Starting in 2003 two mild-mannered Canadians, retired engineer Stephen McIntyre and University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, began making noises about serious problems with the by-then iconic hockey stick graph. The dispute between McIntyre, McKitrick (M/M as they became known in the shorthand of the climate science world) and the hockey team was highly technical, involving advanced methods of data selection and statistical analysis that are almost impossible for a layperson to follow. But one key point was access to the original raw data and complete computer codes that Mann and CRU had used, rather than the adjusted data reported in their final studies.

To extend the sports equipment simile, Mann and the hockey team responded with the scientific equivalent of high-sticking. It was McIntyre's requests for raw data and computer codes that prompted the numerous emails from Jones and other CRU people about "hiding" behind technicalities to refuse freedom of information requests or even destroying data, codes, and emails to stymie McIntyre. Prior to this time, most of the complaints about outsiders in the leaked emails dealt with such well known skeptics as the University of Virginia's Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer, MIT's Richard Lindzen, and journal editors who didn't toe the line. After 2003 the CRU crew became obsessed with McIntyre above all others. He appears in 105 of the emails by name (in some others, he's referred to as "a certain Canadian"), usually with a tone of resentment and contempt.

McIntyre is not a climate-science insider, with peer-reviewed articles in journals that the hockey team firmly controlled. He's an amateur with mathematical chops, with a serious track record for spotting statistical funny business. McIntyre, who spent decades in mineral exploration, was involved in exposing the Bre‑X fraud in Canada several years ago. Bre‑X was a gold mining company promising fat profits on a new proprietary technology for ore deposits in Borneo; McIntyre smelled a rat and demanded the raw data. Bre‑X collapsed shortly after. And McIntyre scored a major hit against NASA's chief climate alarmist James Hansen, discovering significant errors of overestimation in Hansen's temperature reconstruction of the 20th century. (NASA's Goddard Institute website publicly thanked McIntyre, no doubt through gritted cyber teeth, for pointing out their error.) The hockey stickers' obsession with McIntyre seems out of proportion if there was nothing amiss in their work.

McIntyre and McKitrick may have made mistakes in their critique of the hockey stick--the charges and countercharges are difficult for nonspecialists to sort out--but they were sufficiently persuasive that the National Academy of Sciences appointed an expert review panel to look into the dispute. The NAS reported its findings in 2006, and the language was sufficiently hedged in diplomatic equivocations that Mann and the media claimed the hockey stick had been vindicated. But a close reading shows that the NAS report devastated the hockey stick. While the NAS said the hockey stick reconstruction was a "plausible" depiction of 20th-century warming, the report went on to state clearly that

...substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium." [Emphasis added.]

One of the NAS committee members, physicist Kurt Cuffey of the University of California, was more direct in remarks to Science magazine: "The IPCC used [the hockey stick] as a visual prominently in the [2001] report. I think that sent a very misleading message about how resolved this part of the scientific research was." Mann's hockey stick, a centerpiece of the 2001 IPCC report, did not appear in the 2007 IPCC report.

The NAS report, it should be added, included an implicit rebuke of Mann and his colleagues for their reluctance to share their data with other researchers:

The committee recognizes that access to research data is a complicated, discipline-dependent issue, and that access to computer models and methods is especially challenging because intellectual property rights must be considered. Our view is that all research benefits from full and open access to published datasets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory. Peers should have access to the information needed to reproduce published results, so that increased confidence in the outcome of the study can be generated inside and outside the scientific community.

Despite this criticism and rebuke from the NAS, the Climate Research Unit hockey team continued refusing right up to this month to share its raw data and computer codes with McIntyre and McKitrick or anyone else.

Mann continued to insist that the medieval warm period was overestimated, and he keeps on producing more new hockey sticks than the NHL (he has another one out this week in Science magazine). Some of the egregious emails in the stash include suggestions that everyone delete emails related to their work on the IPCC process to shield them from FOIA requests (possibly illegal) and, according to one of Jones's emails, actually destroying the raw data in the face of a successful FOIA requisition. Jones writes to Mann in one 2005 message: "Don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites--you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Jones now claims no emails were deleted, but he'll need to explain his December 3, 2008, message to Ben Santer--a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--about a new FOIA request from McIntyre: "I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I've written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little--if anything at all."

Under the pressure of Climategate, the CRU has finally agreed to release its raw data and computer codes. But now we learn that some of the raw data have been lost, and while Jones should be asked blunt questions about whether he made good on his threats to delete data, it is possible that the data were lost through sheer sloppiness.

The most devastating document in the CRUtape letters may be not the egregious emails that have drawn most of the public attention but the detailed notes of a CRU programmer, Ian "Harry" Harris, assigned the task of sorting out the handling of the raw data and computer files.

The HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, over 100,000 words long, paints a picture of haphazard data handling that would get almost any private sector researcher fired. Among the many damning items included in Harris's narrative are more instances of "hiding the decline" such as "Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid the decline)" and "Apply a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!" Worse are Harris's notes of improperly coded data (or data without codes at all), computer subroutines that don't work, and near complete chaos: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. .  .  . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. .  .  . Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!! .  .  . " On and on goes Harris's catalogue of software bugs and data horrors. Finally, this: "OH F-- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."

No drug company could get through the FDA approval process with data handling this slapdash, yet the climate policy process contemplates trillions of dollars in costs to economies around the world based partially on this incompetent work.

...a close reading of the entire email archive allows some distinctions to be drawn among the CRU circle. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore seem indisputably to be the bad actors (it was Santer who said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" skeptic Pat Michaels). Others in their circle, such as Keith Briffa, Tom Wigley, and Mike Hulme, appear much more scrupulous and restrained about handling the data, uncertainties, and conclusions they put into print. Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and key IPCC contributor, comes out somewhere in the middle, writing recently, for example, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment [since 1998], and it is a travesty that we can't." But Jones also suggests in one email that he and Trenberth will help keep contrarian climate research out of the IPCC process "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA's James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now...

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s--as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world's energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so.

Once again, the el Niño and la Niña effects are plainly visible in the 2007 peak and 2008 trough respectively. Once again, the volatility in the satellite records is greater than that in the CRU terrestrial record. And, most interesting of all in the context of the Climategate revelations, the rate of cooling in the CRU record is equivalent to just 0.9 C° (1.6 F°) per century, while the cooling rate shown by the satellites is substantially greater, at 1.2 C° (2.2 F°) per century. To show how significant this cooling is, the rate of warming across the whole of the past 100 years (from 1906 to 2006) was just 0.6 C° - or about half of the cooling rate observed by the satellites for very nearly a whole decade.

At a 2009 hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives on Capitol Hill, Representative Joe Barton (R: TX), former chairman and now ranking Minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked Mr. Tom Karl, the director of the US National Climatic Data Center, to state whether or not global temperatures had been falling for seven full years. Mr. Karl – one of the Team whose emails to one another have now become public – flannelled and refused to answer the question. Here is the graph of the NCDC monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies since the turn of the millennium. For some reason, Mr. Karl was not willing to admit this –

(Graph displayed here)

The temperature dataset published by the National Climatic Data Center shows that the world cooled at a rate equivalent to 1.4 Fº/century. By contrast, during the 20th century the world warmed by 1.3 Fº.

Until the SPPI began producing its Monthly CO2 Reports, which included temperature graphs showing the startling discrepancy between what the UN’s climate panel had predicted and what the real-world data showed, very few knew that global temperatures had not risen for 15 years and had been on a falling trend for 9 years. The scientists were deliberately not telling anyone.

Instead, they were carefully presenting the data in such a way as to suggest that the rate of warming was itself increasing –

The 2007 report of the UN’s climate panel, cited with approval in a science lecture by Railroad Engineer Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel’s science working group, and also about to be cited with approval in a “Technical Support Document” in justification of the Environment Protection Agency’s bizarre finding that CO2 and five other gases are jointly or severally “dangerous” in terms of the US Clean Air Act, contains the above graph purporting to show that the rate at which the world is warming is inexorably increasing.

The UN’s graph is an egregious instance of the endpoint fallacy, a dishonest abuse of statistics by which false trends are demonstrated by careful selection of endpoints or (in the present instance) startpoints when evaluating data trends.

It beggars belief that an official intergovernmental panel, funded by taxpayers but unfortunately staffed by the very conspirators whose antics have now been exposed by the whistleblower at East Anglia, could ever have put out a headline graph of such staggering dishonesty.

The lead author of the UN document was Susan Solomon, one of those mentioned in the revelatory emails from East Anglia as being closely involved with “the Team” in the conspiracy to fool the world’s naive and untutored politicians and environmental journalists into believing the Team’s story-line that temperatures that are falling are really rising at an unprecedented rate, on the ground that our emissions of CO2 are to blame.

Removal of Railroad Engineer Pachauri’s false trend-lines from the UN’s bogus graph reveals the true position –  (Graph here)

The world warmed at the same rate from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 as it did from 1975-1998, as the three parallel magenta trend-lines demonstrate.

The earlier two periods occurred before humankind can possibly have had any significant influence on temperature.

Therefore there is no anthropogenic signal in the global temperature record, and no scientific basis whatsoever for the assertion by the UN’s climate panel that the warming rate is accelerating. The UN’s graph is merely a pictorial lie, deliberately intended to deceive. And the lie continues to be paraded every time Railroad Engineer Pachauri gives one of his rambling, out-of-his-depth lectures. It is also paraded in the Technical Support Document by which the US Environmental Protection Agency purports to justify its proposal to treat carbon dioxide as though it were a pollutant rather than a harmless trace gas absolutely essential to all life on Earth and currently – compared with former eras – in somewhat short supply in the atmosphere.

To demonstrate why the endpoint fallacy is a shoddy statistical abuse that no reputable scientific body would ever depend upon, we can use the same global temperature data as the UN itself to deliver a result precisely the opposite of that which the UN’s climate panel tries to draw.

We use the same temperature data as the UN, but we carefully choose different startpoints for our temperature trend-lines: 1993 (top left), 1997 (top right), 2001 (bottom left), and 2005 (bottom right), and then plot the least-squares linear-regression trend on the underlying data –  (Graphs here)

If we begin in 1993 (top left) and advance the start-date for the global temperature data successively by 4 years at a time, the UN’s own data show the world heading for an Ice Age. 26

Using the same data as the UN’s climate panel, we reach a diametrically opposite (and equally unjustifiable) conclusion, proving the UN’s shameful abuse of statistical method.

Now that we have demonstrated the unwillingness of the National Climatic Data Center, in the person of its Director, to provide a straight and honest answer to an official committee of the US Congress, and the unwillingness of the official body charged with investigating “global warming” to use statistics honestly and competently, we now turn to the parallel dishonesty that is evident in the compilation of the closely-linked NASA GISS global-temperature dataset.

As Anthony Watts has pointed out in his masterly survey of temperature monitoring stations in the United States, many stations are sited at airports, by tarmac roads, next to buildings, close to air-conditioning heat-vents, by local authorities’ trash-fires, and in industrial areas that were once rural.

This distorts the readings from the stations, causing them to record warming that comes not from greenhouse gases but only from local industrialization next to the measuring instruments.

When Mr. Watts first began to point out these defects in how temperature is measured, and began to attract publicity for his work via his admirable website, www.wattsupwiththat.com, the first reaction of the scientists in charge of the network of US temperature stations that he has surveyed was to remove from the public domain the list of precise locations for the sensors, so that Mr. Watts could not survey any more of the stations.  ...

... Mr. Watts’ survey is now all but complete.

It shows a horrifying picture of gross carelessness and neglect on the part of Mr. Karl and the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, and of Dr. Hansen and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

NASA’s own temperature record has some lamentable irregularities of its own. Recently it was discovered that raw data from individual temperature stations were being “processed” – allegedly to remove the urban heat-island effect – but that the effect of the processing was to enhance the heat-island effect and increase the apparent rate of warming rather than to reduce it to compensate for the heat-island effect.

A startling example of the data tampering by scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is the century-old temperature record for the temperature station at Santa Rosa, California, the headquarters of the NOAA itself. The raw data show one thing: the processed data show quite another. This is a trick we have already seen in the Climate Research Unit’s “Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in tree-ring proxy temperature data after 1960. And we shall see it again later, when we examine in detail how one national temperature dataset has been similarly tampered with so as grievously to misstate the true direction of the temperature trend.

...in 1988 James Hansen, now director of GISS, had testified on Capitol Hill (and) had displayed the following temperature graph –

...there was no sound scientific basis for the graph: it depended upon an assumption that the warming effect of additional CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would be many times greater than is likely. Hansen told Congress that unless CO2 concentration were stabilized by 2000 (the green dotted line on the graph) temperatures would be most likely to rise along the path of the blue dashed line, and might even follow the black solid line.

In fact, none of these scenarios proved to have any contact with reality. Indeed, on the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s failed prediction, not one of the carefully-selected and impeccably sycophantic journalists to whom Hansen granted interviews was impolite enough, or journalist enough, to ask him why his prediction had not come to pass. And this was a strange question not to ask, because the month of June 2008 was colder, globally, than the month of June 1988, 20 years previously.

The red line on the graph below shows what actually happened to global mean surface temperature –

Temperatures indeed rose from 1988 until 2009, but they rose at a rate that turned out to be well below that which Hansen had predicted on the assumption that global CO2 emissions would be stabilized in the year 2000 and would rise no further thereafter. However, in fact CO2 emissions continued to rise at 2 ppmv per year throughout the new millennium, but temperatures failed to rise. Indeed, had the red line above not been taken from the GISS/NCDC temperature dataset, the warming over the years following Hansen’s prediction would have appeared even less than on this graph. Hansen’s prediction had proven to be a very substantial exaggeration.

Why is this important? The reason is that it is Hansen’s method for calculating the warming effect of CO2 on global temperature that the UN’s climate panel chiefly relies upon. Since his method produces a visible and substantial exaggeration of future warming, by implication the forecasts made by the UN’s climate panel are likely to produce similar very large exaggerations.

...

Perhaps it was disappointment that the GISS temperature projections directed by Hansen had proven to be such a failure that led him and his organization to tamper more and more over time with the temperature data for past decades, so as to produce ever-increasing estimates of the rate of “global warming” that had occurred in the 20th century.

The indefatigable Anthony Watts, having noticed that the raw data for many individual stations in the GISS dataset had been “processed” so as to turn a century of actual cooling into a century of spurious warming, wondered whether the “processed” data itself had been altered over time with the aim of producing an ever-higher apparent (but bogus) rate of “global warming” over the 20th century.

He found that this was indeed the case –  (Graphs)

The GISS global-temperature dataset, after adjustment by “processing” of the raw data, as it stood in 1999 (left) and in 2008 (right), showed that the data peak in the 1930s has been reduced in the later version of the dataset, and the 1998 peak has been markedly increased, artificially increasing the 20th-century warming rate and implying that tampering has increased over the years.  ...

Note how the temperature peak in the 1930s has been reduced appreciably in the 2008 dataset. There is no legitimate scientific justification for going back and rewriting the temperature record of three quarters of a century ago in this way.

The story of how the medieval warm period was artificially abolished has been told elsewhere. For now, it is necessary only to point out that the notion that there was no warm period in the Middle Ages does not represent the “consensus” in the scientific literature that the UN’s climate panel falsely claims to summarize in its assessment reports.

The CO2 website, www.co2science.org, has shown by careful gathering of evidence, more than 750 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries over the past 20 years have contributed to learned papers in the peer-reviewed literature that provide hard evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present.

Finally, it is worth setting the debate about the medieval warm period in context. The Team, by ingeniously getting the world to focus exclusively on the medieval warm period, diverted its attention from the fact, well established in the scientific literature, that most of the last 11,400 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, have been warmer – and often considerably warmer – than the present. Certainly the Bronze Age, the Roman era, and the medieval warm period were all warmer than the present. Also, each of the past four interglacial warm periods was up to 6 C° (11 F°) warmer than the present.

The Team’s intention, in promoting the “hockey-stick” graph to which the UN’s climate panel took like a quack to colored water, and in keeping the debate about it raging, was to ensure that no one looked any further back in the historical record, for anyone who has done so has at once realized that today’s temperatures, far from being exceptional, as the Team’s bogus graph had sought to show, are in fact very well within the natural variability of the climate.

The news of the scale on which Professor Jones and the Team were tampering with global temperature data alerted many who had previously believed the “global warming” scare into thinking again.

The first attempt that the Team and their supporters at the UN’s climate panel made to recover their lost position of authority and credibility was to say that there was nothing particularly wrong with the Climate Research Unit’s global-temperature dataset because it accorded so closely with the GISS/NCDC terrestrial dataset and with the two satellite datasets. However, the Team’s members effectively controlled both terrestrial datasets, and, as we have explained, the two satellite datasets were originally calibrated by reference to the terrestrial datasets.

Laurie David, the producer of Al Gore’s recent film “documentary” about the climate, published a children’s book about the climate in 2007. In that book, she displayed a graph purporting to show the correlation – and, by implication, the causative link – between changes in CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 650,000 years and changes in global mean surface temperature. The graph displayed in the book is reproduced here –

The caption below this graph read as follows:

“The more the CO2 in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less CO2, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph.”

Unfortunately, the caption was false. So was the graph. The captions on the graph had been switched, so that the temperature graph (in red) was labeled “CO2 concentration in the atmosphere”, and the CO2 concentration graph (in blue) was labeled “Climate Temperature”. By this device, it became possible for the authors to suggest that it was the changes in CO2 concentration in each of the past four or five interglacial warm periods that had caused the warming in each of the warm periods.

In truth, as paper after paper in the scientific literature has demonstrated, it was always the temperature that changed first in the Earth’s early climate, and CO2 concentration changes followed.

Was the error in the children’s book deliberate? What we can say is this. When the error in both the graph and the caption was admitted by both the authors and the publishers, they absolutely refused to make any correction.

True scientists who came across Al Gore’s climate movie had known for some time that one of the central lies that underpin the climate scare is the lie that global temperatures have been rising in an unusual way in recent decades, with the implication that “global warming” caused by humankind is already triggering disastrous weather events all round the planet.

Take one example. Gore said that the glacier at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro had melted because of “global warming”. In fact, it had been ablating – not melting – since 1880; and half of its snows had gone before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936.

In the past 30 years, NASA satellites have measured two things that make the attribution of the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro to manmade “global warming” altogether impossible.

First, the entire Central African region around the mountain has been cooling for three decades.

Secondly, at no point since satellite records began in 1979 has Kilimanjaro’s summit temperature risen above – 1.6 °C. For most of the past 30 years the mean summit temperature has been –7 °C. Try melting ice at those temperatures. Its thermal inertia makes melting impossible.

As our graph from the University of Alabama at Huntsville shows, there has been no temperature trend at the summit of Kilimanjaro since the satellites first began monitoring it 30 years ago –

Instead, the glacier has been ablating – passing directly from the solid to the gaseous state of water without passing through the intervening liquid state – because of imprudent and substantial post-colonial deforestation in the region surrounding the mountain, which has dried the air.

Gore also recited the falsehood that would later be repeated by his producer in her children’s book: that in the early climate it was CO2 change that preceded and hence by implication caused temperature change, when in fact it was temperature change that preceded and hence cannot have been caused by CO2 change.

Something had gone badly wrong at the Woods household over the holidays, perhaps to the point at which golf clubs were used for a purpose for which they were not designed. (I'd go for the lob wedge myself. But, whatever you do, don't use the 2-iron because Tiger's the only one alive who can hit anything with a 2-iron.)

Afghanistan Was Lost?

Here are American fatality rates in Afghanistan: 2001: 12; 2002: 49; 2003: 48; 2004: 52; 2005: 99; 2006: 98; 2007: 117; 2008: 155; so far in 2009: 301.

One can twist statistics in all sorts of partisan ways. But I do not think that any fair-minded student could suggest that the Afghan war—in which from 2001  through 2006 no more than 100 Americans died in any given year—was somehow lost—or even a war in the sense of WWII, Korea, or Vietnam.

In 2004, 987 American soldiers died outside of both Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly to accident and illness. This year’s total of 301 fatalities is about the same as all the years’ losses in Afghanistan from 2001-through about half of 2006.

So if one were to define Afghanistan as “lost” by a standard of US fatalities, it surely was not until very recently. More troops, of course , from 2002-6 might have helped subdue the Taliban (and would have increased our own losses), but, nevertheless, I don’t think one can suddenly post hoc say that the Afghan war has been a disaster for years.