Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the
Climategate scandal
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley November 30, 2009
THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH
The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern
tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could
scarcely have timed it better.
In less than three weeks, the world's governing class Ð its classe
politique Ð would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to
inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast
and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to
tax and regulate the world's wealthier nations for its own enrichment:
in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end
worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is
now known to be the non-problem of man-made 'global warming'ÿ.
The unnamed hero of 'ùClimategate', after months of work gathering
emails, computer code, and data, quietly sent a 61-megabyte compressed
file from one of the university'ús servers to an obscure public
message-board on the internet, with a short covering note to the effect
that the climate was too important to keep the material secret, and
that the data from the University would be available for a short time
only.
He had caught the world's politico-scientific establishment
green-handed. Yet his first attempts to reveal the highly-profitable
fraud and systematic corruption at the very heart of the UN'ús climate
panel and among the scientists most prominent in influencing it's
prejudiced and absurdly doom-laden reports had failed. He had made the
mistake of sending the data-file to the mainstream news media, which
had also profited for decades by fostering the 'þglobal warming' scare,
and by generally denying anyone who disagreed with the official
viewpoint any platform.
The whistleblower's data file revealed, for the first time, the
innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate
scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that
has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an
unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible.
REVEALED: THE ABJECT CORRUPTION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE
The gallant whistleblower now faces a police investigation at the
instigation of the University authorities desperate to look after their
own and to divert allegations of criminality elsewhere. His crime? He
had revealed what many had long suspected: A tiny clique of
politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they
were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering
and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today's
climate. The 'Team'ÿ, as they called themselves, were bending and
distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line
profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these
days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
ðThe Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of
at least $20 million in 'þresearch'ÿ grants from the Team's activities.
ðThe Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the
UN'ús climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific
results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel's
conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
ðThe Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not
peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not
fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked
wanted the UN's climate panel to report.
ðThey had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies
and errors.
ðThey had emailed one another about using a 'trick'ÿÿ for the sake of
concealing a 'þdecline'ÿ in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
ðThey had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their
predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any
statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for
nine years.
statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that
'global warming'ÿ science is settled.
ðThey had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning
on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to
review their papers.
ðThey had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject
papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
ðThey had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal's editor,
solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt
science for political purposes.
ðThey had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and
denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had
expensively created.
ðContrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had
committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to
destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by
an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their
'research'ÿ was either honest or competent.
THE NATURE 'ùTRICK'ú TO 'ùHIDE THE DECLINE'ú IN TEMPERATURES
Among the most revealing of the emails released to the world by the
whistleblower was one dated November 1999. In that email, Professor
'Phil'ÿ Jones of the CRU wrote to Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and
Malcolm Hughes, the authors of the infamous 'hockey stick' graph that
falsely abolished the medieval warm period:
Almost immediately after the news of Climategate broke, Professor Jones
told Investigative Magazine's TGIF Edition that he 'had no idea'ÿ what
he might have meant by the words 'hide the decline'ÿ. He said:
'They'úre talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered Ð but
they're talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand
years, and it's just about how you add on the last few years, because
when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice
cores, and they don't always have the last few years. So one way
is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.'ÿ
A few hours later, the science hate-crime website created by the Team
cobbled together a jumbled, snivelingly self-serving, and entirely
different pretext:
'The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature
paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction [the
'ùhockey-stick'úgraph of pre-instrumental temperatures over the past
1000 years in the Northern Hemisphere], and the 'ùtrick'ú 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'ÿ to refer to 'a good way to deal with a problem', rather
than something that is 'þsecret'ÿ, and so there is nothing problematic
in this at all. As for the 'ùdecline'ú, it is well known that Keith
Briffa's [another prominent member of the Team] maximum latewood tree
ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960
(this is more commonly known as the 'divergence problem'ÿ 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 'ùhiding'ú is
probably a poor choice of words (since it is 'ùhidden'ú in plain
sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is
further research to understand why this happens.'ÿ
Enter Steve McIntyre, the one who had first realized that the UN's
climate panel in 2001 had used a corrupt graph that had falsely
abolished the medieval warm period with the aim of pretending that
today's global temperatures are unprecedented in at least 1000 years.
Later that day his website, www.climateaudit.org revealed the truth
about the conspirators'ú 'trick'ÿ.
In order to smooth a data series over a given time period, one must pad
it with artificial data beyond the endpoint of the real series.
However, when Mann, Bradley, and Hughes plotted instrumental data
against their reconstructions based on the varying widths of tree-rings
from ancient trees, their favourite form of proxy or pre-instrumental
reconstructed temperature, no smoothing method could conceal the fact
that after 1960 the tree-ring data series trended downward, while the
instrumental series trended upward. This was the Team's 'divergence'ÿ:
'So Mann's solution ['ùMike's Nature trick'ú] was to use the
instrumental record for padding [both the proxy and the instrumental
data series], which changes the smoothed series to point upwards.'ÿ
Accordingly, though the author of the original email had said that the
'trick'ÿwas to add instrumental measurements for years beyond available
proxy data, his conspirators at the science-hate website admitted it
was actually a replacement of proxy data owing to a known but
unexplained post-1960 'divergence'ÿ between the proxy data and
the instrumental data. In fact, it was a fabrication.
The next day, in a statement issued by the University of East Anglia's
press office, Professor Jones fumblingly tried to recover the position:
'The word 'ùtrick'úwas used here colloquially as in a clever thing to
do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.'ÿ
As we shall see, Professor Jones was not telling the truth.
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