By JAMES DELINGPOLE
Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.
The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called “the gold standard” of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The new release of emails was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the original climategate leak and with the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa. And it has already stirred strong emotions. To Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), for example, the leaker or leakers responsible are attempting to “sabotage the international climate talks” and should be identified and brought “to justice.”
One might sympathize with Mr. Markey’s outrage if, say, the emails were maliciously rewritten or invented. But at least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago. So any malfeasance revealed therein ought to be blamed on the scientists who wrote them, rather than on the whistleblower who exposed them.
Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.” Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.
One can understand Mr. Mann’s irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.
The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones’s infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to “hide the decline,” deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists’ preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?
This is the real significance of the climategate emails. They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can’t be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.
That brings us to the motives of the person calling himself “FOIA” who leaked the emails onto the Internet last week.
In his introductory notes, he writes: “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes. One dollar can save a life. . . . Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels. Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline.”
For the service he has performed in pursuit of this larger end, FOIA deserves not opprobrium but gratitude.
Mr. Delingpole is a contributing editor of the Spectator and author of “Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors” (Publius Books, 2011).
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Tom Nelson
ClimateGate scientists on Michael Mann and his work: “probable flaws” and “clearly deficient”, and “crap” and “way too defensive”, oh my!
2002 ClimateGate email
Hi Keith,
Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike’s recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. The only way to deal with this whole issue is to show in a detailed study that his estimates are clearly deficient in multi-centennial power, something that you actually did in your Perspectives piece, even if it was not clearly stated because of editorial cuts. It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.
Ed [Cook]
I have just read this lettter - and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other “target” series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more) Keith [Briffa]
ClimateGate FOIA grepper! - Email 5055
At every meeting I go to where Mike gives a talk, he always presents more on why his series is correct. Honestly, most people I talk to think that he is being way too defensive (as we all know too well). In any case, he is coming out with a new NH reconstruction. It will be interesting to see what it looks like. One problem is that he will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from. Cheers, Ed [Cook]
ClimateGate FOIA grepper! - Email 0562
Met Office/Hadley’s Simon Tett] 1) Didn’t see a justification for use of tree-rings and not using ice
cores—the obvious one is that ice cores are no good—see Jones et
al, 1998.
2) No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann et al did (I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because we think it is crap!)
Hat tip: M. Hulme
By Alan Caruba
At what point will it finally occur to the pea-brained legion of journalists, academics, alleged scientists, United Nations propagandists, and others still blathering about “global warming” and “climate change” that there is no global warming and that the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years on planet Earth?
It would appear that no amount of the evidence of fraud is sufficient to convince them they have either participated or been taken in by the greatest hoax of the modern era.
Perhaps, though, the latest release of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change perpetrators may push them toward a rational conclusion and release the rest of humanity from the penalties and costs imposed by the global warming hoax.
It’s not that the IPCC is not relentless in this ugly business. A report released on November 18 by these reprehensible liars predicted “more extreme weather events.”
Well, duh! There isn’t a day that goes by without an extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the Earth. One might consider the weather at the northern and southern poles extreme. Or the heat of the Earth’s deserts? Then throw in the usual blizzards, floods, and droughts - and you have a non-stop variety of “extreme weather events” to which to point.
To put it another way, the whole hoax was working just fine until the Earth began to cool around 1998. So naturally the IPCC had to (1) change the terminology from global warming to climate change, (2) deny that its “scientists” were lying, and (3) continue the pathetic prediction scheme by pointing to “weather events.”
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather, however, isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 to assist policy makers with climate change.”
That’s right, this whole farce has been going on since 1988. At what point will the “enablers” of global warming accept defeat? Not soon if one considers that the IPCC is laying on another climate conference to be held in Durban, South Africa from November 28 to December 9. It will be the 17th opportunity for these deceivers to gather to wine and dine while taxpayers from the many nations they represent pick up the tab.
Here’s the kicker. “Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “the report also underscored the need for governments to take action to reduce emissions.”
What emissions? Carbon dioxide? A trace gas in the atmosphere (0.038%) that has no effect whatever on climate or weather?
Does anyone grasp how costly all the lies about “emissions” have been and continue to be? The Christmas tree to be erected at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. comes complete with the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” to pay for its transport 4,200 miles across the country from California. Eighty million tons of “carbon credits” were purchased.
Bear in mind, that tree and all others depend on carbon dioxide in the same way humans and other creatures depend on oxygen! CO2 is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. Without it, we all die.
But what is one Christmas tree compared to an entire nation, Australia, whose government just imposed a carbon-emissions tax on everything? The tax will drive existing heavy industry and other generators of CO2 from the nation that can afford to leave and make those who cannot less competitive with global manufacturers and other businesses. Some business will just shut their doors.
This kind of deception is global. The International Energy Agency announced in early November that “dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within little over five years.” The news report concluded saying “The IEA uses conclusions from research collated by the United Nations. Most climate scientists agree with the U.N. conclusions, although recent polls show a growing proportion of the public in many countries is skeptical of climate change.”
No, most climate scientists do not agree with the U.N. data because they know how flawed and frequently fraudulent it is. This kind of casual journalistic reference is a lie, along with all the rest of the global warming and/or climate change data from “official” sources like the IPCC and IEA, et al.
In early November the U.S. Department of Energy published “estimates” of global carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2010. Writing in Forbes, James Taylor of The Heartland Institute, took note that the Department concluded that “emissions rose by 6% from 2009 to 2010. This constitutes the largest rise yet recorded.” And then he added that “global temperatures have not risen during the past decade.’
There is no correlation. Never was.
Whether it is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all depend on people being too ignorant or indifferent to grasp the truth that everything done in the name of global warming, climate change, or carbon dioxide emissions is a costly, evil deception.
By Mark Duchamp
Prince Philip said they were, wails a businessman from Infinergy who attended the same reception as the royal couple in London last week.
Will the truth finally prevail? A week before that, the European and North American platforms which defend windfarm victims issued a press release referring to studies that conclude the same thing.
The crux of the matter is that fossil fuel power stations that are used to back up the intermittency of windpower, spend more fuel and emit more CO2 when operating in the required stop-and-go mode. It is no different from what happens with a car caught in city traffic as opposed to highway.
Prince Philip said wind farms were “absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidies and an absolute disgrace.”
See the whole article from The Telegraph here: Wind farms are useless, says Duke
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EPAW and NA-PAW, the European and North American platforms defending windfarm victims, had declared earlier:
“It is noteworthy ... that the massive build-up of wind farms in countries like Denmark or Germany has not caused any measurable reduction in CO2 emissions or use of fossil fuels. In Europe, the Irish grid operator EIRGRID shows on its website real data on wind energy production and CO2 emissions, from which similar observations may be drawn. Dr Fred Udo, a distinguished engineer from CERN in Geneva, now retired, did a study based on Eirgrid data. His conclusions put in doubt the very usefulness of wind energy.”
Reference was also made to the Bentek report, from the US.
Based on this, and the legally-questionable absence of feasibilities studies on wind energy, the joint press release from EPAW and NA-PAW criticised Brussels for forcing upon Europeans “pharaonic investments which, on the negative side, destroy 2 - 5 jobs for everyone they create, stall the recovery of the EU economy, threaten the existence of the euro, destroy the tourism potential of countless natural and cultural assets, cause losses in property value in the billions of euros, affect the health of wind farm neighbours (noise + infrasounds), are driving many species of birds and bats to extinction, etc.”
See the complete release here: EU governments did not do their homework on wind energy
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Above: Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in 1947
Read the following article on his remarkable character, already showing when a young man:
Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten
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In the name of windfarm victims around the world, both human and animal, I wish to extend our gratitude to Prince Philip for his ever-lasting courage. Few public figures dare like him to speak the truth at a time when so many are busy complimenting the new emperor on his clothes (for “emperor”, read the Big Green industrial-subsidy complex).
20 November 2011
Mark Duchamp
Chairman, World Council for Nature
www.wcfn.org
From Benny Peiser and GWPF
1) Prince Philip: Wind Farms Are ‘Absolutely Useless And A Disgrace’ - The Sunday Telegraph, 20 November 2011
2) Ex-Chancellor Backs Prince Philip Over Attack On Wind Farms - Daily Mail, 21 November 2011
3) Clive Aslet: Prince Philip Said What We’re All Thinking About Wind Farms - The Daily Telegraph, 21 November 2011
4) Bill Carmichael: Solar Panels Are A Badge Of Shame - Yorkshire Post, 19 November 2011