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reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock
and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their
authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance
cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group
of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the
worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through
the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets
of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the
Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's
key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most
important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and
governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm
to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British
scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures
conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned
climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline,
global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded
history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate
the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they
are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global
warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the
statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first
exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician
Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between
Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre
and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into
question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU
construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast
list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey
Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith
Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial
rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth,
who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over
hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent
a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most
obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's
blog Climate Audit and Anthony
Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of
emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been
discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data
to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
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