Climategate 2.0 / More E-mails

From Forbes:

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

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.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

The original Climategate emails contained similar evidence of destroying information and data that the public would naturally assume would be available according to freedom of information principles. “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wrote to Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released in Climategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

The new emails also reveal the scientists’ attempts to politicize the debate and advance predetermined outcomes.

“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes Jonathan Overpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment.

“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email.

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.

These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis.

More than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly released emails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientific shortcomings of global warming assertions.

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary,” writes Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office.

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne adds.

“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.

More damaging emails will likely be uncovered during the next few days as observers pour through the 5,000 emails. What is already clear, however, is the need for more objective research and ethical conduct by the scientists at the heart of the IPCC and the global warming discussion.

So what we have here is a glimpse behind the façade of “science.”

Where “science” is a set of methods about how one knows about the natural world, it’s pretty good and extremely useful.

But when “science” is a social group, rather ingrown, with a distinctive political ideology and distinctive collective interests, no so much.

Here, sociology has trumped the supposed pristine virtues of “science.” We see human nature in full bloom.

Embarrassed UN Panel Backs Away From Blundered Forecast on Global Warming Refugees

From the German weekly, Der Spiegel:

Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.

It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world’s media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: “It is not a UNEP prediction,” a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP’s website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

In October 2005, UNU said: “Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of ‘refugee.’”

It added that “such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions.”

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

It has since disappeared from the Google cache, but we have retrieved both the map and the web page from Archive.org.

‘What Happened to the Climate Refugees?’

The UNEP spokesman said the map had been produced for a newspaper “based on various sources.” He said the map had been taken off the UNEP website “because it was causing confusion and making some journalists think UNEP was the source of such forecasts.”

Given the UN’s warnings of a tide of environmental refugees, the Asian Correspondent, a news and comment website, published an article this month titled “What Happened to the Climate Refugees?”

Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

“As far back as 1995 (latest date for a comprehensive assessment), these environmental refugees totalled at least 25 million people, compared with 27 million traditional refugees (people fleeing political oppression, religious persecution and ethnic troubles),” Myers said. “The environmental refugees total could well double between 1995 and 2010.”

“When global warming takes hold,” he added, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Myers’ report may have been the basis for the UN statements in 2005.

Forecasts in Doubt

But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. That appears to be confirmed by the behavior of victims of last month’s devastating earthquake and tusnami in Japan. Many survivors are returning to rebuild their ruined towns and villages.

The UNU statement from 2005 highlights the difficulties involved in predicting the impact of global warming. The Yemeni capital Sanaa was cited as an example of the threat of climate migration. Sanaa’s ground water was falling “by 6 meters a year and may be exhausted by 2010, according to the World Bank,” the statement said.

In 2010, the IRIN news agency, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported that Sanaa “may run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017.” Meanwhile the city’s population has increased: between 2004 and 2010, it expanded by 585,000 people to almost 2.3 million. Nevertheless, there is no sign of an exodus resulting from a shortage of water.

The same applies to other nations that were classified as particularly endangered on the UNEP map of the world, such as Bangladesh, the Cook Islands and Western Sahara. In these countries and others, the population numbers have increased, according to official data. Even the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu still has its 10,000 inhabitants, even though their relocation had already been planned. The reason may be that many low-lying Pacific islands are actually increasing in size despite the rise in ocean levels, because of a build-up caused by coral debris eroded from reefs and deposited on the islands by storms and sea currents.

Outlook for 2020

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which regularly issues a report summarizing the latest research, is vague when it comes to diagnosing environmental change. For example, the change in precipitation in the African Sahel zone has so far shown no clear trend. But the forecasts based on climate simulations for the next 90 years indicate drought for the region.

The UNEP spokesman said land degradation, the loss of forests and other environmental changes were accelerating, and that UNEP was concerned about the “impact such trends will have on lives and livelihoods and movements of people.”

Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said — for 2020.

True believers in anthropogenic global warming will insist that silly forecasts coming from a UN panel don’t really cast doubt on “the science” of the issue.

But of course, average citizens, even rather well-informed ones, don’t know the science, they only know the media hype, including media hype coming from the United Nations. Learning to discount this hype is an excellent first step toward sanity on the issue.

And unfortunately, the people who “know the science,” climate scientists, have shown themselves to be badly biased. Not only do they have a vested interest in global warming, they constitute a rather closed community with strong community norms. That’s what Climategate showed.

The fact that the true believers have acted like an Inquisition, threatening and punishing people who dissent, also does not engender confidence. Don’t people who are confident in their position usually seek to debate and engage, rather than stiffle opposing opinions?

Changing Climate on Climate Change

From George Will:

WASHINGTON -- Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear now the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

“They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder -- and I hope they put it on their faces every day.”

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement. Global warming alarmists, long cosseted by echoing media, manifest an interesting incongruity -- hysteria and name calling accompanying serene assertions about the “settled science” of climate change. Were it settled, we would be spared the hyperbole that amounts to Ring Lardner’s “Shut up, he explained.”

The global warming industry, like Alexander in the famous children’s story, is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Actually, a bad three months, which began Nov. 19 with the publication of e-mails indicating attempts by scientists to massage data and suppress dissent in order to strengthen “evidence” of global warming.

But there already supposedly was a broad, deep and unassailable consensus. Strange.

Next came the failure of The World’s Last -- We Really, Really Mean It -- Chance, aka the Copenhagen climate change summit. It was a nullity, and since then things have been getting worse for those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.

In 2007, before the economic downturn began enforcing seriousness and discouraging grandstanding, seven Western U.S. states (and four Canadian provinces) decided to fix the planet on their own. California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger intoned, “We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment.” The 11 jurisdictions formed what is now called the Western Climate Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, starting in 2012.

Or not. Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewer recently suspended her state’s participation in what has not yet begun, and some Utah legislators are reportedly considering a similar action. She worries, sensibly, that it would impose costs on businesses and consumers. She also ordered reconsideration of Arizona’s strict vehicle emission rules, modeled on incorrigible California’s, lest they raise the cost of new cars.

Last week, BP America, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar, three early members of the 31-member U.S. Climate Action Partnership, said: Oh, never mind. They withdrew from USCAP. It is a coalition of corporations and global warming alarm groups that was formed in 2007 when carbon rationing legislation seemed inevitable and collaboration with the rationers seemed prudent. A spokesman for Conoco said: “We need to spend time addressing the issues that impact our shareholders and consumers.” What a concept.

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today’s, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today’s supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Will goes on to opine that global warming has become a kind of religion.

And indeed it, and environmentalism generally, is. People have a deep-seated desire to feel “saved.” The fact that they may come from a culture where going to church and engaging in sexual restraint is derided doesn’t change that.

So the deep-seated desire for righteousness expresses itself in environmentalism. But like traditional moralists, they are not content to merely live righteous lives. They demand the right to force their notions of righteousness on everybody.

More Fraud on “Global Warming”

From The Times:

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

It’s clear that the anthropogenic global warming crowd does not consist of disinterested scientists, bureaucrats and citizens. It consists of crusaders.

But the crusaders aren’t people who have picked a random cause. A lot are liberals who are always looking around for an excuse to control the economy. And among the scientists the grants, prominence and influence that comes with global warming hysteria are a strong incentive.

Consider, for example, this:

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 - an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

In this context, it’s hard to believe that things like ClimateGate are just the result of honest misunderstandings or innocent over zealousness.