noworldsystem.com

The link to the data appears to have been posted to a number of climate science websites yesterday by an anonymous hacker or insider going by the name “FOIA,” an apparent allusion to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States. One of the first sites where the 62 MB file was posted was The Air Vent. It was soon picked up by Watts Up With That, Climate Audit and other climate science sites.

The information contained in the leaked emails and documents are as shocking as they are damning of the scientists who have been most vocal about the manmade global warming scare. Some of the excerpts include this email, from one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Phil Jones writing to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist Michael Mann of “Mann’s hockey stick” fame to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. The recent global temperatures show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but Jones ADMITS in this excerpt that he replaced the real global temperatures with Mann’s “hockey-stick” up-slope to fit their climate change viewpoints.:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

In another email from Phil Jones to climate scientist Michael Mann about ousting academics that question the link between human activities and global warming out of any peer-reviewed IPCC reports.:

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

More evidence of the ousting of global warming skeptics is found in this excerpt in which researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal because he seems to be sympathetic to global warming skeptics.:

“Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.< Even this would be difficult."

The scientists at the CRU have been waging a running battle against releasing any information under the Freedom of Information Act. A number of people had been making requests for the release of their data and correspondence – a legitimate target for an FoI, particularly given the large amounts of taxpayers’ money flowing into the CRU, the controversy of the topic and the sizeable impact on public policy that the Unit seeks to have.

These emails reveal the horrendous attitude of the CRU towards these requests behind the scenes, and their furious efforts to defy and even break the FoI Act.

Prof Jones’s colleague, Prof. Keith Briffa – who is a Reader at the CRU – spells out their attitude towards Freedom of Information quite neatly.:

“I have been of the opinion right from the start of these FOI requests, that our private ,
inter-collegial discussion is just that – PRIVATE. Your communication with individual
colleagues was on the same basis as that for any other person and it discredits the IPCC
process not one iota not to reveal the details. On the contrary, submitting to these
“demands” undermines the wider scientific expectation of personal confidentiality . It is
for this reason, and not because we have or have not got anything to hide, that I believe
none of us should submit to these “requests”.”

This is of course absolutely disgraceful behaviour on the part of these academics and their institution. They might have felt this was an imposition or an invasion, and they may have felt that their research should have been out of the grubby grasp of the general public, but the law is clear.

This is a rare insight into the attitude within many public bodies towards transparency, and the refusal to accept the principle of the FoIA is undoubtedly all too common. While the people and the media love FoI for the power it disseminates, those who have lost their privileged status still resent it deeply.

Even more serious than their appalling attitude is the instruction by Prof Jones to his colleagues to delete emails that are apparently subject to an FoI request! Which is illegal. . .

In a January 2nd, 2005 Prof Phil Jones tells colleague Michael Mann in an email that he should delete CRU station data before climate skeptics can get a hold of it via Freedom of Information Act.:

don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it!

Jones just admitted he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre (MM), but that’s not the only evidence of ‘cooking the books’. On May 29th 2008, Prof Jones instructs colleagues to delete emails in a message helpfully titled “IPCC & FOI”:

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? 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 to do likewise.”

AR4 is an IPCC report that Keith Briffa and others at the CRU worked on together, and at least one FoI request on exactly this correspondence had apparently been submitted by a David Holland on May 5th 2008.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 expressly forbids – on pain of criminal conviction – destroying information that has been requested under FoI. As the Information Commissioner puts it:

If information is held when a FOIA request is received, destroying it outside of your normal records management policies will result in a breach of the Act. You must confirm that you hold the information and consider disclosure, subject to any exemption. It will also be a criminal offence to conceal or destroy information if this is done with the intention of preventing disclosure under either FOIA or EIR.

This offence is punishable with a fine of up to £5,000.

Tellingly, another email from Prof Jones later that year shows that UEA’s internal FoI team had evidently become concerned about his secretive actions:

“I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails”

If the FoI team were concerned that Prof Jones might be breaking the law – and even committing a criminal offence – on an area that they are legally responsible for, they should have reported him to the Information Commissioner. Perhaps his flowering relationship with the FoI officer and the Chief Librarian precluded this.

Happily, he’s never tried to become matey with us, so we’re reporting him and his colleagues to the Information Commissioner this afternoon.

In the wake of the damning revelations exposed by these anonymous hackers, the climate change snake oil salesmen Gore and his complaisant entourage of now discredited scientists are in full retreat. Even the corporate media — guilty of peddling the fabrication of man-made climate change for years with the best propaganda money can buy — are desperately scrambling to put the best spin possible on the emerging travesty.

In the above video, Alex Jones examines the startling revelations of the CRU files and spells out what it means for the global elite who have planned to use the ruse to impose crippling carbon taxes and put the finishing touches on their global totalitarian super-state and its accompanying control and slave grid.

Infowars and Prison Planet are now feverishly going through the documents and will post the result in the hours and days ahead. In the meantime, here are a few quotes from the perpetrators:

Kevin Trenberth
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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Phil Jones
I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Your final sentence though about improvements in reviewing and traceability is a bit of a hostage to fortune. The skeptics will try to hang on to something, but I don’t want to give them something clearly tangible.

Mike MacCracken
In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.

Tim Johns
Ironically, the E1-IMAGE scenario runs, although much cooler in the long term of course, are considerably warmer than A1B-AR4 for several decades! Also – relevant to your statement – A1B-AR4 runs show potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C, which I’m sure skeptics would love to see replicated in the real world… (See the attached plot for illustration but please don’t circulate this any further as these are results in progress, not yet shared with other ENSEMBLES partners let alone published).

Christoph Kull
Looks pretty good to me. Only one issue. In our discussion of possible participants in Bern, I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) we concluded that the last two on the list (w/ question marks) would be unwise choices because they are likely to cause conflict than to contribute to concensus [sic] and progress.

Keith Briffa
Mike, I agree very much with the above sentiment. My concern was motivated by the possibility of expressing an impression of more concensus than might actually exist . I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent concensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence. Of course where there are good reasons for the differences in series (such as different seasonal responses or geographic bias) it is equally important not to overstress the discrepancies or suggest contradiction where it does not exist.

Michael E. Mann
The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline. So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates.