Debunking the Climate Scam

Billions of Dollars -  Fudged Data  -  Corrupt Scientists

Greedy Green Corporations - Trillion Dollar Prize

No Warming For Two decades - Illiterate Media

Bought and Paid For Organizations

5000 Years Of Climate Change From Greenland Ice Cores

CRU Emails:

• Several thousand files from the Britain's Climatic Research Unit *(CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been placed on line, including about 1000 emails to/from top climate “scientists”  Since these “scientists” are intimately involved with the UN IPCC, which is a major source of  credibility for the climate alarmists, the revelations potentially destroy the case for claiming that the Earth’s climate has a problem.
• If the files are genuine, they are exposing global warming as multi billion dollar fraud perpetrated by a small group of climate scientists that has succeeded in fooling most of the world media, many political leaders and citizens.

*  This name often is mis-reported as the Climate Research Unit. Their site.

Here are some web posts and resources

The files (FOI2009.zip) are at a number of sites: http://junkscience.com/FOIA/     www.megaupload.com/?d=XD050VKY

You can search the emails at:  http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php

Here are some blogs about the files:

http://www.climateaudit.org/                                    http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/

Early mainstream press:

Guardian: Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

New York Times: Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

Washington Post: Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center

                           In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

BBC: Hackers target leading climate research unit

WSJ: Hacked: Sensitive Documents Lifted from Hadley Climate Center

The Daily Telegraph Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Fox News: Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails

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Climate cuttings 33

Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you. If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

Update on November 22, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Updated to add links to the online database of the emails at Elegant Chaos.

72 comments

3 References

References (3)

References allow you to track sources for this article, as well as articles that were written in response to this article.

Response: The CRU hack - What a difference an internet makes at Samizdata.net on November 21, 2009 If you want to see how different the world now is from how it was before the Internet, look no further than this story (now bouncing energetically around the world): It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a ...

Response: Wow. Just Wow. at Winds of Change.NET on November 21, 2009 Is global warming truly a fake? New evidence suggests it might be...

Response: A list of the more outrageous emails at Synthstuff - music, photography and more... on November 21, 2009 A. W. Montford posts a great list of 33 of the more outrageous emails from the Climatic Research Institute over at Bishop Hill Blog. Here are the first ten: Climate cuttings 33Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you....

Descriptions of some of the emails from

Who is behind all this?

Here is one conspiricy claim from an unverified blog posting

Ron de Haan (15:58:09) :

How deep goes the the AGW Conspiracy?

The “hacked” scientists are directly linked to Real Climate.org, so how do the lines go from there… to AL Gore, President Obama to……Government leaders world wide, UN IPCC, Club of Rome. The entire conspiracy is aimed at World Government, including the new President of the EU. Hear his statement about World Government here: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comment/eu_president_wants_copenhagen_to_give_us_global_ management#63675

Thanks to the excellent link provided by Indiana Bones (11:30:21), we connect some of the dots :

http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/07/truth-about-realclimateorg.html

RealClimate.org whois record: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BsNAUboeko4/SlKvYU2BmjI/AAAAAAAAAPM/gN4PfaVZriQ/s1600-h/RealClimateWhoIS.gif

Registrant Organization – Environmental Media Services

Environmental Media Services (EMS) (Discover the Networks)

EMS’s founder and President was Arlie Schardt, who also served as the National Press Secretary for Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign, and as Gore’s Communications Director during his 2000 bid for the White House. [...]

EMS officially served as the “scientific” branch of the leftist public-relations firm Fenton Communications; both companies shared the same Washington, D.C. address and office space. For more than a decade, David Fenton (CEO of Fenton Communications) used EMS to run negative media campaigns against a wide variety of targets, including biogenetic foods, America’s dairy industry, and President George W. Bush. [...]

EMS also produced many stories condemning the Bush administration’s environmental policies. Among these titles were: “Bush Administration Obscures Truth About Toxic Cleanups”; “President Bush Signs Fatally Flawed Wildfire Bill”; “Earth Day Event To Highlight Bush Administration Assault On Environment, Public Health”; “Bush Administration Report Card: ‘F’ on Protecting Children”; and “National Environmental Groups Launch Campaign to Defeat President Bush.” EMS claimed that the data contained in its press releases constituted “the latest and most credible information” provided by “top scientists, physicians, and other experts.” These “experts” included officials of Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Environmental Media Services (EMS) (Activist Cash)

EMS is the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications. Based in Washington, in the same office suite as Fenton, EMS claims to be “providing journalists with the most current information on environmental issues.” A more accurate assessment might be that it spoon-feeds the news media sensationalized stories, based on questionable science, and featuring activist “experts,” all designed to promote and enrich David Fenton’s paying clients, and build credibility for the nonprofit ones. It’s a clever racket, and EMS & Fenton have been running it since 1994. [...]

It’s called “black marketing,” and Environmental Media Services has become the principal reason Fenton Communications is so good at it. EMS lends an air of legitimacy to what might otherwise be dismissed (and rightly so) as fear-mongering from the lunatic fringe. In addition to pre-packaged “story ideas” for the mass media, EMS provides commentaries, briefing papers, and even a stable of experts, all carefully calculated to win points for paying clients. These “experts,” though, are also part of the ruse. Over 70% of them earn their paychecks from current or past Fenton clients, all of which have a financial stake in seeing to it that the scare tactics prevail. It’s a clever deception perpetrated on journalists who generally don’t consider do-gooder environmentalists to be capable of such blatant and duplicitous “spin.”

Fenton Communications (Discover the Networks)

Foremost public relations firm of the political left. Past clients have included Marxist dictatorships in Central America. Represents environmentalist groups, pro-Democratic political action committees, labor unions, and the anti-war movement.

Founded in 1982 by activist and public relations veteran David Fenton, Fenton Communications (FC) is the leading advertising and public relations firm for advocacy groups on the political left, with locations in Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco.

FC serves as an “umbrella” for “three independent nonprofit organizations” which it co-founded. These include: Environmental Media Services, which manages publicity efforts for environmental groups; New Economy Communications, a social justice group; and the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death penalty lobby.

FC expressly refuses to represent “clients and projects that we don’t believe in ourselves.” Among the clients and projects that FC has worked for are Marxist-Leninist regimes in Central America and Africa, environmental groups, labor unions, and anti-war organizations. In addition, FC has offered its services to pro-Democrat political action committees and law firms, as well as to political campaigns against the death penalty and gun-ownership rights. [...]

Equally noteworthy has been FC’s business partnership with environmental groups. In 1988 and 1989, FC helped one such organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), promote misleading claims about the dangers of Alar, a pesticide then in use by the apple industry. On the basis of NRDC’s study of Alar, itself based on exaggerated probabilities rather than concrete empirical data, FC launched a media campaign that stoked consumers’ fears and captured the interest of television news programs, daily newspapers and daytime talk shows, fueling a backlash against apple growers. By some estimates, the apple industry suffered $200 million in lost revenue as a result of the FC campaign.

By contrast, FC and its client prospered. David Fenton subsequently boasted that his firm had “designed” the media campaign “so that revenue would flow back to NRDC from the public,” noting that FC had gained “$700,000 in net revenues from it.” Fenton Communications today cites the Alar campaign as a significant contribution to the “national debate” on pesticides. [...]

Joining forces with the Environmental Working Group, FC has also engineered media campaigns exaggerating the dangers posed by pesticides in tap water and baby food.

In 2003 FC created an ad campaign targeting the automotive industry for the Evangelical Environmental Network. The controversial ads alleged that consumers who bought sport utility vehicles were, in effect, supporting terrorism by using large amounts of fuel imported from the Middle East. [...]

Arlie Schardt, a senior consultant at Fenton Communications and Chairman of Environmental Media Services, served as Al Gore’s national press secretary during his first presidential campaign.

David Fenton (ActivistCash)

David Fenton has turned leftist activism into big business with his firm Fenton Communications, the single most easily identifiable nexus of anti-consumer activism in Washington, DC. Fenton and his staff masterminded the mad cow scare campaign, the organic marketing craze, the phony Alar-on-apples food scare, and more. He’s very good at what he does, and groups like the Center for Food Safety, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Organic Consumers Association, and SeaWeb are all happy to pony up big bucks to give their radical messages the Fenton touch.

Fenton started out in the music biz, directing public relations for Rolling Stone. He entered the activist fray in the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1970s, co-producing the 1979 “No Nukes” concerts headlined by Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt. From there, he went on to found his own activism-centered PR empire, Fenton Communications, in 1982. Within that umbrella are “three independent nonprofit organizations” all co-founded by Fenton: the Death Penalty Information Center, New Economy Communications (an anti-globalism outfit), and Environmental Media Services.

Fenton Communications Launches Green-Tech Division (Reuters)

Fenton Communications has been deeply involved in environmental issues since its founding in 1982. The firm publicized the first reports of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, helped environmental NGOs at the Kyoto Global Warming Summit, and worked with Vice-President Al Gore to publicize the issues.

Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions? (PDF) (Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT)

“Environmental Media Services (a project of Fenton Communications, a large public relations firm serving left wing and environmental causes; they are responsible for the alar scare as well as Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war campaign.) created a website, realclimate.org, as an ‘authoritative’ source for the ‘truth’ about climate. This time, real scientists who were also environmental activists, were recruited to organize this web site and ‘discredit’ any science or scientist that questioned catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. The web site serves primarily as a support group for believers in catastrophe, constantly reassuring them that there is no reason to reduce their worrying.” – Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT

This is for those who you who still doubt there is NO conspiracy.

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".(1075403821)
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
• Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
• Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)
• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he's "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman's admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
• Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
• Jones says he's found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
• Wigley says Keenan's fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn't be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don't want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
• Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn't be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr "I'm not entirely there in the head" will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

Excerpts from some of the emails

Collection of articles

One incident of tampering with a peer-review journal process

Do you trust RealClimate.org? If so read this.

And this

Some Blog Postings Following Emails Release

The NASA Emails

Washington, DC -- January 14, 2010

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.

The above link it to the, presumably, original released document. Unfortunately it DOES NOT have copyable or searchable text (it is just  a file of images of text.) We have fed this file through an OCR program to add text behind the images of the original pages. Please note that the ORC makes mistakes, so the copied text will have some errors. Download the NASA file with text.

IPCC uses political lobbying group publications as “peer reviewed” sources

We have been told that the IPCC report is all peer reviewed, yet some of their references are to WWF & Greenpeace as if they were peer-reviewed, scientifically accurate sources. This came to light when it was discovered that the claim of the Himalayan glaciers melting  wrong and supported only by a reference to WWF which turned out to be based on a news magazine interview with a scientist:

It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment2 refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. from UN Announcement : http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf

Also see:

“The Science is Scuttled” – NASA climate page, suckered by IPCC, deletes their own ‘moved up’ glacier melting date reference

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Daily Mail  The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.  Also see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/23/breaking-news-scientist-admits-ipcc-used-fake-data-to-pressure-policy-makers/

IPCC AR4 riddled with non peer reviewed WWF papers   Remember our friends at World Wildlife Fund? Those schlockmeisters that produced the video of planes flying into New York with explicit comparisons to 9/11?  

Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.  http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-dodgy-citations-in-nobel-winning.html

Sordnay discovered that a  Google search on IPCC site for WWF & AR4 returns 167 hits. [Note: this gave 176 hits on 1-25-2010]

Why Climategate is so distressing to scientists

Fraud or Fraud of the Century?

The cover-up

Science Magazine publishes false claim of an unanimous, scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of recent global warming; refuses to publish letter exposing the lie.

The people running the investigation of Michael Mann reported interviewing exactly TWO PEOPLE besides Mann himself.

Exposing the Hockeystick: The Wegman and North Reports for Newbies