ClimateGate 2: It Hits the Fan Again

Last month, it was a huge news story about a global warming skeptic announcing that he agreed that the earth was warming.  Richard Muller broke with his earlier findings and issued a statement that the earth is, indeed, warming (see Huffington Post article here), but Muller's research never addressed the cause of global warming.  That part of the story oddly didn't get emphasized very much.

This month; however, Scandal has once again reared its ugly head with regard to global warming.  It appears that there is a "Part Deux" to ClimateGate from two year ago.  First, this headline on Nov. 22nd from James Delingpole of the UK's The Telegraph (emphasis added):

Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower 'FOIA 2011' (or "thief", as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.

A few days later, the UK's The Daily Mail offered more information: 

Second leak of climate emails: Political giants weigh in on bias, scientists bowing to financial pressure from sponsors

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original 'climategate' emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches. 

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’. 

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.  'They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’

The Daily Mail also linked to a related article about the exaggeration of doomsday predictions:

Climate change fears 'have been exaggerated' and doomsday predictions are overestimates, scientists say 


Apocalyptic predictions about climate change are likely to be wrong, a study says. Dire forecasts by activists who say that carbon dioxide levels will 'double' and cause temperature rises of 10C are 'unlikely'. Instead, the maximum increase is likely to be 2.6C. 

Writing in the journal Science, Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University said he and colleagues studied how changes in carbon dioxide levels during the last ice age affected temperature. It shows that figures used routinely by pressure groups are simply wrong.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s best guess is 3c, with an upper limit of 4.5c.  However, it also says that ‘values substantially higher than 4.5c cannot be excluded’.

The ice age, 21,000 years ago, provided a 'clean' comparison where human activities had no effect on atmospheric levels of CO2. The period was not as cold as previously believed.

I imagine that there are lot of scientists running scared, either of being ostracized by colleagues and academia. or afraid of the power backing this global hysteria.  There is an awful lot of power and money up for grabs.  And, the Obama administration keeps plowing ahead with its green agenda regardless of cost to the American taxpayer and ignorant of failed green policies in other countries, such as Spain.