climate gate 2.0_ fresh trove of embarrassing emails the register

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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/climategate_2_first_look/

Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails'All our models are wrong', writes Jones

By Andrew Orlowski ([email protected])

Posted in Environment, 23rd November 2011 14:36 GMT

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Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails [1],as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’tsupport – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new emailarchive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides anabundance of context for those earlier changes.

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message thatthe Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servantwrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t wantto be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the

scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakesmight not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. WhileProfessor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the mostsenior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing tomake billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climatechange based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that arethe building blocks of climate variability.”

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selectiveapproach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitablydramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. “We need to communicate the uncertainty and behonest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale"signature" of greenhouse gas warming was absent. “Observations do not show risingtemperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single studyand approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

mategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails [printer-friendly] •... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/climategate_2_first_look/print...

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“What if climate change appearsto be just mainly a multidecadal

natural fluctuation?”

Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources,Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresseshis discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were thedemands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.

This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came aslittle surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but theyrocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer inthe manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures,

expressed it like this [2]:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go toany lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Intellectual corruption

Where the "intellectual corruption" is plain is that somehow these doubts anduncertainties, along with the limitations of using computer models as evidence, never made it into the “bible” of climate science, the reports produced by the United Nation

Organisation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC [3]) reports.

“Basic problem is that all models are wrong,” writes Phil Jones, bluntly, “not got enoughmiddle and low level clouds.”

If that’s the case, then why isn't this printed as a large health warning on the cover of the IPCC reports? Politicians who devised policy based on estimates of certainty by theIPCC now know they’ve been sold a pup.

In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failedto explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including

transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’stemperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming,and the destruction of internal emails. Since CRU’s temperature work was at the heart of the IPCC, this is troubling. Climategate II finds Phil Jones telling the University of EastAnglia’s FOIA climate officer that:

“I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all theskeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.There might be some bits of pieces of paper, but I’m not wasting my time going throughthese.”

And “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself andall those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.”

His colleague Keith Briffa – expressing doubts about “all temperature reconstructions”


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also appears to ensure such doubts are not on the public record:

“UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anywaywhich I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task.”

Elsewhere Briffa adds: “But for GODS SAKE please respect the sensitivity here anddestroy the file immediately when finished and please do not tell ANYBODY I sent this.Cheers Keith.”

Documentation from "Climate Change": a game from 1998A 100 MHz Pentium PC with 16 Mbytes of RAM is recommended

Source: USE_NOTE.DOC

Some context is worth remembering.

As with the first Climategate archive, much of the correspondence focuses on moderntemperature trends and historical temperature reconstructions – not on the stuff we callhard physics: the behaviour of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. (Note alsothat the emails stop in 2009.)

The temperature work was only thrust into such a dramatic political role because of thestate of the hard physics of climate. There’s broad agreement amongst supporters of themanmade greenhouse gas theory, and ‘lukewarmers’, on what an increase in CO

should do to the Earth’s energy budget – a modest increase in temperatures, before anyfeedbacks are taken into account. But speculation about runaway temperatures, whileentirely legitimate, is for now, just that.

In the absence of telltale manmade global warming "fingerprints" (and there have beenseveral candidates over the years, such as the tropospheric hotspot, or elusive oceanheat sinks) contemporary temperature readings and historical temperaturereconstructions were freighted with immense significance.

So the mewling infant that we call Climate Science – a 40-year-young offshoot of meteorology – has been thrust into a political role long before it’s capable of supportingthe claims made on its behalf. From the archives we can see the scientists know thattoo, and we can read their own reluctance to make those claims, too.

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?”muses one scientist. “They’ll kill us probably.”

That won’t be necessary. ®

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Links

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/30/crugate_analysis/1.

http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/more_on_climategate.php2.

http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.shtml3.

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/25/climategate_symptoms/

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming... (13 May 2011)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/13/downing_cambridge_climate_conference/

Climategate - the Select Committee reports (25 January 2011)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/25/climategate_select_committee/

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud' (11 October 2010)

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'Is this science, or literature?' (10 September 2010)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/10/oxburgh_science_select_committee/

Parliament misled over Climategate report, says MP (9 July 2010)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/09/stringer_on_russell/

Climategate report: 'Campaign to win hearts and minds' needed (7 July 2010)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/07/muir_russell_climategate_report/

Oxburgh blesses Climategate boffins (14 April 2010)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/14/oxburgh_climategate_report/

UK Physicists on Climategate (1 March 2010)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/01/uk_physics_climate/

Climategate: Why it matters (30 November 2009)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/30/crugate_analysis/

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