Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed “Climategate” are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
Former British chancellor Lord Lawson was the latest to demand an impartial investigation be launched into the scandal, which arrives just weeks before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen. “They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,” he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.
The emails were leaked at the end of last week after hackers penetrated the servers of the Climatic Research Unit, which is based at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England. The CRU is described as one of the leading climate research bodies in the world.
The hacked documents and communications reveal how top scientists conspired to falsify data in the face of declining global temperatures in order to prop up the premise that man-made factors are driving climate change. Others illustrate how they embarked on a venomous and coordinated campaign to ostracize climate skeptics and use their influence to keep dissenting reports from appearing in peer-reviewed journals, as well as using cronyism to avoid compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.
As expected, the establishment media has gone into whitewash overdrive, characterizing the emails as evidence of “rancor” amongst the climate community and focusing on some of the lesser emails while ignoring the true significance of what has been revealed.
Organizations with close ties to the CRU have engaged in psychological terrorism by fearmongering about the planet with doomsday scenarios, illustrating their argument with outlandish propaganda animation videos which show pets drowning and others that show computer-generated polar bears crashing to earth in a throwback to 9/11 victims jumping from the towers, when in reality polar bear population figures are thriving.
“One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre’s director, in 1999, reads: “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,” reports the London Telegraph.
The author admitted to the Associated Press that the e mail was genuine.
In another example, researchers discuss data that is “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”. Apparently, the “real temperatures” are whatever global warming cheerleaders want them to be.
As Anthony Watts writes, attempts to claim e mails are “out of context,” as the defense has been from CRU, cannot apply in this instance.
You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.
Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.
Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
Another email discusses changing temperature data to fix “blips” in studies so as to make them conform with expectations, which of course is the cardinal sin of scientific research.
“Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read, writes Andrew Bolt.
Another email appears to celebrate the death of climate change skeptic John L Daly, with the words, “In an odd way this is cheering news.”
In another communication, the author expresses his fantasy to “beat the crap out of” climate change skeptics.
In another exchange, researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, by means of an academic witch hunt, because of his sympathies with climate change skeptics.
“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.”
Other emails express doubt about whether the world is really heating up and infer that data needs to be reinterpreted.
“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.”
Scientists discuss trying to disguise historical data that contradicts the man-made climate change thesis, such as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which must be ‘contained’ according to one email.
Suppression of evidence is also discussed, with scientists resolving to delete embarrassing emails.
“And, perhaps most reprehensibly,” writes James Delingpole, 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 criticising 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!”
Scientists also “discussed ways of dodging Freedom of Information Act requests to release temperature data,” reports the Daily Mail.
The emails show that scientists relied on cronyism and cosying up to FOIA officials to prevent them from being forced to release data.
“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests,’ the email says. “It took a couple of half-hour sessions to convince them otherwise.”
“Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the chief librarian – who deals with appeals.”
It is important to stress that this compendium merely scratches the surface of the monumental levels of fraud that have been exposed as a result of the hacked emails.
People will look back on this moment as the beginning of the end for global warming alarmism and the agenda to implement draconian measures of regulation and control along with the levy of a global carbon tax.
Many more revelations will be forthcoming as a result of this leak, and the desperate effort on behalf of the establishment to whitewash the whole issue will only end up making the damage worse.
