The thing that conservatives made up and liberals don’t want you to hear about

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1. Dakota Said,

   Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists.

   Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world’s leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online

   Leo Hickman and James Randerson
   guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 18.15 GMT

   Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

   The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

   Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

   The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

   The files, which in total amount to 160MB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: “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.”

   A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: “We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry.”

   In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

   This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

   “It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating,” said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “You can’t tell what they are talking about. Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick.”

   In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying “in an odd way this is cheering news”.

   Ward said that if the emails are correct, they “might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public.” But he added, “Let’s separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way.”

   The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. “Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data,” he said. “At the heart of this is basic physics.”

   Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. “It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that.”

   Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: “I’m not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I’m hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.”

   When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

   The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is “value added” by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

   Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, “Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world’s leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we’re experiencing is not down to natural variation.”

   “With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic.”

   A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”

   • This article was amended on Wednesday 25 November 2009. A unit was garbled: the files amount to 160MB of data, not 160MbB. This has been corrected.

2. Dakota Said,

   Climategate central figure, Phil Jones, steps down
   December 4, 9:54 AM, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner, Aaron Turpen

   Professor Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has announced that he is stepping down from his post as Director of the CRU until an independent investigation and revue is complete. The revue comes as a result of the allegations following the publications of emails and software data taken from the CRU by persons known on the Web as only “hadley hack” last month.

   Professor Jones says he will be stepping aside during the investigation and cooperating fully with the investigators. Vice-Chancellor Edward Acton will also be stepping aside during the investigation. Professor Peter Liss, so far not named in any of the implicating emails, will be taking over the role of Director.

   Of course, the global warming alarmists are up in arms about the “stolen data” and the “bad timing” and making all kinds of conspiranoid claims about who the hadley hack was, what was released, and why. This further relegates them, in my mind, into the realm of the delusional religionist and shows them to be logically brain dead.

   “It has created confusion,” said Nicholas Stern, a leading Gorebot economist (meaning climate change cashier), “and confusion never helps scientific discussions.” Apparently Mr. Stern didn’t finish the fifth grade, or otherwise he would have learned that science is all about debate, confusion over the theory, and general bickering about who is right about what. That’s what the scientific vetting process is, at its core. Using the Scientific Method, a research scientist extracts data in as controlled and careful a way as possible. Then he presents it to his peers, who endlessly nit-pick and bicker over it.

   Once again, of course, Stern turned to the old “consensus makes correctness” attitude, saying, “The degree of skepticism among real scientists is very small.” There wasn’t much skepticism over the earth being flat, over Newton’s Law, or any of the others that maverick skeptics challenged and proved wrong either. Thank God for skeptics like Galileo, Einstein, and many others!

   He then repeats the mantra about Five Degrees and how we’re all going to cook when global temperatures rise that much by century’s end. This totally discounts, of course, the Medieval Warming Period wherein the temperature was a full six degrees higher and Vikings made settlements in then-recently-thawed Greenland and agricultural production reached its highest levels up to that point in human history.

   Oh, and the seas weren’t flooding New York or Miami either.

   What Stern is really upset about is that their “strategy” won’t be going through at Copenhagen to create a new world market, enforced by governments, in carbon trading. Trading by which Stern, Gore, and all their buddies would profit immensely, being the forces who control the current carbon trading markets in the West.

   In other words, if people don’t keep believing in global warming, then poor sobs like Stern might lose their billions in future income potentials. Boo hoo.

   Meanwhile, tomorrow we’ll get back to the business of real environmental issues and problems. You know, the ones that the global warming alarmists gloss over in their continual push for global taxation so they can keep riding the gravy train.

3. Dakota Said,

   The CRU hack
   Filed under: — group @ 20 November 2009

   RealClimate

   As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

   Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

   Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

   More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

   Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

   It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

   No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

   The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

   There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

   It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

   Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

4. Dakota Said,

   From The Sunday Times
   November 29, 2009
   Climate change data dumped
   Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

   SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

   It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

   The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

   The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

   The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

   In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

   The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

   Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

   Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

   He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

5. Dakota Said,

   Global warming controversy reaches NASA climate data
   By Stephen Dinan

   The fight over climate science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding the release of the same kind of information that landed a leading British center in hot water over charges that it skewed its data.

   Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data dating as far back as the 1930s.

   “I assume that what is there is highly damaging,” Mr. Horner said. “These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”

   The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed its data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for the hottest years, with 1934 listed as slightly cooler.

   Mr. Horner, a noted skeptic of global warming and author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism,” wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he’s given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he’ll sue to compel the information’s release.

   Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center, which runs the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) laboratory, said officials are working on Mr. Horner’s request, though he couldn’t say why they have taken so long.

   “We’re collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests,” Mr. Hess said. “It’s just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that’s responsive.”

   Mr. Horner’s fight mirrors one that has sprung up in Britain since the release of thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which appear to show researchers shaving their data to conform to their expectations. They also note efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.

   The center’s chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.

   The center has had to acknowledge in response to a Freedom of Information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind the global warming theory.

   Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data shaving has happened at GISS, a leading climate change research center. Mr. Hess said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn’t say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data.

   The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.

   “Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

   But Republicans on Capitol Hill say the revelations deserve a congressional investigation. Republican leaders also sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Wednesday telling her that she should withdraw a series of EPA rules until the climate change science can be better substantiated.

   For now, climate scientists are rallying around the British researchers.

   Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is under fire for his involvement in the British e-mail exchanges, said the e-mails’ release was timed to interfere with next week’s U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. President Obama is planning to attend.

   “They’ve taken scientists’ words and phrases and quoted them out of context, completely misrepresenting what they were saying,” Mr. Mann told AccuWeather.com in an interview, calling it a “manufactured controversy.”

   NASA’s GISS was forced to update its data in 2007 after questions were raised by Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.org.

   GISS had initially listed the warmest years as 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931, respectively. After Mr. McIntyre’s questions, GISS rejiggered the list to show 1934 as the warmest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and then 1931. Since then, the list has been rewritten again so it now runs as 1998, 2006, 1934, 1921 and 1999.

   The institute blamed “a minor data processing error” for the changes but said it doesn’t make much difference, since the top three years remain in a “statistical tie” either way.

   Mr. Horner said he’s seeking the data itself, but he also wants to see the chain of e-mails from scientists discussing the changes.

   The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Mr. Horner says he’s never received an official acknowledgment of his three separate FOIA requests, but has received e-mails showing that the agency is aware of them.

   He said he has provided NASA with a notice of intent to sue under FOIA but that he also hopes members of Congress get involved and demand the release of information.

   NASA and CRU data are considered the backbone of much of the science that suggests the Earth is warming as a result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. NASA argues that its data suggest this decade has been the warmest on record.

   On the other hand, data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville suggest temperatures have been relatively flat for most of this decade.

6. Dakota Said,

   Scientists Return Fire at Climate Skeptics in ‘Destroyed Data’ Dispute
   By ROBIN BRAVENDER of Greenwire
   Published: October 14, 2009

   Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable.

   The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA’s climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group — a staunch critic of U.S. EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases — petitioned the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed “endangerment finding” because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9).

   But climate scientists familiar with the data insist that the reports are based on sound science and that the data in question was altered as part of standard operating procedure to ensure consistency across reporting stations.

   At issue is raw data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, including surface temperature averages from weather stations around the world. The data was used in assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reports that EPA has used in turn to formulate its climate policies.

   Citing a statement on the research unit’s Web site, CEI blasted the research unit for the “suspicious destruction of its original data.” According to CRU’s Web site, “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”

   Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, said that the vast majority of the station data was not altered at all, and the small amount that was changed was adjusted for consistency.

   The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.

   “When you’re looking at climate data, you don’t want stations that are showing urban warming trends,” Jones said, “so we’ve taken them out.” Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. “We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world.”

   Refuting CEI’s claims of data-destruction, Jones said, “We haven’t destroyed anything. The data is still there — you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center.”

   Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.

   Still, CEI’s general counsel Sam Kazman remains skeptical of the IPCC’s conclusions. The fact that the report relies on several data sets “doesn’t really answer the issue,” he said.

   CEI and Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Michaels argued that the “destruction of [CRU's] raw data violates basic scientific norms regarding reproducibility, which are especially important in climatology.”

   Ben Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dismissed that argument. “Raw data were not secretly destroyed to avoid efforts by other scientists to replicate the CRU and Hadley Centre-based estimates of global-scale changes in near-surface temperature,” he wrote in comments to the advocacy group Climate Science Watch.

   Santer said CRU’s major findings were replicated by other groups, including the NOAA climatic data center, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and also in Russia.

7. Dakota Said,

   UK Met Office on the defensive in wake of climate change scandal
   December 6, 7:08 AM, Climate Change Examiner, Tony Hake

   After initially dismissing the Climategate scandal, Britain’s primary source for climate data has been forced to acknowledge the event and is working hard to restore its public image. The UK’s Met Office, Britain’s equivalent of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, says it will be releasing its climate data to the public and will be reanalyzing 160 years worth of data to ensure it is accurate.

   In a statement on its website, the Met Office announced that this week it will release temperatures records from more than one thousand stations. This represents only a subset of the data from approximately 5,000 stations that the office holds however as the agency must seek approval from other agencies to release all of its records.

   The office said, “This subset will continue the policy of putting as much of the station temperature record as possible into the public domain.” Those in the public eager to see the data have questioned the statement wondering why, if the agency was committed to openly sharing data, it wasn’t done before the scandal erupted.

   With public confidence waning, the Met Office also said that it would be going back through 160 years of data to ensure it is accurate, a process expected to take up to three years. As one of only three primary sources for climate data in the world, the accuracy of the Met Office’s data is essential. The other two are maintained in the U.S. by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). Problems with NASA’s climate records have been discovered in the past and much to their embarrassment they have been forced to restate records.

   The Met Office had initially been dismissive of the Climategate event. The agency’s statement four days after the release of the messages did not directly acknowledge the event and instead sought to reassure the public on the accuracy of the data saying, “we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that world leaders continue to have access to the best possible science.”

   Despite the reassurances from the Met Office and other climate agencies, the uproar over the event however failed to subside and continues to grow, casting doubt on the very underpinnings of the manmade climate change theory. The released emails allude to manipulating, falsifying and deleting climate data in what some say were moves by the scientists to come up with a predetermined conclusion to support their hypothesis.

   Much of the analysis of the Met Office’s data was performed by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Its director, Phil Jones, is now at the center of the scandal and has temporarily stepped aside pending the results of an investigation into the center and many of the controversial emails he sent.

   In the United States, Michael Mann of Penn State University is being investigated by his employer for the emails he sent. Mann was the author of the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph that was used in reports released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in Al Gore’s book and movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” The graph has since been discredited.

   The United Nations announced last week it would be conducting its own investigation as well. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said “We certainly are going to take a look at the whole lot of it and then are going to take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet.”

8. Dakota Said,

   December 2, 2009 2:35 PM
   Democrats: “ClimateGate” Leak A Non-Scandal
   Posted by Declan McCullagh

   If you’re a U.S. politician calling for expensive new laws relating to global warming, you know you’re in trouble when Jon Stewart lampoons the scientists whose embarrassing e-mail messages were disclosed in what’s being called “ClimateGate.”

   But Democrats put a brave face on it on Wednesday, with Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey saying that the leaked files and allegations of scientific misconduct should not stand in the way of the U.S. Congress swiftly enacting cap and trade legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. (See earlier CBSNews.com coverage of ClimateGate and the costs of cap and trade.)

   Markey, the head of a House global warming committee, said during a hearing that his Republican colleagues “sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet.” And: “There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual.”

   That’s a bit of an overstatement. The leak includes over 1,000 e-mail messages, and another 2,500 or so computer files, many of which are still being analyzed. And the burden of proof should properly be on anyone — even a House committee chairman — proposing new taxes and extensive regulations, especially when climate science is anything but settled.

   It is true that, if other independent data sets confirm what the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit claimed, ClimateGate’s effect on the view of climate trends may be minimal. Then again, as Reason’s Ron Bailey notes, University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. says the CRU data is not independent of NASA and other temperature data sets. Pielke had previously written that the CRU and its political allies have been trying to “manipulate the science, so that their viewpoints are the only ones that reach the policymakers.”

   Markets benefit from competition, not monopolization, and so do markets in ideas. That’s the argument that Republicans advanced during Wednesday’s hearing, with Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner saying that “the controversy over the leaked e-mails, and their contents, cannot be ignored because it goes to the very basis of the debate” over global warming and what laws are necessary as a result.

   “We’re being asked as a Congress to make major changes in American society, in energy use and how much the out-of-pocket cost is to everyone in this country, as a result of this debate,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “We’d better get it right. The scientists may be able to change their story (but it’s) as difficult to repeal the consequences of that law as it is to get milk back in the cow.”

   Fellow GOP Rep. Candace Miller of Michigan, who has called for hearings into ClimateGate: “I recognize that the e-mails are an inconvenient truth, perhaps, an embarrassment on the brink of Copenhagen… There is at least a debate on whether or not climate change is human-induced.”

   Meanwhile, Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who’s a high-profile critic of the theory of global warming caused by mankind, has instructed the University of Arizona’s Malcolm Hughes — whose correspondence appears in the disclosed files — not to delete any of those e-mail messages. Investigations into climate change researchers are already underway at Penn State and East Anglia, home of the CRU.

   John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, didn’t mention the leaked files in his prepared testimony, which said the U.S. must “act promptly to reduce global emissions to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide” or face “extreme” and “damaging” consequences.

   But when Holdren showed up at the Rayburn House Office Building, he end up being pressed on ClimateGate and little else. He denied its significance, calling the embarrassing disclosures “not remotely sufficient to demonstrate a culture of corruption” and said “as to exactly what went on in the way of manipulation of data, that remains to be seen.” He objected to the idea of an independent probe — the CRU received U.S. government grants — on grounds that he’s not sure an “independent investigation by the Congress of the United States is a way to get at the truth.”

   Moderate Republicans who helped Ed Markey and Nancy Pelosi push through the cap and trade bill by a narrow vote are backing away from anything to do with the measure. Politico reports that Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois (who supported the idea) and Sen. John McCain of Arizona (ditto) have now become critics.

   Does anyone really think that, in the wake of the CRU disclosures, cap and trade would clear the House of Representatives if put to a vote today? It certainly didn’t this week in Australia’s Parliament, where a vote to reject the idea garnered a 41-33 majority. What a difference only a few months, and a few thousand computer files, makes.

   Update 9:21 p.m. ET: Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, says ClimateGate hackers should face criminal penalties. (Then again, if we’re talking about an anonymous whistleblower, there’s no hacking involved.) Ian Plimer, a professor who teaches earth science at Australia’s University of Adelaide, has reiterated his criticism of the climate change lobby in no uncertain terms, calling it a “load of hot air underpinned by fraud.”

9. Dakota Said,

   Republican candidates run from climate bill
   By LISA LERER | 12/2/09 4:49 AM EST

   In late June, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) was a critical swing vote on climate change, helping Democrats put the cap-and-trade bill over the top in a cliffhanger roll call vote.

   By September, Kirk had totally cooled on the global warming measure, saying he would vote against cap and trade if he happened to become a senator.

   That’s what a Republican primary will do for a moderate. Kirk’s running for President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, but he’s got challenges from the right, and he’s worked up a very careful explanation of why he was one of just eight House Republicans to vote for the climate bill.

   “Let me say briefly about cap and trade: I voted for it because it was in the narrow interest of my congressional district,” Kirk said at a Republican event in September. “As your representative, representing the entire state of Illinois, I would vote no on that bill coming up.”

   Kirk is one of a growing group of Republican candidates flip-flopping away from cap and trade as they stare down more-conservative primary challengers. Republicans who once flouted their green bona fides are tacking right, to the point of questioning the science behind global warming, believing it’s politically toxic within the conservative base to favor anything Democrats want to do about the climate.

   Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who built his maverick reputation on crafting climate legislation, has emerged as a vocal critic of the Democratic bills. Charlie Crist, the Florida governor once known as “Gov. Green,” canceled his climate summit this year and has dropped most of his environmental initiatives. And even in California, considered to be at the forefront of environmental policy, Republican candidate Carly Fiorina urged lawmakers to have the “courage” to re-examine the scientific basis of global warming.

   “This issue has become very, very radioactive,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, the onetime chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “People have started to run away from this.”

   Democrats say that Republican opposition to the legislation will hurt them at the polls on Election Day, arguing that their polling shows that most voters see the climate bill as a chance to create new, clean energy jobs.

   But Democrats also know that they will most likely need at least a handful of Republican votes to overcome the possibility of a filibuster in the Senate. And they know that the bill will be a tough sell among politically vulnerable Democrats — especially those from Rust Belt, rural and coal-dependent states.

   If the Republican opposition to the climate bill ends up being a winning strategy at the ballot box, those much-sought-after GOP votes are unlikely to be there for years to come.

   Of even more concern for climate bill advocates is this prospect: More Republicans — both in polls and on Capitol Hill — are willing to publicly cast doubt on the veracity of global warming.

   Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty may be the classic case of a formerly green Republican shifting to the right on climate change, just as he begins laying the groundwork for a 2012 White House bid.

   In 2006, Pawlenty championed an ambitious climate program that would require the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2015 and 80 percent by 2050 — targets that track closely with proposals being considered by the Senate. A year later, after his proposal was passed into law, Pawlenty called the global warming issue “one of the most important of our time.”

   But in June, Pawlenty wrote a letter to the Minnesota delegation calling the House bill “very burdensome on our economy” and “overly bureaucratic, misguided.”

   And last month, he told The Economist that while the Earth might be warming, it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.”

   Republicans say that their candidates object to the specifics of Democratic proposals, pointing to alternative plans being offered by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) that would double nuclear power, a lower-carbon source of energy, but leave behind the cap-and-trade system.

   “It’s a difference in terms of policy and how to deal with carbon,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “You’ve seen a variety of Republican plans that address carbon in a different way.”

   The real shift hasn’t been in policy but, rather, in Republican politics.

   Over the past decade, a handful of Republicans like McCain and former Virginia Sen. John Warner have not only supported cap and trade; they’ve introduced their own versions of the legislation.

   This year, however, Republican leadership has tried to brand the climate change bill as “cap and tax” — and conservative activists have morphed this into the third tenet of their purity test for Republicans facing competitive primaries.

   “Winning a Republican primary requires a complete commitment to the farthest right of the Republican Party,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “These people are moving in this direction purely for electoral purposes.”

   The fiscally conservative Club for Growth endorsed the primary candidacy of former Florida state House Speaker Marco Rubio over Crist — in part because of Crist’s environmental record. “Crist is weak on several issues, and cap and trade was one of them, so it was a big deal for us,” said Andrew Roth, vice president of government affairs at the Club for Growth.

   And in Connecticut, former Rep. Rob Simmons has done a 180 on cap and trade, saying he “became convinced that [it] would cause more harm that good.”

   Simmons is challenging Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in one of the most competitive races this year and has promised to oppose the bill in the Senate.

   Conservative Republicans also see the legislation as an opportunity to attack Democratic opponents in general elections by linking it to larger arguments about the struggling economy.

   “I hear about it all over the state. People are very worried about a huge increase in energy costs,” said conservative Republican Pat Toomey, who’s challenging Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). “It certainly would be part of a broad discussion about the records of candidates and how we create jobs during a very difficult time.

   Beyond the debate about the actual climate legislation, Republicans see potential to exploit newfound skepticism over the causes — or even the existence — of global warming.

   A recent Washington Post poll found that belief that global warming is happening has dropped dramatically among Republicans over the past three years, falling from 76 percent to 54 percent.

   Those shifts come even as some coal companies, auto makers, oil producers and other fossil-fuel-intensive industries support the legislation. But even Big Business’s backing of climate change measures isn’t a draw for Republican voters. Republican Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell won the Southern, coal-intensive district of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) by 66 percent during last month’s elections — a 2-to-1 landslide that some Republicans attribute to Boucher’s support for the House cap-and-trade bill.

   “The voters have reacted very strongly,” said Davis. “They see this as a threat to their whole livelihood and way of life.”

   If the Republican opposition to the climate bill ends up being a winning strategy at the ballot box, those much-sought-after GOP votes are unlikely to be there for years to come.

   Of even more concern for climate bill advocates is this prospect: More Republicans — both in polls and on Capitol Hill — are willing to publicly cast doubt on the veracity of global warming.

   Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty may be the classic case of a formerly green Republican shifting to the right on climate change, just as he begins laying the groundwork for a 2012 White House bid.

   In 2006, Pawlenty championed an ambitious climate program that would require the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2015 and 80 percent by 2050 — targets that track closely with proposals being considered by the Senate. A year later, after his proposal was passed into law, Pawlenty called the global warming issue “one of the most important of our time.”

   But in June, Pawlenty wrote a letter to the Minnesota delegation calling the House bill “very burdensome on our economy” and “overly bureaucratic, misguided.”

   And last month, he told The Economist that while the Earth might be warming, it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.”

   Republicans say that their candidates object to the specifics of Democratic proposals, pointing to alternative plans being offered by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) that would double nuclear power, a lower-carbon source of energy, but leave behind the cap-and-trade system.

   “It’s a difference in terms of policy and how to deal with carbon,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “You’ve seen a variety of Republican plans that address carbon in a different way.”

   The real shift hasn’t been in policy but, rather, in Republican politics.

   Over the past decade, a handful of Republicans like McCain and former Virginia Sen. John Warner have not only supported cap and trade; they’ve introduced their own versions of the legislation.

   This year, however, Republican leadership has tried to brand the climate change bill as “cap and tax” — and conservative activists have morphed this into the third tenet of their purity test for Republicans facing competitive primaries.

   “Winning a Republican primary requires a complete commitment to the farthest right of the Republican Party,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “These people are moving in this direction purely for electoral purposes.”

   The fiscally conservative Club for Growth endorsed the primary candidacy of former Florida state House Speaker Mario Rubio over Crist — in part because of Crist’s environmental record. “Crist is weak on several issues, and cap and trade was one of them, so it was a big deal for us,” said Andrew Roth, vice president of government affairs at the Club for Growth.

   And in Connecticut, former Rep. Rob Simmons has done a 180 on cap and trade, saying he “became convinced that [it] would cause more harm that good.”

   Simmons is challenging Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in one of the most competitive races this year and has promised to oppose the bill in the Senate.

   Conservative Republicans also see the legislation as an opportunity to attack Democratic opponents in general elections by linking it to larger arguments about the struggling economy.

   “I hear about it all over the state. People are very worried about a huge increase in energy costs,” said conservative Republican Pat Toomey, who’s challenging Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). “It certainly would be part of a broad discussion about the records of candidates and how we create jobs during a very difficult time.

   Beyond the debate about the actual climate legislation, Republicans see potential to exploit newfound skepticism over the causes — or even the existence — of global warming.

   A recent Washington Post poll found that belief that global warming is happening has dropped dramatically among Republicans over the past three years, falling from 76 percent to 54 percent.

   Those shifts come even as some coal companies, auto makers, oil producers and other fossil-fuel-intensive industries support the legislation. But even Big Business’s backing of climate change measures isn’t a draw for Republican voters. Republican Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell won the Southern, coal-intensive district of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) by 66 percent during last month’s elections — a 2-to-1 landslide that some Republicans attribute to Boucher’s support for the House cap-and-trade bill.

   “The voters have reacted very strongly,” said Davis. “They see this as a threat to their whole livelihood and way of life.”

10. Dakota Said,

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change refutes ‘climategate’
    Dec 6, 2009 by Stephanie Dearing

    On the cusp of global greenhouse gas emission negations which begin Monday in Copenhagen, the IPCC has issued a statement backing the science behind findings of climate change.

    The rumours and speculation about climategate have brought the attention of the world to zero in on the Copenhagen climate change negotiations in a way that never would have happened three weeks ago. In response to climategate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, has issued a statement assuring the world that the science behind IPCC conclusions on climate change is sound:

    “… IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.”

    The IPCC Working Group went on to say

    “… The body of evidence [for climate change] is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide. The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges, many of whom have dedicated their time and effort to develop these findings in teams of Lead Authors within the production of the series of IPCC Assessment Reports during the past 20 years.”

    While divisions between schools of thought on climate change have always existed, the emergence of climategate has given climate change skeptics fuel and presents a threat to the success of the Copenhagen negotiations. The negotiations were already threatened by disagreement among world leaders on how to implement greenhouse gas emission controls, resulting in the coining of the moniker nopenhagen. Skeptics claim that the Copenhagen conference is not much more than green washing. Green washing normally refers to product or business promotions which claim the product/business is environmentally friendly, when this is not the fact. Public opinion is now swinging against controlling greenhouse gas emissions, even going so far as to claim that science is at death’s door because of climategate.

    There are two people who have been targeted by climategate, Professor Michael Mann who works at Penn State University in the United States, and Professor Phil Jones, who is based at the University of East Anglia. Mann’s work, said Penn State in a release, underwent an investigation in 2005-2006, which resulted in the finding that his methodology was sound. Penn State is conducting a review into the matter, as is East Anglia. Jones stepped down from his position while the investigation is conducted. Both investigations are internal.

    Mann has responded to the leaking of emails saying

    “It’s an 11th hour smear campaign where they’ve stolen personal e-mails from scientists, mined them for single words or phrases that can be taken out of context and misrepresent what scientists are saying.”

    The controversy over climategate is now spilling over onto key environmental leaders, such as Al Gore. Gore, who was to make a presentation on his new book, Our Choice, at an appearance at the climate summit on December 16th, cancelled — and not even the event organizers know why. However, there are many who allege he has cancelled because of climategate. Some 3,000 ticket-holders are affected by the cancellation. There was no word if ticket holders would be reimbursed. Some Hollywood glitteratti are now demanding that the two Oscars for An Inconvenient Truth be rescinded.
    RealClimate, one of the websites which the illegally hacked emails were sent to, said, in part,

    “… More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

    Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking… ”

    Although the Copenhagen website does not refer to climategate, the latest news is that it is thought hackers from Russia were behind the release of the emails, with the implication that there was a sinister purpose behind the hack. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the Vice-Chairman of the IPCC told press

    “This was not a job for amateurs.”

    However, it is anticipated that some nations participating in the negotiations, such as Saudi Arabia, will use climategate to resist agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

    The Sierra Club has asked the RCMP to investigate an apparent Canadian link to climategate, saying the emails were published on at least one Canadian web site.

    The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

11. Dakota Said,

    UN climate chief: hacked e-mails are damaging
    Associated Press

    Sun Dec 6, 5:56 am ET

    COPENHAGEN – The top U.N. climate official says hacked e-mails from climate scientists that appear to cast doubt on their research do look bad, but studies of global warming are solid.

    Yvo de Boer says the review process by some 2,500 scientists of climate change research is thorough and credible.

    He acknowledged the e-mails did serious damage by fueling skepticism among those who believe the science is manipulated to exaggerate global warming.

    He said the e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia indicating some data was not released to the public raised a serious issue that needs to be investigated.

    De Boer told The Associated Press Sunday on the eve of a 192-nation climate summit he was confident the conference will succeed.

12. Dakota Said,

    Scotland Yard join UEA climate probe inquiry
    SHAUN LOWTHORPE
    01 December 2009

    Police investigating the leaking of thousands of emails and data from climate change experts at the University of East Anglia are working with a team from Scotland Yard amid speculation that hackers also tried to break into a second climate institution in Canada.

    Extracts from emails sent by academics at the UEA’s climatic research unit (CRU) were posted on a Russian website more than a week ago including some which talked about deleting messages as part of a move to avoid releasing data under freedom of information (FOI) rules.

    The leaks sparked uproar and calls for CRU director Prof Phil Jones to quit, though the university is standing by the academic, who has also received personal threats since the storm broke.

    While expressing regret at the tone of some of the emails, academics insist that the science of man-made climate change is beyond dispute, and the leaked emails have been taken out of context.

    The scientific reputation of the CRU has come under further attack after the university admitted it no longer held the original raw data it used to calculate its predictions of rising temperatures, but only its modified version because of “data storage issues” in the 1980s, with critics questioning whether its science can be trusted. But the university insisted that no information has been lost and the raw data was still held by the meteorological services of the countries it originated from.

    Others fear the so-called ‘climategate’ scandal could damage the reputation of the UEA overall and, if unchecked, could hamper other research funding bids.

    Last night Norfolk police confirmed that the inquiry was being headed by Det Supt Julian Gregory and detectives were working with a team from the Metropolitan Police.

    Meanwhile it is believed that hackers unsuccessfully attempted to secure data from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma), a division of of the climate research branch of Environment Canada.

    An Environment Canada spokes-man would not go into details, but said: “We have no evidence that any attempts to hack into computers at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis have been successful. For security reasons, Environment Canada does not comment on threats against its infrastructure.”

    A Norfolk police spokesman said: “This matter is being investigated as a potential criminal offence. An inquiry team has been established under the leadership of Det Supt Julian Gregory and the investigation is being supported by relevant experts from other organisations.

    “We are currently investigating the exact nature of the alleged breach and the content of the data that may have been accessed. It would be inappropriate at this early stage to comment on the exact nature of the investigation or speculate publicly on the person or persons involved.”

    It is not clear if officers have established whether hackers based either in this country or abroad had got hold of the information, or whether it had been physically stolen from somebody at the university. Police have also not disclosed whether they have interviewed any UEA staff. But a second potential breach would seem to confirm the UEA’s view that the breach is the latest move in a “sustained and in some cases vexatious campaign” from those opposed to urgent action to tackle climate change in the run-up to this month’s climate summit in Copenhagen.

    A UEA spokeswoman also confirmed that the information was not available on a server that could be easily accessed and could not have been inadvertently released.

    The university has been bombarded by a large number of FOI requests included many seeking detailed information about computer codes used in putting together some of its climate change modelling. Requests to release information under the data protection act have also been received.

    Some academics fear the requests are part of a campaign by climate change sceptics to get them bogged down in protracted and detailed rows over the science and divert them from their research. But many of those seeking to get hold of the information insist they were doing so to test the validity of the science.

13. What Would Captain Planet Do? » Blog Archive » Someone read it in a 10-year old magazine. It’s science! Said,

    [...] climate change movement is currently beset by claims of false science, vis-a-vie Climategate, and this is the last thing climate change advocates need. However before we’re quick write [...]

14. prcrimm1 Said,

    You must be kidding! Why should I read articles by the conspirators so that I can be assured that they are not lying to me. Why don’t you read about Connolly and Wikipedia and the 5000+ articles he rewrote.

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