Global-warming theology
THE WASHINGTON TIMES Friday, December 4, 2009
Belief in global warming had long had a tinge of theology about it, a form of cultism that adherents and defenders elevated to a holy crusade.
Any who questioned the orthodoxy were branded as heretics. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that climate-change skepticism is "treason" and exhorted that "we need to start treating [skeptics] as traitors." In 2007, the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen said that meteorologists who were skeptical of man-made global warming should be decertified. The e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit reveal systematic attempts by high priests of this religion to silence scientists who disputed their rigged findings.
The purveyors of the global-warming theology certainly benefited. They enjoyed professional success, received millions of dollars in grants, had influence in policy circles, were invited to international conferences and found personal validation and fame. Never before had it been sexy to have "climate scientist" on your resume.
Proper science unlocks secrets; it does not create them. The scientific method is a social enterprise and requires openness to function properly. Data must be freely available and methodologies subject to strict scrutiny in order to assess whether results can be verified, reproduced and subjected to reliability tests. There is no reason to trust any results based on hidden data and some very good reasons to distrust them. This is the gist of a prospective lawsuit against NASA by Christopher C. Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which calls on the space agency to produce the climate data it has been keeping under wraps. These data are not classified information and should be part of the public record. NASA's stonewalling is suspicious and could augur that another scandal is brewing.
Global warming was an academic Ponzi scheme. Its leading proponents were mini-Madoffs, peddling a vision of global catastrophe to gullible activists, bureaucrats and policymakers. The vision was so vast, the fear it inspired so pervasive, that it seized popular imagination, aided ably by hucksters like former Vice President Al Gore and his science-fiction feature film "An Inconvenient Truth." But like any Ponzi scheme, global warming only worked if everyone kept investing and no one looked at the books. Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began to collapse.
Yet even as the edifice comes down, the adherents of the orthodoxy say that there is nothing to see, that this is all a distraction from the business at hand, that there is still no time to lose, full steam (or solar power) ahead. But it is far too late for that. The veil has been pierced, the myth revealed, the scales have fallen from the people's eyes. The pagan priests are fleeing the temple, their sacred idols are being pulled down, their holy works renounced. Their god, finally, is dead.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Climategate 32
Media complicity in Climategate
Washington Times Monday, December 7, 2009
A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn't think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn't deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails
Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.
Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart's jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." A Tuesday repartee follows:
Mr. Stewart: "It's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data."
Announcer: "University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out."
Jon Stewart: "Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s."
Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, "none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal."
The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don't see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.
Washington Times Monday, December 7, 2009
A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn't think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn't deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails
Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.
Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart's jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." A Tuesday repartee follows:
Mr. Stewart: "It's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data."
Announcer: "University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out."
Jon Stewart: "Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s."
Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, "none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal."
The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don't see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.
Climategate 31
Climategate: The Silence is Deafening from the Corporate Media
J Speer-Williams
Infowars
November 28, 2009
By now most of us in the alternative media are aware of the some 61 megabytes of global warming research data of emails, documents, and computer code released by whistleblowers (or hackers), that have exposed climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, as the frauds they’ve proven themselves to be.
This decade of emails and documents clearly concludes that global warming scientists have manipulated scientific data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures; and the fact that, there has been no statistically significant global warming for fifteen years, but our world has experienced a rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
So breath-taking has been this leaked data, to date, it has produced some startling headlines in the alternative media:
(1) Climategate: Greatest Scandal in Modern Science!”
(2) “Climategate? Smoking Gun? Blood in the Water?”
(3) “Global Warming Scientists Seek to Protect Their Government Funding by Corrupting the
Peer-review Process.”
(4) “Climate Bombshell: Hackers {or Whistleblowers] Leak Emails Showing Conspiracy.”
(5) “Email Leaks Turn Up Heat on Global Warming Advocates.”
(6) “Climategate Scientists Caught Red-handed in Monumental Fraud.”
(7) “Bad Scientists? No Criminals!”
Now, these global warming scientists, who have been so severely exposed for the frauds they are, are crying, “Persecution!”. While their own emails prove they have been very busy planning how best to get tenured professors fired, who will not shallow the rotten fish of anthropogenic global warming, how to black-ball them from scientific journals, and prevent them from participating in the peer-review process.
Persecution? No, prosecution in a criminal court of law is what they deserve.
Even Obama’s Climate Czar, John P. Holdren has been exposed, by these emails, for the fraud he is, proving Holdren’s avid global warming advocacy has been more driven by politics than science.
Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is no stranger to extremist views: In a 1977 book, Holdren co-authored (Ecoscience – Population, Resources, Environment), he campaigned for compulsory abortion, mass sterilization, involuntary infertility, a one-child policy, and global governance.
In another of Holdren’s books (Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions), he even argued that babies were not human beings.
Mr. Holdren, there’s no question babies are human. The real question is are you a human being?
These academic and governments fraudsters, along with their corporate media counterparts, account for the fact that many people have been denied the truth regarding the man-made global warming myths.
The so-called “consensus” establishing the validity of the man-made global warming theories does not exist; the mainstream, corporately owned media merely tell us it does; and, do not expect “our” media to widely broadcast anything about these email exposures; many people will never hear of them.
When caught red-handed in their lies, the corporate media always has but one response: Utter silence, waiting for the smoking gun to cool, and then be forgotten. But if the red-hot pistol doesn’t cool quickly enough, the whole corrupted system of the controlled press goes into over-drive, preparing for a workable gambit: Which is usually their tried and true method of creating controversy, something relatively easy for them to do. And once an issue enters the world of controversy, the Establishment usually wins the info wars of public opinion, because they get the most words, the loudest words, and the last words. And after all, they represent authority.
Trial and error is employed to find the kindling that will ignite the fires of controversy. Usually the first maneuver is tested with some secondary official, from some secondary country, to gage the effectiveness of the ploy. This process has already begun with Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer.
Ms. Cramer has claimed that the East Anglia University whistleblowers, or hackers, altered 61 metabytes of computer data before leaking the files, in spite of the fact such a statement, has to date, never been made by the man-made global warming advocates, who wrote it all .
If Ms. Cramer’s allegations gain traction, expect to hear more about how the whistle-blowers falsified the data. We may even hear of innocent people coming to trial, falsely confessing they were the ones who “altered” all the emails, before releasing them. But, with enough mind control, I could be convinced, I was the one who falsified them, even though I know so little about computers, I can hardly use my Apple program to write this sentence.
Ms. Cramer, in her outrage, screamed, “This is just criminal. It’s unacceptable.”
What is acceptable Ms. Cramer, the death of a billion starving people, and the guaranteed poverty of the rest of us, due to the pending Cap and Trade legislation in Washington, and the coming international laws, directives, regulations, and more laws, that will inhibit the farming of food and the means to get it to market, with few of us having enough money to buy food if it were available?
Am I exaggerating? I hope so, but believe not.
J Speer-Williams
Infowars
November 28, 2009
By now most of us in the alternative media are aware of the some 61 megabytes of global warming research data of emails, documents, and computer code released by whistleblowers (or hackers), that have exposed climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, as the frauds they’ve proven themselves to be.
This decade of emails and documents clearly concludes that global warming scientists have manipulated scientific data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures; and the fact that, there has been no statistically significant global warming for fifteen years, but our world has experienced a rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
So breath-taking has been this leaked data, to date, it has produced some startling headlines in the alternative media:
(1) Climategate: Greatest Scandal in Modern Science!”
(2) “Climategate? Smoking Gun? Blood in the Water?”
(3) “Global Warming Scientists Seek to Protect Their Government Funding by Corrupting the
Peer-review Process.”
(4) “Climate Bombshell: Hackers {or Whistleblowers] Leak Emails Showing Conspiracy.”
(5) “Email Leaks Turn Up Heat on Global Warming Advocates.”
(6) “Climategate Scientists Caught Red-handed in Monumental Fraud.”
(7) “Bad Scientists? No Criminals!”
Now, these global warming scientists, who have been so severely exposed for the frauds they are, are crying, “Persecution!”. While their own emails prove they have been very busy planning how best to get tenured professors fired, who will not shallow the rotten fish of anthropogenic global warming, how to black-ball them from scientific journals, and prevent them from participating in the peer-review process.
Persecution? No, prosecution in a criminal court of law is what they deserve.
Even Obama’s Climate Czar, John P. Holdren has been exposed, by these emails, for the fraud he is, proving Holdren’s avid global warming advocacy has been more driven by politics than science.
Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is no stranger to extremist views: In a 1977 book, Holdren co-authored (Ecoscience – Population, Resources, Environment), he campaigned for compulsory abortion, mass sterilization, involuntary infertility, a one-child policy, and global governance.
In another of Holdren’s books (Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions), he even argued that babies were not human beings.
Mr. Holdren, there’s no question babies are human. The real question is are you a human being?
These academic and governments fraudsters, along with their corporate media counterparts, account for the fact that many people have been denied the truth regarding the man-made global warming myths.
The so-called “consensus” establishing the validity of the man-made global warming theories does not exist; the mainstream, corporately owned media merely tell us it does; and, do not expect “our” media to widely broadcast anything about these email exposures; many people will never hear of them.
When caught red-handed in their lies, the corporate media always has but one response: Utter silence, waiting for the smoking gun to cool, and then be forgotten. But if the red-hot pistol doesn’t cool quickly enough, the whole corrupted system of the controlled press goes into over-drive, preparing for a workable gambit: Which is usually their tried and true method of creating controversy, something relatively easy for them to do. And once an issue enters the world of controversy, the Establishment usually wins the info wars of public opinion, because they get the most words, the loudest words, and the last words. And after all, they represent authority.
Trial and error is employed to find the kindling that will ignite the fires of controversy. Usually the first maneuver is tested with some secondary official, from some secondary country, to gage the effectiveness of the ploy. This process has already begun with Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer.
Ms. Cramer has claimed that the East Anglia University whistleblowers, or hackers, altered 61 metabytes of computer data before leaking the files, in spite of the fact such a statement, has to date, never been made by the man-made global warming advocates, who wrote it all .
If Ms. Cramer’s allegations gain traction, expect to hear more about how the whistle-blowers falsified the data. We may even hear of innocent people coming to trial, falsely confessing they were the ones who “altered” all the emails, before releasing them. But, with enough mind control, I could be convinced, I was the one who falsified them, even though I know so little about computers, I can hardly use my Apple program to write this sentence.
Ms. Cramer, in her outrage, screamed, “This is just criminal. It’s unacceptable.”
What is acceptable Ms. Cramer, the death of a billion starving people, and the guaranteed poverty of the rest of us, due to the pending Cap and Trade legislation in Washington, and the coming international laws, directives, regulations, and more laws, that will inhibit the farming of food and the means to get it to market, with few of us having enough money to buy food if it were available?
Am I exaggerating? I hope so, but believe not.
Climategate 30
Climategate: the loonies are out of the asylum
By James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
By James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
Climategate 25
Climategate: the UN investigation will be a whitewash
By Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
It is rather ironic that the United Nations, a world body that has done more to push the global warming agenda that any other organization, is now vowing to investigate the leaked Climategate emails. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told BBC Radio 4:
We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.
Forgive my scepticism over this, but the United Nations happens to be one of the most inefficient, corruption-riddled, unaccountable and untransparent entities on the face of the earth. It is hard to see how the UN is going to conduct this kind of inquiry with a straight face, let alone an ounce of credibility. I spent several years working on UN issues in Washington, and served as an expert on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional mandated Task Force on the United Nations, and nothing I have seen of the UN convinces me that it is capable of carrying out a remotely objective investigation.
And who is the man in charge of the United Nations whitewash/inquiry? Rajendra Pachauri is one of the world’s biggest prophets of climate change doom, which he argues is “the greatest challenge facing humanity.” Last year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC with Al Gore. Like his colleague Lord Stern, Pachauri ludicrously believes that people should eat less meat to curb carbon emissions.
We don’t need a fake UN panel on Climategate. What is needed is a full Senate investigation as well as Parliamentary inquiry into a massive scandal with major implications for both the US and the UK and their future approach to the global warming issue. And if Congressional hearings are held, who better to have leading the charge on Capitol Hill than the brilliant James Delingpole, who deserves huge credit for almost single-handedly bringing the Climategate débacle to the attention of the American public.
By Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
It is rather ironic that the United Nations, a world body that has done more to push the global warming agenda that any other organization, is now vowing to investigate the leaked Climategate emails. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told BBC Radio 4:
We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.
Forgive my scepticism over this, but the United Nations happens to be one of the most inefficient, corruption-riddled, unaccountable and untransparent entities on the face of the earth. It is hard to see how the UN is going to conduct this kind of inquiry with a straight face, let alone an ounce of credibility. I spent several years working on UN issues in Washington, and served as an expert on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional mandated Task Force on the United Nations, and nothing I have seen of the UN convinces me that it is capable of carrying out a remotely objective investigation.
And who is the man in charge of the United Nations whitewash/inquiry? Rajendra Pachauri is one of the world’s biggest prophets of climate change doom, which he argues is “the greatest challenge facing humanity.” Last year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC with Al Gore. Like his colleague Lord Stern, Pachauri ludicrously believes that people should eat less meat to curb carbon emissions.
We don’t need a fake UN panel on Climategate. What is needed is a full Senate investigation as well as Parliamentary inquiry into a massive scandal with major implications for both the US and the UK and their future approach to the global warming issue. And if Congressional hearings are held, who better to have leading the charge on Capitol Hill than the brilliant James Delingpole, who deserves huge credit for almost single-handedly bringing the Climategate débacle to the attention of the American public.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Climategate 26
Taking the private jet to Copenhagen
Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants?
The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.
There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.
John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.
It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.
Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.
Oprah Winfrey, who preaches eco-virtue from her TV pulpit, travelled in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years — the preferred model for celebrities and the super-rich. (She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.) The public first became aware of her private-jet habit when her plane had to make a forced landing in California in 2005; it was reminded of it this year after one of her stewardesses was fired for allegedly having sex with the pilot while Oprah and other passengers were asleep.
Jennifer Aniston told reporters that to save the Earth’s precious water resources she brushes her teeth while in the shower. But she also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a recent publicity tour for the film Marley & Me.
Perhaps more egregious, because she is a much more in-your-face global-warming campaigner, is Dame Trudie Styler, film financier and wife of Sting. Not only do she and her husband run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars, but in 2007 an employment tribunal revealed Styler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad. (The chef had regularly made the trip in the past, travelling by train and taxi.) And Sting recently had to contend with accusations that the Police were “the dirtiest band in the world” because of the scale of their last tour and the carbon footprint of the fans who went to see them.
This spring Styler was accused of hiring a private jet to take her and an eight-person entourage from New York to Washington, DC, for the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though there are dozens of scheduled shuttle flights she could have taken, not to mention fast trains. Strangely, Sting flew commercial to the same dinner. When challenged, Styler reportedly defended herself by saying: “Yes, I do take planes. My life is to travel and to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.”
U2’s latest world tour features three stages and a giant claw that ensures as many spectators as possible get a decent view. Alas, transporting the whole shebang around the world is estimated by carbonfootprint.com to produce the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 6,500 British homes — or a rocket trip to Mars and back.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin has been fingered as one of music’s biggest eco-hypocrites. George Monbiot, a writer and environmental campaigner, noted on his blog that Martin flew thousands of miles on his private jet, including brief trips between LA and nearby Palm Springs. Monbiot calculated that Martin’s trips back and forth to see his family produced 250 times the carbon emissions of an average Briton.
Monbiot also cited an interview Martin gave in which he discussed his angry global-warming song, then boasted about his family’s profligate private jet use, saying of his daughter: “As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come and see us when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, ‘I’m not coming in today — I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.’ I do think that wins you a few points.” Martin replied to criticism by pointing out that he paid for the planting of mango trees to offset the carbon emissions of his tours and flights home.
There are endless other examples of hypocrisy by green politicos. David Cameron was once photographed virtuously riding his bike to the House of Commons, with his official car behind him, carrying his suit and briefcase. Ken Livingstone, who swore he would make London the world’s greenest city when he was mayor, made scores of arguably unnecessary flights to foreign destinations. The supposedly green Barack Obama had a St Louis chef flown 850 miles just to make pizza at the White House.
At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.
Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company.
SUVs and four-wheel-drive cars are another eco-sin green celebs find hard to resist. Those who have harangued the public against driving these wicked vehicles — but who turn out to have recently owned at least one themselves — include Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz.
Of course, the SUV is often parked next to a virtuous Toyota Prius hybrid electric car, but the former doesn’t exactly cancel out the latter. However, as one Hollywood agent told me, the real reason so many people in Tinseltown drive a Prius is because “it’s the only car you can drive which costs under $35,000 which doesn’t make everyone think that your career has gone down the toilet”.
It was just as green activists began worrying about eco-fatigue — the green equivalent of compassion fatigue — two years ago that the first wave of celebrity eco-hypocrisy stories hit. The first thing these stories did was make us feel better about our own relatively minor eco-failings. They also allowed us to vent the irritation we feel about being lectured by actors, rock stars and lesser species of celebrity.
There is something annoying about the way “ordinary” people are being told they must give up their “addiction” to cheap travel, when no leading Hollywood star — not even Leonardo DiCaprio, who often flies commercial — can bring themselves to relinquish the private jet.
Yet there is something absurd about criticising celebrity eco-hypocrites. People who become film stars and rock gods usually do so because they want to join the jet set, and the jet-set life is inherently wasteful. It’s the profligacy that makes it fun and gives it its status. They are unable to give up their private jets because celebrity status is connected to travelling in the most exclusive way possible. Hence, just about all the things celebrities do to get away from “civilians” are unsustainable in green terms.
There are notable exceptions to the rule of green-celebrity hypocrisy. Ed Begley Jr from St Elsewhere and Best in Show became a vegan in 1970, bought one of the first electric cars, and has lived for years in a self-sufficient house that uses not just solar and wind energy but a toaster powered by a stationary bicycle. And unlike so many green celebrities, Begley Jr has a sense of humour about his crusade: on an episode of The Simpsons in which he plays himself, he is shown driving a vehicle powered entirely “by my own sense of self-satisfaction”.
The famous neo-hippie Woody Harrelson lives in a sustainable community in Hawaii, grows most of his food, uses only solar power, wears hemp clothes, eschews animal products, and fuels his car with biodiesel. Brad Pitt has done more than tell other people how to change the planet. His charity Make It Right New Orleans has built 13 ultra-energy-efficient greenhouses in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee — at least that will be organic.
When asked if the carbon footprint might have been reduced by turning Copenhagen into a video conference, a spokesman for the event said: “For such a major agreement, people need to meet together and negotiate face to face. We have delegates from all over the world. Video-conferencing systems are extremely useful, but they don’t match the personal touch. This is one of the main factors in having a good conference.”
Some of the charges laid against celebrities who are allegedly hypocritical about their green commitments are either unfair or don’t really stand up when examined closely. In 2008, Sting took a lot of flak when a US watchdog organisation, Charity Navigator, rated his Rainforest Foundation as one of New York’s worst charities. This was because only 41% of almost $2.2m raised at a Rainforest Foundation concert made its way to projects on the ground.
But while many leading charities spend at least 75% of their income on projects rather than fundraising and salaries, it is normal for charity concerts and balls to cost almost as much as they raise. Many of the better-known mega-charities spend a shockingly large amount of what they get from the public on fundraising, image advertising and swanky offices, but are not subject to the same scrutiny as organisations set up by a superstar.
It is also worth looking at the agenda of the green critics who slam celebrities for their eco-hypocrisy. They believe anything short of the immediate adoption of a pre-industrial way of life akin to that of peasant villages in the Middle Ages is a sellout. For them, Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is unforgivably capitalist.
Perhaps it is better that public figures say the right thing, even if they are not doing it themselves. Does it really matter that much that those who ask us to behave better are imperfect in their own behaviour? You could argue that if Trudie Styler believes that GM food, which she fiercely campaigns about, is a bigger threat than global warming, she is entitled to do so, and to fly her organic non-GM products from her Tuscan estate to the counters of Selfridges.
After all, it seems fairly clear that celebrity advocacy of green lifestyles does actually work, at least in the sense that it has made green concerns extremely fashionable.
Some of the nastiest accusations of hypocrisy have been thrown at the Prince of Wales. The “Green Prince” has been mocked for, among other alleged crimes, chartering a plane to South America to raise eco-awareness. Prince Charles’s spokespeople responded saying it would have been impossible to make 48 appointments across three countries in 10 days by regularly scheduled flights.
Unlike the common run of “green celebrities”, at least the Prince of Wales publishes annually an exhaustive green audit of all his homes and activities. Its content includes the paper usage of his household, the fact that his thirsty Aston Martin runs on bio-ethanol from wine wastage, and that his emissions for non-official travel are less than half of what they were two years ago.
If film stars and rock stars followed his lead by publishing their own eco-audits, the public might be more likely to listen to their exhortations.
Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants?
The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.
There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.
John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.
It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.
Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.
Oprah Winfrey, who preaches eco-virtue from her TV pulpit, travelled in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years — the preferred model for celebrities and the super-rich. (She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.) The public first became aware of her private-jet habit when her plane had to make a forced landing in California in 2005; it was reminded of it this year after one of her stewardesses was fired for allegedly having sex with the pilot while Oprah and other passengers were asleep.
Jennifer Aniston told reporters that to save the Earth’s precious water resources she brushes her teeth while in the shower. But she also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a recent publicity tour for the film Marley & Me.
Perhaps more egregious, because she is a much more in-your-face global-warming campaigner, is Dame Trudie Styler, film financier and wife of Sting. Not only do she and her husband run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars, but in 2007 an employment tribunal revealed Styler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad. (The chef had regularly made the trip in the past, travelling by train and taxi.) And Sting recently had to contend with accusations that the Police were “the dirtiest band in the world” because of the scale of their last tour and the carbon footprint of the fans who went to see them.
This spring Styler was accused of hiring a private jet to take her and an eight-person entourage from New York to Washington, DC, for the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though there are dozens of scheduled shuttle flights she could have taken, not to mention fast trains. Strangely, Sting flew commercial to the same dinner. When challenged, Styler reportedly defended herself by saying: “Yes, I do take planes. My life is to travel and to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.”
U2’s latest world tour features three stages and a giant claw that ensures as many spectators as possible get a decent view. Alas, transporting the whole shebang around the world is estimated by carbonfootprint.com to produce the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 6,500 British homes — or a rocket trip to Mars and back.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin has been fingered as one of music’s biggest eco-hypocrites. George Monbiot, a writer and environmental campaigner, noted on his blog that Martin flew thousands of miles on his private jet, including brief trips between LA and nearby Palm Springs. Monbiot calculated that Martin’s trips back and forth to see his family produced 250 times the carbon emissions of an average Briton.
Monbiot also cited an interview Martin gave in which he discussed his angry global-warming song, then boasted about his family’s profligate private jet use, saying of his daughter: “As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come and see us when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, ‘I’m not coming in today — I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.’ I do think that wins you a few points.” Martin replied to criticism by pointing out that he paid for the planting of mango trees to offset the carbon emissions of his tours and flights home.
There are endless other examples of hypocrisy by green politicos. David Cameron was once photographed virtuously riding his bike to the House of Commons, with his official car behind him, carrying his suit and briefcase. Ken Livingstone, who swore he would make London the world’s greenest city when he was mayor, made scores of arguably unnecessary flights to foreign destinations. The supposedly green Barack Obama had a St Louis chef flown 850 miles just to make pizza at the White House.
At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.
Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company.
SUVs and four-wheel-drive cars are another eco-sin green celebs find hard to resist. Those who have harangued the public against driving these wicked vehicles — but who turn out to have recently owned at least one themselves — include Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz.
Of course, the SUV is often parked next to a virtuous Toyota Prius hybrid electric car, but the former doesn’t exactly cancel out the latter. However, as one Hollywood agent told me, the real reason so many people in Tinseltown drive a Prius is because “it’s the only car you can drive which costs under $35,000 which doesn’t make everyone think that your career has gone down the toilet”.
It was just as green activists began worrying about eco-fatigue — the green equivalent of compassion fatigue — two years ago that the first wave of celebrity eco-hypocrisy stories hit. The first thing these stories did was make us feel better about our own relatively minor eco-failings. They also allowed us to vent the irritation we feel about being lectured by actors, rock stars and lesser species of celebrity.
There is something annoying about the way “ordinary” people are being told they must give up their “addiction” to cheap travel, when no leading Hollywood star — not even Leonardo DiCaprio, who often flies commercial — can bring themselves to relinquish the private jet.
Yet there is something absurd about criticising celebrity eco-hypocrites. People who become film stars and rock gods usually do so because they want to join the jet set, and the jet-set life is inherently wasteful. It’s the profligacy that makes it fun and gives it its status. They are unable to give up their private jets because celebrity status is connected to travelling in the most exclusive way possible. Hence, just about all the things celebrities do to get away from “civilians” are unsustainable in green terms.
There are notable exceptions to the rule of green-celebrity hypocrisy. Ed Begley Jr from St Elsewhere and Best in Show became a vegan in 1970, bought one of the first electric cars, and has lived for years in a self-sufficient house that uses not just solar and wind energy but a toaster powered by a stationary bicycle. And unlike so many green celebrities, Begley Jr has a sense of humour about his crusade: on an episode of The Simpsons in which he plays himself, he is shown driving a vehicle powered entirely “by my own sense of self-satisfaction”.
The famous neo-hippie Woody Harrelson lives in a sustainable community in Hawaii, grows most of his food, uses only solar power, wears hemp clothes, eschews animal products, and fuels his car with biodiesel. Brad Pitt has done more than tell other people how to change the planet. His charity Make It Right New Orleans has built 13 ultra-energy-efficient greenhouses in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee — at least that will be organic.
When asked if the carbon footprint might have been reduced by turning Copenhagen into a video conference, a spokesman for the event said: “For such a major agreement, people need to meet together and negotiate face to face. We have delegates from all over the world. Video-conferencing systems are extremely useful, but they don’t match the personal touch. This is one of the main factors in having a good conference.”
Some of the charges laid against celebrities who are allegedly hypocritical about their green commitments are either unfair or don’t really stand up when examined closely. In 2008, Sting took a lot of flak when a US watchdog organisation, Charity Navigator, rated his Rainforest Foundation as one of New York’s worst charities. This was because only 41% of almost $2.2m raised at a Rainforest Foundation concert made its way to projects on the ground.
But while many leading charities spend at least 75% of their income on projects rather than fundraising and salaries, it is normal for charity concerts and balls to cost almost as much as they raise. Many of the better-known mega-charities spend a shockingly large amount of what they get from the public on fundraising, image advertising and swanky offices, but are not subject to the same scrutiny as organisations set up by a superstar.
It is also worth looking at the agenda of the green critics who slam celebrities for their eco-hypocrisy. They believe anything short of the immediate adoption of a pre-industrial way of life akin to that of peasant villages in the Middle Ages is a sellout. For them, Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is unforgivably capitalist.
Perhaps it is better that public figures say the right thing, even if they are not doing it themselves. Does it really matter that much that those who ask us to behave better are imperfect in their own behaviour? You could argue that if Trudie Styler believes that GM food, which she fiercely campaigns about, is a bigger threat than global warming, she is entitled to do so, and to fly her organic non-GM products from her Tuscan estate to the counters of Selfridges.
After all, it seems fairly clear that celebrity advocacy of green lifestyles does actually work, at least in the sense that it has made green concerns extremely fashionable.
Some of the nastiest accusations of hypocrisy have been thrown at the Prince of Wales. The “Green Prince” has been mocked for, among other alleged crimes, chartering a plane to South America to raise eco-awareness. Prince Charles’s spokespeople responded saying it would have been impossible to make 48 appointments across three countries in 10 days by regularly scheduled flights.
Unlike the common run of “green celebrities”, at least the Prince of Wales publishes annually an exhaustive green audit of all his homes and activities. Its content includes the paper usage of his household, the fact that his thirsty Aston Martin runs on bio-ethanol from wine wastage, and that his emissions for non-official travel are less than half of what they were two years ago.
If film stars and rock stars followed his lead by publishing their own eco-audits, the public might be more likely to listen to their exhortations.
Climategate 25
Denying the global-cooling cover-up
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.
Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.
Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled. For example, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the influential University of East Anglia, wrote in an e-mail: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Mr. Jones and Mr. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were contributing authors to the United Nations report.
The partners in pettifoggery have yet to get their various stories straight. Mr. Jones has confirmed that the incriminating message is in fact an e-mail that he sent. But when reached over the weekend, Mr. Trenberth told The Washington Times, "I can reassure you that no such thing occurred." Mr. Trenberth, however, would not answer several questions about why Mr. Jones would make the claim he did to other academics. Mr. Trenberth also declined to answer any questions about whether he had ever talked to Mr. Jones about these topics.
Professor Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took the ruse a step further and threatened journals that had the gall to publish academic research at odds with the global-warming theocracy. Upset that the journal Climate Research had published such a paper, Mr. Mann wrote: "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."
Given Mr. Jones' frequent reference to destroying e-mails and the ensuing criticism from officials at his university for his destruction of them, the full extent of the global-warming deception is unlikely to ever be known. But revelations to date are concerning enough.
The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.
Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.
Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled. For example, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the influential University of East Anglia, wrote in an e-mail: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Mr. Jones and Mr. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were contributing authors to the United Nations report.
The partners in pettifoggery have yet to get their various stories straight. Mr. Jones has confirmed that the incriminating message is in fact an e-mail that he sent. But when reached over the weekend, Mr. Trenberth told The Washington Times, "I can reassure you that no such thing occurred." Mr. Trenberth, however, would not answer several questions about why Mr. Jones would make the claim he did to other academics. Mr. Trenberth also declined to answer any questions about whether he had ever talked to Mr. Jones about these topics.
Professor Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took the ruse a step further and threatened journals that had the gall to publish academic research at odds with the global-warming theocracy. Upset that the journal Climate Research had published such a paper, Mr. Mann wrote: "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."
Given Mr. Jones' frequent reference to destroying e-mails and the ensuing criticism from officials at his university for his destruction of them, the full extent of the global-warming deception is unlikely to ever be known. But revelations to date are concerning enough.
The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Climategate 23
Why 'climategate' won't stop greens
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
26th November 2009, 8:22am
If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a shit about "the science."
They never have.
What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.
Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.
So they desperately try to portray it as the routine "messy" business of science, lamely insisting, "nothing to see here folks, move along."
Before the Internet -- which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called "wise elites" -- they might have gotten away with it.
But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.
The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.
The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.
Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.
What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power.
If it was about saving the planet, "cap-and-trade" (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) -- how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will "fight" global warming and "save the planet" -- would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because Europe's five-year-old cap-and-trade market -- the Emissions Trading Scheme -- has done nothing to make the world cooler.
All it's done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.
Readers often ask how they can fight back. First, forget about asking when the warmists will see reason. They won't.
Instead, send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper by e-mail (pm@pm.gc.ca), fax (1-613-941-6900) or call toll-free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Office of the Prime Minister.
Do the same for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by e-mail, (ignatm@parl.gc.ca). fax, (1-613-947-0310), or call-toll free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Liberal Leader's Office.
Tell them you want no part of the madness in Copenhagen.
Blow their phones off the hook.
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
26th November 2009, 8:22am
If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a shit about "the science."
They never have.
What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.
Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.
So they desperately try to portray it as the routine "messy" business of science, lamely insisting, "nothing to see here folks, move along."
Before the Internet -- which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called "wise elites" -- they might have gotten away with it.
But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.
The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.
The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.
Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.
What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power.
If it was about saving the planet, "cap-and-trade" (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) -- how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will "fight" global warming and "save the planet" -- would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because Europe's five-year-old cap-and-trade market -- the Emissions Trading Scheme -- has done nothing to make the world cooler.
All it's done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.
Readers often ask how they can fight back. First, forget about asking when the warmists will see reason. They won't.
Instead, send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper by e-mail (pm@pm.gc.ca), fax (1-613-941-6900) or call toll-free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Office of the Prime Minister.
Do the same for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by e-mail, (ignatm@parl.gc.ca). fax, (1-613-947-0310), or call-toll free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Liberal Leader's Office.
Tell them you want no part of the madness in Copenhagen.
Blow their phones off the hook.
Climategate 22
Climate scientists: Dog ate homework
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
30th November 2009, 8:25am
In the latest shocking development in climategate, scientists at the world's leading research facility studying climate change have admitted they threw out much of the raw temperature data on which they built their theory of man-made global warming.
The revelation in yesterday's London Sunday Times, reported by environment editor Jonathan Leake, means the original work that led to modern climate change theory developed at the now under fire Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia, cannot be independently verified by other academics, critical of CRU's methods.
They allege CRU manipulated data to exaggerate global warming, which it attributes to mankind's burning of fossil fuels.
These critics have been seeking CRU's raw data for years. Its research is central to the findings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global warming poses a major threat to mankind, the subject of an international meeting in Copenhagen starting Dec. 7 to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto accord, aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
CRU emails and other documents recently leaked by a computer hacker describing, among other things, efforts by CRU director and lead scientist Phil Jones to block the release of this data, even if, as Jones wrote in one email, it meant deleting a file subject to a Freedom of Information request, sparked climategate.
Jones has subsequently said while his choice of words was poor, he didn't delete files, he stands by his research, that CRU has never inappropriately manipulated data and that its findings are similar to those of other leading research institutions studying global warming.
But in a statement released on its website, where, CRU boasts, it steered global warming theory out of the "academic backwater" into a major "political pre-occupation", it acknowledges: "We do not hold the original raw data, but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenised) data."
The facility said the original raw temperature data, collected from weather stations around the world and stored on paper and magnetic tape, were thrown out when CRU moved into a new building in the 1980s, at a time when global warming was not as big an issue and before Jones was in charge.
CRU said it retained the adjusted data it extrapolated from these raw figures, which took into account variations in the way temperatures were collected. CRU also announced it was reversing its earlier refusal to disclose this data and would now release it once it gets clearance from third parties for whom much of the research was done.
But scientists critical of CRU say without the original raw data, it will be impossible to independently verify its work.
While CRU supporters disagree, saying the adjusted data can be used to confirm CRU's original research, that's unlikely to satisfy critics, especially in light of one of the leaked climategate documents, a 274-page computer file known as "HARRY_ READ_Me.txt."
In it, a climatologist/programmer with CRU engaged in a huge project from 2006 to earlier this year to update CRU's database, repeatedly complains about massive problems, including missing data, corrupted files and bug-ridden computer programs.
Near the end of the effort, he appears to give up in frustration, citing "the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
30th November 2009, 8:25am
In the latest shocking development in climategate, scientists at the world's leading research facility studying climate change have admitted they threw out much of the raw temperature data on which they built their theory of man-made global warming.
The revelation in yesterday's London Sunday Times, reported by environment editor Jonathan Leake, means the original work that led to modern climate change theory developed at the now under fire Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia, cannot be independently verified by other academics, critical of CRU's methods.
They allege CRU manipulated data to exaggerate global warming, which it attributes to mankind's burning of fossil fuels.
These critics have been seeking CRU's raw data for years. Its research is central to the findings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global warming poses a major threat to mankind, the subject of an international meeting in Copenhagen starting Dec. 7 to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto accord, aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
CRU emails and other documents recently leaked by a computer hacker describing, among other things, efforts by CRU director and lead scientist Phil Jones to block the release of this data, even if, as Jones wrote in one email, it meant deleting a file subject to a Freedom of Information request, sparked climategate.
Jones has subsequently said while his choice of words was poor, he didn't delete files, he stands by his research, that CRU has never inappropriately manipulated data and that its findings are similar to those of other leading research institutions studying global warming.
But in a statement released on its website, where, CRU boasts, it steered global warming theory out of the "academic backwater" into a major "political pre-occupation", it acknowledges: "We do not hold the original raw data, but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenised) data."
The facility said the original raw temperature data, collected from weather stations around the world and stored on paper and magnetic tape, were thrown out when CRU moved into a new building in the 1980s, at a time when global warming was not as big an issue and before Jones was in charge.
CRU said it retained the adjusted data it extrapolated from these raw figures, which took into account variations in the way temperatures were collected. CRU also announced it was reversing its earlier refusal to disclose this data and would now release it once it gets clearance from third parties for whom much of the research was done.
But scientists critical of CRU say without the original raw data, it will be impossible to independently verify its work.
While CRU supporters disagree, saying the adjusted data can be used to confirm CRU's original research, that's unlikely to satisfy critics, especially in light of one of the leaked climategate documents, a 274-page computer file known as "HARRY_ READ_Me.txt."
In it, a climatologist/programmer with CRU engaged in a huge project from 2006 to earlier this year to update CRU's database, repeatedly complains about massive problems, including missing data, corrupted files and bug-ridden computer programs.
Near the end of the effort, he appears to give up in frustration, citing "the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."
Climategate 21
'Botch after botch after botch'
Leaked 'climategate' documents show huge flaws in the backbone of climate change science
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
29th November 2009, 11:29am
I've been poring over one of many leaked computer files from the "climategate" scandal.
It's worse than those e-mails revealing leading climate scientists did a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures and privately called it a "travesty" they couldn't explain recent cooling.
This document has the innocuous header "HARRY_READ_Me.txt."
I'm indebted to Kate McMillan, the remarkable Canadian blogger who runs smalldeadanimals.com, for calling it to my attention.
You can easily find it online. I used www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_Me.txt.
The file -- 274 pages long -- describes the efforts of a climatologist/programmer at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia to update a huge statistical database (11,000 files) of important climate data between 2006 and 2009.
The computer coding, along with the programmer's apparently unsuccessful efforts to complete the project, involve data that are the foundation of the study of climate change -- recordings from hundreds of weather stations around the world of temperature and precipitation measurements from 1901 to 2006, sun/cloud computer simulations, and the like.
PRESUMABLY PRECISE
These presumably precise data are the backbone of climate science.
Reading "HARRY_READ_ME.txt" it's clear the CRU's files were a mess. The programmer laments huge gaps in data, bug-filled programs and worries about all the guesswork he's doing. His comments suggest the problems go back years.
The CRU at East Anglia University is considered by many as the world's leading climate research agency. Here's how CBSNews.com's Declan McCullagh describes its enormous impact on policymakers:
"In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: It claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. The report ... is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it 'relies on most heavily' when concluding carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated."
As you read the programmer's comments below, remember, this is only a fraction of what he says.
- "But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless ..." (Page 17)
- "It's botch after botch after botch." (18)
- "The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour's edits to the program, when the network died ... no explanation from anyone, I hope it's not a return to last year's troubles ... This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek." (31)
- "Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite." (37)
- "... this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!" (45)
- "Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!" (47)
- "As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless." (57)
- "COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" (71)
- "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have : - )" (98)
- "You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..." (98)
- "So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option -- to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations ... In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad ..." (98-9)
- "OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases." (241).
- "This whole project is SUCH A MESS ..." (266)
And based on stuff like this, politicians are going to blow up our economy and lower our standard of living to "fix" the climate?
Are they insane?
Leaked 'climategate' documents show huge flaws in the backbone of climate change science
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
29th November 2009, 11:29am
I've been poring over one of many leaked computer files from the "climategate" scandal.
It's worse than those e-mails revealing leading climate scientists did a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures and privately called it a "travesty" they couldn't explain recent cooling.
This document has the innocuous header "HARRY_READ_Me.txt."
I'm indebted to Kate McMillan, the remarkable Canadian blogger who runs smalldeadanimals.com, for calling it to my attention.
You can easily find it online. I used www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_Me.txt.
The file -- 274 pages long -- describes the efforts of a climatologist/programmer at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia to update a huge statistical database (11,000 files) of important climate data between 2006 and 2009.
The computer coding, along with the programmer's apparently unsuccessful efforts to complete the project, involve data that are the foundation of the study of climate change -- recordings from hundreds of weather stations around the world of temperature and precipitation measurements from 1901 to 2006, sun/cloud computer simulations, and the like.
PRESUMABLY PRECISE
These presumably precise data are the backbone of climate science.
Reading "HARRY_READ_ME.txt" it's clear the CRU's files were a mess. The programmer laments huge gaps in data, bug-filled programs and worries about all the guesswork he's doing. His comments suggest the problems go back years.
The CRU at East Anglia University is considered by many as the world's leading climate research agency. Here's how CBSNews.com's Declan McCullagh describes its enormous impact on policymakers:
"In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: It claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. The report ... is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it 'relies on most heavily' when concluding carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated."
As you read the programmer's comments below, remember, this is only a fraction of what he says.
- "But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless ..." (Page 17)
- "It's botch after botch after botch." (18)
- "The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour's edits to the program, when the network died ... no explanation from anyone, I hope it's not a return to last year's troubles ... This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek." (31)
- "Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite." (37)
- "... this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!" (45)
- "Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!" (47)
- "As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless." (57)
- "COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" (71)
- "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have : - )" (98)
- "You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..." (98)
- "So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option -- to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations ... In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad ..." (98-9)
- "OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases." (241).
- "This whole project is SUCH A MESS ..." (266)
And based on stuff like this, politicians are going to blow up our economy and lower our standard of living to "fix" the climate?
Are they insane?
Climategate 20
Download Entire Climate Research Unit (CRU) Leaked Data:
Click here to download entire data and email report. (61.9MB zip file)
Read the Climate Research Unit (CRU) Leaked Emails:
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part One)
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part Two)
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part Three)
Click here to download entire data and email report. (61.9MB zip file)
Read the Climate Research Unit (CRU) Leaked Emails:
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part One)
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part Two)
Click here to view Pdf. online, download or email (Part Three)
Climategate 19
Climategate; What the climate scientists wrote and when they wrote it
National Post Tue Nov 24 2009
Source: Financial Post
On Friday, news broke that a hacker had broken in to the computer systems used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain, obtaining more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents. The material, which covers a period of more than a decade, has led many to conclude that climate scientists associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government agencies have been cooking the books to make the case for man-made global warming. Climate researchers deny any wrongdoing, explaining that the e-mails are innocent and have been taken out of context. The University, while confirming the hacking, cannot confirm the authenticity of all the stolen documents. Here is a sampling of some of the exchanges.
- From Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes, three U.S. scientists who have produced the controversial "hockey-stick graphs" that purport to show rapidly increasing temperatures in recent decades. Nov, 16, 1999.
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
---
- From Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to Michael Mann, on Oct 12. 2009. The email, titled "BBC U-turn on climate," laments a BBC article that reversed its long-held position on man-made global warming.
"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. ... Our observing system is inadequate."
---
- From: Michael Mann, Oct 27, 2009
"Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post... As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations."
---
- From: Edward Cook, June 4, 2003
"I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage ... It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically (...) I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review -- Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting."
---
- From: Tom Wigley, Sep 27, 2009
"So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 C, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these)."
---
- From: Phil Jones, Feb 2, 2005
"The two MMs [Canadian skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. 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."
---
- From: Phil Jones, May 29, 2008
"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."
---
- From: Keith Briffa, Sep 22, 1999
"I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don't have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming."
---
- From: Michael E. Mann, Mar 11, 2003
"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."
---
- From: Tom Wigley, Apr24, 2003
"Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc."
---
- From: Phil Jones, July 5, 2005
"If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish."
National Post Tue Nov 24 2009
Source: Financial Post
On Friday, news broke that a hacker had broken in to the computer systems used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain, obtaining more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents. The material, which covers a period of more than a decade, has led many to conclude that climate scientists associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government agencies have been cooking the books to make the case for man-made global warming. Climate researchers deny any wrongdoing, explaining that the e-mails are innocent and have been taken out of context. The University, while confirming the hacking, cannot confirm the authenticity of all the stolen documents. Here is a sampling of some of the exchanges.
- From Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes, three U.S. scientists who have produced the controversial "hockey-stick graphs" that purport to show rapidly increasing temperatures in recent decades. Nov, 16, 1999.
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
---
- From Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to Michael Mann, on Oct 12. 2009. The email, titled "BBC U-turn on climate," laments a BBC article that reversed its long-held position on man-made global warming.
"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. ... Our observing system is inadequate."
---
- From: Michael Mann, Oct 27, 2009
"Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post... As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations."
---
- From: Edward Cook, June 4, 2003
"I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage ... It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically (...) I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review -- Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting."
---
- From: Tom Wigley, Sep 27, 2009
"So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 C, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these)."
---
- From: Phil Jones, Feb 2, 2005
"The two MMs [Canadian skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. 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."
---
- From: Phil Jones, May 29, 2008
"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."
---
- From: Keith Briffa, Sep 22, 1999
"I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don't have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming."
---
- From: Michael E. Mann, Mar 11, 2003
"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."
---
- From: Tom Wigley, Apr24, 2003
"Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc."
---
- From: Phil Jones, July 5, 2005
"If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish."
Climategate 18
Cooking the climate books
National Post Wed Nov 25 2009
By Lorne Gunter
Last Friday it was revealed that someone as yet unknown had hacked into the computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Hadley, U.K. The CRU--or Hadley as it is often referred to -- is the source of one of the four main temperature records used by the United Nations and environmentalists to claim that the Earth is on the verge of a global meltdown. It is also home to some of the most prominent climate researchers in the world.
Stolen and then released were over 1,000 emails and 3,000 research files that appear to show that those at the CRU and other equally well-known climate scientists around the world have been working together for years to "cook" the data about climate change. The emails seem to suggest that much of what the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims is "settled science" is based on data manipulated to confirm assertions that man is dangerously altering our climate. Recent decades may not have been exceptionally warm. The planet may not be warming as fast as these scientists have claimed publicly -- and it looks as though they may have known it and tried to hide it.
If the emails are correct, CRU scientists also took glee in the death of a prominent skeptic and did their level best to keep those who disagreed with them from being published in peer-reviewed journals or invited to contribute to IPCC reports. There is even one exchange in which some of the CRU scientists and their colleagues elsewhere tried to have fired the editor of a peer-reviewed journal that dared publish contrary research.
Okay, I can see where you might not trust me to give you a full perspective on what is becoming known as Climategate. You may think I'm too biased against the concept of man-made global warming. So read, then, what George Monbiot of The Guardian newspaper published on Monday. Mr. Monbiot has been called "Britain's Al Gore." His books, with titles such as Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, are bestsellers in Britain and sell well in North America, too. Among British journalists, he is likely the best-known global warming adherent.
"It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow," Mr. Monbiot writes. The emails "could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
"Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
"Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate skeptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign."
Mr. Monbiot then goes on to try and cut his movement's losses. He insist this scandal involves the reputations and work of only "three or four scientists," and only calls into question the credibility of "one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence" that a man-made climate disaster is upon us.
That is just so much backfill. He has been for years one of the most visible and vocal champions for a high-profile cause; of course he has to dismiss the revelations as ultimately meaningless. Throw three or four overboard to preserve the many.
That, unfortunately, has been the reaction of far too many other environmentalists, scientists and journalists, too.
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times -- himself a highly visible mouthpiece for many of the implicated scientists -- published a piece Saturday that essentially consisted of him interviewing the scientists whose emails have been intercepted and printing their reassurances that the content was harmless and had merely been misinterpreted or taken out of context. His story may as well have been titled "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
Except there is something to see. One of the most prominent environmental icons of the past decade has been the hockey-stick graph, which claims to show a thousand years of stable temperatures (the stick), followed by a sharp upward spike in the last 100 years of industrialization (the blade). Such a graph is essential to the environmentalists' core contention that 20th century temperatures were unusual and one-directional-- upwards.
Two different hockey-stick temperature records were devised by two prominent scientists in the late 1990s, Michael Mann of the U.S. and Brit Keith Briffa at Hadley.
The most frequently cited email so far released is from CRU head Phil Jones to Profs. Mann and Briffa, and others, saying that for an article in Nature magazine, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline" in late-20th Century temperatures. But this is not the only highly damaging one.
Just last month, Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, wrote to Mr. Mann, admitting "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. ... Our observing system is inadequate."
First, these scientists never admit publicly there has been no warming for years. And second, this is essentially blaming the instruments for the lack of data supporting the theory. The warming is happening, we just can't detect it. It's the thermometers' fault.
CRU head Phil Jones on the possibility of skeptics getting possession of his files and emails back in 2005: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send [it] to anyone." That note was followed last year by this one: "Can you delete any emails you have with Keith ... Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?... We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
There is page upon page like this. It goes way beyond the frank and candid exchanges colleagues have when no one is listening.
Does this "drive a nail in the climate change coffin," as some skeptics have asserted? No.
But it should do two important things: raise doubt that climate science is settled and cause the public to question the need for any expensive, big-government solutions such as Copenhagen, Kyoto, cap-and-trade, carbon tax or carbon capture and sequestration.
National Post Wed Nov 25 2009
By Lorne Gunter
Last Friday it was revealed that someone as yet unknown had hacked into the computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Hadley, U.K. The CRU--or Hadley as it is often referred to -- is the source of one of the four main temperature records used by the United Nations and environmentalists to claim that the Earth is on the verge of a global meltdown. It is also home to some of the most prominent climate researchers in the world.
Stolen and then released were over 1,000 emails and 3,000 research files that appear to show that those at the CRU and other equally well-known climate scientists around the world have been working together for years to "cook" the data about climate change. The emails seem to suggest that much of what the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims is "settled science" is based on data manipulated to confirm assertions that man is dangerously altering our climate. Recent decades may not have been exceptionally warm. The planet may not be warming as fast as these scientists have claimed publicly -- and it looks as though they may have known it and tried to hide it.
If the emails are correct, CRU scientists also took glee in the death of a prominent skeptic and did their level best to keep those who disagreed with them from being published in peer-reviewed journals or invited to contribute to IPCC reports. There is even one exchange in which some of the CRU scientists and their colleagues elsewhere tried to have fired the editor of a peer-reviewed journal that dared publish contrary research.
Okay, I can see where you might not trust me to give you a full perspective on what is becoming known as Climategate. You may think I'm too biased against the concept of man-made global warming. So read, then, what George Monbiot of The Guardian newspaper published on Monday. Mr. Monbiot has been called "Britain's Al Gore." His books, with titles such as Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, are bestsellers in Britain and sell well in North America, too. Among British journalists, he is likely the best-known global warming adherent.
"It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow," Mr. Monbiot writes. The emails "could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
"Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
"Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate skeptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign."
Mr. Monbiot then goes on to try and cut his movement's losses. He insist this scandal involves the reputations and work of only "three or four scientists," and only calls into question the credibility of "one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence" that a man-made climate disaster is upon us.
That is just so much backfill. He has been for years one of the most visible and vocal champions for a high-profile cause; of course he has to dismiss the revelations as ultimately meaningless. Throw three or four overboard to preserve the many.
That, unfortunately, has been the reaction of far too many other environmentalists, scientists and journalists, too.
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times -- himself a highly visible mouthpiece for many of the implicated scientists -- published a piece Saturday that essentially consisted of him interviewing the scientists whose emails have been intercepted and printing their reassurances that the content was harmless and had merely been misinterpreted or taken out of context. His story may as well have been titled "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
Except there is something to see. One of the most prominent environmental icons of the past decade has been the hockey-stick graph, which claims to show a thousand years of stable temperatures (the stick), followed by a sharp upward spike in the last 100 years of industrialization (the blade). Such a graph is essential to the environmentalists' core contention that 20th century temperatures were unusual and one-directional-- upwards.
Two different hockey-stick temperature records were devised by two prominent scientists in the late 1990s, Michael Mann of the U.S. and Brit Keith Briffa at Hadley.
The most frequently cited email so far released is from CRU head Phil Jones to Profs. Mann and Briffa, and others, saying that for an article in Nature magazine, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline" in late-20th Century temperatures. But this is not the only highly damaging one.
Just last month, Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, wrote to Mr. Mann, admitting "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. ... Our observing system is inadequate."
First, these scientists never admit publicly there has been no warming for years. And second, this is essentially blaming the instruments for the lack of data supporting the theory. The warming is happening, we just can't detect it. It's the thermometers' fault.
CRU head Phil Jones on the possibility of skeptics getting possession of his files and emails back in 2005: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send [it] to anyone." That note was followed last year by this one: "Can you delete any emails you have with Keith ... Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?... We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
There is page upon page like this. It goes way beyond the frank and candid exchanges colleagues have when no one is listening.
Does this "drive a nail in the climate change coffin," as some skeptics have asserted? No.
But it should do two important things: raise doubt that climate science is settled and cause the public to question the need for any expensive, big-government solutions such as Copenhagen, Kyoto, cap-and-trade, carbon tax or carbon capture and sequestration.
Climategate 17
Skewed science; A French scientist's temperature data show results different from the official climate science. Why was he stonewalled?
National Post Fri Nov 27 2009
By Phil Green
The global average temperature is calculated by climatologists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The temperature graph the CRU produces from its monthly averages is the main indicator of global temperature change used by the International Panel on Climate Change, and it shows a steady increase in global lower atmospheric temperature over the 20th century. Similar graphs for regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, show the same trend. This is consistent with increasing industrialization, growing use of fossil fuels, and rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.
It took the CRU workers decades to assemble millions of temperature measurements from around the globe. The earliest measurements they gathered came from the mid 19th century, when mariners threw buckets over the side of their square riggers and hauled them up to measure water temperature. Meteorologists increasingly started recording regular temperature on land around the same time. Today they collect measurements electronically from national meteorological services and ocean-going ships.
Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU's average temperature data doesn't jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.
Courtillot and Jean-Louis Le Mouel, a French geo-magneticist, and three Russian colleagues first came into climate research as outsiders four years ago. The Earth's magnetic field responds to changes in solar output, so geomagnetic measurements are good indicators of solar activity. They thought it would be interesting to compare solar activity with climatic temperature measurements.
Their first step was to assemble a database of temperature measurements and plot temperature charts. To do that, they needed raw temperature measurements that had not been averaged or adjusted in any way. Courtillot asked Phil Jones, the scientist who runs the CRU database, for his raw data, telling him (according to one of the 'Climategate' emails that surfaced following the recent hacking of CRU's computer systems) "there may be some quite important information in the daily values which is likely lost on monthly averaging." Jones refused Courtillot's request for data, saying that CRU had "signed agreements with national meteorological services saying they would not pass the raw data onto third parties." (Interestingly, in another of the CRU emails, Jones said something very different: "I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre," referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre, who helped uncover the flaws in the hockey stick graph.)
Courtillot and his colleagues were forced to turn to other sources of temperature measurements. They found 44 European weather stations that had long series of daily minimum temperatures that covered most of the 20th century, with few or no gaps. They removed annual seasonal trends for each series with a three-year running average of daily minimum temperatures. Finally they averaged all the European series for each day of the 20th century.
CRU, in contrast, calculates average temperatures by month -- rather than daily -- over individual grid boxes on the Earth's surface that are 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude, from 1850 to the present. First it makes hundreds of adjustments to the raw data, which sometimes require educated guesses, to try to correct for such things as changes in the type and location of thermometers. It also combines air temperatures and water temperatures from the sea. It uses fancy statistical techniques to fill in gaps of missing data in grid boxes with few or no temperature measurements. CRU then adjusts the averages to show changes in temperature since 1961-1990.
CRU calls the 1961-1990 the "normal" period and the average temperature of this period it calls the "normal." It subtracts the normal from each monthly average and calls these the monthly "anomalies." A positive anomaly means a temperature was warmer than CRU's normal period. Finally CRU averages the grid box anomalies over regions such as Europe or over the entire surface of the globe for each month to get the European or global monthly average anomaly. You see the result in the IPCC graph nearby, which shows rising temperatures.
The decision to consider the 1961-1990 period as 'normal' was CRUs. Had CRU chosen a different period under consideration, the IPCC graph would have shown less warming, as discussed in one of the Climategate emails, from David Parker of the UK meteorological office. In it, Parker advised Jones not to select a different period, saying "anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted." That's hardly a compelling scientific justification!
It is well known to statisticians that in any but the simplest data sets, there are many possible ways to calculate an indicator using averages. Paradoxically, and counter-intuitively, they often contradict each other. As a simple example of how the same data can be teased to produce divergent results, consider the batting averages of David Justice and Derek Jeter. For each of three years in 1995-97, Justice had a higher batting average than Jeter did. Yet, overall, Jeter had the highest batting average.
In addition to calculating temperature averages for Europe, Courtillot and his colleagues calculated temperature averages for the United States. Once again, their method yielded more refined averages that were not a close match with the coarser CRU temperature averages. The warmest period was in 1930, slightly above the temperatures at the end of the 20th century. This was followed by 30 years of cooling, then another 30 years of warming.
Courtillot's calculations show the importance of making climate data freely available to all scientists to calculate global average temperature according to the best science. Phil Jones, in response to the email hacking, said that CRU's global temperature series show the same results as "completely independent groups of scientists." Yet CRU would not share its data with independent scientists such as Courtillot and McIntyre, and Courtillot's series are clearly different.
At the upcoming Copenhagen conference, governments are expected to fail to agree to an ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Here's a more modest, if mundane goal for them: They should agree to share the data from their national meteorological services so that independent scientists can calculate global climatic temperature and identify the roles of carbon dioxide and the sun in changing it.
- Phil Green is a statistician, president of Greenbridge Management Inc. and author of the upcoming book misLeading Indicators.
---
Vincent Courtillot, discussed above, was educated at the University of Paris and Stanford University, is a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Paris (Denis-Diderot) and a specialist in paleomagnetism. The author of more than 150 papers in scientific journals, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in November of 2003. Since 2002, he has presided the Science Council of the City of Paris.
National Post Fri Nov 27 2009
By Phil Green
The global average temperature is calculated by climatologists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The temperature graph the CRU produces from its monthly averages is the main indicator of global temperature change used by the International Panel on Climate Change, and it shows a steady increase in global lower atmospheric temperature over the 20th century. Similar graphs for regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, show the same trend. This is consistent with increasing industrialization, growing use of fossil fuels, and rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.
It took the CRU workers decades to assemble millions of temperature measurements from around the globe. The earliest measurements they gathered came from the mid 19th century, when mariners threw buckets over the side of their square riggers and hauled them up to measure water temperature. Meteorologists increasingly started recording regular temperature on land around the same time. Today they collect measurements electronically from national meteorological services and ocean-going ships.
Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU's average temperature data doesn't jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.
Courtillot and Jean-Louis Le Mouel, a French geo-magneticist, and three Russian colleagues first came into climate research as outsiders four years ago. The Earth's magnetic field responds to changes in solar output, so geomagnetic measurements are good indicators of solar activity. They thought it would be interesting to compare solar activity with climatic temperature measurements.
Their first step was to assemble a database of temperature measurements and plot temperature charts. To do that, they needed raw temperature measurements that had not been averaged or adjusted in any way. Courtillot asked Phil Jones, the scientist who runs the CRU database, for his raw data, telling him (according to one of the 'Climategate' emails that surfaced following the recent hacking of CRU's computer systems) "there may be some quite important information in the daily values which is likely lost on monthly averaging." Jones refused Courtillot's request for data, saying that CRU had "signed agreements with national meteorological services saying they would not pass the raw data onto third parties." (Interestingly, in another of the CRU emails, Jones said something very different: "I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre," referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre, who helped uncover the flaws in the hockey stick graph.)
Courtillot and his colleagues were forced to turn to other sources of temperature measurements. They found 44 European weather stations that had long series of daily minimum temperatures that covered most of the 20th century, with few or no gaps. They removed annual seasonal trends for each series with a three-year running average of daily minimum temperatures. Finally they averaged all the European series for each day of the 20th century.
CRU, in contrast, calculates average temperatures by month -- rather than daily -- over individual grid boxes on the Earth's surface that are 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude, from 1850 to the present. First it makes hundreds of adjustments to the raw data, which sometimes require educated guesses, to try to correct for such things as changes in the type and location of thermometers. It also combines air temperatures and water temperatures from the sea. It uses fancy statistical techniques to fill in gaps of missing data in grid boxes with few or no temperature measurements. CRU then adjusts the averages to show changes in temperature since 1961-1990.
CRU calls the 1961-1990 the "normal" period and the average temperature of this period it calls the "normal." It subtracts the normal from each monthly average and calls these the monthly "anomalies." A positive anomaly means a temperature was warmer than CRU's normal period. Finally CRU averages the grid box anomalies over regions such as Europe or over the entire surface of the globe for each month to get the European or global monthly average anomaly. You see the result in the IPCC graph nearby, which shows rising temperatures.
The decision to consider the 1961-1990 period as 'normal' was CRUs. Had CRU chosen a different period under consideration, the IPCC graph would have shown less warming, as discussed in one of the Climategate emails, from David Parker of the UK meteorological office. In it, Parker advised Jones not to select a different period, saying "anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted." That's hardly a compelling scientific justification!
It is well known to statisticians that in any but the simplest data sets, there are many possible ways to calculate an indicator using averages. Paradoxically, and counter-intuitively, they often contradict each other. As a simple example of how the same data can be teased to produce divergent results, consider the batting averages of David Justice and Derek Jeter. For each of three years in 1995-97, Justice had a higher batting average than Jeter did. Yet, overall, Jeter had the highest batting average.
In addition to calculating temperature averages for Europe, Courtillot and his colleagues calculated temperature averages for the United States. Once again, their method yielded more refined averages that were not a close match with the coarser CRU temperature averages. The warmest period was in 1930, slightly above the temperatures at the end of the 20th century. This was followed by 30 years of cooling, then another 30 years of warming.
Courtillot's calculations show the importance of making climate data freely available to all scientists to calculate global average temperature according to the best science. Phil Jones, in response to the email hacking, said that CRU's global temperature series show the same results as "completely independent groups of scientists." Yet CRU would not share its data with independent scientists such as Courtillot and McIntyre, and Courtillot's series are clearly different.
At the upcoming Copenhagen conference, governments are expected to fail to agree to an ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Here's a more modest, if mundane goal for them: They should agree to share the data from their national meteorological services so that independent scientists can calculate global climatic temperature and identify the roles of carbon dioxide and the sun in changing it.
- Phil Green is a statistician, president of Greenbridge Management Inc. and author of the upcoming book misLeading Indicators.
---
Vincent Courtillot, discussed above, was educated at the University of Paris and Stanford University, is a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Paris (Denis-Diderot) and a specialist in paleomagnetism. The author of more than 150 papers in scientific journals, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in November of 2003. Since 2002, he has presided the Science Council of the City of Paris.
Climategate 16
From Climategate to Copenhagen; Will hacked e-mails cast a chill on the UN's environment summit? Richard Foot rises above the hot air and heated debate to consider the long-term repercussions of the controversy.
The Ottawa Citizen Sat Nov 28 2009
By Richard Foot
Christmas came early this year for Diane Katz and other Canadians at the forefront of the most polarized political fight on the planet.
For many years Katz -- the director of environment policy at the Fraser Institute, the free market Vancouver think-tank -- has argued alongside her allies that global warming is neither a man-made phenomenon nor the doomsday crisis it is widely considered to be, and that the scientists who fuel such fears have in fact hoodwinked us.
Then last week, Katz and her colleagues were handed an unexpected gift: a computer hacker had stolen hundreds of e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain -- an influential centre of climate change study -- and posted the material on the Internet, only weeks before world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Dec. 7 to hash out a new global strategy on carbon emissions.
The e-mail exchanges, between a group of powerful, like-minded scientists based in Britain and the U.S., written during the past 13 years, suggest they may have rigged their data, suppressed contrary information and conspired to control what should be an independent peer review process surrounding the publication of their scientific papers.
It's partly the work of these scientists -- whose computer modelling research has formed the basis of reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- that now compels many countries to write new laws on carbon emissions limits.
But Katz says the hacked e-mail exchanges prove the IPCC, and governments everywhere, have been seriously misled.
"The perversion of science exposed in these e-mails is a vindication of the scholars and analysts who have long questioned the claims of climate alarmists," said Katz in an interview this week.
"It also shows that the real deniers are the researchers such as those at the CRU, who ignore evidence that man-made emissions are not causing global warming. It's imperative now that governments not impose measures to mitigate global warming."
In one e-mail, the CRU scientists and their U.S. colleagues discuss using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures presented on a set of data.
Other e-mails show the scientists may have plotted to eliminate from their modelling a set of temperature data from the Middle Ages, when the world may have been warmer than it is now.
And in others they discuss rigging the rules of the peer review process, to ensure that scientific articles on climate change are reviewed by friends, not critics.
When this doesn't work, they resort to bullying. In 2003, when the journal Climate Research published an article contrary to the views of the CRU and its friends, one scientist suggested boycotting the journal or trying to manipulate its editors.
"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," one e-mail said. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues, who currently sit on (the journal's) editorial board."
In another e-mail the scientists even refer to the death of a prominent climate change skeptic as "cheering news."
Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has admitted that "some of the published e-mails do not read well. ... Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment."
But he has also called it "complete rubbish" that he and his colleagues conspired to manipulate the data itself, or the journals that published it.
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who wrote some of the offending e-mails, said the messages have simply been misunderstood, and wrongly turned from "something innocent into something nefarious."
"What they've done is search through stolen personal e-mails, confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world."
Asked about the furor on Friday, John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: "Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.
"They used the word 'trick' in one of the stolen e-mails," Bennett said, "but they were simply referring to a way of dealing with a complicated mathematical problem. They weren't using the word in the sense of, 'I'm going to fool you.' "
In some of Mann's e-mails, however, his meaning is perfectly clear, including the one to a New York Times reporter, in which he disparages Canadian climate researcher Stephen McIntyre as someone "not to be trusted."
McIntyre is a Toronto-based blogger who has become a thorn in the side of Mann and his colleagues, fact-checking their research and pointing out their inconsistencies on his website climateaudit.org.
What kind of effect the Climategate revelations will have on the future of the global warming debate isn't yet clear. Next month's meeting in Copenhagen is unlikely to be influenced by the scandal, says Katz, because expectations are already low that the meeting will produce any kind of serious new plan on carbon emissions.
But the longer-term impact could be greater. Nigel Lawson, a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and a well-known climate change skeptic, has called for a public inquiry into the CRU and the scientific study of global warming.
"I am confident that we'll see a major inquiry within the next one to three years," says Lawrence Solomon, another skeptic, and executive director of the Toronto think-tank Energy Probe.
He says if an inquiry isn't opened by Britain's Labour government, the Conservative opposition, widely expected to win power in the next election, will almost certainly convene one. A U.S. congressional committee might also decide to hold hearings into the science of climate change.
An inquiry, says Solomon, is likely to produce "a lot more e-mails like the ones we've seen so far in Climategate."
He also hopes an inquiry would include a forensic analysis of the computer codes, or programs, that produced the climate models now being relied on by the IPCC.
Even if governments don't investigate the matter, the affair may have permanently shifted the momentum of the debate.
"Until now, what these scientists have said is, 'Trust us.' Now, what the scandal has almost certainly done is put the onus on these people, the doomsayers, to demonstrate the validity of their data. They've never been required them to do that before."
Says Katz: "Proponents of the more alarmist chain of thinking have always assumed this mantle of moral superiority, even going so far as to call those who disagree with them 'deniers.' This has now changed all that. It shows in fact that they don't have any moral superiority, because they've been fixing the data."
Bennett brushes aside those claims, insisting the scandal will be short-lived.
"I think it will have no impact whatsoever," he says.
For one thing, the computer modelling studies that have now been thrown into question aren't the only form of science behind the climate change crisis. Observational science -- witnessed evidence of melting glaciers, disappearing polar ice, rising sea levels and changing ocean acidity -- also inform the world's understanding of global warming.
"In the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of observed changes in the climate," says Bennett. "We're observing the very changes that Mann's models predict. So his work, and that of his colleagues, remains pivotal and important.
"All this controversy will prove is the desperateness of the fossil fuel industry, and those they back, the tiny, minuscule group of pseudo-scientific deniers, who are so desperate they will resort to this kind of criminal tactic -- stealing e-mails -- to make their point."
The Ottawa Citizen Sat Nov 28 2009
By Richard Foot
Christmas came early this year for Diane Katz and other Canadians at the forefront of the most polarized political fight on the planet.
For many years Katz -- the director of environment policy at the Fraser Institute, the free market Vancouver think-tank -- has argued alongside her allies that global warming is neither a man-made phenomenon nor the doomsday crisis it is widely considered to be, and that the scientists who fuel such fears have in fact hoodwinked us.
Then last week, Katz and her colleagues were handed an unexpected gift: a computer hacker had stolen hundreds of e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain -- an influential centre of climate change study -- and posted the material on the Internet, only weeks before world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Dec. 7 to hash out a new global strategy on carbon emissions.
The e-mail exchanges, between a group of powerful, like-minded scientists based in Britain and the U.S., written during the past 13 years, suggest they may have rigged their data, suppressed contrary information and conspired to control what should be an independent peer review process surrounding the publication of their scientific papers.
It's partly the work of these scientists -- whose computer modelling research has formed the basis of reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- that now compels many countries to write new laws on carbon emissions limits.
But Katz says the hacked e-mail exchanges prove the IPCC, and governments everywhere, have been seriously misled.
"The perversion of science exposed in these e-mails is a vindication of the scholars and analysts who have long questioned the claims of climate alarmists," said Katz in an interview this week.
"It also shows that the real deniers are the researchers such as those at the CRU, who ignore evidence that man-made emissions are not causing global warming. It's imperative now that governments not impose measures to mitigate global warming."
In one e-mail, the CRU scientists and their U.S. colleagues discuss using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures presented on a set of data.
Other e-mails show the scientists may have plotted to eliminate from their modelling a set of temperature data from the Middle Ages, when the world may have been warmer than it is now.
And in others they discuss rigging the rules of the peer review process, to ensure that scientific articles on climate change are reviewed by friends, not critics.
When this doesn't work, they resort to bullying. In 2003, when the journal Climate Research published an article contrary to the views of the CRU and its friends, one scientist suggested boycotting the journal or trying to manipulate its editors.
"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," one e-mail said. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues, who currently sit on (the journal's) editorial board."
In another e-mail the scientists even refer to the death of a prominent climate change skeptic as "cheering news."
Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has admitted that "some of the published e-mails do not read well. ... Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment."
But he has also called it "complete rubbish" that he and his colleagues conspired to manipulate the data itself, or the journals that published it.
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who wrote some of the offending e-mails, said the messages have simply been misunderstood, and wrongly turned from "something innocent into something nefarious."
"What they've done is search through stolen personal e-mails, confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world."
Asked about the furor on Friday, John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: "Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.
"They used the word 'trick' in one of the stolen e-mails," Bennett said, "but they were simply referring to a way of dealing with a complicated mathematical problem. They weren't using the word in the sense of, 'I'm going to fool you.' "
In some of Mann's e-mails, however, his meaning is perfectly clear, including the one to a New York Times reporter, in which he disparages Canadian climate researcher Stephen McIntyre as someone "not to be trusted."
McIntyre is a Toronto-based blogger who has become a thorn in the side of Mann and his colleagues, fact-checking their research and pointing out their inconsistencies on his website climateaudit.org.
What kind of effect the Climategate revelations will have on the future of the global warming debate isn't yet clear. Next month's meeting in Copenhagen is unlikely to be influenced by the scandal, says Katz, because expectations are already low that the meeting will produce any kind of serious new plan on carbon emissions.
But the longer-term impact could be greater. Nigel Lawson, a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and a well-known climate change skeptic, has called for a public inquiry into the CRU and the scientific study of global warming.
"I am confident that we'll see a major inquiry within the next one to three years," says Lawrence Solomon, another skeptic, and executive director of the Toronto think-tank Energy Probe.
He says if an inquiry isn't opened by Britain's Labour government, the Conservative opposition, widely expected to win power in the next election, will almost certainly convene one. A U.S. congressional committee might also decide to hold hearings into the science of climate change.
An inquiry, says Solomon, is likely to produce "a lot more e-mails like the ones we've seen so far in Climategate."
He also hopes an inquiry would include a forensic analysis of the computer codes, or programs, that produced the climate models now being relied on by the IPCC.
Even if governments don't investigate the matter, the affair may have permanently shifted the momentum of the debate.
"Until now, what these scientists have said is, 'Trust us.' Now, what the scandal has almost certainly done is put the onus on these people, the doomsayers, to demonstrate the validity of their data. They've never been required them to do that before."
Says Katz: "Proponents of the more alarmist chain of thinking have always assumed this mantle of moral superiority, even going so far as to call those who disagree with them 'deniers.' This has now changed all that. It shows in fact that they don't have any moral superiority, because they've been fixing the data."
Bennett brushes aside those claims, insisting the scandal will be short-lived.
"I think it will have no impact whatsoever," he says.
For one thing, the computer modelling studies that have now been thrown into question aren't the only form of science behind the climate change crisis. Observational science -- witnessed evidence of melting glaciers, disappearing polar ice, rising sea levels and changing ocean acidity -- also inform the world's understanding of global warming.
"In the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of observed changes in the climate," says Bennett. "We're observing the very changes that Mann's models predict. So his work, and that of his colleagues, remains pivotal and important.
"All this controversy will prove is the desperateness of the fossil fuel industry, and those they back, the tiny, minuscule group of pseudo-scientific deniers, who are so desperate they will resort to this kind of criminal tactic -- stealing e-mails -- to make their point."
Climategate 15
Hacked e-mails allude to rigged warmingtests; Scientist says messages being misunderstood
Calgary Herald Sat Nov 28 2009
By Richard Foot
Christmas came early this year for Diane Katz and other Canadians at the forefront of the most polarized political fight on the planet.
For many years Katz--the director of environment policy at the Fraser Institute, the free market Vancouver think-tank --has argued alongside her allies that global warming is neither a man-made phenomenon nor the doomsday crisis it is widely considered to be, and that the scientists who fuel such fears have in fact hoodwinked us.
Then last week Katz and her colleagues were handed an unexpected gift:a computer hacker had stolen hundreds of e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain--an influential centre of climate change study -- and posted the material on the Internet, only weeks before world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Dec. 7 to hash out a new global strategy on carbon emissions.
The e-mail exchanges, between a group of powerful, like-minded scientists based in Britain and the U.S., written over the past 13 years, suggest they may have rigged their data, suppressed contrary information and conspired to control what should be an independent peer review process surrounding the publication of their scientific papers.
It's partly the work of these scientists--whose computer modelling research has formed the basis of reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--that now compels many countries to write new laws on carbon emissions limits.
But Katz says the hacked e-mail exchanges prove the IPCC, and governments everywhere, have been seriously misled.
"The perversion of science exposed in these e-mails is a vindication of the scholars and analysts who have long questioned the claims of climate alarmists," said Katz in an interview this week.
In one e-mail, the CRU scientists and their U.S. colleagues discuss using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures presented on a set of data.
Other e-mails show the scientists may have plotted to eliminate from their modelling an entire set of temperature data from the Middle Ages, when the world may have been warmer than it is now.
And in others they discuss rigging the rules of the peer review process, to ensure that scientific articles on climate change are reviewed by friends, not critics.
When this doesn't work, they resort to bullying. In 2003, when the journal Climate Research published an article contrary to the views of the CRU and its friends, one scientist suggested boycotting the journal or trying to manipulate its editors.
"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," one e-mail said. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues, who currently sit on (the journal's) editorial board."
In another e-mail the scientists even refer to the death of a prominent climate change skeptic as "cheering news."
Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has admitted that "some of the published e-mails do not read well. . . . Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment."
But he has also called it "complete rubbish" that he and his colleagues conspired to manipulate the data itself, or the journals that published it.
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who wrote some of the offending e-mails, said the messages have simply been misunderstood, and wrongly turned from "something innocent into something nefarious."
"What they've done is search through stolen personal e-mails, confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world."
Asked about the furor on Friday, John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: "Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.
"They used the word 'trick' in one of the stolen e-mails," Bennett said, "but they were simply referring to a way of dealing with a complicated mathematical problem. They weren't using the word in the sense of, 'I'm going to fool you.' "
In some of Mann's e-mails, however, his meaning is perfectly clear, including the one to a New York Times reporter, in which he disparages Canadian climate researcher Stephen McIntyre as someone "not to be trusted."
McIntyre is a Toronto-based blogger who has become a thorn in the side of Mann and his colleagues, fact-checking their research and pointing out their inconsistencies on his website climateaudit.org.
What kind of effect the "climategate" revelations will have on the future of the global warming debate isn't yet clear. Next month's meeting in Copenhagen is unlikely to be influenced by the scandal, says Katz, because expectations are already low that the meeting will produce any kind of serious new plan on carbon emissions.
"I am confident that we'll see a major inquiry within the next one to three years," says Lawrence Solomon, another skeptic, and executive director of the Toronto think-tank Energy Probe.
He says if an inquiry isn't opened by Britain's Labour government, the Conservative opposition, widely expected to win power in the next election, will almost certainly convene one. AU. S. congressional committee might also decide to hold hearings into the science of climate change. An inquiry, says Solomon, is likely to produce "a lot more e-mails like the ones we've seen so far in 'climategate.'"
Bennett brushes aside those claims, insisting the scandal will be short-lived.
"I think it will have no impact whatsoever," he says.
For one thing, the computer modelling studies that have now been thrown into question aren't the only form of science behind the climate
change crisis. Observational science--witnessed evidence of melting glaciers, disappearing polar ice, rising sea levels and changing ocean acidity-- also inform the world's understanding of global warming.
"In the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of observed changes in the climate," says Bennett. "We're observing the very changes that Mann's models predict. So his work, and that of his colleagues, remains pivotal and important.
"All this controversy will prove is the desperateness of the fossil fuel industry, and those they back, the tiny, minuscule group of pseudoscientific deniers, who are so desperate they will resort to this kind of criminal tactic-- stealing e-mails-- to make their point."
Calgary Herald Sat Nov 28 2009
By Richard Foot
Christmas came early this year for Diane Katz and other Canadians at the forefront of the most polarized political fight on the planet.
For many years Katz--the director of environment policy at the Fraser Institute, the free market Vancouver think-tank --has argued alongside her allies that global warming is neither a man-made phenomenon nor the doomsday crisis it is widely considered to be, and that the scientists who fuel such fears have in fact hoodwinked us.
Then last week Katz and her colleagues were handed an unexpected gift:a computer hacker had stolen hundreds of e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain--an influential centre of climate change study -- and posted the material on the Internet, only weeks before world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Dec. 7 to hash out a new global strategy on carbon emissions.
The e-mail exchanges, between a group of powerful, like-minded scientists based in Britain and the U.S., written over the past 13 years, suggest they may have rigged their data, suppressed contrary information and conspired to control what should be an independent peer review process surrounding the publication of their scientific papers.
It's partly the work of these scientists--whose computer modelling research has formed the basis of reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--that now compels many countries to write new laws on carbon emissions limits.
But Katz says the hacked e-mail exchanges prove the IPCC, and governments everywhere, have been seriously misled.
"The perversion of science exposed in these e-mails is a vindication of the scholars and analysts who have long questioned the claims of climate alarmists," said Katz in an interview this week.
In one e-mail, the CRU scientists and their U.S. colleagues discuss using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures presented on a set of data.
Other e-mails show the scientists may have plotted to eliminate from their modelling an entire set of temperature data from the Middle Ages, when the world may have been warmer than it is now.
And in others they discuss rigging the rules of the peer review process, to ensure that scientific articles on climate change are reviewed by friends, not critics.
When this doesn't work, they resort to bullying. In 2003, when the journal Climate Research published an article contrary to the views of the CRU and its friends, one scientist suggested boycotting the journal or trying to manipulate its editors.
"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," one e-mail said. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues, who currently sit on (the journal's) editorial board."
In another e-mail the scientists even refer to the death of a prominent climate change skeptic as "cheering news."
Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has admitted that "some of the published e-mails do not read well. . . . Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment."
But he has also called it "complete rubbish" that he and his colleagues conspired to manipulate the data itself, or the journals that published it.
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who wrote some of the offending e-mails, said the messages have simply been misunderstood, and wrongly turned from "something innocent into something nefarious."
"What they've done is search through stolen personal e-mails, confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world."
Asked about the furor on Friday, John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: "Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.
"They used the word 'trick' in one of the stolen e-mails," Bennett said, "but they were simply referring to a way of dealing with a complicated mathematical problem. They weren't using the word in the sense of, 'I'm going to fool you.' "
In some of Mann's e-mails, however, his meaning is perfectly clear, including the one to a New York Times reporter, in which he disparages Canadian climate researcher Stephen McIntyre as someone "not to be trusted."
McIntyre is a Toronto-based blogger who has become a thorn in the side of Mann and his colleagues, fact-checking their research and pointing out their inconsistencies on his website climateaudit.org.
What kind of effect the "climategate" revelations will have on the future of the global warming debate isn't yet clear. Next month's meeting in Copenhagen is unlikely to be influenced by the scandal, says Katz, because expectations are already low that the meeting will produce any kind of serious new plan on carbon emissions.
"I am confident that we'll see a major inquiry within the next one to three years," says Lawrence Solomon, another skeptic, and executive director of the Toronto think-tank Energy Probe.
He says if an inquiry isn't opened by Britain's Labour government, the Conservative opposition, widely expected to win power in the next election, will almost certainly convene one. AU. S. congressional committee might also decide to hold hearings into the science of climate change. An inquiry, says Solomon, is likely to produce "a lot more e-mails like the ones we've seen so far in 'climategate.'"
Bennett brushes aside those claims, insisting the scandal will be short-lived.
"I think it will have no impact whatsoever," he says.
For one thing, the computer modelling studies that have now been thrown into question aren't the only form of science behind the climate
change crisis. Observational science--witnessed evidence of melting glaciers, disappearing polar ice, rising sea levels and changing ocean acidity-- also inform the world's understanding of global warming.
"In the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of observed changes in the climate," says Bennett. "We're observing the very changes that Mann's models predict. So his work, and that of his colleagues, remains pivotal and important.
"All this controversy will prove is the desperateness of the fossil fuel industry, and those they back, the tiny, minuscule group of pseudoscientific deniers, who are so desperate they will resort to this kind of criminal tactic-- stealing e-mails-- to make their point."
Climategate 13
Google climate 'scholars'; Methods used to tabulate the number of experts who are skeptical of climate change leave something to be desired
National Post Sat Nov 28 2009
By Lawrence Solomon
'There you go," concluded Anna Maria Tremonti of CBC's morning radio show, The Current. "According to Jim Prull's database, of the 615 scientists who published papers on climate change, the skeptics are outnumbered 601 to 14."
Case closed, she was saying, after Prull, a computer network manager, explained how anyone can use a spreadsheet and Google Scholar searches to separate the real climate experts from the phony ones. Just key some-one's name into Google Scholar if you think he's a scientist and see how often he has been cited. Those who aren't cited much have little scientific credibility, CBC's national audience was told, and those who are cited a lot have lots. Not once during her interview of Prull did Tremonti question Prull's methodology or his premises or his results.
She didn't, for example, try a reality check by asking him to search Google Scholar for Al Gore. Had she done so, she would have seen that Gore, with 30,000 Scholar hits and untold citations, was closing in on Einstein's 36,000.
On what basis did Tremonti, formerly a CBC investigative journalist, grant so much credibility to Prull's techniques? Perhaps because, as he explained to the CBC audience, Google Scholar "studies just the scientific literature. They look at peer-reviewed journals." She might have done a reality check on that premise, too. Google Scholar finds articles in popular newspapers and magazines. A search for The New York Times yields 101,000 hits, for The Economist magazine 18,000 and for The Wall Street Journal 17,000. Google Scholar also finds articles on global warming web-sites, including those of the skeptics.
Prull claims to have objectively investigated 2,940 names, of scientists on both sides of the debate, including those who signed various petitions protesting global warming doomster-ism. Yet he dismisses the biggest petition of all -- the 31,000 scientists on the petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine -- on the grounds that organizations
like DeSmogBlog say that they're not really scientists. DeSmogBlog, an organization that Prull donates to, was specifically created for the purpose of discrediting skeptics.
The Oregon Petition, for those who are unfamiliar with it, was organized by Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Arthur B. Robinson, the former president and research director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine and the man who, according to Nobel laureate Pauling, was "my principal and most valued collaborator." You can't fault Prull for not wanting to go through all 31,000 names -- he has a day job keeping computer systems running -- but his dismissal of the Oregon Petition calls his objectivity into question, particularly since that petition includes renowned scientists such as Freeman Dyson, America's most famous scientist. Moreover, those 31,000 signatories didn't sign some meaningless motherhood statement -- they unequivocally asserted that carbon dioxide benefits the planet and that the danger that we face comes from a misguided Kyoto Protocol.
My book, The Deniers, warrants a special place on Prull's website. He has investigated 37 of the scientists that I profiled and generally found them wanting. Reid Bryson, for example, fares poorly on Prull's spreadsheet -- he's ranked 290th -- with an inexplicably low number of citations. Yet Bryson, who is known as "the father of scientific climatology," holds the title of "the world's most cited climatologist," according to an analysis in the journal of the Institute of British Geographers.
I don't mean to be hard on Prull -- his professional discipline is outside the ken of climate science or environmental policy, and there's no reason for him to be especially able to judge whose science counts and whose doesn't. But what does it say of the standards at CBC and The Current that they would prefer the judgment of a well-meaning amateur to that of the Institute of British Geographers? Or that they would unquestioningly assume that crude returns from a Google Scholar search were worth imparting to its audience?
Even if Prull were capable of judging which scientists qualify as climate scientists, and even if Google Scholar only searched peer-reviewed sites, CBC and The Current would have been remiss in assuming that appearances in peer-reviewed journals mean what they appear to mean.
For one thing, governments have provided some $80-billion in climate research funding over the last 20 years, virtually none of it to the skeptics. With only one side of the debate funded, it's hardly surprising that one side dominates the publications. For another, as the recently surfaced Climategate emails demonstrate, scholarly publications have been under pressure to refuse any work from skeptics. As The Wall Street Journal Europe put it, "The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start."
The impression left by the performance of Anna Maria Tremonti and The Current is that they -- wittingly or not -- have been helping to rig the game in Canada.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe ( energy.probeinternational.org)and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
National Post Sat Nov 28 2009
By Lawrence Solomon
'There you go," concluded Anna Maria Tremonti of CBC's morning radio show, The Current. "According to Jim Prull's database, of the 615 scientists who published papers on climate change, the skeptics are outnumbered 601 to 14."
Case closed, she was saying, after Prull, a computer network manager, explained how anyone can use a spreadsheet and Google Scholar searches to separate the real climate experts from the phony ones. Just key some-one's name into Google Scholar if you think he's a scientist and see how often he has been cited. Those who aren't cited much have little scientific credibility, CBC's national audience was told, and those who are cited a lot have lots. Not once during her interview of Prull did Tremonti question Prull's methodology or his premises or his results.
She didn't, for example, try a reality check by asking him to search Google Scholar for Al Gore. Had she done so, she would have seen that Gore, with 30,000 Scholar hits and untold citations, was closing in on Einstein's 36,000.
On what basis did Tremonti, formerly a CBC investigative journalist, grant so much credibility to Prull's techniques? Perhaps because, as he explained to the CBC audience, Google Scholar "studies just the scientific literature. They look at peer-reviewed journals." She might have done a reality check on that premise, too. Google Scholar finds articles in popular newspapers and magazines. A search for The New York Times yields 101,000 hits, for The Economist magazine 18,000 and for The Wall Street Journal 17,000. Google Scholar also finds articles on global warming web-sites, including those of the skeptics.
Prull claims to have objectively investigated 2,940 names, of scientists on both sides of the debate, including those who signed various petitions protesting global warming doomster-ism. Yet he dismisses the biggest petition of all -- the 31,000 scientists on the petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine -- on the grounds that organizations
like DeSmogBlog say that they're not really scientists. DeSmogBlog, an organization that Prull donates to, was specifically created for the purpose of discrediting skeptics.
The Oregon Petition, for those who are unfamiliar with it, was organized by Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Arthur B. Robinson, the former president and research director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine and the man who, according to Nobel laureate Pauling, was "my principal and most valued collaborator." You can't fault Prull for not wanting to go through all 31,000 names -- he has a day job keeping computer systems running -- but his dismissal of the Oregon Petition calls his objectivity into question, particularly since that petition includes renowned scientists such as Freeman Dyson, America's most famous scientist. Moreover, those 31,000 signatories didn't sign some meaningless motherhood statement -- they unequivocally asserted that carbon dioxide benefits the planet and that the danger that we face comes from a misguided Kyoto Protocol.
My book, The Deniers, warrants a special place on Prull's website. He has investigated 37 of the scientists that I profiled and generally found them wanting. Reid Bryson, for example, fares poorly on Prull's spreadsheet -- he's ranked 290th -- with an inexplicably low number of citations. Yet Bryson, who is known as "the father of scientific climatology," holds the title of "the world's most cited climatologist," according to an analysis in the journal of the Institute of British Geographers.
I don't mean to be hard on Prull -- his professional discipline is outside the ken of climate science or environmental policy, and there's no reason for him to be especially able to judge whose science counts and whose doesn't. But what does it say of the standards at CBC and The Current that they would prefer the judgment of a well-meaning amateur to that of the Institute of British Geographers? Or that they would unquestioningly assume that crude returns from a Google Scholar search were worth imparting to its audience?
Even if Prull were capable of judging which scientists qualify as climate scientists, and even if Google Scholar only searched peer-reviewed sites, CBC and The Current would have been remiss in assuming that appearances in peer-reviewed journals mean what they appear to mean.
For one thing, governments have provided some $80-billion in climate research funding over the last 20 years, virtually none of it to the skeptics. With only one side of the debate funded, it's hardly surprising that one side dominates the publications. For another, as the recently surfaced Climategate emails demonstrate, scholarly publications have been under pressure to refuse any work from skeptics. As The Wall Street Journal Europe put it, "The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start."
The impression left by the performance of Anna Maria Tremonti and The Current is that they -- wittingly or not -- have been helping to rig the game in Canada.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe ( energy.probeinternational.org)and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
Climategate 14
Who's to blame for Climategate?; The fallout from damning e-mails about climate change is gathering momentum -- and the scandal just might change the future of the planet. Gordon Rayner takes a look at ground zero of the controversy.
The Ottawa Citizen Sun Nov 29 2009
By Gordon Rayner
The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich.
To the uninitiated, it has the look of a '70s bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.
Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy that just might influence the entire future of our planet.
A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal e-mails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the Internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.
At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white-hot political issue that has been seized upon by global warming sceptics, and that threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate-change conference in Copenhagen.
In the U.S., where the CRU e-mails have been cited as proof of "the greatest act of scientific fraud in history," there are very real fears that hardline Republicans -- together with powerful right-wing media organizations -- will use the scandal to scupper U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions.
In Australia, the world's worst carbon dioxide polluter per capita, 10 opposition front bench MPs have resigned in protest at a proposed carbon bill, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the emergence of the e-mails.
In Britain, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal, and demands for a full-scale public inquiry from the former chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson who, this week, launched a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge the consensus on global warming policy.
Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the No. 1 target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the e-mails exposed by the anonymous hacker. In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."
Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics, who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Jones defended himself by claiming the word "trick" was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.
An e-mail sent by one of Jones's colleagues said: "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."
Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another e-mail in which he said sceptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. 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 it to anyone." By chance, he now admits he has "accidentally" deleted some of the raw data.
Another message said the CRU's method of collating data "renders the station counts totally meaningless ... so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the e-mails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published e-mails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.
Although Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world's most influential proponents of the theory of human global warming.
The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations' key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.
But Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the U.S. House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.
Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the e-mails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.
Suddenly, Jones is the name on the lips of every right-wing commentator in the U.S., some of whom have warned that Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the e-mails as a "game-changer" for Obama's cap and trade bills.
Fox's climate-change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented, co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information."
Meanwhile, Matt Drudge, among the most influential reporters on the Internet, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the e-mail scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.
Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence U.S. policy. Senator Peter King suggested the e-mails would "have some impact in slowing down or stopping the cap and trade bill," while fellow Republican senator James Inhofe has called for an investigation into the e-mails -- some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the U.S. -- and alerted the relevant U.S. government agencies to their content.
Obama's climate czar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the e-mails, insisting the science on global warming remains sound.
In Australia, meanwhile, the scandal has helped stoke a growing rift in the opposition Liberal party, which had been poised to back Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution bill, but which is hopelessly split on the issue after 10 of its most senior politicians resigned, threatening to challenge party leader Malcolm Turnbull if he does not oppose the legislation.
Many critics have expressed incredulity that Jones has not been sacked, but his fate is of little consequence compared with the effect the scandal could have on world climate change policy.
Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak -- two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference -- was a "concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change" at the most sensitive possible time.
Next month's Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet's climate.
Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, humanity could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.
The hacker who exposed the e-mails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement -- an outcome likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the U.S., such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU e-mails were evidence of what "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history" and suggested that "nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud."
However, Bob Ward, a climate-change expert at the London School of Economics, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.
"The politicians won't be swayed by this," he said. "It's basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the skeptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these e-mails. And in the U.S., President Obama's cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves."
Ward does not believe the e-mails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up.
He said: "I don't believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it's regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument."
Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between "warmists" and "coolists" more poisonous than ever.
- - -
The e-mails in question
From Phil Jones.
To Many. Nov 16, 1999
'I've just completed Mike's Nature -- the science journal -- trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.'
Critics cite this as evidence that data were manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Jones claims the meaning of "trick" has been misinterpreted.
From Phil Jones.
To Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
'I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!'
Suggestions that the scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view that global warming is genuine and human-made.
From Kevin Trenberth (U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research).
To Michael Mann. Oct. 12, 2009
'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 ... Our observing system is inadequate.'
Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics -- that there is no evidence that temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.
From Phil Jones.
To Many. March 11, 2003
'I will be e-mailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.'
Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.
The Ottawa Citizen Sun Nov 29 2009
By Gordon Rayner
The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich.
To the uninitiated, it has the look of a '70s bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.
Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy that just might influence the entire future of our planet.
A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal e-mails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the Internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.
At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white-hot political issue that has been seized upon by global warming sceptics, and that threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate-change conference in Copenhagen.
In the U.S., where the CRU e-mails have been cited as proof of "the greatest act of scientific fraud in history," there are very real fears that hardline Republicans -- together with powerful right-wing media organizations -- will use the scandal to scupper U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions.
In Australia, the world's worst carbon dioxide polluter per capita, 10 opposition front bench MPs have resigned in protest at a proposed carbon bill, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the emergence of the e-mails.
In Britain, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal, and demands for a full-scale public inquiry from the former chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson who, this week, launched a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge the consensus on global warming policy.
Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the No. 1 target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the e-mails exposed by the anonymous hacker. In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."
Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics, who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Jones defended himself by claiming the word "trick" was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.
An e-mail sent by one of Jones's colleagues said: "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."
Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another e-mail in which he said sceptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. 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 it to anyone." By chance, he now admits he has "accidentally" deleted some of the raw data.
Another message said the CRU's method of collating data "renders the station counts totally meaningless ... so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the e-mails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published e-mails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.
Although Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world's most influential proponents of the theory of human global warming.
The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations' key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.
But Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the U.S. House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.
Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the e-mails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.
Suddenly, Jones is the name on the lips of every right-wing commentator in the U.S., some of whom have warned that Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the e-mails as a "game-changer" for Obama's cap and trade bills.
Fox's climate-change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented, co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information."
Meanwhile, Matt Drudge, among the most influential reporters on the Internet, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the e-mail scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.
Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence U.S. policy. Senator Peter King suggested the e-mails would "have some impact in slowing down or stopping the cap and trade bill," while fellow Republican senator James Inhofe has called for an investigation into the e-mails -- some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the U.S. -- and alerted the relevant U.S. government agencies to their content.
Obama's climate czar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the e-mails, insisting the science on global warming remains sound.
In Australia, meanwhile, the scandal has helped stoke a growing rift in the opposition Liberal party, which had been poised to back Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution bill, but which is hopelessly split on the issue after 10 of its most senior politicians resigned, threatening to challenge party leader Malcolm Turnbull if he does not oppose the legislation.
Many critics have expressed incredulity that Jones has not been sacked, but his fate is of little consequence compared with the effect the scandal could have on world climate change policy.
Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak -- two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference -- was a "concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change" at the most sensitive possible time.
Next month's Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet's climate.
Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, humanity could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.
The hacker who exposed the e-mails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement -- an outcome likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the U.S., such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU e-mails were evidence of what "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history" and suggested that "nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud."
However, Bob Ward, a climate-change expert at the London School of Economics, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.
"The politicians won't be swayed by this," he said. "It's basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the skeptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these e-mails. And in the U.S., President Obama's cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves."
Ward does not believe the e-mails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up.
He said: "I don't believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it's regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument."
Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between "warmists" and "coolists" more poisonous than ever.
- - -
The e-mails in question
From Phil Jones.
To Many. Nov 16, 1999
'I've just completed Mike's Nature -- the science journal -- trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.'
Critics cite this as evidence that data were manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Jones claims the meaning of "trick" has been misinterpreted.
From Phil Jones.
To Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
'I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!'
Suggestions that the scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view that global warming is genuine and human-made.
From Kevin Trenberth (U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research).
To Michael Mann. Oct. 12, 2009
'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 ... Our observing system is inadequate.'
Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics -- that there is no evidence that temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.
From Phil Jones.
To Many. March 11, 2003
'I will be e-mailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.'
Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.
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