Climategate and Surrealism

Surreal
- adjective
. . . having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic

Dictionary.com

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's annual conference is occurring next week in Copenhagen. Could anything be more surreal than Obama, blithely going to Copenhagen to announce that he will commit the U.S. to a massive, economy busting reduction in carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming just days after release of a massive tranche of e-mails, data and programs, all of which paint a picture of junk, manipulated and politicized “climate science.”

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The e-mails from East Anglia University's CRU, released publicly by someone last week ,have been a bomb thrown into the middle of the man-made global warming community (AGW) – albeit a silent bomb (thus raising the deeply philosophical question, if a tree containing climatologically significant tree ring data falls in a forest and the NYT pretends not to hear it, does it make a noise?)

The CRU tranche are proof of what many have posited for years. That is that the “science” behind the global warming juggernaut (or, as Mark Steyn called it, a tree ring circus) has been manipulated to the point of falsification.

Even absent the CRU tranche, it is beyond argument that the ever shriller cries of the AGW'istas have become ever more disconnected from reality. AGW posits that as carbon dioxide levels rise, global temperatures will rise. The problems with this theory are manifold. For example, all evidence indicates that the Medieval Warm Period, a period of minimal human contribution to global carbon dioxide, was hotter than today. We have had many periods of warming and cooling since then. Indeed, by the end of the "Little Cooling" that occurred from about 1940 to 1975, the dominant scientific scare was the return of an ice age.

And then there is the giant pink elephant in the room. For the last fifteen years, even while carbon dioxide levels have steadily risen, the earth has not seen a corresponding increase in temperature. To the contrary, there has actually been global cooling. Even before the release of the CRU data, we knew that not a single computer program relied by the AGW crowd to predict future catastrophe predicted this turn of events. In short, all of the AGW programs are fundamentally – and fatally – flawed. What the CRU tranche has done has been to turn well founded suspicion into verifiable reality. Indeed, to quote from a now public e-mail of the UN's lead IPCC scientist, Kevin Trenberth:

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.

I for one concur.

So how do the world's small clique of “top climate scientists” manage to keep alive the AGW canard that it is a consensus among scientists that man is causing global warming? Here is what is spelled out in the CRU tranche of e-mails:

- refuse to provide their raw data and computer code so that their findings can't be verified and tested (particularly galling, since that is what defines “science.” How the AGW crowd could get away with this for years is a strong indication that much of climate science” is utterly corrupt. It is good to hear calls throughout the scientific community for complete transparency in future climate research, such as this from Dr. Judith Curry - though if you read the comments, you will see a plethora of AGW ideologues disagreeing with her, claiming withholding such information is justified because otherwise the studies would be subject to countless attacks by "deniers.")

- manipulate data to minimize evidence of cooling and maximize, if not create out of whole cloth, warming trends;

- delete data and e-mails subject to Freedom of Information Act requests;

- blatantly corrupt the peer review process through cronyism (do read Mark Steyn's hilarious exposition on peer review and climate science)

- seek to prevent the publication of any “peer reviewed” articles calling AGW into question;

- conspire to remove journal editors who allowed publication of papers that questioned the "consensus” of AGW

- make scurrilous and ad hominem attacks on scientists who contest AGW; and,

- in all of this, they are supported by a vast conglomerate of European and American left wing politicians, left wing media, and rent seekers, all of whom have deeply vested interests in seeing AGW accepted as truth and acted upon in the policy sphere.

As James Lewis writes at PJM:

. . . The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

All of the above is evidence of a system and people corrupt at their core. But that said, the true smoking gun lies in the actual manipulation of the supposed objective data these individuals have published. It is on these numbers and extrapolations that these "scientists" have asked us, for years, to take on faith. But now, at least a part of their programs and raw data are now in the public domain. As A.J Strata explains:

As I suspected when this story broke, the minor problem for the AGW alarmists was dealing with the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. The big headache was the warm period prior to 1960, which we can see in the CRU data was equal to or higher than today. This warm period in the first half of the last century is a real problem for the theory of CO2 driven, man-made warming.

What we see time and time again is one of two ‘tricks’ used by the alarmists to exaggerate or manufacture runaway warming. One is the application of ‘corrections’ which shove down the pre 1960 warm periods and raise up the most recent temperatures (see here and here).

The other ‘trick’ is to cherry pick data that supports the AGW fiction and discard data that contradicts that meme. Over at WUWT Warwick Hughes (original link) has discovered another smoking gun, showing how CRU selected stations and only used post 1950 data to create their fictional warming. When you use ALL the data, the myth of global warming magically disappears!

Likewise is this short video discussing what we are learning now from the released data sets and programs:



Its not that confirmation of any of this is surprising. Even for all their obfuscation, key planks of the AGW “science” have long been known to be fraudulent. [Update: An article by J.R. Dunn at the American Thinker rolls up all the evidence of past frauds in an exceptional article.] Michael Mann's “hockey stick graph” that the IPCC relied upon so heavily to promote AGW a decade ago, magically did away with the Medieval Warming Period and other periods of warming, thus showing a millennium long temperature constant, all ending in a huge spike in global temperatures since about 1980. It was proven an utter fraud by two Canadian computer analysts several years ago. Yet it didn't slow down the AGW juggernaut. The same is true more recently for the claims regarding Ymal tree ring study. Yet “climate scientists” and all of the vested interests simply ignored these frauds, attacked those who pointed out the AGW emperor was in the buff, and then increased the shrillness of their doomsday predictions. All of which brings us to the most pressing question, how will the AGW crowd, from Michael Mann to Al Gore to President Obama, treat the CRU file dump confirming the utter fraud, collusion and possible illegality occurring at the very core of AGW “science?”

On one hand we have the majority of AGW crowd who, in collusion with a compliant left wing press, are simply ignoring the issue. It clearly worked in the past. Thus do we have today the NYT refusing to print the e-mails because of their ethical concerns with hacking (oh spare me) and Obama going to Copenhagen as if nothing is amiss. Others are floating ancillary alternatives.

As equally surreal as Obama's trip to Copenhagen is the response of the head of UN's IPCC to this bombshell - that the IPCC's data and doomsday forecasts are accurate becasue they are all based on "peer reviewed" work.

The thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.

Even AGW acolyte Megan McCardle is having trouble with that one.

According to Salon.com, AGW science is simply beyond the ken of the unwashed masses and we should simply rely on faith. The author then goes a step further, implying that disbelief in AGW is a conspiracy of the energy industry.

You can see James Delingpole at The Telegraph for a further round up of equally laughable responses.

The AGW canard survived past frauds because so many on the left and so many rent seekers have such a vested interest. We can expect they will use every means at their disposal to keep the AGW canard alive - and they hold all the levers of power in both Europe and America. I suspect that this will only unravel when members of the AGW crowd begin to publicly turn on their own in order to protect their livelihoods. And indeed, we see evidence of that already beginning to happen, with, for example, the call of IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita to have "Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf . . . barred from the IPCC process" because "the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore." It has not made it into the MSM yet, but get a hundred more Mr. Zorita's and the MSM will no longer have any choice but to cover it. And that will mark the end to this mortal threat to Western Cvilization. To whoever released this tranche of e-mails and data from Hadley CRU, you, sir or madame, are a true hero.