Climategate: The Final Nail in the Coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

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 Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites 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 Hadley 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. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

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” – Hadley 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. Hadley 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 Hadley 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 is now also 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 if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

Related posts:

  1. RealClimategate hits the final nail in the coffin of ‘peer review’
  2. Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!
  3. Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming
  4. Climategate: what Gore’s useful idiot Ed Begley Jr doesn’t get about the ‘peer review’ process

7 thoughts on “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?”

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  2. Tiggerito says:21st November 2009 at 1:45 pmI’ve been through global cooling/warming and am a skeptic on the current theories and probably the next 10 that come by. They are theories and its a scientific process so they should change/evolve to hopefully something closer to the truth in the future.What I do believe in is that we have done and are still doing things are not good for the environment. Chimney smog, river pollution, mas deforestation, profits over life…I will keep my shares in alternative energy in the hope that it helps us move in a positive direction in protecting where we live, even if the next scare is global brightening.
  3. Strangely says:21st November 2009 at 2:50 pmcui bono?As you said above,

    …wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see…

    We will see what?

    Mysterious hacks into computers?
    Embarrassing emails?
    Personal thoughts and ideas published as accepted, peer-reviewed, authoritative information?

    And the alternative is:
    Weird kiddy climate change ads on telly.
    News about rapidly disappearing glaciers etc.
    Disappearing species.
    Habitat loss.

    Now you can choose to think that all scientists are evil grant-scammers or you can choose the evidence of your own eyes and life. Now that the water is reaching my bottom lip, I have an idea that climate change is real.
    Is it human generated? Probably yes although it all fits in with natural cycles.
    Will the Ice Age return? Of course it will. But not for a long time.

    The problem is that many scientists can be just as cunt-ish as anyone else. But the probability (which is what scientists deal in, not facts), is that much of what we see is human generated, not just by driving cars, but by our very numbers on the planet that all have to eat and live.

    Read up on Richard Feynmann. A good guy, who took nothing at face value, but, and there’s the rub, he knew what he was talking about. Most CC sceptics don’t, they really don’t. They are good at quoting stuff out of context and making mischief, but that’s all. And nearly all of them are part of a vested interest group much larger than the one you choose to denigrate.

    My personal belief is that if what you say “But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover”…
    … is true, then it’s curtains mate, for most of us, and all the fine words and argument will be nothing, just echoes in a wet or dry wind. I have done my own research into this, starting way back when HH Lamb was still alive. I think Feymann would agree and it’s a sad loss that he’s not here now to see all this.

  4. Michael Roc Thomas says:21st November 2009 at 4:56 pmWhat are these vested interests in the global warming myth? One would think the fossil fuel lobby amongst others with huge power would have put them to the sword by now. So what is it that keeps driving this ahem discussion?
  5. Christopher says:21st November 2009 at 6:35 pmThe final quote in the Guardian’s article “Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists” seemed familiar when I read it:>>>A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”This was because it was based on a comment posted at the Realclimate.org site a few hours earlier, signed simply “ben”:>>>”If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last ten years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. The fact is the scientific consensus on climate change has been reached through the publication of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, field research and the lifetime’s work of some of humanity’s best minds. It’s obvious these emails didn’t even go through a spell-check let alone the rigorous peer-review process. Contrary to what the skeptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth.”

    I wonder what to make of this…

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