This is another belated post, but is the best of the reports I have seen so far about what was immediately called Climategate: the exposure of the active conspiracy by climate-change alarmist scientists to load the dice in favor of a hypothesis they realized early enough was not supported by actual scientific data - allowing their obsessive ideology not simply to cloud their good judgment but to pervert science to their ends.
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin
of 'anthropogenic global warming'?
By James Delingpole
November 20th, 2009
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet.
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest scandal in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back – I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.
How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this?
I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board… What do others think?
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor...It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” - CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium.
CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause.
This matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Meteorology Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This is wishful thinking, of course. In the run-up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media.
And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.
The so-called “sceptical” view – which some of us have been expressing for quite some time: see, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Barbecue the Polar Bears’ in WELCOME TO OBAMALAND: I’VE SEEN YOUR FUTURE AND IT DOESN’T WORK – is now also, thank heaven, the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But to judge by the way – despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it – the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recover.
As someone who earned a science degree in college and have been working in an applied science field for the past 20 years, I have always tried to follow climate-change reports. Early enough, I started noticing reports by reputable scientists who raised questions about the facile conclusions by the climate ideologues and cited objective scientific data to prove a contrary or at least mitigating point of view.
I had learned a hard lesson when my teenage enthusiasm over Rachel Carson's Silent Spring turned out to be misguided - what with the counterproductive if not destructive consequences in Africa of banning the use of DDT. I was not going to be taken in again so easily with climate change, given that the anti-ideologues had convincing scientific data, and the alarmists generally had only relatively short-term data. Plus I have this overwhelming common-sense gut feeling that global climate is a cosmic phenomenon usually reckoned in eons, not decades, so why the rush to judgment?
Certainly, the fact that global warming may not be happening, or if it is, that it is by no means the imminent catastrophe that the alarmists make it seem, does not excuse anyone from having to be prudent about energy use, as one must be about those individual and social activities that could degrade the environment in any way.
But reality check: Too many important people everywhere have been too invested too long - ideologically, intellectually, politically and economically - in global-warming alarmism, that they will fight tooth-and-nail to make believe their facade has not been shattered. So the battle goes on... while untold resources are wasted on quixotic climate-control schemes that are misdirected because the scientific basis is simply not there, or at best, equivocal and inconclusive!
One MSM newspaper had an editorial about this today:
Hiding evidence of global cooling:
Junk science exposed among
climate-change ideologues
Editorial
Nov. 24, 2009
Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.
It was announced Thursday afternoon that computer hackers had obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims.
Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Mr. Jones talked to Mr. Mann about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]."
Mr. Mann admitted that he was party to this conversation and lamely explained to the
New York Times that "scientists often used the word 'trick' to refer to a good way to solve a problem 'and not something secret.' "
Though the liberal New York newspaper apparently buys this explanation, we have seen no benign explanation that justifies efforts by researchers to skew data on so-called global-warming "to hide the decline." Given the controversies over the accuracy of Mr. Mann's past research, it is surprising his current explanations are accepted so readily.
There is a lot of damning evidence about these researchers concealing information that counters their bias. In another exchange, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone" and, "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."
Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]?"
In another e-mail, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann, professor Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona and professor Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"
At one point, Mr. Jones complained to another academic, "I did get an email from the [Freedom of Information] person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn't be deleting emails."
He also offered up more dubious tricks of his trade, specifically that "IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI [Freedom of Information]. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on."
Another professor at the Climate Research Unit, Tim Osborn, discussed in e-mails how truncating a data series can hide a cooling trend that otherwise would be seen in the results. Mr. Mann sent Mr. Osborn an e-mail saying that the results he was sending shouldn't be shown to others because the data support critics of global warming.
Repeatedly throughout the e-mails that have been made public, proponents of global-warming theories refer to data that has been hidden or destroyed. Only e-mails from Mr. Jones' institution have been made public, and with his obvious approach to deleting sensitive files, it's difficult to determine exactly how much more information has been lost that could be damaging to the global-warming theocracy and its doomsday forecasts.
We don't condone e-mail theft by hackers, though these e-mails were covered by Britain's Freedom of Information Act and should have been released. The content of these e-mails raises extremely serious questions that could end the academic careers of many prominent professors.
Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud.
We can only hope respected academic institutions such as Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conduct proper investigative inquiries.
Most important, however,
these revelations of fudged science should have a cooling effect on global-warming hysteria and the panicked policies that are being pushed forward to address the unproven theory.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/03/2012 20:19]