Nov
26, 2009
Climate
change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation
By Christopher Booker
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his
Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal
revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s
Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears
across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these
acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these
thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total
shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their
authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance
cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group
of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the
worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through
the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key
sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link
to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of
the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record
is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the
IPCC and governments rely - not least for their predictions that the
world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are
spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and
British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world
temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10
years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after
1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to
their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to
eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures
were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the
entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the
“hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert
Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has
been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey
Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more
devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on
which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast
list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey
Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith
Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial
rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth,
who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over
hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally
Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is
second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which
have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world.
Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach
(see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up
With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr
Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious
tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders
under freedom of information laws. They have come up with every
possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their
findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal
to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely
influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his
startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had
simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which
scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this
is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a
criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal
to release their data is what is it that these scientists
seem so
anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked
documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data
through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the
one desired direction - to lower past temperatures and to “adjust”
recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an
accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents
relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes
the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr
McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last
year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two
further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New
Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to
compare the official temperature record with the original data on which
it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick
has been played - to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a
graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this
manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture
it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex
computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the
approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at
how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in
which these academics have been determined to silence any expert
questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious
methods - not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by
discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to
publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at
nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring
that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC
reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman
produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve
McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in
which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen
to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers
in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much
of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the
latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have
been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of
genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate
scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be
barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George
Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed
experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr
Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new
think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a
proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the
CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by
Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society - itself long a shameless
propagandist for the warmist cause - is far from being what Lord Lawson
had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot
be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest
scientific scandal of our age. See post here.
For inspiration see this UK Telegraph post below and here.
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