British Parliament Whitewashes CRU In ClimateGate

British Parliamentary committee charged with investigating the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has issued what amounts to a whitewash.  As I expected last fall, the investigation was cursory at best, and ignores some key issues. 

...in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.


Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

I suspect that the Guardian newspaper who conducted a much more thorough investigation in February will have much more to say on this in the next few weeks...after all, the Labour party, which has strongly supported "climate change" legislation has absolutely no desire for it to be shown as a hoax...or worse a boondoggle.

Global Warming: Policy Driven Deception

Here is the executive summary from The Science & Public Policy Institute (for those too lazy to "read the whole thing"-lovely turn of phrase, Glenn).

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant "global warming" in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century "global warming".

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC "chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations."

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

In a nutshell, AGW is a hoax of epic proportions. After all the billions and billions of dollars spent on "proving" the science, those behind it, including Al Gore should be prosecuted and have all of the assets seized to reimburse the people for this hoax.

ClimateGate: The Timeline

Here is a link to a .PDF formatted Timeline to ClimateGate. It's eye opening! For literally, the past 30 years, so called "climatologists" have been fraudulently altering temperature data. The scope is tremendous. Take a look at the documents and decide for yourself.

Here is an example of the fraud perpetrated by Jones and the IPCC:

1990
THE WANG AFFAIR AND JONES' URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECT PAPER [48]
JONES is the lead author of a Sep.90 paper [46] which concludes (from Eastern China and other data) there is no relevant urban heat island (UHI) effect (warmer temperatures in and around urban centres). However 3 months later, in Dec.90, his co-author, Wang, publishes another paper [47] (using the very same Eastern China data) but arrives at the opposite conclusion: that there is a significant UHI effect and temperature studies must this take into account to avoid skewing results in favour of warming. (Also see {WIGLEY 26.Nov.2009})

Aside from the fact until the contradictory conclusions are resolved, the papers can't be cited as favoring one position or the other another problem arose with the data set used. Both studies stated that the 84 stations were chosen based on their history such that "few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times".

In February 2007 mathematician Doug Keenan learned from MCINTYRE's blog that data was only available for 35 of them, and of those 35 at least half had substantial moves (eg 25 km). Keenan wrote to JONES asking about the source of location information of the other 49 stations. JONES replied that his co-author Wang had selected those stations in based on his “extensive knowledge of those networks”. So Keenan wrote to Wang, who replied that Zeng (a co-author of [47]) had "hard copies of station histories" but these were not provided to Keenan. However, the problem is that Zeng was also the co-author of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) study which detailed station moves which noted that the “hard copies” to which Wang referred were not found.

Later in 2007 Keenan publishes "The fraud allegation against some climatic research of Wei-Chyung Wang" [49] setting out the matter and despite an investigation by University at Albany (where Wang is employed), and still the "hardcopy" data is not disclosed, nor was the university's investigation report.

In his paper Keenan notes that although JONES may not have known about the fraud in 1990, by 2001 he did due to subsequent papers JONES wrote which addressed the station moves and stated "those relocations substantially affected the measured temperatures" in direct contradiction to the 1990 paper. "Thus, by 2001, Jones must have known that the claims of Wang were not wholly true." Keenan wrote to JONES but received no reply. [49]

The 1990 Jones et al paper has been the major evidence presented by JONES in all of the IPCC reports to dismiss the influence of urban change on the temperature measurements, and also has been used as an excuse for the failure to mention most of the unequivocal evidence that such urban effects exist. The paper was even dragged out again for the 2007 IPCC report. [39] In fact determining the UHI is not complicated at all, for example see [61]: "Picking out the UHI in climatic temperature records - so easy a 6th grader can do it!"

On 31.Aug.2007 WIGLEY e-mailed JONES that Keenan is correct: "Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone ([Wang] at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect." ([1188557698.txt] with more in [1241415427.txt])

ClimateGate, There IS Substantial Evidence Of AGW, NOT!

A great sypopsys of the "denier" arguments...found in volokhconspiracy.com about halfway down.

schizuki says:

Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming

Really? Where? Because all of the “evidence” I’ve seen has been suspect. Do you have a link to any of this “substantial theoretical and empirical evidence”?

The argument always goes like this:

“Sure, the Hockey Stick was shown to be fraudulent, but there is still plenty of other substantial theoretical and empirical evidence.”

“Sure, James Hansen’s NASA climate data was shown to be corrupt, but there is still plenty of other substantial theoretical and empirical evidence.”

“Sure, temperature tracking stations were shown to have had air-conditioning exhausts installed right next to them, but there is still plenty of other substantial theoretical and empirical evidence.”

“Sure, East Anglia CRU is the most influential player in Global Warming research and policy formulation, and has been exposed as a cabal of data-cookers and debate-squelchers, but there is still plenty of other substantial theoretical and empirical evidence.”

“Sure, he hit me a few times, but he’s really a sweet guy when he’s not drinking.”

Quote

ClimateGate--Winning the Propaganda Battle

Are the "deniers" finally winning the ClimateGate battles? Brian Micklethwait of samizdata.com thinks so:

...the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monkton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It's all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time.

That can only mean that despite nearly 20 years of propaganda, the "warmists" are apparently losing the debate, both in the realm of public opinion as well as in the media where the MSM has belatedly begun to report on ClimateGate. Already in this country, a majority doesn't believe that there is a problem now...I suspect that this is the direction world wide as well...especially with reports that in Copenhagen, confusion and chaos is running rampant, both inside as well as outside the conference.

Lord Monckton has done a yeoman's job in not just denouncing, but in actively refuting the "settled science" at the heart of the global warming fraud. Follow the link for an excellent video where you names-names, etc. on the criminals who are behind it all.

CRU Sends Tree Ring Data Down The Memory Hole

The CRU which promised to release all of their data is now blocking access to the public.

And it’s not just subfolders with data, it is the entire Climate Research Unit website that is shielded from public view. Try the main link which has been functional for years:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk
In the last press release issued by UEA we read:

Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor said: “The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the upmost importance to us all.

So now apparently, in this newly pledged period of “openness and transparency”, with the promise of releasing new data access, such as the Met office has done here:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html

The access to important CRU data is simply denied?

That’s a hell of a way to build public trust.

Of course it is...but obviously, that information is just too complicated for mere proles to understand, and thus must be kept for scientific access only...

Lord Monckton Confronts "Warmist" At Copenhagen

Climate Data Looks Falsified

Whatsupwiththat.com has an excellent article on what appears to be falsification of the data the CRU, NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and the NOAA/(GHCN), the Global Historical Climate Network accrued for the continent of Australia for the last 120 years. It's a rather lengthy post and has a number of graphs that make understanding much easier for those of us who are the great unwashed masses and therefore "not able to understand complicated subject matter such as this" (to more or less quote the great Phil Jones, Dir of CRU).

Basically, what it looks like is that the data that the IPCC AR4 report (to be presented in Copenhagen today) has been massaged and almost 5 deg C has been gradually fed into the tempuratures to make them seem much, much warmer than is actually the case. IPCC depends upon CRU, GISS and GHCN, but primarily on the latter for Australian temps.

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.

However, upon close examination it appears that those numbers have no relationship to the raw data...which shows a very gradual increase in temperature over the past century plus twenty years....

Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

To quote Mr. Eschenbach,

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

But what after all does it mean to be "inhomogeneity”? The best definition is from GHCN itself:

Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time series of their observations inhomogeneous. There are many causes for the discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these occur at the same time, as is often the case with the introduction of automatic weather stations that is occurring in many parts of the world. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of longterm climate change, adjustments are needed to compensate for the nonclimatic discontinuities.

The reason for doing this is to remove aberations from the data, for instance if a station is moved to a warmer area, then you must "remove" the higher tempurature thus, "homoginizing" it...to make a more consistent data set. An excellent example he gives is from the Darwin, Australia area:

Figure 5. Five individual temperature records for Darwin, plus station count (green line). This raw data is downloaded from GISS, but GISS use the GHCN raw data as the starting point for their analysis.

Darwin does have a few advantages over other stations with multiple records. There is a continuous record from 1941 to the present (Station 1). There is also a continuous record covering a century. finally, the stations are in very close agreement over the entire period of the record. In fact, where there are multiple stations in operation they are so close that you can’t see the records behind Station Zero.

However, there is a serious problem that occurs when you place the "massaged data set" and the raw data set on the same graph...you get a very different result:
Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Of course, that led me to look at exactly how the GHCN “adjusts” the temperature data. Here’s what they say in An Overview of the GHCN Database:

GHCN temperature data include two different datasets: the original data and a homogeneity- adjusted dataset. All homogeneity testing was done on annual time series. The homogeneity- adjustment technique used two steps.

The first step was creating a homogeneous reference series for each station (Peterson and Easterling 1994). Building a completely homogeneous reference series using data with unknown inhomogeneities may be impossible, but we used several techniques to minimize any potential inhomogeneities in the reference series.
…
In creating each year’s first difference reference series, we used the five most highly correlated neighboring stations that had enough data to accurately model the candidate station.
…
The final technique we used to minimize inhomogeneities in the reference series used the mean of the central three values (of the five neighboring station values) to create the first difference reference series.

Fair enough, that all sounds good. They pick five neighboring stations, and average them. Then they compare the average to the station in question. If it looks wonky compared to the average of the reference five, they check any historical records for changes, and if necessary, they homogenize the poor data mercilessly. I have some problems with what they do to homogenize it, but that’s how they identify the inhomogeneous stations.

OK … but given the scarcity of stations in Australia, I wondered how they would find five “neighboring stations” in 1941 …

So I looked it up. The nearest station that covers the year 1941 is 500 km away from Darwin. Not only is it 500 km away, it is the only station within 750 km of Darwin that covers the 1941 time period. (It’s also a pub, Daly Waters Pub to be exact, but hey, it’s Australia, good on ya.) So there simply aren’t five stations to make a “reference series” out of to check the 1936-1941 drop at Darwin.

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming. {emphasis is mine}

If the IPCC is doing this with just one continent's worth of data, what in the hell are they doing with the rest of the world? It's quite possible that this has been done with all of the data, until someone can take the time to review it all that's the logical assumption to take. To me, this means that Anthorpomorphic Global Warming is a complete fraud. We as a nation have spent billions of dollars researching this "problem" only to discover that the money has basically been put to fraudulent use. Now the problem is to come to grips with WHY someone would do this. I have my opinions, but need to do some further research. Lord Monckton's view is that it's a back door attempt by former communists to complete their take over of the world via sever regulation of the global economy...I'm not sure I'd go that far, but his reasoning is fairly impecible.

Physicists Ask American Physical Society To Recind Global Warming Statement

Here is the request in full, all emphasis is mine:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

ClimateGate: A Brief Explaination

Charles Martin on Pajamasmedia.com has an excellent point by point run down of why this issue is so disturbing. In brief, here are the three main points:

The Climategate files held many embarrassing revelations. They appear to show collusion on the part of many of the top names in climate science:

* to subvert peer review and prevent publication of papers that didn’t completely agree with the favored theory;

*to manipulate data, and the analysis of data, to make the best case for the favored theory;

*to avoid releasing their data under the Freedom of Information laws in the U.S. and UK.

It is the last point that the various researchers have been under investigation for in both the US and the UK...as this is crime and is punishable as such. Follow the links and read the whole thing!

CRU's Andrew Watson Insults Colleague On BBC

Professor Watson gets quite agitated in this exchange.

Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, the University at the center of the Climategate controversy, has come to the defense of his colleagues this week and is claiming that the whole email and data release is much ado about nothing.

But other scientists disagree. One of Watson’s colleagues at the University of East Anglia, Professor Mike Hulme, declared Climategate reveals climate science had become ‘too partisan, too centralized.” Hulme, a climate scientist who was listed as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, does not mince words on the magnitude of the scandal.

Hulme has even suggested that the UN IPCC has run its course. ”

“It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures,” Hulme wrote on November 27, 2009.

“It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the [UN] I.P.C.C. has run its course. “The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production,” Hulme explained.

Lord Monckton's St. Paul, MN Lecture With Slides

I just finished watching an excellent video of Christopher, Lord Monckton of his lecture in St. Paul, MN. He goes through the IPCC report point, by point and essentially refutes all those points of hysteria. He does so with devastating wit. His conclusion on the Copenhagen treaty is three points,

First--Creation of a World Government that will force...

Second--Reparations to be paid to 3rd world countries by shifting enormous amounts of wealth from the "west".

Third--Enforcement...only way to leave the treaty "organization" is with the permission of ALL the other countries that are participating.

traffic light tendency

they call themselves.....Green
because they are too....Yellow
to admit they're..........Reds!

“Poor Al Gore: Global Warming Completely Debunked By the Internet You Invented.”

The Global Warming Debate, by Mike Ramirez

Eduard Zorita, Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process

A prominent climatologist inScientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, the Department of Paleoclimate, which is part of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, named Eduard Zorita has written a statement that demands that those researchers who are the heart of Climategate be banned from further involvement in the IPCC process. Here is his statement:

Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process,
November 2009

Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.

A longer answer: My voice is not very important. I belong to the climate-research infantry, publishing a few papers per year, reviewing a few manuscript per year and participating in a few research projects. I do not form part of important committees, nor I pursue a public awareness of my activities. My very minor task in the public arena was to participate as a contributing author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. My area of research happens to be the climate of the past millennia, where I think I am appreciated by other climate-research 'soldiers'. And it happens that some of my mail exchange with Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn can be found in the CRU-files made public recently on the internet.

To the question of legality or ethicalness of reading those files I will write a couple of words later.

I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.

These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research.

I thank explicitely Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn for their work in the formulation of one Chapter of the IPCC report. As it destills from these emails, they withstood the evident pressure of other IPCC authors, not experts in this area of research, to convey a distorted picture of our knowledge of the hockey-stick graph.

Is [it] legal or ethical to read the CRU files? I am not a lawyer. It seems that if the files had been hacked this would constitute an illegal act. If they have been leaked it could be a whistle blower action protected by law. I think it is not unethical to read them. Once published, I feel myself entitled to read how some researchers tried to influence reviewers to scupper the publication of our work on the 'hockey stick graph' or to read how some IPCC authors tried to exclude this work from the IPCC Report on very dubious reasons. Also, these mails do not contain any personal information at all. They are an account of many dull daily activities of typical climatologists, together with a realistic account of very troubling professional behavior.

ClimateGate, What It's About: A Synopsys

The following, in it's entirety was found i the comments of TigerHawk, a blog by a professor of Princeton University. It's a great synopsis of what ClimateGate is about. It was posted by the ubiquitous anonymous poster (though TigerHawk has his email address/IPP)...I decided to post the entire (2) entries because they are an excellent brief on what the brouhaha is all about.

By Anonymous, at Sun Nov 29, 12:07:00 PM:

Following is copied from another source but is quite illuminating:

"An easy explanation of what ClimateGate means,

ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.

ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.

ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.

ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.

ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:

Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.

1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved.

2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas effect coefficient in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.

continuing ....

By Anonymous, at Sun Nov 29, 12:13:00 PM:

contiunuing ...

3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.

4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.

5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)"

This seems to be an accurate assessment of what happened. Should we be surprised that the models have failed to predict the last ten years? What's scary is that they models could have been half right, because of dumb luck.


If this assessment is correct, the World has been had by an epic conspiracy. If so, the hockey stick is at the center of this, which implicates Michael Mann. What did Al Gore know and when did he know it?

Climategate Documents

Hit the title for the complete list and down loadable files/data sets/emails for all the of the Climategate docs. Some of the excerpts of emails within the archives (edited for brevity, emphasis added):

From Michael E. Mann (withholding of information / data):

Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

From Nick McKay (modifying data):

The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said. I took a look at the original reference – the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong, unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this sound right to you?

From Tom Wigley (acknowleding the urban effect):

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

From Phil Jones (modification of data to hide unwanted results):

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.

From Kevin Trenberth (failure of computer models):

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.

From Michael Mann (truth doesn't matter):

Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa '06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.

From Phil Jones (withholding of data):

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! ... The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
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 !

From Michael E. Mann (using a website to control the message, hide dissent):

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

From Phil Jones (withholding of data):

If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.

Seriosly, don't take my word for it. Take a look at the files themselves. They are quite damning. Even more importantly, I spent the last few days trying to make the smallest of the computer models work. I have some experience with coding using FORTRAN77. The programs are a mess and literally don't work.

Mostly, I feel very sorry for the mysterious "Harry" who spent 3 years trying to make these programs work. He must be a gibbering idiot by now. I gave up after a few days and this porr man spent over 3 years trying to make the operate in the manner CRU claimed they would. No wonder why the CRU was hiding it. They can't make their models work, much less match the historical trends. Nor can they show in their models that they can accurately predict the future, much less match the present and historical date.

Yet, we are told that the science is "settled" and if you present a countervailing view, you are a "denier" and are the equivalent of someone who denies they Holocaust took place. It certainly appears to me that not only has the science not been "settled" but they haven't reached the level of a theory, only that of a hypothesis. I always learned way back in grade school, that scientific research started with an idea, which was then built into a hypothesis:

A hypothesis (from Greek ὑπόθεσις; plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon...People refer to a trial solution to a problem as a hypothesis — often called an "educated guess"[5] — because it provides a suggested solution based on the evidence. Experimenters may test and reject several hypotheses before solving the problem.

But, if you deny any other hypothesis as invalid, without either testing, or modeling are you not creating invalid science yourself? Therein lies the problem here as I see it. These men are not only denying access to their data/models, but they are refusing to allow anyone else to test their hypothetical models, thus they don't have a theory, and the science is not only not "settle" but they are imposing a viewpoint that hasn't been proven in any manner at all.

It is upon this base that they demand that our entire civilization completely alter the way we create energy, and how we approach our daily lives. That's not science, it's politics and perhaps economics, but it's certainly not politics.

Climategate: Expert Prognosis, Hack Was Inside Job

An excellent sysopsis of how a hack is done has been posted on "Its Tea Time" blog.

Hit the title to a link for a full read...and I suggest that you read "the whole thing" as Glenn Reynolds would say.

An often cited statistic above is "80% of hacks are from insiders". True, but it does depend on what manner of hack to stay within that statistic. Further, many hacks are simply not reported.

Will's conclusion is that the hack was conducted by someone on the inside who is angry that at FOIA request was denied. He concludes this from the date/time of some of the last emails, etc.:

Update: I found the following report from Steve McIntyre's blog (a prominent climate change critic) pointing out further evidence it may have been an insider, based partly on a very recent FOIA refusal from CRU.

Additionally, he concludes that, I am, personally still not ruling out the possibility of an outside, foreign intelligence agency being behind the hack. This is because of the monetary motive, the sophistication of the release, the history of intelligence based hacking against even human rights organizations, and the history of such attacks being generally something which comes "from the outside" when the logs are posted publicly. It should be noted that this would be an extremely dangerous, diplomatically attack to perform. So, in this case, the FOIA angle would be cover, or as they say, "plausible deniability". A red herring.

For me, this simply raises the probability this hack was performed "from the inside".