Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any e-mails 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 e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new e-mail address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
…Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back – I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
‘This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature’. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board… What do others think?’
‘I will be e-mailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.’ ‘It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known sceptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!’
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as ‘How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie’ – CRU’s researchers were exposed as having ‘cherry-picked’ data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the twentieth century than at any time in the last millennium. CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office [sic] is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCRUT record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see evermore-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-Fascist activists, such as the risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an airplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called ‘sceptical’ view is now also, thank heaven, the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But to judge by the way – despite the best efforts of the MSM not to report on it – the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recover.
My first glimpse of the story was at Anthony Watts’ website – Watts Up With That? (WUWT). It was headlined ‘Breaking news story Hadley CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released.’ Revisiting the original blogpost gives you a sense of the mix of excitement, astonishment, caution and trepidation it generated among sceptics that day. ‘WOW! That’s all I can say right now!’ is one of the first comments. ‘Be careful here. It is not unusual for files released by hackers to contain all kinds of nasty stuff, from viruses and worms to simple worthless junk,’ says the next.
One or two immediately spot the significance of the soon-to-be infamous ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ and ‘hide the decline’ e-mail. ‘Holy crap, if that’s what it sounds like there [sic] a smoking gun,’ says one. ‘Smoking gun? More like a blazing armoury!’ says another.
A few more comments down, someone has asked rather flatteringly:
Imagine what Delingpole will make of it.
Imagine no more. Delingpole is, of course, wetting his pants with excitement. But he’s also a bit nervous. If it turns out this stuff is a hoax, might it not have legal implications – like libel? (Our libel laws are much more stringent than US ones, remember.) On the other hand, this is clearly a story that needs to be reported quickly. Blogging, even more than print journalism, is very time-sensitive. The last thing you want is your copy sitting with your in-house lawyers for a couple of hours, while your competitors steal a march on you. You don’t get linked on Drudge if you get to the story second…
So what I decided in the end, as you’ll see from my original blog above, was a classic journalist’s fudge. I took out all the names so that nobody could claim that they had been personally libelled, I stuck in ‘allegedly’ a few times, coloured it with a bit of informed background, views from other sources and personal animus. Et voilà. Up went – though I didn’t yet know this – the biggest and most important story of my entire career.
Though I was the first journalist to christen the story ‘Climategate’, I want to stress in all modesty that I was not the first person. That honour went to an Australian commenter on WUWT called Bulldust, who wrote: ‘Hmm how long before this is dubbed Climategate?’ All I did was to pick up his ball and run with it. Looking back, Mark Steyn’s ‘Warmergate’ was infinitely more clever but it arrived just a little too late in the day to gain the traction it deserved. That’s because within a few hours, my story got picked up by Matt Drudge. And when a story gets ‘Drudged’ there’s no stopping it. Climategate was about to go viral.
Going viral is something every blogger dreams of doing. I’d seen it happen to Daniel Hannan a few months before. Hannan had posted up a video of himself eviscerating the then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the floor of the European Parliament. By EU parliamentary convention, Brown could not interrupt or escape: he just had to stand there and take it while Hannan let rip with his usual finely judged blend of poetry, oratory and sadism. Naturally the video struck a chord with all those people round the world who feel that our remote, unaccountable political class deserves its comeuppance. By the end of the week, Hannan’s video had clocked over two million hits on YouTube. As a mate of Dan’s I had mixed feelings about this. Sure, it’s nice seein
g someone you like and admire turning from a virtual nobody into the internet’s biggest star and being flown to America to be fawned over by all the big talk shows. On the other hand, what was it Gore Vidal said? ‘Every time a friend succeeds I die a little.’
But now something similar was happening to me. My hit rates climbed and climbed so that within a few days, my blog had had one-and-a-half-million visitors – more than the combined total of all my other blogs, all my other print articles possibly, in my entire career.
Climategate, meanwhile, had entered the global vocabulary. By the end of the week, it had had thirty million Google entries, making it almost certainly the most popularly sought-after news story of the week.
Still, to listen to some people, you’d think Climategate didn’t matter at all.
Here’s Elizabeth May, head of Canada’s Green Party, just a few days after the story broke:
How dare the world’s media fall into the trap set by contrarian propagandists without reading the whole set [of e-mails]?
Here’s Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University:
Take, for example, the ‘trick’ of combining instrumental data and tree-ring evidence in a single graph to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures over recent decades that would be suggested by a naïve interpretation of the tree-ring record. The journalists repeating this phrase as an example of ‘scientists accused of manipulating their data’ know perfectly well that the decline in question is a spurious artefact of the tree-ring data that has been documented in the literature for years, and that ‘trick’ does not mean ‘deceit’.
Here’s Professor Kerry Emanuel of MIT:
What we have here [are] thousands of e-mails collectively showing scientists hard at work, trying to figure out the meaning of evidence that confronts them. Among a few messages, there are a few lines showing the human failings of a few scientists… Scientifically, it means nothing.
Here’s a RealClimate regular, Steve Easterbrook:
What looks to the outsider like a bunch of scientists trying to subvert some gold standard of scientific truth is really just scientists trying to goad one another into doing a better job in what we all know is a messy, noisy process.
Here is Fred Pearce, one of our foremost science journalists, writing in The Guardian:
Many of the most widely publicised claims from sceptics about what is in the e-mails are demonstrably unfounded. There is no conspiracy to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures. Nor that a lack of warming in the data is a ‘travesty’ – still less of attempts to fix the data.
And here’s how Pearce continues, in an article titled ‘How the “Climategate” scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics’ lies’ and subtitled ‘Claims based on e-mail soundbites are demonstrably false – there is manifestly no evidence of clandestine data manipulation’:
Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate e-mails has been based on brief soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to… If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies.
In other words, ‘Move along. Nothing to see here.’
So let’s do that, shall we? Let’s take the Warmists, and their amen corner in the mainstream media, at their word. After all, some of us don’t even have PhDs. How are we to know that when a scientist uses a word like ‘trick’ he doesn’t in fact mean a ‘cheat’ but ‘a widely respected practice, employed throughout the global scientific community to, um, enhance data in such as a way as to make it – uh, yes, that’s it – even more impeccably accurate than ever before?’ Or that when a scientist says ‘hide the decline’ he doesn’t mean, so much, ‘hide’ in the sense of ‘conceal’ or ‘fudge’ but in the sense of ‘hyd se deoclina’, an Anglo-Saxon druidical phrase still colloquially employed in the top echelons of science research to mean ‘aggregate the filter analysis in an entirely correct way but one which non-scientists could not hope to understand in a million years, the ignorant fools’.
Or…
No. Just kidding. This is ‘dog ate my homework’ level excuse-making.
Let me show you why.
The first thing you need to realise is that the scientists implicated in these Climategate e-mails aren’t junior lab assistants at some minor-league research establishment in the arse-end of Nowheresville. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), whence those e-mails were leaked, is probably the single most important climate research establishment in the world. And the scientists implicated in those e-mails are at the very heart of the process informing the IPCC. Not only were they personally responsible for several of the more alarmist predictions in the IPCC’s four assessment reports, but they were also in control of the scientific data used to make those predictions. Given that the IPCC’s reports are supposed to represent – in President Obama’s phrase – the gold standard of scientific thinking on AGW, this makes the Climategate scientists very significant figures indeed.
Which is why, of course, Climategate was such a momentous scandal. In scientific terms, it’s the equivalent of police acting on a routine tip-off and stumbling upon Fu Manchu, Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler and Fred West gathered around a table – complete with incriminating notes – and talking about all their past and future crimes. It’s not that the police hadn’t suspected before that these guys were up to no good. What they had lacked until now was the smoking gun…
The two names that dominate the e-mails are those of two leading climate scientists, one American and one British: Michael Mann and Phil Jones. Professor Phil Jones, not widely known outside his scientific circle until Climategate broke, was and is head of the CRU. Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University was already a legend in his own lunchtime thanks to his world-renowned invention of the marvellous, extraordinary and dramatic Hockey Stick chart. Besides the two male leads, the character stalwarts in this drama include Keith Briffa, a researcher into some soon-to-be-deeply-controversial tree-ring samples; Dr Tom Wigley, one of Al Gore’s scientific advisors; and Ben Santer, a young hothead with an already proven track record of pushing AGW alarmism rather further than most responsible scientists would have considered decent.
Sadly, Al Gore doesn’t appear, nor does Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, while Dr James Hansen does so only fleetingly. But those omissions apart, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more representative selection of the scientists at the heart of the AGW industry. That’s because they’re a tightly knit group of people, and are more than happy to play the system in order to help each other clamber up the greasy pole of the climate science hierarchy.
This ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ approach is most deliciously exemplified in an e-mail exchange between the two main protagonists, beginning on 4 December 2007, when Mann offers to nominate Jones for an award from the American Geophysical Union and asks which one he’d fancy. Jones tells him, gets one, then Mann asks Jones whether he might return the favour.
Mann to Jones, 4 December 2007: By the way, still looking into nominating you for an AGU award, I’ve been told that the Ewing medal wouldn’t be the right one. Let me know if you have any particular options you’d like me to investigate…
Jones to Mann, same date: As for AGU – just getting one of their Fellowships would be fine.
Mann to Jones, same date: Will look into the AGU fellowship situation ASAP.
Mann to Jones, 2 June 2008: Hi Phil, this is coming along nicely. I’ve got five very strong supporting letter writers lined up to support your AGU Fellowship nomination (confidentially: Ben Santer, Tom Karl, Jean Jouzel and Lonnie Thompson have all agreed, waiting to hear back from one more individual, maximum is six letters including mine as nominator).
Sure enough, in January 2009, Jones hears the wonderful news that he – quelle surprise! – has won an AGU fellow
ship. Four months later, Mann decides that a sufficiently decent interval has elapsed to ask Jones oh-so-parenthetically:
Mann to Jones, 16 May 2009: On a completely unrelated note, I was wondering if you, perhaps in tandem w/ some of the other usual suspects, might be interested in returning the favour this year; I’ve looked over the current list of AGU fellows, and it seems to me that there are quite a few who have gotten in (e.g. Kurt Cuffey, Amy Clement and many others) who aren’t as far along as me in their careers, so I think I ought to be a strong candidate. Anyway, I don’t want to pressure you in any way, but if you think you’d be willing to help organise, I would naturally be much obliged. Perhaps you could convince Ray or Malcolm to take the lead? The deadline looks as if it is again July 1 this year.
All this is very entertaining, to be sure, but making too much of it would play right into the enemy’s hands. After all, as their subsequent defences have shown (see quotes above), there is nothing that the Climategate scientists would like more than to be seen as fundamentally normal, decent guys: the kind of regular Joes who enjoy a bit of edgy banter, sail close to the wind occasionally and aren’t averse to helping out a mate by bending the rules. Their only real crime, we are invited to believe, was to have their venial slips exposed by the publication of e-mails that ought to have stayed private. Lovely blokes, total innocents, in other words.
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