Archives par mot-clé : ClimateGate

Monday Mirthiness – Mike Mann’s Hockey Team ‘will keep those papers out somehow’

by A. Watts, Aug 28, 2023 in WUWT


Remember the famous quote from the head of the UK Climate Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones that was laid bare in ClimateGate?

…I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Dr. Phil Jones – ClimateGate emails

These guys never learn. Josh writes on Twitter:

Mikey’ The Trick’ Mann at work…Another story about ‘scientists’ trying to bury papers and evidence they don’t like. It’s Climategate deja vu. Read about it here https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/08/how-science-is-done-these-days/

and here: The Climategate Gang Rides Again!

 

Shameless abuse of science…but then again, we know Mann has no shame, only hubris

Climategate: Never Forget (12th anniversary)

by Master Source, Nov 22, 2022 in WUWT


 

The growth of the technical skeptical blogosphere (pioneered by Steve McIntyre) has challenged traditional notions of expertise, i.e. credentials and sanctity of journal publications, through Climate Audit’s blogospheric deconstruction of many publications, particularly related to paleo proxies. “–Judith Curry.

By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 22, 2022

There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

It has been 12 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.

And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.” Whitewash exonerations by the educational institutions involved and scientific organizations– was a blow to scholarship and standards as well. The standard of fair, objective, transparent research was sacrificed to a politically correct narrative about the qualitative connection between CO2 forcing and temperature (see Wiki).

Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) was a rare mainstream-of-sorts look at the scandal. Michael Mann is the bad actor, despite his I-am-the-victim take in his account, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012). [1]

Background:

On November 19, 2009, a whistle-blower or hacker downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University (United Kingdom). Posted on a Russian server, these documents were soon accessed by websites around the world to trigger the exposé.

These e-mails were part of confidential communications between top climate scientists in the UK, the United States, and other nations over a 15-year period. The scientists involved had developed surface temperature data sets and promoted the “Hockey Stick” global temperature curve, as well as having wrtten/edited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical-science assessment reports.

Branded “Climategate” by British columnist James Delingpole, the emails provided insight into practices that range from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered.

Some of the more salient quotations follow.

Man-Made Warming Controversy

Climategate And Post-Normal Science

by Michael Kile, November 16, 2019 in WUWT


It was an important moment in the Climategate saga. Yet few remember Jerome Ravetz’s damning critique of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) posted on WUWT in early 2010.

Ravetz is an eminent American philosopher of science and an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation. (Personal web page here; Oxford pages here and here.) For much of his career he has been challenging claims of scientific objectivity and developing a concept of “post-normal science” (PNS).

We can understand the root cause of Climategate as a case of scientists constrained to attempt to do normal science in a post-normal situation. But climate change had never been a really ‘normal’ science, because the policy implications were always present and strong, even overwhelming.  Indeed, if we look at the definition of ‘post-normal science’, we see how well it fits:  facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent.  In needing to treat Planet Earth like a textbook exercise, the climate scientists were forced to break the rules of scientific etiquette and ethics, and to play scientific power-politics in a way that inevitably became corrupt.  The combination of non-critical ‘normal science’ with anti-critical ‘evangelical science’ was lethal. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 9 February, 2010)

Some environmentalists had been using Ravetz’s PNS concept to drive a looser – more subjective – approach to decision-making under uncertainty, urging greater use of the so-called “precautionary principle”, a “principle” of pseudoscience, not genuine science.

The late Stephen Schneider (1945-2010), then Stanford University professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and editor of the journal Climatic Change, was one of them. He was also an IPCC lead author. Schneider advised other lead authors how to deal with uncertainty in a climate context in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports.

Climategate: Ten Years Later

by Dr K. Kemm, November 1, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch


This month marks the tenth anniversary of “Climategate” – the release of thousands of emails to and from climate scientists who had been (and still are) collaborating and colluding to create a man-made climate crisis that exists in their minds and computer models, but not in the real world.

The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism.

Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollarsfrom the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families.

Few people know the Inconvenient Facts about the supposed man-made climate and extreme weather “crisis.”

For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. (For a time, they even declined slightly.)

Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about man-made carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife, and the planet.

Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to power economic growth and better living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the world.

We keep hearing that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures.

But satellite data show no such thing. In fact, computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half-degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements.

See also here

ClimateGate continues – the Mann Hockeystick University of Arizona emails are now public

by Anthony Watts, March4, 2019 in WUWT


After years of trying to suppress their release, and finally being ordered to be released by a judge, they are now public, and we have them here. This will remain as a “top post” for a day, new stories will be below this one.

There’s quite a treasure trove, but also some duplications from previous releases.

Climategate continues: Release of University of Arizona Climate Emails Imminent

by Anthony Watts, September 19, 2018 in WUWT


Nearly seven years ago, on December 7th, 2011, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic’s (FME Law) sought public records from the University of Arizona related to the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick, and development of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.  They refused much of the request and FME Law sued.  Now (on September 18th, 2018) legal counsel for the University informed FME Law that they were done, that they would be withdrawing their appeal of the trial court’s decision, end the case and disclose the records.

Included in the release will be emails that, for example, provide the full context of the discussions between Michael Mann and colleagues and Chick Keller on whether there was a medieval warm period and a little ice age.  Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) were the authors of the “hockey stick” graph that became the icon of climate alarmism.  Dr. Keller was, at the time, Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Los Alamos National Lab and affiliated with the University of California at San Diego, and wanted to reconcile data which appeared to refute the MBH papers.  Also within this collection will be the full discussion on events surrounding an effort to remove editors of journals willing to publish peer-reviewed papers that contradicted the MBH and related papers on which climate alarmism was built.  This collection of emails is particularly important in that they will provide the full context of Climategate emails that have been described as “cherry picking.”

The ClimateGate Emails

by John Costella, March, 2010 in SPPIReprintSeries


The Climategate emails expose to our view a world that was previously hidden from virtually everyone.

This formerly hidden world was made up of a very few players. But they controlled those critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes involv- ing the temperature records from the past, and the official interpretation of cur- rent temperature data. They exerted previously unrecognized influence on the “peer review” process for papers seeking publication in the officially recognised climate science literature from which the IPCC was supposed to rely exclusively in order to draw its conclusions.

see .pdf (168 pages)