This is as balanced as the liberal media (national canadian paper) gets ...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1389842/

Leaked e-mails from Britain's Climatic Research Unit threaten to undermine Copenhagen summit on
carbon emissions
Doug Saunders

Norwich, England - From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Dec. 04, 2009 9:19PM EST
Last updated on Friday, Dec. 04, 2009 9:42PM EST

A short drive from the windswept North Sea coast of England, the Climatic Research Unit occupies a
squat, weather-beaten grey concrete building on the campus of the University of East Anglia.

This scientific bunker holds the world's largest trove of climate-change data, gleaned from
Siberian tree-ring counts, Greenland ice-layer measurements and centuries-old thermometer readings.

Now the pirating of thousands of e-mail messages from within its walls has revealed a dangerous
bunker mentality among the scientists who guarded those records and a data-fudging scandal that has
created a crisis of confidence in global-warming science that is threatening to destroy the
political consensus around next week's carbon-policy summit in Copenhagen.

Said one scientist working at the institute: "It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this has
set the climate-change debate back 20 years."

The crisis intensified yesterday as the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
the main scientific and political authority on global warming, announced an investigation into the
university's practices and the reliability of the findings that have underpinned the UN's
climate-change conclusions. The university has launched its own inquiry and on Wednesday ordered
the CRU's embattled head, Phil Jones, to step down until it is complete.

On a political level, coming on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, the controversy has been
catastrophic: In the last few days, it has prompted opposition politicians in the United States,
Britain and Australia to argue that human-caused global warming is a myth.

Saudi Arabian officials now say that they will argue in Copenhagen that carbon-emission controls
are pointless because the CRU scandal has nullified any evidence of human-caused atmospheric
temperature increase.

The reports the CRU produced from its now-controversial data were the main source of the UN's key
global-warming document, the IPCC's report of 2007, which concluded that "warming of the climate
system is unequivocal" and that "most" of the global temperature increase since the mid-20th
century has been caused by human activity - a conclusion, still supported by the majority of
atmospheric scientists, that most governments adopted as the basis of their carbon-emissions
policy.

That consensus has been shaken by hundreds of pages of messages, apparently stolen from the lab's
servers, which have been interpreted as suggesting that the scientists at the CRU manipulated data
to make it deliver a more dramatic message about the human contribution to global warming,
destroyed data files that did not support their hypothesis, and tried to prevent critics within the
scientific community from having access to their raw information and methods.

Unusually, even sympathetic scientists and some activists have concluded that the credibility of
climate science has been seriously harmed.

"We should not underestimate the damage caused by what has happened, either for the science or for
the politics of climate change, and potentially it could have some very far-reaching consequences,"
said Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at East Anglia whose e-mails were among those included in the
pirated files and who has been critical of the secrecy and lack of impartiality in his colleagues'
work.

Independent scientists are quick to point out that the actions described in the e-mails do not
describe anything like a fabrication of global-warming evidence, and that two other major sets of
historical data drawn from the same sources, both held by NASA institutions in the United States,
also show a historical warming trend.

That has not stopped right-wing politicians in Western countries from using the scandal to dramatic
effect: Yesterday, a group of Hollywood conservatives launched a campaign to revoke the Academy
Award given to Al Gore, the former vice-president and a carbon-cap advocate, for his climate
documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

But perhaps more important than the ammunition the CRU affair has given to conspiracy theorists is
what it has revealed about the awkward role scientists have come to play in the heated world of
climate policy.

"I think there is a serious problem with the way scientists are used, and the way they position
themselves, in climate-policy debates," Prof. Hulme said. "Wherever you look around climate change,
people are bringing their ideologies, beliefs and values to bear on the science."

The CRU files, apparently hacked or leaked from the institute's server, began appearing on websites
on Nov. 17, and reached the attention of climate-skeptic groups and the media two days later.

The most contentious e-mail was written by Prof. Jones, the director of the CRU, who wrote to
colleagues in 1999, as they studied measurements of Siberian tree rings, which scientists have long
realized do not reflect local temperature changes after 1961: "I've just completed Mike's trick of
adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from
1961 to hide the decline."

While it seems clear that he is using "trick" to refer to a change in algorithm to remove the
nonsensical data after 1961 and "decline" likely refers to the quality of the data, the phrase has
led some of the more extreme critics to conclude that a data-shaping plot was at work.

Referring to weather data from the last decade, another scientist wrote: "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."

While such insinuations of poor scientific practice have drawn the most attention, more damaging
for climate scientists are e-mails which reveal the hostile, partisan, bunker-like atmosphere at
the lab, which goes to ridiculous lengths to prevent even moderate critics from seeing any of the
raw data.

In one e-mail, Prof. Jones wrote that climate skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for
years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete
the file rather than send it to anyone."

As it happens, Prof. Jones admitted earlier this year that he "accidentally" deleted some of the
CRU's raw-data files, material that the centre says amounts to about 5 per cent of its collection.

Prof. Jones wrote of efforts to deter skeptics from having access to data: "We will keep them out
somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In another, he asks that
several of his colleagues "delete any e-mails" about their work on the IPCC's 2007 report.

That sort of language has led many people, including climate scientists, to worry that the
scientific findings of the centre have been undermined by scientists who see themselves as
activists trying to prove a case rather than impartial arbiters of scientific fact.

As the political fallout escalated yesterday, it became apparent that it may take some time for
climate scientists to repair their collective reputation.

In Australia, 10 shadow ministers in the opposition Liberal Party resigned in the wake of the
revelations, in protest against their party's support for Australia's carbon-reduction bill.

In the United States, Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, leader of a climate-skeptic
caucus, declared that the e-mails "call into question the whole science of climate change" and
pledged to resist any climate bill.

And Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, announced that the e-mail leaks provide
sufficient proof that climate change is not man-made that there should be no policy resulting from
the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen summit, in which the world's nations will try to negotiate a successor to
the Kyoto Protocol.

"It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human
activities and climate change," said Mohammad al-Sabban, the head of the Saudi Arabian delegation.
"Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons."

While some climate scientists have taken a defensive posture, the crisis has led a number of others
to conclude that their approach to the subject needs to change.

Prof. Hulme leads a group of CRU scientists who believe that the extraordinary political importance
placed on their research, and the activist, ideological way that research has been used by the
IPCC, has put scientists in the position of being the authors of policy - a position that distorts
the role of science in society.

"If we simply believe that science dictates policy, then I'm afraid we're living in an unreal
world," Prof. Hulme said. "If people are arguing that science policy should flow seamlessly from
the science, then science becomes a battleground, where people start saying that we must get the
science on our side. We have lost an openness and a transparency that leads to good science."

Prof. Hulme is one of several scientists calling for the raw data of climate-change research to be
made available to everyone, including climate-change skeptics, on the Internet. That, he says,
would allow genuine research to proceed unhindered. Some of his colleagues also say the IPCC now
does more harm than good and should be disbanded.

That position has led some of his colleagues to attack him. This week, several said in Internet
posts that such transparency would be unworkable because the matter of climate is too urgent and
the stakes too high to allow skeptics to have any influence on policy.

That, Prof. Hulme said, is exactly the attitude that led to the sort of questionable practices
chronicled in the CRU e-mails.

On Fri, 4 Dec 2009 19:53:17 -0800, "Eric Gisin"
wrote:

This is as balanced as the liberal media (national canadian paper) gets ...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1389842/

Leaked e-mails from Britain's Climatic Research Unit threaten to undermine Copenhagen summit on
carbon emissions
Doug Saunders

Norwich, England - From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Dec. 04, 2009 9:19PM EST
Last updated on Friday, Dec. 04, 2009 9:42PM EST

A short drive from the windswept North Sea coast of England, the Climatic Research Unit occupies a
squat, weather-beaten grey concrete building on the campus of the University of East Anglia.

This scientific bunker holds the world's largest trove of climate-change data, gleaned from
Siberian tree-ring counts, Greenland ice-layer measurements and centuries-old thermometer readings.

Now the pirating of thousands of e-mail messages from within its walls has revealed a dangerous
bunker mentality among the scientists who guarded those records and a data-fudging scandal that has
created a crisis of confidence in global-warming science that is threatening to destroy the
political consensus around next week's carbon-policy summit in Copenhagen.

Said one scientist working at the institute: "It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this has
set the climate-change debate back 20 years."

The crisis intensified yesterday as the head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
the main scientific and political authority on global warming, announced an investigation into the
university's practices and the reliability of the findings that have underpinned the UN's
climate-change conclusions. The university has launched its own inquiry and on Wednesday ordered
the CRU's embattled head, Phil Jones, to step down until it is complete.

On a political level, coming on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, the controversy has been
catastrophic: In the last few days, it has prompted opposition politicians in the United States,
Britain and Australia to argue that human-caused global warming is a myth.

Saudi Arabian officials now say that they will argue in Copenhagen that carbon-emission controls
are pointless because the CRU scandal has nullified any evidence of human-caused atmospheric
temperature increase.

The reports the CRU produced from its now-controversial data were the main source of the UN's key
global-warming document, the IPCC's report of 2007, which concluded that "warming of the climate
system is unequivocal" and that "most" of the global temperature increase since the mid-20th
century has been caused by human activity - a conclusion, still supported by the majority of
atmospheric scientists, that most governments adopted as the basis of their carbon-emissions
policy.

That consensus has been shaken by hundreds of pages of messages, apparently stolen from the lab's
servers, which have been interpreted as suggesting that the scientists at the CRU manipulated data
to make it deliver a more dramatic message about the human contribution to global warming,
destroyed data files that did not support their hypothesis, and tried to prevent critics within the
scientific community from having access to their raw information and methods.

Unusually, even sympathetic scientists and some activists have concluded that the credibility of
climate science has been seriously harmed.

"We should not underestimate the damage caused by what has happened, either for the science or for
the politics of climate change, and potentially it could have some very far-reaching consequences,"
said Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at East Anglia whose e-mails were among those included in the
pirated files and who has been critical of the secrecy and lack of impartiality in his colleagues'
work.

Independent scientists are quick to point out that the actions described in the e-mails do not
describe anything like a fabrication of global-warming evidence, and that two other major sets of
historical data drawn from the same sources, both held by NASA institutions in the United States,
also show a historical warming trend.

That has not stopped right-wing politicians in Western countries from using the scandal to dramatic
effect: Yesterday, a group of Hollywood conservatives launched a campaign to revoke the Academy
Award given to Al Gore, the former vice-president and a carbon-cap advocate, for his climate
documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

But perhaps more important than the ammunition the CRU affair has given to conspiracy theorists is
what it has revealed about the awkward role scientists have come to play in the heated world of
climate policy.

"I think there is a serious problem with the way scientists are used, and the way they position
themselves, in climate-policy debates," Prof. Hulme said. "Wherever you look around climate change,
people are bringing their ideologies, beliefs and values to bear on the science."

The CRU files, apparently hacked or leaked from the institute's server, began appearing on websites
on Nov. 17, and reached the attention of climate-skeptic groups and the media two days later.

The most contentious e-mail was written by Prof. Jones, the director of the CRU, who wrote to
colleagues in 1999, as they studied measurements of Siberian tree rings, which scientists have long
realized do not reflect local temperature changes after 1961: "I've just completed Mike's trick of
adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from
1961 to hide the decline."

While it seems clear that he is using "trick" to refer to a change in algorithm to remove the
nonsensical data after 1961 and "decline" likely refers to the quality of the data, the phrase has
led some of the more extreme critics to conclude that a data-shaping plot was at work.

Referring to weather data from the last decade, another scientist wrote: "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."

While such insinuations of poor scientific practice have drawn the most attention, more damaging
for climate scientists are e-mails which reveal the hostile, partisan, bunker-like atmosphere at
the lab, which goes to ridiculous lengths to prevent even moderate critics from seeing any of the
raw data.

In one e-mail, Prof. Jones wrote that climate skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for
years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete
the file rather than send it to anyone."

As it happens, Prof. Jones admitted earlier this year that he "accidentally" deleted some of the
CRU's raw-data files, material that the centre says amounts to about 5 per cent of its collection.

Prof. Jones wrote of efforts to deter skeptics from having access to data: "We will keep them out
somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In another, he asks that
several of his colleagues "delete any e-mails" about their work on the IPCC's 2007 report.

That sort of language has led many people, including climate scientists, to worry that the
scientific findings of the centre have been undermined by scientists who see themselves as
activists trying to prove a case rather than impartial arbiters of scientific fact.

As the political fallout escalated yesterday, it became apparent that it may take some time for
climate scientists to repair their collective reputation.

In Australia, 10 shadow ministers in the opposition Liberal Party resigned in the wake of the
revelations, in protest against their party's support for Australia's carbon-reduction bill.

In the United States, Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, leader of a climate-skeptic
caucus, declared that the e-mails "call into question the whole science of climate change" and
pledged to resist any climate bill.

And Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, announced that the e-mail leaks provide
sufficient proof that climate change is not man-made that there should be no policy resulting from
the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen summit, in which the world's nations will try to negotiate a successor to
the Kyoto Protocol.

"It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human
activities and climate change," said Mohammad al-Sabban, the head of the Saudi Arabian delegation.
"Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons."

While some climate scientists have taken a defensive posture, the crisis has led a number of others
to conclude that their approach to the subject needs to change.

Prof. Hulme leads a group of CRU scientists who believe that the extraordinary political importance
placed on their research, and the activist, ideological way that research has been used by the
IPCC, has put scientists in the position of being the authors of policy - a position that distorts
the role of science in society.

"If we simply believe that science dictates policy, then I'm afraid we're living in an unreal
world," Prof. Hulme said. "If people are arguing that science policy should flow seamlessly from
the science, then science becomes a battleground, where people start saying that we must get the
science on our side. We have lost an openness and a transparency that leads to good science."

Prof. Hulme is one of several scientists calling for the raw data of climate-change research to be
made available to everyone, including climate-change skeptics, on the Internet. That, he says,
would allow genuine research to proceed unhindered. Some of his colleagues also say the IPCC now
does more harm than good and should be disbanded.

That position has led some of his colleagues to attack him. This week, several said in Internet
posts that such transparency would be unworkable because the matter of climate is too urgent and
the stakes too high to allow skeptics to have any influence on policy.

That, Prof. Hulme said, is exactly the attitude that led to the sort of questionable practices
chronicled in the CRU e-mails.


Good article, now what needs to be done is focus on
real possibilities to mitigate local climate change, regardless
of the cause, would we do less for a people in danger if any
change is natural rather than man made.

I would suggest banning all diesel and heavy oil
burning ships from the Arctic Ocean, get cooperation
from all countries to reduce or stop particulate emissions
when winds are carrying soot over the Arctic, and study
the possibility of some control of the Gulf Stream by
controlling river outlets into the two main oceans,
it needs to be balanced, but care must be taken to
not freeze western Europe.

Weather is local, climate is local, regardless
of any effect of added CO2.

It would be nice to hear from scientists who
question their own work and who offer the results
with some humility, all men can do is, their best.