5 years ago today, a cache of emails was dropped into the lap of several Climate blogs, including WUWT. Paul Matthews has a great writeup on it:
On 17th November 2009, comments appeared on a number of sceptic blogs such as here at the Air Vent. The comment started with the text:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
This is a limited time offer, download now:”
This was followed by a link to the file of emails and a brief summary of some of the contents.
What I think is the most succinct quote from Paul’s article is this:
“To me, the real scandal was not so much that two or three climate scientists behaved badly, but that virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong”
More here: https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/climategate-anniversary/
On November 19th, WUWT broke the story, and I’ll have some reflections on the past 5 years in a couple of days.
h/t to Barry Woods
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I am not sure how I feel right now. But thank goodness for climategate Depression is a good deal of my feelings. When I entered the university I thought engineering was going to be my profession. My first introductory class in Geology changed all that. To think that the professors that created the experience of thinking outside the envelope. Plate tectonics were just getting some traction but we were still having text books that supported the cyclothymic theories. Over beer after the last afternoon classes we debated both theories and felt how could previous great theorist have gotten it so wrong. Money! You go where the money is and academia was not ready for plate tectonics until overwhelming evidence and new technologies made it undeniable. The same right now. a great deal of money is there to be had, a lot of money. I think back on my undergraduate days and say thank god my professors exposed us to all the theories and challenged us to find out the truth of which one was correct. Someday hopefully again students will brainstorm over a beer haw did they get so wrong
I had been sceptic-at-a-distance about climate science. Then I was watching the lead up to Copenhagen, and the MSM hype thereof. I was just not happy with this…being an earth scientist, and dealing with carbonate rocks (basically the world’s hugest “carbon” sink), Things just weren’t adding up. The whole song and dance was a fait accompli, there was no more debate, they were going to ramrod some agreement or another, blah, blah, blah. Everybody talked as if we were going to roast. Knowing that the Cretaceous Period was hugely warmer (for example) and so named for its enormous Chalk deposits (calcium carbonate of prodigious quantities), I began to smell rats everywhere. I began to look at blogs…and arrived, serendipitously, into the beginning of Climategate. Well, that pretty much confirmed the rodent-pee that I was smelling.
What happened to the adjustments of temperature records after Climategate? Well, they just accelerated them.
While there was shock in the climate science community for months afterward and investigations from Climategate, it eventually lead to them to just becoming more bold in the exaggerations because they got away with the earlier versions of exaggeration, scot-free.
There needs to be consequences for doing wrong in all forms of human activities or else there is just incentive to do more wrong. Humans respond to the carrot and the stick, to reward and punishment.
Climate science has the stick and the punishment part exactly backwards. That means the carrot and the reward systems are also, exactly backwards.
Or rather, society has it backwards for climate science.
It won’t change until there is finally some consequences for exaggerating. Write your congressman. It has to start somewhere.
Former VA AG Cuccinelli tried, but the federal courts in on the scam gutted his heroic effort. If the new Congress doesn’t act, then maybe that meeting in 2017 will. By then the “Pause” will have lasted longer than did the perfectly natural late 20th century warming, or have already turned noticeably down. Since the long term trend is toward colder temperatures, that’s the way to bet for the next move. Sorry, Willis, but it’s only natural. And statistical.
Cathy R,
If george e. smith sees your post, watch out! ☺
I look forward to whatever he has to say, without having a clue what it’s likely to be.
I am so glad I was a daily visitor to WUWT for a couple of years before Climategate – because few experiences in life have equalled the exhilaration of the day Climategate broke on WUWT. It was so wonderful to see documented proof that climate science was being seriously twisted by rent-seeking, egotistical individuals. It was a confirmation of stuff I had been ranting about to trusted friends (and a few unsuspecting individuals) for several years – and an affirmation of the astute theories put forward by WUWT sleuths and of course McIntyre at Climate Audit, and a few others. It was also a perceptible blow to the excessive policies of Obama and other alarmists.
What remains a disappointment is the continued silence or closing of ranks by the majority of other scientists and academics. As long as the money is still flowing in this direction, I don’t see CAGW propaganda being recanted by the academic, media and political establishments.
I, too, have been a daily visitor and occasional commenter here since the Surface Station days.
I still find it hard to believe that Climategate was not an end to this vast deception. All that hard evidence, all that lying and fraud……. It’s almost like living in some alternate universe.
Sometimes I despair, but have to believe the truth will out.
(Having said that, I really enjoyed the light relief last Christmas when Turney got stuck in the ice……….:0)
I did too, but you know, they decorated this captain of the “Ship of Fools”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/21/spiritofmawson-fiasco-leader-gets-award-for-excellence/
what happened with the encrypted file containing 20,000+ emails? will that ever be released?
^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^
I remember that the key was said to have been released (to a small number of recipients) last year.
So far as I know, nothing of wide interest has subsequently been made public – presumably the remaining emails were all of the “discussion to finalize slides, 3pm Tuesday, rm 411” variety.
Has it only been five years? It seems like forever. Loved the Nixon cartoon too. Even Nixon had the integrity to keep the tapes, unlike the warmists and their deleted emails.
Perhaps the world needs a new Nixon, at least willing to be real in private.
Totally agree, Marcus. Are certain bloggers conspiring to Gruber their readers because they ar too stupid. No satisfactory answer was ever given. Why wait till the “O” is gone?
Well it is now official. The Ecos want to have us all live in Brazilian shanty towns. Except them of course.
Socialism is never for the Socialist……
“Power to the people!” means “Power to me and my friends!”.
“Workers of the World UNITE…to serve your masters…”
That was a helluva week. I’ll see if I can find the status of CG III for those who asked above. But I would speculate that with the protected release of II and III, that the handful of people that received the key just haven’t found it important enough to prioritize, especially if they found or felt there is little of interest after a cursory look.
Every year or so I read the comments under my coming out Post when I need a warm and fuzzy.
If I find anything to report on CG III, I’ll comment in this thread, probably by editing this comment.
I won’t hold my breath. For all those who have the key to have dropped the subject suddenly like it was a hot potato, there must have been some pretty serious threats made by some pretty powerful people with deep pockets to pay lawyers, which makes me fear for Steyn. I don’t expect an answer. I’m just a curious type. It seems most people know enough to not even ask but I seemed to have missed the memo on that, too.
That’s my take on it, too.
It is a very pregnant silence. Even the warmies aren’t goading us. It’s bizarre.
Was Gruber involved?
Quoting
Willis Eschenbach
November 17, 2014 at 10:10 pm
…
Thanks, Will. I expected that some people would just stay schtumm. What I didn’t expect is for the perpetrators to be feted, for their investigations to be total whitewashes, for them to be invited to chair meetings of the AAAS, and for them to not suffer even mild indignity from the assembled masses of scientists, much less their just punishment.
end quote
This is not just a response to climate science today (or, in reality, to the activities of a few highly visible perpetrators), it is the normal political response to any agents who carry out policy in a dirty, aggressive, even mass murdering way — when those activities get exposed. It has been going on for thousands of years in much the same way and there are plenty of examples righr here in the past 50 years . Support and reward them to successfully whitewashes their actions in the eyes of the majority. Otherwise, they being agents, either directly or in just the minds of the public, criticism, anger, and demands for justice against their actions and crimes would reflect back up to the heads of the power structure. Sometimes this kind of propaganda backfires but mostly it is very effective.
Enter the world of the 30% who still believe the lies.
Reduce that group by 5% as a goal.
Our world of the 70% who knowing need not to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back for the knowing.
Use facts, do not even name names or point fingers at this one or that one.
Enter the world of the elected ones who support the lies and fraud and reduce them by votes at the polls on two, four, six and eight year cycles.
As the time moves so will the truth and winning the battle of truth.
Later the time will be compressed by history and those we save in the future will think we did it ever so fast.
History has its way on all of us who become its dust.
Identify the self-correction mechanism in climate focused science in the past ~30 years.
It was not identified by the traditional so-called MSM. Nor identified by academe. Nor identified by authoritarian government.
It was identified by a few reasoning individuals.
That is how science corrects itself.
John
17 November, 2009: the day grubering the climate was arrested.
Speaking as a non-scientist, at their core, there is something fundamentally wrong with the scientific community if they can’t be repelled by alarmism and something fundamentally and tragically wrong if they can even just stand there and let others among them attack those who are repelled. At their core, they are not coming from science. It’s not really about my public community perception of the community, though. It’s more basic than that. It’s the absence of science at the heart of science.
I was first introduced to the bullying of AGW by the efforts of Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre. Climategate emails were confirmation that AGW “climatologists” are arrogant, dishonorable, militant environmentalists/Malthusians. Thanks for your exposure of dimly-lit backrooms and political scheming.
Catherine Ronconi November 18, 2014 at 9:42 am
Thanks, Catherine, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that. While some climate scientists have faked the data, most haven’t. However, all of them are getting tarred with the same brush.
I hold that this is because by and large, those who have NOT faked the data haven’t spoken out against those who HAVE faked the data.
Finally, the main problem is not the faking of data. It’s the shoddy level of the analyses of real data that is the problem—models upon models, poor citation practices, no data or code as used, using model outputs as inputs to other models, no error bars, the list goes on.
Regards,
w.
Willis,
IMO the fakery is far more important than easily shown false or rigged analysis like the HS.
What individual “climate scientists” do is not the issue. The fact is that taxpayers cannot even trust the raw data as reported anymore, let alone the “adjusted” data sets. The gatekeepers are the worst phoneys. All three main surface records–HadCRU, NOAA and NASA GISS–are worse than worthless, just like most government figures.
It’s a criminal conspiracy which may not end until some of the major offenders are perp walked. These are the same anti-scientific, rent-seeking swine who set up an unneeded Death Valley station opposite a south-facing cliff in the so far vain hope of “recording” a new all time US high.
You can’t trust anything produced by government bureaucrats, especially if masquerading as white coat wearing “scientists”. Go ahead and imagine that most “climate scientists” are honest, but then how do you explain their going along with what they have to know is an outrageous hoax threatening everybody on the planet except them and their bosses? They are all culpable, just as were the death camp prison guards along with the N@z! leaders.
The best you can say about the Climanazees is that so far they’ve probably killed only tens or hundreds of thousands rather than the millions murdered by the original Nazees or Rachel Carson and tens of million by the original Communists. But give them time.
A whole lot of eye opening was done back then among a lot of semi-interested people at that point. This event drew a lot of people to science process and scrutiny of policy over reach. That event plus Grubering has changed and educated a lot of voters on the tactics of the policy elite.
I haven’t heard anything about the third release of emails. Were there no important quotes to be found in Climategate 3? Or are the few people who got the key still searching the emails?
Climategate was shocking enough all by itself, but what blew me away was the fact that the mainstream PhD climate scientists weren’t blown away, the MSM wasn’t blown away, tenured professors in disciplines far removed from climate science, weren’t blown away, all the world’s scientific institutions weren’t blown away….Man to have that solid a block of dishonesty and shamelessness should blow any civilized decent person away. And they can still say the problem with ordinary people not getting upset about global warming is that scientists haven’t crafted the message well enough to counteract a puny handful of unfunded active sceptics.
what a day to remember. thanx to whoever it was who released the incriminating material, and thanx to those who had the courage to post it online.
Pat Frank wrote-
The truly shameful response was not “that virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong” but rather that virtually the entire institutional science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.
Not just the AGU, the WMO, and the AMS, but the Royal Society itself, the US National Academy, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, and every single (pdf) major national science academy in the world; with a recent reiteration by the European Academies Science Advisory Council (easac) (pdf), which represents the “National Science Academies of the European Union (EU) Member States.”
How true this i! When Rus Istvan, whose opinion I usually respect, and others demean Obama’s intelligence for following the warmist agenda that the above societies promote, I think it’s very superficial reasoning to blame Obama. Heads of state are not climate scientists; almost all of them have followed the lead of the scientific societies. Now I do condemn Obama for choosing a serial doomsday science adviser, but I mostly blame the science community that Watts and Frank have condemned. Politicians, almost all of them, take the intellectual and moral shortcuts you read about in Machiavelli and Reinhold Niebuhr. I remember when Barry Goldwater voted against the voting Rights Act of 1964 in order to get the Republican nomination. I was a friend of Barry Goldwater (through ham radio) plus my father was one of three journalists invited to travel with him during the presidential campaign (both were WWII bomber pilots). Now Barry Goldwater was a smart and decent man. As a brash young graduate student, I told him personally that I could not vote for him because of his senate vote. He looked ashamed, but changed the conversation to ham antennas. Politics is a a dirty business. Obama has left wing global warming zealots he has to appease if his party is to have a chance at winning elections. Republicans have their right wing zealots, Ask Boehner!
If you want politicians to act reasonably on issues like global warming- get the scientific societies to be reasonable and truthful. Obama like Goldwater and virtually every other politician will do what they have to to get elected. That does not make them stupid or narcissistic
You’re putting the cart before the horse, IMO.
Obama has encouraged systemic lying in institutional “climate science” and environmental regulation. He has gotten the “scientific” advise he wanted and paid for.
When the Democrat Party switched from being for working stiffs like coal miners, hard hats, Teamsters, car makers, etc, to giving to members of its new coalition, ie public employees, trial lawyers and limousine liberals, what they want, the funding followed.
You are giving Obama credit he certainly doesn’t deserve. Obama pushed this garbage in his first two years when he had a congress controlled by Democrats. He couldn’t even get them at that time to pass his carbon-capping legislation and abandoned his efforts until now. He has seen that no one stops him, or even tries to do so, so why should he refrain from using his new found powers as a tyrant to push this nonsense.
How naive can you possibly be, especially at your age?
The popular excuse for every despot in history has been, oh, it’s just his evil advisors!
Obama chose his advisors because they agreed with him and were in on the shakedown scam.
It’s obvious to apparently everyone here but you that Obama has been riding the climate scam from the git-go.
Where do we get such lame excuse makers?
Catherine what I wrote about Obama and Goldwater and politicians is not a scientific hypothesis, We can probably only agree to disagree, but I’m open to hearing your evidence that Obama encouraged systematic lying in institutional climate science as opposed to following the advice of his climate advisor and the scientific societies referred to above,
You get what you pay for. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Obama appointed the venal EPA flunkies who have waged the war on coal. The possibility of in effect taxing breathing via carbon credits is mouthwatering to Marxist statists like Obama.
His administration encouraged lying not only in the EPA but the IRS, NSA, DoJ, VA and other organs of state power guilty of lawlessness, to include destruction of evidence. Before the “missing” IRS emails was the EPA administrator’s secret email account.
Obama, like so many other Marxist watemelons, was a big backer of man0made climate change before he ever received the advice of a single “expert” as president. He ran on a “climate change” platform:
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/issues/climate.html
So the war on coal, opposition to the pipeline, EPA rulings against the real science, etc, were only to be expected. He chose advisers who agreed with him. It’s not that he can be excused for being misled. He hired the liars from whom he wanted to hear, to give him cover to do what he wanted to do.
How much more evidence do you need?
As I just posted above, Obama could not get his own Democrat controlled Congress to pass these economy-busting measures back in 2009. He knows this is a scam and is all about grabbing power and the ability to control peoples’ lives. He full knows what he is doing and that none of it has anything to do with science. He didn’t just hear about it on today’s news like just about everything else he does.
Catherine,
Did you read by question? I wrote “I’m open to hearing your evidence that Obama encouraged systematic lying in institutional climate science as opposed to following the advice of his climate advisor and the scientific societies.” This seems to be a hot button issue for you resulting in more than just the motivated reasoning so common in political discussion. I suggested the perspective of reading Machiavelli and Reinhold Niebuhr. Please also read more history such as the history of our founding fathers and how they were perceived and written about in the political press during their administrations. Demeaning and dehumanizing political adversaries is so very common and a poor substitute for discussing ideas and power, don’t you think? I may be wrong, but I think part of the reason climate scientists have been reluctant to “face up” to the realities of climate science is because they want to avoid the whirlwind of the political extremism of so many on both sides of the issue.
I’m pretty sure that my knowledge of Machiavelli and the Founders at least equals yours. I fail to find anywhere in your comment the least hint of actual response to any other overwhelming evidence of Obama’s intentional abuse of “science” to further his anti-American, collectivist, Chicago-style extortionist agenda. No surprise.
How dare you lecture me, who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution with my life, about that document’s contents? What have you ever risked for the republic created by the Founders?
The reason that “climate scientists” refuse to face reality is because they know they have been paid liars for decades, which mendacity has cost humanity trillions in treasure and untold lives. Plus, people just don’t like to be shown wrong.
Perhaps I should add that I’ve read Machiavelli in Italian and Montesquieu in French. The latter is especially relevant since we’re now misruled by a tyrant who would trash the separation of powers which the Framers found so important in designing a government.