'Climategate' suggests a conspiracy to commit fraud by a small gang of influential UN panel scientists
S Fred Singer, Singapore Business Times 7 Apr 10;
THE United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the date when all the Himalayan glaciers would melt. But the Himalayan blunder is not a one-off mistake; it is only the latest of a long list of errors that have dogged the IPCC over the past 10 years. And by now, after the 'Climategate' flap of last November, 'Glaciergate' seems to have opened the floodgates with reports on 'Amazongate', 'Natural-disaster-gate', and many more.
In their 2001 report, the IPCC had claimed that the 20th century was 'unusual' and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.
Since then, the litany of IPCC errors continues to grow.
# In mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international centres that publish global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. The CRU action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by the CRU impossible - a clear violation of principles of science.
# In October, at the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Dr Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree-ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 was disguised in IPCC publications. The artful deceit so exposed indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report-4 (AR4) of 2007 contains deceptions rendering its conclusion that global warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) scientifically questionable.
# In November, emails from the CRU were leaked to the public, creating what became known as 'Climategate'. These emails reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions of AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Thus, the IPCC scientific review process has a systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favour of human-induced warming.
# In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported that the Hadley Centre for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data does not support human-caused global warming. Thus the reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.
# In January this year, American researchers Joe D'Aleo and E Michael Smith reported that the US-National Climatic Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their databases in recent years. The dropped stations, many of which continue to make appropriate reports, are generally in colder climates. Thus, all global surface temperatures and temperature trends announced by the three international reporting organisations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude - rendering their announced temperature trends scientifically unreliable.
# On Jan 23 this year, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. The published report upon which this claim was based actually stated: 'We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.'
# In January also, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4's chapter on Asia, stated that the IPCC deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. 'We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.' This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document and not a scientific one.
# More recently, additional reports reveal that the IPCC's claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from science studies but from publications by environmental advocacy groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources - not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.
These events show not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme ideological bias - quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to 'Climategate', which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result. In my opinion, Climategate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; Climategate suggests a conspiracy to commit fraud by a small gang of influential IPCC scientists.
In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders and population control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce 'carbon-free' energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted - most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favoured few.
These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come to fruition. Fortunately for the world economy, these schemes all collapsed at the Copenhagen conference last December. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money.
The 'climate establishment', with a vested interest in maintaining climate scares and fanning fears, is desperately trying to save the IPCC and the AGW myth. A number of 'investigations' have been started, mostly trying to excuse IPCC errors and 'whitewash' the frauds committed. The latest such effort involves national science academies, called on by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But it's too late: the public no longer trusts the UN, the IPCC, and its prophets of doom.
The writer - an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service - is the organiser of the NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and co-author of its reports, 'Nature, not Human Activity, Rules the Climate' (2008) and 'Climate Change'
