The Sound Of Corrupted Science

Climate Cult 36 Comments

The Fix is In – Robert Tracinski;

Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”
You can also see from these e-mails the scientists’ panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” That’s exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there.”
Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that “All of them know the sorts of things to say…without any prompting.”
So it’s no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN’s IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming.
This scandal goes beyond scientific journals and into other media used to promote the global warming dogma. For example, RealClimate.org has been billed as an objective website at which global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. But in the CRU e-mails, the global warming establishment boasts that RealClimate is in their pocket.

I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through…. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.
[T]hink of RC as a resource that is at your disposal…. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.

And anyone doubting that the mainstream media is in on it, too, should check out New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s toadying apologia for the CRU e-mails, masquerading as a news report….

h/t Gord Tulk
The Wall Street Journal wants interviews, and gets nowhere;

Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all …
Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

The calls for formal investigation have begun – in the US Congress, the Australian government, and elsewhere. Who’s going to be the first opposition leader or media wag to challenge Environment Minister Jim Prentice about when he plans to launch our own?
Update – Bob A. writes to point out “These are the same people” behind this report: “Global warming threatens billions of Canadian assets, report claims”.

36 Replies to “The Sound Of Corrupted Science”

  1. People need to inundate the CBC, CTV, The Star, and all the news organizations which have been promoting the AGW story with emails and questions about why they are not covering possibly the biggest, most explosive story in decades. We can’t let them just ignore it and hope it goes away.

  2. “This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.
    The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.
    This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.”
    It appears things are going to getter a lot hotter than mere Global Warming!
    Cheers
    Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  3. I am absolutely appalled at the non-coverage by our major media. I mean there’s NOTHING about it.
    I’ll give the government another week before I start firing emails to the PM, JPrentice and all and sundry. Hey, the speed of government… 🙂

  5. Kate,
    Thanks for the extensive coverage regarding the CRU SNAFU. Good on ya! The only global warming, occuring now, is the overheated bearings of the spin doctor machines as ‘they’ try to figure out what to do next.
    Great job!

  7. I think what I find most appalling is that these guys have little clue or concern about the stakes of the game they are playing.
    If they get what they want, through their falsified data and lies about the scope of the “damage” that AGW causes, they will single-handedly do what the communists failed to do over 50 years — destroy western civilization as we know it.
    If that sounds over the top, too bad. Our economies depend on pumping out plant food. Our lives are saved from a bleak, frozen death thanks to the burning of hydrocarbons and the production of hydro electricity.
    You tell us to cut back AND send money to those who giggle all the way to the real polluting factories, and that’s what you’ll have — soup lines a mile long.
    Sonsabitches. Sorry for the cuss-word, but that’s what they are. I’d take off my belt and beat them with it if I could.

  8. WSJ:
    “…these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.”
    The reason these “scientists” feel the public doesn’t have a right to know is because they are not scientists. Rather, they are (undeniably at this point) the propaganda engine room of the biggest rent seeking operation in the history of the world. Substitute “climate-change predictions” to “rent seeking” and it all makes perfect sense:
    “…these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their rent seeking transnational mega-industry…”

  9. Maybe more people will now wake up to the other scam which is our media and do to them what they are doing to the story. Ignore them. If enough people do this they will go away.

  10. Mark – I think that people should e-mail information to Conservative (and ‘other’) M.P.s now because I think that they do not have very good researchers in Ottawa. Most of the bureaucrats, down there, are left over Liberano hacks and I doubt that any of them would be ‘interested’ in uncovering this putrid pot of steaming filth.
    My question is : Where are our paid servants in the msm? If a person was relying on msm for news, nobody would even know that this fraud had been unearthed and exposed to clean, unpolluted thinking.
    As taxpayers we owe much to the internet and especially to blog sites like sda. Sda has taken a lead role in presenting facts day by day to uncover this fraud; long before the explosive e-mails were released. We also have a new hero, the person who released the damning evidence that confirmed the ‘scientology’ fraud that sda has been documenting for years. The e-mails just put the final nails in the coffin.
    Still…silence from paid public servants in the msm…they are just like Bagdad Bob ‘declaring that the Americans had been routed from Bagdad as the American soldiers took over the airport, right behind him! Maybe we are going to be treated to a spectacle by the last of the vested interest groups and hopefully it will be amusing to watch because the bigshots at Copenhagen were about to forfeit the farm to a hoax! We do deserve some entertainment ….watching the fanatical shrieking bedwetters squirming in shame and desperately attempting to ‘splain their crimes would be fun for me…

  12. There is something that bothers me about this; the usual suspects are the Al Gores, David Suzukis, etc.
    But WHO profits when a government decides to implement a carbon tax? I know that carbon credits are a farce, as do most of the people I deal with on a regular basis.
    So, is (any) our government implicated in this? If so, why would they choose to go this route rather than simply raising taxes the way that Special Ed did with royalties in Alberta? See, there is something about this scheme that doesn’t make sense to me. Obviously there is money to be made, but by who? I can understand that the Gores and Suzukis succeed by fraud, but they are not that convincing, otherwise my kids and their friends would have been converted through school and the CBC.
    I am curious about Mo Stlong and Power Corp., but this does not point to a multi-country scheme. Someone with significantly greater influence has been behind this shell game, and I am still not seeing any thing that addresses who this might be. I don’t yet understand the final solution behind the thinking. It remains nebulous.
    I gotta admit, this bothers me.

  14. ” Who’s going to be the first opposition leader or media wag to challenge Environment Minister Jim Prentice about when he plans to launch our own?”
    That has got to be one of the best lines I’ve heard this year. The only thing the opposition wants is us to sign Copenhagen before the meeting even takes place.
    If I were a back bench Tory MP, I would be standing in Question Period and asking for the investigation.

  16. E-mail the PM’s office and tell him NOT to sign any agreement in Copenhagen! You’ll find his e-mail (and other contact info) under the Government of Canada website.
    Do it!! Let the people be heard!

  17. Was the old hippie era banner, ‘If you aren’t part of the Solution you’re part of the Problem’, more ironic and on point then now?
    Seriously, what IS with Canadian media?! Surely their largest advertisers aren’t going to be overly distraught with the news…
    Their readership? What readership?
    I’d be willing to bet that doing an expose/mea culpa series would bring back a lot of former subscribers who could no longer stand the daily forcefeeding of horsesh*t. The problem really is from the editor on down, they’re all of the same mindset. Not a lot of alternate opinion inhouse…

  18. I have emailed CTV on two different days asking if the corruption involved in the fudged Hadley CRU numbers did not rise to a newsworthy story for Canadians.
    Tom Clark has his own agenda and that seems to be his soft spot for some Taliban in Afghanistan, surely is keeping him busy.
    Canadian MSM complicit are in gatekeeping the Hadley CRU story from Canadians.
    They in essence are as corrupt as the so called scientist fudging AGW numbers for withholding the story on TV newscast and on front pages of their newspapers.
    Theerfore sending emails to complain to any Canadian MSM is a total waste of time.
    Our complaints should be addressed to FOX Cable News, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto or alternately to Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin , Rush Limbaugh pointing out the disgraceful Canadian MSM gatekeeping AGW corruption from Canadians.
    However, credit should be given to Lorne Gunter at the Edmonton paper for his piece earlier in the week.
    I still have hope from the Quebecor Sun chain however to take the lead.
    Geez, I miss Conrad Black’s involvement now.

  19. The corruption of ‘Big Green’ and it’s flunky ‘scientists’ is finally, fully exposed. Can David Suzuki finally STFU now? Sorry Dave, you need to look elsewhere for your legacy.

  20. Listened to A-M Tremonte interview the head guy at Suzuki’s PR firm. She stressed repeatedly that critics didn’t produce PEER REVIEWED papers to back their claims,and implied they therefore had no credibility.
    With the recent revelations from Hadley CRU,Peer review is a bloody joke.

  21. The reflexive defensive posture and trite dismissal of this evidence tells us the AGW cult is more a moonie belief system rather than any hard science.

  22. After watching this topic for a few days I think that what we’re looking at from the standpoint of science is a serious crisis that stems from a failure of the peer review process. This process hasn’t just failed in the climate science area; for an example of how it failed in the medical literature see Suter’s paper: “Guns in the medical literature: a failure of peer review” (J Med Assoc Ga. 1994 Mar;83(3):133-48.)
    One just has to look at the atrocious papers that appeared in the CMAJ in the early 1990’s to see how clueless the editors of the paper were. The Kilias paper confused correlation with causation and was full of mathematical errors which I found when I tore the paper apart and another appalling paper on The Cost of Gunshot Wounds in Canada came out just before C68 was voted on. Did you know every time the police shoot a criminal it costs you $1.5 million?
    In the US Kellerman’s group has published extensively on firearms from a “public health” viewpoint in NEJM. These papers are just as bad but better written than the CMAJ crap and debunking them is not as straightforward.
    Science operates on a basis of trust relationships. With people one is working with directly, one knows their strengths and weaknesses as one does with people ones meets at scientific meetings. I found that the best way to find out what was going on in another lab was talk to someone that worked there in a bar late at night. For people one hasn’t met, the journal they publish in used to give an indication of how much one could trust the work: Science, Nature used to be top of the heap general science journals and NEJM at one time was the most prestigious medical journal to publish in. 20 years ago if one saw a paper in one of those journals you had implicit trust in it. Now I no longer trust anything in any journal until I’ve researched it myself which defeats the whole time saving feature of a properly functioning peer review process.
    The ideal of the scientist is an individual working alone searching for the truth with truth being the highest value and ready to discard any theory that doesn’t fit the data. Feynman is a shining example of someone who followed this philosophy. Michael Polanyi wrote extensively about the philosphy of science in the 1930’s to 1960’s and his view of an optimum scientific enterprise was that of independent scientists competing in a marketplace of ideas. Polanyi was disgusted with the perversion of science that occurred in the USSR with Lysenko and this was his solution to the problem.
    The major problem any scientist faces is funding. Polanyi’s view was that the government should fund science with no strings attached and let the scientists work independent of any pressures from this source with the scientific community policing itself. What has happened in practice is that the funding agencies have demanded that the science go in certain ways if the funding is to continue. In the US getting a paper published in which one can show that THC is beneficial almost never happens. Government funding there demands that researchers show that any drug that is illegal cause severe brain damage or other physiologic disruption and the vast bulk of research on medical uses of cannabinoids and the anandamide neurotransmitter system in the brain (anandamide is the brains THC) has been carried on outside the US until recently. If one has support from a drug company then one doesn’t publish papers that show adverse effects from their drugs.
    What has happened is a perversion of science where funding agencies determine the course of research and certain areas of inquiry are blocked. There still are some scientists that are self-supporting either because of family money or they’ve been financially successful in other areas but these are very few now. The only way this is going to change is if people demand that there be funding with no strings attached to scientists who could even be selected by lottery to do exactly as they wished.
    The other perversion of science that we can see in the climategate files is people becoming abnormally attached to a theory and refusing to modify or give up their theory in the face of contrary data. As someone who has worked in research, the situation is by no means as clear as it seems. What may appear to be contrary data may have nothing to do with the theory and hanging on to it might be the right thing to do. The decision of whether or not one sticks with the theory or not is a personal non-rational decision and some of the greatest scientific discoveries in history have been made by scientists who stuck with their theory despite seemingly contrary evidence. We have no record of the ones whose theories died with them and left no mark.
    The key here is that science is an individual enterprise and when groups come into the picture science suffers. What happened at CRU is identical to what happened in the USSR with Lysenko. I don’t know what the solution is to this problem but there is a lot of bad science happening now because of enforced groupthink in various research groups.
    Part of the solution will likely come from the internet. Climate Audit has been an excellent source of information questioning the faulty premises of AGW and Steve McIntyre should be nominated for the Nobel prize. His articles on CA are publication quality and he fits the ideal of a solitary researcher with no financial obligations to any group that wants to determine the direction of his research.

  23. John Cross? Nowhere to be found? Anyway, you can read his talking points in the original in the email database anyway.

  24. I wonder if this will be remembered as the week the MSM officially died.
    Meanwhile the new media have flourished and increased their following. From start to finish this scandal was internet driven – the e-mails, the whistleblowers postings, the blogs linking together and widely distributing the e-mails to readers, the persistence to get the story noticed by politicians- completely bypassing the traditional media. The internet and its ability to inform and disperse info is as revolutionary as the printing press.
    The media is dead. Long live the media!

  25. LC,
    You forget that the emails were generated in the first place due to pointedly accurate analysis by the blogosphere and their attempts to respond and cover up those findings.

  26. You’re right, the blogs influence in this extends back to before the e-mail exposure.
    It also highlights the idiocy in the CRTC/Cable/Broadcaster drama. The old media entities in Canada are attempting to use government to pick our pockets at the very time the new media is exposing their irrelevance? incompetence? complicity in corruption? betrayal of their customers?

  27. CRU and the Tyndal Centre have an interesting relationship. The Senior Research Director at the University of East Anglia, Nick Brooks, is the Tyndall Centre’s Visiting Fellow. As noted earlier, the research for “Major Tipping Points……….” was conducted by the Tyndall Centre.
    The Vancouver Sun covers the report in its’ usual “unbiassed” fashion. The Sun has nary a mention of one of major news stories of 2009.
    Disgusting censorship, by omission, on the part of the Vancouver Sun.

  28. I subscribe to both the Calgary Herald and National Post, and I have seen one article in the Post (a rather lame article given the subject matter reprinted from the NYT) and Lorne Gunter’s op-ed piece in today’s Herald.
    Oddly Gunter’s piece ends with “In the end, this may amount to nothing. But if it were the warming skeptics who had been apparently caught out, you can bet it would be front-page news.”
    What does that say for the papers that Gunter works for in the Canwest Publishing group that they don’t think this is worthy of front-page placement whereas if is was from the other side of the debate they would?
    My wife talked me out of cancelling my Herald and Post subscriptions this morning. If I don’t see an effort on their part in covering this story within one week, they are history in my house.

  29. But WHO profits when a government decides to implement a carbon tax? .
    ~R. Ed Neck at November 24, 2009 11:14 AM
    Liberal Constitutents thru entitlements.
    ,

  30. MSM is so involved in worrying about us hurting some of the Taliban while their friends are strapping on dynamite to blow up our wonderful soldiers. God Help Us All.
    From the beginning I knew this Climate Change was a bunch of crap. Haven’t seen 40 plus here in Regina since I got off the plane from Halifax in 1965. Now that was a shock compared to living in the Maritimes.

  31. No Ratt, that’s not the principal group of beneficiaries. Follow the money. There are two very large general groups who stand to make billions off this.
    The first group is the insurance companies. All those nice new risks that they can write up policies for and collect premiums. Why do you think it is that Zurich is one of the biggest supporters of climate change research?
    The second and even larger group of beneficiaries is the commodities trading houses. Climate legislation creates carbon dioxide and other gases as a tradeable commodity. Unique however, it’s not dependent upon consumer demand, only upon government fiat. So they really want legislation to put cap and trade in place, not a carbon tax, as there’s no market created by a tax. As middlemen, they will make billions on commissions. Again, the big commercial houses are some of the strongest supporters of this.
    Finally, people shouldn’t get too carried away by the contents of the emails. Everyone often says all kinds of stupidity in emails. The real smoking gun here is the computer code and documentation in things like the Harry file. That’s the damning indictment which indicates that what the CRU has being doing for the last two decades or so is utter rubbish. The emails mostly just show what nasty and vindictive swine the AGW scientists are, but that’s not indictable. Fradulent science, known to be so by the speaker and presented under public oath, is indictable.

  32. CBC,yesterday,changed the dates on one their greenhouse gas story yesterday to make it appear more logical. Do not expect much from these ‘progressive’ folks. They use the same methods as the CRU crew. You may as well hope for Lizzie May to hold a press conference and admit that she cares about anything but herself.

  33. Canada must have the most lopsided media in the world,, the media in NaziGermany had more balance!

  34. cgh said: “Follow the money.”
    …-
    PM Harper and Premier Stelmach are backing Mao Stlong’s AGW fraud with our tax monie$.
    Shameful.
    Did you vote Conservative for this?
    Have they not received the memo?
    …-
    “2nd UPDATE: Canada Backs Alberta Carbon-Emissions Pipeline
    OTTAWA (Dow Jones)–The Canadian government announced funding Tuesday for the construction of the world’s largest carbon-capture and storage pipeline in Alberta, the center of Canada’s emissions-heavy oil sands industry.
    The Canadian and Alberta governments pledged a total of C$558 million (US$528.1 million) to create the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, a 240-kilometer pipeline beginning near Edmonton, Alberta, that will capture emissions from the energy industry and pump them beneath old oil fields for the dual purpose of re-pressurizing the declining fields and to prevent the emissions, seen as a key contributor to global warming, from entering the atmosphere.”
    http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091124-716656.html

  35. Joe Molnar:
    I get the Calgary Sun every morning and there was a small mention of this in the Business section. If it doesn’t get more legs real soon, they will get an earful.

  36. John wrote “I subscribe to both the Calgary Herald and National Post, and I have seen one article in the Post ”
    24th Nov there was one full page devoted to climategate, page F11 in my edition. Read Terence Corcoran’s column

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