It’s beginning to look at lot like…fraud
Okay, long-time readers of this blog (or my previous one) will know that when it comes to global warming and climate change, I’m pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. Not of changes in the Earth’s average temperature, I should hasten to note, nor of upward changes therein. No, what I am ultimately skeptical of is a) whether humanity makes any meaningful, causative contribution to these changes, and b) whether it’s worth getting alarmed about in the first place.
Sears is currently running an ad in which the father explains to the Sears associate that due to pressure from various people, he’s been thinking of buying a “greener” washer and dryer. His daughter chimes in with a forlorn remark about polar bears, while pointing to a picture of just such a bear sitting on an ice floe.
That’s kind of what I mean when I list (b) above. Do I really care if the polar bears — nasty, violent animals that they are — are having a hard time lately (they aren’t, by the way, but that’s a separate discussion)? No, not really. Not at all, actually.
But I digress. Suffice to say: I’m a global warming skeptic. There…that should prevent me from ever being invited to dinner parties again.
Anyhow, fraud.
First, let’s begin by noting that the revelations that follow were only made possible because someone hacked an email server. Obviously, there’s a bunch of ethical issues with that — indeed, one notes that information obtained by such means would not be admissible as evidence in a court of law. What compounds the problem, from an ethical perspective, is that the materials obtained by the hacker — and subsequently posted to a web forum as an FTP download — is that they are themselves materials covered under the US Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), and so are technically a matter of public record. The ethical conundrum, then, is that the materials themselves — which include code snapshots, datasets, and emails exchanged by various scientists who have become the “big names” in climate change research circles (Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, etc.) — include evidence of collusion by these parties to suppress or restrict public access to these materials, including deletion of emails and jimmying of datasets.
Hence, the ethical conundrum: the hacker illegally obtained public materials that were being illegally kept from the public eye. And the revelations those materials contain are, or seem to be, utterly damning. If the recovered materials are genuine, the damage to the credibility of both the involved individual climate scientists and the conclusions drawn from their research is — or will be — catastrophic.
All the usual folk are carrying the story: Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit, Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That?, Hot Air, and numerous others. I first saw the story at
(One of Tim Blair’s links has what I think might be the tone-perfect prediction of how this can be expected to play out: “The Global Warming scam keeps on truckin’, but a whole bunch of lefties suddenly become interested in the ‘ethics’ surrounding the hacking of files.”
Because hardly anyone seemed to find an ethical problem when Sarah Palin’s email account got hacked by a Democrat representative’s kid.)
As to the genuine nature of the emails, there’s still some room for doubt, though not all that much. Phil Jones admitted that the CRU had been hacked, and that “loads of data files and emails” had been taken from their systems. Andrew Bolt, I note, muses on the theory that the hacker story might just be that — a cover story to hide the fact that an insider has blown the whistle. Whether that’s true or not, it should be noted that the CRU did cancel all its existing electronic account passwords.
Which would be an awful lot of headache to endure if in fact these emails and datasets were fraudulent themselves. Smart money is on a genuine breach, and genuine materials. If you’d like to make that call for yourself, good reader, there’s now an online searchable database of the hacked materials. You can also download my locally hosted copy:
A number of the hacked emails are getting a lot of coverage on the blogs (in what could once have been called the mainstream media, mammoth dung is the hotter topic), none more than this one (deservedly so):
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@ [snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers, Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
Climate Audit (the site may be slow, as its servers are getting just pounded with traffic at present) has the details on what “hide the decline” means, and it too is devastating. In layman’s terms, Jones and others goosed their data in order to fabricate the infamous “hockey stick graph” which purports to show that global average temperatures have shot up alarmingly in the last century or so.
In reality, something almost the opposite is true…the global average temperature edged up a bit, but fell into a gradual decline again 30 to 40 years ago.
Funnily enough, Der Spiegel — which has garnered a fairly deserved reputation as being “left wing” — launched a story yesterday (how’s that for timing?) about how global warming “appears to have stalled.”
As Robin Williams might say: “Really?!?”
I guess it’s okay to report on such things now, what with them being true and all. Which comes back to my skepticism. As noted, I don’t deny that that the Earth’s average temperature changes, nor do I deny that sometimes that change is an upward one. What I deny is man’s role in those fluctuations. As we’ve just seen, other men have to goose the data to even demonstrate the kind of pronounced warming that the likes of Al Gore assure us man is responsible for. Meanwhile, the Sun — that big glowing thing up in the sky which is the ultimate source of pretty much all the heat life on Earth needs — continues to have its cyclical fluctuations in intensity.
And hey, guess what? Mr. Sun’s having a bit of a low-energy phase right now, after coming off of a fairly high-energy phase. But I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fluctuations in Earth’s average temperature. No sir.
