Obama's Science Czar John Holdren involved in Greatest Fraud in Human History, "Climategate"

Climategate: Follow the Money

Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

• By BRET STEPHENS  Comments (35)

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called--without irony--the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts--amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion--you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data--facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Associated Press

Al Gore wins the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Doing well by doing good?

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California--apparently not feeling bankrupt enough--devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"--largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes--of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent--including the thousands of jobs they provide--vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

The New Big Lie: Climategate Emails Are Not Significant

Click on title if graphics are missing  

Dr. Tim Ball
Canada Free Press
Monday, Dec 14th, 2009

Charles Dickens wrote, "I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it."

The criminals at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England brazenly defend the indefensible. It is stunning to watch Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, who even look alike, staring directly at the camera and denying the significance of their emails.

It works because they used it to deceive the world. They know most won't understand the emails. The Associate Press (AP) has already confirmed this.

As with Revkin at the New York Times the journalist Seth Borenstein of AP has no journalistic integrity. Here is his email to the gang. On July 23, 2009 he wrote, "Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly.  It's in a legit journal. Watchya think?" "Again" means there is previous communication. A journalist talking to scientists is legitimate, but like the email's tone and subjective comments are telling. 

Out of Context

They claim they're taken out of context. In context the fullness of their criminality is exposed. I already described the nature of the Climatic Research Unit and the rogue scientists therein. 

Then there are the ones those who did the dirty work.

They claim there's nothing of consequence in the emails, but they're a litany of manipulation of, the data, the process, publications, peer review, and personal attacks. Understanding requires knowledge of the science and the history of events.

Data Manipulation

The primary issue is the data. Science requires data and inadequacy of the climate record was always a problem. Climatology recognizes three distinct periods: The very recent instrumental period; the historical period to 3000 years, and the geologic/ biologic for the rest. They manipulated data in all three but the first is critical because it is the source of material for the computer models, the vehicle of their deception.

There are few long continuous reliable stations (Figure 1a). Most are on land and there are fewer now than in 1960 (Figure 1b). Figure 2 shows there are virtually no records for the oceans and much of the land. The density looks solid but the large dots are on a very small world map. It is a very sparse inadequate network especially as the basis for construction of the computer models.

Figure 1: Station information determined by NASA GISS.

     
Figure 2 Weather stations distribution with vast gaps.
Source: GHCN
The data is questionable because the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) manipulates the data prior to its use by others; they call it homogenizing. The public rarely sees the raw data and CRU 'lost' theirs. Users like CRU, who produce global annual average temperatures, select stations that create the results they want, then 'adjust' the data again for their purposes. As Warwick Hughes notes, "As an oddity, Phil Jones claimed to have taken out San Juan (PR), that it somehow failed their 1986 tests.   Well it sure is in their list of stations USED in gridding. It is a classic story, the inclusion of UHI (Urban Heat Island) warming biased trends which dominate the rural data where the more accurate regional trends are recorded - albeit in more gappy data."

Translation: a false warming record exists because of the growth of urban areas. Jones chose them over rural stations that don't show "warming".

Lack Of Data Means Computer Models Can't Work

Figure 3 is a schematic of a climate model. CRU described them as follows; "GCM's are complex, three-dimensional computer-based models of the atmospheric circulation. Uncertainties in our understanding of climate processes, the natural variability of the climate, and limitations of the GCMs mean that their results are not definite predictions of future climate."

Figure 3: Schematic of the structure of a global climate model.
Source: Briggs Smithson and Ball, Fundamentals of Physical Geography

Superimpose the surface of the grid in Figure 3 on the map in Figure 2 and you have a majority of squares with no data. It's worse above the surface. CRU emails talk of attempts to hide, ignore, or avoid the problem. Jones used the record for 'gridding', which is the basic method used to produce the computer models. When you have a grid with no data you have to 'infill' with estimates using the nearest data. But in most cases the nearest data is inadequate or in a different setting. 

On the 28 October 2002 email Phil Jones explains to Tom Wigley, "We've had to 'move' some stations to be on model land to get better comparisons. Islands that are not in the model have poor comparisons." "Model land" means the problem of a square that is half on land and half on water and designated 'land'. As recently as November 6, 2009 Wigley wrote to Jones about the larger problem. "We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming--and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important." You're darn right it's important because you've chosen mostly urban records. They knew, as this email indicates.  "CRU temperature data - not the latest version, but the one you used in MBH98 !!(The hockey stick) We added lots of data in for the region this person says has Urban Warming! So easy review to do." "Latest version" is telling - they adjusted, as errors were noticed, not to improve the accuracy but to counteract criticism. The last sentence means "easy" for the questions they choose to rebuff. They ignored tough ones . 

Then there's the problem of squares with no data. Jones to Wigley 13 December 2005 notes, "There isn't any data at the N. Pole."  It is an understatement as this map (Figure 4) from the Arctic Impact Assessment report used by the IPCC shows.

Figure 4: Lack of data area covers most of Arctic basin.
Source: CRU East Anglia.

It is not much better at the other Pole. Tim Osborne's email to the group says, "Even if you do something to sort out the problem at the S. Pole, how about the isolated boxes around the coast of Antarctica, which will be given much less weight than an isolated box in the tropics which might also have only 1 station in." The problem is South Pole temperatures declined over the period of record. They produced another shameless "peer reviewed" paper to falsely show Antarctica was warming; another example of statistical manipulation.

Hiding Data  

Manipulations mean GISS have different results for global average annual temperatures than CRU. It invited this probing email from Yousif Kharaka of the US Geological Survey via Judith Lean to Mann. "I have been puzzled as to why global temperature data from the British Hadley Centre are different from those reported by NASA GISS, especially in the last 10 years." 

Mann replies on 15 October 2008; "My understanding is that the differences arise largely from how missing data are dealt with". Jones adds, "The GISS group average surface T data into 80 equal area boxes across the world. The UK group (CRU/MOHC) grid the data into 5 by 5 degree lat/long boxes, as does NCDC." So the data in each box is different but always less than adequate. No wonder models fail all validation tests that measure their ability to recreate past conditions. Another problem arose as this email indicates. "Also it would seem odd to validate any model in a region where there is no data in a region that had to be infilled." You can't validate what doesn't exist.

Denying access or manipulating the data to falsify the models pervades the emails. Jones wrote to Mann on Feb 26 2004. "Most of the data series in most of the plots have just appeared on the CRU web site. Go to data then to paleoclimate. Did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data series. Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we've done anything wrong." Jones to Mann, Bradley and Hughes on Feb 21 2005. "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!"

These are not innocent comments. What was there to hide? Answer how they falsified the data as the emails expose when you put them in context.

This video runs about 11 minutes and seems to summarize the events.

Climate fraud Climategate