By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 27, 2020
[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]
“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pierce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.
“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.
Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.
Eleven years ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control. But with such an evidentiary record of scientific malpractice, books solidified the record such as:
- The Hockey Stick Illusion, by A. W. Montford (2010)
- Hiding the Decline: A History of the Climategate Affair, by A. W. Montford (2012)
- Climategate: The Crutape Letters, by Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller (2010)
- Climategate, by Brian Sussmanh (2010)
- A Disgrace to the Profession, by Mark Steyn (2015)
Perhaps the most revealing book was by a fair broker of mainstream climate science, Fred Pierce, The Climate Files (2010). Pierce fairly identified Michael Mann as the worst of the bad actors–and Steve McIntyre as the data liberator. Regarding Michael Mann (p. 90):
Mann has always been a tasty target. His voluble style has made enemies and exasperated his friends. “The goddam guy is a slick talker and super-confident. He won’t listen to anyone else,” one of climate science’s most senior figures … told me. “I don’t trust people like that. A lot of data sets he uses are shitty, you know. They are just not up to what he is trying to do….”
And in contrast, Steve McIntyre (pp. 13–14):
Climategate would not have happened without … Steve McIntyre. Whether you see him as a hero or a villain, his data wars with Mann, Jones, Briffa, and Santer helped create the siege mentality among the scientists, and set them on a path of opposition to freedom of information. By drawing in scores of data liberationists from both inside and outside the science community, he certainly inspired whoever stole and released the emails.
Here are some remembrances of the good guys and gals for the record.
“Of course, if you believe the mainstream media, Climategate was little more than a fake news story concocted by a small cabal of wicked deniers in order to discredit the noble cause of climate science. This is a lie and a particularly dangerous lie at that.”
“Climategate was the scandal that exposed this truth to the world. And that’s why the increasingly powerful alarmist Establishment has long fought so hard to play down its significance. The alarmists — helped by a lazily complicit media — are trying to do to the scandal what Harvey Keitel’s Winston ‘The Wolf’ Wolfe character did in Pulp Fiction: clean up the bodies, pretend nothing untoward ever happened.”
“My own involvement in Climategate was actually quite modest. At least, the heavy lifting was done by people much more diligent and scientifically minded than me, such as Steve McIntyre, Willis Eschenbach, Joanna Nova, Anthony Watts, Lucia Liljegren, Andrew Montford, Ross McKitrick, Fred Pearce, Roger Tallbloke, Christopher Booker, David Rose, Jeff Id, Jean S, Steven Mosher, and many others.”
“What Climategate revealed, however, is that the climate change ‘experts’ we’re supposed to trust just aren’t trustworthy. They lie, they cheat, they’re motivated more by grant-troughing and dodgy political activism than they are by — lol — the disinterested quest for knowledge. That was the real shocker at the time of Climategate: that the people on whose ‘expert’ wisdom trillions of dollars worth of your money and my money are being spent on sundry green boondoggles are in fact a lousy bunch of fraudulent second-raters unfit to run a cookie bake sale, let alone a scam involving upwards of one percent of the global economy.”
“In November 2009 I was in Brussels at a climate skeptic conference being put on by Hans Lobohm. I remember the first message I got…. “You need to look at this!“. Then reading the emails, wide-eyed, and realizing I [decided] … under no circumstances would we write anything about it or release it until I was back on U.S. soil. Then, after clearing customs at Dulles two days later, I sat down in the airport, and wrote the story, breaking the news on the 19th.”
“Luckily, James Delingpole picked up the story for his column, and its entry into the British newspaper The Telegraph started the chain reaction that made the story grow, becoming the ‘worst scientific scandal of our generation‘.”
“But while proponents of ‘the cause’ (most notably the execrable Michael E. Mann in a recent op-ed for Newsweek) pat themselves on the back comforting each other with ‘there’s nothing to see here’, there are reasons to rejoice about Climategate ten years later.”
“Climategate brought chaos to Copenhagen aka COP15 – critically wounding the prospects of cap-and-trade legislation in the process. It helped the world dodge the climate mania bullet for 5 years, until the Paris accord in 2015.”
Donald Trump became aware of the Climategate story, years before he became President, and I have to think (since he has mentioned it) that it affected his opinion…. And as we know, as President, he fulfilled his campaign promises and pulled the USA out of the Paris Climate Accord, and gutted the draconian EPA.
“For [the above], I am proud to have had a part, along with the Heartland Institute, whose advice and support gave Trump even more ammunition to pull off the withdrawal from the Paris accord.”
“There was no exoneration [of Climategate] by any objective analysis of the various inquiries. Ross McKitrick lays all this out in his article Understanding the Climategate Inquiries.”
“The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC and WMO reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers. The divergence problem was concealed by deleting data to ‘hide the decline.’ The panels that examined the issue in detail, namely Muir Russell’s panel, concurred that the graph was ‘misleading.’ The ridiculous attempt by the Penn State Inquiry to defend an instance of deleting data and splicing in other data to conceal a divergence problem only discredits their claims to have investigated the issue.”
“The scientists privately expressed greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers. Rather than criticise the scientists for this, the inquiries (particularly the House of Commons and Oxburgh inquiries) took the astonishing view that as long as scientists expressed doubts and uncertainties in their academic papers and among themselves, it was acceptable for them to conceal those uncertainties in documents prepared for policy makers.”
“… academics reading the emails could see quite clearly the tribalism at work, and in comparison to other fields, climatology comes off looking juvenile, corrupt and in the grip of a handful of self-appointed gatekeepers and bullies.”
“Given the huge stakes and the serious structural issues surrounding the assessment of climate science and policy that had emerged from Climategate, these concerns of the climate scientists seem small-minded and naïve, not to mention counter-productive – ‘circling the wagons’ even tighter made the situation even worse.”
“At the time of Climategate, public advocacy by climate scientists of climate policy was generally frowned upon, and only a few senior, well-established scientists dared to do this (e.g. Jim Hansen). At this point, climate scientist/activists are very large in number, and such activism seems to be a ticket to professional success.”
“… Climategate lives on in numerous lawsuits that Michael Mann has filed related to criticisms of his behavior related to the hockeystick. Most of these lawsuits continue to languish since they were filed about 8 years ago (although Mann did lose his lawsuit against Tim Ball). With these lawsuits, there is no denying that the impacts of Climategate are still playing out.”
Update: The New “Denialists”
Some of the involved scientists, such as Michael Mann, as well as a five-part series of blogs at DESMOG have felt it necessary to relive the controversy. None dare do the most simple thing: provide the quotations. (I provided a dirty dozen here that speak for themselves.)
Mann states:
While the fossil fuel industry had for decades sought to forestall regulation of carbon emissions, Climategate illustrated the depths of dishonesty to which denialists were willing to sink in their efforts to sabotage action on climate. It was a tacit admission on their part that they no longer had a legitimate case to make.
And so citing “Climategate” as a reason for inaction has become a simple “tell” in the climate discourse. Those who do it are acting in bad faith. They are not honest actors expressing true belief. They are dissemblers intentionally misrepresenting the science and the scientists to score political points on behalf of the fossil fuel interests whose bidding they are doing.
Such an interpretation is wishful versus actual history. (It is still not known who hacked the emails; just that they were hacked.) And Michael Mann was at the center of it, inspiring one professional climatologist to humorously opine that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.”
Mann is an ordinary charlatan.
Plus infinity!
Wrong. It was established that it even was a hack, despite the UK cybercrime unit being called in very early and even seizing private PCs of those who downloaded the initial data file.
The file was left on an open access ftp server and was probably being prepared with an intent to comply with LEGAL FIOA requests under UK law.
It’s a shame that WUWT , which was intrumental in getting global attention to the leak, cannot get the facts straight on the FAKE claim the UEA was “hacked”.
The claim that there was a “hack” was to avoid admitting such a careless mistake and in a attempt to put the contents into question or avoid reporting the contents.
As with the equally fictitious DNC “hack” they then attempt to divert attention from the very damaging contents.
“intent to comply with LEGAL FIOA requests under UK law”
This from a mob that were actively discussing how to get around FIOA law? Not likely. Then, there was also Climategate 2.0 later, which proves it wasn’t done by the people trying to pervert the course of science.
Greg, you reference to the DNC “hack” gave away your game. You are not to be trusted.
From the article: “That was the real shocker at the time of Climategate: that the people on whose ‘expert’ wisdom trillions of dollars worth of your money and my money are being spent on sundry green boondoggles are in fact a lousy bunch of fraudulent second-raters unfit to run a cookie bake sale, let alone a scam involving upwards of one percent of the global economy.”
And nothing has changed. We are still doing the same stupid thing today: Listening to Charlatans and spending Trillions of dollars on their advice.
Exactly right, Tom. Nothing changed.
Mann: white-washed. Phil Jones: white-washed. Pseudo-science hailed. The whole kit and caboodle going on as before.
The real lesson of climategate is that the system is irredeemably corrupt.
“Pat Frank November 30, 2020 at 3:18 pm
Exactly right, Tom. Nothing changed.”
I disagree. What I have seen change is the political desire to increase the speed in the race to the bottom. Take the UK, installing hundreds of solar and wind plants. Australia, blowing up coal fired power stations in favour of solar and wind with Tesla battery backup. Etc etc. It seems the “West” is h3ll bent on destroying itself.
Progressives are hell bent on destroying the West and its principled individual freedom, Pat.
tonight i got a power co email
my bill is to rise 166$ a year!!!
Victoria where the green lunacy is costing billions in wind n solar
and we were told our bills would DROP 200 or more a year
on a tight budget pension thats a low blow to have to find something else to cut
The lesson of ClimateGate to the liars and climate conspirators was to stop doing dirty, conspiratorial communications on such means that were preserved, either by their institutions email curation requirements or even the fact that GMail accounts can be hacked as John Podesta found out in 2016.
Today I imagine they stick to phone calls/conference calls, personal letters, strong encryption email attachments, and private conversations at conferences, etc. Like any criminal enterprise or terrorist group, exposing their communications has simply made them more careful about what they put in writing between themselves.
For Mann and his co-conspirators, the lesson they learned from ClimateGate was “Don’t Get Caught.”
Summed up Climategate for me.
I did not even bother reading them for about two years after it hit the headlines. I knew for a fact that even the worst of them didn’t really believe the disaster scenarios, and argued about them behind closed doors. So why bother?
When I did read them what shocked me was the personal vindictiveness and lengths that some of them would go to in order to destroy a fellow scientist’s reputation, career, and life. I’d never seen anything that bad in ‘science’ academia.
Hi, Michael
I think the problem is that climatology is really a religion, not a science.
I call it “Edenism” because its basis is that there is some natural order, some call it the Garden of Eden,
that we must get back to, a truly reactionary idea, not progressive in any sense. How does a scientific ignoramus like Al Gore sell himself and millions of others on the idea that CO2 is a pollutant? This stupid and unscientific idea is now solidly endorsed by millions of people the world over. I don’t think they are insane or ill-willed, just poorly informed.
The utter failure of the scientific community to put a cap on this nonsense utterly amazes and disgusts me. The root of the problem intellectually goes back to Malthus and his modern-day followers like the cynical and intellectually dishonest butterfly ‘scientist’, Paul Ehrlich.
Complicit in all the unsavory dealings of “climategate” are the establishment media worldwide.
Talk about denial – the establishment media were still insisting that the emails were a “false flag” tactic being perpetrated by ‘the enemies of science’ even as the climate carpetbaggers cabal were admitting their authorships.
Just look at how the msm salivates over the opportunity to broadcast alarmist climate porn –
400 organizations worldwide now unashamedly beating the “climate crisis” drum.
https://www.coveringclimatenow.org/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/4/climate-crisis-media-coverage-raises-alarm-about-j/
Apple just purged my Climategate reference app from their app store, on the grounds that it offers “minimal functionality”. The Android version is still available for now.
That’s ironic Eric.
Seeing that the whole climate catastrophe carpetbaggers definitely offer “minimal functionality”.
Thanks for this – I downloaded the Android version just now.
Nothing has changed since Climategate with regards to AGW except it is probably now more entrenched. Buying and owning the MSM allowed the Marxists to get around the first amendment and control the narrative. Now they have moved on to governments.
Once again it is time for wisdom from the old Vancouver Stock Exchange.
The definition of promotion:
“At the beginning of the promotion, the promoter has the vision and the public has the money.
At the end, the public has the vision and the promoter has the money.”
I remember when this broke, a friend said to me that the climate scam was over.
I told him nope – they’ll shove the shit back up the horse.
He didn’t think it could be done.
I also told him the last election wasn’t going to be left up to the vote.
Boy, do I hate being right all the time.
Democracy is too important to be left up to the people.
Almost as bad as the inflammatory emails themselves were the tortured sophistries trotted out to explain what were obviously manipulations of data to produce desired conclusions. Common words and phrases developed new, benign meanings known only to credentialed scientists. What they couldn’t explain away was the malicious scheming to subvert peer review, or hide publicly owned data, and reviews of the scandal did condemn them (mildly) for those failings.
Nobody bothered to ask, when data were adjusted, why did the adjustment always support the climate change narrative? If anybody had asked this question, the only answer would have been because the adjustments were meant to support the climate change narrative, which was so obviously anti-scientific that anyone could see that it was crooked.
Nobody bothered to ask …
The so-called mainstream media avoids a lot of questions it should be asking about more than just climategate.
‘Almost as bad as the inflammatory emails themselves were the tortured sophistries trotted out to explain what were obviously manipulations of data to produce desired conclusions’
Boy – you can apply that to progressive methodology right across the board. Kinda like the way they turned out the ‘most secure election ever’.
Lot of the same people, too.
I think about FOIA (the whistleblower) occasionally. I give thanks for their peeling back the curtain hiding= the inner workings of the climate science community.
I hope he/she is well.
Me too. I also hope I live long enough to learn who exactly that was. I don’t for a moment believe the CRU server was hacked by an outsider. The organization of the email file, as opposed to the document file, makes me think this was a FOIA response that was stopped (officially) and then leaked.
Probably feeling very frustrated.
I’ve been following along since Day 1.
Unfortunately Anthro-Global-Warming has become an axiom of many in the developed nations.
A guess became an hypothesis became a theory became religion.
Good ole ClimateGate … still makes me smile 🙂
“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler,
There is no suppressing the hubris in the ranks of climate science’s Dunning-Kruger laureates.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
To even think that climate ‘science’ as practiced by the cast of characters in climategate is science at all would be an even greater PR disaster for real science.
Michael E. Mann is a climate activist:
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/advisory-board/
If Biden gets in, and the out of control “climate’ people get going, it will make climategate a kindergarten version.
One thing I have learned from climategate and now covid is that leftist views themselves as righteous, and thus everyone who does not agree as unrighteousness and deplorable. Which means that anything they do for the cause is righteous. It is okay to lie, commit election fraud, kill, let people die, rob, impovish, be a hypocrite, censor, blacklist. The people who you are doing this to are subhuman or acceptable losses. The cause is righteous, thus the ends always justify the means.
Nothing came from climategate because these people don’t play by the same rules moral people do.
I’m sure the same kind of chattering cabal exists at the top of my particular stovepipe – without the Trillions of dollars at stake.
I’m sure the same kind of chattering cabal exists at the top of my particular stovepipe – without the Trillions of dollars at stake.
I thought there was still another dump of emails that was distributed to a few people, but wasn’t ever released. If someone has any information about this, please post it here.
Considering that the proverbial manure was shoved back in the horse’s a** (great analogy, thanks @joel Snider), perhaps another dump of emails would result in further illumination of the dubious behaviour of the climate cabal.
Well, Daryl M, here it is, nearly a week later and no answer.
Quite disappointing. You are getting the same response from the WUWT publisher and editor that we have been getting for over 6 years. Silence.
Here is what I can share with you (using my workplace’s wifi (because I have none) and short on time, so, only a brief summary of the Climategate III situation, here):
Mike G, November 17, 2014, 5:11PM
“Maybe now would be a good time to summarize what happened with III.”
mebbe, November 17, 2014, 5:59PM
“Mike G, … I can’t understand the deathly silence that surrounds CG III. Does everybody else know what was in the final stash and it’s just Mike G and me that missed that episode?”
SkepticGoneWild, November 17, 2014, 7:02PM
“Agreed. Was CG III a bust? Or what? So what gives? Why the deafening silence??”
David Ball, November 17, 2014 7:37PM
“… just search this blog. It seems to be a delicate subject as our host has the key to the III. I have been told they are of no consequence, but there are 220,000 of them. Hopefully we will be able to judge for ourselves someday,……
charles the moderator, November 18, 2014, 12:10AM
“… I’ll see if I can find the status of CG III for those who asked above. *** If I find anything to report on CG III, I’ll comment in this thread … .”
Mike G, November 18, 2014, 2:58PM
“I won’t hold my breath. For all those who have the key to have dropped the subject suddenly like it was a hot potato, there must have been some pretty serious threats made by some pretty powerful people … .”
Mebbe, November 18, 2014, 5:12PM
“That’s my take on it, too. *** It’s bizarre.”
Above quotes copied from this thread: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/17/quote-of-the-week-5th-anniversary-of-climategate.
**********************************************
As of today, there has been NO EXPLANATION (that I know of) of why the third group of Climategate emails has never been released.
This thread https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/climategate-the-ctm-story/
gives you the chain of custody at WUWT —
by Charles Rotter
“I am the head moderator here, *** Here’s the story of how I was one of the very first to see the CRU files. ***
Tuesday November 17th … the now infamous post came in from user FOIA at 6:25 PST.
*** I started firing off emails to Anthony … In this first couple of hours I also burned a CD for Steven Mosher and gave it to him *** I had not given the link to Mosher as I was trying to control any traceable spread of the information. *** Many wonder why I selected Steven Mosher to be the first recipient of the files. Well, I knew he was eminently qualified to examine them, much more qualified than myself. … .”
Charles very bravely exposed his full name and city of residence that day. Reading that part again just now was quite moving – that was not an easy thing for him to do.
Bottom line: Anthony, Steve, and Charles are the ones to ask this question (I have seen this question asked from time to time by WUWT commenters including myself over the past ~7 years) which has
never been answered:
“Why does WUWT (or someone else at A, S, or C’s direction) not publish in total the third group of Climategate emails?”
I remember… this video!
https://youtu.be/ftVDI8522p0
I keep searching for some empirical evidence or proof that CO2 is responsible for doing to the climate all that it is unremittingly accused of. I can find none. Just the repetition of the original hypothesis and the repeated claim that 0.040% of a trace gas, that is necessary for life on earth, is creating (as O’Biden says) an existential crisis for mankind. I’m not so sure about that, but the narrative that CO2 causes dangerous climate change IS causing a crisis for those who live and work in Alberta, Canada. The oil and gas industry has been decimated by a Trudeau for the second time in Alberta. Thousands of jobs have been lost, investment has vanished, and the economy has shrunk. Peoples lives have been ruined, and there have been many sad stories involving related suicides, especially in the Calgary area. These are real events human events and not constructed projections of what may happen as a result of our continuing obsession with CO 2, a harmless, beneficial gas.
Michael Mann of course has an ego that would prevent him from seeing the human consequences of his story telling. Repeating and supporting the BIG LIE in order to profit from it is his life. Michael Mann is a bully and a coward and eventually will have his pants pulled down by someone smart enough to expose him for what he is. An ARSE.
We have experienced 40 to 50 years of global warming so far with very little to show for it. In Alberta the climate is just as awful now as it was in the seventies, when this lie big first began. When I tell people how tiny the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere really is, they look shocked and suggest that I must be wrong. When I explain to people that a return to the often quoted “pre-industrial global temperatures” means a return the the temperatures at the end of the Little Ice Age, they look confused and usually end up googling LIA.
We need a champion. We need debates. We don’t need O’Biden.
And nobody ever mentions what happened in those past periods when CO2 levels were 2x to 4x higher than today.
Did planet earth burn up and turn to ash?
Did all animal and plant life die off, or did life on earth – plants, animals – thrive?
Were historical periods of elevated CO2 coincident with better living conditions for life on earth?
Will not elevated CO2 levels increase across the world arable land and increase the extent of forests and vegetation?
What exactly is the problem if the earth warms a few degrees?
It’s happened before and, oh, by the way, these warm periods have a nasty habit of turning into ice ages.
Basically
I am still trying to understand that as the pandemic has reduced anthropogenic greenhouse gas production by something like 20% (40 million tonnes instead of 50) and the measured CO2 levels still unchanged after 9 months would indicate that the human contribution to global warming is minimal.
I know 9 months isn’t that long but there were immediate measurable effects to cloud cover after just 2 weeks when the United States became a temporary “no fly zone” shortly after 9/11 if the scientific reporting was to be believed.
Apologies…should have been 40 Billion tonnes instead of 50.
A couple of points. There still is NO evidence of a hack. If one wishes to be accurate, one should say only that the e-mails were leaked or possibly hacked, with a leaker being more likely, due to the choice of leaker’s moniker – FOIA.
In March of 2010, a very thorough analysis was edited and/or written by Australian physicist John Costella and the Lavoisier Group. It’s free to download and is 180 pages. It’s still the best analysis I’ve read. Dr. Curry’s open letter was also very good, and of course, WUWT, JoNova.com, and while they were more active, Bishop Hill and Climate Audit.
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
Tom Nelson’s blog (look in the blog roll) is still a great place to refer to the messages.
One thing has changed since 11 years ago.
In 2009 Climategate gained wide notoriety, and all the main media outlets carried it, relatively extensively. They also, later, reported prominently the various ‘exonerations’ that followed.
If the Climategate emails were released today, they would only be discussed on websites like WUWT, and would get very little, or perhaps zero, airing at the big media outlets. Google and Facebook would be complicit.
They have learned how best to deal with dissenting opinions, and dissenting facts, and they have learned very well indeed. Nobody in positions of power is listening, and often they are not even hearing. 1984 has at last arrived.
I hate that Michael Mann has gotten a free pass. This guy should not in any way be connected to legit academia.
Mann is still on the hook with the Libel case against Mark Steyn. If Steyn ever gets Mann on the witness stand I think he will eviscerate him.
At the rate the US Justice system has been moving the case, Mann and Steyn will both be living in nursing homes and long since lapsed in to senility by the time anyone is called to the witness stand (if they’re even still alive at that point. it’s looking like the lawsuit will outlive their grandkids at the rate it’s going).
John, Steyn appears to have missed the Trump ‘window’. All bets are off with the
Philistines in power.
At least Mann lost his suit against Ball (court ordered him to pay Ball’s costs – though Ball has yet to see a single dime as far as I’m aware).
Climategate: Follow the Money
Wall Street Journal
Dec 02, 2009
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called – without irony – the climate change “consensus.”
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts – amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion – you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data – facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries? Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California – apparently not feeling bankrupt enough – devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus” – largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes – of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate-change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent – including the thousands of jobs they provide – vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
See post here. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html>
Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’
The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails – and says why you should be, too.
November 23, 2009 – by Christopher Monckton
This is what they did – these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud – for fraud is what we now know it to be – tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years – and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters – for fraudsters are what we now know them to be – have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset – the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers – for that is what they are – have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists – they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.
I am angry, and so should you be.
What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.
No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.
At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.
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+1
“At the time of Climategate, public advocacy by climate scientists of climate policy was generally frowned upon…..” Advocacy from ‘scientists’ on environmental affairs is longer than a decade, certainly more prevalent now. Maybe someone has, but it would be interesting to trace this through various projects, scientific publications and other venues that don’t immediately occur to me. For example, older pH articles that I am familiar with only used acidification for real acid, mostly connected to pollution or reduced sediments. Physiological adjustments were long known many decades before the word became ‘necessary.’
Richardson, A. J. 2008. Are jellyfish increasing in response to ocean acidification? Limnology and Oceanography. 53(5):2040-2045 didn’t find any evidence. Bryan, C. F., D. A. Rutherford, B. W. Bryan. 1992. Acidification of the lower Mississippi River. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. 121(3):369-377. [https://doi.org/10.1577/1548-8659(1992)1212.3.CO;2] only found such in the lower industrial area. River has been considerably cleaned up in the last half century. Raymond, P. A. and J. J. Cole. 2003. Increase in the export of alkalinity from North America’s largest river. Science. 301:88-90.
(It is still not known who hacked the emails; just that they were hacked.)
Incorrect. It’s more accurate to say “it is still not known whether the emails were hacked (done by an outsider) or leaked (done by an insider) as it hasn’t been proven one way or the other; just that they were publicly released.”
I don’t believe the Climate Gate e-mails were that important.
The actual hoax was the false claim that government bureaucrats with science degrees, or anyone else, could predict our planet’s climate 100 years in the future, or even one year in the future.
When I started reading climate science in 1997, it took an hour or two for me to distrust long term climate predictions — 23 years later I KNOW there is no reason to trust long term climate predictions — they have been inaccurate EVEN WITH unjustified alterations to the historical temperature record that the e-mails revealed.
The second thought that occurred to me in 1997 was why anyone would complain about warming. People fly to warmer areas for vacations all the time. Some people in Michigan and Canada spend winters in Florida, or other southern states. There has been intermittent warming since the Little Ice Age centuries. I’m still trying to identify anyone hurt by that warming.
Since our planet is always warming or cooling, I consider myself lucky to be living in a relatively warm inter-glacial period, during a mild, harmless warming trend since the late 1600s. I just wish there was MORE global warming here in Michigan.
From my experience Mann ended up in a perfect fit with Penn State. When do they add his statue made of carbon?
Like most inconvenient truths, which don’t match the alarmists’ mantra, Climategate was ignored by the global fake news media.
The individuals exposed should never be forgotten or forgiven.