A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that aimed to combat global warming.
The incident involved an e-mail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, East England. Unknown persons stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents dealing with the global-warming issue made over the course of 13 years.
Controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific evidence and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.
Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.
On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.
IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.
The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration. In the IEA report there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. Given the huge area Russia represents, this significantly affects global land temperatures.
Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.
RIA Novosti is not responsible for the content of outside sources. Read story here. H/T Roger Pielke Sr. See PDF here.
ICECAP NOTE: recall it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming. As this story implies, there was no obvious reason for these data centers to be selective about stations. It implies the stations often selected were urban and those with incomplete data, providing more opportuniuty for mischief.
See still more coverage here in the Daily Express.
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Extreme Cold Becoming Widespread - North America, China, Russia and Europe
Edmonton shatters cold record Edmonton Journal
Edmonton’s weather boasted two dubious distinctions Sunday: it was colder here than anywhere else in North America and it marked the coldest Dec. 13 in the city’s history. Environment Canada recorded a frigid minus 46.1 C (-51F), or minus 58.4 C with the wind chill, at the Edmonton International Airport at 5 a.m., said meteorologist Pierre Lessard. The old record of minus 36.1 C was set last year.
“To break a temperature by 10 degrees C (19F) is very exceptional,” said Lessard. The temperature record from Edmonton’s city centre was also broken Sunday, said meteorologist John McIntyre. Environment Canada recorded a temperature of minus 36.5 C downtown at 8 a.m. Sunday, beating the previous record for the day of minus 32.8 C in 1882, McIntyre said.
While Edmontonians may be wishing the weather gods would be a little less ambitious, there was at least one person in the city who could still see beyond the horrifying numbers on the thermometer. “(Sunday) it was beautiful with the hoar frost on all the trees and the light was really misty,” said Pamela Anthony, director of the Winter Light festival, a civic celebration of winter which launched last January and will run again from Jan. 6 to March 13 next year.
“It was almost cinematic. But it is hard to see if you are distracted by discomfort. The cold can be pretty intimidating. This is serious weather. You are a membrane of glass away from disaster and deep down, we all know it.”
But Edmonton is a winter city, and if last’s year launch was any indication, Edmontonians know how to embrace the cold and even thrive in it, she said. “Last year’s opening in January was very much like this. It was very cold. It was that it’s ‘too cold’ cold. We were so surprised that people came out and were cold with us.” People stuck it out in Churchill Square for a long time, taking in the outdoor blessing and watching artists perform before the event finally moved inside. “It was quite wonderful in that beautiful, odd Edmonton way,” Anthony said.
The city’s longest cold snap was in 1969 when the temperature never got warmer than -20 C for 26 consecutive days. The Journal handed out certificates to survivors.
Some flights scheduled to land at the Edmonton International Airport late Saturday night and early Sunday morning were diverted to Calgary because of the severe temperatures, said Edmonton International Airport spokeswoman Traci Bednard. There were some delays and a couple of cancellations for flights departing Edmonton as well on Sunday morning because of the cold, she said. “Different airlines and aircraft have different operating limits,” Bednard said.
The wait time for a tow truck in Edmonton on Sunday was 24 hours and eight hours for a light service call, said Alberta Motor Association spokesman Kent Dixon. The majority of light service calls have been for boosts, Dixon said. “Below -15 is when you should be plugging (your car) in. It’s absolutely necessary, it’s not a question,” he said. Even if people don’t plan on going outside in between parking cars in two heated garages, people should always dress for outside conditions, Dixon said. “It’s really severely cold out right now, and if, for whatever reason, you get stuck or have to wait in a vehicle or get out, you’re going to be thankful pretty quickly that you were dressed appropriately for outside temperatures,” Dixon said.
He recommends keeping a blanket and an emergency kit in all vehicles. “Act accordingly, be prepared and don’t put your safety at risk,” he said. See more here.
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Delegates freeze as snow falls on global warming debates By Cathy Alexander, Sydney Morning Herald
World leaders will meet to tackle global warming - in the snow. The temperature in Copenhagen, where a landmark UN summit on climate change is taking place, is tipped to hit minus ten degrees Celsius this week. Snow is expected to start falling and continue through to the last day of the summit on Friday.
A white Christmas may please Denmark’s children but Copenhagen in the depths of winter is an odd setting to highlight the dangers of a warming world. Delegates from Africa, Asia and the Pacific are struggling with the freezing conditions. Some do not have the right clothes and are trying to minimise their time spent outside this week. Why UN organisers selected Copenhagen for the December summit remains a mystery. They might have had more success in drawing attention to the perils of hot weather if they had chosen Perth, where the temperature is forecast to reach 37 degrees this week, or Canberra where it will be 36.
A central issue at the summit is whether global warming should be limited to 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees. But some delegates are saying that Copenhagen in December might be more pleasant if it was about 15 degrees warmer. Copenhagen is also being criticised as the summit venue by delegates because it is very expensive. A cappuccino costs $A5, a beer at least $7, a small hot dog from a street stand $8, and a “cheap”, simple lunch dish can easily cost $30. Clothes are also expensive, making it difficult for delegates from the developing world to buy gear for the cold snap. Read more here.
Icecap Note: Over the next few weeks, very cold temperatures and snow will be in the news across southern Canada, the United States, Europe, the FSU and much of China. This was expected as a stratospheric warming event last few weeks led to building arctic high pressure now pressing south.
Today’s lows in Russia (degrees celsius), enlarged here.
Next Monday’s lows in China (degrees celsius), enlarged here.
Next Sunday’s lows in Europe (degrees celsius), enlarged here.
Last week was a truly memorable one too with a record breaking snow and cold outbreak. See summary of the many records set here.
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See Mann throw Colleagues Under the Bus on WAPO By Roger Pielke Jr.
In today’s Washington Post, Michael Mann of Penn State University and CRU email fame, gives us some good news about climate science and some bad news about his colleagues.
The good news is that climate science in his view is not at all impeached by the release of the CRU emails.
The scientific consensus regarding human-caused climate change is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world.
The bad news is that some of his colleagues exhibited “poor judgment”:
I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. . . Some statements in the stolen e-mails reflect poor judgment—for example, a colleague referring to deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request—but there is no evidence that this happened. I doubt that Professor Mann will be getting many cheery Christmas cards from his CRU-email colleagues. See post and comments here.
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A Climategate Who’s Who
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See Expert Videos Craig Idso, CO2 Science
As representatives of the nations of the world meet in Copenhagen to attempt to restrict the use of energy produced from coal, gas and oil in the guise of fighting global warming, many scientists and scholars are expressing grave concerns about what they are trying to do. Recognizing these concerns, we have posted a series of YouTube video vignettes in which such scientists and scholars present the reasons behind them.
We invite you to view the videos and do all you can to inform the public about their presence. Each of the videos can be accessed from the CO2 Science website, from the CO2Science YouTube channel , and other locations across the Internet, such as here. A categorized-list of the videos we have posted is presented on these sites. Wise decisions are made only when all pertinent aspects of an issue are examined. It is our sincere hope that the information presented in these videos will elucidate important truths that are presently ignored. See four posted videso with Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Soon, John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo on KUSI’s web site here.
See also audio interviews with many scientists on Its Rainmaking Time here.
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Urban vs Rural in US
A comparison of data from urban and rural sites to see if there is an Urban Heat Effect. Data from NASA GISS. Graphs made with Microsoft Excel.
Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view.
Google shows the link was once valid
For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data now redirects to a generic page of UEA. Try it yourself.
Now here is what that page says:
Climatic Research Unit
Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, you will shortly be directed to the latest news about CRU on the main University of East Anglia website, or you can go there immediately by clicking on this link.
The cached page at Google is still available here, though none of the links to data or papers works there either.
I’ll point out that if indeed “traffic” is a concern, redirecting to another page on the UEA server system doesn’t do much for the load, it just moves it around. The data files are mostly text, and not that large, they don’t have that much more impact that some wab pages with graphics.
The news page that you get redirected to hasn’t much to say, and has not been updated since December 3rd. And it’s not just subfolders with data, it is the entire Climate Research Unit website that is shielded from public view. Try the main link which has been functional for years here.
In the last press release issued by UEA we read: “Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor said: “The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the upmost importance to us all.”
So now apparently, in this newly pledged period of “openness and transparency”, with the promise of releasing new data access, such as the Met office has done here
The access to important CRU data is simply denied? That’s a hell of a way to build public trust.
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Tony Blair: The world must take action on climate change at Copenhagen even if the science is not correct By Louise Gray, in Copenhagen
Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”. But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.
The first week of key UN negotiations on climate change saw clashes between the rich and poor world over the failure of countries like the US to commit to strict cuts in carbon dioxide. Later this week world leaders, including Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama, will arrive. Mr Blair admitted that the talks are “one of the toughest negotiations that international leaders will ever have been involved in.”
But despite sceptics claiming emails stolen from the University of East Anglia question the science, he said it was urgent to act now. “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be. What is beyond debate, however, is that there is a huge amount of scientific support for the view that the climate is changing and as a result of human activity,” he said.
“Therefore, even purely as a matter of precaution, given the seriousness of the consequences if such a view is correct, and the time it will take for action to take effect, we should act. Not to do so would be grossly irresponsible.” A new report from the ‘Breaking the Climate Deadlock Initiative’ found that the current commitments of rich countries would not be enough to stop global warming. But Mr Blair insisted that even a weak agreement would set the world on a path to a “low carbon future” by encouraging investment in green energy and he suggested a review every five years to toughen targets. Read more here and see more nonsense about the Precautionary Principle below.
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The Precautionary Principle Run Amock By Harold Ambler, Talking About the Weather
In the December 9th New York Times, columnist Tom Friedman tells his readers that the precautionary principle demands that the world take aggressive action to curb the risks of damaging climate change, even if the likelihood of it is only one percent. To support his claim, he writes: “The evidence that our planet, since the Industrial Revolution, has been on a broad warming trend outside the normal variation patterns - with periodic micro-cooling phases - has been documented by a variety of independent research centers.”
Question: Does Tom Friedman know that the ocean-atmosphere system has been cooling since the Holocene Optimum?
Where to start?
Very few, if any, scientists contend that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution sparked a nearly instantaneous rise in temperatures. The rise in temperatures that most of the CRU scientists and most mainstream scientists consider to be non-normal is the one that began in 1975 and ended in 1998.
This is an important point, because although we did in fact start warming in approximately the year 1800, meaningful rises in CO2 would not occur for nearly a century and a half. Why did we begin warming in 1800? One answer is that it was time for the pendulum to swing back toward warm after the 550-year period known as the Little Ice Age. Internal dynamics and possibly solar variability likely brought our ocean-atmosphere system both into and out of the LIA.
The arguments about what falls within “normal,” temperature-wise and climate-wise, will continue for some time, largely because of reasonable disputes concerning tree-ring analysis. The tree-ring analysis that Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia all depend on to show the Modern Warm Period as troublingly pronounced is fraught with issues. Tree rings simply cannot be read with the omniscience they would require to provide a true record of temperature. Why not? Because individual trees growth is affected by too many variables: changing soil composition, changing numbers, of competitor trees in a stand, changing precipitation, changing levels of cloud, nearby volcanic eruptions (especially pertinent in Siberia from which many of the most significant tree-ring studies are drawn). This is only a partial list!
Tree-ring data, as a proxy for temperatures, will be laughed at within a generation. Some are laughing now.
In the meantime, there is abundant evidence that the Medieval Warm Period lasted from roughly the year 1000 to the year 1300 and was warmer than today. Hundreds of articles produced by non-Big Oil funded scientists have confirmed the existence of, the worldwide character of, and the strength of the Medieval Warm Period (below by Lamb as seen in IPCC AR2, enlarged here).
Icecap Note: see confirmation of the MWP by 772 individual scientists from 458 separate research institutions in 42 different countries in the Medieval Warm Period project by CO2 Science here.
As Mr. Friedman insists that primarily (or only!) oil-funded science disputes the findings of global warming alarmism, perhaps he would like to name names? Or is this a conspiracy theory that cannot survive the light of day? In point of fact, the heroic scientists who look at climate with eyes that can see anything other than a disaster movie in the making generally do so at their career and financial peril. In the climate wars, Goliath is the scientists funded by governments (cashing checks worth billions). David is the important minority of scientists who have publication blocked by the antics described in the CRU e-mail release, who lose offices and tenure-track positions because of their heresy.
A final point. Not one climatologist questions that the decade just ended, touted as the warmest on record, is anywhere near as warm as the Holocene Optimum. (The Holocene interglacial, our quite gentle climatic nest, started 11,000 years ago.) The Holocene Optimum lasted from 8,000 to 5,000 years before present. The world ocean was higher; forests extended to the Arctic Ocean; sea level was at least a meter higher than today.
Why is a situation like the Holocene Optimum considered dangerous and out of control? Yet, we are not as warm as that now. And we may not get that warm again before the next Ice Age begins. If we do, why will intelligent men and women, many of them scientifically trained, believe that THIS TIME forests straining to move north toward the Arctic Ocean is part of a disaster movie, and last time it was a beautiful and Edenic part of nature?
As for the precautionary principle, it is wrongly applied here. As Bjorn Lomborg correctly points out, every dollar spent researching and “fighting” climate change is one less dollar that can be spent on something else. I, for one, would rather see clean-water systems installed in the Third World (and my own country, for that matter), before another 100 billion dollars are spent on computer modeling the effect of a trace atmospheric gas that has yet to generate a warming that exceeds the Holocene Optimum (and, likely, the Medieval Warm Period).
A comparison of data from urban and rural sites to see if there is an Urban Heat Effect. Data from NASA GISS. Graphs made with Microsoft Excel.
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See Inhofe and Markey Clash over White House Copenhagen Agenda By Ben Geman, the Hill
Lawmakers at opposite poles of the congressional climate fight on Sunday offered diverging views of President Barack Obama’s right to pledge U.S. emissions cuts at the Copenhagen talks, and whether EPA regulation is inevitable if Congress doesn’t approve climate legislation.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Obama should not proceed with his plan to offer a provisional U.S. emissions reduction target at the international talks. U.S. officials are floating a domestic cut of 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, mirroring leading Democratic plans on Capitol Hill.
“The president can’t do that,” Inhofe said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The emissions reductions he has talked about are what you would find in Markey’s bill, and that isn’t going to happen. Of course that bill is dead, it will never even be brought up again.”
Inhofe, who calls global warming a “hoax,” debated Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who helms the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Markey co-sponsored the sweeping energy and climate bill the House narrowly approved in June.
Markey defended the White House right to offer a provisional U.S. emissions target at the talks, which are aimed at crafting a broad - though preliminary - international accord on climate change. Read more of the clueless Markey arguing with Inhofe over the future of legislation or regulation here.
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Copenhagen Commentary By David Warren, Ottawa Citizen
A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen “Earth summit” has even been attempted before in human history. I’ve been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind—a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.
But it is different from the “anthropogenic global warming” myth. It was published with murderous intentions, which takes us beyond fraud. Whereas, the numbers cooked up to support the global warming hysteria in such places as the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were for the purpose of extorting money, which is fraud in the more conventional sense.
This “man-made crisis” is the successor to many previous environmental scares, each designed as a means to shake down western taxpayers, and justify the creation of huge, intrusive, national and international bureaucracies for the benefit of their sponsors. One thinks of everything from the pioneering DDT scare of the early 1960s, forward—including the various Club of Rome forecasts from the 1970s, and even the “global cooling” scare of the previous generation, now conveniently buried in the mists of the world before Google.
Older readers will remember how we were going to run out of oil in the 1980s, among other commodities; or perhaps the “population bomb keeps ticking” mantra. And then there was “nuclear winter,” quite distinct from the impending Ice Age forecast, and successor to it. It has become harder to remember the profligate United Nations and other institutional efforts to mobilize planetary missions against these imaginary threats.
As these frauds have been perpetrated by largely the same class of people, each environmental scare has benefited from experience gained in publicizing the previous one, through supine liberal media. “Environmentalism” has moreover ballooned since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Reds of this world, defeated in the ambition to impose socialism directly, have turned Green in pursuit of the same end: the creation of an international command economy, under their own “expert” direction.
One might consider “private enterprise” frauds in passing—the great Ponzi schemes of history, from that of Charles Ponzi himself to the more recent efforts of Bernard Madoff. But at a mere $50 billion, this last and largest remains miniscule compared with “public sector” achievements. Consider the unfunded liabilities of all Western “social insurance” schemes—countless trillions of dollars owing in what have been, in accounting terms, very plain Ponzi schemes, made legal only because governments were doing it.
But there again, fraud requires active, conscious planning, not simply a general decay of moral and intellectual standards. The politicians who created the “welfare states” seldom had any clear idea what they were doing; and neither, really, did the generations of “Keynesian” economists who were advising them.
So the answer is probably no, nothing quite compares. Copenhagen takes the prize, for consummating the biggest fraud in history—a vast scheme of financial appropriation, premised upon rogue science, from tainted research. This conclusion has become irresistible after the exposure of thousands of e-mails and other documents, revealing the heart of the enterprise: the creation of convenient climate models from massaged numbers, after discarding raw data to make the findings uncheckable.
But what began as a method to extort research money has spread—through successive world political jamborees at Rio, Kyoto, and now Copenhagen—into something out of all proportion to conventional fraud. Parasitical vested interests (including now the organized kleptocracies of the Third World) have been assembled on such a colossal scale, that even the revelation of the original fraud can do nothing to break their momentum; any more than the 31,000-plus signatures of dissenting scientists on a U.S. petition last year could convince the media that there is no scientific consensus whatever behind the “anthropogenic global warming” propaganda.
The very premise is ludicrous: demonizing carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” when it is a vital part of the Earth’s atmosphere, absolutely essential not only to plant life but everything that depends on plants.
This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under the usual radical Obama appointment (Lisa P. Jackson), did something that could be fairly described as insane. It declared carbon dioxide and five other benign atmospheric “greenhouse gases” to be threats to public health, thus awarding itself extraordinary regulatory power over the entire economy, beyond reach of the U.S. Congress. Yet this is only one of innumerable strange and unnatural acts, being performed under the veil of Copenhagen.
By Maurizio Morabito, The UK Spectator, 5 December 2009
Sparked by an older ICECAP story on the CIA files on the Ice Age consensus of scientists in 1974, Maurizio unearthed the CIA files and blogged on it here.
The threat of a new ice age loomed so large in 1974 that American intelligence collated a report on the likely effects. Maurizio Morabito unearthed it.
A high-priority government report warns of climate change that will lead to floods and starvation. ‘Leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’. The scenario is eerily familiar although the document - never made public before - dates from 1974. But here’s the difference: it was written to respond to the threat of global cooling, not warming. And yes, it even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.
‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974, goes a little way towards explaining why some people over a certain age experience a sense of deja-vu when climate change is mentioned; in the mid-1970s there really was a lot of scientific discussion about global cooling. With the benefit of hindsight, reading it makes one feel wry and embarrassed. So many of the terms bandied about 35 years ago are still being employed by today’s fear-mongers, about the very opposite phenomenon.
It is as if climate scares had to follow a set pattern. Back in 1974 the usual disasters were projected: the ‘new climatic era’ was said to be bringing famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena. The Sahara would expand. World grain reserves, already at less than a month’s supply, would be depleted. A list of past civilisations brought down by ‘major and minor’ cooling episodes was given, which included the Indus, Hittites, Mycenaean, and the Mali empire of Africa. Any possible benefits to climate change were barely mentioned.
More parallels can be drawn. According to the CIA report, in 1974 climate science was developing ‘a successful climatic prediction model’, as indeed it still is. Government intervention had brought together eminent scientists who had previously been at odds with each other then had established a ‘scientific consensus’ on ‘global climate change’. The scientists claimed this pattern of cooling would cause ‘major economic problems around the world’. Dealing with this would, of course, require the creation of several new government agencies. The media at the time seized on all of this, just as it is doing now. Newsweek and the New York Times described the global cooling threat.
How is it that the parallels between that 1970s panic and today’s have been so little remarked upon? And it doesn’t stop there. There have even been recent attempts to label the ‘global cooling consensus’ a ‘myth’, most notably in a well-publicised article by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck published by the American Meteorological Society in September 2008.
It’s easy to miss what you do not look for. Mentions of a global cooling consensus appear as far back as 1961. I found the CIA report referred to in a 1976 newspaper article and was doubly amazed to discover it was available as a microfiche in the British Library.
So what would have prompted the CIA to compile such a dossier? The most likely explanation is what it describes as the loss of ‘a significant portion’ of the USSR’s winter wheat crop in 1972. The harvest was so poor that the CIA saw geopolitical ramifications. Its report says that ‘the politics of food’ is a complex business, which cannot be understood by ‘existing analytical tools’. So to address a political problem, they asked scientists to come up with a solution. Precisely the same thing is happening today. One might almost conclude that, in the world of climatology, theories are made to order.
Or is the problem with the general public, who cannot talk about climate except in doom-laden terms, and for whom the sky is the last animist god? This might be the most important lesson of the 1974 report on global cooling: that we need to grow up, separate climatology from fear, and recognise - much as it pains politicians and scientists - that our understanding of how climate changes remains in its infancy.
ICECAP Note Tom Peterson is NOAA NCDC chief alarmist under Tom Karl. Tom engineered the removal of the UHI adjustment in USHCNv2 in 2007. William Connelly is part of the Real Climate propaganda team and is the prime filter on the climate content of Wikipedia, keeping non AGW information out. Both are key players in the fraud that the emails provided a window into.
By Will Stewart and Martin Delgado, Daily Mail Online
Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit.
An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia. The leaks scandal has left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key climate change data was manipulated in the run-up to the climate change summit of world leaders.
The row erupted when hundreds of messages between scientists at the university’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world were placed on the internet along with other documents. The CRU is internationally recognised as one of the most important sources of information on the rise in global temperatures. Its data is relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which co-ordinates the world response to climate change.
But now the CRU’s findings are under suspicion. The leaked emails appear to show that CRU director Professor Phil Jones and colleagues attempted to manipulate the figures and hide their raw data from researchers with opposing views. Prof Jones has stepped aside from his post while claims are investigated that he wanted certain papers excluded from the United Nations’ next major assessment of climate science. Russia - one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas - has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.
Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns. The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk. The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.
A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: “We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”
Climate-change sceptics in the West seized on the emails as evidence that the books were being cooked by the global-warming lobby. Stories highlighting the ‘scandal’ began to appear from November 21, three or four days after the information was first released on to the server. Some of the leaked emails date back to March, 1996. Tomcity - the server - and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday. The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.
Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city. The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes. Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow. Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.
In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials. The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’. A Russian hacking specialist said last night ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been. ‘There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’
And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’ The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it. East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there. It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk - 2,190 miles east of Moscow - was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era. Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners. It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps.
Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB. The city’s academic quarter - some of which uses the server that revealed the climate-change scandal - includes a leading world expert on the subject, Professor Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist of Tomsk University. He was unavailable yesterday and has not commented on the email controversy. Previously, in research with academic Judith Marquand from Oxford University, he warned of the risk of the release of billions of tons of methane gas because of the melting of the Siberian peat bogs, seen as being due to global warming. Kirpotin described the situation as ‘an ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming’.
Russia is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and lags behind many Western countries in greening its industry. However, its emissions plunged in the Nineties as its economy collapsed and it now sits on a treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits that could be sold to other countries.
These are due to expire in 2012 with the Kyoto Treaty. The Kremlin wants these to be rolled forward and last week signalled they would not sign a new deal without this, threatening the whole Copenhagen summit. The crisis caused by the Climategate email row has resulted in the UK’s Met Office being forced to re-examine 160 years’ of climate data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made warming had been undermined by the leaks.
A new three-year analysis of the data will mean the Met Office - which works closely with Prof Jones’s unit - will not be able to declare with complete confidence the extent of global warming trends until the end of 2012.
The Norwich-based university has called in Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, to investigate the row, which is also the subject of a separate probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Last night, news of the Kremlin connection coincided with Norfolk Police confirming to The Mail on Sunday that it was now ‘investigating criminal offences’ in relation to the data breach.
The Mail on Sunday tracked down Professor Ross McKitrick, a world-renowned expert on the economic effects of climate change, who said Prof Jones had tried to stop his findings being published in an influential UN report. Prof McKitrick concluded that Jones and his colleagues at the CRU had overstated the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures by failing to take account of external factors linked to population growth and urbanisation. The attempt to silence McKitrick was revealed in an email from Jones to a US colleague in 2004, when the UN was preparing for a major report by the IPCC. After describing McKitrick’s findings as ‘garbage’ and dismissing another researcher’s work as inaccurate, Prof Jones wrote: ‘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! Cheers, Phil.’ Kevin’ is understood to refer to Dr Kevin Trenberth, a Jones ally and climate analyst at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Read more here.
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Dueling IPCC email position statements
In this story, in Timesonline, “The United Nations panel on climate change has promised to investigate claims that scientists at a British university deliberately manipulated data to support the theory of man-made global warming.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called “climategate” controversy were too serious to ignore. “We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The Report programme. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.” “
While a semi-official looking dispatch was prepared by a Hollywood activist greenie producer Susan Joy Hassol of Climate Communication dot org who had helped NOAA sex-up and the elevate the level of hype in the CCSP report on which the EPA Finding of Endangerment was based. It was signed allegedly by two IPCC WG1 co-chairs.
“Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) firmly stands behind the conclusions of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the community of researchers and its individuals providing the scientific basis, and the procedures of IPCC Assessments.”
With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth’s last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone’s choices.
China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its “carbon intensity”—carbon emissions per unit of production. So China’s emissions will rise.
Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain—a collaborator with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—reveals some scientists’ willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer “consensus” and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.
The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: “Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them.” These scientists overstated and censored because they were “goaded” by skepticism?
Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be “goaded” into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word “deniers” to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.
Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists’ models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.
The Financial Times’ peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming “is growing more rather than less compelling.” If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”—this “moment” is in its second decade—“and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars—and substantially diminished freedom.
Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet’s fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.
Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments’ attempts to manipulate Earth’s temperature now comprise one of the world’s largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.
Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world’s climate by breaking the world’s—especially America’s—population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth’s last chance, until the next one.
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