Washington, DC 12/2/2009 2:37:22 AM
News / Politics

“Prosecute Climategate”, Urges Former Thatcher Adviser

Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal

A devastating new paper by former Thatcher adviser, Lord Christopher Monckton, reveals the sheer scale and scope of the scientific fraud behind the compilation of the world’s temperature data. Climategate -- Caught Green-Handed analyzes the revelations of scientific skulduggery circulated on the Internet by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, and shows how the data manipulation and destruction at the University’s Climate Research Unit is linked to numerous similar episodes throughout the short but shoddy history of the now-disproven “global warming” scare, says the Science and Public Policy Institute of Washington, D.C.

 

Monckton’s must-read paper reveals that –

 

Ø   A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

Ø       The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

Ø       The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

Ø         The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.

Ø   They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

Ø       They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.

Ø       They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.

Ø       They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.

Ø   They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.

Ø       They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.

Ø        They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.

Ø        Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

 

The paper discusses another major revelation by the whistleblower: that the University of East Anglia, the Climate Research Unit, and several leading scientists had conspired together to block and eventually even to destroy data that had been validly requested under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act –

 

Ø       The Director of the Climate Research Unit refused to release any information on the stated ground those requesting it were only asking for it so that they could find out whether it was correct.

Ø      The Director’s first advice to fellow-members of the Team, recorded in one of the emails released by the whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, was that they should not let anyone know that there was a Freedom of Information Act in the UK.

Ø   He subsequently wrote to other scientists that he would destroy data rather than provide it to researchers who requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.

The scientists involved then contrived a remarkable number of pretexts for not disclosing data and computer programs to anyone who might request them under the Freedom of Information Act. They discussed –

 

Ø  hiding (they repeatedly used the word) behind public-interest immunity;

Ø  hiding behind the UK’s Data Protection Act, which does not prevent disclosure of data or research paid for by taxpayers;

Ø  hiding behind advice from the office of the Information Commissioner, the UK official who enforces the Freedom of Information Act;

Ø  hiding behind the fact that the UN’s climate panel is an international entity not subject to the UK freedom-of-information law,

Ø  hiding behind reclassification of much of their work as UN work, so as to evade their

Ø  hiding behind contracts between the Climate Research Unit and other national weather bureaux, on the pretext that weather data that was and is openly published worldwide might be held by some nations to be confidential.

 

Finally, in 2008 the Director wrote to several other scientists inviting them to delete all emails relating to their participation in the preparation of the previous year’s Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s climate panel. He wrote this email some three weeks after the University of East Anglia had received a request under the Freedom of Information Act for precisely the information that he was recommending his fellow-members of the Team to emulate him in destroying.

 

Lord Monckton and others have written to the UK’s Information Commissioner asking him to investigate and, if thought fit, to prosecute the scientists involved for offenses of conspiring to block and destroy data requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

 

Contact: Robert Ferguson, President

bferguson@sppinstitute.org

202-288-5699