott paper, as you would expect, received uncritical coverage in the liberal press. But it didn’t take long for climate scientists to begin taking it apart, as we noted in our post. Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used...

Steve McIntyre writes of the curious uptick in the 20th century, which doesn’t seem to be rooted in reality, or to have been in Marcott’s PhD thesis: While one expects a difference between NHX and SHX in the Holocene, the remarkable difference between NHX and SHX not just in the 20th century, but in the 19th century is a source of considerable interest. According to Marcott, NHX temperatures increased by 1.9 deg C between 1920 and 1940, a surprising result even for the most zealous activists. But for the rest of us, given the apparent resiliency of our species...

Flat-out: Empirical evidence illustrates that President Obama is undeserving of re-election.What do you think? Does Barack Obama deserve to be re-elected? Not based on what I see. (The following information was mostly gleaned from the Nuclear Counterarguments 16-book series.)Obama was elected to steer the economy toward recovery and he has not done so. Instead of learning from history where the Roaring Twenties teach us that austerity brings about a quick, robust and lasting recovery, he instead has followed FDRHoover’s Dirty Thirties strategy of stimulus spending, with the same failed results of a malaise without foreseeable end. (See #6 Austerity Versus Stimulus – What Is...

Phil Jones’ first instinct on learning about Climategate was that it was linked to the Yamal controversy that was in the air in the weeks leading up to Climategate. I had speculated that CRU must have done calculations for Yamal along the lines of the regional chronology for Taimyr published in Briffa et al 2008. CRU was offended and issued sweeping denials, but my surmise was confirmed by an email in the Climategate dossier. Unfortunately neither Muir Russell nor Oxburgh investigated the circumstances of the withheld regional chronology, despite my submission drawing attention to this battleground issue. I subsequently submitted...

Chinese 2485 year tree ring study shows shows sun or ocean controls climate, temps will cool til 2068 A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan Tree rings by Lui et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2500 years. The temperature, the rate of change: it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Lui et al do a fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do a brave predictions as well....