ClimateGate Could Threaten Copenhagen Climate Deal

(CBS/iStockphoto)

Widening concern about the state of climate science after thousands of internal e-mails and computer files were posted on the Internet could jeopardize any agreement at this week's summit in Copenhagen.

Although a sweeping international deal already appeared unlikely, agreement on even less ambitious measures will be complicated by the growing ClimateGate scandal and questions that have been raised about the reliability of computer models linking global warming to man-made activities. No less an authority than the U.N.'s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, acknowledged on Sunday that the data leak was damaging; domestically, Republicans are pressing the Obama administration to reevaluate its position. (See CBS News' previous coverage.)

The summit in Denmark that began Monday, properly titled the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, is expected to draw some 100 heads of state, including President Obama. One unanswered question: How willing are wealthier, developed nations to curb their economic output and tax their citizens to pay poorer countries to emit less carbon dioxide?

A November 20 report from a U.N. working group outlines what many nations would like to see in a final treaty. Wealthier nations including the United States will make "mandatory contributions" to a "multilateral climate change fund" paid for by the requirement that "developed country parties shall restructure their taxation regime." The report warns: "Delay by developed country parties in implementing their commitments to reduce emissions will increase their climate debt to the developing country parties."

The leaked electronic files have proven problematic because the argument for an international treaty is attached to this chain of reasoning: the earth is warming, the primary cause is man-made carbon dioxide emissions, the effect is harmful and can be remediated by limiting CO2 output, and, finally, it's worth spending billions or even trillions to do so. If foundational data about temperature measurements is in error, as critics now say is the case -- well, we might as well cancel the Copenhagen summit and tell all those inbound private jets to turn around and return home.

To be sure, many -- perhaps even most -- climate researchers say any flaw in the leaked data assembled by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) does not mean the theory of man-made global warming is false. Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, calls evidence for that theory "overwhelming," and Obama administration scientists last week downplayed the scandal, as did a U.N. panel. Tempers are flaring: one of the East Anglia academics resorted to calling a skeptic "an asshole" on a live BBC television interview.

And the scandal seems to be broadening. Internal investigations are underway at the CRU and Penn State (with the state senate warning that the school's budget may be at risk), one estimate from a free-market group says that 12 of the 26 scientists who wrote the relevant section of a U.N. global warming report are "up to their necks in ClimateGate," and the BBC and independent analysts are evaluating the CRU's computer code and finding it lacking.

Saudi Arabia's U.N. negotiator says the country's confidence in temperature data is diminished. England's meterological office has announed that it will begin a three-year review of its analysis, which relied heavily on CRU data. The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs the GlobalWarming.org site that takes a critical look at pro-warming research, has petitioned the EPA to halt regulatory proceedings based on U.N. temperature data, and has announced plans to sue NASA by the end of the month if it does not release scientific and other data that CEI initially asked for three years ago.

In the words of Christopher Booker, a journalist for the U.K. Telegraph: "What has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been (definitively called into question). Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy."

All of a sudden, the domestic political situation has become more perilous for politicians who are proposing dramatic new laws or taxes based on theories of climate change. In addition to questions being raised by congressional Republicans, onetime VP candidate Sarah Palin has has published a statement on Facebook saying "ClimateGate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed (in Copenhagen), including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan." No less than 59 percent of Americans believe that scientists have faked climate change research and only 22 percent view the U.N. as a reliable source of global warming information, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.

The probability that global warming alarmism has become a political movement, as MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has stated and libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has argued, has long been evident. But what we now know is that many of the most prominent climate change scientists have clambered on board that movement, which calls their models, their analysis, and their policy recommendations into question.

Further evidence inadvertently comes from Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois, who apparently threatened a New York Times reporter with "the Big Cutoff" on Saturday for writing an article that displeased him. Schlesinger did not immediately respond to questions from CBS News on Monday. (In retrospect, we probably should have figured this out when NASA's James Hansen called for oil executives to be tried for "high crimes against humanity." What does that make those of us who drive gas or diesel-fueled cars? Accomplices? Or unindicted co-conspirators?)

The official U.N. Copenhagen Web site says, without mentioning arguments that the science remains unsettled, that "the world has only a very narrow window of opportunity to undertake a first dramatic shift towards a low-carbon society and to prevent the worst scenarios of scientists from coming true." What are the odds that the tens of thousands of attendees will take a break from scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges to ensure that those scenarios are based on fact and careful analysis, not other motivations that might be less pure?

Update 2:30 p.m. ET: In November 2007, the American Physical Society (a professional association of physicists) adopted a statement saying "the evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring... We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." Now members of the society, including two eminent professors of physics at Princeton University, are circulating a letter calling ClimateGate "an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership." The letter calls on the society's management to withdraw the 2007 statement; I'll let you know what the American Physical Society has to say on the matter.

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Declan McCullagh is a senior correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached at [e-mail] and can be followed on Twitter as declanm. You can bookmark Declan's Taking Liberties site here, or subscribe to the RSS feed. Declan previously was chief political correspondent for CNET, a reporter for Time, and Washington bureau chief for Wired.

[cjauregui10]

Are you angry about this obvious fraud and the national media's complicity in the cover-up, misinformation, reframing and misdirection of the issue and the related ?carbon derivatives? market Obama?s Administration is spinning up? Take responsibility and take action. STOP all donations to the political party(s) responsible for this fraud. STOP donations to all environmental groups which funded this Global Warming propaganda campaign with our money, especially The Environmental Defense Fund. They have violated the public trust. KEEP donations local, close to home. MAKE donations to Oklahoma?s Senator Inhofe, the only politician to stand firmly against this obvious government/media coordinated information operation (propaganda) targeted at its own people. People that government leaders and employees are sworn to protect. WRITE your state and federal representatives demanding wall to wall investigations of government sponsored propaganda campaigns and demand indictments of those responsible. WRITE your state and federal Attorneys General demanding Al Gore and others conducting Global Warming/Climate Change racketeering and mail fraud operations be brought to justice, indicted, tried, convicted and jailed. Carbon is the stuff of life. He (Obama) who controls carbon, especially CO2, controls the world. Think of the consequences if you do nothing! For one, the UK is becoming the poster child for George Orwell?s ?1984? and the US government?s sponsorship of this worldwide Global Warming propaganda campaign puts it in a class with the failed Soviet Union?s relentless violation of the basic human right to truthful government generated information. Given ClimateGate?s burgeoning revelations of outrageous government misconduct and massive covert misinformation, what are the chances that this Administration?s National Health Care sales campaign is anywhere near the truth?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdneX1djD0

[Paul-Revere]

Monckton Says Secretive Copenhagen Treaty Creates Global Government Tax
?We?re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies,? said Monckton.
Speaking about how such draconian measures were being forced through despite the recent scandal surrounding how key IPCC-affiliated scientists conspired to ?hide the decline in global warming, Monckton emphasized how the climate change establishment were still ludicrously attempting to downplay the significance of the climategate emails by merely repeating their already discredited propaganda about global warming.
?What has happened is that the mainstream media has done themselves terrible damage by signing up to this climate nonsense and then by servilely refusing to admit that climategate was happening, admit how serious it was and simply inform their readers of what was actually in these emails,? said Monckton, ?Admissions that while they?re telling us, as the Met Office did just today, that today is the warmest decade since records began 150 years ago, privately what they?re saying in the climategate emails is ?hey look we?ve got a temperature which has been falling and we can?t explain why and it?s a travesty that we can?t explain why? ? so they?re saying one thing to us publicly to maintain the scare that?s making them rich, and that?s what?s called fraud, it?s criminal fraud, and on the other hand they?re saying privately ?oh dear oh dear we can?t account for the fact that there?s been no warming for the last 15 years??.Monckton said that the Copenhagen treaty meant America was in ?immediate peril? of losing its freedom to a ?sinister dictatorship? being formed under the contrived pretext of global warming. infowars.com
Check out the Copenhagen Document Leaks : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W7vrgW8GTQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KH-WMZuw0 - Tells how they will get rid of UN and use IMF to tax you!
Protest the False Climate Measurments being used in the Copenhagen Treaty: http://www.gopetition.com/online/32485.html

[Republicae]

Perhaps earth's 6.6 Billion People should stop breathing, after all the by-product from all that breathing is C02, there should also be some sort of law against all the flatulence produced by humans...what a messy world we live in. Mass extinction, now there's a plan that these global warming cultists can sink their Malthusian teeth into!

[Kewlbreeze12]

Ubrew12 said
"And we are to believe that GISS and NCDC are ALSO using the same buggy code to generate their surface temperature profiles? Like, CRU just sent them its compiled code as a 'black box' which they couldn't examine? "
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ubrew12 you keep missing the point - the answer is yes, the closed loop of peer review by only those who believe in AGW creates a clouded closed environment of hand wringing doomsayers who - the more they claim the sky is falling the more money they get.

Of course the proxy data was PRACTICALLY IDENTICAL - they all are in it together - they all know they are fudging and using Mike's Trick - to smooth out the MWP and the LIA.....

Stop defending the indefensible. These guys are liars and you are a fool for defending them. you keep on spewing data from "Climate Specialist" like it is the Gospel....but it is tainted. It cannot be trusted. All of them were "going along to get along" to steal from you and I.

Let go of your politics and realize the Warmers want to steal money from you too....not just the skeptics. Politics and science make deadly bedfellows.

[ubrew12]

'Let go of your politics' Wow! Take a look in a mirror. OK, here's some science for you:
Since 1950, the atmosphere has heated up about 8 zettajoules (a zettajoule is 10^21 joules). Yes this is taken from the surface temperature record. CRU produces one of these, but due to ClimateGate this is suspect (according to Kewlbreeze12). GISS also produces one. NCDC also produces one. And I believe the Japanese also produce an independent estimate of the surface temperature record. These all largely match to produce the dreaded hockey stick.

Heck, lets assume they are all invalid. Lets turn them upside down and assume the atmosphere has actually COOLED by 8 zettajoules since 1950. Since 1950, the ocean has heated up about 210 zettajoules. So, the difference between having the surface temperature record right side up, or upside down, is the difference between 218 zettajoules, and 202 zettajoules. Both in the direction of heating of earth. 'Global warming' is dependent on ocean temperatures, not surface temperatures, and especially not on CRU's calculations or miscalculations. So, when people say that ClimateGate is the 'end of global warming' can you understand why some of us are laughing??

Kewlbreeze12: get yourself a high school education in physics and come back when you're educated. Until then, you just can't be trusted to differentiate science from faith.

[orperspectiv]

Declan-

The iconclasts in this debate are not ExxonMobil's Competitive Enterprise Institute or Saudi Arabia's climate skeptics, though you quote them as if they were.

The iconclasts are the scientists. Like James Hansen of NASA - who wrote in 1981 and testified in 1988 that we need to pay attention to CO2 - or Michael Mann of Penn State - who published the hockey stick in 1998 and reaffirmed it in 2003 and 2007 - or Kevin Trenberth of NCAR - who provides an excellent review of our current knowledge and ignorance in "Climate change planning: Tracking Earth?s global energy".

They have been willing to speak their conscience backed by evidence against the world's most massive economic interests for years.

If ExxonMobil truly believed these scientists were wrong, they'd spend their billion to do better research, instead of giving millions to CEI to smear good work.

A true iconoclast challenges entrenched power with new knowledge. They have.

Declan, you're on the wrong side.

[Freetruth]

A recent study comparing how much money has been spent in grants to Climate Change "scientists" by governments versus how much energy companies have spent was revealing: about 3%. That's right, the pro-Chicken Little lobby has recieved over 33 times the amount of money that skeptics have. You're right, follow the money. A world taxing authority requires an enforcement organization (can you say government?) and lo and behold, the answer to this "problem" is a world governing body that can tax us all. Even if it is getting a warmer, do you really have that much faith in politicians to "fix" any problem?

[ubrew12]

The factor of 33 is the difference between public disclosure requirements and private disclosure requirements. Public entities must disclose EVERYTHING they spend, by law, private entitites (like Exxon) have a huge leeway to say 'fvck off' to disclosure requests. You call yourself 'Freetruth', but you don't already know this?

I have a name for you: 'EnslavedFalsehood'

[Steven_Douglas]

That Rasmussen Poll shows why this issue is not so easily minimized, and will not go away. Follow the money? Sure. But follow ALL it. Not only are lay people not as stupid and some fancy, they tend to vote with their pocketbooks.

I thought that Obama would surely be a two term president. Now I have very, very serious doubts. With his ignorance (ignoring) of climategate (i.e., the end around sneak that allows political values to run roughshod over and manipulate an entire scientific process), and his latest political end-around sneak, getting the EPA to declare CO2 a public danger (since he couldn't get what he wanted through normal legislative means) - it may not sound like much, but it's big.

Obama says he learned from Reagan's strengths and successes, but it might be just as wise to learn from the failures and weaknesses of Bush 43 and Carter.

Once the voters find out what this means in terms of all the inevitable, impending hardships to already flailing U.S. industries and economy; once they learn, firsthand, of the hardships ordinary Americans are going to have to endure, whose utility bills "will sky-rocket" (Obama's exact words), he will have his recipe for Jimmy Carter Part Deux perfected.

I remember our past energy crisis, and gas lines, and shortages, and Carter's now famous Malaise Speech, wherein the solution he proposed solved nothing, but instead chastised Americans for consuming too much. Bad move. Really bad. I also remember how that paved the way, in part, for Ronald Reagan. It appears that Obama is gambling that Americans are ready for Malaise II, and in the midst of a weak economy (and it is the economy, stupid).

We're steadily approaching a time when the most shrill of fear-based alarmists, who have heretofore enjoyed the illusion of "having the denialists on the run", will witness firsthand the shifting of their anthropogenic political climate. Action/Reaction - And when Hansen, Mann, Jones, et al are finally required to "show their homework", and not just the answers they gave, they won't be able to reproduce their own results. And when that happens, everything comes apart.

[verycold]

It has been reported that many of the temperature locations have changed over the course of the years. So where a location was once rural it is now a cluster of buildings. This will impact temperature. Equally it is now being reported that some of the rural sites have been abandoned and thus that will skew the results since only the warmer urban location are being used to gather temperatures.

If a person is paid by a rag magazine to give his/her story about some event, people insist that testimony is tainted because of the money exchange. How is this climate debate any different? The e-mails revealed there is good reason to be skeptical of data being used for these models since those doing the gathering are not in the least forthcoming about the origins of that data. So we are to follow and believe even if our best senses feel differently. The likes of Hansen and Gore then revert to name calling and threats to whip everybody into line. What sort of nation are we turning into that we can't have an honest, open debate and those gathering the numbers need to be able to make their case without threatening those that are skeptical.

[MidwestGreen]

Want to talk about an inconvenient truth. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Robert Kennedy Jr. along with Goldman Sachs all make big bucks off of this...From the New York Times. Its all about money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html?_r=2&dbk

[jbuberel]

The outcome that I am hoping for is complete transparency in all future climate research. Apply the open source software model:

1. All raw original unmodified uncorrected data to be made publicly available.
2. Source code to all climate modeling software and tools to be released under an open-source license.
3. All articles pertaining to climate research to be published exclusively in 'open access' journals.

It could be years before climate researchers will be able to win back the trust of the public that they serve (and who funds their research). Complete transparency in everything they do is the only way for them to achieve that.

[OldGeezer43]

In 1974 the National Science Board announced that"during the last 20 to 30 years, temperatures have fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end...leading into the next ice age." On April 28, 1975 Newsweek did a cover issue warning of global cooling. On August 14, 1976 the New York Times reported "many signs that earth may be headed for the next ice age."
In 2007 an unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the citrus, avocado and flower crops in California. Today the weather channel is broadcasting unusual early snow in the south and central USA.
I would like to believe the scientists, but in wake of disputed data and the absence of investigative reviews, I have to save judgement on this issue. It comes down to who do you trust.