As the fallout from CRUHACK grows, the biggest story is not actually whether data was manipulated in individual cases, although in my view that's bad. And it's not that global warming scientists were so arrogant in 2004 as to mock the death of an opponent, although that too is bad.

It's not that some of these scientists were sitting on taxpayer-sourced slush funds worth tens of millions of dollars each, for an industry total of somewhere close to US$100 billion, whilst their supporters raised merry-hell about Exxon sponsoring skeptic research to the tune of a few million, although this too is massively hypocritical.

It's not that the scientists show signs of being political activists, and even helping promote a global governance agenda.

No, in my view the biggest scandal to erupt from CRUHACK is the death of peer-reviewed climate science.

We now all know – the entire industrialized world – that while global warming scientists and their supporters were publicly ridiculing skeptic's arguments as "not peer reviewed" because – by implication – the arguments were not good enough, that in fact some of the top scientific advisors to the UN IPCC were conspiring (and that is the right word) to sabotage any attempt by other scientists to publish peer reviewed papers challenging global warming.

We now know the UN IPPC/Global Governance lobby had sufficient political clout to intimidate scientific journals into submission and to run roughshod over the integrity of the peer review process.

The next global warming believer who raises "peer review" as a defence of global warming deserves to be metaphorically tarred and feathered and laughed at for the rest of his or her natural life.

The Wegman report to the US Congress found unhealthy links between the IPCC's scientific advisors. The CRUHACK emails now prove that festering scientific corruption beyond reasonable doubt.

The integrity of climate science died this weekend. It will never be the same.

Given that these are the men and women who've been telling the world's political leaders "trust us", as they shore up plans to introduce massive global taxes, this should give every President and Prime Minister cause for concern.

Do you really want to stake your country's economic future on the advice of scientists shown to have an agenda, and to have corrupted the only process capable of whistleblowing bad science? How are we to know from now on whether any of the papers these scientists have been associated with is genuine, and not just rubber stamped by their mates to suit a common goal?

Now to some of the highlights. (By the way, if you want to search the emails yourself, enter the file names or keywords into this search engine)

MANIPULATION OF DATA

The emails disclose the IPCC chose, for political rather than scientific reasons, to keep using a 1961-1990 baseline for atmospheric temperature measurements. We've all been told ad nauseum that 30 years is "a climate trend". So by 2007's AR4 report you'd have to ask why they weren't choosing a 1976-2005 baseline? The answer is this:

Neil

There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted. SOURCE: 1105019698.txt

There you go. Proof you've been played for suckers. More modern data would have disclosed less warming in recent times, because 1961-1990 coincided with a cold cycle and that ancient baseline makes modern warming look tropical by comparison, hence it is perfect to overinflate the significance of the warming for political purposes.

Now let's look at whether we should ever consider anything less than a 30 year climate trend. Hot Topic contributor, geologist P Scadden, suggests never:

scaddenp November 3, 2009 at 11:41 am

Boy, am I sick of reiterating this. CLIMATE is about a 30 year trend. The models predict what happens on a 30 year trend.

But here's what a man at the climate coalface, CRU director Phil Jones says in his email about the must-be-adhered-to 30 year trend, as he made the case for picking a 20 year dataset instead:

20 years (1981-2000) isn't 30 years, but the rationale for 30 years isn't that compelling. The original argument was for 35 years around 1900 because Bruckner found 35 cycles in some west Russian

lakes (hence periods like 1881-1915). This went to 30 as it easier to compute.



Personally I don't want to change the base period till after I retire!



Cheers

Phil

Extraordinary! All this time the global warming believers have been stridently insisting that only a 30 year measurement is valid, and then the leaked emails disclose they plucked that figure out of the air, so to speak, and the logic behind it "isn't that compelling".

Feeling like a sucker yet?

And if a ten year trend is nothing, officially, then why was UA-based ex-pat Kiwi scientist Kevin Trenberth having this heated debate in early October this year about the fact that temperature increases have hit a brick wall and stopped, in defiance of UN Policy and Greenpeace pronouncements about imminent catastrophe:

Where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January [winter] weather [in early autumn] (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate. SOURCE 1255352257.txt

For that matter, this inconvenient truth remained suppressed at the heavily staged media climate briefing I was locked out of recently.

Surely, Trenberth's colleagues must have reassured him "it's just weather, not climate", and "short term data is irrelevant, it's the 30 year trend that's important".

Mick Kelly, another climate scientist with Kiwi connections, was so concerned recently about the fact that the global temperature has stopped rising that he told his colleagues he was erasing that inconvenient truth from his powerpoint presentations so the public would not find out:

From: Mick Kelly <mick.tiempo@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

To: <P.Jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>

Subject: RE: Global temperature

Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:02:00 +1300



Yeah, it wasn't so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used

to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a

longer - 10 year - period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you

might expect from La Nina etc.



Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also.

Anyway, I'll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I

give the talk again as that's trending down as a result of the end effects

and the recent cold-ish years.



Enjoy Iceland and pass on my best wishes to Astrid.



Mick SOURCE 1225026120.txt

And I ask the Presidents and Prime Ministers again: how do you know the climate "scientists" briefing you are not fudging the data to hide inconvenient truths from you?

Little wonder they're panicking. One of Europe's top climate scientists has run the numbers and found no global warming in ten years, once natural variations had been accounted for. Yep – 0.0C change in temperatures. As Kevin Trenberth famously said, "Where the heck is global warming?"

But that's OK, because we know the UN climate scientists are peer reviewed.

In my new book Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming, I quoted the case of one climate scientist who was told in an email "we must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period", in reference to the data that shows it was much warmer a thousand years ago than it is now.

The leaked emails now confirm the author of that instruction was Jonathan Overpeck, and it seemed to be a continuing theme – erase inconvenient data so as not to "confuse" the public.

Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fabrication fame, wrote this email:

Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

So even though they had no scientific basis to get rid of it, they got rid of it.

The next spotty-faced, Greenpeace-indoctrinated callow little leftie youth I encounter in a blog exchange who uses the word "cherry-picking" in relation to skeptic arguments will also be laughed at long and loud.

PEER REVIEW IS A JOKE

Rather than me re-inventing the wheel, check out Andrew Bolt's nice synopsis of the corrupting of peer review, then read on here.

This email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann is illuminating, because it appears to suggest among other things that Mann might have been in a position to review studies dealing with his own work (he produced the MBH paper Jones refers to. It also shows Jones is peer reviewing a paper criticizing the data produced by Jones' CRU unit. If that's not incestuous, I don't know what is:

Filename: 1077829152.txt

From: Phil Jones To: "Michael E. Mann"

Subject: Crap Papers

Date: Thu Feb 26 15:59:xxx xxxx xxxx

Mike,

Just agreed to review a paper for GRL – it is absolute rubbish. It is having a go at the CRU temperature data – not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !! We added lots of data in for the region this person says has Urban Warming ! So easy review to do.

Sent Ben the Soon et al. paper and he wonders who reviews these sorts of things. Says GRL hasn't a clue with editors or reviewers. By chance they seem to have got the right person with the one just received.

Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE – don't email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record – from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them – I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.

Cheers

Phil

Again, in my opinion both Mann and Jones have clear conflicts of interest, yet they are effectively peer reviewing their own work and attacking other scientists in the process. What a joke.

The global warming brigade can try and spin it as much as they like, but even their colleagues aren't buying anymore, as this comment posted on Mann's website RealClimate by another scientist shows:

Darrell (15:18:21) : From the same Real Climate thread:

I see a problem when it comes to suggesting that the "skeptics" need to publish in the peer-reviewed literature (which is something that I continually push as well), all the while working to try to prevent them publishing in the literature. I can pretty much guarantee that several recent papers that I (and co-authors) have submitted to the peer-reviewed literature would have been accepted had they carried different authorship. And I would bet that this is not only limited to my co-authors. I grow more suspicious that submitted papers that include particular authors are red-flagged for 'special treatment.' For a long time I denied (to myself and others) that this was the case, but recent experience has me thinking differently. I hope that I am wrong. Today's information has done little to reassure me

The Wall Street Journal found an email in the haul from another scientist worried about the corruption of science by influencing the peer review process:

One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is 'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.

Scientist, Dr Timothy Ball was taking a similar line to me while I was writing this post, and it's worth including a couple of his observations on the implications:

Professor Wegman showed how this "community of scientists" published together and peer reviewed each other's work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the "community". They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

And:

Total Control

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in "I told you so."

THEY'RE NOT SCIENTISTS, THEY'RE GLOBAL CHANGE AGENTS

"It was good to see you again yesterday - if briefly. One particular thing you said - and we agreed - was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?"

"I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say "1000 scientists signed" or "1500 signed". No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story."

These guys were in a battle for public hearts and minds and would spare nothing to push their bigger propaganda agenda.

In fact, one UN IPCC discussion document [SOURCE 889554019.txt] contained in the emails and sent to climate scientists and other hangers on explicitly talks of the IPCC's real agenda in selling the climate change message:

Our approach has been to develop a set of four "scenario families".

The storylines of each of these scenario families describes a demographic, politico-economic, societal and technological future. Within each family one or more scenarios explore global energy industry and other developments and their implications for Greenhouse Gas Emissions and other pollutants. These are a starting point for climate impact modelling.



The scenarios we have built explore two main questions for the 21st century, neither of which we know the answer to:

- Can adequate governance -- institutions and agreements -- be put in place to manage global problems?

- Will society's values focus more on enhancing material wealth or be more broadly balanced, incorporating environmental health and social well-being.

The way we answer these questions leads to four families of scenarios:

- Golden Economic Age (A1): a century of expanded economic prosperity with the emergence of global governance

- Sustainable Development (B1): in which global agreements and institutions, underpinned by a value shift, encourages the integration of ecological and economic goals

- Divided World (A2): difficulty in resolving global issues leads to a world of autarkic regions

- Regional Stewardship (B2): in the face of weak global governance there is a focus on managing regional/local ecological and equity

Easy to see the preferred option.

But of course, as we all know, the UN has no agenda for global governance, because left-wingers like Kevin Rudd tell us it ain't so.

If you want a quick overview of some of the other dynamite in the pile, check this list out below (after my youtube interlude), although the central port of call should probably be Marc Morano's Climate Depot which has a rolling round-up on this issue.

▪ 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".

▪ 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)