The Associated Press
LONDON Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.
The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.
--------------------------
Global Warming Scandal Makes Scientific Progress More Difficult, Experts Say
By Gene J. Koprowski, Fox News
The trustworthiness of the scientific community’s global warming data pool is being called into question as the scandal over doctored data continues to unfold.
The latest revelation came on Sunday with the publication of a report by The Sunday Times of London that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom confessed to throwing out most of the raw temperature data on which the theory of global warming is founded.
The loss of the data prevents other scientists from checking it to determine whether, in fact, there has been a long-term rise in global temperatures during the past century and a half. “They are making scientific progress more difficult now,” says Willie Soon, a physicist, astronomer and climate researcher at the solar and stellar physics division of the Harvard University-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This is a shameful, dark day for science,” he said in an interview with FoxNews.com.
Soon also suggested that there has been systemic suppression of dissenting opinion among scientists in the climate change community, ranging from social snubs to e-mail stalking and even threats of harm. The Climate Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss of data from weather stations around the world after it was sought under a U.K. freedom of information law. In a statement now on its Web site, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added - quality controlled and homogenized - data.”
Many in the environmental policy community are outraged about the disclosure that the data has been lost. “The scientific process has become so appallingly corrupted,” James M. Taylor, senior fellow in environment policy at The Heartland Institute, told FoxNews.com. Heartland is a libertarian think tank in Chicago that recently produced a conference featuring scientists and policymakers, like Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, and Vaclev Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, who dispute the theory of global warming.
The report in the Times quoted Roger Pielke Sr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, who requested the original records from CRU. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us.’ So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” Pielke told the Times. He did not return repeated phone calls seeking additional comment. The university’s publicist also was unable to answer additional questions about the story.
“This closed-door conspiracy is harming everyone,” says Soon. “I thought I had seen it all. Now I have.”
A back story is also starting to emerge, depicting a rough world of suppression of dissenting opinion. Soon, who has been involved in climate change research for 15 years and has published in the field, said there was a general consensus that global warming was possible in the late 1990s. But at the time, the research community wanted to look back not just 150 years but 1,000 years, to see what the long-term trends had been. Soon says some scientists became staunch advocates for their position that global warming was occurring, and that they they dug in and started refusing to publish papers with contradictory viewpoints.
“I read a paper on increasing heat in the ocean and asked the scientist in France for the backup data,” Soon says. “She told me she did not distribute data to people who didn’t agree with her conclusions.” Soon says he has been victimized by other “ugly” personal attacks from leading scientists in the global warming world when he has simply raised questions, as any scientific colleague would, about the veracity of the data. “Seeing all of this controversy in the news is no different than dealing with them in person,” he said. “There’s a lot of personal ugliness.”
Taylor, who is also outspoken in his questioning of climate change theory, says he too has encountered ugliness from global warming enthusiasts, including “e-mail stalking” and “people making thinly veiled threats to physically harm me and my family.” He said his opponents at public forums have refused to shake his hand or even acknowledge his presence. Much scientific research corroborates what the CRU has been reporting, despite the missing data. “It’s true that GISS (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) ground-based temperature reports show temperature increases similar to CRU,” Taylor said.
But then the CRU scandal erupted. Hackers uncovered e-mails between leading global warming advocates, which expressed concerns that the temperature figures from the last decade simply did not demonstrate that global warming was continuing, as theorized. Now, some critics are questioning even the seemingly reliable data from the U.S. government. “The GISS and NOAA reports suffer from the same reliability concerns as the CRU ground-based temperature reports,” Taylor says. “And, more importantly, are similarly staffed by outspoken global warming activists who are likely engaging in the same data rigging and data hiding as CRU.”
---------------------------
E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science
By John Tierney, New York Times
If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:
Aarrggghhh!
That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”
Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.
While Harry is puzzling over temperatures - “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” - the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”
As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude - and ultimately undermine their own cause.
Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.
Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century - in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.
Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.
But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph - the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium - was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.
The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go here for details.)
In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.
It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?
Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too. In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:
Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.
See Myron Ebell on Overrated (Gore) and Underrated (Klaus) in Standpoint here. See also Jon Stewart’s Mocks ‘Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented!’ here.
------------------------
Quote of the week - Krugman’s LOL on skeptics
By Anthony Watts
I don’ t know what sort of world NYT reporters live in, but I am now convinced that some like Paul Krugman have no clue about the real world people live in elsewhere. ClimateGate featured a debate between George Will and Paul Krugman. Noel Sheppard over at Newsbusters provides some video and transcript of a debate between Paul Krugman of the NYT and Washington Post columnist George Will on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. ... They get almost equal time in the media.
When I read what Paul Krugman said, I laughed out loud. He’s truly clueless.
Here’s the context:
WILL: Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the table, and when you say, well, they are academics and they are scientists and they talk in funny ways - academics are human beings, and the enormous incentive to get on the bandwagon on global warming, the financial incentive, the market driving this, is huge.
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.
WILL: Hardly.
KRUGMAN: It’s so much easier, come on. You got the energy industry’s behind it. There are 20 times as many believers as there are skeptics in the scientific community. They get almost equal time in the media.
WILL: Is there a larger venture capital firm in this country than the Energy Department of this government, which right now is sending out billions and billions of dollars in speculation on green energy?
Noel Sheppard writes:
Skeptics get almost equal time in the media? Yeah, that’s why this appears to be the first time ABC addressed this ClimateGate issue. As for there being more money in being a skeptic than there is in supporting this myth, the facts say otherwise.
The Science and Public Policy Institute issued a report on the money involved in funding the global warming debate in August concluding, “Over the last two decades, US taxpayers have subsidized the American climate change industry to the tune of $79 billion.” By contrast, the same study found that the media bogeyman “Exxon Mobil gave a mere $23 million, spread over ten years, to climate sceptics.”
See the video and transcript at Newsbusters
UPDATE: Professor Don Easterbrook left this comment on the ABC news site:
“I’ve spent 4 decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at Krugman’s cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as ‘just the way scientists talk among themselves.’ That’s like saying it’s alright for politicians to be corrupt because that’s the way they are. Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don’t like, hide data they don’t want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data.”
Read more here.
Anthony has also added a ClimateGate page listing recent stories on the issue here. Krugman take note. In it be sure to see this guest post by Willis Eschenbach “When Results Go Bad”. It begins “One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like “Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn’t affect the results, it’s still warming.” See the rest of this very revealing email exchange.
---------------------------
‘Scientists’ IN DENIAL - call leaked emails part of “smear campaign” before Copenhagen
By Justin Sorkin
In their Tuesday-released report about the stepped-up pace of climate change, three scientists - Richard Somerville of Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Michael Mann of Penn State; and Eric Steig of University of Washington - said that last week’s leaked emails controversy was apparently a part of a “smear campaign,” attempting to wreck the climate summit in Copenhagen next month.
The clamor about the leaked emails began on November 20, with an unknown hacker breaking into a server at the well-known Climate Research Unit (CRU) of Britain’s University of East Anglia; stealing nearly 169 megabytes of emails from the institute’s computers; and posting them online.
While climate skeptics said that the leaked documents are a clear revelation of the deliberate effort by some scientists to overemphasize the effects of man-made global warming, the University said that the rather candid messages were a part of the ongoing debate among leading change specialists about the ways in which to address recent data showing temperatures leveling off.
Steig called the skeptics’ attempt as a “desperate” one launched right before the Copenhagen conference, while Mann termed it as a convenient “cherry picking” episode.
Mann said: “What they’ve done is search through stolen personal emails - confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world.” He further added that the skeptics had largely turned “something innocent into something nefarious.” Read post here.
See how Zorita Calls For Banning Mann, Jones and Rahmstorf from IPCC here. See the danger Copenhagen which these ‘scientists’ are cheering on poses in this video here.
Icecap Note: it is the height of irony that these ‘scientists’ who are masters of cherry-picking should claim those who have written about the alleged emails as ‘cherry pickers”. They are in denial and hopefully will find their work, already debunked to now be forever ignored. Let’s hope the great damage they have done to the science is not irreparable. Instead of being “out-of-context nothing to see here emails’, their content suggest a fraud by Mann, Steig, Jones, Santer, Somerville, Peterson, Briffa, Ammann and others including Gore, Holdren, Pachauri, Solomon and the UN IPCC is on such a massive scale that it makes Bernie Madoff look like he was robbing a few convenience stores.
As Joseph Olson in Recussant Picadores Circle the IPCC says so well “It is time for the purge and reboot. For the lead AGW climate scientists, this will be sudden and decisive, due to behavior so abhorrent that none can condone. There is a fairy tale cast of climate charlatans to be the lead lambs. There is Phil “Butcher” Jones who has slaughtered and packaged the data. There is James “Baker” Hansen, who willingly heated the climate information in his control. Dr Michael “Hockey Stick Maker” Mann carved up a marvel of mathematics. The best quote on Dr. MM is from Dr Tim Ball who stated that “Dr Mann is in transition from Penn State to State Pen”. We can only hope he does a better job with license plates than he did with hockey sticks.
See this CBS Online post on How Congress May Probe Emails here. It contains some very powerful email evidence that the data used to show significant warming the last century is seriously flawed. See this excellent WUWT post by Willis Eschenbach on the abuse of the scientific method. And from Andrew Bolt here:
Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, on the true significance of Climategate: “The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected - that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime - the real story of Climategate. It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.”
And even James Hansen of NASA thinks the Copenhagen IPCC meeting is a fraud. See more here.
--------------------------
Lord Monckton: Shut Down The UN, Arrest Al Gore
By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Lord Christopher Monckton went further than ever before in his vehement opposition to the elitists running the climate change scam, calling for the UN to be shut down and for fraudulent peddlers of global
Watch the interview in full here. Part I below. Other parts here.
By John Tierney, New York Times
If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:
Aarrggghhh!
That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”
Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.
While Harry is puzzling over temperatures - “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” - the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”
As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude - and ultimately undermine their own cause.
Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.
Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century - in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.
Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.
But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph - the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium - was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.
The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go here for details.)
In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:
“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.
It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?
Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too. In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:
Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.
See Dr. Lindzen in Wall Street Journal post here. See Myron Ebell on Overrated and Underrated in Standpoint here.
By Anthony Watts
I don’ t know what sort of world NYT reporters live in, but I am now convinced that some like Paul Krugman have no clue about the real world people live in elsewhere. ClimateGate featured a debate between George Will and Paul Krugman. Noel Sheppard over at Newsbusters provides some video and transcript of a debate between Paul Krugman of the NYT and Washington Post columnist George Will on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. ... They get almost equal time in the media.
When I read what Paul Krugman said, I laughed out loud. He’s truly clueless.
Here’s the context:
WILL: Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the table, and when you say, well, they are academics and they are scientists and they talk in funny ways - academics are human beings, and the enormous incentive to get on the bandwagon on global warming, the financial incentive, the market driving this, is huge.
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.
WILL: Hardly.
KRUGMAN: It’s so much easier, come on. You got the energy industry’s behind it. There are 20 times as many believers as there are skeptics in the scientific community. They get almost equal time in the media.
WILL: Is there a larger venture capital firm in this country than the Energy Department of this government, which right now is sending out billions and billions of dollars in speculation on green energy?
Noel Sheppard writes:
Skeptics get almost equal time in the media? Yeah, that’s why this appears to be the first time ABC addressed this ClimateGate issue. As for there being more money in being a skeptic than there is in supporting this myth, the facts say otherwise.
The Science and Public Policy Institute issued a report on the money involved in funding the global warming debate in August concluding, “Over the last two decades, US taxpayers have subsidized the American climate change industry to the tune of $79 billion.” By contrast, the same study found that the media bogeyman “Exxon Mobil gave a mere $23 million, spread over ten years, to climate sceptics.”
See the video and transcript at Newsbusters
UPDATE: Professor Don Easterbrook left this comment on the ABC news site:
“I’ve spent 4 decades studying global climate change and as a scientist I am appalled at Krugman’s cavalier shrugging off the Hadley email scandal as ‘just the way scientists talk among themselves.’ That’s like saying it’s alright for politicians to be corrupt because that’s the way they are. Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don’t like, hide data they don’t want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data.”
Read more here.
Anthony has also added a ClimateGate page listing recent stories on the issue here. Krugman take note. In it be sure to see this guest post by Willis Eschenbach “When Results Go Bad”. It begins “One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like “Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn’t affect the results, it’s still warming.” See the rest of this very revealing email exchange.
---------------------------
‘Scientists’ IN DENIAL - call leaked emails part of “smear campaign” before Copenhagen
By Justin Sorkin
In their Tuesday-released report about the stepped-up pace of climate change, three scientists - Richard Somerville of Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Michael Mann of Penn State; and Eric Steig of University of Washington - said that last week’s leaked emails controversy was apparently a part of a “smear campaign,” attempting to wreck the climate summit in Copenhagen next month.
The clamor about the leaked emails began on November 20, with an unknown hacker breaking into a server at the well-known Climate Research Unit (CRU) of Britain’s University of East Anglia; stealing nearly 169 megabytes of emails from the institute’s computers; and posting them online.
While climate skeptics said that the leaked documents are a clear revelation of the deliberate effort by some scientists to overemphasize the effects of man-made global warming, the University said that the rather candid messages were a part of the ongoing debate among leading change specialists about the ways in which to address recent data showing temperatures leveling off.
Steig called the skeptics’ attempt as a “desperate” one launched right before the Copenhagen conference, while Mann termed it as a convenient “cherry picking” episode.
Mann said: “What they’ve done is search through stolen personal emails - confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world.” He further added that the skeptics had largely turned “something innocent into something nefarious.” Read post here.
See how Zorita Calls For Banning Mann, Jones and Rahmstorf from IPCC here. See the danger Copenhagen which these ‘scientists’ are cheering on poses in this video here.
Icecap Note: it is the height of irony that these ‘scientists’ who are masters of cherry-picking should claim those who have written about the alleged emails as ‘cherry pickers”. They are in denial and hopefully will find their work, already debunked to now be forever ignored. Let’s hope the great damage they have done to the science is not irreparable. Instead of being “out-of-context nothing to see here emails’, their content suggest a fraud by Mann, Steig, Jones, Santer, Somerville, Peterson, Briffa, Ammann and others including Gore, Holdren, Pachauri, Solomon and the UN IPCC is on such a massive scale that it makes Bernie Madoff look like he was robbing a few convenience stores. As Joseph Olson in Recussant Picadores Circle the IPCC says so well “It is time for the purge and reboot. For the lead AGW climate scientists, this will be sudden and decisive, due to behavior so abhorrent that none can condone. There is a fairy tale cast of climate charlatans to be the lead lambs. There is Phil “Butcher” Jones who has slaughtered and packaged the data. There is James “Baker” Hansen, who willingly heated the climate information in his control. Dr Michael “Hockey Stick Maker” Mann carved up a marvel of mathematics. The best quote on Dr. MM is from Dr Tim Ball who stated that “Dr Mann is in transition from Penn State to State Pen”. We can only hope he does a better job with license plates than he did with hockey sticks.
See this CBS Online post on How Congress May Probe Emails here. It contains some very powerful email evidence that the data used to show significant warming the last century is seriously flawed. See this excellent WUWT post by Willis Eschenbach on the abuse of the scientific method. And from Andrew Bolt here:
Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, on the true significance of Climategate: “The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected - that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime - the real story of Climategate. It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.”
And even James Hansen of NASA thinks the Copenhagen IPCC meeting is a fraud. See more here.
--------------------------
Lord Monckton: Shut Down The UN, Arrest Al Gore
By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show yesterday, Lord Christopher Monckton went further than ever before in his vehement opposition to the elitists running the climate change scam, calling for the UN to be shut down and for fraudulent peddlers of global warming propaganda like Al Gore to be arrested and criminally prosecuted.
Monckton said that those who are threatening to shut down economies, bankrupt nations, and deepen the problems of the third world by implementing draconian policies in the name of global warming should be indicted, prosecuted and imprisoned “for a very long time”. “The fraudsters and racketeers from Al Gore to the people at the University of East Anglia who have been making their fortune at the expense of taxpayers and the little guy,” should be criminally charged, said Monckton, in response to the climategate scandal.
“We the people have got to rise up worldwide, found a party in every country which stands for freedom and make sure we fight this bureaucratic communistic world government monster to a standstill - they shall not pass,” he added. Monckton said that the United Nations should be “closed down,” adding that he talked to a senior UN ambassador in Canada who told him that he no longer saw any purpose in the UN and it exists “only to enrich itself at the expense of the nations it claims to serve, it’s time it was brought to an end.”
“We would all save billions if we shut down the UN and just about all of its hideous bureaucracy,” said Monckton. Lord Monckton emphasized how the emails released as a result of climategate prove that global warming alarmism was still prevalent in public but behind closed doors, warmist scientist are admitting that the “deniers” as they label people like Monckton are correct.
“Publicly they’re saying the science is settled, we’re all doomed unless you close down the economies of the west, whereas privately they’re saying to each other ‘we’ve got it wrong, none of this adds up and it’s a travesty that we can’t explain it’.”
Monckton also slammed Obama’s science czar John P. Holdren, who in his 1977 book Ecoscience called for draconian population measures to be enforced by a “planetary regime” in the name of saving the earth, as an “openly admitted communist”. Monckton pointed out how Holdren had been once of the most prominent alarmists in the 70’s warning about the onset of rapid “global cooling”. “Now with seamless mendacity he says that what we’re now facing is global warming,” said Monckton. “How can anyone like Holdren stand up with a straight face and expect anyone to believe it,” he added.
Monckton said that the agenda behind the global warming movement was to set up a communistic world government which will be run by people who “do not care how many people they kill with their policies” and that their goal is to “do away with democracy forever by stealth using the excuse to save the planet.” Monckton said that the people running the scam had a “deliberate desire to control population by killing people in large numbers deliberately if necessary.”
The former advisor to Margaret Thatcher said that the warmists were sounding more and more desperate and knew that they had been rumbled as a result of climategate, which would only make it more urgent for them to try and force through a binding treaty in Copenhagen. Monckton said that the answer to combating the move towards neo-feudalism and global government was to form a worldwide “freedom party” that would operate nationally in every country in order to defend freedom, democracy and prosperity while routing out every aspect of the communistic takeover. “Every time these people try to take it away, we in the freedom party will stop them, and I think now is the time,” said Monckton.
Watch the interview in full here. Part I below. Other parts here.