Climate Change Research "Scandal" Breaks

The internet is on fire this morning with revelations that a major British climate research centre has been hacked, and thousands of confidential emails have spilled into the public domain.

Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition was the first news publication in the world to confirm the hacking was genuine, and get comment from the director of the CRU centre in the UK, Dr Phil Jones – a man whose emails feature highly in the stash.

Following up on that, major news organizations like the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others  have picked up and elaborated on the TGIF story.

The gist of the leaked emails is that they disclosed IPCC scientists discussed manipulating scientific data to minimize evidence that did not fit the official global warming position of the UN IPCC.

Despite repeatedly claiming to the media that no peer-reviewed studies exist that challenge global warming, and that skeptics can’t get published in peer reviewed journals because their work is not good enough, the emails disclose IPCC scientists have actually been colluding behind the scenes to lobby journals not to publish articles by skeptical scientists.

In one case, they even discussed blacklisting and boycotting one climate journal if it ever dared to publish a peer reviewed paper from a skeptical scientist again.

New Zealand scientist Chris de Freitas was singled out for some of the venom in these attacks.

“The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

Cheers

Phil”

And this:

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

As the BBC’s Roger Harrabin reported a short time ago, CRU is not denying the veracity of the emails, but insisting they have been misinterpreted.

The Telegraph, however, takes issue with that generous description:

>When you read some of those files — including 1079 emails and 72 documents — you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science.” [...]

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because — though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room — he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

You can find a copy of the TGIF article at http://www.tgifedition.com

ends

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