Eco-science has a checkered past. And, we are learning, a checkered present. In what is shaping up as one of the biggest science scandals in modern times, hackers have obtained thousands of e-mails, computer codes, and data sets from climate scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. The CRU is one of the world’s leading climate research institutions; its scientists play central roles in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The e-mails involve conversations between CRU scientists and scientists from all over the world who support the theory of man-made global warming. The content of the e-mails is astonishing.
British journalist James Delingpole has a synopsis of the scientific misconduct and criminal fraud revealed in the e-mails that have been analyzed thus far:

1.
Manipulation of evidence. In one email, the CRU’s director, Professor Phil Jones apparently confesses to having played with data — most unscientifically — in order to achieve his desired end. “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” (Professor Jones has defended himself, somewhat disingenuously you might think, by saying that “trick” — in the world of science — has no negative connotations).

2. Concealing private doubts about whether the world is really heating up. One scientist expresses his frustration that the global temperatures are not behaving as he feels they ought to behave: “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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

3. Destruction of evidence (following a Freedom of Information request — almost certainly an illegal activity): “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

4. Fantasizing violence against prominent climate sceptic scientists: “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.’

5. Gloating over news of the death of a prominent climate-change skeptic, Australian John L Daly, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site: “In an odd way this is cheering news.”

6. Attempting to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (ie the period from about 900 to about 1200 when global mean temperatures were considerably warmer than they are now): “……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….”

7. And, perhaps, most damningly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority: “I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

The pro-global warming scientists repeatedly and openly discuss fabrication of scientific evidence, systematic efforts to circumvent release of data that would permit others to replicate their published results, destruction of climate data to avoid Freedom-of-Information Act disclosure, and political efforts to remove scientists who question their pro-global-warming assertions from editorial boards. The evidence of scientific misconduct and actual criminal fraud on the part of these scientists is already massive, and detailed analysis of the e-mails and data sets is only in its early stages.
The contents of these e-mails should end the scientific careers of many of the scientists involved. They have collaborated in gross scientific misconduct. Indeed, the fabrication and destruction of data financed by public funds for the purpose of influencing public policy on a global scale is a criminal act, and many of these scientists should be prosecuted criminally. If these scientists were stockbrokers or business executives, they would be on their way to prison. This scandal, involving scientific data that is set to influence the expenditure of trillions of dollars and even influence the structure of governments and regulation on a global scale, dwarfs Enron and Madoff.
Just as disturbing as the smoking-gun evidence for scientific misconduct and fraud is the apparent absence of dissent from these practices by any of the scientists involved in these e-mail correspondences. This misconduct and even criminal behavior seems to be accepted without question, as an intrinsic part of climate science. It would be naive to believe that this misconduct involves only one field of science. In what other areas of science are fraud and scientific misconduct an accepted part of the culture?
The CRU e-mails reveal that many of the leading pro-global warming ‘scientists’ aren’t really a collaborative of professional scientists searching for the truth about the climate; they’re an international crime syndicate.