Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future

by James Delingpole

  It’s no coincidence that whenever alarmists refer to Climategate they talk about ‘hacked’ or ‘stolen’ e-mails, rather than ‘leaked’ ones. The implication is that the exposed scientists aren’t so much crime perpetrators as crime victims. For similar reasons, there’s little point dwelling on e-mails like the one where Phil Jones has a sly gloat over the sudden death of one of his archenemies, Australian climate sceptic John Daly (‘In an odd way this is cheering news!’). Or the one from 9 October 2009, where Ben Santer writes to Phil Jones about a well-known sceptic:

  I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

  It’s fun to quote these passages, obviously, which is why I’ve done so. But let’s not delude ourselves that they have any connection with the real scandal revealed by Climategate, which has much more to do with the corruption of the scientific process by privileged and enormously powerful scientists whose salaries and expenses we fund, and whose abuses threaten to have a serious, deleterious impact on all our lives.

  Climategate is really about the systematic abuse of the ‘scientific method’. Naturally, the apologists for Climategate scientists – such as Steve Easterbrook – have worked very hard to put us off the scent. Their tactic is to make out that science is a realm so rarefied and remote from ordinary life that mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend the subtle, mysterious ways of the chosen white-coated ones with their peer-reviewed papers and their wondrous computer models. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads about these complicated matters,’ their message runs. ‘It might look dodgy, but that’s only because you don’t understand how science works.’

  This is utter hogwash. There are accepted standards of behaviour which have applied for years throughout the scientific community, based on principles which are very easily understood by the layman. They include rigour (sticking to what your experiments show, rather than what you might like them to show); openness (sharing your research with other scientists, so that they can evaluate your work and then build upon it); and honesty (telling the truth, not making stuff up, not deleting awkward e-mails or data when subject to a Freedom of Information request – that kind of thing). At the heart of this scientific method is something called ‘peer review’. This is the benchmark by which most new scientific research tends to be judged. If that research is to be taken seriously by the scientific community then it must be accepted for publication by an academic journal such as Nature or Science.

  Peer review is not a perfect system. In the golden era of early twentieth-century science, it wasn’t even thought necessary: neither Watson and Crick nor Einstein were peer reviewed. But in today’s abstruse, fragmented world where the various branches of science have grown increasingly recondite and specialised, peer review has become widely accepted as the least-worst method by which quality science can be sifted from junk science.

  And nowhere more so than within the climate science community. In the run-up to Climategate, one of the main weapons used by those within ‘the consensus’ against dissenting scientists was that their various papers picking holes in AGW theory had not been ‘peer reviewed’ and were therefore invalid. As Phil Jones puts it in one of his e-mails:

  The peer-review system is the safeguard science has adopted to stop bad science being published.

  Besides ‘peer review’, the other concept that’s worth explaining before we delve into the Climategate e-mails more closely is something called the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). It features quite heavily in the correspondence between the Warmist scientists – in much the same way you might find e-mails between vampires especially preoccupied with garlic, crosses and holy water.

  Why so? Because of all the climate-change-related evidence from recorded history, the MWP is the one piece of evidence that does most to undermine the cause of AGW. The MWP (given very short shrift at Wikipedia, incidentally, for reasons not unconnected with the Warmist bias of those involved in editing relevant Wikipedia entries) was that era of bounteous warmth and fruitfulness which existed throughout the world between roughly 900AD and 1280AD.

  This was the era when the now-all-but-uninhabitable Greenland actually lived up to its name (at least in some parts) – enabling Vikings to settle, grow barley and raise sheep and cattle. It was, records the Domesday Book, a time when grapes were grown in parts of England where they could ill-survive today. But it wasn’t just Northern Europe that benefited from this period of balmy fruitfulness. There is good evidence that it spread as far as China and Japan, Africa, South and North America. And to the extent that it is possible to assess any temperature in an era without temperature records, it seems plausible at least – based on what we know of the vegetation and human habits of the day – that global average temperatures were significantly warmer than they are today. And that was what eminent climate scientists such as Prof. H. H. Lamb, the first director of the CRU, argued in his seminal book, Climate, History and the Modern World.

  Now just imagine how annoying this would be if you were a committed believer in man-made global warming. For one thing, it would horribly contradict your scary, attention-grabbing claim that late twentieth-century temperature highs were dramatic and unprecedented. For another, it would seriously hamper your line about CO2 emissions being a significant driver of climate change. After all, there were no CO2-belching coal-fired power stations, no factories, no aeroplanes or cars in the eleventh century. So how do you possibly explain that average temperatures then were even higher than they are now? Mightn’t this suggest, to the neutral observer, that perhaps climate is capable of changing quite independently of human activity? And if this was true 1,000 years ago, why is it suddenly not true today? Moreover, if people were able to thrive in a warmer world, why should we be worried about a little AGW?

  OK. Now we’re ready to examine those e-mails more closely. I am indebted here to the brilliant, detailed analysis done by Dr John Costella, an Australian scientist. Costella believes that what is essentially going on here is a breach of trust. He writes:

  [In science] scientists assume that the rules of the scientific method have been followed, at least in any discipline that publishes its results for public consumption. It is that trust in the process that allows me, for example, to believe that the human genome has been mapped – despite my knowing nothing about that field of science at all. That same trust has allowed scientists at large to similarly believe in the results of climate science. Until now.

  Costella compares it to a bent trial:

  Everyone knows what happens if police obtain evidence by illegal means: the evidence is ruled inadmissible; and, if a case rests on that tainted evidence, it is thrown out of court.

  (The big difference, Costella might have added, being that if this particular court case leads to the wrong verdict, it’s not just going to be the innocent defendant who ends up in the slammer, but the entire world.)

  Let us turn, then, to exhibit A. The one everyone has heard of, not least because it was turned into a catchy viral hit on YouTube by Minnesotans for Global Warming – complete with Michael Mann dancing amid reindeer, Christmas trees and guitar-strumming cats:

  Makin’ up data the old hard way

  Fudgin’ the numbers day by day

  Ignoring the snow and the cold and a downward line.

  Hide the decline (hide the decline).

  Here’s the relevant passage – in an e-mail from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement – dated 16 November 1999.

  I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last twenty years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) [and] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

  No, it doesn’t mean ‘hide the decline’ in temperature – excitingly damning though that might be – but something rather more subtly incrim
inating. It has to do with our friend Keith Briffa and his increasing concerns that his tortured, mangled, brutalised evidence is still stubbornly refusing to scream.

  Just so it’s not taken out of context, here is Briffa outlining the problem in an earlier e-mail from 22 September 1999. This e-mail finds him worrying that his colleagues might be about to overegg the doom ’n’ disaster pudding in the next IPCC assessment:

  I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies). [There are] some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.

  By proxy, Briffa means a temperature substitute. Because hardly any thermometers existed prior to 1850, paleoclimatologists like Briffa must find other ways to calculate past temperatures. One method is to look at the variations in width and density on the rings of trees which grew hundreds or, better still, thousands of years ago. But Briffa is having a problem with his tree samples: at the very point in the late twentieth century when the real world thermometers show temperatures are going up, his pesky trees are telling him that temperatures are going down. He has encountered what is known as a ‘divergence’ problem.

  Which is more likely to be accurate: spiffy modern weather stations with state-of-the-art thermometers or the relative width of rings on the stump of an old tree?

  Actually that’s a trick question: weather stations for a number of reasons can be quite inaccurate too, to the point where some scientists doubt whether even the records showing late twentieth century warming can be taken seriously. But yes, by and large you’re right. When it comes to judging how high or low average global temperatures might have been twenty years ago, let alone a thousand, tree-ring samples are barely a twig away from utter uselessness. Consider, for a moment, the variables that might affect a tree’s growth in a particular year: the amount of sunlight that falls on its leaves; how hot or cold it is; how much it rains; the soil conditions; the amount of CO2 it breathes. Already that makes four unknowns besides temperature, and we haven’t even factored in further complexities such as competition (i.e. suppose for a period of years the sample tree was overshadowed by a much bigger tree which later died and disappeared) or insect infestation. So there are lots of things those tree rings might show other than temperature – hence the need to treat them with great caution.

  Now suppose you’re Keith Briffa. Using your proxy data, you’ve constructed this fabulous chart which proves pretty much everything the rest of your gang would like to see proved, namely: that the MWP and the Little Ice Age (LIA) which followed were relatively insignificant when compared to the massive, ice-hockey-blade shaped temperature spike which occurred at the end of the twentieth century. Your big, scary bully of a gang leader Mike Mann is pleased with you (for once) and is keen for your chart to be included in the next IPCC assessment report. But then – despite all the peer pressure you remain a reasonably honest fellow – you do a bit of due diligence and realise (oh the horror!) that the entire basis of your graph may be a crock.

  That bad? Yes. Really that bad. You see, while there’s no easy way to check the accuracy of tree-ring proxies from a thousand years ago, there’s a perfectly simple way to check the most recent ones.

  You – duh! – compare them with actual thermometer readings. And if they don’t coincide, you have one hell of a problem, for it means your tree-ring proxies aren’t accurate. Not for the last forty years, certainly; and therefore, most likely, not ever.

  Poor Keith, you can see now why his e-mails convey such an anguished tone. His last few years of research look as if they have been entirely wasted. Damn it, he can’t even bring himself to agree with the rest of the gang’s assessment that the MWP is insignificant. He says, later in the e-mail: ‘I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’ Yet his gang leaders are planning on co-opting his research in their efforts to prove otherwise. What is he to do?

  Luckily, his gang leader Mike Mann has a cunning plan. Is it – the most honourable option – to publish the data, warts and all, so that fellow scientists and other interested parties can decide for themselves how viable it is? Nope. Is it, then, to cut it out of the IPCC assessment altogether? Nope. Mann has found what Tony Blair would no doubt call a Third Way, but which you and I would more likely call a devious fudge.

  Here he outlines his scheme:

  I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the plot, and can ask Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the plot he has been preparing (nobody liked my own color/plotting conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself ). The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire twentieth century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the twentieth century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late twentieth century decline.

  This e-mail marks the genesis of Mann’s infamous ‘green graph’ – the green tree-ring line in the graph on the IPCC report that mysteriously passes behind the other lines in the year 1961, but never comes out the other side.

  ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ is something slightly different. It refers to a cheat, presumably invented by Mann but enthusiastically adopted by Jones, whereby at the point where the tree-ring data start giving out the wrong message (i.e. post-1960) they are spliced with thermometer temperature data instead. This is deeply unscientific: like pretending that apples are the same as oranges. But as Jones rightly suggests, it’s really rather useful when there’s a ‘decline’ you want to ‘hide’.

  At some point, Phil Jones wonders how best to conceal data that he has been asked to disclose under a Freedom of Information request. ‘The two Ms have been after the CRU station data for years,’ he writes, meaning his nemeses McIntyre and McKitrick. ‘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.’ Deleting data subject to an FOI request is a criminal offence.

  Such is the nature of the Climategate e-mails: the worst devilry often lies in the obscure and frankly rather tedious detail. If you were hoping for e-mails saying things like: ‘Teehee! Wonder how much longer we’re going to get away with this ridiculous “Anthropogenic Global Warming” scam’ or ‘Hey, I know. Let’s add another ten degrees to the 1980s’ summer temperature dataset’, you will be disappointed. There is little evidence to suggest that the Climategate scientists don’t believe in AGW. On the contrary: most of the e-mail evidence suggests that they believe in it all too fervently. So fervently, in fact, that they see almost nothing wrong with distorting the evidence in order to give a greater impression of scientific certainty and ‘consensus’ on AGW than actually exists. Therein lies the real scandal of Climategate: it’s a case of scientists breaking the rules of science and behaving instead like political activists.

  We see them ‘cherry-picking’ data that supports their theories and burying data that doesn’t. We see them drawing conclusions based on gut-feeling rather than evidence. We see them ganging up to bully editors, journalists and fellow scientists who disagree with them. We see them orchestrating smear campaigns. We see them subverting and debasing the peer-review process. We see them insert bogus graphs and misleading information into official reports which are supposed to represent the ‘gold standard’ of international scientific knowledge. We see them not only fail to keep proper records but actually losing the vital, irreplaceable raw data which they are paid by governments to collect and maintain. We see them obstructing, in every possible way, requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

  You don’t need to be a scientist to know that this is not how proper scientists should behave. And if you’re in any doubt, read what the US Nati
onal Academy of Sciences has to say on the subject in its book On Being a Scientist:

  Researchers who manipulate their data in ways that deceive others, even if the manipulation seems insignificant at the time, are violating both the basic values and widely accepted professional standards of science. Researchers draw conclusions based on their observations of nature. If data are altered to present a case that is stronger than the data warrant, researchers fail to fulfil all three of the obligations described at the beginning of this guide. They mislead their colleagues and potentially impede progress in their field or research. They undermine their own authority and trustworthiness as researchers. And they introduce information into the scientific record that could cause harm to the broader society, as when the dangers of a medical treatment are understated.

  What makes it worse is that the Climategate scientists wield such extraordinary power. The men you see in the e-mails – bickering like schoolgirls, jetting to junkets from Trieste to Hawaii to Venice to Finland to Tanzania, ganging up on their enemies – they may not sound like people you’d ever like to be seated next to at a dinner party, but you cannot ignore them. That’s because grasped within their sweaty palms and being squeezed ever tighter are some extremely sensitive and tender parts of your anatomy.

  Perhaps you take the indulgent view that this is simply a case of boys being boys, and that if your private e-mails or my private e-mails were exposed to public scrutiny, none of us would be shown in any more flattering a light than those poor, put-upon, much-misunderstood Climategate scientists.

  Personally, I’m not at all convinced by this ‘everyone’s a crook at heart’ defence. This isn’t a formal invitation for you to hack my e-mails. But if you did, I think you’d be disappointed. You’d find nothing there so embarrassing or untoward that I’d feel my reputation had been damaged, especially not regarding my role as a card-carrying global-warming denier. No secret payments from Big Oil (more’s the pity!). No cosy exchanges with Viscount Monckton or Christopher Booker or Pat Michaels, discussing how best to trick the data so it makes it look like AGW isn’t really happening. It’s just not how we sceptics operate.