Michael E. Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said in a telephone interview from Paris that skeptics “are taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious.”

I agree with Professor Mann that the context in which something is written or said or done is always critical.  So let’s look at the context of a couple of these e-mails.  Here’s one that looks pretty bad until you understand the context:

From: Ben Santer

To: P.Jones

Subject: Re: CEI formal petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature record

Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:07:56 -0700

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Now let’s put that in context.  Dr. Ben Santer is a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.  In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report (1995), he was the lead author of a chapter and cleverly cut off the early and later years of a dataset, so that the resulting graph would show that global temperatures were only going in one direction in recent years–rapidly upwards.  In fact, temperatures were just as high in earlier years and had declined in the most recent years, but that data at both ends was cleverly deleted.  This made the graph much easier to understand correctly.  So the first bit of context is that Dr. Santer is an outstanding scientist of fine and upstanding character.

The next bit of context is that CEI–the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is where I work)–had filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open a regulatory decision that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare on the basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute.  Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw data he used to compile the global mean temperature record.  EPA relied on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced.  That means that EPA must take Professor Jones’s work on trust, which of course is standard operating procedure in all good climate research.  Dr. Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable.  Everyone knows that we can trust Professor Jones’s honesty and utter scientific competence.

Now, what is Dr. Santer writing in this e-mail to Professor Jones?  Clearly this is the sort of high level scientific communication that ordinary people often can’t understand or de-code.  It contains the kind of innocent remark that tip-top scientists are always making.  And you can see that Dr. Santer is a real wit.  I bet Professor Jones couldn’t stop laughing.  The phrase “beat the crap out of him” is a common pleasantry among this tip-top scientific crowd.   It merely means that the next time Dr. Santer runs into Dr. Michaels, he’ll be sure to greet him heartily and say something like, “Pat, my dear esteemed colleague, it’s so good to see you.  Phil and I were just a tiny bit annoyed that you would be so silly as to call attention to the lack of data, but all is forgiven.   You know that you can always trust us.”

So now that we know the context, we can plainly see that the appearance–that Dr. Santer is a nasty bully who is too cowardly to say in person to Dr. Michaels what he wrote in an e-mail–is completely misleading.  Dr. Santer is transparently a prince of a fellow.  Score one for Professor Michael Mann.

Here’s another e-mail where the appearance looks bad.  You’ve just got to understand it in context:

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley, mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx ,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

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) and 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

Now let’s quickly put that in context before anyone draws the wrong conclusions.  For people who don’t know any better, this looks like Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, is saying that he has used a “trick” that he got from Professor Michael Mann in order to “hide the decline.”  First of all, we know that Professor Jones is a man of high integrity (as well as high competence in his field), so he would never do anything dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous.  Second, “trick” is a technical term often employed by the cream of climate scientists.  It simply means employing a clever (or “slick”) method to accomplish some technical goal (in this case, “to hide the decline”).  Anyone can see that “trick” is a much shorter and more elegant way to say that.  And you’ve got to admire the verbal facility of these tip-top scientists.  They are as articulate and literate as they are scientifically tip-top.

What is the clever method that Professor Jones learned from Professor Mann?  I think he is referring to the way Professor Mann constructed his celebrated hockey stick graph.  His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the past thousand years, including the past century.  But everyone knows that temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades.  That’s what the surface temperature record compiled by Professor Jones at CRU shows.  And everyone knows that Professor Jones’s temperature record is irreproachable, even though he destroyed the raw data.  So what Professor Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature records onto his proxy record.  Voila!–the hockey stick.  Over nine centuries of flat temperatures and then rapid warming in the late twentieth century.  What Professor Mann did was simply make sure that ordinary people weren’t misled by the proxy data.

What does Professor Jones mean, then, by “to hide the decline”?  I’m not sure, but I expect he’s just doing what Professor Mann did.  He’s got some obviously misleading data, which he doesn’t want people to see so they won’t get confused and draw the wrong conclusion.  So he’s hiding it for our own good.  This just shows what a chivalrous and deeply caring man Professor Jones is.

There you have it.  Context is everything.  And you’ve got to hand it to Professor Michael E. Mann.  He sure knows his context.  Pennsylvania State University can be just as proud of him as the University of East Anglia undoubtedly is of their Climatic Research Unit and its head, Professor Phil Jones.

Here is CEI’s press release, and my colleague Chris Horner’s post is here.

Andrew Revkin’s story in tomorrow’s New York Times has already been posted on the Times’s web site.  Here is one interesting tidbit from Revkin’s story:

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

‘Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often use the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.” “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

Yes, that’s right, everyone knows that “trick” is used as a technical term in many professions.  For example, in prostitution “trick” means….

So now an actual hacker — or an insider — has exposed something similar in the global warming activism realm: scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (regarded as Britain’s top authority) caught in behaviors they would never want the outside world to see. Marc Morano at Climate Depot is developing the link archive and Australian reporter Andrew Bolt is harvesting revelatory remarks from emails and documents, as he explains:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

The clogosphere (climate blogs) is awash in this story (again, see Climate Depot). You ought to at least spend a little time this weekend (all us politico-infojunkies still get our fixes on Saturdays, right?) perusing what Bolt has unearthed. Amazing stuff which Chris Horner says could be alarmism’s “blue dress moment.” As Bolt notes, it’s not just the East Anglians — it’s the foremost global warmer scientists from all over, caught. Wow.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute this week launched a new video campaign to persuade Al Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge for a debate on climate change. CEI is offering Mr. Gore big bucks to debate!

The Cornwall Alliance and the Heritage Foundation are holding a joint event, “Leading Evangelical Scholars Warn That Global Warming Alarmism Will Hurt the Poor,” on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 1:00 P.M., at The Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium. RSVP online at http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/.

In the News

Is Old George Still Causing Trouble?
Myron Ebell, Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2009

The Decline of Climate Alarmism
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 20 November 2009

Estimating the Cost of Cap-and-Trade
David Kreutzer, Heritage WebMemo, 19 November 2009

Climate Gasbags Want To Shame You
Greg Gutfeld, FoxNews, 19 November 2009

Revenge of the Climate Layman
Anne Jolis, Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2009

Pawlenty’s Flip-Flop
Paul Chesser, GlobalWarming.org, 17 November 2009

Kyoto II Climate Change Treaty; Implications for American Sovereignty
Steven Groves, Copenhagen Consequences, 17 November 2009

Obama’s Failure
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 17 November 2009

News You Can Use

NASA: Sun Drives Climate

An major article in this week’s Spiegel Online, “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out,” cited a recent study by NASA scientists in the journal Geophysical Research Letters showing that reduced solar activity is the most important cause of stagnating global warming.

Cap-and-Trade Poll

The Pew Research Center polled Americans with the question, “What does a cap-and-trade deal with?” Twenty-seven percent of Republicans, but only 15% of Democrats, knew that cap-and-trade is an environmental policy.

Obama’s 70-car Motorcade

President Barack Obama went to China this week to discuss a climate change policies, among other things. According to the Politico, Obama traveled in China with a 70-car motorcade.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

World Leaders Concede Failure in Copenhagen

World leaders and the United Nations’ top global warming officials have given up signing a big new international treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen next month.  Instead, they are now talking about concluding such an agreement some time in 2010 and coming to a less ambitious agreement in Copenhagen.  The latter might be a list of national commitments from all the major developed economies and most of the major developing countries.

For example, the Obama Administration might commit the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 14% or 17% below current levels by 2020.  The Obama Administration may indeed do that, but what’s going on in the Senate makes such a commitment look unconvincing.  Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has now put off any consideration of the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bills until this spring.  He’s putting a polite gloss on the ugly (for the alarmists) reality: the Kerry-Boxer bill is dead in the Senate.  Whether some other version of cap-and-trade surfaces and gains traction next spring is now the question.

Across the States

California

The California Energy Commission on Wednesday established energy efficiency standards for large screen televisions. To understand why this policy unnecessarily limits consumer choice, read this commentary by CEI’s William Yeatman in the Orange County Register. The Washington Times reports today that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has sent a letter to the Department of Energy demanding similar television standards for the rest of the country.

Alaska

The AP reported this week that Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) is suing the federal government to overturn the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species. The Governor noted that polar bear populations are at historical all-time highs, having increased to 25,000 from 10,000 in 1960.

Oregon

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) has ordered an immediate review of the state’s tax incentives for renewable energy after the Oregonian reported that state officials had deliberately low-balled cost estimates of the program by a factor of forty.

Around the World

Myron Ebell

Australia

Australia’s Labor Government has again passed cap-and-trade legislation through the House and sent it to the Senate.  The Senate is closely divided, and seven votes from the opposition Liberal or National parties or from the small parties or independents are needed.  Liberal Party Leader Malcolm Turnbull, who represents a very wealthy part of Sydney and is a global warming true believer, is pulling out all the stops to force some of his party’s Senators to go along.  He is meeting strong public opposition from the Liberals’ Senate leader, Nick Minchin, and several other Liberal Senators including Cory Bernardi and Tony Abbott.  The Senate will probably vote before the end of the parliamentary session on November 30th.  While the outcome is still in doubt, it is clear that Turnbull is risking splitting his party in order to enact energy-rationing legislation.  News reports and personal communications agree that opposition to the bill is growing stronger and broader among the Liberal Party’s Representatives and Senators and supporters among the electorate.

The Global Warming Establishment Uncovered

Julie Walsh

The electronic files of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK have been hacked and 61 MB worth of emails, approximately a thousand documents, have been posted on the internet on a Russian server. CRU is one of the few institutions in the world that compile and maintain the records of the world’s temperature data. In an interview with “Investigate” magazine, the director of CRU Professor Phil Jones said, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.” Anthony Watts has the evolving story at WattsUpWithThat.com.

Here are some of the most revealing and shocking email quotes unearthed so far (my emphases):

On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:

Mike (Mann),

The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations — but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity — compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxx.xx>

To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxx.xx>

Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Date: Thu Jul  8 16:30:16 2004

The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. 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 !

From: Kevin Trenberth

To: Michael Mann

Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

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.

From: Phil Jones

To: “Michael E. Mann”

Subject: IPCC & FOI

Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!

From: Ben Santer

To: P.Jones

Subject: Re: CEI formal petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature record

Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:07:56 -0700

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

My colleague Chris Horner wrote a book published in 2008 on this exact subject, “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed“

Obviously those interested in the Cooler Heads Coalition are focused on the pro-government, anti-freedom and anti-energy agenda-driven UN IPCC. The U.N. Population Fund, which today released a report titled “The State of the World Population 2009,” is another you should be wary of. This political body finds that “women bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, but have so far been largely overlooked in the debate about how to address problems of rising seas, droughts, melting glaciers and extreme weather.”

So global warming is sexist. More:

The report shows that investments that empower women and girls—particularly education and health—bolster economic development and reduce poverty and have a beneficial impact on climate. Girls with more education, for example, tend to have smaller and healthier families as adults. Women with access to reproductive health services, including family planning, have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run.

More promotion of a culture that promotes the eradication of humans for a phony cause. About as far as you can get from “be fruitful and multiply.”

However, Senator Gillibrand might have made several additional points.  Now that Enron has gone away, New York City is the center of financial wizards who’ve done much to mystify and confuse markets and regulations.  It is also the home of some of the most affluent individuals in the world along, of course, with some of the poorest urban dwellers in the world.  Thus, there will be great future market potential for NYC as energy rationing is extended from firms to individuals.  I raised this point with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, one of the creative capitalists championing energy rationing, at Wall Street Journal’s ECOnomics conference in Santa Barbara a few years ago.

I noted that my wife and I - for ecological reasons - had elected not to have children.  As a middle class American, our carbon footprint is a heavy one, undoubtedly that of our children would have been even heavier.  Thus, I believed we merited a reasonable allotment of carbon credits.  Immelt dodged the question but the logic is unassailable.  But, in NYC terms, Fran and I are light-footed indeed.  We don’t jet around the world as frequently, our homes are in the relatively less energy intensive areas south of the Mason Dixon line, we don’t watch television and have only one car.  Our allotments would thus be minimal compared to the affluent of New York.
The poor in NYC would not be entitled to such credits.  They have unfortunately less environmental conscious parenting practices and already experience to a degree the energy poverty that would be exacerbated by cap-and-trade.  But, this shortfall could readily be addressed by further taxes on the rich to fund the vital social services needed to offset this problem.

Thus, one can only urge Senator Gillebrand and her fellow social engineers.  As the late Peter Bauer noted, there’s lots of money in poverty programs - and even more in energy poverty programs.  Two Cheers for the Senator!

Thomas L. Friedman’s op-ed in the NYT today could have been written by Paul Krugman.  And that’s not a compliment.

Friedman, like Krugman, waxes hysterical about those who are opposing  the cap-and-trade energy bill - those “deniers.” And, also like Krugman, he sets up those opponents as straw men that he can readily knock down.  In today’s article, Friedman worries about U.S. dependence on foreign oil supplied by  ”petro-dictators” and he fears ever-rising prices for increasingly scarce fossil fuels.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Friedman’s terror about world population growth, especially growth in developing countries, is Malthusian.  (See Julian Simon on population and natural resources in “The Ultimate Resource II.”) . And Friedman  doesn’t seem to want those people to use energy to improve their standard of living.  Here’s what he says about that dream for a better life:

The world keeps getting flatter - more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” - with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

Such horror one can’t imagine for a person living at a subsistence level in India or China.

In his article, Friedman says that “clean energy” is the answer to the world’s energy problems.  He embraces  “E.T.” (no, not that visitor from another planet), but “energy technology”  that is carbon-less and efficient.

And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon - combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech - and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

His solution then is to tax conventional energy and subsidize alternative energy sources. Right.  That’s clearly an innovative solution that nobody has thought of.  And how would this affect the population bomb he fears?  Undoubtedly, raising the price of fossil fuels could indeed have an effect on developing countries’ populations.  While waiting for those alternative energy sources to develop, they’ll  continue to face poverty and resultant devastating diseases.  Not surprisingly, Friedman doesn’t address that problem.

We developed this session to honor the great tradition of science and scientific inquiry, as exemplified by Galileo when, 400 years ago this year, he first pointed his telescope at the Earth’s moon and at the moons of Jupiter, analyzed his findings, and subsequently challenged the orthodoxy of a geocentric universe. Our proposed session was accepted by the AGU.

In response to its acceptance, we were joined by a highly distinguished list of scientists – which included members of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, France and China, as well as recipients of the AGU’s William Bowie, Charles Whitten and James MacElwane medals. Our participants faithfully submitted abstracts for the session.

But by late September, several puzzling events left us wondering whether the AGU truly serves science and environmental scientists – or simply reflects, protects and advances the political agendas of those who espouse belief in manmade CO2-induced catastrophic global warming.

Could this AGU position have anything to do with it?

The scientific consensus on climate change was expressed in an open letter sent to the US Senate on last Wednesday, 21 October….

While the signatories represent a wide variety of scientific disciplines, they all came together to express their concern over anthropogenic climate change. The letter states: “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.”

What about the independent lines of evidence of no global warming the last ten years, which the vast body could not see below their extended gut?