Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails
'All our models are wrong', writes Jones
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Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.
“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”
Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.
“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”
With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.
To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. “We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale "signature" of greenhouse gas warming was absent. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?”
Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources, Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresses his discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were the demands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.
This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came as little surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but they rocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:
“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”
Next page: Intellectual corruption
COMMENTS
When something sounds religious...
you can tell it's gone off the rails - at this moment EVEN IF the evidence was ultimately correct I think I'd STILL have a knee-jerk reaction to ignore all the preachy, hand waving bullshit the 'holier than thou' group have at their disposal.
It's Catholic guilt, but instead of GOD being mad at us and us being bad and sinful, it's GAIA that is sad with us being bad energy consuming wastrels. If only we listen to the eco-friendly and their preaching of a low-energy future where we can all EQUALLY share in the poverty and disease, all the while peddaling the bicycle with the dynamo attached to power the one surviving piece of medical equipment per village.
Too ranty?
No conspiracy?
> There is absolutely nothing about the leaked emails
> which supports the notion that there is a conspiracy.
Yeah, nothing except page after page of evidence of peer review corruption, illegal deletion of contradictory evidence, pledges of allegiance to "The cause", expressions of public certainly about MMGW while concealing private doubts, high level discussions with BBC journalists and NGOs on how best to scaremonger, how to smear sceptics, keep them out of the scientific literature etc. All by supposedly unbiased 'top climate experts' and IPCC lead authors.
Yeah - absolutely nothing to see here.... Move along.
The Beeb has some great coverage of this:
"...A similar release in 2009 triggered the "ClimateGate" affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed...."
"...Three inquiries in the UK in 2010 found that the CRU team had not acted fraudulently or tried to manipulate data, as they were accused of doing...."
"...CRU has also released all of the data it held from weather stations around the world - even some that the original owners of such data wanted kept private...."
"...In partnership with the UK Met Office, CRU maintains one of the three most important global temperature records that have been used to demonstrate the reality of 20th Century warming...."
That must be the impartiality I'm smelling.
Seeing as these emails were public property, and illegally witheld and deleted to avoid FOI requests, I think it's more apt to describe them as being "liberated" rather than "stolen".
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