RUTHFULLY YOURS

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA’s James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.

For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.

Now, it turns out, it’s the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.

We don’t know who “Deep Throat” is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine’s TGIF edition with Philip Jones, director of the Hadley Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University, the incriminating e-mails documenting collusion and fraud among top global warming scientists, including a few from Jones himself, are genuine.

In one e-mail sent to Michael Mann, director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, Raymond Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts, and Malcolm Hughes, a professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, Jones speaks of the “trick” of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Hide the decline? “Keith” is Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit, also involved in the bogus manipulation of data.

An e-mail from scientist Mick Kelly to Jones also speaks of manipulating data to hide the fact that Earth is actually cooling: “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 coldish years.”

In another e-mail to Mann from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, copied to Dr. James Hansen of NASA, Trenberth says: “Well, I have my own article on 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.”

Trenberth also says: “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.” He goes on to say that “the data is surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Well, that much is true. We have reported on information obtained by Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat on the inaccuracy of temperature-monitoring stations around the country and the screwy places these scientific stations are located. Daily temperature data are gathered by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and the 1,221 or so weather observation stations it monitors around the country.

Watts and a few volunteers decided to check a few of them out. They found one station in Forest Grove, Ore., that stands just 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. Another station in Roseburg, Ore., is on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., one is near a drum where trash is burned.

When bad numbers aren’t enough to show global warming, it’s okay to just make them up. Hansen, the NASA scientist who began the climate scare, was himself caught fudging the numbers when he declared October 2008 the warmest October on record.

This despite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s registering of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranking it the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So how did Hansen claim it was the warmest October ever? As Christopher Booker wrote in the U.K.’s Telegraph: “The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.”

As it turns out, Mann is the creator of the discredited “hockey stick” graph used in reports from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bradley and Hughes were also involved in the famous graph, which purports to show a sudden and sharp spike in global temperatures the day man first dreamed of taking an SUV to the mall.

Canadian researchers and others have thoroughly debunked the hockey stick, finding serious problems with the study, including calculation errors, data used twice and a faulty computer program that produced a hockey stick out of whatever data were fed into it.

Their study also totally ignored major events such as the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850).

The warming debate was never over, only censored. We have noted how the Environmental Protection Agency has engaged in an ongoing cover-up of its own analyses of climate change and discouraged public dissent.

EPA lawyers Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel produced a video in which they said cap-and-trade is a “Big Lie” and carbon offsets are a “Big Rip-off.” At the EPA’s insistence, Zabel and Williams took down the video from their Web site, but not before it was copied and widely circulated.

Alan Carlin, senior research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, dared to say, in essence, that Emperor Al Gore and his toadies at EPA were wearing no clothes.

After examining numerous global warming studies, Carlin, who holds a doctorate in economics with an undergraduate degree in physics, said his research showed that “available observable data … invalidate the hypothesis” that humans cause dangerous global warming.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg who has received death threats for citing how Earth’s history doesn’t quite jibe with current prophecies of doom, says: “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.”

Ball says he has “watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists.” “Surely,” he says, “this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the carbon credits shell game.”

These inconvenient truths may be just the tip of the iceberg.