Climategate – It’s worse than we thought

Al Gore: "It's worse than we thought." For once, he's right.

There’s plenty of information on the Internet regarding the bad behavior of climate scientists with the leak of emails and data from Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, and “The Team” who claim to be helping save the world from the climate crisis. Notice I say “leak”, not “hack”, because this was most likely an inside job. 

This apparently has come about due to requests for the release of data and code related to temperature measurements and climate models.  Some of these requests were submitted as Freedom of Information Act inquiries.  I’ve previously written about the need to release code and data here and here.

So far the scientists seem more like cunning politicians and PR hacks than scientists. Take a look at the discussion on some the favorite alarmist sites:

• Andrew Revkin of NYT
• Gavin Schmidt of the Real Climate blog 
• George Monbiot’s blog

Viewpoint from the realists:

• Anthony Watts’ blog:  Watts Up With That blog
• Steven McIntyre’s blog:  Climate Audit and mirror site (due to traffic issues)
• Jeff Id’s blog:  The Air Vent

Some stories are finally showing up in the mainstream media, but they are still largely absent from reporting on this important issue (ABC, NBC, CNN, etc):

• Christopher Booker in the Guardian UK: Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation
• Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun of Australia: The warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones and New Zealand’s man-made warming
• Wall Street Journal: Lawmakers Probe Climate Emails, Rigging a Climate ‘Consensus’, and Cap and Trade is Dead

It seems the “denialists”, as the climate scientists like to call them, were right all along.  The scientists are using the defense that the emails are being taken out of context. Read the emails for yourself here, here, or here and make your own decision. 

From what I’ve read of the emails and what I’ve seen of the code and documentation (I’m a former software developer), it appears the evidence is overwhelming.  The data is either lost (as CRU recently claimed) or so corrupt it is useless. But don’t take my word for it. Do your own research and draw your own conclusions. 

Here’s a summary of the main issues as I see them:

1. Top climate scientists were suppressing dissenting papers in the scientific journals.  It appears there was/is a major effort to keep papers with other viewpoints out of the journals. The alarmists want the “denialists” to submit to peer review journals, but they were doing their very best to make sure no opposing viewpoints were represented.  Sound fair?
2. Massaging/manipulating data to meet the hypothesis.  Confirmation bias is extremely evident in some of the emails, code, and documentation.  It appears there were efforts to make the data fit the hypothesis. This is the climate record that we’re basing potentially trillions of dollars of legislation on, and it is useless.  We don’t have a temperature record.
3. Withholding data from the climate realists.  If Steve McIntyre and others are so incompetent as the climate scientists claim, why don’t they let them just hang themselves by giving them the data and code? Now we know why.
4. Conspiracy to withhold information from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)  request.  An obvious violation of at least the spirit of such laws.  
5. Deleting data and emails to prevent detection. Unethical at best, and possibly a violation of FOIA.
6. Bad behavior by scientists.  This is a non-issue. Who cares? Name calling and politics are always involved in any big issues. Don’t let this detract from the real issues.  The science is what counts.

I’ll post more as I have time and will link to the best discussions of the issues.