Climate Change (Lobbying) Has Been Very Very Good to the Podestas

The Center for Public Integrity is reporting a delicious only-in-Washington-story in which members of the politically influential Podesta family are taking opposite sides in the capital's climate change fight. According to the Center:

In one corner, John Podesta, who served as co-chair of President Obama's transition and was White House chief of staff to President Clinton. John Podesta's think tank, the Center for American Progress, has been an ardent voice in favor of Congress taking bold steps to address climate change — making its views known on Capitol Hill through its action fund. American Progress has been especially critical of the coal industry's "clean coal" campaign, calling it a "smoke screen" aimed at delaying meaningful action on global warming.

In the opposite corner, John's brother, Tony Podesta, one of Washington's most successful lobbyists — who picked up a significant new client as the climate debate revved up in the House this spring, according to the just-filed lobbying disclosure forms for the second quarter of the year. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) — the very industry group derided by John Podesta's group — paid Tony Podesta and five other lobbyists in his Podesta Group $50,000 in the second quarter to help represent its interests on the climate bill passed by the House in June.

The clean coal folks "have a great lobbyist working on behalf of them for an ignoble cause," said Dan Weiss, director of climate change strategy for the Center for American Progress and its action fund.

Gotta love DC!

Comments

[Cream of Sum Yung Gai]

For all of our UK readers, now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country (and science). The Met Office refuses to release data and methodology for their HadCRUT global temperature dataset after being asked repeatedly. Without the data and procedures there is no possibility of replication, and without replication the Hadley climate data is not scientifically valid. This isn't just a skeptic issue, mind you, others have just a keen an interest in proving the data.

What is so bizarre is this. The FOI request by Steve McIntyre to the Met Office was for a copy of the data sent to Peter Webster. If the restrictions on the data hold for Steve McIntyre, why did they not prevent release of the data to Webster?

When asked by Warwick Hughes for this data, Dr. Jones famously replied:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

This is just wrong on so many levels. This isn't state secrets, it is temperature data gathered from weather stations worldwide and the methodology of collating and processing it. Much of the weather station data is available online and live via hundreds of Internet sites, so the argument that "strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released" is in my opinion, bogus. You can get a list of CRU stations. Go to: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/and download the file: crustnsused.txt

more at:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

[Xeones]

Gotta love DC!

No, i don't "gotta." Fuck DC, yo.

Nuke it from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure.

[Randall]

"Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Isn't that how science is supposed to work?

[question]

Is it true that Congress is responsible for DC Public Schools? That would explain a lot.

[R C Dean]

Sounds like the hackers who cook up a virus over the weekend, and then spend the week consulting with their corporate clients on how to beat it.

[robc]

Sounds like the recent Wells Fargo deal.

Law firm A files a lawsuit on behalf of their client, Wells Fargo. Law firm B denies the cliams made in the lawsuit on behalf of their client, Wells Fargo.

[TallDave]

But... but... he's SAVING THE WORLD!!

Fun graph on the exponential rise in temperature since 1989.

Did I say temperature? I mean government money spent on global warming.

[TallDave]

Isn't that how science is supposed to work?

Yes, but religion has different rules.

[FermatsLastFlameWar]

I'm no gynecologist, but that curve didn't appear to be exponential at all.

[James Anderson Merritt]

Perhaps the climate-change cultists clutch the data so tightly because, were anyone to examine the data too carefully, they might end up with a conclusion such as this:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml

"The results showed that SOI [Southern Oscillation Index] accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics. Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5-7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation."

In other words, as I read it, El Nino has matched quite closely with most of the temperature variation we have seen in the past 50 years. If man has an influence on climate change, it is very small -- perhaps negligible -- in comparison with the dominant El Nino mechanism. Is mankind responsible for El Nino?

This paper was peer-reviewed and published last week in the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.