Author Archives: DB

Last week I noted that the producers of the BBC’s World Service programme WHYS were complaining that they couldn’t generate any interest in Copenhagen and climate change. Well there’s plenty of interest now, and last night the programme actually had three sceptics on: the great Christopher Booker, Patrick Michaels from the Cato Institute, and Prof Richard Lindzen from MIT (who hung up the phone in despair at the quality of argument when he was compared to, among other things, a slavery denier [new one on me] by a representative from a Kenyan NGO). There were also three believers in MMGW, plus presenter Ros Atkins who was clearly antagonistic towards the sceptics (or deniers as he called them on more than one occasion). (Download podcast here.)

This level of balance appears to have been too much for the warmists because Atkins has had to defend the decision to have the sceptics on. The alarmists are trying to close down the debate again; it is essential that pressure is kept on the BBC to ensure that the sceptical voices we’ve heard on the airwaves over the past couple of days are not just some temporary token gesture.

Update. Forgot to add – the sceptics kicked ass!

Update 2. Great piece by Gerald Warner on the BBC’s coverage of Climategate. (Hat tip George R).

BBC2, 7pm Wed 25 Nov: Can Obama Save the Planet? presented by Justin “Ethical Man” Rowlatt.

We finally got a discussion about the CRU emails on the BBC with Lord Lawson and UEA Professor Robert Watson appearing on the Today programme this morning. Listen here.

I, like Cassandra in the comments, was struck by the little qualifying statements made by Professor Watson:

“These scientists at the University of East Anglia are both honourable and world class. Their data is not being manipulated in any bad way whatsoever… these scientists are not manipulating or hiding anything… UEA work with the British Met Office and they’re absolutely beyond doubt that they have not manipulated the data in any negative sense…”

Depends what you mean by “bad” and “negative”, I guess. Fiddling the code, changing results, deleting emails, claiming to have lost data and threatening to destroy it rather than release it through FOI requests, getting those who disagree removed from prominent positions, refusing to include contradictory research in the IPCC report – just a brief list of the things done by these “honourable and world class” scientists. But not in a bad way.

Here’s a neat little quiz highlighting some of the honourable activities revealed by the emails.

I’m reminded of the words of comedian Dom Irrera:

“When people say to me, “Can I be honest with you?” No, please be as misleading and deceitful as possible, that’s all I’d expect from a lowlife scumbag like you. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

(Update – sorry, didn’t notice that David had already posted on this.)

Update 13.15. Tonight’s edition of Newsnight:

Susan Watts will be bringing us the latest on the story that the e-mail system of one of the world’s leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.

Watts, you may recall, is no stranger to the manipulation of information where climate change is concerned.

[Newsnight also has a film on “controversial” Polish MEP Michal Kaminski. How many BBC reports have there been on this one man? Where are the equivalent investigations into senior European politicians with “controversial” left-wing backgrounds (the new unelected European foreign minister, for example)?]

Update 16.15. Compare and contrast.

From Richard Black’s blog:

Update 2 – 0930 GMT Monday 23 November: We have now re-opened comments on this post. However, legal considerations mean that we will not publish comments quoting from e-mails purporting to be those stolen from the University of East Anglia, nor comments linking to other sites quoting from that material.

From this morning’s Today programme (emphasis added):

When the Sultan of the Gulf state of Oman was overthrown by his son in July 1970, the coup was painted as a family affair. But secret documents obtained by the BBC prove that the British government helped plan the revolt, partly to safeguard its interests there. The papers, which were released by mistake and have now been closed again to the public, are the subject of Radio 4’s Document programme. Mike Thomson reports on how the documents show that ministers ordered British officers seconded to the Sultan’s army to help oust him by force if the coup appeared to be failing.

CRU emails? No way!
State secrets? Meh.

Update 16.30. BBC weatherman Paul Hudson (whose article “What happened to global warming?” caused such a stir) is quite happy to link to the emails on his blog.

Update 18.20. Thanks to Guest in the comments for spotting once again that the BBC WHYS blog has bumped its post on climate change, making my updated link redundant as the earlier one. In its latest version the blog now asks:

So, is it hard to engage people in a debate over what to do about climate change simply because they believe that climate change is a conspiracy?

As anybody who has given more than cursory glance to the emails will know, it’s the people behind climate change alarmism who have been refusing “to engage people in debate”, preferring instead to hide and manipulate data while smearing those with opposing views.

Update 18.40. One more thing – the WHYS blog, like Paul Hudson but not Richard Black, does link to the emails. Rumours that the online editors are all away on a BBC course called “Arse and elbow – how to tell the difference” are unconfirmed at this point.

Via Clive Davis, a quote from Richard Black taken from the BBC’s staff magazine Ariel:

In case you ever want to meet up in the blogosphere, I’m the guy with the target on his back. It’s big, it’s green and it flashes up a message saying “climate sceptics – shoot here”.

Yeah, but the target’s so big now that it’s not much of a sport any more.

It’s about time Black and his fellow BBC environment and science correspondents began asking some challenging questions concerning the machinations and motivations of their dissent-crushing friends within the climate science community. Of course that will be difficult given that all their reputations are collectively staked on the shaky MMGW house of cards staying up.

Tim Blair:

“BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin wants us to feel sorry for his warmy friends”

My contacts at the CRU tell me the e-mails are being taken out of context and insist they are part of the normal hurly-burly of conversations between scientists working on some of the most complicated questions of our times.
They ask how many of us would feel completely comfortable if our own inboxes were emptied out for the world to see.

One small issue with that: most peoples’ inboxes don’t concern the multi-billion dollar restructuring of international economies to counter predicted climate change. Harrabin’s contacts at the CRU are quite literally seeking to change our world, yet they whine about us looking through mere email.

Or as the The Devil’s Kitchen puts it “Ah, diddums…”

From Richard Black’s blog:

Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.

As I pointed out in the previous post, in one of the leaked emails Michael Mann states that Richard Black “does a great job” and indicates his intent to contact the BBC correspondent to find out how an article titled “What happened to global warming?” by Paul Hudson was allowed to appear on the BBC website. Opposing views must be not be heard!

Bishop Hill has more goodies from the emails, or search them youself here.

Thanks to all in the comments for the tips.

Update 12.30. BBC to send 35 staff to cover Copenhagen. Nice quote from Conservative MP Philip Davies:

‘On the subject of climate change, the BBC seems to lose all its critical faculties and it will probably be just a fawning exercise over these environmentalists anyway.

‘It would be nice if one of these 35 people asked some pertinent and critical questions about climate change. But I suspect they will all be subscribers to the extreme environmental agenda.’

I suspect so too. They wouldn’t want to upset their friends on the CRU mailing list.

(Update – the Examiner article linked to below stated that this was the UEA Hadley Climate Research Centre. Hadley is not in the title. The leaked documents are from the UEA’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Hadley is a separate Met Office organisation. Thanks to a very agitated Pete Pisspoor in the comments for pointing that out.
Further update – CRU has provided a lot of the “climate simulations data” for Hadley’s LINK project. It has also ” developed datasets in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office”. Search HadCRU and HadCRUT on Google.)

And now, back to our original programming…

This could get very interesting:

The University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

CRU has confirmed that it has been hacked and it has cancelled all existing passwords. If you see or hear any mention of this on the BBC please point it out in the comments so we can monitor how this story is spun, both by CRU and the BBC.

Update 13.45. Andrew Bolt has been picking through the emails and documents and, if they are all genuine, the information in them is simply astonishing.

There’s a document by CRU’s Professor Phil Jones which shows that he was so concerned by Freedom Of Information requests for raw data that he was contemplating ways to remove key information and reconstruct the data to make it fit the preferred conclusions.
There’s an email from American climate scientist Tom Wigley advising Professor Jones how to manipulate some data to emphasise warming trends.
There’s an email from Jones telling his colleagues to delete incriminatory emails.
There’s another from Jones in which he tells a colleague that he’s used the same “trick” as Michael Mann (Mr Hockey Stick) “to hide the decline”, and in yet another he calls the reported death of a climate sceptic “cheering news”.
There’s an email from Mann himself promising senior CRU staff that they can use the RealClimate website to post articles and he will ensure the censorship of any comments from sceptics challenging what they’ve written.
There’s an email from senior IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth in which he asks, “Where the heck is global warming?…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.”
There’s an email in which CRU staff promise to blackball scientists from the IPCC report whose work doesn’t conform to their alarmist predictions: “keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”

If the BBC’s environment correspondents are too upset to touch the story, perhaps the BBC’s Open Secrets blogger Martin Rosenbaum will do something about it. Deleting data and emails demanded by FOI requests is, after all, illegal.

Update 17.00. The BBC has reported it here. Hat tip to 1327 in the comments who points out, as does Mr Eugenides, that the potentially explosive contents of the emails and documents are not mentioned.

Update 17.30. The Guardian’s report does mention the email contents. There’s also a quote from a very angry sounding Michael Mann: “I’m hoping that the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.”

Update 17.40. Our old friend Jo Abbess responds: “I’ve read a number of them, and there’s nothing untoward in anything. It’s all a hoax to make you think that the Science is unravelling or that the Scientists are misbehaving (aka “lying”).” She adds: “I await put-downs from the Climate Science community after the weekend.” I’m not sure they’ll wait that long to start the “put-downs”, Jo.

Update 18.30. (With a reminder of the health warning until it’s all proved to be kosher) One of the leaked emails from Michael Mann addressing the recent “What happened to global warming? article by the BBC’s Paul Hudson which caused such outrage among the econuts (emphasis added) :

From: Michael Mann
To: Stephen H Schneider
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:00:44 -0400
Cc: Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , trenbert , Michael Oppenheimer

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?

mike

Looks like Richard Black is considered a reliable sort by this bunch. I wonder if they’re in contact with him now, coordinating their response. (Hat tip to a guest in the comments.)

Update 19.00. The email from the IPCC’s Kevin Trenberth (mentioned above @13.45 update – follow link to Andrew Bolt to view) in which he says, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we cant” comes from the same email exchange relating to Paul Hudson’s article. Trenberth seems to be backing Hudson.

Update 19.30. Reminder: “Climate ‘hockey stick’ is revived” by Richard Black.

Update 20.00. Richard Black has a round-up of Copenhagen-related news on his blog, time stamped 18.16 UK time today. No mention of the CRU documents. (Last update this evening from me.)