Michael Egnor

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal has a fine essay on the financial roots of global warming fraud:

Climategate: Follow the Money

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called–without irony–the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts–amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion–you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data–facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Real climate scientists are sifting out the details of the data to which CRU director and warmist Phil Jones applied fellow warmist Michael Mann’s ‘Nature trick…to hide the decline…’.

The hidden data is that of Keith Briffa, a fellow climate scientist (and warmist) at East Anglia. Briffa compiled tree-ring data to obtain global temperature estimates back to 1400. But there was a problem with the tree-ring data, from the warmist perspective. The tree ring data showed pronounced cooling beginning in the mid-20th century. This was at variance with some ground temperature measurements (so we are told- the actual raw data from the ground stations was ‘accidently’ thrown in the garbage in the 1980’s, and all we have are ‘modified’ data from the CRU scientists themselves.)

So the method that the warmist climate scientists used to estimate temperatures over the past millenium or so (tree ring data) did not show warming that correlated with rising CO2. This leaves a couple of possibilities, neither favorable to the warmist hypothesis. Either the tree ring data in the 20th century that was inconsistent with temperature recordings meant that the older tree ring data was unreliable (eliminating the argument that the warming was unprecedented) or the temperature recordings were inaccurate (perhaps from the heat island effect, in which sensors situated near growing urban areas give spurriously high readings) and rising CO2 didn’t cause warming.

What to do?

Simple. Delete the tree rign data beginning in the mid-20th century, when the cooling became pronounced, and use (already CRU ‘modified’) ground station data more supportive of the warmist hypothesis in it’s place.

Climate scientist and skeptic Steve McIntyre:

Senior Editor of Atlantic Monthly Clive Crook is revising his earlier sanguine view of ClimateGate. What happened? He read the emails.

In a post on ClimateGate that Crook wrote before he had read the emails carefully, he observed:

…nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much.

Over the weekend, he read the documents more carefully:

Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back..The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And… this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu. It goes to the core of that process.

This is not a parody. I swear this is not a parody. From the NEWS.scotsman.com; date November 30, 2009 (post-ClimateGate):

Warming will ‘wipe out billions’

MOST of the world’s population will be wiped out if political leaders fail to agree a method of stopping current rates of global warming, one of the UK’s most senior climate scientists has warned.

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.

I’m speechless. I’m really trying to think of something to say.

From the Sunday Times in London:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

Most of us know that President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, warned of the danger of the “military-industrial complex”. Regardless of your particular stand on military spending, there is no doubt that he was substantially right about the enormous abuse of power and fraud in the defense industry. Less known is the Eisenhower’s second warning in the speech. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual Read More ›

There’s a totalitarian subtext to scientism. Scientism entails a militant certainty of truth, and an utter intolerance for dissent that is remarkably akin to totalitarian political movements. Scientism is increasingly a spawn of the political left, which has been the primary source of totalitarianism in the past century.

The reaction of Darwinists or of global warming scientists to even the most mild skepticism is remarkably vicious. They hunt down skeptics and suppress differing opinions using practically any means at their disposal. If a school district attaches a sticker to a textbook that says “Darwin’s theory is a theory, not a fact, and evidence for and against it should be considered.” it will find itself in federal court, facing financial ruin, with jail a possibility for individuals who don’t comply. Who would have imagined, a few decades ago, that scientists would use courts to settle scientific disputes?

As the ClimateGate emails amply demonstrate, scientists who believe in global warming systematically exclude and professionally destroy scientists who express skepticism. The emails show a remarkable demand for doctrinal purity in climate science. These pro-global warming scientists manufacture a “consensus” using strong-arm tactics, and enforce it with singular purpose. And when asked why scientists use such brutal tactics, they reply ‘because it’s consensus science!”

Particularly disturbing to me is the appellation “denialism” applied to mere questioning of scientific orthodoxy. It’s an effort to drive anyone who questions orthodoxy out of acceptable society. Bourgeoisie, reactionaries, revisionists, denialists. It fits well in the Leninist lexicon.

Melanie Phillips at the British Spectator has a fine essay on this totalitarian current in the global warming movement. It applies as well to other encroachments of scientism in our civilization.

Green Totalitarianism

British journalist Christopher Booker, writing in the British Telegraph, has a thoughtful essay that puts the various aspects of the ClimateGate scandal in context and provides insight into the relative impact of each component of the scandal.

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Read More ›

Iowahawk has a delightful post on a newly evolved species: climate researchers. Money quotes: Like other species in the order homo scientifica, the climate researcher gathers and organizes data to lure grant money to the hive. In contrast to those other species, however, the climate researcher has evolved a set of complex violent behaviors to insure any data leaving the hive is perfectly adapted to nature’s most lucrative and sweetest grants. It really is a marvel of natural selection, and explains why the climate researcher continues to thrive in any kind of weather condition…The ear-piercing screech of the swarm warns the intruder that they will cut off his peer review unless he retreats. But the the hungry skeptic is not Read More ›

It’s going viral. Very funny. link