Evidence uncovered of pro-AGW scientific corruption?

[Andy Hunt]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... l-warming/

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 megabites 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 Sceptic 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 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 !”

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 “sceptical” 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.

[clv101]

The Telegraph piece is just a joke. There is no story here.

Better coverage here:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/climate-hack

And here's the Real Climate reply:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... -cru-hack/

Just more propaganda.

[Ludwig]

Oh God, not James Delingpole again.

Anyone who claims, without apparent irony, to be "right about everything" is ALWAYS going to end up looking like a nob.

[Quintus]

Whether there's a real story here or not ... it doesn't look like the leak or the contents of the emails are going to be denied; various investigations going on. Now covered by most of the big media agencies.

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

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 veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ked-emails

[MacG]

This wont go away. It is one of those famous "moments" when things change. I feel utterly relieved, and it is wonderful to get the opportunity to experience this turn of events during my lifetime.

My guess is that the next turn will involve very defensive damage control where some "scientists" try to save the research grants by ostracizing Mann and similar "guilty" people.

[caspian]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... l-warming/

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.

Nice satire on that idiotic article:

Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’

If the Newton / Royal Society mail scandal is true, it is a blow to the Renaissance lobby's credibility which is never likely to recover.

[Ludwig]

This wont go away. It is one of those famous "moments" when things change. I feel utterly relieved, and it is wonderful to get the opportunity to experience this turn of events during my lifetime.

My guess is that the next turn will involve very defensive damage control where some "scientists" try to save the research grants by ostracizing Mann and similar "guilty" people.

I would love to believe you are right, but I have yet to hear any AGW denier explain how the science of greenhouse gases, which IIRC is over 50 years old, could prove to be so wrong. The science is there and the evidence is there (most of us have seen it with our own eyes). You MUST know something we don't, so what is it?

[MacG]

This wont go away. It is one of those famous "moments" when things change. I feel utterly relieved, and it is wonderful to get the opportunity to experience this turn of events during my lifetime.

My guess is that the next turn will involve very defensive damage control where some "scientists" try to save the research grants by ostracizing Mann and similar "guilty" people.

I would love to believe you are right, but I have yet to hear any AGW denier explain how the science of greenhouse gases, which IIRC is over 50 years old, could prove to be so wrong. The science is there and the evidence is there (most of us have seen it with our own eyes). You MUST know something we don't, so what is it?

Could you please send a link to that climate model? Just to prove you are correct.

[caspian]

Could you please send a link to that climate model? Just to prove you are correct.

Tell you what, why don't YOU supply the peer-reviewed evidence that AGW is all a con, since you're the one claiming that it's all bunk. Come on, show us the beef.

[MacG]

Could you please send a link to that climate model? Just to prove you are correct.

Tell you what, why don't YOU supply the peer-reviewed evidence that AGW is all a con, since you're the one claiming that it's all bunk. Come on, show us the beef.

Well, as soon as I can have a look at the source code for the IPCC models I will be able to provide detailed comments on them. Without source code it is not a scientific discussion at all, but rather a political or religious discussion. Do you have the link?

[clv101]

Could you please send a link to that climate model? Just to prove you are correct.

Tell you what, why don't YOU supply the peer-reviewed evidence that AGW is all a con, since you're the one claiming that it's all bunk. Come on, show us the beef.

Well, as soon as I can have a look at the source code for the IPCC models I will be able to provide detailed comments on them. Without source code it is not a scientific discussion at all, but rather a political or religious discussion. Do you have the link?

What a cop out... the code isn't important! Only the data the methodology are important, both of which are published.

[MacG]

Tell you what, why don't YOU supply the peer-reviewed evidence that AGW is all a con, since you're the one claiming that it's all bunk. Come on, show us the beef.

Well, as soon as I can have a look at the source code for the IPCC models I will be able to provide detailed comments on them. Without source code it is not a scientific discussion at all, but rather a political or religious discussion. Do you have the link?

What a cop out... the code isn't important! Only the data the methodology are important, both of which are published.

Well, do you have a link to THAT then? Any kind of enumerated model which can be scrutinized would be appreciated....

[caspian]

Well, do you have a link to THAT then? Any kind of enumerated model which can be scrutinized would be appreciated....

If you were really serious, rather than just using obvious diversionary tactics designed to waste people's time, then you'd be able to find the information you need. There's a huge body of published work out there if you really cared about the science behind climate change. Much of the discussion on realclimate.org should be enlightening.

[johnathome]

Isn't this all a moot point?

The IEA guy said, before he had to correct himself, that the world would hit peak oil before 2020. With a gradual decline following that then we will have to use alternative energy sources.

So won't this AGW correct itself before the century is out?

Or is this too simplistic a view?

[biffvernon]

Trusting that everybody (yes, even MacG) has read the now two posts on RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org/