Climategate Remembered: The Need for a Second Opinion (new panel taking shape)

Dr. Larry Bell, a leading figure in space architecture and endowed professor at the University of Houston, is one of a small army of gifted people who have jumped disciplines to help even the climate debate against a locked-in academic establishment.

One of Bell’s recent columns deserves attention in reference to the current proposal by Dr. William Happer of the White House’s National Security Council to create an independent panel of outside experts to critically review the Fourth National Climate Assessment of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. (For the latest of the developing panel, see here.)

While Climategate has been the subject of several dedicated posts at MasterResource, Bell’s retelling is particularly relevant to what has been going on behind closed doors by a band of mostly deep-ecologist academic climatologists who work from an agenda of climate alarm and Malthusianism (a fear of population growth, technology, and affluence). Working in a still young and quite unsettled field, the science can be skewed into alarmist directions.

Bell’s article, “Proposed Scientific Climate Debate Unsettles Indignant Alarmists,” is worth reading in its entirely. The present post excerpts Bell’s recounting of Climategate in regard to the White House proposal to appoint a scientific panel to examine the benefits of carbon dioxide for humankind–as well as the exaggerated warming/climate change from increasing atmospheric concentrations of what is a trace gas (several hundred parts per million).

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A March 20 article co-authored by Mann and Bob Ward in The Guardian equated the planned NSC panel to Stalinist repression.

…. One of the loudest, shrillest, most unsettled voices of protest against science scrutiny [led by Princeton emeritus professor of physics Dr. Will Happer] is emanating from Dr. Michael Mann, the author of a cobbled-together and thoroughly debunked “hockey stick” graph first used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore to gin up the climate Armageddon alarm.

Accordingly, a great place to begin this investigation is to revisit scandalous Climategate email exchanges between members of Mann’s hockey team along with readily available public records I have previously written about in numerous Forbes and Newsmax articles.

Tom Crowley, a close Mann colleague, wrote, “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.”

Yet friendship aside, Mann’s hockey shtick graph co-author Raymond Bradley clearly drew the line regarding another research paper jointly published by Mann and colleague Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia.

Bradley wrote, “I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year [climate] reconstruction.”

Nevertheless, Michael Mann sanctimoniously attacked Will Happer’s scientific credentials to chair the NSC’s panel because “[he] has not published any research on climate change in a reputable science journal.”

By “reputable,” Mann is obviously referring to publishers that exclusively post research papers endorsed by the Climate Crisis Cartel and its IPCC sponsors.

An email from Jones to Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, said, “Kevin, Seems that this potential Nature [journal] paper may be worth citing, if it does say that GW [global warming] is having an effect on TC [tropical cyclone] activity.”

Jones wanted to make sure that people who supported this connection be represented in IPCC reviews, “Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.”

Top cyclone expert Christopher Landsea demanded that the IPCC refute Trenberth’s scientifically unsupportable but highly publicized claim of a global warming-hurricane link following a deadly 2004 Florida storm season. Receiving no response, Landsea resigned as an invited 2007 IPCC report author.

A July 2004 communication from Phil Jones to Michael Mann marked “Highly Confidential” discussed keeping two papers published in Climate Research from being in that next IPCC report. Jones wrote: Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a coordinating lead IPCC report author, suggested, “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.”

Trenberth’s associate Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research warned in another email to Mann, “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC . . . ” Wigley and Trenberth suggested in another email to Mann, “If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted [as editor-in-chief of the Geophysical Research Letters journal].”

Writing to Phil Jones, Peter Thorne of the U.K. Met Office advised caution, saying, “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

Thorne prudently observed in a separate email, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

Another scientist worries, ” . . . clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”

Still another observed, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

One researcher foresaw some very troubling consequences, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably . . . “

There you have it. These are the scientists that are concerned, even scared, that a public airing of the scientific debate and the very well established positive side of carbon dioxide will reveal the “consensus” of climate alarmism to be anything but.