Climategate 2.0

As reported in The Guardian and elsewhere, a new batch of 5,000 emails (“FOIA2011”) has just been leaked that follow up on Climategate of 2009 and the more recent scandal of the BEST studies that further reveal the deliberate and coordinated efforts by key climate alarmist scientists to distort the scientific record in order to deceive people into believing that global warming is a dire threat requiring massive government intervention.

One marked difference from the original 2009 release is that the person or persons responsible has included a message headed “background and context” which, for the first time, gives an insight into their motivations. Following some bullet-pointed quotes such as “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day” and, “Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels,” the message states:

“Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.” . . .

One of the most damaging claims in 2009 was that Prof Phil Jones, the head of the UEA’s Climatic Research Institute had deleted emails to avoid FOI request. One of the reviews into the content of the emails, conducted by Sir Muir Russell, concluded that “emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them” – something that Jones has denied. At the time CRU was coming under sustained pressure by an organised campaign to release information, which the scientists saw as distracting from their work.

The new emails include similar statements apparently made by the scientists about avoiding requests for information. In one email, which has not yet been specifically confirmed as genuine, Jones writes: “I’ve been told that IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all emails at the end of the process”.

In a statement, the University of East Anglia said: “While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our systems. If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.”

It continued: “As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the university and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.”

James Delingpole in The Telegraph of London states the following:

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower ‘FOIA 2011’ (or “thief”, as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

Here is a selection of the revealed emails.

UPDATE: Our Research Fellow S. Fred Singer is discussed in a Climategate 2.0 email note from Edward Cook (Columbia University) to fellow climate alarmist Keith Briffa (University of East Anglia). In the note, Cook admits that in a recent talk at Columbia by Singer and based on his new peer-reviewed paper, “Lack of Consistency Between Modeled and Observed Temperature Trends” (Energy & Environment, vol. 22, no. 4, 2011) Singer correctly showed a key point that Thomas Wigley misused statistics to exaggerate greenhouse attribution to temperature levels. Nevertheless and even when he agreed with Singer’s scientific findings, Cook reveals his own bias by then still dismissing Singer’s presentation. Here is the email note:

Fred Singer was here on Monday and gave a rather uninspired talk criticizing global warming, etc. He did show an example of the mis-use of statistics in the greenhouse attribution debate and it was one of Wigley’s papers. It was the one in which Tom tried to show that the autocorrelation function of instrumental temperatures was far greater than the acf of temperatures from unforced OAGCM models, therefore “proving” that greenhouse gases were forcing instrumental temperatures. It was a pathetically poor paper that had Mark Cane, Yochanan Kushnir, Upmanu Lall, Balaji Rajagoplan (all good maths/stats people), and me just shaking our collective heads wondering what the fuck Wigley was trying to do. Needless to say, Singer quite easily showed how hopelessly flawed and ridiculous the analysis was, and everyone agreed with him for once. Other than that he pretty much fell on his face.