Scientists at the heart of the Climategate controversy face
new allegations which cast further doubt about global warming.
Analysis shows researchers had tried to suppress key details
of their findings for twenty years.
New allegations swirl in Climategate, which began last November
with an email leak at the University of East Anglia, suggesting
that one of the world’s foremost centres for climate research
had been manipulating data to prove the existence of man-made
global warming.
Now, it turns out data manipulation has been going on since
at least 1990.
The head of the university’s climate research unit, Professor
Phil Jones, has come under fresh suspicion due to a paper he
released 20 years ago, claiming urban warming wasn’t a
factor in higher temperature readings he’d recorded. But
he doesn’t seem to be able to show where his information
came from.
“That research was paid for with public money so everyone
should have access to it, and if we’re spending that kind
of money to stop climate change then the fundamental data should
be open to anyone who wants to check it,” International
Climate Science Coalition executive director Tom Harris says.
That same paper was used as evidence in the latest report from
the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel
has also recently come under fire for falsely claiming in one
of its own reports that all Himalayan glaciers could completely
melt down by 2035.
The head of the panel has refused to apologise, calling the
error “an isolated mistake”. However, global warming
skeptics say such occurrences mean we essentially know nothing
about the climate.
“It means that we do not have a measure of how temperatures
have changed over the last 50-100 years, that we can say, well,
one year is warmer than the other but the relative amounts,
like 2002 compared with the 1930’s, was that it warmer
or colder, but we do not actually know,” Piers Corbyn
from Weatheraction says.
More worrying, another case suggests the whole system of scientists
reviewing their colleagues’ work has been corrupted. Some
of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s
Climate Research Unit refer to a paper that Professor Jones
reviewed and deliberately suppressed.
What emerged was an analysis of data from weather stations
around Russia’s Lake Baikal. It showed much less warming
than Professor Jones’ own analysis using much the same
data.
“The other things which they have been doing which are
grossly unacceptable – is trying to prevent the publication
of valid scientific opinion and research which goes against
what they believe, and that is absolutely monstrous! So they
not only suppress the scientific opinion they don’t like,
but they actively avoid commissioning work which I’m certain
would have appeared in print, but to the fact that they have
a total grip and bias against anything they don’t agree
with,” Corbyn adds.
The University of East Anglia continues to call its data “rock
solid”.
These latest Climategate revelations show this scandal is far
from over. And all through it, the voices of the skeptics are
getting louder. They’re asking, if man-made climate change
is such an unassailable fact, why does it have to be proven
using manipulated data?
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