Climate activist uses taxpayer-funded site for disgraceful attack on minister of the crown

New Zealand’s foremost climate crank, Gareth Renowden, has a disgraceful post on the taxpayer-funded Sciblogs website attacking a minister of the Crown for not spouting the AGWarming message that Gareth and his fellow cranks say is the True Religion.

Gareth attacks Rodney Hide for uttering in Parliament yesterday such inconvenient truths as the latest round of global warming (which followed decades of cooling) ended in 1998.

Using language intemperate in the extreme, Gareth accuses Rodney of lying to the House and misleading Parliament, allegations which themselves must come close to being contempt of Parliament.

Now, a politician is fair game for criticism and this would not be the major issue it is if Gareth just let loose on his own blog.

But such political propaganda should not be posted on a taxpayer-funded site. Sciblogs is part of the Science Media Centre, funded by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology to “educate” journalists about science issues.

Sciblogs has become a shameless vehicle for one climate crank after another to daily push the “we’re all doomed because of global warming” line. The cranks post article after article laying into anyone who takes issue with their received wisdom. One of them is also a militant atheist who uses Sciblogs to attack Christianity.

It’s well past time that somebody in the ministry looks at what is being posted on this taxpayer-funded site.

It’s not a matter of letting “the other side” also post there, which I have no doubt would not be allowed. These are, after all, people who support the hiding of inconvenient climate facts and data as exposed in the Climategate emails.

No political propaganda from any source should be published on a taxpayer-funded site, let alone the kind of naked political grandstanding and religious abuse that fills Sciblogs in the name of “educating” journalists about scientific issues. Whoever has ultimate charge of this outrageous website needs to bring it into line.

Even the BBC is now worried that religious fanatics are doing the AGWarming cause great harm

Even the BBC has become concerned that many fanatical promoters of AGWarming are harming the cause by couching their alarmism in religious language that promises hellfire and damnation unless we repent and return to the lifestyles of the Dark Ages.

This is an extraordinary development, because the BBC is one of the world’s foremost promoters of the AGWarming shock horror. When it briefly went off-message two years ago and reported there had actually been no warming since 1998 (there still hasn’t been), green activists furiously demanded changes to the story. The BBC meekly obeyed. It did not even report the Climategate emails, despite those emails being leaked in what would have been a world scoop to one of the BBC’s AGWarming reporters a week or more before they were made public by bloggers alerted to them after the BBC decided to suppress them.

In response to the rising skepticism around the world, BBC reporter Helen Grady has written a fascinating account of looking at an online doomsday clock that says there are just 83 months left to the end of the world, or whatever.

She writes, in an article on the BBC’s website : But this doomsday countdown has not been devised by a religious cult or millenarian seer. It is on the website of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), designed to raise awareness about climate change. The website’s designers are not the only ones who are keen to warn us of impending climate Armageddon. Ahead of last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, politicians and campaigners were queuing up to tell us it was our “last chance” to tackle global warming. Gordon Brown even warned that “the dire consequences of failure” at Copenhagen could include a “catastrophic” future of killer heat-waves, floods and droughts.

Grady notes that, for some, this appropriation of religious language and themes reveals the extent to which climate change is, for a section of the green movement, part of a much wider agenda for radical social change.

But she is worried they are going too far. She quotes theologian and environmentalist Martin Palmer as saying “environmentalists have stolen fear, guilt and sin from religion, but they have left behind celebration, hope and redemption.”

The worried BBC reporter says some campaigners think it is time to stop relying on apocalyptic messages to convert people to the climate change cause.

“Selling people a vision of climate hell simply doesn’t work,” says Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of the firm Futerra, a firm that specialises in green public relations. “A lot of environmentalists think they need to convince people that the way they live their lives is wrong. They want us to stop sinning so they try to scare us into conversion with predictions of high-carbon hell. But it’s not an effective message.”

I’ve written before that AGWarming is the new religion in the post-Christian age most of the West lives in. But this new religion is not science. Science is about facts, evidence, skepticism and dissent, especially in a field as new as climatology, which didn’t exist until 30 years ago. Many of the scientists involved believe they are saving the world and thus look only for “evidence” that supports their beliefs and keeps those hundreds of millions of grant monies rolling in. Their congregations — the green, fanatical AGWarming believers who’ve hitched themselves in religious ecstasy to mad dreams of a scientifically sanctioned armageddon — brook no dissent. They claim absolutely that they and the now utterly discredited IPCC alone are right, “the science is settled” and no contrary views will be allowed.

Thank goodness we no longer have the death penalty for blasphemy, such is the blazing eyed fanaticism of some of them. They would have burnt Gallileo at the stake had they been alive in his day. These religious fundamentalists call their critics “flat earthers,” in obvious total ignorance that it was the skeptics who challenged and proved false the religious fundamentalist view of the time that the world was flat.

New Zealand AGWarming fanatics like Ken Perrot (perhaps not ironically a Christian-despising militant atheist) and his tag-team mate Grant Jacobs sit on the Net 24/7, trawling the blogs for the slightest sign of apostasy. They and many others post sneering, smug comments in reply and add links to sites promoting the One True Religion, presumably to attract converts or re-educate the wavering.

When their bombastic comments go into moderation for a short while because bloggers like me do not sit online 24/7 waiting for their comments to arrive (I have a family, a job and a life; and in any case it is the multiple links they post that send them into moderation), they fire complaining emails to me, demanding their golden words be removed from moderation instantly.

Ken has even taken to emailing other people who’ve commented on my blog, complaining his comments have taken more than a few seconds to get out of the moderation queue. He calls this usually minor delay “censorship.”

One extraordinary feature of the Kens and the Grants and similar fanatics is that they have open access to the taxpayer-funded, Royal Society Sciblogs site, where they post article after article pushing their religion and attacking heretical bloggers like me.

Ken, Grant and their many fellow believers seem so seriously concerned that what appears on my obscure blog risks undermining their religion that they have to counter every article I write on the issue, even though Grant boasted he actually didn’t even read past the second paragraph of my 4600-word Climategate analysis.

Ho hum. They make me feel very, very important. Ho hum.

Lest we forget — Victoria a state in mourning on first anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires

Our neighbours over the Tasman in Victoria are engaged in a day of mourning today.

It is the first anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires of February 7 2009, in which 173 people died, 5000 more were burnt or otherwise injured, 2298 houses were destroyed and 520,000 hectares of township, bush, farm, grassland and forest were devastated by 12 major bushfires that rampaged across much of the state.

The day is being marked quietly, with church services attended by the prime minister, the governor-general, the state premier and many ordinary Victorians in Melbourne and in the country towns outside Melbourne that became crematoria this day last year.

I remember vividly going to bed in Wellington on February 7 last year after hearing on the late news that a dozen or more people had died in the bushfires. Waking to the 7am news next morning, the toll had become scores. That was horrific enough to hear from so far away. When it climbed and climbed and climbed as more and more bodies were found in the ashes of homes in such bush mountain townships as Kinglake and Marysville, it was numbing.

By accident of my work this year, I’ve been able to visit Kinglake (where 121 died) and Marysville (where 40 died). It was sobering. These towns are — were — in thick eucalypt forest in the mountains to the north and north-east of Melbourne. They were reduced to fields of black ruins, where barely a building survived (some did) amidst the blackened, leafless trunks of the trees that had brought the firestorms to them.

Victoria’s landscape and ecology depends on bushfires for regeneration. When I visited Kinglake and Marysville a few months ago, the blackened trees were already a blaze of green shoots.

The south-east of Australia has always had bushfires. There were equally major ones in 1983, 1939 and 1851. Such infernos always follow the periodic droughts that affect the region and come after a summer heatwave that dries out completely the already parched vegetation.

The difference between those fires and those of this day last year was that thousands and thousands and thousands of green-leaning former city dwellers had moved to the bush outside Melbourne this past 25 years, to places like Kinglake and Marysville. Australians call them “tree changers.”

It meant when the latest huge fires ravaged the state, far more people were living in near-urban communities in thick bush than previously. Their councils had even passed bylaws forbidding the cutting down of trees, even for fire breaks. The houses that were lost with their families too often inside them had highly flammable gum trees towering right over their very eaves.

A royal commission has been investigating the fires and why so many people died in them. Its interim report found serious failures in the management of the fires that destroyed Kinglake and Marysville, including an almost total absence of warnings to the people of those areas. In response to the commission’s 51 interim recommendations, the state’s warning systems and the way fires are managed have been changed in significant ways.

The commission this week begins looking at the planning laws and regulations that allowed so many homes to be built in such thick bush and which prevented residents from clearing space around their homes even if they wanted to (and many did not — the bush was why they moved there, and drove in their SUVs to and from their work in Melbourne over tortuous, narrow mountain roads that made escape in the face of a bushfire a nightmare).

The commission seeks to ensure that the lessons of Black Saturday will not be lost, the way many lessons of past fires were lost.

In memory of the 173 children, women and men in Victoria who lost their lives this day last year, and in respect for the continuing grief of those who survived. Lest we forget.

Hockey stick fabricator Michael Mann to face further scrutiny in the wake of Climategate emails leak

Michael E Mann is the Penn State University professor responsible for the shonky, utterly discredited “hockey stick” graph that was the centrepiece of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report. It claimed that global temperatures had been stable for 1000 years before 1900, after which they had leapt, allegedly because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The whole graph was a fraud because it was based on “measuring” temperatures from a 1000-year-old tree until 1900, then using actual measured temperatures to bring the chart to the present, in the shape of a hockey stick. It relied on wiping the Medieval Warm Period (when the world was warmer than now 1000 years ago) and the Little Ice Age (when the world was much, much colder than now 250 years ago) from the records.

The Climategate emails exposed the machinations of Professor Mann and the other members of the Team at the heart of the IPCC’s rapidly collapsing edifice.

Penn State University began scutinising Professor Mann following the leaking of the emails, from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, one of the IPCC’s main sources of climate data (when it’s not lifting its “peer reviewed research” from propaganda pamphlets issued by Greenpeace and WWF or musings by students and mountaineers).

Penn State has cleared Professor Mann of deleting emails and certain other matters, but it has decided further scrutiny is warranted. Says a report issued today by Henry C Foley, vice president for research and graduate school dean: Given that information emerged in the form of the emails purloined from CRU in November 2009, which have raised questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research activity, given that this may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist, and given that it may be undermining public trust in science in general and climate science specifically, the inquiry committee believes an investigatory committee of faculty peers from diverse fields should be constituted under RA-10 to further consider this allegation.

A five-member investigatory committee of eminent faculty members with impeccable credentials has been given 120 days to consider this matter and present its findings and recommendations to Dr Foley.

This committee may find Professor Mann pure as the snow inconveniently covering his university, but it demonstrates two points.

One, the first committee found a prima facie case worthy of further consideration, which is a credit to the university, showing it is open to criticism and does not want to preside over a whitewash of allegations against one of its stars. Two, that these gods of climate science are now on notice that they can no longer smugly make the extraordinarily alarmist claims they specialise in about human affects on global climate without the scrutiny of their work that they have strongly resisted but which is central to every field of science.

In the meantime, enjoy the wonderful video at the top of this article about Dr Mann and his hockey stick.

Government cheerleaders silent as Bill English blasts unemployment back as high as when National last in power

I turned to Kiwiblog to read David’s spin on his slash-and-burn government’s handing us a disgraceful leap in unemployment to a withering 7.3 per cent. But as of 4.40pm, many hours after this appalling news was released, he is silent on it.

He has posts quoting boring “knights” wanting a new flag; pontificating on former Immigration head Mary Anne Thompson’s guilty plea to faking her qualifications; and even one boasting about the academic record of the daughter of our dreary, awful finance minister. He even posted two minutes ago about someone’s funeral. But about our unemployment rate going from the lowest in the OECD under the last government to the highest we had in a more than a decade, there was not a word.

It’s actually fitting that the awful Mr English has managed to push unemployment to 7.3 per cent in only 14 months, because that is where it was when National was last the government.

Under Labour’s policy of steady economic growth, debt repayment, budget surpluses (National in Opposition demanded the surpluses be splashed on tax cuts for teh rich) and stable economic policies, unemployment fell to 3.4 per cent, the lowest in decades. Mr English has more than doubled it with his policies of high debt, slash-and-burn and endless dirge-like speeches about the country facing decades of misery ahead.

No wonder business is not investing. No wonder so many New Zealanders flock to Australia, where even the Opposition does not run down their country the way our finance minister bad mouths New Zealand at every opportunity, while being exposed as gorging at the taxpayer trough like no politician had ever dared before.

Australia managed to avoid a recession altogether, because instead of doing nothing, its government actively worked to stimulate the economy to retain jobs. Its unemployment rate has fallen steadily from the small jump it experienced when the former mates of the nice Mr Key destroyed the world’s financial system. It is now 5.5 per cent and steadily going down while New Zealand’s rate is 7.3 per cent and going up.

Footnote: I see that Homepaddock, the blogosphere’s other full-time National Party cheerleader, has overlooked the unemployment rate too, despite her usually being as quick to push “post” as David is when she can find something to blame the Labour Party for. I have no doubt that when David finally works out how to spin this disaster as being all Labour’s fault (just as the big drop in unemployment under Labour was all National’s doing), Homepaddock will quickly follow.

• Update 8.25pm: Hilariously, the first commenter on David’s latest post, also not about the unemployment statistics, says: DPF: “must not talk about unemployment, must not talk about unemployment must not talk about unemployment oh look an eagle!”

• Update 12.08am:I see that David is still not talking about unemployment, but he has banned the person who wrote the hilarious “oh look an eagle” comment.
• Update 12.25am:Ah, here are David’s Key lines, in this statement from the Nice Mr Key: “An economy is like a super tanker it takes a long time to turn around and we had nine years of poor economy policy that put us in the wrong place.” Ah yes. Homepaddock take note. The government that brought unemployment down to 3.4 per cent and paid off most of the national debt was actually engaged in “nine years of poor economy [sic] policy.” Go David! Go Ele!

  Actually, if the New Zealand economy is a supertanker, I’d argue that the Awful Mr English and the Nice Mr Key have crashed it at full speed into the wharf.

• Update 9.20am: There we go! Almost 24 hours and many posts after the bad news! David has finally posted on the issue and boy, does he have an interesting spin. Unemployment is largely because of the minimum wage! Young people are not worth $12.75 an hour, let alone $15. Bring back youth rates!

Waitangi Day New Zealand’s shame, Australia Day a nation’s joyful party

Two countries separated by more than the Tasman. It’s Time to restore New Zealand Day

Visiting Sydney for Australia Day this week was a fascinating contrast to the many Waitangi Days I’ve spent at Waitangi, Wellington, Auckland and elsewhere in New Zealand.

Australia Day marks the arrival at Sydney Cove on January 26 1788 of a fleet of sailing ships carrying convicts banished from England and the marines and officials needed to keep them in hard labour in a strange land. The arrival of this flotsam and jetsam of England led immediately to the dispossession and near genocide of the land’s indigenous people, the survivors of whom all these years later are among the most dispossessed and sorry people on the face of the planet.

Waitangi Day marks the signing at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands on February 6 1840 of a treaty between the chiefs of the indigenous people of this land and British officials led by William Hobson. The treaty was aimed at ensuring the Maori were not dispossessed of their lands and lives the way Australia’s Aborigines were and, despite many dishonourings of the treaty over the next 136 years, today te Tangata Whenua and Tikanga Maori are a central and celebrated focus of life in New Zealand. Genuine moves to make good the injustices of the past have been engaged in sincerely since 1984.

Given the gulf wider than the Tasman in the treatment and present-day state of the indigenous peoples of both countries — the Aborigines were even denied citizenship and the vote until 1967, a full 98 years after Maori were enfranchised — it is extraordinary that Waitangi Day is “celebrated” as little more than New Zealand’s Day of Shame, where shame-faced Pakeha recite mea culpa after mea maxima culpa to protest after relentless, unforgiving protest and criticism from the Maori elite and the Harawira whanau.

Sydney on Australia Day this week was a massive throng of Australians pouring into the streets to celebrate their country’s official founding. Many waved Australian flags. Some were even dressed in flags. Many had flags painted on their faces. They greeted each other (and me) with “Happy Australia Day!” The city streets were closed to allow carnivals to take place all over. The harbour was a spectacle of tall sailing ships, ferries, private boats and yachts and constant events such as parachute drops and fly-bys of air force jets. The prime minister named the Australian of the Year and unveiled the Australia Day honours. The crowds numbered as many enthusiastic newer immigrant Australians such as Chinese and Vietnamese as it did the descendants of the convicts and marines who stole the country from the indigenous people. If any Aborigines were celebrating the day, or even protesting at it, there was no sight or sound of them that I could discern, though the day before, in Canberra, I saw the Aboriginal tent embassy protest camp that has been a feature of the lawn outside the Old Parliament House since 1972. It seems now to be a sad little tourist attraction.

The television news and the next morning’s papers indicated this celebration of the country’s official day was as enthusiastic nationwide as it was in Sydney.

If Australians annually can engage in such a joyous public celebration despite the disgraceful way their country was stolen from its inhabitants and the shocking state today of the remnants of the indigenous people, surely we New Zealanders can stop beating ourselves up every Waitangi Day despite the very much better history of our country? Or are we just a bunch of cheerless masochists?

Waitangi Day is New Zealand Day. For better or worse (and mostly for the better) it is the commemoration of the day New Zealand was founded as a nation, just as Australia Day is the commemoration of the day Australia was founded.

Put aside for now the debates over changing the flag or becoming a republic. I strongly support both. I was saddened to wake up in Wellington on December 31 and see the John Key government had knighted yet another beer baron (who no longer lives here but who doubtless gives much money to the National Party’s Waitemata Trust). What a backward step it was to revert to knighthoods again a decade after we abolished them decades after Australia did. But all this colonial cringe is another issue, not the issue of our national day.

For now, it is time to reclaim Waitangi Day as New Zealand Day and celebrate it as such and celebrate our wonderful heritage. The way Australia celebrates Australia Day. We can do it with even more pride, because we don’t shy from the bad parts of our history the way Australia does.

Watchdog: East Anglia CRU illegally hid global warming data from critics

BREAKING NEWS — THE WHOLE IPCC EDIFICE LOOKS CLOSE TO THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE

Britain’s freedom of information watchdog has just ruled that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit broke the law by refusing to give skeptical researchers access to raw data used to produce claims of global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office says the university breached the Freedom of Information Act by withholding the data, but it could not be prosecuted because complaints were out of time. It wants the law changed to allow proscutions when a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The CRU’s illegal activities came to light when 14 years of its internal emails were leaked by a whistleblower last November in what has become known as the Climategate scandal.

CRU director Phil Jones — one of the key climate scientists behind the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — was stood down after the email leak while an independent inquiry was made into their contents and circumstances. That inquiry has yet to report.

Among the many Jones emails in the Climategate trove was one of him asking another scientist to delete emails relating to the IPCC’s 2007 report, and one where he boasted he had persuaded the university to ignore information requests from climate skeptics.

This latest setback for the AGWarming cause comes within days of the IPCC having to admit its claims of Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 were false; revelations that its claims of global warming making hurricanes worse and more frequent were also false; Britain’s chief science advisor criticising climate scientists for exaggerating claims about global warming; and revelations of companies and trusts associated with IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri making millions from climate science, including “research” on the false melting glacier claims.

• Update:The Team member who controls all Wikipedia entries on climate change, William Connolley, has been busy today deleting attempts to report the Information Commissioner’s Office findings on Phil Jones’s Wikipedia page. This is what Connolley is deleting:

  On January 28, 2010, the Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA and Jones had breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece]

  The Team might still control Wikipedia, but even the mainstream media is taking note now of their chicanery and widely reporting it (well, everywhere except New Zealand). Their cause is lost.

Facebook foibles — do they buy people’s email address books or something?

Facebook seems to have a very clever method of tempting people to sign up.

The other day, I got an email (to my Poneke email account) from Darren of Fairfacts Media infamy, asking me to join Facebook and become his friend. Embedded in the email were links to the Facebook profiles of the bloggers Adolf Fiinkensein (of No Minister), Tina (of Roar Prawn) Danyl (of The Dim Post) and a Woman from Miramar whom I’ve never met but had some email discussion with about two years ago.

I assumed Darren had put the links in the email, thinking I would recognise the names and want to become his friend (though the Woman from Miramar link slightly surprised me – maybe she likes emailing bloggers, I thought).

Well, I’ve just received a similar email (to my personal email account) from an old friend, Diana, wanting me to join Facebook and become her friend. The email had exactly the same text as that from Darren, so I realised both were sent through an auto-formatted Facebook system.

To my utter astonishment, it also had a similarly formatted set of Facebook links like the ones in the email from Darren. The utter astonishment was over who those links were to.

One was a lecturer I had at Columbia University in NYC, another was a trolleybus fanatic from Reading, UK, another was blogger Stef, another was another old friend I had not seen for a couple of years and the last was also the Woman from Miramar.

Diana could not possibly know my former Columbia lecturer, the Reading trolleybus fanatic, Stef or the Woman from Miramar. It means that Facebook has a system that auto-selects Facebook members that it knows people being sent an invitation to join have had email contact with. As far back as eight years ago, being the last time I had an email exchange with the Columbia lecturer.

Can one of this blog’s techie readers tell me how they do this clever trick? The simplest explanation (which I always look for first) is that Slingshot, my ISP, sells its subscribers’ webmail email lists to Facebook. The common denominator of the links in Darren’s email were to people I have had email contact with on my Poneke Slingshot account, while the links in Diana’s email were to people I have had contact with on my personal Slingshot account. I had exchanged emails with the Woman from Miramar on both email accounts.

On the other hand, a New Zealand ISP would not last five minutes if it sold its customers’ details. But it must be something like this. I don’t believe in Black Helicopters.

While I am very impressed with the technology, I’m sure as hell not going to join Facebook. There can be no greater invasion of privacy yet invented. I wonder if the Privacy Commissioner knows about it?

UK’s chief scientist admits global warming claims sexed up, scientists wrong to hide data from skeptics

Britain’s chief scientific advisor admits some scientists have exaggerated claims of global warming and says climate scientists should be less hostile to skeptics.

Professor John Beddington also condemns the attempts by climate scientists to prevent scrutiny of their data, as revealed by the Climategate emails leaked from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Centre.

Professor Beddington was speaking to The Times after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit it lifted the un-peer reviewed, false claim that the Himalayan Glaciers would melt by 2035 from a WWF propaganda booklet.

He told the newspaper that public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that skeptics had been right on some hotly-disputed issues.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.”

He said that the false claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 had exposed a wider problem with the way that some evidence was presented.

“Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate. We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There’s definitely an issue there. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be the level of skepticism. All of these predictions have to be caveated by saying, ‘There’s a level of uncertainty about that’.”

Professor Beddington said that particular caution was needed when communicating predictions about climate change made with the help of computer models.

“It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.

“When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.”

It was wrong for scientists to refuse to disclose their data to their critics: “I think, wherever possible, we should try to ensure there is openness and that source material is available for the whole scientific community.”

Comment: What are the chances of similar frank comments coming from New Zealand’s chief science advisor, Peter Gluckman? Or of a mainstream New Zealand journalist even asking him?

A very convenient primer on atmospheric CO2

Hilary from Canada, who has contributed to some recent climate change debates here, has provided this video on the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The teacher in the video uses grains of rice. She stacks one million grains of rice, then produces 385 grains of rice by comparison. That shows the proportion of the atmosphere that is made up of CO2 — 385 parts per million. Of that, just 15 grains represents the proportion of CO2 attributed to human activities.

Some climate scientists say that any further human-caused increase in this tiny proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophic global warming/climate change.

This video is neutral about carbon, indeed it doesn’t mention the climate change debate at all, it just shows clearly, simply and accurately the proprtion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a way anyone can understand. It is thus another Inconvenient Truth.

Has the media cried wolf once too often? Constantly predicting doom may be why growing numbers are shunning the latest armageddon

Almost half of New Zealanders do not believe climate change is real, according to the results of a poll published in the New Zealand Herald this week. A full 20 per cent of the 2296 respondents said the concept was a giant con, with a further 28 per cent saying global warming had not been conclusively proved.

This is not another article on climate change. Climate always changes, and human activity is clearly responsible for some of the changes. Nor is this another article on the Climategate emails, disturbing as these are.

What interests me in this Herald poll, which is similar to others recently in Australia and the United States, is the role of the media in people expressing such opinions in rising numbers. It could be symptomatic of the public turning away from the constant, Armageddon-like disasters the news media keeps predicting but which never happen.

The news media have always accentuated the negative – murders, wars, disasters – while minimising the positive, the ordinary and the mundane (except where the ordinary and the mundane involve celebrities). But over the past couple of decades, as the news industry has become increasingly competitive – nationally and globally – accentuating the negative has become increasingly strident.

The rise of the Internet has created a continuous news cycle, where the pressure is on reporters to be the first to get the “news” onto the website, then check later if it is correct. This is the reverse of how newsrooms used to operate. Reporters sought out the facts, checked them as best they could, then published the results in the morning paper or broadcast them on the 7pm news.

The takeover by multinational corporations of independent media organisations in many countries, New Zealand included, has seen profit become the predominant motive in newsgathering – delivering audiences to advertisers – leading to the laying off of huge numbers of experienced journalists, leaving most newsrooms in New Zealand and many elsewhere staffed by fewer, less experienced reporters who are rarely given time to look at an issue in any depth.

The 24-hour news cycle has presented politicians and other decision-makers the world over with enormous problems. Whatever issue arises, usually out of nowhere, reporters and talkback radio immediately demand a political response. If government ministers are slow to respond, their political opponents will quickly sniff the wind and promise whatever action is demanded by the baying mob.

It means politics has become driven cynically by opinion polls and kneejerk populism. It means governments employ armies of spin doctors to churn out press releases and photo-opportunities in a desperate attempt to keep control of the news cycle, while reporters are required by their editors to find the newest, scariest, nastiest beat-up angle possible for the same hysterical story being run by every other news outlet.

Historically and to this day, many human beings have followed religions, cults or just odd beliefs that the world is coming to an end. The end of the millennium in 1000 AD was widely feared (or welcomed) by Christians as the time Armageddon would happen. In 1798, Malthus predicted humanity would soon starve to death, because the growth in human population would soon surpass agriculture’s ability to feed everyone. Malthusian scenarios have been trotted out by alarmists since, but always come to nought.

The belief in a religious armageddon in many countries has diminished substantially in the past 200 years or so with the rise of rationality, reason and science. We now know what causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, solar eclipses and many other catastrophic natural events, so most people no longer feel the need to pray to a god to protect them from such events, nor sacrifice virgins or witches to appease the gods.

The news media, however, is always seeking a disaster in waiting so it can run bigger and bigger headlines to scare the wits out of people in order to deliver audiences to the advertisers.

In the past, we had global wars that were a source of horrific, genuine headlines. After World War II, the proliferation of nuclear weapons seemed to pose a very real threat to humanity. There are still more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity several times over, but that threat has receded since the end of the Cold War. The media had to seek ever new and present dangers.

The past decade has seen the media the world over in frenzied promotion of one armageddon after another. The Y2K bug was meant to make planes fall from the sky and computers crash all over the world at the stroke of the midnight hour on December 31 1999. When that failed to happen, the media pursued one health scare after another. There was SARS, Bird Flu and most recently Swine Flu, the latter the mildest form of seasonal flu in years.

Because of the global media storm generated by all these scares, politicians were forced to act, throwing huge sums of public money into computer fixes, Tamiflu and other products and services the private sector was delighted to sell. No matter that these scares were just media beat-ups. If just one plane had fallen from the sky, if just one runaway epidemic had followed a flu scare, the politicians would have been blamed. They had to be seen to act. With public money.

Global warming, or climate change, has been the biggest media beat-up of all. It grew in a rising tumult of media shrieking that culminated in a thundering media scare fest at Copenhagen last month. The world has never been hotter, the headlines howled. It’s going to get hotter and hotter. We are all doomed, unless we pay billions of dollars for carbon credits to a mafia somewhere in Russia, laundered through the same money merchants who gave us the global financial crisis (a real crisis the media did not predict).

Copenhagen failed. The politicians who attended it were unable to reach any consensus acceptable to their voters. The fact is, that voting public just may have become more than a tad suspicious, after a relentless decade of media alarmism about Y2K, SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu.

It was getting through to public consciousness that global temperatures had peaked in 1998 and had even begun to fall in recent years. People saw, all over the world, how any hurricane or heatwave was presented by the media as proof of man-made global warming, but there was a conspiracy of media silence linking the snow storms that began blanketing the northern hemisphere as Copenhagen ended to the repeated claims the world can only get warmer. Ah, that is just “weather,” a hot day is “climate change,” was the belated explanation.

And so, in the opinion polls about global warming here and elsewhere in recent weeks, a sceptical public are saying in greater numbers that they do not believe, or they question, the alarmist claims of man-made global warming. And it is likely many are questioning global warming because of all the other media beat-ups that came before Copenhagen, not least the Swine Flu hysteria so fresh in the public mind.

The climate change industry thus might be in the peculiar position of being brought down not by the science (which may or may not turn out to be right), or the Climategate emails, or even inconvenient snowstorms, but by the news media crying wolf just once too often. And that would be an irony.

Taxpayer-funded Science Media Centre gets a curious ratings boost from global warming

I’ve noticed something interesting from my site stats. Yesterday, an astonishing 85 clicks were made from a link in a comment blogger Grant Jacobs wrote under my Climategate emails story. Grant’s link was to an article he wrote an article he wrote critical of me on the taxpayer-funded Sciblogs blog.

So far today, 41 clicks have been made from the same comment to the same article.

Both days, these clicks to an obscure article exceeded the number of clicks made to any other single link on my blog, including to any single link of the many Climategate emails I linked to.

Why would anyone be going back to an early comment on the Climategate story and repeatedly clicking on such an obscure link in it?

Just now came the possible answer. Another Sciblogs blogger, a Ken Perrott, who has also been critical of me in my comments section as well as on Sciblogs, has just published an article on Sciblogs saying Sciblogs is now the fifth most-popular blog in New Zealand — based on a sitemeter survey that Ken publishes each month.

According to Ken’s January survey, Sciblogs has been averaging 653 individual hits a day with 1207 page views, compared with 152 hits a day and 240 page views in December, when his survey ranked it number 29.

Well, Sciblogs’ hits have certainly gone up yesterday and today, thanks to whoever has been visiting my Climategate story over and over to click on the link from Grant’s comment to Grant’s article on Sciblogs.

Ken’s latest Sciblogs article uses his platform to attack me as a conspiracy theorist who attacks science bloggers. He’s welcome to his opinion.

What is really starting to interest me is the taxpayers of New Zealand funding a pro-global warming blog that hurls abuse at those who don’t swallow the party line hook, line and sinker.

Sciblogs is hosted and fully funded by the Royal Society’s Science Media Centre, which is fully funded by taxpayers via the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

The Science Media Centre is itself a platform that pushes AGWarming at every chance, Its featured article today tries to contradict the inconvenient truth that the IPCC’s hysterical claim about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 was based on a casual phone conversation with an obscure Indian scientist a decade ago and got into the Fourth Assessment Report in a cut and paste job from the World Wildlife Fund.

Taxpayers fund the Science Media Centre to provide independent, impartial information from scientists to journalists, not to take a highly partisan stance from one corner of the most controversial scientific debate of the decade.

As the SMC/Sciblogs says about itself and Sciblogs:

Sciblogs is an initiative of the Science Media Centre, an independent source of expert comment and information for journalists covering science and technology in New Zealand. Our aim is to promote accurate, bias-free reporting on science and technology by helping the media work more closely with the scientific community. The Science Media Centre was set up in June 2008 by the Royal Society of New Zealand with funding from the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

I don’t doubt for a moment that the people who write for Sciblogs and work for the Science Media Centre sincerely believe they are fighting the good fight to save the planet from an oil company conspiracy, or whatever, but I really do question their using taxpayer’s money to push what looks suspiciously like shrill propaganda in support of their cause.

13 years of Climategate emails show tawdry manipulation of science by a powerful cabal at the heart of the global warming campaign

• This is the longest and most important article I’ve yet written for this blog and I make no apology for its 4600 words — more also than in any newspaper article. As a journalist, I believe the Climategate emails have exposed one of the most significant news stories of the decade. As the mainstream news media has so far barely gone beyond giving those who wrote them and their supporters time and space to deny their undeniable contents, I present here an extensive journalistic account of what they actually say in the context of the dates and events in which they were written, with full links to all the emails.

Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure.

The emails reveal that the entire global warming debate and the IPCC process is controlled by a small cabal of climate specialists in England and North America. This cabal, who call themselves “the Team,” bully and smear any critics. They control the “peer review” process for research in the field and use their power to prevent contrary research being published.

The Team’s members are the heart of the IPCC process, many of them the lead authors of its reports.

They falsely claim there is a scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled,” by getting lists of scientists to sign petitions claiming there is such a consensus. They have fought for years to conceal the actual shonky data they have used to wrongly claim there has been unprecedented global warming this past 50 years. Their emailed discussions among each other show they have concocted their data by matching analyses of tree rings from around 1000 AD to 1960, then actual temperatures from 1960 to make it look temperatures have shot up alarmingly since then, after the tree rings from 1960 on inconveniently failed to match observed temperatures.

The emails show that some of them at least concede in private that the world was warmer 1000 years ago (in the Medieval Warm Period) than it is today, but the emails also show they had to get rid of the MWP from the records to claim today’s temperatures are unprecedented.

They show Team members becoming alarmed and despondent at global temperatures peaking in 1998, then slowly falling to the present, while publicly trying to hide the fact that there was a peak and now a decline.

Revealingly, they show them even smugly nominating each other for prestigious awards, using factually wrong details in the information sent in nominating letters in support of the awards.

The Climategate emails (and accompanying computer data) were almost certainly leaked by a whistleblower inside the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU” — the supplier of much key IPCC historic climate data), not hacked from there by an outsider, as initially thought. Their sheer volume and content makes that clear, as do postings to some websites made by the still anonymous leaker. They are a treasure trove that begins on March 7 1996 and runs to November 12 2009, just before they were released and first publicised in an incredulous post on the Watts Up With That blog, which had been sent a link to them.

Don’t take my word for what their contents reveal. Read the emails for yourselves. They have been conveniently posted online in full and in date order. My article here looks at a range of them to back up the assertions I have made about what they reveal. It would take a book to discuss all of them, and you can be sure several books are already being written.

The peer review charade

AGWarmers parrot the mantra that their view is supported by learned articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and that peer-reviewed contrary views cannot be found. The Climategate emails conclusively show that the Team control the peer-reviewed literature, to the extent they “peer review” each other’s reports, and veto publication of research they do not support, bullying the editors and owners of scientific journals.

Worse, though, is the emails’ revelation that even material they put into the hallowed reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was not peer reviewed, and knowingly shabby.

See, for example, this email, by Filippo Giorgi, head of the physics of weather and climate section of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, writing on September 12 2000 to fellow lead authors of Chapter 10 of IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) then about to be published:

I myself think that material for a document as important as the TAR cannot be drawn from last-minute barely quality checked and un-peered reviewed material (people have barely looked at the MPI run that was completed last friday !!).

Fabricating temperature records from ancient trees

To be able to claim that recent global warming was unprecedented, man-made and dangerous, the Team had to prove current temperatures are the highest ever and going up at an alarming pace. Unfortunately, thermometers have only been around for a few hundred years and actual temperature records from many parts of the world only began around 1850. The Team therefore decided to use temperature “proxies,” looking at the growth rings in 1000-year-old trees (there are some, in Siberia and North America) and deciphering what temperature each year’s ring suggested.

In this email of September 22 1999, discussing proposals for a “nice tidy” 1000-year temperature graph for an upcoming IPCC report, the East Anglia University CRU’s tree ring specialist Keith Briffa expresses concerns to other Team members:

I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter. For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.

Briffa, as is apparent from that last sentence, believes the MWP existed, however inconvenient it might be for his colleagues needing it to disappear so they can claim it has never been as warm as today.

What Briffa was pointing out to colleagues such as CRU chief Phil Jones (who has stood aside while EAU investigates the scandal) and Penn State University’s Michael Mann (creator of the fraudulent 2001 “hockey stick” graph the IPCC quietly dropped from its reports and whose activities are also under investigation) is that Briffa’s tree ring data showed warming 1000 years ago, and very inconvenient cooling since the 1950s. The emails show Mann decided to run several series of tree ring data and average them.

Responded Mann to the Team the same day: I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the plot, and can ask Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the plot he has been preparing (nobody liked my own color/plotting conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself). The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline.

Mann’s highlighting the “vertically aligned” refers to his insistence that the 1000-year temperature chart they are discussing leaps vertically after 1950 from his previously straight line, to produce his now infamous “hockey stick” chart, discussed later in this article.

Hide the decline

Mann’s final comment above about “the late 20th century decline” is the genesis of the now-infamous “hide the decline” email that is the most quoted of the Climategate treasure trove, almost always out of context. The context is being given here.

Mann went on to say the problem remained that Briffa’s proxy data differed sharply in the late 20th century from his and Jones’s. He continued: This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series. So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case…. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!

The problem Mann saw was soon solved, as shown by that infamous email dated November 16 1999, from Phil Jones to Mann, Briffa and others:

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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

What this is saying – and no amount of obfuscation can alter the fact – is that a 1000-year “global temperature” chart was created – fabricated – by using tree-ring proxy data from 1000 to 1960, then using actual temperatures from 1961 on, to “hide” the fact that the tree ring proxies showed a “decline” from 1960 onwards. There can not be a more blatant example of using apples and oranges to “prove” a point than this, and they would have got away with it if not for the Climategate whistleblower.

NZ link in push to ban contrary views

In 2003, the peer-reviewed journal Climate Research decided to publish a paper by astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas that declared the the 20th century was “probably not” the warmest climatic period of the last 1000 years nor a uniquely extreme one. One of the editors at Climate Research was none other than Auckland University associate professor Chris de Freitas, a climate contrarian who is constantly vilified in the news media by AGWarmists and their journalist allies. The Climategate emails show the hysteria the Soon-Baliunas paper aroused in the Team as it slipped through their control of the peer review process.

By email to the team on March 11 2003, Jones said: Best to ignore probably, so don’t let it spoil your day. I’ve not looked at it yet. 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.

De Freitas is of course the “well known NZ skeptic.” Von Storch, a German climate scientist, was a member of the journal’s editorial board. The email shows Jones was happy to dismiss the article without even having read it. The Team followed up with a welter of actions to discredit the article, the journal and all associated with it.

Later that day, Jones emailed the Team again, after a quick look at the article: I am becoming more convinced we should do something – even if this is just to state once and for all what we mean by the LIA and MWP. I think the skeptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. 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. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

To which Mike Mann replied: The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn’t have cleared a ‘legitimate’ peer review process anywhere. That leaves only one possibility–that the peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn’t just De Frietas, unfortunately I think this group also includes a member of my own department… The skeptics appear to have staged a ‘coup’ at “Climate Research” (it was a mediocre journal to begin with, but now its a mediocre journal with a definite ‘purpose’).

Mann realised that a contrary paper being published in a peer reviewed journal jeopardised the Team’s smug claim that there was no peer-reviewed research questioning the Team’s line. In the same email, he said: This was the danger of always criticising 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…

This exchange, and the lengthy campaign against Climate Research that followed, is but one of many examples in the Climategate emails that show the lengths the Team have gone to attempting to prevent publication of any contrary peer-reviewed research, and demonstrates the control Team members believe they should have on the supposedly independent peer review process.

Totally destroying the Hockey Stick chart

Worse was to follow. In 2003, Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick began investigating Mann’s now infamous “hockey stick” graph, the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report. The hockey stick –based on the tree ring data cited above — purported to show the world’s temperature being stable from 1000 to 1950, then shooting upward, in the shape of a hockey stick.

McIntyre and McKitrick earned the hatred of the Team by demonstrating major mathematical fallacies in the chart — this long before anyone realised how it had actually been put together — leading to its being totally discredited and dropped from subsequent IPCC reports.

Hiding data in breach of information laws

McIntyre went on to request the raw data and computer programs behind numerous climate change charts, graphs and papers. You can find the results of his work on his Climate Audit blog. The Team responded to his requests for information under US and UK freedom of information laws by stonewalling, ignoring him, claiming to have lost data and, most outrageously, by discussing destroying their data to stop it being checked.

Apart from the latter being in serious breach of the freedom of information laws, it is in flagrant breach of the scientific principle that research should be capable of replication by others. If you refuse to tell others how you came to your conclusion, your work cannot be replicated, or, more to the point at issue here, it cannot be falsified, another important scientific principle.

See this email from Phil Jones to other scientists on May 7 2004: Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them.

And this from Jones to Mann, headed HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, on July 8 2004: The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Jones to Mann, again, on February 2 2005:Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. [Emphasis added]

The discussions about hiding or destroying data and entire sets of emails became more frantic as the months and years rolled by. The tone of the emails became increasingly hysterical, suggesting the Team was feeling ever more pressured because of the requests to produce the raw data their conclusions were based on, despite revealing such data being a basic scientific tenet.

Mike Mann on April 26 2006: I’m saddened to hear that this bozo is bothering you too, in addition to NCAR, NSF, NAS, IPCC and everyone else. Rest assured that I won’t ever respond to McIntyre should he ever contact me, but I will forward you any email he sends related to this. I assume Scott feels the same way…

New Zealander Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder Colorado, to Phil Jones, April 21 2007: I am sure you know that this is not about the science. It is an attack to undermine the science in some way. In that regard I don’t think you can ignore it all, as Mike suggests as one option, but the response should try to somehow label these guys and lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database. Indeed technology and data handling capabilities have evolved and not everything was saved. So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothng better to do seems like a good thing to do.

Smoking guns

And, on May 29 2008, the smoking gun of the many smoking guns related to document destruction in the Climategate emails. Jones to Mann: 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. Cheers Phil

The AR4 referred to is the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, published in 2007.

But wait, there’s more. Mann replies: I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.

McIntyre and others continued to use the US and UK freedom of information acts to try to extract the information they sought, with the US law in particular forcing material to be made public, including by being placed on the websites of various institutions for everyone to see.

The Team’s increasing paranoia is palpable in this email from Mann to Jones on September 30 2009: Its part of the attack of the corporate-funded attack machine, i.e. its a direct and highly intended outcome of a highly orchestrated, heavily-funded corporate attack campaign. We saw it over the summer w/ the health insurance industry trying to defeat Obama’s health plan, we’ll see it now as the U.S. Senate moves on to focus on the cap & trade bill that passed congress this summer. It isn’t coincidental that the original McIntyre and McKitrick E&E paper w/ press release came out the day before the U.S. senate was considering the McCain Lieberman climate bill in ‘05.

Such comments show clearly that the Team see their work as political — they are fighting the good fight for the green left, while their opponents are a rabble of right wing bigots funded by the oil industry, or whoever. It’s certainly not science, which does not sit on the political spectrum.

But there is no doubt they sincerely believe in their mission — they believe they are saving the planet, no less, as have so many other religious fundamentalists before them.

That does not excuse their way of operating. One gets the impression from their emails, so condemnatory of any other view but their own, that the Team would have been at the forefront of the priests and bishops demanding Galileo’s execution, had they been alive in 1633 (coincidentally during the Little Ice Age, which, like the Medieval Warm Period, they deny happened, as it upsets the hockey stick).

Their hiding and calls for destruction of data are not just a historic event. It continues. Tom Wigley, former head of the EAU CRU, to Jones, regarding growing controversy over Briffa’s tree ring data, on October 5 2009 — just three months ago: the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons — but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden. I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours

The emails give an extraordinary insight to the vanity and personality of these cardinals of global warming. There is a delicious series of emails in which Mike Mann offers to nominate Phil Jones for an award by the American Geophysical Union. Jones tells Mann the award he’d like, then works with Mann to help with the nomination. Jones duly gets the award, and Mann then asks Jones to nominate him for one.

Mann to Jones, December 4 2007: By the way, still looking into nominating you for an AGU award, I’ve been told that the Ewing medal wouldn’t be the right one. Let me know if you have any particular options you’d like me to investigate…

Jones to Mann, same date: As for AGU – just getting one of their Fellowships would be fine.

Mann to Jones, same date: Will look into the AGU fellowship situation ASAP.

Mann to Jones, June 2 2008: Hi Phil, This is coming along nicely. I’ve got 5 very strong supporting letter writers lined up to support your AGU Fellowship nomination (confidentially: Ben Santer, Tom Karl, Jean Jouzel, and Lonnie Thompson have all agreed, waiting to hear back from one more individual, maximum is six letters including mine as nominator). Meanwhile, if you can pass along the following information that is needed for the nomination package that would be very helpful. thanks in advance! mike

Jones sent him the requested information, including information for an index based on the number of papers he’s had published and how many times they have been cited. Jones to Mann, June 11 2008:this is what people call the H index. I’ve tried working this out and there is software for it on the web of science. Problem is my surname. I get a number of 62 if I just use the software, but I have too many papers. I then waded through and deleted those in journals I’d never heard of and got 52. I think this got rid of some biologist from the 1970s/1980s, so go with 52.

But Mann, shamelessly, thinks the higher, wrong, number would look more impressive. Mann to Jones, same date: OK–thanks, I’ll just go w/ the H=62. That is an impressive number and almost certainly higher than the vast majority of AGU Fellows.

Lo and behold, on January 29 2009, Jones gets the wonderful news. He emails Ben Santer, an American Team member, one of his nominators, though he’s not supposed to know that (see the Mann email of June 2 2008 above): I heard during IDAG that I’ve been made an AGU Fellow. Will likely have to go to Toronto to Spring AGU to collect it. I hope I don’t see a certain person there!

The person he does not want to see in Toronto of course is the Team’s Canadian nemesis, Stephen McIntyre.

Mann waits a decent interval before he blatantly asks for Jones to return the favour. Mann to Jones, May 16 2009: On a completely unrelated note, I was wondering if you, perhaps in tandem w/ some of the other usual suspects, might be interested in returning the favor this year I’ve looked over the current list of AGU fellows, and it seems to me that there are quite a few who have gotten in (e.g. Kurt Cuffey, Amy Clement, and many others) who aren’t as far along as me in their careers, so I think I ought to be a strong candidate. anyway, I don’t want to pressure you in any way, but if you think you’d be willing to help organize,I would naturally be much obliged. Perhaps you could convince Ray or Malcolm to take the lead? The deadline looks as if it is again July 1 this year.

Jones to Mann, May 18 2009: I’ll email Ray and Malcolm. I’d be happy to contribute.

Then some bad news. Jones to Mann, May 19 2009: Mike, Have gotten replies -the’re both happy to write supporting letters, but both are too busy to take it on this year. One suggested waiting till next year. Malcolm is supporting one other person this year. I’d be happy to do it next year, so I can pace it over a longer period.

Mann takes it like a man. Mann to Jones, May 19 2009: thanks much Phil, that sounds good. So why don’t we wait until next round (June ‘10) on this hen. That will give everyone an opportunity to get their ducks in a row. Plus I’ll have one more Nature and one more Science paper on my resume by then more about that soon!). I’ll be sure to send you a reminder sometime next may or so!

The ‘travesty’ of unpredicted cold weather

As noted early on in this article, the Climategate emails ran until late last year, until just before the failed Copenhagen scare fest. The very last word must go to the expatriate New Zealander, Kevin Trenberth, from his cold hole in Boulder Colorado on October 12 2009.

In an email series between Team members bemoaning the normally staunch BBC’s running an item asking what has happened now there had been 11 years without global warming, the shivering Dr Trenberth now famously stated: 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. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F… 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.

• Footnote: A Melbourne physicist, Dr John P Costella, has written a 63,000-word article on the Climategate emails. His article links to the emails published on a website where I have linked to the full chronological series of the emails cited in my article. While the latter website appears to be a conspiracy theorist’s picnic of the kind that would delight Ian Wishart, its unedited publication of the emails in chronological order is a public service that should not detract from the odd nature of the website hosting it.

The horse has bolted on name suppression

The horse has well and truly bolted on the issue of enforcement of court-imposed name suppression orders in the age of the Internet.

Since blogger Cameron Slater (Whale Oil) yesterday published (in binary code) the name of the former MP charged with indecent assault, details of the charges have been posted on the former MP’s Wikipedia entry.

Though the details have been removed several times from the main entry (once within three minutes of being posted), they remain for all to see in the history section. My understanding of how Wikipedia works is they cannot be deleted.

Sorry, Inspector Winter, but there is nothing you can do about it — finding the identity of anonymous Wikipedia updaters is a completely different matter to finding a blogger who wants to be found.

The article itself has now been locked against editing by a fanatical Auckland University based “administrator” whose obsessive editing of Wikipedia rivals the Team’s William Connolley (where do these activists find the time to sit online all day for years?).

This locking saw the following response sent to the busy administrator by one of the persons whose entry was removed: “Wikipedia is not subject in any way to the New Zealand judicial system (or to its anti free speech supression orders), and therefore, on account of being hosted in the US state of Florida, it is perfectly acceptable to post futher relevent and sourced information regarding this order on the MP’s article. The use of protections for an article are to be used only to protect articles from vandalism, and not to engage in political censorship unrecognised by all other states except New Zealand. Assuming you will maintain the protections regardless of my protest, I will take my complaint to another admin.”

The debate on this issue is complicated by the Herald On Sunday running an article which, prima facie, is in breach of the suppression order.

The article revealed (for the first time) that the charged man was a former MP and its careful wording made it obvious it was a former MP who had belonged to two parties at different times, and lived in Nelson.

I would thus not be surprised if former MP Ken Shirley, who represented Tasman for Labour and later was an ACT list MP, spoke to a lawyer after the HOS story. It’s clear from comments posted in many online forums that many people, wrongly, assumed Ken Shirley was the “national figure” cited in the media. This alone shows the danger of name suppression orders.

If Inspector Winter is going to haul the deranged, sad Cameron Slater into court over this, it would seem amiss if he does not come calling on the HOS editor too.

Wikipedia, however, demonstrates the futility of trying to enforce such a suppression order.

As a journalist, I do not support name suppression in criminal cases. The courts are meant to be open institutions where justice is done in public. There are very good historic reasons for this. Not too many hundred years ago in the England where our justice system came from, innocent people and straight-out political dissidents were tried and ordered executed by kings and closed courts such as the infamous Star Chamber. Open courts were developed in response to such injustices and spread to most of the world.

There would be no arguments about the rich and famous, or even the mildly interesting (to the media) getting name suppression, if our courts were truly open and unable to suppress not just the names of accused people but even large tracts of evidence if the presiding judge decides to do that, which happens more often than many people might think.

One of our judges not long ago even tried to suppress the very fact that a case was taking place.

There are no restrictions on reporting cases in the courts in the United States, and nor there are there any restrictions on the news media to report public affairs. The freedom of the press in the US to tell Americans what is happening in their country is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

It should be the same in New Zealand. Open courts. Open justice. A free and unfettered news media. Freedom even of deranged bloggers like Cameron Slater.

Footnote: I note with interest that David Farrar has a blatant contempt of court in one of his threads on this issue. A commenter has posted the name of a very public figure (still an elected representative) who was given name suppression after being convicted of a serious criminal offence. As David would know full well the details of the conviction and name suppression, I find it hard to believe he has innocently let this contempt sit there for three days now.

• Update, January 18:David contacted me today and I gave him the details of the contempt, which he promptly removed. He said he did not have time to read every comment on his blog.

Yet another Unfortunate Truth too delicious to ignore

This is Britain today from space, taken by MODIS on NASA’s Terra satellite. For a bonus point, is this the “mild winter” smugly forecast by the British Met Office (one of the main promoters of AGWarming), or is it the “barbecue summer” the same bunch of witchdoctors religious fanatics heroic climate scientists also so confidently forecast?