This is a story just leaking out, but it’s possible the hacking of the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain might end up being the largest worldwide news event of the year.

If the preliminary indications of the take from this hack – which might actually be an inside job more akin to whistleblowing than a run-of-the-mill smash-and-grab – pan out into the real thing, we really ought to be looking at the end of the global warming movement. Because among the 160 megabytes of data (original raw file in zip format can be found here) blasted out over the internet are e-mails and files from some of the heaviest hitters in the global warming advocacy movement which expose the “science” behind man-made global warming as a complete fraud.

It’s the type of revelation that would appear to be too good to be true, but Hadley CRU head Phil Jones has confirmed that his outfit was indeed hacked and the data dump is real.

Some of the juicier elements coming out of this disclosure are e-mails between prominent scientists within the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) advocacy movement. They prove four patterns of behavior within the top ranks of that movement:

1. Rigging the scientific peer review process in favor of AGW advocacy;
2. Circumventing Freedom Of Information Act laws in Britain;
3. Fudging inconvenient data in an effort to support AGW as a viable theory; and
4. Engaging in efforts to mislead and intimidate scientific and environmental journalists.

Here’s a small sample of the take:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

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. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH [northern hemisphere] land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

This first e-mail between Jones, Michael Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn, all of whom have participated in generating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports purporting to establish a factual basis for man-made global warming theory, contains a good bit of scientific gobbledygook. But two phrases stand out -”Mike’s nature trick” and “hide the decline.” Those refer to Mann, who was the originator of the infamous Hockey Stick Graph which Al Gore used in his propaganda film of a few years back, and indicate that Mann’s work is the product of lies and obfuscations. Damning stuff, indeed.

Another:

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

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.***

Kevin Trenberth is another IPCC researcher and in fact one of the most strident of the AGW advocates in fingering fossil fuels as a culprit in climate change. He also has blown the horn about hurricanes supposedly rising in severity and frequency as a result of global warning; that hasn’t occurred. And in this e-mail he basically throws in the towel and admits his and his cohorts’ computer models predicting warming are trash.

The recipients of the e-mail are an august bunch. Schneider, a former global-cooling prophet, was once quoted in Discover Magazine as saying:

“So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Allen is another IPCC contributor and AGW advocate, as is Stott. Santer was one of the original authors of the 1995 IPCC study “establishing” global warming as a phenomenon; he was accused of doctoring the final language in that study to delete statements in previous drafts so as to “deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.” He has since accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to study human effects on global warming. Wigley has been quoted as saying in touting AGW that “the human-induced changes that are expected over the next 100 years are much, much greater than any changes that societies experienced in the past.” Karl heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center and another AGW mouthpiece. Schmidt is a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies along with Hansen, who heads GISS – a controversy erupted surrounding Hansen, a confidant of Al Gore’s, when it was found that his outfit had falsified temperature data last October in an effort to show that the 10-year trend toward global cooling had reportedly ended. Oppenheimer is best known for his palling around with Leonardo DiCaprio and making propaganda TV programs on global warming with Tom Brokaw.

Want another e-mail? How about this one:

From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: LAND vs OCEAN
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:36:15 -0700

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

See attached note.

Comments?

Tom

In case you’re not familiar with the Urban Heat Island effect, it essentially describes the phenomenon that cities full of pavement, cars, industry and all other manners of modern convenience tend to be warmer than wilderness, and the more urbanized an area is the more likely that thermometers making temperature readings will show a warming trend over time. Wigley here is basically conceding the AGW position has major problems in this regard.

Another:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

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.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

It might be mentioned that since the Hadley CRU is a government-funded institution, it is subject to the British Freedom Of Information Act and to destroy its documents and correspondence is a crime. “Keith” in this case is Keith Briffa, who with Jones works at Hadley.

More:

From: Tom Wigley [...]
To: Phil Jones [...]
Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
Cc: Ben Santer [...]
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that theland also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.
Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH—just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.
The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note – from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not)—but not really enough.
So … why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.)
This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I’d appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have.
Tom.

Obviously there’s a good deal of jargon here, but it’s clear Wigley is talking about massaging his data to make a prettier picture.

There is a great deal more, and it’s all very damaging. The reaction has been strikingly similar to that of ACORN after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles aired evidence of criminal conspiracies within its offices – castigate the whistle-blower. Mann pretty much channels Bertha Lewis:

“I’m not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained e-mails,” says Mann. “However, their theft constitutes serious criminal activity. I’m hoping that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.” Jones declined to comment on the matter.

With less than three weeks to go until the start of the United Nations’ climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Mann doubts that the timing of the attack is a coincidence. “The deniers will probably do anything they can to distract the public from the reality of the problem [of climate change], and the threat that it poses,” he says. “Cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes, stolen from private e-mails, is the best they’ve got.”

Meanwhile, Trenberth and Schmidt are quoted basically saying that while the material is genuine, the skeptics ain’t-got-nuttin-on-us. The global warming mouthpiece site RealClimate.org, to which several of these individuals are contributors, exults in the disclosure by declaiming:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

One wonders whether the quote above represents a catalog of AGW skeptic criticisms per se, or if it really means what it says – it’s interesting that none of the above were broken open by this disclosure. If there is any indication of the latter and this thing plays out along the lines of the O’Keefe/Giles/ACORN exposes, the RealClimate gang might well regret that paragraph.

So – what’s the ultimate effect of all this? Well, if the credibility of the AGW advocates gets trashed to such an extent as a result of this that it affects public policy, it’s the end of the rationale for a whole host of awful initiatives and political positions which have been destructive to America’s economy. And if those were ever to melt away, this nation would then have the ability and motivation to use its staggering domestic energy reserves to create an economic groundswell which lifts us out of this recession and eliminates the vast majority of our trade deficit.

The chance alone that these disclosures might allow the scales to fall from the eyes of those people of good will who have been suckered by global warming propaganda and create a consensus in favor of rational, sensible economic and energy policies is one worth getting excited about. Particularly in this environment of non-stop bad news. If the global warming movement is to go the way of ACORN, it’s a victory over tyranny. And that’s worth celebrating this weekend.

Cross-posted at TheHayride.com