O'Reilly Tonight: Climategate

I’ll be on O’Reilly tonight to talk about the recent Climategate e-mails. How bad are they? They show that scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit – which the UN IPCC relies on for temperature data – tried silence dissent. From the Washington Post:

In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

… “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann writes. . . .

Many of the worst e-mails are between Michael Mann, a Meteorologist at Penn State University who worked with CRU researchers, and CRU director Phil Jones. PSU has launched an investigation into Mann’s e-mails, the student newspaper reports.

Good. Here’s what Mann wrote about skeptical academics who asked for the programming code he used for climate models.

Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

And when Jones asked him to “delete any emails you may have had with Keith... Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?” Mann replied, “I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is ___”

Mann has denied deleting e-mails to the PSU student paper, but didn’t return our calls for comment.

Scientists who think we do need to act on global warming are upset about the Climategate e-mails.

“[CRU scientists] sought to turn the entire notion of peer review on its head… The need to respond to climate change (which I support) does not justify sacrificing standards of scientific integrity for political ends,” Roger Pielke, Jr., an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote on his blog.

Others call for the IPCC to stop using the Center’s data in its climate forecasts. Eduardo Zorita, a climate scientists at GKSS Resaerch Center in Germany, says the Center should be “barred from the IPCC process…because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.”

I agree. The response from the Climate Research Unit has been weak. The director has apologized – sort of – for the content of the e-mails.

My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.

The scandal has also embarrassed the director into promising to release all of the university’s temperature data.

Oops, they’d already thrown the original temperature measurements out! But at least they’ll share the data they still have.

Climategate doesn’t prove that global warming isn’t a problem. But it does show that we should be extra skeptical of global warming orthodoxy.

It also shines a light on Academia. Ivory-tower types pretend to be objective and impartial -- but it’s often a ruse.