Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?
Devil's Advocate
the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global
Warming'?
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 20th, 2009
775 Comments Comment on this article
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start
dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming
myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite
deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the
University of East Anglia�s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and
released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip:
Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files � including 1079 emails and 72
documents � you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred
to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could
well be �the greatest in modern science�. These alleged emails �
supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing
AGW theory � suggest:
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.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of
John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the
Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
�In an odd way this is cheering news.�
But perhaps the most damaging revelations � the scientific equivalent
of the Telegraph�s MPs� expenses scandal � are those concerning the way
Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence
in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
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.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
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.
Suppression of evidence:
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.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I�ll be tempted to
beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period
(MWP):
��Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH
records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly
2K back�I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the
usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the
memo, that it would be nice to try to �contain� the putative �MWP�, even
if we don�t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that
far back�.
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications
discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer
review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in
which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose
views do not have a scrap of authority.
�This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not
publishing in the �peer-reviewed literature�. Obviously, they found a
solution to that�take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I
think we have to stop considering �Climate Research� as a legitimate
peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the
climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in,
this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of
our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial
board�What do others think?�
�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.��It
results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible
one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers
through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I�ve had words with Hans von
Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !�
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September � I wrote the story up
here as �How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie� -
CRU�s researchers were exposed as having �cherry-picked� data in order
to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher
at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium.
CRU was also the organisation which � in contravention of all acceptable
behaviour in the international scientific community � spent years
withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This
matters because CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a
government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its
HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature
data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of
Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the
run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and
grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media.
And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist
activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid
showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind
of, like, man, that�s sort of what happens whenever you take another
trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant
to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher
taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore�s
Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called �sceptical� view �
which is some of us have been expressing for quite some time: see, for
example, the chapter entitled �Barbecue the Polar Bears� in WELCOME TO
OBAMALAND: I�VE SEEN YOUR FUTURE AND IT DOESN�T WORK � is now also,
thank heaven, the majority view.
Unfortunately, we�ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and
scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many
vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of
reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But to judge by the way � despite the best efforts of the MSM not to
report on it � the CRU scandal is spreading like wildfire across the
internet, this shabby story represents a blow to the AGW lobby�s
credibility from which it is never likely to recover.
UPDATE: I write about this subject a lot and the threads below my posts
often contain an impressive range of informed opinion from readers with
solid scientific backgrounds (plus lots of cheap swipes from Libtards �
but, hey, their discomfort and rage are my joy).
Here are a few links:
Interview in the Spectator with Australian geology Professor Ian Plimer
re his book Heaven And Earth. Plimer makes the point that CO2 is not a
pollutant � CO2 is plant food, and that climate change is an ongoing
natural process.
An earlier scandal at the Climate Research Unit, this time involving
�cherry-picked� data samples.
A contretemps with a Climate Bully who wonders whether I have a science
degree. (No I don�t. I just happen to be a believer in empiricism and
not spending taxpayers� money on a problem that may well not exist)
59 per cent of UK population does not believe in AGW. The Times decides
they are �village idiots�
Comparing �Climate Change� to the 9/11 and the Holocaust is despicable
and dumb
Copenhagen: a step closer to one-world government?
UK Government blows �6 million on eco-propaganda ad which makes children
cry
and a very funny piece by Damian Thompson comparing the liberal media�s
coverage of Watergate with its almost non-existent coverage of
Climategate