Climategate e-mails

Climategate e-mails November 25, 2009

Hackers broke into the computers of some prominent global warming scientists, whose e-mails show them fudging data, suppressing contrary evidence, and violating scientific protocols to advance their hypothesis about catastrophic climate change. Here are some of the e-mails, as classified by the London Telegraph:

Manipulation of evidence
:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. . . .

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

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

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming] can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority:

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

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

This is a reminder that science is an enterprise of human beings, with the whole array of agendas, ambitions, personalities, biases, preconceptions, and sins. Yet we are on the verge of risking our whole economy on a carbon-trade system that assumes what these guys have been saying about catastrophic global warming is objectively true.

"Are old-Earth and evolution actually incompatible with orthodox Lutheranism, though?ETA: ChatBot Luther says:No, acceptance of ..."

Sasse’s “This Is My Body”
"I noticed how hard it was to get the chat off to get to Justification ..."

The Martin Luther Chatbot
"Excellent review.Reading This Is My Body while at seminary (not required for any class!) was ..."

Sasse’s “This Is My Body”
"I would take some things with Issues, Etc. w a pinch of a grain of ..."

Sasse’s “This Is My Body”

Browse Our Archives