More on the Global Warming Rort

Global Warming Mafia

The internet blogs and leading mainstream media are digging up more and more damning material from the leaked CRU e-mails. It looks like the initial attempts to play it down as a storm in a teacup have failed. Below is a summary of some of the more interesting material published over the past twenty-four hours.

Firstly, the blogsite Climate Audit (as reported by Anthony Watts in Watts Up With That) has delved down into some of the computer code which has been used to run regressions on temperature data at the Climate Research Unit in the UK--which is arguably the most influential climate data institution in the world. The program notes show that the code has been written to falsify the actual results. And the code does not lie. It cannot be spun. Anthony Watts writes:

CRU Emails “may” be open to interpretation, but commented code by the programmer tells the real story. In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?

There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:

Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer:

function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;
pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

and later the same programming comment again in another routine:

;
; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD
; reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.


You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.

Now we know why Phil Jones, the CRU, Michael Mann and others have steadfastly refused to release their data or their regression code to be audited or reviewed. Like every good propagandist they don't want the world to be confused by facts.

The American Thinker has had a look at what the leaked material reveals about the funding arrangements of the Global Warming Gurus. This is material because the standard propaganda line issued ad nauseum by these chaps against scientists criticising or opposing them is ad hominem: their opponents are being paid by "big oil" and therefore their science is not to be taken seriously, lacks rigour, objectivity etc. etc. The leaked material, however, shows that the pot has called the kettle well and truly black: the Global Warming Gurus are in the pocket of special interest groups and want to be paid off by clean energy companies. Science for sale. Marc Sheppard writes:

Amid the thousands of files apparently lifted from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief P.D. Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.

But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of "energy agencies" they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust -- are U.K.-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting "new energy" technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.

Needless to say, all four of these CRU "potential funding sources" have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on demand. And equally obvious, Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.

When you are a true believer in a messianic call to save the planet, all that you do is good; all that your opponents do is evil. If you take money it is all good, good, good because you have the best interests of humanity at heart; if opponents take money, it is thoroughly evil (regardless of the merits of their science) because mankind will suffer if they are listened to. How credulous and duped the oh-so-clever political and media elites have all been.

The leaked e-mails also show a conspiracy stretching over many years to use threats, blackmail, and standover tactics to block non authorised scientific papers critical of global warming ideology being published. The censoring of opposition has been critical: it has allowed the Global Warming gurus to run a superficially credible criticism of their opponents, whom, they say, have consistently failed to get peer reviewed scientific papers published in credible scientific journals. This "proves" that the sceptical position lacks scientific rigour and credibility. It also "proves" that the science is "settled" and the majority of scientists believe in the scientific verity of anthropogenic global warming.

Keith Johnson in the Wall Street Journal writes:

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.

"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical." . . . . A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view.

In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.

The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.

The article concludes by quoting Mojib Latif, a German climatologist who raised eyebrows recently at a global warming conference by acknowledging that temperatures have stopped rising:

Mojib Latif, a climate researcher at Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, said he found it hard to believe that climate scientists were trying to squelch dissent. Mr. Latif, who believes in man-made global warming but who has co-authored a paper ascribing current cooling to temporary natural trends, said, "I simply can't believe that there is a kind of mafia that is trying to inhibit critical papers from being published."

A Climate Change Mafia? Well you had better believe it, Mojib--that is, if you are prepared to look at the evidence. There are going to be a lot of very hurt, disappointed, and embarrassed global warming climatologists around. Hell hath no fury like a scientists duped. Expect a whole lot more new sceptical voices to be raised, as these folk jump ship to try to salvage some academic respectability.