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McIntyre & McKitrick: CLIMATEGATE: UNTANGLING MYTH AND REALITY 10 YEARS LATER

Full Report here: https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climategate.10yearsafter.pdf @RossMcKitrick and I have written up reflections on Climategate 10 years later, focusing on the myths promulgated by climate academic community. Take a look.https://t.co/wY5vRMBg10 — Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) December 5, 2019 2/ Climategate contains important lessons on how institutions evade responsibility through sly and carefully restrictive terms of reference, unrepresentative inquiry teams, and wrongheaded findings – relevant caveats in the week before Horowitz — Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) December 5, 2019 Steve is also interviewed in a very good video by John Robson on the Hide the Decline emailshttps://t.co/zawAGPZEua — Ross McKitrick (@RossMcKitrick) December 5, 2019 Steve McIntyre and I have written a retrospective and evaluation of the issues raised by Climategate and the inquiries that followed from it: Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (2019) Climategate: Untangling Myth and Reality 10 Years Later. It’s hard to believe that a decade later the controversies are still resonating, even to the point of having bearing on a decision of the US Supreme Court last week (via a point made by Justice Alito in his dissent), as well as a decision this past summer in a BC court pertaining to the dismissal of a defamation case. We discuss these things and many many more. We had hoped to write a short summary of a few key items, but ended up going deep into some topics that are still pertinent and subject to widespread misunderstanding and misinformation. Full Report here: https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climategate.10yearsafter.pdf

Climategate Plus Ten: Revealed ‘science went to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time’

  Climategate Plus Ten By Craig Rucker|November 20th, 2019|Climate|47 Comments Ten years ago the “Climategate” scandal broke. A group of climate scientists consistently refused to comply with public records requests for data and communications concerning their research.  What was the quality of the research the public had lavished so many taxpayer dollars on?  They did not want us to know. Then suddenly the dam broke and hundreds of thousands of emails were made public.  The source of the emails remained anonymous, styling himself only as “Mr. FOIA,” adopting the acronym for the Freedom of Information Act. Now that’s a whistleblower! South African nuclear physicist and CFACT’s close fried Kelvin Kemm posted a detailed account at CFACT.org: On the morning of 17 November 2009 a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A computer hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 Megs of material that showed the CRU had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind and industrial CO2. Among many other scandals, the shocking leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures. In another email, he advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the information. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a Government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.  The affair became known as “Climategate.” CFACT’s Marc Morano posted an excerpt from his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change at ClimateDepot: The Climategate scandal revealed that the UN IPCC was simply a lobbying organization portraying itself as a science panel. If the UN failed to find carbon dioxide was a problem, it would no longer have a reason to continue studying it—or to be in charge of offering “solutions” …The leading UN IPCC scientists were caught red-handed artificially manufacturing the “scientific consensus” for the global warming narrative. Their own words betrayed that they were acting like political partisans, not scientists—crafting a predetermined message rather than following the evidence. Climategate exposed the work product of the IPCC as the best science that politics and activism could manufacture. Marc posted this summary from Rex Murphy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: (Climategate) pulls back the curtain on a scene of pettiness, turf protection, manipulation, defiance of freedom of information, lost or destroyed data and attempts to blacklist critics or skeptics of the global warming cause… Science has gone to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time. The Climategate emails reveal just how much damage was done when scientists abandoned the scientific method and the ethics that come with it in favor of political advocacy. There’s a lot of work to be done if the climate science establishment hopes to ever earn back the public’s trust. # Related: 10-year retrospective of Climategate: https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climategate.10yearsafter.pdf Guardian’s George Monbiot: It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again Or German climatologist Hans von Storch:  ‘Climategate’ reveals a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results useful to a political agenda.

Don’t Let Media Whitewash Climategate! Read Chapter excerpt revealing the truth behind scandal 10 years later

The mainstream media has been attempting once again to re-write Climategate on the 10th Anniversary of the scandal. Chapter excerpt on Climategate: The UN IPCC Exposed from best-selling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano [Note: Also, see: Chapter excerpt Michael Mann’s Hockey Schtick: From best-selling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano ]   CHAPTER 10 Climategate: The UN IPCC Exposed Chapter Excerpt: “I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple.” That’s Princeton physicist Robert Austin’s take on the scandal that exposed the very unscientific conduct of UN IPCC scientists. But what the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Institute revealed was more than just a shocking case of dishonesty in science. It was the fraudulence of the entire man-made climate change narrative. The Climategate emails showed that UN IPCC scientists were holding together the global warming narrative and the supposed scientific “consensus” that supported it by subterfuge and intimidation. The Climategate scandal opened a lot of eyes to the fact that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was more political than scientific. The Climategate scandal pulled back the curtain on the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists, who were caught artificially propping up the climate change narrative via a partisan campaign to boost only the science and scientists that support their cause and exclude science and scientists that don’t fit. Data manipulation, manipulation of the peer-review process, blacklisting, data destruction, and willful violation of Freedom of Information Act requests were some of the key revelations in the Climategate emails. CBS News reported on the Climategate scandal in December of 2009: “Those files show that prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data, plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing, and discussed how to conceal apparently buggy computer code from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law.” When NBC News reported on “A scandal called ‘Climategate’” in 2009, it was introduced as “a scandal involving some stolen emails.” NBC noted that “the language in the emails suggest these scientists manipulated their findings.” The thousands of emails, either hacked or more likely leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealed the behind the-scenes collusion of the climate change leadership. The leading UN IPCC scientists were caught red-handed artificially manufacturing the “scientific consensus” for the global warming narrative. Their own words betrayed that they were acting like political partisans, not scientists—crafting a predetermined message rather than following the evidence. Climategate exposed the work product of the IPCC as the best science that politics and activism could manufacture. Emails between Climategate scientists showed a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures. As Forbes reported on the emails released in both the original 2009 Climategate scandal and a second release in 2011 dubbed “Climategate 2.0,” “‘I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,’ writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email. ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get—and has to be well hidden,’ Jones writes in another email. ‘I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data…. ’” Chris Horner, author of the 2007 Politically Incorrect Guide® to Global Warming, reported on the efforts to delete correspondence by Climategate scientists. “Phil Jones in the United Kingdom asked Mann, now at Penn State, by email to delete records being sought under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, and to get a colleague to do so as well,” Horner explained in 2011. Jones had emailed, Mike: Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN IPCC 4th Assessment]? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment—minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. “‘Gene’ is Eugene Wahl, who now works for the federal government,” explained Horner. Mann’s terse reply included in pertinent part: “I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.” According to Wahl, Mann did contact him. “For the record, while I received the email from CRU [Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit] as forwarded by Dr. Mann, the forwarded message came without any additional comment from Dr. Mann; there was no request from him to delete emails,” Wahl explained in 2011. The Telegraph reported that CRU director Jones was “accused of making error of judgment by colleague” Mann for asking their colleagues to “delete sensitive emails to evade Freedom of Information requests.” Mann tried to distance himself from Jones, “I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.” Jones retired in 2016. A Washington Post editorial on November 25, 2009, summed up the unfolding scandal: According to one of the stolen e-mails, CRU [Climate Research Unit] Director Phil Jones wrote that he would keep papers questioning the connection between warming and human activity out of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” In another, Mr. Jones and Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann write about an academic journal and its editor, with Mr. Mann discussing organizing a boycott of the publication and Mr. Jones saying, “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”  Other e-mails speak of withholding data from climate-change skeptics…. Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them. Mann joined Jones in planning to punish a scientific journal that he did not consider faithful to the climate narrative: “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” Climate blogger Tom Nelson dug through and collected a slew of the Climategate emails on his website: • Email 1819, Nov 2003, warmist Tom Wigley to Mann et al on possible responses to McIntyre and McKitrick’s request for data: “The second is to tell them to go to hell” • Email 4868, Sept ’05: IPCC reviewer McIntyre asks to see the data underlying a paper; warmists complain this is a “major abuse of his position” • Email 1897, Dec 2008: After Phil Jones admits deleting material, UEA’s FOI officer David Palmer writes: “Phil, you must be very careful about deleting material, more particularly when you delete it” • 2000: Warmist Phil Jones goes to “solar variability and climate” conference in Tenerife; finds that “Many in the solar terrestrial physics community seem totally convinced that solar output changes can explain most of the observed changes we are seeing”; laments that THEY are “so set in their ways” • Email 4657, Oct 2000, It’s a small world after all: Editor of Journal of Climate, Michael Mann, gets Phil Jones to review a paper by Tom Wigley and Ben Santer • 2004 email: Phil Jones on why he thought the last 20 years was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period: “This is all gut feeling, no science”; warmist Tom Wigley also calls the hockey stick “a very sloppy piece of work” Climategate exposed the manufactured consensus and gave the lie to the endlessly repeated mantra that all scientists agree on anthropogenic global warming. Breaking Ranks Climate skeptics hailed the release of the emails as a victory for science. But even more significant, Climategate ultimately prompted UN scientists to turn on UN scientists, and on the UN IPCC process. UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita, for example, publicly declared that his colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones, who had both been implicated in Climategate, “should be barred from the IPCC process…. They are not credible anymore.” Zorita also noted how petty and punitive the global warming science had become: “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication.” Zorita was making reference to Climategate emails in which IPCC scientists had discussed how to suppress data and scientific studies that did not agree with the UN IPCC line. He noted how scientists who deviated from the UN IPCC’s position were “bullied and subtly blackmailed.” Zorita was a contributing author to the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. He has published more than seventy peer-reviewed scientific studies. We have already met UN lead author Richard Tol, now a dissenter. In the wake of Climategate he lamented that the IPCC had been “captured” and demanded that “the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed.” Despite the fact that Tol publicly called to “suspend” the IPCC process in 2010, he once again served as lead author for the Fifth Assessment Report. Over subsequent years, Tol grew even more disillusioned with the UN and appeared in my 2016 film Climate Hustle. *** How the Global Warming Narrative Undermines Genuine Scientific  Research (an Insider Explains) “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.” —Eduardo Zorita, UN IPCC contributing author *** Another scientist suggested disbanding the United Nations climate panel altogether. Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, which was ground zero of the Climategate scandal, suggested that the UN IPCC had “run its course.” He complained about its “tendency to politicize climate science” and suggested that it had “perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian, exclusive form of knowledge production.” Hulme warned, “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; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.” Pat Michaels, a climate scientist and IPCC reviewer, commented, “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.” Yet another UN IPCC reviewer, Vincent Gray, declared in November 2009, “I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.” Other UN scientists were even more blunt. Will Alexander, professor emeritus at the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, called the UN IPCC a “worthless carcass” and then–IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri a “disgrace.” He complained of the IPCC’s “deliberate manipulation to suit political objectives” and “fraudulent science” that “continue[d] to be exposed” and explained, “I was subjected to vilification tactics…. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded…. There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!” Geologist Don Easterbrook, a professor at Western Washington University, summed up the scandal: “The corruption within the IPCC revealed by the Climategate scandal, the doctoring of data and the refusal to admit mistakes have so severely tainted the IPCC that it is no longer a credible agency.” *** Now We Can See the Force of Your Argument Warmists’ tendency to resort to insults in the climate debate suggests that they may not have scientific evidence and rational arguments to back up their position. On December 4, 2009, at the height of the Climategate scandal, I appeared on BBC TV—which described me as “one of America’s leading climate change skeptics”—to debate Andrew Watson, professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, whose emails appear in the Climategate files. Watson, bent on defending his colleagues, was the climate activist who called me an asshole on live television. As CBS News reported, “Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. It didn’t take long before the two got in each other’s face and Watson became increasingly annoyed with Morano’s loud interruptions. He finally lost it by the end when the anchor thanked the participants. ‘What an asshole,’ Watson said.” His remark prompted an on-air apology to viewers from the BBC for the offensive language. During the live debate, I charged Professor Watson with being in “denial” over the importance of Climategate and noted that “you have to feel sorry for Professor Watson.” I explained that Professor Watson’s “colleague, Mike Hulme at the  University of East Anglia is saying this is authoritarian science, he is suggesting the IPCC should be disbanded based on what Climategate reveals.” A clearly agitated Watson, whose university was at the epicenter of the Climategate scandal, blurted out, “Will you shut up just a second!?” right before dropping the A bomb on me. He later apologized to me via email. I myself was actually mentioned in one of the Climategate scandal emails. On July 23, 2009, AP reporter Seth Borenstein had emailed one of the Climategate scientists, Penn State professor Michael Mann of hockey stick fame, about a “a paper in JGR [Journal of Geophysical Research] today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly.” Mann wrote back to Borenstein, “The aptly named Marc ‘Morano’ has fallen for it!”  As Breitbart News reported, “Borenstein’s email is hardly a neutral ‘standard step for journalists.’ Borenstein criticizes Marc Morano, a critic of manmade global warming claims, of ‘hyping wildly’ the study that Borenstein was asking for comments on. The email looks as if Borenstein was working with others involved in Climategate to discredit critics of man-made global warming.” Associated Press climate reporter Seth Borenstein’s reputation as a foot soldier in the global warming cause was further cemented by the Climategate revelations.  *** Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning environmental physical chemist from Japan, is another UN IPCC scientist who has turned his back on the UN climate panel. Kiminori declared that global warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…. When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller presented a video lecture in 2011 on his disgust with the “hide the decline” temperature alterations, which came to light in Climategate, and which we discussed in chapter six. “They are not allowed to do this in science. It isn’t up to our standards,” Muller declared. “As a scientist, I now have a list of scientists whose papers I will not read anymore.” In November 2009, I was one of the first reporters to publicize the Climategate scandal, after first being alerted to it by a phone call from fellow skeptic Anthony Watts. I devoted my website to the unfolding revelations. The mainstream media’s initial attempts to ignore or downplay Climategate allowed skeptics to report on the reality of the scandal without the filter of the warmist defenders in the media. “My fervent hope is the mainstream media continues to ignore Climategate, as this will ensure the public will continue to receive the most accurate and balanced information about the scandal,” I told Newsweek magazine in December 2009. The Newsweek profile of me noted, “While on the Hill, Morano was more like a wire service than a spokesman, pumping out scads of e-mails each week, sometimes each day, to reporters covering climate change” adding, “Morano was influential if not [sic] just through sheer relentlessness. With ‘Climategate’—the release last month of thousands of hacked e-mails showing debate about climate change may have been stifled—he is now getting more attention than ever before.” Circling the Wagons When the scandal broke, the global warming establishment—led by the UN, academia, and the media—immediately went into move-along-nothing-to see-here mode. There were several high-profile “investigations” of Climategate that were obviously designed simply to restore credibility to the UN and climate scientists The global warming industry investigated itself and exonerated itself. The pre-determined goal was to declare that Climategate was much ado about nothing. The investigations were hopelessly compromised—lacking thoroughness and riddled with conflicts of interest. The Hockey Stick Illusion author Andrew Montford analyzed four of the Climategate investigations and found that they were “rushed, cursory and largely unpersuasive.” Clive Crook, writing for the Atlantic, also slammed the Penn State investigation: “The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with ‘the hockey stick’—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for ‘lack of credible evidence’, it will not even investigate them…. You think I exaggerate?…In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no.” As Crook explained, “The [Penn State] report…says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers—so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.” But the coup de grâce was the report’s conclusion that anyone as respected (and as lucrative for Penn State) as Mann couldn’t possibly be guilty. Penn State was touting Mann’s cash cow status for the university as some sort of guarantee that he could do no wrong. As the report explained, “This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…. Had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions…. Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.” At the Watts Up with That blog, Willis Eschenbach pointed out the fact that the Penn State investigators had tasked Mann, the man under investigation, with gathering and presenting the evidence against himself. The university simply exonerated Mann by making sure that “none of the important questions are ever answered.” *** And the Taxpayers Foot the Bill The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 that Michael Mann has racked up “more than $2.4 million” in stimulus money from the U.S. government. “He received another grant worth nearly $1.9 million to investigate the role of ‘environmental temperature on the transmission of vector-borne diseases,’” the paper noted. *** Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit pointed out that the UK Royal Society’s Climategate investigation was “tainted” by the fact that the investigators— including one of Mann’s co-authors—had an obvious stake in declaring there was nothing to see here. Another one of the Climategate investigations was the Muir Russell investigation, which the UK Register’s Andrew Orlowski called “shameful”—its main goal was to urge a “campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in global warming science. Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre noted that the Muir Russell report “adopted a unique inquiry process in which they interviewed only one side—CRU [the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University]. As a result, the report is heavily weighted towards CRU apologia.” An East Anglia University inquiry chaired by Lord Oxburgh was characterized by the Register as “Dracula’s in charge of the blood bank” because of conflicts of interest. As Andrew Orlowski reported, “The peer leading the second Climategate enquiry at the University of East Anglia serves as a director of one of the most powerful environmental networks in the world, according to Companies House documents—and has failed to declare it. Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal on Monday. But Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.” Thoroughly Discredited But despite these whitewashes coming from the global warming establishment, Climategate did have a major effect. We have already seen how it triggered the conversion of numerous scientists—including UN IPCC scientists—from true believers to more skeptical. Climatologist Judith Curry, for example, said in 2014, “Bottom line: Climategate was career changing for me.” She explained, “Climategate shed a public light on the lack of transparency in climate science, which was deemed intolerable by pretty much everyone (except for some people who ‘owned’ climate data sets).” Curry noted that “in the U.S., it seems that Climategate had a more palpable impact on climate legislation. Senator James Inhofe stated that Climategate was the death knell of carbon cap and trade legislation.” Rex Murphy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation summed it up this way: Climategate “pulls back the curtain on a scene of pettiness, turf protection, manipulation, defiance of freedom of information, lost or destroyed data and attempts to blacklist critics or skeptics of the global warming cause.” He continued, “You wouldn’t accept that at a grade 9 science fair.” Murphy added, “Science has gone to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time.” The Climategate scandal revealed that the UN IPCC was simply a lobbying organization portraying itself as a science panel. If the UN failed to find carbon dioxide was a problem, it would no longer have a reason to continue studying it—or to be in charge of offering “solutions.” Professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado has noted, “I think we can get past the lie—and it was a lie—that these activist scientists, in the words of RealClimate.org’s Gavin Schmidt, are not taking a political stand.” The UN IPCC reports are often used to claim the science is “settled.” New Scientist magazine once dubbed the IPCC “the gold standard of consensus on climate change science.” Well, if there was any doubt before, Climategate exposed the IPCC to be fool’s gold. But even before Climategate, there was good reason to realize that the UN IPCC was more political than scientific. On July 23, 2008, more than a year before the Climategate emails were leaked, John Brignell, an engineering professor emeritus at the University of Southampton who had held the chair in Industrial Instrumentation, accused the UN of censorship. “The creation of the UN IPCC was a cataclysmic event in the history of science. Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage it rapidly attracted acolytes. ‘Peer review’ soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship,” wrote Brignell. “As [the] Wegman [report] demonstrated, new circles of like minded propagandists formed, acting as judge and jury for each other. Above all, they acted in concert to keep out alien and hostile opinion. ‘Peer review’ developed into a mantra that was picked up by political activists who clearly had no idea of the procedures of science or its learned societies. It became an imprimatur of political acceptability, whose absence was equivalent to placement on the proscribed list.” In 2007, Australian climate data analyst John McLean did research into the IPCC’s peer-review process. McLean’s study found that very few scientists are actively involved in the UN’s peer-review process, which he called “an illusion.” “More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 (‘Understanding and Attributing Climate Change’) of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other,” McLean found. “Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.” According to McLean, “Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community.” As McLean explained, “To sum up, the IPCC is a single-interest organisation, whose charter assumes a widespread human influence on climate, rather than consideration of whether such influence may be negligible or missing altogether. For example, the IPCC Summary had asserted that “it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” But as McLean discovered, “The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC’s 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all.” Many UN scientists have publicly rejected the IPCC’s methods. (The following material on UN scientists who have turned on the UN has been adapted and updated from a speech I wrote for Senator Jim Inhofe in 2007, while working at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.) “I have found examples of a Summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said,” noted South African nuclear physicist and chemical engineer Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications. “The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil…. I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher, has claimed, “A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact.” UN IPCC expert reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist, lamented that many “seem to naively believe that the climate change science espoused in the [UN’s] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documents represents ‘scientific consensus.’” In fact, “Nothing could be further than the truth! As one of the invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have pointed out the flawed review process used by the IPCC scientists in one of my letters. I have also pointed out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are now questioning the hypothesis of Greenhouse gas induced warming of the earth’s surface and suggesting a stronger impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase than previously believed…. Unfortunately, the IPCC climate change documents do not provide an objective assessment of the earth’s temperature trends and associated climate change.” Hurricane scientist Christopher W. Landsea, formerly of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, was an author for the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 and the Third Assessment Report in 2001, but he resigned from the Fourth Assessment Report, accusing the IPCC of distorting hurricane science. “I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns,” Landsea wrote in a January 17, 2005, public letter. “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.” Landsea is currently with the Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center. The process in which UN IPCC documents are produced is simply not compatible with good science. The UN IPCC’s guidelines stipulate that the scientific reports have to be “change[d]” to “ensure consistency with” the media-hyped Summary for Policymakers. *** Withdrawing in Disgust Paul Reiter, a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was part of the UN IPCC assessments. But Reiter resigned in disgust and declared the “consensus” claims a “sham.” Reiter, a professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, threatened legal action to have his name removed from the IPCC. “That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed,” he said on March 5, 2007. “It’s not true,” he added. *** As Senator Inhofe, the former chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has noted, “The IPCC more closely resembles a political party’s convention platform battle—not a scientific process.” Inhofe explained, “During an IPCC Summary for Policymakers process, political delegates and international bureaucrats squabble over the specific wording of a phrase or assertion.” The Guardian detailed the process in a 2014 article. “Government officials and scientists are gathered in Yokohama this week to wrangle over every line of a summary of the report before the final wording is released on Monday—the first update in seven years. Nearly 500 people must sign off on the exact wording of the summary, including the 66 expert authors, 271 officials from 115 countries, and 57 observers.” Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit analyzed the process behind the IPCC Summary for Policymakers and discovered that “the purpose of the three month delay between the publication of the (IPCC) Summary for PolicyMakers and the release of the actual WG1 (Working Group 1) is to enable them to make any ‘necessary’ adjustments to the technical report to match the policy summary. Unbelievable. Can you imagine what securities commissions would say if business promoters issued a big promotion and then the promoters made the ‘necessary’ adjustments to the qualifying reports and financial statements so that they matched the promotion. Words fail me.” Former Colorado State Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. revealed his personal experience dealing with the UN IPCC: “The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date very few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.” Years before the Climategate scandal broke, Pielke was warning the public, “We need recognition among the scientific community, the media, and policymakers that the IPCC process is obviously a real conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a significantly flawed report.” Any remaining doubts that the IPCC is a political organization were eliminated when former UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri admitted the IPCC is an arm of world governments and serves at their “beck and call.” “We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do,” Pachauri told the Guardian in 2013. “If the governments decide we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call. Pachauri freely told the world that the purpose of the UN IPCC reports is to make the case for “action” on global warming. As he explained, “There will be enough information provided so that rational people across the globe will see that action is needed on climate change.” In 2017, climate policy researcher and author Donna Laframboise issued an analysis finding that U.S. government rules “in no uncertain terms, repudiate the process by which UN climate reports are produced. The US government says political tampering with scientific findings is a violation of scientific integrity. But political revision is central to how IPCC reports get produced.” UN Chief’s Climate Religion In 2015, former UN IPCC Chief Rajendra Pachauri, whose organization shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, literally called global warming his religion. Pachauri, who was forced out of his position at the UN by a sexual harassment scandal, said in his resignation letter, “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” Journalist Donna Laframboise, who has written two books critical of the UN climate panel responded to Pachauri’s admission: “Yes, the IPCC—which we’re told to take seriously because it is a scientific body producing scientific reports—has, in fact, been led by an environmentalist on a mission. By someone for whom protecting the planet is a religious calling.” Laframboise, who authored the 2011 book exposing the IPCC titled The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert,” reported: “IPCC reports therefore lack scientific integrity. People who rely on IPCC reports are basing their decisions on documents that have no scientific integrity. The IPCC goes back, after the fact, and changes the original scientific report so that it aligns with the politically negotiated summary.” She also noted, “After the summaries are haggled over, the IPCC alters what the scientists wrote. That’s the reason the IPCC routinely releases its summaries before it releases the underlying scientific report. In this 2007 news clipping, the IPCC chairman explains: “we have to ensure that the underlying report conforms to the refinements.” Greenpeace co-founder turned climate skeptic Dr. Patrick Moore commented on Laframboise’s report, noting this is the “perfect reason for the US to abandon the UN Paris climate ‘agreement.’” Insiders Speak Out An impressive array of former UN IPCC scientists are completely disillusioned with the climate panel and its politically manufactured “scientific” conclusions. They’ve seen how the sausage is made, and they’re willing to testify to the dishonesty of the process. Indian geologist Arun D. Ahluwalia of Punjab University, a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet, has charged, “The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds…. I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” Steven M. Japar, an atmospheric chemist who was part of the UN IPCC’s Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports and has authored eighty-three peer-reviewed publications in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions, and vehicle emissions, explained, “Temperature measurements show that the [climate model–predicted midtroposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them!” Kenneth P. Green, who was a Working Group 1 expert reviewer for the IPCC in 2001, has declared, “We can expect the climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority.” Climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville was a lead author on the 2001 UN IPCC report. Christy explained how his colleagues were telegraphing the science to support politics. “I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.” Top United Nations officials apparently know years in advance that each UN climate report will be more alarming—an exercise in making the science fit their political agenda. In 2010, AFP reported that Robert Orr, UN undersecretary general for planning, had declared that the “next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.” In 2017, the IPCC, realizing how damaging these slips of the tongue from UN officials could be to public support, attempted to dismiss this Orr’s comments, saying that Orr “was UN Under Secretary-General, not working with IPCC.” So according to the IPCC, if Orr was not an official IPCC executive, then his comments had no bearing on its work. But how do they explain the then-head of the IPCC, Pachauri, making very similar comments in 2009, a  full four years ahead of the next report? “When the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say, ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’” Pachauri told the BBC in 2013, “I hope that [the report] will reassure everyone that human influence is having a major impact on the Earth’s climate.” It does not stop there. In 2012, a year before the report came out, former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer announced that the next IPCC report “is going to scare the wits out of everyone.” He added, “I’m confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.” Australia’s the  Age newspaper reported that de Boer believes the scary IPCC report “should provide the impetus needed for the world to finally sign an agreement to tackle global warming.” In 2014, I became a bit bored with the whole IPCC scare the public and media hype routine. “After years of covering this debate for well over a decade as a reporter, researcher, and U.S. Senate staffer, I find myself completely bored by the UN’s same old ramp up the alarm approach,” I responded to media inquiries. “I have covered this debate on a daily basis, hourly basis and sometimes minute by minute basis. I am trying to get excited, but alas, even the alarmism and apocalyptic claims fail to excite me. Can’t the UN think of more effective ways to get attention? Can’t the UN try something different?” Let’s let IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Vincent Gray of New Zealand have the last word. Gray, the author of more than one hundred scientific publications, was an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990. And he says, “The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense.” # Related Links:  https://twitter.com/DawnTJ90/status/1354635480650887176 https://twitter.com/DawnTJ90/status/1354271424316370948 James Delingpole: Climategate 10 Years On – The Bastards Have Got Away With It! The real history of the Climategate scandal explained – UN Top Scientists Exposed BBC features Morano in 10 year Climategate anniversary whitewash – Climate Depot corrects BBC tries to whitewash Climategate. Morano featured on BBC report. Watch 2019 BBC TV report here:  Flashback 2009: Climategate Professor to Morano on Live BBC TV: ‘What an A**hole’ Correct history of Climategate here: Watch & Read: Climategate – The UN Top Scientists Exposed – See Morano debating in 2009 & 2010 – 2019 BBC TV:  

James Delingpole: Climategate 10 Years On – The Bastards Have Got Away With It!

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/11/17/delingpole-climategate-10-years-on-the-bastards-have-got-away-with-it/ By James Delingpole Climategate was the biggest scandal in the history of climate science. Modesty forbids me from identifying the guy who broke the story in the mainstream media — ten years ago this month — took it viral on the internet and brought it to worldwide prominence. Sorry, but I refuse to name the handsome, brave, witty, intelligent, funny, clever, spectacularly endowed, bravura writer, beloved parent, adored husband, and skilled horseman responsible for this veritable Scoop of the Century, if not the Millennium. No, absolutely not. Only from my cold, dead hands will you ever prise this secret information. Unless, maybe, you twist my arm just a tiny bit more and — Yeah, all right. I admit it. That godlike hero was me. 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. If we allow it to prevail then the bad guys will have won, as they are close to doing already. Look at the fawning media attention afforded Greta Thunberg. Look at the rise and rise of Extinction Rebellion and the extraordinary degree of public sympathy these eco-fascist wreckers command. Look at how across the world — with notable exceptions such as President Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — even conservative administrations, such as Boris Johnson’s, are surrendering to the Green Blob. Yet the “science” on which climate protestors base their hysterical claims and from which politicians derive their expensive, constrictive, damaging environmental policies is at best highly suspect, at worst downright fraudulent. 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. “Move along. Nothing to see here,” the Climate Industrial Complex is telling us about Climategate. 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. All I did, really, was give the story the spin, invective, colour and context which made it readily comprehensible to the general reader — and which thus bagged me most of the credit for it. Here is my summary of what happened. (The Australian Spectator is just about the only print media outlet to have given a fair and accurate account of the Climategate anniversary: that’s how desperate and one-sided the coverage of these issues has now become across the MSM) Climategate mattered because it offered the first solid proof that the scientific establishment wasn’t being altogether honest about man-made global warming. Up until that point, one or two of us had had our suspicions. But this was the breakthrough; the moment when the alarmists were caught red-handed with egg over their face and their trousers down. Someone – to this day, anonymous – had dumped onto the internet a huge cache of documents and correspondence retrieved from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia – one of the world’s main gatekeepers of climate science research. Finally, we could discover what the scientists most assiduously promoting the climate change scare narrative were saying to one another behind closed doors… …They were shown: contriving to destroy inconvenient data in order to evade FOI inquiries; attempting to shut down scientific journals which published studies unhelpful to their cause; viciously bullying dissenters; even trying to rewrite history, for example, to erase the widely recognised Medieval Warming Period. True, Climategate did not offer definitive proof that the man-made climate scare is fabricated. But it did prove something very nearly as important: that the doom-laden grand narrative about climate change which teachers use to frighten children, which politicians use to justify more taxes and regulations, and which crony capitalists use to say ‘subsidise my planet-saving wind farm’ is based on a prospectus so flimsy that if an insurance salesman tried touting it on your doorstep you’d tell him just where he could shove it. About the only other publication to tell the true story is Quadrant. (Again an Australian publication. Maybe it’s because Australia has been hit particularly hard by the climate scam — electricity prices in South Australia are the world’s highest and Australian greens are especially noxious and whiny — that the sceptics are more robust there…) The piece, by Tony Thomas, is abundant with damning detail: Today, anyone questioning this colossal enterprise is told to “respect the science”. Based on the Climategate emails released in 2009, 2013 and 2015, I’d rather respect the Mafia, who at least don’t claim to be saving the planet. For example, today we’re told that warming of 2degC above pre-industrial level is some sort of a tipping point of doom. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, emailed on September 6, 2007, that the supposed 2-degree limit was “plucked out of thin air”, a throwaway line in an early 1990s paper from the catastrophists at the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute. Thomas goes on to give a list — with illustrative emails – of the myriad ways in which the Climategate scientists were embarrassed and humiliated: ‘Subverting peer review’, ‘Restricting and adjusting data’ and so on. That infamous ‘Mike’s Nature Trick’ email was just one damning example among many hundreds. The idea — heavily promoted by disingenuous alarmists in the whitewash inquiries that followed — that this was just a few, cherry-picked emails ripped out of context is absolute nonsense. Here was a scandal which none those of implicated should have been permitted to survive with their careers intact: the incompetence, corruption, malfeasance, bullying, and mendacity by these taxpayer-funded scientists was just so widespread and blatant. For coders and programmers, probably the most damning moment are the Harry Read Me files exposing the sheer cackhandedness of the gatekeepers of the global climatic datasets. But I think for me — as Willis Eschenbach argued at the time — what’s most shocking is the betrayal of the scientific method. Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science. This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct. We’re constantly being told by politicians, by the media, and, of course, by the scientists themselves that we should trust the experts: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, President Obama once told us, is the “gold standard” of climate science; the “97 per cent of climate scientists” apparently form an irrefutable “consensus”; and so on. 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. Ten years on from Climategate, the most shocking thing about Climategate is that the bastards have got away with it. No-one has been punished, or even reprimanded, for offences that at the very least should have cost them their jobs as public servants, and in some cases should have landed them behind bars. Instead of being treated as crooks, losers, amd incompetents they are being celebrated as heroic victims of a vengeful witch-hunt, in which the only honest people in this ugly affair — the sceptics — have been recast as the villains. As I wrote in the Australian Spectator: If you’d asked me at the time of Climategate whether I’d still be writing about this stuff ten years hence I would have said: “No! God, no! The caravan will have moved on by then.” But it hasn’t, has it? Instead it has accumulated more baggage, more freeloaders. In fact, by some bizarre inversion of logic, the less and less credible the evidence for the great global warming scare, the bigger and noisier and more powerful the Climate Industrial Complex has grown. I’m especially disappointed with my own trade in this regard. The job of journalists, I had naively imagined, was to seek out the truth, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, 99.99 per cent of the mainstream media — and that’s probably an understatement — has taken the side of the lying liars, the hair shirt green zealots, the greedy crony capitalists all making like bandits at our expense on the climate change gravy train. In her own must-read account of Climategate’s legacy, climate scientist Judith Curry optimistically concludes that the truth will out in the end. These factors below, she believes, will inject a note of reality into the fantastical world of the climate change alarmists: Energy engineering realities: for a superb overview, see Michael Kelly’s recent essay Energy Utopias and Engineering Realities Growing concerns about energy reliability and security, e.g. the recent experience of California with massive power shutdowns and blackouts in Australia The climate itself; even with huge 2016 (see this recent overview by Ross McKitrick), the temperatures are not keeping pace with the CMIP5 predictions At some point, a spate of La Nina events, a shift to the cold phase of the AMO, increased volcanic activity, impacts of a solar minimum and another ‘hiatus’ are inevitable; sort of the reverse of what Steve Schneider was waiting for. Most of the CMIP6 climate models have gone somewhat bonkers, with a majority having values of ECS that exceed 4.5C and do a poor job of simulating the temperatures since 1950; makes it difficult to take seriously their 21st century projections I wish I could share her optimism. Climategate was the event when, just for a moment, it seemed we’d got the climate scamsters bang to rights, that the world’s biggest scientific (and economic) con trick had been exposed and that the Climate Industrial Complex would be dismantled before it could do any more damage to our freedom and our prosperity. But the truth, it would seem, is no match for big money, dirty politics and madness-of-crowds groupthink. We’ve lost this one, I think, my friends. And the fact that all those involved in this scam will one day burn in Hell is something, I’m afraid, which gives me all too little consolation.

The real history of the Climategate scandal explained – UN Top Scientists Exposed

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/11/ten-years-after-climategate/ Climate Science Proves Scams Don’t Die of Exposure It’s the tenth anniversary next week of the 2009 Climategate email dump that exposed top climate scientists’ chicanery and subversion of science – and did so in their own words and out of their own mouths, or keyboards. I’ll list a few emails-of-infamy shortly, but first some background. For the three years before Climategate, the climate crowd was ascendant with its pseudo-narrative of “settled science”. Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie Inconvenient Truth of 2006 had swept the Western world and its readily-traduced schoolkids. In 2007 Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In late 2008 Barack Obama won the White House, proclaiming in his modest way, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The Climategate emails hit the blogosphere just a month before the Copenhagen summit was scheduled to lock Western countries into Kyoto Mark 2, a legally-binding commitment to renewables from 2012. Climategate destroyed warmists’ moral high ground and reinforced the natural reluctance of most governments to up-end their economies with emission controls. The  Copenhagen circus fell apart, resolving merely to “take note” of the exhortations to action by Obama and like-minded leaders. The mainstream media strove to ignore and bury the Climategate  revelations. The climate establishment ran half a dozen inquiries with limited briefs and ludicrous lack of rigour, all of which purported to clear the climate scientists of wrong-doing.[1] But even today, ten years after, scientists faithful to their calling and disciplines can only shudder at what Climategate revealed. Those who subverted the scientific method were not fringe players but at the pinnacle. They were doing the archetypal studies “proving” catastrophic human-caused catastrophic warming (CAGW) and shaping the content and messaging in the six-yearly reports of the IPCC. The hacked (or otherwise revealed) email archive spanning the prior decade was stored by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit[2]. The CRU co-compiled the HadCRUT global temperature series, along with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre. This data set charting alleged global warming in fractions of a degree was a key input to the climate computer models forecasting doomladen heat for this century. (The model forecasts continue to exceed actual measured warming). Based on these dud modelled forecasts, the West is now spending $US1.5 trillion a year in quest of zero CO2 emissions. Today, anyone questioning this colossal enterprise is told to “respect the science”. Based on the Climategate emails released in 2009, 2013 and 2015, I’d rather respect the Mafia, who at least don’t claim to be saving the planet. For example, today we’re told that warming of 2degC above pre-industrial level is some sort of a tipping point of doom. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, emailed on September 6, 2007, that the supposed 2-degree limit was “plucked out of thin air”, a throwaway line in an early 1990s paper from the catastrophists at the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute. Now for the emails. We journos love a local angle, and here’s one – the CRU’s Ian “Harry” Harris worked for four years to de-bug and properly document a CRU data base “TS 2.1” of global stations recording monthly temperatures. One input  was from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, with its frequent adjustments that result in a greater warming trend (think Rutherglen and Darwin). Harry’s comments in a 200-page logging of notes: What a bloody mess. Now looking at the dates… something bad has happened, hasn’t it. COBAR AIRPORT AWS [data from an Australian weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn’t open until 1993! … getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. So many new stations have been introduced, so many false references … so many changes that aren’t documented … I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was…Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight…! What else did Harry Harris mention? Perhaps science-respecting Dr Ross Garnaut (Q&A on November 11) could get his head around this lot (emphasis added): OH F**K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases … Bear in mind that there is no working synthetic method for cloud, because Mark New lost the coefficients file and never found it again (despite searching on tape archives at UEA) and never recreated it … This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!! … So, uhhhh what in tarnation is going on? Just how off-beam are these datasets?!! … Unbelievable — even here the conventions have not been followed. It’s botch after botch after botch …Where is the documentation to explain all this?! … It’s halfway through April and I’m still working on it. This surely is the worst project I’ve ever attempted. Eeeek … Oh bugger. What the HELL is going on?!.. Oh GOD if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite!! .,. Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!! … So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage… Who added those two series together? When? Why? Untraceable, except anecdotally. It’s the same story for many other Russian stations, unfortunately — meaning that (probably) there was a full Russian update that did no data integrity checking at all. I just hope it’s restricted to Russia!! … What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no ‘supposed’, I can make it up. So I have 🙂 … [My attempted corrections] will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ’em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late.” That was then. How’s things today? In 2015 Prime Minister Tony Abbott set in train an audit of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology’s  temperature adjustments that  increased Australia’s apparent warming, but one of the first moves of  his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, was to scuttle that audit. Of equal significance is that late last year, Melbourne scientist Dr John McLean published the first-ever audit of Britain’s HADCRUT4 temperature data set and commented, It’s very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student … Governments have had 25 years to check the data on which they’ve been spending billions of dollars. And they haven’t done so once. For example, he found that for two years the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were derived from just one site in Indonesia, and on two occasions the average December temperature at an airport on tropical St Kitts in the Caribbean was reported at zero degrees. The inaccuracies in the data record are so bad, McLean believes, that it is impossible to know how much global temperatures have really risen – probably about 0.4degC in 70 years, not the 0.6degC claimed. Subverting peer review Climategate showed how warmist scientists gamed the peer review process to ensure a monopoly for their views. When two papers contrary to their ‘consensus’ were published, CRU director Phil Jones and his circle pulled out all stops to get the editor sacked and prevent such papers being considered by the IPCC. Jones, 8 July 2004: …I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, leading climate scientist] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! US colleague Dr Michael Mann (author of the influential-but-wrong Hockey Stick graph of the past 1000 years’ temperature), July 3, 2003: It seems clear we have to go above [the sceptic author Chris de Freitas] … I think that the community should, as Mike H [warmist scientist] has previously suggested in this eventuality, terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels –reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute. (De Freitas at the  University of Auckland served as deputy dean of science, head of science and technology, and for four years as pro vice-chancellor. He also served as vice-president of the Meteorological Society of New Zealand) Concerning another sceptic scientist, Steve McIntyre (who used his superior statistical skills to refute Mann’s work), Mann wrote, in August 2007, I have been talking [with] folks in the States about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose [him]. Restricting and adjusting data CRU director Jones destroyed emails subject to Freedom of Information requests and urged colleagues to do the same. Some of the emails could have exposed improper manipulation of IPCC processes. In 2004 Jones refused a sceptic’s request for his source data: …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? He had good reason to conceal his data. Perhaps here’s why: # Jones, April 15, 2009: For much of the SH [Southern Hemisphere] between 40 and 60 [degrees] S[outh] the normals are mostly made up as there is very little ship data there. # Jones, November 10, 2009: For the 1940-1960 period if the SSTs [sea surface temperatures] were adjusted they would look much better # Scientist Dr Tom Wigley, then with the US Government, to Jones September 28, 2008, urging more adjusting: …If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip. 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… It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with ‘why the blip’. # From Jones’ CRU colleague Dr Tim Osborn, December 20, 2006: 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… # Jones in November 2007 mentioned research malpractice allegations against some climate people in the US and Europe…I reckon only a few in the climate field know the full extent of what is going on behind the scenes in climate science. The Nobel Peace prize will certainly help, but some skeptics are redoubling their efforts. # Jones’s University of East Anglia colleague Anthony Footitt, June 25, 2009: I do hope all these emails are just staying within UEA because it really makes us – UEA as a whole – look like a bunch of amateurs Hiding the decline On November 16, 1999, Jones welcomed and had re-used professionally a “trick” in a Nature article involving secret switching from tree-ring proxy temperature data to actual data. This covered up that tree-rings ceased to suggest rising temperature after 1960. That would have invalidated Mann’s tree-ring-based temperature chronologies for earlier centuries.  Jones: 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. Scientist Tom Wigley points out flaws in Mann’s own research: Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. UK climate researcher Douglas Maraun: How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think that ‘our’ reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.   The IPCC exposed UK Met Bureau’s Peter Thorne, concerning work on the IPCC’s 2007 fourth report: 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. Jones admits the political bias in the IPCC’s all-important Summary for Policy Makers (SPM): He says he’ll read the IPCC Chapters! He hadn’t as he said he thought they were politically biased. I assured him they were not. The SPM [Summary for Policy Makers] may be, but not the chapters. IPCC coordinating lead author Jonathan Overpeck: The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out [of IPCC reports]. Need it be said that leaving out inconvenient stuff is anathema to real, genuine, principled science? Warmist Mike Hulme agrees that the debate around climate change is fundamentally about power and politics rather than the environment … There are not that many ‘facts’ about (the meaning of) climate change which science can unequivocally reveal From climate scientist Giorgi Filippo, who contributed to all five IPCC Assessment Reports: I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also un- reviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions)…I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes Email 5286 from scientist Hans von Storch: We should explain why we don’t think the information robust yet. Climate research has become a postnormal science, with the intrusion of political demands and significant influence by activists driven by ideological (well meant) concerns.” Also from von Storch: The concealment of dissent and uncertainty in favor of a politically good cause takes its toll on credibility, for the public is more intelligent than is usually assumed Scientist Richard Somerville, 2004: We don’t understand cloud feedbacks. We don’t understand air-sea interactions. We don’t understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Warmist Kevin Trenberth: We are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter Michael Mann, 2006: We certainly don’t know the GLOBAL mean temperature anomaly very well, and nobody has ever claimed we do. Jones’ CRU was meant to provide part of the gold-standard science in the IPCC reports. Sadly, it lost or destroyed massive raw data from global temperature stations, admitting on its website in 2011,“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.” Warmist Keith Briffa: It seems we got the balance between realism and hype about right In light of all the above admissions of lost data, mangled data, twisted data and the stated intentions of the Climategate correspondents to produce work that confirmed warmist preconceptions, there is a delicious irony to the lament of Phil Jones in 2008  Why can’t people just accept that the IPCC is right!! Miscellaneous mayhem # University of East Anglia’s Mike Hulme: I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies – including some of those I am involved in. # Michael Mann: It would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘Medieval Warming Period’. His Hockey Stick did just that. The medieval warming remains an embarrassment to climate scientists, since it is natural rather than CO2-related. #  Milind Kandlikar, 2004: Tuning [of models] may be a way to fudge the physics. In November 2007: UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon, perhaps actually believing what he was saying on the strength of the guff being fed to him, suggested CO2 might cause sea levels to rise six meters in 10 years — that is, by 2017! Needless to say, universities have showered climate guys with honors. IPCC author Ben Santer agreed with honors for Jones and Wigley: “Phil Jones is one of the true gentlemen of our field” and the pair “deserve medals as big as soup plates”, he wrote, October 8, 2009. After Climategate Climategate’s influence on the public debate was fleeting. But now groups like Tim Flannery’s Climate Council persuade many citizens that any weather drama or fire is proof of global warming.[3] A steady stream of younger scientists, fuelled by propaganda from their earliest years in high school and locked onto their career rewards at “woke” universities for adhering to the warmist party line, is continuing the tradition of shoddy climate scholarship. Meanwhile,  non-conformers like reef expert Peter Ridd get sacked. Call me an optimist, but I see warming extremists alienating voters with a panoply of far-left “social justice” issues attached to their climate narrative — causes that make Greenpeace seem traditionalist. The debate about the many interpretations of the science has become esoteric compared with close-to-home arguments about fossil-fuel power versus renewables. While Climategate exposed dud science, ten years later the hot topic is the exposure of unfeasible electricity makeovers. Tony Thomas’s hilarious history, The West: An insider’s tale – A romping reporter in Perth’s innocent ’60s is available from Boffins Books, Perth, the Royal WA Historical Society (Nedlands) and online here   [1] “The inquiries were largely unable to deal with the issue of the issue of blocking publication of papers, or intimidating journals. But 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.” [2] The still-unidentified Climategate “hacker” said his motive was to help divert useless trillions for renewables towards doing genuine good for the world’s poor. [3] Warmist scientist Steve Schneider perceptively said: “A mega heat wave this summer is worth 3 orders of magnitude more in the PR wars – too bad we have to wait for random events since evidence doesn’t seem to cut it anymore with the MSM [mainstream media].”

BBC features Morano in 10 year Climategate anniversary whitewash – Climate Depot corrects

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/07/11/bbc-tries-airbrush-climategate-out-history/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_campaign=20190711&utm_content=B Delingpole: ‘Climategate Was Fake News,’ Lies the BBC… By James Delingpole The risible section of last night’s Newsnight which the BBC had cobbled together in a sad, desperate, and unconvincing attempt to debunk the Climategate scandal. Climategate is fast approaching its tenth anniversary (which falls in November). Naturally the BBC — as one of the key promoters of the man-made global warming scare — is keen to get its excuses in early. How did it achieve this? Why, by the genius move of speaking to some of the activist-scientists implicated in the Climategate scandal and getting them to explain how it was always a lot of fuss about nothing. I particularly enjoyed the contribution from NASA GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt. “I had about 400 emails in the hacked email package…15 years of emails and people were picking and choosing out of them. People were kind of like putting them together in weird orders that made it seem like one email was talking about this event when it was really talking about something else. There was a lot of confusion.” Schmidt is being disingenuous here. It really doesn’t matter in what order you rearrange the Climategate emails. You get the same result every time: a bunch of second-raters bullying dissenters, troughing lavish grants, racking up air miles on conference freebies, cooking the books, manipulating the evidence, torturing the data till it screams in order to make man-made global warming look like a much more significant and well-understood problem than it actually is. The implicated scientists have come up with all manner of excuses since: it’s a war on science conducted by the evil Big-Oil-funded right; it has all been taken out of context; the incriminating emails don’t mean what the deniers claim they mean; the Climategate scientists have been exonerated by three inquiries; etc. Meanwhile in the real world, no convincing evidence whatsoever has emerged to support the threadbare theory that anthropogenic CO2 is causing the planet to warm in ways which are dangerous or unprecedented. Still, the theory rests entirely on computer models which, increasingly, appear to diverge from the actual observed data. Booker knew all this. He’d done his homework, written the definitive book on the subject, and was too honest and rigorous and fearless to soft-pedal his position by claiming that “Of course, I recognise that man made global warming may be a problem…” because he knew that it wasn’t. He never doubted that one day the great global warming scare would come to an end for the simple reason that nature is on the side of the sceptics, not the alarmists. But nor did he kid himself that the scam was going to end any time soon — not least because of the way it has been so assiduously, unquestioningly promoted by influential institutions like the BBC. As he wrote in his paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal: In the very years when the global warming issue was becoming more controversial than at any time since the scare was first launched on its way in the 1980s, the BBC continued to promote the received orthodoxy on climate change and the political response to it without ever exposing either to serious questioning. The BBC’s journalists went out of their way to publicise almost every alarmist claim the promoters of the scare could come up with, even after these had been shown to be without scientific foundation. Almost the only occasions on which they have paid attention to the views of dissenters from the orthodoxy has been when they have produced programmes designed to trivialise and caricature those views, portraying them as being held by only a tiny and disreputable minority of ‘deniers’. They have lent enthusiastic support to every political measure proposed to ‘fight climate change’, while consistently failing to explain the immense financial cost of those proposals and their enormous economic implications. In their relentless promotion of the benefits of ‘renewable energy’, such as wind power, they have consistently endorsed the often absurdly exaggerated claims of the commercial interests involved in ‘renewables’, while failing to explain their practical shortcomings. In doing this, as this report will try to show, the BBC has not only failed in its professional duty to report fully and accurately on one of the biggest scientific and political stories of our time: it has betrayed its own principles, in three respects. First, it has betrayed its statutory obligation to be impartial, using the excuse that any dissent from the official orthodoxy was so insignificant that it should just be ignored or made to look ridiculous. Second, it has betrayed the principles of responsible journalism, by allowing its coverage to become so one-sided that it has too often amounted to no more than propaganda. Third, it has betrayed the fundamental principles of science, which relies on unrelenting scepticism towards any theory until it can be shown to provide a comprehensive explanation for the observed evidence. Booker never minced his words. How I would have loved to hear his demolition of the BBC’s pathetic effort at undermining the significance of the Climategate emails. He wouldn’t have been angry about it, though. Just drily amused and quietly pleased at the way it yet again confirmed all his theories about the follies to which man is prey when he becomes a victim of groupthink. I’m sure he would also have been cheered by the legal challenge being launched by the campaign group Stop BBC Bias. A former BBC employee, David Keighley, is crowdfunding a judicial review of the way the BBC measures impartiality. The BBC insists that it is impartial. Most of us who watch it and listen to it know it isn’t, especially on topics like climate change which it no longer even pretends to cover even-handedly having decided that the debate is over… Booker wasn’t happy that he got ill — he felt that he still had much work to do. But he did feel a measure of relief that he’d no longer have to put up with a world where everyone gets their lessons on global warming from a 16-year-old kid in pigtails who can see ‘carbon’ in the air and a doddery old Malthusian whose TV crews drive walruses off cliffs and then blame it on climate change, all courtesy of a propaganda institution so shamelessly left-biased it makes Central Television of the USSR look like Fox News.

Climategate Continues – The Mann Hockeystick University Of Arizona Emails Are Now Public

  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/03/04/climategate-continues-the-mann-hockeystick-university-of-arizona-emails-are-now-public/ By Anthony Watts After years of trying to suppress their release, and finally being ordered to be released by a judge, they are now public, and we have them here. This will remain as a “top post” for a day, new stories will be below this one. There’s quite a treasure trove, but also some duplications from previous releases. First a look at the release letter from University of Arizona: The files released cover emails from Michael Mann to Malcolm Hughes, Eugene Wahl, Caspar Amman, Ray Bradley, and Jonathan Overpeck. Plus there were additional requests for anything out of UEA (Phil Jones at CRU). The FOIA request goes all the way back to December of 2011, it’s taken this long to get released. Mann fought the release all the way. Here is a sample, where Keith Briffa of CRU says that Mann’s data (and others) do in fact show a Medieval Warm Period. There’s further arguments from Keith Briffa about Mann’s data, along with Mann claiming that the “screening” process to decide whether or not to include certain proxy data is actually a good thing. There was some blowback a few years ago when it was discovered that Mann’s pre-screening really skewed the results in his favor….yet in these email exchanges, he thinks the process is “objective”: Here’s Mann responding to the publication of the McIntyre and McKittrick paper in E&E: There’s quite a bit to wade through, and some emails are duplicated from the original Climategate release. I invite readers to read and review these documents, and to point out any items of interest in comments. Here are the documents, available for download:  Chris Horner, Government Accountability Oversight – Response Close 2-27-19 (00115527xC3E11)   00249611   00249725   E E matter. Exemplar Records Release Privilege Log (00115528xC3E11) 00249611   00249725   ATI-U-of-A-Hughes-Overpeck-FOI-Request   E E – Overpeck. Log of Responsive Nonresponsive Records (00114879xC3E11)   E E. Overpeck email records released to E E 2-5-19 per court order (00114885xC3E11)   Malcolm Hughes – Log of Redactions Peer Review Withholding (00115522xC3E11) Advertisements

Climategate continues: Release of University of Arizona Climate Emails Imminent

Climategate continues: Release of University of Arizona Climate Emails Imminent https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/19/climategate-continues-release-of-university-of-arizona-climate-emails-imminent/ Press Release Nearly seven years ago, on December 7th, 2011, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic’s (FME Law) sought public records from the University of Arizona related to the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick, and development of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. They refused much of the request… — gReader Pro

Delingpole: The Pause in Global Warming Is Real, Admits Climategate Scientist

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/20/delingpole-the-pause-in-global-warming-is-real-admits-climategate-scientist/ by JAMES DELINGPOLE20 Jun 20171,132 The ‘Pause’ in global warming is real and the computer models predicting dramatically increased temperatures have failed. This is the shocking admission of a paper published this week in Nature Geoscience. It’s shocking because the paper’s lead author is none other than Ben Santer – one of the more vociferous and energetic alarmists exposed in the Climategate emails. advertisement According to the paper’s abstract: In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble. And: We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations. Translation: the real-world temperature increases were much smaller than our spiffy, expensive computer models predicted. Its significance did not pass unnoticed by this veteran climate scientist:  Follow Roger A. Pielke Sr @RogerAPielkeSr Wow! “most early 21st century…model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed” https://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2973.html … h/t @RyanMaue 2:24 PM – 19 Jun 2017    3939 Retweets    3737 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy His surprise is understandable given that, previously, alarmist scientists like Ben Santer have gone to great lengths to deny the existence of a ‘Pause’ in global warming, to pour scorn on those who have argued otherwise and to insist that their computer models are fundamentally reliable. Indeed, only last week the Spectator published an article by one such Pause Denier – a scientist from the University of East Anglia (ground zero of the Climategate scandal), fondly known as the University of Easy Access, named Phil Williamson. It is titled The Great Myth of the Global Warming Pause and it claims, somewhat imaginatively: The Paris agreement will be the future, whereas the so-called global-warming hiatus is already history. And let’s not forget that in the dog days of the Obama administration, alarmist scientists were so desperate to pooh pooh the “Pause” in the run up to the Paris climate talks that they concocted a junk science paper – now the subject of a federal investigation – which used dodgy data to try to airbrush the Pause out of history. Truly, as the Daily Caller notes, the alarmists’ flip-flopping on this subject has of late been remarkable. Do they believe in the ‘Pause’ (or ‘hiatus’ as they sometimes term it) or don’t they? Santer recently co-authored a separate paper that purported to debunk statements EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made that global warming had “leveled off.” But Santer’s paper only evaluated a selectively-edited and out-of-context portion of Pruitt’s statement by removing the term “hiatus.” Moreover, climate scientists mocked Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for talking about the global warming “hiatus” during a 2015 congressional hearing. Instead, activist scientists worked hard to airbrush the global warming slowdown from data records and advance media claim that it was a “myth.” Santer and Carl Mears, who operate the Remote Sensing System satellite temperature dataset, authored a lengthy blog post in 2016 critical of Cruz’s contention there was an 18-year “hiatus” in warming that climate models didn’t predict. The fact that Ben Santer is involved in this embarrassing retraction – his admission on the Pause is bad enough, but what the paper says about the unreliability of the computer models is breathtaking in its implications – will be particularly piquant to those who remember his prominent role in the Climategate emails. Santer revealed himself to be one of the nastier and more aggressive members of Michael Mann’s “Hockey” team when he emailed one of his colleagues: Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted. (Climatologist Pat Michaels, now of the Cato Institute, incurred Santer’s wrath by being one of the first climate scientists to pour cold water on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. In other words, Michaels made the disgusting, punishment-worthy error of using actual science and being right). But perhaps Santer’s lowest point was the occasion where he effectively hijacked one of the early IPCC Assessment Reports and ramped up the scaremongering in a way that had rather more to do with political activism than it did to science. I describe it in my book Watermelons: Ben who? Well quite. Unless his name rings a bell as the guy from the Climategate emails who wanted to “beat the crap out of” climate sceptic Pat Michaels, you almost certainly won’t have heard of him. Yet in the mid-90s this climate modeling nonenity was somehow placed in the extraordinary position of being able to dictate world opinion on global warming at the stroke of a pen. He achieved this in his role as “lead author” of Chapter 8 of the scientific working group report on the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (SAR). Nothing to write home about there, you might think, except that Santer was personally responsible for by far the most widely reported sentence in the entire report: the one from the Summary for Policy Makers (the only part of the IPCC’s Assessment Report most people actually bother to read) claiming “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” But was this line actually true? Was this really a fair summary – the kind of summary the IPCC purports rigorously and definitively to give of us – of the general state of scientific understanding at that particular moment? Er, well not according to some of the scientists who’d contributed to that chapter of the report, no. The original version of the chapter – as agreed on and signed off by all 28 contributing authors – expressed considerably more doubt about AGW than was indicated in Santer’s summary. It included these passages: “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” “No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change observed) to (man-made) causes.” “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.” “When will an anthropogenic climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to the question is “We do not know.” Strangely, none of these passages made it to the final draft. They were among 15 deleted after the event by Santer, who also inserted a phrase entirely of his own to the effect that “the body of statistical evidence” now “points to a discernible human influence on climate.” In other words the chapter did not represent the “consensus” position reached by 28 scientists. What it in fact represented was the scientifically unsupported opinion of one man, Benjamin D Santer. We climate rationalists do still get an awful lot of stick from the alarmists for our old fashioned belief that scientists should stick to the evidence and use actual data rather than plucking stuff from thin air based on their fanciful notions of what ought to be true or what might get them more grant-funding. How delightful it is to have it confirmed – albeit in the arid language of a science paper – that yet again are 100 percent correct.

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