The REAL climate conspiracy
Posted by Jack in Uncategorized, tags: climate change, environment, science, tabloids
Prof. Phil Jones: an innocent man
News came today that an independent inquiry into the so-called ‘Climategate’ hacked email scandal has cleared the scientists involved of any wrongdoing.
Last year an as yet unidentified hacker managed to steal thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. These were then sent to climate change deniers, who picked through them with a fine tooth comb, trying to prove that climate change is in fact a giant lie made up by a global conspiracy.
The media coverage that ensued has made a big dent in the public’s acceptance for what it is, a scientifically proven fact that is taking place. The emails went back years, and the most notorious one was from 1999, in which Professor Phil Jones said he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline in tempratures.” Climate change deniers seized on this as proof that climate scientists were fiddling data and lying.
There’s a detailed explanation here of why this particular phrase was used. Basically, the truth of the matter is that climate scientists trying to study global temperatures over hundreds of years have a problem: accurate regular readings with thermometers were only possible from the 1850’s. Before that we have to rely on evidence gathered in the natural world, like ice cores or tree rings. However, scientists have noted that there is a statistical blip where the evidence of the temperature that comes from tree rings isn’t borne out by the real temperature as measured using thermometers. The “trick” Professor Jones used was to add in the ACTUAL REAL temperatures over recent decades to a graph, so that it would be MORE scientifically accurate than just relying on tree rings.
The media seized on the word “trick”, but in fact it’s nothing more than a poorly worded email written in a hurry. Evidence of a conspiracy it was not.
The independent inquiry into the “scandal” was led by Lord Oxburgh, and gave the unit “a clean bill of health.” Their report says there was “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever.” This comes after another enquiry, by a House of Commons committee, also cleared the scientists.You can read the full text of the Oxburgh report here.
The worst the report could find to say about Professor Jones and his colleagues is that, over decades, there were some problems keeping paper records. A problem completely unknown in any other workplace in the world, where everyone has copies of everything going back to the 70’s in triplicate.
You have to feel for Professor Jones and his colleagues. When the CRU was set up, they were doing what most people would regard as boring and unsexy science. But their and others’ discoveries turned out to have huge political and social implications, as society slowly began to realise that the global capitalist economy is destroying the conditions which allowed human civilisation to develop on Earth. This is the biggest scientific issue in human history, and suddenly the CRU were put at the forefront of the most important political question of our time.
Professor Jones has said publicly that he is “a very apolitical person, I don’t want to get involved in the politics, I’m much happier doing the science and producing the papers. I’m a scientist, I let my science do the talking, along with all my scientific climate colleagues. It’s up to governments to decide and climate science is just one thing they have to take into account with the decisions they have to make.”
He's hiding from scary freaks in bear costumes!
In other words, a guy who just wanted a nice quiet life compiling graphs of tree rings and the like has been thrust into the spotlight, as allegations that could have ruined his career were repeated again and again in the mass media. He’s never been telling what anyone what we should do or set himself up as a political guru, he’s just tried to tell us all how it is, scientifically. Despite huge pressure in the media, he refused to resign, as he’d done nothing wrong. The uni themselves said they’d refuse to accept his resignation even if he did submit it.
After three inquiries into their actions, there has yet to be any serious investigation for the people responsible for harassing them, making their work more difficult, and ultimately stealing private emails. Before the leak, the scientists had faced barrages of demands from climate denier Steve McIntyre. His constant pestering hampered their ability to do their jobs.
The emails were stolen in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen summit. There is still no sign of the person responsible coming forward or being found out, but it’s clear their intention was to do maximum damage to attempts to do anything about the climate crisis.
As the contents of private emails, going back years, by people who were being regularly harassed at work by climate change deniers, were repeated again and again, the public took in the idea that the people involved were liars. Some scientists even received death threats.
The tabloids that tried to tell us again and again this was evidence of a conspiracy have of course moved on before the publication of today’s report. But the bigger question remains-who stole the emails and started this whole farce off? They are part of the REAL climate conspiracy. The gigantic lie that is being propagated by the fossil fuel industry that climate change isn’t taking place is one of the greatest crimes of all time, because the people responsible are endangering the long term survival of human civilisation in order to maximise short term profits. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious reason why capitalism is a totally bankrupt system that needs to be replaced before it takes us to the brink of catastrophic climate change.
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