text: « More on the stolen emails | Main | Willis Eschenbach caught lying about temperature trends » 
   
   Category: Global Warming 
   
   Posted on: December 8, 2009 9:52 PM, by Tim Lambert 
   
   Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph: 
   
   The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate. 
   
   I didn't add the link to this paragraph. It's a link to the WaPo's own report on the email theft and it directly contradicts Palin. For example, the WaPo's news story says: 
   
   Phil Jones, the unit's director, wrote a colleague that he would "hide" a problem with data from Siberian tree rings with more accurate local air temperature measurements. 
   
   But Palin says that he tried to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, when in fact he showed the increase in global temperatures since 1960. 
   
   The Wapo's report does not support any of the false claims in Palin's paragraph. No they didn't deliberately destroy data, no, they didn't try to stop their critics from publishing. And while the emails show there are many things that the scientists disagree on, they doesn't mean there is no consensus about anything -- they agree that it is getting warmer and that we are causing it. 
   
   So what use is the Washington Post? If they are not going to do even the most perfunctory fact checking on the stuff they publish, what value do they add? ||||| Wednesday's edition of the Washington Post features an op-ed by Sarah Palin, who reprises her call -- first made in a Facebook post last week -- for President Obama to "boycott" the major climate talks in Copenhagen due to the "Climate-gate" controversy (actually a non-controversy). 
   
   "Policy decisions require real science and real solutions," Palin argued on Facebook, "not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public's worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a 'sin' against the planet." 
   
   The reaction to Palin's latest piece, however, is focused not on what she wrote, but on the fact that the Washington Post chose to run it in the first place. 
   
   Shortly after the op-ed was published online, Post media reporter Howard Kurtz tweeted that his paper was being "ripped for running Palin op-ed." Kurtz highlighted a blog post whose author refused to link to the op-ed because "[t]hey shouldn't be rewarded with the clicks, which is pretty much what this is about, I figure." 
   
   Politico's Ben Smith wrote on Twitter that it "struck me as slightly odd [that the Post] published an expanded version of her Facebook piece." He added later, "I agree she's relevant and boycott call is news." 
   
   The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder begged to differ with Smith's latter point. "Her boycott call is like a video press release," he wrote. "She's looking for a way to inject herself into this and found it." Ambinder published a critical "annotated" version of Palin's piece, noting at the onset, "Once again, the Washington Post has given Sarah Palin the chance to harness herself to the political story of the hour." ||||| by Mark Silva and updated 
   
   In the practice of preaching to the choir, Sarah Palin appears to have all but patented the art of saying what a few want to hear -- and it's an all-new tune now. 
   
   Palin, who was the Republican Party's nominee for vice president, is suggesting that President Barack Obama "boycott'' an international conference on climate change underway in Copenhagen, because some hacked emails questioning the ethics of some scientists at a university in Great Britain have given the obstinate opposition to the concept of global warming, let alone the science involving man's hand in climate change, all the fuel it needs to declare the case closed, conference over, thank you ma'am. 
   
   The president's withdrawal from the conference, with an appearance planned near the summit's finish next week, would come as quite a surprise to a global community that has witnessed the reengagement of the United States in an international dialog about the fate of the planet from which the previous president had all but withdrawn until the end of his second term. 
   
   But, for a share of the American electorate which fears the consequences of limitations on the emissions of pollutants that could force the U.S. to find alternative, and in some cases more costly, sources of energy - the fabled "energy tax'' - talk such as Palin's comes straight from the wand of the maestro. 
   
   From Palin's new viewpoint, the consensus of world science on the question of global warming represents "the radical environmental movement'' -- though this was not the same tune Palin was whistling when she ran for national office last year: "We've got to reduce emissions,'' she said during the 2008 campaign, and get other nations to "come along.'' 
   
   From the world's viewpoint, Palin's apparent new opposition to any dialog involving the United States in Copenhagen represents the politics of radical retrenchment. 
   
   
   
   "With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point,'' Palin writes in an Op-ed essay appearing in Wednesday's Washington Post. "The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. 
   
   "Climate-gate," Palin writes of the e-mails and other documents obtained from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia by hackers, "exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather,'' the former governor of Alaska writes, "but they would change our economy for the worse.'' 
   
   "Drill, baby, drill": A hole so deep that no one but the most radicalized base of the Republican Party might possibly take seriously the pivoting of Palin on the question. Now she has a memoir and a book-tour, Going Rogue, apparently taking the title to heart. 
   
   
   
   "I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics,'' writes Palin, who also has entertained creationism as a reasonable counterpoint to evolutionary theory, at least something worthy of teaching in the schools. 
   
   "I am a proponent of teaching both,'' she said during her campaign for governor in 2006. "And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject -- creationism and evolution. It's been a healthy foundation for me. But don't be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides." 
   
   "Snake oil,'' Palin called the science of climate change in a recent radio interview, suggesting: "The fact is, the Caribou population is increasing.'' 
   
   Yet Palin was far more generous about the challenge of climate change and what the world should do about it during last year's debate with Vice President Joe Biden, who then asserted flatly that global warming is "man-made.'' 
   
   This is what Palin said in debate with Biden in October 2008: 
   
   " Well, as the nation's only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it's real. 
   
   "I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts? 
   
   "We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.'' 
   
   And just eight months ago, at an Interior Department hearing, the then-governor of Alaska said this: "We Alaskans are living with the changes that you are observing in Washington, The dramatic decreases in the extent of summer sea ice, increased coastal erosion, melting of permafrost, decrease in alpine glaciers and overall ecosystem changes are very real to us.'' 
   
   Yet this is no cause for curtailing drilling for new oil, she maintained: "Stopping domestic energy production of preferred fuels does not solve the issues associated with global warming and threatened or endangered species, but it can make them worse....Simply waiting for low-carbon-emitting renewable capacity to be large enough will mean that it will be too late to meet the mitigation goals for reducing [carbon dioxide] that will be required under most credible climate-change models.'' 
   
   (Sarah Paln's book-signing in Fairfax, Va., over the weekend saw some snow flurries. . Photo by Paul J. Richards / AFP /Getty Images) 
   
   "As governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change sub-cabinet to start dealing with the impacts. We've got to reduce emissions,'' Palin said in the October 2008 vice presidential debate with Biden. "John McCain is right there with an "all of the above" approach to deal with climate change impacts. 
   
   "We've got to become energy independent for that reason. Also as we rely more and more on other countries that don't care as much about the climate as we do, we're allowing them to produce and to emit and even pollute more than America would ever stand for. So even in dealing with climate change, it's all the more reason that we have an "all of the above" approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.'' 
   
   Palin has staked a new stance on the issue little more than a year later - no more of that encouraging other nations "to come along with us with the impacts of climate change.'' 
   
   Now, it's "come along'' for a new ride, preaching to the chorus of "Climate-gate'' protesters who maintain that all the world's science suddently has been reduced to rubble with a pile of hacked emails from England -- regardless of all the other science that has been conducted throughout the world. 
   
   "As governor of Alaska,'' Palin writes in the Post Op-ed, "I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. 
   
   "I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development. 
   
   "Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure. 
   
   
   
   "But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes,'' she writes. "We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real.. 
   
   "President Obama has proposed serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions,'' Palin writes. "Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax proposals, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs (as Obama admitted during the campaign). That's not exactly what most Americans are hoping for these days. And as public opposition continues to stall Congress's cap-and-tax plans, Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats plan to regulate carbon emissions themselves, doing an end run around the American people.'' 
   
   Palin writes: "In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." 
   
   "But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. 
   
   "What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal,'' Palin writes. "This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science. 
   
   "Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.'' 
   
   
   
  
target: – The Washington Post's decision to run an op-ed piece by Sarah Palin on the "Climategate" emails is attracting almost as much derision as Palin's call for President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen conference, the Huffington Post notes. Here's an attitude roundup: Palin was "looking for a way to inject herself into this and found it," writes Marc Ambinder, who dissects the piece paragraph by paragraph in a highly critical "annotated" version at the Atlantic. Scientific consensus on climate change now appears to represent "the radical environmental movement" to Palin, writes Mark Silva at the Chicago Tribune, noting that she was singing a different tune on the campaign trail last year. "What use is the Washington Post?" asks Tim Lambert at Science Blogs, complaining that even the links embedded in Palin's piece contradict her claim that there is no consensus on global warming. "If they are not going to do even the most perfunctory fact checking on the stuff they publish, what value do they add?"