Copenhagen Climate Treaty & Climategate

UK Climate Scientist to Temporarily Step Down

December 1, 2009

Tri-City Herald - The chief of a prestigious British research center caught in a storm of controversy over claims that he and others suppressed data about climate change has stepped down pending an investigation, the University of East Anglia said Tuesday.

The university said in a statement that Phil Jones, whose e-mails were among the thousands of pieces of correspondence leaked to the Internet late last month, would relinquish his position as director of Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent review.

The university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research Trevor Davies said the investigation would cover data security, whether the university responded properly to Freedom of Information requests, "and any other relevant issues." The statement said the specific terms of the review will be announced later in the week.

Jones has been accused by skeptics of man-made climate change of manipulating data to support his research. In particular, many have pointed to a leaked e-mail in which Jones writes that he had used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a chart detailing recent global temperatures. Jones has denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been misunderstood, explaining that he'd used the word trick "as in a clever thing to do."

Davies said there was nothing in the stolen material to suggest the peer-reviewed publications by the unit "are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."

But the correspondence from Jones and others - which appears to include discussions of how to keep critical work out of peer-reviewed journals and efforts to shield scientists' data and methodology from outside scrutiny - have been seized upon by those who are fighting efforts to impose caps on emissions of carbon dioxide as evidence of a scientific conspiracy...

No Science Is Possible: CRU Has Destroyed the Original Data

November 28, 2009

TigerHawk - The Times of London is reporting in its Sunday edition that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has destroyed the original data used to construct the historical climate record that purports to show a temperature increase. That is, the hope that independent scientists could assess the "adjustments" made to the raw data is now dashed, for the raw data no longer exists.

This fact has actually been known for months, but the mainstream media ignored it -- no doubt intentionally -- until the email scandal broke last week.

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... In a statement on its website, the CRU said:

“We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records.

“The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

So, basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?

In a few days this has gone from being a kerfuffle over a few snotty emails and some academic source code to a full-blown political and policy catastrophe. Any government that supports greenhouse gas regulation based on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which relied heavily on the CRU data, would be derelict in its own obligation to do due diligence.

Climate "skeptics" have been saying this for some time and dismissed as cranks for it. Months ago conservative bloggers were writing that these data had been destroyed (based on an admission on the CRU's own web site), but the mainstream media sat on the story as if it were irrelevant. Now, with the excuse of the CRU hack, even the Times of London is writing about it breathlessly.

Better late than never, but it still leaves this scary question: What if these wholly discredited "scientists" who threw away their raw data and are asking us to change the world on their say-so are actually right?