Like an Aristophanes satire, like Hamlet, it opens with two slaves, spear-carriers, little people.
Footsoldiers of history, two researchers in a corrupt and impoverished mid-90s Russia schlep
through the tundra to take core samples from trees at the behest of the bigger fish in far-off
East Anglia. Stepan and Rashit don't even have their own e-mail address and like
characters in some absurdist comedy must pass jointly under the name of
Tatiana M. Dedkova. Conscientious and obliging, they strike a human note
all through this drama. Their talk is of mundane material concerns, the
smallness of funds, the expense of helicopters, the scramble for grants.
They are the ones who get their hands dirty, and their vicissitudes periodically revived
my interest during the slower stretches of the tale, those otherwise devoted to abstruse details of
committee work and other longueurs. 'We also collected many wood samples
from living and dead larches of various ages. But we were bited by many
thousands of mosquitos especially small ones.' They are perhaps the only
likeable characters on the establishment side, apart from the exasperated
and appalled IT man Harry in the separate 'Harry_read_me' document, and
I cheered up whenever they appeared. 'Slaves' is horseshit, and
'footsoldiers' insulting, but if scientists are allowed to put a
creative spin on facts, I can certainly do so. They are respected scientists: in fact, it emerges, eminent or destined to be eminent. But they talk funny and are at the beck and call of CRU, are financially dependent on them; when the film is made they will be comedy relief, played by Alexei Sayle and the dopey one out of The Fast Show.
In the early parts of the story those who are to become the bigger players are not much better off, though. The mails start in 1996 when they have not yet attained world fame and the ear of statesmen, and often do not know where their next grant is coming from. There are moments of poignance:
The first disquieting note, the first thing that causes the novice to this to frown with unease or
hang his mouth open with alarm, and the experienced skeptic to laugh bitterly, comes ten
mails in, text
document 0842992948. Two scientists - one cajoling the other to try to wring more from his data than the latter thinks it warrants, to try to turn some mildly interesting samples into a reconstruction of past climate - share a joke about a third who appears to have been notoriously fastidious about jumping to conclusions: 'Are you not being (in the time honoured Don Graybill fashion) too demanding of the response function results when you say deriving a transfer function is not justified? We all strive for perfection but does it exist? Seriously, it would be easier as regards publication policy to get the Editor to accept a reconstruction...'
Keith Briffa to one Gary Funkhouser. Funkhouser laughs but declines the suggestion:
'I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian).'
Silly old finicky Graybill died some years ago. I had to do an internet search for this Gary Funkhouser who - sheepishly, laughing at himself - manages to resist temptation: unlike Briffa he has not become a household name in climate science.
A while later, Briffa is being interviewed by New Scientist [0845217169]: a draft of the article is copied into an e-mail to him from the reporter. It details efforts to isolate man's fingerprint on weather patterns: at this point problems with the theory, the models and the raw data can still be admitted to outsiders. It is still 1996 and the existence of a Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age may be acknowledged. There is frank, excited talk of how the problems might be resolved. Keith's on a high: he may be the man to do it. 'The modellers are queuing at Briffa's door to find out what his tree-ring data shows about the real world beyond the computer simulations.'
Even knowing how the story ends, I found their enthusiasm infectious. A glimpse of men doing what they were born to do is always vicariously exhilarating, the spectacle of humans applying their intelligence uplifting.
But already the fatal flaw is evident. One of the more cautious scientists, one who has actually fought with the IPCC to keep caveats as to the uncertainty of models within their reports, one who does not underestimate natural variability, has set up a group to examine patterns of forcings on the climate. He says, 'What we hope is that the current patterns of temperature change prove distinctive, quite different from the patterns of natural variability in the past.'
I think they are not supposed to 'hope' things in that way. There is a human tendency to magnify the evidence that proves the things we hope to find and diminish that which does not, and scientists of all people are supposed to guard rigorously against this. They are a forensic team looking to bring a murder home to a pre-determined suspect. Without even being sure there is a body.
The journalist says: 'For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.' I don't think I need point out how that sentence should have sounded alarm bells.
*
Now it's June 1997 and one of the CRU scientists, Mike Hulme, who will go on to espouse the theory of 'post-normal science', is putting his name to a letter to The Times, drafted on his behalf by Greenpeace, 'to remind your readers of the seriousness of the potential threat caused by our continued use of fossil fuels ... There is no doubt the need for precautionary, preventative action is urgent.' [0872202064]
Kyoto is coming up. Hulme receives a World Wildlife Fund circular expressing outrage that the Japanese want only a 5% reduction in 'greenhouse gas' emissions. 'It would also be very useful if progressive business groups would express their horror at the new economic opportunities which will be foregone if Kyoto is a flop.'
I had a big laugh-out-loud at another mail to Hulme shortly after that. One Joseph Alcamo weighs in on a pre-Kyoto Statement (his capital) they are trying to put together:
He's right, of course. The media isn't going to check. The media wouldn't care if it was 2000 lab rats.
There are still scientists who care though. Shortly after [0880476729] Tom Wigley bollocks them for this lobbying:
November 97. 0878654527. Keith is excited about what he thinks he's found in his tree samples but admits: 'We now need to make some horrible simplistic assumptions about absolute carbon ... Without these implications we will have difficulty convincing Nature that this work is mega important.'
There are the demands of science; there are the demands of careerism; there are the demands of propaganda. Their downfall will be in the conflict between the latter two and the first.
On a bit. July 1999. 0933255789. The WWF in Australia wants Hulme to add more scariness to a risk assessment paper. 'In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.' He is told that warnings of drought and tropical storms are what the audience demands there.
At this point I did a big skip forward to 2003. En route I passed over the already famous 0942777075, in November 99, in which Phil Jones says, '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.'
Here is the explanation of what that trick was and why it matters.
2003
By 2003 the gang are on top of the world. Michael Mann's famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction has appeared to be the irrefutable Sign, Oh Lord, of mankind's guilt which they have hoped to find with such Biblical fervour. Predictions of effects of warming have become increasingly hysterical. Governments are alarmed and the grants are bountiful.
Privately they will still admit to problems, uncertainties, how much they don't know; they will even gently or not so gently query the reliability or value of each other's work, sometimes appear to have difficulties reproducing it for themselves; and sometimes say bluntly it is worthless. But they adopt a stern policy of pas devant les domestiques and to the media present a united front of complete confidence and mutual esteem.
They are still curious and inquiring, try to resolve the problems; but it genuinely never seems to occur to them that the answers may lie outside the theory of man-made greenhouse warming, or that they may not be problems at all without it. Every apparent contradiction must be fitted into that paradigm with crowbar or blowtorch.
More, it never occurs to them that anyone else could question the theory in good faith. Any scientist who raises doubts is automatically dismissed, and slandered, as having been paid to do so by big oil.
This is ironic when in fact... well, see for example 0962818260, 0973374325, 0968367517, 0968691929, 0947541692, or the separate Shell_Memo document, for illustrations of how CRU themselves are only too eager to accept oil money. Or the article quoted at the bottom of 0965750123, for an indication of how many years ago (1997) the oil companies started to jump on board the AGW bandwagon.
Those beyond the circle of Anthropogenic Global Warming believers who doubt the miraculous Sign must be cast into the outer darkness. The policy the gang have evolved is to insist all skeptics must point out problems with their work in peer-reviewed journals or not be taken seriously. They then do their utmost to deny them access to these journals by means of unfavourable peer reviews; when this fails, they will start to boycott these journals and lobby for the editors to be removed, and deny that they are peer-reviewed literature at all.
They call the skeptics 'Contrarians', the phrase 'Deniers' not having come into use yet, and say they have a right-wing agenda as well as taking the oil money which they would rather have themselves. Any editor or publisher who allows the Contrarians' research to be aired is suspect too. Anyone who casts doubt on the theory of man-made global warming is, circularly, disparaged as being a known doubter of the theory of man-made global warming.
In mail 1057944829 in July 2003, Chris de Freitas, an editor at Climate Research, a journal which has lately published two major papers by skeptics, entertainingly asks them where they get off with regard to this: 'I have spent a considerable amount of my time on this matter and had my integrity attacked in the process. I want to emphasize that the people leading this attack are hardly impartial observers. Mike himself refers to "politics" and political incitement involved. Both Hulme and Goodess are from the Climate Research Unit of UEA that is not particularly well known for impartial views on the climate change debate. The CRU has a large stake in climate change research funding as I understand it pays the salaries of most of its staff. ... Mike Hulme refers to the number of papers I have processed for CR that "have been authored by scientists who are well known for their opposition to the notion that humans are significantly altering global climate." How many can he say he has processed? I suspect the answer is nil. Does this mean he is biased towards scientists who are well known for their support for the notion that humans are significantly altering global climate?'
They write to Otto Kinne, publisher of Climate Research, to bitch about De Freitas, but Kinne backs him up. They decide Kinne, too, must have an agenda. [1057941657] Says Michael Mann:
'It seems to me that this "Kinne" character's words are disingenuous, and he probably supports what De Freitas is trying to do. It seems clear we have to go above him. I think that the community should, as Mike H has previously suggested in this eventuality, terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels--reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute.'
Cautious Tom Wigley puts in: 'I agree that Kinne seems like he could be a deFreitas clone. However, what would be our legal position if we were to openly and extensively tell people to avoid the journal?'
By the way 'this "Kinne" character', according to a net search, would be Professor Otto Kinne, 'one of the great marine biologists of our time ... editor and major author of the world famous treatises Marine Ecology ... founded the International Ecology Institute ... In 1998, anxious about harmful tendencies in the anthropogenic degradation of the environment, Kinne founded the Eco-Ethics International Union' and etcetera and etcetera, respected academic heavyweight and fish-hugging conservationist.
In the same month, mail 1059664704, Tim Osborn has queries about Mann's models. 'I now understand how you compute them in theory ... how do you compute them in practise?' Mann is helpful, within limits, and provides some of the calibrations he used. 'I can't find the one for the network back to 1820! ... You only want to look at the first column (year) and second column (residual) of the files. I can't even remember what the other columns are!' He adds:
I know I probably don't need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I'm providing these for your own personal use, since you're a trusted colleague. So please don't pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of "dirty laundry" one doesn't want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things.
1061625894
A paper by Mann and CRU's Phil Jones in GRL [Geophysical Research Letters, the
journal of the American Geophysical Union] is attacked. They sneer at their
opponents but are forced to admit they identify at least one pertinent problem.
Their reconstructions from tree proxies have not factored for increased CO2 as well as warming driving tree growth. 'While I am confident that you are correct, and that this is not a crucial factor, I think one should be careful about denying its existence,' says Wigley. Mann concedes, 'In retrospect, Phil and I should have included this analysis in the GRL article, but its always hard to know what specifics the contrarians are going to target in their attacks.' And of course one must never under any circumstances admit to uncertainties needlessly.
Another problem their opponents have pointed out is that: 'The globe only becomes warmer in the 20th century when its measured temperatures are substituted for its reconstructed temperatures. This approach is clearly unacceptable; it is like comparing apples and oranges.'
Now here's fun. Here is a proverbial cordite-smelling revolver. Here is something interesting Jeremy Paxman apparently didn't find. 1062592331. Edward Cook of Columbia to Keith Briffa, proposing some kind of multi-author meta-study of uncertainties with and differences between the key temperature reconstructions. Describes the latest Mann and Jones one as 'a mess'. Suggests they be excluded: 'I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in - Bradley hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they can contribute without just defending their past work - this is the key to having anyone involved. Be honest.'
Says they should 'Publish, retire, and don't leave a forwarding address.' Because,
Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).
My bold, obviously, and I think it's worth it; in fact when we the people rise up it ought to be tattooed on every one of these two-faced bastards' foreheads, and that of every journalist who has betrayed his profession and got down on his knees and serviced them.
He continues: 'I think this is exactly the kind of study that needs to be done before the next IPCC assessment. But to give it credibility, it has to have a reasonably broad spectrum of authors to avoid looking like a biased attack paper, i.e. like Soon and Balliunas.' [There's the problem: those from outside the gang who point out flaws and problems in the science are dismissed as biased, bought, oil-industry shills and professional contrarians. Those inside the gang ... daren't point them out, for fear of being excluded from the gang and/or missing out on the global-panic funding.] If you don't want to do it, just say so and I will drop the whole idea like a hot potato. I honestly don't want to do it without your participation.'
In the next, 1062618881, Tim Osborn has picked this idea up, sort of; actually as far as I can see he has hijacked it to his own ends. He seems to regard it not so much as an exercise in frank cards-on-the-table as an opportunity to defend their position and rebut the skeptical Soon and Balliunas paper published in Climate Research. Copied are a number of mails about the latter. Phil Jones has said: '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.' (In fact they end up ordering all their friends to resign from the board.) They're discussing a multi-author response: 'NOT', says Phil Jones, 'the scholarly review a la Jean Grove (bless her soul) that just reviews but doesn't come to anything firm. We want a critical review that enables agendas to be set.' Wants to 'address the misconceptions by finally coming up with definitive dates for the LIA [Little Ice Age] and MWP [Medieval Warm Period] and redefining what we think the terms really mean?'
(Who Jean Grove, bless her soul? Another stodgy old Graybill? Damn her fusty scholarliness. Damn her and her tweed and her twinsets and her apologetic little cough and her dryly ironic 'In point of fact'. What modern science needs is men with fire in their belly, go-getters, agenda-setters, two-fisted, big-balled, lectern-hammering loudmouths.)
(In a mail from 1999, 925823304, I came across discussions to do with an invitation to bid for a research project of which it was apparently a precondition that an "internationally renowned and charismatic scientist" head up the team. No. No. Why? God save us from us charismatic rainmakers in any field but especially science.)
(I looked her up. Jean Grove, bless her soul, used to crawl around glaciers and up Alps carrying her children on her back. She published a classic book on the Little Ice Age in 1988 which, with a worldwide scope, drawing on strenuous and dangerous personal ice-face research and neglected archives of contemporary accounts, some written in Norse and Catalan, 'showed that natural climate fluctuations in history were in fact very large, with a distinct medieval warm period from about 950 to 1250; her research served to counterbalance the view that large changes in climate, such as those currently being experienced, are artificially caused.' Phil is probably wise to NOT want a scholarly review a la Jean Grove, then.)
The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age which followed it are to be central battlegrounds. If they existed, and the overwhelming evidence - historical, literary, and scientific - is that they did, then the warming of recent years (up until 1998) was nothing to do with man. Michael Mann's famous, erroneous hockey-stick graph attempted to do away with them; when that is at length shown to be false, others will take its place, and they will die a death of a thousand fudges and 'redefinitions' in the IPCC reports. Eventually the plan is to claim that, due to the incomplete picture of the temperature of the past, the MWP and LIA cannot be shown to have happened all over the world in the same period. Or just to fiddle the data to do away with them.
2nd October 2003. 1065125462. The Science Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph dares question the Mann-Jones paper in Geophysical Research Letters on "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia":
I'd be very interested to include your rebuttals to these arguments in the piece I'm doing. I must admit to being confused by why proxy data should be compared to instrumental data for the last part of the data-set. Shouldn't the comparison be a consistent one throughout?
With many thanks for your patience with this
'Their main point is that their counter information hangs together into a logically coherent picture.
Models: no real finger print that distinguishes AGHG forcings from others! Models using AGHG forcings predict warming is function of latitude yet the Arctic is hardly warming (north of ~^65°N), and high latitude Antarctic (excepting for the peninsula) is actually cooling slightly. ...
Models predict that any surface warming will be seen in the troposphere. Since UAH satellite reduction shows no such warming--1. models are wrong and/or no warming at surface just lousy observations. 2. If no warming at surface in last 30 years AGHG forcing predictions by models is incorrect probably due to poor cloud/water vapor modeling ...
[And on and on, several other cogent points]
... Soooo, it still ain't all that easy to convince an audience ... AND keep in mind that increased CO2 is good for us--more agriculture, etc. Nope it just ain't that easy. So any information--graphics, etc on these issues will be greatly appreciated.'
Tom Crowley snaps:
'For goodness sakes, I don't know where to start ... enough, this is like trying to convert someone with one religion to another.' Indeed.
Someone called Richard (Somerville, I think) has tried to be more helpful to poor Chick in his work trying to proselytize among the heathens, but isn't really - in fact is downright demoralizing as far as I can see, telling him he won't really get anywhere by trying to make sense of the facts:
Do you, if you are someone coming new to this, understand the implications of that? Do you see the point they have reached? No matter what is disproved on the data, the theory goes rolling majestically on - because we say so. It simply cannot be refuted or disproved.
This is a recurring and appalling leitmotif: the data doesn't matter. (See also the words of a British Met Office man down below, and... etcetera and etcetera.)
I certainly don't think the issue of whether anthropogenic influences are a serious concern should be settled by looking at any single data set.
It cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set.
I know unicorns exist because
A) We find hoofprints.
B) I found a horn. You can't see it, unfortunately, I threw it out by mistake, but trust me.
C) Only virgins can see them, so the dearth of reliable sightings fits perfectly when you factor in youth promiscuity.
Terrible sacrifices must be enacted to the unicorns or they will kill us all with their magic powers. Which can do anything.
You can't attack me on A because I still have B and C, and you can't attack me on B because I still have A and blah blah blah. If you try to you are wicked and are putting the world in jeopardy. You must have been bribed and are callously irresponsible about the risk of the unicorns wiping us out.
If anyone questions this, don't get bogged down in facts, just refer them to the recent definitive pronouncement by the Unicorn-Hunters' Federation.
There's more: he believes that the many things they don't know, the fact that they can prove so little, actually strengthen their case.
'I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific uncertainties work both ways.' Like a proud boast, like a stirring declaration of principles, like a political leader setting out his stall at a conference in a rousing peroration, he declares: 'We don't understand cloud feedbacks. We don't understand air-sea interactions. We don't understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long.' Then: 'It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback.'
Might. Might. Just as likely. Might.
It cannot be refuted or disproved by...
Time and again one wants to yell: listen to yourselves. Listen to yourselves, and try to remember the scientific principles you were presumably taught in college, and look at what's become of you.
Plaintively Richard (Somerville?) goes on to muse, 'I have often wondered how our medical colleagues manage to escape the trap of having their entire science dismissed because there are uncured diseases and other remaining uncertainties. Maybe we can learn from the physicians.'
What? What? What? I don't know where to begin. How is that remotely comparable? Maybe the physicians can learn from you. 'The patient is getting better, his temperature has dropped.' 'Nonsense. Don't believe it. According to my models he should be close to death. Really I cannot explain what is going on but unless he gives me huge amounts of money and avoids car and plane travel for the foreseeable future the consequences will be fatal.'
Richard winds up by saying, 'People on airplanes, when they find out what I do for a living, usually ask me if I "believe in" global warming.'
I bet they bloody do. And if just one of these bastards could stay off a plane for one single year, I might start to believe - not in their theory, but that they actually, honestly, deep down believed it.
Well. All in all, I would say the protagonists appear to have reached the hubris stage at this point. Oh look, here comes nemesis.
In February 2004 a man named Steve McIntyre sends Phil Jones of CRU a request for copies of some datasets. [1076359809] 'Wonder what he's up to?' says Phil.
'Personally, I wouldn't send him anything,' replies Michael Mann. 'I have no idea what he's up to, but you can be sure it falls into the "no good" category. ... I would not give them *anything*. I would not respond or even acknowledge receipt of their emails. There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!'
He is right, if unethical. It is no damn good from their point of view. For McIntyre is our hero. In the film he will be played by ... Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart are dead and no-one nowadays specializes in quiet but dogged decency. Perhaps he must remain an unseen presence off camera, like film portrayals of Mohammed. Do it as a sort of remake of 'Phone Booth': Phil Jones cornered in his office, slowly crumbling from regent to wreck, Kiefer Sutherland reading out McIntyre's mails as a voice-over.
I have skipped ahead here. This is not McIntyre's first appearance in the mails or on the scene and they already know the peril he represents. He has come out of nowhere in 2003 with a paper refuting Mann's hockey-stick and they have instinctively closed ranks against him.
*
McIntyre is not a professional scientist, but a retired Canadian mining engineer. Neither is he - not that it should matter; play the ball, not the man - an oil-industry lobbyist, or career contrarian, or knee-jerk libertarian, or right-winger of any kind. 'In American terms,' he will let slip once, 'Canada would be a blue state along the lines of Massachusetts; Toronto would be a liberal city in a blue state; and I live downtown in one of the most liberal constituencies in the city. None of this is unrelated to my political views.'
His expertise being in mining, he knows a dodgy prospectus when he sees one. He sees one in the Mann paper that provided the infamous hockey stick. Out of curiosity at first, for the hell of it, he decides to 'audit' the numbers behind the AGW theory, and finds himself carrying on when he realises to his concern that no-one else is.
He is the perfect foil for these rude, arrogant, amour-propre-sensitive, increasingly macho men. He is unfailingly, superhumanly polite - confirming my theory that politeness is actually a great way of annoying people, in particular the people who don't deserve any. At times he will show the humility of a monk in his dealings with the AGW proponents - or perhaps say that of Chesterton's Father Brown. In contrast to the policy on Real Climate, the pro-AGW website the Mann-CRU gang will set up to respond to him and others, where opposing views disappear into a memory-hole [see below], the only people he censors on his website Climate Audit are his own supporters, when he feels they have transgressed the rules of polite debate and are insulting his opponents. No invective. No venting. Just the facts, Ma'am. Once in a long while when particularly frustrated and goaded he will indulge briefly in satire, calm but lacerating; when he does it's like when you punch a Buddhist monk in the face, thinking they won't hit you back, and they just nod and smile, so you keep punching them, and they keep smiling, and then you punch once too often and all of a sudden there's a blur of movement and they've kicked one of your kidneys out, still smiling.
Of course, in obedience to Gore Vidal's dictum that the ascetic is always accused of licentiousness, the philanthropist of being a miser, the Mann-CRU axis - the Hockey Team, as they dub themselves - will with a straight face and perfect indignation accuse McIntyre of being unmannerly and impudent in his pronouncements and his communications with them, his terse calm formal requests for data to enable him to replicate their work, a basic requirement of respectable science. He will be called a gadfly, a dilettante. His Majesty James Hansen, originator of the theory of manmade global warming, will say, of his refusal to engage with him and his like, that he will not 'joust with jesters'.
They will refuse his requests for data. They will stall and give him the runaround. They will use every excuse in the book, break the rules of scientific ethics and the laws of the land. They will call him names and spread lies about him. It doesn't matter. He wins in the end and will kill their hockey-stick, the forged sole fingerprint of man's responsibility for fluctuations in the mighty machine of nature, the badge of breath-taking arrogance and breast-beating species guilt, not once but, due to its continued miraculous resurrection, again and again and again.
And for the sake of the example to future generations, if we win this fight, we should take an infinitesimal fraction of the money we would have pissed away chasing a demon that is one of the basic building blocks of life and erect a statue to him somewhere, on the burned-out ruins of the CRU campus would be good, slapping him briskly across his blushing Canadian face every time he says no.
*
Back to the mails. 1077829152. Jones reviews and spikes a skeptic article, 'It is having a go at the CRU temperature data - not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !!' Then some shenanigans of some sort I don't quite get: 'Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE - don't email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record - from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them - I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.'
They have suspicions of the American Geophysical Union journal GRL. Too many Contrarian viewpoints getting through.
A while later, another fired revolver the non-internet media appear to find completely uninteresting:
From: Phil Jones To: "Michael E. Mann" Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004
This one made me laugh:
From: Phil Jones
To: "Janice Lough"
Subject: Re: liked the paper
Date: Fri Aug 6 09:26:49 2004
In February 2005 Jones will respond to a request by Australian scientist Warwick Hughes for his raw data with the words: 'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?' [Not in the leaked mails, but see here, for example.]
1092167224
Michael E. Mann wrote:
1092581797 made me chuckle with its tales of urgent meetings in Geneva, Trieste, Marrakech and Potsdam. I expect it will seem less amusing when the rest of us aren't allowed or can't afford to go there.
Oh next is something from the Russians again. They're probably still in Siberia. That makes me feel better.
But a few mails later Phil Jones is off to Delhi and Seattle. This makes me unhappy again. No, it makes me laugh. People flying all over the planet on an urgent quest to stop other people flying all over the planet always do. [1097159316]
Shit, now Keith is going to Austria in a few days, after having just returned from some other unspecified travels. I am happy for him. All right, I resent it. I shouldn't be reading this. This is like one of the books my mum reads about glamorous people going to glamorous places.
Fuck, the next one from Phil Jones: 'I met this guy in Utrecht last week ... ' Can't they stay put for a single frigging minute? I am glad their theory is a crock of shit, because if it was true, the irony of their single-handedly having doomed us all flying around the world spreading the word about it would be unbearable. Mind you, have you seen the pictures of the UEA campus? I wouldn't spend a minute there either. I hope the poor Russians are getting some money, that's all I hope. Freezing their gonads off prodding trees while the rest of them gad about the playgrounds of the well-heeled and tenured.
Concentrate. He's bad-mouthing Von Storch, a scientist who has gone off-piste, for bad-mouthing the Mann Bradley Hughes papers. I have never badly wanted to go to Utrecht anyway.
Next [1098294574] Keith is back. He has brought home the bacon. He has scored a grant of 10 million Euros for something. Break out the travel brochures. Save some for the Russians, you bastard. Wait, no. Not 10 million. Brussels has 'given a (very unofficial) hint' that they should ask for 17 million, thereby enabling Brussels to look tough (I assume) when they only give them 15 million. Venice is lovely in October, or so I've heard. He could afford blankets for the Russians too. At least Keith appears to be staying home this week. Ha. Feel the East Anglian wind and look at the neo-brutalist architecture and suffer, dog.
God hates me. Next up is Phil, 1098472400. 'I have to go home to drive with Ruth to Gatwick for our week in Florence.'
Why can't I join this quest to save the planet? I like trees. I can talk about weather. I would like Florence, I bet.
This mail contains some other bollocks I suspect is important. I don't care. All I can make out through the green haze of envy is the sentence 'The paper didn't consider spatial autocorrelation at all.' I would like to do a paper on the spatial correlation, or complete lack of it, of the CRU climate change team. They are never on the same landmass at the same time.
Focus. Wait, it is juicy, it is devastating, it is priceless stuff. Tom Wigley to Jones:
Phil,
Phil's reply:
Bottom line - their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the
last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C
on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but
years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.
Must go to Florence now.
1101133749. Roger Pielke stands up to them over the other rogue paper Phil rubbished earlier. A back and forth as to its merits. 'This debate,' says Pielke, 'should really take place in the literature. There has been, however, in my view an unfortunate change over time where reviewers who disagree with already published work recommend rejection of subsequent work rather than letting the community view and assess the different perspectives on a science issue.'
Two mails later, Phil: 'Maybe when you all meet at the delightful Chicago Airport Hilton ... ' This is one of my mum's Jackie Collins books.
Enough envy, more schadenfreude. The furies are upon them. But now they start to fight back.
G. Schmidt, 1102687002, 'No doubt some of you share our frustration with the current state of media reporting on the climate change issue.' I think this is the first use I've noticed of 'climate change' as opposed to 'global warming'. Did a memo go out - is it in here somewhere? - from someone brave enough to point out the planet wasn't warming at all?
The realclimate.org website is launched to correct the terrible imbalance involved in alternative viewpoints occasionally getting reported. 'The site will be moderated to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.' Which means the comments will be censored to avoid alternative viewpoints being reported there or uncomfortable questions being asked. (1139521913, 'going to be careful about what comments we screen through... We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or no.')
1102953345. Ooh. Keith needs to phone Mann urgently. Panic setting in? Getting a story straight? Advice as to good places to eat out in Kuala Lumpur?
1102956436 makes clear he was offering Mann an 'informal' role contributing to the next IPCC report.
More Keith. I have failed to note the number. 'S. America, New Zealand, Tasmania.' Travel itinerary? No, something about their temperatures. Someone has a meeting in San Francisco. It's probably a dreadful place and it's right on a fault line.
Now Keith has visited his family. That'll be nice for them, they don't see the bastard from one year's end to the next. It's December, he's writing to Mann: 'have a great Christmas and for f..ks sake keep the right priorities to the fore as the years progress.' Did Keith give him some kind of stern talking-to about his ethics in the phone call? Did they have some tearful drunken 'What happened to us? It used to be about the science... we've turned into PR men...'? Or is he urging him to get out and travel more?
January 2005 now. 1104855751. Steve McIntyre complains that his paper debunking the hockey-stick has been falsely attacked. 'It is false and misleading for Rutherford et al. to now allege that we used the wrong dataset. We used the dataset they directed us to at their FTP site.' Asks Phil Jones for help: 'I get the impression that, while you feel very strongly about your views, you are also concerned with getting to the bottom of matters and are less concerned with scoring meaningless debating points.'
Wrong. Wrong. Thinking Jones had some kind of decency and basic scientific rigour may be the one thing McIntyre has ever been wrong about. Jones promptly forwards the mail to Mann, who replies: 'I would NOT RESPOND to this guy. As you know, only bad things can come of that' - like the truth emerging - and then adds some allegations about McIntyre which, not for the last time in these mails, I am fairly sure must count as slander. Says he is a fraud and funded by the bad guys. [He isn't and is funded by no-one unless you count reader paypal donations on his website now.]
Next. 1104893567. 'Hi Keith - Happy new year. 'Criticisms of his section of the IPCC draft. 'The biggest problem with what appears here is in the handling of the greater variability found in some reconstructions, and the whole discussion of the 'hockey stick'. The tone is defensive, and worse, it both minimizes and avoids the problems. We should clearly say (e.g., page 12 middle paragraph) that there are substantial uncertainties ... Attempting to avoid such statements will just cause more problems. ... M&M claim that when they used [Mann's statistical procedure] with a red noise spectrum, it always resulted in a 'hockey stick'. Is this true? If so, it constitutes a devastating criticism of the approach.' It was true.
There follow lots of IPCC draft discussions that largely go over my head but I suspect are revelatory in the right quarters.
1105978592, IPCC bloke Jonathan Overpeck:
'Hi all - attached is Keith's MWP box w/ my edits. It reads just great - much like a big hammer. Nice job.'
More on this later. Hammer is appropriate because Overpeck has said he wants to 'nail' the Medieval Warm Period. (In fairness, in the context in which he says this in 1105588681 he may just mean he wants to settle the question. But it is clear from lots of other passages which way he wants it settled. And see a mail below.)
1106322460 is fun. Michael Mann frets that they are losing the AGU journal GRL to the Contrarians. Rogue research has been allowed to see the light of day. In particular, they have agreed to publish McIntyre's debunking of Mann's claims. So Mann suggests keeping dossiers on (I assume) the editors:
'It's one thing to lose "Climate Research". We can't afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don't know him--he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here).
If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don't [sic, doubt? don't think?] that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised!'
But who knows how far this thing goes, Mike? It might go all the way to the top. Trust no-one.
This is... this is... Torquemada with a persecution complex. Beria imagining he's being followed.
'The contrarians now have an "in" with GRL. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes me some unease.'
Why does that sentence tickle me so much? 'Watch out for that nasty little toerag... he has form... a prior with the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences.' That is actually where Mann himself works at this point so I don't even know what it means.
Tom Wigley: 'If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.'
Next up, 1106338806, Tom Wigley frets to Phil Jones:
'I got a brochure on the FOI Act from UEA. Does this mean that, if someone asks for a computer program we have to give it out??'
Phil replies:
'I wouldn't worry about the code. If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [intellectual property rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.'
He harps on this theme to Mann in 1107454306.
'Don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites,' he warns, 'you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre & McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.'
On the brighter side, however, 'We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here.' He's happy with the way a chapter of IPCC AR4 [assessment report] is shaping up: 'MM and SB get dismissed. All the right emphasis is there, but the wording on occasions will be crucial.'
Mann is moving to Penn State. (I hope the people there aren't made uneasy by his prior connection with the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences.) He has learned his lesson 'about FTP. We're going to be very careful in the future what gets put there.' Some data has fallen into the wrong hands, i.e. that of people who might use it to try to replicate his results and check he hasn't pulled them out of his arse.
He has seen the draft of the IPCC report chapter. 'It looks very good at present--will be interesting to see how they deal w/ the contrarian criticisms--there will be many. I'm hoping they'll stand firm (I believe they will--I think the chapter has the right sort of personalities for that).'
Next, Phil Jones goes to Madrid, Pune, Chicago. His interlocutor Kevin Trenberth one-ups him with Beijing, Hawaii, New Zealand. I am finding this kind of thing amusing again. Laughter is really God's way of making up to us for the scarcity of ground-to-air missiles. Pune? Pune? They are going to places I have literally never heard of. They have invented a whole country just to be able to go somewhere I never will. A special country that only climate scientists can go to. Maybe Pune is the country where all the predicted sunny weather is happening.
Enough. That isn't the point. Boy detective hat back on. All kinds of IPCC inside info, and something called a CCSP review, but I can't decipher the acronyms. 1107555812. 'Apart from Lindzen the panel seem pretty good.'
Then, 1108399027, February 2005, something I do get and it's hilarious. The Wall Street Journal is on Mann's case: 'Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes, says this doesn't mean its results in this case are wrong.'
To clarify: he used a program that was designed to produce hockey-stick shapes from almost any data. He was found out, in the McIntyre paper he has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to rubbish. His defence now? Yes, I did do that, but the data might, coincidentally, have produced a hockey-stick shape if I hadn't rigged it to do so.
Tom Wigley is worried and asks him some urgent questions arising out of this. Mann replies tersely with a link to the popular internet general-knowledge site Wikipedia.
It shows a graph an associate of Mann's has put together with lots of vaguely quasi-almost not-quite-as-dramatic hockey sticks that other people have done. However, [click on 'Discussion' tab], it is pointed out that 'of the 10 reconstructions the first 7 are by Mann himself or coauthors or direct collaborators of Mann. And so is reconstruction 9.'
Poor Tom. Poor BBC, who used this graph in their climate change programme last year and forgot to mention this caveat. Poor us, who pay for them to deceive us.
(I wonder what the principal produce of Pune is. My guess is margaritas and bare-breasted maidens.)
Next. 1107899057. Something I don't get. A mail appearing to date from two days after the above WSJ article, but in it Mann tells Andy Revkin [see below] of the New York Times 'The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud.'
(Again, since this is not true - does it constitute slander now this claim has emerged?)
1108594561. WSJ journalist defends his story to Mann. 'The specific sentences youre thinking of (Indeed, new research from Stockholm University on historical temperatures suggests past fluctuations were nearly twice as great as the hockey stick shows. That could mean the 20th-century jump isn't quite so anomalous.) seem to me be not only factual but precisely to the point of what the mainstream of science is discussing vis a vis MBH.' Then, invites Mann to write a letter - or indeed his own editorial - to make up for it. Also asks him what his next story ought to be.
This doesn't satisfy Mann, who forwards the mail to his cronies, brooding, 'Interesting that Antonio R. doesn't (or at least claims not to) recognize a lack of balance in the article.' They got to him, Mike. Soon, you will be the only one left. 'Please treat this email as confidential. I don't believe that sending a letter to the editor myself would be the best avenue. But perhaps someone else is interested in pursuing this?' Don't rely on them, Mike. What kind of friends have to be chivvied into defending your nonsense graph?
(I have looked Pune up. It is a city in India. It has palaces. I like palaces. It is going on my list of places I will be even less able to afford to go to when air travel is punitively taxed thanks to these people.)
Shortly after that Phil is again begging: 'Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !' [1109021312] He is 'getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.' Why can't they just leave a man alone? Damn those remorseless pursuers of scientific verification. Is it a crime? Is it a crime to want to prevent people checking your results? Actually, it may well be, if it involves either deleting or claiming not to have data in contravention of an FOI request. [See passim.] Otherwise, it is merely unprincipled and unethical.
Appended to this mail is a mailing list of excellent articles - all of them a good read as showing the state of the controversy at that time, and all still relevant now.
1111085657. Mann and Phil, several laugh-making (in a hollow way) quotes:
Mann: 'Yes, BBC has been disappointing in the way they've dealt with this--almost seems to be a contrarian element there.'
Poor Mann. He is surrounded by contrarian elements at every turn, conspiring, conspiring of their boundless malevolence to be ... contrary.
'Do you remember the name of the reporter you spoke to?' It can go on his blacklist.
Phil had 'tried to convince the reporter here there wasn't a story,' [the hockey-stick being horse-shit] 'but he went with it anyway.' Something he regrets not having had the opportunity to have said to the reporter: 'What is the point of doing any more paleo work, if we are constrained by the answer we are allowed to get.' Quite right. If you're not allowed to twist the data into any shape you choose, simply don't play any more.
But now Mann has had a call from a BBC reporter who seems more reliable, so all ends well.
More IPCC. What is 'Zod'? Probably another secret exclusive country they are travelling to. The airlines only tell you about Zod as a hidden easter-egg bonus country if you clock up 100,000 air-miles. Ben Santer has a paper rejected, sniffs, 'I doubt whether I'll be submitting any papers to Nature in the next few years.' Diddums. Why, if I refused to submit books to publishers that had previously rejected me, I'd be... right where I am now, frankly. More IPCC shenanigans that go over my head, I wish someone would hurry up and interpret this stuff. Radiosonde and troposhere. More planet-killing air-travelling enviable tax-funded bastards, a Mexican going to Hawaii and Japan and who now wants to come to East Anglia. It takes all sorts. IPCC, IPCC. I should skip ahead to nearer the end now, where it all starts to turn into the Caligula episodes of 'I, Claudius'. But maybe I can find something interesting no-one else has yet. McIntyre auditing Jones. IPCC. Bitchery on lack of transparency in EU grants, 'not what you know but who you know.' At length. I skip. Mail from Jones to Mann, 'Subject: Empire Strikes Back - return of proper science !' We have tracked down the Contrarian Alliance to a moon of, no. Someone admitted a mistake that makes their findings less contrary. Now Keith back from China. I'm sure some of this IPCC stuff, committees, revision, redrafts, must be hot revelation to people who understand it. Even I can see the Medieval Warm Period is being ruthlessly and unfairly chipped away at. Will end up reduced to one slightly muggy afternoon in Hastings in 1066. That's a point, has anyone checked the Bayeux Tapestry is onside? What if some Contrarian bitch of a nun put sweat on Harold's brow or a jolly smiling sun in the sky? Fix it. I don't care how. Find a different tapestry. And references to British grape-growing in Roman accounts may well refer to a native propensity to haemorrhoids. Skip, skip. I want to hear Phil Jones's shriek of horror when he finds he's failed to suppress the news that Britain has a Freedom of Information act. 'Which one of you loose-lipped bastards talked? You, Briffa, in an airport departure lounge? Did one of the sultry nautch-dancers of Pune or the languorous courtesans of Zod charm the secret out of you?' Someone to do with the IPCC is named Bin Wang. Enjoying that is why I am not allowed to travel and serve on international committees. Phil wants Mann's proxies for Keith and himself to play around with. 'We won't pass any on or put on web sites etc.'
Zod isn't a country. It appears to be some kind of doomsday device for destroying the Medieval Warm Period. Jonathan Overpeck, an IPCC boss, unveils it in impressive Bond-villain style: 'Gentlemen - attached is the ZOD Med Warm Period Box'. [1119924849] Says, 'the recent Wall Street Journal editiorial that is creating all the crap in the US actually showed a time series from the IPCC FAR.' [Fourth Assessment Report.] Offers to send a scan, then feels it incumbent on him to defend himself from the implication that he might actually read the Wall Street Journal or any other Contrary point of view: 'My Republican Dad sends me these things.' Instantly feels the need to be defensive about his Republican Dad: 'he's an increasingly rare breed of moderate Republican'. I laugh at him, this Overpeck, and call him a rude name in the privacy of my heart. He is a silly thing. Maybe he is frightened, though. What if it got back to Michael Mann that his father was a Republican or that he read the WSJ?
Here comes Mann. 1119957715. Called to testify to Congress, subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. T. Wigley tells him 'On the science side the key point is that the M&M criticisms are unfounded.' But surely at this point, June 2005, they have been proved to be utterly founded? Maybe T. Wigley was taken in by the Wikipedia graph. Cautions him against 'people both inside and outside of Congress who have ulterior motives'. Like not stifling the economy and stopping working people travelling in order to build defences against a giant killer unicorn. Suggests blaming Contrarianist infiltrators for allowing the paper to be published in GRL. 'Recent papers in GRL (including the M&M paper) have clearly not been reviewed by appropriate people.' Suggests a means to find out their names. Suggests he not use other paleo reconstructions to back up the hockey stick as, well, they don't, really. Better to rely on model results.
Overpeck tells his IPCC author/editor/reviewers not to let on that it's actually their own research that they are quoting approvingly in the report.
'The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.'
'The Australian also alerted me to this blogging ! I think this is the term ! Luckily I don't live in Australia.'
Not sure who comes out with these golden quotes, all kinds of inline mails.
But this one is Phil Jones: 'As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.'
Copied below these, questions from the US House of Representatives committee:
'We understand that Dr. Michael Mann, the lead author of the [debunked hockey-stick] studies in question, was also a lead author of the IPCC chapter that assessed and reported this very same work, and that two co-authors of the studies were also contributing authors to the same chapter. Given the prominence these studies were accorded in the IPCC TAR [Third Assessment Report], we seek to learn more about the facts and circumstances that led to acceptance and prominent use of this work in the IPCC TAR and to understand what this controversy indicates about the data quality of key IPCC studies.'
Worth reading the whole thing for the pertinent questions asked. I would like to know the answers given. Here I have inserted what I think some honest answers would be to several of them:
2. What specifically did IPCC do to check the quality of the Mann et. al. studies and underlying data, cited in the TAR? Did IPCC seek to ensure the studies could be replicated?
Nothing. Nope.
5. Explain (a) the facts and circumstances by which Dr. Michael Mann served as a lead author of the very chapter that prominently featured his work and (b) by which his work became a finding and graphical feature of the TAR Summary for Policymakers.
We liked his face. He's kind of a big man on campus, you know? Internationally renowned and charismatic scientist. No Jean Grove or Donald Graybill, put it that way.
6. Explain (a) how IPCC ensures objectivity and independence among section contributors and reviewers, (b) how they are chosen, and (c) how the chapters, summaries, and the full report are approved and what any such approval signifies about the quality and acceptance of particular research therein.
We don't. Everyone gets to review their own work. Chapters, summaries and reports are approved if they manage to hammer the Medieval Warm Period flat like a pet hamster trapped under a new-layed carpet. All work we approve carries the 'consensus' seal of quality, a sort of backwards tick.
8. Given the questions about Mann et. al. data, has the Working Group I or the IPCC made any changes to specific procedures or policies, including policies for checking the quality of data, for the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report? If so, explain in detail any such changes, and why they were made.
None. The exact same thing is happening again in the fourth report. Well, except for this time we're cunningly not going to cite our own work when we include it and hope you don't find out. And Mann's only going to be an unofficial consultant on this one, to keep him off the books, and we'll delete all e-mails relating to that. [See somewhere below.]
Next P. Jones is up:
Also, that no-one thinks to ask him if the UK has an FOI act.
Wigley to Jones:
'Can you comment, off the record, on Keith's paleo series. ... Correlations with the climate model are not the same -- but Briffa is again the clear outlier. Why?'
Briffa on IPCC:
Goes on to worry, I think, that they can't show the MWP as looking as lukewarm and inoffensive as they'd like without buggering up the looks of something else they want to get just so.
The next, 1121869083, 19 Jul 2005, smells of shenanigans or sleight-of-hand too, Briffa taking pains to avoid being dragged into them, or blamed for them. Argy-bargy about MWP.
Enough. Time for another fast-forward.
February 2006. Mails in range 1140568004 to 1142108839. Gene Wahl signs his mails, 'Peace, Gene'. The IPCC crew are fudging rules so that his and Caspar Amman's paper which apparently supports Mann's hockey stick can be cited in IPCC AR4, even though it will not have been published by the deadline. ('Try and change the Received date!' Phil Jones will later say in 1189722851. 'Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with'.) 1141226255, the preliminary findings of the report have been leaked to the Guardian and BBC. 1141393414, one of the authors cited in the report worries that McIntyre and McKitrick might, yikes, ask for the data used to build reconstructions. Should they yank a problematic figure? No, says Overpeck, 'I don't think the IPCC has to provide anything beyond the report.' Phew.
Rosanne D'arrigo causes them worries with a paper pointing out the 'divergence problems' with tree-ring samples. 'It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the hockey stick.' Ye of little faith! The hockey stick cannot be killed by mortal man.
1141930111, Phil Jones: 'I'm the greatest hoarder of climate information!' He has developed suspicions of Susan, one of their superiors on the IPCC report I think. 'I knew she had an agenda, but I hadn't fully realised how extensive it was.'
A bigger fast-forward. June 2007 now.
1182361058. Steve McIntyre has discovered that quality control claims regarding a paper Phil Jones published dismissing the Urban Heat Island effect on temperature-measuring stations are incorrect: data was unavailable for 205 of the 260 stations cited, and some of the others have moved. He invites Phil to issue a correction. Instead Phil seeks legal advice. 'I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!' Aww, somebody blabbed about Britain's Freedom of Information Act. (I'm sorry, but I continue to savour this joke: someone, a scientist, saying, 'Don't tell anyone about the Freedom of Information Act.')
Gene 'Peace' Wahl weighs in: 'I know what you mean about the need for community when under duress. The individual quality of being a scientist works against us in this way.'
Now I stop laughing and get angry: he continues, 'I was wondering if there is any way we as the scientific community can seek some kind of "cease and desist" action with these people.' Suggests Phil at least 'inquire into the possibility of acting proactively in response via the British system' for slander. Peace, Gene.
1183499559. Aww, the Russians! Bless.
Best regards
Rashit Hantemirov
The fuckers. They probably called him Ratshit. They are as meticulous with
names as they are with weather data.
1188478901. Mann suggests a libel action against someone else, Keenan, who's calling into question the data behind Phil's surface station paper. Keenan is using the word 'fraud', but then Mann himself often does with far less reason. 'Of course, if it does get published, maybe the resulting settlement would shut down E&E and Benny and Sonja all together! [He refers to Energy and Environment, a hopelessly off-message Contrarian-infested journal, and its editors.] We can only hope, anyway. So maybe in an odd way its actually win-win for us, not them. Lets see how this plays out...'
Next more ramifications of this. Phil invites Wei Chyung Wang, his colleague on the UHI paper to sue Keenan for libel. He declines. Following that, though, Tom Wigley says, 'Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.'
Then in 1189515774 Phil suggests Mann sue Keenan over something in a footnote. Mann declines, says Wang must do it 'or at the least threaten a lawsuit ... The threat of a lawsuit alone my prevent them from publishing this paper.'
1196872660. Mann says, 'I don't read E&E, gives me indigestion--I don't even consider it peer-reviewed science, and in my view we should treat it that way. i.e., don't cite, and if journalists ask us about a paper, simply explain its not peer-reviewed science.'
Deride the critics when they don't publish in peer-reviewed literature, deride the peer-reviewed literature when they do.
Also, 'JGR-Atmospheres has been publishing some truly awful papers lately.' Oh, and in the previous mail, 1196795844, Ben Santer has said, about what I don't know, 'We all knew that some journal, somewhere, would eventually publish this stuff. Turns out that it was the International Journal of Climatology.' Who do they have left to count on?? They should start up a zine of their own; edit it in a treehouse; put up a sign saying 'No girls or Contrarians.'
1200493432, Jan15 2008:
Contrarians spotted in France!
Phil: 'I'm just happy I'm in the UK, and our Royal Society knows who and why it appoints its fellows!'
1206628118, March 2008, is curious. Jonathan Overpeck has just made a brave and unabashed appearance on a moving daytime talk-show segment called 'I Still Love My Moderate Republican Dad'. No, but he asks the gang for advice on something that's worrying him. He has been outed as the prominent AGW researcher alluded to but not named in skeptic David Deming's Senate testimony who, mistaking Deming for one of the team, famously told him 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period'. His instinct is to deny, but strangely enough he says 'I suspect that this Deeming [sic] guy could then produce a fake email.'
Should he just ignore it? Kevin Trenberth says: 'An alternative approach is to write a blog on this topic of the medieval warm period and post it at a neutral site and then refer enquiries to that link.' Phil Jones says it wasn't him who actually said it!
From: Phil Jones
To: "Michael E. Mann"
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? [The IPCC report]
Keith will do likewise. ...
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.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Reply:
I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: xxxx
talk to you later,
mike
June 2008. 1213201481. A commenter at Climate Audit pointed out the nice little character vignettes revealed in this one. This is the whole thing in microcosm really.
Mann has been trying to get Phil an American Geophysical Union fellowship (see also 1196872660). To help with his nomination he asks Phil to provide what he calls his N-number and Phil refers to as the H-index. This is a yardstick of a scientist's standing and influence. 'N" is the number of papers an individual authored/co-authored that have more than N citations. N=40 (i.e., an individual has published at least 40 papers that have each been cited at least 40 times)'. Phil replies:
Problem is my surname. I get a number of 62 if I just use the software, but I have too many papers. I then waded through and deleted those in journals I'd never heard of and got 52. I think this got rid of some biologist from the 1970s/1980s, so go with 52.
They'll also be sounding out other climate research centres such as Tyndall but CRU could bag this in whole or in part.
In other words, £75 million of British government money that's meant to help the Third World could be going to these lying, propagandizing, deliberately slipshod bastards!
And if it hasn't gone to CRU, it will have gone to someone similar. That's nice. Forget infrastructure, famine, trade and so on, and least the impoverished Africans will be able to know what the weather's going to be like. Or, at least, what people think the weather ought to be like.
I can't find any follow-ups to this in the mails, but if you look at the DFID website it turns out that, not only is it full of warmist propaganda, the whole department seems to be largely a slush-fund for academic projects of one kind and another.
I reckon this kind of money will tend to count double in parliamentary reports and answers: i.e. in this case the government would include it both as £15 million spent on British universities and £15 million spent on aiding the Third World.
Apart from that, why the eff does Britain's international development spending go through Price Waterhouse Cooper?
Phil Jones trying to circumvent the FOI, UEA helping him. 'When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school - the head of school and a few others) became very supportive.'
Ben Santer says he won't give Steve McIntyre any more data either. Schmidt of Real Climate compares him to a Somali pirate.
Phil:
...I know that DEFRA receive Parliamentary Questions from MPs to answer. One of these 2 months ago was from a Tory MP asking how much money DEFRA has given to CRU over the last 5 years. DEFRA replied that they don't give money - they award grants based on open competition. DEFRA's system also told them there were no awards to CRU, as when we do get something it is down as UEA!
Tim, Chris,
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020.
I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998! [1998 wasn't by any means the warmest year on record. It was in fact
1934]
Still a way to go before 2014.
I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.
Chris - I presume the Met Office continually monitor the weather forecasts.
Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems
a bit over the top re the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk)
it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
It sounds almost as though ... I don't watch much telly myself nowadays. Do they have alternative comedians delivering the weather forecasts now or something? 'It's f***ing freeze your bollocks off weather out there now.' Well, it was. It is.
Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
Anecdotal, sir! Not statistically significant! Unfiltered raw data! I love that reversal, that payback for anyone who's ever pointed out that the global-warming models are contradicted by the evidence of their own frostbitten extremities.
I am picturing Phil standing outside his house in a T-shirt and shorts in complete denial, arse-deep in snowdrifts, lacerated by an icy wind, icicles hanging off his ears, muttering 'Quite balmy today, really' through chattering teeth. 'Come in and shut the bloody door, it's freezing,' says his wife. 'Put a jumper on for Christ's sake.' 'Nonsense. It's not cold. It's lovely for the time of year. Daffodils'll be out early if it carries on like this. I'm sweltering. What are you, a Contrarian?'
Phil was famously cheered at the news of the death of the skeptic John Daly in 2004 [1075403821]. Would it be wrong of me to hope the silly tool catches pneumonia this winter? Plenty of older people will in the long run if fuel is made more expensive or rationed thanks to him and his kind.
I don't in these mails find the scientists - unlike the media and lobby groups - pushing the line that man is actually responsible for the cold weather too; nor have I noticed them using 'climate change' rather than 'global warming' all that much. They know quite well the cold weather makes them look like chumps.
Incidentally one of the British Met office people he's writing to in the 'It's not cold, you're all wimps' mail is the AGW proponent Chris Folland who back in 1991 said, 'The data don't matter ... We're not basing our recommendations [for reductions in CO2 emissions] upon the data. We're basing them upon the climate models.'
I jump ahead to September 2009.
The walls of the sand-castle are crumbling by now. 1252164302. Overpeck, nervous of FOI requests:
'Please write all emails as though they will be made public.' In the spirit of this virtuously says 'it would be nice if [McIntyre] could have access to all the data that we used - that's the way science is supposed to work.' But hints they could hide behind intellectual property issues.
This relates to questions arising from one of Michael Mann's models. Hilariously, McIntyre has pointed out Mann has inserted a big stretch of data upside down. Hilariously, they will say this doesn't really matter. Hilariously, they are essentially right, which should tell you all you need to know about the models.
Wigley on means of correcting things to explain temperature 'blips'. Over my head but smells dubious. 'I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip.' But says 'we are still left with "why the blip"' and is genuinely interested. These are smart curious men. Surely they must chafe at the constraints, sometimes, of having to fit everything to one theory. But then a college of medieval theologians may have enjoyed the exercise of intellect involved in conforming things to a required pattern.
Mann slanders McIntyre to Andy Revkin of the New York Times. McIntrye has pointed out the problems with Keith Briffa's Yamal reconstruction, after at long last being able to get hold of the data. Briffa used a sample of just twelve trees to flatten the Medieval Warming Period. Using other available trees would have changed the story entirely.
Says it will take a few days to get to the bottom of McIntyre's findings but, adhering to the standard ploy, 'likely he won't submit for peer-reviewed scrutiny, or if it does get his criticism "published" it will be in the discredited contrarian home journal "Energy and Environment"... Fortunately, the prestige press doesn't fall for this sort of stuff, right?'
Right. Right and thrice right. Revkin laps it all up. His reply is next [1254259645]:
'thanks heaps.
tom crowley has sent me a direct challenge to mcintyre to start contributing to the
reviewed lit or shut up. i'm going to post that soon.'
The detestable Mann has the gall to say 'Skepticism is essential for the functioning of science.' But that 'legitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process.'
Furthermore he cautions that Revkin shouldn't quote him about any of the slanderous and untrue things he's just said in the previous mail. It is deep background, you understand.
In the next, [1254323180] the gang are still scrambling to deal with the Briffa-Yamal revelations. Mann says they are 'part of the attack of the corporate-funded attack machine'. I think this is not only mendacious and paranoid but downright insensitive to his CRU colleagues, when they are so keen on corporate funding themselves. In 1254345329 they're still trying to limit damage. How many other studies are contaminated by having incorporated the debunked Briffa one? Tim Osborn tries to be upbeat: 'I wouldn't say we were immune to the issue' but on the bright side 'the IPCC AR4 and other assessments are not saying the evidence is 100% conclusive (or even 90% conclusive) but just "likely" that modern is warmer than MWP.'
1254832684 is amusing. Andrew Manning of CRU is 'in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurments here in the UK' and tells Phil Jones the last thing he needs in the middle of this shakedown is doubts being cast on the whole farrago. How should he respond to questions about CRU's raw data having apparently gone missing?
Phil says to point out that projections don't depend on observed data. They are just computer models.
Again, the data doesn't matter. The real observable world doesn't matter. Trust the programs they have made, which have no connection to it.
Next, he has the unmitigated gall to hide behind Steve McIntyre and his good manners.
'Here is what Stephen McIntyre says on Climate Audit. "While there is much to criticise in the handling of this data by the authors and the journals, the results do not in any way show that 'AGW is a fraud' nor that this particular study was a 'fraud'."
And then in the very next sentence to repeat the standard abracadabra that 'McIntyre has no interest in publishing his results in the peer-review literature.'
Then he hides behind intellectual property issues, as is his wont, and says, 'It is the right wing web sites doing all this.' No-one at CRU can talk about corporate links or oil money in this regard, for the obvious reasons.
It is true that - unlike the CRU-Mann group, who toss it around like salad - McIntyre never, under any circumstances, no matter what shenanigans he uncovers, stoops to using the f-word, and severely discourages anyone else from doing so. I suspect this is less due to politeness than to an awareness of Sun Tzu's maxim about leaving your enemy a means of escape.
It is more important for the world that these 'mistakes' and 'errors' be admitted and rectified than that those who have perpetrated them be discredited and shamed. People will (in theory) own up to mistakes, but not to fraud. If they showed any propensity at all to be gentlemen, to be scientists, and admitted when they had been mistaken and in error, the whole mess could be cleared up and thus it may be sound tactics to avoid the word 'fraud'. Using it merely serves to further entrench them in their position.
Nevertheless, in layman's terms, and forgetting about strategic considerations that at this point are very obviously going to have no effect anyway, I think it is utterly clear that some of the behaviour documented in the mails and elsewhere unquestionably amounts to ... but I will try to follow Mr McIntyre's example.
Oh here's something else good. 1255095172. Skeptical scientist Pat Michaels has been writing articles pointing out how CRU has apparently destroyed its raw source data and how this should invalidate the research that is being used to justify a draconian reorganisation of our society. Ben Santer says, 'I'm sure that Pat Michaels does not have the primary source data used in his Ph.D. thesis. Perhaps one of us should request the datasets used in Michaels' Ph.D. work, and then ask the University of Wisconsin to withdraw Michaels' Ph.D. if he fails to produce every dataset and computer program used in the course of his thesis research.'
Naturally I curled my lip at this at went, 'Oh ha ha ha, how very satirical, I bet you are a riot when everyone lets their hair down at the meet-ups in Pune.'
Only, it isn't a joke. Cut to 1255477545: Tom Wigley promptly starts investigating Michaels' PhD and trying to cast doubt upon its validity. Phil Jones [1255538481] encourages this and offers helpful suggestions.
1255100876. Santer now says, 'Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.'
Oh and while I'm at it here's another from Santer from 1997: 'I looked at some of the stuff on the Climate Audit web site. I'd really like to talk to a few of these "Auditors" in a dark alley.' [1177534709]
When people go wrong they always go macho. Let a gay hairdresser start fiddling the till and he will commence to talk like Al Capone.
Back to 1255095172 though. Butch Ben Santer also says 'The integrity and reliability of this story does NOT rest on a single observational dataset', again returning to the leitmotif of there's no point in attacking any single bit of data, because they have more where that came from, although they all seem to depend on each other, and each individually seems to turn out doubtful when someone is so ill-mannered as to examine them closely. He also says that 'I am sure that, over 20 years ago, Phil could not have foreseen that the raw station data might be the subject of legal proceedings by the CEI and Pat Michaels.' And what other possible reason could there be for preserving it? Certainly not that someone might want to use it to do science with at some point. Weather data in a climate research centre is really just cluttering up the place. He further declares that 'Phil Jones is one of the true gentlemen of our field'. Well, it takes one to know one, I suppose.
Towards the end of the mails the running theme is, 'Where the hell is global warming anyway?'
1255318331. Stephen Schneider, who has been here before, having predicted a catastrophic global cooling in the 1970s, passes on some bad news: 'Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that there has been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next 20-30 years.' (A goody-goody student, of whom I expect a great career in the climate research field, has alerted him to this, asking, 'Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?'). Schneider refers to the reporter as 'this new "IPCC Lead Author"', which I think is meant to be sarcastic but I call a mortal insult.
Then he says the weather will be getting hotter soon anyway, because, well, the sun-spots that drive the temperature will be back.
Michael Mann says 'extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC' and perhaps they should get the British Met Office to respond. 'I might ask Richard Black [someone at the BBC he can trust] what's up here?'
But then [1255352257] all hell breaks loose. Kevin Trenberth responds:
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.'
'How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!'
Mann is unfazed but admits the models may not have got 'the energy & radiation budget' right.
Trenberth declares: 'Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go?' And on and on, losing his religion in a hysterical outpouring of questions the catechism doesn't answer.
Like a patient tutor Mann thanks him for his thoughts. [1255532032]. He falls back on the saw that real observed temperature cannot falsify the model projections. 'To argue that the observed global mean temperature anomalies of the past decade falsifies the model projections of global mean temperature change, as contrarians have been fond of claiming, is clearly wrong'. Again, the data doesn't matter, the real world is in error, the models are inviolate in a parallel universe of their own.
However he concedes 'that doesn't mean we can explain exactly what's going on.' But sternly, trying to save Trenberth's soul, he warns against the danger of falling into the deadly fallacy of "we don't know everything, so we know nothing".
Tom [1255550975] tries to soothe Kevin further with a nice bit of Jesuitry: 'I didn't mean to offend you. But what you said was "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment". Now you say "we are no where close to knowing where energy is going". In my eyes these are two different things -- the second relates to our level of understanding' and the first, presumably, to our degree of faith.
(I can't make Tom out at all as a character, however. He is an enigma to me, as changeable as, well, the climate. At times he can be the scourge of the heathens, and in very unpleasant ways; at others a stern voice of reason, moderation, and scientific standards, compared to some of the others. Next, for example, in 1255553034, he rebukes Mann 'The Figure you sent is very deceptive ... In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC' and Schmidt 'I just think that you need to be up front with uncertainties and the possibility of compensating errors', referring to a graph which Mann says will reassure Kevin and doubters in the outside world. An unquestioning true believer who won't see his beloved cause brought into disrepute? This is fun. This must be what it was like to be a Kremlinologist or someone who studies the inner machinations of the Vatican. We need scientists, number-crunchers and other experts on this story to annotate the mails and other files fully, but we will only fully understand what happened and the people involved when someone writes a novel about it.)
In 1256765544 Gentleman Phil Jones complains about scientist Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen to someone at her university. She has forwarded articles about the Yamal scandal and the disappearing CRU data [they are also in the mail and are worth reading if you are coming newish to this] to someone at UKCIP [UK Climate Impacts Programme] she thinks ought to know about it: 'I expect that a great deal of UKCIP work is based on the data provided by CRU (as does the work of the IPCC and of course UK climate policy). Some of this, very fundamentally, would now seem to be open to scientific challenge, and may even face future legal enquiries. It may be in the interest of UKCIP to inform itself in good time and become a little more 'uncertain' about its policy advice.'
Gentleman Phil disparages these articles with the standard line about peer-reviewed lit and in the next breath disparages Boehmer-Christiansen's peer-reviewed literature: 'You are probably aware of this, but the journal Sonja edits is at the very bottom of almost all climate scientists lists of journals to read.'
Boehmer-Christiansen's colleague commiserates with Phil, and says 'I'll try and have a quiet word with her' about using her 'Reader Emeritus' title in communications of this sort, 'but at the moment in fairness she is entitled to use it in the way she does.' Also 'I'd want to protect another academic's freedom to be contrary and critical, even if I personally believe she is probably wrong.' But reassures Phil he's personally onside: 'Since Sonja retired I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness - I've signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it.'
1256760240. Phil cautions Keith not to respond to mails he has forwarded, from an academic at another university, who has written expressing concern over various matters pertaining to Keith's Yamal work and the other studies that have drawn on it, including:
Whilst I would not describe myself as an expert statistician, I do use inferential statistics routinely for both research and teaching and find difficulty in understanding the statistical rationale in these papers. As a plant physiologist I can say without hesitation that points 3 and 4 do not agree with the accepted science.
There is a saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Given the scientific, political and economic importance of these papers, further detailed explanation is urgently required.
1256735067. Mann to Phil: 'be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy [Revkin? Of the NYT? Of 'the prestige press doesn't fall for this sort of stuff, right'?] and what emails you copy him in on. He's not as predictable as we'd like.'
In 1257888920, November 10th this year, someone from UKCIP is writing about problems with the CRU database. See the 'Harry_read_me' file for more.
The mails end shortly after with references to a new IPCC working group. There is mention of a 'Good Practice Guidance Paper'.
Rather than end with a whimper I will now go back a bit.
1254751382, October 5th, 2009. This is perhaps the climax, where it really all falls apart. The mails at the top of the file are just the gang damage-limiting. But scroll down below, where there are newsgroup mails they've forwarded to each other. Scientists talking about the Yamal revelations: I could well be wrong but when I first read it it looked to me like a generation of younger scientists, fighting free of the dead hand of the established old blokes at CRU and elsewhere. This may be the happy ending, if you like, at least unless and until this new blood become as crusty and stuck on their pet theories as the old guard.
2) The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a
lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of
his own work, where that work is the critical core of the
chapter.
"the IPCC has depended on 1) computer
models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature
forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are
sitting on firm ground."
...
'This is terrible
but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with
these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis. I
dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I
think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to
gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare
tactics. That is not to say that global warming is not occurring
to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The
CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other
factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may
be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I
postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial
motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal
to their equally dishonest club members. Among the motivations
are increased and continued grant funding, university
advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon
control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and
other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.
Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar
behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall ... in the good old days. Humans are hardly perfect creations. I am never surprised at what they can do. I
am perpetually grateful for those who are honest and fair and
thankfully there is a goodly share of those.'
...Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with
so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is
impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall,
nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single
tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century
temperature reconstruction.
The "consensus" reports now are just the consensus of those who agree with the consensus. The government-selected authors have become gatekeepers rather than honest brokers of information. That is a real tragedy, because when someone becomes a gatekeeper, they don't know they've become a gatekeeper - and begin to (sincerely) think the non-consensus scientists are just nuts.
*
The real ending is up to us.
At this point we are already guaranteed to be the laughing stock of the future, for having entertained this nonsense for even a single year. A cautionary tale of mass hysteria, comparable to the witch-burners or the millenarian doom-cults, all the more so because we were more technologically advanced and fancied ourselves so superior to them.
If you're a fairly youngish person reading this, you can expect one day to have bratty grandkids dancing around you taunting you about it. 'Ha ha ha! In Granddad's day they were afraid of carbon dioxide! Ha ha ha!' They will breathe on you. 'Look, look, I'm poisoning Granddad! Look, I'm destroying the planet with my poison breath! Oh no, Granddad - I think I'm going to fart - shall I put a cork in? Granddad, there's a cow in the field going to fart - shall we kill it? Granddad, do you think Mummy will burn in hell for driving a car? Do you call them the Devil's Chariot, Granddad? Do you think light-bulbs are sinful, Granddad? Do you flog yourself when you turn one on? Do you think Mummy was sinful for having children, Granddad? Should I not have been born, Granddad? Granddad ... you're choking me...'
At least, I hope you do. That's what's up to us now. If we sit back and allow them to enact radical changes at Copenhagen in spite of what's been revealed, more likely your grandchild will be a pious little snot in a sackcloth habit who every time he visits will point and yell, 'OIL-BURNING PLANET-KILLER!' and spit on you.
Or they will not have been born, because you couldn't afford to buy the indulgences to have kids.
I sincerely hope I'm being alarmist and shrill saying that. But if something gets pushed through at Copenhagen it will be only the beginning. The history of the past few years has shown that even good, worthwhile movements for social change keep going through inertia and simply don't know when to stop even when they've become destructive. This will be destructive from the start and will simply never end of its own accord because they will go on calling for more and more sacrifices to an unappeasable god, because none of what we do will make a blind bit of difference because they are barking up the wrong tree.
I'm not expert at what cap and trade schemes will lead to but it seems to me that, rather than being 'socialism' as some opponents claim, it will enable big companies (and economies) to get bigger at the expense of smaller ones. People are already making huge amounts from carbon-trading, and companies like Shell are preparing to cash in on carbon-capture. It's what will come after that worries me. Discouraging all but the rich from flying or driving would only be a first step. After that, eating meat will be punitively taxed, everything else you buy or do will be rationed on some carbon measure rated by a massive new bureaucracy, and I suspect that after a while you won't be able to have children without purchasing a license for all the CO2 they'll put out over the course of a lifetime.
Already there is a new scheme, endorsed by the great and good, whereby you can assuage the guilt of taking a plane trip by preventing an African from being born.
When I visited that article almost none of the commenters seemed to find that tasteless, let alone disturbing or deeply wrong; pretty much the only objections were from people who said it would be much better to stop people in the Western world being born.
I'm having to bite my fingers to keep from triggering Godwin's Law. And I suppose it would be wildly inappropriate, after several thousand words mocking people for betraying science and reason, to make any reference to the devil.
*
The scientists depicted in the CRU mails have little directly to do with all that. They are just doing their job. They are deluded, some have crossed the line between scientist and lobbyist, but, based purely on the evidence of these mails, they are not deranged misanthropists and haters of civilisation like many of the people who have enthusiastically embraced their theory.
I think only a couple of them are anything close to conscious and deliberate f-words. Only a couple of them are genuinely unpleasant people, and even they would be genuinely surprised if you told them that. 'Seems like we are now the bad guys,' Phil Jones says wonderingly after the 'Kinne character' of Climate Research refuses to bow to all their demands. They genuinely believe their theory is correct and that they are doing right in bending all the rules to serve it. It has been an idee fixee with them since before the mails open; and of course their careers are now built upon it. They are a clique, not a conspiracy.
They should be objects of pity, for the most part. Anyone can be wrong. Their failings are human ones of seeing what you want to see, preferring your friends to strangers, not going out of your way to do the right thing if it will harm your career. But these failings and the behaviour they have indulged in have absolutely no place in science or the determination of public policy.
'Climate science' is rotten, a joke. But the real rot is in the media. All through these mails there are examples of scientists doing the right thing, standing up against groupthink, calling their friends to account, sometimes even among the inner circle. But the honourable ones have had to fight not only the zombie scientists but the journalists who unquestioningly arrayed themselves with them. Save for a few loose-cannon columnists the media by and large have been a bloody embarrassment, acting as unpaid flacks to zealots, hysterics and hucksters.
Where were you? Where are you now? This used to be the stuff that Pulitzers were made of. The thing is, there is much that is shocking and outrageous but so far little that is actually really new in these files. It's just all the things skeptics have been saying for years, but straight from the guilty parties' mouths.
There is no shame in having been deceived or mistaken. The shame would be in failing to admit that when it stares you in the face. If someone like George Monbiot has the integrity and courage to admit these revelations are appalling, there is no excuse for anyone else not doing so.
I used to groan at people who thought the net could, would or should take over from the mainstream media. But it looks as though it may have to do so. There are stories that can only be covered properly by a big organisation's resources, but I for one am not going to pay to be lied to and treated like an idiot. What are you for, if not to be on the people's side in cases of this kind?
But the net can only take us so far. We aren't going to fix this by sitting mesmerised in front of a screen compulsively clicking on links and reading about it. There need to be letters and faxes, angry and unequivocally demanding phone calls to politicians, above all demos. Where are our marches? Where's our ten tons of shit dumped on someone's lawn? Why are the other side always making all the noise?
It must be made clear that we are not on board with this. It must be made clear that we will withdraw our patronage from any politician who tries to continue with this busted con-job. They must be made to see that they will - I would hope - face widespread civil disobedience at the very least if they try to enact horseshit laws because of an embarrassing panic based on a lie.
If you consider yourself an environmentalist, who are reading this, if you've got this far, and on the remote chance this is the first you've heard of this: you have been lied to, and should be angrier than anyone. They are not worthy of your idealism. I generally prefer trees to people, and would cheerfully shoot anyone who, say, polluted a river. But this is wrong, terribly wrong, and among the many bad things it will do is, when it's over, discredit the cause of environmentalism for decades.
If you regard yourself as a lefty: the Wall Street Journal shouldn't be your enemy on this, or the American Republican party. Your enemy should be the people who - funded by huge corporations, including oil producers - are trying to usher in a very unpleasant regime which a lot of very rich people will get very much richer out of while stopping the rest of us cluttering up roads and airports and, eventually, restaurants and creches.
On the other hand, no-one at all who's coming relatively new to this scandal should take my word for it. Read around, on both sides, and make your own mind up. It requires some effort at times, but there are people who will take the trouble to explain the more technical parts to you, and all you really need is an ability to weigh evidence and a functioning bullshit detector. See which side you think is more honest. See which side you think is more open to debate and good scientific procedure. See which side blusters more. See which side consistently, tirelessly, shamelessly gives itself the benefit of every possible doubt. See which side treats 'There's a lot we don't know' as a feature rather than a drawback.
The only good thing to come out of this may be that for many people it will be a salutary lesson in independent-mindedness. The stuff we get taught about thinking for ourselves rather than trusting to authority to do it for us applies equally to all forms of authority: to the teachers and pop stars who teach you that as well as to politicians and journalists. It applies to scientists too now, and it always and especially applies to people who tell you they only want to save the world.
=======
Notes and cuts
like Hamlet
A tragedy about climate scientists should really start like Macbeth:
'So foul and fair a day I have not seen.' 'Anecdotal.'
[0880476729] Tom Wigley bollocks them
More:
Your approach of trying to gain scientific credibility for your personal views by asking people to endorse your letter is reprehensible. No scientist who wishes to maintain respect in the community should ever endorse any statement unless they have examined the issue fully themselves. You are asking people to prostitute themselves by doing just this! I fear that some will endorse your letter, in the mistaken belief that you are making a balanced and knowledgeable assessment of the science -- when, in fact, you are presenting a flawed view that neither accords with IPCC nor with the bulk of the scientific and economic literature on the subject. ... It has also been shown that there is likely to be an equal or greater cost differential for non-Annex I countries, and that the economic burden in Annex I countries would fall disproportionately on poorer people. ...Furthermore, you have compounded your sin by actually putting a lie into the mouths of innocents ("after carefully examining the question of timing of emissions reductions, we find the arguments against postponement to be more compelling"). People who endorse your letter will NOT have "carefully examined" the issue.
There are the demands of science, etc
See 1177890796, Briffa: 'I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same.' Also the needs of making sure Michael Mann doesn't get 'the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties'.
Even though his work was as dodgy as anyone's I feel sorry for Briffa at times. He appears to develop a kind of Stockholm Syndrome towards the hectoring Mann. In his heart he is well aware of the flaws in Mann's research and in the early years he is capable of mutiny. 1024334440, 2002. 'I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more)'. Cook sympathises: 'Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. ... It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.'
The WWF in Australia wants Hulme to add more scariness to a risk assessment paper
There are annoying lacunae in the mails. I have no idea what became of this and if he did or not. A real obsessive might obtain the report. In mails leading up to it (0933254004) Hulme has held a semi-virtuous 'I will go thus far but no further' stance towards spinning and dumbing-down for them: he tells a colleague the exchanges illustrate 'the nuances of presenting climate scenarios in different Fora'.
I did a big skip forward
Whenever I say 'I skip ahead' I usually really did. I have still only read around 70% of the mails. Many of those went over my head, and I haven't even attempted to use all the juicy ones that didn't. Also, be it noted I have not so much cherry-picked, in time-honoured CRU fashion, as frequently disdained several large and promising cherries in grabbing what immediately appealed to me in each mail. Those ferreting through the archive for themselves should not assume there is nothing of interest in the mails I list above apart from what I mention in my half-arsed summaries. There will be all kinds of recently-discharged munitions that just looked like numbers and casual chit-chat to me.
There must be more comprehensive and pertinent walkthroughs than the above by now and certainly better starting points for anyone coming new to it. See some of the links at bottom.
He has come out of nowhere in 2003 with a paper refuting Mann's hockey-stick
and they have instinctively closed ranks against him.
'Whatever scientific differences and fascination with the nuances of techniques we may /may not share, this whole process represents the most despicable example of slander and down right deliberate perversion of the scientific process.' Briffa, 1067542015. In the same mail Raymond Bradley hilariously suggests CRU should act as arbiters of the controversy: 'if an "independent group" such as you guys at CRU could make a statement as to whether the M&M effort is truly an "audit", and if they did it right, I think that would go a long way to defusing the issue.'
1068239573 seems to indicate that there actually was a moment when it was
agreed that CRU would act as honest brokers in the dispute that arose, a new
detail to me if so. And in 1067596623, actually, Tim Osborn tries bravely to
be fair to Mann and McKittrick and has the nous, caution or integrity not to slavishly back Mann to the hilt.
I don't have the time, energy, inclination or detailed knowledge to trace
the full story of the twists and turns of the saga that rumbled through
climate science and the mails for the next couple of years before McIntyre was proved right, in spite of attempts to discredit him, and the original hockey stick false. It can be found in various of the links at the bottom. An excellent summary of the 'problems' he found with the hockey-stick paper can be found in the first.
Jean Grove ... classic book on the Little Ice Age ...
From an Amazon review:
'...Grove turns to a review of how the cooler weather impacted various regions, including Iceland, Scandinavia, the Alps, North America, and New Zealand. Although diagrams are provided, the best proof of the ice advances and retreats lies in fine black and white photos and narratives of persons who lived in areas where farms were destroyed, people had to leave, and life was threatened by famine. ... The author also presents an excellent discussion of how morainal advances show the Little Ice Age was hardly a singular event, and follows this analysis with a general review of Holocene warmings and coolings. Plainly, even geologically short interglacial periods, such as we now live in, are marked by fluctuations in climate. ... The book notes that Norse colonies in Greenland were destroyed, and that the people died of famine when they could not leave because ice choked the North Atlantic.'
The other bit I quoted is from here.
I would not give them anything... There is no reason to give them any data...
I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone... We also have a data
protection act, which I will hide behind & etc & etc & etc
Dr Johnson on the Ossian controversy, in 'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland':
'To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.'
vaguely quasi-almost not-quite-as-dramatic hockey sticks that other people have
done.
As well as being by close colleagues of Mann's they also rely on much of the same suspect data.
See also here.
bonus country if you clock up 100,000 air-miles
At one point I started copying and pasting all travel references I came across:
I'm in Athens at the moment.
meeting in Paris
I just returned from my trip to Australia
hey Phil, at Dulles waiting for flight to Orlando Florida.
I'm continuing to work on your nomination package (here in my hotel
room in Trieste--the weather isn't any good!)
traveling, and only had brief opportunity to look this over
I'm in Belgium
Yes I will be in Vienna , this will be a pleasure to meet you
I ad a look whilst I was in Iceland as I had nothing better to do a few times.
Dear folks, While on travel in Hawaii
I'm currently in Copenhagen for a meeting
was indeed in Switzerland the week before last
the Monday pm of the Trieste meeting.
the thought process was at Marrakech and Potsdam
I very quickly gave it up. It's like a box set of Alias.
I say above 'they genuinely believe' but I really think that subconsciously at least they know it's a crock. Because if the theory was true, the above would be the equivalent of people working for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children writing mails saying, 'Hi, sorry for the delay in reply, I was just punching a baby in the face.'
Of course when restrictions start coming in climate scientists will be one of the elite exempted classes allowed to fly wherever the hell they want whenever the hell they want. Well, they will have to be, because if the buggers were forced to stay home for one single weekend they would instantly crack and announce they'd been kidding all along.
IPCC draft discussions that largely go over my head
Some don't. Look at 1152909980. Is it just me or is that dodgy? Am I mistaken or is that someone with more power asking someone with less power to help them completely change the thrust of one of his own old papers, or at least say he agrees with their re-interpretation, in order to fit it into the IPCC report?
This looks like something vaguely similar, same bloke, earlier IPCC report, Phil Jones rather than Overpeck acting the Mephistopheles.
Maybe T. Wigley was taken in by the Wikipedia graph
[Added later:]
Christ. See this and this if you haven't already.
the Russians! Bless
I am happy to say that in 0962724639 Stepan tactfully tells Keith his method of standardisation is 'very interesting' but 'disputable' and disagrees with his conclusions. 'May be it is a result of stundartisation?'
In the film there should be a scene after the scandal breaks where the Russians go, 'Keith, I thought we were droogs. Why, Keith, you always send us into wilderness, while you are on beach in Zod, to sample trees, and then, you only use twelve trees? Keith, I have collect for you sample of many many trees. It is cold, Keith, where we go to get trees, and when it is not cold are bitey insects. And yet, you only use twelve. Life is unbearable. I am very sad.'
Chris Folland who back in 1991 said, 'The data don't matter
http://www.off-road.com/offroad/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=291565
citing pp. 82-83 of "Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming" by Patrick J. Michaels
When people go wrong they always go macho...Butch Ben Santer
I would kick his dick off, mind.
Sun-Tzu's maxim
If it is. I've seen it attributed to him but in a brief search can't find anything exactly like that. Von Clausewitz? But Von Clausewitz's maxim seems to be 'Stab! Stab! Kill! Exterminate all the brutes.'
the models are inviolate in a parallel universe of their own
In 1196964260, in a discussion about the models being wrong, occur the gorgeous words: 'You can't prove this with only one universe'.
Research grant proposal:
Request: 150 million billion trillion pounds
To: create a new universe where the climate models will actually work
In the film, they should actually do this, perhaps in a dream sequence. Jonathan Overpeck steps through the portal and finds his father in the happy perfect parallel universe is a Democrat. They hug. Overpeck sobs.
Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that there has
been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling
for the next 20-30 years
This is the same Paul Hudson who keeps erroneously being accused now of having been sent the leaked mails weeks before they appeared on the net but having kept quiet about them! He wasn't sent them! He didn't see them before the rest of us did. What he wrote about it immediately after the leak broke was this:
'I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world's leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article "Whatever Happened To Global Warming".'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/11/climategate-cru-hacked-into-an.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/11/climategate-what-next.shtml
In other words, before the leak he was forwarded or copied in the normal manner the mails above relating to his article which have now shown up in the files. All he was saying is that he could vouch (at a time when it wasn't certain) that at least some of the mails are genuine - he's seen these particular ones before, the leaked ones have the right internet address, etc.
It's highly ironic and unjust: one of the only people at the BBC or in the media generally to have been brave enough to report this even-handedly - earning the wrath of the AGW propagandists in the process - is now accused of having tried to suppress the leaked files.
Please try to correct this story whenever you see it rear its head. Hudson is on the side of the angels, of disinterested truth. As I add this note, for example, he's pointing out that we may be heading for another Little Ice Age:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/12/could-the-sun-cast-a-shadow-on.shtml
Which would be a great ending to the whole palaver. 'Everyone get out there and gun your engines to save civilisation from the big freeze! Quick, where are the farting cows? Oh no, we killed him them all, etc.'
I can't make Tom out at all as a character
Look at this one. 1225579812.
Hi Ben & Phil, No need to push this further, and you probably realize this anyhow, but the
RealClimate criticism of Doug et al. is simply wrong. Ho hum. Tom.
Ho hum? No need to push it further? Tom at this point is like a Jiminy Cricket who's given up the struggle.
[Added later]:
Oh read this though. Here the sometime Jiminy Cricket wailingly rebukes Phil Jones for not having had the sense to use an appalling duplicity to hide a disgusting lie.
triggering Godwin's Law
I did it to death two years ago in the 'Godawful Life' book. I regret nothing.
Really, though, it's grotesque. The Guardian website has a picture of the kind of
black babies you can help to prevent. Let me go this far: I think someone must be
trying to remedy the fact that Nick Griffin is not on board yet. And I'm probably
insulting him in saying that. As with the scientists, one wants to yell, Listen
to yourselves, look at what you've become.
Of course we all like having access to contraception. To locate the evil, for those
who are unable to: it is in seeing your fellow humans - and other living creatures -
as mere inconvenient producers of a supposedly noxious gas.
[Added later]:
George Monbiot has the integrity and courage to admit these revelations are appalling
He later recanted; I retract the compliments.
take over from the mainstream media
The indifference has been astonishing; the naked bias in the grudging reports there have been, embarrassing. It's as if at the end of a thriller, the hero escapes from pursuit and crawls through barbed wire carrying the vital dossier that will save the world, he's over the border and he's free, and he gets to safety and he hands it in to the authorities to expose the conspiracy and ... they shrug and throw it in the bin.
I suppose big business has geared itself up for carbon trading now, and I suppose that includes newspaper owners. The 'environment editors', who probably outnumber actual journalists by now, are also too invested in it. We may be screwed.
No-one foreign should count on the British 'independent inquiry' into this achieving anything, by the way. The British establishment are craftier at whitewashing than Tom Sawyer.
====
SOME LINKS
An excellent summary of and introduction to the whole farrago, especially the hockey stick hoax,
written before the mails were leaked
Another good precis and intro
A longer, more comprehensive and truly excellent beginner's guide to the problems with AGW
'science'
More about the hockey stick from the bloke whose death cheered Phil Jones up
Climate Audit, home of Steve McIntyre
Wattsupwiththat
The Scientific Method: Willis Eschenbach, the first person to send an FOI request to CRU,
annotates the mails arising from that
Bishop Hill
His guide to the Yamal scandal
James Delingpole
Jo Nova
Christopher Booker
John Brignell
Climate Depot
The King of Cornwall
The Medieval Warm Period Project
The mails and other documents
The mails, but I can't get the search to work with my browser
The mails, but there are some missing and others truncated.
Another database of the mails
*Can anyone remember an article highlighting the way
governments and lobby groups promoting AGW hugely outspend skeptics? I know
there've been several good ones, but this particular one I remember had figures on
the way oil companies actually spend far more sponsoring global-warming alarmist
scientists than they do skeptics, in the form of grants to universities etc? It was excellent but I can't find the damn thing now.
Would be obliged if anyone who knows would drop me a mail.
My website
CRU Rorschach Tests
CRU Porn Stash
====
December 9th 2009
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