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Written by Rebecca Terrell and Ed Hiserodt
Monday, 23 November 2009 00:00
Global warming alarmists are scrambling to save face after hackers stole hundreds of incriminating e-mails from a British university and published them on the Internet.
The messages were pirated from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and reveal correspondence between British and American researchers engaged in fraudulent reporting of data to favor their own climate change agenda. UEA officials confirmed one of their servers was hacked, and several of the scientists involved admitted the authenticity of the messages, according to the New York Times. The article opined, "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument."
Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels challenged that position. "This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud." The e-mails implicate scores of researchers, most of whom are associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization many skeptics believe was created exclusively to provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Among the IPCC elite embarrassingly, if not criminally, compromised is Phillip D. Jones, a Ph.D. climatologist at the University of East Anglia whose work figured prominently in the IPCC Third Assessment Report of 2001. Jones also contributed significantly to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 (AR4), but he failed to follow through when skeptical investigators asked to review raw data associated with that report. They announced intent to use UK Freedom of Information laws to obtain the data, so Jones sent the following e-mail to one of his collaborators: "Mike, Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.... Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?... Will be getting Caspar to do likewise." The Mike in this message is Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, whose influential "hockey stick" graph warning of pending global warming eco-catastrophe was found by a congressional investigation to be fraudulent. In another correspondence about AR4 labeled HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, Jones contacted Mann regarding research critical of their global warming platform. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," wrote Jones. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
Mann received another incriminating e-mail from Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a New Zealander now with the University of Colorado and Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." An incredulous Trenberth simply blamed "our [inadequate] observing system." Yet he and his colleagues are now dodging the "Climategate" bullet, indignant that global warming skeptics are supposedly taking their comments out of context. One wonders if they might be referring to a message from Jones who wrote about a statistical "trick" he used to "hide" data. Or perhaps they mean Mann's reference to climate change skeptics as "idiots."
Monday, 23 November 2009 / 40 comments
CRU emails reveal a worrying pattern of bad behaviour
by Sinclair Davidson
Sometime last week the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia was hacked and materials stolen off its server. That information, including thousands of emails, has been posted on the internet (including at Wikileaks) and has caused a weekend of frantic blogging. There is more or less a rather juicy scandal brewing
This is not a good look at all. Some of this behaviour is bad form, some of it unethical, and some of it potentially illegal. The destruction of data subject to a freedom-of-information request is illegal. The CRU has argued that a lot of their early raw data was destroyed because they couldn’t store it. That explanation is, unfortunately, all too plausible. We live in a world where as recently as 20 years ago, data would have been thrown away for want of storage space. These irreplaceable and valuable historical documents are likely to have been tossed. Why then find a 2005 email from Phil Jones: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”?
