by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
01 December 2009

from ScienceAndPublicPolicy Website

THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH

The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.

In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class - its classe politique - would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment:

in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming”.

The unnamed hero of ‘Climategate’, after months of work gathering emails, computer code, and data, quietly sent a 61-megabyte compressed file from one of the university’s servers to an obscure public message-board on the Internet, with a short covering note to the effect that the climate was too important to keep the material secret, and that the data from the University would be available for a short time only.

He had caught the world’s politico-scientific establishment green-handed.

Yet his first attempts to reveal the highly-profitable fraud and systematic corruption at the very heart of the United Nations’s climate panel and among the scientists most prominent in influencing its prejudiced and absurdly doom-laden reports had failed.

He had made the mistake of sending the data-file to the mainstream news media, which had also profited for decades by fostering the “global warming” scare, and by generally denying anyone who disagreed with the official viewpoint any platform.

The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible.
 

REVEALED - THE ABJECT CORRUPTION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

The gallant whistleblower now faces a police investigation at the instigation of the University authorities desperate to look after their own and to divert allegations of criminality elsewhere.

His crime? He had revealed what many had long suspected:

• A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
   

• The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
   

• The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
   

• The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
   

• They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
   

• They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
   

• They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
   

• They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
   

• They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
   

• They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
   

• They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
   

• Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

The Nature ‘Trick’ To ‘Hide The Decline’ In Temperatures

Among the most revealing of the emails released to the world by the whistleblower was one dated November 1999.

In that email, Professor “Phil” Jones of the CRU wrote to Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, the authors of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that falsely abolished the medieval warm period:

“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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Almost immediately after the news of Climategate broke, Professor Jones told Investigative Magazine’s TGIF Edition that he “had no idea” what he might have meant by the words “hide the decline”.

He said:

“They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered - but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

A few hours later, the science hate-crime website created by the Team cobbled together a jumbled, snivelingly self-serving, and entirely different pretext:

“The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction [the ‘hockey-stick’ graph of pre-instrumental temperatures over the past 1000 years in the Northern Hemisphere], and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear.

 

Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.

 

As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s [another prominent member of the Team] maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”... and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al. in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682).

 

Those authors have always recommend not using the post-1960 part of their reconstruction, and so, while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”

Steve McIntyre, the one who had first realized that the United Nations’s climate panel in 2001 had used a corrupt graph that had falsely abolished the medieval warm period with the aim of pretending that today’s global temperatures are unprecedented in at least 1000 years.

Later that day his website, www.climateaudit.org, revealed the truth about the conspirators’ “trick”. In order to smooth a data series over a given time period, one must pad it with artificial data beyond the endpoint of the real series.

However, when Mann, Bradley, and Hughes plotted instrumental data against their reconstructions based on the varying widths of tree-rings from ancient trees, their favorite form of proxy or pre-instrumental reconstructed temperature, no smoothing method could conceal the fact that after 1960 the tree-ring data series trended downward, while the instrumental series trended upward.

This was the Team’s “divergence”:

“So Mann’s solution [‘Mike’s Nature trick’] was to use the instrumental record for padding [both the proxy and the instrumental data series], which changes the smoothed series to point upwards.”

Accordingly, though the author of the original email had said that the “trick” was to add instrumental measurements for years beyond available proxy data, his conspirators at the science-hate website admitted it was actually a replacement of proxy data owing to a known but unexplained post-1960 “divergence” between the proxy data and the instrumental data.

In fact, it was a fabrication.

The next day, in a statement issued by the University of East Anglia’s press office, Professor Jones fumblingly tried to recover the position:

“The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”

As we shall see, Professor Jones was not telling the truth.
 

BREAKING THE BROKEN CODE - DISSECTING THE DODGY DATA

The “Documents” folder in the enormous data-file released by the whistleblower contains many segments of computer program code used by Jones and the Team in contriving the Climate Research Unit’s global temperature series.

The data-file also contained a 15,000-line commentary by programmers concerned that the code and the data used by the Team were suspect, were fabricated, and were not fit for their purpose.

Looking at the seldom-tidy code, the sheer number of programs which subject the raw data to various degrees of filtering, processing, and tampering is disconcerting.

Some of these alterations were blatant and unacceptable, notably those which removed proxy data that correlate poorly with measured regional temperature, or even replaced proxy data altogether with measured data to conceal a discrepancy between what the proxy data actually showed and what the Team wanted it to show.

The Team’s programmers even admitted, in comments within the code, that they were artificially adjusting or “correcting” the proxy data from tree-rings.

In Fortran, the high-level computer language long in use at universities for programming, a programmer’s comment is usually preceded by the statement “REM” for “remark”, indicating that the text on the line following the word “REM” should be ignored by the compiler program that translates the Fortran code that humans can understand into executable machine language that the computer can understand.

One of the commonest remarks included in the program fragments disclosed by the whistleblower is as follows:

“REM Uses ‘corrected’ MXD [proxy data from tree-rings] - but shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

“These will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

There could scarcely be a plainer admission that the data are being regularly, routinely, materially tampered with, for the sake of making it appear that the proxy data are sufficiently reliable to appear close to the instrumental temperatures.

This is no mere debating point. The UN’s climate panel had issued specific warnings against using proxy data (MXD) from tree-rings, because warmer weather is not the only reason why tree-rings become wider in some years than in others.

There are at least two other prominent reasons, both of which can - and do - distort the tree-ring data beyond the point where they are useful as indicators of (or proxies for) pre-instrumental temperatures.

• First, the tree-rings become wider whenever the weather becomes wetter.

• Secondly, and of still greater concern, the tree-rings widen when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

• And there is 40% more CO² in the atmosphere today than there was in 1750.

Yet, as McIntyre and McKitrick had established originally in 2003, and had published in a leading journal in 2005, the majority of the data on the basis of which Mann, Bradley and Hughes, and later other members of the Team, had attempted to pretend that there had been no medieval warm period were tree-ring series.

Take out the suspect tree-ring series, together with just one other rogue series, and all the remaining data series establish beyond reasonable doubt that the Middle Ages were truly, materially, and globally warmer than the present.

Scientists with programming knowledge have already begun to examine the computer code that Professor Jones and his colleagues had attempted to hide for so long.

Here is Marc Sheppard’s selection of three examples of the tortuous sequences of deliberate data tampering that are evident within the program code.
 

Example 1
‘In subfolder “osborn-tree6mannoldprog” there’s a program (Calibrate_mxd.pro) that calibrates the MXD data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911 and 1990, then merges that data into a new file.

 

That file is then digested and further modified by another program (Pl_calibmxd1.pro) which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and “estimates” (i.e. infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available.

 

The file created by that program is modified once again by Pl_Decline.pro, which “corrects it” - as described by the author - by “identifying and “artificially” (the author’s own word) removing “the decline.” But oddly enough the series doesn’t begin its “decline adjustment” in 1960 - the supposed year of the enigmatic “divergence.”

 

In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.”’
 

Example 2
‘In two other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the “correction” is bolder by far.

 

The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the “adjustment” routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!!” And he/she wasn’t kidding. Now, IDL [a computer language] is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I’m familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

 

Here’s the “fudge factor” (notice [he] actually called it that in his REM statement):

‘yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

‘valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

‘These 2 lines of code establish a 20-element array (yrloc) comprising the year 1400 (base year, but not sure why needed here) and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments.

 

Then the corresponding “fudge factor” (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1964) but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower.

 

That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD [tree-ring proxies] after 1960 (or earlier), CRU’s “divergence problem” also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

 

And the former apparently wasn’t a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.’

Note that the words “fudge factor” that we have highlighted in the code fragment shown in this example actually appear in the code as released by the whistleblower.

 

The words follow a semicolon, which, in IDL and many other computer languages, has the same significance as a “REM” statement:

it tells the automatic code-compiler to treat everything between the semicolon and the next line-feed as a programmer’s remark, and to ignore it rather than trying convert it to executable code as part of the program.

In short, the programmer was recording his own admission that he was tampering with the data by multiplying it by what he himself was calling a “fudge factor”.

No true or honest scientist would apply an undeclared, undisclosed fudge-factor (which the Climate Research Unit’s programmer actually called a “fudge-factor”) so as artificially to generate the “politically-correct” - but scientifically baseless - result.
 

Example 3

‘Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart:

‘“IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set this ‘decline’ has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.”

‘Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning:

‘“NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then [should be “than”] they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).'

The true meaning of Professor Jones’ “trick” to “hide the decline” in the data proxy series from 1960 onwards is all too clear from the three above examples.

 

The real purpose of Michael Mann’s Nature trick (one of the many artifices and devices that the Team had used in fabricating the graph that had falsely abolished the medieval warm period) was to,

“incorrectly imply the reconstruction [from the tree-ring proxies] is more skilful [i.e. accurate as a representation of pre-industrial temperatures] than it actually is”.

Why does this matter so much?

 

The reason is that if a “divergence” or discrepancy exists not merely between the magnitudes but even between the signs (i.e. the directions, towards warming or cooling) of measured temperature trends on the one hand, and those derived from tree-ring proxy data from the 1960s onwards on the other, then discarding only the post-1960 figures will have the effect of concealing that, during much of the period when instrumental temperatures are available to demonstrate the extent to which parallel tree-ring proxy data for the same period are producing accurate temperature reconstructions, the tree-ring proxies are producing flagrantly inaccurate and erroneous temperature reconstructions.

 

In short, the tree-ring proxies are no good, as the UN had long stated, but the “Nature trick” was intended to “hide the decline” - and did so, until the whistleblower came along.

The very existence of a “divergence” between proxy and instrumental data covering the same period betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring densities.

 

If the relationship between proxy and instrumental data breaks down beyond a certain date, then any honest men of science would instinctively question whether the relationship was sound even before that date.

The entire basis for the Team’s purported abolition of the medieval warm period, and hence for the UN’s assertion that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in at least the last 1000 years, was false.

And the Team’s attempt to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring proxy data compared with the post-1960 rise in instrumental global-temperature data, so as to conceal the inadequacy of the tree-ring proxies on the basis of which it had tried to abolish the medieval warm period,

was - and there is no other way to put this - scientific fraud.
 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA ARE SILENT, BUT THE INTERNET ROARS

Most of the world’s news media simply ignored the news about the decades of organized corruption and outright scientific crime at the University of East Anglia.

For years, newspapers, television, and radio had naively and unquestioningly bought into the Team’s story-line that the world was warming at an unprecedented rate, and that we are to blame. They were simply not honest enough to change their tune.

The unspeakable BBC, whose bias on the “global warming” issue now places its current right to levy a poll-tax on every UK citizen with a television gravely in question, was as usual the worst offender in its abject failure to report the content of the whistleblower’s emails accurately or, until others had broken the story, at all.

The BBC had had a copy of the data for at least a month before the story broke. But was it the BBC that broke the story? No, it was an obscure bulletin-board in the United States.

The BBC has been peddling the extremist line on “global warming” throughout, and its senior personnel simply no longer possess the objectivity or sense of journalistic fair play to allow anything on the air that might seriously question its Stakhanovite orthodoxy.

The BBC sat on the story, presumably in the vain and desperate hope that no one else would find out about it.

Then, when the story eventually broke elsewhere, one of the BBC’s dozens of environmental commentators, a laughable, clownish anti-scientist called Roger Harrabin, immediately posted up a blog entry to say that his “friends” at the Climate Research Unit had assured him that the emails and data released by the whistleblower were nothing more than a storm in a teacup.

Now that we have here revealed a little of what those tainted emails contained - the BBC, true to form, has still not revealed any of their damning contents on the air, and probably never will - its listeners will have some means of judging for themselves whether Harrabin’s “friends” in climate science’s organized crime unit are telling the truth.

The embarrassment of environmental journalists who had profited as handsomely as the corrupt scientists by hawking and peddling the mother of all “we-are-all-guilty” scares was palpable. Most of them could not bear to report on the affair at all.

Those who did report it - the BBC being a typical example - were careful not to mention, at all, any of the information that the whistleblower had revealed.

On the Internet, however, which in some countries - such as Britain - is now the only independent source of news not controlled or influenced to the point of endemic bias and irremediably blind prejudice by the government, the news of the corruption that had long festered at the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia and throughout the international scientific community circulated rapidly.

For decades, national scientific societies, professional groups, universities, and environmental pressure-groups funded by questionable sources had made common cause and uncommon profits by lining up to push the climate scare, without the slightest regard to whether it was true. Now their corruption, and their criminality, had been exposed.

Those who had long had reason to suspect the financial and political links and motives of those chiefly responsible for the climate scare were understandably angry at what this additional hard evidence revealed about the sheer scale, reach, and magnitude of the criminal conspiracy of the scientific and political establishment against the little guy whose taxes pay for their crimes.

The website of Steve McIntyre, the diligent researcher who had first exposed as a fake the Team’s attempt to abolish the medieval warm period, could no longer handle the traffic when the news of the scandal at the University of East Anglia broke.

It was Mr. McIntyre who had repeatedly made requests to the Climate Research Unit, under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK, for the computer codes and data that the Team were using to construct - or, as we now know beyond reasonable doubt, to fabricate - the record of changes in global mean surface temperature over recent decades.
 

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION? WHAT FREEDOM?

One of the many astonishing revelations by the whistleblower is the exposure of the systematic and ruthless attempts by Professor Jones and his international colleagues to prevent other scientific researchers from being able to obtain their program codes and their temperature data so that their results could be independently verified.

Abu Ali Ibn al-Hassan Ibn al-Hussain Ibn al-Haytham, the 11th-century Iraqi mathematician and natural scientist, wrote a thousand years ago that,

the “seeker after truth” - his phrase for the scientist, and how very unlike the pseudo-scientists of the Team - had an obligation not to believe any consensus, however well established: instead, it was his duty to check for himself, using his own hard-won knowledge and skill.

 

For the road to truth, said al-Haytham, was long and hard, but, he wrote “that is the road we must follow.”

For that great statement of scientific principle, al-Haytham is rightly celebrated by historians of natural philosophy as the father of what is now called the “scientific method”, and his signal contribution to the development of scientific thought is commemorated on an Iraqi banknote - 10000 dinars Iraqi bank note (2003)

The scientific method was codified by Karl Popper in a landmark paper of 1934, in which he said that any scientific hypothesis - such as the hypothesis that the Middle Ages were not, after all, warmer than the present, or that global temperatures during the 20th century rose as fast as the Team’s global-temperature datasets were pretending - followed a repeated, step-by-step process of scrutiny.

• The first step is the description of a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, which Popper called the “General Problem”. The problem should be clearly defined, and should be generally accepted as being a problem that required to be addressed.
   

• The second step is the formulation of a hypothesis - a suggested scientific answer to the General Problem. Popper’s term for the hypothesis is the “Tentative Theory”. Here, the rules are clear. The hypothesis must address a definite general problem, and it must be stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics.
   

• The third step is what Popper called the “Error Elimination” phase. It is at this step that other scientists examine the General Problem in the light of the Tentative Theory and consider whether or to what extent the Tentative Theory has successfully followed the rules of science and has helped in addressing the General Problem.

It follows from this crucial step in the scientific method that the hypothesis, or “Tentative Theory”, must be one that is capable of being tested and verified by other science: or, as Popper put it, every hypothesis, if it is to be a genuine hypothesis, must be “falsifiable”.

There are three possible outcomes from the Error Elimination phase.

• The first outcome, which is extremely rare, is that the hypothesis is formally and completely proven. In this special case the Tentative Theory becomes an established theorem and passes out from the scientific method into the realm of settled science, along with propositions such as Pythagoras’ proof that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle in the Euclidean plane necessarily equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
   

• The second and more common outcome is the hypothesis, after being subjected to testing, is disproved. In that event, the hypothesis passes out from the scientific method and into the dustbin of failed ideas. A disproven hypothesis cannot live again. That is the end of it.
   

• The third and commonest outcome is that the hypothesis is neither proven, because no complete and formal demonstration of it can be found, nor disproven. In that event, the hypothesis lives to fight another day, the General Problem is redefined and improved in the light of the failure of scientists attacking the hypothesis to disprove it, and in due course a new Tentative Theory emerges to be subjected to another Error Elimination phase, and so ad infinitum.

From this short description of the origin and current formulation of the scientific method, we conclude that:

• the scientific truth - not any political objective - is the only purpose of the scientific method

• that scientists are supposed to be “seekers after truth”, not pedlars of political propaganda

• that any hypothesis that they propose, however politically fashionable or financially profitable or academically expedient it may be, must be capable of being rigorously scrutinized and tested by other scientists to establish whether it is false.

And how can one possibly test a hypothesis that is the result of the application of a given computer program to a given set of data unless the program code and the data are fully disclosed to any scientists who wish to verify the program and the data and the methods used by those advancing the hypothesis?

The refusal of Professor Jones and the Team to release their data, a refusal that persisted for many years, is in direct and flagrant contradiction to every rule and principle of science that underlies the scientific method.

On that ground alone, it is a scandal, and a serious one.

Just how serious the scandal is will become apparent when we study the elaborate steps that the Team furtively took to make quite sure that their hypotheses about the 20th century being the warmest in the past ten centuries, and about the rate at which the Earth warmed over the 20th century, could not be subjected to the independent and necessary scrutiny and verification by other scientists that the scientific method absolutely and always requires.

Here are the steps that the Team took to thwart requests from Mr. McIntyre and other scientific researchers to be allowed access to their methods and data for purposes of verification.

1. Professor “Phil” Jones, the man chiefly responsible for the Climate Research Unit’s surface- temperature dataset, at first answered all queries about his computer codes and data by saying that he refused to release any information because those requesting it were only asking for it so that they could find out whether it was correct.

    

   Well, yes: that is how science works. It is not enough for a scientist merely to declare a result, and then to refuse to say how he obtained it.
    

2. Professor Jones’ sour, sullen, silly, scientifically-senseless refusal to make all of his data and codes immediately available when other scientists requested it had long aroused suspicion, particularly because his results had a direct bearing on the question of how fast the world is warming, a currently-fashionable political topic, and not least because we, the taxpayers, are writing the checks that fund him and his research.
    

3. When the Freedom of Information Act came into force in the UK, Professor Jones and other members of the Team began writing emails to each other about how they could prevent their codes and data from being made available.
    

4. Professor Jones’ first advice to fellow-members of the Team, recorded in one of the emails released by the whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, was that they should not let anyone know that there was a Freedom of Information Act in the UK.
    

5. Professor Jones subsequently wrote to members of the Team that he would destroy data rather than provide it to researchers who requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.
    

6. Professor Jones and his conspirators on the Team then contrived a remarkable number of pretexts for not disclosing data and computer programs to anyone who might request them under the Freedom of Information Act.

    

   The Team discussed:

   • Hiding (they repeatedly used the word) behind public-interest immunity

   • Hiding behind the UK’s Data Protection Act, which does not prevent disclosure of data or research paid for by taxpayers

   • Hiding behind advice from the office of the Information Commissioner, the UK official who enforces the Freedom of Information Act

   • Hiding behind the fact that the UN’s climate panel is an international entity not subject to the UK freedom-of-information law

   • Hiding behind reclassification of as much as possible of their work as UN work, so as to evade their obligation at law to disclose requested information

   • Hiding behind contracts between the Climate Research Unit and other national weather bureau whose data it had received, on the bizarre pretext that weather data that was and is openly published worldwide might be held by some nations to be confidential.
      

7. Professor Jones, in another exchange of emails revealed by the whistleblower, discusses with the Team the fact - which the emails deplore - that some scientific journals not only have a policy of requiring all computer codes and data to be archived with the journal at the same time as a learned paper is submitted, but also actually go to the trouble of enforcing the policy.

    

   The implication was that submitting papers to such journals was best avoided, because it might lead to publication of the information the Team was, for some reason, so desperately anxious to conceal and to withhold.
    

8. Professor Jones then conspired with Freedom of Information Officers at the University of East Anglia to minimize the scope, categories, and quantity of information to be disclosed to those requesting it.

    

   A revealing email to members of the Team describes how Professor Jones had shown the University’s Freedom of Information Officers details of the website of one of those requesting information about how he had compiled his global-temperature dataset, and had persuaded them to agree that the person requesting the data ought not to be given anything if possible.

    

   Yet there is no provision in the Freedom of Information Act in the UK that allows any such arbitrary discrimination against people whom those who are bound to disclose information happen to fear or dislike.
    

9. Professor Jones, in another revelatory email, discloses how a Freedom of Information officer at the University of East Anglia had told him that he must not destroy any emails, except for the purpose of keeping email traffic manageable.

    

   These weasel words were, in effect, an open invitation to Jones to destroy as many emails as he liked, in the sure and certain knowledge that the Freedom of Information officer would cover for him, even though the capacity of the servers at the University was and is more than adequate to permit all of the Team’s emails to be permanently stored, tracked, and made available on request.
    

10. Numerous emails between Professor Jones and the Team establish that they were particularly anxious to conceal from other researchers the computer code they were using to fabricate their global-temperature record.

     

    The reason for this refusal is readily discernible from one of the document files also released by the whistleblower, a series of notes by a exasperated programmers trying to make sense of the numerous segments of apparently meaningless, erroneous, or incomprehensible computer code in the Team’s programs, and of many data files that were missing, incomplete, unlabeled, labeled as duplicates, duplicated, or based on incompatible units of measurement.
     

11. The methodology at the University of East Anglia - if the 15,000 lines of commentary by the programmers are right - is little better than simply making the numbers up. In short, there is a very good and obvious reason why Professor Jones wanted to conceal his computer code: any independent researcher examining it - particularly one as competent and diligent as Mr. McIntyre - would at once realize that it was entirely unfit for its purpose, and that the global instrumental temperature record of the past 150 years is little better than a work of fiction.
     

12. Finally - and here the evidence of criminality is incontrovertible - in 2008 Professor Jones wrote to several members of the Team inviting them to delete all emails relating to the Team’s participation in the preparation of the previous year’s Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel.

     

    He wrote this email some three weeks after the University of East Anglia had received a request under the Freedom of Information Act for precisely the information that he was recommending his fellow-members of the Team to emulate him in destroying.

Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 empowers the courts to impose substantial fines on public bodies or their personnel found guilty of the offense of altering, defacing, blocking, erasing, destroying, or concealing any record held by a public authority with the intention of preventing disclosure of information lawfully applied for under the Act.

At least one complaint has already been sent to the Information Commissioner, who, on receiving the complaint, is bound by law to investigate the years of attempts by Professor Jones and other members of the Team to prevent the disclosure of information from various applicants who had lawfully requested it, and to whom it should by law have been - but was not - unhesitatingly, promptly, and fully supplied.
 

WHY THE TRUTH ABOUT TEMPERATURE MATTERS

The question whether “global warming” is manmade is conflated - sometimes to an absurd and illogical degree - with the question whether “global warming” is occurring.

Those who take the extravagantly and baselessly alarmist view beloved of the scientific and political establishment tend to assert or imply, over and over again, that merely because the world is warming the warming must be the fault of the world’s people.

However, this assertion or implication is a notorious instance of the fundamental Aristotelian logical fallacy of relevance long known as the argumentum ad ignorantiam - the argument from ignorance.

The world, this bogus argument runs, is warming, and we do not know why it is warming, so we shall blame it on whatever or whoever we like. Let’s call it manmade.

All of the endlessly-repeated, endlessly-exaggerated news about melting glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms, plagues and other disasters formerly safely confined to the verses of the Psalmist at his most lurid or of St. John the Divine at his most excitable is implicitly, and all too often explicitly, blamed on humankind. All such attributions are illogical, given the present state of climate science.

However, precisely because those who hawk the “global warming” scare so often resort to the argumentum ad ignorantiam when attributing blame for the “global warming” that is thought to have occurred over the past 50 years, the very small number of global-temperature datasets that are available to us are of central importance to the debate, if not necessarily to scientific logic. There are only four such datasets: two from the Earth’s surface and two from satellites.

The two terrestrial datasets are:

• Professor Jones’ dataset from the Climate Research Unit, in collaboration with the Hadley Center for Forecasting at the UK Meteorological Office

• Professor James Hansen’s dataset at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in collaboration with NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which produces its own dataset that is, however, functionally near-identical with that of NASA.

The two satellite datasets are those of:

• Remote Sensing Systems, Inc.

• the University of Alabama at Huntsville

Given that there are four datasets, it might at first be thought that systematic scientific corruption in the compilation of just one dataset would have very little significance - and that is the line that is being hawked around by the embarrassed environmental journalists who are acting not as independent journalists but rather as willing apologists for the Team at the moment.

However, the whistleblower’s data file reveals that there is very close collusion indeed between key figures in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and in both NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Members of all of these entities in the scientific establishment are also members of the Team.

They co-ordinate their results, and they co-ordinate how they present their results, and they co-ordinate how, between them, they control or seek to control - to a remarkable extent - the entire process of the UN’s climate panel, as well as the process of publication of learned papers in scientific journals, and even the appointment of reviewers and editors.

Professor Jones at the Climate Research Unit in the UK, Gavin Schmidt at NASA, and Tom Karl at NOAA are now known via their email correspondence to be closely and poisonously in league with one another, and with the paleoclimate community, such as Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, the three authors of the paper seized upon by the UN for its 2001 report claiming - contrary to the overwhelming evidence in the peer-reviewed literature, and in history, and in archaeology - that there was no medieval warm period and that, accordingly, the 20th century was the warmest in at least the past ten centuries.

There is no link between those who produce the two satellite-based datasets and those who produce the surface datasets.

Indeed, John Christy and Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who run one of the two satellite datasets, are among the most vocal dissenters from what we are told is the scientific “consensus” attributing most of the “global warming” of the past half-century to humankind.
 

TERRESTRIAL VS. SATELLITE TEMPERATURE RECORDS

Taking the data from 1 January 1980, by which time the satellites had been calibrated and were in reasonably reliable operation, and running the temperature series right through to the present, the Climate Research Unit’s terrestrial mean global surface temperature dataset shows 30 years’ warming at a rate equivalent to 1.6 C° (2.9 F°) per century.

Hadley/Climate Research Unit global temperature record

1980-2009

Various influences can be seen in the temperature record.

The two years of cooling that followed the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 are plainly visible. The Philippine volcano, next to Clark Air Force Base, put up so much ash into the atmosphere that the ash acted as a parasol preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth.

The great el Niño event in 1998 is also prominent. This sudden spike in global temperatures occurred because the oceans released vast amounts of stored heat-energy to the atmosphere. This event occurs every three or four years: but an event of the magnitude of the 1998 el Niño only occurs once in 150 years.

The opposite event, la Niña, where the oceans take up large amounts of heat from the atmosphere, last occurred in 2008, and was so profound that the fall in temperature between the peak of the el Niño of 2007 and the trough of the la Niña in 2008 gave the world the fastest January-to-January temperature drop since global records began in 1880.

The two satellite datasets show very similar warming rates to the terrestrial dataset. The warming rate shown by all of the datasets is considerably above the 0.6 C° (1.1 F°) over the 20th century as a whole.

However, the warming is well below the 3.4 C° (6.1 F°) predicted by the UN for the 21st century on the basis of the current global rate of carbon dioxide emissions.

Remote Sensing Systems’ global temperature record

1980-2009

University of Alabama Huntsville global temperature record

1980-2009

However, there is one immediate and obvious difference between the Hadley/CRU dataset and the two satellite datasets.

The monthly upward or downward fluctuations in temperature shown in the satellite datasets are visibly steeper than in the surface dataset. However, if anything the reverse ought to be the case, because the satellite measurements are taken a mile or two above the surface measurements.

They ought to (and the UAH dataset does) show a little less warming over time than the surface dataset: but they should also show less volatility than the surface dataset. Yet they show appreciably more volatility.

The most likely reason is that the satellite datasets, having been trained to produce long-run temperature trends similar to those shown (rightly or wrongly) in the terrestrial datasets, are far more faithfully measuring short-run temperature anomalies than the Hadley/CRU terrestrial dataset, which has been subjected to so many corrections and adjustments and data failures and mere guesswork that it is barely - if at all - fit for its purpose.

The Science and Public Policy Institute, in compiling its global-temperature graphs for the authoritative Monthly CO² Reports, had originally relied upon all four of the major datasets.

We were compelled to drop the NASA GISS/NOAA NCDC dataset when it became apparent that the data from more than half a century ago were being deliberately manipulated in an improper manner with the manifest intention of artificially inflating the true rate of observed warming in the 20th century.

We must now also cease to use the Hadley/CRU dataset, which - on the evidence made public by the courageous whistleblower at the University of East Anglia - is little better than science fiction.

In future, therefore, the SPPI monthly surface-temperature graphs will exclude the two terrestrial-temperature datasets altogether and will rely solely upon the RSS and UAH satellite datasets.

Other problems are apparent with the Climate Research Unit’s approach to temperature trends. The official line from the Team, and from the UN’s climate panel that is so strongly under their influence, is that ten of the last 12 years have been the warmest in the 150-year temperature record (not exactly a surprise given that the world has been warming for 300 years, so that the warmest years would naturally occur at the end of the record).

However, the truth, as yet another revealing email between members of the Team privately admits, is that global temperatures have been falling for almost a decade, and the author of the email bewails the fact that he and his colleagues are unable to explain the fall. So they decided merely to conceal it.

Many mainstream news media, unquestioningly parroting whatever the conspirators fed to them, have not reported to this day that temperatures have been on a rapid and significant downtrend ever since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001.

Even the CRU dataset shows this long and significant decline in mean global surface temperatures:

Hadley/Climate Research Unit global temperature record

2001-2009

The decline, however, is steeper in the combined RSS/UAH satellite record:

Combined RSS and UAH global temperature record

2001-2009

Once again, the el Niño and la Niña effects are plainly visible in the 2007 peak and 2008 trough respectively.

Once again, the volatility in the satellite records is greater than that in the CRU terrestrial record. And, most interesting of all in the context of the Climategate revelations, the rate of cooling in the CRU record is equivalent to just 0.9 C° (1.6 F°) per century, while the cooling rate shown by the satellites is substantially greater, at 1.2 C° (2.2 F°) per century.

To show how significant this cooling is, the rate of warming across the whole of the past 100 years (from 1906 to 2006) was just 0.6 C° - or about half of the cooling rate observed by the satellites for very nearly a whole decade.

At a 2009 hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives on Capitol Hill, Representative Joe Barton (R: TX), former chairman and now ranking Minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked Mr. Tom Karl, the director of the US National Climatic Data Center, to state whether or not global temperatures had been falling for seven full years.

Mr. Karl - one of the Team whose emails to one another have now become public - flannelled and refused to answer the question.

Here is the graph of the NCDC monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies since the turn of the millennium. For some reason, Mr. Karl was not willing to admit this:

NCDC confirms 7 years’ unequivocal global cooling

The temperature dataset published by the National Climatic Data Center shows that the world cooled at a rate equivalent to 1.4 Fº/century.

By contrast, during the 20th century the world warmed by 1.3 Fº.
 

MORE OFFICIAL DISHONESTY ABOUT GLOBAL TEMPERATURE

Until the SPPI began producing its Monthly CO² Reports, which included temperature graphs showing the startling discrepancy between what the UN’s climate panel had predicted and what the real-world data showed, very few knew that global temperatures had not risen for 15 years and had been on a falling trend for 9 years.

The scientists were deliberately not telling anyone.

Instead, they were carefully presenting the data in such a way as to suggest that the rate of warming was itself increasing:

The 2007 report of the UN’s climate panel, cited with approval in a science lecture by Railroad Engineer Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel’s science working group, and also about to be cited with approval in a “Technical Support Document” in justification of the Environment Protection Agency’s bizarre finding that CO² and five other gases are jointly or severally “dangerous” in terms of the US Clean Air Act, contains the above graph purporting to show that the rate at which the world is warming is inexorably increasing.

The UN’s graph is an egregious instance of the endpoint fallacy, a dishonest abuse of statistics by which false trends are demonstrated by careful selection of endpoints or (in the present instance) start-points when evaluating data trends.

It beggars belief that an official intergovernmental panel, funded by taxpayers but unfortunately staffed by the very conspirators whose antics have now been exposed by the whistleblower at East Anglia, could ever have put out a headline graph of such staggering dishonesty.

The lead author of the UN document was Susan Solomon, one of those mentioned in the revelatory emails from East Anglia as being closely involved with “the Team” in the conspiracy to fool the world’s naive and untutored politicians and environmental journalists into believing the Team’s story-line that temperatures that are falling are really rising at an unprecedented rate, on the ground that our emissions of CO² are to blame.

Removal of Railroad Engineer Pachauri’s false trend-lines from the UN’s bogus graph reveals the true position:

The world warmed at the same rate from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 as it did from 1975-1998, as the three parallel magenta trend-lines demonstrate.

The earlier two periods occurred before humankind can possibly have had any significant influence on temperature.

Therefore there is no anthropogenic signal in the global temperature record, and no scientific basis whatsoever for the assertion by the UN’s climate panel that the warming rate is accelerating.

The United Nations’ graph is merely a pictorial lie, deliberately intended to deceive.

And the lie continues to be paraded every time Railroad Engineer Pachauri gives one of his rambling, out-of-his-depth lectures. It is also paraded in the Technical Support Document by which the US Environmental Protection Agency purports to justify its proposal to treat carbon dioxide as though it were a pollutant rather than a harmless trace gas absolutely essential to all life on Earth and currently - compared with former eras - in somewhat short supply in the atmosphere.

To demonstrate why the endpoint fallacy is a shoddy statistical abuse that no reputable scientific body would ever depend upon, we can use the same global temperature data as the UN itself to deliver a result precisely the opposite of that which the UN’s climate panel tries to draw.

We use the same temperature data as the UN, but we carefully choose different start-points for our temperature trend-lines: 1993 (top left), 1997 (top right), 2001 (bottom left), and 2005 (bottom right), and then plot the least-squares linear-regression trend on the underlying data:
 

Accelerating “warming” becomes rampant cooling

If we begin in 1993 (top left) and advance the start-date for the global temperature data successively by 4 years at a time, the UN’s own data show the world heading for an Ice Age. Using the same data as the UN’s climate panel, we reach a diametrically opposite (and equally unjustifiable) conclusion, proving the UN’s shameful abuse of statistical method.

No reliance can be placed upon purported temperature trends that depend arbitrarily upon a careful selection of start-dates and end-dates. The reason is that the temperature record is what scientists call “stochastic” - it jumps up and down more or less at random, so that the trend-line calculated from it (the straight line in each of the above graphs) is highly sensitive to the scientists’ choice of startpoints and endpoints.

That is why the United Nations, Dr. Pachauri, and the EPA are wrong to rely upon the endpoint fallacy as the basis for their erroneous conclusion that “global warming” rates that are far from unprecedented are accelerating when they are doing nothing of the kind.

Not only do we now need an accurate, globally uniform, unbiased method of gathering hourly temperature changes everywhere in the world, but we also need scientists honest enough not to perpetrate the shoddy statistical abuses that are so evident in the documents of the UN’s climate panel, influenced as we now know them to be by the machinations of the Team.

Now that we have demonstrated the unwillingness of the National Climatic Data Center, in the person of its Director, to provide a straight and honest answer to an official committee of the US Congress, and the unwillingness of the official body charged with investigating “global warming” to use statistics honestly and competently, we now turn to the parallel dishonesty that is evident in the compilation of the closely-linked NASA GISS global-temperature dataset.

As Anthony Watts has pointed out in his masterly survey of temperature monitoring stations in the United States, many stations are sited at airports, by tarmac roads, next to buildings, close to air-conditioning heat-vents, by local authorities’ trash-fires, and in industrial areas that were once rural.

This distorts the readings from the stations, causing them to record warming that comes not from greenhouse gases but only from local industrialization next to the measuring instruments.

When Mr. Watts first began to point out these defects in how temperature is measured, and began to attract publicity for his work via his admirable website, www.wattsupwiththat.com, the first reaction of the scientists in charge of the network of US temperature stations that he has surveyed was to remove from the public domain the list of precise locations for the sensors, so that Mr. Watts could not survey any more of the stations.

However, there was an outcry at this scandalous attempt at concealment of data that had been paid for by the public, and to which the public were on any view entitled.

The bureaucrats - who had at first tried to react exactly as Professor Jones and his colleagues at the Climate Research Unit had reacted, by hiding public scientific data - climbed down and republished the locations for their temperature stations, and Mr. Watts’ survey is now all but complete.

It shows a horrifying picture of gross carelessness and neglect on the part of:

• Mr. Karl and the NOAA National Climatic Data Center

• Dr. Hansen and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

NASA’s own temperature record has some lamentable irregularities of its own.

Recently it was discovered that raw data from individual temperature stations were being “processed” - allegedly to remove the urban heat-island effect - but that the effect of the processing was to enhance the heat-island effect and increase the apparent rate of warming rather than to reduce it to compensate for the heat-island effect.

A startling example of the data tampering by scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the century-old temperature record for the temperature station at Santa Rosa, New Mexico, the headquarters of the NOAA itself.

The raw data show one thing: the processed data show quite another. This is a trick we have already seen in the Climate Research Unit’s “Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in tree-ring proxy temperature data after 1960.

And we shall see it again later, when we examine in detail how one national temperature dataset has been similarly tampered with so as grievously to misstate the true direction of the temperature trend.
 

Raw data show 100 years’ cooling   -   ‘Processed ’ data show warming

This discovery led Mr. Watts to investigate how GISS had changed its processed data over the years.

Had the scientists increased the amount of ‘processing’ of the raw data over the years in a dishonest attempt to try to compensate for the continuing failure of global mean surface temperature to rise in accordance with the exaggerated predictions of the computer models, including that from GISS itself?

The GISS model had long been notorious for over-predicting “global warming”.

For instance, in 1988 James Hansen, now director of GISS, had testified on Capitol Hill on a day carefully chosen by the then Democrat administration because a heat-wave had been forecast.

He had displayed the following temperature graph:

The elected representatives who saw Hansen’s graph on that hot day were understandably alarmed at what it foretold.

However, there was no sound scientific basis for the graph: it depended upon an assumption that the warming effect of additional CO² concentrations in the atmosphere would be many times greater than is likely.

Hansen told Congress that unless CO² concentration were stabilized by 2000 (the green dotted line on the graph) temperatures would be most likely to rise along the path of the blue dashed line, and might even follow the black solid line.

In fact, none of these scenarios proved to have any contact with reality. Indeed, on the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s failed prediction, not one of the carefully-selected and impeccably sycophantic journalists to whom Hansen granted interviews was impolite enough, or journalist enough, to ask him why his prediction had not come to pass. And this was a strange question not to ask, because the month of June 2008 was colder, globally, than the month of June 1988, 20 years previously.

The red line on the graph below shows what actually happened to global mean surface temperature:

Temperatures indeed rose from 1988 until 2009, but they rose at a rate that turned out to be well below that which Hansen had predicted on the assumption that global CO² emissions would be stabilized in the year 2000 and would rise no further thereafter.

However, in fact CO² emissions continued to rise at 2 ppmv per year throughout the new millennium, but temperatures failed to rise.

Indeed, had the red line above not been taken from the GISS/NCDC temperature dataset, the warming over the years following Hansen’s prediction would have appeared even less than on this graph. Hansen’s prediction had proven to be a very substantial exaggeration.

Why is this important?

The reason is that it is Hansen’s method for calculating the warming effect of CO² on global temperature that the UN’s climate panel chiefly relies upon. Since his method produces a visible and substantial exaggeration of future warming, by implication the forecasts made by the UN’s climate panel are likely to produce similar very large exaggerations.

Perhaps it was disappointment that the GISS temperature projections directed by Hansen had proven to be such a failure that led him and his organization to tamper more and more

over time with the temperature data for past decades, so as to produce ever-increasing estimates of the rate of “global warming” that had occurred in the 20th century.

The indefatigable Anthony Watts, having noticed that the raw data for many individual stations in the GISS dataset had been “processed” so as to turn a century of actual cooling into a century of spurious warming, wondered whether the “processed” data itself had been altered over time with the aim of producing an ever-higher apparent (but bogus) rate of “global warming” over the 20th century.

He found that this was indeed the case:

   1999 global processed data...       ...and 2008 global processed data

The GISS global-temperature dataset, after adjustment by “processing” of the raw data, as it stood in 1999 (left) and in 2008 (right), showed that the data peak in the 1930s has been reduced in the later version of the dataset, and the 1998 peak has been markedly increased, artificially increasing the 20th-century warming rate and implying that tampering has increased over the years.

As an experiment, you can see this progressively increased tampering clearly by taking the two graphs above and setting them up as successive slides in a PowerPoint presentation. Now turn your computer into a “blink-comparator” by flicking backwards and forwards between the two graphs.

Note how the temperature peak in the 1930s has been reduced appreciably in the 2008 dataset. There is no legitimate scientific justification for going back and rewriting the temperature record of three quarters of a century ago in this way.

One final piece of tampering with the 20th-century temperature record is worthy of note, because it is so seldom cited.

The infamous “hockey-stick” graph, by which the Team purported to rewrite a thousand years of temperature history by ingeniously but falsely abolishing the medieval warm period, also contained a spectacular data trick in the 20th century instrumental record, shown in red on the graph:
 

How the medieval warm period was abolished

The Team carefully chose to use only northern-hemisphere temperature data.

In this way, they were able to overstate the 0.6 C° (1.1 F°) warming of the 20th century (in red on the above graph) by an impressive but less than honest 100%, making it look more like 1.2 C° (2.2 F°).

The story of how the medieval warm period was artificially abolished has been told elsewhere. For now, it is necessary only to point out that the notion that there was no warm period in the Middle Ages does not represent the “consensus” in the scientific literature that the UN’s climate panel falsely claims to summarize in its assessment reports.

The CO² website, www.co2science.org, has shown by careful gathering of evidence,

• more than 750 scientists

• from more than 400 institutions

• in more than 40 countries over the past 20 years,

...have contributed to learned papers in the peer-reviewed literature that provide hard evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present.

Finally, it is worth setting the debate about the medieval warm period in context.

The Team, by ingeniously getting the world to focus exclusively on the medieval warm period, diverted its attention from the fact, well established in the scientific literature, that most of the last 11,400 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, have been warmer - and often considerably warmer - than the present.

Certainly the Bronze Age, the Roman era, and the medieval warm period were all warmer than the present. Also, each of the past four interglacial warm periods was up to 6 C° (11 F°) warmer than the present.

The Team’s intention, in promoting the “hockey-stick” graph to which the UN’s climate panel took like a quack to colored water, and in keeping the debate about it raging, was to ensure that no one looked any further back in the historical record, for anyone who has done so has at once realized that today’s temperatures, far from being exceptional, as the Team’s bogus graph had sought to show, are in fact very well within the natural variability of the climate.
 

A NATION TAMPERS WITH ITS TEMPERATURE RECORD

The news of the scale on which Professor Jones and the Team were tampering with global temperature data alerted many who had previously believed the “global warming” scare into thinking again.

The first attempt that the Team and their supporters at the UN’s climate panel made to recover their lost position of authority and credibility was to say that there was nothing particularly wrong with the Climate Research Unit’s global-temperature dataset because it accorded so closely with the GISS/NCDC terrestrial dataset and with the two satellite datasets. However, the Team’s members effectively controlled both terrestrial datasets.

Now, therefore, it has become necessary for every temperature dataset, including national and regional datasets, to be re-examined with a view to discovering whether there is any scientific basis for it.

Science, after all, is as globalized as all other activities of humankind.

If the global temperature datasets have been tampered with by the scientific-technological elite to demonstrate a false warming where far less warming truly occurred, have national and regional datasets been tampered with as well, particularly in countries whose governments are of a political stamp likely to find the “global warming” scare expedient as a method of increasing the taxes and regulations and controls and rationings that they like to inflict on the little guy?

In this process of essential scrutiny, New Zealand has led the way.

Richard Treadgold of the Climate Conversation Group, working with the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, has compiled data showing that New Zealand has not been warming for an entire century. This startling result gives the lie to claims from the UN’s climate panel and many other corrupt scientific sources that the country has been part of “global warming” over the past 100 years.

Mr. Treadgold has made a simple check of publicly-available information, and has proven the official claims that New Zealand has been warming to be simply false.

In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half.

New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is responsible for the National Climate Database. This database, available online, holds all New Zealand's climate data, including temperature readings, since the 1850s.

Anybody can go and get the data for free. Mr. Treadgold did that, and compiled his own graph directly from the published data.

NIWA’s official graph of temperatures since the mid-1850s is shown above. It shows a pronounced warming trend of 0.9 C° (1.7 F°) over the past century.

This graph is the centerpiece of NIWA’s temperature claims. It contributes to global temperature statistics and the IPCC reports. This graph is no small part of the reason why the New Zealand government is insisting on introducing an emissions-trading scheme and participating in the climate conference in Copenhagen.

However, the graph is an illusion. It is as bogus as the Climate Research Unit’s graphs.

Dr Jim Salinger (who no longer works for NIWA) began compiling this graph in the 1980s when he was working at the Climate Research Unit in the UK.

To get the original New Zealand temperature readings, Mr. Treadgold registered on NIWA's web site, downloaded the data he needed, and made his own graph. The result looked nothing like the official graph.

Instead, Mr. Treadgold and his colleagues were surprised to get this:

It is apparent using nothing more than the Mk. 1 Eyeball that there is no slope in the temperature trend as plotted from the raw New Zealand temperature data, either upward or downward.

The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s.

Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level - statistically insignificant at a warming of 0.06 C° (0.11 F°) per century since 1850.

• Why does NIWA’s graph show strong warming, while the graph compiled from their own raw data looks completely different?

• Why does their graph show warming, while the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever?

• Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?

Mr. Treadgold and his colleagues compared NIWA’s raw temperature data for each station with the adjusted official data, which they obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, had long gone unanswered, just as similar requests for the data from his former employers, the Climate Research Unit in the UK, had also gone unanswered.

The temperature-station histories in New Zealand were unremarkable. There were no reasons for any large corrections. However, Mr. Treadgold was astonished to find that very substantial adjustments had indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed in reality; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments either created or increased the warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below, and in a fashion very similar to that which Mr. Watts had documented for the corrupt NASA/GISS temperature dataset.

There was nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments. To date, despite requests, Dr. Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they made them.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a staggering 1.3 °C (2.3 °F), creating an artificial strong warming from a real mild cooling. Yet, as with the Santa Rosa temperature station in the US, there was no apparent reason for tampering with the long-established historical record of instrumental temperatures.

The researchers in New Zealand had discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO². It had been created by man-made adjustments of the temperature.

In effect, NIWA were claiming that New Zealand, with a (purely artificial and invented) warming rate of 0.9 C° over the past 100 years, had warmed at a rate 50% greater than the global average of 0.6 C°.

The unexplained changes to the official New Zealand temperature record cast strong doubt on the Government’s assertions that addressing “global warming” is urgent. On any view, a true temperature increase of just 0.06 C° (0.11 F°) over the whole of the past century does not suggest any need for urgent remedial action by the New Zealand Government.

At a minimum, NIWA’s official “global warming” predictions, including changes in temperatures, precipitation, winds, storms and sea levels, must be re-examined in the light of the absence of any significant change in temperature to date, from any cause.

New Zealand’s contribution to the global statistics is now under a shadow, so there could be regional or even global implications of these undisclosed, unjustified, and unjustifiable “adjustments”.

In the light of these findings, does New Zealand really need an emissions-trading scheme?

For, if all that “nasty” carbon dioxide and methane we are pumping into the atmosphere has utterly failed to increase our temperature until now, why ever should it do so in the future?
 

LYING EVEN TO CHILDREN

Even children are no longer protected from the lies - for that is what they are - fabricated and circulated by the profiteering “global-warming” fraudsters in the scientific and political community.

Laurie David, the producer of Al Gore’s recent film “documentary” about the climate, published a children’s book about the climate in 2007. In that book, she displayed a graph purporting to show the correlation - and, by implication, the causative link - between changes in CO² concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 650,000 years and changes in global mean surface temperature.

The graph displayed in the book is reproduced here:

The caption below this graph read as follows:

“The more the CO² in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less CO², the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph.”

Unfortunately, the caption was false. So was the graph.

The captions on the graph had been switched, so that the temperature graph (in red) was labeled “CO² concentration in the atmosphere”, and the CO² concentration graph (in blue) was labeled “Climate Temperature”. By this device, it became possible for the authors to suggest that it was the changes in CO² concentration in each of the past four or five interglacial warm periods that had caused the warming in each of the warm periods.

In truth, as paper after paper in the scientific literature has demonstrated, it was always the temperature that changed first in the Earth’s early climate, and CO² concentration changes followed.

Was the error in the children’s book deliberate?

What we can say is this. When the error in both the graph and the caption was admitted by both the authors and the publishers, they absolutely refused to make any correction.

They were content to profit by lying, deliberately, to children.
 

AL GORE’S TEMPERATURE-RELATED FALSEHOODS

True scientists who came across Al Gore’s climate movie had known for some time that one of the central lies that underpin the climate scare is the lie that global temperatures have been rising in an unusual way in recent decades, with the implication that “global warming” caused by humankind is already triggering disastrous weather events all round the planet.

Take one example.

Gore said that the glacier at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro had melted because of “global warming”. In fact, it had been ablating - not melting - since 1880; and half of its snows had gone before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936.

In the past 30 years, NASA satellites have measured two things that make the attribution of the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro to manmade “global warming” altogether impossible.

• First, the entire Central African region around the mountain has been cooling for three decades.

• Secondly, at no point since satellite records began in 1979 has Kilimanjaro’s summit temperature risen above -1.6 °C.

For most of the past 30 years the mean summit temperature has been -7 °C. Try melting ice at those temperatures. Its thermal inertia makes melting impossible.

As our graph from the University of Alabama at Huntsville shows, there has been no temperature trend at the summit of Kilimanjaro since the satellites first began monitoring it 30 years ago:

Instead, the glacier has been ablating - passing directly from the solid to the gaseous state of water without passing through the intervening liquid state - because of imprudent and substantial post-colonial deforestation in the region surrounding the mountain, which has dried the air.

Gore also recited the falsehood that would later be repeated by his producer in her children’s book:

that in the early climate it was CO² change that preceded and hence by implication caused temperature change, when in fact it was temperature change that preceded and hence cannot have been caused by CO² change.

Lies about the rate and significance of global and regional temperature change, therefore, have long been right at the center of the case presented to the world, until now with great success, by the international cadre of “global-warming” profiteers and scientific fraudsters that have promoted and pushed and peddled the scare.

The scale and extent of those lies has been indicated in this paper.

How, then, can such willful misfeasance by the “scientific-technological elite” of whose activities President Eisenhower gave the nation a warning in his farewell address from the White House be prevented in future?
 

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

In public policy terms, the revelation that the international scientific and political establishment has been inventing, bending, distorting, manipulating, hiding, blocking, and destroying scientific data for the sake of advancing a narrow, extremist, and bitterly anti-Western political viewpoint cannot be safely ignored.

Climate science is too important to be left to politicized scientists, just as climate politics is too important to be left to unscientific politicians.

The first step is to close the Climate Research Unit (and perhaps the University of East Anglia with it), to dismiss all of its personnel, and not to allow any of them to be funded by taxpayers ever again.

Scientific fraud and corruption on the scale that has now been revealed must be firmly rooted out and prevented from recurring.

Those responsible for the deliberate blocking, altering, concealing, or destroying of scientific data must be put on trial - to use James Hansen’s term - for “high crimes against humanity”.

For it is on the word of crooks and racketeers such as these that, in the name of addressing the non-problem that they had invented and fostered and festered, the Third World has been flung into food riots and mass starvation by the doubling of world food prices that followed the biofuel scam that the “global-warming” profiteers invented as just one of a bewildering array of boondoggles to enrich themselves at the expense of the little guy, who, as always, suffers when the political elite merely exploit him when it is their duty to serve him.

Let the climate criminals stand trial, and let them be fined for offenses under the Freedom of Information laws, and let them be imprisoned for their fraudulent tampering with scientific data, and for their suppression of results uncongenial to their politicized viewpoint, and for the sheer venom with which they have publicly as well as privately denigrated all those scientists with whom they disagreed, and for the insouciance with which they interfered with editors of scientific journals and with the process of the UN’s climate panel itself.

Once the fraudsters on both sides of the Atlantic have been locked up and cleared from the field, it will be essential to obtain a reliable indication of how temperatures are really changing worldwide.

For the oceans, this necessary step has already been taken.

The 3319 automated bathythermograph buoys of the ARGO project, deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003, have for the first time provided a reasonably accurate profile of temperature change in the climate-relevant upper mile of the ocean surface. They have shown that, throughout their period of operation, there has been no net accumulation of heat-energy in the world’s oceans. None whatsoever.

The analysis has recently been extended backward for 68 years by Douglass and Knox (2009), who find that there has been no accumulation of heat-energy in the oceans for 68 years.

This conclusion, like the results from the ARGO buoys, is fatal to the official (and now discredited) notion that a very small increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO² will engender a very large warming.

Might an analysis of land surface temperatures produce a similarly uncongenial result for the world’s classe politique, mesmerized as it is by the prospect of vastly increasing its own wealth and power by setting up an unelected world government with massive powers to tax, regulate, interfere, shut down free markets, and cancel patent and intellectual property rights, and all in the name of saving us from ourselves?

One of the thousands of emails released by the heroic whistleblower suggests that the answer to this question is Yes.

One Team member recently wrote to his conspirators to point out that land temperatures had risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures, a fact which, he said, would be seized upon by skeptics who would point out that the Climate Research Unit, like GISS/NCDC, had failed to make sufficient allowance for the “urban heat-island effect” - the increasing industrialization that has surrounded once-rural temperature stations with tarmac and industry and the direct and indirect output of heat that they bring.

Manifestly, something must now be done to put right the damage that has been done to climate science by the malevolent and incompetent antics of the Team.

1. First, there is now a need for a standardized, international network of properly-sited, modern, automated land temperature monitoring stations, reporting by satellite so that the data are immediately available to all.

    

   The aim should be to equal the reliability and public accessibility of the ARGO bathythermographs that have been deployed for the past six years in the oceans.
   
   Until this standardized network has been installed worldwide, calibrated, and declared operational, all terrestrial and satellite temperature records should be regarded with profound suspicion, and no public policy - particularly any policy that menaces the freedom, democracy, and prosperity of the West - should be founded upon them.
   
    

2. Secondly, all those whose emails have demonstrated that they have acted maliciously and in bad faith - even those whose conduct stopped short of being actually criminal - should be dismissed from every publicly-funded scientific post, and should be permanently debarred from participating in any international scientific endeavor, including the UN’s climate panel.

    

   On grounds of its sheer nastiness alone, the Team should be disbanded forthwith and for aye, never to trouble humankind again.
   
    

3. Thirdly, all public policy measures to address what is now known to be the manufactured non-problem of “global warming” should be put on hold forthwith, and no further public policy measures should be instituted at any future time, unless and until global mean surface temperature, as properly and independently measured by the new methods recommended here, shall have risen by at least 1 C° (2 F°) compared with temperature in the year 2000.
   
    

4. Fourthly, all “global-warming” profiteers who are making money out of carbon-trading or “green investment” or UN climate boondoggles of whatever kind should be warned, and clearly warned, that now that the basis for their profitable activities is known to be hollow and fraudulent, they themselves will be indicted, prosecuted, and jailed for fraud, and their profits confiscated as the fruits of money-laundering, if in future they participate in any fostering or furthering or promoting of the lies, damned lies, and bogus statistics that have now shown the entire “global warming” theory to be nothing more than a scam.

We end this paper on temperature trends with the following quotation from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation as President of the United States:

“Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite... The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.”

Amen to that.
 

ESSENTIAL READINGS

"Global Warming" A Debate at Last - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/_global_warming_a_debate_at_last.html

SPPI Monthly CO² Reports - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/

CO², Global Warming and Coral Reefs: Prospects for the Future - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/co2_coral_warming.html
http://www.amazon.com/CO²-Global-Warming-Coral- Reefs/dp/0971484589/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259620285&sr=1-2

CO², Global Warming and Species Extinctions: Prospects for the Future - http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field- keywords=idso&x=18&y=17

Climate Science Corrupted - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_science_corrupted.html

"'Unequivocal' 'Consensus' on 'Global Warming'" - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/unequivocal_consensus_on_global_warming.h tml

Public Comment to the Environmental Protection Agency - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/public_comment_to_the_environ mental_protection_agency.html

The Science of Deceit - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/the_science_of_deceit.html

The IPCC can't count its "Expert Scientists": Author and Reviewer Numbers are Wrong - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/author_reviewer_numbers_wrong.html

Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/prejudiced_authors_prejudiced_findings.html

Why the IPCC Should be Disbanded - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/whytheipccshouldbedisbanded.html

Peer Review? What Peer Review? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/peerreview.html

What is Wrong with the IPCC? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/whatiswrongwiththeipcc.html

A Climate Science Brief - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/climate_science_brief.html

Senator Kerry Misfires about Global Warming and National Security - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/sen_kerry_misfires.pdf

‘Global Warming’ is No Global Crisis, Major Talking Points - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/major_talking_points.html

Twisted Science, Crooked Policy - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/twisted_science_crooked_policy.html

The Dog Ate Global Warming - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/the_dog_ate_global_warming.ht ml

Hockey Stick? What Hockey Stick? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html

Caspar and the Jesus Paper - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/caspar_and_the_jesus_paper.ht ml

What is the 'Hockey Stick' Debate About? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/hockey_debate.html

That Famous Consensus - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/that_famous_consensus.html

Why Has “Global Warming” Become Such A Passionate Subject? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/akasofu_cool_it.html

Medieval Warm Period Project - http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php

Climate Change, William Happer testimony to Senate Energy Committee - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/happer_senate_testimony.html

Cleaning Out the Climate Science Cesspool - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/cleaning_cesspool.html

Scenes from the Climate Inquisition - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/scenes_from_the_climate_inquisi tion.html

NCAR US Temperature Record Facts or Deception? - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/temperature_record_facts_or_deception.html

The Coming Climate Dictatorship - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/the_coming_climate_dictatorship .html

Peer Warns Public About Dangers to Fundamental Freedoms at Forth-Coming UN Copenhagen Summit - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/peers_warns_dangers_of_un_su mmit.html

Copenhagen Climate Treaty Framework Draft - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/copenhagen_climate_treaty_framework_draft.h tml

450 Peer Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of AGW-Caused Global Warming - http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/450_peer_reviewed_papers.html