Climategate: the man-made global warming hoax

The release of leading climate scientists’ emails, suggestive of a conspiracy to manipulate global warming data, raised the temperature ahead of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit.

Philip Coppens

Dr. Phil Jones

Man-made global warming has now been exposed as a deliberate lie, constructed by some of the world’s leading scientists. When on 17 November 2009 a hacker broke into a computer used by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—where one of the world’s four global temperature datasets is held—and then released a 61-megabyte zip file containing 160 MB of climate change data on the Internet, the results put science, as practised in the 21st century, in the most shameful of lights. Indeed, controversial Australian journalist Andrew Bolt has labelled the hoax as “the greatest in modern science”. (1) It is.
British author, policy adviser and hereditary peer Christopher Monckton has gone so far as to label the scientists involved as snake-oil salesmen, profiteers and crooks—”crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and US taxpayers”. (2) Monckton reported the scientists to the UK Information Commissioner, with a request to investigate their offences and, if thought fit, prosecute.
The CRU, which was established in 1972 and cooperates with the UK Met Office Hadley Centre in providing global temperature information, has now been caught in purposely promoting a lie. Amongst the 1,079 emails and 3,000 documents hacked from the CRU’s computer, some coming from leading climate change scientists, one finds clear evidence of conspiracy, collusion and potentially illegal destruction of embarrassing information, as well as organised resistance to disclosure, admissions of flaws in their arguments and manipulation of data.
In one email dated 16 November 1999, the CRU’s director, Professor Phil Jones, wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” (3,4) The email is confirmation that the evidence was altered in favour of man-made climate change and global warming. When confronted with this statement, Jones denied manipulating the evidence and insisted his comment had been misunderstood. He said that he’d used the word “trick” as in “a clever thing to do”. Jones has since stepped aside from his position as director while an Independent Review into the allegations is conducted.
One of the other people involved in the scandal is Dr Kevin Trenberth, head the climate analysis section of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. One hundred and two of his emails were posted online. In one of the emails, dated 12 October 2009, Trenberth reportedly wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” (5)—a clear admission that a chief promoter of global warming actually had no real evidence to back up his claim. But when asked for comments, he actually asserted that the hacking had occurred so that sceptics could undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change! Pots and kettles...
The information leak from the CRU is not unique. Similar reports of unscientific methodologies practised by NASA have emerged in recent years. When global warming critic Stephen McIntyre found serious errors in the temperature data of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which undermined the conclusion that global warming was occurring, some global warming adherents were quick to point out that this error was nevertheless insignificant in the greater scheme of things. (6)
But the real consequences of this error were summarised by atmospheric physicist Professor Fred Singer: “A change in climate history data at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently occurred which dramatically alters the debate over global warming. Yet, this transpired with no official announcement from GISS head James Hansen, and went unreported until Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered it Wednesday, August 11, 2007.” (7)
Indeed, whereas man-made global warming proponents are quick to use every weather anomaly of climate change when confronted with criticism of unscientific methodology—if not outright scientific fraud— they are quick to claim they are the victims of a giant conspiracy.

Al Gore and the polar bears

The fact of the matter is that the global warming “consensus” has been a dangerous collusion between science, politics and the media in the spreading of a modern myth: that we are responsible for global warming. Though we might be, the reality is that science has been unable to prove so.

A photograph of two polar bears clinging to a melting iceberg has become one of the most enduring images in this campaign. It was used by former US Vice-President Al Gore during his Inconvenient Truth lectures to underline the peril in which the world already finds itself. Journalist Carole “C.J.” Williams reported (8) that the image was taken in August 2004, just off the coast of Alaska, by Amanda Byrd, then a marine biology graduate student. As Byrd is happy to point out, the bears were in no danger as they were so close to the coast (they can swim 100 miles). She wanted a photo more of the “windsculpted ice” than of the bears. But then the image was copied by another member of the crew and eventually passed on to Environment Canada. Then it was eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine—chiefly by Al Gore, who claimed: “Their habitat is melting … beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet”. (9) In truth, no polar bears were in distress during the shooting of that photograph.
It must be said that the situation is not at all as severe as Gore and company like to pretend it is. In 2007, it was reported that the polar ice-caps were melting. They were... but figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that a year later almost all the “lost” ice had come back. (10) Hence, ice levels which had shrunk from 13 million square kilometres in January 2007 to just four million in October 2007 were almost back to their original levels a few months later. In fact, figures for 2008 showed that there was nearly a third more ice on the Antarctic Ice Shelf than is usual for the time of year. (11) This was hardly reported.
Christopher Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, (12) claims that there is far more to Al Gore than meets the eye. He argues that through personal contacts with Gore and President Clinton, as well as wide support from the Green movement, the energy corporation Enron was set to exploit the global warming issue for tens of billions of dollars. According to Horner, a contributing factor in the collapse of Enron was the unwillingness of the United States to play this dangerous game. It may also come as a surprise to learn that Enron chief Ken Lay and the CEO of British Petroleum (BP), John Browne, had meetings in the White House in 1997 with Vice- President Gore and President Clinton. Their agenda was to ensure that the US agreed to the Kyoto Protocols. Yes, you have read that correctly. BP wanted the US to agree to the Kyoto Protocols. Why? Such a compliance with the Protocols would have imposed major costs upon the US energy industry and all of those who use energy—a very large hidden tax. Both Enron and BP would have made billions from this hidden tax that would have been extracted from the American people.
Al Gore might thus be seen by many as the one who revealed a truth that the Bush administration was trying to hide. Indeed, for a long time, the fact that Bush was unwilling to endorse and act upon global warming was seen as evidence that it had to be real! When it comes to climate change, Gore might be a far more evil villain than Bush!
American climatologist Dr Robert Durrenberger stated: “Al Gore has returned me into the battle, and forced me to research climatology again. Due to all of the disinformation that Gore and his army are spreading about climate change, I have decided that real climatologists have to help the public understand the nature of the problem.” (13)
So where does one find “real climatologists”?

Scientists critical of consensus

Al Gore

In medieval times, there was a “scientific consensus” that the Earth was flat. Today, there is a “scientific consensus” that global warming is real. But to achieve this consensus, there have been personal attacks, calls for defunding the sceptics, etc. It seems that such bullying tactics were required to keep up the pretence.
The bible of global warming consensus is the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report, which in 2007 stated that by 2100 global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1.1°C and 6.4°C, or 2°F and 11.5°F, compared to 1980–99 levels. Note the word “could”. It also claimed that in the next 20 years alone, the global climate would warm by around 0.2°C, or 0.4°F, per decade.
But Dr Fred Seitz noted in the Wall Street Journal (12 June 1996) that there were already serious problems with the UN IPCC’s Second Assessment Report: Climate Change 1995 (SAR). Seitz wrote: “This IPCC report, like all others, is held in such high regard largely because it has been peerreviewed. That is, it has been read, discussed, modified and approved by an international body of experts. These scientists have laid their reputations on the line. But this report is not what it appears to be—it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.” (14) A second, brief IPCC document, entitled “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), did not match what the hundreds of scientists had stated in the SAR. Seitz claimed that the SPM misrepresented what the scientists had said, without their knowledge or approval.
Professor Edward Wegman, who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the so-called “hockey stick” chart—one of the main graphs used by anthropogenic global warming adherents—identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peerreviewing each other’s literature. In short, it was a small cabal, helping to further themselves and like-minded colleagues.
Scientists sceptical of man-made global warming claim that numerous colleagues share their views but are afraid of speaking out in public about them. “Many of my colleagues that I have spoken to share this stance, and inform me about the impossibility of...publishing their scepticism in scientific or public media,” said Dr Nathan Paldor, an atmospheric scientist and a professor of dynamic meteorology and physical oceanography at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as the author of more than 70 scientific studies. (15)
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, shares his conviction and has argued that humans are not responsible for the warming of the Earth. “We’re brainwashing our children,” said Gray, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.” Gray does not deny the phenomenon, but instead argues that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures—related to the amount of salt in ocean water—is responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place. However, he said, that same cycle means a period of global cooling will begin soon and last for several years. “We’ll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was,” Gray said. “The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures.” He said that his beliefs have made him an outsider in popular science. “It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong,” he said. “But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.” (16)

The “hockey stick” graph debunked

Getting grants from governments, whether they be scientists or oil executives asking for them, is what the man-made global warming hoax is mostly about. The chief billboard for their cause is the “hockey stick” graph, which has been used by the IPCC to promote how global warming has rocketed. The graph, however, has also been subject to manipulation. This chart was included as fact in the UN IPCC’s Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001 (TAR) and has been shown widely since the report’s publication. The “hockey stick” term refers to the general shape of the chart of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years or so. The chart was produced by modifying temperature data and proxies, and was generated by a computer algorithm.
But a detailed analysis of the data and the algorithm by Steve McIntyre and environmental economist Dr Ross McKitrick demonstrated very improper and unscientific conduct in the graph’s creation. For example, the “hockey stick” chart does not show the well-known warmer times of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) about 1,000 years ago. This was a time when Vikings lived and farmed in Greenland for centuries. The chart also does not show the Little Ice Age, which extended from about 1350 to 1850 CE. The history of those times includes snow falling in Paris in July, ice festivals held on four feet of ice on the Thames River in London, people walking from Denmark to Sweden across the frozen Baltic, as well as people walking from Manhattan to New Jersey across the frozen New York Harbor.
What McIntyre and McKitrick found was that the algorithm could produce a “hockey stick”–shaped graph from a table of random numbers. No valid temperature data were necessary. And that seems nothing short of magic...proving that there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Equally, on 6 December 2006, geophysicist Dr David Deming of the University of Oklahoma gave some telling testimony to the US Senate. He testified that, around the time that a paper of his was published in Science in 1995, he received an email from a prominent climate change researcher, stating: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” (17)
The series of leaked memos from the CRU has now confirmed that the global warmists were aware of the absence of the Medieval Warm Period on the graph but deliberately kept it hidden—a most unscientific method.
It should therefore not come as a surprise that the likes of Dennis Avery, an environmental economist, and Professor Fred Singer have looked at the work of more than 500 scientists and concluded that it is very doubtful that man-made global warming exists. They also say that temperature increase can actually be a good thing as, in the past, sudden cool periods have killed twice as many people as have warm spells.

Global warming sceptics petition

When it comes to global warming and climate change, it is apparent that white is black and black seems to be white. In 1998, Dr Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, posted his first global warming sceptics petition on the Institute’s website (www.oism.org). It eventually attracted the signatures of more than 17,000 Americans with science degrees. Widely known as the Oregon Petition, it became a counterweight for the “all scientists agree” mantra of the man-made climate change crowd.
In late 2007, Robinson mailed a new copy of the petition to the original signatories, asking them to recruit additional qualified scientists. Now his list includes around 31,500 man-made warming sceptics with science qualifications. More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 31,500 sceptics happens to be more than 12 times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the IPCC to form a scientific consensus.
In May 2008, Robinson held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, followed by a luncheon on Capitol Hill, to which members of Congress and their aides were invited. Unsurprisingly, it was not well attended. Though the truth might not be popular, Robinson’s petition states a truth: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” (18) Full stop. No convincing scientific evidence.
The Oregon chemist warns that “no other major scientific problem has ever been tackled the way the UN has approached global warming”. (19) The UN hosted a big meeting of scientists, Robinson said, and then a small group of “authors” summarised the discussions into a global action plan. But, he added, the UN has never produced any evidence that humans are warming our climate. The UN panel says that CO2 became the culprit “by the process of elimination”, he noted—but such a process is neither scientific nor admissible in a court of law.

The “cap and trade” game

Dr. James Hansen

When one looks at the evidence used by man-made global warming promoters, it is a fact that the evidence for no global warming is equally present. One example cited in favour of global warming is a well-publicised World Wildlife Fund report of 14 March 2005, claiming that “Himalayan glaciers are among the fastest retreating glaciers globally due to the effects of global warming”. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported that “[g]laciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who have recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame”.
Reuters news agency reported on 6 November 2001 that “Africa’s highest mountain might lose its all-year ice cap and snow by 2015 due to climate changes, threatening to worsen an already tight water supply, the environment group Greenpeace said”. Yet an article in the 23 November 2003 issue of Nature stated that “[a]lthough it’s tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit”.
Recently there have been warnings portending disaster because global warming caused by man threatens to melt much of the ice covering Greenland. But researchers reported in July 2007 that Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests. (20) Who was to blame for that warming trend? It was writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, (21) but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large.
The sad fact of the matter is that the problem of our climate has been reduced to a debate about man-made carbon dioxide emissions, and this has been reduced to a “cap and trade” system in which the problem is not seriously addressed, but politicians have come up with a means of taxing heavy polluters—often underdeveloped countries, whose infrastructure relies on old machinery and which, hence, is polluting.
Even one of the main promoters of the man-made global warming line, Dr James Hansen—a man involved in “Climategate”—is aghast to see the issue reduced to a “cap and trade” system, noting ahead of the December 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change: “They are selling indulgences there. The developed nations want to continue basically business as usual so they are expected to purchase indulgences to give some small amount of money to developing countries. They do that in the form of offsets and adaptation funds.” (22)
The Copenhagen summit was there so that the politicians could use these “facts” and announce a new form of economy based on man-made global warming, namely “cap and trade”. Alas, the fallacy of the science upon which this new form of economy is meant to be based was shot from under their feet because of “Climategate”. It meant that the international politicians left the Danish capital without being able to announce their favourite new toy to the world. The question is: how long will it continue to be played on the field of international politics? Will it be relaunched, or simply abandoned to make way for a new toy?

Endnotes

1. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
2. http://evergreenmagazine.com/web/Senator_to_demand_probe_of_global_warming_fraud_.html
3. http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails. php?eid=154&filename=942777075.txt
4. “Mike” is climatologist Professor Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, who came up with the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph; the “Nature trick” refers to a paper by Mann et al., published in the 23 April 1998 edition of the journal Nature, that got around a problem with how temperature data are usually displayed; “Keith” is dendroclimatologist Professor Keith Briffa, deputy director of the CRU and lead author of a key paper on tree-ring data in the 12 February 1998 edition of Nature.
5. http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt
6. http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/aug07/article. html?id=WebExtra081607_2.html
7. http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story. aspx?c34061bf-3155-41ea-a90d-42b45e1e55f0
8. http://www.newswithviews.com/Williams/ carole7.htm
9. http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story. html?id=5961259b-de08-4532-850b-09d4753bed39
10. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/science/ earth/02arct.html
11. http://drknow.newsvine.com/_news/2008/02/25/ 1325262-arctic-ice-all-back-antarctic-has-one-thirdmore- january-coldest-in-100-years
12. Horner, Christopher, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, DC, 2007
13. http://hatch.senate.gov/public/_files/ UNClimateScientistsSpeakOut.pdf
14. http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/ipcccont/ Item05.htm
15. http://www.javno.com/en-world/mankind-notresponsible- for-global-warming_108866
16. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003946751_nobelgray13.html
17. http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements. cfm?id=266543
18. http://www.oism.org/pproject/
19. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/ article/3214
20. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/ 2007/07/070705153019.htm
21. http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speechenvironmentalismaseligion.html
22. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/ environment/article6941974.ece

This article appeared in Nexus Magazine 17.2 (February-March 2010).