Summary of the warming scandal

Christopher Booker has a useful article in the Telegraph explaining the importance of the leaked e-mails from Britain’s Climatic Research Unit. He writes (with emphasis added by me):

[I]n all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely—not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Booker then goes on to show the three most signficant things revealed in the e-mails:

Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws….

The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction—to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming….

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods—not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 29, 2009 01:55 PM | Send