Posts Tagged CRU

CRU’s Jones on the stand: Pearce offers opinion as news Bryan Walker Mar 02

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Fred Pearce is obviously unrepentant over the unjust treatment he meted out to Phil Jones in his unfortunate series of artices on the UEA emails, one of which I commented on here. He has just produced an extraordinarily slanted account of Jones’ questioning from the Parliamentary committee set up to look into the affair. How’s this for openers?

“Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn’t quite believe him, they didn’t have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.”

Then Pearce offers two highly prejudicial descriptions of Jones’ actions, each linked to one of his own articles:

“Jones’s general defence was that anything people didn’t like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all “standard practice” among climate scientists.”

Pearce expresses disappointment that one of his own pet projects was not pursued by the committee:

“Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.”

Gavin Schmidt has comprehensively dealt with this claim on Real Climate (see his comments on part 5). If Pearce is aware of what Schmidt wrote he is undeterred by it and again links to his own article as demonstrating the topic worthy of the attention of a parliamentary committee.

Then Pearce apparently leaves the scene of the parliamentary committee and offers his own account of what he claims Jones has conceded publicly about the 1990 China study, translating Jones’ ‘slightly different conclusion’ into his own ‘radically different findings’.  

There are other important Pearce conclusions which the committee failed to investigate, again expressed in prejudicial terms:

“Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones’s world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.”

Pearce takes comfort from his feeling that the committee will have to pay closer attention to the issue in the light of the written submission from the Institute of Physics which is highly critical of the emailers.  He doesn’t mention that John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told the committee the institute’s view was “premature” and that they should wait until the Russell inquiry publishes its findings in the spring.

Pearce’s Guardian report is clearly an opinion piece but not presented as such. It is an extraordinary example of the authority some journalists have taken upon themselves to declare judgment on matters of which they have shown very little knowledge. Pearce is not a climate change sceptic, but he is hounding a group of climate scientists and seems fired up by the thrill of the chase. It’s a sad spectacle in a leading newspaper.

[GR adds: The Guardian's David Adam provides a more balanced overview here, and the paper's live blog of the session is worth a look.]
[GR update: Simon Hoggart's take: "Whatever your view on man-made global warming, you had to feel sorry for Professor Phil Jones.."]

Weekend reading: dealing with noise Gareth Renowden Feb 27

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There’s no doubt that in the last few months the PR war against action on climate change has been fierce — and effective. Three articles I’ve read in the last couple of days throw some light on what’s been going on, and are well worth a few moments of anyone’s time. The first, and by far the most eloquent, is Bill McKibben’s The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century. McKibben likens the tactics of OJ Simpson’s lawyers, confronted with a huge pile of evidence that their client was guilty to the campaign against climate science:

If anything, [OJ's lawyers] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared [LA detective Mark] Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instil considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

McKibben suggests that CRU head Phil Jones has been cast in the Fuhrman role, taking the full force of the attack. This personalisation of the process is exemplified by the McCarthy-like tactics of US senator James Inhofe, who has just released a report calling for investigations and prosecutions of leading climate scientists. Because they can’t change the evidence, however hard they try, they are reduced to shooting the messenger…

The robustness of the case for action is underlined in the new statement on climate science from NZ PM John Key’s science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman, Climate change and the scientific process, but Gluckman is also realistic about the difficulty of making policy in this area.

Although the risk to our future of not acting now is real, the scientific community has had and is having difficulty communicating both its uncertainty and the absolute need for action simultaneously. [...] The ensuing political and economic debate on how best to respond to climate change should not be used as an excuse to gamble the planet’s future against the overwhelming evidence that humans are contributing to the world warming at an unsafe rate. The basic principle is no different to risk management in any other sphere of life.

The “debate”, such as it is, is not about the science. McKibben again:

…it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

Feelings can do more: they condition the way the think about things. This recent National Public Radio story, headlined Belief in climate change hinges on worldview explains the work of The Cultural Cognition Project:

To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it’s not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs. “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view,” Braman says.

“Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,” says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work.

“If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way,” he says.

And if the information doesn’t, you tend to reject it.

This is what is happening with climate change. The polarisation is all too obvious in the blogosphere and the wider media. The CCP has also identified what it calls the “messenger effect” — where people tend to believe information if it comes from people like themselves. In the climate “debate” this becomes a vicious, inward-looking circle, with sceptic and crank arguments endlessly recirculating around blogs, boards and mailing lists.

All of these articles illuminate one central truth: all the noise about emails, IPCC “errors” and crooked scientists has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying science. Those who want to delay action on climate change have no hope of dismantling what McKibben calls the haystack of evidence, they can only pretend that finding a needle means the thing is not made of hay. But they can change the politics — the willingness of politicians the world over to take firm action now.

The answer, if it can be found, will not come from climate scientists. They need to do what they do best — study the planet in all its complexity, define and delineate the implications of what we’re doing to it. But we should not expect them to win hearts and minds, to build a global public consensus on the need for urgent action. That’s a matter for politics, not science. The lead has to come from elsewhere. My own suspicion is that nothing much will get done until the damage from change becomes too great to ignore — and I found an eery echo of that fear in my morning paper, in a story lifted from the Times about a new British report on likely land use changes in the UK over the coming century. One scenario considered is described thus:

Mass migration northwards to new towns in Scotland, Wales and northeast England may be needed to cope with climate change and water shortages in the South East, according to an apocalyptic vision set out by the Government Office for Science. [...] In the most extreme scenario, world leaders hold an emergency summit in 2014 when it becomes clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be far worse and happen much sooner than previously envisaged.

The sad fact is that if we wait until the damage is too obvious to ignore, it will be too late to stop much worse impacts in future decades. McKibben says we need courage and hope. But we also need leaders who are prepared to take the evidence and act on it — and who will not be swayed by the denialist noise campaign. They need to recognise empty vessels when they see them.

La-la Land again: Jim Hopkins gets it wrong Gareth Renowden Feb 19

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It must be sceptic idiot week at the Herald. Not content with allowing Garth George to make stuff up, today they unleash that mighty wit (or should that be twit?) Jim Hopkins, who has been reading the Daily Mail’s daft coverage of a BBC interview with Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the beat-up over stolen emails:

Professor Jones discussed many things with the BBC, including the trouble he has “keeping track” of information, but the professorial concession the Daily Mail pounced upon – and our media ignored – was this: He said that for the past 15 years there has been “no statistically significant” warming. “No statistically significant warming”. None. It’s not happening. Since 1995, we ain’t got hotter. And that’s not the sceptics speaking. That’s from a man who garnered $22 million to prove we were getting warmer. Much warmer, worryingly warmer, “Lucy Lawless was right” warmer. But now he says we’re not. And haven’t been for 15 years.

I suppose we can’t expect a newspaper columnist and professional funny man to understand statistical concepts. Jones did not say that there had been no warming for 15 years. He said that the warming trend over the last 15 years just fails to meet one test for statistical significance. Here’s Jones in full:

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. [My emphasis].

The Daily Mail misunderstood and/or misrepresented what Jones told the BBC — and that’s been extensively covered on the web. Hopkins is happy to repeat that misinformation without checking his facts. Perhaps he doesn’t understand how to use Google? More coverage of Mailgate at Deltoid, In It For The Gold, Real Climate, and for a full explanation of what statistical significance means in this context, Tamino has an excellent article here. Meanwhile, Jim should stick to his knitting instead of repeating tabloid lies from Britain.

Pearced to the heart: Fred gets it wrong Bryan Walker Feb 18

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I have been a reader of the Guardian newspaper for 55 years and was more than a little astonished when they ran a series of articles by prominent environmental journalist Fred Pearce on the stolen University of East Anglia emails. For that matter I was surprised that Fred Pearce wrote them. He is no climate change denialist, and makes it perfectly clear that the emails in no way alter the case that humans are warming the planet. But he seems to have taken them at the face value the hackers presumably hoped for, and drawn some unjustified and unfair conclusions. The Guardian obviously thought he was on to something significant. A “major investigation” they proclaimed, getting at the “real story”. Revelations and exposures abound.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the revelations. It’s an article claiming that the emails reveal “strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics”.  It was the one chosen for inclusion in the latest Guardian Weekly. As a reader of that paper I’d been quietly hoping we’d be spared the sight of any of the articles, but there it was, on the science page, with the lurid headline “Research red in tooth and claw.”  

Pearce claims that there have been obvious cracks in the peer-review system for years, mentioning an open letter from 14 stem cell researchers to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process, alleging a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

From there he jumps to the emails, where he claims “many will see a similar pattern.”  Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers “and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.”

Pearce quotes from a 2004 email in which Jones mentions that he had recently rejected two papers from people saying CRU (his climate research unit) has it wrong over Siberia.  “If either appears I will be very surprised.”   Pearce acknowledges that Jones doesn’t say why he rejected the papers (might it have been that they were poor science?).  Pearce also doesn’t know what the papers were, but announces that the Guardian has established that one of them was probably from Lars Kamel, a Swedish astrophysicist who analysed temperature records from parts of southern Siberia and claimed to find much less warming than Jones. 

Pearce admits that Kamel’s paper could be criticised as being slight and lacking in detail about its methods of analysis.  However, he surmises, Jones would have known that Kamel called mainstream climate research “pseudo-science” and that publication of the article in a serious journal would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. (Presumably suggesting that this would prejudice Jones in his estimation of the paper?) In spite of the paper’s inadequacy Pearce says that because it was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones’ analysis “some would have recommended its publication.”

So is Pearce suggesting that if a scientist of Jones’ stature considers papers to be lacking scientific rigour he shouldn’t say so, lest he might be instrumental in persuading an editor not to publish them?  Or is he suggesting that Jones deliberately sets out to prevent publication of anything which questions his own position?  He hardly makes himself clear, but succeeds, on the basis of much conjecture, in casting a slur on Jones’ integrity.

He later makes a good deal of Jones’ “harsh criticism” of the journal Climate Research for publishing papers he “disagreed with”.  It seems to me that Jones and others had every reason for their criticism. Chris de Freitas, the editor responsible for publishing the Soon and Baliunas paper, is our well known crusading climate change denier. He constantly seeks and gains publicity for standard denialist claims (one might not unreasonably say lies) that increases in carbon dioxide don’t dangerously change the climate, that there is no acceleration in sea level rise, that climate scientists exaggerate for the sake of money, and so on. If he accepted the paper against the advice of four reviewers there is every reason to suspect the quality of the journal’s editorship.  But no, Pearce manages to imply that Jones and Mann did something improper and damaging to the publication of scientific papers.

It’s one thing for Pearce to discuss the general question of the mechanics of peer review, but quite another to use Jones as an example of the abuse of the system. That’s a rush to judgment which I find hard to believe the Guardian allowed.

I was pleased to discover that the Guardian at least invited climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA to comment on Pearce’s article.  If you click on the highlighted yellow sections of the article (linked to above) you can see his annotations.  He roundly rejects much of what Pearce has to say. I’m no scientist, but it seemed apparent to me as a general reader that Pearce was pushing the email material way beyond anything it justified.  It was good to have that view confirmed by a working scientist.   

I’m left wondering why this sort of “investigation” was ever supported by the Guardian.  It pre-empts the independent review the University has arranged.  It treats stolen and possibly selected emails as evidence, though to do so it has to make all sorts of assumptions about what the authors might have meant. It is manifestly unjust to the scientists concerned and trivialises their work.

Note:  Jones has recently been interviewed by Nature and although there are aspects of the Climategate allegations that he is not able to comment on he defends himself against some of the accusations made against his work.

Analysis of stolen CRU emails by NZ blogger shows tawdry manipulation of facts – Poneke’s credibility now in tatters Gareth Renowden Jan 19

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homer.jpgThis may be one of the least important posts I’ve ever written. It’s only 1,100 words (including quotes), but that’s all that was necessary. When a blogger makes as many simple mistakes, and indulges in so much gross distortion of the truth as seen in the last two posts by Poneke (aka former journalist David McLoughlin), then it really doesn’t take long to show him to be incapable of a fair-minded assessment of climate science, or the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This is how he begins his first post on the subject of the stolen emails:

Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure.

Oh really? Let’s parse that post…

The emails reveal that the entire global warming debate and the IPCC process is controlled by a small cabal of climate specialists in England and North America.

Rubbish. That’s not only untrue, it’s unfair to the cabal of NZ climate scientists who have played a key role in the IPCC process.

This cabal, who call themselves “the Team,” bully and smear any critics.

They were dubbed “The Team” by blogger Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit, as a reference to McIntyre’s persistent, but failed, attempts to discredit the so-called “hockey stick” graph of temperature over the last 2,000 years.

They control the “peer review” process for research in the field and use their power to prevent contrary research being published.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is simply not feasible. Poneke clearly has no idea how many journals publish climate-related material, or how the peer review process works. Grant at Code For Life does.

They falsely claim there is a scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled,” by getting lists of scientists to sign petitions claiming there is such a consensus.

Pardon? That’s what the deniers do to assert there’s no consensus — with their Oregon Petition. Perhaps Poneke is getting confused about the statements on climate change by all the world’s leading scientific bodies. But of course, they’re all controlled by Michael Mann and Phil Jones, even the Glorious Scientific Academy of the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.

They have fought for years to conceal the actual shonky data they have used to wrongly claim there has been unprecedented global warming this past 50 years.

…followed by a considerable misunderstanding of ten year old discussions about paleoclimate studies.

They show Team members becoming alarmed and despondent at global temperatures peaking in 1998, then slowly falling to the present, while publicly trying to hide the fact that there was a peak and now a decline.

But… 1998 is only the warmest year in the CRU record, and they’re The Team who’ve been fiddling the data, so we can’t trust them can we? But never mind, it doesn’t matter which temperature record you choose, the first decade of the 21st century was warmer than the last decade of the 20th.

The Climategate emails (and accompanying computer data) were almost certainly leaked by a whistleblower inside the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU” — the supplier of much key IPCC historic climate data), not hacked from there by an outsider, as initially thought.

He provides no evidence for that assertion, beyond wishful thinking. The computer forensic specialists of the UK’s National Domestic Extremism Unit are helping the East Anglia police with their investigation into the theft. The CRU servers were hacked at least twice, and the entire email database was stolen, my sources tell me. The released emails are a carefully edited selection of that database. An investigative journalist might ask who did the selection, and who stood to gain from their release? Poneke can’t be bothered.

McLoughlin then gets the Chris de Freitas/Climate Research story exactly the wrong way round (it was CdF perverting peer review to get shonky papers published, not “The Team” trying to prevent it – see Mediamatters report), further demonstrates his misunderstanding of the “hockey stick” controversy (not dropped by IPCC reports (it’s on p467, WG1, Chapter 6), explicitly endorsed by the US National Research Council review), and misrepresents what NZ scientist Kevin Trenberth meant by his comment on “cooling”. You can find out what Trenberth was talking about, in his own words, here. It was published before McLoughlin’s ill-advised and ill-educated rant.

To this outsider (I know no more about “Poneke” than can be gleaned by reading his blog), it looks as though McLoughlin has approached the stolen emails with a set of preconceptions — or perhaps knowledge of what what was being said in climate crank circles — and then managed to find his preconceptions confirmed. A modicum of research, of looking into what the scientists he so freely maligns have to say might have made for a less embarrassing article.

If any journalist produced a shoddy report like this — and claimed it to be the most important thing they’d written — any self-respecting editor would fire them on the spot.

Meanwhile, unhappy with being told he’s wrong by scientists who happen to blog at Sciblogs, he’s busy attacking the messenger:

…I really do question their using taxpayer’s money to push what looks suspiciously like shrill propaganda in support of their cause.

The only shrill propaganda in this sorry little episode is coming from a once-respected writer who has forgotten what looking at both sides of a story really involves.

[NB: Before DM complains, Hot Topic is syndicated to Sciblogs, not hosted there. I hold no brief for the SMC. They can look after themselves.]

CRU emails show fraud? Yeah, right. Gareth Renowden Dec 08

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This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

Want to know just how much you have to read into the stolen CRU emails to uncover fraud? This excellent Youtube video explains the background to two of the more widely quoted passages — and in passing presents a few of the absurd accusations from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck in the USA. For members of the reality-based community, those sections may be painful. The whole thing’s well worth a watch — if only for the most creative use of the phrase “febrile nitwits” I’ve come across this year. Presenter “potholer54″ has a Youtube channel devoted to climate and science issues, which is also well worth exploring.

Shock revelation: top NZ climate scientist admits global conspiracy to warm planet Gareth Renowden Dec 02

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WORLD EXCLUSIVE!: Hot Topic can reveal that the days of the great climate science conspiracy are finally over. In an unprecedented display of public candour Dr Jim Salinger, New Zealand’s leading climate scientist, admitted in a letter to the NZ Herald this week that he’s been part of a conspiracy to mislead the public about global warming. Responding to a perceptive column by investigative reporter Jim Hopkins, he wrote (and this is the unedited version which names names — I had to hack into his email system to get it):

I was very upset to see that the doyen of climate science investigators, Jim Hopkins, has finally got to the truth of NZ’s con of the century. Yes – he has uncovered it – the Great Aotearoa Climate Conspiracy (GACC) of the 20th century! My fellow schemers over the years include E Kidson, Ben Garnier, Blair Fitzharris, Trevor Chinn, Kevin Trenberth, John Kidson, James Renwick, Brett Mullan, and Rob Muldoon. GACC operatives have secreted heaters and concentrated sunlight on the permanent snow and ice that once clothed Aotearoa. The Mackenzie hydro scheme generates power for the heaters under Mt Cook. We have been so successful that the ice volume has dripped from 100 cubic kilometres in the 1900s to 45 cubic kilometres by 2008. Thus we have convinced the good peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand that the climate is indeed warming.

And indeed, to demonstrate that we have been in control, we were planning to turn the Land of the Long White Cloud into a lot of hot air. But we have been exposed by the mighty pen of Hopkins! Wait until The Guardian’s George Monbiot learns of this. I will have to consider a career change – perhaps to becoming a columnist so that I can write whatever I want without worrying about the facts. Long live the truth!

It’s unclear how the GACC operation fits into the wider global conspiracy revealed in my earlier post about the hijacking of Monckton’s emails, but my research indicates that Salinger commands a senior position in the hierarchy: he has taken to signing his emails as “Climate operative 007″. Meanwhile, sources close to Lucy Lawless, who has been a close companion of Salinger in recent months, tell me she is now refusing to let him anywhere near her shower.

[Disclosure: the author is GACC operative 287(b): (b) denotes blogger. We all have badges to wear at meetings, there's a secret handshake, and members of the NZ GACC are also obliged to wear smocks made from Emperor penguin hides. Details of the Aussie branch regalia are sketchy, but seem to involve doing strange things with Tasmanian marsupials.]

[Update: For an alternative view on the merits of Hopkins' reporting, see this post at Editing teh Herald.]

Mycroft Monckton makes mischief Gareth Renowden Dec 01

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MoncktonScrotum wiped his sweat-beaded brow and shut down Monckton’s computer. The laird, concerned that a decade’s worth of personal emails might be stolen by some Green-fingered socialist geek, had instructed his wrinkled retainer to install “something that the buggers won’t be able to crack” on his laptop, and Scrotum had been pleased to do so. Every time Monckton sent an email, a copy was now automatically forwarded to Climate Con headquarters, where the one they call Gavin would scan them for information. In special circumstances, CC operatives might be despatched to make the Laird’s life a little more difficult than he had foreseen, but the pompous peer’s missives were mainly forwarded around the CC elite to provide a little light relief. However, Scrotum hadn’t counted on Monckton’s evil twin getting in on the act.

Mycroft Monckton, the Laird’s younger brother by some 30 minutes, was a constant thorn in his sibling’s side. While Monckton the elder had been studying classics at Cambridge, Mycroft had skipped university to take up a career setting crosswords for The Times. There were rumours he occasionally took on “projects” for one of the more anonymous offices of the British state, but Mycroft always laughed when taxed with this suggestion, and was given to noting that military intelligence was an oxymoron whatever number might be attached. While Christopher struggled on Fleet Street, and touched his forelock to the Thatcher hem (”No Monckton will ever lick arse”, grandfather “Machine Gun” Monckton used to splutter over his port on one of those long damp Scottish Sundays when his overuse of an ancient Gatling gun had scared the deer into the next glen and winged a few servants, “but they’ll do just about anything else”), Mycroft seemed to make money without effort. Property or shares? He would never say…

Mycroft’s chief delight, in those heady days of Thatcher’s ascendance, was to feed his brother with absurd ideas to put before the PM. There was the matter of the outrigger second hull for the new Type 42 frigate, sketched on the back of a menu at L’Escargot, elaborated by Monckton the elder in a series of papers that made Margaret laugh so much she started calling him “my little Polynesian poppet”. Earned him a gruff bark or two from Dennis, but Monckton didn’t mind. At least she knew he was there.

Latterly, with his brother so deep into his climate efforts — “Got to save the world, you know, Mycroft. Those bloody socialist billionaires and crooked scientists will have us all in penury!” — Mycroft seemed to have been keeping a low profile. But this morning the Laird’s usual eruptive pre-breakfast bellow had been more of a hacking cough, and Scrotum had seldom seen the peer so pale, at least when raptors weren’t around.

“Scrotum.” It was a quiet summons this morning. “How did Mycroft get into my emails?” The laird looked quizzical, a face he normally kept for working on puzzle schemes.

Scrotum nearly fell backwards, his surprise entirely unfeigned.
“I, I, I, er, don’t know, your Lordship. I can’t imagine… What has he done?”

“It appears, you snivelling little wretch, that your security precautions are no better than those at the University of East Anglia. Mycroft must have hacked into my machine, obtained the short opinion piece I was working on for electronic distribution, and altered it. It’s out there on the interweb thingy, over my name, but it has been so deviously and fraudulently altered that it hides my real meaning. Indeed it reads like a parody of my thoughts.”

“May I see it, your Lordship?” Scrotum asked. Monckton gestured at his desk, where the laptop showed the pink portcullis with entwined tutu and pith helmet that was the peer’s favourite screensaver. Scrotum began to read…

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

This is beyond parody, Scrotum thought as he read. The laird’s willingness to find signs of global governance lurking everywhere had caused him trouble before. There was the sad affair in Sweden, when Monckton had attacked Abba for promoting world government based solely on a mishearing of the words of Dancing Queen. Rescuing him from the hordes of drunken blondes had been a challenge.

“In what way has this been altered, your Lordship?” Scrotum asked.

“He’s toned it down, of course. Taken out my reference to UN jackboots crushing the faces of the weak and defenceless rich. It’s a travesty. The Americans will think I’ve gone soft.”

Scrotum read on.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures.

“But your Lordship, are not land temperatures meant to warm faster than those of the ocean?”

“Precisely. Mycroft is trying to make it seem that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He doesn’t need to try very hard, then, thought Scrotum.

One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Scrotum paused. He could never keep track of how long the world was supposed to have been cooling. Fifteen years seemed rather a long time, and “rapid cooling” for nine years a tad of an overstatement, perhaps it would be better to let this pass, but the peer was clearly incensed.

“You see, Scrotum, you see! Fifteen years! Ten years, eleven years, I have made both claims, but fifteen! This has Mycroft’s fingerprints all over it. He’s sabotaging my credibility.”

Scrotum had to turn aside to hide the grin that was creeping around the corners of his mouth.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up.

“This section too, your lordship?”

“This too, Scrotum. Mycroft knows that I have to occasionally exaggerate to make my points — the threat of global climate conspiracy is so great that I have no option — but by putting these words into my mouth he makes me seem hippo, hippo…” He couldn’t get the word out. He was choking on it, turning red.

“Hypocritical, sir?” Scrotum offered gently.

“That too..”

Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

“These are strong words, sir. Are they yours?”

“Yes, of course they are, but the original was in Latin.” Monckton looked peeved.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offence. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

“What’s wrong with this section sir?”

“Nothing, nothing, just the subtle twisting of the style. He has removed my careful use of the Latin phrase cave canem, and the references to the data being conjured from their computers like the offerings before the oracle at Delphi.”

“Too straightforward then?” Scrotum asked.

“Not enough finesse, Scrotum. Finesse.”

What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little.

The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.

No, they’re not. They’re criminals.

Scrotum wondered if the laird had originally intended to libel the scientists of the world, or whether this was a Mycroft improvement, but the next section nearly made him choke.

With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offences and, if thought fit, prosecute.

“Do you see that, Scrotum? He brings Singer into it. Fred’s a charming old buffer, a dab hand at the scientific sleight of hand, but even I wouldn’t use him as a reference. Too much tobacco money under the bridge to be taken seriously in the right circles – though the BBC seem happy enough to put him on. Just shows how standards have fallen there since the great days of the 1980s.” The laird’s eyes were beginning to glaze over.

But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.

Police state! Scrotum could see Mycroft’s game. Hook the reader, lead them along, and then leave them gasping for breath. Would Rupert Murdoch take kindly to being portrayed as supine, his media an arm of government. And in a Britain where the Tannochbrae bobby had long since sold his bicycle and taken to riding around in a little white car, never to be seen unless it was closing time at the pub, it was clear that parody was spilling over into farce.

At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.

Scrotum closed the laptop. “Would your Lordship like me to check the security settings?”

“Check them! I want them quintuple checked, all security measures doubled, access to all but me denied. Use the usual password. And then see if you can sniff out how he did it.” Scrotum tugged his forelock and tried to look contrite.

The phone rang. Scrotum picked up the old-fashioned black Bakelite handset. “Tannochbrae Manor, Lord Monckton’s residence.”

“Has he worked it out?” Mycroft’s soft voice was unmistakeable.

“Yes,” Scrotum muttered. “He’s right here.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Your lordship, Mycroft is on the line. Do you wish to speak with him?”

Monckton snatched the phone. “Mycroft, what have you done? Are you trying to ruin me, make me a laughing stock, the butt of jokes around the American elite?”

Scrotum couldn’t hear the reply, but Monckton the elder turned a whiter shade of pale ale. He put the phone down in its cradle. “He’s got the lot, Scrotum. The whole bloody lot. All my email, all my research, the database of misleading references and the address of Fred Singer’s secret floating Kennebunkport lair. Everything. I am in his power…”

Scrotum tried to look serious, but knew his straight face would fail in moments. He took to clearing up the breakfast dishes — the untouched kidneys, black pudding and venison liver faggots gleamed in the morning sun, and all was right with the world.

Who writes Rodney’s rubbish? Gareth Renowden Nov 29

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rodenymorph.gifWho’s this supporting the NZ C”S”C’s idiotic attempt to cast doubt on the NZ temperature record? Why, it’s none other than Rodney Hide, leader of the ACT Party, and Minister of Local Government, Associate Minister of Commerce, Minister of Regulatory Reform and Parliamentary principal climate crank. Hide has written to climate change minister Nick Smith, demanding that the NIWA release the temperature data:

There is only one process that is appropriate for matters of science, and that is to release all data, together with a detailed account of what adjustments have been made, with an account of the reasons for doing so, and the computer codes that have been used to adjust and smooth the final published series, together with details of which measurements have been discarded. All the data and the relevant computer codes should be available for scientific scrutiny.

Free the NIWA code! What a rallying cry. It’s a pity that he thinks the likes of Treadgold constitute independent scientific scrutiny. Hide’s also been taking instructions on the CRU hack, and is seemingly happy to completely misrepresent what’s been going on. Apparently the emails:

…reveal a systematic attempt to manipulate the historical time series data, together with what appear to be arbitrary adjustments to the computer codes which produce the averaged and smoothed temperature data…

Er, no. That’s not true. The Herald does a far better job than the Minister of Local Government of covering the stolen emails and what they actually say. But perhaps Rodney gets his “facts” from somewhere else. So, in the spirit of his letter to Nick, here’s mine to Rodney.

Dear Mr Hide,

In your letter to Nick Smith, dated November 27th, you refer to a NZ Climate “Science” Coalition document entitled Are we feeling warmer yet? and use it as the basis for the request of further information from NIWA. In the interests of open government, and the full disclosure of the interests of Ministers of the Crown seeking to use to use their position to advance the agendas of external organisations, I request that you answer the following questions in full, revealing any email or other communications made in relation to this subject during the period in question.

  • Who drew your attention the NZ CSC document?
  • Have you actually read to it?
  • As an “environmental scientist“, who understands (per your letter) that adjustments to temperature series are necessary, did you not notice that the NZ CSC document deliberately ignored the adjustments in order to make their case?
  • If you did not, why not?
  • Who drafted your letter to the Minister for Climate Change Issues?
  • What correspondence, via email, letter or other means (including telephone conversations), have you had with Bryan Leyland, Alan Gibb, Terry Dunleavy, Bob Dedekind, Owen McShane, Richard Treadgold, or any member of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, in respect of NIWA temperature data, the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, or climate science or policy matters in the last month?
  • As a Minister of the Crown, do you support the theft of emails and data from universities here or overseas?
  • If not, why do you use stolen emails to support your case?
  • If you have not read those emails, who supplied your interpretation of them?
  • Do you think its reasonable for a Minister of the Crown to join a smear campaign against New Zealand scientists?

Thank you for you urgent attention to these matters. I look forward to receiving a full disclosure of all and any information relating to this issue at your earliest convenience.

Regards

Gareth Renowden

(But I won’t be holding my breath…)

Don’t let a thief steal into your heart Gareth Renowden Nov 23

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Quite a fuss about stolen emails over the weekend. Let’s review the story so far. Person or persons unknown hack into servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and steal lots of emails and other documents [BBC 1, 2, Times, Bob Ward at The Guardian]. This is a criminal offence in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and many other jurisdictions. The criminals then release edited highlights of these documents and emails by putting them up on a Russian web server, and let the news out via what Nature calls “a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog” (The Air Vent which may have been Andrew Bolt’s blog in Australia). Within a matter of hours, the usual suspects are out in force, screaming data manipulation, conspiracy to exclude climate sceptics from publishing, and fraudulent behaviour. Criminals are portrayed as whistleblowers, quotes are pulled out of private emails and taken out of context, and the end of climate science is proclaimed.

I’ve been reluctant to weigh in on this issue, because commenting on stolen and possibly edited documents strikes me as unethical. In a courtroom, improperly obtained evidence is not allowed to influence proceedings, and I would prefer to apply the same standard here. That hasn’t stopped the likes of Wishart (peer review is broken, climate science is dead), propagandist in chief Marc Morano (continuously updated “Climategate” coverage at his Climate Depot), or even now well out of the closet denialist, the NZ blogger sometimes known as Poneke (warming stopped in 1998 (yet again)). However…

I’ve been asked to comment on the issue a few times today, so I’ve been doing a little research. First, the content of the emails. I’m not going to link to them (see above) — but they’re easy enough to find if you want to. What I’ve read (and I’ve read some, but nowhere near all), look to me like the normal sort of email traffic you might expect from a bunch of working scientists, in a field where critics have been throwing mud at them for years. Are they pissed off? Yes. Are they rude? Yes, sometimes — and enjoyably so, from my perspective. Are they careful? Most of the time. Is peer review broken? No. Is there evidence of some vast, over-arching conspiracy? If that’s the best they can muster, then I’d have to say they’re bloody useless conspirators.

Nor is it a complete record. It seems to be widely acknowledged that this is only part of the hackers haul, so what is there in the rest? Certainly, there will be personal emails — private stuff, family stuff, stuff that any reasonable person would admit should remain out of the public domain.

But are there emails that portray a different picture, a more anodyne, boring portrait of science in action? Who knows? The editorial decisions have been made by a bunch of crooks, and all the noise is being made by people with an overt agenda.

All of which leads me to the crux of the matter. Cui bono, or as Jerry Maguire might say, show me the money. Are we supposed to believe that in the run up to a major international conference on climate change, when there’s a big climate bill being considered by the US legislature, and when we know that for the last 20 years there has been a concerted campaign and PR effort to derail action on reducing carbon emissions, that a “whistleblower” has been so moved by the behaviour of the CRU that they have broken the law to uncover this compelling story? Frankly, that’s unbelievable. But then so is much of the denial campaign. Believability and credibility is much less important than noise and column inches.

This whole affair looks like nothing more than another beat-up by the cranks, denialists and ideologues, a crude and unpersuasive attempt to add PR pressure in the run up to Copenhagen and Waxman Markey. With that in mind, let me ask another pertinent question. Who did it? Do they have links with the US think tanks who seem to be running the denial campaign? Perhaps a real investigative journalist might do some digging…

For excellent coverage on the story so far, I recommend Greenfyre’s: Mike’s been documenting events as they happen. RealClimate provides context for the most egregious quote mines here and here (and Gavin Schmidt has been heroically dealing with a flood of comments — over 1,000 at the time of writing). For something you’ll never read at Climate Depot or Wishart’s crank central, try this exposé of ethical behaviour by climate scientists confronted by rubbish, and for a candid opinion on the quality of Chris de Freitas and Patrick Michaels PhD theses — you’ll have to search the texts… ;-)

[Richard Thompson]