Climategate 3.0 - Climategate email leaker leaks more

James Delingpole:

FOIA – the anonymous leaker who brought the Climategate and Climategate II emails to light has emerged briefly from the shadows. He has released to selected parties (not me) the password to the cache of Climategate II emails ...

I think it's worth dwelling on some of the clues he offers as to his identity and motivation. (I'm assuming it is a "he", btw):

That's right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn't plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

Delingpole comments further:

Rings true to me. It's certainly why I'm in this game – the cause, not (laughs bitterly) the money ...

Many terrible things have resulted from the great climate scam – the debasement of the scientific method, the corruption, the rent-seeking, the greed, the lies, the blighted careers, the malfeasance, the dissemination of ignorance, the waste, the environmental damage – but the worst thing by far is the human misery it has engendered. ...

For more - two of the selected recipients of FOIA's latest leak were WUWT's Anthony Watts and Bishop Hill blogger Andrew Montford.

Climategate 2.0

Terence Corcoran: "In the wake of Climategate 2.0, action on the IPCC is more needed than ever."

Anthony Watts has the all the details dirt on the latest Climategate email dump.

Response to ClimateGate Inquiries

From Friends of Science a summary of Ross McKitrick's report "Understanding The ClimateGate Inquiries":

None of these inquiries were independent and none investigated the allegations or interviewed critics of the CRU or the IPCC. In summarizing, McKitrick says that the evidence shows that scientists manipulated IPCC reports with the effect of misleading readers, deleted emails to prevent disclosure of information in apparent violation of freedom of information laws, privately expressed doubts about the science, and took steps to block access to data or methodologies. 

One of the most notorious email revelations was the trick to hide the decline of proxy temperature data presented in WMO and IPCC reports for policy makers. The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee concluded that this trick was not dishonest because Phil Jones of the CRU had discussed the decline relative to instrument data (the divergence problem) in a journal article. McKitrick writes “The fact that Jones had acknowledged the divergence in journal articles makes it worse that he hid the decline in official reports, as it proves that the deception was not inadvertent.” The divergence of proxy data from instrument data would prove to reasonable readers that the proxy data are not good temperature proxies, so the claim that the 20th century temperature increase is unprecedented cannot be supported. This destroys the foundation of the IPCC climate science.

Donate to Friends of Science.

US Climate centers now caught manipulating data

John Coleman at KUSI weather reports:

... It has been revealed that a "sleight of hand" was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as "THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the U.S. Government's two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations ...

The report aired Jan 14th as part (see Part 6) of the TV program "Global Warming" The Other Side".



[via FOS]

ClimateGate: 30 years in the making

From JoNova comes Mohib Ebrahim's neat timeline documenting events leading up to ClimateGate.
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Some samples:

NEWSWEEK 28.Apr.1975: The Cooling World - "Almost unanimous the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." [3]

1976 James Hansen publishes a paper on anthropogenic greenhouse gases

FEB 1979 -- First World Climate Conference organised by the World Meteorological Organisation

Aug 21, 1981 NEW YORK TIMES: Global warming makes the front page following Hansen sending them a copy of his paper, "Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". Many scientists were critical of the approach taken by Hansen and others for damaging the integrity of science.

Oct 9, 1985 IPCC Conceived

Jun 1988 Hansen makes his famous ... appearance before a Congressional committee. Afterwards [he] tells journalists that it was time to “stop waffling, and that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”. ... According to [climate historian Spencer] Weart, ‘respected scientists publicly rebuked Hansen,saying he had gone far beyond what scientific evidence justified’ [5]

[via FOS]

Googlegate: Google censoring climategate

Lawrence Solomon has picked up on Google's apparent censoring of climategate references:

... Google announced an end to its long-standing collaboration with the Chinese Communists — it will no longer censor users inside China.That’s good of it. Maybe Google will now also stop using its search engine to censor the rest of us, in the Western countries.

... in early December, Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users. By Dec. 17, the number of climategate pages that a Google search found dropped by almost 10 million, to 22.2 million. One day later Google dropped its find by another 8 million pages, to 14.1 million. By Dec. 23, Google could find only 7.5 million hits and on Dec. 24 just 6 million. And yesterday, when I checked, Google reported a mere 1.8 million climategate pages.

The accusations against Google of censorship are wide-spread, involving schemes to elect Barack Obama, attacks on Christianity (key in “Christianity is” and Google will suggest unflattering completions to the phrase), and political correctness (key in “Islam is” and nothing negative is suggested).The bottom line? Google is as inscrutable as the Chinese, and perhaps no less corrupt. For safe searches, you’re best off with Bing.

For more on this, blogger Harold Ambler documents his efforts to get Google's executives to explain themselves. He asks them whether or not Al Gore had influenced their censorship. The responses from Google were less than convincing.

Google, in suppressing Climategate information, exhibits the same corrupt mindset displayed in the CRU email files. In fact, it is complicit in Climategate.

I'm taking up Lawrence Solomon's suggestion and switching to Bing with the hope that Microsoft isn't (or doesn't become) similarly corrupted.