CROSS: The IRS Does Not Back Up Their Computers
From IRS Claims to Have Lost Over 2 Years of Lerner Emails | House Committee on Ways & Means:
Washington, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.“Just a short time ago, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies. Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. This failure of the IRS requires the White House, which promised to get to the bottom of this, to do an Administration-wide search and production of any emails to or from Lois Lerner. The Administration has repeatedly referred us back to the IRS for production of materials. It is clear that is wholly insufficient when it comes to determining the full scope of the violation of taxpayer rights.”Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., M.D. (R-LA) added, "In the course of the Committee's investigation, the Administration repeatedly claimed we were getting access to all relevant IRS documents. Only now - thirteen months into the investigation - the IRS reveals that key emails from the time of the targeting have been lost. And they bury that fact deep in an unrelated letter on a Friday afternoon. In that same letter, they urge Congress to end the investigations into IRS wrongdoing. This is not the transparency promised to the American people. If there is no smidgeon of corruption what is the Administration hiding?"
More like deleted.I wonder what would happen if a citizen told the IRS that all their records were lost in a computer crash? Shame the IRS never heard of making backups. Perhaps they used the computer consultants in charge of running the Obamacare website. Or, perhaps the NSA will have them!
CROSS: Obama and Benghazi Cover Up Continues
The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers' higher ups.”[...]Stahl also contended that given his crew’s alert status and location, they could have reached Benghazi in time to have played a role in rescuing the victims of the assault, and ferrying them to safety in Germany, had they been asked to do so. “We were on a 45-day deployment to Ramstein air base,” he told Fox News. “And we were there basically to pick up priority missions, last-minute missions that needed to be accomplished.”“You would've thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11,” Stahl added. “A hurried-up timeline probably would take us [an] hour-and-a-half to get off the ground and three hours and fifteen minutes to get down there. So we could've gone down there and gotten them easily.”
WOW! Mountainbike footage through Scottish Highlands
Claudio Caluori blazes down the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup track in Fort William, Scotland. Watch as he rides through the Scottish Countryside, boosting off big jumps and flying down some gorgeous single track!http://www.youtube.com/embed/igp9sJkuAnUDOLLAR: Students Defeat Teacher Unions in California
Writes Campbell Brown in A historic victory for America’s kids - NY Daily News on the Vergara v. California decision:
The case began with courageous students, because they had to endure the nightmare: grossly incompetent teachers, mainly in poor and minority schools, protected by state laws. And when the court ruling thundered down Tuesday, the impact was profoundly clear: Students, you win.
[...] Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu said the evidence of the deleterious effect of ineffective teachers on students is so compelling that it “shocks the conscience” — a line that instantly gave voice to countless parents.The court found that the nine student plaintiffs and their team had proven both of their points. One, that California’s laws directly cause students to be unreasonably exposed to grossly ineffective teachers. And two, that poor and minority students, in particular, are saddled with those teachers. The ruling was so complete that the judge declared every state law in question unconstitutional:-California teachers are permitted to earn lifetime employment after a mere 18 months in class, well before they could truly earn that status or even be properly evaluated for it. The upshot, said the judge, is that “both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily and for no legally cognizable reasons (let alone a compelling one) disadvantaged.”-The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying. That leaves thousands of underperforming teachers knowingly remaining in front of students. The judge blasted the system as so problematic that it turned dismissal into an illusion.-California’s “last-in, first-out” law gives top priority in a time of layoffs to ineffective teachers if they have seniority while better teachers with fewer years are sent packing. The judge called that a lose-lose situation, supported by logic that was “unfathomable.”
[...]It should never have come to this: Students taking on the powerful governments and teachers unions, all to challenge laws that inexplicably and directly lead to a worse public education.
California Students 1, Teacher Unions 0
Writes Campbell Brown in A historic victory for America’s kids - NY Daily News on the Vergara v. California decision:The case began with courageous students, because they had to endure the nightmare: grossly incompetent teachers, mainly in poor and minority schools, protected by state laws. And when the court ruling thundered down Tuesday, the impact was profoundly clear: Students, you win.[...] Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu said the evidence of the deleterious effect of ineffective teachers on students is so compelling that it “shocks the conscience” — a line that instantly gave voice to countless parents.The court found that the nine student plaintiffs and their team had proven both of their points. One, that California’s laws directly cause students to be unreasonably exposed to grossly ineffective teachers. And two, that poor and minority students, in particular, are saddled with those teachers. The ruling was so complete that the judge declared every state law in question unconstitutional:-California teachers are permitted to earn lifetime employment after a mere 18 months in class, well before they could truly earn that status or even be properly evaluated for it. The upshot, said the judge, is that “both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily and for no legally cognizable reasons (let alone a compelling one) disadvantaged.”-The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying. That leaves thousands of underperforming teachers knowingly remaining in front of students. The judge blasted the system as so problematic that it turned dismissal into an illusion.-California’s “last-in, first-out” law gives top priority in a time of layoffs to ineffective teachers if they have seniority while better teachers with fewer years are sent packing. The judge called that a lose-lose situation, supported by logic that was “unfathomable.”[...]It should never have come to this: Students taking on the powerful governments and teachers unions, all to challenge laws that inexplicably and directly lead to a worse public education.
The 97% Consensus on a Dangerous Global Warming Catastophe is Really 1%
From Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer: The Myth of the Climate Change '97%' - WSJ:
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the "crippling consequences" of climate change. "Ninety-seven percent of the world's scientists," he added, "tell us this is urgent."
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous." Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes's definition of consensus covered "man-made" but left out "dangerous"—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren't substantiated in the papers.
[...]
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported [7]that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
[...]
There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.
Wait For It!
Elmo the Dog is a Chihuahua and a Staffy mix. He is also a little greedy...DOLLAR: OCON Student Rate of $15 a Day Now Applies to Students of All Ages!
From Objectivist Summer Conference:
Due to high demand, we are expanding Young Adult pricing to include full-time students of any age. With this pricing, you'll get access to all the talks and panels offered at OCON 2014 for only $15 a day! Just make sure you have a valid student I.D. with you when checking in at the conference.
CROSS: Snowden would NOT get a fair trial
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment).More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they're saying.[...]
John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Should assisted suicide be legal in Canada?”
Today’s letters: My life, my choice how to end it | National Post
Absolutely yes — because the only proper function of government is to protect individual rights, and one’s right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness logically implies the right to end one’s own life if one no longer wants to live, or else freely contract someone to do so (assuming one is an adult when such a right would kick in). The religious enemies of individual rights believe one’s life belongs to a mystical entity and thus one should endure unbearable pain until this entity allegedly decides when one’s life should end, which is irrational and immoral. -- Glenn Woiceshyn, Calgary.
Tennis Player Dance Off
Dance battle between Monfils and Lokoli at French Open Roland Garroshttp://www.youtube.com/embed/AO3IQtW8Dlc?rel=0DOLLAR: New Book on the Business Cycle and a Free Market in Money and Banking
Dr. Brian P. Simpson, author of Markets Don’t Fail! (Lexington Books, 2005) and an economist at National University in San Diego, CA, has written a new book on the business cycle and a free monetary and banking system. The book shows how government interference—particularly in the monetary and banking system—causes the business cycle, including the recessions, depressions, and financial crises that are a part of it. The book also shows how establishing a free market in money and banking can virtually eliminate the business cycle.This book is a major contribution to the monetary, banking, and business cycle literature. It builds on the business cycle theory developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The two-volume book is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is titled Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, with subtitles of Integrating Theory and Practice for volume one and Remedies and Alternative Theories for volume two. Volume one was published in April. Volume two is due out in July.Part one of volume one shows how manipulations of the supply of money and credit by the government are the primary cause of the cycle. Part two applies the theory to over 100 years of U.S. history to illustrate the explanatory power of the theory. The author uses extensive quantities of data to make his case, including data for interest rates, the rate of profit in the economy, the money supply, the velocity of money, industrial production, GDP/GNP, gross national revenue (a more comprehensive measure of spending and output than GDP/GNP), and more. He shows how the theory explains the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the recession of the early 1980s, and all episodes of the cycle in the U.S. since 1900. In addition, he goes back to 18th century France and the Mississippi Bubble to demonstrate the explanatory power of the theory.Part one of volume two critiques alternative theories of the cycle, including Keynes’s theories of depressions and fluctuations, Keynesian “sticky” price and wage theory, and real business cycle theory. Part two shows what a free market in money and banking would look like, provides an outline to transition to a free market in money and banking, and gives a detailed explanation of why it would lead to greater stability in the monetary and banking system and raise the rate of economic progress in the economy.Here are links to the two volumes:Volume 1: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle/BrianPSimpson Volume 2: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle-1/BrianPSimpsonIt is also available at Amazon at a discounted price.Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume I: Integrating Theory and Practice: 1 Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume II: Remedies and Alternative TheoriesThe book is highly recommended for anyone interested in free-market ideas or monetary, banking, and business cycle theory. Economics professors will find both volumes excellent for courses on "macroeconomics," money and banking, Austrian economics, or the business cycle. Both volumes would also be great additions to the collections of university libraries and libraries of free-market institutions.Violence Against Women and Islam
by Michael HurdShould courts excuse Muslim men who beat up their wives on account of freedom of religious practices and beliefs? Do religious and cultural “sensitivity” count more than individual rights?It seems incredible that we even must consider such questions, but the indiscriminate, unthinking tolerance of our times has brought us here.Consider this most recent news headline:
NYC Muslim Beats Wife to Death, Lawyer says Beating Women is “Customary” in his Culture.The story reports:
A Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death in their Brooklyn home after she made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers.
Noor Hussain, 75, was so outraged over the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussain, 66, with a stick until she was a “bloody mess,” according to prosecutors and court papers.
Defense attorney Julie Clark admitted Hussain beat his wife — but argued that he is guilty of only manslaughter because he didn’t intend to kill her. In Pakistan, Clark said, beating one’s wife is customary.
“He comes from a culture where he thinks this is appropriate conduct, where he can hit his wife,” Clark said in her opening statements at the Brooklyn Supreme Court bench trial. “He culturally believed he had the right to hit his wife and discipline his wife.” [Source: Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMag.com 5-23-14]This is what happens when you erase the concepts “right,” “wrong” and objective from your conceptual vocabulary.If it’s true that there’s no such thing as right or wrong, then we have no standard for making a law in the first place. You cannot protect people’s “rights” unless you first establish — and choose to stand by — some concept of “right” (and “wrong”) in the first place.The defense attorney in this case is saying, “There’s no legitimate or objective basis for claiming this man’s religion or cultural tradition is any better or worse than any other.” If his religion says it’s OK to beat up his wife, rape her, hold her hostage, or anything else he feels like doing — well, who are we to judge otherwise? And if his religion teaches this is OK, then we have to change the law because it’s his religion. So we’ll have a double standard for people who practice this irrational religion in favor of those who do not. Oops — we’re not supposed to call one’s religion (at least not a politically correct one, such as Islam) “irrational,” because that’s rude, mean and judgmental.By the way, what does it mean to “culturally believe” something as opposed to merely “believe” it? Are we so divorced from responsibility for the content of our own minds, thoughts and emotions that we can now claim (at least if we’re Muslim) that our culture (i.e. millions of other people) literally do our thinking for us?Sooner or later, rotten ideas come home to roost. Subjectivists in psychology and its parent field, philosophy, have made this claim for decades: What’s true for you isn’t true for me. They’re not just talking about legitimate options and preferences; they’re talking about everything. Physical abuse, rape, torture, initiation of violence? Well, if that’s all you know, or if that’s how you were raised, it’s an excuse for whatever you do.According to this ideological view: The fact that each of us has our own mind proves that there’s no one reality, no provably correct right or wrong, not in any context. Here you have it, now playing out in courts we’re counting on to protect us from brute force initiated by others.You can laugh at philosophy as well as psychology, and claim these fields have no relevance to your daily life. But conclusions in these areas have life or death meaning for what government will do or not do to you; or permit done to you.Oddly silent in all this are the feminists and other opponents of domestic violence against women. Will Hillary Clinton come out against this? Not if it offends Muslims. Will our current president, Barack Obama? This man loves Islam. This is the man who once said, “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”Seriously, Barack? Try living for five minutes under Sharia (Islamic) law, and see how much overlap you will find between that and America.OK, you’ve got your cultural sensitivity. You’ve got your diversity for its own sake, and you’ve got the emotional sense that, “I’m compassionate, I don’t judge anybody else ever, not for any reason. Now people can like me. Look at what a sensitive, gentle and completely non-judgmental human being I am.” It has been my observation that people who claim to uphold these views don’t necessarily mean them, but badly want to be seen as meaning them. A tiny number of intellectuals and judicial officials actually do hold these incredibly insane viewpoints, and they’re paving the way to death and destruction throughout the free world, so long as the rest of us remain silent and/or stupid.You can’t have your justice and eat it too. You can’t claim that Sharia law — the Muslim approach to “justice” which upholds such atrocities as this Brooklyn defense — is morally equivalent to, or “overlaps” the American, individual rights-based approach to justice. In areas of differing principles, you have to choose one, or the other, but not both.So what’s your choice?
Solar Technology is Great Choice, Except When It Isn’t
Solar power is pretty awesome -- when its use is determined by free minds in a free-market.However...Why The Solar Roadway Is A Terrible IdeaCOST
Solar Roadways seem to take the problem of generating solar power, and put it into conditions that maximize cost.
[...]
I may have missed a few points. Read this.
Those solar-panel-covered shade structures that are popping up in church parking lots all over Tucson are looking smarter by the minute. The solar panels are mass-produced in China for a couple dollars a watt, and the structures are simple cantilevered steel I-beam ramadas. No fancy computers are needed, no worries about damage from tires, no hacking into can happen, and they are not blocked by pedestrians, cars, trees or buses.
Save your $5 for a good cause.
Under capitalism, in the "long run", it is the rational decisions that eventually win. If people wish to put their own money into making roads solar, that is their right. Not a smart choice given the present context; but their choice none the less.
DOLLAR: Binswanger Torpedoes Piketty
Thomas Piketty's latest book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has had its fair share of criticisms. The political right continues to bludgeon the latest critique of capitalism by challenging the veracity of the book's mathematics, formulas, and quantitative reasoning. But Harry Binswanger understands that the basis for every attack against capitalism is grounded in the idea that capitalism is inherently immoral. Therefore, any defense of capitalism cannot, and should not, be grounded in statistics, but must challenge the existing moral premises that permeate today's society..."Capital in the Twenty-First Century" offers up the same failed, blood-soaked doctrines as its forbearer, "Das Kapital." But in our Twitterized culture, yesterday's disgraced notions, now forgotten, can be re-Tweeted as revelations.[...]Evil cannot be combated by offering counter-statistics, as many conservatives are doing. No one is concerned with the statistics, only with the moral narrative. And the book's opening epigraph gives us that, via a quote from France's 1789 "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen":
"Social distinctions can be based only on common utility."
In quiet, understated language, that statement lays down the formula for total collectivism. It cuts the ground out from under individual rights, substituting "common utility" as the standard for state action. It demands the yoking of the individual to the group.
M. Piketty doesn't mention that four years after that ill-named Declaration of Rights came the Reign of Terror. The sequence is logical: the Declaration appealed to the raw envy of the mob, whose instrument became the guillotine.
The whole thing can be read here.
CROSS: No Justice for Gibson Guitars
Bill Frezza revives the Gibson Guitars case in a piece published in Forbes. The whole affair stands as an appalling example of the law run amok. The owners believe they suffered heavy-handed treatment from the feds due to the "protectionist" interests of labor unions and environmentalists. But when the law can be warped to satisfy the whim of any bureaucrat or power-holder, that's not protectionism, that's tyranny. More specifically, the Gibson Guitars case epitomizes the tyranny of non-objective law.While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong. Thus began a five-year saga, extensively covered by the press, with reputation-destroying leaks and shady allegations that Gibson was illegally importing wood from endangered tree species. In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group.You can read the rest here.
The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’
Write Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer in WSJ.com:[T]he assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.[...] Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union" by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master's thesis adviser Peter Doran.It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed "97 percent of climate scientists agree" that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.The survey's questions don't reveal much of interest. Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless would answer "yes" to both questions. The survey was silent on whether the human impact is large enough to constitute a problem. Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.[...] In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.[...] Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.Read the rest of The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'