Media Whitewashes Climategate Scandal One Decade On
Read Chapter excerpt from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano:
UN IPCC exposed as “the best science that politics and activism could manufacture.”
Morano: “The Climategate scandal revealed that the UN IPCC was simply a lobbying organization portraying itself as a science panel. If the UN failed to find carbon dioxide was a problem, it would no longer have a reason to continue studying it—or to be in charge of offering ‘solutions’…The leading UN IPCC scientists were caught red-handed artificially manufacturing the “scientific consensus” for the global warming narrative. Their own words betrayed that they were acting like political partisans, not scientists—crafting a predetermined message rather than following the evidence. Climategate exposed the work product of the IPCC as the best science that politics and activism could manufacture.”
Morano: “When the scandal broke, the global warming establishment—led by the UN, academia, and the media—immediately went into move-along-nothing-to see-here mode. There were several high-profile “investigations” of Climategate that were obviously designed simply to restore credibility to the UN and climate scientists The global warming industry investigated itself and exonerated itself.”
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Rex Murphy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation summed it up: Climategate “pulls back the curtain on a scene of pettiness, turf protection, manipulation, defiance of freedom of information, lost or destroyed data and attempts to blacklist critics or skeptics of the global warming cause.” Murphy added, “Science has gone to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time.”
Clive Crook, writing for the Atlantic: “The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with ‘the hockey stick’—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for ‘lack of credible evidence’, it will not even investigate them…. You think I exaggerate?…In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no.”
By: Marc Morano – Climate DepotNovember 18, 2019 12:25 PM with 0 comments
Chapter excerpt on Climategate: The UN IPCC Exposed from best-selling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano
CHAPTER 10
Climategate: The UN IPCC Exposed
Chapter Excerpt: “I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple.” That’s Princeton physicist Robert Austin’s take on the scandal that exposed the
very unscientific conduct of UN IPCC scientists.
But what the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Institute revealed was more than just a shocking case of dishonesty in science. It was the fraudulence of the entire man-made climate change narrative. The Climategate emails showed that UN IPCC scientists were holding together the global warming narrative and the supposed scientific “consensus” that supported it by subterfuge and intimidation. The Climategate scandal opened a lot of eyes to the fact that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was more political than scientific.
The Climategate scandal pulled back the curtain on the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists, who were caught artificially propping up the climate
change narrative via a partisan campaign to boost only the science and scientists that support their cause and exclude science and scientists that
don’t fit. Data manipulation, manipulation of the peer-review process, blacklisting, data destruction, and willful violation of Freedom of Information Act requests were some of the key revelations in the Climategate emails.
CBS News reported on the Climategate scandal in December of 2009:
“Those files show that prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data, plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing, and discussed how to conceal apparently buggy
computer code from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information law.”
When NBC News reported on “A scandal called ‘Climategate’” in 2009, it was introduced as “a scandal involving some stolen emails.” NBC noted that “the language in the emails suggest these scientists manipulated their findings.”
The thousands of emails, either hacked or more likely leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealed the behind the-scenes collusion of the climate change leadership. The leading UN IPCC scientists were caught red-handed artificially manufacturing the “scientific consensus” for the global warming narrative. Their own words betrayed that they were acting like political partisans, not scientists—crafting a predetermined message rather than following the evidence. Climategate exposed the work product of the IPCC as the best science that politics and activism could manufacture. Emails between Climategate scientists showed a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.
As Forbes reported on the emails released in both the original 2009 Climategate scandal and a second release in 2011 dubbed “Climategate 2.0,”
“‘I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,’ writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email. ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get—and has to be well hidden,’ Jones writes in another email. ‘I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data…. ’”
Chris Horner, author of the 2007 Politically Incorrect Guide® to Global Warming, reported on the efforts to delete correspondence by Climategate scientists. “Phil Jones in the United Kingdom asked Mann, now at Penn State, by email to delete records being sought under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, and to get a colleague to do so as well,” Horner explained in 2011.
Jones had emailed, Mike:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN IPCC 4th Assessment]? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment—minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise.
“‘Gene’ is Eugene Wahl, who now works for the federal government,” explained Horner. Mann’s terse reply included in pertinent part: “I’ll contact
Gene about this ASAP.”
According to Wahl, Mann did contact him. “For the record, while I received the email from CRU [Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit] as forwarded by Dr. Mann, the forwarded message came without any additional comment from Dr. Mann; there was no request from him to delete emails,” Wahl explained in 2011.
The Telegraph reported that CRU director Jones was “accused of making error of judgment by colleague” Mann for asking their colleagues to “delete
sensitive emails to evade Freedom of Information requests.” Mann tried to distance himself from Jones, “I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate
that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.” Jones retired in 2016.
A Washington Post editorial on November 25, 2009, summed up the unfolding scandal:
According to one of the stolen e-mails, CRU [Climate Research Unit] Director Phil Jones wrote that he would keep papers questioning the connection between warming and human activity out of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
In another, Mr. Jones and Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann write about an academic journal and its editor, with Mr. Mann discussing organizing a boycott of the publication and Mr. Jones saying, “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
Other e-mails speak of withholding data from climate-change skeptics…. Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them.
Mann joined Jones in planning to punish a scientific journal that he did not consider faithful to the climate narrative: “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Climate blogger Tom Nelson dug through and collected a slew of the Climategate emails on his website:
• Email 1819, Nov 2003, warmist Tom Wigley to Mann et al on possible responses to McIntyre and McKitrick’s request for data: “The second is to tell them to go to hell”
• Email 4868, Sept ’05: IPCC reviewer McIntyre asks to see the data underlying a paper; warmists complain this is a “major abuse of his position”
• Email 1897, Dec 2008: After Phil Jones admits deleting material, UEA’s FOI officer David Palmer writes: “Phil, you must be very careful about deleting material, more particularly when you delete it”
• 2000: Warmist Phil Jones goes to “solar variability and climate” conference in Tenerife; finds that “Many in the solar terrestrial physics community seem totally convinced that solar output changes can explain most of the observed changes we are seeing”; laments that THEY are “so set in their ways”
• Email 4657, Oct 2000, It’s a small world after all: Editor of Journal of Climate, Michael Mann, gets Phil Jones to review a paper by Tom Wigley and Ben Santer
• 2004 email: Phil Jones on why he thought the last 20 years was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period: “This is all gut feeling, no science”; warmist Tom Wigley also calls the hockey stick “a very sloppy piece of work”
Climategate exposed the manufactured consensus and gave the lie to the endlessly repeated mantra that all scientists agree on anthropogenic
global warming.
Breaking Ranks Climate skeptics hailed the release of the emails as a victory for science. But even more significant, Climategate ultimately prompted UN scientists to turn on UN scientists, and on the UN IPCC process.
UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita, for example, publicly declared that his colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones, who had both been implicated in Climategate, “should be barred from the IPCC process…. They are not credible anymore.”
Zorita also noted how petty and punitive the global warming science had become: “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication.”
Zorita was making reference to Climategate emails in which IPCC scientists had discussed how to suppress data and scientific studies that did not agree with the UN IPCC line. He noted how scientists who deviated from the UN IPCC’s position were “bullied and subtly blackmailed.” Zorita was a contributing author to the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. He has published more than seventy peer-reviewed scientific studies.
We have already met UN lead author Richard Tol, now a dissenter. In the wake of Climategate he lamented that the IPCC had been “captured” and demanded that “the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed.”
Despite the fact that Tol publicly called to “suspend” the IPCC process in 2010, he once again served as lead author for the Fifth Assessment Report. Over subsequent years, Tol grew even more disillusioned with the UN and appeared in my 2016 film Climate Hustle.
How the Global Warming Narrative Undermines Genuine Scientific Research (an Insider Explains)
“In this atmosphere, Ph.D. students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the ‘pleasure’ to experience all this in my area of research.” —Eduardo Zorita, UN IPCC contributing author
Another scientist suggested disbanding the United Nations climate panel altogether. Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, which was ground zero of the Climategate scandal, suggested that the UN IPCC had “run its course.” He complained about its “tendency to politicize climate science” and suggested that it had “perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian, exclusive form of knowledge production.”
Hulme warned, “It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”
Pat Michaels, a climate scientist and IPCC reviewer, commented, “This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn’t questionable practice, this is unethical.”
Yet another UN IPCC reviewer, Vincent Gray, declared in November 2009, “I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.”
Other UN scientists were even more blunt. Will Alexander, professor emeritus at the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, called the UN IPCC
a “worthless carcass” and then–IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri a “disgrace.”
He complained of the IPCC’s “deliberate manipulation to suit political objectives” and “fraudulent science” that “continue[d] to be exposed” and explained, “I was subjected to vilification tactics…. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded…. There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!”
Geologist Don Easterbrook, a professor at Western Washington University, summed up the scandal: “The corruption within the IPCC revealed by the Climategate scandal, the doctoring of data and the refusal to admit mistakes have so severely tainted the IPCC that it is no longer a credible agency.”
Now We Can See the Force of Your Argument
Warmists’ tendency to resort to insults in the climate debate suggests that they may not have scientific evidence and rational arguments to back
up their position. On December 4, 2009, at the height of the Climategate scandal, I appeared on BBC TV—which described me as “one of America’s leading climate change skeptics”—to debate Andrew Watson, professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, whose emails appear in the Climategate files. Watson, bent on defending his colleagues, was the climate activist who called me an asshole on live
television. As CBS News reported, “Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. It didn’t take long before the two got in each other’s face and Watson became increasingly annoyed with Morano’s loud interruptions. He finally lost it by the end when the anchor thanked the participants. ‘What an asshole,’ Watson said.”
His remark prompted an on-air apology to viewers from the BBC for the offensive language. During the live debate, I charged Professor Watson with being in “denial” over the importance of Climategate and noted that “you have to feel sorry for Professor Watson.” I explained that Professor Watson’s “colleague, Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia is saying this is authoritarian science, he is suggesting the IPCC should be disbanded based on what Climategate reveals.”
A clearly agitated Watson, whose university was at the epicenter of the Climategate scandal, blurted out, “Will you shut up just a second!?”
right before dropping the A bomb on me. He later apologized to me via email.
I myself was actually mentioned in one of the Climategate scandal emails. On July 23, 2009, AP reporter Seth Borenstein had emailed one of the Climategate scientists, Penn State professor Michael Mann of hockey stick fame, about a “a paper in JGR [Journal of Geophysical Research] today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly.” Mann wrote back to Borenstein, “The aptly named Marc ‘Morano’ has fallen for it!”
As Breitbart News reported, “Borenstein’s email is hardly a neutral ‘standard step for journalists.’ Borenstein criticizes Marc Morano, a critic of manmade global warming claims, of ‘hyping wildly’ the study that Borenstein was asking for comments on. The email looks as if Borenstein was working
with others involved in Climategate to discredit critics of man-made global warming.”
Associated Press climate reporter Seth Borenstein’s reputation as a foot soldier in the global warming cause was further cemented by the Climategate revelations.
Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning environmental physical chemist from Japan, is another UN IPCC scientist who has turned his back on the UN climate panel. Kiminori declared that global warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…. When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”
Berkeley professor Richard A. Muller presented a video lecture in 2011 on his disgust with the “hide the decline” temperature alterations, which came to light in Climategate, and which we discussed in chapter six. “They are not allowed to do this in science. It isn’t up to our standards,” Muller declared. “As a scientist, I now have a list of scientists whose papers I will not read anymore.”
In November 2009, I was one of the first reporters to publicize the Climategate scandal, after first being alerted to it by a phone call from fellow skeptic Anthony Watts. I devoted my website to the unfolding revelations. The mainstream media’s initial attempts to ignore or downplay Climategate allowed skeptics to report on the reality of the scandal without the filter of the warmist defenders in the media. “My fervent hope is the mainstream media continues to ignore Climategate, as this will ensure the public will continue to receive the most accurate and balanced information about the scandal,” I told Newsweek magazine in December 2009.
The Newsweek profile of me noted, “While on the Hill, Morano was more like a wire service than a spokesman, pumping out scads of e-mails each week, sometimes each day, to reporters covering climate change” adding, “Morano was influential if not [sic] just through sheer relentlessness. With ‘Climategate’—the release last month of thousands of hacked e-mails showing debate about climate change may have been stifled—he is now getting
more attention than ever before.”
Circling the Wagons
When the scandal broke, the global warming establishment—led by the UN, academia, and the media—immediately went into move-along-nothing-to see-here mode. There were several high-profile “investigations” of Climategate that were obviously designed simply to restore credibility to the UN and climate scientists The global warming industry investigated itself and exonerated itself.
The pre-determined goal was to declare that Climategate was much ado about nothing. The investigations were hopelessly compromised—lacking thoroughness and riddled with conflicts of interest. The Hockey Stick Illusion author Andrew Montford analyzed four of the Climategate investigations and found that they were “rushed, cursory and largely unpersuasive.”
Clive Crook, writing for the Atlantic, also slammed the Penn State investigation: “The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with ‘the hockey stick’—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces
that, for ‘lack of credible evidence’, it will not even investigate them…. You think I exaggerate?…In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is
asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no.”
As Crook explained, “The [Penn State] report…says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired
by his peers—so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.”
But the coup de grâce was the report’s conclusion that anyone as respected (and as lucrative for Penn State) as Mann couldn’t possibly be guilty. Penn
State was touting Mann’s cash cow status for the university as some sort of guarantee that he could do no wrong.
As the report explained,
“This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…. Had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions…. Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.”
At the Watts Up with That blog, Willis Eschenbach pointed out the fact that the Penn State investigators had tasked Mann, the man under investigation,
with gathering and presenting the evidence against himself. The university simply exonerated Mann by making sure that “none of the important questions are ever answered.”
Read more in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano
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