More Reaction To The Great Climate Fraud

The After Shocks Continue

It is ironic and dismaying that the National government is working to ram through its Emissions Trading Scheme bill under urgency. The Bill is long, complex, with many amendments to be debated in the committee of the whole--it is bad legislation to be made worse through the process of urgency under which it will most likely be passed. And why? So New Zealand can "look good" at the yet-to-be-held, but already failed UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

If it were just the grandstanding of a few egocentric, venal, and self-serving politicians it could be cynically lived with; sadly the ETS will do real damage to our country, our children, and our grandchildren. It will saddle forthcoming generations with enormous debt burdens, that eventually have to be paid through higher taxation. The saddest part of all is that the protagonists may well be genuinely deluded by the global warming hoax and actually believe they are doing a good thing for the country. Do you really believe, Mr Key that you should do evil that good may come?

It is even more ironic that this charade of irresponsibility and soft-despotism is playing out at the very point where the dubious foundations of global warming science are under scrutiny as never before. The leaked e-mails are having an effect right around the world. Here is a sample of the last twenty-four hours.

Firstly, George Monbiot climate change reporter for the Guardian, a card carrying cheerleader to mobilise governments and global action to counter the perceived global warming threat. He writes:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed. . . .

You think, George? The depth of commitment to the global warming hoax amongst credulous scientists and politicians has shown up over the last few days in the oft-repeated refrain: "regardless of a few rogue events like the contents of these e-mails, we know that the earth is warming." Curious George wants to ask a question: how do you know? Virtually all the "data" upon which the IPCC has relied came from the cabal and we now know it has been cooked. The rug has just be swept from under your feet, and like the Energizer Bunny you still beat your "climate change is real" drum. Don't you realise just how conditioned and programmed you have allowed yourself to become? At least Monbiot wants to go back and have a second look.

Secondly, Lord Monckton long a target of ad hominem attack by the very cabal that has now been exposed as having orchestrated, planned, and conspired to shut down opposition to their agenda, writes this:

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be [1] — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be. . . .

Dr Roy Spencer, a true scientist and expert on atmospheric temperature research, and also a long-suffering target of the smears of the cabal, writes this:

ClimateGate and the Elitist Roots of Global Warming Alarmism
November 21st, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. It will take some time before we know whether any illegal activity has been uncovered (e.g. hiding or destruction of data to avoid Freedom of Information Act inquiries).

Some commentators even think this is the beginning of the end for the IPCC. I doubt it. . . . At a minimum, some of these e-mails reveal an undercurrent of elitism that many of us have always claimed existed in the IPCC. These scientists look upon us skeptics with scorn. It is well known that the IPCC machine is made up of bureaucrats and scientists who think they know how the world should be run. The language contained in a draft of the latest climate treaty (meant to replace the Kyoto treaty) involves global governance and the most authoritarian means by which people’s energy use will be restricted and monitored by the government.

Even if this language does not survive in the treaty’s final form, it illustrates the kind of people we are dealing with. The IPCC folks jet around the world to all kinds of exotic locations for their UN-organized meetings where they eat the finest food. Their gigantic carbon footprints stomp around the planet as they deride poor Brazilian farmers who convert jungle into farmland simply to survive. . . .

The elitist attitudes exist elsewhere, too. While the skeptics’ blogs allow those who disagree to post opinions as long as they remain civil about it, RealClimate.org routinely ignores or deletes posts that might cast doubt on their tidy worldview. The same thing happens at Wikipedia, where a gatekeeper deletes newly posted content that departs from the IPCC party line.

A few of the CRU e-mails suggest that manipulation of climate data in order to reduce the signature of natural climate variations, and to exaggerate the supposed evidence for manmade climate change, is OK with these folks. Apparently, the ends justify the means.

The defense posted at RealClimate.org actually reinforces my point. Do the IPCC scientists assume that this is how all climate scientists behave? If it really was how the rest of us behave, why would our eyebrows be raised up to our hairlines as we read the e-mails?

If all of this sounds incompatible with the process of scientific investigation, it shouldn’t. One of the biggest misconceptions the public has about science is that research is a straightforward process of making measurements, and then seeing whether the data support hypothesis A or B. The truth is that the interpretation of data is seldom that simple.

There are all kinds of subjective decisions that must be made along the way, and the scientist must remain vigilant that he or she is not making those decisions based upon preconceived notions. Data are almost always dirty, with errors of various kinds. Which data will be ignored? Which data will be emphasized? How will the data be processed to tease out the signal we think we see?

Hopefully, the scientist is more interested in discovering how nature really works, rather than twisting the data to support some other agenda. It took me years to develop the discipline to question every research result I got. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and very difficult to be right.

Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?

Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting the IPCC’s politics, not to find out how nature works. The ‘data spin’ is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

Finally, while all sides have condemned the act of hacking, at least one commentator has applied Ocam's Razor to the issue:

There’s an old adage, never assume malice when stupidity or incompetence will explain it.
A few people inside CRU possessed the archive of documents being held in reserve in case the FOI [Freedom of Information] appeal decision was made in favor of Steve McIntyre. [McIntyre of Climate Audit had made requests for release of base temperature data under the FOI to cross check the work of CRU]. They shared it with others by putting it in an FTP [File Transfer Protocol] directory which was on the same CPU as the external webserver, or even worse, was an on a shared drive somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available. Then, along comes our “hackers” who happened to find it, download it, and the rest is history unfolding before our eyes. So much for the cries of sophisticated hacking and victimization . . . .

If I had to bet money, I would guess that . . . [the] Information Policy & Compliance Manager, University of East Anglia, has an even chance of being the guilty party, but it would only be a guess.

To repeat the basic premise of this theory.

There’s an old adage, never assume malice when stupidity or incompetence will explain it.