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Climategate: The Crutape Letters

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Mosher and Fuller were at the forefront of the revelation that Hadley's CRU was acting out of line. They were careful about moving ahead unless or until the leaked emails were deemed authentic. The reader can trust this volume. What many anthropogenic global warming advocates do not know is that workers at the CRU were concerned about the strength of data that showed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was much warmer than the 20th Century. The leaked emails reveal this concern and how some ethically challenged scientists endeavored since the mid-1990s to diminish the importance of the MWP and devise support for the erroneous notion the the 20th Century was the warmest period of the past millennium. This book by Mosher and Fuller honestly chronicles that revelation. This book is a step -- albeit an important one -- in the citizen's quest to understand the empirical truth about anthropological global warming. Everyone who desires to have a thorough understanding of the issue must read this book and recognize the importance of the leaked CRUtape letters.

This book details the history of respected (up to now) climate scientists here and abroad (mostly UK) who colluded and connived to create inaccurate reports, conceal their fraud, malign their critics and prevent them from publishing in journals that they influenced, lie about their raw data, lose their raw data, deny peremptorily requests for data, delay and then refuse to respond to Freedom of Information requests, promise to destroy files rather than release them to FOIA requesters, and attempt to call for criminal prosecution of those who procured correspondences and data that confirmed all this. Their highly unscientific behavior - normal enough I suppose in other fields of endeavor - does not define them or their work, but it is repetitive, and frequent enough and deliberative enough to call the rest of their work into question. Students have been expelled for less.

The closest analogy would be the Pentagon Papers, for which Daniel Ellsberg received praise rather than vilification. But the Vietnam War was not an object of adoration as is our self-flagellating anthropogenic global warming.

This is quite the thriller, with a fascinating documentation of how scientists can be gradually corrupted by the heady power of convincing the UN, world leaders, and (to a slightly lesser extent) the people of the world that we are headed for disastrous climate change and must undertake supreme efforts within the next decade or condemn our grandchildren to famine, flood, and hurricanes. Mosher was near the heart of the early confused reception of the Climategate emails, when the leaker (Mosher presents strong reasons for it being a leaker, not a hacker)attempted time and again to get his message out (even, ironically, including sending the link to the main blog for the defenders of the status quo) and no one paid any attention. The leaker sent one message ("And then a miracle occurred") with a link to the documents and no one clicked the link! Finally Mosher and others began cautiously reading, wondering if this was a hoax, calling persons whose emails they were reading to see if they were authentic, and gradually realizing that this was the break of a lifetime, akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers. The book is valuable just for bringing the readers in to the middle of this white-hot period.

The remainder of the book is a fairly complete chronological history of the emails with a reasonable effort at explaining the backstory for the general reader. It was of course thrown together in a very short time and shows it. (So I give it only 4 stars). The co-authors describe themselves as "Lukewarmers", neither alarmists not denialists, accepting that global warming is occurring but not convinced it is mostly caused by man and not convinced that superhuman efforts are all that can save the planet. The larger story here is an almost Shakespearean tragedy as the scientists at the heart of the story become more and more desperate to keep the millions of dollars in research funds coming despite the awareness that their models are not working. No doubt this will take years to be sorted out, as the most prestigious science journals of our time gradually come to realize they fell into a scientific consensus built on sand.

As an astrophysicist, I learned long ago of the Milankevitch cycle, which has led to about 7 Ice Ages lasting about 100,000 years each in the last million years, and which it seems will inevitably lead to another one down the road. Do we think we can change the precession of the poles (Vega will be the North Star in 13,000 years), the wobble of the angle of the North Pole, or the variation of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit? If we can't, there's some serious global cooling ahead.

These gentlemen were among the first to find these emails on the WWW... The emails show the true state of climate "science". The so called scientists were funded by US and British taxpayer money. Every taxpayer has a right to see the shenanigans that were, and probably still are, taking place. Thanks, authors, for bringing these emails into the public eye. Also a big thanks to the whistleblower who released this evidence of malfeasance.

Mosher and Fuller do a good job putting the ClimageGate documents in context, and the book is a riveting read. I received my copy yesterday, and find the book to be faithful to the climate war events that I have followed over a period of years. It reports actual email communications of a small group of paleoclimatologists and their roles in perhaps the biggest scientific hoax since Piltdown Man. The sad realization is that formerly respectable scientists are human, following the money at all costs to others. They put themselves in the position of publishing bad science, and doing everything in their power, ethical or not, to defend shoddy work. The reputations of their supporting institutions (East Anglia University, Pennsylvania State University, and NASA) are at risk. Understand that the emails and documents in the ClimateGate files don't necessarily prove that global warming is false. The documents do confirm that studies by Michael Mann (Penn State), Keith Biffra (CRU, EAU), and Phil Jones (Director CRU) are based on compromised, fudged data and as such do not comprise credible science. The statement that "the warmth of the 20th century is unprecendented" is falsified.

For the past ten years Planet Earth has NOT been warming, but the political heat has been intense. Tens of thousands of scientists have been speaking out on the Gore global warming fraud, but the money and power has all been on the other side.

Finally, just before the failed December 2009 Copenhagen Conference, proof positive came out with the release to the public of the CRU files. The authors were close to this event, and, like me, they watched the creation of a new word, "Climategate," which within a week was getting tens of millions of hits on Google.

This evidence is more than a smoking gun. It's a chain of nuclear explosions. The UN's IPCC -- a political body with only a few scientists (aided and abetted by formerly repected scientists at England's CRU) -- has been twisting and selectively cherry picking temperature records for years. THEY THREW OUT THE TEMPERATURE RECORDS!!!! Literally. Even the "Medieval Optimum" -- the time 1,000 years ago when people were visiting Greenland in open boats (in winter) and growing wine grapes there -- disappeared from the record. Michael Mann (here in the U.S.) helped by manipulating tree ring data, spreading false science to show the infamous "hocky stick" temperature graph as per Gore's movie. Google "hide the decline" for an amusing video about that.

And now in 2010 we are moving into Climategate II. Climategate I is the scandal uncovered at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the Univ. of East Anglia in England, the subject of this book. Climategate II Involves the dishonesty at the US NASA-GiSS facilities as well as at the NOAA facilities. The underlying science of the entire global warming scare has disappeared in a mushroom cloud of scientific dishonesty. Nothing produced by these agencies including all of the IPCC documents can be trusted for scientific honesty.

This book is an easy way to get up to speed on this fraud. Learn about how Michael Moore created the "hockey stick" by manipulating tree ring data to support Global Warming fear mongering.

The danger to humanity isn't Global Warming, it is Radical Green politics, the new Socialism. It's about money and power: Trillions of dollars and freedom is at stake. For that story, Blue Planet in Green Shackles by Klaus tells of the economics and politics.

An insightful review of the Climate Research Unit emails and source code heroically leaked by a frustrated climate scientist seeking to preserve the concept of scientific objectivity and the scientific method in climate science over the more popular and polically expedient opinion of the hysterical anthropogenic global warming crowd.

Truly, you cannot go wrong with this book. On the one hand, the world may be inevitably inching toward a searing apocalyptic doom, in which case the reader may fashion a neat hat from the pages with which to shield against the Sun's malevolent rays; or on the other hand, the world may be sliding back into an ice age and the reader would be well equipped to kindle the very fire necessary to preserve one's lineage in the cold, dark nights ahead with the pages of this book.

It's a win either way, and conveniently packaged for a mere $17.

--Not A Carbon Cow

One of the authors styles himself as a progressive Democrat and both say they are "lukewarmers" as opposed to climate alarmists.

The most stunning part of the book is the back and forth detailing the requests and non-responses to Freedom of Information requests asking for the raw data on which Dr. Phil Jones based his work. The responses amounted to "the dog ate my homework."

The responses included claims that the data was already available online. It was - maybe - but it was buried in a ton of data that WAS NOT INCLUDED IN THE STUDIES.
Repeatedly, Jones was asked for the specific stations and their data. One of the stories was that it could not be reconstructed because that would take too much time and expense. Another response was that the data was on a disc that could not be found. When that did not satisfy, the response was that the data could not be released to a non-academic. Yet another response was that the data could not be released because it was under restrictions due to agreements signed with countries -which ones specifically Jones could not recall.

I have been following the story online mostly at [...] and thought the book would mostly be a rehash, but the authors do what they set out to do - provide the context to the emails that were released that is absolutely shocking.

Anyone who has ever tried to sort through even as few as a half dozen emails from as few as three people knows how frustrating and demanding the effort can be. Thank goodness that for the hundreds of emails with dozens of players in the CRU emails, other people do the work for us. Mosher and Fuller do us a great service in this regard. It occurs to me, that in their efforts they are aided by their computers, but they (like the great Steve McIntyre) also have this organized in their own brains. Amazing! Hat's off.

After reading such a book, your first temptation is to read it again, and this is a good idea. I also find it useful myself to look at similar material, and here I mention other sources, with the hope that the reader will look at Mosher and Fuller, AND the others as well.

Online, there is John Costella's "Climategate Analysis"

[...]

which covers many (most?) of the same emails. He edits them. Oh my gosh - he edits them!!! Yes, he does two useful things. In a delightful "Cast of Colorful Characters" he not only puts the email text in color so that they stand out, but assigns different colors to the major characters (Mann, Jones, Briffa, Wigley, etc. - and of course "other"). Then he may change things in the emails, correcting spelling, adding needed punctuation, filling out acronyms, clarifying names - that sort of thing - always in black so you know what he did. His own added analysis (that is, beyond just publishing the email text) is perhaps, occasionally hyperbolic.

Another book is Andrew Montford's (AKS "Bishop Hill") "The Hockey Stick Illusion", most of it is PRE-climategate, so it supplements Mosher and Fuller. This does not seem to be available extensively on Amazon USA (not yet anyway) but you can get it on Amazon.UK. You pay almost as much for shipping as for the book, but still its a substantial book, still for $26 including shipping, and mine arrived by "Royal Mail" in 8 days. It's as simple to order online as the US version of Amazon.

Mosher and Fuller already present a wonderful gift, and with the two items above (and others), we have an embarrassment of riches.

Mosher and Fuller do an excellent job of putting perspective and context around the emails hacked (leaked?) from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia. They interweave the emails with postings from two major climate blogs - McIntyre's Climate Audit and Schmidt's Real Climate - to provide a clearer understanding of the discussion and implications of a given email. Without this back story, many of the emails cannot be fully appreciated. Further, they dispel some misunderstandings of the more widely publicized sound bites such as "hide the decline", which was about temperature-tree ring correlations post 1960, not the 2000-2009 decade of supposed global temperature decrease as proffered by some radio and TV pundits. Readers will be engaged by the behind the scenes look into the private conversations of climate scientists (Mann, Jones, Briffa to name a few) that show how defensive, emotional and subjective they can be when their life's work is challenged by others. For academics, Climategate is a great illustration of how peer review can go awry, and how the blogosphere has emerged as a second check on peer review.
I think both sides - the catastrophic global warming folks and the "deniers" - will find this book appealing, although it may seem to be a play toward the latter group. I taught an Honors Colloquium on climate change Fall semester 2009 where I tried to let the students find the truth for themselves. We presented both perspectives on issues and told the students that the truth was somewhere between Rush Limbaugh and Al Gore. Too bad the timing did not permit us to use Climategate as a case study in the course. Mosher and Fuller, self-described "lukewarmers", have found the middle ground with Climategate, noting that climate change is real and humans have something to do with it, but end of the earth is not nigh. After a year of consuming climate change literature, including the IPCC WGI and WGII reports (not just the SPM!), I found the book refreshing, balanced, and accessible.