CHAPTER 9: CLIMATEGATE EMAILS

In November 2009 a large number of Emails and other material from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK suddenly became available on the Internet.^1,2,3 The mysterious hacker or whistleblower has never been revealed – so far.

They amounted to a total of 120MB, 1078 Emails from 6/03/1996 to 13/11/2009 and 72 documents, computer code and models. They dealt with the exchanges and activities of several of the most senior scientists engaged in the climate change swindle over this period.

Every effort has been made to suppress them. Several servers I have tried ignore requests to supply the actual Emails and instead gave many pages of articles devoted to attempts to whitewash them or explain them away. Most of the earlier websites that supplied them have either disappeared or been hacked.

At the time of writing this they could be accessed by copying the references^1.2. into your server. A good summary of the most important ones is supplied by the Canadians.³A set of links to the most important documents and comments has been made by Anthony Watts.⁴ Further useful summaries are by Costella^5.6and Monckton.⁷

The emails provide detailed information about how this group of scientists were able to manipulate the imposition on the world public of their false theory of the climate. It involved distorting, and fabricating climate data, intimidating opposition using every technique of public relations, dishonest advertising techniques and spin, and efforts to prevent criticism from being published or debated, They showed how they exercise control over journal editors and control of the peer review process and obstruction from official information requests.

The Telegraph Journalist James Delingpole⁸called it climategateand the title stuck.

Christopher Booker⁹ called it :The Worst Scandal of our Generation.

From this enormous store I can only quote a few. Let us start with extracts from Delingpole’s article⁸

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. (This is further treated by Just Facts¹⁰)

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beatthe crap out of him. Very tempted.

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

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

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

This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this?

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.

It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice⁹

This Email mentions myself. I submitted a paper entitled The IPCC Future Projections : Are They Plausible to the Journal “Climate Research in October 1990 It was published in August 14^th1991 as Vol 19155-162, 1991¹¹

As a result of the above Email, the Editor, Chris de Freitas, who had also approved a paper by Willie Soon, was sacked. and so were the entire Editorial Board, who since then will not permit any criticism of the greenhouse scam.

Further extracts from Reference 2

Kevin Trenberth said¹²

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. . The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The data published in the August .2009 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter[?] We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

It is a travesty!

Here are some of the issues as I see them: Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go? . But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System data. That data are unfortunately wanting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.

October 14: Tom Wigley replies

Kevin, I didnt mean to offend you. But what you said was "we cant account for the lack of warming at the moment". Now you say "we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going". In my eyes these are two different things—the second relates to our level of understanding, and I agree that this is still lacking.

We are now debating how quickly the ship is sinking. But why didnt any of these scientists speak up when their paymasters said to the world, "the science is settled"?

So Tom Wigley believes that the ship is sinking. Let us take a look at his other views:³

August 1999. Tom Wigley former director of (CRU) Climate Research Unit (1978 to 1993), who in 2009 works for the (NCAR) National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado believes ice cores were unreliable because they correlate very poorly with (land) temperature. He said the link between ice core and temperature variation was “close to zero” and tree rings were less than 50% reliable (to other evidences?) The main external candidate is solar, and more work is required to improve the ‘paleo’ solar forcing record. The OIS-3 studies using ice cores suggested climate and temperatures on continental lands are poorly known, due to the discontinuous nature of sedimentation changes on land. This scientific nonsense must stop if a political objective is to be met.

1997 November 25: From: Tom Wigley To: jan.goudriaan, grassl_h, Klaus Hasselmann, Jill Jaeger, oriordan, uctpa84, john, mparry, pier.vellinga

Subject: Re: ATTENTION. Invitation to influence Kyoto.

"I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the IPCC "view" when you say that "the latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions. "In contrast to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting arguments in support of both "immediate control" and the spectrum of more cost-effective options. It is not IPCC's role to make "convincing cases" for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your statement.This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.

Your approach of trying to gain scientific credibility for your personal views by asking people to endorse your letter is reprehensible. No scientist who wishes to maintain respect in the community should ever endorse any statement unless they have examined the issue fully themselves. You are asking people to prostitute themselves by doing just this! I fear that some will endorse your letter, in the mistaken belief that you are making a balanced and knowledgeable assessment of the science -- when, in fact, you are presenting a flawed view that neither accords with IPCC nor with the bulk of the scientific and economic literature on the subject.

When scientists color the science with their own PERSONAL views or make categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is, in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics, Michaels, Singer et al. I find this extremely disturbing."

1999 May 19: Tom Wigley writes to Mike Hulme and Mike MacCracken, regarding a chain of emails discussing climate models:

"I’ve just read the emails of May 14 onwards regarding carbon dioxide. I must say that I am stunned by the confusion that surrounds this issue. Basically, I and MacCracken are right and Felzer, Schimel and (to a lesser extent) Hulme are wrong. There is absolutely, categorically no doubt about this."

Mike Hulme responds:

"I still have a problem making sense of what the Met(eorological) Office Hadley Centre have published "

Tom Wigley replies:

"Yes, I am aware of the confusion surrounding what the Met(eorological) Office Hadley Centre did and why. It is even messier than you realize. The Hadley people have clearly screwed things up, but their "errors" don't really matter given all of the uncertainties. I didn't mention this because I thought that opening up that can of worms would confuse people even more. The climate model output is also uncertain."

2009 October 5: Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones, CRU head, to say that sceptic Steve McIntyre was actually right, CRU deputy director Keith Briffa had made an extraordinary “mess” of tree ring data which he’d claimed showed the world hadn’t been hotter. Wigley also wondered why Briffa had chosen just 12 trees in Yamal to show modern warming, and failed to include a much larger sample which would have shown cooling instead. He also warned against the CRU’s hiding of data:

October 5: Tom Wigley wrote to Phil Jones:

It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith Briffa does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal (Siberia) is insignificant. I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me. Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of (sic). I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I'd be willing to check over anything he puts together.

Phil Jones forwarded the email to Keith.

There is more. I have already quoted the one where Wigley agrees that Wei-Chyung Wang is a fraud (Chapter 7)

Phil Jones was Director throughout the period of the emails. Wigley, the previous Director, was the eminence grise of the first two IPCC Reports (if you include the original Final Draft of the second) when the view expressed officially was that the warming could be natural.

Although he is shown to be keen on preventing publication from sceptics, he frequently expresses disagreement with much of what is being done by his staff and their friends since he left. He is surely the Prime Suspect behind the release of these Emails.

Kevin Trenberth took over the leading theoretical role for the subsequent IPCC Reports, but he also is obviously uncomfortable with what he feels impelled to say.

Then Mike Mann, explains what it’s all about.

Email 1103 Sept 1999²

I am definitely using the version of the Briffa et al series you sent in which Keith had restandardized to retain morelow-frequency variability relative to the one shown by Briffa et al (1998). So already, the reconstruction I'm using is one-step removed from the published series (as far as I know!) and that makes our use of even this series a bit tenuous in my mind, but I'm happy to do it and let the reviewers tell us if they see any problem.

2009 October 27: Mike Mann to Phil Jones and Gavin Schmidt:²

As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations[.]

And again:

it’s tough when even your allies are starting to turn:

Be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy Revkin of the New York Times] and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like.

An interesting exchange is a correspondence between Keith Briffa whose results differed from the views of Eugene Wahl¹³.

So, Briffa writes confidentially to Wahl for help and Wahl assists him by passing a copy of a paper that has yet to be published. The aim is to answer concerns that McIntyre as reviewer has raised. Wahl and Ammann’s words are incorporated in the response to McIntyre with the hope that no one will ever notice.

Two years later, someone does notice. It’s May 24^th2008, Steve McIntyre, climate science puzzle solver, is reading the reviewer comments to chapter 6 of AR4 written in 2006. In the course of reviewing Briffa’s replies to him, McIntyre notes something peculiar. Briffa’s replies, written in 2006, seemed to plagiarize an unpublished paper by Casper Amman and Eugene Wahl published in 2007. That is, in 2006 Briffa was repeating the argument of a paper that was not published until 2007. How could Briffa plagiarize an article that hadn’t been published? Why would he repeat the arguments almost word for word? Who was feeding Briffa his arguments? How was Briffa doing this if all communication with the authors had to be part of the official record?

At the time, in May of 2008, McIntyre assumed that Briffa was getting information from Casper Ammann since Ammann was listed as a contributing author to chapter 6. It did not occur to McIntyre that Wahl was the source of the text. Thanks to the individual who liberated the Climategate emails, we now know that Wahl was the source of that text. The Climategate emails, quoted above, show Briffa and Wahl exchanging emails about the way McIntyre’s arguments should be handled. Confidentially, outside the process of the IPCC which is designed to capture reviewer objections and authors’ responses to those objections. Wahl is brought in by Briffa to defend his own work. And defend it with literature that has not been published yet.

At the same time in 2008, across the ocean, David Holland had been reading McIntyre’s work and he had issued an FOIA request to the Climatic Research Unit–CRU. That FOIA request covered all correspondence coming in and out of CRU relative to chapter 6 of AR4. The hunt for the source that was feeding Briffa was on, with Holland leading the charge. At CRU, FOIA officer Palmer instructs the team that they must do everything “by the book” because Holland will most certainly appeal a rejection letter.

In that context, Jones writes the famous email to Mann. Jones requests that Mann delete his emails and he requests that Mann contact Wahl and have Wahl delete his emails. Is Jones covering his bases in case of an appeal? Is he covering his bases against an FOIA request that might be served on Mann and Wahl in the US? In any case, he appears to be conspiring with others to deny Holland his FOIA rights.

Mike,

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

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper.

Mann responds that he will contact Wahl ASAP, which he does.

Hi Phil,laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxxtalk to you later,mike

As Wahl told the investigators in 2011, Mann contacted him and Wahl deleted his Emails.

In 2010, in an effort to clear Mann of any wrong doing, a committee of inquiry was set up at Penn State. We now know that committee failed miserably. They failed for many reasons, but the Wahl admission is the starkest example.

Here is one allegation the committee investigated:

Allegation 2: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?

Finding 2. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data related to AR4, as suggested by Dr. Phil Jones. Dr. Mann has stated that he did not delete emails in response to Dr. Jones’ request. Further, Dr. Mann produced upon request a full archive of his emails in and around the time of the preparation of AR4. The archive contained e-mails related to AR4.

The committee found this because they apparently failed to understand Mann’s reply. As they reported:

He [Mann] explained that he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; …

What can we make of this? Mann was apparently asked the question: “Did you engage in or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete emails.”

And it seems clear he only answered half of the question, leaving the unanswered second part dangling: did you contact anyone or otherwise ‘indirectly’ participate in deleting records? This either did not strike, or did not interest, the Penn State ‘investigators’. This despite that Mann, it appears, answered “carefully” and incompletely. He only answered that he hadn’t deleted emails. He never directly denies partaking, indirectly, in the deletion of Wahl’s emails. He apparently withheld the information that he had asked Wahl to delete emails.

Is this a lie? Not directly. It’s more what Wikipedia would describe as “Careful Speaking.”

Careful speaking is distinct from the above in that the speaker wishes to avoid imparting certain information or admitting certain facts and, additionally, does not want to ‘lie’ when doing so. Careful speaking involves using carefully-phrased statements to give a ‘half-answer’: one that does not actually ‘answer’ the question, but still provides an appropriate (and accurate) answer based on that question. As with ‘misleading’, below, ‘careful speaking’ is not outright lying.

So why did the inquiry, stocked with Mann’s fellow professors, fail to ask good follow up questions? We really do not know because we don’t have access to the transcript of their interview with Mann. Did he intend to deceive? Or did he just speak “carefully?” It would seem that the actual transcript of the questions and answers should be published. Perhaps Congress should serve the members of the inquiry with a subpoena. That would allow people to decide if Mann lied or if he just spoke carefully.

And there are a few more questions we need to ask. Mann claims that he never deleted the emails. But he asked Wahl to delete the emails. This makes no sense. It makes no sense that Mann would participate in a cover up by passing along a message to another participant of that cover-up downstream and not delete emails himself. It defies any logical reconstruction of events. Why would Mann ask Wahl to do something that he himself would not do? We also know from the inquiry that Mann delivered emails to the inquiry. From that evidence and his testimony they concluded that he deleted no emails. This does not compute. [S.M: See update below for a possible explanation.]

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

The most revealing section of Climategatewas a large file with the report of a scientist Called “Harry” who had the job of sorting out the files¹⁴.

The file is full of computer jargon, but here are some of the more juicy bits:

Sometimes life is just too hard. It’s after midnight – again. And I’m doing all thisover VNC in 256 colours, which hurts. Anyway, the above line counts. I don’t knowwhich is the more worrying – the fact that adding the CLIMAT updates lost us 1251lines from tmax but gained us 1448 for tmin, or that the BOM additions added sod all.And yes – I’ve checked, the int2 and int3 databases are IDENTICAL. Aaaarrgghhhhh.

I guess.. I am going to need one of those programs I wrote to sync the tmin and tmax databases, aren’t I?

Actually, it’s worse than that. The CLIMAT merges for TMN and TMX look very similar:

OK, this is getting SILLY. Now the BOM and CLIMAT conversions are in sync, and the original databases are in synch, yet the processing creates massive divergence!!

OH F*** THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.

25. Wahey! It’s halfway through April and I’m still working on it. This surely is the worst project I’ve ever attempted. Eeeek. I think the mainproblem is the rather nebulous concept of the automatic updater. If Ihadn’t had to write it to add the 1991-2006 temperature file to the ‘main’one, it would probably have been a lot simpler. But that one operation has proved so costly in terms of time, etc that the program has had to bend over backwards to accommodate it. So yes, in retrospect it was not a brilliant idea to try and kill two birds with one stone – I should haverealised that one of the birds was actually a pterodactyl with a temper problem.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. Look at this:¹³

The Climategate scandal led to three official investigations which whitewashed all the scammers. Andrew Montford¹⁵ has published an excellent summary of this continuing scandal. Here is an extract:

ForewordWhen in November 2009 a large archive of emails and ﬁles from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia appeared on the internet a number of serious allegations were made including:
that scientists at the CRU had failed to give a full and fair view to policymakers and the IPCC of all the evidence available to them. that they deliberately obstructed access to data and methods to those taking different viewpoints from themselves;that they failed to comply with FOI requirements;that they sought to inﬂuence the review panels of journals in order to pre-vent rival scientiﬁc evidence from being published.

Even if only some of these accusations were substantiated the consequences or the credibility of climate change science would be immense. This was at atime when the international negotiations on climate change were foundering though not to the extent that they have done subsequently), and when, in the recession, the public and businesses were beginning to question the costs they were being asked to bear in order to achieve fundamental changes in our society. One would therefore have expected the relevant “authorities”, Government/Parliament, the University of East Anglia (UAE) and the Royal Society, to have moved fast and decisively to get to the bottom of the matter.

There was indeed a ﬂurry of activity and three inquiries were set in train, including a hearing by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee; the Climate Change E-mails Review (CCE) set up by UAE and chaired by Sir Muir Russell; and the Scientiﬁc Assessment Panel (SAP) set up by UAE in consultation with the Royal Society and chaired by Lord Oxburgh.

Sadly, as the report by Andrew Montford clearly demonstrates, all three reports have serious flaws.

His report shows that: these enquiries were hurried, the terms of reference were unclear, insufficient care was taken with the choice of panel members to ensure balance and independence and insufficient care was taken to ensure the process was independent of those being investigated, eg the Royal Society allowed CRU to suggest the papers it should read.

Sir Muir Russell failed to attend the session with the CRU’s Director Professor Jones and only four of fourteen members of the Science and Technology Select Committee attended the crucial final meeting to sign off their report.

But above all, Andrew Montford’s report brings out the disparity between the treatment of the incumbentsand the critics. The former appear to have been treated with kid gloves and their explanations readily accepted without serious challenge. The latter have been disparaged and denied adequate opportunity to put their case. The CCE report stated that holding public hearings would be unlikely to add significant value, thereby assuming that critics would not be able to provide any additional information that would help assess the validity of CRU submissions.

This failure to accord critics rights of audience was despite the fact that Lord Lawson wrote to Sir Muir Russell when the review was first announced speciﬁcally urging that his panel should take evidence from those outside CRU who may have been wronged.

The result has been that the three investigations have failed to achieve their objective, i.e. early and conclusive closure and restoration of conﬁdence. The reports have been more Widgery than Saville.

Writing in an article The Atlantic, Clive Crook of the Financial Times referred to an ethos of Suffocating groupthink.

Montford makes a number of recommendations all of which have been comprehensively ignored. The founders of the climate change scam are more powerful than ever, Dissent and disagreement are more comprehensively suppressed/ And the climate change scam is firmly established in the public education system, in the Unoversities, the print and television media and in the political opinion polls. Much of the comment has been suppressed even from the Internet browsers.

CLIMATEGATE II

On 22 November 2011, a second set of approximately 5,000 emails was released¹⁵

⁶and they are included in reference 2, but the searchable index which is promised has been suppressed. They also are summarised links to a number of subsidiary websites and discussed by Watts¹⁷ Bell¹⁸and Delingpole¹⁹ have published further critical Reviews.

They provide further confirmation of what we know already and this Chapter is getting too long. So I will leave with the following typical quote²

Saturday 3rd December Email 3555

Mann: "We actually eliminate records with negative correlations";

Briffa: "I too have expressed my concern to Phil (and Ray) over the logic that you leave all series you want in but just weight them according to some (sometimes low) correlation"

REFERENCES

1, Climate Gate Emails http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/

2 Tom Nelson http://tomnelson.blogspot.co.nz/p/climategate_05.html

3 Climate-Gate http://www.telusplanet.net/dgarneau/climate-e-mails.htm

http://metis-history.info/climate-e-mails.shtml

http://junksciencearchive.com/FOIA/

4 Watts Up With That http://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/06/250-plus-noteworthy-climategate-2-0-emails/

5 Costella J P Climategate: A Step by Step Analysis http://heartland.org/policy-documents/climategate-step-step-analysis

6 Costella J P

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf