djmb74

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’? – Telegraph Blogs

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 20th, 2009

309 Comments Comment on this article

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabits of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

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 from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any 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.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “skeptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

Tags: AGW, Andrew Bolt, Climategate, Hadley CRU, ManBearPig, scandal




and this link, trying to carry water for the global warming hoaxers:
Environment news, comment and analysis from the Guardian | Environment | guardian.co.uk ... ails/print


Climate skeptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online

* Buzz up!
* Digg it

* Leo Hickman and James Randerson
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 18.15 GMT
* larger | smaller
* Article history

A researcher collects data from an electronic device to monitor climate change.

A researcher collects data from an electronic device to monitor climate change. Photograph: Vo Trung Dung/Corbis

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned center focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change skeptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, 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."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by skeptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change skeptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behavior that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from skeptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organization's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the skeptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

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island cassie

Yes Martin - I was reading that earlier - good to know that I am not the only cynic around!!

Dalmatiansoap

This is just to complicate for me to understand .
What is this about?

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Lets share good vibrations

island cassie

It is about scientists manipulating data to back up their pet theories!

turtile

Its an article written with political motives rather than real science. (In other words, it is an article with valueless information)

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Richard

It's a piece of tabloid journalism. Should provide lots of ad sales for fear-mongering media publications.

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Scuba_Dave

Right...the ice caps are getting smaller cause its getting colder

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stumpy4700

Quite frankly I don't believe the data from either side. It can all be manipulated.

damaclese

the article in my mind is irrelevant the climate is changing
the hole time that the earth has been able to support life is small in comparison to its total history are we so egocentric to think that we have any say one way or another as to what the out come of all this will be any way

it just another way for some people to hate on others which is what we excel at isn't that a sad commentary on human beings

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djmb74

I am kinda with you on that as well. I think there are a lot of fill in the blanks on both sides of the fence...

__________________
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*PEOPLE WILL FORGET WHAT YOU DID.
*BUT PEOPLE WILL NEVER FORGET HOW YOU MADE THEM FEEL!

Richard

I think "chang" is spelled "change"

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damaclese

I noticed i misspelled irrelevant

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Seaner

Somebody once told me "if you wanna understand human history, just follow the money trail". I like to keep that in mind. I've noticed that people will do almost anything to support an argument but the climate keeps changing. They recently discovered forests beneath the ice in Antarctica. I really don't believe they grew that way !
If I'm holding a candle and it gets close to some ice, the ice will melt. The temp of the room hasn't changed but more of the heat is closer to the ice. I think it would be great if industries quit pumping so much garbage into the air, land, and water. That may or may not help, if it is causing a global warming, but it couldn't hurt. Besides, if that's not what's causing it then it's probably something nobody can change anyway.

sbl

To me, there are only 2 things you need to know to make a decision here--

1. If we keep sending $700 Billion to the people that want to destroy us--we won't really have to worry about climate change.

2. If the climate is changing and we ignore it--bad things happen, if we do what we can to avoid it--we don't have to worry about point #1 and we might create a few jobs in the process.

I understand the theory, but nobody knows what will happen until it happens. There are many factors involved, some positive, some negative. One big factor is pretty obvious--the loss of the Arctic Ice cap significantly increases the heating of Earth because the snow is not there to reflect the sunlight.


Unfortunately, my guess is we will ignore it until it is too late.

lorax

That's pretty yellow journalism up there in the first post... However it's true that both sides can, and likely do, lie with their statistics.

I agree with sbl, and I'll also say that here at the equator, where minute changes for you are large changes for us, we are seeing definite disruption in our traditional weather patterns. A rainy season without rain is a telltale that something's up.

Worm_Farmer

New World Order! Its all scare tactics!
The planet Earth has gone through how many Ice ages so far? Weather change is natural and nothing to fear. However you should fear ManBearPig, he is becoming a real problem. And I meet Glenn Beck this Friday, Fear Glenn Beck he eat's baby's!

harveyc

Global climate has always changed and will continue to change. Are human causing it? I don't know. If so, is it taking a vacation in recent years? Why not show a more recent photo of the Arctic instead of one a few years ago? Why not show the Antarctic where the polar ice set a record in 2008?

Here's a graph with a trend of total global ice over the past 30 years:

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Jack Daw

It's too long for me, Ante...

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Thnx to Marcel, Ante, Dr. Chiranjit Parmar and Francesco for the plants I've received so far.

Not so precise weather sticker:


Interesting video, a part of Russian analysis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU

momoese

That's pretty much what I said too! "I aint readin' all that!"

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Mitchel

damaclese

man i had this long list of links that support most of the stuff you guys are posting in this thread but i hit the back button by mistake and lost it but I'm with you Harvey

And what about methane hydrates as a cause i think its what killed the Dinosaurs not a asteroid its vary complexes so when people get up on there sop box and say its because of humans i don't think there much of any conclusive evidence that that is the only cause and I'm not a Kook my IQ is in the 98th Percentile

this isn't the first time the earth has heated up if one really wants to comprehend just what a Herculean task it is to determine its cause then you should study the milky way then the earths geological history then all the mass extinction scenarios theirs are dozens of things that can cause heating of are atmosphere

and although we think its heating up we are still not 100% sure that is whats happening theres a lot of money riding on this subject as has been pointed out

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