The Legend of Pine Ridge

How the Mighty Have Fallen: Department of Justice and Scotland Yard Continue to Close in on Murdoch's News Corp

2012-02-12T13:43:00.007-05:00

The Guardian has some new articles about the Department of Justice's and Scotland Yard's continuing investigation of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which owns Fox News. A Scotland Yard investigation is called Operation Elveden is investigating allegedly illegal payments to British police.

Reuters (2-7-12) reports:
British detectives are conducting three parallel investigations.

One inquiry, known as Operation Weeting, is investigating alleged phone hacking, and a second inquiry, Operation Tuleta, is investigating allegations of computer hacking. The third investigation, Operation Elveden, is investigating allegations that journalists paid police officers bribes in return for story tipoffs. The head of the three investigations said this week she was increasing the number of police looking at police payments.

Because their headquarters is in New York City, News Corp is subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act if they bribed British policemen. Here is a link to articles about Rupert Murdoch. Here is a link to a Guardian (2-11-12) article about why Murdoch may be subject to the FCPA act.

Here is Wikipedia's article on the FCPA. Here is what the Department of Justice says about the FCPA.

University of East Anglia Climate Scientist Professor Bob Watson Knighted

2012-01-29T12:30:00.001-05:00

University of East Anglia climate scientist Prof Bob Watson [above] has received a knighthood in the New Year Honours.---The University of East Anglia (1-2-2012)

According to a press release from The University of East Anglia (2012):

Prof Watson is professor of environmental sciences at UEA, director of strategic development at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has its headquarters at UEA, and chief scientific adviser at Defra. From 1997 to 2002, he was chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

On receiving the news Bob said: "I am delighted and humbled by this honour, which implicitly recognises the value of scientific knowledge in national and international environmental policy formulation. Of all the honours I have received this is very special, not only to me but also to my family and friends."

Prof Watson previously worked as chief scientist at the World Bank and environmental adviser to the Clinton White House. He has played a key role in chairing or co-chairing major international scientific assessments which have provided the scientific basis for informed national and international environmental policies. These include the IPCC, the International Ozone Assessments, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. He also co-chaired the recently released UK National Ecosystem Assessment.

Prof Watson gained his PhD in Chemistry from London University in 1973. He has received numerous national and international awards and prizes for his contributions to science including: the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility (1993); the insignia of Honorary Companion of St Michael and St George from the British Government (2003); and the Blue Planet Prize (2010) – Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize - for his roles in highlighting the influence of human activities in the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change.

UEA Vice-Chancellor Prof Edward Acton said: "I would like to offer my warmest congratulations on this latest public recognition of one of our very finest scientists. Bob Watson has made, and continues to make, an enormous contribution to the globally important field of climate science - a field in which this university is committed to playing a leading role."

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Smears the Famous Writer Boris Akunin

2012-01-28T10:22:00.004-05:00

Boris Akunin is one of Russia's most beloved writers. Here is Akunin's page at Amazon. Akunin is an expert on Japan who also writes detective novels set in pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia. The novels that feature his fictional 19th Century detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin are extremely popular in Russia. Check out Akunin's official English-language website and his Russian-language blog.

Detective novels are extremely popular in Russia, but they are usually lowbrow, vulgar pulp fiction. Akunin has taken the detective genre and transformed it into something that blends the modern Russian detective fiction with Dostoyevsky's famous detective story Crime and Punishment. The New York Times (7-13-03) reviewed Akunin's novel The Winter Queen. The reviewer Andrew Bromfield translated the novel into English.

The New York Times (11-3-12) reports that Akunin has been targeted by investigators for possibly violating Russia's vague terrorism laws because he allegedly included "extremist statements" in his novel All the World's a Stage. Sometimes, in Russia, novels provide commentary on the current political situation. Even the play Hamlet was seen as controversial in the Soviet era. The audience read a lot into Hamlet's observation that "something stinks in Denmark."

Recently, Putin smeared Akunin by suggesting that the writer had made common cause with Putin's opposition due to his Georgian ethic heritage. Akunin described Putin's characterization of his motives as a smear and observed that Putin had learned how to smear people during his KGB training.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (1-19-12) reports:

Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili, joined a group of cultural luminaries to form a League of Voters to assure a more transparent presidential election on March 4.

"As far as I know, he's an ethnic Georgian," Putin said about Akunin. "I understand that he could not have accepted Russia's actions during [the] armed conflict between Georgia and Russia," Putin said.

In an interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service today, Akunin fired back:

I'm not taking this seriously. That is how he was trained in his special [KGB] school. It is his normal method of smearing an opponent. I don't feel smeared. OK, I'm Georgian, so what? There are people of many ethnicities in our country. Actually, he was hinting that since I'm an ethnic Georgian, it means I'm an enemy of Russia. That is what he meant....

I have a feeling that whatever action Putin takes now, it only works to his detriment. The system has degraded so much that it keeps digging its own grave. I swear to God, I have a strong feeling that Vladimir Putin's time in history is coming to an end.

See the full text of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (1-19-12 article.

Department of Justice Pulls the Plug on Megaupload File Sharing Site

2012-01-19T21:34:00.036-05:00

"The [Mega Conspiracy] case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) [link added], with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Philippines also provided assistance."---Department of Justice (1-19-12)

The Department of Justice Criminal Division Cybercrimes and Intellectual Property Taskforce has taken down a file-sharing site called Megaupload. This action was taken after a federal grand jury studied the evidence for two years, determined that there was probable cause that felonies were/are being committed, and issued an Indictment.

A website of the U.S. Federal Courts explains the functions of the grand jury and the petit (trial) jury:

The United States attorney, the prosecutor in federal criminal cases, presents evidence to the grand jury for them to determine whether there is "probable cause" to believe that an individual has committed a crime and should be put on trial. If the grand jury decides there is enough evidence, it will issue an indictment against the defendant. Grand jury proceedings are not open for public observation.

According to page 18 of the grand jury's Indictment, 525 servers leased by Megaupload are located in Ashburn, Virginia. The computers are owned by Carpathia Hosting, a company "headquartered in Dulles and with data centers in Ashburn, Harrisonburg, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Toronto." Ashburn Patch (1-20-12). According to the Ashburn Patch (1-20-12), millions of dollars are going to a Carpathia bank account in Richmond, Virginia. Details about the financial transactions between Megaupload and Carpathia Hosting are available at the Ashburn Patch (1-20-12), but I think the same information is in the 74-page Indictment.

Seven people and two companies (Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited) were indicted, but the Indictment says that other people "known and unknown to the grand jury" were also part of the conspiracy. (See page 2 of the Indictment.) The mention of known and unknown conspirators might mean that the government has unindicted co-conspirators who are cooperating with the investigation, but nobody knows who is talking to the grand jury and/or the authorities and whom the authorities are still tracking down. According to the Indictment (page 13), Megaupload employs more than 30 people in approximately 9 countries.

The founder of Megaupload is said to be Kim Dotcom (formerly known as Kim Schmitz), a person with a string of aliases and a long history of unethical and criminal behavior. Schmitz sounds like a cartoon villain in a Bond movie according to this colorful article titled "Inside Megaupload's Megamind" (1-20-12).

Read the DOJ press release titled Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement. See more information about the Intellectual Property Task Force.

It is hard to read the FBI and DOJ sites because the hacktivists called Anonymous are taking it down with a Denial of Service attack. Cyber criminals evidently think that there is nothing wrong with preventing the public from reading our government's websites or with making millions by selling stolen movies.

Some people parked the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in a file on the Megaupload site. Now the site is shut down, and global warming denialists like Virginia's oppressive Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Ashburn's ludicrous blogger "ex-CIA operative" Kent Clizbe might not be able to access these stolen emails in order to mischaracterize their contents and defame climate scientists as liars and criminals. This suits me just fine.

In order to seem like an authoritative source on the so-called "hoax" of global warming, blogger-conspiracist Kent Clizbe claims that he used to be an operative for the CIA; but Kent Clizbe fails to inform his readers that the CIA is giving climate scientists security clearances or that the CIA is studying the national security implications of climate change. If people want to know what the CIA says about climate change, perhaps they should read what Larry Kobayashi, the head of the CIA's Center for Climate Change and National Security, explained to the media in an article titled "Our Man in the Greenhouse: Why the CIA is Spying on a Changing Climate." For Kent Clizbe's unhinged disinformation campaign read "Kent Clizbe: Our Man in the Nut House."

Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli and Ashburn's "ex-CIA operative" Kent Clizbe might also want to read what the National Intelligence Council says about global warming and climate change. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) "is a center of strategic thinking within the US Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community." Probably they know more than Ashburn's "ex-CIA operative" and blogger-conspiracist Kent Clizbe.

The NIC has posted a document called "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." This document is a collection of research and conference reports. On June 25, 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, summarized this report in Congress.

In his testimony before Congress, Dr. Fingar stated:

"Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses andcontracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community."

The conspiracist Ashburn blogger Kent Clizbe and the abusive Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is persecuting the world-famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, might want to read "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." In my opinion, Cuccinelli persecutes climate scientists because his father is a consultant/lobbyist for the natural gas industry. His father's company, Quest-Fore, gave $96,000 to Attorney General Cuccinelli's campaign, according to a report published on the Internet.

The mendacious Cuccinelli and his deputy W. Russell claim that Dr. Michael Mann is being investigated for fraud, not because he is one of the world's foremost climate scientists. That is a transparent lie. Dr. Mann is being hounded by operatives for the fossil-fuel industry who are operating against our national security from their outpost in the Virginia Attorney General's office.

Dr. Michael Mann earned two Ph.D.s from Yale and a Nobel Prize (2007) for his work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

Dr. Mann and Dr. Kump have co-authored a book titled Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. This book is based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report and more recent research.

Our intelligence agencies accept what the IPCC scientists say, but when he sued the EPA, Attorney General Cuccinelli used an article from the Russian government's press agency RIA Novosti as "proof" that climate scientists are fudging their research.

Michael Mann: The Climate Scientist Who the Deniers Have in Their Sights

2012-01-16T06:37:00.010-05:00

"I've been the focus for attack by those who deny the reality of climate change for so long that it almost seems like forever," the professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University [Dr. Michael Mann] says. "I'm a reluctant public figure, but I have embraced the opportunity to communicate the science."...

"[The theft of the climate scientists' emails] was a very successful, well-planned smear campaign intended ... to go directly at the trust the public had in scientists," [climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann] insists. "Even though they haven't solved the crime of who actually broke in, the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups."---The Independent (1-16-12)

The Independent (1-16-12) has published a fantastic account about how the powerful politicians Senator James Inhofe, Congressman Joe Barton, and Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli have unjustly vilified the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann because he was the creator of the "hockey stick" graph, which demonstrates that the earth's temperature is rising rapidly.

American politicians should uphold the law, but instead these politicians hoped to help their wealthy fossil-fuel sponsors by collaborating with criminals who stole the famous climate scientists' emails in order to discredit them by mischaracterizing their correspondance. Read "Michael Mann: The climate scientist who the deniers have in their sights."

Virginia Supreme Court Justice Bernard Goodwyn Observes that Attorney General Cuccinelli Wants Carte Blanche

2012-01-15T16:47:00.022-05:00

Last Thursday, January 12, 2012, the Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments from Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the University of Virginia in connection with Cuccinelli's allegation that the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann may have committed fraud against Virginia taxpayers. Cuccinelli wants to use a civil investigative demand (CID) to get Dr. Mann's emails. I am not a lawyer, but a civil investigative demand in Virginia to uncover fraud against taxpayers seems to require probable cause, just like any subpoena:

Each civil investigative demand issued under this article shall state the nature of the conduct constituting the alleged violation of a false claims law that is under investigation, and the applicable provision of law alleged to be violated.

Cuccinelli denies global warming, and his father is a lobbyist for the natural gas industry. Cuccinelli wants the University to hand over Dr. Mann's emails without probable cause so he can mischaracterize what the emails mean and discredit climate science. The tyrant wants to abuse his power to do the same thing as the hacker-criminals who stole scientists' emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

The PilotOnline (1-13-2012) reports that Supreme Court Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn told Cuccinelli's underling W. Russell, “You want us, I guess, to give you carte blanche.” It seems to me that Justice Goodwyn is alluding to the fact that Cuccinelli lacks probable cause. Cuccinelli was already refused his civil investigative demand from a lower court on the grounds that he lacked probable cause.

Cuccinelli poses as a person who is defending us from a tyrannical federal government, but I think that Cuccinelli is the tyrant. Cuccinelli is so disingenuous that he even claims that his civil investigative demand is not about climate change but only about some alleged fraud. I think the only people misusing our tax dollars are the demagogue Cuccinelli and the fossil-fuel interests he serves.

Climate Crocks (12-22-11) wonders whether the CRU hacking can be "characterized as a simple cybercrime — or are there elements of cyber-terrorism involved?" Climate Crocks observes that cyber-terrorism expert Bruce Schneier notes:

What I’ve been thinking about is whether the hack was intended to intimidate, threaten or bully. Then the crime becomes an effort to stop people from doing legitimate research. So, it is not just a data theft, but has a goal of creating a chilling effect, a threat, an intimidation.

A chilling effect is what the tyrannical bully Ken Cuccinelli is no doubt trying to achieve with his lawless inquisition, but the University of Virginia and Michael Mann are not backing down.

Here is an interesting interview (12-4-09) about cyber-terrorism and cyber-crime with the FBI official Shawn Henry. Mr. Henry was appointed executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch on September 15, 2010. In this position, he is responsible for all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide, as well as international operations and critical incident response.

Network World (12-19-11) reports Shawn Henry's warning to "hacktivists":

"When anybody breaches a network and steals data and then publicizes it--whether they're from a foreign country and they're using the data to help their country's industry, they sell it as an organized crime group, or they just display it because they think the company they stole it from is acting inappropriately--the fact that the data is stolen is a violation of federal law," he says, his voice rising with conviction. "Hacktivism is no different from organized crime groups or foreign governments. It's the exact same activity, perhaps done for a different reason or purpose, and it's all still illegal."

Hacker Julian Assange AKA "Nathanial Frank" May Face Espionage Charges in the USA

2012-01-15T14:57:00.012-05:00

Wikileaks hacker Julian Assange may face espionage charges in the US because he allegedly advised the American soldier Bradley Manning about how to hack into U.S. government computers and steal classified documents.

Assange allegedly used the alias "Nathanial Frank" when he communicated with Manning. This is a variant spelling of Nathaniel Frank, the name of the man who wrote the book Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. This book advocates ending the policy about "don't ask don't tell" in the U.S. military.

Wired (12-19-11) has a technical account of how federal investigators uncovered the Assange-Manning chat logs. It may be that the U.S. investigators want the young Private Manning to testify against the older hacker Assange in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

The Daily Mail (12-24-11) reports:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could face spy charges in the U.S. after a court revealed his apparent 'role' in the theft of secret military documents, it emerged today.

Lawyers have produced logs of online chats they claim show him coaching U.S. Private Bradley Manning how to break passwords to gain access to military computer networks...

The prosecutors claim Manning, 24, used the online alias of 'Nobody' while talking to 'Nathanial Frank' which they claim was an alias for Mr Assange.

In one chat, the young intelligence analyst asked 'Frank' for help cracking the password on his classified computer so he could log on anonymously. (See the full text.)

Renowned Climate Scientist Dr. Michael Mann Appears on MSNBC with Chris Hayes

2012-01-14T12:02:00.005-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dr. Michael Mann (check out his Facebook and twitter) appears on MSNBC with Chris Hayes following the discussion about prisoners in Guantanamo.

The Game is Afoot: U.K. Investigation of Climategate Hacker-Criminals Heats Up!

2012-01-02T15:17:00.003-05:00

"It seems to me the authorities wouldn't have acted without some actionable intelligence," said Michael Mann, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who specializes in climate modelling and whose messages came in for particular scrutiny in 2009. "They must know something that we don't yet know."---NYT (1-1-12)

The New York Times (1-1-12) has published an informative article about the new leads in the search for the hacker-criminals who stole climate scientists' emails and other documents from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Institute (CRU) and posted them on the Internet in 2009. The hacker-criminals posted a second tranche of stolen emails on the Internet in November 2011, and this may have given the authorities new information for their investigation. Even the U.S. Department of Justice is cooperating with the British authorities. See my previous post.

The Guardian (12-15-11) reports:

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said today: "We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change."

Computers Seized in Climategate Hacking!

2011-12-15T20:09:00.033-05:00

Full Department of Justice Criminal Division document linked here. The Request for Preservation of Records is signed by Trial Attorney Kendra R. Ervin of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section.

"We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change."---University of East Anglia

In November 2009, one or more hacker-criminals released emails and other information they had stolen from a computer belonging to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The criminals released some of the scientists' stolen emails again in November 2011. This second release may have provided the authorities with some clues about the identities of the hacker-criminals.

The hackers, who call themselves FOIA, first posted the CRU emails on a server with Russian ISP and then a posted a link to these stolen emails on the comments of blogs run by climate change denialists. After denialists copied the emails, the emails disappeared from the Russian server. These blogs are now being investigated by the British authorities with the cooperation of the U.S. Department of Justice. Computer equipment in the home of a British blogger known as Tallbloke has been seized by the police.

The Guardian (12-15-11) is reporting that computer equipment has been seized in connection with the November 2009 hacking of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Check the Guardian (12-15-11), Climate Progress (12-15-11), DeSmogblog (12-15-11), and ClimateCrocks (12-15-11).

No arrests have been made, but the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), the Norfolk Constabulary, the computer crime division, and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division seem to be closing in on the culprits who stole the CRU emails and posted them on the Internet. There is also this Twitter feed, which is carrying a lot of hysterical raving by denialists.

According to the DOJ:

The Criminal Division develops, enforces, and supervises the application of all federal criminal laws except those specifically assigned to other divisions. The Division, and the 94 U.S. Attorneys have the responsibility for overseeing criminal matters under the more than 900 statutes as well as certain civil litigation. Criminal Division attorneys prosecute many nationally significant cases. In addition to its direct litigation responsibilities, the Division formulates and implements criminal enforcement policy and provides advice and assistance. For example, the Division approves or monitors sensitive areas of law enforcement such as participation in the Witness Security Program and the use of electronic surveillance; advises the Attorney General, Congress, the Office of Management Budget and the White House on matters of criminal law; provides legal advice and assistance to federal prosecutors and investigative agencies; and provides leadership for coordinating international as well as federal, state, and local law enforcement matters.

The Guardian (12-15-11) reports:

Police officers investigating the theft of thousands of private emails between climate scientists from a University of East Anglia server in 2009 have seized computer equipment belonging to a web content editor based at the University of Leeds.

On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had "executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers". She added: "No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009.”...

Last month, Tattersall's blog, as well as at least four other blogs popular with climate sceptics, received a comment from a user called "FOIA" providing a link to a Russian server hosting a compressed folder containing more than 5,000 emails exchanged between climate scientists, along with a short message setting out the perpetrator's motives. The folder also contained an encrypted subfolder containing a further 220,000 emails. It was the second time such a release had occurred.

In November 2009, thousands of emails were released in a similar manner on the eve the Copenhagen climate summit. The episode prompted a series of inquiries into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness, they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Both Tattersall and a US-based climate sceptic blogger known as Jeff Id said they had received a "formal notice" that their blogging platform WordPress had been asked by the US Department of Justice's criminal division, dated 9 December, to preserve "all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession" related to their own blogs as well as to Climate Audit, a climate sceptic blog run by a Canadian mining consultant called Steve McIntyre. All three blogs had received messages from "FOIA" last month pointing to the link hosting a second tranche of emails first taken from the UEA in 2009...

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said today: "We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change."

Muscovites Protesting in the Street: Birnam Wood Comes to Dunsinane!

2011-12-10T16:14:00.025-05:00

"I pull in resolution and begin To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth. “Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane”; and now a wood comes toward Dunsinane.—Arm, arm, and out!—If this which he avouches does appear, there is nor flying hence nor tarrying here. I 'gin to be aweary of the sun, and wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.—Ring the alarum-bell!—Blow, wind! Come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back."---Shakespeare's MacBeth

The New York Times (12-10-11), Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (12-10-11), the Washington Post (12-10-11), and the Guardian (12-10-11) are covering today's large, peaceful demonstrations in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square, across the river from the Kremlin.

In the past, Bolotnaya (bog) Square in Moscow's Yakimanka District was the site of public executions. Peter the Great executed Russian guardsmen called Streltsy (shooters) there in the 17th Century. The last person executed there was the peasant revolutionary Yemelyan Pugachev who was sent to Moscow in a metal cage and executed in 1775.

Well-dressed, middle-class protesters are demonstrating against the fraud and ballot-stuffing that took place on behalf of Mr. Putin's ruling party United Russia during last Sunday's Parliamentary elections. The protesters demand that the elections be annulled and are shouting "Russia without Putin!" and "New elections!"

Gennady Onischenko, the Kremlin's top doctor, warned that people who attend the demonstrations risked getting sick with the flu or another disease. RFE/RL (12-9-11) reports that Onischenko warned:

“I recommend that people don’t go to the demonstration and, considering the cold weather and forecasts saying it will get worse, this goes especially for people with chronic illnesses and endocrinic illnesses,” Onishchenko told the RIA Novosti state news agency.

“With the increase of people falling ill that we are observing at the moment, a mass gathering of people on the streets could facilitate the rapid infection of flu with ensuing consequences.”

Dr. Onischenko has a history of making health recommendations with political overtones. RFE/RL (12-9-11) reports:

Chief Health Inspector Onischchenko has gained infamy for making medical and health pronouncements that have an overtly political flavor.

At the height of souring Russian relations with Tbilisi and Chisinau, he declared that Georgian and Moldovan wines were not fit for consumption, leading to Russian trade embargos decimating the countries’ most lucrative exports.

Most recently, amid a diplomatic spat with Dushanbe when a Russian pilot was jailed in Tajikistan, Onishchenko suggested making it harder for Tajiks to enter Russia on the grounds that they have a higher incidence of HIV and tuberculosis.

Vladimir Churov, the head of the election commission is claiming that video appearing on the Internet of election violations has been fabricated. RFE/RL reports (12-9-11):

On December 9, Churov told journalists that he has appealed to police to find the people who “ordered and sponsored” this “fabricated” material, suggesting he remains unswayed by the YouTube videos after his last comments outraged many of Russia's 51 million Internet users.

“There’s a lot of rubbish on the Internet about the elections,” Churov said in an interview with the Itogi magazine ahead of the elections. “Even before polling day, I knew about several fake election polling stations in apartments where they would make videos. I think we will see this film.”

The videos, allegedly shot in apartments, appear to contain footage of multiple storey polling stations at schools, buses shuttling “carousel” voters around to cast their votes several times, and election officials signing dozens of ballot papers in favor of the ruling United Russia party.

According to media sources, the December 10, 2011 demonstration is the largest demonstration since the fall of the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands turned out; some observers claim that as many as 100,000 people are in the streets, but probably the number was about half that. There have also been smaller demonstrations in dozens of other Russian cities. The Guardian (12-10-11) are blogging about the demonstration and posting live updates.

Environmentalist Yevgenia Chirikova, the Khimki Forest defender and a key opposition leader, told RFE/RL (12-10-11):

"The first [demand] is the release of political prisoners who were jailed after the so-called elections and the second is new elections," she said. "Of course, having new elections is one of our definite demands, but there are rather a lot of conditions."

Those conditions include a call for the resignation of Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Churov and an investigation into his work, as well as an investigation into vote-fraud allegations, and changes to the law on registering political parties to allow all opposition parties to participate in future elections.

The organizers say they will protest again on December 24 if the government has not acceded to their demands.

The Washington Post (12-10-11) reports:

Almost no one appeared to be seeking revolution — bloggers called it the Great December Evolution, a play on the Bolsheviks’ Great October Revolution of 1917.

“We don’t want blood,” said Dmitry Raev, who works for an international law firm. “We don’t want revolution. We earn enough money to live. But the authorities need to understand we are really fed up.”

Their specific demands — for good government, with new and honest elections, and the the freeing of the nearly 1,000 protesters arrested last week — are unlikely to be met, at least right away. But protesters said they suspect that Saturday marked the beginning of an inevitable change in the political culture.

The Moscow crowd was full of people like Raev: young and educated, with good jobs, but willing to stand for four hours under a gray sky and lightly falling snow to make themselves heard.

Disgust has been building for years over both the extent of corruption and the state of politics, managed so adroitly by Putin that no real political opposition exists.

“Putin appointed himself the next president,” said Viktor Melchikov, referring to the way Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev announced in September that they will be swapping positions next year. “Why didn’t anyone ask us? We hope the forces arrayed against these thieves and crooks will consolidate today and find a way out of this mess. Putin is a thief. He should be in prison.”

Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes

2011-12-10T10:23:00.008-05:00

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) held its fall meeting in San Francisco on December 5-7, 2011. The renowned James Hansen, the Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, presented a powerpoint at a press conference titled "Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes." A video of this presentation has been posted on Youtube.

The other prominent scientists who contributed to this power point are Eelco Rohling, Professor of Ocean and Climate Change at Southhampton University (U.K.), and Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Stanford University.

NASA Nabs Cyber-Criminals!

2011-12-10T06:00:00.003-05:00

“These arrests illustrate the level of cooperation needed to confront the growing worldwide threat of cyber crime. We will continue working with our national and international colleagues to help protect Governments, U.S. agencies like NASA, businesses, and individual users of the Internet from fraud and theft.”---NASA Inspector General Paul Martin

The NASA Office of Inspector General has issued a press release (11-9-11) that describes the role they played in capturing cyber-criminals:

PREET BHARARA, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, JANICE K. FEDARCYK, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and PAUL MARTIN, the Inspector General of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Inspector General (“NASA OIG”), today announced charges against six Estonian nationals and one Russian national for engaging in a massive and sophisticated Internet fraud scheme that infected with malware more than four million computers located in over 100 countries. Of the computers infected with malware, at least 500,000 were in the United States, including computers belonging to U.S. government agencies, such as NASA; educational institutions; non-profit organizations; commercial businesses; and individuals...

Six of the defendants, VLADIMIR TSASTSIN, 31, TIMUR GERASSIMENKO, 31, DMITRI JEGOROV, 33, VALERI ALEKSEJEV, 31, KONSTANTIN POLTEV, 28, and ANTON IVANOV, 26, all Estonian nationals, were arrested and taken into custody yesterday in Estonia by the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board. The U.S. Attorney’s Office will seek their extradition to the United States. The seventh defendant, ANDREY TAAME, 31, a Russian national, remains at large...

NASA Inspector General PAUL MARTIN said: “These arrests illustrate the level of cooperation needed to confront the growing worldwide threat of cyber crime. We will continue working with our national and international colleagues to help protect Governments, U.S. agencies like NASA, businesses, and individual users of the Internet from fraud and theft.”...

Mr. BHARARA praised the investigative work of the FBI, NASA OIG, and the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board. Mr. BHARARA also specially thanked the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Dutch National Police Agency. The FBI and NASA OIG received assistance from multiple domestic and international private sector partners, including Georgia Tech University, Internet Systems Consortium, Mandiant, National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, Neustar, Spamhaus, Team Cymru, Trend Micro, University of Alabama at Birmingham and members of an ad hoc group of subject matter experts known as the DNS Changer Working Group (DCG).

Climate Scientist Dr. Alan Robock, an Expert on Climate Change and Nuclear Winter

2011-12-09T06:16:00.012-05:00

Check out the on-line book The Encyclopedia of Earth. The lead author of the chapter on nuclear winter is the distinguished Rutgers professor of climatology Dr. Alan Robock. Check out all the on-line resources on his homepage. Check out Dr. Robock's biographical sketch. Dr. Robock is a Lead Author in Working Group I for the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Here is a power point presentation Dr. Robock gave in Moscow titled "Smoke and Mirrors: Is Geoengineering a Solution to Global Warming." Dr. Robock was a speaker at a conference hosted by ROSHYDROMET titled "Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change" (November 7-9, 2011). The Russian site RACC 2011 has now posted information about the conference.

I haven't had a chance to read these papers yet, but the papers are linked after the welcoming speeches under the heading Plenary Presentations. The Director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr. R.K. Pachauri, presented an easy-to-understand powerpoint about climate change titled "Science as the Basis for Adaptation Measures" as his welcoming speech.

The Russians are discussing ways to mitigate climate change, but they make a lot of their money selling natural gas so they don't usually address the need to move away from fossil fuels. Also, their scientists---like ours---may be targeted by the powerful fossil-fuel interests like Gazprom if they aren't careful. Gazprom is majority owned by the Russian government and pays a lot of the bills. The fossil-fuel companies own a lot of the T.V. and print media, so their political operatives can run influence operations. The big media can have a lot of influence as long as they promote the line of Putin's ruling United Russia political party.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Separating Signal and Noise in Climate Warming

2011-12-04T15:00:00.006-05:00

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (11-16-11) has issued the following press release:

In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists. [See the full text.]

When reading this article from the LLNL, it is helpful to remember how BBC ambushed the CRU climate scientist Dr. Phil Jones. See my post "Media Misquotes Climatologist Phil Jones" (2-21-10).

Anonymous "FOIA" Hacker-Criminals Release More CRU Emails

2011-12-04T09:45:00.022-05:00

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has issued a statement about the November 22, 2011 release of more emails stolen from the CRU by an anonymous entity called "FOIA." As they did in 2009, the hackers have "cherrypicked" the emails in order to mischaracterize the larger context of the scientists' discussions. The emails were posted on a short-lived "Russian server" and quickly downloaded by collaborators and/or bloggers who were evidently notified about the new cache of emails. Most of the emails were encrypted, so only collaborators who are privy to the password would be able to read most of the emails posted by "FOIA" on the "Russian server."

Although the email file was subsequently posted elsewhere on the Internet, the mysterious "Russian server" used by "FOIA" seems to have vanished into thin air. It is possible that some denialist bloggers should have heeded that folksy advice about not buying a pig in a poke.

The U.K. Guardian has a page devoted to the hacked climate science emails. According to The Guardian (11-22-11):

One marked difference from the original 2009 release is that the person or persons responsible has included a message headed "background and context" which, for the first time, gives an insight into their motivations. Following some bullet-pointed quotes such as "Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day" and, "Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels," the message states:

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.”

For reasons known only to themselves, the hacker-criminals have posted a file that includes 5,000 emails that can be read and 22,000 encrypted emails. There are also two README files that were presumably added by the criminals. One can be read, but the second is encrypted. Perhaps the hacker who posted the most recent stolen emails put this encrypted message there for his collaborators who share the code; or perhaps he just wants to give the impression that he has collaborators. The Guardian has some speculation about the encrypted emails and the encrypted README file in the link titled hacked climate science emails.

So far, nobody claims to have used the secret code to access the encrypted emails or encrypted README file. Probably the encrypted emails aren't that interesting, but encrypting them makes them seem more exciting. Perhaps the criminals are trying to seem like they are using good judgment by avoiding the publication of personal information.

If readers click on the yellow highlighting at the bottom of the article linked below, Guardian journalist Leo Hickman speculates about the hacker’s claim that the emails are “encrypted for various reasons”:

One of the most intriguing statements. Why wouldn't the vast majority of the remaining emails be released, instead of being hidden behind a password? Wikileaks, famously, did much the same thing, but the password was inadvertently revealed months later. Is it intended as a threat? Or a future bargaining chip? Do those emails really contain anything of interest? If they do, why continue to wait rather than releasing them now, or even back in 2009? (Guardian, 11-25-11)

The truth is that these pathetic, low-life criminals really can't contend with the peer-reviewed science, as honest scientists do; rather, the dishonest culprits try to discredit the scientists by mischaracterizing the cherrypicked quotes they mine in the emails and by cloaking themselves and the encrypted emails an air of mystery.

The hackers claim they are interested in freedom of information, but they mischaracterize the climate scientists discussions and cloak themselves and their motives in secrecy. The hypocritical hackers employ the disreputable tactics of operatives who work for the fossil fuel industry and of political operatives in dictatorships who are practiced in kompromat.

The Guardian (11-22-11) reports:

Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is "of interest" to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.

The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (11-22-11) reports:

Tue, 22 Nov 2011

While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our systems.

If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.

This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and number of studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.

As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the University and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.

See this link for responses from Prof Phil Jones regarding a selection of the stolen emails.

Alaska Congressman Don Young Tries to Bully Dr. Douglas Brinkley

2011-12-03T20:36:00.006-05:00

No doubt Alaska Congressman Don Young receives a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry. In 2007, it was also reported that he was the subject of a federal investigation for taking illegal money. See the article and the video from MinnPost.com (11-22-11) that shows how the thuggish Congressman Young tries to bully the emminent historian Dr. Douglas Brinkley, who was invited to testify in Congress about preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The Washington Post (11-18-11) has an article and a video, and MSNBC also describes Young's despicable treatment of Dr. Brinkley.

Congressman Young didn't attend Dr. Brinkley's presentation, but he managed to arrive late and call it "trash." Young sounds like some ranting, senile, old drunk. He is supposed to ask the professor questions; instead, this ignorant buffoon just sits up on his high table and insults the distinguished witness. He reminds me of Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table in the United Nations.

Because evil, greedy, thieving, un-American politician-bullies like Congressman Young, Senator Inhofe, Congressman Joe Barton, and Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli hound, humiliate, and persecute our great teachers, I have started voting for the Democrats.

Here is Dr. Douglas Brinkley's page at Amazon. Many of his books are available on Kindle.

Dr. Michael Mann's Data is Available on the Internet

2011-11-19T03:00:00.018-05:00

"My research is all based on data sets regarding the Earth’s climate that are freely and widely available to all researchers. Whether I make available my computer programs is irrelevant to whether our results can be reproduced...

My computer program is a piece of private, intellectual property, as the National Science Foundation and its lawyers recognize. It is a bedrock principle of American law that the government may not take private property “without [a] public use,” and “without just compensation.”"---Dr. Michael Mann's letter to Congressman Joe Barton (7-15-05)

Mendacious people who spread falsehoods on the Internet about the alleged fabrications of climate scientists often claim that the famous Penn State climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has kept his data secret. Actually, as Dr. Mann's 1995 letter to Congressman Barton states, Dr. Mann's data is available on Internet at government and university sites.

Dr. Mann's computer programs are a secret because they are his private intellectual property; still, researchers can develop their own computer codes and use Mann's data to verify his results. Scholars have replicated Dr. Mann's results by using his data with their own computer programs.

Researchers need not have access to exactly the same computer programs (or “code”) as Dr. Mann developed. Dr. Mann's results can be replicated using his underlying data and methodologies. See the letter (7-15-05) that Dr. Mann sent to the corrupt Congressman Joe Barton explaining the true facts and listing the Internet sites where his data was stored in 2005.

The MBH [Mann-Bradley-Hughes] data have been publicly available for more than a decade now! When Dr. Mann moved from U.Va, the same information and data were maintained through his Penn State research site.

Here are some links where the data can be found:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Paleo_data

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/MANNETAL98/

More generally, links to ALL the MBH research data, etc. from ALL of the MBH studies are here:

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/research/research.html

Dr. Alan Robock Explains Nuclear Winter

2011-11-12T09:59:00.018-05:00

Dr. Alan Robock (see his informative articles and power-points) is the head author of an entry on nuclear winter that appears in The Encyclopedia of Earth. I think that Dr. Robock is a much more credible source on information about nuclear winter than the anonymous author of an ignorant, misleading, defamatory FBI white paper that recycles the conspiracy theories of a former KGB official and smears scientists who research the science of nuclear winter.

The disinformation about nuclear winter is being spread by FBI Agent Patrick Laflin on his FBI Tampa CI Strategic Partnership Newsletter (July 1, 2011). See the link marked "Higher Education and National Security." The actual white paper is titled "Higher Education and National Security: The Targeting of Sensitive, Proprietary, and Classified Information on Campuses of Higher Education."

The Russian government has just held a conference titled "Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change." The conference was organized by the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET).

Dr. Robock presented a paper at this conference titled "Smoke and Mirrors." Dr. Robock has posted a power point for his students with the same title on his website. On the website, the powerpoint appears on the left side of the screen and is titled Geoengineering Powerpoint (revised April 16, 2011).

If the Russians think that nuclear winter is a KGB hoax, as the FBI white paper's cited source Comrade J alleges, then why do the leaders of this Russian conference on climate change seem to be considering geoengineering ("climate stabilization using new technologies") to cool the planet? The Russians are considering putting aerosols in the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun. Evidently, the Russians are considering creating a "controlled" nuclear winter.

The Russian conference discusses adapting to and mitigating the problem of global warming, but they also anticipate that global warming will bring some benefits. They mention limiting emissions of greenhouse gasses, but they don't say people should replace fossil-fuels with renewable sources of energy. See the short-sighted "vision" of the conference. (See my earlier post on the Russian conference.)

Still, the Russians have clearly accepted man-made climate change. President Medvedev claimed in early 2010 that global warming was a "tricky campaign." After the 2010 forest fires, President Medvedev reversed himself and claimed that man was causing global warming.

During the fires, Andrei Areshev, a lunatic attached to a Foreign Ministry drunk tank, even claimed right in the Russian government's official press agency RIA Novosti that those sneaky

U.S.

climate scientists were causing global warming by beaming secret climate weapons at

Russia

!

Now, it seems that scientists are experimenting with ways to geoengineer the climate. When we have droughts and floods, probably some people will be suspicious that these new technologies are being used as weapons. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate our efforts on renewable energy?

University of Virginia: Judge Rules on Motions in Michael Mann Email Case

2011-11-06T16:50:00.004-05:00

"A court in Virginia agreed yesterday that Michael Mann did have standing to join the ATI vs UVa lawsuit (unsurprising) and also agreed to UVa's request to reopen the consent decree that UVa had signed with ATI (again unsurprising)....

UVa successfully argued that the original arrangement should be re-opened mainly because they were unable to trust the ATI lawyers to maintain confidentiality of the process. This is not a surprising argument given the amount of misrepresentation, disinformation and hyperbole seen in any of their filings, and even more so in their public pronouncements, but it was strengthened enormously by the behaviour of David Schnare in the process of this lawsuit itself.

Schnare, it turns out, was actually a federal civil servant with EPA(!) until a few months ago. According to Nature News, he misrepresented himself in communications with UVa, furthermore, he was not granted permission to engage in outside activity for ATI by his federal employers."---Climate Science FOI Report (11-2-11)

The University of Virginia has posted the following press release about the case (11-2-11):

Judge Rules on Motions in Mann Email Case

November 3, 2011 — A Prince William County Circuit Court judge Tuesday granted a motion in favor of the University of Virginia and another filed on behalf of former faculty member Michael Mann.

Mann, formerly an environmental sciences professor in U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, is one of the scientists whose email was hacked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009. Climate-change skeptics seized on the emails and claim they show that scientists falsified their research to support the idea that the Earth's climate is warming.

Ensuing controversy has raised two important issues: Does political pressure have a chilling effect on scientists who pursue research that may become unpopular politically? And do scientists have the academic freedom to communicate with confidence that these communications won't become public and then misconstrued?

The motions granted Tuesday relate to a January Freedom of Information Act request from the American Tradition Institute for extensive records, including Mann's email from his time on the U.Va. faculty from 1999 to 2005. ATI filed suit in May, claiming that U.Va. was too slow to comply and was unfairly charging for providing the emails. ATI's suit also requested that a process be put in place to minimize the number of excluded emails the court would need to review.

The University has already released hundreds of non-exempt records in response to the Freedom of Information request. Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch earlier ruled that U.Va. had followed Virginia law in passing along to ATI its costs for reviewing and providing the non-exempt emails.

Finch Tuesday granted the University's motion that a protective order governing the review of the exempt emails be revisited. At issue is how the University can demonstrate that the approximately 12,000 documents it considers exempt are indeed exempt under the law.

Also, Finch granted a motion – supported by the University and opposed by ATI – to allow Mann, now a professor at Pennsylvania State University, to intervene in the case. Court rules allow a person who is not party to a lawsuit to intervene and become a party if that person's interests are sufficiently distinct from the other parties' interests that he or she should be represented. Mann's lawyer will work in partnership with University counsel going forward.

"We were very pleased with the judge's decisions and feel they were proper and appropriate," said Richard C. Kast, who presented the University's arguments with co-counsel Madelyn Wessel Tuesday. Each is an associate legal counsel at U.Va.

The earlier order would have allowed David Schnare and Christopher Horner, lawyers and staff members for ATI, to examine all of Mann's emails to see whether they agreed with the University's classifying them as exempt and, if not, to collaborate with University lawyers to select representative emails to be reviewed by the judge.

Although Schnare and Horner would have been required to keep the content of the emails confidential under terms of the order, scientific groups have protested that it is improper to release all of them for review and questioned whether the confidentiality pledge would be upheld. The University shared their concerns.

The University and ATI now have until Dec. 20 to agree on a new process in which a neutral third party would have access to the complete records and select samples on which the parties will make their arguments to the court under the Virginia FOIA.

Russian Bloggers Accuse Russian Spy Anna Chapman of Plagiarism

2011-11-05T17:35:00.009-04:00

"You can't call this a normal situation," says Alexei Lukatsky, an Internet specialist. "It's becoming rather common to appropriate someone else's ideas, without giving proper attribution. If there are no consequences, it will just become more common."---Christian Science Monitor (2-2-11)

The Washington Post (10-31-11) reports that on Halloween, the FBI posted more information about the Russian spy Anna Chapman on their site. The FBI investigation was code-named "Ghost Stories" because the spies took the names of dead people.

The FBI boasts that the Russian spies never stole a single secret in ten years, and the Russians seem to concede the point. If this is true, perhaps the FBI has time to investigate if any people in America were involved in the cyber-theft of the emails of the world's most famous climate scientists from the computer at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. These cyber-criminals stole the emails in order to spread disinformation about the supposed conspiracies of Western climate scientists so they could torpedo the Copenhagen Conference. Instead, the FBI seems to be spreading disinformation about Western climate scientists in a so-called FBI "white paper." See here and here for some background.

This week, Russian bloggers are accusing Chapman of plagiarism in connection with an article she published in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The article is titled "Если бы Пушкин успел написать свои зрелые произведения, то, возможно, не было бы революции и убийства царя!" (10-31-11). ["If Pushkin had managed to write his mature works, then perhaps there would not have been a revolution and the czar would not have been killed."]

The Guardian (11-2-11) explains:

Since her expulsion from the US last year for spying, Anna Chapman has reinvented herself as an entrepreneur, TV personality, and cheerleader for the Kremlin.

But the 29-year-old has also become a growing target for ridicule over her role in a series of state-promoted PR stunts.

Now she faces claims that she plagiarised a controversial Kremlin spin doctor in the column she writes for a tabloid newspaper.

Prominent bloggers say Chapman copied almost word for word a passage from a book by Oleg Matveyechev in her article for the mass market Komsomolskaya Pravda on Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most revered poet.

Chapman argued that the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917 would never have happened had Pushkin not been killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37.

"Just half a century later, liberals and socialists flooded Russia and killed the tsar, and then set the course for the revolution," she wrote. "I'm confident that things would have been different if Pushkin had managed to write his mature works."

But bloggers said her text was almost a direct copy of a passage from a book by Matveyechev, a member of prime minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia

Matveyechev's 2009 book, The Sovereignty of the Soul, goes further, describing Pushkin's death as an anti-Russian plot organised by Europe. Chapman merely argues that, had he lived, Pushkin could have become "a poet whose global historical significance would have surpassed that of Homer and Shakespeare". [See full text.]

The U.K. Telegraph (11-2-11) suggests that Matveyechev may have actually ghost-written Chapman's article:

Mr Matveyechev, a politician in Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, is unlikely to object though. Based in Miss Chapman's native Volgograd, he has collaborated with her on a number of projects in the past, stoking speculation that he may have actually ghostwritten the offending article itself.

The Christian Science Monitor (2-11-11) reports:

The release of the FBI materials about Chapman and her fellow sleeper agents has reinvigorated a debate among Russian security experts about what Russian secret services thought they were doing by planting so many spies in seemingly ordinary, suburban American lives.

Some argue that the 10 agents, who never uncovered a single classified secret during a decade of working in the US, were not actually spies at all but just "moochers" living off the budget of the SVR, Russia's intelligence service.

Dr. Michael Mann Confronts Attorney General Cuccinelli's Mafia in a Prince William County, Virginia Courtroom

2011-11-01T12:46:00.017-04:00

This post has updated and corrected material.

Michael Mann posts on Twitter: "Judge rules against ATI and in our and UVa's favor. We may intervene in case. UVa allowed to renegotiate protective order. details to come.."

The Institute for Southern Studies has documented how money from fossil-fuel interests are driving the legal attack on an American hero, the climate scientist Michael Mann. The ISS article is titled Who's Behind the Information Attacks on Climate Scientists?" (October 2011). This article also appears on Climate Progress (10-31-2011).

The ISS article also notes that an important hearing is set for today:

The hearing on the American Tradition Institute's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the University of Virginia seeking [climate scientist] Michael Mann's records is set for Tuesday, Nov. 1 before Judge Gaylord Finch in Prince William County Court. The hearing was postponed from September after Finch said he wanted to allow more time for arguments because of the case's significance. [Please read the entire article.]

In a post on DeSmogblog, computer scientist John Mashey reveals that Milton Johns, an attorney for Professor Ed Wegman, who is under investigation by George Mason University for academic misconduct, is Attorney General Cuccinelli's former law partner. Attorney General Cuccinelli used the discredited "Wegman Report" as evidence that Dr. Mann fabricated his research and misused government money. Mashey's article is titled "Curious Coincidences at George Mason University: Ed Wegman, Milton Johns, and Ken Cuccinelli" (10-30-2011).

A blog titled Climate Science FOI (Freedom of Information) Report reveals in an article titled "ATI & UVa: Reopening the review of exempted material" (11-2-2011) that the main lawyer for the American Tradition Institute (ATI), David Schnare, did not have permission from his employer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to represent the ATI. Not only that, a document submitted to the court by the University of Virginia (UVA) suggests that David Schnare probably fabricated information that suggested he had permission to represent the ATI.

It seems to me that Attorney General Cuccinelli and the other third-rate lawyer-operatives, who falsely accuse the famous climate scientist Dr. Mann of a conspiracy, are way out of their league. Attorney General Cuccinelli has hijacked the Office of Attorney General in order to persecute Dr. Mann on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry. His actions put the national security of the United States at risk.

The University of Virginia has posted their perspective on Virginia's Freedom of Information Laws here. See further information on their sidebar and homepage. Perhaps they will post a press release about the November 1, 2011 hearing before Judge Gaylord Finch.

Trick or Treat, Attorney General Cuccinelli!

2011-10-30T20:58:00.004-04:00

The George Mason School of Public Policy reports:

The School of Public Policy and Transatlantic Policy Consortium will host a talk from Dr. Michael Mann on Monday, October 31 at Mason University’s Arlington campus. Mann is author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines and a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The talk is free and open to the public. Click here for more information.

The FBI's Counterintelligence Strategic Partnership Unit Publishes an Ignorant White Paper

2011-10-30T14:31:00.007-04:00

"[Dr. Pollack] extended his studies of Earth's atmosphere in collaboration with Carl Sagan and other colleagues to develop the nuclear winter scenario, a frightening extrapolation of the consequences of a global nuclear exchange. Published in the journal Science, the nuclear winter model fired the arms control movement of the 1980's and played a major role in encouraging U.S. and Soviet leaders to engage in serious disarmament talks. Pollack's contributions have shown that the study of other planets is not only valuable in and of itself, but also because of the new perspective it gives us of our own world...Someday, humans will walk on Mars, possibly even within Crater Pollack. Their presence on the red planet will owe much to the work of other explorers such as James Pollack, who devoted his life to studying other planets -- and helping us to appreciate and preserve our

own Earth."---NASA

This is a photo of the late NASA astrophysicist James Pollack. If he were alive, I am sure this award-winning scientist would be very surprised to learn that an FBI white paper is giving credibility to an absurd book called Comrade J, which claims that nuclear winter is a "KGB hoax."

Dr. Pollack had a crater on Mars named after him, according to his NASA biography, but the anonymous FBI official who wrote this white paper only has rocks in his head. Maybe instead of spreading vague, ignorant allegations about climate scientists in Comrade J, the FBI could have checked with NASA.

The Counterintelligence Strategic Partnership Unit of the FBI published a white paper in order to warn scholars about KGB spies, but what scholar will take FBI cautions about national security seriously when they publish such shoddy scholarship and malign the reputations of scientists who are also concerned about national security?

The FBI should retract this paper, admit their errors, and apologize to the scientists they have maligned by giving credibility to the book Comrade J. See here and here for some background.

ROSHYDROMET Hosts "Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change" (November 7-9, 2011)

2011-10-30T08:45:00.024-04:00

Correction: The conference RACC 2011 is not hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences, although they participate.
The main organizer is the ROSHYDROMET, the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring.

On November 7-9, 2011, ROSHYDROMET will be hosting an international conference titled "Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change."

According to the (Russian language/English language) program, Alan Robock, a Rutgers expert on nuclear winter, will be presenting a paper titled "Smoke and Mirrors: Is Geoengineering the Solution for Global Warming?" Dr. Robock has a Geoengineering power point (revised April 16, 2011) with the same title on his site that will probably be similar to his presentation before the RASS 2011 Conference.

No word on whether loopy FBI conspiracists armed with poorly-documented white papers will suddenly descend on Red Square and embarrass the American Government and climate scientists by peddling the moonshine promoted in the book Comrade J: nuclear winter is a KGB hoax.

If the Russians think that nuclear winter is a KGB hoax, as the FBI white paper's cited source Comrade J alleges, then why do the leaders of this Russian conference on climate change seem to be considering geoengineering ("climate stabilization using new technologies") to cool the planet? The Russians are considering putting aerosols in the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun. Evidently, the Russians are considering creating a "controlled" nuclear winter.

The Russian conference discusses adapting to and mitigating the problem of global warming, but they also anticipate that global warming will bring some benefits. They mention limiting emissions of greenhouse gasses, but they don't say people should replace fossil-fuels with renewable sources of energy. See the short-sighted "vision" of the conference.

Declassified CIA Report on Stalin's Doctors' Plot

2011-10-29T09:54:00.003-04:00

The CIA has declassified a July 15, 1953 report on the Stalin-era "The Doctors' Plot." I have written about the Doctors' Plot before on this blog (scroll through these articles), but it is interesting to read what experts could glean in 1953. This political cartoon from the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil depicts a "greedy" Jewish doctor being unmasked for plotting to kill Soviet leaders. Money from the doctor's alleged CIA masters is falling out of his pocket.

Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's defamation and persecution of the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann reminds me of the Stalin-era Doctors' Plot. How shameful that, instead of upholding justice, Virginia's Attorney General persecutes our scientists by spreading lies about how greedy they are for U.S. government grants. In fact, Cuccinelli's father is a lobbyist for the gas industry, and Cuccinelli reportedly gets money from his father's company as well as from other fossil-fuel interests. In Virginia, the Attorney General's office has been kidnapped by the fossil-fuel interests. Eventually, people will realize that the despicable Attorney General Cuccinelli is a demagogue and a liar. Cuccinelli hypocritically campaigns against sex-trafficking in Northern Virginia, but I think he is a prostitute who sells his office for money.

Scientists Revolt Against Political Interference and Censorship from Texas Governor Perry's Environmental Appointees

2011-10-16T17:58:00.011-04:00

"Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency."--The U.K. Guardian (10-14-11)

The UK Guardian (10-14-11) has published an article titled "Rick Perry Officials Spark Revolt After Doctoring Environmental Report." The Guardian reports that Mother Jones (10-12-11) has tracked the changes in the report that were given to them by Professor John B. Anderson at Rice University. This story was reported earlier at Climate Progress (10-12-11).

I am so glad that America has been blessed with brave scientists who are not afraid to step forward in defense of our country and confront the lies of powerful "conservative leaders" like Rick Perry who are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. The scientists are the real conservative leaders because they are conserving both our environment and our democracy. Thanks to the courage of America's scientists, the average voter continues to have access to peer-reviewed scientific opinion instead of being fed a diet of propaganda, slander, and lies that will cause misery and death for untold numbers of people all over the world.

The Guardian (10-14-11) reports:

Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government's new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas," said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. "The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax," said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorised changes to Anderson's chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.

"It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn't accept science results published in Science magazine," Anderson said. "That's going pretty far."

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. "They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated," said Anderson. "That's not scientific review that's just straight forward censorship."

Mother Jones has tracked the changes. The agency has defended its actions. "It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it," Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. "Information was included in a report that we disagree with."

She said Anderson's report had been "inconsistent with current agency policy", and that he had refused to change it. She refused to answer any questions. Campaigners said the censorship by the Texas state authorities was a throwback to the George Bush era when White House officials also interfered with scientific reports on climate change.

In the last few years, however, such politicisation of science has spread to the states. In the most notorious case, Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who is a professed doubter of climate science, has spent a year investigating grants made to a prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, when he was at a state university in Virginia.

Several courts have rejected Cuccinelli's demands for a subpoena for the emails. In Utah, meanwhile, Mike Noel, a Republican member of the Utah state legislature called on the state university to sack a physicist who had criticised climate science doubters.

The university rejected Noel's demand, but the physicist, Robert Davies said such actions had had a chilling effect on the state of climate science. "We do have very accomplished scientists in this state who are quite fearful of retribution from lawmakers, and who consequently refuse to speak up on this very important topic. And the loser is the public," Davies said in an email.

"By employing these intimidation tactics, these policymakers are, in fact, successful in censoring the message coming from the very institutions whose expertise we need."

Michael E. Mann: "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines"

2011-10-16T16:32:00.006-04:00

The famous climate scientist Michael E. Mann has written a soon-to-be published book titled The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. At the end of his forthcoming book, Dr. Mann describes the fake November 2009 "Climategate" scandal, which erupted after hypocritical cyber-criminals who called themselves "honest men" hacked into the server of that the University of the Climatic Research Center (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, stole climate scientists' emails, and posted them on the Internet.

The criminals hoped to ruin the scientists' careers by mischaracterizing the meaning of their emails, but I read what actual scientists are writing about climate change and soon concluded that the criminals were the liars. So far, the British authorities have not identified the culprits.

Attorney General Cuccinelli even tried to force the University of Virginia to hand over Dr. Mann's emails by claiming that they would show that he had defrauded the taxpayers.

Cuccinelli, an arrogant demagogue who grandstands for the Tea Party movement, is the one who should be investigated for fraud against taxpayers. I think that Cuccinelli gets money from the fossil-fuel interests in exchange for persecuting climate scientists. Cuccinelli's own father is a career lobbyist for the natural gas industry. His company gave the Attorney General 96,000 dollars according to information posted on the Internet.

I think Cuccinelli is a dangerous political gangster, not a law officer. He has hijacked the Attorney General's office in order to persecute climate scientists whose research threatens the profits of the fossil-fuel industry; however, when he attacked Dr. Mann, Cuccinelli was barking up the wrong tree!

I have learned from "Climategate" that the Republican Party that I used to vote for is nothing but a pack of cynical liars who persecute scientists on behalf of their financial donors.

Unrepentant Political Gangster Ken Cuccinelli's Dirty Dozen Lies

2011-10-10T15:38:00.011-04:00

This Stalin-era political cartoon from the satirical magazine Krokodil (January 1953) depicts the "Doctors' Plot." A "saboteur-doctor" is being unmasked as a poisoner of the Soviet political and military leadership. Dollars from the CIA are falling from the doctor's pocket. As soon as Stalin died, in 1953, Soviet leaders reevaluated and denounced this conspiracy theory. Perhaps the most famous denunciation of the Doctors' Plot was made by Nikita Khrushchev in his "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956.

Over a year ago, on August 2, 2010, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented twelve mistakes in Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli's attack on the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann. More than a year has passed, but the arrogant Cuccinelli stubbornly refuses to admit his mistakes and continues to persecute Dr. Mann in spite of the fact that scientists keep pointing out his errors. I think Cuccinelli continues to persecute Dr. Mann because his father is a lobbyist/consultant for the gas industry. It seems to me that our so-called "law officer" is nothing but a political gangster, the "sword and shield" of the fossil fuel industry who has hijacked the AG's office on behalf of his sponsors. Attorney General Cuccinelli is attacking the climate scientist Dr. Mann and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, which is accepted by the National Intelligence Council (16 U.S. intelligence agencies).

Here is what the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote on August 2, 2010:

Latest Court Filing from Ken Cuccinelli Continues to Make Basic Scientific Errors

Below are a dozen of the most egregious errors the Union of Concerned Scientists found in Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's July 13 court filing requesting documents from the University of Virginia related to climate scientist Michael Mann.

1. Cuccinelli inaccurately asserts that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age "disappeared" in Mann et al.’s original hockey stick paper.

2. Cuccinelli misrepresents the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

3. Cuccinelli falsely maintains that climate scientists are primarily motivated by money, and suggests they are skewing their research results to attract grants.

4. Cuccinelli exaggerates the importance of the hockey stick, implying that it provides the rationale for laws that would require emissions reductions.

5. Cuccinelli cites a paper that criticized the hockey stick, but fails to cite refutations of that paper’s conclusions or the unusual circumstances under which it was published.

6. Cuccinelli uncritically cites a study by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick that erroneously criticized Mann et al.’s hockey stick research.

7. Cuccinelli implies Mann was hiding something in a data folder marked "CENSORED," but fails to acknowledge that the folder was publicly available.

8. Cuccinelli extensively cites the 2006 Wegman report, but fails to note valid criticisms of that report.

9. Cuccinelli incorrectly cites three emails that were stolen last fall from Mann.

10. Cuccinelli and his staff again make a basic mistake when describing the now well-known email that features the phrases "trick" and "hide the decline."

11. Cuccinelli confuses the Muir Russell report’s criticism of a Phil Jones graph with Mann et al.’s hockey stick research.

12. Cuccinelli’s filing demonstrates a lack of understanding of how science works.

CIA Drone Kills Al-Qaeda Operative Anwar Al-Awlaki

2011-10-02T21:45:00.001-04:00

On Friday, September 30, a CIA drone killed the dangerous American Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. Here is the story in The Washington Post (10-1-11). This traitor lived more-or-less around the corner from my old house, and I am glad the CIA finally killed him.

After 9-11, Al-Awlaki gave a two-part interview to National Geographic. He masqueraded as a moderate Muslim; but for some reason, I didn't believe him. Read "Attack on America: An Islamic Scholar's Perspective--Part I" (9-28-01) and Part 2 (9-28-01). Al-Awlaki was a stupendous liar who was probably up to his eyeballs in 9-11.

President Obama (9-30-11) said:

Earlier this morning, Anwar al-Awlaki -- a leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- was killed in Yemen. (Applause.) The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans. He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.

The death of al-Awlaki marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. Furthermore, this success is a tribute to our intelligence community, and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces, who have worked closely with the United States over the course of several years.

Awlaki and his organization have been directly responsible for the deaths of many Yemeni citizens. His hateful ideology -- and targeting of innocent civilians -- has been rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, and people of all faiths. And he has met his demise because the government and the people of Yemen have joined the international community in a common effort against Al Qaeda.

Cuccinelli Mafia Foiled Again: Climatologist Michael Mann Exonerated by Inspector General of the National Science Foundation!

2011-10-02T07:03:00.003-04:00

"No direct evidence has been presented that indicates the subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results," the report concludes. "Lacking any direct evidence of research misconduct, ... we are closing this investigation with no further action."---National Science Foundation Inspector General

The famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann is constantly being hounded and persecuted by Virginia's demagogic Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. I think this is because Cuccinelli's father has spent his career as a lobbyist/consultant for domestic and foreign natural gas interests. The elder Cuccinelli's firm, Quest-Fore, reportedly gave 96,000 dollars to the Attorney General's political campaign.

Our Attorney General's office has been hijacked and transformed into an organ of persecution like the KGB: the Attorney General's Office is nothing but legalized lawlessness, the "sword and shield" of the fossil fuel interests on a quest for the scalps of climate scientists!

The Cuccinelli mafia organization defends the interests of the Republican Party's financial sponsors, not the people. Cuccinelli claims that he is protecting the people, but I think he is endangering our people with his lawless, dishonest inquisition against climate scientists. I would rather be protected by scientists like Dr. Mann than outposts of mafia structures like the Virginia Attorney General's Office. Instead of persecuting Dr. Mann, Cuccinelli should investigate the accused criminal Bobby Thompson, who gave him 55,000 dollars.

The Daily Climate is a very educational site that posts articles about climate change that appear in the mass media as well as their own articles. On August 22, Douglas Fischer, editor of The Daily Climate posted an article titled "Federal Auditors Find No Evidence to Support "Climategate" Accusations" (8-22-11). The Cuccinelli Mafia has been foiled again!

Dr. Mann has no illusions that this latest finding will silence his opponents, but he noted that this latest investigation "establishes that every credible body has found that there is no evidence at all for the allegations."

National Intelligence Council: "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030"

2011-09-25T07:43:00.013-04:00

"Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses and contracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community."---Dr. Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis (June 25, 2008 before Congress)

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) "is a center of strategic thinking within the US Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community."

The NIC does research on a variety of foreign policy and national security issues, but they are most recognized for their groundbreaking research on transnational organized crime. According to the National Intelligence Council, “Transnational criminal networks are actively targeting U.S. ... government programs.”

The NIC has posted a document called "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." This document is a collection of research and conference reports. On June 25, 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, summarized this report in Congress.

In his testimony before Congress, Dr. Fingar stated:

"Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses and contracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community."

Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is persecuting the world-famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, might want to read "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." In my opinion, Cuccinelli persecutes climate scientists because his father is a consultant/lobbyist for the natural gas industry. His father's company, Quest-Fore, gave $96,000 to Attorney General Cuccinelli's campaign, according to a report published on the Internet.

The mendacious Cuccinelli and his deputy W. Russell claim that Dr. Michael Mann is being investigated for fraud, not because he is one of the world's foremost climate scientists. That is a transparent lie. Dr. Mann is being hounded by operatives for the fossil-fuel industry who are operating against our national security from their outpost in the Virginia Attorney General's office.

Dr. Michael Mann earned two Ph.D.s from Yale and a Nobel Prize (2007) for his work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

Dr. Mann and Dr. Kump have co-authored a book titled Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. This book is based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report and more recent research.

Our intelligence agencies accept what the IPCC scientists say, but when he sued the EPA, Attorney General Cuccinelli used an article from the Russian media as "proof" that climate scientists are fudging their research.

The Voyage of the Healy

2011-08-20T13:28:00.009-04:00

"The central science question of this program is, “What is the impact of climate change (natural and anthropogenic) on the biogeochemistry and ecology of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?” While both of these regions are experiencing significant changes in the ice cover, their biogeochemical response will likely be quite different due to their distinct physical, chemical, and biological differences."---NASA's ICESCAPE homepage

Everyone has read passages from Charles Darwin's exciting tale The Voyage of the Beagle in Biology class, but scientists are still sailing to distant oceans and making new discoveries. These days, we can even follow their progress on-line!

On August 15, 2011, the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy embarked on its second voyage to the Arctic Ocean in order to study how the increase in CO2 caused by burning fossil fuels is increasing the acidification of the Arctic Ocean. [See my related post on a British expedition to the Barents Sea.]

The U.S. Coast Guard explains:

The Coast Guard Cutter HEALY (WAGB - 20) is United States' newest and most technologically advanced polar icebreaker.

HEALY is designed to conduct a wide range of research activities, providing more than 4,200 square feet of scientific laboratory space, numerous electronic sensor systems, oceanographic winches, and accommodations for up to 50 scientists. HEALY is designed to break 4 ½ feet of ice continuously at three knots and can operate in temperatures as low as -50 degrees F. The science community provided invaluable input on lab lay-outs and science capabilities during design and construction of the ship. At a time when scientific interest in the Arctic Ocean basin is intensifying, HEALY substantially enhances the United States Arctic research capability.

As a Coast Guard cutter, HEALY is also a capable platform for supporting other potential missions in the polar regions, including logistics, search and rescue, ship escort, environmental protection, and enforcement of laws and treaties.

The link to the Healy has information and pictures about the ship's mission, called ICESCAPE. Be sure to visit NASA's ICESCAPE site, too.

The Healy is carrying scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), but we can follow the trip on-line at the USGS and find out what the scientists are learning.

MSNBC.com has an informative article with links about the journey titled "Arctic Voyage to Study Ocean's Changing Acidity: Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out What It Means for Delicate Marine Life" (8-12-11):

The world's oceans are getting more acidic, and a new mission to the Arctic will help scientists figure out what this means for delicate marine life.

For the second straight year, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) will embark on a research cruise aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel Healy to the Arctic Ocean on Aug. 15 to collect water samples and other data to determine trends in ocean acidification from the least explored ocean in the world.

What the scientists learn from the data collected during the seven-week cruise will provide an understanding of the extent to which the Arctic Ocean 's chemistry is changing and detail potential implications for carbonate species — such as phytoplankton and shellfish — that are vulnerable to greater ocean acidity created by climate change.

"Ocean acidification can have broad global impacts on industry, ecosystems, tourism and policy, so it is of vital importance to determine trends and whether impacts are already occurring in oceans around the world," said USGS oceanographer Lisa Robbins.

Vulnerable Arctic

Ocean acidification is the process by which pH levels of seawater decrease due to the greater amounts of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans from the atmosphere, making the ocean water more acidic. Currently, oceans absorb about one-fourth of the greenhouse gas. Lab studies have shown that more acidic waters decrease calcification rates in calcifying organisms, reducing their ability to build shells or skeletons. These changes, in species ranging from corals to shrimp, have the potential to impact species up and down the food chain.

Field experiments are under way in tropical and temperate environments to determine the extent to which calcification rates are already changing, but little is known about the chemistry of the Arctic Ocean and whether changes are already having impacts on the innumerable calcifying organisms that inhabit its waters.

"The Arctic Ocean is one of the most vulnerable areas for ocean acidification on our planet, but there is very little data and understanding about current acidification trends and potential impacts to oceanic food chains in the region," Robbins said. "This research should provide us with greater insight into this growing climatic concern."

During their voyage, the USGS scientists, along with researchers from the University of South Florida, will collect and analyze water samples using an array of highly specialized instruments, including sampling bottles that can collect water from ocean depths up to 11,480 feet. Instruments will also measure the amounts of oxygen dissolved in the water, its conductivity and temperature.

"Sampling from a variety of environments and depths in the Arctic will provide a robust data set that we can use to compare our techniques as well as give us an overall picture of ocean chemistry changes throughout the water column," said USGS oceanographer Kim Yates.

Follow along

Last year, the team spent five weeks on board the Healy collecting water samples. This included sampling the Arctic Ocean continuously every two minutes and collecting more than 25,000 data samples. Preliminary data from 2010 is currently being processed and analyzed for trends and will be published later this year. Data from this summer's survey will provide further information about ocean chemistry trends.

Those interested will be able to track the ocean acidification research team during its voyage in the Arctic on their cruise journal. A slideshow on USGS Arctic acidification research that includes photos from last year's cruise is also available online.

The research is taking place during the 2011 U.S.-Canada Extended Continental Shelf Survey research expedition, a joint mission between the U.S. Coast Guard, the USGS and the Canadian Coast Guard.

Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia Releases Data

2011-07-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

In a press release, the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England reports:

Climate data released

Wed, 27 Jul 2011

All data sent to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia by National Meteorological Services around the globe to complete its global land temperature dataset CRUTEM3 will be released today, apart from data from 19 stations in Poland.

The University has been working closely with the Met Office to arrange the release of the remaining data not already in the public domain.

CRU has made its gridded datasets available online for many years, but climate sceptics had asked to see the data as received from National Meteorological Services and research colleagues around the world, who had sent data to the Unit for its research purposes.

Some countries’ Meteorological Services, including Poland’s, had been unwilling to have their data publicly released – some, who charge for this information, for commercial reasons.

Data from Trinidad and Tobago are being released against that state’s wishes. This is because the University is complying with the Information Commissioner’s Office’s instruction to release part of the database which covered the latitude zones 30° N to 40° S.

Professor Trevor Davies, UEA Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, said: “We regret having to release data from Trinidad and Tobago against that state’s express wish but we want to place beyond all doubt our determination to be open with our data and to comply with the ICO’s instruction.

“To demonstrate that determination we have made the decision, in discussion with the Met Office, to release the data from latitudes outside the 30° N to 40° S zone, with the exception of some stations in Poland which has explicitly refused permission. This means that data from 5113 weather stations around the world are now released.

“We are very pleased to be in the position now to release data for all but 19 stations and are grateful to the Met Office for its support over the past 18 months and for its major effort in contacting National Meteorological Services to seek their permission for release. In the interest of openness, we have released data from those which have not responded to requests to release.

“We remain concerned, however, that the forced release of material from a source which has explicitly refused to give permission for release could have some damaging consequences for the UK in international research collaborations.”

Research findings from the analysis of the CRUTEM dataset, on the course of global-scale land temperature changes, tally with those of other independent research groups across the world, including NOAA and NASA.

The data are available from Met Office website:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/climate-monitoring/land-and-atmosphere/surface-station-records

And from CRU:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/station-data/

With explanations at:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/

Yelena Bonner Dies in Boston

2011-06-19T14:00:00.010-04:00

"I am a Muscovite...I am a Jew of 'Caucasian nationality.' In 1941, I defended my country and in 1945, I wept with joy. In 1953, I protested against the so-called Doctors' Plot. For many years, since the spring of 1937, I waited for my mother somehow, some way to return from the gulag camp where she'd been sent. And when she returned and rang the doorbell, I didn't recognize her. I took her for a beggar."

"And all these years, my dreams have been filled with tears for my father, who was shot dead. My father had a stomach ulcer and I remember how in the evening he'd call me and say: 'Lusya-jan, prepare me a hot water bottle. My stomach is killing me.' And I cried for my grandmother, who raised three children orphaned by the 1937 Great Terror and who took her last breath during the blockade of Leningrad. And all my life I tormented myself -- was I to blame that my mother was arrested, that I didn't recognize her? Was I to blame that my father was shot in the head, that the headstone for him in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery marks an empty grave? Was I guilty for not remaining in blockaded Leningrad and dying together with my grandmother?"

"But I had to go and save my motherland! The motherland. And after that there was no strength left to save my family. There isn't even enough strength to go prepare a hot water bottle. But how does one save one's motherland? I didn't know then and I don't know now. Count me among those who come out to Pushkin Square on December 26. Consider me one of those who came out to once again save the motherland -- even though my legs no longer have the strength."---Yelena Bonner, RFE/RL (6-19-11)

The pediatrician Yelena Bonner, a great Russian human rights activist and the wife of physicist and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, died in Boston on Saturday, June 18, 2011. She was 88 years old.

Bonner's second husband, Andrei Sakharov (d. 12-14-89), was the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and a hero of the Soviet Union. When he became a dissident, the regime appealed to anti-Semitic sentiments in the public and claimed that Sakharov had been led astray by "the Jewess Bonner." The family believes that the KGB gave Bonner's infant grandson a poisoned cookie that nearly killed him.

The KGB and Soviet politicians constantly hounded and persecuted this great scientist and humanitarian. They defamed him in the press and drugged him in order to steal his memoirs while he was exiled in Gorky. The KGB official who was in charge of this campaign of repression is Filipp Bobkov, the former head of the dissident-hunting 5th directorate of the KGB.

In America, the climate scientist Michael Mann is being vilified on the Internet and persecuted by Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli, and criminals stole the private emails of British and American climate scientists.
In his suit against the EPA, Attorney General Cuccinelli even cited an article from the official Russian government media in order to malign climate scientists.

The Guardian (6-19-11) and The New York Times (6-19-11) carry Bonner's obituary.

The New York Times (6-19-11) reports:

Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, into turning against his country...

Her efforts made her a favorite target of Soviet journalist Nikolai Yakovlev, who portrayed her as a Zionist and CIA agent trying to undermine the Soviet system.

In a particularly nasty 1983 magazine article, Yakovlev accused her of imposing her sympathies on Sakharov, turning him against his children and his country and taking control of his finances.

Bonner said Yakovlev's writings led to "thousands of irate, malicious letters which we receive recommending Sakharov 'to repent,' 'divorce the Jewess' and 'to live by his own mind, not by Bonnerovsky.'

The Washington Post (6-19-11) reports:

Yelena G. Bonner, the Russian human rights activist who was the widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov and came under repression by the secret police, died of heart failure in Boston on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.

Mrs. Bonner, decorated for valor and wounds during World War II, was 88. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich told the A.P.

Mrs. Bonner was a founder of one of the most active rights groups in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s, the Helsinki Monitoring Committee. The organization, which for a time disbanded in 1982 after most of its members were jailed for political crimes against the state, sought to publicize Soviet violations of human rights guarantees made when Moscow signed the 1975 Helsinki Agreement on European Cooperation and Security.

The Helsinki Act recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe in return for Soviet assurance to nurture fundamental freedoms, such as free speech, assembly and religion.

The Helsinki Act caused numerous unofficial rights groups to form, and they became an unusual phenomenon in the life of the Soviet capital in the mid-1970s. There were groups delving into invalids' rights, religious oppression, political abuse of psychiatry, workers' rights and emigration demands.

Mrs. Bonner signed hundreds of zayevlenie, or statements, supporting victims of KGB reprisals. She and her husband traveled through Siberia and remote parts of Russia, visiting courtrooms and jails to aid imprisoned activists.

By the decade's end, however, many activists were in prison or labor camps. The luckier were expelled from Russia or sent into internal exile far from Moscow. Mr. Sakharov was arrested in January 1980, and was confined to Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow. Mrs. Bonner had a special status as wife of Mr. Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. She was allowed to travel to Moscow until May 1984, when the KGB detained her in Gorky on allegations she had committed anti-state crimes.[See the full text of the article about this brave woman.]

Higher Education and National Security: The Targeting of Sensitive, Proprietary, and Classified Information on Campuses of Higher Education

2011-06-13T13:16:00.103-04:00

"The KGB had the report published in a Swedish journal. In the intelligence world, this is called disinformation."--the FBI

UPDATE #1 Nuclear Winter and the KGB (Wikipedia User Talk)

UPDATE #2 The Soviet Approach to Nuclear Winter (CIA, December 1984)

UPDATE #3 Debunking Pete Earley's [Comrade J]

UPDATE #4 Brian Martin, "Nuclear Winter: Science and Politics." (Science and Public Policy, 10-88)

UPDATE #5 The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, 1986)

UPDATE #6 Alan Robock, lead author. The Encyclopedia of Earth, "Nuclear Winter". (2009)

UPDATE #7 "Study on the Climatic and Other Global Effects of Nuclear War." (U.N. 1989)

The Counterintelligence Strategic Partnership Unit of the FBI has published a white paper titled "Higher Education and National Security: The Targeting of Sensitive, Proprietary, and Classified Information on Campuses of Higher Education (April 2011)." [I think the print version is easier to read.]

The FBI white paper quotes the Russian KGB/SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov, who died exactly one year ago today, on June 13, 2010. Tretyakov's espionage exploits are detailed in Pete Earley's 2007 book Comrade J.

Tretyakov's unsubstantiated claim (pages 169-177) that the KGB fabricated the theory of nuclear winter in a failed attempt to prevent Pershing missiles from being deployed in Europe is quite controversial; never-the-less, this uncorroborated KGB defector's apocryphal boasting is uncritically repeated as fact in the FBI white paper on page 6 of the print edition:

According to Sergei Tretyakov, a former KGB/SVR officer, the KGB ordered the Soviet Academy of Sciences to come up with a report that would scare the Western public and keep NATO from placing Pershing missiles in Western Europe:

"The story, which had been approved by KGB propagandists, described experiments in the Karakum desert in South Central Asia that were being done by a Soviet specialist in atmospheric physics…[Other Soviet] scientists claimed they had used a mathematical model to estimate how much dirt and debris would be blasted into the atmosphere during a nuclear attack in Germany." [In this paragraph, the FBI is quoting from Pete Earley's book Comrade J. pages 170-171.]

The KGB had the report published in a Swedish journal. In the intelligence world, this is called disinformation. Disinformation may be blatant deception or small fabricated kernels in a large milieu of reliable facts. In the academic arena where research is often based on previous research, when results from a study can be shared quickly and easily with other researchers, it is important to science that people share accurate results. If subsequent research is based on incorrect data, many of those subsequent conclusions could be inaccurate as well. Expanding scientific horizons is not always the main motivating factors for research or publications in other countries. Foreign researchers may be under pressure to make their research conclude what their government wants it to conclude, or they may be ordered to write completely fabricated studies.

This FBI white paper is recycling and even mischaracterizing vague, uncorroborated allegations that appear on pages 169-177 of Comrade J. (These pages are available at Amazon. Search the book using "Crutzen.") This book has no footnotes to the original sources or to briefly quoted scientists who cast doubt on the theory of nuclear winter.

The FBI claims, "The KGB had the report published in a Swedish journal." Exactly what report published in a Swedish journal is the FBI alluding to? The book Comrade J does not claim that this allegedly fabricated Russian scientific report was published in a Swedish journal; on the contrary, the book explicitly states that the Soviet report was not published in a scientific journal (171).

The book claims that a story, which is not identified or dated, was released by the Soviet Union's news service, picked up by the BBC, and "widely accepted as a scientific fact" (170). [A 1984 CIA report (p. 13) notes that the English-language service of Moscow News (4-19-84) published an important story about nuclear winter.]

The FBI's quote from Comrade J is spliced together from two passages that appear on different pages (171-172), and important information is omitted.

The book Comrade J identifies a 1982 paper that was published in the Swedish journal Ambio. This paper, "The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon," was written by Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen and John Birks. Is the FBI implying that this 1982 paper is the allegedly fabricated KGB report published in a Swedish journal? Is the FBI implying that fabricated research was included in this 1982 paper? Is the FBI referring to another paper that was published in the same issue of Ambio, which was devoted to the subject of nuclear winter? [According to a December 1984 CIA report, Soviet research on nuclear winter did not begin until 1983 ("Key Judgements" page 1).]

I looked at Comrade J, and the book claims that an allegedly fabricated story was published by the Soviet Union's news service, picked up by the BBC, and "widely accepted as a scientific fact." If this article is the 1984 Moscow News story cited by the CIA (p. 13), it is difficult to see how a story published in 1984 could have influenced the 1982 Ambio article by Crutzen and Birks. In addition, according to the 1984 CIA report (page 1) "Soviet research on Nuclear Winter...is derived almost entirely from US ideas, data, and models."

The book does not say, as the FBI claims, that this report was "published in a Swedish journal." The book alleges that members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences falsely "claimed they had used a mathematical model to estimate how much dirt and debris would be blasted into the atmosphere during a nuclear attack in Germany" (171). The book claims that "instead of publishing it in a scientific journal, the KGB began using...covert active measures...to disseminate the doomsday findings" (171).

Chapter 21 of Comrade J closes with Tretyakov's rather terrifying claim that "no one in Moscow ever believed [nuclear winter] was true" (177).

According to the fantastic account of this covert operation detailed in Comrade J, the mighty KGB disseminated a scientific hoax via the Soviet news service (170) about “the anti-hothouse effect" (170) that was “widely accepted as scientific fact" (170), but “no one in Moscow ever believed [nuclear winter] was true” (177).

While the KGB certainly may have exploited scientific research on nuclear winter as part of a propaganda campaign against the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, it does not necessarily follow that nuclear winter is a KGB hoax.

The unknown author of this FBI white paper is spreading a KGB defector's misinformation about the origins of the research on nuclear winter and damaging the reputation of climate science. The paper even mischaracterizes information "cited" from Comrade J.
This paper is unworthy of the FBI.

Climate change is an important national security issue, but, this FBI white paper can only damage our national security by undermining public confidence in climate science. Why should scholars credit the cautionary tales of FBI counterintelligence "experts" who mischaracterize their sources and uncritically recycle a KGB defector's garbled and contradictory conspiracy theory about how the KGB manipulated western scientists with fabricated research about nuclear winter?

The FBI should not rely on some Russian defector or on apocryphal, uncorroborated KGB rumors for reliable scientific information about nuclear winter. The FBI has access to the resources of the U.S. government's scientific agencies, the National Academies, and our university researchers. For example, here is a 2007 paper on nuclear winter titled "Nuclear Winter Revisited With a Modern Climate Model and Current Nuclear Arsenals: Still Catastrophic Consequences" (April 2007).

Scientific research about nuclear winter helped end the arms war in the 1980s. The introduction to an article in Nature titled "Nuclear Winter is a Real and Present Danger" (5-18-2011) observes:

In the 1980s, discussion and debate about the possibility of a 'nuclear winter' helped to end the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. As former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2000: “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honour and morality, to act. [See an account of the interview with Gorbachev at Salon (9-7-2000).]

The book Comrade J quotes the "physicist" Russell Seitz who claims that nuclear winter research is based on "a notorious lack of scientific integrity" (176). However, Seitz does not have a Ph.D. in physics. [See Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter's Tale, page 249.]

I think it is possible that Seitz's ideas about nuclear winter were attributed to the KGB defector Tretykov in order to give Seitz's views credibility.

An Internet article titled "Debunking Pete Earley's Comrade J" claims:

Most of Earley's account is directly lifted from “The Scandal of Nuclear Winter” by Brad Sparks published in National Review (November 15, 1985), and “The Melting of 'Nuclear Winter'” by R. Seitz published in The World [Sic?] Street Journal (December 12, 1986). [See page 10, "General Remarks.]

The author (above) may have confused his dates, because this copy on the Internet of Seitz's article is dated November 5, 1986. I will try to sort out the confusion.

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave Paintings

2011-06-05T06:35:00.018-04:00

This weekend I went to see a French documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave paintings titled Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film was written, directed, and narrated by the renowned German director Werner Herzog.

The film opens with a 3-D arial perspective as the camera soars over a French vineyard and approaches the Pont-d'Arc, a natural bridge that spans the Ardèche River near the town of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc. The Pont-d'Arc bridge and the nearby Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave are located in the rugged Ardèche département of southern France.

The camera then leads the viewers to the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave where they are introduced to the earliest-known cave paintings in the world, some of which are perhaps 32,000 years old.

The film explains that the cave has hidden for millennia in a limestone cliff above the former bed of the Ardèche River. The original entrance was sealed-off, possibly by falling rocks, so people who enter the cave today have to enter from a hole above the cave. The cave was discovered---or more accurately rediscovered---in 1994 by three speleologists: Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet, for whom the cave is named.

Here are some images from the Chauvet Pont-d'Arc Cave. The paintings on the walls of the cave depict hundreds of ice-age animals: bison, horses, mammoths, lions, leopards, panthers, bears, owls, hyenas, and rhinos. At least thirteen species of animals are depicted, some of which are now extinct.

The paleolithic artists etched the walls or incorporated the existing contours of the cave walls in order to give the animals a semblance of three dimensionality. The artists frequently sketched the outlines of a series of animals behind other animals to capture the sense of large herds, as in the painting of horses (above) and these rhinos.

Unfortunately, with the possible exception of one partial figure of the lower part of a woman's body, the ancient artists failed to depict themselves!

There is evidence that a written code may have been used by these palaolithic people.

The U.K. Mail (1-21-11) explains:

For example, a tusk was used to indicate a mammoth. This, known as a synecdoche, is common to pictographic languages.

This appeared to prove that our ancestors, even at this early date, were considering how to use abstract symbols rather than realistic pictures.

The cave was inhabited at different times by the now-extinct cave bear and Cro-Magnon man.

Herzog's impressionistic 3-D film was beautiful but didn't really provide too much information. The film might have benefited from more expert commentary. The 3-D effects were exiting, but I found it strenuous to watch for a long time.

Apparently, 3-D films can cause eye-strain. The Voice of America (2-21-10) report:

[A] study at the University of California Berkeley found that 3-D movies can cause eye strain.

Normally, when we look at things nearby, our eyes converge. They do the opposite when we look at things in the distance. Martin Banks, a professor of optometry at Berkeley, says 3-D doesn't allow our eyes to follow the rules because we're focusing on things both far and near at the same time. That's called "vergence accommodation conflict."

MSNBC has also published an article about how 3-D effects some movie-goers titled "Why watching 'Avatar' can feel like eating bad mushrooms" (2-8-10).

The French Ministry of Culture provides an information site about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave paintings that includes an interactive map with photos. National Geographic (August 2001) has an abstract of an article about the cave titled "France's Magical Ice Age Art." The New Yorker (6-29-08) has an article titled "First Impressions" about the cave paintings. I enjoyed the New Yorker article the most.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences: Study Week on Astrobiology Honors Galileo

2011-05-30T10:11:00.026-04:00

Listen to the facinating and thoughtful interview with NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) Director Carl Pilcher and Vatican Observatory astronomer and Jesuit brother Guy Consolmagno.

In November 2009, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted a Study Week on Astrobiology to commemorate the fourth centenary of Galileo Galilei's first observations by telescope.

Wikipedia explains that "Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." NASA has a site that explains astrobiology as well as the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). You can read the biographies of the scientists who participated in the Vatican Study Week beginning on page 14.

The Catholic News Service (11-10-09) reports on the conference and how the leaders of the Catholic Church view the possibility of extraterrestrial life from both a scientific and religious perspective:

[Jesuit Father Jose Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory/homepage] said that even though the study week looked exclusively at scientific evidence and theories, it was "very important that the church is involved in this type of research" looking at life in the cosmos.

He quoted Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, president of the commission governing Vatican City, as telling participants that "truth from research cannot make us afraid; what is to be feared is error."

Science opens up the human mind to new knowledge and contributes toward the fulfillment of humankind, the cardinal said, according to Father Funes.

When asked whether God would have to be incarnated elsewhere if there were intelligent life on another planet, Father Funes recalled the parable of the lost sheep.

God's incarnation in Jesus Christ was a singular and "unique event not only in human history but in the history of the universe and the cosmos," he said.

The existence of evil and original sin on Earth meant God, the good shepherd, had to leave behind his entire flock to go get his one lost sheep, he said.

"Humanity would be this lost sheep and in order to find this lost sheep (God) became man in Jesus," Father Funes said.

In May 2008, Father Funes gave an interview to L’Osservatore Romano titled "The Extraterrestrial is my Brother" (5-14-08). An article describing this remarkable interview was published by the Catholic News Agency (5-13-08).

I don't read Italian, but the Google translation of Father Funes' full interview in LOR seems consistent with this blog translation. At the end of the interview, Father Funes was asked if extra-terrestrials would need to be redeemed from sin:

LOR: And what about redemption?

FUNES: We borrow the gospel image of the lost sheep. The pastor leaves the 99 in the herd for go look for the one that is lost. We think that in this universe there can be 100 sheep, corresponding to diverse forms of creatures. We that belong to the human race could be precisely the lost sheep, sinners who have need of a pastor. God was made man in Jesus to save us. In this way, if other intelligent beings existed, it is not said that they would have need of redemption. They could remain in full friendship with their Creator.

LOR: I insist: if they were sinners, would redemption also be possible for them?

FUNES: Jesus has been incarnated once, for everyone. The incarnation is an unique and unrepeatable event. I am therefore sure that they, in some way, would have the possibility to enjoy God’s mercy, as it has been for us men.

The Washington Post (11-8-09) and the Guardian (11-11-09) also covered the Pontifical Academy's astrobiology conference; but instead of focusing on the scientific presentations, the newspapers focused more on scientists who believe that the possibility of extraterrestrial life is fraught with troubling theological implications for Christianity.

Even NASA has posted an article about the Pontifical Academy's Study Week on Astrobiology:

This past week in Rome as part of the International Year of Astronomy, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted a Study Week on Astrobiology, an interdisciplinary event during which “cloistered astrobiologists confronted each other’s fields of research” and dialogued about the connections. The participants included many from the extended astrobiology community, including John Baross, David Charbonneau, Roger Summons, Andy Knoll, Chris Impey, Jonathan Lunine, Jill Tarter, Sara Seager, and Giovanna Tinetti.

“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory, in an Associated Press Interview. Funes, a Jesuit priest, also said that the possibility of alien life raises “many philosophical and theological implications” but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue. RadioVaticana reports.

Today, NAI Director Carl Pilcher and Vatican Observatory astronomer and Jesuit brother Guy Consolmagno continue the conversation with Anna Maria Tremonti, host of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s radio program The Current. Their discussion ranges from what it would mean to the Church if alien life were found, to whether or not science needs religion.

Pope Benedict Phones Astronauts on Space Shuttle

2011-05-21T15:04:00.007-04:00

"On Earth, people often fight for energy; in space we use solar power and we have fuel cells on the Space Station. You know, the science and the technology that we put into the Space Station to develop a solar power capability, gives us pretty much an unlimited amount of energy. And if those technologies could be adapted more on Earth, we could possibly reduce some of that violence."---Astronaut Mark Kelly during his audience with Pope Benedict

On May 11, 2011, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences published a report titled "Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene."

Today, Pope Benedict sat in the Foconi Room of the Vatican Library in Rome, called the astronauts on the International Space Station, and asked them some scientific and religious questions. The Pope spoke with two crews of astronauts: those who work on the space station and a second crew that had arrived on the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The Papal audience was organized by the European Space Agency. NASA has video of the interview. See also the video of the Pope's remarks at Space.com.

Vatican Radio reports (5-21-11) reports:

This is the story of the latest milestone in a Vatican - space connection. One which began at the time of the 1969 moonwalk when Paul VI made history by sending a the first papal radio message to astronauts hurtling through space.

Over forty years on, on Saturday 21st May 2011, Benedict XVI continued that trend going one step further: a two way approach to space in a conversation with astronauts. It took place in a landmark audio visual satellite linkup with two crews of astronauts: those who work at the station and those who’d reached there on the Shuttle Endeavour.

This event which was the result of international cooperation and organized by the European Space Agency included serious, touching and even humorous moments which brought a smile to the Pope’s face as the astronauts who could not see the pope, but knew he could see them, played on the floating elements in space, among which a medal he had given them representing Michelangelo’s depiction of creation in the Sistine chapel . The appointment began shortly after 1 pm Rome time as the astronauts from different nationalities , including Russian cosmonauts introduced themselves and welcomed him on board.

And when the Holy Father replied he began by recognizing the scientific progress as well as express his admiration for their courage as representatives of humankind in a mission to explore new spaces:

“... We are convinced you are inspired by noble ideals and that you intend placing the results of your research and endeavours at the disposal of all humanity and for the common good."

But the pope also remarked he didn’t really want to be the only one doing the talking:

“…this is a conversation, so I must not be the only one doing the talking…I am very curious to hear you tell me about your experiences and your reflections. If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a few questions…”

And question the astronauts he did: asking about the perspective from their observation point in space, regarding issues ranging from the contribution of science to the cause of peace among nations in the earth below, to the responsibility and concern for the future generations of our planet.

The answers were brief and pragmatic even when asked if there were any special tips they might pass on to others from this experience. There was time for a personal touch of consolation addressed to one of the astronauts whose mother had passed away while he was in space.

As might be expected there was also a question surrounding the origins and destiny of the universe and humanity. For while space exploration the pope pointed out is a fascinating scientific adventure, it is also an adventure of the human spirit, a powerful stimulus to reflect on the origins and on the destiny of the universe and humanity:

“…Believers often look up at the limitless heavens and, meditating on the Creator of it all, they are struck by the mystery of His greatness. ..

“In the midst of your intense work and research, the Holy Father went on to ask the astronauts: do you ever stop and reflect like this – perhaps even to say a prayer to the Creator? Or will it be easier for you to think about these things once you have returned to Earth?

Listen to this report by Veronica Scarisbrick :

Full text of conversation [Go to Vatican Radio and scroll down.]

Dear astronauts,

I am very happy to have this extraordinary opportunity to converse with you during your mission. I am especially grateful to be able to speak to so many of you, as both crews are present on the Space Station at this time.

Humanity is experiencing a period of extremely rapid progress in the fields of scientific knowledge and technical applications. In a sense, you are our representatives – spear-heading humanity’s exploration of new spaces and possibilities for our future, going beyond the limitations of our everyday existence.

We all admire your courage, as well as the discipline and commitment with which you prepared yourselves for this mission. We are convinced you are inspired by noble ideals and that you intend placing the results of your research and endeavours at the disposal of all humanity and for the common good.

This conversation gives me the chance to express my own admiration and appreciation to you and to all those who collaborate in making your mission possible, and to add my heartfelt encouragement to bring it to a safe and successful conclusion.

But this is a conversation, so I must not be the only one doing the talking.

I am very curious to hear you tell me about your experiences and your reflections.

If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a few questions…

First Question:

From the Space Station you have a very different view of the Earth. You fly over different continents and nations several times a day. I think it must be obvious to you how we all live together on one Earth and how absurd it is that we fight and kill each other one. I know that Mark Kelly’s wife was a victim of a serious attack and I hope her health continues to improve. When you are contemplating the Earth from up there, do you ever wonder about the way nations and people live together down here, or about how science can contribute to the cause of peace?

Reply :

Well, thank you for the kind words, Your Holiness, and thank you for mentioning my wife Gabby. It’s a very good question: we fly over most of the world and you don’t see borders, but at the same time we realize that people fight with each other and there is a lot of violence in this world and it’s really an unfortunate thing. Usually, people fight over many different things. As we’ve seen in the Middle East right now: it’s somewhat for democracy in certain areas, but usually people fight for resources. And it’s interesting in space … on Earth, people often fight for energy; in space we use solar power and we have fuel cells on the Space Station. You know, the science and the technology that we put into the Space Station to develop a solar power capability, gives us pretty much an unlimited amount of energy. And if those technologies could be adapted more on Earth, we could possibly reduce some of that violence.

Second Question:

One of the themes I often return to in my discourses concerns the responsibility we all have towards the future of our planet. I recall the serious risks facing the environment and the survival of future generations. Scientists tell us we have to be careful and from an ethical point of view we must develop our consciences as well.

From your extraordinary observation point, how do you see the situation on Earth?

Do you see signs or phenomena to which we need to be more attentive

Reply:

Well, Your Holiness, it’s a great honour to speak with you and you’re right: it really is an extraordinary vantage point we have up here. On the one hand, we can see how indescribably beautiful the planet that we have been given is; but on the other hand, we can really clearly see how fragile it is. Just the atmosphere, for instance: the atmosphere when viewed from space is paper-thin, and to think that this paper-thin layer is all that separates every living thing from the vacuum of space and is all that protects us, is really a sobering thought. You know, it seems to us that it’s just incredible to view the Earth hanging in the blackness of space and to think that we are all on this together, riding through this beautiful fragile oasis through the universe, it really fills us with a lot of hope to think that all of us on board this incredible orbiting Space Station that was built by the many nations of our international partnership, to accomplish this tremendous feat in orbit, I think … you know, that just shows that by working together and by cooperating we can overcome many of the problems that face our planet, we could solve many of the challenges that face the inhabitants of our planet … it really is a wonderful place to live and work, and it’s a wonderful place to view our beautiful Earth.

Third Question:

The experience you are having right now is both extraordinary and very important – even if you must eventually come back down to Earth like all the rest of us.

When you do return, you will be much admired and treated like heroes who speak and act with authority. You will be asked to talk about your experiences. What will be the most important messages you would like to convey – to young people especially – who will live in a world strongly influenced by your experiences and discoveries?

Reply:

Your Holiness, as my colleagues have indicated, we can look down and see our beautiful planet Earth that God has made, and it is the most beautiful planet in the whole Solar System. However, if we look up, we can see the rest of the universe, and the rest of the Universe is out there for us to go explore. And the International Space Station is just one symbol, one example of what human beings can do when we work together constructively. So our message, I think - one of our many messages, but I think one of our most important messages – is to let the children of the planet know, the young people know that there is a whole universe for us to go explore. And when we do it together, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish.

Fourth Question:

Space exploration is a fascinating scientific adventure. I know that you have been installing new equipment to further scientific research and the study of radiation coming from outer space. But I think it is also an adventure of the human spirit, a powerful stimulus to reflect on the origins and on the destiny of the universe and humanity. Believers often look up at the limitless heavens and, meditating on the Creator of it all, they are struck by the mystery of His greatness. That is why the medal I gave Robert (Vittori) as a sign of my own participation in your mission, represents the Creation of Man – as painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel. In the midst of your intense work and research, do you ever stop and reflect like this – perhaps even to say a prayer to the Creator? Or will it be easier for you to think about these things once you have returned to Earth?

Reply:

Your Holiness, to live on board of the International Space Station, to work as an astronaut on the shuttle Soyuz of the Station, is extremely intense. But we all have an opportunity, when the nights come, to look down on Earth: our planet, the blue planet, is beautiful. Blue is the colour of our planet, blue is the colour of the sky, blue is also the colour of the Italian Air Force, the organization that gave me the opportunity to then join the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency. When we have a moment to look down, beauty which is the three-dimensional effect of the beauty of the planet is capturing our heart, is capturing my heart. And I do pray: I do pray for me, for our families, for our future. I took with me the coin and I allow this coin to float in front of me to demonstrate lack of gravity. I shall thank you very much for this opportunity and I’d like to allow this coin to float to my friend and colleague Paolo: he will make return to Earth on the Soyuz. I brought it with me to space and he will take it down to Earth to then give it back to you.

Fifth Question – in Italian – for Paolo Nespoli:

La mia ultima domanda è per Paolo. Caro Paolo, so che nei giorni scorsi la tua mamma ti ha lasciato e quando fra pochi giorni tornerai a casa non la troverai più ad aspettarti. Tutti ti siamo stati vicini, anche io ho pregato per lei…Come hai vissuto questo tempo di dolore? Nella vostra Stazione vi sentite lontani e isolati e soffrite un senso di separazione, o vi sentite uniti fra voi e inseriti in una comunità che vi accompagna con attenzione e affetto?

Reply:

Santo Padre, ho sentito le sue preghiere, le vostre preghiere arrivare fino qua su: è vero, siamo fuori da questo mondo, orbitiamo intorno alla Terra ed abbiamo un punto di vantaggio per guardare la Terra e per sentire tutto quello che ci sta attorno. I miei colleghi qui, a bordo della Stazione – Dimitri, Kelly, Ron, Alexander e Andrei – mi sono stati vicini in questo momento importante per me, molto intenso, così come i miei fratelli, le mie sorelle, le mie zie, i miei cugini, i miei parenti sono stati vicini a mia madre negli ultimi momenti. Sono grato di tutto questo. Mi sono sentito lontano ma anche molto vicino, e sicuramente il pensiero di sentire tutti voi vicino a me, uniti in questo momento, è stato di estremo sollievo. Ringrazio anche l’Agenzia spaziale europea e l’Agenzia spaziale americana che hanno messo a disposizione le risorse affinché io abbia potuto parlare con lei negli ultimi momenti.

(Dear Paolo (Nespoli), I know that your Mother passed away recently and that when you get back home in a few days she will not be there to greet you. We are all close to you in your loss, and I personally have prayed for her…How did you cope with this sorrowful time? Do you feel alone and cut off in your Space Station? Do you suffer a sense of separation, or do you feel united among yourselves and part of a community that follows your endeavours with attention and affection?)

Final greeting:

Dear astronauts,

I thank you warmly for this wonderful opportunity to meet and dialogue with you. You have helped me and many other people to reflect together on important issues that regard the future of humanity. I wish you the very best for your work and for the success of your great mission at the service of science, international collaboration, authentic progress, and for peace in the world. I will continue to follow you in my thoughts and prayers and I willingly impart my Apostolic Blessing…

The Vatican's Pontifical Academy Reports: "Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene"

2011-05-14T09:45:00.007-04:00

"Atmospheric chemist V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography -- a member of the Pontifical Academy since 2004 -- said he hopes the new report will have a lasting impact. His model is the papal academy's 1981 statement on nuclear war, which condemned the use of nuclear weapons.

'That was communicated to world leaders personally, in some cases by the pope,' Ramanathan said. 'Apparently it had a big impact on President Reagan.'

The scientist, who has spent decades studying climate change, said working under the auspices of the Vatican also offered a fresh perspective.

'I have never participated in any report in 30 years where the word 'God' is mentioned,' Ramanathan said. 'I think the Vatican brings that moral authority.'"---NYT (5-6-11)

Recently, I posted an article titled "Pontifical Academy of Sciences Hosts a Workshop on the Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene" (3-20-11).

My previous post described the history of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy, highlighted some of the Academicians, and touched on the research and impressive scientific credentials of the scientists who organized this workshop.

The Pontifical Academy has now published the Report on their April 2011 workshop: "Fate of the Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene: A Report by the Working Group Commissioned by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences."

The New York Times has published an informative article titled "Green Smoke Is Sighted as Vatican Releases Glacier Report" (5-6-11) that describes the Pontifical Academy workshop.

Reporter Lauren Morello interviewed several of the Academicians who participated in the Pontifical Academy workshop, such as V. Ramanathan. Academician Ramanathan's research on Asia's brown cloud is described in the A.P. Environmental Science book used by Catholic high school students.

Joe Romm's Climate Progress has a post about the Report by the Working Group titled Vatican on climate: Pray for science (5-11-11).

The homepage of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy states:

Workshop on Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene
(2-4 April 2011)

We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life. We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish.

Ajai, L. Bengtsson, D. Breashears, P.J. Crutzen, S. Fuzzi, W. Haeberli, W.W. Immerzeel, G. Kaser, C. Kennel, A. Kulkarni, R. Pachauri, T. Painter, J. Rabassa, V. Ramanathan, A. Robock, C. Rubbia, L. Russell, M. Sánchez Sorondo, H.J. Schellnhuber, S. Sorooshian, T. F. Stocker, L.G. Thompson, O.B. Toon, D. Zaelke

Download the complete Statement

Erratum: This version dated May 11, 2011, corrects an error in the May 5 version. The word 'expansion' in the 2nd sentence in the 1st paragraph of p. 6 has been replaced with 'exploitation'.

The Climate Show

2011-05-14T08:33:00.003-04:00

The Climate Show is an Internet radio and video program from New Zealand about climate change. The episodes are listed and linked (newest first) at Hot Topic. Each episode includes a short post explaining the program's focus.

The "About" link at The Climate Show expains:

The Climate Show is a fortnightly roundup of the latest climate news, science, research, sceptics, politics and solutions. It answers the question "what is happening with the Earth's climate right now?" Every week the show features a special guest, chosen for their specialist knowledge in a current area of climate science or first hand experience of climate change. Hosted by radio and internet broadcaster Glenn Williams and Gareth Renowden from Hot Topic along with Skeptical Science's John Cook. We are passionate about understanding and communicating the biggest issue facing life on Planet Earth. Take time to go back through the archives, subscribe to the iTunes audio or rss audio feed and keep in touch on Twitter or Facebook. [See full text and links.]

Confusing Michael Mann's Hockey Stick with the Decline in Tree-Ring Density

2011-05-08T12:26:00.005-04:00

Michael Mann, the Nobel-Winning Climate Scientist Who is Being Persecuted and Hounded by Virginia's Vicious, Ambitious, Greedy, Duplicitous, Fossil-fuel tool---Attorney General Cuccinelli!

Unless we get to vote him off the island, I won't be voting for that scoundrel Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli again! I probably won't be voting for any Republicans for a long time because they are taking money from the fossil fuel interests, confusing us about the science of climate change, and persecuting our great scientists.

It is not easy to judge what brilliant scientists are discussing amongst themselves just from reading their e-mails. We need more context. We don't understand what they are talking about.

That's why criminal political operatives, who don't care about the truth or the protection of world civilization, hatched a plan to steal the climate scientists' e-mails: they wanted to trick us and destroy the scientists' credibility and reputations by mischaracterizing what the e-mails really said. In Russia they call that kompromat.

John Cook of Skeptical Science (5-1-11) has published the following helpful post about the allegation that the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann (above) dishonestly used a "trick" to supposedly "hide the decline" in the earth's temperature.

John Cook (5-1-11) explains:

A common climate misconception is confusing the hockey stick with the 'decline' in tree-ring density. Skeptical Science has cleared up the misconception in Muller Misinformation #1: confusing Mike's trick with hide the decline as well as in this interview on The Climate Show. A new Climate Crock video Unwinding "Hide the Decline" has been released by Peter Sinclair which is one of the clearest explanations of 'Mike's trick' and 'hide the decline' yet (as well as the most entertaining).

Conspiracist Blogger James Corbett Appears on the Kremlin-Financed Russia Today

2011-05-08T09:26:00.006-04:00

James Corbett is a conspiracist with a site on the Internet. He is a 9-11 Truther. Truthers argue amongst themselves, but typically claim that 9-11 was masterminded by President George W. Bush and/or an inside job orchestrated by the U.S. government and not the work of Osama bin Laden. James Corbett claims that man-made global warming is a hoax. He claims that President Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, worked for the CIA.

James Corbett recently appeared on Russia Today (RT, the Kremlin-financed, English-language, propaganda satellite T.V. channel) the day after bin Laden was killed and claimed that bin Laden had deep ties to U.S. intelligence.

Russia Today is an uncritical purveyor of conspiracy theories and frequently interviews American and British conspiracists who claim that global warming is a "hoax," too. RT doesn't interview the famous scientists--Russian or Western---who understand global warming. The anti-scientific claim that global warming is a "hoax" has been a staple of Russian propaganda.

President Medvedev claimed in early 2010 that global warming was a "tricky campaign." After the 2010 forest fires, President Medvedev reversed himself and claimed that man was causing global warming. (Andrei Areshev, a lunatic attached to a Foreign Ministry drunk tank, even claimed right in RIA Novosti that those sneaky U.S. climate scientists were causing global arming by beaming secret climate weapons at Russia!)

Fossil fuel companies such as Gazprom have a lot of power and own much of the media in Russia. The Russian gas company Gazprom is majority-owned by the Russian government and pays taxes that support the government.

In the U.S., Politicians like Senator Inhofe and Attorney General Cuccinelli even cite official Russian/Gazprom propaganda in defence of their global warming denialism. These politicians might want to reconsider spreading propaganda that even the Russian scientist don't agree with and stop persecuting our great scientists!

In his suit against the EPA, Cucinelli even cites a report by Putin's former adviser, the economist Andrei Illarionov, that has been discredited by Russian scientists. Illarionov was also an aviser to Victor Chernomyrdin, the head of the Soviet Gas Ministry and its post-Soviet reincarnation Gazprom. Illarionov has a think tank in Russia called the Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA) and also writes about climate change for the Libertarian Cato Institute, which is funded by Koch brothers, who own a coal company and other businesses. The father of the Koch brothers built Stalin's oil refineries. Cuccinelli gets money from fossil-fuel interests. He even gets money from his father, a career lobbyist for the gas industry.

The NYT (2-22-11) reports that Russian scientists have distanced themselves from Illarionov's IEA report:

Alexander Bedritskiy, president of the World Meteorological Organization and the top climate change adviser to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, said that the Russian report [by Illarionov's IEA] was thoroughly discredited by top scientists in his country more than a year ago.

“Any scientific discussion on the results, pretending to be science-based, does not make sense,” Dr. Bedritskiy said in an e-mail.

He also noted that the author of that report, Andrei Illarionov, is not a climate scientist but an economist with the Cato Institute, a conservative research group in the United States.

Mr. Cuccinelli could not say how he had verified the accuracy of the report, which is written in Russian, but said that his legal complaint had been “heavily researched.” The research did not consist of consultations with scientists, however, he said.

“We have to have a certain understanding of our context to operate, but that doesn’t require expert witnesses,” he said.

Here is a video of James Corbett interviewing the Canadian Dr. Tim Ball, who falsely claims to be a climate scientist but has published little peer-reviewed research in this field. Ball is being sued for defaming the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann because he publically claimed that Dr. Mann should be in the state pen instead of at Penn State. We still don't know who precipitated this fake "Climategate" scandal by stealing, publishing, and mischaracterizing the meaning of scientists' private e-mails. Russian entities may have been involved, but it is difficult to know. There is sometimes a confluence of interests between Russian and Western fossil fuel corporations and their denialist mouthpieces.

I only noticed Corbett's weird RT interview about bin Laden because a screen-snatch appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with the title "Six Countries, Six Conspiracies: Skepticism Over Bin Laden's Death" (5-4-11). [See also "Bin Laden Conspiracy Theories Flourish Amid Demands For Proof".]

Corbett's conspiracist claim that bin Laden is a CIA asset is the top myth about bin Laden, according to the reporter Peter Bergen's article "Five Myths about Osama Bin Laden" (5-6-11):

1. The CIA created Osama bin Laden.

Common among conspiracy theorists is the notion that bin Laden was a CIA creation and that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were blowback from an agency operation gone awry. Typifying this view is filmmaker Michael Moore, who on the day after the terrorist attacks wrote: “WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”

In fact, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA had no dealings with “Afghan Arabs” such as bin Laden and had few direct dealings with any of the Afghan mujaheddin. Instead, all U.S. aid to Afghanistan was funneled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, the ISI officer who coordinated Pakistani efforts during the war, explained in “The Bear Trap,” his 1992 book: “No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujaheddin.”

Since 9/11, al-Qaeda insiders have responded in writing to assertions that they had some kind of relationship with the CIA. Bin Laden’s top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his autobiographical “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet,” wrote, “The truth that everyone should learn is that the United States did not give one penny in aid to the [Arab] mujaheddin.” Similarly, Abu Musab al-Suri, long an associate of bin Laden’s, explained in his history of the jihadist movement, “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance”: “It is a big lie that the Afghan Arabs were formed with the backing of the CIA.”

There are very few things that al-Qaeda and the CIA agree upon — except that they have never had any relationship.

Thank-You Mr. President, CIA, and Navy Seals!

2011-05-07T14:09:00.025-04:00

May 1, 2011: The Fanatical Killer Osama bin Laden Is Dead!

"Jihadist Web sites mourn their slain mentor, but few in the Arab street care for a man who brought nothing to the region but havoc and desolation, provoked the United States into waging war and, above all, reinforced the very rulers whom radical Islamists most wished to topple ... From Libya to Bahrain, Syria to Yemen, a pluralistic political system is the goal of a young, urban middle class that is sick of the old order."---NYT (5-7-11)

In this iconic Situation Room photo (click to enlarge), a grim President Obama and his advisers watch as the the assault on Osama bin Laden's lair unfolds. See the NYT coverage of "The Death of Osama bin Laden."

It's not really clear what our leaders are watching. Perhaps the Seals even have video cameras mounted on their helmets. Hillary Clinton's hand covers her mouth. I remember that many women in New York covered their mouths when they watched the Twin Towers burn.

Perhaps our leaders are in the "Surge Room," a smaller room in the Situation Room that is filled with communications equipment and staffed by telecommunications experts. Here is a video about the different rooms in the Situation Room. Many government agencies had to cooperate and keep a big secret to make this great victory possible.

The Seal who shot bin Laden will probably take his secret to the grave. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (5-7-11) has an article about the "Team 6" Navy Seals. Wikipedia also notes:

The United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG), commonly known as DEVGRU and informally by its former name SEAL Team Six (ST6), is one of the United States' two secretive Tier One counter-terrorism and Special Mission Units (SMUs); the other such group is 1st SFOD-D (Delta Force)...In a recent article, Marc Ambinder wrote that DEVGRU's designation had been changed by the Defense Department to a new name. Hovever, the new name is currently classified. [Full text].

In Homer's Iliad, after Achilles finally finishes off his enemy Hector in the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles keeps screaming "die, die, die!" Homer's point seems to be that even the bloody, painful, gruesome death of Hector has failed to satisfy Achilles' insatiable lust for revenge.

I thought I would feel elated when they got bin Laden; and I was happy, but I was also left a bit disatisfied. Killing bin Laden wasn't enough. The bloody death of this twisted fanatic can never restore all the 9-11 victims or the victims of these ten long years of war to their loved ones. I felt like the vengeful Achilles screaming to the dead Hector: "Die, die, die!"

I had almost given up hope that Osama bin Laden would ever have to pay for his mass murders. Initially, Wolf Blitzer was afraid to report what his sources were telling him. I could tell he wanted to tell what he had heard, but he didn't want to jump the gun.

Finally, Mr. Blitzer reported that President Obama was about to appear on T.V. and announce that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden.

I think bin Laden's death will damage Al Qaeda, although I know that the terrorism probably won't end in my lifetime. Still, the revolutions spearheaded by young educated people in the Middle East give me hope that a new day may be dawning.

I thought I would feel jubilant when this day came, but we can only kill bin Laden once. The announcement of bin Laden's death mostly brought back all those terrible memories of 9-11. We should remember bin Laden's innocent victims, and not their twisted killer.

I thought President Obama's speech set a good tone. He was serious and dignified. He didn't focus on Bin Laden. He remembered the dead instead of gloating about the killing of this twisted mass-murderer.

I think that's what I needed. President Obama had promised the American people that he would catch bin Laden, and he did. Mr. Obama told people that bin Laden was a terrorist, not a Muslim; he reminded us that bin Laden was a murderer of Muslims. The President's speech diminished the bin Laden that I couldn't kill enough.

President Obama thanked the patient intelligence experts and the brave operatives who tracked down and killed bin Laden. He offered comfort to the bereaved, and he promised to protect us. I was very moved by his elegant, dignified words. He took responsibility for this mission, but he gave credit and thanks to many government employees and military men and women who can never be named and who worked together in secret to make this victory possible after ten arduous years of war.

Arrogant Ignoramus Kent Clizbe Opines: Climate Scientist Christopher Field Is "Sucking Off the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, NOAA, and Other Government Teats"

2011-04-26T09:49:00.023-04:00

The other day, I read an article titled "Chesapeake Energy Suspends ALL Fracking in Pennsylvania After Blowout On Eve of BP Anniversary" (4-21-11). The author, Brendan DeMelle, is the Executive Director and Managing Editor of DeSmogBlog, a site that posts articles about climate change.

The commenter Anonymous (whose vulgar, comments addressed to Mr. DeMelle have now been deleted) mistakenly corrected Mr. DeMelle's variant spelling of the word eerie/eery.

Anonymous shouldn't be criticizing Mr. DeMelle's research abilities and calling him a hand-wringing, pseudo-intellectual asshole who sucks his boyfriend's cock. Instead, Anonymous should consider that there are regional and national variations in English spelling. He should consult a dictionary instead of resorting to profanity.

I couldn't help noticing that Anonymous--who attacks Mr. DeMelle with vulgar, sexually-demeaning aspersions---also uses the words “pseudo-intellectual” and “hand-wringing” to describe Mr. DeMelle.

Anonymous coincidentally used some of the same diction that the self-described ex-CIA linguist/operations officer Kent Clizbe used in a recent article titled "Selective Progressive Outrage? Water-Boarding or Extra-Judicial Killings, Take Your Pick" (12-9-10).

Of course, the similarities in diction are undoubtedly nothing but a coincidence because Kent Clizbe is a highly-trained linguist who would undoubtedly check a dictionary before he "corrected" a person's variant spelling and called him a cock-sucking asshole.

Still, I couldn't help noticing that Mr. Clizbe also uses both the words "pseudo-intellectual" and "hand-wringing" in the article he wrote criticizing President Obama and the CIA.

However, unlike Anonymous, Kent Clizbe doesn't write that experts on climate change suck their boyfriend's cocks. Rather, Kent Clizbe writes something entirely different: he observes that the climate scientist Christopher Field is "sucking off the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, NOAA, and other government teats."

In this video, Newsmax (4-22-11) interviews Kent Clizbe. He is about to publish a book about the KGB, but there is no evidence that he is really an expert on the KGB. In this video, Kent Clizbe observes something fairly obvious: the KGB and its proxies claim that "America sucks."

If the linguist, retired CIA case officer, job-vetter, and climate change denialist Kent Clizbe were also an expert on the history of the Soviet/Russian intelligence services, he would have noticed that Western denialists such as Lord Monckton, Pat Michaels, and John O'Sullivan have popped up on the Kremlin-financed Russia Today English-language propaganda satellite channel. Their interviews are posted on Youtube.

Here is John O'Sullivan's interview on the Kremlin-financed channel Russia Today. Notice how English-speaking interviewer gives the appearance of asking skeptical questions. Elsewhere John O'Sullivan has claimed that Kent Clizbe is one of his collaborators in the effort to discredit Dr. Michael Mann.

If Kent Clizbe were an expert on the KGB, he would have noticed that Attorney General Cuccinelli's suit against the EPA cited RIA Novosti's English-language version of Kommersant's attack on British climate scientists. Many of the organizations that petitioned the EPA about its finding that CO2 is a pollutant also cited the RIA Novosti's English-language version of Kommersant's attack on British climate scientists.

See Cucinelli's suit against the EPA and the petitions to the EPA. (Note: Cuccinelli's petition is not the same as his suit.)

If Kent Clizbe were an expert on the Soviet/Russian intelligence, he would know that Kommersant is owned by the Gazprom operative Alisher Usmanov, who has an education and career that suggest his affiliation with the KGB. Kommersant cited the Russian economist Andrei Illarionov who worked for Putin and Gazprom before he was hired to be a climate expert for the Cato Institute.

If he were an expert on the Russian security services, Kent Clizbe would have noticed that the "Denialist Party" is spouting Kremlin/Gazprom canards about the supposedly greedy, dishonest climate scientists who allegedly mislead people about global warming.

How ironic that the Denialist Party hates American agencies such as the EPA but doesn't have any problems with Russian agencies such as Russia Today, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, and the Government-owned Gazprom.

If he were an expert on the Russian intelligence, Kent Clizbe would have noticed that Russia's President Medvedev claims that global warming is a "tricky campaign" (Time, 8-2-10):

Two months before Copenhagen, [Russia's] state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia's involvement in the leak....

"Broadly speaking, the Russian position has always been that climate change is an invention of the West to try to bring Russia to its knees," says Vladimir Chuprov, director of the Greenpeace energy department in Moscow. Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter [early 2010], he called the global-warming debate "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects." That was two months after the Copenhagen talks.

If he were an expert on Russian security agencies, Kent Clizbe would know that Russian and Soviet propaganda campaigns often depict scientists as crafty and meretricious, although the leaders frequently publically re-evaluate their anti-scientific propaganda. Even in Russia, politicians eventually retract ridiculous lies about scientists because they need to deal with reality.

In his famous 1956 "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Conference, Nikita Khrushchev stated:

Let us...recall the “affair of the doctor-plotters [who were falsely accused of taking money from the U.S. government to poison Soviet leaders].”

(Animation in the hall.)

Actually there was no “affair” outside of the declaration of the woman doctor [Lidiya] Timashuk [more here], who was probably influenced or ordered by someone (after all, she was an unofficial collaborator of the organs of state security) to write Stalin a letter in which she declared that doctors were applying supposedly improper methods of medical treatment.

Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported:

[Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' "crafty" plots were fabricated in KGB offices.

During last summer's forest fires, Russia's President Medvedev stated that global warming is happening. RIA Novosti (7-31-10) reports that President Medvedev stated:

"What is happening to our planet's climate should motivate all of us, I mean, states and heads of non-governmental organizations, to take more active steps to resist global warming."

This affirmation of global warming is an about-face for President Medvedev, the former CEO of Gazprom. As noted above, when he visited Tomsk two months after the Copenhagen Climate Conference, President Medvedev characterized the global-warming debate as "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects."

It should be pretty obvious that President Medvedev's former views are shared by U.S., British, Canadian, and Australian global warming denialists. They are the same conspiracy theories that are spread by Fox News and many Republican politicians. I certainly hope that President Medvedev continues to listen to what the world's great scientists are saying about global warming. Even if the immediate cause of Russia's terrible forest fires is not due to global warming, the effects are a harbinger of things to come.

I think Kent Clizbe should study the KGB's Soviet-era anti-science campaigns. They are a lot like the campaign against the scientists who study climate change. Kent Clizbe has correctly observed that Westerners are sometimes used by the Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, but it is a mistake to think that only political liberals are exploited.

Perhaps Kent Clizbe should read the Russian media, which is often owned by Russia's Kremlin-friendly gas/oil billionaires. He might want to consider the shameful possibility that so-called "conservative" business interests are cooperating with the Russian petrostate's anti-science campaign.

I personally don't consider people like Attorney General Cuccinelli conservative. I think he is quite radical to be quoting Kremlin propaganda that targets climate scientists and EPA rulings.

I think the climate scientists are the real conservatives. They are trying to conserve our environment, the independence of science from politics, and the future of civilization.

The scientific organizations, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Vatican all say that man is causing climate change.

Kent Clizbe brags about his CIA experience, but this operative trashes CIA analysts who evaluate information. The CIA has its own climate scientists and even gives highly-qualified outside climate scientists security clearances. I think these analysts scientists are more reliable sources of information than Kent Clizbe.

I doubt that the CIA agrees with Kent Clizbe's attacks on Dr. Mann for alleged "fraud." The CIA has a Center for Climate Change and National Security. The Center is part of both the Intelligence Directorate and Science Directorate of the CIA. The head of this Center has been identified in the media as Larry Kobayashi. He sounds like more of an expert than Kent Clizbe, who is out of step with long-standing CIA and scientific efforts to confront the challenge of climate change.

I hope politicians in all countries will eventually consider the futures of their people, let the scientists do their important work, and encourage the development of renewable energy.

John Mashey: "The Machinery of Climate Anti-Science"

2011-04-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

The video of Dr. John Mashey's April 7, 2011 presentation "The Machinery of Climate Anti-Science" is now available.

The accompanying powerpoints are here.

Dr. Mashey is famous for his debunking of the Wegman Report.

The Long Island Serial Killer

2011-04-16T16:18:00.003-04:00

This picture accompanies The Long Island News article "Long Island Serial Killer: Beach Bodies" (4-14-11).

FBI agents are working with the Long Island police to capture a serial killer who used the cell phone of one of his victims to taunt her teenaged sister. A blog called Long Island Serial Killer is posting all the latest scuttlebutt.

According to The Long Island Press (4-12-11):

For now, police are keeping quiet on the specifics of these crimes, but information has been unofficially leaked that the first four victims—Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy, Maureen Brainard-Barnes and Amber Lynn Costello—were strangled to death and wrapped in burlap.

The Associated Press (accessed 4-16-11) reports:

With police saying next to nothing about the discovery of 10 sets of human remains dumped off a highway near Jones Beach, amateurs and experts alike are offering a multiplicity of theories — some outlandish, some entirely plausible.

Many of the theories have been compiled on the Web site LongIslandserialkiller.com or offered up in the daily papers.

"It's mostly fodder for laughter by the investigators," said attorney Bruce Barket, a former prosecutor in the Nassau County district attorney's office. "Because the investigators know much more than they have revealed publicly, they're sitting there chuckling at this theory and that theory. Because it really is irrelevant to what they are doing."

Suspicion and Conspiracy: Defending the Reputation of Noble Individuals

2011-04-03T15:46:00.006-04:00

The idea that Pope Pius XII did little to oppose Nazi persecution of Jews is a lie perpetrated by communist sympathizers, according to a University of Mississippi law professor.

Ronald Rychlak, associate dean at the University of Mississippi School of Law, spoke on March 21 at the Lincoln Center campus. He said the communists besmirched the Pope to sow division between Jews and Catholics.

Working from the research he conducted for his book Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000), he told an audience in the 12th-Floor Lounge that Pope Pius XII was rightly lauded in the days after World War II for his efforts to save Jews from extermination.

Many Jews, including the city of Rome’s chief rabbi, took refuge at the Vatican as the war raged around it, said Rychlak, who is an adviser to the Holy See’s delegation to the United Nations.

In addition, Pope Pius XII passed along messages to the British on behalf of Nazi officers contemplating the overthrow of Hitler, as depicted in the 2008 film Valkyrie.

"Pinchas Lipade, the Israeli consul in Italy, said, 'The Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together,’” he said. "[Lipade] put the number at 850,000."---Fordham University

The Vatican's Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations sponsored an event at Fordham University on March 21, 2011 titled Suspicion and Conspiracy: Defending the Reputation of Noble Individuals. [See a collection of articles about the event here.]

The topic of the event was a discussion and signing of Prof. Ronald Rychlak's book on Pope Pius XII, Hitler, the War and the Pope.

This weekend (April 2-4, 2011), the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is hosting a workshop in the Vatican for climate scientists, who are also unjustly maligned and hounded by fanatical propagandists and politicians such as Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli. The workshop is titled The Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene.

A fearful Dante and his guide Virgil in the ninth circle of Hell look upon a colossal Satan, who flaps his wings while frozen in the ice from his chest down.

It would be better if Attorney General Cucinelli's ice-cold heart would melt instead of the Earth's glaciers. The Attorney General is a law officer, but instead of upholding the law and protecting the innocent, he flaps his mouth, abuses his office, and persecutes our innocent prophets--climate scientists. I think this is because Attorney General Cuccinelli's father is a natural-gas lobbyist.