In 2009, thousands of documents were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (cru). They revealed years of data manipulation, suppression and fraud by prominent climate scientists. The massive scandal, nicknamed Climategate, revealed three main themes: First, many scientists privately admit to each other that parts of the data are flimsy and require manipulation if they are to support the idea of severe man-made climate change. Second, many leading climate scientists see climate change as more of a political cause than a scientific pursuit. Third, many such scientists hide underlying data if it does not support the cause.
If the science is sure and settled, why would this manipulation and antiscientific behavior be needed to “prove” it? Climategate has been called “the worst scandal of this generation” and “the biggest scam in history.” Yet it was downplayed by climate activists dismissed as “irrelevant.” and whitewashed or ignored by most media and politicians.
But are they irrelevant? In one leaked e-mail, climatologist Kevin Trenberth wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” In another, cru chief Phil Jones wrote to climatologists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes: “I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) … to hide the decline.”
It was use of this “trick” that had enabled Mann to produce the now infamous “hockey stick” graph. Gathering data from ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments and corals, his crew graphed global temperature over the past thousand years. Their graph showed a long, mostly flat line for the years from 800 to 1900 (the handle of the hockey stick), then a sudden upward spike (the upturned blade). It seemed to pin warming firmly on industrialization and became a fixture of global warming alarmism.
But the problem is that the graph was the result of manipulation—or, as Jones said, a “trick.” Mann had massaged the data to get rid of a pesky time of pre-industrial warmth called the Medieval Warm Period (occurring from about a.d. 1000 to 1300). This was followed by the Little Ice Age, lasting until the late 1800s. Does this mean 20th century warming could be largely a natural recovery from those cold years? Mann’s trick, which buried around seven centuries of climate history, tries to silence such questions.
In 2011, Climategate 2.0 broke. A new batch of 5,000 e-mails was leaked to the public showing the same themes as the first batch. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose [skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre],” wrote Mann in one leaked e-mail. “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out [of IPCC reports],” wrote Jonathan Overpeck, (coordinating lead author for the most recent climate assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)), in another. They also discussed, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data.
Prof Phil Jones said- “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
Phil Jones @uea Tue Jul 5 15:51:55 2005
I found this brilliant introduction to the emails extremely useful and interesting.
Over 100 emails are featured with explanatory notes.
So much for this being a case of a few emails taken out of context.
The more emails that you read and the more contexts that are given, the worse it all looks…
Climategate, what’s going on?
This (wikileaks.org) archive presents over 60MB of emails, documents, code and models from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, written between 1996 and 2009. (prior to a redaction & deletion process, triggered by a Freedom of Information request – If everything is kosher, why would CRU want to hide stuff ?)
There’s also a List of additional reading on the more info page.
It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, due to the eye watering amounts of money involved, “the
science silence is settled” !!