Global Warming: "Fixing the Climate Data around the Policy"

Simulpost with www.GlobalResearch.ca

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, November 30, 2009  [print_link]

More than 15,000 people will be gathering in Copenhagen for COP 15: the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Official delegations from 192 nations will mingle with the representatives of  major multinational corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, The representatives of environmental and civil society organizations will also be in attendance. Parties & Observers

Heads of state and heads of government are slated to be in appearance in the later part of the Summit event. (See The essentials in Copenhagen – COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009)

It is worth noting that key decisions and orientations on COP15 had already wrapped up at the World Business Summit on Climate Change (WBSCC) held in May in Copenhagen. The WBSCC brought together some of the World’s most prominent business executives and World leaders including Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. (The World Business Summit on Climate Change, includes webcast)

The results of these high level consultations were forwarded to the Danish government as well as to the governments of participating member states. A so-called summary report for policymakers was drafted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, on behalf the corporate executives participating in the event. This report has very little to do with environmental protection. It largely consists in proposing a profit driven agenda, which uses the global warming consensus as a justification.

(For details see http://www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/world-business-summit.html)

“The underlying ambition of the Summit was to address the twin challenges of climate change and the economic crisis. Participants at the Summit considered how these risks can be turned into opportunity if business and governments work together, and what policies, incentives, and investments will most effectively stimulate low-carbon growth.” (Copenhagen Climate Council)

The agenda of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (7-18 December 2009), is upheld both by the governments, the business executives and the NGO community as “one of the most significant gatherings in history. It is being called the most complex and vital agreement the world has ever seen.”

CO2 emissions are heralded as the single and most important threat to the future of humanity.

The focus of the Summit is on strictly environmental issues. No mention of the word “war” –i.e. the US-NATO led war and its devastating environmental consequences.

No mention of the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of “peacemaking”.

No mention, as part of an environmental debate, of the radioactive fallout resulting from the Pentagon’s humanitarian nuclear bombs. Tactical nuclear weapons, according to scientific opinion commissioned by the Pentagon are “safe for the surrounding civilian population”.

No mention of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques” (ENMOD) and climatic warfare.

No mention in the debate on climate change of the US Air Force 2025 project entitled “Owning the Weather” for military use. (See FAS, AF2025 v3c15-1 | Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning… | (Ch 1) see also SPACE.com — U.S. Military Wants to Own the Weather)

Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use is no longer part of the UN agenda on climate change. It was, however, part of the agenda of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Environmental Warfare and Climate Change, Global Research, 27 November 2005, See also Michel Chossudovsky,  Weather Warfare: Beware the US military’s experiments with climatic warfare, The Ecologist, December 2007 )

CO2 is the logo, which describes the Worldwide crisis. No other variable is contemplated.

The words “poverty”, “unemployment” and “disease” resulting from a global economic depression are not a matter of emphasis because authoritative financial sources state unequivocally: “the economic recession is over”.

And the war in the Middle East and Central Asia is not a war but “a humanitarian operation directed against terrorists and rogue states.”

The Real Crisis

The Copenhagen Summit not only serves powerful corporate interests which have a stake in the global multibillion dollar carbon trading scheme, it also serves to divert public attention from the devastation resulting from the “real crisis” underlying the process of economic globalization and a profit driven war without borders, which the Pentagon calls “the long war”.

We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. War and economic depression constitute the real crisis, yet both the governments and the media have focused their attention on the environmental devastation resulting from CO2 emissions, which is upheld as the greatest threat to humanity.

The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading System

The carbon trading system is a multibillion money-making bonanza for the financial establishment. The stakes are extremely high and the various lobby groups on behalf of Wall Street have already positioned themselves.

According to a recent report, “the carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU’s emissions trading scheme…  The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe.” (Terry Macalister, Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade, The Guardian, 28 November 2009)

The large financial conglomerates, involved in derivative trade, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s, Citi Bank, Nomura, Société Générale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are actively involved in carbon trading.( FACTBOX: Investment banks in carbon trading | Reuters, 14 September 2009)

The legitimacy of the carbon trading system rests on the legitimacy of Global Warming Consensus, which views CO2 emissions as the single threat to the environment. And for Wall Street the carbon trading system is a convenient and secure money-making safety-net, allowing for the transfer of billions of dollars into the pockets of a handful of conglomerates.

“Every major financial house in New York and London has set up carbon trading operations. Very big numbers are dancing in their heads, and they need them to replace the “wealth” that evaporated in the housing bust. Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, told the New York Times, “Carbon will be the world’s biggest market over all.” Barclays thinks the current $60 billion carbon market could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. Four years ago Redshaw, a former electricity trader, couldn’t get anyone to talk to him about carbon.” (Mark Braly, The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading, RenewableEnergyWorld.com, 5 March 2008)

The Global Warming Data Base

Is the Global Warming Consensus based on reliable data?

There are indications that both the concepts and the data on temperature and greenhouse gas emissions including CO2 have been adjusted and shaped to fit the agenda of the UN Panel on Climate Change.

For several years, the claims of the UN Panel on Climate Change (UNPCC) including the data base have been questioned. (See Global Research’s Climate Change Dossier: Archive of more than 100 articles)

Critical analysis of the climate change consensus has been conveyed in reports by several prominent scientists.

There has been, in this regard, a persistent attempt to silence the critics as conveyed in the writings of MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen (See  Richard Lindzen, Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence., Global Research, 7 April 2007)

Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. (Ibid)

ClimateGate and the Emails’ Scandal

In November 2009, barely a few weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, a vast data bank of over 3000 email exchanges between key Climate Change scientists and researchers was revealed.

While the emails does not prove that the entire data was falsified, they nonetheless point to scientific dishonesty and deceit on the part of several prominent scientists who are directly linked to the UNPCC.

The emails suggest that the data was shaped, with a view to supporting a predetermined policy agenda. “Fixing the climate data to fit the policy” is modus operandi as revealed in the email messages of top scientists, directly linked to the work of the UN Panel on Climate Change?

The British media has acknowledged that the scientists were intent upon manipulating the data on Climate Change as well as excluding the critics:  [the comments below the quotes are by The Telegraph].

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of “trick” has been misinterpreted

From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.

From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009

“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… Our observing system is inadequate”

Prof Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics – that there is no evidence temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”

Prof Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.

From Phil Jones. To: Michael Mann. Date: May 29, 2008

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.” Climate change sceptics tried to use Freedom of Information laws to obtain raw climate data submitted to an IPCC report known as AR4. The scientists did not want their email exchanges about the data to be made public.

From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004

“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future.”

The scientists make no attempt to hide their disdain for climate change sceptics who request more information about their work

(University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes – Telegraph, 23 November 2009).

The complete list of contentious emails can be consulted at Alleged CRU Emails – Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com:

What is significant is that the authors of the emails are directly involved in the UN Panel on Climate Change:

“[They are] the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

The scientists are not saying “we did not do it”. What they are saying is that the Global Warming Consensus holds irrespective of their actions to selectively manipulate the data as well as exclude the critics from the scientific debate on climate change.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history. (Prof. Christopher Booker, Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation, The Telegraph, 28 November 2009)

One of the contentious emails by Dr Jones (published by  eastangliaemails.com) points to the deliberate manipulation of the data:

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 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 +44 xxx xxxx xxxx

School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 xxx xxxx xxxx

University of East Anglia

Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

NR4 7TJ

UK

Source: Alleged CRU Emails – Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com

 

US Congressional Probe

Barely two weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, the US Congress is now probing into “the Global Warming Emails”:

“U.S. congress has begun investigating climate scientists whose emails and documents were hacked into to see if their global warming theories have misrepresented the truth behind the cause of climate change.

Investigators have begun “studying” the 1,079 e-mails and over 3,800 documents that hackers stole last week from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the U.K, Rep. Darrel Issa from California told the Wall Street Journal.

Some of the leaked e-mails and files – which were posted on sites like www.Wikileaks.org  and www.EastAngliaEmails.com – show growing tensions between scientists and skeptics. Others are mundane announcements of upcoming conferences or research trips.

According to his website, Rep. James Inhofe from Oklahoma said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers “cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.”

The White House Science Adviser John Holdren has also come under investigation, after one of his emails written in 2003 to Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, was hacked.

“I’m happy to stand by my contribution to this exchange. I think anybody who reads what I wrote in its entirety will find it a serious and balanced treatment of the question of ‘burden of proof’ in situations where science germane to public policy is in dispute,” Holdren said.

Meanwhile, The University of East Anglia said it will cooperate with police and proceed with its own internal investigation. The University posted a statement calling the disclosure “mischievous” and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU’s director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Jones said that the word trick was used “colloquially as in a clever thing to do” and that it “is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”

The leaked data comes just two weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen will begin on Dec. 7 -18, when 192 nations will meet to discuss a solution on how to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. (International Business Times, November 24, 2009)

Meanwhile, the “international community” (supported by the mainstream media) has launched a counteroffensive, accusing the critics of waging a smear campaign:

The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, stood by his panel’s 2007 findings last week. That study is the foundation for a global climate response, including carbon emission targets proposed this week by both the US and China.

So far, climate scientists say nothing in the leaked emails [that] takes away from the fact that the climate change evidence is solid. In fact, a new study in the journal Science shows the polar ice cap melting is happening at a faster rate than predicted just a few years ago.

In a teleconference call with reporters this week, one of the scientists whose emails were leaked, Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, said that “regardless of how cherry-picked” the emails are, there is “absolutely nothing in any of the emails that calls into the question the deep level of consensus of climate change.”

This is a “smear campaign to distract the public,” added Mann, a coauthor of the Copenhagen Diagnosis, the report on climate change released this week ahead of the Copenhagen. “Those opposed to climate action, simply don’t have the science on their side,” he added.

Professor Trevor Davies of the East Anglia CRU called the stolen data the latest example of a campaign intended “to distract from reasoned debate” about global climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit. (As Copenhagen summit nears, ‘Climategate’ dogs global warming debate | csmonitor.com, Christian Science Monitor, 28 November 2009, emphasis added)

But what is significant in this counteroffensive, is that the authenticity of the emails has not been challenged by the IPCC scientists.

The scientists are not saying “we did not do it”. What they are saying is that the Global Warming Consensus holds irrespective of their actions to selectively manipulate the data as well as exclude the critics from the scientific debate on climate change.

What is the Stance of the Civil Society and Environmentalist Organizations

Civil society organisations are currently mobilizing with a view to pressuring the official governmental delegations:

“Two years ago, at a previous UN climate conference in Bali, all UN governments agreed on a timetable that would ensure a strong climate deal by the time of the Copenhagen conference. The implications of not achieving this goal are massive, and nearly unthinkable. Turn to our great partners film – the Age of Stupid – if you need to be convinced why.

The meeting – which should include major heads of state for the last three days, will attempt to reach a massively complex agreement on cutting carbon, providing finance for mitigation and adaptation, and supporting technology transfer from the North to the South.

This is a major milestone in history, and one where civil society must speak with one voice in calling for a fair, ambitious and binding deal. We are ready, but we need to let the leaders know the world is ready too. Are you? (COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Conference | TckTckTck)

Where do civil society activists stand in relation to the climate change email scandal?

Will these civil society organizations, many of which are funded by major foundations and governments continue to unreservedly endorse the Global Warming consensus?

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace are among several key civil society organizations which are pushing the Copenhagen agenda. Their position is unchanged.

Most environmentalist organizations are demanding a reduction in CO2 emissions. For them, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the “bible”. It cannot be challenged even if the climate data base which supports the Global Warming Consensus turns out to be questionable or contentious.

While the mainstream NGO lobby groups including Greenpeace and WWF continue to support the consensus, there is small but growing movement which challenges the legitimacy of  the Copenhagen CO15 Summit agenda, while accusing  the UNPCC of manipulating the data.

The Alternative Summit: KlimaForum09

The NGOs will be meeting in a parallel alternative summit, KlimaForum09, funded by the Danish government. More than 10,000 people a day are expected to attend the sessions of KlimatForum09

Major international NGOs and environmentalist groups will be in attendance including Friends of the Earth, Campaign against Climate Change among others.

Klimaforum09 is finalize a draft declaration which “will put forth a vision of a more socially just world society, [while]  emphasizing  the need to create substantial changes in the social and economic structures of society in order to meet the challenges of global warming and food sovereignty.” (See  Declaration · Klimaforum09)

It is unlikely that within the Alternative Summit, the Global Warming consensus including the multibillion dollar carbon trading system will be challenged in a meaningful fashion. (All events · Klimaforum09).

In many regards, the rhetoric of the KlimaForum09’s Danish organizers ties in with that of the host government and the official summit. (Political Platform · Klimaforum09″).

There can be no real activism unless the falsehoods and manipulations underlying the activities of the UNPCC including the multibillion profit driven carbon trading scheme, are fully revealed, debated and understood.