Editorial by S. Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
ClimateGate Whitewash
There is now a desperate effort afoot by assorted climate alarmists to explain away the revelations of the incriminating e-mails leaked last year from the University of East Anglia (UAE). But the ongoing investigations so far have avoided the real problem, namely whether the reported warming is genuine or simply the manufactured result of manipulation of temperature data by scientists in England and the United States.
The latest report is by the British House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee, which largely absolved Philip Jones, head of UEA’s Climate Research Unit and author of most of the e-mails. How can we tell that it’s a whitewash? Here are some telltale signs:
- It refers to the e-mails as “stolen”
- It did not take direct testimony from scientifically competent skeptics
- Yet it derives the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the basic science and that warming is human caused – essentially endorsing the IPCC
None of the investigations have gone into any detail on how the data might have been manipulated. But this is really the most important task for any investigation, since it deals directly with the central issue: Is there an appreciable human influence on climate change in the past decades?
Instead, much of the attention of newspapers, and of the public, has focused on secondary issues: the melting of Himalayan glaciers, the possible inundation of the Netherlands, deforestation of the Amazon, crop failures in Africa, etc. While these issues demonstrate the sloppiness of the IPCC process, they don’t tell anything about the cause of the warming: natural or anthropogenic.
So what do the e-mails really reveal? We know that Jones and his gang tried and largely succeeded in “hiding the decline” of temperature by using what he termed “Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick.” Most people think it refers to CRU tree ring data after 1960, which do show a decline in temperature. However, I believe that it refers to Michael Mann’s “trick” in hiding the fact that his multi-proxy data did not show the expected warming after 1979. So he abruptly cut off his analysis in 1979 and simply inserted the thermometer data supplied by Jones, which do claim a strong temperature increase. Hence the hockey-stick, suggesting a sudden major warming during the past century.
Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.
“Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.”
We aren’t going to get a thorough scientific investigation. The outcomes of the other two UK investigations are foregone conclusions. The whitewash was purchased weeks ago.
This is Her Majesty’s govenment we are talking about. The most corrupt and venal institute in the UK. Did you really expect they’d actually do an honest job?
I got this in a email from the conservative party, when i asked why they still believed in AGW.
The Conservative Party’s view on this is very clear: It is only right that scientific theories should be constantly subject to questioning and challenge – that is how scientific discovery happens – but that should not be accepted as a case for inaction.
Those in favour of doing nothing need to be able to show that the risks we run by not acting are small and manageable. This is a very difficult case to make, given all the evidence we now have, and considering all the additional benefits that a low carbon economy will bring.
Conservatives do not accept the argument that acting on climate change is all about costs and penalties. Many of the actions we want to take will both save and make money, not cost it: Making every home in Britain more energy efficient will reduce our energy bills and create lots of local jobs, as well as safeguarding our environment. Reducing our reliance on fossil fuels through developing new clean energy technologies will be good for our economy and our national security, as well as our environment. And the global market for green goods and services will soon be worth trillions of pounds – so we need to start investing in new green technologies and industries if we’re going to get a bigger stake in this enormous economic opportunity.
You may wish to take a look at our policy paper, Rebuilding Security, Conservative energy policy for an uncertain world, which is available on conservatives.com. It gives a hard-headed analysis of Britain’s energy security situation and concludes that our future security lies in reduced exposure to volatile fossil fuels, greater diversity in supply and a far more efficient energy system.
Regardless of one’s views on the science of climate change, it is therefore clear that our national energy security lies in the transition to a low carbon economy.
you couldn’t make it up!
Thank you
“West Houston (19:56:42) :
You’ll post the GreenWar death threats but you exclude me ’cause I called them “snot-nosed little creeps”
?
REPLY: well, that was then, this is now.”
Laughed my socks off (and I’d only just put them on).
Just shows the ability on this side of the fence at least to modify positions in the light of new circumstances and to inject a little wit and good humour.
Well done Anthony and your crew.
BTW, can anyone point me to a paper that indicates “It woz Man what done it”? I have heard of some work based on stable carbon isotopes but haven’t come across it yet.
You’ve lost, move on.
People are not going to believe claims of “whitewash” forever. If you had a solid case you could have made an impact through the investigation by laying out that case clearly and demanding those aspects were addresses. But skeptics had so many hairbrained arguments based on the flimsiest reading of CRU emails that you ended up throwing a lot of noise into the discussion. That seemed more like entertainment. Next time try to cut out the noise and just focus on some key points and make them clearly.
socold (05:19:52) :
You obviously have not read the Evidence supplied by Scientists, which was completely ignored by said committee.
Back to my earlier point- many people don’t believe there can be a large scale corruption of government science– yet we have Lovelock’s claim the ozone hole data were faked. It would seem easier to make the climate case by being able to show it is part of an ongoing problem of corruption.
Hello socold,
I see that you are still going to play the feeble advocate devil angle.It failed utterly over at JoNova blog.Yet you are going to try it HERE!,with a lot of smart people?
The CRU e-mails are real and definitely damning,something you can not wish it away.I suggest that you drop this absurd (here is that word again) denial of their contents that have proved many claims made by climate skeptics.
How about this startling idea:
YOU make a case that Fred Singer is wrong and that we are wrong about the believed “whitewashing” claims.
David Alan Evans (19:19:25) :
Liam (15:57:42) :
Lon Hocker (15:30:48) :
Use the ballot box.
Time for a non-violent, but thorough revolution
—————————-
Difficult when all 3 major political parties in the UK seem signed up to AGW.
Easy answer Liam.
Vote UKIP or the party that can’t be mentioned! ABBCC, (Anyone But Brown, Cameron or Clegg!)
DaveE.
===============================================
To all those above who despair at the thought of voting for one of our 3
Eurolabour parties check out the UKIP energy/climate policy at the link below – makes sense and it really is worth a look.
http://www.ukip.org/content/ukip-policies/418-energy-environment-ukip-policy-2009
What else would one expect from brainwashed Anglia-land?
jazznick ( 4 04 2010
To all those above who despair at the thought of voting for one of our 3
Eurolabour parties check out the UKIP energy/climate policy at the link below – makes sense and it really is worth a look.
http://www.ukip.org/content/ukip-policies/418-energy-environment-ukip-policy-2009
it’s good to see some sense for a change! I do however wonder if the UKIP can get enough votes in the forthcoming elections though they will get one more – MINE!
Sorry Fred, “public intellectual” Clive Hamilton on our tax funded, “balanced” ABC not only disagrees with you, he believes it is the sceptics that are the guilty ones:
“So, no conspiracy, no collusion, no manipulation of data, no corruption of the peer-review process, no scandal; just an understandable reluctance to hand over data to dishonest people with a history of misrepresenting it.’
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2862717.htm#comments
Mind you, looks like there was a little discussion to the contrary.
I lived in Florida for over 20 years. Every year the line where it was possible to grow Oranges moved SOUTH. A famous landmark – a local tower where one could view unending fields of Orange trees is abandoned and the trees dead.
From downunder.
A concern that I do have in regard to this whole AGW issue is that of the unsettled debt.
People of the world have a huge debt to Dr. Singer; Lord Moncton; Professor Plimer; Anthony Watts; Ross McKiltrick (There are many more people who should be mentioned) and the very few politicians who stood up to the established dogma and questioned. They stood up to the so called “consensus opinion”, when the going was at its toughest. These people were ridiculed, called offensive terms such as “denier” and said to be in the pay of big oil. There was an attempt to impugn their reputations.
Such people are the true heroes of today!
They remind me of the darkest hour in Britain’s history when Winston Churchill made that famous claim of; so much being being owed, by so many, to so few.
My great worry in this whole matter is that many of the protagonists may get off “scott free”. However, my great hope is that at least the main perpetrators will be brought before a proper court of law and prosecuted.
Dr. Singer is absolutely right – the main issue has slipped away due to the excessive amount of interest spent on minor and secondary issues.
My research shows that the entire Climategate scandal is only the tip of the iceberg when compared to what is still hidden in the belly of the beast. I have demonstrated that the entire “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties, the one shown as a steady temperature increase by NASA, NOAA, and tha Met Office, simply did not happen.
This is the same warming that James Hansen spoke of when he stood up in front of the Senate in 1988 and testified that global warming had arrived and that its cause was carbon dioxide we were putting into the air. My reason for saying this is simple: experimental evidence.
As you may know, satellites have been measuring global temperatures for the last thirty years and they simply cannot see that warming. When the satellite temperature curve is outlined with a magic marker a series of temperature oscillations become visible, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, but no rise until the super El Nino of 1998 shows up. It turns out that these oscillations are not random but correlate with the ENSO phases in the Pacific.
Some people have tried to see the influence of volcanic eruptions from Pinatubo or El Chichon in these temperature oscillations but they are not present. In both cases volcanic cooling was confined to the stratosphere and did not influence tropospheric temperatures. There are five oscillatory peaks within the twenty year period and they all can be assigned to El Ninos. And the valleys between them belong to La Ninas.
But how is it possible that the said three guardians of world temperature do not show them? I had to investigate and discovered that they have transmogrified an oscillating temperature curve into a rising temperature curve. If you take, say, HadCRUT3 from the Met Office and put it side by side with a satellite curve you notice right away that they start by cherry picking the El Nino peaks and then raising up the low La Nina temperatures in between to change a horizontal temperature curve into a rising temperature curve.
But this works only for the first four El Ninos. The fifth one is too low so it gets raised up bodily. The super El Nino is next which they gratefully take to be their own even though its cause is not carboniferous. Its aftermath is the twenty-first century high, a run of six warm years near the El Nino maximum. But even this does not satisfy them and the entire right side of the curve gets lifted up.
NOAA is worse. While HadCRUT3 still retains the greatly reduced La Nina valleys they stay with the peaks, jettison all low values in between and raise the twenty-first century high as well. NASA (Land-Ocean from Hansen 2006) starts out just like HadCRUT3 but they do not have the nerve to lift up peaks so these are all in place and so is the twenty-first century high. Only their super El Nino is off (too low) and their data point for 2005 is too high.
I put the beginning of this data manipulatin into the late seventies. It amounts to a sustained, long-term scientific fraud. Checking NOAA’s global temperature curve, there had not been any warming for a good twenty years and people were speculating about a coming ice age, when the warming suddenly appeared. And because it was sudden, Hansen’s attribution of it to carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is also invalid because carbon dioxide partial pressure did not change at the same time as required by laws of physics. This makes both of his 1988 claims false.
I wrote all this up and included appropriate graphs in “What Warming?” available on Amazon. com. You will also learn more about the the El Nino, arctic warming, and other climate stuff from it.
To sunsettommy:
Great comments, seriously, but you need to put a space after commas and full stops (periods). Otherwise, even text editors will see the two adjacent words as being one.
Dr. Singer is absolutely right – the main issue has slipped away due to the excessive amount of interest spent on minor and secondary issues. My research shows that the entire Climategate scandal is only the tip of the iceberg when compared to what is still hidden in the belly of the beast. I have demonstrated that the entire “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties, the one shown as a steady temperature increase by NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office, simply did not happen. This is the same warming that James Hansen spoke of when he stood up in front of the Senate in 1988 and testified that global warming had arrived and that its cause was carbon dioxide we were putting into the air. My reason for saying this is simple: experimental evidence. As you may know, satellites have been measuring global temperatures for the last thirty years and they simply cannot see that warming. When the satellite temperature curve is outlined with a magic marker a series of temperature oscillations become visible, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, but no rise until the super El Nino of 1998 shows up. It turns out that these oscillations are not random but correlate with the ENSO phases in the Pacific. Some people have tried to see the influence of volcanic eruptions from Pinatubo or El Chichon in these temperature oscillations but they are not present. In both cases volcanic cooling was confined to the stratosphere and did not influence tropospheric temperatures. There are five oscillatory peaks within the twenty year period and they all can be assigned to El Ninos. And the valleys between them belong to La Ninas. But how is it possible that the said three guardians of world temperature do not show them? I had to investigate and discovered that they have transmogrified an oscillating temperature curve into a rising temperature curve. If you take, say, HadCRUT3 from the Met Office and put it side by side with a satellite curve you notice right away that they start by cherry picking the El Nino peaks and then raising up the low La Nina temperatures in between to change a horizontal temperature curve into a rising temperature curve. But this works only for the first four El Ninos. The fifth one is too low so it gets raised up bodily. The super El Nino is next which they gratefully take to be their own even though its cause is not carboniferous. Its aftermath is the twenty-first century high, a run of six warm years near the El Nino maximum. But even this does not satisfy them and the entire right side of the curve gets lifted up. NOAA is worse. While HadCRUT3 still retains the greatly reduced La Nina valleys they stay with the peaks, jettison all low values in between and raise the twenty-first century high as well. NASA (Land-Ocean from Hansen 2006) starts out just like HadCRUT3 but they do not have the nerve to lift up peaks so these are all in place and so is the twenty-first century high. Only their super El Nino is off (too low) and their data point for 2005 is too high. I put the beginning of this data manipulation into the late seventies. It amounts to a sustained, long-term scientific fraud. Checking NOAA’s global temperature curve, there had not been any warming for a good twenty years and people were speculating about a coming ice age when the warming suddenly appeared. And because it was sudden Hansen’s attribution of it to carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is also invalid because carbon dioxide partial pressure did not change at the same time as required by laws of physics. This makes both of his 1988 claims false. I wrote all this up and included appropriate graphs in “What Warming?” available on Amazon. com. You will also learn more about the the El Nino, arctic warming, and other climate stuff from it.
socold wrote:
“You’ve” = “I am a warmist” and “You’ve lost, move on” = “Skeptics, stop doing what you are doing to us. ”
They would love us to stop and that is a damned good reason not to. The AGW machine is still rolling on, superficially unscathed, but that is not really so. The e-mails were the elephant in the room and Copenhagen and there will be a herd of elephants in Mexico.
socold then wrote:
Flimsy? Using a ‘”trick” to “hide the decline”, means exactly what it says. It means using a device to disguise an inconvenience. It means concealment. It means arrogance and further manipulation in a graph that was already as corrupt as the anatomical enhancement e-mails that one receives. It was additional deceit in a graph, that aside from flattening the MWP, would produce an up-sweeping ‘Hockey Stick’ regardless of the inputted data.
Then there are other ‘flimsy’ evidence like ‘fudge factors’ appearing appearing in the code and, in one instance, labeled exactly as that in the comments field. Then there was the request to destroy records and now there is the lost data. Then there was their efforts to control the peer review and make it pal review – in the process destroying the reputations and careers of those who upset their cozy world.
We haven’t lost; it’s just going to take more time for all of this to filter through to an increasingly sceptical public. The media is still doing its best to keep it hushed, but it’s not working well enough. Have you noticed how the alarmists aren’t so quick to talk about the supposed ‘consensus’ now? Climategate has destroyed that perceived shield. We now have even Phil Jones saying that he doesn’t believe that the science is settled and admitting that that there hasn’t been any significant warming for over a decade. Do you think he would have conceded that before Climategate?
These guys are under scrutiny and will find it increasingly difficult to continue with their shenanigans. Also, they have lost much of their power of intimidation and will no longer be able to silence the opposing science.
socold also wrote:
Next time, if you want sceptics to really embrace your helpful advice, don’t forget to append, “Warmist regards”.
[Note: WUWT uses HTML. I replaced your box parentheses with < and > brackets. Please use arrow brackets here. ~dbs, mod.]
Dr Singer wrote: “Most people think it refers to CRU tree ring data after 1960, which do show a decline in temperature.”
In the context of that email, I did. But!!!
“However, I believe that it refers to Michael Mann’s “trick” in hiding the fact that his multi-proxy data did not show the expected warming after 1979. So he abruptly cut off his analysis in 1979 and simply inserted the thermometer data supplied by Jones, which do claim a strong temperature increase. Hence the hockey-stick, suggesting a sudden major warming during the past century.”
It just keeps getting worse! Switch data sources and the hockey stick’s blade rises!!! Seriously outrageous. How did they hide that little detail… or did I just miss it all these years?
Thanks for that insight.
As mentioned previously the only way forward is the law. This argument “that the science is settled” and so “many scientists say that global warming is a fact” are media junkets that would not stand up as evidence in a court of law. There are a lot of us who have suffered financially because of the cold of this past winter, whether it is loss via plants, higher fuel costs, higher electricity costs as a result of unviable alternative energy, higher taxes to pay for infrastructural damage as a result of the deep freeze and to add insult to injury we are paying carbon taxes on fuel for a globe that is warming out of control. Europe and large parts of the US are heading toward a poor growing season that are likely to see severe food price inflation. We have alarmists trying to send us back to the stone age while they pontify from city to city in first class for our greater good. Greenpiss and World Wide F’ks go around subverting the scientrific method to their end. This crap stops in court. We all have and are paying for the global warming hoax that lines the pockets of Al Gore and people like him.
It is now time for some sharp lawyers to step forward and bring classs action lawsuits againts these corrupt organizations and individuals. We want our money back and most of all regain control of science, take it back from the various charlatans who have abused science for so long their personal gain.
‘…….. it derives the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the basic science and that warming is human caused……’
Since the science was outside the Committee’s remit, how can they possibly draw this conclusion?
Thx for the web site – refreshing to say the least.
There are no surprises in this “finding”. T many red faces and additonal taxes at stake. Developed Nation Governements were banking on C&T to save their sorry asses and their pet projects. They seem to think that the tax payer has even deeper pockets and screw the what the scientists have to say – after all who needs them – the science is proven beyond a shadow of doubt and I refer to this recently published UK Government “our minds are made up” propaganda piece?
http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/Sellthesizzle.pdf
“Sell the Sizzle not the Sausage – We believe that climate action is no longer a scientist’s job”.
“We believe that climate action is no longer a scientist’s job; it’s now a salesman’s job. You must get out there and sell the solutions we already have. We need to build a new picture in people’s heads: a self-fulfilling, low carbon prophesy. For the full evidence for these rules, and the climate change communications strategy itself, please visit: http://www.defra.gov.uk. For the new UK sustainable development strategy please visit: http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk.”
So, any surprises here???????
Where are the emails that actually show how they coordinated their alleged evil deeds, such as getting people fired and supressing publications? Where are the victorious emails where they pat eachother on the backs after achieving these dirty deeds? This whol ‘gate’ is such a bunch of wishful thinking.
If you’d read them you’d know. Obviously you just want your little victory, even though you’re wrong.
cute.
So – not a single example then.