Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.
While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.
In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
[More]
Notes:
Now that the Washington Post has the story you just know that hacking is going to become big business in the days ahead. Suzuki may have a problem here.
Updates:
2:37 pm EST, November 22nd, 2009 — Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?
The real problem that I have with all these chicken little climate alarmists is that they are only advocating relatively minor solutions to what they claim is a really big problem.
I mean, if the polar caps are really melting and will flood all oceanside cities in the next few decades, wouldn’t it be wiser to prepare or relocate the cities than to use CFC lightbulbs and drive smaller cars?
Global warming is a fraud, the only thing the whole charade proved is that if you pump bags of cash into something you will get all sorts of people on board who are willing to trash their own reputations.
I am not wrong about Obama and his choir. Billions (if not trillions) in taxes from you and I are at stake. They are not going to convince you in the days ahead. They are going to steal your money and they don’t care what you think.
Video…and Harper should back off.
Will someone please stand up in Denmark and using this new data say that they will have nothing to do with this fraud and put a stop this bogus industry that will cost taxpayers billions for nothing.
Harper has made financial commitments, cap & trade, the Montreal Exchange is to be Canada’s carbon market center, CO2 sequestration in Alberta to make our oil sands “clean” ( really, to bury coal-fired power generation by ATCO and Transalta), but why quibble over words or semantics here – it’s all about the money. Yours.
Taxpayer’s money funding green industry subsidies and higher carbon taxes to tax you on your consumption and feed to our corporations to pay you for a job. Maybe. One big swilling of cash flow from one side of the country to the other. It won’t be any different than Dion’s idea last election. Green Shift. You’ve been sold out like Income Trust investors. Welcome to the Gulag!
Our elected officials need to dig their heads out on this one.
When the scientists who declared the “science is in” are openly talking about hiding and/or deleting their data rather than allowing it to be checked, there’s a problem… several problems, actually. As Jack suggests, they all need to be fired for their lack of integrity.
Interesting indeed. If this story develops legs and cannot be suppressed or minimized, then the pseud0-scientific smokescreen that the CRU helped to cloak the warmist carpetbaggers with will dissipate.
The only danger is that kind of money (billions of dollars in existing carbon trading schemes, etc.) does not go down without fighting; what will they latch onto next?
There was an excellent article in Der Spiegel (hardly a right-wing, climate change denying publication) recently. It appears as though some much-needed introspection is finally starting to creep into the global warming set. It is heartening to read prominent climatologists admit that A) Our models were/ are wrong, and therefore woefully flawed, and B) We WAY oversold the whole “Climate change is happening right now and it’s killing people!!!” idea.
They come right out and say that there has been no warming in the past ten years, and that every climatologist worth his salt knows that, even if most won’t admit it. If this article is any indication, it would appear the alarmists are finally starting – only starting – to lose their influence over the media.
Enjoy.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
Fred R:
Water! Watch for it, it will be the next enviro freakout.
There’s a possibility that Jack or someone else may have posted the Der Spiegel article already, and I just missed it. My apologies if that is the case.
I particularly love this comment:
“At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
(Italics my own.)
Broke the previous high set in 1939 yesterday here in ‘the Peg’. So what excuse do the environuts have for it being so warm 70 years ago? Or about the fact that this past June was the coldest since 1938, and the 2nd coldest since 1888. Or that since 1971, there have been four other periods with 7 consecutive months of below normal monthly temperatures in Winnipeg. Namely……Nov 73 to May 74, June 85 to Dec 85, May 93 to Nov 93, Nov 96 to May 97. There were also two periods with 8 consecutive months below normal Nov 78 to Jun 79 and Oct 95 to May 96. Gore, Suzuki……anyone? Will the LSM ever start to simply do their job?
“hacker“? – I started hacking analogue computers and my soldering iron and continued with digital computers. Jack, you mean a “cracker” who cracks passwords. But in this case the perpetrator is most likely a whistle-blower.
“stolen“? – The files were certainly copied, many times. But stolen, illegally? I don’t see it.
* If the whistle-blower was authorized to be inside the computer system, there was no break-in (cracking).
* This files are public information, gathered using public funds and employees. They should have been available with an FOI request; yes, even the emails. Not even the scientific journals that tried the FOI route could pry out the data; the ones that didn’t try are just publicists, not worth their subscription cost, and certainly not peer-review journals.
* It was decided earlier that this information is not copyright-able, or under DRM rules – a “temporarily available” file of facts on a FTP-server was earlier copied from Hadley. I may be wrong – the Attack Plan might be covered by the DRM rules.
* BUT … Judges in EU:England have already determined that actions like this, even if a break-in, are a belief, and are in the public good, and have been dismissed – even actions where property is actually destroyed.
Most scary is that when asked “Why?”, the whistle-blower replied “SOROS”.
Ah well, enjoy all of this while you can. Publicizing of government and scientific dirty laundry won’t be possible in a couple of years. If anyone wants to know my thoughts as to why, post a message and I’ll write it up. If Jack posts a message about today’s Kiddie-Porn vote in Parliament I’ll certainly post it there.