Today is the 10th Anniversary of Climategate 2, when a zip file of over 5000 emails was posted on six blogs. https://t.co/zRLatcdxrQ
— Paul Matthews (@etzpcm) November 22, 2021
https://cliscep.com/2021/11/22/climategate-2-anniversary/
“I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.” – Douglas Maraun, UEA.
Today is the tenth anniversary of “Climategate 2”.
On 22 November 2011, about two years after the first Climategate event, a link was placed by FOIA on six climate sceptic blogs. One of the blog owners, Verity Jones, wrote a blog post The Chosen Few with all the links and timings.
As mentioned in my previous post, one of those bloggers, Roger Tattersall, subsequently had his computers confiscated by the Police. You can hear his full interview with Gordon Corera here (only a short excerpt made it into the Radio 4 programme).
The zip file at the link contained over 5000 emails, many more than the first tranche, but they were all from the same original batch downloaded in 2009.
As well as the emails, there was a README.txt file in which Mr FOIA sets out his motivation (“FOIA 2011 — Background and Context”) and then summarises some of the issues raised by the content of the emails. It’s given in full here.
FOIA expresses concern over poverty and the amount of money being wasted on climate action, that could be better spent. He clearly has left-wing views. As I discussed in the post about the BBC’s “Hack That Changed The World”, this ought to dispose of the delusion that Climategate was organised by a free market lobby group or “Big oil”. Presumably those in the echo chamber who still believe this myth haven’t bothered to read it.
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”
Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline.
The text file then highlights certain issues, with some quotes from relevant emails.
One issue is how the IPCC AR4 is being written in a misleading way by Phil Jones and others. For example, in email 1939, Peter Thorne criticises Jones for not accurately representing uncertainties, and in email 3066 he says that “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”
In email 2884, Tom Wigley tells Michael Mann that a figure he sent is “very deceptive” and that in his opinion “there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.“
FOIA gives numerous example of politicisation and spin and “The Cause”, a phrase used by Mann in email 3115 and email 3940.
On the technical side, FOIA highlights the temperature reconstructions, the medieval warm period, and private admissions of the poor quality of climate models.
The first issue is particularly devastating. It’s clear from the emails that most of the climate scientists in the emails regard Michael Mann’s notorious hockey stick as, to use their technical term, “crap”, and some of them acknowledge that Steve McIntyre’s criticism of Mann’s work is valid.
I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because we think it is crap!
the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published.
That’s just the tip of the Climategate 2 iceberg. There are more links and summaries here, here and here.
