Climategate: Have They No Shame?

Climategate: Have They No Shame?
The implicated scientists' strategy is to brazen it out and rely on the global warming alarmist establishment and the mainstream media to circle the wagons.


November 25, 2009 - by Myron Ebell It is clear that the tip-top scientists implicated in the burgeoning Climategate scandal have no honor, but it is also becoming apparent that they have no sense of shame either. Their strategy is to brazen it out and rely on the great global warming alarmist establishment and the mainstream media to circle the wagons. They have got their talking point and the environmental pressure groups are already repeating it over and over: “The ‘global warming deniers’ are cherry-picking a few unfortunately worded emails and then taking them out of context.” Well, they are some pretty big, juicy cherries and there are a lots of them.

But it isn’t going to work. There is simply too much evidence that “the world’s leading climate scientists” (as they are always described — at least up until a few days ago) at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were cooking the data. For those not up on technical scientific terms, “cooking the data” means manipulating and falsifying it. Here are just two examples from one of the approximately 3000 files that were released — either by a hacker or (more likely in my view) a public-spirited whistleblower at the CRU who just couldn’t stand the fraud any more. These two examples are from the “Harry Read Me” file (which can be found here) and are apparently the ongoing notes of someone charged with trying to fix the problems in one of the CRU’s temperature datasets. The first email:

What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no )’supposed’, I can make it up. So I have … So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option – to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ‘em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late.

The second email:

OH FU*K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m
hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.

I haven’t found any evidence that anyone in authority at the CRU, such as its director, Professor Phil Jones, cared that the datasets were in a hopeless state. Every year, CRU, in cooperation with the UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre, publishes the global mean temperature for the past year. Hadley/CRU is widely considered to be the most authoritative record of the world’s temperature history and is widely cited in the press. Yet I don’t remember and can’t find any comment by Professor Jones that it is anything less than what it’s been cracked up to be or that there are just a few tiny little problems. It’s now clear why he resisted repeated requests by other scientists to share the raw data and the methodologies used — he would be exposed as a fraud. Releasing raw data and methodologies is standard operating procedure in most fields of scientific research, but not for these tip-top climate scientists, whose motto is: “You can trust us!” When Jones was finally cornered by a Freedom of Information request earlier this year, he said that the data had been lost. Pat Michaels has the whole story here.

Have they no shame?

Myron Ebell is director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Instititute, director of Freedom Action, and chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition.