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.
Monday, November 30, 2009
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.
Climategate 12
Readers question the Post's news judgment and slant
National Post Mon Nov 30 2009
By: Paul Russell
The National Post won both praise and criticism last week for its coverage of "Climategate." That scandal involves hundreds of private emails and documents, hacked from a computer server at the University of East Anglia in Britain, that seem to indicate that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for man-made global warming.
The Post ran a large story on this issue two Saturdays ago on one of our inside news pages, then followed it up with at least six other stories or columns last week, almost all on the FP Comment page. Despite this ongoing coverage, some readers felt we still didn't do this story justice.
"I had expected to open my National Post [on Tuesday] morning to headlines about this man-made climate hoax," wrote Sue Reid. "Yet once again you have failed to do the right thing, opting for the safety of hiding the truth in the back pages of the Financial Post."
"How come the National Post isn't running the story of the century today on its front page?" asked Frank Hilliard. "These hacked files and emails show anthropogenic global warming is a myth at best, and a hoax at worst. So where is the National Post in all this?"
"I was dismayed to see that three great pieces on the emerging scandal in the world of climate science were
relegated to a page deep in the Financial Post," agreed Toby Yull. "My concern is that a lot of readers won't read [that page]. I want everyone to follow this story so that average people can rethink their allegiance to the notion of global warming before we reorganize world economies to fix a problem that may not be happening. This story should be on A3."
Other readers thanked us for our coverage of "Climategate," with special praise for the writers and editors of the FP Comment page.
"The hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit in Hadley, U.K., will clearly have a profound effect on next month's climate conference in Copenhagen," wrote Jeff Spooner. "However if you have been a regular reader of the National Post and its companion paper, the Financial Post, for the last couple of years, these revelations would have only confirmed what you already knew. Writers like Terence Corcoran and Peter Foster have regularly debunked the so-called settled science of global warming. The Post should be congratulated for being one of few sources of that truth."
- Is the National Post biased? That question seems to crop up fairly regularly, and it was asked again last week by readers.
A few of these queries were sparked by an editorial urging Canadians not to visit Cuba, "where the worst excesses of authoritarianism remain as entrenched as ever." To back that point up, the editorial quoted from a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report highlighting various injustices on the Caribbean island.
Even though the editorial clearly stated: "We have criticized HRW's biased, anti-Israel reporting in the past," that didn't deter a few readers from accusing us of hypocrisy by relying on the group for information. To back that up, a few pointed to a Post column headline last month, which questioned HRW's assessment of Israel's human rights record. It read: "Human Rights Watch: Lost in the Mideast."
"Oh I get it," wrote Doug Little. "Human Rights Watch is right when it comes to Cuba but wrong when it comes to Israel. Your hypocrisy is showing."
"How can [this contradiction] be?" asked Roy Weston. "Their goal is still the same, looking for human rights violations ... [I]t's not Human Right Watch that has a bias, it's the National Post, with its support for Israel under any circumstances."
Really, Mr. Weston? Then how does one explain the numerous notes that also came in last week, expressing disappointment and anger with our coverage of the Gilo controversy. Depending on your viewpoint, Gilo is either a settlement near Jerusalem or a neighbourhood within the city.
Our first news story on Gilo -- where 900 new homes are now being erected -- referred to it as a "settlement." That provoked at least a dozen readers to send in letters to correct our wording. Here's an example.
"Surely the editors should be sophisticated enough to realize that the apartments being built are within the city of Jerusalem and in no way can be construed as a settlement," wrote H.T. Keen. "The front page goes on to use the pejorative word 'settlers' to describe the future residents. This is what I would expect if the BBC or al-Jazeera had a newspaper in Toronto, but not from the National Post."
- While some readers may sometimes wonder if the Post is biased and one-sided, it's reassuring to hear about the occasions when their suspicions are shaken. This note came in after a Peter Goodspeed feature on an outspoken Afghan woman, titled "Leave my country."
"I think that the National Post has a right-of-centre editorial point of view; this bias upsets me," wrote Derek Wilson. "But then you publish this article about Malalai Joya, the former female Afghan parliamentarian and activist, calling for the withdrawal of foreign military forces from her homeland. I'm gobsmacked!"
- The Post strives to provide readers with the latest news and insightful commentary on the issues of the day -- it's refreshing to hear that this effort is appreciated.
"This letter is long overdue," wrote Morton Doran. "Probably the single most important thing I do each day to preserve and promote mental acuity and at the same time gain perspective is read the National Post. Stimulating, thought-provoking analysis by a broad range of serious thinkers is a delight."
National Post Mon Nov 30 2009
By: Paul Russell
The National Post won both praise and criticism last week for its coverage of "Climategate." That scandal involves hundreds of private emails and documents, hacked from a computer server at the University of East Anglia in Britain, that seem to indicate that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for man-made global warming.
The Post ran a large story on this issue two Saturdays ago on one of our inside news pages, then followed it up with at least six other stories or columns last week, almost all on the FP Comment page. Despite this ongoing coverage, some readers felt we still didn't do this story justice.
"I had expected to open my National Post [on Tuesday] morning to headlines about this man-made climate hoax," wrote Sue Reid. "Yet once again you have failed to do the right thing, opting for the safety of hiding the truth in the back pages of the Financial Post."
"How come the National Post isn't running the story of the century today on its front page?" asked Frank Hilliard. "These hacked files and emails show anthropogenic global warming is a myth at best, and a hoax at worst. So where is the National Post in all this?"
"I was dismayed to see that three great pieces on the emerging scandal in the world of climate science were
relegated to a page deep in the Financial Post," agreed Toby Yull. "My concern is that a lot of readers won't read [that page]. I want everyone to follow this story so that average people can rethink their allegiance to the notion of global warming before we reorganize world economies to fix a problem that may not be happening. This story should be on A3."
Other readers thanked us for our coverage of "Climategate," with special praise for the writers and editors of the FP Comment page.
"The hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit in Hadley, U.K., will clearly have a profound effect on next month's climate conference in Copenhagen," wrote Jeff Spooner. "However if you have been a regular reader of the National Post and its companion paper, the Financial Post, for the last couple of years, these revelations would have only confirmed what you already knew. Writers like Terence Corcoran and Peter Foster have regularly debunked the so-called settled science of global warming. The Post should be congratulated for being one of few sources of that truth."
- Is the National Post biased? That question seems to crop up fairly regularly, and it was asked again last week by readers.
A few of these queries were sparked by an editorial urging Canadians not to visit Cuba, "where the worst excesses of authoritarianism remain as entrenched as ever." To back that point up, the editorial quoted from a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report highlighting various injustices on the Caribbean island.
Even though the editorial clearly stated: "We have criticized HRW's biased, anti-Israel reporting in the past," that didn't deter a few readers from accusing us of hypocrisy by relying on the group for information. To back that up, a few pointed to a Post column headline last month, which questioned HRW's assessment of Israel's human rights record. It read: "Human Rights Watch: Lost in the Mideast."
"Oh I get it," wrote Doug Little. "Human Rights Watch is right when it comes to Cuba but wrong when it comes to Israel. Your hypocrisy is showing."
"How can [this contradiction] be?" asked Roy Weston. "Their goal is still the same, looking for human rights violations ... [I]t's not Human Right Watch that has a bias, it's the National Post, with its support for Israel under any circumstances."
Really, Mr. Weston? Then how does one explain the numerous notes that also came in last week, expressing disappointment and anger with our coverage of the Gilo controversy. Depending on your viewpoint, Gilo is either a settlement near Jerusalem or a neighbourhood within the city.
Our first news story on Gilo -- where 900 new homes are now being erected -- referred to it as a "settlement." That provoked at least a dozen readers to send in letters to correct our wording. Here's an example.
"Surely the editors should be sophisticated enough to realize that the apartments being built are within the city of Jerusalem and in no way can be construed as a settlement," wrote H.T. Keen. "The front page goes on to use the pejorative word 'settlers' to describe the future residents. This is what I would expect if the BBC or al-Jazeera had a newspaper in Toronto, but not from the National Post."
- While some readers may sometimes wonder if the Post is biased and one-sided, it's reassuring to hear about the occasions when their suspicions are shaken. This note came in after a Peter Goodspeed feature on an outspoken Afghan woman, titled "Leave my country."
"I think that the National Post has a right-of-centre editorial point of view; this bias upsets me," wrote Derek Wilson. "But then you publish this article about Malalai Joya, the former female Afghan parliamentarian and activist, calling for the withdrawal of foreign military forces from her homeland. I'm gobsmacked!"
- The Post strives to provide readers with the latest news and insightful commentary on the issues of the day -- it's refreshing to hear that this effort is appreciated.
"This letter is long overdue," wrote Morton Doran. "Probably the single most important thing I do each day to preserve and promote mental acuity and at the same time gain perspective is read the National Post. Stimulating, thought-provoking analysis by a broad range of serious thinkers is a delight."
Climategate 11
Self-righteous scientists threaten world economy; Incriminating emails reveal flawed data
The Province
Mon Nov 30 2009
By Jon Ferry
The David Suzuki Foundation says that "climate change is considered by many scientists to be the most serious threat facing the world today." I believe, though, a far greater threat is posed by climate-change scientists themselves.
Their preconceived, green notions about global warming could well wind up doing more damage to the world's economy than all the machinations of greedy Wall Street bankers.
As evidence for their disturbing bias, we need look no further than a set of emails a hacker has lifted from what's arguably the world's most influential climate-change research centre, the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia.
Now burning up the blogosphere, the researchers' revealing emails raise serious questions about the data on which the theory of man-made global warming is based, and the methods and motives of those promoting it so relentlessly and in such partisan fashion.
Indeed, the emails suggest the dire predictions of a leading clique of obstructionist climate-change scientists may simply be wishful thinking.
Global-warming true believers themselves have expressed concern about what furious bloggers are calling Climategate.
Even Richard Littlemore, writer for Vancouver-based desmogblog.com, the attack dog for the Suzuki foundation in savaging climate-change skeptics, acknowledges the emails are disconcerting: "They are embarrassing, sometimes humiliating evidence that climate scientists -- even really, really good ones -- are human and are apt to make mistakes or write intemperately when they think they aren't being watched." Intemperate? Try arrogant and self-righteous.
Indeed, the whole notion that scientists must march in lock-step with the currently fashionable eco-consensus is the construct of politicians, public-relations people and other cause-mongerers, not real researchers, for whom skepticism is second nature.
We're just a week away from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
What the world needs, of course, is not a whole new round of punitive taxes, levies and energy curbs in an apparently futile bid to turn down the world's temperature a couple of degrees, but a scrupulously fair, independent inquiry into the science of climate change itself.
The last thing we want is to monkey-wrench the fragile global economy in the name of an unproven theory that increasingly appears to be under-researched, over-hyped and quite possibly a tissue of lies.
The Province
Mon Nov 30 2009
By Jon Ferry
The David Suzuki Foundation says that "climate change is considered by many scientists to be the most serious threat facing the world today." I believe, though, a far greater threat is posed by climate-change scientists themselves.
Their preconceived, green notions about global warming could well wind up doing more damage to the world's economy than all the machinations of greedy Wall Street bankers.
As evidence for their disturbing bias, we need look no further than a set of emails a hacker has lifted from what's arguably the world's most influential climate-change research centre, the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia.
Now burning up the blogosphere, the researchers' revealing emails raise serious questions about the data on which the theory of man-made global warming is based, and the methods and motives of those promoting it so relentlessly and in such partisan fashion.
Indeed, the emails suggest the dire predictions of a leading clique of obstructionist climate-change scientists may simply be wishful thinking.
Global-warming true believers themselves have expressed concern about what furious bloggers are calling Climategate.
Even Richard Littlemore, writer for Vancouver-based desmogblog.com, the attack dog for the Suzuki foundation in savaging climate-change skeptics, acknowledges the emails are disconcerting: "They are embarrassing, sometimes humiliating evidence that climate scientists -- even really, really good ones -- are human and are apt to make mistakes or write intemperately when they think they aren't being watched." Intemperate? Try arrogant and self-righteous.
Indeed, the whole notion that scientists must march in lock-step with the currently fashionable eco-consensus is the construct of politicians, public-relations people and other cause-mongerers, not real researchers, for whom skepticism is second nature.
We're just a week away from the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
What the world needs, of course, is not a whole new round of punitive taxes, levies and energy curbs in an apparently futile bid to turn down the world's temperature a couple of degrees, but a scrupulously fair, independent inquiry into the science of climate change itself.
The last thing we want is to monkey-wrench the fragile global economy in the name of an unproven theory that increasingly appears to be under-researched, over-hyped and quite possibly a tissue of lies.
Climategate 10
Censoring contradictions
Monday, November 30, 2009 Washington Times
Mark Steyn
My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama "St. Elsewhere" but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist."
Mr. Begley currently is in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it.
Anyway, Mr. Begley was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit in which the world's leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to "hide the decline" and other interesting matters.
Nothing to worry about, folks. "We'll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies," said Mr. Begley airily. "Those are the key words here, Stuart. 'Peer-reviewed studies.' "
Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Mr. Begley said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don't have a 76-inch high-definition TV, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a talismanic, peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection.
"If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it," insisted Mr. Begley. "Don't get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph. D. after their names. 'Peer-reviewed studies' is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies ... ."
Got it: Pier-reviewed studies. You stand on the pier and you notice the tide seems to be coming in a little higher than it used to and you wonder if it's something to do with incandescent light bulbs killing the polar bears? Is that how it works?
No, no, peer-reviewed studies. "Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature," babbled Mr. Begley. "Read peer-reviewed studies. That's all you need to do. Don't get it from you or me."
Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you. The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which dominates the "science" behind the congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet. But don't worry, it's all "peer reviewed."
Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael E. Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review." When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Mr. Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor" and Mr. Mann advised that "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."
So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Mr. Jones assured Mr. Mann, "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!"
That in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science.
The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mr. Mann and Mr. Jones insisted they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Mr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph), "Andy" writes to Mr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Mr. Mann does so.
"Re, your point at the end - you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Mr. Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.
If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you're as big a dupe as Mr. Begley or Mr. Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer reviews the peer reviewers?" Mr. Mann peer reviewed Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones peer reviewed Mr. Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia.
The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Mr. Begley and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out glassy-eyed into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled."
Looking forward to Copenhagen next month, Herman Van Rumpoy, the new president of the European Union and an eager proponent of the ecopalypse, says 2009 is "the first year of global governance." Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office. Hey, but don't worry, it'll all be "peer reviewed."
Mark Steyn is the author of the New York Times best-seller "America Alone" (Regnery, 2006).
Monday, November 30, 2009 Washington Times
Mark Steyn
My favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the "climate change" racket was Stuart Varney's interview on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr., star of the 1980s medical drama "St. Elsewhere" but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an "activist."
Mr. Begley currently is in a competition with Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") to see who can have the lowest "carbon footprint." Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn't get a reality series out of it.
Anyway, Mr. Begley was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit in which the world's leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to "hide the decline" and other interesting matters.
Nothing to worry about, folks. "We'll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies," said Mr. Begley airily. "Those are the key words here, Stuart. 'Peer-reviewed studies.' "
Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Mr. Begley said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don't have a 76-inch high-definition TV, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a talismanic, peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection.
"If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it," insisted Mr. Begley. "Don't get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph. D. after their names. 'Peer-reviewed studies' is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies ... ."
Got it: Pier-reviewed studies. You stand on the pier and you notice the tide seems to be coming in a little higher than it used to and you wonder if it's something to do with incandescent light bulbs killing the polar bears? Is that how it works?
No, no, peer-reviewed studies. "Peer-reviewed studies. Go to Science magazine, folks. Go to Nature," babbled Mr. Begley. "Read peer-reviewed studies. That's all you need to do. Don't get it from you or me."
Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you. The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which dominates the "science" behind the congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet. But don't worry, it's all "peer reviewed."
Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael E. Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review." When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Mr. Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor" and Mr. Mann advised that "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."
So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the "consensus" reservation, Tom Wigley ("one of the world's foremost experts on climate change") suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to "get him ousted." When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Mr. Jones assured Mr. Mann, "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!"
That in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up "peer review" as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science.
The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: "How To Forge A Consensus." Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review," climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mr. Mann and Mr. Jones insisted they and only they represent the "peer-reviewed" "consensus." And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.
The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Mr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph), "Andy" writes to Mr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:
"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.
"peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?"
And, amazingly, Mr. Mann does so.
"Re, your point at the end - you've taken the words out of my mouth."
And that's what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Mr. Mann's mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.
If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you're as big a dupe as Mr. Begley or Mr. Revkin.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask "Who peer reviews the peer reviewers?" Mr. Mann peer reviewed Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones peer reviewed Mr. Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia.
The "consensus" warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as "peer reviewed" if it's published in Peer-Reviewed Studies published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Mr. Begley and "Andy" Revkin would still have wandered out glassy-eyed into the streets droning "Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled."
Looking forward to Copenhagen next month, Herman Van Rumpoy, the new president of the European Union and an eager proponent of the ecopalypse, says 2009 is "the first year of global governance." Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office. Hey, but don't worry, it'll all be "peer reviewed."
Mark Steyn is the author of the New York Times best-seller "America Alone" (Regnery, 2006).
Climategate 9
Climate-cult con is hard to 'bear'
By Andrea Peyser November 30, 2009
When did global warming turn into a forced religion?
My daughter came home from school recently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing -- or time to call an exorcist -- out came this chilling refrain:
" . . . You can hear the warning -- GLOBAL WARMING . . . "
By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:
A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called "The Warming Song," at a concert for parents.
B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.
C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.
The international "Climategate" scandal is now moving into its third week. And reaction from folks on the scientific and political left -- or is that redundant? -- who treat global warming as a cult in which naysayers must be crushed has been depressing:
Total denial.
The scandal began when someone hacked into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, and uncovered a cache of messages between leading warming gurus. These e-mails revealed guys deeply frustrated by planetary temperatures that, stubbornly, had refused to rise in some time. Were they afraid of losing their scientific juice? Or their funding?
So, as the e-mails prove, the scientists did something about it. They cooked the books to exaggerate global warming.
Of course! How can you scare the bejeezus out of little kids and small animals if you can't make the mercury move a millimeter? Simple. You lie.
But while one rival scientist predicted the shocking revelations would blast a "mushroom cloud" over theories of climate change, that has not come to pass.
The Obama administration's "climate adviser," Carol Browner, totally ignored the smoking e-mails, and attributed the scandal to "a very small group of people who continue to say this isn't a real problem, that we don't need to do anything."
"What am I going to do?" asked Browner. "Side with the couple of naysayers out there, or the 2,500 scientists?" -- who've drunk the Kool-Aid. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists."
No less an authority than The New York Times sought to explain away the most damning e-mail, sent by scientist Phil Jones, who said he employed a "trick" to make temps appear higher than they were.
The paper quoted Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University as saying he often used the word "trick" to refer to a good way to solve a problem. "And not something secret."
Is anyone home?
Our children are on the front lines of the warming hysteria, a place where "experts" from Al Gore to the president leave no room for dissent or even the slightest skepticism, despite claims that are no more provable than the Earth is flat.
Children were the targets of a book co-written by the producer of Al Gore's star-making vehicle, "An Inconvenient Truth" -- a fantastical view of global warming that should have been called a fiction, not a documentary.
Producer Laurie David told Publisher's Weekly that she wrote the kids' book, "Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," because "kids also are the Number 1 influence on their parents, so if you want to reach the parents, go to the kids." She knows of which she speaks.
It may come to pass that global warming is real. Or not.
But your children won't get the truth from Al Gore, the president or the scientific community. Or sadly, from school.
Neither will you.
By Andrea Peyser November 30, 2009
When did global warming turn into a forced religion?
My daughter came home from school recently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing -- or time to call an exorcist -- out came this chilling refrain:
" . . . You can hear the warning -- GLOBAL WARMING . . . "
By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:
A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called "The Warming Song," at a concert for parents.
B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.
C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.
The international "Climategate" scandal is now moving into its third week. And reaction from folks on the scientific and political left -- or is that redundant? -- who treat global warming as a cult in which naysayers must be crushed has been depressing:
Total denial.
The scandal began when someone hacked into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, and uncovered a cache of messages between leading warming gurus. These e-mails revealed guys deeply frustrated by planetary temperatures that, stubbornly, had refused to rise in some time. Were they afraid of losing their scientific juice? Or their funding?
So, as the e-mails prove, the scientists did something about it. They cooked the books to exaggerate global warming.
Of course! How can you scare the bejeezus out of little kids and small animals if you can't make the mercury move a millimeter? Simple. You lie.
But while one rival scientist predicted the shocking revelations would blast a "mushroom cloud" over theories of climate change, that has not come to pass.
The Obama administration's "climate adviser," Carol Browner, totally ignored the smoking e-mails, and attributed the scandal to "a very small group of people who continue to say this isn't a real problem, that we don't need to do anything."
"What am I going to do?" asked Browner. "Side with the couple of naysayers out there, or the 2,500 scientists?" -- who've drunk the Kool-Aid. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists."
No less an authority than The New York Times sought to explain away the most damning e-mail, sent by scientist Phil Jones, who said he employed a "trick" to make temps appear higher than they were.
The paper quoted Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University as saying he often used the word "trick" to refer to a good way to solve a problem. "And not something secret."
Is anyone home?
Our children are on the front lines of the warming hysteria, a place where "experts" from Al Gore to the president leave no room for dissent or even the slightest skepticism, despite claims that are no more provable than the Earth is flat.
Children were the targets of a book co-written by the producer of Al Gore's star-making vehicle, "An Inconvenient Truth" -- a fantastical view of global warming that should have been called a fiction, not a documentary.
Producer Laurie David told Publisher's Weekly that she wrote the kids' book, "Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming," because "kids also are the Number 1 influence on their parents, so if you want to reach the parents, go to the kids." She knows of which she speaks.
It may come to pass that global warming is real. Or not.
But your children won't get the truth from Al Gore, the president or the scientific community. Or sadly, from school.
Neither will you.
Climategate 8
BBC's paleo-news site finally runs a real scoop story on Climategate's Michael Mann
By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 27th, 2009
No apologies for revisiting Climategate, for this is the exposé of the can of worms that is the AGW mindset that just keeps giving. Now, what would you say if I were to tell you that the BBC News website is running a story on Professor Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, one of the boys in Phil Jones’s gang hut at CRU East Anglia? “B****r me!” you would probably respond. “Don’t tell me the BBC has finally caught up with Climategate.”
Relax. I’m not telling you that; and it hasn’t. Instead, the BBC “News” site is running a story based on an article in Science magazine. Under the headline “Past climate anomalies explained,” it begins: “Unusually warm and cold periods in Earth’s pre-industrial climate history are linked to how the oceans responded to temperature changes, say scientists.” In this instance, “scientists” turns out to mean primarily Michael Mann, who is generously quoted.
“We reconstructed patterns of [the Earth’s] surface temperatures during those two intervals,” he explains, the two intervals being the “little ice age” and “medieval warm period”. There is much chatter about ice cores, tree rings and coral. There is no reference to the fact that this man is involved, very prominently, in the controversy surrounding the CRU at East Anglia, or to his interesting semantic convolutions in redefining the word “trick”.
Still less is there any acknowledgement that, at the moment, commentators in the United States, in online video reports, are reading increasing chunks of the CRU computer code and bursting into laughter at the incredible manipulations they reveal as, hour by hour, the Climategate scandal unravels. Issues relating to tree rings, not to mention Michael Mann, are central to that deconstruction of what is now being accepted, even by AGW supporters, as the junk science practised at the CRU.
Instead, the BBC – on a website devoted to “News” – thinks it more important to retail material from an article in a scientific journal, as if nothing had happened. Mann is the paleo-climate scientist who helped create the notorious “hockey stick graph” which was the first major element of the man-made global warming scam to be discredited.
Yet the paleo-news outlet that is the BBC pursues business as usual. Turmoil in Australian and New Zealand politics, with climate research in New Zealand now being similarly exposed, Congressional investigations of Climategate in the United States – all that has passed by the BBC. The big news about Michael Mann is his investigations into ocean coral. (“Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”)
Hot tip: better tune in promptly to the BBC News tonight, or you may miss the death of Queen Anne.
By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 27th, 2009
No apologies for revisiting Climategate, for this is the exposé of the can of worms that is the AGW mindset that just keeps giving. Now, what would you say if I were to tell you that the BBC News website is running a story on Professor Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, one of the boys in Phil Jones’s gang hut at CRU East Anglia? “B****r me!” you would probably respond. “Don’t tell me the BBC has finally caught up with Climategate.”
Relax. I’m not telling you that; and it hasn’t. Instead, the BBC “News” site is running a story based on an article in Science magazine. Under the headline “Past climate anomalies explained,” it begins: “Unusually warm and cold periods in Earth’s pre-industrial climate history are linked to how the oceans responded to temperature changes, say scientists.” In this instance, “scientists” turns out to mean primarily Michael Mann, who is generously quoted.
“We reconstructed patterns of [the Earth’s] surface temperatures during those two intervals,” he explains, the two intervals being the “little ice age” and “medieval warm period”. There is much chatter about ice cores, tree rings and coral. There is no reference to the fact that this man is involved, very prominently, in the controversy surrounding the CRU at East Anglia, or to his interesting semantic convolutions in redefining the word “trick”.
Still less is there any acknowledgement that, at the moment, commentators in the United States, in online video reports, are reading increasing chunks of the CRU computer code and bursting into laughter at the incredible manipulations they reveal as, hour by hour, the Climategate scandal unravels. Issues relating to tree rings, not to mention Michael Mann, are central to that deconstruction of what is now being accepted, even by AGW supporters, as the junk science practised at the CRU.
Instead, the BBC – on a website devoted to “News” – thinks it more important to retail material from an article in a scientific journal, as if nothing had happened. Mann is the paleo-climate scientist who helped create the notorious “hockey stick graph” which was the first major element of the man-made global warming scam to be discredited.
Yet the paleo-news outlet that is the BBC pursues business as usual. Turmoil in Australian and New Zealand politics, with climate research in New Zealand now being similarly exposed, Congressional investigations of Climategate in the United States – all that has passed by the BBC. The big news about Michael Mann is his investigations into ocean coral. (“Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”)
Hot tip: better tune in promptly to the BBC News tonight, or you may miss the death of Queen Anne.
Climategate 7
US Congress investigates Climategate e-mails: this could be the beginning of the end for AGW
By Gerald Warner World Last updated: November 26th, 2009
The United States Congress has begun the process of investigating the leaked climate change e-mails from the University of East Anglia, which means all attempts to suppress and shut down the scandal have failed. Already aides to Representative Darrell Issa (Republican, California), who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have begun analysing the correspondence exposed by hackers.
At the same time, in the upper house, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has been told by Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) that unless it acts promptly on the matter he will call for an investigation into the state of climate science. The e-mails are of huge interest to American legislators because one of them was sent by White House Science Adviser Dr John Holdren, in 2003, when he was at the Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, to support Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.
In his own e-mail, which he has defended and not denied, Mann suggested colleagues should be encouraged to stop submitting papers to the journal Climate Research, as it had published a paper to which he objected. The involvement of a White House adviser has given the controversy political traction on Capitol Hill, where legislators are considering the Obama administration’s plans for cap and trade laws, just when Obama has committed himself to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and personal attendance at the Copenhagen climate summit in a month’s time.
At this most sensitive moment the whole climate scare is threatening to unravel with literally immeasurable consequences. The seriousness with which the Americans are treating this has highlighted just how pivotal the CRU at East Anglia is to the global warming hype. As American newsmen are pointing out, East Anglia claims the world’s largest temperature data set and its findings and mathematical models were incorporated into the IPCC’s 2007 report, which the US Environmental Protection Agency admits it “relies on most heavily” in deciding that carbon dioxide emissions must be curbed.
Now these e-mails are being read on the CBS site, revealing a farcical Carry On Researching scenario at East Anglia: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline!!” “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!” And so on. Codes were erratic, the baffled researchers had no idea what was going on.
Joe Public is now reading this stuff, courtesy of CBS, and wondering just what the heck has been happening. Republicans will be asking Obama’s people how the Environment Protection Agency came to rely on the CRU’s projections. They will also be asking questions about e-mails referring to grants from the US Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia. One of them allegedly says: “We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”
Unless and until that e-mail is authoritatively denied (and none of them so far appear to have been), many will conclude that those sentiments encapsulate the ethos of the climate alarmist industry. Contrast, too, the speed with which American legislators have concerned themselves with this scandal and the indifference of our own parliamentarians and mainstream media. America may not have Beefeaters, historic stately homes, or the Queen; but when our Transatlantic cousins suspect they have been shafted by a bunch of wide boys in white lab coats they do not hang around.
While the British public has heard only whingers from East Anglia shouting that hacking into e-mails is a crime, it is the American media that are pointing out that deleting e-mail messages to conceal them from a FOI request in the United Kingdom is also a criminal offence. Congress, seeing an opportunity of derailing Obama, Al Gore and an attempt to cripple America to the tune of countless billions of dollars, is on the case. This is global news now.
Meanwhile, the CBS News website is running the George Monbiot quote: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging.” Too right.
By Gerald Warner World Last updated: November 26th, 2009
The United States Congress has begun the process of investigating the leaked climate change e-mails from the University of East Anglia, which means all attempts to suppress and shut down the scandal have failed. Already aides to Representative Darrell Issa (Republican, California), who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, have begun analysing the correspondence exposed by hackers.
At the same time, in the upper house, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has been told by Senator James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) that unless it acts promptly on the matter he will call for an investigation into the state of climate science. The e-mails are of huge interest to American legislators because one of them was sent by White House Science Adviser Dr John Holdren, in 2003, when he was at the Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, to support Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.
In his own e-mail, which he has defended and not denied, Mann suggested colleagues should be encouraged to stop submitting papers to the journal Climate Research, as it had published a paper to which he objected. The involvement of a White House adviser has given the controversy political traction on Capitol Hill, where legislators are considering the Obama administration’s plans for cap and trade laws, just when Obama has committed himself to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and personal attendance at the Copenhagen climate summit in a month’s time.
At this most sensitive moment the whole climate scare is threatening to unravel with literally immeasurable consequences. The seriousness with which the Americans are treating this has highlighted just how pivotal the CRU at East Anglia is to the global warming hype. As American newsmen are pointing out, East Anglia claims the world’s largest temperature data set and its findings and mathematical models were incorporated into the IPCC’s 2007 report, which the US Environmental Protection Agency admits it “relies on most heavily” in deciding that carbon dioxide emissions must be curbed.
Now these e-mails are being read on the CBS site, revealing a farcical Carry On Researching scenario at East Anglia: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline!!” “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!” And so on. Codes were erratic, the baffled researchers had no idea what was going on.
Joe Public is now reading this stuff, courtesy of CBS, and wondering just what the heck has been happening. Republicans will be asking Obama’s people how the Environment Protection Agency came to rely on the CRU’s projections. They will also be asking questions about e-mails referring to grants from the US Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia. One of them allegedly says: “We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”
Unless and until that e-mail is authoritatively denied (and none of them so far appear to have been), many will conclude that those sentiments encapsulate the ethos of the climate alarmist industry. Contrast, too, the speed with which American legislators have concerned themselves with this scandal and the indifference of our own parliamentarians and mainstream media. America may not have Beefeaters, historic stately homes, or the Queen; but when our Transatlantic cousins suspect they have been shafted by a bunch of wide boys in white lab coats they do not hang around.
While the British public has heard only whingers from East Anglia shouting that hacking into e-mails is a crime, it is the American media that are pointing out that deleting e-mail messages to conceal them from a FOI request in the United Kingdom is also a criminal offence. Congress, seeing an opportunity of derailing Obama, Al Gore and an attempt to cripple America to the tune of countless billions of dollars, is on the case. This is global news now.
Meanwhile, the CBS News website is running the George Monbiot quote: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The e-mails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging.” Too right.
Climategate 6
Climategate e-mails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama's Cap and Trade laws
By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009
Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.
Senator James Inhofe’s Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.
At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.
The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.
At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.
By Gerald Warner Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2009
Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.
Senator James Inhofe’s Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.
At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.
The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.
At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.
Climategate 5
Who's to blame for Climategate?
The publication of damning emails about climate change could literally change the world. Gordon Rayner reports.
By Gordon Rayner
Published: 7:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2009
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 Seventies 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 which just might influence the entire future of our planet.
A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails 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 internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen.
In the US, where the CRU emails 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 organisations – will use the scandal to scupper President 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 emails.
And here in the UK, 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 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 number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails 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. Professor 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 email sent by one of Prof 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."
Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email 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!"
Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.
Although Prof 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 man-made 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 Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.
Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails 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, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the emails as a "game-changer" for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox's climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information". Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.
Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence US policy. Senator Peter King suggested the emails 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 emails – some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the US – and alerted the relevant US government agencies to their content.
President Obama's climate tsar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the emails, 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 Prof 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.
Prof 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, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.
The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU emails 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 and Political Science, 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 sceptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these emails. And in the US, 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."
Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson's 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 publication of damning emails about climate change could literally change the world. Gordon Rayner reports.
By Gordon Rayner
Published: 7:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2009
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 Seventies 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 which just might influence the entire future of our planet.
A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails 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 internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen.
In the US, where the CRU emails 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 organisations – will use the scandal to scupper President 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 emails.
And here in the UK, 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 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 number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails 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. Professor 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 email sent by one of Prof 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."
Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email 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!"
Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.
Although Prof 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 man-made 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 Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.
Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails 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, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the emails as a "game-changer" for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox's climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information". Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.
Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence US policy. Senator Peter King suggested the emails 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 emails – some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the US – and alerted the relevant US government agencies to their content.
President Obama's climate tsar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the emails, 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 Prof 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.
Prof 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, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.
The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU emails 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 and Political Science, 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 sceptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these emails. And in the US, 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."
Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson's 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.
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