Climategate

Climategate refers to the Global Warming Controversy, a theory which asserts that human activity causes dangerous increases in temperatures and thus climate change. Climategate began after a hacker, or perhaps a whistle-blower, broke into the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK, obtaining thousands of e-mails and documents, from which evidence revealed told the truth about man-made global warming: it's a hoax. The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade revealed by a thousand emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following the leaked data from the Climate Research Unit. Climategate is said to have revealed the biggest scientific hoax in world history as the worst scandal of this generation.

Three takeaways

Iain Murray at Pajamas Media pointed out three takeaways that people must know about Climategate.

1. First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results. The most prominently featured scientists are paleoclimatologists, who reconstruct historical temperatures and who were responsible for a series of reconstructions that seemed to show a sharp rise in temperatures well above historical variation in recent decades.

2. Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. In 2003, Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, complained that paleoclimatologist Hans von Storch was responsible for “the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’” and that they “must get rid of von Storch” (1051190249) as an editor of the journal Climate Research (he indeed subsequently resigned).

3. Finally, the scientists worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom.

Freedom of Information Act

The Freedom of Information Act explicitly forbids deletion of any material subject to a FOIA request. The penalty for such a criminal act is a fine of up to £5,000. Presumably being found guilty of such an act, or even suggesting it, would also bring about significant disciplinary procedures at any reputable university.

Themes

Climategate shows strong evidence of fraud, and may show smoking-gun proof of a cover-up by CRU scientists to exaggerate the existence, causation, and threat of global warming. In one e-mail dated November 1999, CRU chief P.D. Jones wrote to Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes:

“

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

”

Michael Mann's graph that 'hid the decline' was shaped like a hockey stick, and it portrayed temperatures as steadily declining since medieval times and then sharply rising in the last century and a half. Notably, his reconstruction fueled claims that 1998 and following years had the highest temperatures in 1,000 years. Once it became publicly known that man-made global warming is a hoax, as a direct result of the e-mail discussing a "trick" for adding data to each temperature series for the last 20 years, Climategate motivated the making of a video called, "Hide The Decline."

Critique of the Hockey Stick Reconstruction

• Corrections To The Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base And Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Energy & Enviornment volume 14, 2003.
• The Decay of the Hockey Stick by Von Storch published on the journal Nature's blog, May 3, 2007.
• A Global Warming Bombshell by Richard A. Muller, Technology Review , Oct. 2004; calls into question famous graph by Michael Mann.
• Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data by Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita, Julie M. Jones, Yegor Dimitriev, Fidel González-Rouco, Simon F. B. Tett, Science magazine, 22 October 2004.

Oil

According to Rush Limbaugh, another theme of the e-mails that have been released is how people at the Climate Research Unit were constantly trying to "shake down" the oil companies (ie. Exxon, Shell) for money and for partnerships. On this reoccurring theme, Limbaugh mentioned the following:

“

They talk about it openly, how they're constantly trying to shake down the oil companies. The only thing man-made about global warming is the theory behind it. What you are going to do with people who are even willing to lie about the weather?

”

Media coverage

In the wake of the Climategate scandal, a truly bizarre situation happened; the mainstream media stories about global warming pretended the uncovered documents never happened. As Climategate was totally ignored by most TV news outlets, Fox News appeared to be the only national news media in America interested in the growing Climategate scandal. Perhaps the MSM felt that by ignoring Climategate entirely that it would have just gone away. However, just as the case was during the Tea Party Movement, notably during the Tax Day Tea Party, bloggers and the readers of the global warming stories kept bringing up the inconvenient truth of Climategate by mentioning the scandal "over and over and over again."

See Also

• Global warming
• Anthropogenic global warming theory
• Global Warming Controversy
• Massachusetts v. EPA
• Socialism and global warming
• Politics of global warming
• Global Warming Derangement Syndrome
• Socialist Environmental Disasters
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Articles about Global Warming from previous "Breaking News"
• Wikiproject:News by Subject- Global Warming

External links

• John Holdren also involved in CRU e-mails
• The BBC and Climategate: was a reporter put under pressure to ignore the story?
• Climategate: Googlegate?
• Obama vs. 'Climategate'