Climategate latest

Andrew Bolt Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:52am
Herald Sun
Nov. 23, 2009

Slowly seeping into the local media.

The Australian:

COMPUTER hackers have broken into Britain’s leading climate science research centre, making public thousands of private emails between top climate change scientists and, in the process, laying bare their bitter disagreements about the cause of climate change.

Tim Blair in the Daily Telegraph:

Should they be proved genuine, which is looking likely at this point, in the absence of any denials, these emails are absolute dynamite.

Sydney Morning Herald (devoting an entire artice to the defence):

A leading climate change scientist whose private emails are included in thousands of documents stolen by hackers and posted online says the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month’s global climate summit in Denmark.

Prominent climate scientist Roger Pielke Sr says we now need to review the extent of the hijacking of the IPCC:
blockquote>The challenge to the IPCC community, now that their duplicity has been exposed, is to communicate to all of us why the peer-reviewed papers that we documented, and that were available in time for the IPCC review process, were considered “bad papers” and thus ignored in the IPCC report. A balanced assessment would comment on these papers, and provide the reason they disagree with their results.UPDATE

Did my bit to alert the voters on Steve Price’s 2UE morning show today. Don’t know if there will be audio on his site later.

UPDATE 2

Former British Chancellor Lord Lawson in The Times:

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

UPDATE 3

For those who missed the most damning of the emails so far, I’ve posted on them here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

UPDATE 4

More links…

The emails show the astonishing funds behind warmist scientists - with nearly $25 million going to Professor Phil Jones alone. The American Thinker points out the hypcrisy of warming preachers for then denouncing sceptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen as Big Oil shills for having charged, in his case, just $10,000 to appear as an expert witness 20 years ago.

Meanwhile Charlie Martin links to the emails which prove his charge:

The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.

(Thanks to readers Kent and John, and so many others.)

UPDATE 5

Professor Aynsley Kellow warned about just this corruption of science by evangelism in his 2007 book Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science.

He now writes:

The e-mails leaked suggest the situation was much worse than my analysis "“ but then I was just pointing to the degree of collaboration and the effects of the communications revolution in breaking down the normal safeguards. We now have evidence of: collective "˜dealing’ with inconvenient data; attempts to hijack peer review; the keeping of inconvenient published science out of the IPCC process; keeping that which did appear out of the important Summary for Policy-Makers; attempts to intimidate journal editors; inability to acocunt for observational data which are "˜surely wrong’ . . . .

Really quite amazing stuff! And on this we will base an ETS which assumes we know (because the science is settled) what size the cap should be in a cap-and-trade scheme.

UPDATE 6

Oh, but how those crusading scientists felt in their guts the faith burn! No way could - should - the Medieval Warm Period have been warmer than today:

From: Phil Jones

To: Tom Wigley

Subject: Re: MBH

Date: Fri Oct 22 15:13:20 2004

Cc:

Bottom line - their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

Must got to Florence now. Back in Nov 1.

Cheers

Phil

This may help explain why Jones’ CRU produced a graphic derived from tree rings that indeed showed this recent warming was unprecedented - but only because the CRU researcher deliberately ignored a much bigger sample of tree rings that said it most certainly was not. And, privately, his colleagues knew the work was error-riddled.

UPDATE 7

Gavin Atkins has a quiz. Sample question:

3. Director of the CRU Phil Jones says that if contrarians ever hear there is a new Freedom of Information Act operating in Britain he will:

a) Gladly comply, after all, it is in the interests of good science.

b) Reluctantly comply "“ he has many better things to do with his time

c) Seek legal advice as to the best path to follow

d) Delete the files.

Test yourself.