This article
was originally
published here
in mid-2019.
It needs to be
published
once a year:
"Climategate"
was the 2009
leaked e-mails
from the University
of East Anglia's
Climatic Research
Unit, and more
were leaked in 2011.
These e-mails
were sent
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 UN's IPCC
for its climate 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
have repeatedly been discussing,
over many years, devious tactics
to avoid releasing their data
to outsiders, under freedom
of information law requests.
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,
which --
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
showed the scientists
trying to
manipulate data only
only in the direction
of lowering the
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.
E-MAIL EXAMPLES:
March 2, 2001:
email 0983566497
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
the "problems"
in the historical
temperature
estimates
obtained from
individual
"climate 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:
email 1254832684
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:
email 1256735067
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."