"Climategate"
was the 2009
leaked e-mails
from the University
of East Anglia's
Climatic Research Unit,
( and more e-mails in 2011 ).
These e-mails were among the small
group of scientists who drive the
worldwide alarm over global warming,
through the role they play for the
UN's Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC).
CRU's Director Professor Philip Jones
was in charge of the two key sets of data
used by the IPCC for its reports.
The senders and recipients of
the leaked CRU emails included:
Michael "Hockey Stick Chart" Mann,
Phil Jones and his CRU colleague
Keith Briffa,
Ben Santer, responsible for
a controversial rewriting
of key passages
in the IPCC's 1995 report;
Kevin Trenberth,
who pushed the IPCC into
scaremongering over
hurricane activity; and
Gavin Schmidt,
right-hand man
to Dr James Hansen,
whose own NASA-GISS record
of surface temperature data
is second in importance
to that of the CRU itself.
The series of emails show how
Phil Jones and his colleagues
had repeatedly been discussing,
over many years, devious tactics
to avoid releasing their data
to outsiders, under freedom
of information laws.
Phil Jones's
refusal to release
the basic data,
from which the
CRU derives
its hugely influential
temperature record,
was accompanied
by his claim that
much of the raw data
from all over the world ,
had simply got "lost".
More incriminating are e-mails
in which scientists are advised
to delete large chunks of data
... when this is done
after receipt of a freedom
of information request,
is a crime.
What is it that
these scientists
seem so anxious
to hide ?
Leaked documents
clearly showed
the scientists trying to
manipulate data only
in the direction of
lowering past temperatures,
and "adjusting" recent
temperatures upwards,
both creating a faster rate
of global warming.
This comes up often
in the "Harry Read Me" file.
The Harry Read Me file shows
CRU scientists frustrated that
complex computer programs
made it difficult to get
the results they desired !
These climate academics silenced
any expert questioning of their findings,
by refusing to disclose their basic data,
and by 'freezing out' any scientific journal
which dared to publish their critics' work.
EXAMPLES:
March 2, 2001:
Chick Keller, of the
Institute of Geophysics
and Planetary Physics at the University
of California at San Diego, United States,
writes to Mike Mann, Ray Bradley, Phil Jones,
Keith Briffa, Tom Crowley, Jonathan Overpeck,
Tom Wigley, and Mike MacCracken,
pointing out problems in the historical
temperature estimates obtained from
individual “proxy” methods:
"Anyone looking at the records
gets the impression that the
temperature variation for many
individual records or sites
over the past 1000 years or so
is often larger than 1° Celsius.
... And they see this as evidence
that the 0.8° Celsius or so
temperature rise
in the 20th century
is not all that special."
He then makes note of a trick
that they have used to mask this effect:
"The community of climate scientists,
however, in making averages of
different proxies gets a much smaller
amplitude of about 0.5° Celsius,
which they say shows that reasonable
combinations of effects can indeed
explain this and that the 20th century
warming is unique."
Keller provides
an excellent summary
of the debate:
"Thus, the impasse—one side the skeptics
pointing to large temperature variations
in many records around the globe,
and the other side saying, “Yes, but not
at the same time and so, if averaged out,
is no big deal.”
" ... there might be something wrong
with our rationale that the average
does not vary much even though
many regions see large variations."
"This may be the nub of the disagreement,
and until we answer it, many careful scientists
will decide the issue is still unsettled,
and that indeed climate in the past
may well have varied as much or more
than in the last hundred years."
They knew, more than
eight years before the
ClimateGate whistle-blower
released these emails,
that the entire basis of their
unprecedented warming claim
was on shaky ground.
October 6, 2009:
Martin Lutyens,
of the British CO2morrow project,
writes to the Climatic Research
Unit’s Andrew Manning,
the scientific consultant
to CO2morrow:
"I just came across an article in The Week,
called “The case of the vanishing data”."
"It writes in a rather wry and skeptical way
about your University of East Anglia
colleagues Phil Jones and Tom Wigley,
saying that only their “homogenised”
or “adjusted” historical data is available,
and the original, raw data has gone missing."
"According to the article, the adjusted data
forms the basis for much of the climate change
debate and, because others now want to look
at the source data, it is “at the centre of
an academic spat that could
have major implications
for the climate change debate”.
October 27, 2009:
Mikael Mann’s last words before
the e-mails were hacked:
To Phil Jones and Gavin Schmidt:
"As we all know,
this isn’t about
truth at all;
it’s about
plausibly
deniable
accusations."
"Be a bit careful about
what information you send to
Andy Revkin of The New York Times
and what emails you copy him in on.
He’s not as predictable as we’d like."
All the 2009 e-Mails can be read here:
https://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
All the 2009 e-Mails can be read here:
https://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf