Recently in Climategate Category

By Donna Laframboise, Financial Post

U.S. Justice Department request puts chill on skeptical bloggers

In recent days I've been receiving calls and emails asking what the U.S. Justice Department wants with me. In fact, there has been a misunderstanding. I write a blog about climate-change dogma that has a similar Web address to a blogger in the United States. It is that person -- who publishes under the pen name Jeff Id at NOconsensus.wordpress.com -- who is being targeted.

Earlier this month, a trial attorney employed by the Justice Department's criminal division sent a formal request to WordPress (the blogging software company) to freeze for 90 days "all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession" regarding three climate-skeptic blogs. ClimateAudit.org -- written by Canadian Steve McIntyre and hosted on WordPress' U.S.-based servers -- was one of that trio. So was Tallbloke's Talkshop, written by a U.K. resident and published at tallbloke.wordpress.com.

The Justice Department is interested in WordPress records spanning three days -- Nov. 21 to 23 inclusive. At 4:09 a.m. on Nov. 22, someone calling themselves FOIA made a comment on McIntyre's blog. It consisted solely of a link to a zip file posted online at a Russian Web address. The zip file contained 5,000 emails written by some of the most prominent names in climate science.

Dubbed Climategate 2, these documents are still being examined and sifted. But emails have already come to light in which scientists employed by publicly funded universities in the U.K. and elsewhere discuss the deliberate deletion and removal of records from university computers. (In the U.K., altering or deleting documents in an attempt to circumvent freedom of information legislation is a criminal offense.)

In these emails individuals such as the University of Pennsylvania's Michael Mann also talk about "the cause" they feel they are advancing. Moreover, these exchanges make it abundantly clear that the experts who've been conducting climate research (and writing reports about that research for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have privately expressed doubts about the robustness of many of their findings.

Read the rest of the article here.

By Maxim Lott, Fox News

Are your tax dollars helping hide global warming data from the public? Internal emails leaked as part of "Climategate 2.0" indicate the answer may be "Yes."

The original Climategate emails -- correspondence stolen from servers at a research facility in the U.K. and released on the Internet in late 2009 -- shook up the field of climate research. Now a new batch posted in late November to a Russian server shows that scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit refused to share their U.S. government-funded data with anyone they thought would disagree with them.

Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.

"Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn't be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007," Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.

Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data."

Read the rest of article here.

By Elmer Beauregard





One of the themes to come out of Climategate 2.0 is the phrase "The Cause" that Michael Mann mentions in a few of his emails. You probably already saw this fake movie trailer I made. But what is "The Cause"? I'm sure if you asked Michael Mann he would say it is to educate people about the dangers of Global Warming and to institute legislation like Cap & Trade to try and stop global warming in their minds they are "Saving The Planet". Also part of their cause is to win the PR battle and to silence the skeptics, because you can only pass new laws if a large majority believe in it. This is basically what he says int this TEDx speech.

To be fair we as skeptics also have a cause, our cause is to expose the warmists like Michael Mann and to stop their agenda. So having a "Cause" per se is not a bad thing, both skeptics and warmists are fighting for their perspective causes on the battlefield of public opinion. So why is this phrase so insidious? Well maybe the cause to what Michael refers is more than just a scientific theory about the weather.

In Michael's TEDx speech he brings up the fact that the first Climategate came out just before the Copenhagen meeting and it helped to derail a "most important opportunity" for an international agreement. He states that maybe it was just a coincidence, but I don't think it was. Here are the event leading up to the Copenhagen Meeting in my mind, and I do think it would make a great movie.

James Delingpole, Wall Street Journal

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world's top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called "the gold standard" of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The new release of emails was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the original climategate leak and with the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa. And it has already stirred strong emotions. To Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), for example, the leaker or leakers responsible are attempting to "sabotage the international climate talks" and should be identified and brought "to justice."

One might sympathize with Mr. Markey's outrage if, say, the emails were maliciously rewritten or invented. But at least one scientist involved--Mr. Mann--has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago. So any malfeasance revealed therein ought to be blamed on the scientists who wrote them, rather than on the whistleblower who exposed them.

Read the rest of the article here.

By Rob Waugh, The Daily Mail

• 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made


• Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a 'strong message'


• Critics claim: 'The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering'


• Scientist asks, 'What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They'll kill us all'

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of 'massaging' evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original 'climategate' emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a 'strong message'.

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

'Humphrey', said to work at Defra, writes: 'I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.

'They want their story to be a very strong one and don't want to be made to look foolish.'

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.

Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden.

'I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'

Read the rest of the article here.

By Elmer Beauregard

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Hide The Decline

Here we go again, thanks to The Air Vent another batch of emails has been released this one I would say is going to be harder to defend than hiding the decline, I think you can clearly see a conspiracy here.

This time around there are a lot of scientists behind the scenes complaining about what's going on but publicly they are in lock step. This one will be harder for the main stream press to ignore.

Here are some snippets.

"Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary"

"I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."

"It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group."

"Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC"

More at The Air Vent.

And at WattsUpWithThat

By Paul Chesser, Amercian Tradtion Institute

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Dr. Michael Mann, lead author of the discredited "hockey stick" graph that was once hailed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the "smoking gun" of the catastrophic man-made global warming theory, has asked to intervene in American Tradition Institute's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks certain records produced by Mann and others while he was at the University of Virginia, for the purpose of keeping them hidden from the taxpayer.

Specifically over the weekend ATI's Environmental Law Center received service from two Pennsylvania attorneys who seek the court's permission to argue for Dr. Mann to intervene in ATI's case. The attorneys also filed a motion to stay production of documents still withheld by UVA, which are to be provided to ATI's lawyers in roughly two weeks under a protective order that UVA voluntarily agreed to in May. Dr. Mann's lawyers also desire a hearing in mid-September, in an effort to further delay UVA's scheduled production of records under the order.

Dr. Mann's argument, distilled, is that the court must bend the rules to allow him to block implementation of a transparency law, so as to shield his sensibilities from offense once the taxpayer - on whose dime he subsists - sees the methods he employed to advance the global warming theory and related policies. ATI's Environmental Law Center is not sympathetic.

"Dr. Mann's late-hour tactics offer the spectacle of someone who relies on the media's repeats of his untrue claims of having been 'investigated' and 'exonerated' - that is, when he's not sputtering ad hominem and conspiracy theories to change the subject," said Christopher Horner, director of litigation for ATI's Environmental Law Center. "Mann has tried whatever means possible to ensure he remains free of any serious scrutiny, and this just appears to be his last gasp."

Read the rest of the article here.

By Norman Leahy, The Examiner

Over the weekend on "The Score" radio show, we followed-up on the story of how Chris Horner, working with the American Tradition Institute, had filed a freedom of information request with the University of Virginia for emails and materials former UVA Prof. Michael Mann generated during his time at the school. What we learned from our interview with Horner is jaw-dropping.

When what Horner termed "a gaggle of pressure groups" got wind of people lurking around Mann's emails, they descended on UVA stating, in effect "don't you dare co-operate with law enforcement to release the records the taxpayer paid for in a fraud pre-investigation under a statute that passed unanimously [in the Virginia General Assembly]," that nowhere provides an exemption for academics.

Horner says that once these groups made their displeasure known, UVA "reversed course" and decided to fight, spending "$500,000 with [former U.S. Senator] John Warner's law firm in Washington, D.C. to keep the taxpayer from seeing the records."

He recounts how he discovered UVA had a FOIA compliance officer - the same office that was eager to turn over the emails of former university climate scientist Pat Michaels to Greenpeace (once the group paid the appropriate fee) - and decided to file his own FOIA request for Mann's emails.

By Paul Chesser, American Specator

Yesterday a dozen liberal and academic (but I repeat myself) groups rose in defense of Penn State Climategate scientist Michael Mann, making up reasons such as "academic freedom" to deny American Tradition Institute's request for Mann's emails and records from the University of Virginia, his previous employer. ATI, where I am executive director, is asking for similar records that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has asked for under the state's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, but has been denied so far by the university and lower courts. We request the documents under Virginia's Freedom of Information Act. Both of us are curious about Mann's activities at UVA when he came up with that "Hockey Stick" temperature chart that ignored the Medieval Warm Period, but helped fuel the AlGorean chants of global warming alarmism a few years ago. He got government grants for his work.

The defenders of Mann include the ACLU of Virginia, People for the American Way, American Association of University Professors, Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, Union of Scientists Concerned About Their Grant Funding, and that heavyweight of heavyweights, The Ornithological Council. From their collective authorship:

The undersigned organizations, dedicated both to academic freedom and the exchange of scholarly and scientific ideas and to the critically important ideals of government transparency that are embodied by FOIA, urge the University of Virginia to...balanc(e) the interests in public disclosure against the public interest in academic freedom, which the University of Virginia has recognized in its faculty handbook as "an essential ingredient of an environment of academic excellence."

ATI's FOIA request is not on behalf of government, but of taxpayers, who have the right to know how and where their dollars are spent - or misspent. "Academic freedom" is not a legitimate exemption, any more than "bureaucratic freedom" is an acceptable exemption for state government employees. The coverage of state universities is very clear in Virginia's Freedom of Information laws.

ATI's Chris Horner also notes in our response how these groups were missing in action on the "academic freedom" front when Greenpeace demanded the records of Mann's former UVA colleague, Patrick Michaels, a climate alarmism skeptic. Same goes for several other skeptical scientists at other institutions where Greenpeace inquired.

In other Penn State news, I see that "The Amazing Revkin," who also goes by Andy, will be featured at the university's 2011 Colloquium on the Environment. PSU describes in part the New York Times blogger with this laugh line: "While the media largely ignored the climate story until the last several years, Revkin spent more than 20 years immersed in this subject...."

The story of Andy as pioneer -- ought to be fun.

by Joseph D'Aleo, January 14, 2011 Full Report in PDF form.

NOAA and NASA announced this week that 2010 was tied for the warmest year.

NOAA's Dr. Lubchenko, when she was president of AAAS in 1999, urged "Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract ... a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding."

NOAA and NASA are receiving big dollars $437M (NOAA) and $438M (NASA) in climate research funding and are expected to provide the information needed to support environmental, social and political agendas. NOAA and NASA also benefited from funding for climate change research from the Recovery Act of 2009 with up to $600 million. You can see how quickly the political operatives and the media enablers respond to those press releases (Hill story here).

The pressure has been mounting. The public doubt about global warming has been increasing in recent years given Climategate, and how promises of warm snowless winters failed. After cold and snowy winters in 2007/08 and 2008/09, the winter of 2009/10 was the coldest ever in parts of the southeast, and in parts of Siberia and the coldest since 1977/78 or 1962/63 in many parts of the United States, Europe and Asia. This past December was the second coldest in the entire Central England Temperature record extending back to 1659. It was the coldest ever December in diverse locations like Ireland, Sweden, and Florida. Reluctantly, alarmists changed their tune and the promise of warm and snowless winters as recent as 4 years ago morphed into global warming means cold and snowy winters.

Marc Morano, Climate Depot

Climate Depot Exclusive: 321-page 'Consensus Buster' Report set to further chill UN Climate Summit in Cancun

Link to Complete 321-Page PDF Special Report

More than 1000 dissenting scientists (updates previous 700 scientist report) from around the globe have now challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 2010 320-page Climate Depot Special Report -- updated from 2007's groundbreaking U.S. Senate Report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming "consensus" -- features the skeptical voices of over 1000 international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. This updated 2010 report includes a dramatic increase of over 300 additional (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the last update in March 2009. This report's release coincides with the 2010 UN global warming summit in being held in Cancun.

The rest of the story.

By Alan Caruba, factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

November 20, 2009 is an important date because it was the day that "global warming" ended. It was the day that a total fabrication, a hoax, was revealed to be the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aided and abetted by a vast network of governmental and business leaders, a compliant media, and scientists who sold their souls for grants and other funding.

It was the day that Al Gore was shown to be unworthy to share a Nobel Peace Prize with the iniquitous IPCC, nor an Oscar for his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

It was the day that Cap-and-Trade legislation, the largest tax ever on energy use, was eviscerated as lacking any basis in science. The legislation proposed to establish a "carbon credits" trade that would have enriched the Chicago Climate Exchange created by investors that included Goldman Sachs. Following the "global warming" hoax revelations, the Exchange would close its doors within a year.

Read the rest of the article.

James Delingpole, blogs.telegraph.co.uk

This week marks the anniversary of Climategate but even though I helped break and name the story I'm certainly not celebrating. That's because, despite the marked shift it effected in public opinion, its effect on public policy-making has been close to zilch.

Read the rest of the article.

By Julia A. Seymour, Business and Media Institute

Climate controversy shook public's faith in global warming science, but not network news media's. Reporters downplayed allegations, defended the science and turned accused into victims.

It's been a year since thousands of emails and files were leaked from a prominent climate science group at the University of East Anglia, with startling comments including this one: "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment."

Other leaked emails showed potential manipulation of temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under the British Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles. The files also indicated that the temperature data was in a "hopeless" state.

Even though many considered it a huge scandal, the three broadcast networks didn't think so. They ignored the story for roughly two weeks, and have only mentioned it in a dozen stories in the past year.

Read the rest of the article.

By Lachlan Markay, Newsbusters.org

Nearly a year after leaked emails from the University of East Anglia revealed scientists manipulating data to embellish the case for anthropogenic global warming, journalists are finally starting to learn a few lessons. Unfortunately, few, if any, of those journalists are Americans.

Margot O'Neill of the Australian Broadcasting Company reported last week:

[A] key BBC news manager has declared that climate science "isn't quite a settled question"; and the BBC Trust is investigating the impartiality of science reporting including on climate change and including whether sceptical views are given due airing.

O'Neill, who examined the apparent decline in coverage of global warming, highlighted the blind-faith approach many journalists had taken in reporting on AGW. That approach was shaken by the so-called ClimateGate scandal.

Read the rest of the article here.

By Brett Israel, Live Science

As the right side of the U.S. capitol gets a little heavier following midterm elections, federal climate change legislation may be stuck in neutral.

Over 100 freshmen Republicans were elected to the 112th Congress. According to an investigation by ThinkProgress, a progressive blog, 50 percent of the GOP class of 2010 deny the existence of manmade climate change, and 86 percent are opposed to any climate change legislation that increases government revenue.

"With the possible exception of Tiger Woods, nothing has had a worse year than global warming," Todd Young, a new congressperson from Indiana, was widely quoted as saying earlier this year. "We have discovered that a good portion of the science used to justify 'climate change' was a hoax perpetrated by leftist ideologues with an agenda."

Read the rest of the article.

James Delingpole, telegraph.co.uk

Just back from the House of Lords for the launch of the Global Warming Policy Foundation's report on the failings of the three Climategate inquiries.

The official inquiries, as we know, found nothing untoward in any of the Climategate emails - nor in the behaviour of the scientists responsible for them. But the GWPF's report, by Andrew "Bishop Hill" Montford, begs to differ. At the conference, one journalist asked Montford to try to summarise the juiciest of his allegations. Montford found this difficult: so many and varied are the failings of the three whitewash inquiries, he simply couldn't decide which ones to choose.

After Lord Monckton's lengthy rebuttal yesterday to John Abraham's 83 minute critique, Professor Abraham has decided to remove 10 minutes of his presentation.

From wattsupwiththat.com

"Latest news - sent to me by two readers of Anthony's outstanding blog - is that Abraham, inferentially on orders from the Trustees of his university acting on advice from their lawyers, has (without telling me) re-recorded his entire 83-minute talk to take out the very many direct accusations of "misrepresentation", "complete fabrication", "sleight of hand" etc. etc. that he had hurled at me in the original version of his talk. For instance, he now seems to have appreciated his unwisdom in having accused me of having "misrepresented" the work of scientists I had not even cited in the first place.

Taking out his direct libels has reduced the length of his talk by 10 minutes. To my own lawyers, Abraham's retreat will be of interest, because it is in effect an admission that his talk is libelous, and that he and his university know it is libelous. Though his new version corrects some of the stupider and more egregious errors in the original, many crass errors remain, including errors of simple arithmetic that are surely disfiguring in a "scientist" presuming to correct mine."

Anchored by Andrea Canning - Original Air Date: Monday July 12, 2010

ABC News Global Warming Debate Part 1:

Thanks to Climate Realists

Christopher Monckton has issued an extensive and detailed critique and refutation of a widely circulated 83-minute personal attack on him by one J.P. Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Professor Abraham's 83-minute lecture with 115 slides purported to demolish a talk about climate change that Lord Monckton had given in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 2009. More than 2.5 million people have seen Monckton's talk on YouTube, making it one of the most popular viewings on the web.

In June 2010, John Abraham posted up an attack on the internet via the servers of the University of St. Thomas. Within a week, Monckton's response letter with its near-500 questions was in Abraham's hands, to which he has not responded as challenged.

Monckton publicly accuses Abraham of -

Bad faith in having "furtively" spent eight months preparing his savage personal attack behind Monckton's back, entirely contrary to accepted academic practice;

Malice in having made dozens of serious allegations about Monckton when he knew the allegations he had made were false in every material particular, or had no reason to believe the allegations were true;

Appealing to a false authority on the subject of the climate that, as a lecturer in fluid mechanics, he did not possess (Monckton demonstrates Abraham appears at times incompetent even in arithmetic);

Academic dishonesty in having repeatedly made up statements that Monckton had not made, having put those statements to other scientists, having obtained hostile responses from those scientists, and having included those hostile responses in his attack as though they were responses to what Monckton had said; and

Lying repeatedly by misstating what Monckton had said and then attacking those misstatements; by falsely and repeatedly alleging that Monckton had misrepresented scientists' results when Monckton had either accurately represented the results or not cited the scientists he was alleged to have misrepresented at all; by unjustifiably and repeatedly impugning Monckton's integrity, qualifications, experience, and competence in a manner that he knew to be inaccurate; and by repeatedly taking Monckton's words out of their context and making a willful nonsense of them.

Download Monckton's critique.

By Patrick J. Michaels, WSJ

Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year's data manipulation scandal. Don't believe the 'independent' reviews.

Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Read the rest of the article.

By Dr. Tim Ball Thursday, Canada Free Press

There were two British investigations into the behavior of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) exposed in leaked emails. Both reports provide no answers, no explanations and are only telling for what they did not ask or do and how they were manipulated. The blatant level of cover up is frightening. These are acts by people who believe they are unaccountable because they have carried out the greatest scam in history with impunity. The degree of cover up in both cases is an arrogant in-your-face statement that we are the power and are not answerable to anyone. Their cover up almost belittles the ones they are investigating.

Read the rest of the article.