ClimateGate - Lord Monckton's summary

Lord Christopher Monckton has come out with a condensed summary [2] of some of the evidence in the ClimateGate papers.

Some highlights:

• 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”, 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.

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s 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.

• The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to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.

• They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

• They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.

• They 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. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.

• They 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.

• They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.

• They 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.

• They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.

• Contrary 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” was either honest or competent.

...

For decades, national scientific societies, professional groups, universities, and environmental pressure-groups funded by questionable sources had made common cause and uncommon profits by lining up to push the climate scare, without the slightest regard to whether it was true. Now their corruption, and their criminality, had been exposed.

Those who had long had reason to suspect the financial and political links and motives of those chiefly responsible for the climate scare were understandably angry at what this additional hard evidence revealed about the sheer scale, reach, and magnitude of the criminal conspiracy of the scientific and political establishment against the little guy whose taxes pay for their crimes.

...

Here are the steps that the Team took to thwart requests from Mr. McIntyre and other scientific researchers to be allowed access to their methods and data for purposes of verification.

1. Professor “Phil” Jones, the man chiefly responsible for the Climate Research Unit’s surface-temperature dataset, at first answered all queries about his computer codes and data by saying that he refused to release any information because those requesting it were only asking for it so that they could find out whether it was correct. Well, yes: that is how science works. It is not enough for a scientist merely to declare a result, and then to refuse to say how he obtained it.

2. Professor Jones’ sour, sullen, silly, scientifically-senseless refusal to make all of his data and codes immediately available when other scientists requested it had long aroused suspicion, particularly because his results had a direct bearing on the question of how fast the world is warming, a currently-fashionable political topic, and not least because we, the taxpayers, are writing the checks that fund him and his research.

3. When the Freedom of Information Act came into force in the UK, Professor Jones and other members of the Team began writing emails to each other about how they could prevent their codes and data from being made available.

4. Professor Jones’ first advice to fellow-members of the Team, recorded in one of the emails released by the whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, was that they should not let anyone know that there was a Freedom of Information Act in the UK.

5. Professor Jones subsequently wrote to members of the Team that he would destroy data rather than provide it to researchers who requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.

6. Professor Jones and his conspirators on the Team then contrived a remarkable number of pretexts for not disclosing data and computer programs to anyone who might request them under the Freedom of Information Act. The Team discussed –

   • Hiding (they repeatedly used the word) behind public-interest immunity;

   • Hiding behind the UK’s Data Protection Act, which does not prevent disclosure of data or research paid for by taxpayers;

   • Hiding behind advice from the office of the Information Commissioner, the UK official who enforces the Freedom of Information Act;

   • Hiding behind the fact that the UN’s climate panel is an international entity not subject to the UK freedom-of-information law,

   • Hiding behind reclassification of as much as possible of their work as UN work, so as to evade their obligation at law to disclose requested information; and

   • Hiding behind contracts between the Climate Research Unit and other national weather bureaux whose data it had received, on the bizarre pretext that weather data that was and is openly published worldwide might be held by some nations to be confidential.

7. Professor Jones, in another exchange of emails revealed by the whistleblower, discusses with the Team the fact – which the emails deplore – that some scientific journals not only have a policy of requiring all computer codes and data to be archived with the journal at the same time as a learned paper is submitted, but also actually go to the trouble of enforcing the policy. The implication was that submitting papers to such journals was best avoided, because it might lead to publication of the information the Team was, for some reason, so desperately anxious to conceal and to withhold.

8. Professor Jones then conspired with Freedom of Information Officers at the University of East Anglia to minimize the scope, categories, and quantity of information to be disclosed to those requesting it. A revealing email to members of the Team describes how Professor Jones had shown the University’s Freedom of Information Officers details of the website of one of those requesting information about how he had compiled his global-temperature dataset, and had persuaded them to agree that the person requesting the data ought not to be given anything if possible. Yet there is no provision in the Freedom of Information Act in the UK that allows any such arbitrary discrimination against people whom those who are bound to disclose information happen to fear or dislike.

9. Professor Jones, in another revelatory email, discloses how a Freedom of Information officer at the University of East Anglia had told him that he must not destroy any emails, except for the purpose of keeping email traffic manageable. These weasel words were, in effect, an open invitation to Jones to destroy as many emails as he liked, in the sure and certain knowledge that the Freedom of Information officer would cover for him, even though the capacity of the servers at the University was and is more than adequate to permit all of the Team’s emails to be permanently stored, tracked, and made available on request.

10. Numerous emails between Professor Jones and the Team establish that they were particularly anxious to conceal from other researchers the computer code they were using to fabricate their global-temperature record. The reason for this refusal is readily discernible from one of the document files also released by the whistleblower, a series of notes by a exasperated programmers trying to make sense of the numerous segments of apparently meaningless, erroneous, or incomprehensible computer code in the Team’s programs, and of many data files that were missing, incomplete, unlabeled, labeled as duplicates, duplicated, or based on incompatible units of measurement.

11. The methodology at the University of East Anglia – if the 15,000 lines of commentary by the programmers are right – is little better than simply making the numbers up. In short, there is a very good and obvious reason why Professor Jones wanted to conceal his computer code: any independent researcher examining it – particularly one as competent and diligent as Mr. McIntyre – would at once realize that it was entirely unfit for its purpose, and that the global instrumental temperature record of the past 150 years is little better than a work of fiction.

12. Finally – and here the evidence of criminality is incontrovertible – in 2008 Professor Jones wrote to several members of the Team inviting them to delete all emails relating to the Team’s participation in the preparation of the previous year’s Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel. He wrote this email some three weeks after the University of East Anglia had received a request under the Freedom of Information Act for precisely the information that he was recommending his fellow-members of the Team to emulate him in destroying.

You can download the entire report here. [2] There is no longer any excuse for the mainstream media pretending nothing has happened. The gaffe has been blown.

... all “global-warming” profiteers who are making money out of carbon-trading or “green investment” or UN climate boondoggles of whatever kind should be warned, and clearly warned, that now that the basis for their profitable activities is known to be hollow and fraudulent, they themselves will be indicted, prosecuted, and jailed for fraud, and their profits confiscated as the fruits of money-laundering, if in future they participate in any fostering or furthering or promoting of the lies, damned lies, and bogus statistics that have now shown the entire “global warming” theory to be nothing more than a scam.

Amen to that.