Climategate: One Year and Sixty House Seats
Later
By Marc Sheppard
AmericanThinker.com
It’s been one year to the day since hero or
heroes still unnamed and unrewarded bestowed
upon the world a virtual dossier, the contents
of which should have ended the anthropogenic
global warming (AGW) debate abruptly and
evermore. Remarkably, it didn’t. Despite the
revelations exposed in the now public climate
huckster’s handbook, one year later the specter
of governance and wealth redistribution both
national and international based largely, if not
solely, on pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus
persists.
By all measures, last year’s U.N. climate
summit in Copenhagen was an embarrassing
flop for those who again tried to sell an
international progressive fund reallocation
scheme as the “last chance to save the
planet” from runaway climate change. But
with Cancun’s “last chance to save the
planet” climate talks just around the
corner, the media is working overtime to
explain away previous failures as anything
other than the product of bad policy toward
unproven hazards that they indeed were.
On Monday, The
Washington Post ran a
piece
about an Oxford University's Reuters
Institute study on who attended and how
countries covered last year’s U.N. summit.
But the paper’s emphasis was somewhat
different and clearly divulged in its
headline -- Coverage of
climate summit called short on science.
Yet what truly
boggles the mind is their assessment of
that which we celebrate today:
Much coverage from Copenhagen instead
focused on hacked e-mails from a British
university that some skeptics took as
evidence of efforts by scientists to ignore
dissenting views. The scientists involved
have since been cleared of wrongdoing.
Ignore dissenting views? How about conspiring
to block – not ignore
-- the publication of rival scientific
evidence? Or the Nixonian plots the communiqués
disclosed, including conspirators discussing
deleting emails and other documents in order to
prevent disclosure of information subject to
Freedom of Information Laws? Or how access
might be prevented to data, source code, and
algorithms in an attempt to prevent external
evaluation of their conclusions?
Not to mention their arrogant mockery of the
peer review process atop a widespread complicity
in and acceptance of hiding, manipulating,
inventing and otherwise misrepresenting data in
a clear effort to exaggerate the existence,
causation, precedence and threat of global
warming. What’s more, the fact that many of the
conspirators were editors, lead authors, and
contributors to the U.N’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports on
which international climate policy is made put
all such reports and policies to question.
Indeed, the documents, source-code, data and
e-mails contained in the folder purportedly
"hacked" from Britain's University of East
Anglia (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU) and
first uploaded to a Russian FTP server in the
wee hours of November 17, 2009 -- and announced
that evening as a
comment at Air Vent
-- revealed a widespread pattern of scientific
misconduct amongst the very climate researchers
on whose “science” the entire AGW theory and all
consequent policy is based.
With trillions of dollars at stake,
Climategate, as it was dubbed days later,
was and is about potentially
astronomical criminal wrongdoing, not
petty school-yard rivalries.
And as to those involved being “cleared of
wrongdoing,” let’s consider both the
tribunals and their actual pronouncements.
On With the Showcase Investigations
Last November was not a good month for
climate alarmists, particularly the two
primary Climategate conspirators, CRU chief
Phil “Hide the Decline” Jones and Mike
“Nature Trick” Mann.
As the new-media-led understanding of the
Climategate folder’s incriminating contents
took wider purchase, with it did the cries
for formal investigations, as the
evidence of climate fraud
appeared both devastating and
incontrovertible. On December 1st,
against the backdrop of business pending in
Copenhagen, the U.K. House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee sent a
letter of intent and preliminary
questionnaire to the UEA. The university’s
response that it had commissioned its own
“independent inquiry” under the auspices of
Sir Muir Russell failed to dissuade the
Committee’s decision to proceed with its own
inquiry.
As the Russell investigation was to focus
primarily on policy, the UEA later asked
Ronald (Lord) Oxburgh to lead another
“independent” team to investigate the
scientific methodology of CRU. As if by
design, that action allowed many facets of
each investigation to be ignored by one
while fingers bore down on the other. The
Russell report stated that although they
didn’t actually examine the science -- such
would be Oxburgh’s job -- the science was
nonetheless correct. Meanwhile, Lord
Oxburgh specifically stated that his
inquiry, although named the Science
Appraisal Panel, did not look at the
science. Oh, and CRU’s was just fine.
By August’s end, the final reports were in
from all three “formal” investigations into
CRU: The House of Commons Science and
Technology Committee [PDF],
The Oxburgh Science Appraisal Panel [PDF]
and the Independent Climate Change Emails
Review under Sir Muir Russell [PDF].
All three examinations took place within the
country of physical jurisdiction, Great
Britain, and none disappointed those of us
anticipating whitewash. Simply stated, all
parties were cleared of all wrongdoing other
than perhaps sloppy journaling and
sophomoric note-passing and all suspensions
were lifted. As Andrew Montford summarized
in his
report,
The Climategate
Inquiries:
[T] here can be little doubt that none
of [the inquiries] have performed their
work in a way that is likely to restore
confidence in the work of CRU. None has
managed to be objective and
comprehensive. None has shown a serious
concern for the truth. The best of them
– the House of Commons inquiry – was
cursory and appeared to exonerate the
scientists with little evidence to
justify such a conclusion. The Oxburgh
and Russell inquiries were worse.
But an investigation was also undertaken by
a Pennsylvania State University Inquiry
Committee into the specific actions of the
institution’s employee -- Dr. Michael Mann.
Based in the U.S., the Penn State inquiry
offered perhaps the best hope of
impartiality. After all, not only was a
faculty member implicated at the deepest
levels of the misconduct (See
Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline),
but also in the attempt to
destroy evidence.
Unfortunately, it was Mann’s fellow Penn
professors tasked with investigating him.
According to the official report [PDF],
following an interview with Mann during
which he simply denied all particulars of
misconduct against him,
Inquiry Committee member Dr. Henry C. Foley
“conveyed via email an additional request of
Dr. Mann, who was asked to produce all
emails related to the fourth IPCC report
(AR4), the same emails that Dr. Phil Jones
had suggested that he delete.”
So rather than demand a date-stamped e-mail
dump from the University’s IT sector (the
emails likely reside on their primary server
or in some backup format and remain, in
fact, the university’s property), the panel
requested that the subject of their
investigation make the decision which emails
were relevant to their investigation. And
three days later, he “provided a zip-archive
of these emails and an explanation of their
content.”
In other words -- Michael Mann was allowed
to cherry-pick not only data, but also the
emails to be presented as evidence that he
did so. Crazier still -- one of the
charges Mann faced was that he had deleted
incriminating emails.
Given the hilarity of its methods, scant
shock was elicited by the Investigatory
Committee’s unanimous determination that
“Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor
did he participate in, directly or
indirectly, any actions that seriously
deviated from accepted practices within the
academic community for proposing,
conducting, or reporting research, or other
scholarly activities.”
Mann wasted no time declaring himself
“exonerated” and the MSM proved equally
efficient in its blathering concurrence.
WaPo Leads the MSM
Charge to Support Suppression
There’s little question that the initial silence
and ultimate dismissal of the MSM was and
remains a factor in Climategate’s surprisingly
marginal effect on left-leaning policymakers.
But the impacts, both societal and financial, of
proposed policies shaped by the misinformation
in question are nothing short of astounding. As
such, it was the absence of any authoritative
investigation, particularly here in the U.S,
over the past 12 months which likely provided
the greatest cover of all to alarmists both home
and abroad.
As Ross McKitrick stated in
Understanding the
Climategate Inquiries [PDF]:
The world still awaits a proper inquiry
into climategate: one that is not
stacked with global warming advocates,
and one that is prepared to
cross-examine evidence, interview
critics as well as supporters of the CRU
and other IPCC players, and follow the
evidence where it clearly leads.
Perchance the gallant efforts of one man and
the removal from Congress of 60 others will
provide just that -- and more.
Mann served as assistant professor of
environmental sciences at University of
Virginia from 1995 to 2005. Back in May,
Virginia’s Attorney-General Ken Cuccinelli
launched an exhaustive campaign to uncover
the truth by filing a
"civil
investigative demand"
for documents. These included five grant
applications Mann prepared and any checks,
purchase orders or other documents related
to the pursuit of or disbursements from
grant funds Mann received. Cuccinelli
alleges that Mann defrauded taxpayers by
obtaining grants from the commonwealth to
conduct fraudulent research on global
temperatures. To prove it, he has also
demanded Mann’s emails, correspondence, or
messages to or from a list of some 39 fellow
scientists and academics, as well as any
computer source code or algorithms created
or edited by Mann. All of which will likely
reveal so much more.
Not surprisingly, WaPo,
which first reported Climategate with the
headline Hackers steal
electronic data from top climate research
center, has been running interference
for UVA right from the jump. The paper
described
“Cuccinelli's faulty investigation of
Michael Mann,” which they insisted the
university should fight, as an “ongoing
campaign to wish away human-induced climate
change.”
And when Cuccinelli lost the first round in
August by a judge’s ruling that “it’s not
clear what [Mann] did was misleading, false
or fraudulent in obtaining funds from the
Commonwealth of Virginia,”
WaPo was downright
giddy. Until, that is, the bell rang for
round two and the DA came out swinging a
reissued civil subpoena, this time limiting
his inquiry to just one specific $214,700
state-funded only grant (the judge dismissed
the other four as partially federally
funded) that Mann received from the
university. Cuccinelli’s confidence that
his newly focused approach will ultimately
prevail did not please his detractors.
In an October 6th
article
amateurishly headlined
Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to embarrass
Virginia, WaPo actually accused the
investigator of the transgressions of the
investigated:
The attorney general's logic is so
tenuous as to leave only one plausible
explanation: that he is on a fishing
expedition designed to intimidate and
suppress honest research and the free
exchange of ideas upon which science and
academia both depend -- all because he
does not like what science says about
climate change.”
Talk about displacement. In the real world, it
was Mann who suppressed “honest research and the
free exchange of ideas” and manipulated data
“because he does not like what science says
about climate change.” And while UVA’s slippery
slope argument of "academic freedom" is not
entirely without merit, it’s not only light when
weighed against the erroneous rewiring of an
already flailing international economy (not to
mention academic and scientific integrity) --
but also duplicitous.
As Dr. Fred Singer wrote in his Sunday
AT
Piece:
The University of Virginia is fighting the
demand for the data using outside lawyers
and claiming "academic freedom" among other
such excuses. I cannot comment on the legal
implications of the AG's investigation. It
should be noted, however, that UVA was quite
willing to deliver up the e-mails of
Professor Pat Michaels when Greenpeace asked
for them in December 2009. It makes the UVA
protestations sound rather hypocritical.
Singer has been convinced from the get-go
that Mann deleted crucial emails, and
wrote
in July that they’d likely be found amongst
those still housed at UVA, adding that “Cuccinelli’s
demand for those emails might put a new
light on the whole Climategate affair.” In
his
ICCC-4
presentation
in June, Dr. Singer proffered that all
post-1979 “warming” is phony and that
divulging the “hidden” 1979-1997
proxy data will likely prove it.
So WaPo took double
aim on Monday when its
screed
decrying a WSJ
video
decrying the American Geophysical Union’s
omission of skeptics in its program to link
reporters with scientists during the Cancun
conference also targeted Singer. Referring
to the renowned atmospheric physicist as
“aging” (“but very gracefully, I should
note,” Singer wrote with typical grace and
good nature in an email),
WaPo had the
unmitigated gall to claim that “very few
climate scientists would describe him as
‘renowned’ for his climate research.”
Imagine -- the same news organization
said
to define investigative journalism in the
‘70’s now championing deceitful defamation
and nondisclosure.
Nevertheless, should justice trump ideology,
the court will deny the October 21st
UVA filings asking that Cuccinelli’s 2nd
subpoena also be set aside, and the truth the
alarmists have fought so hard to suppress will
finally be heard. In any event,
the battle is far from over.
Climate Realists Regain Committee Gavels
Republicans’ Election Day landslide handed
them control of the House by a colossal 239
to 186 margin. And, according to and much
to the vexation of the George Soros-funded
alarmism machine
Think Progress,
more than half of the 100-plus GOP freshmen
“deny the existence of man-made climate
change.” Better still, a full 86% “are
opposed to any climate change legislation
that increases government costs.”
The consequence of the public’s ballot-box
repudiation of liberal wealth redistribution
policies on future ”climate” legislation was
not lost on Think
Progress’s Joe Romm. Days after the
election, the uber-alarmist wrote a scathing
rebuke
of Barack Obama’s “failed presidency,”
accusing him of “poisoning the well,”
explaining that:
Obama hasn't merely failed to get a
climate bill. Given the self-described
(and self-inflicted) "shellacking" the
president received Tuesday, he has made
it all but impossible for a return to
such an alignment of the stars this
decade.
Indeed. Not only will alarmist shill Henry
A. Waxman (D-Calif.) soon surrender the
House Energy and Commerce Committee gavel,
but over two dozen fellow Democrats who
voted for the cap-and-tax bill Waxman
co-sponsored were given the boot by
enlightened voters who simply aren’t buying
the snake oil climate alarmists are selling.
A recent
PEW Poll
found that while 59% of Americans “believe
that the earth is getting warmer,” only 34%
attribute that warming “mostly to human
activity such as burning fossil fuels.”
That’s down from 50% in a similar July 2006
poll. Undoubtedly, that rapidly dwindling
number of reality deniers will have an
impact both immediate and long term, as
surviving House and Senate Democrats absorb
its corollary on their fallen cohorts.
What’s more, short the obstructive tactics
of the befallen eco-socialist ruling class,
the colossal climate fraud uncovered over
the past year both here and abroad will
finally be scrutinized by the government of
the country most affected by it. And not by
those wishing to white-wash it, as has been
the case elsewhere.
Last year, Oversight and Government Reform
Committee ranking member Rep. Darrell Issa
condemned
that it would be the U.N. and not the U.S.
investigating the fraud uncovered in the
Climategate matter:
“The very integrity of the report [IPCC
AR4] that the Obama administration has
predicated much of its climate change
policy has been called into question and
it is unconscionable that this
administration and Congress is willing
to abdicate responsibility of uncovering
the truth to the United Nations.”
The California Republican will likely be
chairing that oversight panel come January,
and though he told reporters Monday that
much of the investigation will rightfully
fall to the
Science and Technology Committee, Issa has
promised to include the "politicization of
science" that led to the corrupt findings
released by the IPCC in his 2011 schedule.
And he’ll have wind of public opinion at his
back, as an on-line
Scientific American
survey
just found that 83.7% of Americans believe
the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone
to groupthink, with a political agenda.”
And Issa’s not alone in seeking true (not
Marxist) climate justice. Rep. Fred Upton
(R-MI), a likely choice to replace Waxman at
Energy and Commerce, has stated that “no
real science” exists to support climate
policy and has also called for Climategate
hearings.
And the investigations won’t likely stop
there.
Climategate: The Truth Will Out
Climategate’s initial revelations of
corruption at Britain’s CRU (details
here,
here,
here,
and
here)
proved to be just the beginning. In the
months that followed, allegations of similar
misconduct among alarm-leaning climate
scientists throughout the globe arose almost
daily. And their affiliations were as
momentous as those of Jones, Mann, and
Briffa, et al,
including the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS) (See
Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the
Iceberg),
and ultimately, the IPCC (See
IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks)
itself.
Hopefully, bona fide
investigations will follow a similar course,
with CRU first on the docket, followed
closely by NOAA, GISS and ultimately, the
IPCC itself. An
InterAcademy Council’s Review of the IPCC
found that the panel “needs to fundamentally
reform its management structure and
strengthen its [existing] procedures,” and
to call that a gross understatement would be
grossly understated.
Last week, Bracken Hendricks wrote an
article
for WaPo (I, too,
am shocked) claiming that:
The best science available suggests that
without taking action to fundamentally
change how we produce and use energy, we
could see temperatures rise 9 to 11
degrees Fahrenheit over much of the
United States by 2090.
What’s most distressing about this statement
isn’t the fact that to meet that projection,
we’d need to warm every decade for the next
8 by about the about same amount the IPCC
claims we warmed in all of the previous
century. Nor that we’d need to start
warming fast and soon, as the planet is
currently in a cooling phase predicted to
last for decades.
It’s that Bracken Hendricks was
a key architect
of the clean-energy portions of Obama’s
failed Stimulus Bill and an advisor to
Obama’s campaign and transition team. He
and the similar likes of Energy Czar Carol
Browner, a
former
member
of a socialist group's Commission for a
Sustainable World Society, which calls for
"global governance," and Energy Secretary
Steven Chu, who
believes
that CO2
caused Hurricane Katrina, and director of
the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy John “Ice
Free Winter”
Holdren, each have Obama’s ear. So does EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson, who has already
put the wheels of carbon regulation in
motion and must be stopped (Congress
must overturn EPA’s
Endangerment Rule)
if the economy is ever to be saved.
Now consider the U.N. plan to
levy a
climate reparations tax
on the developed world (read that United
States) on everything from airline flights
and international shipping to fuel and
financial transactions to the tune of $100
billion annually. That scheme is backed by
both Obama advisor Lawrence Summers and
radical anti-American billionaire George
Soros as a means to meet the annual figure
“international leaders” agreed to in
Copenhagen and will be a primary goal at
Cancun in a few weeks.
Will the 112th Congress have the votes to
block all such junk-science-based policy?
It will.
But of greater magnitude will be its power
to assure more durable protection by
exposing the whole truth about “climate
change.” As we’ve learned in the one year
and sixty House seats since we first
unzipped
FOI2009
-- only full and fully transparent
investigations into all of the agencies
supplying such “truth” will provide the
citizenry the clarity it deserves.
And, it seems, Climategate the commemorative
status it deserves.