The warming conspiracy's most damning emails

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
Nov. 25, 2009

THREE weeks ago Prime Minister Kevin Rudd named me as part of an international conspiracy to spread lies about global warming.

How I laughed.

But I’m not laughing now. Emails leaked at the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world - and Rudd has fallen for it.

This conspiracy comprises a group of warming scientists who have been central in spreading the false claim that the world has never been hotter and man’s gases are to blame.

It’s come to light after nearly 4000 emails and documents were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and dumped on the internet by what is almost certainly a whistleblower.

What they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time - a conspiracy by warmist scientists to fudge statistics, sack sceptical scientists, block the release of data to prevent checking, illegally destroy data, deceive reporters, censor sceptical papers, and hide errors in their work.

Most extraordinary are the emails in which these scientists admit to each other what they’ve never confessed to the world - that the world is not warming as their theories predicted.

In fact, it’s been cooling since 2001.

Cried one, IPCC co-author Kevin Trenberth, in an email to other members of this conspiracy: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.”

These are not some obscure scientists. Rather, they include co-authors of the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which Rudd cites as his proof that warming is “happening and it’s caused by human activity”.

They include Phil Jones, head of the CRU unit from which the emails were taken - a unit that Britain’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said “set the agenda for the major research effort” in climate science.

They include Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann and CRU deputy director Keith Briffa, both IPCC co-authors, who also produced the two studies that most convinced journalists of the false claim that it’s now hotter than the Medieval Warm Period just 800 years ago.

They also include scientists responsible for the HadCRU data - one of the four main measurements of the world’s temperature today.

All this may sound too James Bond-like to be true. Yet only three years ago we were warned that many of these same people had indeed created a network that was distorting science.

In 2006 the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee commissioned eminent statisticians to check Mann’s famous “hockey stick” - a graph used by the IPCC to claim today’s temperatures were the highest for thousands of years.

Their report not only found that Mann’s work was too flawed to be relied upon, just as a retired petroleum engineer, Steve McIntyre, had first said, but that there was now a “clique” of 43 climate scientists stifling true debate, with Mann, Jones and Briffa all named.

Few heeded the warning. And so that clique morphed into a conspiracy that has helped to panic the world - including Rudd - into spending billions on a scare that may not in fact exist.

That’s the background. Now here are just some of the emails.

FIDDLING DATA: “Hide the decline”

Phil Jones tells Michael Mann and others how he made his data show warming:

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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Mick Kelly, Professor of Climate Change at Jones’ university, on hiding recent cooling:

Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

A CRU programming code for dealing with tree-ring data:

Uses corrected MXD but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.

From green entrepreneur Adam Markham to the CRU, ordering better propaganda:

(WWW Australia) are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.

FAITH, NOT SCIENCE: “This is all gut feeling”

Phil Jones shows his faith:

I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.

Phil Jones to his CRU staff:

I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like - half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!

From Phil Jones to Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, now of the US University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, saying he cannot believe the Medieval Warm Period really was warmer:

Bottom line - there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years ... this is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.

From Phil Jones to Michael Mann, on the death of Australian sceptic John Daly:

In an odd way this is cheering news!

COVERING UP: “Destroy the emails”

Phil Jones warns Michael Mann that Steve McIntyre and Prof Ross McKittrick, two sceptics who first debunked Mann’s “hockey stick”, are now wanting to check CRU data:

If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone ... We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

From Phil Jones to Michael Mann and others:

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!

Phil Jones to American climatologist and IPCC lead author Benjamin Santer:

I did get an email from the FoI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, just three weeks after an FOI request from sceptic David Holland:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise ... Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?

SILENCING SCEPTICS: “Beat the crap out of him”

Ben Santer on a sceptical climatologist :

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

Phil Jones on cheating on deadlines to sneak warmist material into the IPCC:

Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don’t give those sceptic something to amuse themselves with.

Tom Wigley on ousting the editor of Geophysical Research Letters (achieved):

If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse sceptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

Phil Jones to Michael Mann on keeping two sceptics’ papers from the IPCC:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Michael Mann on removing the editor of Climate Science (achieved):

How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that anti-greenhouse science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on).

Michael Mann to the CRU’s Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, on blocking sceptics’ comments on his RealClimate website:

We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not ...

OUR THEORY ISN’T WORKING! “Where the heck is global warming?”

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth privately tells Mann, Santer, Wigley, Jones and leading alarmists such as Stephen H. Schneider and James Hansen that the data doesn’t show what their climate models predicted:

… where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. ... 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.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

It doesn’t mean all global warming science is bogus. But it does mean the process used to produce it is corrupted.

It means “peer review” is too often “mates’ review”. It means sceptical scientists have not had the hearing they deserve, and leading warmist scientists have not been honest or frank.

It means the “consensus” of scientists we hear of may not actually exist and the IPCC reports cannot be trusted to be balanced.

It means that claims we’ve never been hotter are false or unproven, and much research now needs to be rechecked.

And at heart it means global warming theory is too weak to accept, being contradicted by a decade of climate.

Even Tim Flannery, the alarmist who claimed global warming could cause Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide to run out of water by last summer, now admits - after reading some of these emails - that “the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”, since “for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend”.

He confessed at last: “ We don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate.”

When even Flannery says that, tell me why Kevin Rudd says the science is still good enough to hit us with a colossal tax on gases to “stop” a warming that’s actually stopped already?

Heed this fraud. End this farce.