By Marc Sheppard, The American Thinker

It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields.  Words can’t adequately express my astonishment. 

Amid the thousands of files apparently misappropriated from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding.  One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief PD Jones has received since 1990.  It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S Department of Energy to NATO and worth a total of 13,718,547 pounds or approximately 22.6 million USD.  I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist. 

But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale.  In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on.  Three—the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust—are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth—Renewables North West—is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.

Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on-demand.  And equally obvious is that Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.

And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp. For instance, when MIT’s Richard Lindzen delivers one of his trademark brilliant presentations leading to the conclusion that climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is about 0.5C, not the 1.5-5C predicted by IPCC models, all we hear from alarmists and complicit media types is that the professor once charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services and is therefore an unreliable big-oil hack. 

Or when S. Fred Singer challenges the IPCC to explain whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback or stands before a graph depicted temperatures decreasing over the past 10 years while CO2 climbed and declares that “the relationship is meaningless,” his words are similarly dismissed based solely on the fact that he has received funding from ExxonMobil.

Let’s set aside the fact that Lindzen had actually accepted a total of $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from such interests on the day he ceased such activities two decades ago.  And that Singer has received only $20,000 from ExxonMobil.  And that climate realists are out-funded by alarmists by several orders of magnitude, which leads to the artificial expansion of the number of scientists who appear to support alarmist views.  And even that monies paid to either side of the debate have zero impact on the science of whether or not 20th century warming was caused or exacerbated by manmade CO2 emissions.  And don’t get me started on carbon-millionaire Al Gore.

The issue is this - just how is it that funding from renewable energy interests evades charges of bias yet subsidies from traditional power entities scream bloody-conflict when each is equally friendly to the recipient’s cause? 

As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw-canard that the science is settled but for a few outlying scientists in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had.  And the scientific subterfuge surfaced last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax which has been perpetrated upon them. 

In the broader scheme, the credibility blow the IPCC will likely suffer because the majority of those data manipulation revealing emails flowed from the fingertips of its senior authors and editors will weaken and perhaps ultimately break the AGW orthodoxy spine its politically-charged assessments have erected.  And that can only serve to further declaw their fellow alarmists and media minions - which of course would be nothing short of stupendous.

For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March: “There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.” And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who have been the liers.  Or the cheaters. 

Or the bought-and-paid-for hypocrites.

Read the post here.

See this shocking email:

Mick Kelly Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom

GlobalWarming.org

In the case of the apparently scandalous leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in England, it’s all a matter of getting the context right.  That’s what Professor Michael E. Mann, the fabricator of the celebrated hockey stick graph, told the Washington Post.  Here’s what he said in Juliet Eilperin’s story today:

Michael E. Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said in a telephone interview from Paris that skeptics “are taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious.”

I agree with Professor Mann that the context in which something is written or said or done is always critical.  So let’s look at the context of a couple of these e-mails.  Here’s one that looks pretty bad until you understand the context:

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Now let’s put that in context. Dr. Ben Santer is a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.  In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report (1995), he was the lead author of a chapter and cleverly cut off the early and later years of a dataset, so that the resulting graph would show that global temperatures were only going in one direction in recent years--rapidly upwards.  In fact, temperatures were just as high in earlier years and had declined in the most recent years, but that data at both ends was cleverly deleted.  This made the graph much easier to understand correctly.  So the first bit of context is that Dr. Santer is an outstanding scientist of fine and upstanding character.

The next bit of context is that CEI--the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is where I work)--had filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open a regulatory decision that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare on the basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute.  Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw data he used to compile the global mean temperature record. EPA relied on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced.  That means that EPA must take Professor Jones’s work on trust, which of course is standard operating procedure in all good climate research.  Dr. Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable.  Everyone knows that we can trust Professor Jones’s honesty and utter scientific competence.

Now, what is Dr. Santer writing in this e-mail to Professor Jones? Clearly this is the sort of high level scientific communication that ordinary people often can’t understand or de-code. It contains the kind of innocent remark that tip-top scientists are always making. And you can see that Dr. Santer is a real wit. I bet Professor Jones couldn’t stop laughing. The phrase “beat the crap out of him” is a common pleasantry among this tip-top scientific crowd.  It merely means that the next time Dr. Santer runs into Dr. Michaels, he’ll be sure to greet him heartily and say something like, “Pat, my dear esteemed colleague, it’s so good to see you. Phil and I were just a tiny bit annoyed that you would be so silly as to call attention to the lack of data, but all is forgiven. You know that you can always trust us.”

So now that we know the context, we can plainly see that the appearance--that Dr. Santer is a nasty bully who is too cowardly to say in person to Dr. Michaels what he wrote in an e-mail--is completely misleading.  Dr. Santer is transparently a prince of a fellow.  Score one for Professor Michael Mann.

Here’s another e-mail where the appearance looks bad.  You’ve just got to understand it in context:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley, mann, mhughes
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999
Cc: k.briffa,t.osborn

Cheers
Phil

Now let’s quickly put that in context before anyone draws the wrong conclusions.  For people who don’t know any better, this looks like Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, is saying that he has used a “trick” that he got from Professor Michael Mann in order to “hide the decline.” First of all, we know that Professor Jones is a man of high integrity (as well as high competence in his field), so he would never do anything dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous.  Second, “trick” is a technical term often employed by the cream of climate scientists.  It simply means employing a clever (or “slick") method to accomplish some technical goal (in this case, “to hide the decline").  Anyone can see that “trick” is a much shorter and more elegant way to say that.  And you’ve got to admire the verbal facility of these tip-top scientists.  They are as articulate and literate as they are scientifically tip-top.

What is the clever method that Professor Jones learned from Professor Mann?  I think he is referring to the way Professor Mann constructed his celebrated hockey stick graph.  His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the past thousand years, including the past century.  But everyone knows that temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades.  That’s what the surface temperature record compiled by Professor Jones at CRU shows.  And everyone knows that Professor Jones’s temperature record is irreproachable, even though he destroyed the raw data.  So what Professor Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature records onto his proxy record.  Voila!--the hockey stick.  Over nine centuries of flat temperatures and then rapid warming in the late twentieth century.  What Professor Mann did was simply make sure that ordinary people weren’t misled by the proxy data.

What does Professor Jones mean, then, by “to hide the decline”?  I’m not sure, but I expect he’s just doing what Professor Mann did.  He’s got some obviously misleading data, which he doesn’t want people to see so they won’t get confused and draw the wrong conclusion.  So he’s hiding it for our own good.  This just shows what a chivalrous and deeply caring man Professor Jones is.

There you have it.  Context is everything.  And you’ve got to hand it to Professor Michael E. Mann.  He sure knows his context.  Pennsylvania State University can be just as proud of him as the University of East Anglia undoubtedly is of their Climatic Research Unit and its head, Professor Phil Jones.
See full post and more here.

By Andrew Bolt

These are the emails that should have Professor Phil Jones most worried about his future.  Jones, head of the CRU unit whose emails were leaked, has been under most fire so far over one email in particular in which he boasted of using a “trick” to “hide the decline” that would have otherwise spoiled his graph showing temperatures soaring ever-upward.

But far more serious - at least in a legal sense - may be his apparent boasting of destroying data to stop sceptics from checking this alarmist work. If, as some emails suggest, he destroyed it to thwart FOI requests from Professor Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, who’d already exposed as fake the Michael Mann “hockey stick”, Jones, one of the most active of the IPCC lead authors, could even face criminal charges.

(Note: in saying that, I should add that these emails may simply be poorly worded, out of context or even altered by the whistleblower who leaked them.  Jones may also not knowingly have done anything wrong, and there is no proof that he did anything against the law.) Whether laws were broken or not, the emails prove beyond doubt how resistant Jones and his colleagues were to having their work properly scrutinised by anyone not of their “team”.

The most damning emails on this point are the following, starting with 1107454306.txt, in which Jones refers to MM - McIntyre and McKitrick (bold added):

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs 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. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

Jones admits he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre - or anyone:

From: Phil Jones
To: santer1@XXXX

Subject: Re: A quick question
Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008

Ben,

Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his 10 pounds, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.

Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here!

Makes you wonder very strongly what Jones is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Also makes you laugh all over again at his claim once that the data being sought had, sadly, been ... um, lost.

In1212063122.txtm, Jones urges another colleague, Michael “Hockey Stick”, Mann, to join in the deleting - at least of emails about the IPCC’s controversial ARA report on man-made warming which Jones co-authored, and which claimed warming was “unequivocal” and “most likely” caused by humans:

From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

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.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers
Phil

For years Jones has made clear his determination to keep crucial data from the eyes of sceptics:

From: Phil Jones To: mann@xxx.edu
Subject: Fwd: CCNet: PRESSURE GROWING ON CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER TO DISCLOSE SECRET DATA
Date: Mon Feb 21 16:28:32 2005
Cc: “Raymond S. Bradley” , “Malcolm Hughes”

Mike, Ray and Malcolm,

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here ! Maybe we can use this to our advantage to get the series updated !

Odd idea to update the proxies with satellite estimates of the lower troposphere rather than surface data !. Odder still that they don’t realise that Moberg et al used the Jones and Moberg updated series !

Francis Zwiers is still onside. He said that PC1s produce hockey sticks. He stressed that the late 20th century is the warmest of the millennium, but Regaldo didn’t bother with that. Also ignored Francis’ comment about all the other series looking similar to MBH.  The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !

Cheers
Phil

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

And when Jones is really forced to the point of handing over his data, he considers ways to may checking it more difficult or annoying:

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

But Jones figures a way out:

At 04:53 AM 5/9/2008, you wrote:
Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things - don’t pass on either…

You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this.

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!

Cheers
Phil

More from Don’t-Disclose Phil, who seems to have a like-minded acolyte in Melbourne’s own Bureau of Meterology warmist David Jones:

Email 1182255717.txt
Wei-Chyung and Tom,

The Climate Audit web site has a new thread on the Jones et al. (1990) paper, with lots of quotes from Keenan. So they may not be going to submit something to Albany. Well may be?!?

Just agreed to review a paper by Ren et al. for JGR. This refers to a paper on urbanization effects in China, which may be in press in J. Climate. I say ‘may be’ as Ren isn’t that clear about this in the text, references and responses to earlier reviews. Have requested JGR get a copy a copy of this in order to do the review. In the meantime attaching this paper by Ren et al. on urbanization at two sites in China. Nothing much else to say except:

1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit

2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. He said they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are threads on it about Australian sites.

3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning) about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on paleo.

Cheers
Phil

Wow. Which sites may they be? And what does it say of Jones that the reading of a single website renders you a non-person, whose inquiries must invariably be disregarded? See Andrew Bolt’s Post here.

----------------------
Miscellaneous emails of interest. H/T MJ

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley,mann, mhughes Cc: k.briffa,t.osborn
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers,
Phil

Here’s one of Michael Mann’s quotes: (Yamal is a dendro study using 12 trees!?!)

Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t?  As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa ‘06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”

From Kevin Trenberth (failure of computer models):
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.

From Tom Wigley:
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, 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). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips - higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH - just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note - from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) - but not really enough. So why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.

The Scientific Method at its finest!!! From Tom Wigley (ousting of a skeptic from a professional organization). He is addressing their “problem” of an editor they can’t control, James Saiers, editor of the Geophysical Research Letters journal because he seems to be sympathetic to climate realists.

This is truly awful. GRL has gone downhill rapidly in recent years.  I think the decline began before Saiers. I have had some unhelpful dealings with him recently with regard to a paper Sarah and I have on glaciers - it was well received by the referees, and so is in the publication pipeline. However, I got the impression that Saiers was trying to keep it from being published.

Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. Even this would be difficult.

From Mick Kelly:
“Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer 10 year - period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc. Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”

1123622471.txt:
“The use of “likely”, “very likely” and my additional fudge word “unusual” are all carefully chosen where used.” - Keith Briffa