Climategate
A major story has been breaking now for nearly two weeks (as this goes to print) that has potentially a significant bearing on any future cap and trade legislation or action by the USEPA on CO2. This story has been underreported by the US media. Fuel Oil News is providing this notice in case that shocking lack of broad media coverage has continued by the time this arrives via mail.
A computer hacker, or more likely an inside whistle blower, passed along 61 megabytes of e-mails (over 1,000) and other files including modeling code (2,000 files) from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. The CRU one of the world’s leading research bodies and a leading proponent of anthropogenic, or greenhouse gas related, global warming. Its work underpins the positions of both the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the USEPA position on CO2 as a ‘pollutant.”
These e-mails also involve a number of other top, international scientific proponents of AGW, such as Michael E. Mann, aassociate professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and director of the university’s interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. His ‘hockey stick’ reconstructions of the past several millennia from tree ring, ice core, coral and other data are used to support both global warming and its link to greenhouse gasses.
At best, the e-mails indicate sloppiness in research and a disregard for many common scientific practices. At worst, they represent massive fraud. And, in any case, they virtually demolish the reported ‘scientific consensus” spiel regarding global warming.
Some of e-mails discuss tricks to hide contradictory data, how to evade Freedom of Information Act requests, the fact that the cooling trend of the past decade is unaccounted for, and how to stack peer review journals so that only favored (pro AGW) papers get published. These e-mails are currently acknowledged as being legitimate by parties on both sides of this issue. The spin primarily centers on what various phrases and lines in the e-mails and code mean, their significance to this particular research, and their ultimate significance to the broader global warming movement and its opposition.
Space does not permit deeper coverage at this time, but a Google of ‘Climategate” should provide the details of both the e-mails and the early analysis of the modeling code.
This comes during the same time that these researched claim to have thrown out the original ‘raw” data used in developing their climate models leaving only the adjusted data for independent review.