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Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

By Chris Morrison | Nov 25, 2009

Last Friday looked like a red-letter day for climate change skeptics. A hacker (or inside leaker) posted over a thousand emails from the United Kingdom’s Climate Research Unit online, sparking accusations of foul play by climate researchers. The first skeptics to write about the leak quickly dubbed it Climategate.

Well, several news cycles have now passed, and it looks like Climategate is falling far short of skeptics’ hopes that it would explode the field of climate science.

All the righteous outrage in the world, it seems, is still insufficient to create the scandal of the century. By and large, it’s not even breaking into the top headlines. That’s not just liberal media bias; even conservative bastion Fox News isn’t spending much time on Climategate. No huge surprise there. On Saturday, I argued that the email hack is not all it’s cracked up to be, and most people seem to agree.

Yet Climategate is also stubbornly refusing to disappear, despite the efforts of the scientists involved to sweep it under the rug by explaining the wording of some questionable emails.

George Monbiot
, a well-respected and staunch defender of climate change science at the UK’s Guardian, explained today why he’s not helping to kill Climategate:

Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial… It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

In other words, the best way to deal with this scandal is for the scientists involved to face the music, and for others to take the lead in research and create standards that won’t allow scientists to engage in back-stabbing and manipulation (of their own data, or of the possibility of publication by other scientists).

To my eyes, it’s pretty clear why all the responses from the CRU and the scientists who are involved have so far been so wishy-washy. Obviously, they don’t want their own careers or institutional prestige damaged, but it’s also obviously too late to stop that from happening. Rather, they’re afraid they might enable the scandal to blow out of proportion — afraid that reasonable debate is impossible.

To an extent, this is a justifiable worry. The harshest criticism has come from non-scientists. Among scientific circles, even among most scientists skeptical of climate science, the reaction has been a sort of collective head nodding: they understand what happened. They just don’t expect anyone else to. Here’s some commentary from David Zetland, an outsider to the debate (he studies water issues):

My opinion is that this kind of sabotage, censorship, backstabbing and favoritism occurs all the time (just look at the editors of a journal and how many of their students and colleagues publish there…) My opinion is that this is going to give WAY too much impetus to the “climate change is not happening” crowd.

And, you may ask, how can I trust the CC scientists, now that they are revealed to be “typical” humans? Because the gains (in career, fame, money, etc.) to ANYONE able to show that climate change is NOT happening, is all a hoax, etc. are extreme. With that kind of reward on the table (from Exxon?), anyone with a plausible analysis showing that it’s not happening would be a rockstar.

All the fears that Climategate will be blown out of proportion are correct — but so is Monbiot, in his opinion that the scandal nevertheless needs to be dealt with.

If not for public relations purposes, then for political ones and legal ones. In one example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an aggressive lobbyist funded by businesses, said today that it will file suit against NASA for allegedly failing to fulfill requests for info made under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit appears to be the result of some the CRU emails, which suggest ways to block FOIA requests.

And Sen. James Inhofe, who has aggressively challenged climate change science for years, appears to be trying to open an inquiry into the emails. If Inhofe’s past history is any guide, Climategate will continue to matter for months, no how much climate scientists want it to go away.

Chris Morrison, a reporter on energy, renewables and climate change, is the former lead cleantech writer for VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter.

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  •  
    1

    Richard A. McGough

    11/25/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    I hope you can see the outrageous irony of your position. An essential aspect of good science is peer review. This has been the primary weapon used against anyone who disagreed with the pseudo-scientific political "consensus" - the AGW dogma states that they should be simply ignored because they were not published in "peer reviewed" journals. But the CRU emails indicate that the peer review process was rigged! Here is how climate scientist Phil Jones put it:

    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 !

    Cheers

    Phil

    So now you are applying exactly the same strategy except that you have replaced "peer review" with "newspaper headlines."

    The media groupthink your article reveals is at least as significant the revelation of the corrupt climate database and code used by CRU. I'm talking about the HARRY_READ_ME file. It is a 700KB text file (about 3/4 the size of the New Testament) that is filled from beginning to end with notes about the utter corruption and unreliability of both the CRU database and codebase. Here is a snippet I picked up from an article on CBSNews.com:

    I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

    I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

    One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up ? but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

    Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

    Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

    This scandal does not involve just the few scientists at CRU. It involves all the others who were supposed to review their papers. They all missed it! And the CRU data lies at the heart of the IPCC reports and have been used by many other scientists. This means that all scientific papers relying on the corrupt CRU data are suspect!

    And you think to sweep this under the carpet? Where is your journalistic curiosity, let alone integrity?

  •  
    2

    Stajack

    11/25/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    Chris,

    From the tone of your post, I guess us common folk should base our level of interest in Climategate on whether THE MEDIA thinks it an important story or not. Well excuse me, but I learned a while ago that the level of coverage a story gets from the MSM has NOTHING to do with the merits of the story. Rather, coverage is DIRECTLY proportional to the amount of harm it can do to Republicans/conservativism and INVERSELY proportional to the amount of harm to Democrats/liberalism. Climategate is in the latter category, along with Rev. Wright's rantings, Rep. Rangel's taxes, and John Edwards infidelity. Like these other stories, the media will be reluctant to give Climategate a fair journalistic scrub because it's too invested in the Climate Change narrative. Talk about denial.

  •  
    3

    jgfox

    11/25/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    When you Google "Climategate" you get 3 million hits ... and its
    climbing.

    We are just at the beginning of this scandal.

    Rather than rely on "commentators" about what it is and what it
    isn't, I've read 30 or 40 of the emails and, also, the comments
    on the "code".

    It is very damning and we just began to mine the politics behind
    AGW.

    If Hadley wants to prevent this from become a formal
    investigation, just release the data used in the models and the
    models themselves.

    No, they fought releasing information and in one email pledged
    to destroy it before it became public.

    Those on the fence and those with open minds ... go to
    Wattsupwiththat.com website ... or any website with the emails
    and make up your own mind.

    I remember when Senator Sam Erwin in the Watergate scandal
    was challenged "how could you know that?", he responded

    "Because I can understand the English language. It's my
    mother's tongue."

    The emails are in English ... you decide ... and not Chris
    Morrison.

    If you are reading this you understand English whether it is your
    "Mother tongue" or not.

  •  
    4

    dantronamus

    11/26/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.

    You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

    You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.

    This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.

    This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:

    Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.

    You have suspected as much for years.

    You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.

    You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.

    You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.

    You disagreed when the slogans?and then the science?were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.

    You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.

    You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.

    Your movement had been hijacked.

    The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome?s 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:

    ?In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.?

    And when you looked at the Club of Rome?s elite member roster. And when you learnt about eugenics and the Rockefeller ties to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute and the practice of crypto-eugenics and the rise of overpopulation fearmongering and the call by elitist after elitist after elitist to cull the world population.



    Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.

    Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.

    Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.

    We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.

    We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists? wishes, not reality.

    We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.

    We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.

    We now know, in short, that they were lying.

    It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.

    With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.

    Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.

    We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.

    We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.

    In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.

    Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.

    We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.

    We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.

    We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.

    We can begin focusing on depleted uranium and the dumping of toxic waste into the rivers and all of the issues that we once knew were part of the mandate of the real environmental movement.

    Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support ?our? side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.

    It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.

    We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?

  •  
    5

    dantronamus

    11/26/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.

    You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

    You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.

    This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.

    This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:

    Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.

    You have suspected as much for years.

    You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.

    You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.

    You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.

    You disagreed when the slogans?and then the science?were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.

    You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.

    You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.

    Your movement had been hijacked.

    The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome?s 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:

    ?In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.?

    And when you looked at the Club of Rome?s elite member roster. And when you learnt about eugenics and the Rockefeller ties to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute and the practice of crypto-eugenics and the rise of overpopulation fearmongering and the call by elitist after elitist after elitist to cull the world population.



    Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.

    Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.

    Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.

    We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.

    We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists? wishes, not reality.

    We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.

    We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.

    We now know, in short, that they were lying.

    It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.

    With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.

    Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.

    We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.

    We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.

    In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.

    Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.

    We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.

    We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.

    We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.

    We can begin focusing on depleted uranium and the dumping of toxic waste into the rivers and all of the issues that we once knew were part of the mandate of the real environmental movement.

    Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support ?our? side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.

    It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.

    We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?

  •  
    6

    Gypsy_tech

    12/01/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet

    The right wing media hasn't been jumping on this story because it probably is all a hoax anyway. The rare publication that is actually slanted to the left won't be featured on Yahoo or Fox.
    I don't get the anti climate change croud anyway. You want to keep burning oil and paying the oil companies, why?

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