Tag Archives: Phil Jones

Global warming alarmists are now alarmed because they cannot account for the cooling trend that has been evident since the late 1990s in contradiction to their climate models. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the planet has entered a cooling cycle that could persist for decades. Dr. Don Easterbook, for instance, a geologist and professor emeritus at Western Washington University, has concluded that sea surface temperatures will experience a drop that could last for the next 25 to 30 years based on his observations of the Pacific Decadal Oscilliation or PDO, a weather phenomenon that reverts between warm and cool modes.

Researchers who have long questioned the premise of man-made global warming theories point out that alarmist claims are driven more by computer models that omit key variables than they are by actual observations. The growing “climategate” scandal goes a long way toward vindicating the scientific skeptics who have been ostracized in the media and the academic community. Emails that have been leaked to the Internet from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia show that researchers have deliberately fudged and manipulated data in an effort to account for predicted catastrophic warming that has not materialized.

In his testimony before the British Parliament, Phil Jones, the CRU director, suggested that he would be cleared of any wrongdoing once a fuller body of evidence is presented. The emails that have been made public were only a “tenth of one percent” of his correspondence, Jones said.

If anything, the more recent email revelations serve to invalidate the use of climate models that figure prominently into the reports issued through the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC author wrote in an email addressed to other alarmists in October of last year. “The CERES data published in August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data surely are wrong.  Our observing system is inadequate.”

In another email addressed to Tom Wigley, a physicist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Trenberth makes the following comment:

“Hi Tom — How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

This exchange is particularly significant because it demonstrates that climate models that have been used to rationalize expansive regulatory schemes are in error, Steve Milloy editor and founder of JunkScience.com said in interview.

“We’ve had no warming for the past 10-15 years, even though carbon dioxide emissions have increased,” he observed. “The upper atmosphere should be warming at a much greater rate than the lower atmosphere but this is not happening. It means that we don’t understand energy flows, and if you don’t understand how something works it cannot be modeled. It’s insanity to go forward with regulations that are not based on something we understand, but that’s what is being proposed.”

Although “climategate” is properly viewed as an “unexpected gift” to skeptics in that it shows  “Big Science in its natural state,” it is not exactly new, laments David Berlinski, a senior fellow with The Discovery Institute.

“In the 1970s, the Club of Rome was on everyone’s lips with their hysterical warnings of mass disasters that were shortly to arrive,” he wrote in an email message. “My first book, On Systems Analysis, which I wrote for the MIT press, was an expose and a denunciation of the kind of stuff then current. I cannot see that anything has changed. Then as now, the people doing the hustle were doing it for money. Phil Jones and the CRU, after all, took 23 million dollars of public funds to fudge their data and the Club of Rome in their time took in as much.”

Berlinski continues:

“The overwhelming consensus is, as it always is, utter nonsense because it is in the first place an illusion: There are very many scientists who dissent from global warming. And it is utter nonsense because it is based on nothing more than a trend line. No one has the faintest idea what the trend represents or whether it will continue or whether even the trend itself was based on data so fudged as to be meaningless. The latter, I think.”

“What is at work deep down is a delusion as striking as various Zulu beliefs and no more credible: To wit, that because there is something that might for the sake of convenience be designated as the global atmosphere, there is as well a science of the global atmosphere, one in which for various initial conditions of the GA, laws of its evolution might be adduced from which explanations and predictions would flow. There is no such science; there are no such laws. To be sure one can say with easy confidence that the GA is determined by fundamental physics.”

Berlinski appeared in the 2008 documentary “Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed,” which probes into the mistreatment of scientists who have raised questions about Charles Darwin’s 150 year old theory of evolution.  Ben Stein, the former Nixon speechwriter turned Hollywood actor, served as the film’s narrator. The film is built around the idea that free thinkers who dissent from the orthodoxy of “Big Science” are being silenced and marginalized. In light of the “climategate” scandal, “Expelled” now appears quite prescient.

Berlinski, who is also a noted mathematician, is not himself a proponent of Intelligent Design theory, but he does defend biologists and astronomers appearing in the documentary who are open to the idea as an alternative to Darwinian views that continue to dominate the scientific academy.

In reality, science has never operated by consensus. Over time, prevailing views are either substantiated or dismissed as new evidence emerges. The momentum is now very much with Easterbrook and other researchers who have identified natural forces as opposed to human activity as the primary driving force behind warming and cooling trends. Ideally, they should find greater expression.

But Berlinski is not so confident over the long term.

“Climate science stands exposed but only for the moment,” he wrote. “It will be back. I cannot see much difference between evolutionary science and climate science and I have no expectation that the winds of dissent will ever blow from the one to the other. Why should they? In just the past few years, large scale econometric models have, once again, been shown to be unreliable and intellectually worthless. The world-wide economy tanked and not one — not one! — econometric model predicted it.”

Global warming alarmism as a movement appears to have peaked; that’s the good news. A new Gallup Poll shows the American public now dismisses catastrophic claims. Unfortunately, the political agenda that always stood behind the man-made global warming scare remains in motion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding aimed against greenhouse gasses could open the way to centralized planning and government control that irrevocably transforms American society.

Sen. Lisa  Murkowsi (R-Alaska) has introduced a resolution to block EPA action under the Congressional Review Act. It deserves the full support of small government activists. But the economic case against new regulations, as important and compelling as they are, may be insufficient standing alone.

The grand designs of the statists who now hold sway in Washington D.C. can only be uprooted and defeated by attacking the nexus that exists between Big Government and Big Science. Swollen federal agencies that have victimized private property owners, business owners and private citizens in the name of environmentalism could become quite vulnerable in short order.

USA Today on Thursday devoted a front page story to defending one of the key scientists involved in November's ClimateGate scandal.

In a piece entitled "Questions about research slow climate change efforts," author Brian Winter -- oh the irony! -- omitted important information about Penn State University's controversial global warming alarmist Michael Mann while downplaying the seriousness of the e-mail messages at the heart of the matter.

The main article also dishonestly ignored how Mann is being investigated by his own university concerning his involvement in the scandal, and actually NEVER even mentioned the scientist's infamous "Hockey Stick" graph that has been widely discredited by climatologists and meteorologists around the world.

Instead of a fair and balanced treatment of Mann and issues related to his view of anthropogenic global warming, readers were unfortunately presented with a grossly one-sided and disingenuous report evident in the very first paragraphs:

The violent threats are not what bother Michael Mann the most. He's used to them.

Instead, it's the fact that his life's work — the effort to stop global warming — has been under siege since last fall. That's when Mann suddenly found himself in the middle of the so-called "climategate" scandal, in which more than 1,000 e-mails among top climate scientists — including Mann — were obtained illegally by hackers and published on the Internet.

With this beginning, Mann was depicted as the victim in this matter, someone the reader should sympathize with RATHER than question.

Is this journalism? Is this what should be on the front page of a major newspaper or somewhere in its opinion pages?

But Winter wasn't done acting as Mann's defense attorney, for these are paragraphs four and five:

In a rare extended interview, Mann acknowledges "minor" errors but says he has been bewildered by the criticism — including a deluge of correspondence sent to his Pennsylvania State University office that, he says, occasionally has turned ugly.

"I've developed a thick skin," Mann says. "Frankly, I'm more worried that these people are succeeding in creating doubt in the minds of the public, when there really shouldn't be any."

Minor errors? Really?

Well, if Winter was actually a journalist, and not a global warming sycophant, he might have informed readers what the former director of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, Phil Jones, told the BBC about these "minor errors" last month, in particular the infamous "hide the decline" phrase in one of the e-mail messages in question:

This remark has nothing to do with any "decline" in observed instrumental temperatures. The remark referred to a well-known observation, in a particular set of tree-ring data, that I had used in a figure to represent large-scale summer temperature changes over the last 600 years.

The phrase 'hide the decline' was shorthand for providing a composite representation of long-term temperature changes made up of recent instrumental data and earlier tree-ring based evidence, where it was absolutely necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were.

Unlike Winter, those that have studied these e-mail messages know that "hide the decline" was no "minor error." It was an intentional manipulation of climate data.

More importantly, it related directly to Mann, as his infamous "Hockey Stick" graph used data from these tree rings.

As Winter noted, "Mann's research, which used tree rings, coral and other historical indicators to estimate how temperatures have risen in recent centuries, has been used by the IPCC in its reports."

As such, this article -- whose third sentence talked about Mann's "life work" -- completely ignored that his most important contribution to this debate was seriously questioned not only by the e-mail messages themselves, but by the former head of the organization at the heart of the scandal who admitted to the BBC that temperature data from these tree rings has been found to be inaccurate.

How could Winter POSSIBLY ignore such an inconvenient truth in an article about Mann?

But it gets worse, for the piece also never actually referred to the name of Mann's work -- the infamous "Hockey Stick."

Yep. Nowhere in this almost 1700-word piece defending Mann's "life work" is "Hockey Stick" mentioned.

Is it possible this was intentionally omitted because someone at USA Today might have then insisted that Winter inform readers that this graph has been widely discredited by scientists around the world including indirectly Jones just last month?

No, facts like that were unimportant, as were others that might have made the reader wonder why Winter was going so far out of his way to defend Mann.

Although the article referred to a recent finding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change improperly claimed -- using what can only be called junk science! -- Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035, Winter for some reason chose not to inform his readers of other errors recently discovered in IPCC reports.

All Winter needed to do was look at a Scientific American article published Wednesday to gain a little knowledge on the subject marvelously entitled "IPCC Errors Prompt Review by International Science Academies":

African crop yields wither, along with the Amazon rainforest; Himalayan glaciers disappear by 2035. These are the erroneous predictions ascribed to the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a document reviewed by some 2,500 scientists and other experts as well as vetted by more than 190 countries. So does the fact that a few errors crept into a more than 3,000 page report merit a revision of IPCC processes?

That is the question facing a new panel to be assembled by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) in Amsterdam, a composite board of many of the world's national scientific bodies, such as the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. "This will be an independent review," says physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the IAC co-chairs, about the evaluation requested by the U.N. and the IPCC. [...]

"What it will do is see what are the procedures and how can they be improved. How can we avoid perhaps that certain types of errors are not made?"

Dijkgraaf should know. After all, one of the errors made by the IPCC came as a result of information provided directly by the Dutch government about the percentage of the Netherlands that would be vulnerable to flooding as a result of rising sea levels. The government corrected that percentage in a subsequent statement.

Although Winter touched on this development -- "The United Nations announced Wednesday that it would bring in an outside panel of scientists to help review an occasional study put together by a U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)" -- he chose not to inform his readers of these other errors in the IPCC reports or their seriousness.

Obviously, that would have interfered with the mission:

Despite the mistakes, Mann says the core argument — that the Earth is warming, humans are at least partly responsible, and disaster may wait unless action is taken — remains intact.

"I look at it like this: Let's say that you're in your car, you open up the owner's manual, and you discover a typo on page 225. Does that mean you stop driving the car? Of course not. Those are the kind of errors we're talking about here," Mann says. "Nothing has fundamentally changed."

Nothing has fundamentally changed? 

Well, using Mann's car example, and what's going on right now with Toyota, the answer might actually be that you DO stop driving the car.

After all, these errors aren't typos. These are serious mistakes in not only the science involved in various predictions key to the global warming argument, but also the science involved in determining what global temperatures were before the thermometer was invented.

As such, again using Mann's car example, if one found serious flaws in the engine and drive train of a car, would you keep driving it?

Unfortunately, Winter's readers might, for his goal was to downplay the seriousness not only of ClimateGate, but of all the recent errors found in crucial IPCC documents.

Instead of acting like a journalist looking to get to the heart of a very controversial issue, Winter took a side, and set out to convince readers that not only didn't Mann do anything wrong, but also that it's his accusers that are at fault.

This was also accomplished by citing only one scientist skeptical of manmade global warming with this meager reference that had nothing specific to do with Mann or his work:

It has been a dramatic reversal of fortune for a movement that, just a few years ago, thought it was "invincible," says Leighton Steward, a geologist and global warming skeptic. "We've all been kind of giggling as we watch this thing fall apart," he says.

Imagine that.

The person at the heart of this scandal who is currently being investigated by his own school was given free rein to offer his side of the argument without almost no opposing viewpoints, and not one scientistific opinion was cited to specifically address Mann's involvement in ClimateGate or the veracity of his work. 

In fact, the only other skeptic referred to by Winter was Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), but he's not a scientist.

Making matters worse, Winter even gave Mann the last word:

Citing climate data, Mann says "there's a better than 50-50 chance" that 2010 will be the hottest year ever. That, more than any political statement, could refocus the debate, he says.

"If we don't act on this, it's not a failure of science," Mann says. "It's our failure as a civilization to deal with the problem."

How disgraceful. 

Aren't journalists supposed to question those caught making errors? 

If Mann worked for the oil or coal industry, and had been found to be in the middle of a scandal to misreport vital information to the public, would he have been treated so favorably in this front page story, or given such latitude to explain his side? Would there have been absolutely no scientists cited attacking his views?

Or would he have been torn to shreds much like the heads of Toyota were when they appeared on Capitol Hill? Or how the financial services industry's CEO's are continually lambasted by the press as being corrupt and greedy?

Unfortunately, because Winter and most American so-called journalists like the industry Nobel Laureate Al Gore is the de facto CEO of -- and let's be clear about this: the advancement of the manmade global warming theory IS an industry! -- all those involved get defended when they make mistakes, and their detractors are labeled as corrupt and possessing greed-filled motivations.

Must be nice for them to have advocates working for them in the press rather than scrutinizing their every word and move, wouldn't you say? 

Once again, this is by no means surprising. For years, NewsBusters has been informing readers about the disgraceful coverage of manmade global warming by America's press.

This front page piece by USA Today is a perfect example, and all those involved should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Serious errors are now being uncovered in IPCC reports, and those involved in supplying scientific information to the United Nations have been shown to be manipulating data, withholding their methodologies, and preventing dissenting views from being incorporated in such reports.

Rather than exposing what's going on along with all those involved, America's press have taken it upon themselves to participate in the disinformation campaign while sheltering the guilty from blame or scrutiny.

Quite simply, almost forty years since the first scandal called "Gate" erupted, the press now have taken the side of the burglars, and are assisting "All The President's Men" rather than exposing them.

Talk about your inconvenient truths. 

The absolutely stunning global warming revelations this weekend by the man in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal have gone almost completely ignored by America's press.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.

Jones also admitted that he and his fellow scientists manipulated figures to hide a decline in crucial tree-ring data thereby questioning the validity of the entire global warming theory.

Despite the seriousness of these revelations, much as what happened when the ClimateGate scandal first broke, with the exception of Fox News, America's media have almost totally boycotted this amazing story:

• No mention by the New York Times
• No mention by the Washington Post
• No mention by USA Today
• No mention by ANY major U.S. newspaper EXCEPT the Washington Times
• No mention by the Associated Press
• No mention by Reuters
• No mention by UPI
• No mention by ABC News
• No mention by CBS News
• No mention by NBC News
• No mention by MSNBC 

For its part, CNN FINALLY got around to covering this story with a very brief mention Tuesday:

JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: There's also something else that's out there. Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia, the climate research unit, the guy that was at the center of this recent e-mail controversy late last year, has said in an interview with the BBC that he has not seen any, quote, "statistically significant warming since 1995," though he says he still believes that the earth's temperature has warmed. And he also said that he might be missing some of the data that is responsible for his climate models.

Of course, skeptics are jumping all over this, saying the whole thing is a farce. Global warming doesn't exist.

What do you think of the Professor Jones situation, the lack of statistically significant warming, and the fact that he may have misplaced some of the records?

JOHN CHRISTY, PROFESSOR, ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, UNIV. OF ALABAMA- HUNTSVILLE: Well, I think what Phil Jones is saying is that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of making the temperature rise and fall through the past several hundred years. And in terms of the data problems, well, we do have to be careful when we're talking about public policy, that means trillions of dollars, and we haven't had that very hard and critical situation where you take care of data and make it publicly available to everyone. And that needs to be done now.

That's it!

Bear in mind that the Jones BBC interview was published Saturday. NewsBusters reported the revelations at 6PM Eastern Time the same day. And yet CNN first mentioned the story possibly as much as 72 hours AFTER the BBC piece.

I guess that's why CNN is no longer considered the most trusted name in news.

Speaking of which, much as it did when ClimateGate broke, FNC has been all over this story addressing it on "Fox News Sunday," on Monday's "Glenn Beck Show," on Monday's "Special Report," and on Monday's "Hannity."

By contrast, for their part, the rest of the news media have found filmmaker Kevin Smith being thrown off a Southwest plane for being too fat MUCH more important:

• The New York Times reported it
• The Washington Post reported it
• The Associated Press reported it
• UPI reported it
• ABC News reported it
• CBS News reported it
• CNN reported it -- 14 TIMES!

Well, I guess "journalists" have to have their priorities, don't they?

Once again, much as what happened with ClimateGate, America's press are asleep at the wheel concerning a major story involving global warming.

There's no other way of saying it: when it comes to Al Gore's favorite money-making myth, the American media are almost criminal in their behavior.

Shame on them!!!

*****Update: Marc Sheppard has more.

The U.S. Chamber strongly supports efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, but we believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to achieve that goal.

The wrong way is through the EPA’s endangerment finding, which triggers Clean Air Act regulation. Because of the huge potential impact on jobs and local economies, this is an issue that requires careful analysis of all available data and options. Unfortunately, the agency failed to do that and instead overreached. The result is a flawed administrative finding that will lead to other poorly conceived regulations further downstream.

Today the Chamber is filing a formal petition indicating it will challenge EPA’s decision to trigger Clean Air Act regulation, based on lapses in EPA’s process in making that decision. The Chamber’s legal challenge will focus specifically on the inadequacies of the process that EPA followed in triggering Clean Air Act regulation, and not on scientific issues related to climate change or endangerment.

We continue to call for Congress to address climate change policy through the legislative process, rather than having EPA misapply environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act that were not created to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Emphasis mine.

In addition to ignoring its own internal rules and working outside the legislative branch, the EPA is acting on a 2007 Supreme Court Ruling, which, based on new developments in the Climategate scandal, should be revisited. The ruling states the EPA was found to have the authority to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming and climate change. In addition, the Court stated:

Based on respected scientific opinion that a well-documented rise in global temperatures and attendant climatological and environmental changes have resulted from a significant increase in the atmospheric concentration of “greenhouse gases,” a group of private organizations petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin regulating the emissions of four such gases, including carbon dioxide, under §202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, which requires that the EPA “shall by regulation prescribe…

The EPA, in concert with with Obama administration, is attempting to force through a modified version of cap-and-trade through regulation, a signal that Obama realizes cap and trade is dead in the Senate–especially after this death blow to the global warming/climate change movement:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

It will be interesting to watch the Obama administration attempt to circumvent and spin lead scientist Professor Jones’ statements. Will the EPA revise its final report based on this new information?

Global warming, climate change, and cap and trade will be that much harder for the Left to sell. Americans weren’t buying them in the first place. Cap and trade was recognized for what is was and is–the legislation that provided the trigger for the transfer of wealth to poor nations–wealth redistribution on a global scale.

What, now, is the fate of the “Copenhagen Accord” non-binding agreement where:

The Copenhagen Accord is a 12 paragraph document that sets a 2 degree Celsius limit on future warming. Its provisions address emissions cuts, verification and deforestation. It would also commit 100 billion dollars from wealthy countries and global institutions over the next 10 years to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

Based on all of the new information on climate change and the manipulation of the “science” for some 15 years, it will be revealing if the United States adheres to this agreement. If Obama continues with this nonsense of climate change and insists on transferring United States’ wealth to third world countries, my assertions have been correct all along–that the core intentions of the Obama agenda are to place severe hardship on the American people by destroying the nation’s wealth. After all, Obama is intentionally proposing, supporting, and forcing policies through–by any means–that bankrupt the United States and weaken our economy, discourage businesses from investing and hiring workers, deepening unemployment and stifling innovation, and squeezing the American people into desperation for federal aid (there is a record number of food stamp recipients now, for example) and health care benefits.

It seems the end goal of the Obama Administration is to make people dependent upon the federal government. How’s that for some hope and change.

The British scientist in the middle of November's ClimateGate scandal says that contrary to what Al Gore and many in the media claim, the debate concerning manmade global warming is not over.

"There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well," Phil Jones, the former head of Britain's Climatic Research Unit told the BBC.

In a lengthy Q&A published at BBC.com Saturday, Jones also said: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.

Maybe most important, Jones explained what "hide the decline" in ClimateGate e-mail messages meant confirming they manipulated data (questions in bold, h/t Sonic Frog via Glenn Reynolds): 

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical? [...]

[T]he warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. [...]

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. [...]

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.

Now comes the part of the Q&A many will find most interesting:

K - How much faith do you have - and should we have - in the Yamal tree ring data from Siberia? Should we trust the science behind the palaeoclimate record?

First, we would all accept that palaeoclimatic data are considerably less certain than the instrumental data. However, we must use what data are available in order to look at the last 1,000 years.

I believe that our current interpretation of the Yamal tree-ring data in Siberia is sound. Yamal is just one series that enters some of the millennial long reconstructions that are available.

The current interpretation of the tree-ring data is "sound." Yet, Jones earlier said (emphasis added), "There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well."

Q - Let's talk about the e-mails now: In the e-mails you refer to a "trick" which your critics say suggests you conspired to trick the public? You also mentioned "hiding the decline" (in temperatures). Why did you say these things?

This remark has nothing to do with any "decline" in observed instrumental temperatures. The remark referred to a well-known observation, in a particular set of tree-ring data, that I had used in a figure to represent large-scale summer temperature changes over the last 600 years.

The phrase 'hide the decline' was shorthand for providing a composite representation of long-term temperature changes made up of recent instrumental data and earlier tree-ring based evidence, where it was absolutely necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were.

This "divergence" is well known in the tree-ring literature and "trick" did not refer to any intention to deceive - but rather "a convenient way of achieving something", in this case joining the earlier valid part of the tree-ring record with the recent, more reliable instrumental record.

I was justified in curtailing the tree-ring reconstruction in the mid-20th Century because these particular data were not valid after that time - an issue which was later directly discussed in the 2007 IPCC AR4 Report.

This is important, for most people still don't understand what the decline they were trying to hide was.

As Marc Sheppard wrote in December, "[T]he decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists -- those determined by proxy reconstructions." He continued:

Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], "WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1990," when he wrote the e-mail. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, Jones was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann's series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.

Now, Jones has admitted this to the BBC: "[It] was absolutely necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were."

In simple terms, Briffa's tree-ring data showed a decline in temperatures between 1960 and 1999 that weather stations around the world disagreed with. So, Jones spliced into Briffa's data set the real "instrumental" numbers for that period thereby hiding the decline.

This should raise eyebrows for a number of reasons. First, Jones and Company gave no notification to folks receiving this data -- including the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change -- that Briffa's numbers included instrumental data.

But more importantly, as the tree-ring numbers deviated so demonstrably from the observed temperature data between 1960 and 1999, why should anyone believe they're accurate for any periods in the past that can't be confirmed with instrumentation?

The entire global warming myth depends on tree-ring data that was grossly errant for forty years in the last century. This makes the decline ClimateGate scientists were trying to hide FAR MORE serious than most people believe.

Moving backward in the Q&A, there was another issue addressed by the BBC readers will find interesting:

N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So, the scientist at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal doesn't think the debate is over.

Given what he's now confirmed about significant flaws in the tree-ring data, the only thing surprising is that he'd admit it.

Are you listening Mr. Gore? 

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

– The IPCC warned that because of global warming the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.” They cited one study to support their claim, but when the research was published in 2008, after the IPCC report was released, the study noted: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

– The IPCC warned that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming, but the sole source for that claim was a non-refereed report authored by two people who the Sunday Times of London referred to as “two green activists,” one of them with the World Wildlife Fund.

– The IPCC even got wrong the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level. The report claims that the percent is 55 percent, when the right number is 26 percent.

On February 3rd, Mr. Pachauri however defended the UN’s IPCC report by saying that the critics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder. I hope that they apply [asbestos] to their faces every day.” While Pachauri admits that the IPCC was inaccurate about the Himalayan glaciers melting, he claimed that the attacks were motivated by “business interests” who “spread a lot of disinformation.”

Finally, it should be noted that Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces that country’s freedom of information act regulations, has come to some conclusions regarding Climategate. The ICO found that the University of East Anglia breached violated British law by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The UK Daily Mail reports that “the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.” Out of 105 freedom of information requests, Professor Phil Jones, who headed the university’s Climate Research Unit, only complied with 10 requests.

For too long global warming proponents have claimed that their claims can’t be questioned. Science should be more transparent than this. But relying on misreported news stories and white papers put out by non-scientists from advocacy cases isn’t science.  Why these climate temperature data has been hidden and why researchers won’t answer questions on adjustments that they have made has become quite troubling. In this age of computers and website, there is no excuse for hiding data.

The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot.

Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble. Taylor got off a little easier, receiving only scoffs and curious-to-annoyed glances for asking inconvenient questions.

But that’s not to say we were the only people to question the assumptions of the attendees who believe the “science is settled” on global warming. Perhaps the greatest challenge came from one of their own — renowned climate scientist William Sprigg — who urged his colleagues to stop treating the ClimateGate scandal as irrelevant noise promoted by “deniers.” In an amazingly telling moment, green energy consultant Andy Van Horn, who introduced Sprigg, admitted he’d never heard of ClimateGate until Sprigg suggested it a few weeks ago as a topic worthy of discussion. (Who are the real “deniers” again?)

Sprigg, adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, believes the planet is on a potentially dangerous warming path and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to blame. He also led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. Clealry, Sprigg is no “outlier” or “rebel,” but one of the most respected and “mainstream” scientists in the field of climatology. So it came to a bit of shock to the audience when Sprigg expressed concerns about how contrarian scientists are treated with contempt by many of his colleagues.

It’s not right, he said, that the game is rigged to keep skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals. It violates the scientific method to refuse to release raw data so others can test your theories. And it’s a big mistake to keep defending the likes of infamous “Hide the Decline” emailers Phil Jones and Michael Mann. The very credibility of the entire discipline of climate science is at stake, Sprigg said, and it’s time to stop ignoring this fact. As one might imagine, this all did not go over very well in the audience — who were undoubtedly expecting to hear a lecture ratifying their view that ClimateGate was no big deal when they saw Sprigg’s topic on the agenda.

I recorded Sprigg’s remarks on video for Heartland, and (from what I could tell) mine was the only camera in the room. The footage below features Taylor — who is also managing editor of Environment & Climate News — asking Sprigg what he thinks the future holds for the wholly corrupted IPCC. Sprigg nodded as Taylor referred to “mounting scandals” at the IPCC and then responded:

“There will be some reform. I think there are going to be big changes in the peer review process for the IPCC. There will be — there are — calls for the head of [IPCC Chairman Raj] Pachauri. Some of my colleagues have written letters saying that he needs to be taken off the job.”

In his 24-minute lecture, Sprigg also:

• warned of a growing perception that “the IPCC is biased, conflicted, [and] pushing political agendas.”;

• called for a new climate research agency supported not entirely by the government, but in conjunction with the private sector;

• and declared: “We need to stick to our scientific principles,” and “improve our peer preview process, and expand the stakeholders’ role to keep us all honest.”

It was a remarkable presentation, one that The Heartland Institute has summarized with commentary in the video below. One gets the feeling Sprigg has put himself on the path to pariah status among the true-believers of global warming, But this honest scientist deserves praise from all sides of the debate for demanding politics, group-think and a desire to control our lives through government mandates not replace scientific rigor.

Graham Smith of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has revealed to Jonathan Leake of the London Sunday Times that his office has uncovered wrongdoing on the part of the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU). In a letter to Leake, Smith writes:

The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information..

Climate Email -

Currently the law prevents the authorities from taking any action against CRU, and the ICO office will recommend changes to the law to close the loophole.

On Nov 19^th after I alerted the internet to the Climategate files, I contacted Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. The message: follow the FOIA. He didn’t; Leake did. Score one for the London Times. As the story unfolded Tom Fuller and I grumbled about with the coverage of the FOIA story. A book fell out of that. Climategate:the Crutape letters, now available on Kindle and as a Lulu Ebook.

The story behind Holland’s FOIA request (here and here) requires close reading of blogs, scientific papers, leaked mails, FOIA requests, IPCC drafts, and expert reviewer comments. There is no simple take away. Except this: the Climate scientists corrupted the IPCC process, the science journal process, the statistical process, and the FOIA process to silence one man– Stephan McIntyre –and to waterboard the climate data till it delivered the message they wanted delivered, an icon more compelling than the “Hockey Stick.”

No one who can put two brain cells together can argue that these processes and the people who abused them are untainted. Instead, they will argue that nothing changes in the science. But without a trusted process there is no science. Surely, the specter of global warming does not earn a last place in the concerns of Americans. But it’s been driven there by the public’s lack of trust in the process. In their rush to judgment, the climate scientists, convinced of the nobility of their cause, have engaged noble cause corruption. Lucky for them a loophole in the law may save them from prosecution, but should not save them from disbarment.

The case is clear. In an effort to shoe horn a paper into the IPCC report, the scientists working together with Stephen Schneider of Climate Change journal, destroyed the credibility of chapter 6 of the 4^th Assessment of the IPCC. And they knew as they hijacked the process that Stephen McIntyre was watching. Yet they persisted and were caught. One scientist, Phil Jones, even suggested changing the dates on papers to hide the misdeed. But there was no hiding of the misdeed as they left a paper trail of violations.

The critical violation revolves around the submission of comments outside the IPCC process. All comments must pass through official channels. Overpeck, the task master for chapter 6 makes this clear in the mails. But the “Jesus Paper”, the paper that will save the Hockey stick is different. In defiance of process the lead author, Keith Briffa, contacts and is contacted by the authors of the “Jesus Paper,” Casper Ammann and Eugene Wahl.  That correspondence, evident to McIntyre, a reviewer of chapter 6, was one target of Holland’s FOIA.

The details of Holland’s requests are covered at Climate Audit. On May 6^th 2008 CRU acknowledged his request. On the 3^rd of June they denied his request. On the 4^th he appealed and they rejected his appeal on June 20^th.

At 6:30 on May 27^th 2008 , the scientists in CRU  were directed by FOIA officer Palmer to contact Ammann and find out if he considered his mails confidential. That was the predetermined excuse Palmer had suggested for rejecting Holland’s request. Palmer, fearing an appeal wanted to do things “by the book.” Which in this case meant suggesting to Ammann that his mails were confidential. Ammann appears to think otherwise. His response, however, was not taken into account and the refusal was issued.

Between the time when Palmer suggested that confidentially would be the excuse (May 27^th) and the denial (June 3^rd), Phil Jones would close the door on any potential appeal. He would request that everyone involved delete their mails.

The deletion of the mails might have worked. But buried in a mail from Wahl to Briffa, we have Briffa’s original mail, detailing the circumvention of the IPCC process. Worried that he cannot be objective in evaluating McIntyre, Briffa shipped a confidential file to Wahl in direct violation of the policy that Overpeck had explained to Roberts, in essence asking Wahl to evaluate his “Jesus Paper.”

In the end, of course, the full extent of the misdeeds will be detailed by the ICO, this is my take on the matter given the evidence in the climategate files. And while they have escaped prosecution, it’s clear that CRU and CRU employees cannot be trusted with the public interest. Beyond that we can wonder if action will be taken against them under the laws of misconduct in a public office, or under conspiracy laws in the UK. The legal status of destroying email in the US bears investigation.

Graham Smith of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has revealed to Jonathan Leake of the London Sunday Times that his office has uncovered wrongdoing on the part of the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU). In a letter to Leake, Smith writes:

The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information..

Climate Email -

Currently the law prevents the authorities from taking any action against CRU, and the ICO office will recommend changes to the law to close the loophole.

On Nov 19^th after I alerted the internet to the Climategate files, I contacted Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. The message: follow the FOIA. He didn’t; Leake did. Score one for the London Times. As the story unfolded Tom Fuller and I grumbled about with the coverage of the FOIA story. A book fell out of that. Climategate:the Crutape letters, now available on Kindle and as a Lulu Ebook.

The story behind Holland’s FOIA request (here and here) requires close reading of blogs, scientific papers, leaked mails, FOIA requests, IPCC drafts, and expert reviewer comments. There is no simple take away. Except this: the Climate scientists corrupted the IPCC process, the science journal process, the statistical process, and the FOIA process to silence one man– Stephan McIntyre –and to waterboard the climate data till it delivered the message they wanted delivered, an icon more compelling than the “Hockey Stick.”

No one who can put two brain cells together can argue that these processes and the people who abused them are untainted. Instead, they will argue that nothing changes in the science. But without a trusted process there is no science. Surely, the specter of global warming does not earn a last place in the concerns of Americans. But it’s been driven there by the public’s lack of trust in the process. In their rush to judgment, the climate scientists, convinced of the nobility of their cause, have engaged noble cause corruption. Lucky for them a loophole in the law may save them from prosecution, but should not save them from disbarment.

The case is clear. In an effort to shoe horn a paper into the IPCC report, the scientists working together with Stephen Schneider of Climate Change journal, destroyed the credibility of chapter 6 of the 4^th Assessment of the IPCC. And they knew as they hijacked the process that Stephen McIntyre was watching. Yet they persisted and were caught. One scientist, Phil Jones, even suggested changing the dates on papers to hide the misdeed. But there was no hiding of the misdeed as they left a paper trail of violations.

The critical violation revolves around the submission of comments outside the IPCC process. All comments must pass through official channels. Overpeck, the task master for chapter 6 makes this clear in the mails. But the “Jesus Paper”, the paper that will save the Hockey stick is different. In defiance of process the lead author, Keith Briffa, contacts and is contacted by the authors of the “Jesus Paper,” Casper Ammann and Eugene Wahl.  That correspondence, evident to McIntyre, a reviewer of chapter 6, was one target of Holland’s FOIA.

The details of Holland’s requests are covered at Climate Audit. On May 6^th 2008 CRU acknowledged his request. On the 3^rd of June they denied his request. On the 4^th he appealed and they rejected his appeal on June 20^th.

At 6:30 on May 27^th 2008 , the scientists in CRU  were directed by FOIA officer Palmer to contact Ammann and find out if he considered his mails confidential. That was the predetermined excuse Palmer had suggested for rejecting Holland’s request. Palmer, fearing an appeal wanted to do things “by the book.” Which in this case meant suggesting to Ammann that his mails were confidential. Ammann appears to think otherwise. His response, however, was not taken into account and the refusal was issued.

Between the time when Palmer suggested that confidentially would be the excuse (May 27^th) and the denial (June 3^rd), Phil Jones would close the door on any potential appeal. He would request that everyone involved delete their mails.

The deletion of the mails might have worked. But buried in a mail from Wahl to Briffa, we have Briffa’s original mail, detailing the circumvention of the IPCC process. Worried that he cannot be objective in evaluating McIntyre, Briffa shipped a confidential file to Wahl in direct violation of the policy that Overpeck had explained to Roberts, in essence asking Wahl to evaluate his “Jesus Paper.”

In the end, of course, the full extent of the misdeeds will be detailed by the ICO, this is my take on the matter given the evidence in the climategate files. And while they have escaped prosecution, it’s clear that CRU and CRU employees cannot be trusted with the public interest. Beyond that we can wonder if action will be taken against them under the laws of misconduct in a public office, or under conspiracy laws in the UK. The legal status of destroying email in the US bears investigation.

Canada’s Macleans has a profile of the skeptic at the center of the ClimateGate e-mails (what, you expected an American newspaper to cover this story?):

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

The political stakes are now so high when it comes to the “Climategate” scandal, and motives are being questioned so loudly on both sides, that few are noticing the remarkable story at the heart of it all: a 62-year-old mining executive and squash enthusiast has, for better or worse, found his way into the centre of a major scientific melée—almost by accident—and been able to make legitimate contributions.

McIntyre first became notorious in 2003 for his statistical critique, co-authored with economist Ross McKitrick, of the “hockey stick graph” that showed global temperatures rocketing upward in the 20th century. The hockey stick, featured in the 2001 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had a profound influence on policy worldwide, and played a starring role in presentations like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The McIntyre-McKitrick critique called attention to uncertainties in its temperature reconstructions dating back before 1600, to certain problems with dendrochronology (the use of tree rings to estimate past temperatures), and to issues with the statistical calculations underlying the hockey stick. Some climatologists insist that the graph tells the same story when you correct for all this, but much of the critique is now accepted, and the hockey stick, whose weaknesses are better understood, has itself become a somewhat inconvenient distraction for climatologists and environmentalists.

Meanwhile, McIntyre, working alone, has gone on to score further critical points. In 2007, he caught a mistake in the reporting of U.S. surface temperatures by NASA’s Goddard Institute that was quickly acknowledged, with thanks, and corrected. (NASA’s gracious manner contrasts sharply with the attitudes displayed behind the scenes at the CRU.)

The truth is that McIntyre, 62, little resembles the caricature of a wild-eyed climate-change “denier.” He is scrupulous about focusing his criticism on statistical procedures and disclosure practices. He is polite to, and about, climate scientists. He refuses to make grand categorical statements of the “Global warming is just commie horse puckey” type, preferring to remain agnostic, and he discourages such talk on his website,Climate Audit.

Read the whole profile here.

A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions”  during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book.

McAleer, a veteran journalist and film maker, has recently made a documentary “Not Evil Just Wrong’ which takes a sceptical look at the science and politics behind Global Warming concerns.

He asked Professor Schneider about his opinions on Climategate – where leaked emails have revealed that a senior British professor deleted data and encouraged colleagues to do likewise if it contradicted their belief in Global Warming.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, has temporarily stood down pending an investigation into the scandal.

Professor Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he would not comment on emails that may have been incomplete or edited.

During some testy exchanges with McAleer, UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistants twice tried to cut short McAleer’s question.

However as the press conference drew to a close Professor Schneider’s assistant called armed UN security guards to the room. They held McAleer and aggressively ordered cameraman Ian Foster to stop filming. The guard threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference if they did not obey his instructions to stop filming Professor Schneider.

The guard demanded to look at the film crews press credentials and refused to allow them to film until Professor Schneider left the room.
McAleer said he was disappointed by Professor Schneider’s behaviour.

“It was a press conference. Climategate is a major story – it goes to the heart of the Global Warming debate by calling into question the scientific data and the integrity of many scientists involved.”

“These questions should be answered. The attempts by UN officials and Professor Schneider’s assistant to remove my microphone were hamfisted  but events took a more sinister turn when they called an armed UN security officer to silence a journalist.”

Two officers corralled the film crew and one officer can be seen on tape threatening the cameraman. The Guard can also be heard warning that if the crew did not stop filming their would seize the equipment and the journalists expelled from the conference.

McAleer says he has made an official complaint about the incident.

“I have met Mr Christopher Ankerson the UN’s head of security for the conference and he has confirmed it was Professor Schneider’s staff who asked the security guards to come corral us at the press conference. Mr Ankerson could not say what grounds the security guard had for ordering us to stop filming.”

“This is a blatant attempt to stop journalists doing journalism and asking hard questions. It is not the job of armed UN security officers to stop legitimate journalists asking legitimate questions of senior members of the UN’s IPCC.”

Professor Schneider was interviewed for McAleer’s “Not Evil Just Wrong” documentary but lawyers later wrote to McAleer saying he was withdrawing permission for the interview to be used.

McAleer, who is from Ireland, has gained quite a reputation for asking difficult questions of those who have been promoting the idea of man-made Global Warming.

His microphone was cut off after he asked former vice-president Al Gore about the British court case which found that An Inconvenient Truth had a nine significant errors and exaggerations. Almost 500,000 people have watched the incident on youtube.

There have been numerous ostentatiously pathetic efforts to distract from what ClimateGate has not “revealed”, but affirmed, in the principals’ own words, and this mewling is getting more pathetic by the attempt.

Sitting in the chair waiting to participate in a CNN program Monday night largely dedicated to the issue — or, rather, what proved to be an embarrassingly slanted effort at to diminishing it, in its language and approach though to the channel’s credit they at least let me and Steve McIntyre on — I listened to the program’s lead-in. It entailed childish language like that the program will have “scientists and skeptics” (good grief), but also a remarkably insistent emphasis — with nothing whatsoever to back the claim up — on the exposed material being “hacked emails” (with no mention of computer code, annotations, other documentation and the like contained in the exposed trove; now that’s some serious bias).

There also is nothing in the record to suggest a hacking. Indeed,  there is tremendous reason to suspect a whistleblower, tracing back the evolution of the demands for the information, the denials, and the information’s path into the public realm. Yet whichever it was changes nothing about the substance, all of which is found in documents subject to the UK’s freedom of information act.

Which raises the second, ultra-whiny complaint sniffing about “private emails”. Actually, in looking into this I have yet to see one private email. So far I have only found more than a thousand emails subject to the UK’s freedom of information act, discussing taxpayer funded projects and professional advocacy. Someone might volunteer some of these private emails. And computer code, annotations, etc.

Then comes the substance-free hand-wringing that the pre-Copenhagen timing of this involuntary compliance with the transparency laws — which could have been accomplished years earlier if only the hucksters weren’t hiding and destroying the evidence — gives cause to probably better just ignore it all because the wrong kind of people must be behind getting it out into the open. Oh.

Besides, the BBC  has admitted it had the material six weeks before others stumbled onto it, which, given the history of how UK whistleblowers work, also informs a conclusion that a whistleblower sought to get the material out in response to Phil Jones’s latest effort to avoid providing the raw data. That was to claim that he lost it (which doesn’t pass the red face test for several reasons not least of which is there are no “oh, snap!” emails indicating concern among these alarmists that they did look only to see they actually had lost the raw data they had been refusing access to for years on ever-changing bases).

But the most revealing tantrum comes to me today in an email explaining that the fraudster-funded DeSmogBlog wants to take the discussion in the following direction: the skeptics, and particularly the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had the information before saying anything about it. If so that would somehow indicate we have some involvement in whatever process it was — hacking, whistleblowing — that forced at least partial compliance with long-obstructed requests under the UK’s freedom of information act. Because apparently that would impact the importance of what the information affirms. Their evidence is that we were able to see right away what this material signified. It is that self-evident. but nothing is easy for the alarmists. Just as with climate that’s always changing, they are able to see nefariousness behind the simplest observation.

But they are confusing us with the BBC, having the information as of October 12 but also to having sat on it until after others had let the nasty kitten out of the bag, at which point the guy who had received it in early October said he was buys and would figure out what to say about it soon.

This is somewhat similar to CEI, if for about six weeks longer than we waited. Indeed, I’ve checked with my colleagues, and their experience was like mine. I received an email notifying me that the materials were posted on an obscure site, on Wednesday November 18. Then I received another the next day, and posted an item here saying to keep an eye on what develops.

All of which I really think is to say that the alarmists recognize full-well what threat these affirmations pose. The substance terrifies them. It is so damning that they’re flailing about to assign some miscreance to its emergence to tar it. Although as a matter of, well, substance, that would not do so. And they want to do everything they can to avoid addressing the substance. Because the substance dooms them.

Believe it or not, the UN just whined that climategate is the Russian’s fault. It appears that the United Nation’s position is that the obvious cover-up of the false doctrine that is global warming perpetrated by global warming “scientists” is not the fault of the lying scientists, but that of the assumed “paid” Russian hacker that hacked the globaloney scientist’s emails and exposed the cover-up to the world. Convoluted reasoning, no?

Remember when you were a child and your Mother discovered through hearing about it from the neighbors that you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing? Remember how instead of taking responsibility for your actions you cried that it wasn’t right that someone narced on you? Well, that is the same sort of childish, facile reasoning that the UN has employed to explain away this climaegate scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently said that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were obtained and hyped by Russia in order to “destroy public confidence” in the “science” of man-made global warming… or is it now “climate change”? It’s hard to keep up with their constant name changing as they look for more sellable rhetoric.

Just like that kid that’s mad at getting caught but can’t see that he is at fault in the first place, the UN is now trying to get everyone to consider this as “hackergate” instead of climategate. Various UN folks are in essence telling us not to look “here,” but to instead look “over there.”

A few quotes:

“This is not ‘climategate’ it’s ‘hackergate’. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that.” — Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Program

“We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.” — Jean-Pascal van Ypersele

Yes, like a bad magician telling us to look at his right hand while his left hand is fishing around in his pocket for the “magic” card, the UN is trying desperately to make us forget about the actual contents of the emails while continuing to parlay its particular brand of economy-killing “magic” with its IPCC climate policies.

Skepticism against global warming is growing. Fortunately, it seems that the UN and these “climate change” salesmen are now fighting a rearguard action to try and keep their big government, nanny state plans rolling forward. The sad truth is that all their nanny state styled, economically inviable policies are little different than the sort of anti-capitalist (read anti-American) policies that have been pushed by the UN since it first met.

It’s all just another effort to eliminate local control and custom and vest all power in a central, singular body. And that goal is the most tyrannical idea of them all. Without custom, the unitary state without question devolves into tyranny. Without these intermediary institutions, these strong and voluntary associations outside of governmental control, there is no way to maintain civil liberty. But with them in place there is no way for far off masters to fully control the people. The UN and other nanny staters, therefore, must destroy these institutions.

For its part, the UN would see these local interests and even local governments squelched leaving itself as the arbiter of man’s relations, his education, his field of work, even his very soul. And the policies of “carbon trading” and the other prescriptions emanating from the global warming true believers are intended to do just that.

But people are starting to wake up. India has let it be known that it rejects Danish climate proposals. Australia has had a major party shake up over the issue with the result that its own cap and tax plan has arrived still born. And a recent Rasmussen poll found that more Americans than ever are skeptical about the science behind global warming. Cracks are appearing in the credibility of global warming.

So it’s no wonder that the UN is trying to make this into “hackergate” instead of “climategate.” Just as the refrain from the “well informed” during the Cold War was that an inordinate fear of communism, a red scare, was discreditable — even as they lost that fight when communism fell — now the same sorts of people are trying to substitute the old red arguments with green ones. And in a similar vein these folks are trying to discredit skeptics of their green policies. So, green is the new red, indeed. Let us strive to defeat these attempts as well.

Over at the Weekly Standard, the always impressive Steven Hayward has a good summation of where we are in Climate Gate:

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

As in the furor over Dan Rather’s fabricated documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the “fake but accurate” defense–what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don’t you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow,” Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. “The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. .  .  . I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. .  .  . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.” Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.

Hayward’s conclusion:

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.

Read the whole article here.

America's media might not think the growing ClimateGate scandal is important, but Britain's Met Office believes it's serious enough to re-examine 160 years of temperature data:

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. 

For those unfamiliar, the Met Office is England's national weather service.

Maybe this revelation will convince our global warming-obsessed press that information in the e-mail messages obtained from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is actually newsworthy.

As reported by the London Times Saturday (h/t Ed Morrissey):

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. [...]

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

With the Copenhagen summit just days from now, this announcement out of England is HUGE news, especially given how connected this Office is to the university at the heart of the scandal:

The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being investigated after e-mails written by its director, Phil Jones, appeared to show an attempt to manipulate temperature data and block alternative scientific views.

The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data to the Met Office, which added this to its own analysis of sea temperature data.

Also of consequence is how this Office is trying to get temperature data from all over the world re-examined:

Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations. [...]

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change admitted yesterday that it needed to consider the full implications of the e-mails and whether they cast doubt on any of the evidence for man-made global warming.

This led Ed Morrissey to opine Saturday:

The Met Office is taking the correct approach.  The data on which they largely relied has not only been shown to have been corrupted by bias and corruption, it’s also been destroyed.  Knowing the UEA-CRU’s credibility as a scientific effort has been compromised, real scientists would insist on recreating the data set in a thoroughly testable and transparent process before proceeding to use any of the conclusions reached from the previous work to form any more recommendations for action.

In fact, the UN, the UK, and the rest of the world should be insisting on the same approach — if they were interested in science in the first place.  The UK’s efforts to quash the Met Office’s review, which is what scientists would demand in any other context, shows that the politicians aren’t terribly interested in whether AGW is scientifically supportable, or even true at all.  They want the power that AGW hysteria gives them to seize control of private-industry production and the choices available to people now.

Indeed. 

One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.

That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it.

First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.

But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?

Among all that has been revealed, there does not appear to be one. Let alone a chain discussing the importance of not at long last actually having the raw data, how this loss might relate to the scores of emails they wrote about whether to release the data and how to avoid releasing the data and how they’d rather destroy it (I don’t know, “pretend to have lost it”) than give it to the folks who seem to be on to them.

This seems like a big email, and a chain of discussions that would pervade that which has been revealed. It doesn’t.

To the contrary, we have numerous emails from Jones explaining how turning over the raw data is one option, but he’d much rather destroy it than let the intrepid start pawing over it which could only lead, as he admits in one email, to figuring out what CRU et al did to said raw data in order to come up with their alarming claims.

So there is a reasonable conclusion, and it is not that the data was lost or destroyed twenty years ago.

But who knows, maybe Jones wrote James Hansen at NASA, or Gavin Schmidt – for so long a taxpayer-funded activist for Environmental Media Services’ RealClimate.blog and now implicated as a major player in these emails  (Capo number 6 according to this analysis). Those should turn up when the courts help NASA figure out how to come into compliance with their legal obligations and provide me similar data and correspondence that they have been, similarly and by chance, refusing me for over two years.

As the USS Obama Administration slowly starts to settle into the waves, future historians will be kept busy searching for the source of the iceberg that holed it below the waterline on its maiden voyage to the land of Hope and Change.  Was it the non-stimulating “stimulus”?  The ludicrous Nobel Peace Prize?  The decision to try the Sept. 11^th plotters in lower Manhattan?  The Afghanistan speech at West Point this week, splitting the difference between surging and surrendering as the photo-op cadets nodded off in the background?  It’s a tough call, and the first year’s not even over yet.

But this administration is more than simply its swivel-headed Fearless Leader, ping-ponging between his teleprompters as the law of diminishing returns exerts its iron grip on his poll numbers.  It’s also the executive officers, the governing party’s top senators and congressmen, the palace courtiers who enforce discipline among the spear-carriers as they split up the swag.  In this, the Obama Administration is especially blessed, featuring both the frozen rictus of Anunciata d’Alesandro Pelosi as the speaker of the house and Harry “the Horse” Reid, an innocent Mormon virgin wandering among the fleshpots and real-estate deals of Las Vegas, as the Senate majority leader.  The Right is, indeed, fortunate in its enemies.

Still, the prize for the dumbest Democrat currently extorting a salary from the taxpayer (check out what her staff costs you here) remains where it long has been, in the grip of Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, née Levy, the pride of Brooklyn and, latterly, of Marin County, Calif., and former relation-by-marriage to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the brief marriage between her daughter, Nicole, and Hillary’s sterling brother, Tony.  Tony Rodham, you may recall, is a former prison guard and repo man who managed to get himself into hot water over a hazelnut deal in the republic of Georgia, got caught up in Pardongate, was assaulted in flagranteby a man who claimed Tony was boinking his girlfriend, got caught up in bankruptcy court and battled his ex over child-support payments.

Standing not quite five feet tall, Boxer has consistently distinguished herself in the discharge of her duties, including trying to prevent the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes during the 2000 election, attacking Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearings, racially patronizing Harry Alford of the Black Chamber of Commerce, and dressing down my namesake, Brig. General Michael Walsh, for an act of what she considered lèse majesté. The general had to bite his tongue, but the righteous contempt with which Alford treats the senator’s plantation racism was one of the feel-good stories of the year.

Not for nothing has she earned the people’s choice award as America’s Stupidest Senator and against some stiff competition. Now, the Terror of Tiny Town has stepped into the steaming pile of Climategate, the recent revelations via leaked/hacked emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  But is “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” Boxer upset that a scheme designed to siphon trillions of dollars away from the western economies, reduce their standard of living to Third World levels and enrich crackpot global-warming enthusiasts like Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.?  Of course not.  What’s got Barb’s panties in a bunch is “E-mail-theft-gate.”  ”You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate.  Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not… This is a crime.”

Her agita comes as no surprise.  Gangsters always get antsy when threatened with exposure of their rackets, and Climate Fraud is a hell of a racket, a grand bargain among greedy science whores, malevolent government officials and a supine but protective media – Americans who get their news from The New York Times or the networks basically have no idea what we’re talking about here – who are all in this together.  As Mark Steyn noted Wednesday over at NRO:

Whatever your views on the merits, if you’re an “environmental journalist” this ought to be news. The reviled “skeptics” and “deniers” have forced Prof. Phil Jones in East Anglia to step down “temporarily” and prompted Penn State to investigate Prof. Michael Mann. Yet you’d have no idea of what the story was about from reading the AP reports in the average American monodaily…  As Jonah [Goldberg] has said, this is not just a science scandal but a journalism scandal — worldwide.

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference coming up, the ruinous Waxman-Markey bill rattling around Capitol Hill, and the investigation into climate data-manipulation starting to head to these shores, the Democrats are heavily invested in “hiding the decline,” so naturally they’re changing the subject. Leaving aside for the moment the sheer counterintuitive insanity (did I mention Al Gore?) of carbon-constraining a civilization of carbon-based life forms, it’s awfully convenient for the Left to discover its High Dudgeon about leaks right about now.  For leaking, in all probability, is what we’re dealing with here: an insider who, faced with the specter of Copenhagen, decided to go public, rather than some crazed right-wing “denier” brazenly hacking into the system.  Indeed, the BBC had the files a month before they were posted on a handy Russian server – but naturally suppressed them.

Leaks are as old as the republic, and one man’s leaker is another man’s heroic whistle-blower.  And, in the end, it all comes down to one’s interpretation of the First Amendment.  The leak of the Pentagon Papers by a disaffected Daniel Ellsberg not only set the gold standard, but the subsequent Supreme Court decision, a 6-3 ruling in favor of The New York Times, which had published the purloined material, also firmly established the First Amendment principle of no prior restraint on publication.

Closer to our time, there was the 1996 cell phone call between embattled Speaker Newt Gingrich and some of his supporters strategizing about how to handle various ethics charges brought against him by the Democrats, which was intercepted and taped by a pair of Democratic activists, John and Alice Martin, who just so happened to be driving around in their car that day, monitoring the police scanner.  They leaked the tape to radical left-wing congressman “Baghdad” Jim McDermott, who helpfully passed it over to reporters.  Sued by John Boehner (R-Ohio), one of the phone call’s participants, for invasion of privacy, McDermott stonewalled for five years before finally admitting he was the source of the press leak. The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it because it had already decided, in a similar case, that the principle of no prior restraint also applied to the airwaves, no matter how the tape was obtained.  ”A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens.

So nothing is likely to come from Barbara “I’m Not a Madam, I’m a Senator” Boxer’s idle threat to get to the bottom of “E-mail-theft-gate.”  Like the rest of the Democrats, she has too much invested in the scam, and with electoral disaster looming for Obama and the Democrats next year, she’s and the rest of the executive officers are going full speed ahead with their radical agenda, and damn the icebergs dead ahead.

It's been nearly two weeks since a scandal shook many people's faith in the scientists behind global warming alarmism. The scandal forced the University of East Anglia (UK) to divulge that it threw away raw temperature data and prompted the temporary resignation of Phil Jones of the university's Climate Research Unit.

Despite that resignation and calls by a U.S. senator to investigate the matter, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programming has remained silent - not mentioning a word about the scandal since it broke on Nov. 20, even as world leaders including President Barack Obama prepare to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to promote a pact to reduce greenhouse gases.

MRC's President Brent Bozell called the networks' silence a "cover-up" Dec. 2.

Other news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Associated Press have deemed ClimateGate worthy of reporting, but the networks were too busy reporting on celebrity car accidents and the killer whale that ate a great white shark. Instead of airing a broadcast news segment that might inform the public about the science scandal, both ABC and CBS relegated the story to their Web sites. There was one mention of the scandal on ABC's Sunday talk show: "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

The ClimateGate scandal, as it is being called, has the hallmarks of a major news story: private emails purporting to show unethical or illegal behavior supplied by a hacker or whistleblower, high profile scientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann, and a potential conspiracy to distort science for political gain. But the networks haven't bothered with the story.

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and BMI adviser, said Nov. 20 of the leaked e-mails and documents: "This isn't a smoking gun, it's a mushroom cloud."

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded to a question about ClimateGate by insisting that "global warming is happening" and that for most people it isn't really a question anymore. That is the same message viewers get from the network news about climate change.

An examination of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC since Nov. 20 yielded zero mentions of the scandal, even in the Nov. 25 reports about Obama going to Copenhagen to discuss the need for emissions reductions. But during the same time period, the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods' "minor" car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president's State Dinner.

ClimateGate began after someone (hacker or whistleblower) attacked servers of University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and made thousands of e-mails  and documents public. Those e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles.

CRU's director Phil Jones admitted real CRU e-mails had been stolen when he told New Zealand's Investigate magazine, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails." Others argue a whistleblower was responsible for the breach.

One of those alleged e-mails was from Jones to Michael Mann (famous for his hockey stick graph of global warming) and two others appeared to indicate manipulation of scientific data.

Jones wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [Sic] from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Jones, who contributed to a chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report, claims the term "trick" was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do." Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), supplied his own view of what Jones and Mann meant by hiding the decline.

Ebell wrote in the National Post: "What is the clever method that Prof. Jones learned from Prof. Mann? I think he is referring to the way Prof. Mann constructed his celebrated hockey stick graph. His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the past 1,000 years, including the past century. But everyone knows that temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades ... So what Prof. Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature records onto his proxy record. Voila! - the hockey stick."

The alleged e-mails were enough to force Jones' temporary resignation. On Dec. 1, Associated Press reported that Jones is "stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change."

Other leaked e-mails asked people to delete e-mails and one said that if information was requested using FOI, it would be deleted rather than turned over:

Alleged e-mail from Jones to Mann Feb. 2, 2005:

"The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does !  The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

In Britain, it is a crime to delete information requested under FOI.

You can read the Business & Media Institute's entire assessment of the ClimateGate scandal and the networks' refusal to report it on the BMI Web site.

ABC, CBS and NBC’s collective silence on “ClimateGate” has reached ridiculous levels as the broadcast networks continued to ignore the great and growing scandal. The bias by omission has now become scandalous.

“The networks’ silence on ClimateGate is deafening. Scandal, cover-ups and conspiracy are the bread and butter of the media. Yet they have selectively and deliberately decided not to report this bombshell – or any of the incriminating details surrounding the scandal – because it goes against their left-wing agenda," Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell complained in a statement released today.

Phil Jones announced yesterday that he is temporarily leaving his post as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) pending the investigation into the controversial e-mails and documents that started ClimateGate.

Yet none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed ClimateGate or the incriminating Jones development since the news broke yesterday. This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.

"To pretend this story simply doesn’t exist is damning to journalism. The so-called 'news' media are protecting scientists because it exposes their underbelly. That’s not journalism. That’s a cover-up. And we will continue to call them out for ignoring these allegations and the mounting, inconvenient evidence against them," Bozell added.

If you needed any more assurance the growing ClimateGate scandal is far more significant than America's media has been portraying, you got it Tuesday night from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart.

Somewhat surprisingly, "The Daily Show" host in his opening sketch tore apart the scientists involved in sending the obtained e-mail messages for showing "a clear effort to raise fears about global warming, and hide evidence against it."

Stewart even mocked the man responsible for spreading more fear on this subject than anyone on the planet: 

Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. OH. OH the irony. 

Irony indeed (video embedded below the fold with transcript, vulgarity alert, h/t Story Balloon):

(BEGIN VIDEO)

UNKNOWN PERSON: A hacker in England got hold of emails between leading scientists which skeptics say show a clear effort to raise fears about global warming, and hide evidence against it.

(END VIDEO)

JON STEWART, HOST: Oh for f**k's sake! Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. OH. OH the irony. The iro---ny. Actually, the real story isn't quite that sensational. Basically, emails stolen from scientists at one of the leading centers for global warming show them discussing the work, a bit, how do I put this, casually.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

UNKNOWN FOX ANNOUNCER READING EMAIL MESSAGE FROM CLIMATEGATE PARTICIPANTS): "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." (Kevin Trenberth)

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." (Phil Jones, CRU Director)

(END VIDEO)

STEWART: (Laughing) See, I tell you it's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It's just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here's what's great about science: in disagreement, we go back and look at the raw data.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

UNKNOWN FOX NEWS ANNOUNCER): University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out.

(END VIDEO)

STEWART: Oh for f**k's sake! Why would you throw out raw data from the '80s? I still have Penthouses from the '70s! Laminated. What did you keep?

(BEGIN VIDEO)

UNKNOWN FOX NEWS ANNOUNCER): The scientists say they kept something called "value added data".

(END VIDEO)

STEWART: Value added data? What is that, numbers fortified with art? Truth plus, now with lemon? It doesn't look good. Now does it disprove global warming? No, of course not. But it does put a fresh set of energizers in the Senate's resident denier bunny.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

SENATOR JOHN INHOFE, (R-OKLA.): The fact that this whole idea on the global warming. I'm glad that's over, gone, done. We won. You lost. Get a life.

(END VIDEO)

STEWART: Alright. We knew Inhofe was going to say that. That guy thinks global warming is debunked every time he drinks a Slushee and gets a brain freeze. "If global warming is real, why does my head hurt?" But by the way, that quote was from BEFORE he found out about the leaked email story. But that's the point. If you care about an issue, and want it to be your life's work, don't cut corners. It's disheartening for people inclined towards the scientific method, and it's catnip to these guys who are going to end up celebrating tonight drunk, roaming the Arctic Circle trying to skullf**k polar bears, which are quickly disappearing because of rising oceans caused now apparently by God's tears!

Pretty amazing.

To be sure, it's just a comedy show. However, for several years various polls have indicated that many young people in America get their "news" from this program.

As polls have also shown belief in the global warming myth seems to decrease as you go up in age bracket, young folks hearing Stewart's view on this matter could easily be swayed by it.

But even more important than that, "The Daily Show" addressing this subject is a clear indication that ClimateGate is not going away any time soon.

All we need now is for "Saturday Night Live" to start mocking Al Gore along with this entire pathetic scam, and we can say goodbye to cap and trade.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Bravo, Jon. Bravo. 

The British scientist in the middle of the growing ClimateGate scandal is temporarily stepping down from his position as head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit pending an investigation.

As NewsBusters reported on November 20, Phil Jones was one of the scientists on the sending and receiving end of many of the controversial e-mail messages obtained from the University's computer system.

The Associated Press reported moments ago (h/t Marc Morano):

Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

As NewsBusters has been reporting since this story first broke, most global warming-obsessed media have either ignored this scandal or downplayed its significance.

With the man in the middle of the controversy now stepping down from his position, will America's press pay more attention to this matter?

Stay tuned.

Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson Friday called the growing ClimateGate scandal a "major embarrassment for the scientists involved" that undermines the "consensus" concerning man's role in global warming.

Even more concerning to Robinson was that these scientists "seem to be trying to squelch dissent" from anyone that disagrees with them.

"The fact is that climate science is fiendishly hard because of the enormous number of variables that interact in ways no one fully understands," he wrote. "Scientists should welcome contrarian views from respected colleagues, not try to squelch them. They should admit what they don't know."

As you can see, Robinson was by no means trying to downplay the significance of this scandal:

That said, the e-mail episode is more than a major embarrassment for the scientists involved. Most Americans are convinced that climate change is real -- a necessary prerequisite for the kinds of huge economic and behavioral adjustments we would have to make to begin seriously limiting carbon emissions. But consensus on the nature and scope of the problem will dissipate, and fast, if experts try to obscure the fact that there's much about the climate they still don't know. 

After explaining some of ClimateGate's details -- and doing a surprisingly good job of it! -- Robinson editorialized:

From my reading, the most damning e-mails are those in which scientists seem to be trying to squelch dissent from climate-change orthodoxy -- threatening to withhold papers from journals if they publish the work of naysayers, vowing to keep skeptical research out of the official U.N.-sponsored report on climate change.

In his statement, Jones noted that the e-mail hack occurred just days before the climate summit in Copenhagen. "This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change," he said. There's that understatement again.

The fact is that climate science is fiendishly hard because of the enormous number of variables that interact in ways no one fully understands. Scientists should welcome contrarian views from respected colleagues, not try to squelch them. They should admit what they don't know.

To be sure, this scandal hasn't changed Robinson's mind:

It would be great if this were all a big misunderstanding. But we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and we know the planet is hotter than it was a century ago. The skeptics might have convinced one another, but so far they haven't gotten through to the vanishing polar ice. 

However, the rare abundance of skepticism in his piece means that even a strong "consensus" believer like himself has been rocked by this scandal, so much so that he's even willing to write about it.

A trial lawyer reading through the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) will immediately, almost unconsciously, begin generating a list of questions he would love to ask the authors if he were able to face them on the witness stand and under oath.  The beauty of the adversarial process is how cross-examination tests and challenges the other side’s position – precisely what the emails indisputably show the CRU and its allies in the climate change scam have gone to shocking lengths to avoid.

There are several lines of examination that come immediately to mind.  We can rest assured that it will never happen – as the emails show, the last thing they want to do is be in a position where they have to explain themselves.  But certainly asking leading climate change cheerleader Phil Jones about his email describing his use of a “trick” to describe the manipulation of observed temperature data to “hide the decline” in order to achieve the desired result would be amusing:

• So, Dr. Jones, when you used the word “trick,” you really meant that it was not a “trick” at all but a valid, scientifically recognized process of data interpretation?
• Can you identify another instance in your experience where a scientist described his valid, scientifically recognized process of data interpretation with a term commonly used to describe a hoax, scam or fraud?
• And when you wrote the words “hide the decline,” is it now your testimony that when you used the word “hiding,” you were not actually “hiding” anything, and moreover, though you used the word “decline,” there was no “decline” in temperatures to be hidden in the first place?
• So, if I understand your explanation, it is that you commonly use language in your communications which means precisely the opposite of the meaning that you are seeking to communicate?
• And if an email from those who disagree with your findings – who you call “deniers” or “skeptics” – were to be made public that described their use of a “trick” to “hide the increase” in temperatures, would you find this to be of no great import because scientists commonly describe their processes as “tricks” and that their act of “hiding the increase” must be purely benign based on the manner of usage you describe?
• So, is it only proponents of man-made global warming that habitually use words and phrases that mean precisely the opposite of their common usage to describe their work?

But, as delightful as it would be to pick at particular instances of the activists’ admissions of fraud and their lame attempts to explain them away, there’s really one question that needs to be asked.  In fact, if Al Gore would ever expose himself to the questions of anyone beyond the most credulous climate change sycophants, someone ought to ask it of him:

Mr. Gore, would you be happy if tomorrow you were to see irrefutable scientific evidence that mankind’s activities are not causing the Earth to warm?

A normal person would answer with a resounding, “Yes!”  A normal person would be relieved that not only is our planet safe, but that we need not spend trillions of dollars and forfeit our most basic freedoms in pursuit of remedies for the bugbear of climate change.

But do you think for a second Al Gore would say, “Yes”?  Do you think any of the global warming suckers would?  Get real.

Understand you would not get an express, “No.”  He would probably just deny the validity of the question (“We know climate change is real so that will never happen”).  But after 15 years of examining witnesses, I have a rule of thumb.  Any answer to a question that is not an unambiguous “Yes” is really a “No.”

And to those invested (ideologically, professionally and financially) in man-made climate change, the answer would be “No.”  But contrary evidence would make no difference regardless.  Al Gore and his ilk would not be shaken in the least by contrary scientific findings because the climate change scam is not driven by science.  It is a campaign driven by the end the believers seek – an agenda of political, economic and social control.  The science is simply a convenient means to that end.  In fact, climate change belief is the opposite of science.  It is a faith, a pagan religion complete with infallible doctrines, ritual sacrifices and even heretics who must be burned at the (so far) figurative stake.

A basic concept in the scientific method is falsifiability, the idea that a scientific hypothesis can be disproven through evidence.  If a hypothesis cannot ever be falsified, then to believe it requires an act of faith.  Therefore, if the climate change hypothesis is truly based upon science, with the production of satisfactory evidence it could be disproven.  And this leads to one final question for the climate change believers:

Mr. Gore, if presented with irrefutable scientific evidence that the man-made climate change hypothesis is incorrect, would you accept it?

Of course, believing that Mr. Gore would answer with an unambiguous “Yes” would itself require an enormous leap of faith.

A trial lawyer reading through the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) will immediately, almost unconsciously, begin generating a list of questions he would love to ask the authors if he were able to face them on the witness stand and under oath.  The beauty of the adversarial process is how cross-examination tests and challenges the other side’s position – precisely what the emails indisputably show the CRU and its allies in the climate change scam have gone to shocking lengths to avoid.

There are several lines of examination that come immediately to mind.  We can rest assured that it will never happen – as the emails show, the last thing they want to do is be in a position where they have to explain themselves.  But certainly asking leading climate change cheerleader Phil Jones about his email describing his use of a “trick” to describe the manipulation of observed temperature data to “hide the decline” in order to achieve the desired result would be amusing:

• So, Dr. Jones, when you used the word “trick,” you really meant that it was not a “trick” at all but a valid, scientifically recognized process of data interpretation?
• Can you identify another instance in your experience where a scientist described his valid, scientifically recognized process of data interpretation with a term commonly used to describe a hoax, scam or fraud?
• And when you wrote the words “hide the decline,” is it now your testimony that when you used the word “hiding,” you were not actually “hiding” anything, and moreover, though you used the word “decline,” there was no “decline” in temperatures to be hidden in the first place?
• So, if I understand your explanation, it is that you commonly use language in your communications which means precisely the opposite of the meaning that you are seeking to communicate?
• And if an email from those who disagree with your findings – who you call “deniers” or “skeptics” – were to be made public that described their use of a “trick” to “hide the increase” in temperatures, would you find this to be of no great import because scientists commonly describe their processes as “tricks” and that their act of “hiding the increase” must be purely benign based on the manner of usage you describe?
• So, is it only proponents of man-made global warming that habitually use words and phrases that mean precisely the opposite of their common usage to describe their work?

But, as delightful as it would be to pick at particular instances of the activists’ admissions of fraud and their lame attempts to explain them away, there’s really one question that needs to be asked.  In fact, if Al Gore would ever expose himself to the questions of anyone beyond the most credulous climate change sycophants, someone ought to ask it of him:

Mr. Gore, would you be happy if tomorrow you were to see irrefutable scientific evidence that mankind’s activities are not causing the Earth to warm?

A normal person would answer with a resounding, “Yes!”  A normal person would be relieved that not only is our planet safe, but that we need not spend trillions of dollars and forfeit our most basic freedoms in pursuit of remedies for the bugbear of climate change.

But do you think for a second Al Gore would say, “Yes”?  Do you think any of the global warming suckers would?  Get real.

Understand you would not get an express, “No.”  He would probably just deny the validity of the question (“We know climate change is real so that will never happen”).  But after 15 years of examining witnesses, I have a rule of thumb.  Any answer to a question that is not an unambiguous “Yes” is really a “No.”

And to those invested (ideologically, professionally and financially) in man-made climate change, the answer would be “No.”  But contrary evidence would make no difference regardless.  Al Gore and his ilk would not be shaken in the least by contrary scientific findings because the climate change scam is not driven by science.  It is a campaign driven by the end the believers seek – an agenda of political, economic and social control.  The science is simply a convenient means to that end.  In fact, climate change belief is the opposite of science.  It is a faith, a pagan religion complete with infallible doctrines, ritual sacrifices and even heretics who must be burned at the (so far) figurative stake.

A basic concept in the scientific method is falsifiability, the idea that a scientific hypothesis can be disproven through evidence.  If a hypothesis cannot ever be falsified, then to believe it requires an act of faith.  Therefore, if the climate change hypothesis is truly based upon science, with the production of satisfactory evidence it could be disproven.  And this leads to one final question for the climate change believers:

Mr. Gore, if presented with irrefutable scientific evidence that the man-made climate change hypothesis is incorrect, would you accept it?

Of course, believing that Mr. Gore would answer with an unambiguous “Yes” would itself require an enormous leap of faith.

Scientists involved in the growing ClimateGate scandal were cited in an October climate change report prepared for the White House and Congress.

Titled "Our Changing Planet," the 172-page document was created by The U.S. Global Change Research Program along with the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, and was submitted as a supplement to President Obama's fiscal 2010 budget.

As such, its contents not only impact future and current legislation involving global warming, but also how tax dollars are spent to research and address it.

The report began with an introduction by White House science czar John Holdren, a man directly involved in ClimateGate (h/t Right Pundits via NB reader George):

Members of Congress:

We herewith transmit a copy of Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2010. The report describes the activities and plans of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) established under the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The USGCRP coordinates and integrates scientific research on climate and global change supported by 13 participating departments and agencies of the U.S. government. [...]

The document describes a range of activities including examples of the USGCRP's contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as progress in understanding Earth system components of the global climate system, how these components interact, and the processes and forces bringing about changes to the Earth system. [...]

USGCRP is committed to its mission to facilitate the creation and application of knowledge of the Earth's global environment though research, observations, decision support, and communication. We thank the participating agencies for their close cooperation, and we look forward to working with Congress in the continued development of this important program.

Respectfully,

Dr. John P. Holdren,
Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology

The subsequent chapters addressed a number of topics involving climate, and concluded with "Chapter References and Endnotes" where the following names appeared:

• Phil Jones, Director of the British Climate Research Unit
• Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist and climate modeler
• Michael Mann, Penn State professor and author of the Hockey Stick graph
• Benjamin Santer, Lawrence Livermore Lab climate modeler
• Raymond Bradley, professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Peter Stott, climate scientist at the UK Met office
• Tom Wigley, climate scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

To be sure, that papers by these scientists would be cited in such a report is by no means shocking. They have been preparing high-profile documents about global warming for years including for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In reality, it would have been shocking if this report DIDN'T include them.

However, what is disturbing is that America's news media haven't cross-referenced this high-profile report with all the names in the e-mail messages obtained from the computers of the University of East Anglia, and reported to the American people just how connected to the United States government these people are.

Or would that be too much like journalism?

Before you answer, consider how the press would be all over this report if the scandal involved policies advocated by leading Republicans that were not supported by the media, and the man in the White House was also a Republican.

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, the international television news network Russia Today has been doing an outstanding job of reporting the growing ClimateGate scandal.

On Wednesday, RT featured an absolute must-see debate between Piers Corbyn, a British weather forecaster and consultant who believes anthropogenic global warming is a dangerous scam, and Aleksey Korkorin, a Russian climatologist and contributor to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

As you watch the following segment, try to imagine an American television news outlet besides Fox giving so much air time not only to a debate about this scandal, but also to a discussion about the very existence of global warming (video embedded below the fold with transcribed highlights of Corbyn's comments, h/t Marc Morano):

• The case [for anthropogenic global warming] is blown to smithereens [by this scandal], and this whole theory should be destroyed and discarded and Copenhagen conference should be closed.
• The world is cooling and has been cooling for seven years, and the leading scientists, so-called "scientists," have been trying to hide that evidence.
• The data, real data, over the last one thousand, ten thousand or million years, shows there is no relationship between carbon dioxide and world temperatures or climate extremes. Now we can see that actually the people in charge of data have been fiddling it, and they have been hiding the real decline in world temperatures in an attempt to keep their so called moral high ground.
• The Copenhagen jamboree is a scandal and it must be stopped.
• There is a gigantic bandwagon run by governments who want to control world energy supplies and hold back development in the third world. This thing they are doing now is just the same as they are doing in the banking crisis, it is creating a whole bubble of false values.
• Their claims are false, I repeat, they are false, and this theory they've got is like the Titanic and it will crash. I would suggest that honest green campaigners who want to preserve biodiversity should get off this [man-made global warming] bandwagon before it sinks.
• Carbon dioxide levels are driven by temps, not the other way around. There have been big peaks in CO2 in past...carbon dioxide is actually a good thing for the world...More CO2 makes plants and animals more efficient.

Think you'll see that kind of debate on non-Fox television any time soon?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

Has the emerging international ClimateGate scandal changed President Obama's global warming strategy?

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.

Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he's going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner told FBN's Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

CHARLES PAYNE, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK: Well, my next guest says the president's going to Copenhagen not in spite of these e-mails but because of these e-mails. He's in full panic mode. He's the author of the book "Red Hot Lies, How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep you Misinformed." So I guess based on the title, Chris Horner might feel a little vindicated by these hacked e-mails. How are you feeling about this thing?

CHRISTOPHER HORNER, "RED HOT LIES" AUTHOR: Yes, the words I told you so have come to mind a lot in the last week, and I just want to be clear, I'm not saying you were intentionally misled by your previous guest. I agree he doesn't have enough understanding or knowledge of the issues to comment because, for example, beyond the e-mails in the actual computer code itself annotated in the double digit number of times we have statements like apply a very artificial correction decline, two exclamation marks, all caps, very artificial.

And it's in the double digit number of times whereby they say they're applying an artificial decline to, as the gentleman said, use a trick to hide the decline. And I might be tempted to entertain such fantasy if not for an independent investigation. Thanks to Congress, already proving that these very specific actions and questions were a trick to hide the decline in temperatures.

So they're trying to brazen this out, Charles, and the president, as you indicated, I believe, is doubling down. They're panicked. They're going to politically commit the U.S. in three weeks to a treaty now in violation of their own express policy of waiting for Congress to tell them what they're able to do because they really do believe they must act now.

PAYNE: But the interesting thing though is even if they go over there, they make these proposals, you've got major countries out there, China and India, who seemed very reluctant to go along at all. Does that mean at the end of the day it's going to cost Americans even more money to comply with the president's agenda?

HORNER: It's going to cost an awful lot of money. According to the Congressional Budget Office, EPA, Energy Information Administration, Charles River Associates International, American Council for Capital Formation, that's government, that's private, cap and trade kills jobs.

It killed jobs in Europe. It sent them here. Carroll county, Kentucky. Steel jobs from Acerinox in Spain called North American Stainless Steel. Their CEO now says those jobs are going to Malaysia. I don't know what about that we don't understand, what about this newest export from Europe, we don't like. But cap and trade is energy rationing. It will kill jobs, it's the point. I have no reason to believe Barack Obama was lying when he said his goal was to cause energy prices to necessarily skyrocket to raise billions. This is an ideology in search of an excuse.

The scientists in their own words have now affirmed, not revealed, affirmed. These are the same people I named in my book, admitting to precisely the actions I described in my book. Yes, I told you so has come to mind recently.

PAYNE: So, Chris, now having said that, you know, listen, a lot of Americans still believe in global warming and are ready to take the dive, if you will. Is there any chance that these e-mails, this smoking gun can turn the tide?

HORNER: Well, first of all, that's two different statements. A lot of people so long as it's at the cocktail, feel-good, don't you want to save the planet level? Yes, 80 percent of the people do. And then you say, what would you want to pay for it? And they say something below $1 per gallon and the "Washington Post" wouldn't ask below that.

And I suggested less than a quarter a gallon because people understand - this, look, these people have been exposed in their own words as falsifying results. Not marginal results, the premise for Kyoto and cap and trade. It's an organized, in their own words, effort to destroy data, subvert and violate transparency laws, and it appears on its face to be an organized effort with an intent to defraud.

Yes, we need an investigation because, Charles, these scientists say their names have been wrongly sullied. And there's no - they're great. And surely they join my call, Senator Inhofe's call and others for an investigation to clear their name before we go any further on these international commitments that really only target us and cap and trade, which is the biggest tax increase in American history. No, the American people don't support that, just ask them.

PAYNE: All right. The biggest tax increase in American history. Chris, I know your phone's ringing off the hook, congratulations. Thanks for coming on the show.

WARNER: Thank you, Charles.

Is Horner right?

Well, let's start with an October 24 article by Britain's Times:

President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals, The Times has learnt.

With healthcare reform clogging his domestic agenda and no prospect of a comprehensive climate treaty in Copenhagen, Mr Obama may disappoint campaigners and foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, who have urged him to attend to boost the hopes of a breakthrough.

The White House would not comment on Mr Obama's travel plans yesterday, but administration officials have said privately that "Oslo is plenty close" - a reference to the Nobel ceremony that falls on December 10, two days into the Copenhagen meeting.

The White House confirmed that the President would be in Oslo to accept the prize, but a source close to the Administration said it was "hard to see the benefit" of his going to Copenhagen if there was no comprehensive deal for him to close or sign. Another expert, who did not want to be named, said he would be "really, really shocked" if Mr Obama went to Copenhagen, adding that European hopes about the power of his Administration to transform the climate change debate in a matter of months bore little relation to reality.

Three weeks later, the New York Times reported:

President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific "politically binding" agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

"There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days," said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. "I don't think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact."

Four days later, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday they would put off debate on a big climate-change bill until spring, in a sign of weakening political will to tackle a long-term environmental issue at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty.

Legislation on health care, overhauling financial markets and job creation will be considered before the Senate takes up a measure to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to climate change, Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday.

Climate legislation will be taken up "some time in the spring," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Tuesday after a Democratic caucus meeting.

That was November 18. Two days later, NewsBusters reported:

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages. 

Now, five days after the scandal rocked climate alarmists around the world, Obama seemed to shift gears as reported by Britain's Financial Times:

Barack Obama has thrown his weight behind a deal on climate change by announcing he will attend the Copenhagen summit with a pledge for a 17 per cent cut in US emissions.

The US president's pledge removes one of the final obstacles to a deal, as other developed countries have already announced their targets to cut emissions by 2020.

Adding to the drama, the Los Angeles Times reported moments ago:

Canada's prime minister is reversing his position and will attend a United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen next month, Stephen Harper's spokesman said Thursday.

Dimitri Soudas announced Harper decided to attend one day after U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced their attendance at the U.N. talks. Soudas said Harper's decision was based on the fact that now "a critical mass of world leaders will be attending."

So, four weeks ago, for a variety of reasons, Obama was believed to be skipping the Copenhagen conference. World leaders then decided to postpone coming to any major agreements there, and Reid similarly postponed bringing cap-and-trade legislation to the floor of the Senate. 

Along comes ClimateGate, and Obama quickly announced that he's heading to Copenhagen with a fairly serious emissions cut pledge.

Coincidence?

Not likely, for the White House either realizes that the current momentum against cap-and-trade legislation needs to be halted quickly if it's ever going to get passed, or they felt they needed to divert attention on the subject of global warming away from the growing scandal.

After all, as e-mail messages and documents obtained from the computers of Britain's Climate Research Unit continue to be analyzed, it seems likely that more revelations damaging to scientists involved as well as to the global warming myth are going to surface.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, the American Thinker's Marc Sheppard has already uncovered source code in CRU documents clearly used to manipulate climate data. 

More such discoveries seem a metaphysical certitude.

With calls out for CRU director Phil Jones to resign or be fired, such occurring while the Copenhagen conference produces absolutely nothing could be close to a death knell for the entire climate alarmism movement. 

Fox News's Glenn Beck took on the global warming e-mail scandal known as ClimateGate Monday, and really laid into all the high-profile scientists involved.

As NewsBusters reported Friday, hacked e-mail messages to and from folks with direct access to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show a concerted effort on the part of these powerful scientists to manipulate temperature data in order to exaggerate average global temperatures.

As Beck pointed out Monday, those involved also conspired to prevent viewpoints counter to their own from getting published in scientific journals or becoming part of IPCC reports.

"Think about that next time you hear about, oh, 'the consensus,' and 'the science is settled,' and Al Gore is bragging about the peer reviewed journals" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Anthony Watts via Bob Ferguson):

GLENN BECK, HOST: A potentially major scandal is unfolding after someone released thousands of e-mails and documents sent between prominent scientists of global warming debate. The New York Times has verified that these e-mails are legitimate which wasn't too hard because some of them were written by and to one of their reporters. More on that here in just a second. But first let's start with the science that has been so settled for all these years. What do these guys say behind closed doors about their so-called bullet-proof consensus? Well, Kevin Trenberth, he's a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He wrote, "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't." Incorrect data? Inadequate systems? Yeah. Travesty, pretty good word for it.

How about Phil Jones, head of of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, "I have just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years to hide the decline." Yes, he is talking about a trick that another scientist previously used in a peer reviewed journal to apparently hide the decline in temperatures. Incredible. But it doesn't stop there.

How about when scientific journals published material that Jones didn't like? Quote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report...Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is" end quote. Think about that next time you hear about, oh, "the consensus," and "the science is settled," and Al Gore is bragging about the peer reviewed journals

Now what happens to a peer reviewed paper when they disagree with what gets published? Quote "...our only choice is to ignore this paper. They have already achieved what they wanted." But at least they are not intentionally deleting documents or hiding information, right? Oh, no, they're doing that, too. Here is Phil Jones writing Michael Mann, the scientist that came up with that Hockey Stick graph, that one. He said, "Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re: AR4? 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 get Caspar to do likewise." Count them. There's Jones, Mike, Keith, Gene, and Caspar, whoever they are, potentially deleting e-mails supposedly about supposed science.

So why all the secrecy? Well, we find out from another e-mail from Michael Mann about skeptic Steven McIntyre. "I'm sure you are aware that McIntyre and his ilk realize they no longer need to get their crap published in legitimate journals [you know, the one's they're cycling! ] but all they have to do is put it up on their blog and the contrarian noise machine kicks into gear. Pretty soon Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck and their ilk are parroting the claims."

So you see, if McIntyre sees the data, he'll find the tricks that are in it to hide the decline, and then crazy people like me might just let you know about it. Oh, the horror what will happen to cap and trade? That e-mail was sent from one of the scientists to a New York Times reporter. That same reporter, Andrew Revkin, thankfully did report on the story for the New York Times, but he will not post the documents because, quote "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here." Oh, well, I know, the New York Times would never post or print anything that wasn't intended for the public eye, like, maybe, the way we monitor terrorists or specific strategies to protect our troops in the field. No, no, the New York Times, they're above that.

Deleting e-mails, hiding declines, incorrect data, inadequate systems, redefining scientific peer reviews for their own uses! This is what appears to be going on behind the scenes and literally trillions of dollars of policy decisions are being based on what these guys are telling us. If your gut said, "Wait a minute, this global warming thing sounds like a scam." Well, I think you're seeing it now. We told you this was going on, without proof, because we listened to our gut. You'd never believe me, but once again, here we are with yet another brand new reality.

Indeed. 

The release of internal emails from Britain's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit shows scientists plotting to ostracize and marginalize other researchers who question their assumptions on anthropogenic global warming. Yet the Washington Post finds that such a strategy is but a natural reaction to attacks on these scientists by climate skeptics.

The Post characterizes the CRU, and the larger circle of scientists pushing the global warming theory, as "an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack." Readers must be forgiven for their confusion about who exactly is being attacked, as the Post goes on to detail CRU communications calling for a boycott of academic journals that publish articles critical of the supposed "consensus" on global warming. (Noel Sheppard reported on these and other incendiary statements in a Friday post.)

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," CRU director Phil Jones wrote of two skeptical academic works. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," wrote Penn State's Michael Mann, in reference to a journal that published works by climate skeptics. "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," Jones replied.

So who exactly is being attacked? It seems from the Post's own coverage that it is the climate alarmists attacking the skeptics, not the other way around. In fact, the latter are doing what scientists do: present alternative views that must be disproved before they are cast aside. They are not attacking anyone, they are vigorously pursuing scientific truth. The CRU staff are the ones doing the attacking.

But the Post seems determined to portray the folks at CRU as victims of an ideological assault bent on ignoring the global consensus on human-induced global warming.

"It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions, [Kevin] Trenberth said. "The question to me is what to do."

"It's certainly a legitimate question," he added. "Unfortunately one of the side effects of this is the messengers get attacked."

In his new book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate," Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider details the intense debate over warming, arguing that it has helped slow the nation's public policy response.

"I've been here on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," writes Schneider, who was copied on one of the controversial e-mails. "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."

This is the problem with approaching the issue as a win/lose scenario, rather than a quest to find scientific truth. The Post feeds into this unhealthy win/lose narrative. Since it has apparently picked sides, it is prone to seeing climate skeptics as "attacking" the CRU staff.

Were it to characterize debate as a healthy means of truth-seeking, the Post might conclude that skeptics were not attacking a consensus, but rather demonstrating that the consensus does not exist. If it did, there would be no skeptics. But the Post's chosen narrative--the one promoting the win/lose dichotomy--sees the CRU as trying to root out the hostile opponents of settled fact, not individuals posing legitimate arguments against the incontrovertibility of anthropogenic global warming.

The Post quotes Mann excusing the CRU emails as a form of "vigorous debate" among climate scientists. But debate about how to silence debate is antithetical to the scientific method. The Post has fed into this damaging characterization of the scientific discussion surrounding climate change by portraying those who would stifle reasoned dissent as victims of the skeptics' "attacks."

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.

Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore confidant.

A statement released Friday by the alarmist website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet. 

Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:

The director of Britain's leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."

The BBC.com filed this report moments ago:

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated.

The journal Nature got a comment from one of the scientists whose name appears on some of these e-mail messages:

Some climate-sceptic bloggers are already poring over the posted material, which includes e-mails allegedly sent by the CRU's director Phil Jones to fellow climate researchers, including Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Mann is the author of a widely cited assessment of past climate records, known as the hockey-stick graph, which shows a pronounced global-warming trend during the latter part of the twentieth century.

"I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained e-mails," says Mann. "However, their theft constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows." Jones declined to comment on the matter.

Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun has more:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics. 

Bolt included a number of these e-mail messages (emphasis his):

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: //';l[1]='a';l[2]='/';l[3]='<';l[4]=' 110';l[5]=' 114';l[6]=' 111';l[7]=' 98';l[8]=' 115';l[9]=' 111';l[10]=' 46';l[11]=' 88';l[12]=' 88';l[13]=' 88';l[14]=' 64';l[15]=' 97';l[16]=' 102';l[17]=' 102';l[18]=' 105';l[19]=' 114';l[20]=' 98';l[21]=' 46';l[22]=' 107';l[23]='>';l[24]='\"';l[25]=' 110';l[26]=' 114';l[27]=' 111';l[28]=' 98';l[29]=' 115';l[30]=' 111';l[31]=' 46';l[32]=' 88';l[33]=' 88';l[34]=' 88';l[35]=' 64';l[36]=' 97';l[37]=' 102';l[38]=' 102';l[39]=' 105';l[40]=' 114';l[41]=' 98';l[42]=' 46';l[43]=' 107';l[44]=':';l[45]='o';l[46]='t';l[47]='l';l[48]='i';l[49]='a';l[50]='m';l[51]='\"';l[52]='=';l[53]='f';l[54]='e';l[55]='r';l[56]='h';l[57]='a ';l[58]='<'; for (var i = l.length-1; i >= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ' ') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i])); } //]]> k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

Here's a more recent one. See how many prominent climate alarmists are allegedly in receipt:

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

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 to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

 

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit

Here's a REALLY juicy one from Mann wherein he allegedly instructed the group to use the website RealClimate, and addressed how comments would be screened to control the message:

From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa
Subject: update
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:51:53 -0500
Cc: Gavin Schmidt

guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we put up the RC post. By now, you’ve probably read that nasty McIntyre thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don’t go there personally, but so I’m informed).

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC comments as a megaphone…

This e-mail lacking a header allegedly from Jones discussed exactly how to manipulate temperature data being sent to climate realist Steven McIntyre as part of one of his Freedom of Information Act requests:

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

Finally, here's an e-mail message wherein Jones allegedly celebrated the death of a climate realist:

From: Phil Jones
To: //';l[1]='a';l[2]='/';l[3]='<';l[4]=' 120';l[5]=' 120';l[6]=' 120';l[7]=' 46';l[8]=' 120';l[9]=' 120';l[10]=' 120';l[11]=' 120';l[12]=' 120';l[13]=' 118';l[14]=' 64';l[15]=' 110';l[16]=' 110';l[17]=' 97';l[18]=' 109';l[19]='>';l[20]='\"';l[21]=' 120';l[22]=' 120';l[23]=' 120';l[24]=' 46';l[25]=' 120';l[26]=' 120';l[27]=' 120';l[28]=' 120';l[29]=' 120';l[30]=' 118';l[31]=' 64';l[32]=' 110';l[33]=' 110';l[34]=' 97';l[35]=' 109';l[36]=':';l[37]='o';l[38]='t';l[39]='l';l[40]='i';l[41]='a';l[42]='m';l[43]='\"';l[44]='=';l[45]='f';l[46]='e';l[47]='r';l[48]='h';l[49]='a ';l[50]='<'; for (var i = l.length-1; i >= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ' ') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i])); } //]]> mann@vxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Fwd: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu Jan 29 14:17:01 2004

From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal

Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

Cheers
Phil

“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John Daly.Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@XXXX)
“
Reported with great sadness

The Examiner.com found another interesting e-mail message allegedly from a Dr. Tom Wigley to Jones (author's emphasis):

Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH — just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note — from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) — but not really enough. So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.

Wow. Scary stuff.

Once again, it is unknown which e-mail messages are real, and which if any are fraudulent. As you might imagine, numerous entities are sifting through the files to connect some dots.

For its part, NewsBusters has sent e-mail messages requesting comment from all of the scientists mentioned in this article. None have responded yet.

However, maybe more importantly, with cap and trade legislation currently before Congress, and an international climate meeting happening in Copenhagen next month, the question is what will America's leading media outlets do with this news.

Should we expect investigative television programs like "60 Minutes" and "20/20" to be all over this story interrogating the scientists allegedly involved in these e-mail exchanges?

Will America's press be as eager to find out the truth of this matter as they were in fact-checking former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's new book?

Consider that at the time of this article's publishing, only FoxNews.com, NPR.com, and WSJ.com have logged printed stories on this subject from this side of the Atlantic.

Will others follow, and if so, how will they report what on the surface appears to be a huge, developing story?

Stay tuned. 

*****Update: Readers are STRONGLY encouraged to watch the scrambling going on at RealClimate.