Climategate Turns 15!

“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” (- Michael Mann, below)

The futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade is in its 37th year, dating from the hot, dry summer of 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm before U.S. lawmakers, led by Al Gore.

Last week, the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ended with acrimony over an unenforceable agreement pledging to transfer wealth to developing (Statist) countries for “clean” energy development.

CO2 emissions cuts? With almost all major emitters well beyond the targets set in the 2015 Paris Accord, the (also) unenforceable agreement is losing more and more every day as self-interest swamps aspirations. The recipient welfare states described COP29 as “chaotic,” “complete failure,” “optical illusion,” “stage managed,” and “paltry.” Big Green recognized the international effort as more greenwashing than progress, not unlike prior COP results. Mainstream media has tried to paint a happy face on the walking dead.

COP29’s failure should not be surprising? Stated James Hansen.

[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

But it all begins with the physical science, and the science of climate alarmism has really never recovered from its PR disaster 15 years ago: Climategate. No amount of whitewashing can erase the words, sentences, and paragraphs of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. Four categories are mentioned below:

Man-Made Warming Controversy

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”

—Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.

“Keith’s [Briffa] series…differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.

“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003

“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004.

“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”

—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008

“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming… 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.”

—Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009.

Manipulating Temperature Data

“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999

“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….

—Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006.

“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….”

—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008.

“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”

—Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011.

Data Suppression; Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004.

“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.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005.

“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008.

“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.”

—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009.

Subverting the Peer-Review Process

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

—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004.

Implications

The establishment whitewashed and then pretended that the episode was over. Mr. Climategate himself, Michael Mann, called the episode “pathetic” and “shameless”. [1] “After three inquiries, thousands of column inches and several death threats,” Dave Reay wrote in Nature, “the ‘Climategate’ affair is now subsiding into the long grass of conspiracy blogs.” [2]

Nope. Climategate is nary forgotten as a blatant case of professional misconduct and a classic case of ‘Busted!”. It lives in infamy.

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[1] Mann added:

As for emails that in some way involve me, I hardly see anything damning at all, despite these snippets all being taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad…. Agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat.”

[2] Better reactions were made by Derek Lowe in Science who stated, “what I feel needs to be looked at is the scientific conduct. I’m no climatologist, but I am an experienced working scientist – so, is there a problem here?”

I’ll give you the short answer: yes. I have to say that there appears to be several, as shown by many troubling features in the documents that have come out. The first one is the apparent attempts to evade the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended…. A second issue is a concerted effort to shape what sorts of papers get into the scientific literature. Again, this does not seem to be a matter of interpretation; such messages as this, this, and this spell out exactly what’s going on. You have talk of getting journal editors fired…. A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis…. No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.

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