With the UN's International Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen only weeks away, recent revelations have thrown a monkey wrench in the plans of global warming activists to implement a worldwide treaty which would impose costly sanctions on the industrialized west and effect a massive wealth transfer to developing nations. The Obama administration had appeared willing to sign away a great deal of U..S sovereignty and transfer significant power over U.S. citizens to an unelected international bureaucracy, but the latest news may make it impossible to use anthropogenic global warming as a pretext for expanding the power of the administration's transnational socialist allies.
It started with the reluctant acknowledgment by many climatologists that despite past opposition, the claims of skeptics that the Earth has actually been cooling were essentially true. German scientists from the Liebnitz Institute for Marine Studies and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology led the way, admitting that "global warming is taking a break," referring to the increasingly widespread acknowledgment that for the last decade temperatures have remained stable and that over the last 40 years the level of overall warming is considerably lower than previously claimed.
Even "Global Warming Central" at Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research had to admit that their past figures were suspect and that rather than a 0.2% temperature increase over the past decade their adjusted figures suggested only a 0.07% temperature increase during that period. Hadley has always been a leading source for global warming activism and their computer models and data analysis techniques are being looked at with increasing skepticism as they remain one of the few climate research groups still reporting any warming at all over the last 10 years.
This week Hadley became the center of a storm of controversy over "climategate" when a hacker accessed their internal network and made over a thousand emails and documents public, revealing what looks like a concerted effort to misrepresent the results of their research, manufacture bogus data, suppress data, tweak models to produce desired results, and carry out smear campaigns against climate change skeptics. As the story unfolds some are describing it as one of the greatest scientific scandals of the modern era. As the scandal has unfolded the reputations of some of the most prominent climate scientists have been placed in doubt and ties have been exposed to journalists and media outlets who seem to have been complicit in the conspiracy.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - James Bedell
You are missing links to any evidence of the conspiratorial claims you make. Where's the beef?
2 - Dave Nalle
Did someone take the links out?
If you want a link other than a news report, you can download all the Hadley docutments from this source.
Dave
3 - Arch Conservative
The moonbats have taken to calling it Hopenhagen. I heard a rdio adverstisement the other day. Just when you though they couldn't be any mor eannoying......
4 - zingzing
i wouldn't be so quick to jump on this band wagon. a bunch of nutty conspiracy hunters trying to find something in emails written by scientists, using their own particular vernacular, might just be a dead end. still, it would be wonderful if you were right, and it all is a hoax. not that that should change the fact that we shouldn't pollute the earth.
5 - zingzing
"Just when you though they couldn't be any mor eannoying......"
drunk, archie? and you can be pretty annoying yourself, with your little catch phrases and cutesy names.
6 - dt0x
zingzing...you know.... The school officials verified that the information stolen was authentic, and in the same breath denied that there is any cover up....Having read these e-mails myself as you should do....It is clear...There is no mistaking what they mean by what they say...a 2 yr old would understand this.
7 - dt0x
never underestimate the true owners of the internet.... the hackers ;)
Have a Great Day!
8 - Tofu Charlie
@ Y'all -- People are jumping the gun on the "nutty conspiracy hunters" angle, IMO. There's 7.6 MB of email text alone to go through. (Some are datasets, etc, but mostly correspondence). Agree the use of cynical language is normal, and that people are making too much of this... but put in the context of the Freedom of Information requests made of CRU, it's not looking good. (That's why the filename was FOIA2009.ZIP.)
Allegedly CRU did a big public data purge in July (?) ... and in August they announced they had lost or destroyed too much data for a third-party climate model to be created -- widely reported in MSM as something along the lines of "Global Warming Ate My Data".
I want to hear more from non-climate scientists... the emails do seem more deceptive and unprofessional than what I'd expected. At times (especially Phil Jones) the tone is propagandistic and aggressively anti-transparency. Consider that CRU is a central player in the UN IPCC process.
The many references to deleting emails regarding AC4 (i.e. the latest UN climate model, released in '07), as well as this very recent Kevin Trenberth quote (US NCAR, UN IPCC, AC4) seem likely to get some MSM play somewhere down the line:
"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."
It's going to take some time for this to play out. At least wait until Monday morning before you call "tinfoil".
Dave Nalle, above, was kind enough to link to my post about the hack/leak.
9 - zingzing
"a 2 yr old would understand this."
no, it wouldn't... and what you think you understand and what you actually understand are two different things.
i'm going to let the story develop some more before i pass any judgment. people have been burned that way.
10 - JP
Oh yeah, those crazy skeptics!
OF course, you need to ignore the emails where Mann et al discuss how to pressure peer-reviewed Journals from printing articles espousing a different point of view.
You need to ignore the emails where these "esteemed" scientists write about deleting emails so they will not be available for Freedom of Information requests.
You need to ignore the email where two scientists discuss lopping off the end of a graph to make the trend more linear in favor of a warming climate.
You need to ignore the emails where they discuss how the tree ring data, which was one of the primary bits of evidence for the UPCC document is WRONG and rather than correct it, their stance is to vilify the person who found the errors.
So sure, keep believing these guys. They are the most noted climate researchers in the world and they are pursuing their own agenda at any cost.
Michael Mann: "well, they are just taking these mails out of context". Jeez. He sounds just like a politician who will soon be going to jail
11 - zingzing
"At least wait until Monday morning before you call "tinfoil"."
well, that's what it is right now. that's why i'm waiting. i don't see the why behind this supposed fraud. if global warming is slowing, that's a fantastic thing. but data is data and melting polar ice caps is another. it's pretty hard to say "there's no such thing as global warming" and then look at no glacier where a glacier should be.
12 - JP
Except -- zingzing, the Arctic ice has had a spectacular recovery in the past 3 years. Since all of the Arctic data we have is really 40 years old, if it continues to recover next year, that's what we call a trend.
If the computer model doesn't actually work, we shouldn't continue to use it, yes?
13 - JP
Oh and zingzing, the "WHY" behind this fraud is because none of these fools will continue to get government grants if their data is wrong. It's just plain old greed and narcissism.
14 - Dan(Miller)
Still, the circus continues:
The Italian Foreign Minister threatened that "world leaders['] . . . credibility could suffer if they failed to make concrete commitments at next month's Copenhagen climate summit."
Central American countries will demand $105 billion dollars "from industrialized countries for damages caused by global warming. . . .We hope for a deal that is ethical and moral."
Poland "is to sell 15 million euros' (22 million dollars) worth of carbon credits to Ireland, the Polish environment minister said Saturday."
That's from just five minutes on Breitbart.
Willie Sutton, also known as "Slick Willie," said that he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." Now, we are more sophisticated and man made global warming is where the money is.
Dan(Miller)
15 - Tofu Charlie
@ZingZing -- so, have you read any of emails or not? Are there any quotes or excerpts that stand out to you? ...Doesn't it bother you the way MSM and institutions (etc) present the entirely separate issues of "climate change / climate debate / climate response" in such an insulting and superficial way -- and as if they were the same issue?
16 - KL
It's far far too easy to get sucked into the wrong conclusions, when you don't have the full unedited content put into context.
and it is telling that far too many out there are so quick to judge these e-mails out of context.
If the correspondence between leading Global warming skeptics was edited,,and phrases carefully selected, then it would be pretty easy to paint a picture that gives the reader the impression that the skeptic might actually believe in man made global warming.
Take the "Loose Change" film made by two 9/11 conspiracy college kids, If you are easily led, then you would conclude from the sound bites, that had been edited together in the film, that everyone that was quoted firmly believed that 9/11 must have been an inside job, but in truth that wasn't the case at all, lots of the quotes were taken out of context and quotes not supporting the conspiracy theory had been edited out.
What is also telling is the information that was completely left out of the film, i.e no interview with the the Fire Chief at the scene who believes all the 9/11 conspiracy theories were unfounded.
The publication of these e-mails seems no different to those 9/11 conspiracy theorists using quotes out of context and leaving out quotes that don't fit the agenda.
17 - JP
KL -- tell me, would you *ever* be convinced climate change scientists are cooking the data to keep their high dollar grants? What exactly would it take?
18 - SebSyd
University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked, not the Hadley Centre. Different organisations as you should have know.
19 - Dave Nalle
well, that's what it is right now. that's why i'm waiting. i don't see the why behind this supposed fraud.
This would be why I made the fraud issue only part of the article. The defection of the German climate scientists, the 10 years of cooling or at least no warming, Al Gore's change of position on CO2 -- it all adds up to a story larger than just the fraud.
Dave
20 - Glenn Contrarian
Dave -
Y'know, I DO usually take the time to read the links to the claims by conservatives...
...and gee whiz, LOOK what I found!
>Draft statement
>Any implication that Professor Keith Briffa deliberately selected tree-ring data in order to manufacture evidence of >recent dramatic warming in the Yamal region of northern Russia is completely false. A full rebuttal is published on the
>Climatic Research Unit's website.
>
This stems from a report on the Climate Audit blog site - a site for climate change sceptics. The blog's editor, Steve
>McIntyre, has produced an alternative history of tree-growth changes in the Yamal region by substituting some of the data used in Prof Briffa's published and peer-reviewed analysis, with recent data from a more localised origin than the data
>analysed by Prof Briffa. While McIntyre's selection produces a different result, it cannot be considered to be more authoritative.
This appears to be an attempt to discredit the work of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change in the run-up to the
Copenhagen climate talks.
SO IN OTHER WORDS, DAVE, a climate change skeptic altered the data to try to discredit the IPCC.
From what I've read in the e-mails, there is almost NOTHING untoward in the actions of the IPCC...and sections of the e-mails like that found in reply #8 above are refuted elsewhere.
Now, how well do you understand what you read below?
"Dear all, At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data. Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second method leaves a significant warming over the past decade. These sums complement Kevin's energy work. Kevin says ... "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". I do not agree with this. Tom."
One of the most important tasks of any statistician is to remove the factors and variables that improperly skew the results. The factors being removed for the 'second method' listed above are exactly that - variables that (if included) would wrongly skew the statistics.
And NONE of the so-called 'evidence' of a vast 'climate-change conspiracy' answers the observations below:
On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote: Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and sampling errors to
this new "IPCC Lead Author" from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another dramatic upward spike like 1xxx xxxx xxxx. I heard someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was willing to bet a lot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the
past 10 years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my student suggests below."
Dave, any time I want to see solid proof of global warming, all I need do is look from my yard to Mount Rainier and see the glaciers that aren't even a quarter of what they were a century ago.
AND those of you who insist that there's no such thing as 'anthropological global warming' are forgetting one thing: You cannot afford to be wrong, whereas if the IPCC is wrong, fine, no big deal.
If the skeptics are wrong but we do NOTHING - catastrophe. If the IPCC is wrong but we do everything they ask - NO catastrophe.
The IPCC is betting money, as it were, whereas the skeptics are betting millions of lives. Sadly, those lives mean absolutely nothing to many conservatives.
21 - SebSyd
One thing to note is that although we are going through a period of sunspot minimum We are getting record November temperature here in Australia.
I agree there is no doubt sunspots do affect climate but why is it not cooler. Doesn't it seem likely that human activities are accentuating climate change.
3000 years ago there were 27million people on the planet now there are 6.7 billion, surely at the rate we are consuming resources and pumping by products of burning oil gas and coal we must be having an effect.
22 - Dave Nalle
Glenn, you expected every document out of hundreds to be a smoking gun? And you think that a few examples which don't support the argument that there was malfeasance hold more weight than the ones which do? Clearly people at Hadley were saying a lot of things about global warming. The fact that there was a lot of volume doesn't change the character of their negative actions.
And SebSyd, one thing which is almost always overlooked is anthropogenic factors which actually reduce global warming. For example, human measures to reduce forest fires and proliferate certain crops have actually substantially increased CO2 absorbtion, and the proliferation of domesticated cattle is somewhat offset by the reduction in wild bovines and other species.
And going back to Glenn and his Mt. Ranier observation, how is it any more valid than my observation of a succession of unusually cool years here in Texas? No localized trend can be the basis of a generalized conclusion.
I'll go with what appears to be emerging as Al Gore's new argument, that reducing pollution is a generally desirable for myriad reasons. Beyond that, there is no justification for the creation of a vast and unaccountable and unelected climate bureaucracy, nor is there a justification for redistributing wealth on a massive scale from developed nations to nations which actually produce more pollutants than they do relative to GDP and industrial output.
Dave
23 - AMERICAN PATRIOT
GLOBAL WARMING IS SCIENTIFIC FRAUD.
HACKERS UNCOVERED THE REAL DATA
THE ELITE OF THE PLANET WANT YOU TO BELIEVE IT.
ITS A LIE.
TO SETUP WORLD GOVERNMENT
CAP AND TRADE = FRAUD
GLOBAL CARBON TAX = FRAUD
WAKE UP.
24 - Dave Nalle
"I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.
Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !" -- Phil Jones.
Dave
25 - caloot
I really must applaud Mr. Nalle's recognition of the true underlying cause of 'global warming'. The very words 'climate change' are a joke when taken into context with the endlessly long history of our planet. It is a history of nothing but climate change. "Global Warming" and the politicization of this term is the true root of the discussion; and the seemingly nefarious shaping of this discussion by the 'Scientific Community' provides an almost unheard of look into the roots of how propaganda begins. The overwhelming fear of presumed outcome, coupled with a narcissistic approach to the practice of 'science', has led to what appears to be one of the many possible origins to a 'fundamental redistribution of wealth'. That redistribution is meant to occur on the global stage, and the scientific community, whether they know it or not, through the fulcrum of 'global warming', is at its center.
The already mentioned UN treaty will create a global government. Taxing carbon will fund the new monetary system that will replace the crushed dollar. Redistribution of economy will create a new bourgeoisie that will only empower the global totalitarian state.
Goodbye American sovereignty. That beautiful bill of rights is going to be superseded by the global collective. blah blah blah...
But dude was right before.. "never underestimate the true owners of the internet"
THANK YOU Internet Freedom Fighters... err I mean you horrible hackers. You are patriots.
I only hope we, as a society, can stand true to our beliefs in the power of freedom. and the power of true science to shed white light on the truth.