The Great Climate Debate commits suicide

Illustration: pschubert/morguefile

Michael Cosgrove draws a timeline of some of the key events which led to what he calls the “untimely suicide of what was a young and promising debate.”

I suppose that many of you are just as mystified as I am as to how the (albeit minimal) hopes of finally seeing some concrete action on the climate issue could possibly have been dashed just as the weight of scientific opinion and public opinion was beginning to put real pressure on the skeptics.

And I suppose that many of you are just as mystified as I am as to how it came to be that the debate became so totally discredited because of greedy, ego-driven and reckless actions carried out by some of the very people who were supposedly trying to help the planet.

We all know that governments and industrialists have had a tendency to minimise the problems –- all’s fair in love and war after all –- but what about the climate scientists? Are they any less corrupt than their opponents? What has happened since the run-up to Copenhagen and Climategate? How does it all fit together? Who loused the whole thing up? I have another question to ask, but I’ll save it for the end of this article.

Here are a few key dates from the sad and sorry saga of the untimely suicide of what was a young and promising debate.

November 19 2009 Hackers gain access to backup servers at the highly prestigious Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England’s East Anglia University. Emails between several climate scientists are made public on a Russian website before spreading around the world like wildfire, the fans being flamed by climate skeptics. The emails are said to contain evidence that climate scientists do not agree on certain climate issues that are being presented to the world as facts, that a virulent campaign of denigration is underway vis-à-vis skeptics, that climate scientists rejected requests for information and have mounted a campaign to keep the work of skeptics out of scientific journals, and that efforts to dissimulate inconvenient facts have been made. Professor Phil Jones steps down from his post as head of the unit pending an independent inquiry into whether there is any evidence of scientific misconduct. He is not implicated in the hacking.

December 4 2009 Sarah Palin jumps into the fray and demands that the United States boycott Copenhagen, calling the work of climate scientists “junk science.” The email affair is now elevated to the status of “Climategate.”

December 7 2009 Influential Saudi Arabian Copenhagen delegate Mohammed Al-Sabban announces before the start of the summit that he wants to see an international inquiry into Climategate, claiming that it will have an impact on the summit and may even derail it.

December 20 2009 Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is accused of gaining personal financial benefit from contracts signed with companies whose interests are not helped by those who propose stricter action on the climate to reduce pollution.

January 17 2010 The Sunday Times alleges that the world has been misled by exaggerated reports by the IPCC which claim that the Himalayan glaciers are in imminent danger. The research is said to be based on old and erroneous past research papers, with little effort having been made to update data. The IPCC subsequently apologizes and corrects the research findings.

January 24 2010 Rajendra Pachauri (him again) and his Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, is said to have been awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and most of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. Both of these grants, and others, are alleged to have been obtained by the fraudulent use of the discredited Himalayan research in order to do more research into the same phenomena.

January 25 2010 Pachauri excludes any possibility of his resignation in an interview given to the BBC.

February 3 2010 The British government files an official protest in which it expresses its concern to the IPCC about lax scientific procedures used by the body which supplies the world with the facts about global warming.

February 3 2010 The Guardian claims that Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, may have attempted to cover up the fact that very old and false temperature data from Chinese collaborators was being submitted to American scientists before being published. The Guardian says that the documents containing the data no longer exist and that what data is available suggests that "the findings are fundamentally flawed." Jones and a Chinese-American colleague are also being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper published back in 1990.

February 3 2010 The IPCC announces that it is trying to verify figures in its 2007 report which claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is under sea level. That and other figures in the report are currently being hotly contested.

February 8 2010 Phil Jones tells the Sunday Times that he had contemplated suicide over the Copenhagen email leaks. He also expressed regret for attempting to block public access to scientific research, blaming his decision on “a campaign by foreign global warming sceptics.”

February 8 2010 Pachaori publishes a "partially autobiographical" novel
in a “raunchy” style which mixes reincarnation, sexual prowess and, of course, climate change. Frequent mentions are made of “voluptuous breasts.” What he doesn’t mention, though, is that it was released by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and the head of the oil and gas conglomerate Reliance Industries, the largest private company in India. He also omits to say who financed the book’s launch bash and campaign. That’s not surprising, given that that company is the Indian subsidiary of British oil giant BP, which also just happens to be the principal source of funding for.....Pachouari’s Energy and Resources Institute. 

And the list goes on.

All I can say about these events is that with friends like climate scientists to help us put the climate right, we certainly don’t need enemies.

I said I had another question to ask. Here it is.

Where are all those moralizing climate catastrophists who are normally so quick to screech and squeal about injustice and why aren’t they calling for the heads of those responsible for this mess instead of lamely bleating that none of the events described above ever happened or that they have all been manipulated?

The public expects rational answers from climate scientists and their supporters and not 9/11-style conspiracy theories. Moreover, if those answers and corollary actions are not forthcoming soon that same public should hit the delete button on the whole damn fraudulent bunch of them.