By Robert Bradley Jr.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” (- Michael Mann, below)
The futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade is in its 37th year, dating from the hot, dry summer of 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm before U.S. lawmakers, led by Al Gore.
Last week, the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ended with acrimony over an unenforceable agreement pledging to transfer wealth to developing (Statist) countries for “clean” energy development.
CO2 emissions cuts? With almost all major emitters well beyond the targets set in the 2015 Paris Accord, the (also) unenforceable agreement is losing more and more every day as self-interest swamps aspirations. The recipient welfare states described COP29 as “chaotic,” “complete failure,” “optical illusion,” “stage managed,” and “paltry.” Big Green recognized the international effort as more greenwashing than progress, not unlike prior COP results. Mainstream media has tried to paint a happy face on the walking dead.
COP29’s failure should not be surprising? Stated James Hansen.
[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
But it all begins with the physical science, and the science of climate alarmism has really never recovered from its PR disaster 15 years ago: Climategate. No amount of whitewashing can erase the words, sentences, and paragraphs of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. Four categories are mentioned below:
Man-Made Warming Controversy
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”
—Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“Keith’s [Briffa] series…differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming… 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.”
—Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009.
Manipulating Temperature Data
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….
—Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006.
“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….”
—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008.
“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”
—Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011.
Data Suppression; Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance
“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004.
“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.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005.
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008.
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009.
Subverting the Peer-Review Process
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004.
Implications
The establishment whitewashed and then pretended that the episode was over. Mr. Climategate himself, Michael Mann, called the episode “pathetic” and “shameless”. [1] “After three inquiries, thousands of column inches and several death threats,” Dave Reay wrote in Nature, “the ‘Climategate’ affair is now subsiding into the long grass of conspiracy blogs.” [2]
Nope. Climategate is nary forgotten as a blatant case of professional misconduct and a classic case of ‘Busted!”. It lives in infamy.
————————-
[1] Mann added:
As for emails that in some way involve me, I hardly see anything damning at all, despite these snippets all being taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad…. Agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat.”
[2] Better reactions were made by Derek Lowe in Science who stated, “what I feel needs to be looked at is the scientific conduct. I’m no climatologist, but I am an experienced working scientist – so, is there a problem here?”
I’ll give you the short answer: yes. I have to say that there appears to be several, as shown by many troubling features in the documents that have come out. The first one is the apparent attempts to evade the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended…. A second issue is a concerted effort to shape what sorts of papers get into the scientific literature. Again, this does not seem to be a matter of interpretation; such messages as this, this, and this spell out exactly what’s going on. You have talk of getting journal editors fired…. A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis…. No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.
Editor’s note: Watts Up With That broke the Climategate story back in 2009
Many of our posts about the incident and controversy can be found on this page.
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Looking for the “hide the decline” video. It appears to have been ‘memory holed’…
It showed up on youtube for me but only using “hide the decline m4gw”.
As for minnesotans for global warming, nada!
Try on Rumble.
Here’s the poster
Mann threatened a lawsuit over the original one, so they had to re-make it.
The Richard Muller presentation is on Youtube:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk&w=480&h=360%5D
The MSM never gave Climategate the attention it deserved and it died on the vine.
The problem was that the MSM had a Wonder-Scoop, but it could be best summed up as:
“We’ve blundered for the last decade and have misinformed you”.
Not appealing to anyone who wants to keep their job.
My understanding is that it remains unclear whether the emails were leaked by a whistleblower or a hacker.
So what?
It is very clear to all sensible and independent thinkers that it was a whistle-blower. Unfortunately, some biased and prejudiced people, and most people who let others do their thinking for them, still imagine hackers were involved. Probably Russian hackers.
Doubt in “The Science-TM” began about when this revelation unfolded, but yes not nearly the coverage it deserved to this day. Lying grubby money hungry pigs.
Mann only needs to explain one thing. What’s “the cause” that he kept referring to?
If “the cause” is science, then he’s obviously WAAAYYYY off the mark. He and the team were obviously not concerned about transparent science. If they were, they would have welcomed any and all criticism dealing with data, procedures, etc.
No, it’s blatantly obvious they were only interested in preconceived outcomes. In other words, propaganda.
Latter day followers of Jean Lamarck who falsified the data to fit his preconceived theory of evolution
The Cause was for the Alarmists to prove that CO2 was a dangerous, heat-inducing substance and needed regulation/reduction.
Phil Jones talked about reducing the “ocean blip”. So Phil Jones admits the meager ocean data he had showed warming, not cooling. So he cooled it in his computer.
Phil Jones does show the 1880’s and the 1930’s to be equally warm, but he doesn’t show them to be as warm as current temperatures, and that is the lie he perpetrated with his temperature reconstructions.
All for “The Cause”, don’t you see.
Alarmist Climate Science is based on Lies and Distortions.
Here is a Phil Jones chart. To be an accurante representation of the global temperature profile the 1880’s, the 1930’s and the temperatures of today would all be on the same horizontal line because they are all equally warm. But Phil Jones and the other climate alarmists couldn’t show that. If they did, then it would demonstrate that CO2 is a minor player in the Earth’s atmosphere, and that was the last thing they wanted to show. That would ruin their Cause. So they cooled the past in their computers to make the present look hotter. They lied to us to advance their own agenda.
“The Cause was for the Alarmists to prove that CO2 was a dangerous, heat-inducing substance and needed regulation/reduction.”
Respectfully, I don’t think that was The Cause. That was a means of attaining whatever their cause might be.
Great appreciation to WUWT for the original work to expose this material and for now reminding us of the nature of the content.
Another 15-year anniversary comes next month – USEPA’s December 2009 Endangerment Finding about so-called “greenhouse gases.”
I remember this vividly. I followed Roger Pielke’s blog at the time
Same here. It read like something out of a spy thriller.
Yet they are STILL DOING IT !!!
And the latest COP shows that they are having no impact.
They are pooping in their own bed. Academia is a laughing stock.
But no-one thinks joining them is fun, except weirdos.
Victory will be when they miss on COP year.
We are not winning.
No, we are not.
Some doubt has been placed in some minds but not enough for the powers-that-be to change course.
The global elites, such as Soros, Gore, WEF, etc., will never change course.
Keir Starmer led the enquiry that whitewashed the enquiry into UEAs involvement in Climategate.
But the MSM has forgotten it. Luckily, the MSM is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
The Guardian was most upset about it. George Monbier feared that global warming had been exposed as a scam and all of his good work promoting the scam was in ruins
“Editor’s note: Watts Up With That broke the Climategate story back in 2009”
Didn’t know that!
Just think how exciting it was for those of us who watched it happen in real time.
In my memory, it was Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit who broke the story. Watts Up with That picked up on it the next day, and made it go viral. Kudos to both.
close enough!
No, we were first.
And the Truth shall set you free.
Oh yes, it was so exciting to watch it unfold here and like many I thought it was the kiss of death for the climate catastrophe hoax. Unfortunately we didn’t reckon with the corruption of the MSM and their relentless propaganda. No matter the truth will always out and time proves it.
The MSM were/are just mouthpieces. People MUCH higher up determined that this would not stop them.
Of course, if they wanted this issue to die a death they’d only have to own up to it.
They insist it’s just a few bad apples, but then refuse to jettison them. A more cynical person might wonder if they have any non-bad apples in their barrel at all.
And as long as they refuse to drain the abscess of Climategate it remains a live infection, and it’s as sensitive to touch as ever. Rubor, color, calor, turgor and Al Gore: the torturer’s best friends.
Some like to give Briffa a pass because he supposedly had a “come to Jesus” moment. But he never renounced his utterly unreal Yamal series, which is worse than Mann’s.
“series”?
I thought the whole shebang boiled down to one bristlecone pine tree in Yamal or somewhere.
His anus?
If you’ve seen one bristlecone pine, you’ve seen Yamal!
You’re conflating things. Yamal was Larch trees. Mann’s iconic hockey stick relied heavily on bristlecone pines.
But yes, Briffa’s Yamal series relied on one tree to get the HS shape.
Actually, Briffa’s data post 1900 is quite revealing.
Peak in the 1940’s big drop to late 1970s.
Mid 1990s way cooler than around 1940 and even back to 1900. !!
There has never been any real science behind any of global warming, climate change, whatever they call it now hypothesis. The weak kneed the climate is warming crowd needs to get their urban heat island head out of their posteriors and not give an inch to those lying, thieving bastards.
Also, longer term data clearly shows the LIA period.
Anything further back would probably not respond much to warmer temperatures because of the atmospheric CO2 deficit.
Yes it’s the chutzpah turned up to 11.
To quote the definitive history of the climate debate at Jo Nova’s,
2009
*Independent of each other, not of the Climate Research Unit in question.**
**Independent in a poetic, not a legal, procedural, or quote-unquote ‘actual,’ sense.
2010
Thanks to everyone for your work on Climategate: Anthony Watts, Stephen McIntyre & Co.
I wonder when we’ll see the Documentary that tells the whole story and helps root out the corruption in high places.
OK. I’m not holding my breath.
If only Kurzgesagt would apply this level of skepticism and research rigor into debunking AlGore and AGW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgo7rm5Maqg
On one point M. Mann is absolutely correct: “they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change”
And that is the problem. Not because it was not possible, but rather because “they” failed to deliver. The fundamental science is rotten and no one was smart enough to point it out correctly.
WV feedback for instance is total nonsense..
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-incredibly-stupid-case-of-water-vapor-feedback
As a Brit i cringe with embarrassment that Mann hs been elected to the Royal Society.
The whole story is best read in Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. The local police could not determine the leaker but Steve MacIntyre on ClimateAudit has a post analysing the release process and sequences showing that the hacker was reading his and other websites and was clearly a disgusted insider.
Yes, the “The Hockey Stick Illusion” is a good book.
Here are some other good books on the subject:
A Disgrace to the Profession by Mark Steyn
Climategate by Brian Susskin
The Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford
Climategate: The CRUTape Letters by Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller
The Delinquent Teenager by Donna Laframboise
IIRC James Hanson ‘sabotaged’ the air conditioning in the meeting room, on the hottest day in the year, where the US lawmakers were doing their investigation. The discomfort of the people in the resulting overheated room tilted the scales in Hanson’s direction where he was giving his alarmist opinion.
Not factual.
First, it’s “Hansen”. Second, it was supposedly one of the congressmen, Wirth, I think, who was purported to have turned off the AC in the hearing room.
Wirth said “we” sabotaged the air conditioning:
“And did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
… What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. …
So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony. …”
From the context it sounds as though his accomplice was Hansen, but he doesn’t say it explicitly, that’s just the standard assumption. If anyone knows a source that disambiguates this story I’d be very interested to know.
“Climategate is nary forgotten as a blatant case of professional misconduct and a classic case of ‘Busted!”. It lives in infamy.”
How I wish that were true, but I fear that currently it is not. It is true as far as most of the readers here see it, but it does not appear to have had any influence on the debate where it matters, at the level of the scientific establishment, government and supra-national organisations. They seem to have convinced themselves that it was a fuss about nothing. As far as the public is concerned, I am not sure many will recognise the term ‘Climategate’. The BBC made a drama about Phil Jones and his part in it, I did not watch it, but apparently he was portrayed as an innocent victim of unscrupulous villains. The consequences of ‘net zero’ will be calamitous, only when this affects the public at large is there a chance that ‘Climategate’ will be revisited.
In a world ruled by scientific integrity, this would have been the end of the anti-carbon AGW agenda. But it was barely a speed bump. Just proved how deep the agenda and grift really is.
For those wanting a chronological look at Climategate from an insider, I was the poor fool who made the first Freedom Of Information Act request to Phil Jones at UEA. That story is here.
Best to everyone,
w.
It’s a pity that almost all of the specific links to CA articles no longer work.
Thanks, Willis.
From John Walker’s list of reasons why so many CAGW skeptics
9 . Climategate. Climategate was a notorious event initiated by leaked emails in 2009 (with a second batch released in 2011) allegedly revealing the deceit and deception practiced by a prominent group of British (Climatic Research Unit or CRU) and American climate researchers (including Michael Mann of Penn State) who promote the theory of CAGW and supply much of the climate and temperature data and reports to the IPCC. The latter gives this group tremendous influence regarding the UN’s climate change agenda.
“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.
“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 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.
“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.”
In one Climategate email, Mann referred to “our closeted friends.” It’s a bit too clever, in that he can claim a typo for “closest.” But I think he was referring to real but hidden people who support him and have paid all of his legal fees for various lawsuits. His Hockey Stick was not science, and standing back and looking it is easy to see he was given a mission (and a premature PhD): Write a paper demonstrating that in the 20th century, temperatures went wild. Do whatever needs to be done. We’ve got your back.
It is my studied opinion that temperatures are rising only modestly, even imperceptibly, and that CO2 has nothing to do with it. I came across the word “adiabatic” in a paper by Nikolov and Zeller. Very long title for the paper, begins with Exact formulas for estimating equilibrium Climate sensitivity…’ should turn it up on Yandex. Adiabatic refers to “occurring without loss or gain of heat.” As used in their paper, N&Z conclude that “… atmospheric composition plays no role in determining the baseline global surface temperatures of a planetary body.” In other words, and as historic proxy studies like ice cores give evidence to, CO2 in the atmosphere has no effect on temperatures.
Many good and smart people unknowingly lead with their chin by claiming at the outset that CO2 has some effect on temps and then debating how much.