The above three men are, left to right, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa (1952-2017), and Phil Jones. All three worked in or for the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Norwich, England when in 2009 there was a major leak of internal emails, a scandal now referred to as “Climategate”. Over the years, by means of whitewash and lack of media coverage, the subject of Climategate has been minimized if not forgotten, and the people at its center exonerated.
I do not exonerate them.
Year’s ago, perhaps 2010 or so, I stumbled into a Montana blog and shot off my mouth, claiming that Climate Change was a real thing backed by real science. I had no idea about that, and was just trusting of news and science. I was hammered by blog writers and commenters. I had no idea that Climate Change was so controversial. I did not change my mind as, you know, people don’t change their minds easily or even ever. But I was troubled by the response I had gotten, and especially by my ignorance on the topic. I needed to get up to speed, and some time later, having moved to Colorado (that’s how I judge time frame – where I lived at the time), I decided to dive in. I got hold of and read the Climategate emails.
Climategate was a big deal. It shook their world at Climate Research Unit (CRU). It took them months and years of whitewash committee hearings and public testimony on behalf of the miscreants to get the air cleared and get back to business as usual, lying about the state of climate on our planet. But here is my take on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee hearings headed by Phil Willis; The Science Assessment Panel (Lord Oxburgh), and the Penn State hearings where Graham Spanier, who also used his sway to work on behalf of Jerry McClusky, was God in a Machine for Michael Mann, lifting him to safety from snapping dogs. It was liars making sure other liars didn’t get caught.
Climate change, Climategate, and all the people behind the scenes who manage these affairs are liars, some of the first order, liars with power.
In the climate alarmist world, everyone has everyone’s back. You might say that is a good thing, collegial and all. But when such collegiality is used to defend bad work and attack anyone who does not agree with them, it is groupthink/pseudoscience, even science fraud. Behind Climategate we found criminal behavior, ignoring Freedom of Information Laws, lying about publicly funded science, destruction of careers, forced resignations without cause, and character assassination that should lead to civil penalties for libel, but which does not.
What I learned in and through Climategate was that there are powerful people who have the backs of Michael Mann, the late Keith Briffa, and Phil Jones and others. They would not be allowed to fail in their unstated objectives or get caught doing their dirt on others – that is, getting people fired, preventing honest papers from being published, perverting the peer review system so that they are just stroking one another, and making a joke of the British Freedom of Information Act. (I suffer no illusions about FOI anywhere – such laws are like our supposed freedom of speech: They only work to the extent that we make them work.)
David Deming had recently created a temperature reconstruction for the last 150 years, based on boreholes in North America. In his study he concluded that North America had warmed somewhat in the period since 1850, but had little to say beyond that. This was good, solid science but not the stuff of newspaper headlines. His findings were, however, considered highly important in climate science circles. With the expectation that temperatures were being driven upward by carbon dioxide emissions, the Deming study seemed like good evidence to support the hypothesis. Because of this interest, Deming was able to get his work published in one of the world’s most important journals, Science. And with a story line of rising temperatures published in such a prestigious publication, he also attracted the notice some of the most influential people in the global warming industry, who thought they saw in Deming a valuable new recruit to the cause. Deming explained what happened in a later article:
With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. The major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
We later learn that the person who emailed Deming was Jonathon Overpeck of the University of Arizona. Overpeck is quoted much later in the book weakly defending himself for having gone ‘out of school’ with Deming (whom he calls ‘Deeming’):
“I have no memory of emailing [Deming]. nor any record of doing so (I need to do an exhaustive search I guess), not any memory of him [from that] period. I assume that it is possible that I emailed … him long ago, and that he’s taking the quote out of context, since [I] know I would never had said what he’s saying I would have, at least in the context he’s implying.”
What to make of that statement? A lot, actually. First, note the weasel-wording … I have no memory … record … must do exhaustive search …it is possible that I emailed … him long ago … out of context … I would never have said … at least in the context…
How to interpret those words? Easy. He’s on bended knee. He sent the email, knows he did it, knows he screwed up. Insiders then and now were not allowed to divulge secret strategies to outsiders. Moreover, he’s afraid. Of what? The people in CRU like Mann, Briffa and Jones, have power in the same sense that kids who get elected to high school class president or student body offices do … real power operates through them, and that is the administration of the school. The kids appear to be in charge but are being watched closely. And this is what Overpeck fears … the power behind Mann, Briffa and Jones. His screwup could be the end of his career. As I see it, he is still on probation.
I am quoting below A.W. Monford from page 30 of his book, The Hockey Stick Illusion, as I thought he put it very succinctly why the power behind Mann, Briffa and Jones and all the others needed a hockey stick. One of the objectives of the three was to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” (Odd they don’t mention the Minoan and Roman Warm periods before Medieval, as the those periods were even warmer. See graph above.) The MWP was a warm time that existed from approximately 900 to 1300 AD. But the focus of Mann’s Hockey Stick paper, referred to as MBH98, was on the MWP. Much of the book follows Steve McIntyre literally bird dogging Mann to get him to release his data and computer code, which I do not think he has done to this day. Part of their strategy was to write off the MWP has a mere regional phenomenon. This from Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion:
There was one major problem with the case for the Medieval Warm Period having been an insignificant regional phenomenon though. This was the paucity of hard data to support the case – the “limited available evidence” [referred to elsewhere in Monford’s book]. It was simple for critics to point out that any conclusions drawn from … it would have to be highly speculative at best. Climate science wanted big funding and big political action and that was going to require definitive evidence. In order to strengthen the arguments for the current warming being unprecedented, there was going to have to be a major study, presenting unimpeachable evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was a chimera.
See AlsoYour Best Friends Buddy Cool Visit Title VHSSong 174B: “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” Part Two, “It Takes Two” – A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs – PodcastMy dear, my darling one - CorralineSageGutfeld! : FOXNEWSW : May 22, 2024 12:00am-1:00am PDT : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet ArchiveEnter the Hockey Stick.
Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick was formulated in 1998-99, and by 2005 the Stick had been demolished by skeptics. That’s another story, one I have devoted much of my time to understanding, and too much for a lonely blog post (as, likely, this post). However, with the destruction of the Stick, Mann, is like a gunman hiding behind a rock while reloading, emerged with a fresh volley of purely made-up-on-the-spot science. This from Penn State News [Mann was employed by Penn State at one time] as quoted in Whatsupwiththat:
… a 2009 piece from Penn State News quoting Mann as follows: “These terms can be misleading,” said Mann. “Though the Medieval period appears modestly warmer globally in comparison with the later centuries of the Little Ice Age, some key regions were in fact colder. For this reason, we prefer to use ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ to underscore that, while there were significant climate anomalies at the time, they were highly variable from region to region.”
I note the graph above might be had to read and so offer a friendlier version below.
A scientist (a real one) named Craig Idso was crucial in heading off the CRU in the next phase of the debate, that the MWP was a regional phenomenon, nothing more. Again from WUWT,
Good try. The effort to diminish the MWP as merely “regional” has inspired several organizations and individuals in response to compile lists of research papers covering all areas of the world and reconstructing temperatures from the approximate MWP years of 1000 to 1250. One of the mostcomprehensive collections I am aware ofhas been compiled by Craig Idso at the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Idso has listed well over 100 studies from literally every corner of the world, organized under categories that include Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Europe, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Oceans, and South America. As with the Hockey Stick graph, the idea that the MWP was merely “regional” has been thoroughly demolished.
The big picture is far more controlled by the powers that are behind Mann and colleagues at CRU. We may know that, thanks in large part to Canadian mining consultant Steve McIntyre and his colleague in the Hockey Stick affair, Canadian economist Ross McKittrick.* They demolished the hockey stick. It is a relic. But it still pops up as the monkey in a Whackamole game in sloppy research on the climate alarmist side. Further, I just came across a blog called Skeptical Science, run by (originally) an Aussie named John Cook. It is now a group effort. Here’s a screen shot on the Medieval Warm Period, the left taken from Climate the Movie:
Keep in mind that Climate Skeptics have been robbed of the title “Scientists” even as many are very good ones (I am a retired CPA, not a scientist), and are now called “Deniers.” The group now seizing on the term “Scientists” are more like a hive. If you have any kind of public profile and say something true, like the Medieval Warm Period (along with Minoan and Roman periods) being warmer than today, first you will feel a sharp sting, then another, and finally you’ll be swinging wildly at all of the bees that have emerged from the most unlikely places to attack you. Steve McIntyre, apparently immune to bee stings, could not get the computer code behind MBH98 out of Mann, and so went to the agency that financed him, the National Science Foundation. There, he was told, that use of grant money from the US taxpayer still left Mann with private property. He was not obliged to share it. As McIntyre noted, the NSF should advise the American public about this use of tax dollars. NSF acting like this a signal about how high this corruption has creeped.
Given that MBH98 is and was not accepted science outside the hive, you’d think agencies with power, such as NSF, if credible, would back independent research to try to disprove it, the essence of science (according to Karl Popper, at least). But we do not have science anymore, not in that sense, the sense of cooperation and sharing of data and respectful arguing of results. That has been taken from us, at least in climatology, by CRU. Anyway, as I see it, the Skeptical Science quote above about MWP is a made-up fact. There is far too much counterevidence contradicting it, including the ice core research from Greenland and Antarctica, and all of the historical research complied by Craig Idso. But to be a climate alarmist, in essence a fake scientist, is to have carte blanche to say anything you please. No worries. Powerful people have your back.
The longer explanation of the effects of CO2 rely heavily on Svante Arrhenius, who indeed was a pioneer in climate science, though it was not his chosen calling. He was not great at predicting, as in saying the United States would run out of oil in 1953, but that is to be forgiven, as no one can predict the future. In that sense, he’s merely an earlier version of Paul Erlich.
But his work on CO2 and water vapor and their effects as greenhouse gases was quite prescient. Scientists have carried it forward … we now know that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will not have nearly the catastrophic effects as once thought, as in putting a second coat of red paint on an already-red barn does not make it redder. That’s not the best example, and certainly not original with me, but the point is that CO2 is not a control knob. It is more like a gas heater on a cold day, having some effect but not warming the entire neighborhood. It is essentially benign, but was chosen as arch villain, as a “pollutant” with purpose: To attack fossil fuels, which are our reason for warmth, prosperity, abundance and growth. Climate alarmism is an attack on humanity, and the forces behind it, hidden as always, are sincere, malevolent, and extremely dangerous. They want us gone. Bill Gates, hardly any kind of genius in my view, is first and foremost an eugenicist. He wants us gone. He’s also delusional – he thinks he should get to stay.
The following is from The Inconvenient Skeptic by John Kehr, starting at page 250. Before offering his words, two points, one his cv which I could not locate but was offered to me by a commenter, Tim Groves, in March of 2023. In it, he offers that obliquity (axial tilt), precession and orbital eccentricity have more effect on our climate than CO2. But Kehr’s work that I want to note follows Tim’s comment on cv.
Hi Mark!
I believe that John H. Kehr, who authored The Inconvenient Skeptic, is the same John Kehr who has the following Linkedin account.
My belief is based on the portrait photo, as I saw other photos of John about a decade ago and this matches my memory, and on John’s career.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-kehr-a079455a/
He works in software development/engineering and has the kind of disciplined analytical mind that enjoys solving problems involving lots of data, and that abhors the thought of twisting the data to support foregone conclusions.
In this respect, John reminds me of Tony Heller, who runs the blog Real Climate Science, and is another software guy who can write code that works perfectly and fixes problems that make lesser nerds wince.
I’m impressed by the data that indicates that the Earth’s average temperature (which is itself an abstract measure, but is indicative of the amount of heat in the system at a said time) wobbles up and down on a scale of centuries but that it shows consistent cooling for the last 4,000 years at least when measured on a millennial scale.
And I’m intrigued that this apparent cooling is correlated rather neatly with the decline in the Earth’s axial tilt or obliquity. Today, according to NASA, the Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. But this tilt changes. During a cycle that averages about 40,000 years, the tilt of the axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees.
Based on that rough data, the tilt varies by 2.4 degrees over a 40,000 year cycle, going up for 20,000 years and then down for the next 20,000 years, and we are currently 1 degree (approx. 40%) below the top and have another 1.4 degrees until we hit bottom. So, off the top of my head and counting on my fingers, and certainly inaccurate at best, we are 40% of the way through a 20,000-year drop, so we were at the top (maximum obliquity) about 8,000 years ago.
And amazingly, about 8,000 years ago was the peak of the Holocene optimum.
Obviously, there are other orbital forcing factors at work, such as the precession of the axis and the eccentricity of the orbit, but it seems clear that the change in obliquity is making itself felt over a millennial timescale. And it must be doing that by altering the distribution of insolation at different latitudes, even as the total insolation reaching the Earth over the course of a year remains constant.
The polar circumference of the Earth, which represents the distance around the Earth when measured along a line passing through the poles, is approximately 40,008 kilometers (24,860 miles).Accordingly, the distance covered by one degree of latitude on the Earth’s surface is approximately 111 kilometers (69 miles). So the difference between how far north and the Sun reaches at the solstices (the latitude of the tropics) at maximum obliquity and minimum obliquity is 111 km x 2.4(º) = 266.4 km (approximately, of course).
This difference also changes the size of the arctic and Antarctic circles as well as the amount of insolation received everywhere on the Earth’s surface. In particular, it affects the total amount of insolation received each year in the mid-high attitudes where even small changes in the height of the sun at midday in summer can result in substantial differences in rate of snow melting, affecting ice caps, glaciers and the timing of seasonal snow-melting, which affect the Earth’s albedo and influence the amount of sunlight reflected from the surface.
I have an imaginative grasp of this sort of thing, and I can run models in my head using rough calculations—but it is basically guesswork and I don’t claim it is correct. However, John Kehr appears to have studied the available data and crunched the numbers using rigorous maths and statistics, and produced something much more substantial than anything I could manage.
Is it an accurate account on how the earth’s climate changes over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years? I don’t know, but as Mark says, John used GISP data, which is generally considered to be accurate and uncorrupted. And John doesn’t seem to have had any axe to grind, but only to try to sketch out what the data might be indicating.
Now follows Kehr’s words on OLR, or Outgoing Long Radiation, which I would suspect goes back to the advent of weather satellites, as he mentions the year 1979.
Since 1979, sciences has had the capability to measure the amount of energy that is leaving the Earth. It is called the Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR). This infra-red energy is how the Earth loses energy to space. It is possible to see how OLR has responded to the temperature change that has taken place over the past 30 years. It should be no surprise that the amount of energy escaping the earth is increased with the temperature. That is the most basic rule of radiative energy.
A 0.2°C change in temperature resulted in a two W/m2 increase in the amount of energy that the Earth is losing. That energy is simply gone forever. Any additional increase in temperature will result in even more energy being lost to space. There is no way that can be avoided.
If I compare the increasing OLR for the IPCC projection that the Earth will warm up 3°C for a doubling of CO2 it is possible to plot out the projected increase in OLR that will result as the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases. Remember that the “forcing” for a doubling of CO2 is 3.7 W/m2. I am even going to base that 3.7 W/m2 is being achieved at 600 ppm which is a doubling from 300 ppm, but base the increase of OLR as from the modern-day. That gives the theory of global warming a 100-year head start. My projection for future CO2 level at 600 ppm in 2100 is pretty much in line with predictions.
The result is that the “forcing” of CO2 is 3.7 W/m2. The Earth would be warmer by 3°C according to the Theory of Global Warming, but the problem is the Earth would then be losing 7.5 W/m2 than it does today. The earth would be losing more than twice the energy to space than the “forcing” effect of CO2. That ratio increases the more the Earth warms up. Warming up the Earth will always ensure that it will cool down in the future.
In essence, Kehr is saying that the planet compensates for warming and cooling, and so get on with your lives.
We have covered the Medieval Warm Period, and the need for climate alarmists to get rid of it. We have also covered CO2 and its relative unimportance in our climate. What I wish to accomplish before closing out this long post is to paint a portrait of Michael Mann, and to expose the Climate Alarmist movement for what it is, an attack on humanity.
I’ve read a lot about Mann in my past years, and seen him at his best and worst. At his best, he is sitting calmly in a DC court room as a jury inexplicably awards him a $1 million award for being libeled even as during the trial he could not show that he had even been damaged! But that’s Mann, surrounded by people who have his back. We cannot penetrate that circle and expose him because the climate alarmist movement is a big hive, and none can get close to him. By the way, with the DC trial (Mann v Steyn), I suspect I witnessed a stage play. Was Mark Steyn part of it? I don’t know, but have suspicions.
That’s his best side, and not someone in any sense likeable. Something I have intuited about him, however, contributes to his darker side. He need to be the smartest guy in the room. As long as you defer to him in that manner, he is your colleague. If someone comes along genuinely smarter than him, he is unhinged. He attacks, viciously.
Watch his eyes as Dr. Judith Curry interrupts his lie fest. He’s not used to being contradicted.
Dr. Curry was an adjunct professor at Penn State for a time, and is a smart scientist, once part of the alarmist side of it, but smart enough to switch. She must have done something to Mann to set him off, but I do not know what. It could be something as small as seen in the above video, setting him straight in public.
Enraged, Mann viciously attacked Curry. The following is from a Mark Steyn post, “Hockey Stick Warfare” in which he highlights Amy K. Mitchell reporting on the proceedings of the Mann v Steyn libel case. Here’s Curry:
Dr. Judith Curry:Michael Mann knew who I was. My name appeared in one of the ClimateGate emails that Mann sent. He knew who I was. I mean, when this story was changed or altered to portray me as a graduate student, to my mind, the implication that I was, you know, just a woman sleeping my way to the top. And if you’re a professional woman, this is about the worst thing that anyone can say about you. It discredits your accomplishments and it gives people permission to ignore you.
Defense Counsel:Dr. Curry, did you ever get any of your tenured faculty positions or department chairs or awards or publications or anything else because you slept with somebody?
Dr. Judith Curry:No.
Here are Mitchell’s opening words from that post, which serve now as my closing words, as I cannot do better.
There was a reason that Dante consigned hypocrites to one of the deepest, darkest reaches of hell in theInferno. Hypocrites and hypocrisy writ large have, throughout history, caused more damage than almost all others. They believe they have carte blanche to do or say whatever they want — for fame, money, power, name the vice — but those same rules don’t apply to their own lives. History has tried to educate the present with the thousands upon thousands of essays, books, and profiles dedicated to the subject, but those who have the most to gain ignore the wise counsel and advice of the past.
___________________________
*As one who is aware of Freemasons among us and the strict secrecy in which they operate, I am always at a loss to comment without qualifiers as “it appears…”. They use hand signals and magical numbers (magical to them – they appear to be very superstitious). Two of their most used numerical signals are 11 and 33. I do not know why. I just know when I see them in use. The letter “M” is the 13th of the alphabet, and the initials “MM” could be interpreted as 1313, easily made into 1133. I could not help but notice as Mann, who got his PhD at age 33, has the MM signal, but also noted that his two fiercest critics were McIntyre and McKittrick, MM again. Are the criminals here covering their bases, representing both sides of the argument? Don’t know, of course. It would not be the first time.
