Environmentalism's Berlin Wall

From TIA Daily

The last week has seen an important change in the coverage of Climategate in the British press—a change that is likely to make it over to this side of the Atlantic and begin to influence the American press. Jack Wakeland sent me the following comments, which he said should be reviewed by someone who is "slightly less excited." I'm not sure that I qualify. Here are Jack's remarks:

"The Times and Daily Telegraph have launched a newspaperman's crusade against the IPCC's 'Glaciergate.' Both papers are reporting extensively in numerous stories about mistaken, false, and biased findings about glaciers in the IPCC's 2007 climate change report.

"All of these newspaper stories are being printed as straight news, not analysis, commentary, or opinion. This is a sea change. Gone are the days that fraudulent environmentalist scare stories and pseudo-scientific proofs of 'global warming' will be printed as straight news in the major British press, not without the other side—the side of rational and objective science—getting the straight news coverage first.

"Both The Times and Daily Telegraph are beating the drums for the removal of IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, and they're doing it by covering 'Glaciergate' as a straight news story about political corruption. The Times has even gone so far as to report claims that Dr. Pachauri deliberately let stand statements that he knew were false about rapidly disappearing Himalayan glaciers, in order 'to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.'

"Climate criminals are now being called out by name by the establishment British press and being convicted of their frauds in straight news stories by the normal techniques of good journalism.

"This is the fruit of Climategate at the CRU: the presumption of legitimacy has been stripped from the AGW crowd. From now on, the British press will question their bogus claims and will pursue those questions all of the way down until they find either legitimate scientific controversy—or ideological posturing and grant application fraud.

"This is not to say that the British press have corrected all of their false premises about environmentalism. Far from it. The British press are fighting for the truth about global warming in the mistaken belief that it is being discredited by a handful of corrupt and criminal hacks at the CRU and the IPCC. The article summary in today's Daily Telegraph says it all: 'Faulty science published by the United Nations' climate change body is in danger of obscuring a "much larger truth," a senior government official warned yesterday, amid fears of growing public skepticism about the reality of global warming.'

"The British press expects to scrub off a crust of corrupt and misleading statements to leave the shining truth of man-made global warming pure and untainted. In their vigor to clean away the falsehoods, the scrub brush will go deep. It will go in a whole lot deeper than they expect. It will go all of the way down to the core. And when all the scrubbing and brushing and cleaning is complete—there will be nothing left of the AGW theory."

That was yesterday. Today, Jack saw that the trend had spread to a leftist British newspaper, The Guardian—see the main link below—and sent me a follow-up comment.

"Environmentalist Fred Pearce has become an anti-climate fraud crusader. With Mr. Pearce's new journalistic obsession, the scientific left in Great Britain is now in full and open rebellion against the AGW establishment.

"They think that they're fighting to right the listing ship of legitimate man-made global warming science. Instead, they're sinking it. And they're sinking it fast!

"This is huge. This is even bigger than the tea party movement. This has the potential to become as big as Thatcherism and Reaganism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is quickly snowballing into the fall of environmentalism. And it is happening very, very fast. Information-age fast.

"One more month of this assault, and the whole environmentalist school will be in cultural shambles. Four more months and environmentalists won't be able to show their faces in public.

"We've waited 25 long years for good and rational scientists and commentators to hack away at the political defenses of the ruling AGW clique. Now the waiting is over. Man made global warming is dead as a scientific, cultural, moral, and political cause."

 

"Strange Case of Moving Weather Posts and a Scientist Under Siege," Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 1

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

[CRU head Phil] Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990….

It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night. So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.

The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible….

British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication."…

Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more."