By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009
A week after my colleague James
Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term
"Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails
from the
The reason why even the Guardian's
George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by
the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.
Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the
small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving
the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the
role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's
director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up
its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office,
which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global
temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data
on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that
the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are
spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of
the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for
promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's
"hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its
head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have
recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC,
not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm
Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the
central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the
statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first
exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve
McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's
supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and
his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the
entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the
leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite,
including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr
Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a
highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin
Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering
over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr
James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in
importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in
particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through
informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put
together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony
Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails
which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the
devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders
under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every
possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and
temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major
scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the
CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last
summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had
simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which
scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done
after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably
arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that
these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking
revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to
manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in
only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to
"adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression
of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents
relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most
disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught
Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen
was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now
come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has
been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record
with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is
clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat
temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in
each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from
the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly
at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their
data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation
at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of
these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been
determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived
at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data
but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to
publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to
stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting
research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US
statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US
Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey
stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group"
of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to
"peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings
of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy
may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident
that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the
heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected
The former Chancellor Lord
(Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming
Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the
maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on
Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society –
itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being
what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific
establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become
the greatest scientific scandal of our age.