MELNIE PHILLIPS ON CLIMATE ZEALOTS
Not waving but drowning
TUESDAY, 2ND FEBRUARY 2010
The climate change zealots continue their free fall into utter ridicule. Yesterday, the government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, told the Independent that the
highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency.
Ah! Reds under the sea-bed! But by today King had retreated. The Guardianreported:
Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a ‘side-issue’, he said. But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts. One of his grounds for believing a high-powered team of professionals were behind the leak, he said, was that there had been a wide spread of emails going back decades ‘between very different people’. He told the Independent: ‘The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years.’ In fact, as UEA confirmed today, all the files and emails were archived on a single backup server on the Norwich campus. Once access was gained, it would have been simple to copy all the material.
Sir David King FRS is a former professor of physical chemistry and one of this country’s most distinguished scientists. Yet he has shown himself here to be sloppy with facts and prone to wild conspiracy theorising. Is it any wonder therefore that he is a climate change zealot? This frighteningly closed-minded individual was a key force in shaping Britain’s science policy from 2000 to 2007.
The Guardian’s take on all this today is fascinating. It splashes on the apparent discovery of yet another global warming academic scam, once again involving Phil Jones of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (the one at the centre of the dodgy emails saga). The story reveals how Jones and a collaborator have been accused of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that cast doubt on a key 1990 study, on the extent to which cities contributed to and thus distorted global warming statistics, by covering up flaws in the data from Chinese weather stations. In a fuller account, the paper reports:
…when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.
Keenan told the Guardian: ‘The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres’; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that ‘there were “few if any changes†to locations is a fabrication’. He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.
But as both Andrew Bolt and Philip Stott point out, this Guardian ‘exclusive’ is not actually new at all. Stott writes:
Indeed, ‘exclusive’ is hardly the case, for the serious allegation of fraud was first investigated in the academic journal, Energy & Environment, as early as 2007 [see: ‘The fraud allegation against some climatic research of Wei-Chyung Wang’ by Douglas J. Keenan, Energy & Environment 18: 985–995 (2007): doi: 10.1260/095830507782616913]. Here is a .pdf version of the original paper, and here is what the Abstract states:
‘Wei-Chyung Wang has been a respected researcher in global warming studies for decades. I have formally alleged that he committed fraud in some of his research including research cited by the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2007) on “urban heat islands†(a critical issue). Herein, the allegation is reviewed, and some of its implications are explicated.’ We should further note that this allegation was also taken up at the web site,Climate Audit, on June 18, 2007.
… Moreover, and more worryingly, we must note that this allegation was published in Energy & Environment, the very journal that we now know was being traduced in the revealing UEA e-mail exchanges. Here is just one example, dated 14.00 04/12/2007:
‘I don’t read E&E, gives me indigestion – I don’t even consider it peer-reviewed science, and in my view we should treat it that way. i.e., don’t cite, and if journalists ask us about a paper, simply explain its not peer-reviewed science, and Sonja B-C [Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, University of Hull], the editor, has even admitted to an anti-Kyoto agenda!’
Now this is dreadful. Here we are witnessing the dangerous downside of peer reviewing, in which a cabal try to enforce its own view of ‘the science’ by trashing a critical journal and/or by attacking its editor ad hominem.
Andrew Bolt wrote about the Keenan/Wang imbroglio last year. Bolt comments:
For all this time, the Guardian kept up its alarmist campaign on global warming, and ignored this particular scandal. But today I read that the Guardian has a ‘scoop’ thanks to its ‘investigation’ and ‘today reveals’ what it last year wouldn’t… This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose. But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.
Of course. Who now remembers the names of all those in the British progressive intelligentsia who endorsed Stalinism during the inter-war years – and which particular newspaper was their cheerleader, I wonder?
Meanwhile, with spectacular timing the new green Tory party has chosen this of all moments to announce that they have poached from the government one Sir Nicholas Stern to advise them on
the creation of a Green Investment Bank to drive the development of climate-friendly technology.
Yet Stern’s 2006 report on the economics of climate change was not only discredited by serious economists but its fundamental premise of man-made global warming is currently in meltdown. With even the Guardian now trying to distance itself from the climate change madness it has done so much to create, the Tories now risk being the last people stranded on the melting floe of ideology as it calves into the sea of denial.
You’d have to have a heart of ice not to laugh.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5747281/not-waving-but-drowning.thtml
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