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NASA hiding climate data
The Washington Times

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

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Eduardo Zorita, climatologue travaillant pour le Institute for Coastal Research au sujet du climategate:

« By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. [...]

I am aware that in this thick atmosphere editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. »

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The Wal-Mart Effect
Foreign Policy

When India’s first Wal-Mart opened this summer in Amritsar, the response was mixed, with detractors fearing that big-box stores would eventually crowd out India’s fabled « wallah » culture. What no one remarked on, however, was that Wal-Mart’s debut in a country is a bellwether for future growth. Indeed, Wal-Mart has started operations in 15 countries since 1991, and 13 of them have had boom economies, with an average of 4.4 percent annual growth since Wal-Mart arrived. Over the last five years, the economies of Wal-Mart countries outside the United States have grown 40 percent faster than the world average. So what’s going on? Does the ability to buy giant bags of Froot Loops at cut-rate prices inspire economic growth? More likely, Wal-Mart is simply a smart, cautious investor. « Wal-Mart chooses to go places with a sizable middle class, » says Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian who just published a book on Wal-Mart’s rise. And Wal-Mart’s attention to middle-class growth could pay off for the company in the future.

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Australia’s Parliament defeats global warming bill
San Francisco Chronicle

Australia’s Parliament defeated legislation to set up a greenhouse gas emissions trading system on Wednesday, throwing a central plank of the government’s plans to combat global warming into disarray.

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« La fonte des glaces, le dégel des sols du grand Nord et la diminution de la capacité d’absorption du CO2 par les forêts et les océans sont autant de bombes à retardement qui pourraient accélérer le changement climatique, selon les scientifiques. [...] Il faudra au mieux plusieurs décennies avant de stopper la hausse des températures, et la montée du niveau moyen des mers se poursuivra pendant des siècles. »

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« At the UN’s World Climate Conference–an annual gathering of the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ on man-made climate change –Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering ‘one or even two decades during which temperatures cool’. [...] Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years. »

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Secrecy in science is a corrosive force
The Financial Times

There are no denials around the researchers’ repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.