Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the ‘climategate scandal’, is to be reinstated in his role at the University of East Anglia after being cleared of dishonesty by a major review.

By Louise Gray

Prof Jones lost his job as head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA after personal emails he sent appeared on the internet.

The emails referred to a ‘trick’ used to interpret data and the death of a leading climate change sceptic as “cheering news.”

Sceptics claimed the stolen emails showed Prof Jones and his colleagues were willing to manipulate key data to exaggerate the rise in global temperatures.

The scandal, that became known as ‘climategate’, caused repercussions around the world as it was used by those who question the case for man made global warming.

However a comprehensive review into the case by Sir Muir Russell, a senior UK civil servant, has cleared Prof Jones of dishonest behaviour.

Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the UEA, immediately announced that Prof Jones will be reinstated as Director of Research in CRU, a role of similar importance to his last post.

He said it was a personal vindication for Prof Jones, who has said he considered suicide over the affair.

“We hope this means the wilder assertions about the climate science community will stop,” he said.

However sceptics claimed the report was a whitewash and questioned the reinstatement of Prof Jones.

David Holland, one of the leading sceptics on the blogosphere, pointed out that Prof Jones referred to deleting emails in one of his communications.

“Would you trust a man who has asked to delete evidence?” he said.

Read the rest of this story at The London Telegraph.

By Ben Webster

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.

The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect - there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.

Read the rest of this story at London Times.

This is a translation of an article in the Norwegian newspaper Forskning.

By Bjornar Kjensli

A German climate researcher says that people are beginning to lose faith in climate research, pointing to the IPPC as one of the main causes. Norwegian IPCC veterans disagree about what the organization should do about it.

After a winter of setbacks and disclosure of mistakes, many different ideas have been put forward about what can be done about the IPPC and these ideas abound in newspapers and in journals such as Nature and Science. One of the most vociferous critics has been Hans von Storch. He is a professor of meteorology at the University of Hamburg, director of the Institute for Coastal Research at GKSS in Geestacht and was the main author of the chapter on regional climate in Working Group 1 (WG1) of the Third IPCC Assessment Report (AR3), which was published in 2001.

On 22 April 2010 he was in Oslo, where he addressed the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in a lecture containing a number of objections to the IPCCs current way of working. The presentation of the lecture, you can see here.[link]

Not skeptic but a critic

Von Storch has long been critical of the way the IPCC has dealt with scientific uncertainty, and was himself described in less than flattering terms in some of the disputed emails released from the CRU at the University of East Anglia last November.

The man behind the hockey stick curve, Professor Michael Mann wrote, among other things, in an email to Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia Climate Centre, that “Von Storch is a strange guy”, and that it would not surprise him if he was really a climate skeptic. Von Storch says he has nothing against being a strange guy, but he is not in any doubt that anthropogenic emissions are leading to climate change. He is however very critical of the internal processes of the IPCC and the role of chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.

Read the rest at Bishop Hill.

By Ed Barnes

The Penn State climate professor who has silently endured investigations, hostile questioning, legislative probes and attacks by colleagues has finally spoken out. He says he’ll sue the makers of a satirical video that’s a hit on You Tube.

Their response: Bring it on.

Michael Mann, one of the central figures in the recent climate-data scandal, is best known for his “hockey stick graph,” which was the key visual aid in explaining how the world is warming at an alarming rate and in connecting the rise to the increase in use of carbon fuels in this century. E-mails stolen from a university in England were released online, revealing exchanges between climatologists and a reference to a “trick” that Mann had used to get the graph to portray what global warming scientists wanted to see. 

The parody video, titled “Hide the Decline,” had more than 500,000 viewers on YouTube and received national attention when Rush Limbaugh played it on his radio show. It features a cat with a guitar, a talking tree, and a dancing figure sporting the image of Professor Mann. It’s the use of his image that Mann is complaining about, arguing that the video supports “efforts to sell various products and merchandise.”

“The guy is crazy to threaten legal action,” said Jeff Davis, the President of No Cap and Trade, a large organization that includes the group Mann is threatening to sue, Minnesotans for Global Warming. “A lawsuit would give us full discovery — and there’s a lot to look at in his work.”

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Dr. Richard Lindzen

In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.

In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.

Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.

But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.

The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.

There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).

The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.

Read the rest of this article at The Australian.

By Lawrence Solomon

Climate scientists play a good game of whack-a-mole.Right from the early days of the global warming controversy, they whacked any scientist who dissented from the view that CO2 was warming the planet in a dangerous way. Up popped other skeptical scientists, and WHACK!! Down they went.

Up popped skeptical journalists and WHACK! Down they went, too. Then more whacks for new scientists who surfaced, or pesky scientists who resurfaced.

Today, decades later, the climate science establishment is still whacking away, faster and more frenetically than ever, as more and more skeptical scientists, journalists and politicians surface. And now there’s a new species of skeptic in need of whacking down ­- the many inquiries that have sprung up in the wake of Climategate, the unauthorized release of some 3,000 documents from the computers of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University showing that data had been manipulated and destroyed.

East Anglia University was the first to establish an inquiry into its conduct. Then it started a second inquiry to complement the first. The Met Office, the UK government’s meteorological department, announced its inquiry to redo the data that CRU had destroyed, a process that would take it three years. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office began an inquiry, to ascertain whether the country’s Freedom of Information Law had been broken. The local police force, working with Scotland Yard, also began an inquiry.

All these would and will need to be whacked, and more would, too. The IPCC itself announced an inquiry. Across the Atlantic, Penn State University, home to Michael Mann, one of America’s most important doomsayers, launched an investigation.

Read the rest of this story at the National Post.

Michael Mann

By Ed Barnes

When a Penn State board of inquiry unilaterally decided that Michael Mann had broken no rules in the climate-data scandal, global-warming alarmists breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the most damaging episode in their effort to save the planet was behind them. They were wrong.

The geology professor’s 1998 climate study, which showed a sharp increase in the world’s temperatures in the past century,  was seen by many as proof that climate change was rapidly occurring and that humans played a significant role in the change. Despite ongoing criticism, the study formed the backbone of global warming theories — until leaked e-mails cast fresh doubt on Mann’s methodology and integrity, notably “the trick” he used to make his data so compelling.

It was those e-mails, stolen from British university East Anglia’s climate study group, that sparked Penn State’s probe into Mann’s work. On Feb. 3, he was exonerated on three of four charges, and the investigation of the fourth charge will be concluded by June 3. 

But the final say will be in the hands of a skeptical inspector general at the National Science Foundation, the primary funder of the research into global warming. According to published documents obtained by FoxNews.com, the IG must determine whether Penn State’s investigation was adequate.

Read the rest of this story at Fox News.

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

By Leo Hickman

When I recently interviewed James Lovelock for the G2 section of the Guardian, we spoke for nearly two hours about the various events of the past few months – a period in which he’d remained silent because he’d been over-wintering with his wife Sandy in her native Missouri. There was a lot to talk about: the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia, the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the intense scrutiny placed on the IPCC, and the rather nippy winter experienced across much of the Northern Hemisphere. As is inevitable with an interview appearing in the newspaper, space was at a premium so the quotes used were tightly edited. But, just as I did with my interview with Al Gore last year, I have decided to publish a transcript of his key points here online for anyone interested in hearing in much more detail what Lovelock had to say on some of these controversial and much-discussed topics. 

Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the stolen CRU emails [he later clarified that he hadn't read the originals, saying: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry"]: 

I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.

You can make mistakes; they’re helpful. In the old days, it was perfectly OK to make a mistake and say so. You often learned from it. Nowadays if you’re dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can’t make mistakes as you won’t get another one if you do. It’s an awful moral climate and it was all set up for the best of reasons. I think it was felt there was far too much inequality in science and there was an enormous redress. Looking around the country [at the wider society] this was good on the whole, but in some special professions you want the best, the elite. Elitism is important in science. It is vital.

Read the rest at the London Guardian.

By Richard of EUReferendum

It’s been a heady few months for climate sceptics - or “deniers” as the opposition loves to call us. Starting with “climategate”, through a progression of “gates” with much else in between - including the apparent collapse at Copenhagen - it seemed as if we had the warmists on the run.Certainly, we’ve scored some hits and, aided and abetted by Mother Nature who has been generous in her deliveries of global warming this winter, we have seen a turnaround in public opinion, with a distinct loss of enthusiasm for the surfeit of alarmism on offer.

The successes have led to a certain amount of triumphalism amongst the sceptics, with a feeling in certain quarters that we are winning the game. But any such sentiment is, to say the very least, premature. In fact, a more realistic appraisal might suggest that we have not even dented the underlying agenda.

Herein lies a certain definitional problem, as we have certainly dented the confidence of many so-called climate “scientists”, worried some of the hangers-on and made serious inroads into the intellectual argument, challenging the science.

But as to the “agenda”, this has nothing to do with science or even climate change. The climate change scare is merely a front used to conceal on the one hand and, on the other, to legitimise a far more sinister movement which has at its root politics, power and money. And its agenda might have suffered a few setbacks and some delays, but it is essentially intact.

Read the rest of this piece at EUReferendum.

NASA can put a man on the moon, but the space agency can’t tell you what the temperature was back then.

By Blake Snow

NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can’t tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA’s temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

Read the rest at Fox News.

Michael Mann

R.I.P. Global Warming 1992-2010

By Dr. Goldstein

2010 will be remembered as the year Global Warming died.  Global Warming was Mann made using clever computer ‘tricks’ and ‘massaged’ data. After slowly developing in the womb of junk science for several years, the primary birth announcement and christening occurred when Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992.  Gore, the self proclaimed genius who had “created the internet” , eagerly adopted Global Warming and put his new baby in the public spotlight.

 Global Warming was a very good earner who attracteded billions of investor’s dollars to Gore’s for-profit corporation called Generation Investment Management.  From day one Global Warming was all about making money. His detractors dared to call him a fraudster and a control freak who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

Gore’s book was really quite boring and it failed to get Global Warming the attention (and money) Gore felt his baby deserved, so Gore followed up with An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. The movie will go down in history as an excellent example of what happens when one person, with a hidden financial agenda, tells one side of a story.

Despite it’s success, the wildly popular movie was the beginning of the end for Global Warming. It triggered a quick and lethal downward spiral. The movie galvanized scientists who recognized a bogus pseuo-scientific scam when they saw one. Powerful opposition groups formed around the world. Books were written by scholars that destroyed the credibility of Al Gore’s pride and joy.

Global Warming was a cash cow, and his opposition had no money, but the opposition (”skeptics”) had something more powerful than money: The Truth.

Read the rest of this piece at TPM.

The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign

By Steven F. Hayward

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago-changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media-even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC-are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

Read the rest of this article at the Weekly Standard.